Alignment is Messy Action: Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone and Stepping Into Your Visible Leadership Era

Is the fear of being perceived keeping you small? You've got the vision, but taking the next step feels paralyzing. In this episode of The Visibility Standard, host Jazzmyn tackles the biggest misconception in entrepreneurial growth: the belief that aligned action should feel easy.

We challenge the notion of "comfortable growth" and reframe discomfort as the ultimate proof that you are expanding and moving toward your biggest goals. You'll learn:

• Why you might be choosing familiarity and stagnation over the growth you say you want.
• The essential practice of building your "distress tolerance" so that feeling uncomfortable signals progress, not failure.
• How Jazzmyn flexed her own growth muscle by choosing a moment of profound professional discomfort—quitting a job with no backup—and why that experience made her feel "unstoppable."
• The difference between allegiance and loyalty and why cutting one-sided relationships is a vital act of self-preservation and growth.

If you're a founder or creative wrestling with visibility fears and internal resistance, this is your permission slip to stop shrinking. Embrace the friction—your biggest breakthroughs are waiting on the other side of your comfort zone.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Are you sitting with thousands of hours of B-roll content and telling yourself, I'll start posting tomorrow? Are you in your head worried about your friends and family thinking your friends were choosing to be visible? Are you chasing trends instead of building influence? Welcome to the Visibility Standard where the visionaries of today are changing the roles of their industries and letting their voice be heard. I'm your host, Jasmine, and we are setting this together. Are you willing to take aligned action on the thing that you want? Let's talk about it. Hi, I'm Jasmine, host of the Visibility Standard, formerly known as Ar Love Hearts. The show is all about showing up, being seen. The show is for founders, creatives, healers who are making space in their profession, creating their own lane, and using their voice to create an impact in their work. I was sitting with this question this week of like, are we willing to take aligned action on the things that we say that we want? And I'm sure a lot of you are listening to that question, you're like, yeah, I'm doing it right now. But for some of you, the answer is probably no. Think about the steps that we're taking when we say that we want our career to look a certain way, when we say we want these friendships, when we say we want these things out of our life, but we're not willing to make aligned action. Because I think a lot of the times when we hear aligned, we think it's supposed to feel good. Like we think it's meant for us, therefore it's going to be easy, it's going to feel good. Yeah, when you get there, the path to an aligned life, career, relationships comes with discomfort, and I think a lot of us are really uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. As someone who has experienced a lot of fear around being abandoned, around feeling like they needed to say yes or be a certain way to keep relationships, to maintain a certain place in their career, to always be somebody's yes person. I do get it. I get why it would feel more comfortable to shrink into a position that you're already in because you know it, because it's familiar, because you may not want to lose that person, you don't want to lose that relationship, you don't want to lose a project. But growth is uncomfortable. There is no growth without discomfort. And part of that for us is us being able to build our distress tolerance around that discomfort and growth. Discomfort doesn't mean we failed, discomfort doesn't mean that we're doing the wrong thing, discomfort doesn't mean that we need to stay where we are, it just means we are doing something new for ourselves. And we've got to build that tolerance to be able to experience that discomfort. Like the most miserable, when I think about times where I liked myself the least, it was times where I was not taking aligned action. I was doing what was familiar, I was doing what I knew would be comfortable because I didn't have the capacity to try something new because I was scared, because I let that fear take over. I let myself get in my head and I did nothing. As I continue to think about the ways that I want to evolve, both personally and professionally, I've found myself in a really uncomfortable spot. Like even when I think about my own personal brand, when I think about the things that I want to share, the things that I'm choosing not to share online as part of my brand or not part of my brand, some of those things are things that are important to me. And that's not what my presence is leaning towards. Okay, do I talk about these really important things that I see are happening that are important to me, that are conversations that I am having in my own circles? Do I bring them to the broader public? The answer I came to was no. And I get to make that choice because that isn't part of the community that I'm building, the space that I'm creating, and bringing those topics into this space takes away from me being able to talk about the things that are important to me, the things that I do want to bring into the space. At first, I felt like a failure. I felt like I was abandoning a really big part of myself