Birth. Life. Death. These are linear events and yet together they make up cycles.

Religion. Education. Careers. All cyclic, and within them they condition us to cyclic behavior.

Some cycles, like the 24-hour cycles our days run on, are easy to see in their entirety and not difficult to get a complete understanding of the behaviors within that one cycle.

Then there are cycles that happen so fast and often, we can be completely unaware they exist until someone takes the time to share with us a simple model of our mental processes when we encounter a problem.

Other cycles can be so long that it is hard to even identify them as a cycle, let alone try to grasp the complete picture or concepts within them.

For instance, the past 365 days have been one cycle and have held millions of cycles within them. In the last week, I have spent time taking a comprehensive look at my blog posts over this year.

It is my intention to write and publish a book that includes my entire 365-day journey into leadership and responsibility.

The idea is to add to each of the entries, expand on the full stories of what was going on that brought about each post. In some cases I will even identify personal growth by pointing out how I think differently today than I did in earlier posts.

When I sat down with 50 blog posts in a binder, just flipping through the pages, I could feel the weight of how many experiences, how many mini cycles occurred within those words.

As I started to read one right after the other, it didn’t take long to start recognizing patterns in my writing. Similar topics — or even the exact same topic — would come up with only a few weeks separating the entries.

By reading them as a collection, one after the next, I was able to see the smaller cycles I was going through within this one large cycle of a year. I can’t begin to explain how much this taught me about myself.

It made it impossible to go into denial about the way I think, the way I act.

It opened my eyes to the one or two concepts that stump me every time, and instead of feeling shame about not being able to overcome them, I felt empowered. I know that I have options. I can accept that is who I am completely and let the cycles continue and eventually repeat.

OR – I can use this awareness to identify a cycle earlier and choose differently.

One of those concepts is evaluation and spending a good amount in a control mindset.

I wrote about my struggle with this multiple times, and as I re-read these words, I became highly aware that this type of situation – looking at a collection of my work – was a perfect opportunity to evaluate myself.

I put the binder down and stopped writing notes.

With the awareness that I could easily begin to evaluate my work and shame myself based on a feeling of inadequacy, I had a moment of clarity: what a perfect opportunity to not do that!

What a perfect opportunity for growth. Identifying and accepting the countless cycles in my life lead me to awareness.

Awareness is the key to break the negative cycles or the control cycles and reclaim my power.

My hope is that going through this cycle together — this one blog post – will help raise your awareness of the cycles in your life. Better yet, I hope it will raise your awareness of your personal power to break the cycles that aren’t healthy or helpful.

Jessica Soroky, CSM

Recently turning 22 years old, Jessica is already a Certified Scrum Master with two years of practice in agile delivery and team leadership. She is also the youngest participant in The Leadership Gift™ Program and its growing worldwide community of leaders and coaches. After five years of non-profit development through Nellie’s Catwalk for Kids, Jessica continues her leadership journey in state government, not-for-profit, and private sector leadership studies.

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