Choose Your Hard!

Warrior DIVAS | Real Talk for Real Women

Hello, and Welcome to Warrior DIVAS | Real Talk for Real Women. I am your host, Angie Leigh Monroe and we are going to have a fantabulous show today, but before we jump in, I do want to take a moment and invite you to join us for our DIVAS Impact conference | Unmasked, October 11 and 12th of this year 2019. In Grapevine, Texas, it'll be an amazing time with other DIVAS like yourself as we come together, and embrace our femininity and walk more boldly and confidently to the future that lays out there for us. So go to our website, divasimpact.com and you can learn more about the conference and reserve your tickets here. Now, when we launched DIVAS Impact, we knew there were some amazing women out there doing some phenomenal things and we also knew that there were some women out there that didn't feel that they were entitled or worthy of phenomenal things happening to them, and so we really wanted to focus on how do we help those women that don't see their worth, don't see a path of hope and future for themselves? How do we get them to see that a lot of times I sit across from a woman and I can sit there and I can pull out so many amazing things that they've turned a blind eye to, it breaks my heart, and a lot of times that comes from a tragic event that happened in their lives, or maybe even a series of events that have happened in their lives that they just have not been able to get over.
So we accepted the mission. You know, back in one of my episodes before I talked about I like challenges. So I accepted the challenge, because there was this one time, not at band camp. But when I was in the military, that we had an exercise that I had to do. And you know, when you go into the military, you got to know how to do sit-ups, you got to know how to do push-ups, and you got to be able to run. But one of the things that our company commanders used to have us do was we would do sit-ups locked arms. And what they did was have us do them locked arms, so that we could build up not just ourselves, but build up each other, because what would happen after that is if we had a sister that was in our Squadron or our squad that wasn't as strong as the rest of us. First off, we were helping her up doing that, but what would happen when we got done is we would go back to our rooms, and we'd help her get stronger at sit-ups. So the next time it would be easier for all of us, right? Well, that's what we're going to focus on today. Right, we're going to focus on how to help you be stronger, so that we can all be stronger together link arms and be stronger and walk boldly and confidently together, you hear me say that over and over and over again. Because there are too many women pulling back from where they're called to be. I'm not saying everybody deserves to be in the limelight. I'm not saying everybody is called to be in the limelight. What I'm saying is, is whatever you are purposed for it is there and waiting for you, and we need you doing what you're purposed for. So I realized that some of what I'm about to talk about may not be something that everybody will be receptive to at this time. You may hear this and you may be like you do in church; sitting there, thinking of somebody else that needs to hear this message, but you may actually be the one that needs to hear it right? I have never done that. Not at all. I never think of somebody else who needs to hear a message. Now, honestly, I think my husband needs to hear every message I hear in church, but I am the perfect little Angel. Not. But here's the deal. I'm sharing this today because if it impacts just one person, then that starts a ripple effect and that ripple effect can change everything. So today, are you ready? We're going to talk about the victim mindset. How many of you out there know some people that play the victim really well? I mean, I know some really good victim players, right? And I often wonder what brought them to that place. Of course, I never thought about that until I stopped being a victim myself. We talked in one of my previous episodes about being attacked. We talked about me being sexually assaulted, we talked about my drama instructor, you know, saying words to be in those things were bad in themselves in different ways. But as they built up, and I started believing not only what they said, but some things that other people may have said, trying to make me feel better about myself or they said it in the wrong tone. How many of you have ever said to a student, "you'll never amount to nothing if you don't do your homework." You know, I've had teachers tell students that and the students don't hear the, "if you don't do your homework", part; what they hear is, I'll never amount to anything. So here's what we need to focus on. We need to focus on what we're speaking into each other's lives because we are layering on to that victim mentality already. Now here's the challenge. Some of us get really addicted to being a victim. The benefits of being a victim. Yes, there are benefits to being a victim. People walk on eggshells around you, you don't have to accept responsibility for anything. Others give you the attention and feel sorry for you. And do you feel justified and complaining and not having to take responsibility for anything that has happened because after all, you know, you could fill in this blank. If blank, blank didn't happen, then I would be in such a better place. You could say, if I wasn't molested by my grandparents, if I wasn't raped by that stranger, if I wasn't stolen from by my coworker, if my husband didn't leave me, if my kids didn't wreck my body, I'd still have a perfect 10 figure, whatever you want to use to play a victim. And I have heard every one of those excuses for women before. You can all use them to play yourself as a victim.
