Moana and Designing a Life You Love | Cierra
The Season of Becoming: How to Design a Life You Actually Love
You don’t build a meaningful life by waiting for permission. You build it by deciding what matters, then moving toward it—even when you’re terrified, even when people judge you, even when you have no idea what you’re doing.
Cierra, the brand manager at Minky Couture, knows this intimately. She’s been through the kind of losses that break most people: the death of her infant son, two divorces, a decade as a stay-at-home mom, and the sudden realization that she had to rebuild everything from scratch. But here’s what’s remarkable: instead of becoming bitter or paralyzed, she became intentional. She designed a life she actually loves—and she did it while raising three boys, navigating an unfamiliar corporate world, and dealing with judgment from people who didn’t know her story.
The process of becoming isn’t linear. It’s not a self-help formula. It’s messy, it’s ongoing, and it requires you to hold two truths at the same time: yes, I can grieve what I’ve lost, and yes, I can still build something beautiful.
The Freight Train Moment: When You Stop Denying Reality
Some moments stop you cold. For Cierra, it was when a physician told her that her newborn son’s septic infection was “like a freight train going 200 miles an hour. We can’t stop it.”
That’s the moment she stopped hoping for a miracle and started saying goodbye.
Grief doesn’t follow the stages you read about in textbooks. Those stages were designed for people at the end of their own lives, not for parents losing a child. When you lose someone you love, you don’t move through stages—you learn to live with a hole in your heart that never fully closes. Eleven years later, Cierra still has moments that are hard. She still misses him. And she’s learned that this isn’t something to “get over.” It’s something to integrate into who you are.
What’s striking is how she didn’t let that loss become her entire story. She had two more miscarriages. She eventually had two more sons. And she discovered that grief and joy don’t cancel each other out. You can miss someone deeply and still be grateful for the people in your life. You can accept loss and still build something meaningful.
The trap most people fall into is thinking that healing means forgetting or moving on completely. It doesn’t. It means accepting the pain as part of your story while refusing to let it be the only story.
The Divorce Double: When the People You Thought Would Stay Leave
Here’s where it gets harder: Cierra didn’t just lose a child. She lost a marriage. Then she lost another marriage.
Being divorced in Utah—especially twice—carries a weight that people outside that culture don’t fully understand. There’s judgment. There’s narrative-building from people who don’t know the full story. There are friends who disappear. There’s the whispered assumption that something is wrong with you.
What Cierra learned is that the judgment says more about the people judging than it does about her. She showed up every Sunday. She didn’t waver. She knew her truth, she knew her testimony, and she knew that protecting her relationship with her kids mattered more than managing other people’s opinions.
But here’s the real insight: the best thing that came out of those divorces wasn’t the pain. It was the clarity.
When you’re forced to rebuild, you get to choose what you actually want to build. Cierra didn’t drift into her current life. She designed it. And in designing it, she became more intentional about everything—her relationships, her work, her presence with her kids, her values.
The Theater Kid Who Learned to Improvise Her Way Into a Career
Cierra minored in theater in college. She loved taking on different identities, creating characters, bringing joy to an audience. Then life happened, and she spent a decade as a stay-at-home mom. When her first marriage ended in 2022, she suddenly had to re-enter a workforce she’d left a decade ago—with no plan, no job lined up, and genuine fear about what would happen next.
Enter the neighbor’s birthday dinner at a restaurant in Sundance, where she sat across from Sandy Hendry, the founder of Minky Couture.
Cierra didn’t have a polished pitch. She didn’t have a detailed plan. She was five days out from her husband leaving the house, running on adrenaline and anxiety, still figuring out how to survive financially. But she did what theater had taught her: she improvised. She told Sandy about her degree, her experience, her genuine admiration for the company and its mission. She asked for a shot.
Sandy said yes.
What’s crucial here is that Cierra didn’t wait until she was ready. She didn’t spend six months taking courses or rebuilding her resume to perfection. She jumped. And then, once she was hired, she had to figure out how to actually do the job.
This is where most people fail. They get the opportunity and then retreat when it gets hard. Cierra did the opposite. She joined 14 different chambers of commerce. She read books. She listened to podcasts obsessively. She leaned on the one skill she actually had—the ability to create genuine relationships with people—and she built a career on that foundation.
Four years later, she’s the brand manager of a company that donated $5.5 million worth of blankets last year and is expanding into markets they’ve never reached before. She didn’t become an expert first. She became an expert by doing the work.
The Mantra That Keeps You Moving Forward
In Moana, there’s a scene where Moana is on the boat, completely alone, trying to sail toward an island she can barely see. She repeats a mantra over and over: “I am Moana. I will drive this boat. I will do this.”
Nothing’s working. She keeps veering off course. But she keeps repeating the mantra anyway.
Cierra does the same thing. Every day, she tells herself: “I can do this.”
Some days it’s genuine confidence. Other days it’s pure act—the same theatrical skill that got her through high school drama productions. She puts on the appearance that she has everything under control, even when she doesn’t. And here’s the thing: the people close to her know it’s partly performance. But they also know she’s being real about the struggle.
She’s honest with her kids when things are hard. She lets them see her cry sometimes. She explains what’s happening and why. She’s not pretending to be a superhero. She’s just showing them what it looks like to keep moving forward anyway.
The mantra works because it’s not about denying reality. It’s about choosing action in the face of reality. Yes, today is hard. Yes, this week is overwhelming. And yes, I can do this anyway.
Designing a Life Worth Living
On her vanity, Cierra has a quote: “She designed a life she loved.”
She looks at it every morning. And it’s not aspirational for her anymore—it’s descriptive. She’s actually doing it.
The life she designed includes being deeply present with her kids during the time she has them. It includes work that matters—a company with a mission to blanket the world in comfort. It includes serving people, which she’s discovered is the fastest way back to herself when she gets lost. It includes being kind, being genuine, and refusing to judge people for their choices when she doesn’t know their full story.
But it also includes hard moments. It includes nights where she cries. It includes the resentment that sometimes comes with being strong all the time, with having to be the head of the household, with not having the option to just be taken care of.
She’s learned to hold both things at once: gratitude for what she’s built and acknowledgment that it would be nice if things were different. That’s not weakness. That’s wisdom.
The Only Way Forward Is Through
The process of becoming never stops. You don’t arrive at some finished version of yourself. You’re always in a season of becoming—always learning, always adjusting, always discovering new capacities you didn’t know you had.
What Cierra figured out is that the only way through grief, through loss, through fear, is to move toward it with intention. Not to deny it. Not to rush past it. But to accept it, learn from it, and then decide who you want to be on the other side of it.
That’s not inspiration. That’s reality. And it’s available to anyone willing to jump before they’re ready, keep going when it gets hard, and serve others even when they’re rebuilding themselves.
Ready to design a life you actually love? Listen to the full conversation on Yes And Land.
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