Adam Roa
“What are your greatest strengths?”
“I think my greatest strengths are my willingness to face and learn and understand all the deepest, darkest parts of myself. The deeper I go within, the deeper I can go without. The more I learn about myself, the more I overcome within myself, the more I can understand and help others.”
“So what do you feel is the darkest part of yourself?”
“Self-doubt has been a big one my whole life. Self-doubt is interesting because I don’t believe you can rid yourself of doubt…so it’s really about redefining your relationship with doubt. Recognizing that doubt is that thing that makes you double check your work. Doubt is the thing that encourages you to get really really good at something so that you don’t mess it up. So doubt can be really beneficial if you have a healthy relationship to it. As I reach higher levels of external success the doubt reaches higher levels internally so it’s a constant running into a wall, and then moving that wall, and doing that over and over again.”
“I see you and your partner’s post on Facebook and it seems like y’all have a beautiful 8 year partnership. Do you remember the first time you met your partner Melinda and what it felt like?”
“Yeah, we met in an acting class. I was already in the class, and you would have people come in and audit. Whenever a pretty girl would come in all the guys would try to impress her, so I was very aware of her presence immediately, but at the time I was a very different person and there was a lot of ego wrapped up in trying to be an actor for me. Part of that was in this class where I wanted to be seen in a certain way. I had this ‘let them come to me’ to do scenes kind of attitude, and she was the only person in the 2 years of that class that I went to do a scene.”
“Do you remember the feeling you had when you first interacted with her?”
“It just felt right. There’s a lot of people who get really wrapped up in how you know if it’s the right relationship. How do you know it’s love. All I know is that when it’s right, it’s right. Everyone who I’ve talked to who is in a relationship that I look up to will say the same thing. When it’s right it’s right and you feel that.”
“What are the most important things to maintain a relationship over that amount of time?”
“Well that’s why we started our company ‘The Slinky Effect’. It’s essentially describing what we think of as a healthy relationship. Both people are the ends of a slinky and when one of them has growth and expands the slinky is pulled forward. Now the other person has a choice, do they allow it to pull them forward, or do they stay stuck in their ways? If you stay stuck in your ways it’s not a slinky, it’s a ball and chain, and it’ll snap. If you don’t want it to snap you can say, ‘Oh wow! That’s amazing! I’m going to let that motivate me and inspire me to find my own growth within that.’ So usually what happens is the other person jumps further ahead and the momentum just keeps pulling you forward in the same direction.”
“What do you do when fear comes up around someone growing and potentially moving away from you?”
“The single greatest truth of a relationship is that the relationship can’t be more important than yourself. What that means is that your growth as a person, your passion in life, your love has to come first. The moment the relationship becomes more important than that, you risk making sacrifices to things that you need for your own growth. Two people can grow in separate directions. At one point in my relationship, I experienced a huge spiritual awakening. If Melinda had said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with spirituality or meditation’ that gap would have grown and grown and grown and at some point it wouldn’t work because that gap in values would be too big. You also have to recognize that the success of a relationship is not dependent on it’s length of time or the fact that it continues going. People see breaking up as failure a lot of times and that’s just not how I see it. You can have a very successful 3-month passionate fling.”
“So what is your purpose?”
“My purpose is to remind people that they are seen, heard, and loved. The relationship I’m in is a beautiful reminder that I am seen, heard, and loved because Melinda can do that for me in a way I’ve never felt before.”