Now recently, I heard Charlene Johnson use the term ‘Choose Your Hard’, and I think it's my new favorite quote, choose your hard! I've heard it before. But this time it stuck. So choosing your hard means choosing the hard you're willing to live with. So if you're a person who's been victimized, you can choose your life to be one of hardest, where you're constantly having to be reminded of your victimization as you tell the story over and over and over again. So you can manipulate people's sympathy, or you can choose another path. But see, trying to accomplish things in a victim mindset is like trying to run a sprint or pulling an anvil, you will get there. But the energy and the effort it will take will more than likely wear you out. So what's the other choice. The other choices to clean house, go to counseling, join a group that helps walk through some of the things you're talking about, and begin peeling back the layers and I do mean layers.
So a few years ago, my oldest daughter had just had her twins, my son was off in the army, we had a lot of things going on in our lives. And for about a year I had been what I call, stuffing and suppressing, and if you think in cartoon figures like I typically do, because I'm kind of animated in that way, but you lift up a carpet and you start sweeping things under, it stuffing and suppressing them. Stuffing and suppressing them, well eventually, that carpet that's in the middle of the room you can't see over because you've swept so much underneath the carpet to get to another day. As you all know I like Scarlett O'Hara from the movie Gone with the Wind. So that fiddle DD I'll deal with that another day, that procrastination mindset. So, I was doing that over and over and over again. I can't deal with that right now I've got to deal with this emergency. I can't deal with that emotion right now. Because I've got to deal with the emergency right here. I can't deal with this because I've got to deal with this, and what was happening was I was starting to feel anxiety build up. I was starting to feel tension build up, I was starting to lose sleep, my hair was starting to fall out there were very serious things happening in my life, that were a direct result of stuffing and suppressing all of these things. It came to a head one day when I contacted a friend of mine who's a pastor, I said I need to talk to someone. And the sad part was I had contacted her assistant.
And I said “that's it. I know, I wrote the policy and procedures on how you get in to see a pastor but I honestly right now cannot remember how to do that, Can you just tell me what I need to do to be able to see be seen by Pastor?” And so Dana sent me back a message and she said, “Pastor Jan will see you at one o'clock this afternoon.” So I went into Pastor Jan's office, and she looked at me dead in the eye and she goes, “Angie, I need you to give yourself permission to fall apart right there.” And I told her, “I couldn't, I couldn't do it.”
And she says, “but you need to, you need to be able to fall apart so you can start putting the pieces back together again.”
See, I'm one of those tough girls that I kind of have the camouflage victim side of things, right. So, when I worked at the church, there was one time I'd go to my friend Kim's desk and I was a little mad. No, let's rephrase that. I was a lot mad. And when I get mad tears to form in my eyes, how many of you women out there have that happened to you? You get so mad, those tears start coming. And then you get madder because you feel like your emotions are defying you right? SO MAD! I've got tears in my eyes, I go to my friend Kim's desk, another girl there her names Althea she goes, “Okay, I'm gonna let you go. Somebody's broken Angie.”
