You Deserve It!

I grew up in Los Angeles. You know, the city of beautiful people? La-La Land. Hollywood. While my upbringing was less than glamorous, I was certainly close enough to the action to allow some of the “shine” to rub off on me. In my mother’s more prosperous years, she started taking me to the beauty shop to get my hair done when I was just four years old. I was too little to reach the dryer hood so I used to sit on stacks of Yellow Pages until my hair was dry. A common theme I would hear while the perm was burning my scalp was, “You gotta suffer to be beautiful!” Little did I know that those subtle influences about how I viewed beauty, fashion and even myself would govern my thoughts and actions to this day. Little did I know that even though I kept up appearances, I had a distorted image of myself in my mind that told me that I had to look a certain way in order to be accepted.

Now I love to see a sistah when she has it ‘goin’ on’. Her hair is fly, make-up is tight and, of course, her clothes are banging. I used to put a lot of stock in how a person looks and think that was the sum total of who they were. But I have learned that everything that glitters ain’t gold! That sistah could be steep in debt trying to maintain her ‘flyness’. And as I’ve had an opportunity to meet lots of women in my profession, I’ve learned some things about women, in general. I’ve learned that underneath all of the Gucci and the Prada is usually just a regular sistah who wants to be loved and accepted. And sometimes we want this to our detriment. Sometimes we compromise our values, morals and core beliefs just for that acceptance. Sometimes we settle for Ain’t-Had-No-Job-In-Two-Years-Laying-Up-On-My-Unpaid-For-Couch-Leroy just for the comfort of a warm body in our beds. Sometimes we settle for letting the Undereducated-Low-Skilled-Sister-of-the-Boss get a promotion ahead of us. Sometimes we settle for letting Nina, our girl from college, use our credit card once again to get her hair done.

I believe at the heart of why we settle for less than the best and over-extend ourselves to be accepted is because we don’t believe we deserve better. If you ask us, however, we would say that we are “confident, secure, and our way to the top”, but our actions belie us. What is it going to take for us to realize that we are fierce all by ourselves even if we don’t have the latest Coach Bag or the flyest ‘do’? Clothes, purses and make-up don’t validate you as a person; being a woman of substance and character does. So take some time to think about all the ways that you settled or compromised to gain acceptance and start making steps toward re-defining how you view yourself. ‘Cause, guess what? You deserve it!

Last Week's Poll Results...

The question was: After dating for 3 mos., thrice-divorced, Kenny says that he loves you and is ready to take your relationship to the next level. What do you do?

The overwhelming winning response, at 61%, was to tell Kenny that you’re feeling him, too, but that you’d like to take things slowly and walk through some seasons with him. Thirty-Nine percent of you chose response number 3 which was to ask him if he’s crazy and if that’s what happened with his other three wives! LOL! Nobody picked the answer of saying that you were waiting for him to come around ‘cause you’ve already been ring shopping. Hmmm...I wonder why? Will anybody fess up? LOL!

New relationships are always so exciting and it’s easy to get caught-up. When things are going well, it’s tempting to begin to (secretly) plan your future with him. But time and experience teaches us that a leopard shows his true spots after awhile. If we wait it out, we’ll find out if the prince is going to turn into a frog! Way to go, ladies! Keep holding up the standards.

Don't Be an Old Fool!

I grew up in a single-parent household and I watched my mother struggle tremendously trying to raise my brothers and me on limited resources. Things that other people took for granted like having clean clothes on a daily basis, weren’t always a luxury for me. As a result, the spirit of lack took hold of me and even as I became an adult, that spirit manifested in my life to the point where I was living hand-to-mouth on a regular basis. To look at me on the outside, you wouldn’t have known because I had become a master at disguising my struggle. When I was on my own and earning an income I got into credit trouble where I ended up with two car repo’s and credit so bad that I probably couldn’t even finance a pack of bubble gum!

Now, many years older and wiser, my credit is restored and I can probably buy just about anything I want on credit. Through my many mishaps in life I have developed a motto of, “No experience is a wasted experience”. What I mean by that is that when setbacks occur in life, whether they were based in your own ignorance or not, there is always an opportunity for growth. What having jacked-up credit has taught me, is to never intentionally get myself in a situation where I can’t rent a car if I need to, open a checking account if I need to or get the lights turned on with the power company without a having to fork out a huge deposit. I took the obstacle of having poor credit, and the consequences it brought with it, to learn and grow from it.

I’m sure there are situations that have occurred in your life that you thought you would never recover from. But you did! And although you may have been down, you don’t have to be out. View the apparent set-back as a set-up; a set-up to start a new business, a set-up for healthy, loving relationships, or a set-up for that dream house. Turn those past experiences into gold mines of wisdom-gained and don’t let it go to waste. Getting older doesn’t necessary equate to getting wiser. There’s a saying that says, “There’s no fool like an OLD fool!” Capitalize on the things that you’ve learned and, please, don’t be an old fool!

Last Week's Poll Results...

The Question was: After being turned down twice for a mortgage due to some past credit challenges, what should you do?

100% of you chose to get a second job to help pay off some bills and reapply next year, realizing that faith without works is dead. One of the other options was to call your cousin Ray-Ray because he had a friend that could give you the ‘hook-up’. It may be tempting sometimes to take short-cuts because it seems other people are cutting corners and are doing just fine. But everything that glitters ain’t gold! You may not know what’s really going on behind the Jones’ closed doors. And the final option was to just give up. Well, we all know that giving up is not an option. Delay is not necessarily a denial. The best option was, of course, getting your affairs in order and re-applying. We can’t be daunted by what appears to be a rejection. It’s really more of an opportunity to be set up to be blessed in a mind-blowing way. Good job, sistahs!