When I was born, my mother was convinced I was going to be a drummer. I kicked her so hard in the womb, she just “knew”. Turns out; I didn’t become a drummer. My drum teacher actually told me, at 12 years old, that I was too “passive aggressive” to hit the drums hard enough. Not angry enough. Not authentic enough.
The joke’s on him, because I found a different way of expressing myself. Not through the drums. Not true the violin [though, Lord knows I tried]. Not through art or poetry or even books [though I loved reading, and I’m now an author]… but while I realize we’re taught our lives are supposed to be one long, linear story where every page has to matter, every paragraph has to build toward some bestseller ending, I went a different route.
I turned my life into an album instead.
Every song became a chance to channel a struggle, work through a piece of trauma, make sense of something that didn’t make sense yet. I talked about this in my second TEDx Talk: transmuting pain into power, one track at a time. It’s become one of the core ideas behind my own personal growth mindset, and the mindset I try to help my coaching clients build too.
I thought about that talk again recently after a conversation on my podcast, REALTALK with Emma G and Dinah, with the rapper, filmmaker, and entrepreneur: Erie Ave. He told us about a phrase he built his entire mindset around: “before the deal”. Before Rick Ross. Before the headlines. He was a kid eating instant noodles while it looked like everyone else was eating lobster, and instead of being ashamed of that, he decided to name it, and keep moving. “I might be eating ramen now… but that’s because this is before the deal”. He still says it today, deals done, career thriving, but every day is still a “before the deal” moment for him.
Why do I bring this up today?
That conversation, and my second TEDx talk, are pointing at the same truth from two different directions. So I wanted to lay out in today’s blog post five reasons why [and how] your life is an album, not a chapter book, and what that actually means for how you move through personal growth, self acceptance, and everyday life, you know: before the deal.
1. An Album Doesn’t Get Judged by Its Weakest Track
Nobody scraps an entire album because one song didn’t land the way they hoped. That track still gets released. It still counts. It’s still part of the body of work, even if it’s not the lead single.
Yes, for some reason, we feel like we can do this to ourselves constantly.
We treat one hard season, one embarrassing mistake, one chapter we’d rather skip, as if it defines the whole record of our lives.
This is really a question of self worth. If your self esteem is built entirely on your highlight reel, your best tracks, your proudest moments, then every low self esteem spiral gets triggered the moment life hands you something less polished. But if your sense of self worth is rooted in the whole album, the messy tracks included, a bad season stops being able to define you.
Erie’s “before the deal” era, the noodles, the not-yet, the years before anyone knew his name, wasn’t a chapter he needed to edit out. It’s track one. Without it, the rest of the album doesn’t make sense. That’s what real self acceptance looks like in practice: not pretending the hard track didn’t happen, but refusing to let it be the only thing people, or you, remember about the album.
2. You Are Nobody’s Puppet, and Neither Is Your Story
In that TEDx talk, the first life lesson I shared came from a simple but radical idea: in a world that is constantly selling us low-selfesteem; the best act of rebellion is loving yourself unconditionally, exactly as you are, not as the world tells you to be. We live in a world constantly telling us who to be, how to show up, what our story is supposed to sound like by now: societal pressures, others’ opinions, the quiet demand for others’ approval, all of it adds up to a kind of negative self talk that isn’t even originally ours. It’s borrowed. Inherited. Absorbed.
This is where self awareness becomes so important. The inner critic in your head, the one running a constant stream of self judgment, self criticism, and self loathing, usually didn’t originate with you. It’s an old recording of someone else’s voice, played back so many times it started to sound like your own thoughts. Cultivating self compassion means learning to recognize when that voice is playing, and choosing, on purpose, not to let it write the next verse.
Erie talked about something similar.
Poetry was the only place he was allowed to feel things as a young Black man growing up in the DMV [that’s DC/MD/VA for those who don’t dwell in the area], when everywhere else told him to be hard, be tough, don’t feel it out loud. Writing that poetry, badly, privately, for no one, was his way of cutting the strings. Refusing to be anyone’s puppet, including the version of himself other people expected him to be.
