A LABOR OF CONVICTION
My Story
Three “events” happened that changed the way I viewed my world. This workbook could have been called “How to Get Through a Hard Divorce” or “How to Survive After You Survive a Robbery!” or “How to Get Over the Humiliation of Being Reorganized out of a Job You Thought You Were Going to Retire From.” Yes, this all happened to me within the space of two years or so. However, if I am truly honest with myself, there have been at least four of these events that I now call “life” transitions. It was as if God were saying, “You just haven’t quite learned this lesson yet.”
At the height of each of these circumstances, fear and coping were the basis of the decision making. I seemed to have some sort of genetic defect located at the coping gene. There was a sense of spinning in directions that were not directed by me. But my young life was unusual, so I wasn’t used to coping. I was used to performing. I was a track star at a very young age, so I ran and ran and ran some more. There were morning runs, afternoon practices, and before bed routines. I was the “perfect” teenager because I was so busy running that I did not get into any “trouble.” So when life finally dealt me “Life,” by the time I graduated from college, I hadn’t dealt with boyfriends and breakups or finding a job. When the first “event”—being rear-ended by a drunk driver—ended my Olympic aspirations, the displacement of not being “special” anymore was excruciating. Not coping, I would just swallow and move on—escape and deal with the life that was before me.
Fear is strangely paralyzing because people see you functioning and, in my case, at a fairly high level. But there were times when my stomach hurt so bad that my first action out of bed was to double over. Sometimes, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and just prayed that those two numb limbs would hold me up. I couldn’t breathe. There wasn’t enough air.
I was a marketing executive for a large candy company. I would diagram and tease my brain with the models in this workbook. Later, I became a guest presenter at the Nevada MicroEnterprise Initiative and these models became part of my presentation. This plan was born from the last set of life lessons—a home invasion at gunpoint, where I ended up face down on my carpet with a towel over my head and two guns to my back—and my decision to divorce my husband, whom I had met at the age of seventeen, married at twenty-four, and lived with for all of my adult life. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is sneaky. It crept up on me after the second of three times that my husband “accidentally” left the stove on. Our divorce process took almost one year from the time the papers were served to the date of the final decree. We continued to live together for that year— he at one end of the house, me in the master bedroom. Yes, I lived in the same room where I was face down on the carpet with the two bad men.
This plan got me through! At the time, it wasn’t formalized. I didn’t yet call it “the Plan.” I was a marketing executive and I subconsciously applied my craft to my life. In my journal, there are diagrams and spokes and wheels. Sometimes getting through just came down to talking to someone. When I cornered a poor friend, the approach was so emotional that my chest sometimes hurt. I’m human. Then the desire to change kicked in. My brain began to click. The rose-colored tint covering fear, denial, hurt, and intimidation diminished; however, it was not completely gone. Opportunities and people seemed to be visible through this new vista, and my marketing mind, the way my brain coped, allowed me to see hope. This marketing plan provided me with a mechanism for systematic empowerment. It was the way in which I allowed my truths to emerge. Through this plan, I inventoried my “departments,” such as “finances,” “relationships,” “housing,” “security,” and “job,” and then made decisions and prioritized. My Personal Achievement Plan allowed me to pause for a brief moment and stop spinning, and that is all it took. I then looked around, evaluated, and moved. I could embrace, accept, visualize, and shift. My shifts were large and small.
Writing My Personal Achievement Plan was a labor of conviction. I have a passion, a dream, a vision that one day I will be standing in a grand ballroom full of people, primarily women, with each table representing an Empowerment Council of individuals who have mentored each other to success in business and success in life. I hope that they would have read and embraced even just a portion of this book, and that it was enough to peel back their rose tint and move their hopeful dream from their imagination to their reality. I see these people as shifting from abuse to peace, from broke to sustainability, employee to entrepreneur, and from wanting to doing.
Making shifts means moving forward, moving forward toward your vision. Live passionately.
Be Happy, Prosperous, & Infinite!
