Reflections from Ashley Iduda: Embracing Authenticity and Finding One's Self

Reflections from Ashley Iduda: Embracing Authenticity and Finding One's Self

In this episode of Happiness Unscripted, Kristin DeSouza highlights the inspiring transformation of Ashley Iduda, who reclaimed her true self. Ashley's journey demonstrates the courage to acknowledge personal struggles, confront codependency, and combat shame to find genuine happiness. Her story underscores the importance of self-honesty, self-love, and embracing one's inherent worth. The episode concludes with practical advice for rewiring the mind for positivity and the value of spiritual encounters in nurturing self-acceptance and authentic living.

Time Stamps

00:00 Introduction to Happiness Unscripted
01:43 Ashley's Journey to Authenticity
03:21 The Power of Vulnerability
07:08 Breaking Free from People Pleasing
12:06 Confronting and Overcoming Shame
16:14 A Spiritual Awakening
24:10 Daily Practices for Happiness
30:12 Embracing Inherent Worth
34:09 Outro & Closing

Connect with Happiness Unscripted:

✉️: happinessunscriptedpodcast@gmail.com

🎙️: https://happinessunscripted.buzzsprout.com

      On Spotify      

https://open.spotify.com/show/61RuOPMxtnkZaGKtQTO1pm?si=e7bfd270bb7f489a

       On Apple Podcast

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/happiness-unscripted/id1837486744

• Also where you normally listen 👂 to podcasts!

📱 Social Media:

• facebook.com/HappinessUnscripted
• instagram.com/happinessunscripted/

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 - just 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!

