Is It Time To Get Uncomfortable? Why We Need New Dreams & Hobbies!
New episode of SoulTech with Cynthia Podcast with Famed Author Mark Shaw - The Connections He Found Between the Deaths of Marilyn, JFK, & Dorothy Kilgallen
Cynthia L Elliott
3x Best-Selling Author, Inspirational Speaker, & Cultural Futurist
Before we get going on this week’s newsletter, I wanted to wholeheartedly say thank you to everyone who reached out to me regarding my last newsletter on learning to cry again. It means SO much to me that many of you saw yourselves in my journey and that you truly felt seen, understood, and/or inspired. I also appreciate all the birthday wishes! Can’t believe I am 30, again ;-) !
Alright, time to share something that makes me squirm.
Today I recorded myself singing in the bathroom and I am going to share it with you. No filter, no autotune, no good speaker to hide behind, just my voice, a tinny little laptop speaker, and the acoustic mercy of tile. Just thinking about hitting “share” on that makes me want to curl up and die. I am not someone who likes being watched, especially while I am still learning something. I am a person who built a career on being polished. Books published. Stages held. Words chosen carefully. Letting you see me be bad at something, in progress, unedited, goes against every instinct I have.
Here is why I am doing it anyway.
Just to make myself really uncomfortable, I recorded this one time in the bathroom with no warmup. It would hardly serve the point to have recorded it over and over.
I am deep in the writing of one of our new SoulTech Foundation courses, 9 Steps to Living Joyfully, which is built on the framework I first wrote about in my book Unleash the Empress. That book documented the steps I took years ago to glow up and genuinely learn to enjoy life again, and one of those steps was discovering, and rediscovering, my gifts. Back then I went through the full list of things I had ever been curious about or halfway good at. I revisited things I had tried long ago. I added brand new things to the list, too.
Writing the course version of that step this week put all of it right back in front of me, and it reminded me that discovering your gifts is not a one time task you check off during a glow up and move past. It is ongoing. So I decided to keep proving that to myself in real time, in front of you.
Painting is the oldest hobby I chose on my glow up journey. I painted in high school, let it go for decades, and picked it back up a few years ago, before Unleash the Empress even came out. Singing came later. I have been practicing in the gym for about a year and a half now, and I am still very much in the learning trenches. And this year I bought a vintage Ovation guitar, the next item on my own list, which I am only just beginning to actually learn.
That is the part nobody tells you when they talk about “finding your gifts.” They show you the after. The gallery show, the album, the highlight reel. Nobody shows you the middle, the part where your painting looks like it was made by a caffeinated toddler and your guitar chords sound like they are dying. That middle is uncomfortable. Practice can be messy. And I have come to believe it is one of the most important places a grown adult can put themselves.
Why new goals and hobbies matter more than we think
We tend to treat hobbies as decoration, something nice we do once the real work of life is finished. I want to reframe that for you, because the research and the wisdom traditions actually agree on this one.
Your brain is not a fixed object. Neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to form new neural pathways throughout your entire life, does not shut off at some arbitrary age.
It responds to novelty and challenge. When you ask your hands to do something they have never done, hold a paintbrush at a new angle, find a chord shape your fingers have never made, your brain builds new connections to meet the demand. Familiar, well worn activities do not ask this of you. New ones do.
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There is also a longevity piece here that I think about often, especially working alongside communities who are navigating what it means to build a meaningful life in the age of AI. Studies on aging populations consistently point to cognitive engagement, social connection, and a sense of purpose as protective factors, not just for the mind but for the body. Learning is not just a metaphor for staying young. It appears to be one of the actual mechanisms.
And then there is the piece that matters most to me spiritually, which is evolution. Not the Darwinian kind, the soul kind. Every time you let yourself be a beginner, you practice a very specific kind of humility and courage at the same time. You prove to yourself that your identity is not fixed at whatever you already mastered years ago. You remember that you are still becoming. That is not a small thing. That might be the whole point.
What the awkward phase is actually doing for you
The clumsy, cringe, not-good-yet phase is not a detour on the way to the gift. It is the gift doing its early work. Every wrong note and lopsided brushstroke is your brain and your nervous system recalibrating. You cannot skip this part, and honestly, I would gently suggest you should not want to. The awkward phase is where your ego gets a little smaller and your capacity gets a little bigger. Both of those are good for you.
How to actually do this, step by step
If this is stirring something in you, here is how I would suggest starting.
First, pick something you have always been curious about, not something you think you should be good at. Curiosity survives the awkward phase. Should does not.
A new episode of SoulTech with Cynthia just dropped! My special guest is famed author Mark Shaw. We cover the FASCINATING work he did connecting the deaths of Marilyn, JFK, and Dorothy Kilgallen. Listen on Apple, Spotify & YouTube.
Second, lower the bar on purpose. Give yourself permission to be genuinely bad for a defined stretch of time, say 90 - 180 days, with zero expectation of impressing anyone, including yourself.
Third, make it small and repeatable. Fifteen minutes of guitar most days will change your brain faster than one heroic two hour session you only do once.
Fourth, let someone see you before you are ready, even if every part of you resists it. This is the hardest one and the most important one, and I say that as someone who genuinely does not enjoy this step. Share the recording. Show the ugly painting. Being witnessed in the unfinished middle is part of what makes the growth real instead of theoretical, and it does not get more comfortable just because you already know that.
Fifth, track how you feel, not how you sound or look. Are you more present. Are you sleeping better. Are you a little less rigid about who you think you are. That is the metric that matters.
I am still terrible at guitar, for the record. My painting has graduated from “cringe” to “acceptable,” which honestly feels like a Grammy win. My singing is finding its footing, and today, on a bathroom recording with a crappy speaker and zero polish, you get to hear exactly where it is.
I want to be clear that I am not doing this because I love being watched mid-learning. I do not. I am doing it because I think we have all gotten a little too comfortable hiding behind our competence, myself included, and someone has to go first.
What is the thing you have been wanting to try and haven’t, because you are afraid of being bad at it first? I would love to know. Hit reply and tell me, or better yet, go be bad at it this week and tell me how it felt.
With so much love and a recording I almost didn’t send,
Have a blessed week!
Cynthia
3x Best-Selling author, Cynthia L. Elliott, is the founder of the SoulTech AI Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit supporting underserved communities in the age of artificial intelligence, and the author of SoulTech: 12 Codes for Awakening Your Higher Self.
