Forging My Own Path (Can You Relate?)
In this inaugural episode, I'm pulling back the curtain and sharing my personal journey. You'll hear about my conventional aspirations to live a "normal life", and about how unforeseen shifts led me on a very unexpected journey into military life. And how my personal journey led me to my mission of helping other Military Spouses & women in military life to transform their own lives through health & fitness
Show Notes
27 March 2024
The PCS-Proof Podcast
Episode 1: Forging My Own Path (Can You Relate?)
In this inaugural episode, I'm pulling back the curtain and sharing my personal journey.
You'll hear about:
My conventional aspirations to live a "normal life", and about how unforeseen shifts led me on a very unexpected journey into military life.
Some of my setbacks, professionally & personally, which highlight the importance of resilience and adaptability⎯both of which are crucial in navigating military life.
What sparked my personal transformation. How prioritizing health and fitness became a catalyst for positive change in all areas of my life.
How my personal journey led me to my mission of helping other Military Spouses & women in military life to transform their own lives through health & fitness!
Please help me reach more amazing women just like you by Following/Subscribing to this podcast. And, I would be so appreciative if you could leave a 5-star review.
I also wanted to invite you to interact with me in the show notes. Leave a question for me, or a request for a specific topic that you’d like me to cover in a future episode! (If you’re listening on a platform other than Spotify, just CLICK HERE to go to the episode website, and you’ll see the option to leave your question or request.)
Connect with Me:
Join My "PCSProof Fitness" Program (Let me cover your first month! Use code POD4FREE at check out)
Episode Transcript
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the PCS-Proof Podcast where we're covering the vital things you need to know to thrive in every season of military life. I'm your host and MilSpouse fitness expert, Grace Barnick-Damazo, and I encourage you to join me each week as we dive deep into topics like fitness, wellness, and entrepreneurship as a military spouse so that you can maintain your own sense of identity and purpose. Conquering every transition with strength and resilience.
As we journey together, you can expect uplifting conversations and insights. We'll share some laughs and you can count on me to keep it real. So it's together we can become truly PCS proof. Now let's get into it!
You guys, I just got home from the nicest little last minute getaway to Okinawa Japan. I was able to sneak away and meet my husband. He there on a short port visit and it was so fun and so delicious and I'm sharing that with you today not only because I'm super excited to be recording this inaugural podcast episode, but also because sometimes we just need those little reminders of how lucky we are to be able to live this unique lifestyle. Right?
Military life is so far from easy. Not many of us would willingly choose to have our spouse leave for months at a time.
And leave us holding everything together. But on the other hand, we are gifted with these amazing experiences, and I personally never foresaw any of this for myself. So I'm just super fired up with gratitude today for this amazing life that we get to live, and I'm so grateful today to be able to be talking to you. And it's really a perfect way to start this episode because I wanted to pull back the curtain a little bit and share my story with you. I thought that would be a nice place for us to start and get to know each other.
In future episodes, we're gonna be diving deep into topics that directly apply to MilSpouse lifestyle, but I feel like it's really important to have a little bit of understanding of who I am and where I came from in order to be sharing with you today.
But before we get into that, Let me just take a moment. I wanted to really encourage you if you've not already done so to follow or subscribe to this podcast. And I wanted to invite you to interact with me! It's really important that I'm speaking exactly to what you need and what you wanna hear from from me.
So if you're listening on Spotify, you'll see an option on this episode page to leave a question for me, and I'd love to answer you or you can request a specific topic that you'd like me to cover in a future episode. And if you're listening on a different platform, that's okay too.
Just click the link in the show notes to go to the episode website, and you'll see the option to leave your question or request.
Alright? So now let me share a little bit about my story and how I ended up here talking to you today...
I'm really I'm just a regular girl. I had regular dreams for myself.
I grew up in California, kind of in the countryside. So imagine like Rolling Hills, cattle ranches, cowboys—of course, the beach. That's kind of where I grew up. And all I wanted to do as a young girl was get out of there! I wanted to see things, go places, and I really envisioned myself going to college and getting a regular job.
I wanted to become a vet. And so go to school, become a vet, get out, have my practice. That was what I envisioned for myself. And I did get into my dream college, which was amazing, but even within the first year of college, my path started to shift a little bit. I kind of kept with the same general path, but things started to shift and I started spending more time studying public health and how animals can be used for models for human diseases and I got more interested in humans and human health.