What causes a lack of self acceptance?
More often than not, it isn’t one single event. It’s a slow accumulation of moments where you learned that being fully yourself wasn’t safe, wasn’t welcomed, or wasn’t enough. Childhood conditioning, past mistakes you never fully forgave yourself for, comparison to others, and years of negative thoughts left unchallenged can all quietly erode your sense of self. The good news is that just as it was built slowly, it can be rebuilt slowly too, one honest track at a time.
3. Growth Happens in the Track You Wanted to Skip
Lesson two from my TEDx talk: life is hard sometimes, but it’s our job to grow through the pain, not just go through it. We can’t change what happens to us, but we can certainly decide how to respond. That’s the difference between a song you survive and a song that actually changes you. It’s also, in many ways, the entire definition of a growth mindset: the belief that your ability, your character, and your capacity aren’t fixed, they’re built through effort, through discomfort, through the tracks you didn’t want to record in the first place.
This is where “before the deal” becomes more than a catchy phrase. It’s a growth mechanism. Erie didn’t wait until he’d made it to stop being ashamed, or to own his rockstar self. He decided, in the middle of the hard track, that the hard track still counted, that he could grow through it instead of just enduring it until the next one started.
How do you actually grow through pain, instead of just getting through it?
In my experience, both personally and with the clients I coach, real growth requires three things: naming what’s actually happening (instead of numbing it or performing through it), giving yourself permission to feel it without rushing to fix it, and eventually, when you’re ready, doing something with it. That’s the whole premise behind turning pain into a song instead of just a private wound. The processing has to go somewhere. Left unspoken, pain tends to calcify into self judgment. Given a voice, even an imperfect one, it tends to soften into growth. I go into this in much more detail in my book: Mental Health Sounds Like This, if you’re tempted to get even deeper into that topic.
4. Your Superpowers Are Built in the Bridge, Not the Chorus
The biggest punch-in-the-feelings on an album usually aren’t written in the easy moments. They’re written in the bridge: the part of the song where everything gets a little more raw, a little more honest, right before the final chorus lands differently than it did the first time.
I call this “stepping into being your own kind of superhero”: discovering that your pain points, leaned into rather than avoided, are where your real power gets built. Your strengths, the ones that actually hold up under pressure, rarely come from the parts of your life that were easy. They come from the bridge. The uncomfortable middle section nobody puts on the highlight reel.
But the catch? It’s an ongoing battle of building strength.
Erie still calls himself “before the deal” today, not because he hasn’t arrived, but because he knows the bridge never really stops writing itself. There’s always a next level, which means there’s always another bridge. Psychological well-being isn’t a destination you arrive at once and never revisit. It’s a practice, a muscle, something you keep building every time life hands you a new bridge to write.
What are the characteristics of a growth mindset?
People with a strong growth mindset tend to share a few things in common:
they treat setbacks as information rather than identity
they stay curious about their own reactions instead of judging them
they surround themselves with people who challenge and support them in equal measure
and they understand that self improvement is a long game, not a single dramatic transformation.
None of that requires you to have it all figured out. It just requires you to keep showing up for the next verse.
5. You Have the Pen
Here’s how I closed that TEDx talk: “this is your life, you have the pen, there’s no way to predict your future except to write it yourself”.
That’s the whole difference between a chapter book and an album, really. A chapter book implies someone else already knows how the story ends. An album is something you’re still actively writing, track by track, verse by verse, deal by deal. Erie’s still writing his. I’m still writing mine. And so are you.
You don’t need to have it all figured out to start the next track. You don’t need to be ashamed of the one you’re on right now, even if it still feels a little bit before the deal. Pick up the pen anyway.
Since these are questions I hear often, both from my coaching clients and from people discovering this work for the first time, I wanted to answer a few of them directly.
What does personal growth actually mean? At its core, personal growth is the ongoing process of understanding yourself more honestly and building the skills, self awareness, and self compassion to act on that understanding. It’s not a certificate you earn once. It’s daily life, practiced on purpose.