when that's not the case. I am someone that has risked their career on multiple occasions to do what I believed was right. I have risked relationships, I have risked, like I said, career. I damn sure feel like I almost risked my degree in some cases for speaking up and being vocal and fighting for what I believed was right. And it was all worth it. And I wouldn't take any of it back because it helped me build the tolerance that I needed to be where I am right now and to continue growing in the direction that I hope to grow in. If I didn't have those early experiences of disappointing somebody, of prioritizing my own needs over their needs, if I didn't have those early experiences of conflict, of discomfort, knowing that I am going against what somebody else wants for me. Having those experiences early has made decision making now a bit easier. But I've also gotten a lot better at prioritizing my own growth. And I've gotten a lot better at identifying what I need, what I want, what is important to me, and finding the people who are looking to support that. Allegiance, there is an obligation typically attached to it. Like it's in the definition, it is within its definition an obligation. But it's also one-sided. And that is the distinction that I want to make between allegiance and loyalty. When you are a lead, when you have an allegiance to somebody, it is one-sided. You are benefiting the hell out of them. It's a hundred zero, a hundred and twenty-five. Loyalty, when I look at my relationships and think about the level of loyalty that I do offer, that I am offering, I also ask myself the question: are they loyal to me in return? Is the loyalty mutual? If it isn't, then it's an allegiance. And not all allegiances are serving you. They're serving the other person because that thing benefits from you being loyal to you committing your time, energy, effort, emotional labor into supporting that person or project or thing. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they have an allegiance to you. Loyalty, more relational. There's a reciprocity to it. You're benefiting one another's growth. You aren't looking for them to benefit you and shrink them into the thing that you want. Both of you are just, I'm here for you. I'm here to collaborate. I'm here to connect. I'm here to uplift one another's brands. Even if we don't always have the same exact goals, we have similar goals in similar directions. And so amplifying one another and moving each other forward is important. And that is loyalty. And this moment that we can distinguish those two easier, the moment that we can identify that we are being loyal and not having allegiance to something. I know I've been in a one lot of one-sided relationships, and I know that I've been in relationships where, not just personal but professionally, I was benefiting them. And they got pissed when I wasn't benefiting them anymore. Like I remember when I quit my job at the quasi-government agency I worked at. And I did it in a staff meeting because we were sitting there arguing about the same shit. I was about to start grad school anyway. But my manager had posed the question: is everyone willing to come to a uniform decision and move forward? In that moment, I was wrestling in my mind, if I say yes, I am committing to something that I don't believe is true. If I say yes, then that makes me a liar. And in that moment, it was a game time decision for me. Not necessarily what the environment was looking for, not necessarily what the question was posing. But that's one of the first moments where I recognize I was thinking about how much I was willing to abandon myself. If I was willing to. And if I had it in me and I didn't. So when it got to me, I said, you know, I've really enjoyed being here, and I'm putting in my two weeks notice today. Because I couldn't make that commitment to stay and figure it out. Because I knew, I recognized, it was only taking more away from me that I did not have to give anymore. Did I have a backup plan? No. Did I know what I was doing? No. But I knew it was right for me. And sometimes that's all you need to know. You don't need to know the outcome. You don't even know how you need to know how it's going to feel. You don't need to know who's still going to be beside you at the end of it. You don't need to know what's next. You don't you don't always need to know. But me giving myself that space to say, I'm done. I'm over it. Goodbye. And I was up for a promotion, too. I mean, like, within the coming weeks, it wasn't worth it. Because the promotion wasn't even in alignment with what I wanted. It wasn't even in alignment with what I was working towards. So I could have stayed in my promotion and enjoyed it and suffered in silence. Or I could have been true to myself. And flexing that muscle at that time, I do not, I did not know how valuable that would be for me. I did not know how game-changing that would be for me. Because then in that moment that made me feel unstoppable. Like no matter what, I was gonna figure it out. Now that doesn't mean since that moment I haven't had times where I'm like, fuck. I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I have it in me. And that's absolute bullshit because I do. And you do too. I always think of resilience as a double-edged sword because resilience is great. It's what allows us to move forward. It's what preserves us in really tough times. And if we are people who have had to be resilient almost our entire lives, we forget how to make choices