And then, when I got out of school, it was right in the middle of the recession and there were no jobs. So again, my path shifted; I had to make a career change. And I ended up going back into hospitality, which is what I did in high school, and I started working in restaurants and then eventually moved into working at wineries. I found a partner and ended up moving to Napa Valley together. We both were in the wine industry.
And years went on. We were deep into this relationship. I found myself in—And I wanna say all of a sudden, but it wasn't all of a sudden—it happened over years. But if you ever had that moment where you kinda wake up and you realize, 'oh my gosh, how did I get here?' In this life that I I'm not happy any more, but how did I get here? It happens over time, and that's what happened to me.
So I found myself years into this relationship where I was in a very codependent relationship, with a person who had substance abuse issues, where I gave all of my energy and my attention to taking care of this other person. And I found myself in a career that I wasn't necessarily fulfilled in. And I found myself in a position where I had kind of 'let myself go', for a lack of a better term. I hadn't been taking care of myself. I wasn't happy with how my body looked, and I wasn't happy with how I felt in my body.
I was invited to go to a boot camp with a coworker and I had been putting her off.
She kept inviting me and I kept putting her off saying "no, no, no, I can't go. I can't afford it. I don't have time." All those, you know, real life reasons why people have a hard time investing in themselves. But eventually, she wore me down and I said yes. And I went to my first boot camp. It was at six AM in the morning, in the freezing cold, outside on the Tennis Court in Napa Valley. And I remember those first couple sessions that I went to. It was so hard! I could barely do the movements. And the days after I was so sore, I could barely lift my arms up or sit down on the toilet!
I was so sore, but I kept going back.
And after a few weeks of going, I started to notice that I felt different. I started to notice that my posture was a little bit better. I started to feel like I was standing up taller and like I could feel some muscle definition and that felt really good! Like, maybe I have a little bit more control over my life than I had been giving myself credit for. And once I started investing that time in myself and my health, I started to build confidence in other areas of my life.
And I started to feel like I could take back control in those other areas.
So, not that the moral of the story is leave your spouse, leave your career, leave your home, but that was what I needed to do in order to take that control of my journey and my life.
Because I was taking care of myself and focusing on myself again, I could see how far off track I'd gotten. And I started to kind of regain that control.
So, I ended up leaving that co dependent relationship.
I ended up leaving the job that I was in and leaving that location that was so toxic for me, leaving that whole environment behind, and I moved back to the city that I'd kind of grown up in.
And, you know, when you start to take control of your life and take responsibility for the direction of your life, amazing things can happen! And It was not even three months after I had moved back to the city that I met my now husband. So amazing things can happen, Right?!
And now here we are. Ten years later!
So I I just wanted to kind of share that that that was my experience of, you know, you you have these experiences in your life that you have you're forced to adapt. You're forced to be versatile and adaptable. But sometimes those those decisions (or lack thereof—kind of riding the wave) lead you to places that you might not necessarily be happy with, but you have control. You have a responsibility to take control of your life and when you do, you are in control of how you change it.
So, that was my experience. And because of that—because of this experience of taking control of my life and taking care control of my health and fitness—that led to some amazing things. The trajectory of my life completely changed!
So once I started my fitness journey, I started to realize that there were these pipe dreams that I had that I never thought would be possible, but now seemed like they might be doable. One of those that I'd always thought like, "oh my god, I'll never be able to run a marathon."
But now feeling like, "oh, maybe I could run a marathon."
So I ended up in 2016 signing up for my very first full marathon. I didn't even go to, like, 'let's do a 5k. Let's do a 10k. Maybe a half marathon, and then I'll do a full marathon.'
No. Crazy me, I just signed up for a full marathon right then.
And six months later, I ran my very first full marathon! Which was pretty dang amazing.
Fast forward a couple years, having spent that time investing myself through fitness and seeing what a positive impact that had on me, I wanted to help other women to do the same. I had my personal training certification and was kind of doing it on the side. It was a side-gig to my main hospitality jobs. And in 2017, I decided that I really wanted to give this a shot. I wanted to give it a chance to really give my 100% effort to fitness.
So I quit my job in hospitality altogether, and I started working at a big box gym in San Diego as a as a personal trainer. And I loved it!
But knowing that, in this military life, I'm gonna have to move eventually. We didn't know when, but I'm gonna have to move eventually. I started having this kind of like vision for myself that there has to be a way that I could build a career where I can do what I love and help women, which I'd love to do. And still be able to take them with me wherever I go, or for them to take me with them wherever they go.
Because the reality is that one of us is gonna leave first. Either I'm gonna be leaving first or they're gonna be leaving first. And I have this kind of vision for myself that there has to be a way that we could continue keep our relationship, and they can count on me to be there for them, and I can continue to be with them wherever they go.