What are some real examples of personal growth? Learning to sit with discomfort instead of numbing it. Setting a boundary you used to be too afraid to set. Replacing negative self talk with something closer to the truth. Trying a new skill even though you might be bad at it at first. Choosing to spend time with people who reflect your growth back to you, rather than people who keep you small.
Why is self love so difficult for so many of us? Because most of us were never taught it directly. We were taught achievement, approval, and how to read a room. Self love asks you to unlearn a lot of that conditioning and build something new in its place, which is uncomfortable work, even when it’s good work.
How do you start liking yourself again after a hard season? Usually, in small, almost embarrassingly simple ways. Speaking to yourself the way you’d speak to someone you love. Noticing the inner critic without obeying it. Giving yourself credit for the tracks you got through, even the ones that were rough around the edges.
What is self acceptance, really? It’s the practice of acknowledging exactly who you are, strengths and struggles both, without needing to earn the right to exist as you are first. Radical self acceptance doesn’t mean you stop growing. It means you stop making your worth conditional on finishing the album before you’re allowed to feel good about being on it.
How do you actually practice self acceptance day to day? It starts small. Catching a moment of self criticism and asking whether you’d say that same thing to someone you love. Letting a mistake be a mistake instead of evidence about your entire character. Giving yourself the same grace for an unfinished goal that you’d give a friend. Self acceptance isn’t a mood you wait to feel. It’s a practice you choose, often before you feel ready for it, the same way Erie chose to say “before the deal” long before he felt like he’d made it anywhere.
Is unconditional self acceptance the same as giving up on growth? Not even close. This might be the biggest misconception people carry. Unconditional acceptance and ambition can coexist. You can fully accept exactly where you are on the album right now, noodles and all, while still working toward the next track. In fact, in my experience coaching people through exactly this, acceptance is usually what makes sustainable growth possible in the first place. Trying to grow from a place of self loathing tends to produce burnout. Growing from a place of self compassion tends to produce something that actually lasts.
What role does your community play in all of this? A bigger one than most people realize. In my TEDx talk, one of the five life lessons was about who you’re spending your time with, because a rising tide really does lift all boats. The people around you either reflect your growth back to you or quietly ask you to stay who you used to be. Erie talked about this too, the friends and collaborators who showed up for him long before the deal existed. Self acceptance is easier to sustain when you’re not doing it entirely alone.
Is manifesting your future self actually different from just wanting something badly? Yes, and this distinction matters more than people realize. I heard entrepreneur and Mindvalley founder Vishen Lakhiani explain it well: “the universe doesn’t hand you what you want, it reflects back who you already are. If you want to be the CEO but you haven’t started thinking, speaking, or carrying yourself like one yet, wanting harder won’t close that gap. Becoming will.” That’s exactly what “before the deal” is really doing underneath the catchy phrase. Erie wasn’t just hoping for a different life. He was practicing being the version of himself who’d already arrived, long before the evidence caught up. That’s identity work, not wishful thinking, and it’s the same principle behind why I believe writing a song about who you’re becoming does something a diary entry about who you were never could.
You know… songs like Living Proof, Be Brave, and I Am
Does changing your environment actually change your mindset, or is that just a nice idea? It’s more than a nice idea. Speaker and mentor Regan Hillyer talks about how stepping into an unfamiliar environment, a new culture, a new landscape, a different rhythm of life, expands what she calls your internal architecture in ways your everyday surroundings simply can’t. Familiar places hold you in familiar patterns. New ones interrupt them.
That’s part of why Dinah and I are so excited about the retreat we’re building in New Zealand next March. It’s not a vacation. It’s a deliberate change of frequency, ten days away from the noise that’s been telling you who you’re supposed to be, so you can hear who you’re actually becoming.
If any of this resonated, I’d invite you to listen to the full conversation with Erie Ave on REALTALK with Emma G and Dinah. You can find it here:
And if you’re curious about writing your own next track, whether that’s through coaching, songwriting, or a deeper reset like our upcoming New Zealand retreat, I’d love to hear from you. Simply click here to book a free connection call today!