that are going to make our lives easier. Mostly because we don't feel like our lives get to be easier. We're used to hard, we're used to working for it, we're used to grinding it out and figuring it out and making it work and rationalizing it and making reason with it. And you don't always have to do that. In that moment, I was like, I don't need to figure this out, I don't need to understand it. And you know what? I drove Instacart and I door dashed for like three years. Because my studies were really important to me. And I knew having a job where I would have to answer to somebody else's schedule and somebody else's needs just wasn't going to work because that's how important grad school was to me. And eventually I went to work in my graduate office during the rest of my time. We sometimes make choices out of fear. We stay in places out of fear of not knowing what's next. We like that comfort, we like that security of knowing about that certainty. But it is only holding you back from the aligned action. It's only holding you back from making the choices that you know you want to make, that you know would benefit you, and you are choosing not to make those choices. What a shame, honestly. We all have big dreams, we all have wants and aspirations, and at the end of the day, they are only going to be that if you don't create the time, space, energy, and effort to go after it, to have relationships that are encouraging you to go after it, to be working with people and for people who are encouraging you to get after it. For you to be your own cheerleader, your own support, and say, I've got to get after it. These days, what makes me uncomfortable is staying the same. Like to feel like I've I'm stagnant or that I'm not going, I'm not making strides towards the things that I'm working towards. That's what makes me uncomfortable. What makes me uncomfortable is one-sided relationships where I recognize I'm putting more energy in, where I recognize that they are only in the relationship to serve themselves, that it is not mutual reciprocal loyalty. That makes me uncomfortable. What makes me uncomfortable is the partnerships that I do not have both parties in mind. That's what makes me really uncomfortable. What makes me uncomfortable is recognizing the fear and doing it anyway. It's honestly thrilling. I will say I have a flight response. Quick caveat, I do have a flight response, like fight, flight, freeze. I'm on the very much on the flight side, so leaving isn't that hard. But I have learned how to tame it. And leaving is not the only solution to things. But it's a solution to most things that I've experienced. Sometimes it's necessary to just leave. And if that if you are someone that struggles with just walking away, this is your reminder that you get to walk away at any given moment. If you recognize there is no fruit at the end, you get to walk away. There's situations that I wish I walked away from sooner. Because I but I didn't know any better. Now I know better. Now I don't stay as long. Or really do I find myself in those situations anymore? Does the part of me that fears abandonment still get frazzled every once in a while? Absolutely. It'll always be there because it wants to protect me. It wants to make sure that I'm not alone because I do believe in the value of community and being around folks. But I'm not willing to sacri sacrifice myself for anything anymore. I owe it to myself to preserve. Who I am and what I want and what I believe in, and self-preservation used to be burn it all down, blow that shit up, let it go. Now it's just having a quiet life, being boring. I was actually like complaining to myself the other day. I was like, man, I'm I'm real boring these days. Like I go to bed early. Um not partying too hard. Hanging with my dog. Watching Real Housewives, watching Ina Garden like it's my job. Because I'm a low-key chef. I'm really boring. And that's okay. Sometimes I could have more fun. I think I could do better at going out more. But how I used to have fun doesn't fit anymore. It doesn't push me towards the things that I am working towards. It actually takes me away. So I'm still learning what exciting, adventurous things look like for me. And that's okay. But I like that I go to bed at 10 and can wake up feeling fully rested and can walk my dog and feel energized and feel a lot of mental clarity. And that's worth it. That's the life that I'm working towards. Being able to slow down and talk to my neighbor before I run errands, being able to sit down with my partner and have dinner, being able to travel and see my friends when I want to and not be restrained by work. Being able to have multiple options within my work. That's what that's the life that I'm working towards. And I'm very clear on that within myself. And so I'm committed and loyal to the things that bring me closer to that. And I'm pretty quick to let things go that aren't. Let me know in the comments. Is there a place that you could be taking better aligned action? Are you holding an allegiance to something that you really probably should let go? What's the life that you are creating? I would love to chat more about it. You can find me at Healing with Jasmine on all social platforms. This was great. Let me know what you all want to hear from me too. I'm loving this visibility conversation, continuing to weave in relationships and healing and all of those things that are still really important to me. Leave a message in the comments. Shoot me a DM. And I'll see you Friday.