While financial freedom may look different for everyone, the path towards getting there is relatively the same!

The career professionals of the world have spoken about a behavioral mindset framework during one’s growth journey called, the “Valley of Despair.” I found this to be quite helpful during the debt-free journey that I’ve been on, and have often referred back to it whenever I’ve felt discouraged or can’t explain the emotional state that I’m in at present, despite a genuine desire to persevere. So, in this blog post, I’d like to share what the Valley of Despair is and how it has related to my debt-free journey in hopes that it may help you too.

Reflecting on small moments in my little library of videos on the Noir In Color YouTube channel, I realized unknowingly that I’ve hit many of the milestones outlined in the valley of despair while acknowledging what worked and what did work.

According to the logic of the Valley of Despair, whenever you’re beginning something new, particularly something outside of your comfort zone, that’s going to result in a big change, you’ll likely go through five phases.

Starting at phase one:  Uninformed Optimism

In this phase, you have pretty much no idea yet what you might be in for. While you may have a general sense of the path ahead, it’s not enough to dissuade you from attempting the task. So naturally, you’re excited and up for the challenge.

Phase two: Informed Pessimism

Towards the end of February, after the Texas winter storm Uri, is where I think I was starting to enter into phase two.  This is where I was realizing that the things that I said in my earlier post, may not actually happen…but I had already gotten the ball rolling. The beginning of March is when phase two went into full drive.  I felt like I was doing the work, I was putting in the time, but I wasn’t building momentum.  The winter storm had completely thrown me off track.  Door Dash shut down service in my area, which made me feel like I wasn’t making any progress towards hitting my monthly earnings goals.

Around the end of March, I started noticing that I was getting extremely frustrated.  By everything!  I was feeling extremely overwhelmed.  I felt like I wasn’t making any progress toward my goal.  And every time I tried making progress towards my goal, some financial obligation would come up where I would have to use the money that was intended to go towards extra payments on my debt, towards something else of higher priority.

And it is very uncomfortable to be on camera admitting to an audience that had invested time in watching my journey that I didn’t hit my monthly goal.  I was at the point of giving up, but I wasn’t there yet.  And I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I had already put myself out there and I was getting viewership! Over time I had developed a small community of people who became invested in watching my videos and leaving comments and that felt like huge support.  And it felt very encouraging!  For that reason, I didn’t want to let anyone down and look like a complete flake, so I continued on and continued to post. The thought of not following through was something I knew I would regret later if I didn’t allow myself to see how everything turned out.  I had officially put myself in a situation where quitting was not an option.

This phase is called phase three:  The Valley of Despair

Some people will quit in phase three. They’ll either make an excuse of why they no longer think it’s necessary to do. They’ll say something along the lines of, “The plan is no longer working!”  So, they end up spending their time starting over again.

They’ll scrap the goal completely! Saying something like, “Well, now’s probably not the best time to do it.” Putting their goal on pause and focusing on something that gives them more immediate results.  In the end, it ends up resulting in them repeating steps one through three all over again.  This is where I had to dig deep and tell myself to keep going.

On the other side of the Valley of Despair lies those that will hang out in phase three for a while, and then push through and enter into…

Phase Four: Informed Optimism

If you can hang in there just for a little while longer, this is where you’ll start to see results.

By May of 2021, it was the first time that I had seen my loan balance lower than the loan origination amount (the loan amount that was initially given to you before interest).  That for me was a huge accomplishment. I now felt like I had enough to work with to make some changes in my strategy to keep going.

The Final Phase:  Success and Fulfillment

With 3k left as of April 2022, still, I’m not there yet.  If I’m being honest, there are still times when I tend to float between phases three and four.

However, what I can say that has helped me towards getting my loan balance down is contacting my loan representative, in the beginning, to ensure that I was making my overpayments the right way from the start.  I found an article about someone who did not do this and unfortunately ended up paying over thousands of dollars that just went to the interest and not to the principal.  What worked in my favor during this journey, was that I read up on best practices and what not to do.  Which is what I’m sure brought you here too!

Another thing that I think has been working for me is that I chose to publish my journey here on this platform.  And it’s been nice to see my audience grow and I’m thankful.  Hopefully, you’re finding it entertaining, inspiring, or inciteful.

Now, the one thing I’ll say that I regret not doing right off the bat in January was to throw all my discretionary income at the balance as early as possible.  Instead, I was still spending frivolously, relying on my side income to support my debt-free goal solely.  I should have taken the money that I made for my full-time earnings and subsidized that with my door dash earnings.

But instead, I just kept holding out hope with Door Dash waiting to see if maybe I would get back on track somehow. Just so that I wouldn’t have to use my earnings from my full-time employment.  It eventually became clear that that was not going to work.  If I had been doing that from the beginning, attacking it early, I probably would be in a different position at this point.

Overall, if you’re working towards becoming debt-free like I am; my best advice is to not give up on the initial goal, but instead continue to readjust your strategy towards getting to the goal and keep a lookout for the small wins where you can find them and build momentum off that until you’ve successfully found your way through the Valley of Despair.