Because so many people were so unfamiliar with seeing my emotions. But see, sitting in that chair that day with my friend, Jan. I knew that if I fell apart, that there might not be enough daylight hours left for me to put myself back together to go on with my next day. So, she recommended a group to me and told me, I should probably get some counseling. I did both. I'm not ashamed to admit it. Now I will admit when I walked into the group. And when I walked into the counseling, I was like, sup? I'm here. What do you want me to talk about? And they're like, Well, what do you want to talk about? I'm like, no, ask questions, I'll answer and they're like, that's not how it works. So I started this class, and it's called mending the soul. And if you have one in your area, I highly encourage you to go to it. They're done in small groups. And if you need information on how to be a part of a group like this reach out to us we’ll help you get in touch with it. But in this meeting the soul, I'm going to probably give the worst, if not the best advertisement for this type of crew. Yes, it's a dichotomy. So in this class, you walk in, and they give you this book, and they tell you that the first five weeks will be like going through chemotherapy. Lovely, I've got enough problems in my life, I don't need a terminal illness on top of all of this, that they said after five weeks, something will shift. And you have to want that shift more than you want to be in out of the five weeks that you’re in. So for five weeks, I walked in clinging my book to my chest, knowing that the things that I wrote in there, the things that I had revealed about myself, the things that were started the layers of the onion that were starting to peel back, were very raw, very truthful, had been very hurtful, and had victimized me and held me back for years. But let me tell you about Week Six, I've got that book, I've got it up in the air. And I'm going “you know what, this is my story, and this is how I will help other people. Because I've walked out of this muck now, with the help of all these people in this room with me, I've walked out of this muck, and we can accomplish anything we've set our mind to now.”
So remember, I often tell you, my name is Angie Leigh Monroe, and I am your friend. But as your friend I simply cannot let you walk away, stay in life as a victim because I know you were created for so much more. See, here's, here's the deal. If you're a victim out there, in using this victim mindset, you may not even recognize it in yourself yet, that maybe this is a seed to start opening your eyes to seeing how many times you're telling the story of what you went through. You know, there's a difference between telling the story about what you've been through and parking your RV there and then building up around your RV. I mean, come on, you cannot stay part in the place where your greatest tragedy happened. Because you were destined for so much more than that. We talked about girlfriends in our last episode, and as your girlfriend, I want to come and get you out of that RV USA. Let's burn the RV to the ground and get you a mansion. You know, speaking figuratively, I think I have to put that out there because somebody will be calling me and telling me they want me to build them a mansion. But that's one of the things we would eventually love to do with our organization is we would love to build homes for people that are walking out of these dark places that we are helping them walk out of. So as a victim, you have a choice. You may have not had a choice at the moment that you were victimized, but once you walked away from that act that victimized you, you have a choice. And that choice is right here in front of you today.
Do you stay stuck, tied down, anchored down by that act that happened to you? Do you choose to be free? I'm telling you, several years ago, after going through mending the soul and the counseling and all that stuff, it was literally six months of it? It was a hard six months. But I would much rather go through six months of counseling than 25 years of torture from what had happened to me. And that six months of counseling freed me up on multiple levels. And there are still days today that I'm finding multiple other ways that I'm being freed up. So one of the things because I was attacked from behind, I was afraid to put my back to a door or an opening always set with my back against the wall. I had been out of counseling for about a month when I went to a conference and I'm sitting there with my back to the front door of the hotel, facing the wall, and all I could do was start laughing. There was an overwhelming joy to watch what was happening, an overwhelming peace that came about upon me right there. Because I knew that I wasn't living and walking in fear. It didn't mean that I wasn't still alert and aware of what was going on in my surroundings. I had situational awareness. But I wasn't consumed by the fear that was dictating what I could and couldn't do. You know, one of the funny things I'm going to say right now it's funny, haha, funny not. And there's a challenge with a lot of people over moving and losing weight and getting healthy. And if you