I have been teaching about life transformation for the past 14 years.  I have taught in Jails, Prisons, Halfway houses, Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Low income neighborhoods, and homeless shelters. Every time I teach, I learn something new about myself, which in itself is funny, because I wrote the curriculum I teach.

A question in week 2 of the foundational piece, called New Beginnings, is “In all honesty, how do you see yourself today”.

As a teacher you can usually ask the question and never think about it yourself. That is until God asks you to answer that question.

Last year, after reading the book One Word, my word was “worthy”.

As we are ending 2016 and starting 2017 I want to share my experience into finding myself “worthy” and how God would not let me rest until I worked through the demons of my past.

In every week of the foundational piece of the 180 Curriculum, we have goal sheets.  These goal sheets look like this

Basically, you have a goal that you want to reach.  Then you break it down into bite size pieces, so that you can first celebrate the small accomplishments. Second stay on track. Third, if that goal is going to take longer, you move it to the following week and make more bite sized goals from it.

The reason I came up with this format was because my father started working with computers, when computers only operated when you used a flow chart to get to the end result.  To me, it was like the ‘Aha’ moment, “I can reach my goals, if I just break them down.”

After teaching this for all these years, I realized that I sabotaged my goals and here is why. It was a learned behavior.  Let me explain.

Growing up I wanted to tryout for basketball.  I was so excited. I practiced and the day was finally here. I was ready to stay after school when the call came in, it was from my step-father.  “You had better not stay after,” I was told, “you will not like the consequences.”

A couple of years later, I was so excited.  I was going to try out to be a majorette in the high school marching band. I had my routine all prepared and I was so excited to stay after and try out when… the phone call came in. “You had better not stay after,” I was told, “you will not like the consequences.”

If you take these two major events in my life and couple it with the dysfunction that was going on in the home, I was being told that I would never amount to anything.  I was also told that no one would ever want to hear what I had to say, this was priming me for sabotaging my goals and success.

Even though I left that home and started my own family, those words were a part of my psyche.

Even into my marriage, there was a certain man who would jokingly talk about how I could have done better than my husband. Adding even more to the insecurity of my worthiness.  Unfortunately this person was someone that I saw a lot, and was respected in his position of authority in the Church.

Then came another man  of authority who through his lack of words to me and more by his actions, stated that I should not start a non-profit, that it wouldn’t succeed, and that my husband needed to go back to work and support his family.

It was not until 2016, as I started this journey on my one word “worthy” that I realized how unworthy I really felt, especially when it came to men in authority, especially those in Church authority and that were respected by many, but when it came to how I was treated by them, they added to my feeling of being unworthy.

I am so excited to say that as I have worked through my demons, I have called meetings with men in authority this past quarter and have walked out of those meetings feeling like I do matter and I do have a voice.

God has given me an ability to be an advocate.  To be a woman of God, who will push forth His agenda on teaching transformational living and leadership.

Now, we enter 2017… and my new word is “Overcomer”, and I can’t wait to see what God does with that.