[01:01] – Damianne Thank you, Renita for joining me today on Changes BIG and small.

[01:05] – Renita Thank you for the invite.

[01:08] – Damianne To get started, if you could tell me, where do you live, and a few sentences about your work. And by work, I’m being quite broad here. I mean, any activity that you do that brings value to other people, whether or not you get paid for it.

[01:24.045] – Renita I was born in Detroit, Michigan, raised in Chicago, Illinois, and I’m currently in Lafayette, Indiana. I’ve been here for three years. At the moment I am a payroll specialist at a university here and on the side. I am a blogger and a vlogger. Yeah.

[01:41] – Damianne Wonderful. You’re a busy lady.

[01:43] – Renita Yes.

[01:46] – Damianne In reading a bit about you on your website, it said that you moved a lot as a child. What was that like? Why did you move so much?

[01:53] – Renita It was unstable. My parents divorced when I was around four, so me and my mom moved around a lot. Prior to their divorce, my dad was in the Coast Guard, so we moved a lot with him as well. So I went to like six elementary schools and two high schools. So, yeah, it was kind of hard to make friends because I was always bouncing around a lot.

[02:15] – Damianne My big move was moving to Canada from the Caribbean, from St. Lucia when I was 12. nd just that one move, I remember being quite difficult. Well, there were lots of differences, new culture, different people. And so that was tough. But I can’t imagine moving around so much and what that must have been like as a kid. Also, what attitudes do you think you developed as a result of those moves?

[02:41] – Renita I think it turned me into an introvert. I think I might have started out extroverted. But the more we moved, the more I just stayed to myself. I didn’t try to connect with people. So I guess the attitude would be, I have me and that’s it. I don’t want to connect with someone because it’s temporary. So I saw friendship as something temporary as a kid, and I had to unlearn it, of course, in adulthood. But that is just an idea that I developed when I was younger and I just grew up with it. I was really close to my mom. So it was like my mom was my best friend. She still is to this day. My mom played games with me and she was constant because I moved with her so she became my world.

[03:26] – Damianne You mentioned that you needed to unlearn this isolation, I guess, self-isolation and learn how to make friends. How did that happen?

[03:34] – Renita When I became older in college, I hung out with my friends but if I just didn’t feel like it, I didn’t see the importance of being there and being dependable, so to speak, because once again, relationships were temporary to me. I felt as long as I’m there when you need me or if you want to complain and I’m there; I’m giving advice, that’s fine. But to just hang out and meet your family and things like that, I didn’t see the value in spending time and just learning my friends. So I honestly can say in my 30s is when I really aggressively started to shed that behavior, and my friendships that lasted through my temporary phase, we’ve got a deeper connection because I’ve learned that. They were connected to me, but I wasn’t connected to them, if that makes sense. So now I’m in my thirties, I can feel them. I can call them out of the blue and don’t want absolutely nothing, or if nothing’s wrong in their life, I can hang out with them. It’s the relationship.

[04:34] – Damianne So it sounds like before relationships were more transactional to you as opposed to …

[04:41] – Renita Exactly. Yeah.

[04:42] – Damianne So what happened that made you realize that you needed to change that or you wanted to change that?

[04:49] – Renita All my friends individually told me about myself. When the first friend said it, I’m like, yeah, you’re tripping? And then the second, and the third, and the fourth friend. I’m like OK, if everyone says it, it can’t be wrong. So I started really thinking on that. It’s weird that I saw relationships as transactional because I’m married. So that made me kind of check myself with how I’m connected with my husband as well, because that’s a pretty permanent situation to think like that. I pretty much just all around changed how I interacted with everyone. I kind of feel like I was going through the motions and not really present in people’s lives. It’s weird.

[05:31] – Damianne Well, that’s the interesting thing. Sometimes feedback can be mixed, but usually if we’re getting the same feedback over and over again, there’s a kernel of truth and something that we need to reflect on and examine.

[05:42] – Renita Yeah, exactly.

[05:45] – Damianne What was the challenge that you would say that you faced that you grew the most from?

