Happiness Unscripted

Finding Identity and Faith with Ashley Iduda

• Kristin DeSouza • Season 1 • Episode 6

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Finding Identity and Faith with Ashley Iduda of Her Identity Project Podcast

 In this episode of Happiness Unscripted, host Kristin DeSouza talks with Ashley Iduda, a Christian woman's empowerment coach and podcast host of 'Her Identity Project.' Ashley shares her transformative journey of overcoming identity struggles, imposter syndrome, and feelings of shame. 

 She discusses her career transition from a makeup artist to a stay-at-home mom, revealing how she grappled with lost identity and insecurity. Ashley's powerful encounter with God's love led her to a profound healing process, ultimately helping her embrace her inner and outer beauty, which led her to help other women do the same. This inspiring conversation highlights the importance of self-awareness, courage, and faith in achieving true self-acceptance and happiness.

Key Timestamps 

00:00 Finding Identity and Faith with Ashley Iduda 21Jul25_Oct25

00:57 Ashley Iduda Intro

02:23 Ashley's Background story

03:58 Ashley's Struggles with Identity

10:27 The Start of Ashley's Journey to Understand Her Identity

15:20 Kristin Relates to Realizing It Is Time To Make Changes

18:23 Ashley's Transformative Experience with God

25:51 Outro-See You Next Time as We Continue with Ashley

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Hey there friends! Just a friendly reminder that this podcast is all about sharing ideas and having fun conversations. I'm not an expert in this subject over here - jut a curious person exploring topics I find interesting. So please don't take anything said here as professional advice. When in doubt, chat with the real pros who know their stuff. Thanks for listening and hope you join us for the next episode! Now, let's dive in and get happy!

Kristin, Host:

Hello, welcome to Happiness Unscripted, where we are on a mission to embrace happiness. I'm your host, Kristin DeSouza. If you're ready to explore the real unscripted journey to deeper happiness and joy in life, then so glad you found us. Through this podcast, I'm inviting you to join me as we look within ourselves to find a path towards a life we each passionately embrace and love. With us, hear real stories from people who've made meaningful changes in their lives to find greater fulfillment alongside wisdom from experts across a range of fields to help inspire and inform your journey. So let's get started. Hello again. I'm so excited you're here with us today as we talk with Ashley Iduda. Ashley is a Christian woman's empowerment coach and podcast host who specializes in helping women discover their God-given inner and outer beauty and confidence. She hosts Her Identity Project: true confidence and inner beauty for Christian women. A podcast focused on biblical teachings about self-worth, beauty, and identity for overwhelmed moms and women struggling with shame and insecurity. Ashley has a background as a makeup artist and has experienced her own journey of overwhelming identity struggles, including imposter syndrome as a stay-at-home mom, along with battles on shame and self-doubt. Her ministry centers on helping women break free from societal labels and find their worth in the relationship with God. Emphasizing that women are God's masterpieces, Ephesians 2:10. Ashley is in her third season of Her Identity Project podcast, which you can find where you listen to podcasts, such as this one. Additionally, she has launched Designed To Glow workshops where she offers guidance based on her formal training as a makeup artist, coupled with biblical teachings on embracing inner self-confidence.​We're gonna dive into your fascinating and inspiring story of the journey you've been on during our conversation today. So just to get started, please share with us a bit about yourself, to provide some background as a starting point.

Ashley:

Yeah, so, um, I recently moved to Austin, Texas about a year ago. I'm pretty much a Texas girl. I grew up in California as a kid and then moved to Texas. Um, I have two beautiful children. My kids are elementary age. My daughter's about to turn eight, my son's about to turn 11. Um, I am happily married and. Um, yeah, I am in a transitional season of my life. It's very exciting. Um, as you said, we started the podcast together and I've been podcasting, like you said, for about six months now, and the journey's been really cool. It's really evolving and it's, it's becoming something, I'm not sure I imagine it to be right in front of my eyes. And so I'm just kind of trusting God and going with like each step as he kind of puts it out there for me. Um, so yeah, I'm excited to, you have some pretty great questions, so I don't wanna say too much, but yeah, I'm excited to talk about the journey I've been on.

Kristin, Host:

That's wonderful. I'm definitely excited for our conversation today. I'm going to start with, you shared about your decades long struggle with identity from denying your creativity as a makeup artist to feeling like an imposter, as a stay at home mom. So first, would you share a high level picture of the struggles you were having during searching for your identity?

