Sierra Abler is a doctoral candidate pursuing her Doctor of Education in Applied Leadership, the founder and CEO of Innovative Leadership, and the host of the Confidence Compass podcast. A farmer’s wife and mom of two boys with a third on the way, Sierra works primarily with educators and teachers, helping people recognize and expand the leadership skills they already carry rather than starting from scratch.

At 27, she brings both academic grounding and real-time lived experience to this conversation. She is someone who is actively navigating a doctoral program, a growing business, a farm, and a full family life simultaneously, which makes her perspective on the early adult brain not just informed, but immediate.

The decade when you were supposed to have it all figured out was actually the decade your brain was least equipped to do so.

We don’t say this to excuse anything. We say it because it changes the story you might still be carrying about who you were then, and why.

This episode is part of our Aging Brain Series, and we’re moving into the early adult brain, roughly the 20s through mid-30s. We sat down with Sierra, and what unfolded was a conversation that landed far beyond any single age group.

The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning, impulse control, and identity integration, doesn’t fully mature until around 25. But the expectation of having it together often arrives years before that. That gap between what the brain is capable of and what we demand of it is where a lot of quiet shame lives, and it doesn’t always dissolve just because the years pass.

Sierra brings a scaffold analogy to this conversation that stays with you. The idea that the first 18 years lay the outer frame, and everything after is the interior work. Adding rooms, knocking down walls, making space for what actually matters now. It’s a simple image, and it holds something true about how identity doesn’t form once and settle. It keeps building. It keeps revising.

What we found ourselves circling in this episode is the tension between expansion and pressure that so many people feel when they’re in the thick of this phase, and how easily that tension gets mislabeled as personal failure rather than recognized as the natural friction of a brain doing its developmental work.

For our listeners who are further along in life, this episode offers something different: a chance to look back at that chapter with less judgment. To recognize that the version of you who felt scattered, or didn’t know what she wanted, or made choices that didn’t hold, wasn’t failing. She was wiring.

We’re curious: when you look back at your early adult years, is there something you would offer that younger version of yourself, if she could hear it now?

And if any of this is stirring something current for you, about where you are now, patterns that still feel active, or identity questions that feel unresolved, we’re always open to hearing from you. You can reach us at hello@therawonionpodcast.com.

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