15 RESILIENT MAGAZINE
myself out there. I would try. So at this stage of my life, I was like, okay, tomorrow is promised to no one. I'm sure. Try everything I can to help people to make my life better, happier and less pain and better cognitive skills to be a resource to more. Right. I wasn't a resource with a chemo brain, so I applied to Harvard. They took me and I've been in the master's program for three years. I have one more year and my chemo brain is completely gone. Kim: If you're doing everything for a nonprofit, how do you pay for the roof over your head? And I know for you, it's not just money. It's not just about being financially rewarded although that is a part of it. What is your monetization model around your speaking and your coaching or anything along those lines? So I think the best way for me to describe it is I felt at a certain point that I had value and that value should be monetized because whether it was modelling and getting a paycheck from the modelling or getting a paycheck from speaking and not giving all of my speaking gigs away for free, which I did in the beginning because I needed content. But I think it goes back to self-esteem. I'm worthy of a paycheck. I'm worthy of being compensated for what I do. And so whether it's speaking or whether it's being on a nonprofit or whether it's modelling or my book or my book becoming a film or whatever it is, I'm setting myself up for success, financial success, most importantly, for emotional success. That's number one. But that doesn't have to exclude financial success. We shouldn't be compensated for our hard work. And that's a self-esteem issue, I think. I think that the biggest struggle women have is that imposter syndrome. I see that repeatedly. Credibility, confidence and relevancy are the biggest challenges they face and it's really easy to get sidelined by those that you've grown up with or have been around in your life. And they still view you as the nine-year-old that threw up on your cousin's payday game. They don't view you as the 49-year-old who's crushing it. Right on. You know, you've got one person in your life that goes I one.
Kim: Can you share with us the time of your life that without resiliency you would not be sitting here having this conversation? So many things. I think the breast cancer diagnosis on top of my arm was my breaking point. I was almost buried in despair. I just didn't know how to move forward. I now was a thriving mother-wife model self-proclaimed athlete who became a sickly woman needing constant care and attention, whose husband didn't want to change the model that they had made right she's an independent girl. She's just like a really strong, tough girl. I was not the strong, tough girl when I was diagnosed with cancer. I was depleted after this whole arm situation. And after this man bullied me, I felt so low about myself. And the physical pain and the emotional pain were burying me. And I had a lot of friends show up for me. And I had a lot of people say to me, I will not forsake you. But man, without faith and faith in God and without shifting my measure, from society's accolades to saying to God, I'm just going to surrender and you're in charge, I would have never made it. And that was the best shift in my life. There was like there was so much despair. And, you know, the suicide thoughts that engulfed me. And those are kind of normal thoughts when everything that you believed was your value is taken away and I didn't know if I was going to be a mother anymore. I didn't know if my kids were going to be raised by somebody else. I didn't know if I was going to make it through chemotherapy. I didn't know if I was going to make decisions with healthy self-esteem because I'd made disastrous decisions from low self-esteem. I didn't know how I was going to ask my friends and family to help me after they'd just helped me for a year with my arm. All my pride and my ego were teetering, my decision-making, right? And I was afraid of asking for help. That's insecurity. And when I started to have more compassion for myself and I started to let go and surrender, then I was able to ask for help. The help that I needed but that's letting go of pride, of ego. And I can say this with certainty, in the 40 years that I lived before this trauma I accomplished things. But from 40 till now, never in a million years would I have ever imagined that I could have accomplished anything in those beginning