Ashley:

Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, I, I think it's kind of worth going down my career journey a little bit to, you know, just help kind of explain what life's been like for me. But, you know, I started out with a lot of fear and insecurity. You know, I've learned recently that I think a lot of it came from childhood trauma, but I knew I wanted to be a makeup artist when I was a little girl. I mean, I grew up watching my mom put makeup on in the mirror and I never had the confidence to pursue it until I was in my late twenties. And just saying that feels shameful in a way because it's like, you know, most people have it have a dream or a job or a career track in mind, and they go after it and then it feels like their life is just kind of set up, you know? Um, but my life's just never felt that linear. And so that's been really challenging for me. I moved to New York City, um, in my late twenties. I finally got the courage and the confidence to become a makeup artist. And then, um, two years later and before that, I met my husband and we started to journey into having a family. And so I traded it all to have kids to stay at home with my kids. And going back to that type of work just never felt possible for me. Um, I think there were lots of lies I was kind of telling myself along the way of like why it couldn't work. But, um, you know, at the end of the day, I think that the career pivot to being a stay at home mom was really, really challenging for me. And then I, you know, have since, I guess gone on a personal healing journey through faith and just an inner healing journey. And I realized that no, wait a minute, like there's a reason, right, that, you know, God has made me enjoy the things he is given me as, you know, passions and interests. Um, so, you know, I think the point of my journey,'cause I wanted to answer your question. I think you wanted to know like when the, um, like real, what was the question? Where the actual pain point was kind of thing.

Kristin, Host:

just I was looking to, yeah, understand the things that you felt like you were struggling with. And so what I'm hearing from you is one, at a younger point in life, feeling like you didn't know where, where you wanted to go in terms of your career, like who you wanted to be in your career, and

Ashley:

Mm-hmm.

Kristin, Host:

Sounds like about the time that you were starting to figure that out, you were fortunate enough to be able to start your family and be having children. And I think that is a struggle that we are starting to recognize for both, you know, men and women as they become fathers and mothers. But I think it definitely hits harder for women that draw to, um, really fully invest ourselves in raising our children. And I guess I hear sounds of from you.

Ashley:

Yeah. Yeah. You nailed it. And I think the identity shift for me, well, I guess I should say the, the, like, the minute I realized I was kind of, you know, hitting rock bottom, if you will. Um. You know, I'll just never forget being in the kitchen and being on my phone. I was on a, um, Facebook group and it was like a new moms group, you know, meet the moms in the neighborhood and I mean, I must have spent at least 30 minutes trying to type out like the about me section. And it was, I mean, I had typed and deleted and typed and deleted and couldn't come up with anything. And then suddenly realize the things I was typing out was the old me. And, and that now, like as this stay at home mom, like, wait a minute, I'm a makeup artist, but I'm not a makeup artist because I don't actively do it. So what do I do and what do I love and who actually am I? And it was in that moment that I realized like, I've really lost myself. I mean, I really, don't know who I am anymore. I'm unhappy and I'm not who I used to be. And it was really kind of a, an unsettling, I mean, a really scary moment for me to just be so self-aware that I was really not proud of, and kind of ashamed of who I was.

Kristin, Host:

That is very, um, I think that is very honest of you to share about and uh, I can imagine it'd be very scary and disorienting to, sounds like you had such a clear moment that you're like, wait, who am I? Um, but I can envision that that would, I could see myself almost feeling panicky about that. So I expect that was a hard realization to have in that point in time.

Ashley:

Yeah, thanks for seeing me. I definitely would say that's the beginning of my kind of like, I don't wanna call it a rock bottom, but just the realization that, I mean, I really did tell my husband I'm having a midlife crisis, like I'm not Okay. I remember very distinctly being like, I'm not okay. I need to figure this out because like, I wasn't happy with anything in my life at that point.

Kristin, Host:

Can I ask, you said that, am I correct in following that this is something that really in the last year, you've had that realization about, was this something that happened, as you were also settling into Austin, or is this something that you had started to realize prior to that

Ashley:

well it's definitely like a journey and a process that, that, that day of realizing, you know, I'm not okay. And that I had kind of lost my identity was back when we were living in San Antonio. So probably I would say even two, two and a half, three years ago, uh, or maybe two years ago. And then, um, you know, I began to start to make small changes like, you know, and at my work and that kind of thing to try to get realigned. And then when we moved here a year ago, I said, that's when I got this sense of like, you know what, I'm just not okay. Like this is not necessarily about my career. Like this is much deeper than that. And um, yeah, and then that's when I think I dedicated my life to figuring out like, what, what was wrong with me? Honestly.

