You have to believe you are enough in moments of crisis if you are to see yourself through. In this episode, I go deep into a personal trauma that would forever change my outlook and yet again remind me in 2020, you'll get through this too. Wherever you are listening from, whatever your story; trust and believe there is more to your story. You are capable of more.
You have to believe you are enough in moments of crisis if you are to see yourself through. In this episode, I go deep into a personal trauma that would forever change my outlook and yet again remind me in 2020, you'll get through this too. Wherever you are listening from, whatever your story; trust and believe there is more to your story. You are capable of more.
I’m going to start by saying this—You Are Enough.
When I started the social initiative ‘find your power in the middle of chaos‘ it wasn’t my intention to start a movement of any kind, all I knew at that time as I still do now, was that I needed to do my part. We had just lived through one month of an abrupt widespread shutdown to schools, parks, shopping centres, everyday services,. Absolutely everything.
And it was new territory, one we were not prepared for, we were the real actors to a very difficult storyline. My children like most everyone else’s were suddenly at home full-time. There was a panic in the air of what are we going to do, the kids are home, careers are stalled on the lips of everyone and anyone who depended on the preexisting structure to carry out their daily lives.
Yet, as I looked at the peril of our world, I felt a similarity I hadn’t felt since I was a twenty-something-year-old young woman who had just lost at the time, what I thought was, everything.
I was practically living out of a suitcase somewhere over the Indian Ocean in my nomad lifestyle of travel and work far from the life I grew up, in South America. And The financial crisis of 08’ was deepening when I got the dire news that the woman who had raised me, my grandmother, had died, after a long and difficult journey with breast cancer. As another 12 months went by I got a similar phone call, only this time, it was my mother who had suddenly passed away.
In the months to lead, I felt a numbness overcome me. I was not sad, nor was I happy. There was no pain, nor was there joy. I was not aware; I was not present. It was a sort of limbo that I found myself deeply overshadowed. My fear was now I had no home to return. It was lonely.
To me, I identified “home” as the people who made it home, and now everyone, the two most important people to me, my family, my home, were gone. It was the scariest moment of my life, yet as I looked around my current space, I had learned my first lesson: we must live to move onward, not to remain comforted through our existing dependency.
Had I not had the will to leave the nest that I had grown so fondly attached in pursuit of my own path, dreams and aspirations, even if from a suitcase, my story may have been very different.
The healing took time, but in time I embraced my second lesson that found it’s way back into my reflection in the form of a handwritten note I had kept from one of the strongest women I knew, my grandmother, with the words: ‘‘while you are alive, live.’‘ There was so much more to those words than they seemed. And so, in those moments, I made the decision to live. Not in the pure sense of staying alive floating through life’s ins and outs but to become the life I knew deep down I needed to be in order to serve my purpose.
Making that decision to live through my moment of crisis, meant the only choices I had were the ones that would stem from the question, what else is there that I can do; giving renewed hope to everything I did and finding new ways of living a life I loved.
By overcoming my obstacles: the ones we get thrown and the ones we often throw ourselves, I realized my chaos at an earlier age made me feel somewhat comfortable in the height of the chaos today. Or as I call it, being comfortable in discomfort and though very different on many levels to what we’ve all experienced throughout 2020, it allowed me to think without the dependency that crippled much of our ability to see beyond.
I knew immediately I needed to speak up and use this insight to help bring a similar clarity to so many who were feeling lost, confused, scared, uncertain and absolutely defeated by their moment in time. I realized more than anything else, when we are faced with crises, these are the deafening questions that are often present:
What will become of me?
Will I be forgotten?
Will I be nothing?
It made me realize that the sole reason we become trapped by this fear is due to what and where we place our power of self. We put it into houses, into cars, into shoes, into money, into brands, into vacations, into perception and everything and everyone else but ourselves. In everything but our potential or in our ability to transform, in our ability to learn from the discomfort. In everything but our power to evolve. Even though as humans, this is the one thing that we’ve been doing from the beginning of our time.
In an earlier piece, I stated: your power is not in your possessions, it is in knowing ‘If you lose it all today, you’ll be okay’ because you know, you’ll get back up – always.
I didn’t whimsically curate these words, I’ve lived them, time and time again. But for now, my message to you is this: find your power by believing you are capable of contributing. That you are capable of rewriting your story or rerouting your path. That you are capable of starting the conversations to pivot into new waters, circles of thinking and purpose.That you are capable of more. I’m Nerissa Persaud and this was Mindset Bootcamp. Until next time, keep on inspiring.