How to empower yourself after almost losing everything
My personal journey to self-empowerment.
In 2018, I was sinking fast. I had hit rock bottom emotionally, spiritually and financially. Flash back to 2016. This was the year that I finished my 25-year marriage, left my marital home, and moved back in my mother’s house. A year later, I decided to move again to establish a home for my children, my mother and myself. However, in a space of six months, my mother passed away following a short illness, my sister became estranged, and my life had essentially hit rock bottom. I had no money, was a sole provider with two children attending university full-time, and had no other family or friends. We were on the verge of losing everything.
With overwhelming grief enveloping me, my head and emotions were spinning fast out of control. Before all of these events hit me, my mind was clear, my vision focused, and my actions measured. Now, I was in unknown territory. I felt that I was in quicksand and was sinking too quickly. I knew that I had to take control. Otherwise, my children and I were going to lose everything.
However, after slowly following key and measured steps, I made a journey to not only to becoming myself again, but becoming even better than before. It was a phased approach that took focus, time, determination, grit, luck and belief. Despite this tiring and arduous journey, it evoked a need and drive within me to become the person I have always dreamt of becoming.
Belief
The first step to empower yourself is to hold on to something so solid that it will take earth and heaven to move. The key to empowerment is to anchor yourself onto an ideal that you will have constant, perpetual, and unchanging faith in. Throughout and even after my journey, I have followed four key credos that I believe have saved me from sinking.
First and foremost, God. The strong connection that I have with God and my faith keeps me centered and focused.
You have two options in life to sink or swim. For me, sinking has never been or ever will be an option.
Anything is possible.
Only you can make the difference.
Focus
My family is why I didn’t sink. My family are the reason why I needed to pull myself out of my despair.
Having lost my mum, my mind was in turmoil. All I wanted to do was to hide away and dwell on my sorrows. However, the realities of life hit home very quickly i.e.paying bills, putting food on the table, and earning money. For my family, I had to quickly get practical.
Before my mother’s passing, I worked as a freelance consultant in technology. When she died at the end of November 2017, Christmas was fast approaching — an exceptionally difficult time to get work. However with persistence, luck and God on my side, I managed to secure a contract.
However, this wasn’t even the easy part.
I was unfocused, not working to the best of my ability, struggled with simple tasks and lost all enthusiasm for what I was doing. I worked until I saved some money and then decided to take time out to re-evaluate my life and myself. This proved to be valuable in hindsight, as this was the time that I decided I needed to do something different. I decided to do something for myself, my late mother, and others.
I enrolled onto a coaching course to learn how to empower others, took a personal styling course following my mother’s comments about the lack of color in my wardrobe, and started working out for myself. The diversion of my energies onto focussed goals enabled me to start making the journey to becoming my best and brightest self. The shift from negative toxicity to a decided path of positivity is one of the most important moves that I made when making the journey to to self-empowerment.
Determination
Nelson Mandela once said “a winner is a dreamer who never gives up.” In one sentence, Mr Mandela said everything that needs to be said — that someone who continues to achieve never stops wanting to achieve. Resilience, tenacity and determination are the qualities that determine individuals to follow a path of continuous victory. During my life when I have been dealt the hardest of blows, moments of despair and instances of sheer panic, I have pulled myself together. The sink-and-swim scenario is the one that always pushes me forward. I have always made a conscious decision to swim — no matter how deep the water is.
This is a big part of personal development, which you will always need a lot of determination for. What is personal development? Simply, it’s an act or process through which you attempt to change for the better. This can include working on your strengths as well as your growing edges, and it tends to be that you are trying to reach a more idealized version of yourself. Ironically, that can mean that you need to accept yourself just as you are first and foremost. In any case, it’s a major part of getting through any time when you have lost everything you once had.
Grit
Grit is so closely aligned with determination. To have grit means you have to have strength of character, courage, passion , perseverance, resilience and conscientiousness. For me personally, grit conjures up the image of pushing through or against huge boulders that block your path. In “Grit”, a book by Angela Duckworth, she describes grit as “the commitment to finish what you start, to rise from setbacks, to want to improve and succeed, and to undertake sustained and sometimes unpleasant practice in order to do so”. I know exactly what she means. I’ve had to endure a lot of shit in my time — both events and people. However, I have put on my steely armour, held a determined look in my eye and have focused enough to push through those times.
Time
Everything changes over time. Time does not stand still or waits for anyone. As I have slowly healed from the pain of my past, I have often wished for times when the healing process was faster. However, in the back of my mind, I knew that I had to be patient not only with time, but with myself. As time makes its steady journey, so do your thoughts, actions and perspectives. Be patient with yourself as you set on a journey to change. Although initial inertia may seem like a tempting option, it is important to carry on and keep moving. One change precedes another change. One action precedes another. Finally, before you know it, you have moved on.
Luck
If anyone knows about being meant to be unlucky, it’s me. Having been born on Friday the 13th and thus fated to live a life sans luck, I have always managed to discover golden threads of luck interwoven throughout my life. Even when I have had to face the most of difficult of times, I have come across aureate nuggets of prosperity that have stopped me from falling from the bottom of the world. In times of widespread economic recession or the festive “dead months” in the job market, I have managed to find roles and contracts. Although luck isn’t something that one can necessarily have control over, you can increase your luck by simply being positive and increasing the surface area for opportunities where luck can befall you.
It has been painful. It has been distressing. It has been difficult. However, it cannot be denied that my personal journey has been the making of me. Even in the darkest of times, I have had to set myself on fire to become the light of my life. I invoked my inner lion and garnered the strength to pull myself forward. It is only then that you can become truly empowered.
It is almost two years since my mother passed away. It has taken me nearly two years to become stronger and more confident than ever before. Resilence and focus has been my mantra in moving ahead, and today, I am happier than ever before. Even in an ongoing deadly pandemic, I’m happier than ever. For the first time in over a hundred years, the world has been put on pause. Thus, this time of peace has allowed me to focus on my own personal and familial needs and wants. However, I have also invested time in motivating others to pull themselves up and push themselves forward. You can only champion something you believe in. As a creator of a coaching business, I believe full-heartedly in the ability to become self-empowered no matter who you are, where you have come from, or what you have gone through. I have taken the power that my journey has given me, and I have moulded it into a tool that encourages and inspires those who wish to become the best they can be.