Kristin, Host:

Can I ask, when you shared with your husband that you weren't okay, how did he take that? Because, you know, being married myself, I know that there can be challenges of, you know, sharing something like that with a spouse. And even though this is someone that you know, loves you deeply, I feel like sometimes can be difficult; one as the person to share that, and two as the person to take it in and hear it. You want your partner, your person in life to be okay. And I think sometimes there can be a quick response to say, we're fine, we're fine. here's all the reasons that it's okay. so I'm curious, would you be willing to share kind of how that initial conversation went with your husband?

Ashley:

Yeah. It's interesting you asked that question because I think it. It kind of, um, allows other parts of my story to come to the surface. But, you know, uh, it was a challenging conversation because, you know, what I've discovered about myself is that I've really had an issue with, uh, basically what therapists would consider codependency and people pleasing. And those two things, um, were I think, really big contributors to the fact that I didn't feel happy in my life because I wasn't living for myself. And, you know, to be really transparent. I can look back and see a lot of times where I had been living to make my husband happy, like making decisions that I knew would please him and not necessarily, you know, even having the voice to speak up for like, what I knew I needed because I, I thought that it wouldn't agree with his vision or whatever. And so I typically would just be appeasing, you know, um, maybe do what he expected or what other people expected in my life. And then just kind of stuff everything down. So it took a lot of courage. It was really scary and really hard to tell him I'm not okay. Um, and even more so because we had like, we're about to move. I was in a transition where it was like, okay, I had gone from staying at home to working full-time to that being too much to me scaling down to working part-time and then, you know, us agreeing that like, now it's time to jump back in the workforce. Like go pursue whatever career you never pursued and let's you know it's time to start bringing in some real money. Right. And, and that it was right at that point where I said, sorry, but I need some time to work on myself and I can't go back to work right now. Because I knew that I needed time to heal. I knew I needed to kind of deal with some stuff that I think I had been stuffing down for almost 30 years.

Kristin, Host:

Wow. I can, I think what really resonates with me in that is having to find the inner courage and, self-worth to say that you needed that time to work on yourself. Because I think we've touched on very lightly, but one of where my journey, that led me to podcasting, started, now over five years ago was I was really struggling in, the career I was in and I'm the primary income earner in my family. And, um, had some reasons that that job was really starting to impact my health and I wasn't realizing right away that it was my health. But, finally had to also say to my husband, like, I'm gonna go get some help here. You know, I'm gonna go start some mental health counseling. I'm gonna go talk with my GP because I don't like how things are going on internally in me and I need to figure out how to make some changes. And I remember him, almost looking surprised and confused because I think I, I realized how good of a false face I was putting on things and just like, okay, I just gotta get up and do every day and keep going and keep going. And, I was starting to reach a point where I'm like, I literally don't know if I can keep doing this.

Ashley:

Aw. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah. That resonates with me, um, really deeply on, on a lot of different levels. I think that, and you and I have talked about this, you know, in our personal lives before, but also, as a woman who has ADD That's something that I hadn't really been diagnosed with until recently. And so now I've learned that they call it masking. And so typically women with ADD like can put on this face where everything's okay and you're just kind of pretending to be okay and you're putting on like a performance and an act for everybody. But inside you are struggling. I mean, you're really kind of like drowning. And that's, um, exactly what was happening for me as I think I had pretended like I was okay for way too long. So, um, yeah. Well, good for you that you are courageous enough to choose yourself, because I think that's what all this is about, at the end of the day, is being brave enough to own if we're okay or not, and if we're not having the courage to go do something about it.

Kristin, Host:

yeah. I like that. Having the courage to do something about it, and I think that is what I'm finding a lot of people are, you know, struggle with in their midlife in particular as we've talked about, and kind of figuring out, okay, what do I want my life to really look like as a whole.

Ashley:

Yeah. Yeah.

Kristin, Host:

I think that, uh, moves us to another Point that wanted to get into. So you've talked about having a transformative encounter with God's love that shattered your chains of insecurity. Can you share what did that breakthrough look like uh, when it happened and on a practical level, how did that start to be incorporated into your life?