[05:51] – Renita I want to say when I flunked out of college and undergraduate. I’d never failed before in life, always good grades. Academics, that’s my thing. And I learned that I wasn’t perfect, which at the time it was horrible. But it helped me to see that I’m human. And I’m not as smart as I thought I was where I thought I can just bypass class and just coast through life. You actually have to try. It make me be intentional and not just haphazardly set out to do things. But once I changed that behavior, I did end up going back to school and graduating undergrad and graduate school. But I feel like I wouldn’t have done that had I not learned during that time how to be intentional in my actions and intentional with my goals and not just randomly do things or procrastinate and hope for the best. That definitely changed my life and humbled me a lot, too, because I feel like I was kind of self-righteous, too.

[06:50] – Damianne How long did it take you to go back to school and what did you do, then, in the interim?

[06:55] – Renita It took me two years to go back because it kicked my ego hard. It took me two years to go back and even when I went back, I was a little scared that I fail again. That first semester, I did the total opposite of what I did before. I met with teachers, I did my homework. I came to class. I did school work, did what I was supposed to do and it was total focus. There was no partying or anything, just tunnel focus, like this is what I set out to do. And I promised my grandmother too; she co-signed my loan. So I wasn’t just doing this for me. I was keeping a promise to her because she put her credit on the line for me to go back to school. So it became double fold for me.

[07:35] – Damianne It sounds like you really learned from what didn’t work and intentionally went about doing things the opposite way, I guess we could say the right way. But you had to figure out what was right.

[07:47] – Renita Right. Exactly.

[07:49] – Damianne And how did you figure out what was right? Was it just stuff that you already knew that you hadn’t done before or was there some sort of process you had to go through?

[07:56] – Renita Well, first, I feel like I learned self accountability during that time, because when it first happened, I blamed everything, every external factor. It was this, it was that. But at the end of the day, no one twisted my arm and said don’t go to class. No one told me not to do my homework. This was something you said you wanted to do and you want to blame everyone else. These were the conversations I’m having with myself. And I came to the realization, maybe a year later, no, this was totally your fault. You can’t blame anyone but you. My husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, used to go to class with me to make sure I went there. And I think a part of me flunking out was being too self-righteous to reach out for help because some of those classes were harder. I wasn’t the smartest anymore. I didn’t know everything. I couldn’t coast. And instead of having that self accountability, like hey, you need tutoring. I just was like, well, I’m just not going to go at all. So that’s why I said it taught me humility in the midst of that. Yeah.

[08:57] – Damianne And listening to you talk, I think one other opportunity that would also arise from this is realizing that you can grow, you can change. And you talked about how that first semester you were a bit scared. But I imagine that what you learned that first semester was, oh, OK, if I change my behaviors, then things will change in terms of results and performance.

[09:21] – Renita Right. And I think that’s why it took me so long to go back, because I’m like I’m just gonna to fail again. So it was a mind over matter thing. When I finally took that step and was accepted in school, it was like, OK, if I do what I’m supposed to do is mind over matter. The past doesn’t matter anymore. It’s what you do now. And that is always my bookmark. When I feel like I’m stagnant or I want something to happen right now, I always go back to that point, back to the school situation, because it humbles me and it reminds me that God is still in control. And if I got through that and I got through all the mental stuff that was entangled in that, then I’m OK for the present, the future. So I lean on that situation a lot.

[10:04] – Damianne And so what other challenges or what other struggles have you had that having that firm core belief has really helped you through?

[10:12] – Renita I wrestled with depression for a while. It was that feeling of invisibility. Now that we’re talking, I don’t know if that’s connected to the moving around as a kid. At one point, it was OK to be invisible because I wasn’t going to be there long. But then when you become an adult, you’re placed in permanent situations, work, marriage, relationships, friendships. And I reached a point where it’s like no one notices me, does anybody know that I’m there? And it wasn’t that people didn’t notice me. It’s I didn’t notice me because during these years, as I said earlier, I just coasted, coasted life. A brick could have fell on my foot and I wouldn’t have felt it because I wasn’t present. I wasn’t present with the now, just coasting. Let me just sneak by here. Let me just do that. But when you start to be intentional, you have to feel, you have to be present. When I first started this intentional road, it hurt because I had to feel, so I suppressed a lot of things, a lot of emotions, anger, sadness, lost, gains, which was just the weight. It’s like I had to feel all of that. And I think it just took me out. All that rushed at once for me.