can see the video of this, you can see that I'm not at optimal health and optimal weight, but I'm working on it. The reason I'm working on it is I've realized that I've allowed past emotions to hold me hostage and make me feel like I didn't deserve to be skinny again. How stupid is that? I know all these things. I've been to counseling, I've done all this stuff. It's just another layer. And I'm not trying to compare myself to anybody out there. And I'm not trying to be skinny mini or supermodel thin or any of that stuff. I'm trying to be healthy so that I can enjoy my lifestyle. But I got to peel back another layer of that victim mindset that I'm not worthy because somebody in my past had told me I wasn't worthy. See, people look at me all the time. And they're like, ‘Wow, you're so strong. You're so powerful. You're so confident You're so this, you're so that.’ That's great, but I have heard so many women talk about the imposter syndrome. And the imposter syndrome can normally be tied back to a moment where you felt like you had lost control of something of victimization of some sort. It doesn't even have to be a crime that you were victimized by. It could have been harsh words from somebody. So do I still get attacked? Yes, I do. Do people say negative things to me, you bet your sweet bippy, they do, but I'm not tormented by the opinions of others anymore. I get over it. It's like a water off a duck's back anymore, it does not have a place to take root anymore. Because see what I went through mending the soul. When I went through the counseling when I kept peeling back those layers, what do the gardener's call it? Weed n feed, I have been a weed n’ feeding my garden. So I pulled all those negative roots out and begin nourishing myself with positive things, and positive influences positive people, positive relationships, positive words of affirmation, and just even my faith, and that begin to grow in me and helped me accomplish bigger and better things. I'm not accomplishing them by myself. As I grow, there are other people around me that are growing up with me and I love that. I love being challenged by them too. It wasn't a couple of weeks ago that I'm going to out her but my assistant basically told me that I was being the slow car in the left lane. You know, if you don't know what the slow car in the left lane means it means the left lane is the fast lane and trust me, I drive in the fast lane. But apparently at that moment, I was letting some things that were internally holding me back and she needed me to be at another level so that she could go to that level too. So be careful because if you're holding yourself back, you may be holding others back and they may be looking to you to accomplish so much more.
Now today, for our EVERYDAY DIVA, I'm going to tell you about Amy Modglin because her nickname is Doc Perky. She was a US Navy Corpsman. She is the President and CEO of the Magdalene Modglin leadership solutions, and let me just tell you guys that have a man cave, this girl can put your man cave to shame. She is a huge Boston sports fan, Red Sox patriots, Bruins, you name it. She's a bed and a huge fan of baseball, and she had always had a dream of playing on Fenway, right. So in 2016, she went out and she actually became part of their family, the fantasy team that they did for women, and she has just been added as the newest member of the International Women's baseball center. She's on their board of directors now. So, she is making great strides for women in areas that women weren't ever even thought of being. But see, here's the thing that you don't know about Amy. Amy has been battling cancer for a while. Even in the middle of taking her chemo pills and all the things that she does for that. I think she still runs every day. Some of the medicines that she had helped take away some of her hearing. So she reads lips because she's deaf. But she makes everybody that walks in a room feel welcome. She's engaging, and unless you knew that she was deaf, you would not know that she was deaf. See, she could play the victim role so well because of all the things that have come up with the come up. Boy, that sounded real proper didn't it? Everything has come up against her. But she is a shining example of a woman that I put up there on a pedestal, not to idolize her, but to say, wow, I get to join arms with a girl like her. She's part of my John Maxwell team with me and we love having fun together. So go to our Facebook page. Look up Doc Perky, learn more about her, what she's doing, because she is phenomenal. And if you have somebody you'd like to nominate for an EVERYDAY DIVA, you can email us at [e-mail] but today I want you to be just as diligent as Doc Perky is every day, not to be a victim. If you're ready to walk out of that, we're ready to help you out, our flashlight in our hands. They're on and they're out, ready to walk you out of that dark spot. So thank you for joining us today, and stay tuned for our next episode, and in the meantime, be sure to connect with us on our Facebook page DIVAS Impact and on our website, divasimpact.com. And until next time, this is Angie Leigh Monroe, reminding you to be a diva and make an impact.