3 SelfEmpowerment Truths That Will Set You Free
Transcriber: Lujain Elmallah
Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
Four years ago today,
I lay on a sofa in my mother’s house,
at 3AM in the morning,
Shaking.
Shivering.
Crying.
Body bruised from having been slammed
into a car door.
My then four month old lay next to me in
his rocker.
While I rocked him with the tip of my toe.
Moments before
I had been physically,
verbally and mentally abused
by my then partner,
and I only escaped
with the help of law enforcement.
And as I lay on that sofa, I asked myself.
How did I get here?
Why was I here?
And what was I going to do?
And since that moment, I found that the
answers to those questions,
Were in the three truths
of self empowerment
that set me on a path to freedom.
And I’d like to share those with
you here today as they can be
a catalyst of change for you as well.
No matter if you’re a man
or woman, boy or girl,
these three truths of self empowerment
can set you on a path to being
the highest version of yourself.
So here’s what I know for sure.
Truth number one.
This is not the end of your story.
No matter what you’re going through,
no matter what you’ve been through,
no matter what you will go
through in the future,
it’s not the end of your story.
After that crisis moment when I found
myself laying on that sofa at 3AM,
I went on a spiritual journey.
And like a lot of us do when
we go through a crisis,
we look for religion or spirituality.
And I began
to study and learn Buddhism.
And after weeks and weeks
of practicing Buddhism,
I understood something profound
that Buddhism teaches us.
And that is the notion of impermanence.
That is nothing stays the same.
Everything changes.
And so I begin to get up every day trying
to climb out of this crisis,
knowing that what I was going through
was not going to stay the same.
It was going to change.
In right around this time,
a good friend of mine said, Sheena,
you should read the success principles
by Jack Canfield.
And not only that, she sent me a
passion planner and she said,
Let’s read it together and let’s document
our journey in this passion planner.
In the book, Jack Canfield teaches you a
lot of things about self-empowerment.
But one of the most profound things
that I took away from the book was
the notion of taking 100 percent
accountability for your life.
And as someone that had been
in abusive relationship,
I did not want to take the
onus off of the abuser.
But I begin to understand that I had to
take 100 percent accountability for
the fact that I found myself
laying on my mother’s couch.
And taking accountability meant that
I had to think about all of
the decisions that I made that
led me to that point.
And once I began to embrace 100 percent
accountability for the reality that
I had created, it allowed me to
think about a radical future,
a future that I can control my future,
the future that was in my own hands.
And I began to take my power back,
and I began to understand
that that moment and
the moments that lie ahead were not the
end of my story.
Truth number two.
Define your own story.
See, I grew up in a very
loving, fulfilling household,
and anybody that knows me will know that
I talk about how great my childhood was,
2 vacations every year, a great family,
a great household. I was happy.
I never wanted to grow older.
And I remember being 11 or 12 years old
in a department store with my mother
and we were at the cash register
and my mom was buying me.
Yet the latest sneakers and the latest
outfit and I looked up at her and I said,
Mom, we’re rich, right? And she looked
down at me like only a black woman could,
and she didn’t say yes or no.
She just gave me a little grin.
And it wouldn’t be until years
later when I was in college
and my brother was in college that
we learned that my mom had filed
for bankruptcy. She had spent all
of those years raising us,
turning pennies into dimes and creating
resources out of nothing.
So I didn’t grow up in a rich
household financially,
but my household was rich in
all of the things that
a loving household should be.
Then around the age of 22 or
23, I was on a date.
And after, you know, you get past the,
Where are you from and what do you do?
And you know, who are you?
My date had learned about my upbringing
and being from a single parent household,
and my date looked at me and said.
I don’t date people from single
parent households.
And from that moment,
I began to engage on what
you would call confirmation bias,
I began to look at all of the signs
and commentary around what
a single parent household meant.
And it placed a seed within me,
and I began to internalize all of
the negative labels that people have about
single parent households.
Broken.
Dysfunctional,
And even though those
labels didn’t square with
the actual experiences that
I had in my household,
I internalize those labels
and I began to
date people from two parent households
because I thought that people from two
parent households had some special secret
sauce or some special insight into
how relationships should work.
And unfortunately, that led
me to being in not one
but two abusive relationships at
the hands of people who had parents
that were still together
Because I thought they knew how
relationships worked better than I did
because I was from a single parent
household. I let others define my story.
And today, 25% of children
live in single parent households.
And here in Philadelphia, that number
jumps to 57%.
That’s millions of people right now living
in single parent households.
And you know what, they all
have their own story.
And just as ridiculous as it is to label a
single parent household dysfunctional.
Broken, it’s just as ridiculous to label
all two parent households as whole
and healthy. But this is the version of
me talking today that has defined my
own story. The version that laid on
that couch four years ago had not
yet understood the power of
defining your own story.
And though it’s hard to escape the
trappings of societal labels,
it is necessary if we want to live a
life of freedom and empowerment.
Truth number three,
be the hero of your own story.
Not only am I a professor,
I am a creative writer from
fiction to nonfiction,
from writing for DC Comics in Lion
Forge Publishing Company.
I understand what we call
the hero’s journey.
It’s a narrative story arc where
the hero starts here,
An ordinary day in ordinary life and
then something tragic happens in
the rest of the story is about the hero
clawing his or her self out of
the tragedy growing. And by the end of
the story, the hero is the hero.
And so for me and my journey to
self-empowerment and freedom,
I had two choices I could either stay
rock bottom and self-sabotage,
or I could be the resilient woman
that my mother raised me to be.
I could be the hero of my own story.
And I’m happy to say that today, standing
here on this TED stage,
I am the hero of my own story because I
decided to define my story and become
the hero. And you can do the same.
So what does self-empowerment mean
and how do we access it?
Number one, we understand that this
is not the end of our story,
no matter what we are going
through right now,
no matter what we’ve been through
in the past, no matter what
We will go through in the future. This
is not the end of your story.
Also, define your own story
on your own terms.
And number three, be the
hero of your story.
So I’m asking you to use these three
truths of self-empowerment to become
the highest version of yourself.
Thank you.