[11:27] – Damianne You actually wrote on your blog in January 2019, I am going through emotional hell to obtain mental relief. I don’t know if you remember that.

[11:35] – Renita Yeah. And it was overwhelming. I feel like I romanticized some relationships and people in my life. Well, when I saw the real them, some were toxic. And that hurt because that’s a loss of someone that’s been in my life forever. So with this road of purpose and being intentional, it’s not all roses. It is something that you have to feel to get through that pain, which you have to feel it. That’s how you get to the other side of it. You have to feel it. You can’t just coast by it.

[12:03] – Damianne Yes, and I think that’s very common, that it’s very easy, especially when things are hard for us to go into our mind or for us to just get through. I remember this person telling me about how she structured her day so that she did not have any time to think or feel because life was hard. And I just remember thinking, can you do that indefinitely and it not come back to haunt you. And then, are you kind of hampering yourself in some way when you do that. What kind of life do you live when you can’t feel anything? I imagine that would be very painful in a different way.

[12:42] – Renita Yeah, because you’re literally watching life pass you by. It’s almost like you’ve placed your life on a TV screen. It’s not even real, or you’re looking at the TV screen of everyone else living their life and you just sit because you’re not present. Nothing’s happening for real. And I find that the more you suppress, the more you kind of gravitate towards behaviors that you don’t think you ever would gravitate towards or behaviors that maybe your parents had or family members had that you did not like. You gravitate towards that because you’re not fighting against it, because you’re not doing anything.

[13:18] – Damianne Yeah, things keep coming up again and again until we deal with them, right?

[13:20] – Renita Yes.

[13:22] – Damianne You mentioned before about feeling invisible. What did you do to become visible to yourself? Was it mostly this mental work or was there anything else that you needed to go through?

[13:33] – Renita I won free sessions to a life coach and he had me do this thing called mirror talk every day. I went to the mirror and I had to say something nice about myself. And the first day, it felt so weird. And it was so awkward because it’s just me, right. I know me better than anyone. I should have a list of things and I couldn’t think of anything. So that’s problem number one.

[13:55] – Damianne Anything positive

[13:56] – Renita Right, anything positive because it had to be positive. Correct. So then the first day is like, well, your eyebrows kind of cute. Then the next day it’s I love your smell. Towards the second week, it was girl, we got it today. It was full conversations with myself. And I noticed that the more positive I spoke and more affirmations that I spoke to myself in the mirror, the more I didn’t allow people to treat me any kind of way anymore. I made myself visible. Hey no, I don’t like it when you say things like that to me. Well, I’ve said it before. Yes. But I’m telling you now that I’ve never liked it. It ignited something inside of me. I can’t even explain it. And I made myself visible. I made myself know what I like, what I don’t like. I do matter. And at first, the people around you, they’re not used to this because they’ve been doing this for years. When you don’t stop people, they just think it’s cool.

[14:46] – Damianne You might change. But that doesn’t mean they did.

[14:49] – Renita Right, exactly. So I might have rub some people the wrong way. They make jokes now, some people are kind of sarcastic. They’re like I better not say that to you. And I’m like, right. So it made me feel visible. I felt alive. Then I projected that on everyone else, like, hey, I’m here. I matter.

[15:06] – Damianne Was this also part of the process that you took to becoming comfortable with yourself?

[15:11] – Renita Yes

[15:12] – Damianne Your brand, your website, your podcast, they’re all BYOK, be your own kind. And as I said in the intro, it’s be your own kind of whatever you want to be. Tell me how you came up with this concept.