Transcript

Kristin - Host.. 0:01

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, you'll 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. Welcome back to Happiness Unscripted. I'm your host, Kristin DeSouza. Over three beautiful episodes we've journeyed with Ashley Iduda. Through her powerful transformation from a woman who'd lost herself in the roles she'd played to someone courageously building a life of authentic purpose and meaningful connection with herself, with others, and with God. As I recorded our conversation and later edited those episodes, certain themes kept resonating with me, messages that speak directly to the heart of what we explore here, at Happiness Unscripted. Today, I want to reflect on these insights and how I believe they help Illuminate the path towards genuine happiness and fulfillment. Ashley's story demonstrates that happiness isn't found by meeting everyone else's expectations or always performing for others in order to gain a sense of worthiness or connection. Instead, it emerges when we have the courage to be honest about our struggles, release the shame that's binding us, and step into who we're truly meant to be, imperfectly, authentically, and one choice at a time. So where does a transformation begin? Ashley's story starts in what might seem like an ordinary moment standing in her kitchen, trying to write an'About Me' section for a Facebook group. But as she typed and deleted, typed and deleted, she was unable to articulate who she was. Uh, and she became aware of something pretty profound. She realized she'd been describing who she used to be. But not who she was in that current moment. And this resonates deeply with me because I think it illuminates an experience almost all of us will have at some point in our lives. That moment when we realize we've lost ourselves in the role we play, parent, professional, caregiver, friend, we can become so consumed by these roles that we lose touch with the person we are. So one point early in my conversation with Ashley that really took my breath away was when she shared the story of telling her husband,'I'm not okay'. The courage and the self-awareness that took still makes me pause when I think about it for me. What makes Ashley's journey so instructive for helping to build a meaningful happiness is her willingness to voice what can feel like a terrifying truth.'I'm not, okay. I need to figure something out.' I think this wasn't a casual admission. I think it required. Confronting an uncomfortable reality and then giving that feeling voice out loud, and Ashley realizes she felt she'd been making decisions to please others rather than what she wanted or needed herself. She talks about having lost that connection to her core self and no longer recognizing the person that she was. And I think that required her to be very vulnerable, uh, despite any sense of shame about not having it together, that I think a lot of us can feel and struggle with. The deep lesson here is we cannot build an authentic happiness on a false pretense. The false front Ashley had been maintaining, what she later learned was'masking' related to her undiagnosed ADHD is something many of us employ. We present ourselves as being okay while internally, we're drowning, and that sense of drowning is something that I really connected with because that was very similar to what I was feeling at one point, that started me on this journey of feeling like something wasn't working right in my life, but, no matter how much I tried to tell people about it, it was like stuck inside me. Uh, and so I was presenting myself as being okay while internally just felt like I was struggling through so many things. And Ashley demonstrates that, a genuine transformation required the courage to stop performing for even herself and to start being really honest and that honesty was something she first had to give to herself, and then something that, with the safe people in her life, she had to share. And I think that's a great, uh, example that all of us can relate to and work on. I think it's important to acknowledge that that sort of honesty isn't weakness. It's really a bedrock of authentic living. So I think that leads me to talk about an idea of, you know, kinda people pleasing and living for others approval. One of Ashley's most vulnerable admissions was about codependancy and people pleasing. She shared that she felt like she'd been living to make others happy, uh, make decisions that would please them, and not necessarily, uh, having a voice or using her voice to speak up for what she knew she needed. When we build our lives around meeting others' expectations or earning approval. We really get ourselves on an exhausting treadmill that just keeps going and going. We're suppressing our desires and our needs, and we're making choices that don't align with ourselves and don't honor ourselves. Think that can lead us to accumulate resentment and disconnection from our own inner self and we lose track of who we are, separate from what the performance is, and eventually we arrive at the kitchen table saying, who am I? Another moment in Ashley's story that. It showed tremendous strength for me was her willingness to be vulnerable, yet show so much courage to tell her husband that she needed time. They had been working towards this goal of her returning to work and she had to say that she couldn't do that right then. Uh, she needed some, time to figure something out. Uh, she needed time to heal, to work on herself, to discover who at this point in her life was she, actually. So, so why I think this matters for happiness. Uh, you can't be deeply happy living, someone else's script, or even your script, but an outdated version of it. I felt Ashley's story demonstrated several crucial truths. Uh, first, authentic happiness requires self knowledge, which can only come from listening to your own inner voice. Uh, second. Choosing yourself isn't, isn't a selfish choice. It's a necessary foundation for showing up authentically in relationships. And if you're not showing up authentically, then you know how are those relationships really gonna last because then you're on that treadmill. And third, short term discomfort can be really worth enduring for the long term benefit, the alignment with yourself and finding the people in the world who connect with that true self. So here's something to consider. Examine recent decisions, how many were made to avoid disappointing someone or maintaining an image or living up to an external expectation. What would change if you gave your own needs and desires an equal weight in those decisions