In 2019, I decided I really wanna go for this.
I want to start my own company, which by the way, I had never envisioned that for myself. I'd never thought myself as an entrepreneur. I always thought "I'll go to college, I'll get out, I'll have a traditional job." That was what I thought.
I'd never thought for myself, 'you're gonna own a business someday.' That was so out of the realm of reality in my world.
So the fact that now, many years later, I was now envisioning for myself that maybe I could own my own business is just a testament to the journey and how far you can come when you start investing in yourself, you start seeing what you're capable of.
So in 2019, I hired my first business coaches, and I hired them to help me build this business. With this vision for what was going to be, this "PCS-proof" company. And then not even a month later after hiring those coaches, we got our first orders to Japan.
So, you know, when you asked the universe, questions, it will give you answers sometimes, and this was the inverse telling me that I was moving in the right direction.
Then in 2020, six months later, the pandemic happened, the shutdown happened, and the gym that I was working at completely shut its doors for good. It was never gonna reopen no matter what was happening.
And because I'd already kind of started this path, I was able to transition my business to 100% online, literally overnight. I don't think I slept very much that first night of the shutdown because I was on the move! We were we were switching everything over and ready to go by the next morning. My business was completely online and ready to go.
Since then, since 2020, we've we've gone through two OCONUS PCS's. And while they never get easier, the PCS thing never gets easier, I've been really fortunate to be able to continue building this company and continuing to serve my clients, all military spouses and active duty women, on their own journeys to improve their lives through health and fitness similar to my own.
And in one of the future episodes, I'll talk more about what it means to me to be "PCS-Proof". I hope that for you, now that you know a little bit about my story, that you can really relate to at least pieces of my journey in your own.
But as you can tell, my life has not followed a straight path, definitely not the path that I envision for myself as a young naive girl. And my vision that I have for myself is dramatically different from start to present.
And isn't that the story for most of us? We have to adapt and kind of forward our own path in this military life in order to maintain our own sense of identity and control within chaos and unpredictability.
I even remember in the first few weeks of the lockdown back in 2020, I posted a short video on my social media about how military spouses have been preparing for a lockdown situation even without realizing it. Military spouses are highly adaptable or highly resilient, and that's one of our biggest strengths!
So now that you know about me and my story, I really wanna challenge you to think about your own story. And in what ways have you had to adapt? And how have you evolved throughout your life that have led to where you're at now?
It's kinda nice to be able to kinda look back at where you started and where you're at now.
Then, instead of kind of feeling like you're out of control, like, what decisions do I make that I was able to adapt and kind of carve my own path within the chaos.
And I want to know from you, what skills have you gained that have help to become more resilient in military life and that you can lean on now, that you can lean into now? And what things have you learned on your journey that you can share with other military spouses? We're always gaining more people to the club. And it can feel very lonely and like you're doing it on your own. But there are so many of us who have been there before and so many have come before me and I would really love for us to be passing on that knowledge to the next generation of military spouses. And maybe you're listening to this now and you're feeling really stuck. Maybe you're at the beginning of this journey. And you're not happy with where you are.
You you don't like that it feels out of control. I I definitely remember there were times where I so frustrated because I felt like I had no control. I had no control over my career. I had no control over where we're gonna live. I had no control over a timeline and that's super frustrating.
Right? And that's all okay. Maybe the only message that you need to hear today in this this episode is that there's so much brightness ahead of you if you're willing to invest the time in yourself. You might not be able to see it right now. I know that I didn't, but at the times of my life that I was really investing in myself, those were the times where the biggest positive changes happened.
Like, the example that I gave today was I invested in business coaching, and a month later, we got the the news that we were moving to Japan. So sometimes when you're investing in yourself, the universe rewards you. And tells you, hey, you're moving in the right direction. And I never would have been here in Japan talking to you today if I hadn't been willing to take those chances and bet on myself. So you were absolutely worth the investment.
And you're not alone. Right? We've all kind of been on a similar journey. Maybe they were not exactly the same, but You're not alone in this. So I wanted to thank you so much for listening to this very first hopefully, very, very many episodes of the PCS-Proof Podcast.
I can't wait to talk to you next week. And if you enjoyed listening to this first episode, please take a moment to leave a five-star review. And make sure to follow or subscribe or share with a friend so that you'll be the first to be notified when the next episode drops next week. And with that being said, I hope that you have an amazing week ahead. Remember, no matter where in the world military life sends you Together, we are PCS-Proof!
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