[15:31] – Renita I just feel like with social media, everyone is following these false perceptions of people’s life. We don’t really know if this is what’s happening in people’s life, but we get pressured by it. We see people get a house. Man, I wish I could get a house, a car, man wish I. Or you see a charismatic video from somebody, man, I wish I had that charisma. No, I feel like we should follow our own blueprint. We should draw up our own blueprint and we should be that. It’s not about competition, it’s not about what the next person has. It’s about embracing who we are. It’s not about living to other people’s standards because I feel like when we’re kids, mom wants us to do this, dad wants us to do that. What is that age where you break out of that? Hey, Mom. Dad, you don’t agree but I just have to be me. I feel like social media pressures people to fit this blueprint or fit this perception. And it’s stressing people out. Like I feel like that’s part of the cause of depression, trying to keep up with someone else’s life that we don’t even know is real. If you stay in your own lane, you don’t really care what other people are doing because you’re in your lane. You’re embracing who you are. You’re around people that love you. You don’t have to bend and your entire essence to be in a certain group or get a certain DM or be on a certain Instagram page. You’re just you. And there’s so much pressure taken off of you when you just you.

[16:52] – Damianne That’s a tough one because we’re so addicted or some people are so addicted to social media and getting likes and we get those dopamine hits which feel good. And so we’re looking for those things. What did you do so that you could stop focusing on the fitting in and the social media competition? How did you stop participating in the social media competition that exists?

[17:17] – Renita I just post my stuff and anyone I follow on any of my social media sites, they’re like minded. If it’s too toxic or if it’s too much, I just don’t follow them. So anything that I’m looking at, I’m feeding myself, is like minded people.

[17:33] – Damianne You curate your content so that it could uplift you.

[17:37] – Renita Right, right. So I don’t have a lot of people that say, hey, look at me, this is what you want your life to be. No, I’m not following you. I stay out of that lane. But on the other hand, I don’t look at life as a competition either. I feel like there’s enough opportunity for everyone out there to do what they want to do. I feel like we should be sharpening each other and what we want to do. Competition, what are we racing to, death? A life starts, a life ends. That’s the only two identical things that’s gonna happen in everyone’s life. So what are we competing against?

[18:10] – Damianne So surely with this mindset, you’ve had to say no to some things. What are some of those things you’ve had to say no to, besides what you follow on social media.

[18:19] – Renita When I started off blogging, I started reading a lot of stuff like this is what you need to do for your blog. You need to post this. You need to do it at this time. I feel like I just said no to the blueprint. If only one person reads my blog, that’s fine. I’m not going to write things that I can’t relate to. I want people to see me as transparent. So that is what I go for. I’m not going to talk about makeup; I don’t know anything about it. Anything that’s not authentic to me, I just threw it out. So I just said no to compromising myself because I’ve been doing that for so long. So once I decided I’m going to be me, anything that is outside of it is no.

[19:00] – Damianne Seth Godin, who is my hero when it comes to marketing, talks about how you just need to find your minimum viable audience. You’re not trying to be everything to everybody. You’re trying to find your niche. I try to keep that in mind and let it guide me to some extent. And it sounds like you do a lot of the same thing. One thing I did read about on your website that I wanted to know a bit more about is how you lost your job after 11 years. And you talked about that was actually a great opportunity for you. Would you please share that story with us?

[19:37] – Renita I started working for a foreclosure law firm maybe a year after I flunked out, so I was about 23 years old. I didn’t want to do anything with law, but that was my cushion. I knew foreclosure law. And even after getting my degrees, I stayed there. My degrees have nothing to do with law. It was just my cushion. A lot of people were like you should just leave. And I was miserable there.

[19:58] – Damianne What kept you there?

[19:59] The friendships. I love the people. I love my boss. I made a lot of great friends there, so we all were just miserable together, I guess. Another company bought them out and they were downsizing, so I got laid off first. I was really sad. And then maybe the next week I was like, you didn’t even like that place. You’re just mourning the unknown. So my husband and I, we moved from Chicago, Illinois, to Lafayette, Indiana. And my first job was in HR. That’s what my degree was, in HR. So I actually landed what I wanted to do. So did he, justing moved out of that environment. So we just took a leap.

[20:37] – Damianne How did you decide to move and why Lafayette?

[20:40] – Renita We just wanted a change. It was just that simple. Chicago is so fast pace, hustle, bustle. It’s just always fighting to get to the top. That’s what it felt like for us. And we moved to Lafayette, which is a little slower, and we’ve gotten a chance to reconnect in different ways as well. And we managed to find our careers after less than a year here.

[21:07] – Damianne So did you have family there or something?

