When a Leap of Faith Becomes A Quantum Leap!

March 19th, 2021 was one of the most significant personal and professional experiences of my life! I suppose you could attribute that realization to the fact that LinkedIn’s Women of Color Empowerment Conference TransformHer, co-founded by my former colleagues and dear friends Tyrona Heath and Ezra Zimbler emerged as a day of reckoning, better yet a day of atonement.?It was the first day I've ever spoken about my divorce publicly...you can watch the replay here .

You see, two years ago in January of 2019, life as I knew it began to fall apart... my 15-year relationship and marriage of nearly 13 years unraveled...it was devastating, I was devastated. Due to the circumstances, I felt I had no choice but to leave. I won’t get into details because this isn’t about vilifying my ex, this is my redemption song; I have learned to not fault those who don’t realize, trauma not transformed is trauma transferred.?

By March of 2019, I moved out of my home and went to stay with a girlfriend who assured me that if I ever needed a place to stay, she would be happy to receive me. So on March 6th, I made the call...in my mind, I had decided if she picks up, I’m going to leave tonight but because she’s a doctor, I secretly hoped that she’d be tied up with a patient and that would be my excuse for not carrying out my extraction plan. The phone rings twice, she picks up and I say ”are you home, can I come tonight?” before I could finish my sentence “ABSOLUTELY!” she replies. And so that night I packed up as much as I could and moved out of the house I had just purchased a few years prior.?

That night I made the excruciatingly painful decision to walk away from a 15-year relationship that no longer served me or my highest self. Little did I know that that experience would serve as the catalyst to evaluate every facet of my life...what I learned was I was sacrificing all of me, to appease everyone else including society and it was killing me!

From there I realized I had some tough choices to make to live my truth. Despite working for one of the most amazing companies you could work for in the world i.e. the world’s largest professional social network, an environment where I truly found my life’s calling as a motivational speaker and an empowerment consultant, I knew I had to walk away. My beloved NYC, the city that raised me to be all I can be, the place where I bought my first home, I knew I had to walk away.?

The moral is I walked away from all of it because I knew in my heart of hearts, I could not become who I’m destined to be if I continued to live anyone else’s life plan. So, the identities of:

• wife
• LinkedIn’er
• New Yorker?

They all had to die. But guess what, there can be no resurrection without DEATH!

The Buddha says “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional” and so as painful as it was to leave all that I knew, all that was familiar, it was the only way to emancipate my heart and unleash my mind. When I left the life I knew behind in April 2019 for a fresh start in the bay area, the life I had dreamed of, a life where I can scale empowerment globally began to unfold. Since then I have given motivational talks and delivered personal/professional training at DoorDash, the Ghana Tech Summit, Microsoft, and my beloved LinkedIn. What I’ve learned from my life experiences, I have codified into a curriculum that I now teach called “Authentic Intelligence?''. It takes time to process and time to heal yet there is so much power in being vulnerable and I hope my testimony serves as an example of when a leap of faith becomes a quantum leap and that’s #FancyfiedCertified!