How to Own Your Success By BEing Authentically You: OWN YOUR STORY

“You either walk inside your story and OWN it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.” ~Brene Brown

In the last installment for How to Own Your Success By BEing Authentically You, I shared there are three parts to it: Own Your Story/Own Your Power/Own Your Presence. Today, we are continuing this path with Own Your Story.

What do I mean by OWN YOUR STORY?

It all begins with the story we tell ourselves.   We are all authors of our lives…we hold the pen…which means we write the narrative…. we create the story. We have all been telling ourselves a certain story about our life up to this point, whether from ourselves or sometimes allowed to be written by other people.

You see, the stories we tell about our life become our truth. They give our life the meaning, or depending on our story…lack of meaning…

 Until we take the time to become consciously aware of our stories…it’s like being on autopilot...we are living our lives by default versus by design. Becoming more aware of our story, we can course correct or rewrite if we wish. Our stories are made up of many moments. The most impactful can DEFINE our lives.

Defining moments can show up as the ups and downs of your life, the forks in the road (major decisions) and even the roads not taken (someone you didn't marry, a job you didn't take). I would invite you, to carve out some time to look back at your life and understand your defining moments and how their impact shows up in your current life. Have you used them to serve your greatness or keep you in your comfort zone?

“It’s hard to be what you can’t see.” ~ Marian Wright Edelman

Each defining moment is an opportunity to transition. We are always transitioning. We don’t stay the same. One of my defining moments happened in 1972 (afros, bell bottoms, earth, wind and fire). 

At that time, I lived in a blue-collar neighborhood, inner city in Camden, NJ…a mile from Philly. My Mom and aunts worked at Campbell Soup and because they were family, I could be hired as well. I was taking business prep in high school because at the time, in my neighborhood, if you didn’t work in the factory…being a professional and a woman meant you were a nurse, a secretary or a teacher…that’s it. 

I’m reminded of Marian Wright Edelman’s (Founder/CEO Children’s Defense Fund) quote: “It’s hard to be what you can’t see.”

At 16, because I could type 70 wpm, I had the opportunity to work for the Board of Education in City Hall as a co-op student, meaning, I attended school in the morning and in the afternoon, I went to work. To my surprise, there were women wearing suits, in charge, making decisions, traveling around the country and the world. They were my first glimpse of women in leadership positions…managing departments… people seeking them for guidance. Seeing these women, of all races, running things allowed me to see that the world was much larger than the diameter of my inner-city environment and broader than the scope of my circumstance. “It’s hard to be what you can’t see.”

I remember declaring to my Mom, “I am going to college and become a businesswoman, with my name on the door and travel around the world!!!” My Mom still recounts this declaration to this day!

That summer had so much of an impact that I transitioned my high school academic track from Business Courses to College Prep. My experience at City Hall was a defining moment because it exposed me to different styles of leadership and especially in that time period…it validated that becoming a leader was possible for me, not just as a woman, but as a woman of color. My life was NEVER quite the same. “It’s hard to be what you can’t see.” I’ve been on the leadership track ever since.

I invite us to stop living our lives like a WORD document. Copy/Paste…Copy/Paste…Copy/Paste. ~ Bernadette Johnson

When I turned 49, my Rx told me I may have colon cancer and had to have surgery. I had the usual reaction…wait…what?

Resection surgery…what started out as laparoscopic surgery…well let’s just say I woke up with a zipper. The surgeon asked: where’s your appendix…I don’t know you were in there!

Turns out…it was a tumor around my appendix…swung over and attached to my colon wall. I didn’t have colon cancer, I had cancer of the appendix…

10,001: That’s the number of people in the US who had cancer of the appendix. The tumor actually saved my life…my appendix was going to burst.

About a month later, I had a PET scan to see the ‘state’ of my condition post-surgery. There was nothing…absolutely nothing. Meaning no chemo…no radiation, just watching over the next 5 years. 

There were many so many lessons from that defining moment, but the biggest one was my belief in second chances…to start from a clean slate. How did I want to live my life (quite literally) going forward? I’ve always been a pretty positive person, but now I live more consciously about what I say “yes” to, who I invite into my life and how I live it.

I invite us to stop living our lives like a WORD document. Copy/Paste…Copy/Paste…Copy/Paste. Honor all of your defining moments...they've influenced who you are. But in a way that serves your highest self. You are transitioning…you have a blank slate…It’s time to answer: What is the NEW story you want to tell? You hold the pen…OWN YOUR STORY!

The next step is to Own Your Success is to OWN YOUR POWER and this will be our next installment. 

If this resonates with you and you want more insights, I invite you to PRE-ORDER my next book, Waves of Leadership: Inspiration for the Those Leading from the Middle and be automatically entered to be one of three winners of a premium midnight blue Own Your Success Tumbler!

I invite you to share your most defining moment in the comment section below. And, if you think this message will resonate and move a colleague or a loved one, share it! Remember, “inspired action motivates.”