[21:07] – Renita Yeah. My dad, my paternal side lives here.

[21:10] – Damianne So that helped.

[21:11] – Renita Yeah, it helped a lot. I lived here in high school; that’s how I had two high schools. I lived with my dad for a couple of years in high school. And then I moved back to Chicago. So my dad’s been trying to get us to come back for years. We were like, yeah, we need a change of pace.

[21:26] – Damianne So you ended up finding a job in HR, which is what you’d studied, right. How did that happen? Did you decide that you were only going to find HR jobs when you move?

[21:36] – Renita I was looking for HR, but I went to the staffing agency for them to help me find an HR job and they ended up hiring me. I wasn’t looking for a job there. I went there for them that help me find one. And the owner called me the next day and was like, hey, I want to talk to you a little bit further about a position we have here. I don’t even know they had a position in the actual staffing agency. I was just going with the flow of things because I wasn’t expecting that.

[22:04] – Damianne So as somebody who’s gone through a lot of changes, some of which will kind of forced on you, some of which you decided yourself, and come into some great realizations about the person that you want to be and living life according to your own blueprint. What would you say to somebody is something that they can do, even a small action they can take today that can help them if they’re feeling stuck in their own life?

[22:28] – Renita Sometimes when you’re feeling stuck it’s good to do nothing and flow. And then sometimes, when you’re stagnant, you just have to fight through. And how do you know the difference is through meditation and prayer? Because sometimes we can be making movement and not progress. We can be doing all the steps and all of the things but we’re on a conveyor belt, we’re not going anywhere. So in situations like that, maybe hop off that conveyor belt. And just sit there for a minute, regroup or re prioritize, but just stop the movement completely. And sometimes an opportunity or an idea will just come to you when you just stop.

[23:07] – Damianne Make space.

[23:08] – Renita Yes, exactly. Make the space, and then there are some times we’re just stagnant because we are paralyzed with fear from past things or things that people have told us about us that were untrue. And the fight is mentally and that’s where the affirmations come, that’s where the mirror talk come in to say, you’re not that, you’re smart, you’re beautiful, you’re capable, you can do this. Those things, that’s fighting the mind. And that’s a great thing that I use anywhere. Any time a negative thought happens, I counter it with something positive. So if you have an issues in your mind and if you can’t think of something off top, I have a book. I carry an affirmation book with me. Do you have favorite quotes? Keep them which you. Positive quotes, keep them with so. So on days where you just can’t think of nothing clever to counter with, open that book and you read that. Oh yeah, I got this. Those are the things you do, either you flow or you fight.

[24:02] – Damianne Yeah, I really like that idea of writing things down, because we all know that it’s easier to think of positive things when we’re in a good mood, when we’re happy, when life is going well. But those things are no less true when life is not going so well, when we’re struggling to come up with something to see that is positive. So I like that idea because I think if you were telling yourself things that you know are false, you can start to have this mental war going on. But if there are things that are true regardless, then you can really start to shift your mental paradigm or your mindset.

[24:40] – Renita Right. And when you say it out loud, you’re out of your head. If you are trying to fight in your head, you’re thinking it back. I don’t think it works great. But when you say it out loud, you’ve jumped outside of your head. The best part is just get out of there because the mind is a rabbit hole. It never stops. You’ll think of one thing, then you’ll think of another thing, then you’ll think of another. Next thing you know, Oh, I just can’t do it. It’s like you’re planting one seed about breakfast or something., next thing you know, you’re a failure in life. Oh my God, I’m supposed to be so far at this age. Jump out of there. Speak it, write it, get it out. There’s this thing called Morning Pages. Have you heard of it?

[25:16] – Damianne Yes.

[25:17] – Renita That works for me. I don’t do it in a morning, but I’ll set the timer for 40 minutes and just go on days where I’m just clouded. And once I’m done, whatever I wrote, the crazy stuff in my head, I feel better. Just get it out. Anyway, you can get it out.

[25:33] – Damianne What I want to say to people who are listening is one thing or another might not work for you. My approach is to always say take some action. Try it and see if it works for you. And if it doesn’t work, you’ve tried. Now you can try something else. But if it does work for you, how wonderful is that? You have one more tool in your toolkit of strategies that you can use to help you in your own life.