Ashley:

Yeah. Um, let's see. I think for me it was, it's hard to not like that in itself feels like it could be a whole episode. So I wanna really kind of think about my answer. Um. You know, at the core, I think that I suffered from some severe, like rejection wounds from my childhood and from not feeling love like that I could receive love is actually what I think I finally realized what was happening with me. And so, you know, it's really interesting because I've been a Christian, I gave my life to Jesus, like, I don't know, 11 years ago when, I was in New York City and um, you can love Jesus and still be in bondage. You can love Jesus and still not really be free of all of the, insecurities and everything. And so I think that, um, I was struggling with really not feeling. Like, I could receive love is what I discovered, and then I had this supernatural encounter with Christ. I mean, the shortest story would just be to explain that I, in a very literal way, I could literally feel God's spirit on me, like in a, in a, in a crazy way where people would be like, maybe not even believe me or something like that. But I felt electricity coursing through my vein. Like, I felt like a super, super hero, like where I could literally like shock somebody because I could literally feel like lightning, like energy, like, but in a very real way coursing through my veins. And, um, it, it was odd. It lasted for a really long time, like an hour or two. And, so eventually after I kind of felt really like, I don't know how else to explain it. I was like, in bondage. It was like the feeling wouldn't stop and I couldn't talk, I couldn't walk. I felt like a heavy weight was on me. I didn't know how to break out of it. Like I didn't know what to do. And, um, finally my husband called over like a prayer partner at the church and was like, we need help. Like, come pray over her or something, you know? And I was literally like, I mean, I was shaking my voice, my, um. Sorry, not my voice, my breathing. I'll never forget it. It was labored. The way you're breathing, uh, when you're having like giving birth to a child. Like it was literally, oh yeah. Like I had to breathe, like breathe through the moment. Like it was cra it was so, it was crazy. It was legit like an out of body. It was crazy, out of body experience. Finally, I really did see this bright light. I felt like Jesus basically hug me, like hold me in his arms, like wrap me, like hold me. And he, he told me he loved me. I mean, he literally like told me he loved me and he gave me a word. He told me I was'chosen'. And, um, that experience. Cracked my heart open, like he cracked my heart open. And what I mean by that is I could feel my literal heart glowing like a glow worm, like from when we were little, like a real glow worm. Like I could feel it glowing and it was just such an undeniable experience. And so, you know, after that I didn't magically feel different. It wasn't like that changed me in some crazy way, but it did begin me understanding like, what, what, I guess loving myself and being able to accept and receive love, like truly is, and it, it's through I think, what I would consider the example of God and how he loves us.

Kristin, Host:

That is such an amazing story. I know you mentioned to me that, you had this really deep moment of connection with God and that you, felt called and chosen, but I had no idea that it was a, consuming of, your entire body and your entire being when you had this moment. So it's really powerful. thank you. for sharing that. That's amazing.

Ashley:

Thank you Thank you for asking. I'm getting the courage to talk about it. It was so personal. That it's taken me a while to be able to even, like, feel confident talking about it. Um, you know, because I know not everybody who's going to listen to this is a Christian. First of all, not everybody, you know, really understands the Bible or knows the word or like has a relationship with God and Jesus. And, um, I think that what I guess is important for people to know is that we, we are spirit beings who live in a body and have a soul. And our soul is our mind and our will and our emotions. But there is a very real spirit world and it's like, staying connected to that source, to God's source, to God's essence, um, has been life changing for me. I mean, life changing. And so, yeah, people talk about Jesus, but it's not about religion. Like it has nothing to do with that. It's a, it's about a relationship with, with the creator is really what it's about. And my life has significantly changed when I was able to, let go and not like get out of the driver's seat, as my husband says, and let God lead. I mean, truly surrendering my life. Like the Bible tells you to die to yourself, and that sounds like such a weird thing, but it's when you can get out of your own way and then just be who God wants you to be. Your whole life opens up for you.

Kristin, Host:

Well, that's a wrap on this episode of Happiness Unscripted. I'm so grateful you chose to spend this time with me today exploring what it means to build a life we truly love. But here's the thing, we're just getting started on this incredible story with Ashley Iduda. Make sure to tune in next week because we'll be continuing our conversation with Ashley Diving even deeper into her story and lessons she's learned along the way. Remember, the path to happiness isn't always linear, and I can't wait for you to hear what comes next. Your presence here means everything to me. Before you go, please take a moment to think about one small thing from today's conversation. That you could put into practice this week, then please share it in the comment section to inspire others. If you found value in what we discussed, it would be amazing if you share this episode with someone who might need to hear it or leave a great review. To help others find us, please follow happiness unscripted on Facebook and Instagram and subscribe to this podcast so you get updates on the next episode release. I am Kristen DeSouza. See you next time as we continue our journey towards Happiness Unscripted. Let's go get happy.

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Kristin DeSouza

Host
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Ashley Iduda

Guest