In a recent podcast episode, I spoke with Ada Lloyd, the creator of The Momentum Planner. Ada experienced childhood sexual abuse at a time when no one spoke about it, but she found a way to carve a path to hope and healing.
After building her first million-dollar business as a single mom, she found that there was a need for her voice of hope and healing for other survivors who still thought they were the only one. She went on to build a two-million-dollar business before transitioning to full time coaching and speaking.
Here is Ada’s story:
I grew up being sexually abused as a child at a time where that was not on the public radar. There weren’t any programs, there wasn’t any recognition of it, and so, as a child, I felt isolated. Not finding anything as I was trying to figure out, this is wrong, this hurts. I figured the best thing for me to do is to figure out a socially acceptable way to run away. And so, that’s what I did. I got myself on a college campus one month after my sixteenth birthday.
It was a few years after that that I had a life-changing epiphany, that essentially was: you are not responsible for your father’s choices, but you are responsible for how you allow those choices to impact your life.
And that began my quest to find hope and healing and so I went into the self-help arena. I would take a piece here, and if it worked, I kept it, and I’d take a piece here, and if it didn’t work, I’d toss it. Gradually, I got these assorted pieces that helped here or there, and then I started building bridges between them so that I could find what I needed for me to not be changed to that legacy.
I was in my thirties the first time I even danced close to mentioning this publicly, because it was just beginning to hit the public radar. But after I just mentioned it in passing as one of the things that can create stress in our lives, I had four women come up to me and put their arms around me and sob. Three of them said, “I thought I was the only one;” the fourth one just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
I developed what I call the 7 Pillars of a Happy & Successful Life. This started with me getting to know myself, in all of the different areas of my life: personal, my relationship with myself; physical, everything about my health and my body; emotional, largely about resiliency and how we roll with the unexpected – you know, fire bombs that sometimes life tosses at us; spiritual, however you define spiritual; professional, whatever brings money into the house; financial, your stability and your long-term goals; and relationships of all kinds.
The first thing was that I needed to build a foundation for me. It all comes back to these seven pillars because that creates a foundation on which all of these other things can be built. If you’ve been abused, if you’ve been in a domestic violence situation, even if you haven’t had anything that serious, lots of times one of the things we struggle with are those little voices in the back of our heads, just saying, “Who do you think you’re kidding? You really think you can do what?”
And that’s part of the destructive legacy that so many of us live with. Those voices aren’t about you. They’re about the person whose voice you are hearing. For example, if it’s your mom’s voice that is saying these things – what was going on in your mom’s life at that time? Maybe she was trying to protect you, or maybe she was projecting her own unhappiness on you because she didn’t have a way of dealing with her struggles.
At this point, you’re then in a position to begin to quiet those voices and to understand that it’s not about you. It’s about that other person whose voice is inside your head.
I agree with Ada. I think this is huge. That’s one of the biggest realizations you can have when you’re dealing with the voices or the stories that loop around in your head.
We think it’s us, we think it’s our thoughts, and when you can start to differentiate between that and the real you, that’s when healing can start taking place because it removes it from you. That’s not your thought, it was put there by another person. And now you can ask yourself, “How true is that thought, really?”
You just need a GPS for your heart.
Ada says, “Think about GPS. GPS needs to know where you’re at before it can create a roadmap to get you where you want to go. It’s the same thing here, and healing is all a part of this. When you know where you are, and you know where you want to go, you can then create a roadmap that will get you there. When you do the process of the seven pillars of life, the end result is to create your unique definition of success.”
Embracing your unstoppable you must start with your own unique definition of success. So many of us are trying to operate on a definition of success that’s not ours, and it doesn’t align with our values and goals and vision. Give yourself permission; stop a minute, and think about what does success look like for you? Where do you want your life to go? That just puts you back in the driver’s seat of your own life, and it’s very powerful to be there.
Your Unstoppable You is Your Gift to the World!
When you are being you and are releasing the gift of who you are, it’s a gift to the world that nobody else can give.
A beautiful, talented amazing woman, a mother of five children, once told me that she couldn’t pursue all her creative passions because whenever she took time to do so, she would feel so guilty, she felt sick to her stomach. I asked her why.
She said, “Because I feel like if I’m taking time for me to pursue my interests, then I am taking away from my family and my children.”
I asked her to put herself in the shoes of one of her children, especially her daughter. “What would your daughter say to you, through her eyes watching you spend this hour writing your book or whatever it is – what do you think your daughter would say to you about that?”
“Oh, she’d probably tell me, ‘Go for it, Mom, that’s awesome.’ And she’d probably encourage me.”
I said, “Exactly. And what kind of a message are you sending your daughter when you are still taking time to pursue your own interests?”
She replied, “Oh, well – it gives her permission to do the same thing.”
Yes. You’re actually giving your family a gift. You’re not taking away from them, you are giving to them when you take the time for yourself to love yourself and to pursue your own passions and gifts and creative endeavors, or whatever it might be.
But you need a strong foundation to build on. A foundation that reveals your unique definition of success. A foundation that gives you the confidence to be who you are and give your gifts to the world.
If you have never taken the time to build a foundation or if you’re wondering how to do it, you may find Ada’s 7 Pillars of a Happy and Successful Life is just what you need. This is a free resource for you, so just reach out and grab it.
If you’d like to listen to the entire episode (there’s much more), simply click here.
And if you would like to know how to work with me to help you to become fearlessly confident, please email me at janelle@emerginglifecoaching.com.
You can also grab my free mini-course: Be Confident, Be Real, Be You. It’s a three-video course with downloadable action guides that will definitely help you to get on this journey to becoming fearlessly confident.