that you made and the actions that you took, something for each of us to maybe ponder while we're Yeah. Out for a walk, hopefully, or just sitting quietly after we've completed a busy day. Next I want to touch on Ashley's conversation about shame, and in particular, bringing darkness into the light, or you know, the shame into the light as she talks about it. Ashley's work with shame offers one of the most practical pathways. To freedom that I think we talked about during our conversation. You know her, the therapist told her,'you're full of shame', and she described that this shocked her because she hadn't even identified shame as a struggle that she was having. She describes it as realizing she'd stuffed it down so far that it operated invisibly. Shaping her life from shadows. She goes on to talk about her liberation coming from understanding. As, Brene Brown teaches, shame thrives in the dark. When we hide, ignore, or bury shame, we give it a place to be able to grow and gain power. And then that shame convinces us that we have to hide it so that it can continue to grow and build power. It says, if people really knew us, they'd reject us. Yet Brene Brown talks about when you bring shame into the light by naming it and by sharing it with safe people in your life to discuss these kinds of things, uh, that's how you can cause shame to lose its hold. And Ashley shared, I think a powerful tool from one of her own podcast guests, so it may be worth going and finding this episode on Ashley's podcast, this guest said,'name it to tame it'. And I just, I thought, that's so easy to remember. Name it, to tame it. And she said when she began naming her shame, acknowledging feelings and experiences of childhood reject wounds, uh, struggles with receiving love, owning her feelings of inadequacy, that's how she broke shame's. Primary weapon secrecy. And I think this is just such practical, foundational work. You know, ask yourself, what are you most afraid of people knowing about you? What do you believe makes you feel unworthy or unlovable or what do you believe just makes you unworthy or unlovable that you think this is a, a fact and not a feeling? That's a way to possibly help you identify shame wounds and understand. What things maybe are keeping us from each of our authentic happiness? Then the path forward isn't to fix yourself until you're worthy. It's really to stop hiding these beliefs and instead bring them into the light Really look at them, you know, explore them. Help yourself recognize that they're lies. Shame is lying to you. Okay, so let's talk about the amazing spiritual encounter and how that really helped Ashley open up to feeling love and purpose. I think this is a highlight of my conversation with Ashley hearing about her astounding experience with God. You know, she described feeling electricity coursing through her veins and experiencing what felt like a literal embrace. Hearing God tell her she was chosen. I've tried to visualize what this must have been like, but it seems beyond full comprehension until you actually experience it. That sense of, you can't really know it until you have experienced it reminds me of. Uh, what I feel about giving birth, having been fortunate enough to do that twice for my amazing kids. It's something that you can understand intellectually. But the depth and the breadth of, anyone's individual experience is more complex than can ever really be fully described for someone else to really understand and making that connection helped me understand. What an amazing moment of awakening this was for Ashley. You know, that's what really came across to me is I listened to her share this experience. So even if I can't fully comprehend it to the level that she experienced it, uh, I can at least. Appreciate the experience and do my best to visualize what that must have been like. She described this spiritual encounter as having cracked her heart open. Allowing her to begin to understand what truly receiving love feels like. And here's what struck me with this. It wasn't about becoming perfect or something that she had to achieve. It was simply about accepting that she was loved, chosen and worthy, simply because she exists. So try to think a bit about a universal application of this. So whether you frame it spiritually or not, I think many of us struggle with feeling like it's okay to simply receive, receive that love. We deflect compliments, we feel indebted if someone helps us. We believe we need to earn the love and that leads us to wait for the other shoe to drop when feels like good things are happening. Thus, this inability to receive keeps us in performance mode always working to be worthy, rather than simply being able to accept our inherent worth because we exist. Ashley shared something that really resonated for me. Hopefully I quote her correctly here,'you can love Jesus and still be in bondage, can love Jesus and still not really be free.' End quote. She talks about how she'd been a Christian for 11 years, but hadn't experienced the freedom of truthfully believing she was loved and chosen, and talks about how the path to freedom requires opening your heart to receive love from God, from others, even just from yourself, which means releasing a belief that you must earn it. And so Ashley shares with us that this is spiritual work, psychological work, and a deeply practical work all at once. So, of course I resonate towards some of the practical ways to practice receiving. Um, I also think that could be a really good starting point for any of us working on this. So you, I think we can work on noticing when we're deflecting. When someone compliments you, do you immediately minimize it. Instead, we can practice simply saying thank you and letting that compliment in letting us feel the positivity and the light from it. Could examine your'earning patterns'. Where are you still trying to prove that you're worthy? And then think about what would change if you simply accepted you're already worthy. This is a, a good one, but definitely can be a challenging one. Practice self-compassion. Speak to yourself the way a loving parent or friend would. How would you speak with kindness, patience, and acceptance to yourself in the way that you might speak to others or you've heard someone else speak that in a way that you really admire because it carries with it those qualities. What about trying to connect to something greater? Whether that is through prayer, whether that's through meditation, being in nature, community. What about creating space to feel like you're being held and are a part of something beyond yourself? What if