[25:57] – Renita Google is great if you don’t know where to start, or a counsellor. Because of technology, there are so many ways to find things that help you move forward or help you push through those stagnant times.

[26:08] – Damianne What are you finding joy in these days? There’s COVID-19. We talked a little bit at the beginning of the podcast about what life is like. How has your life been affected with COVID-19.

[26:21] – Renita It’s actually been awesome. I’ve cleared some things off my credit. I have grown closer to family members. Family members I have rarely talked to, I talk to all the time now, reconnecting with some friends. My husband and I found some new shows that we watch together. I like the pause a lot; I really do. It kind of just stopped life. The money I spent going out, I just started clearing my credit. So it’s been pretty beneficial for me.

[26:51] – Damianne Are you working from home?

[26:53] – Renita Yes. I’m working from home until August.

[26:58] – Damianne OK. Connecting back, what’s your favorite thing that you get to do right now?

[27:02] – Renita Oh, talking to my family; it’s been a lot of fun. We play games on Zoom and things like that. I hang out more with my dad; my dad is out here.

[27:12] – Damianne It’s been so great chatting with you. I’ll just end with a couple more questions. What’s one thing, if somebody is listening, that you would like them to take away from this conversation.

[27:24] – Renita Go through the process. No matter how rough it may seem at the beginning, the more you push, the more you’ll see that light at the end of the tunnel. Learn what you can while you’re going through the process; it’ll help you at the end. Stay encouraged with the affirmations as you’re going through. Be patient with yourself as you’re going through the process. Because when we start something, we don’t know as much as we thought we knew. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s a growing thing. So grow with your process and stay encouraged.

[27:56] – Damianne And this is the process for going through self-affirmation and self awareness?

[28:01] – Renita It’s the process regarding anything. Want to start a business, just start it. But go through the process because sometimes when we have this idea, we hit that wall and then we’re discouraged.

[28:13] – Damianne So keep at it.

[28:15] – Renita Keep at it, the process of anything. Whatever you’re starting, just keep at it. It will pay off at the end.

[28:22] – Damianne Connecting to that also is the whole idea of if something fails, then you’ve learned something that you can use for you to pivot. If one small action fails, that doesn’t mean that everything fails. But it means that I know to focus on a different angle or focus on something else towards that progress that I want.

[28:42] – Renita Yes.

[28:44] – Damianne Is there anything else that I have not asked you that you would like to add?

[28:48] – Renita I don’t know. You’ve asked me some pretty great questions here. Am I allowed to ask you a question?

[28:55] – Damianne Sure. Of course.

[28:57] – Renita What inspired you to start your podcast?

[29:00] – Damianne I started my podcast because I was curious about the topic of change. Like everybody tells me, change is inevitable. We know that but people are always like oh wow, you’re so courageous, you’re so brave. And so I’m curious about how people perceive change, what people learn from change, what inspires them to change. And I thought that the podcast was a great way to explore this curiosity and take some people on this journey with me.

[29:27] – Renita Of course, I listened to it prior to coming on here and I liked it.

[29:32] – Damianne Thank you. I’m always happy for any feedback or advice that people have because you don’t have to do everything that people tell you in feedback but it’s good to have some ideas of how people feel when they listen. I enjoy feedback but reserve the right to say thank you and carry on. As we end our conversation today, if people want to get in touch with you or want to follow your work, where can they find you?

[29:58] – Renita Everything is on beyourownkind.com, just how it sounds.

[30:03] – Damianne That’s very memorable.

[30:04] – Renita Yeah, I tried. When I started, I’m like be your own kind of what. And I’m like be your own kind of anything you want to be. So I left it at be your own kind. Everything is housed there, the podcast, my posts and YouTube videos; they’re all there. On Instagram, I am be_yourownkind. On Twitter, I’m beyourownkind24.

[30:24] – Damianne Well, all of those links will be in the show notes so people can find them there and connect with you and follow what you’re doing. You’re very active on your blog and on social media. So there’s always some great content for people to find. Thank you. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

[30:42] – Renita Thank you for having me.