The Tension Between Urgency & Trust

Welcome back to Outside the Script.

Today’s episode is an honest conversation about ambition, urgency, nervous system expansion, and what it actually means to “hold more.”

I’m sharing where I’m currently at in this in-between season of life — balancing gratitude for what already exists while simultaneously craving deeper freedom, purpose, impact, and alignment.

We talk about:

• the pressure to hustle
• the fear of slowing down
• productivity as identity
• building capacity for more money, responsibility, and leadership
• motherhood as preparation for expansion
• trusting divine timing
• and learning how to create a meaningful life without building it from panic

This episode became a reflection on the tension between urgency and trust… and the realization that maybe becoming isn’t about forcing, striving, or arriving overnight, maybe it’s about slowly growing into the version of ourselves who can truly hold the life we desire.

If you’re in an in-between season right now, this one is for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Outside the Script, a podcast where we question the default path and explore what it means to live a life differently. I'm your host, Amanda Cukuro, and this is where I'm sharing what I'm learning, building, and figuring out in real time. Welcome back, everybody. Happy Wednesday. And today I just want to have a little conversation with you about what's been on my heart and my mind and what's been circling, you know, for me lately. And I'm gonna circle back to the idea and yeah, this thing that I'm pondering of growing the capacity to hold more, to hold more responsibility, more freedom, more income, more impact, more life. And, you know, I feel like I'm in a really hard place right now, of like just in this place of the murky middle, of not fully knowing, you know, where I'm going, what's you know, what the next step is completely. And yeah, I think that it's a hard space, it's a liminal space, and yeah, and also I'm just in this place of like just feeling so deeply grateful for my life on every level and my health and my family, and so deeply grateful just for my job and grateful that my job supports my family financially, and I'm grateful for everything that it provides for us. But at the same time, I know that I'm not fully expressed, and I have deeper desires, and I'm not living in my dharma. And I think that tension can be really heavy to hold, and it has been very heavy for me to hold if I'm being honest, because there's a deeper desire inside of me that wants more, not even just financially, although, yes, that is absolutely a part of it. I absolutely desire financial freedom, multiple streams of income, and the ability to live my life on my own terms. But underneath it all, I think that I'm really craving to build something that feels more like mine, something meaningful, and something that feels deeply aligned with my soul and who I've come here to be. And service has always been an undertone of my life, even from a young age. I'm an Aquarian and I've always felt this deep desire to contribute something good to the world, to serve humanity in some way, and just to create something that like truly helps people and helps people feel like less alone and inspired, and just to really uplift. And lately I've been realizing that I don't just want success. Of course, I want success. We all want success, but a life that feels good to live, and that is so much of like the the podcast and what I'm creating, and just like really documenting in real time is you know, just really creating a life that does really truly feel good, and a life of freedom and peace and present in a life where I feel more connected to myself, source, my family, and connected to my deep purpose in this lifetime, in my remaining years here on earth, being a human. Um, of course, I do feel all these things on some level, but I'm like looking like you know, to really cultivate this on a much deeper, deeper level, and like just a true embodiment of that. And I think that's where some of the confusion has been coming in lately, is because I'm sitting in like also a paradox of like between hustle and ease. Like if you have big dreams, does that require hard work? Does it require sacrifice? Does it require grinding for a season or two or three or four or five multiple seasons? I think sometimes like online it's really funny, or you know, what I've even experienced in my own life is you know, people just swing in too far into extremes, either hustle until you burn out, or just align and receive. And but real life feels way more nuanced than that, right? And especially when you have children, you have builds, you have responsibilities, you have a family, you have debt, you have real-world things that still need to be carried out. So I'm just been sitting with this question lately: is like, how do you build something extraordinary without abandoning yourself in the process? Because I already know how to work hard, and I've been working hard my whole life in some capacity, and only people who truly know me on a deepest level will probably understand that. And I'm not even just talking about hard work of just like even going to work, even the hard work of becoming the person that I am today, and the work that I had to put in, you know, over the last, you know, I don't know, 20-something years of my life, or just even the hard work of, you know, being a mom to three, the hard work of homeschooling the hard work of the work that goes into building a beautiful four walls to cultivate a beautiful, rich, fulfilling family life. So yeah, and I think becoming a mom at 19, I've spent years carrying responsibilities, just surviving, caretaking, working, rebuilding my life many times. And so, you know, I don't think the next level of my life is necessarily about learning how to like hustle harder. It's about learning how to direct my energy more intentionally. And I think that is so much of it of life, right? In so many ways is the power of intention. Everything does circle back to intention to some capacity, right? So just how do I, how do we direct our energy more intentionally? And honestly, I think the deepest thing I'm uncovering recently is underneath all of this ambition and