Hello dear Passengers! Welcome aboard 'The Self-Growth Train' a podcast that combines personal stories, opinions and research in order to better guide you through your self-growth journey. My name is Frances Marie Rivera Pacheco and I am your tour guide :)
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Uncertainty doesn’t politely wait until you feel rested, healthy, or ready. After months away because of recurring medical issues, I’m back on the Self-Growth Train with a format that’s simpler, more honest, and built for real life: one affirmation, then the stories, opinions, and research that help us live it.
Today’s affirmation is “I trust myself to navigate uncertainty with wisdom and grace” and I unpack why those two words matter so much. Wisdom is what we earn when we finally admit we can’t control everything. Grace is the part most of us skip, the decision to stop beating ourselves up for not getting it right on the first try, or the third, or the thousandth. When I hold both, life feels less heavy and a lot more possible.
I also share a turning-point story from 2018, when I left restaurant work for a special education paraprofessional role and got thrown into supporting students with autism while knowing almost nothing about it. I talk about what helped, what didn’t, and why the best preparation for the unknown is often education plus action plus patience with yourself. Then we connect the message to psychology and mental health research through Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy, the evidence-backed link between believing you can handle hard things and actually persisting when outcomes aren’t guaranteed.
If you’ve been feeling lonely, overwhelmed, or stuck in the middle of a hard season, come ride with me for a few minutes. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review so more passengers can find their way here.
Hello, my dear passengers, and welcome aboard the Self-Growth Train, a podcast that combines personal stories, opinions, and research in order to better guide you through your self-growth journey. My name is Frances Maritivera Pacheco and I am your guide. First, I just want to say thank you for tuning back for another episode. My dear passengers, it has been a while, okay? It has been months since I posted anything. A lot has happened in my life. I don't really want to get into it, so I'll just give you a summary. There has been a lot of medical stuff that keeps resurfacing and keep taking me to the hospital, and then my health is just all over the place, and then I just I really couldn't do it. Like I was like, no, I I need to focus on getting better, and I'm still focusing on getting better. But this past few weeks, I have been in the hospital because again, health issues, and I was like, you know what? I keep getting emails about
the podcast and how people are still finding out about the podcast, even though I literally do nothing to promote it. And I don't know, I felt like God is telling me, like, you need to come back into the podcast, like, you need to come back to the podcast and you need to make it work for you. So, what had what I have been doing the past couple of weeks is I've been focusing on my TikTok and I've been doing daily affirmations, and people really seem to like daily affirmations. So, because of that, give me an idea. I was like, okay, what if the podcast episode had an affirmation, and then based on that affirmation, I would give you stories, opinions, and research, and then that would be the podcast, and then I wouldn't have to worry about it being so many minutes and the format and all of that. So we're gonna give this a shot. This is day one of trying this, and with me, as you have for the past five years, I cannot
believe it's been five years that I have been all over the place with the podcast, but I I sincerely love and appreciate each one of you guys still coming back, still listening to the episodes, still writing reviews, still sending me messages. Because again, like the purpose of this podcast is for people to not feel alone. And yeah, I've been kind of feeling kind of lonely recently, and I know that whenever I feel that way, I know this sounds weird, but like sometimes I go back to like past episodes and I'm like, oh, maybe if I tried this, this would help me. So, yeah, anyways, without further ado, here's the new format, and I hope you enjoy it. Today's affirmation is I trust
myself to navigate uncertainty with wisdom and grace. My dear passengers, when I tell you that the past few months have been filled with uncertainty, that is putting it mildly, okay? It has been filled with so much uncertainty, and I think that for the majority of the time, I am a very positive person. I am very like, again, like I believe in God, so I'm like, everything happens for a reason, everything's gonna be okay in the end. And like, don't get me wrong, like I fully hundred percent believe that, but I'm not gonna lie, there are times where I'm just like, can I just give up? Can I just tap out for a second and take a break? Because like it is a lot. So when I saw the affirmation of I trust myself to navigate uncertainty with wisdom and grace, I had to take a step back, and I had to be like, okay, take a moment, Francis. The reality is nobody knows what's gonna happen. Nobody does, and we live in uncertainty literally every single day, and somehow we still push through, right? But the part about wisdom and grace is the part that really gets to me because over the years you develop wisdom, you develop the knowledge that certain things you cannot control. Doesn't matter how much you want to, doesn't matter how much you wish you were superhuman, you are human and you cannot control it, right? Now, the Grace part is where it really puts the sherry on the top because I think we tend to be so hard on ourselves, and I can only speak from personal experience, but I'm pretty sure you guys are pretty hard on yourselves as well. I think that a lot of us suspect ourselves to get things right the first time or get it right by the third time, or like, hey, not a thousand times before I get it right, you know. But if life has taught me anything, is that when you do things calmly or with the knowledge that it will all work out in your favor in the end, things feel less heavy, things feel doable, things feel possible.