you spent time thinking about how you are simply a part of a greater whole, that you find very, enveloping in a warm and nurturing way? So from there, that led me to think about daily choices and an idea of, rewiring your mind for happiness. Looking for happiness and accepting of happiness. Potentially Ashley's most practical and applicable, teaching we discussed is the daily choice we all face to believe truth or believe lies. And I think that can connect very much to that bringing shame from the dark into the light as well. So Ashley shared an insight that she gained after her experience with God. She said'Every day you have a choice. I can choose love, or I can choose fear. God is love. I get to choose to believe that what he says about me is true or I can get all wrapped up in my mental spiral and all my insecurities.' End quote. Even after her encounter with God, Ashley still has days with doubt, fear, and questioning. And that really helps remind me that the human experience is real for all of us. It probably isn't going to be a moment where we stop having that human experience while we're here on Earth. I certainly hope not, uh, because there's a lot of amazing things that come with that experience. However, the difference is she talks about now. Having a practice for those moments, and I really loved the method Ashley shared to counter those moments of doubt again, because I think it is so simple and universal that it feels very doable for anyone. So you write positive truths about yourself on note cards. You put them where you'll see them regularly and then when those limiting beliefs come up in your mind, you deliberately speak these truths instead. So here's something that surprised me about this. She said even Mel Robbins uses this practice. When overwhelmed with anxiety, Mel Robbins apparently Googled what scripture says about fear and found the verse.'I have not given you a spirit of fear, but power, love, and a sound mind.' She chose to whisper that throughout her day. Every time anxiety arose in her. And I think that's amazing in the simplicity that it has, but the power that it can carry to give yourself something, to really get yourself in the habit of, um, retraining your brain to believe what you see is truth about yourself instead of, lies or insecurities that are coming up. So a key component of this practice is that, at least I do not think that it is toxic positivity or denying reality. It's about recognizing a negative narrative we are telling ourselves often, um, and that those negative narratives are generally not strictly, uh, reality. They're distortions based on fear or what others have said about us or insecurities that we carry for ourselves. And so I like that Ashley asked us to consider this idea of, again, to quote her,'I get to choose who I believe I am. I am either a product of this world or I'm a creation that God made, literally his daughter created with intention. Uniquely with a purpose.' End quote. So again, because this podcast is not strictly about Christian beliefs, if we wanna look at this in secular terms, I think it means you get to choose who or what you believe about yourself. Are you going to accept limiting narratives from society, family, or even yourself? Or are you going to believe that your inherent value and your ever expanding capacity to embrace something positive exists and is more powerful, is bigger than the negativity and the insecurity? So then let's talk about freedom of inherent worth. That kind of freedom comes if you can start to just accept that you have inherent worth. A message Ashley shared that I think all of us can work to embrace, especially considering a lot of us are in a very achievement focused culture or time right now, is this- God says you're worthy just by existing. All you have to do is be who he created you to be. So, so again, this message I think has a really beautiful and straightforward, translation to a secular perspective as well. Your worth exists independent of achievement. You don't need to earn the right to exist, to take up space, to have needs, or to be loved. And I think, again, this is something that almost all people have some component they feel in life. but I will say, I think this is one that can particularly resonate with, women where, intentionally or unintentionally, society has worked for us to sometimes be small, shrink, don't take up too much space, don't stand out. I think this idea of, you have worth simply being who you are, and it's independent of anything that you achieve, can really be a great thing to work on embracing, in terms of working on making yourself feel lighter and freer to just move through the world as you are. Let's talk about what'being' could actually mean. When Ashley talks about focusing on being' rather than'doing', she's not suggesting that we all just become passive or avoid growth. In fact, I think it's very much the opposite. She means something that's much more nuanced and a shift in what we focus on. It's moving from the external validation of others saying what we've achieved, what we're worth, to an internal alignment. Going back to that early concept of moving from that constant treadmill of performance to simply being our authentic selves. We're moving from earning worth to simply recognizing and acknowledging our inherent worth of being who we are. To me that really speaks to a way to become more fully myself. I liked a description she gave of be the most elevated version of yourself in every aspect, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Because being that authentic version of yourself in all areas is really embracing who you are and be who you are. 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. Your journey matters. The path to happiness isn't always linear, but it's always worth walking. Remember, this path isn't about perfection; it's about progress, self-compassion, and the courage to keep walking towards your goals. I want you to know that your presence here means everything to me. Before you go, take a moment to think about one small thing from today's conversation that gives you joy or you can put into practice this week, then please share it in the comments section to inspire others. If you found value in what we discussed. Please share this episode with someone who might need to hear it or leave us a great review to help others find their way here too. Please follow Happiness Unscripted on Facebook and Instagram and subscribe so you get updates on the next episode release. I'm Kristin DeSouza and I can't wait to continue our journey towards Happiness Unscripted. Let's get happy.