underneath all this surviving in dreaming and building, there's also like this level, I feel like of urgency right now, and this feeling like I can't miss this moment, I need to do it now, I need to hurry, I need to figure it out. Time is moving, AI is gonna take over. You know, you only have X amount of time to like get rich. Like the the things that we feed ourselves, it's it is funny. At least I can laugh about it, right? And if I'm being really honest, I think my identity identity has become wrapped up in like productivity in some capacity. Like if you know me, like you know, I'm always have my hands in something, I'm always doing something. I always, yeah, I just it's it's a you know, doing the producing, the thinking, the moving, you know, the shifting. It's you know, and that that I feel like almost like slowing down, you know, we almost feel guilty about it. Isn't that wild? Like, just to like really slow down. And like if you slow down too much, you're gonna miss something, you're gonna fall behind. Oh no, like are we gonna lose momentum? And I know I'm not alone in that. And I think so many women do carry urgency and pressure within their nervous system, especially women who spent their lives holding everything together. Um, but Lily, I'm wondering if like that version of me, if the version of me who already has the life I desire probably isn't rushing around as much. She's probably trusting more. She probably understands that life isn't something that you force into existence through panic. She probably understands that clarity doesn't come from thinking harder, and maybe clarity comes from creating enough stillness to actually hear herself. And that's another thing that I've been realizing lately is I do need more stillness. I do need to cultivate that, and I do need, I do need more quiet because I am someone who thinks constantly, moves constantly, creates constantly. But I think there's a wisdom trying to come through that can only be heard when you slow down enough to listen. And I think even just this winter, when I like I needed a heel myself and my family, and moving, you know, out of a house because of the mold has was a huge lesson in like just so many nuggets of gold, and just even being able to have that two months to be still, like I did gain a lot of clarity, and it was like amazing. So I do know it on some level now, but you know, I am back to work and the we're in, you know, we're about to move again in a couple weeks, and there's just so many other things that are, you know, that need to be taken care of day to day. So it's interesting, it's just an interesting dance all the time. And I think so much of what blocks us from hearing ourselves is is our conditioning, our conditioning, our own patterning, programming, trauma, fear, pressure, survival, you name it. But honestly, I believe that deep down we already do carry the medicine within us. We carry the answers, we carry the wisdom, we carry the capacity. But there are so many layers placed on top of us throughout our lives that we forget how powerful and capable we actually are. And so maybe becoming isn't necessarily even adding more, maybe it's just about remembering, maybe the version of us trying to become, you know, maybe the version of us that we are already trying to become already exists somewhere inside of us underneath all the noise. And maybe becoming building, maybe building capacity isn't about overnight transformation. Maybe it's building it slowly through consistency, through tiny shifts, through keeping promises to ourselves, through repetition, and through choosing again and again who you want to become. And I think one of the biggest things that motherhood has taught me is like you're never fully ready to become a mother. Never. And you don't fully understand the depth of what is going to require from you. But yet somehow all of us grow into it. We expand, we adapt, and we become capable of holding more than we ever imagined. So maybe that's how like life works in some way. And so maybe we don't need to become fully ready first. Maybe we become ready by living it, maybe we grow our capacity by walking the path itself. And I think that's really where I am right now in a lot of ways. And just learning how to trust the process of my own evolution and my own, my own career, in my own path, and trusting the the the divine time of that. Like, I'm like, I always get so heady about like, oh my gosh, I'm 41, I'm gonna be 42 in January, and I still don't have the career that I want. And so, you know, and just learning how to relax to into becoming instead of forcing every three, everything through urgency. All big lessons here for me. Don't have this mastered in any way, shape, or form, thinking out loud and just like realizing like these are, and I do know these are things that I do need to cultivate and work on in my life. You know, and at the end of the day, I don't want just success. Of course, I want success. All of us want success in some way, shape, or form. It just depends on how you define success, right? So, you know, I want peace, I want presence, I want freedom, and I want a life that feels like super delicious in my body. And I want to wake up every day feeling like alive and connected to what I'm creating. And I think that's the real journey I'm on right now is just not building a life externally. It's becoming the version of myself internally who can hold it. And like that is so much of what I am like, you know, striving towards of one of the things of just like, you know, if I want all these different things in life, how would I ever hold it? And how do I grow my capacity? So yeah, and if you're in this space too, of this like murky middle or you know, how however it looks for you, just know that you're not alone and I see you. And yeah, I just want to thank you so much for being here and for listening, and I appreciate you so deeply. And if you resonate with this episode or this show, I would just love for you to follow along. And as always, thank you for walking this journey with me. I so appreciate you. I love you all so much. And yeah, I think that's it for today. I love to keep my episodes kind of short and sweet because that's how I like mine. Um, and yeah, I'll see you in the next episode. Bye for now.