So that is my opinion on the matter, but I want to give you a story because again, I always have to give stories. You know, back in 2018, I was working at a restaurant and I really loved it, but I felt like I was called to do more, like to do something different, right? And so I started looking into different job opportunities, and at the time I had not finished my bachelor's degree, and I just I didn't have that much faith in myself, even though like I'm very intelligent and I know I'm very capable and I'm very resourceful. I just didn't have a lot of faith in myself, right? And somebody told me, like, why don't you go for a teaching position? And I was like, Well, because I'm not a teacher, but mind you, I had been a teacher's assistant when I was like in school. I volunteered as a tutor, I sometimes got paid to tutor people. What else? I was the president of the best buddies club, and I just I love being around kids and I love helping kids with homework. So in my head, I was like, that makes total sense. But again, I didn't have a teaching certificate, so there was a position open for a para, a special needs para. And like, if you don't know, a para is a teacher's assistant. So now I was going to be serving the special needs community, which again, I had been in Best Buddies, so I had some experience, but most of the experience that I had had involved children that had Down syndrome or cerebral palsy and other types of diagnosis. When I get this job, I get told, you know, you're going to be working with people that have autism. I knew
nothing, nothing about autism. Okay. I in that moment I was so uncertain. Not because I didn't think that I didn't have the skills to aid people and help them through their schooling, but I chose I genuinely, I was like, I don't know. Like this is a new territory for me. So what do I do? What do I do when I don't know? I get educated. So I decided to march up to Barnes and Nobles, and I bought three books. I bought a book by at the time he was 13, he was a Japanese child who has autism who wrote about his experience having autism. I bought a book about a mom who was an educator who had children with autism, and then I bought a book about another mom who had an autistic child, and she was like a scientist, if I can't if I remember correctly. And what I learned through those books was autism has a very broad spectrum. Okay, you can read books about it, you can meet one person, and it doesn't mean you know anything about it because every person is different. But going into that job, I had what I thought was my security blanket, and I was like, oh my gosh, I read three books about this, I'm gonna do fine. And the reality is, my dear passengers, I did do fine. I learned that the basic knowledge that I had gathered from those three books had been very beneficial because it gave me an inside look as to what things could potentially happen. But being in the pit, being in the presence of people with autism and interacting with them and like learning like what their needs were and how I could help them, made me realize that really the only way to prepare for uncertainty was to throw myself at it and trust the process.
And you know, that was back in 2018, and nowadays I work as a preschool special needs parent, and so it's just it's amazing how one random day decision of like, hey, yeah, maybe I could be a teacher, has led me to have a job that I really enjoy. Does that mean that I want to be a teacher? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I love the children, I don't think I have the patience or the right attitude to deal with parents, so I prefer to be with the children, and that is why I will remain a para. But again, I went into this thinking, yes, maybe if I have some background information, it's going to help. But then along the way, I gave myself grace because I was learning, and I'm still learning. It's been years, and I'm still learning in my job, and I love it. But is it scientifically proven that
just trusting ourself to navigate with uncertainty and wisdom and grace is gonna help? Yes! According to the American Psychological Association, psychologist Albert Bandura called this self-efficacy, our belief that we can organize our thoughts and actions to handle a situation. In fact, research connects stronger self-efficacy with greater persistence, resilience, motivation, and willingness to act when outcomes are not guaranteed. Last but not least, self-efficacy develops primarily through mastery experiences. These are the ones where you're living through something difficult and discovering that we can response. Every challenge you have already navigated becomes evidence your brain can use when facing the next unknown. So basically, my dear passengers, we've got this. Okay, it might not feel like it, and at times it might be super difficult, but the gist of it is do not give up. You're doing everything you can. Give yourself grace while you're using
the wisdom that you already have to get through it, and eventually you will get through it. Can I get a choo-choo? Well, my dear passengers, that is the end of the episode. And as always, all the resources used today have been added to the episode's descriptions. Well, until the next up, dear passengers. Safe travels. Bye.
