Chapter 1

WAS IT JUST MY IMAGINATION?

What Is Imagination?

I magination is one of the most powerful tools that we have. It enables us to visualize the future. It is the doorway to unlimited possibilities and key to creating something more meaningful and significant. Simply defined, imagination is the ability of the mind to think in pictures, to conceive something that does not yet exist. It is a facet of the mind along with reason, emotions, and the will that allows us to contemplate our lives in the future.

We use our imagination all the time, whether we are daydreaming, planning, recalling, or meditating. Without imagination we would not have a source of creativity, because every innovation in history began with an image in someone’s mind. Books, movies, toys, songs, automobiles, companies, foods, clothes, and phone apps and other technology advances, to name a few, all started in someone’s imagination and without it we wouldn’t enjoy the conveniences we do today.

Both individuals and organizations use their imagination to create their future state. For example, as a consultant I enjoy the opportunity to work with clients on developing their long-term strategic plans. I guide them through envisioning what the future could look like for them three to five years out. One of the first exercises I take them through involves using their imagination. I instruct them to “imagine that it is five years from now and your business has grown to a new level of success and profitability. Without being limited or constrained by budget, current practices, past successes, or the fear of failure, list all of the attributes of that new organization.”

I have used the same exercise with individuals who are contemplating a strategic move and need to imagine their future. Taking them through this exercise sets a strong foundation on which they can build. Some of their best thinking is documented because they are given permission to imagine without limits or restrictions, just like we did as kids.

Dreaming as a Kid

Think back to when you were a kid and your dreams ran wild. What did you imagine being and doing, and where did you imagine going? I am a dreamer by nature and have a vivid imagination. As a child and up to my teenage years, I kept a diary and I remember writing all kinds of dreams about what I would be when I grew up. I wrote that I would be a teacher, an all-star athlete, a basketball coach, a high-fashion model in New York, a movie star, a lawyer, and a writer. I imagined being rich and living like what I had seen on the TV show starring Robin Leach, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. My imagination transported me to places all over the world, to achieving anything my heart desired and my mind envisioned. I was unrestricted by rules and had no limits, questions, or fears. Nothing seemed impossible.

Most of these dreams were influenced by what I watched on TV, by what I was taught by my parents, and by what came naturally to me—for example, teaching. I loved playing “school” with my three brothers and being the teacher. We would play for hours and I would actually create assignments for them to do and games for them to play. I would assign them homework and grade their papers, so dreaming of being a teacher one day wasn’t farfetched. It would end up being my job as a trainer years later.

I loved to play “dress up” with my mom’s clothes and shoes, put on her makeup and jewelry, and pretend to be a model and a contestant in beauty pageants. During those years, I watched TV shows like Star Search every week and the Miss America and Miss USA pageants every year and imagine myself being one of the contestants. Modeling on stage also came naturally to me. I started modeling for a local agency and participated in a number of fashion shows, and even won a local Star Search runway modeling competition. I didn’t become a high-fashion model in New York for a world-renowned designer, but my dream of modeling was partially realized.

While watching the pageants every year I was enamored with the parade of costumes, the extravagant gowns, the roaring applause from each contestant’s cheering section, the speech competitions, and the amazing talent performances. And then the big moment came when the winner’s name was announced and this huge crown, decorated with what looked like hundreds of diamonds and rubies, was placed on the winner’s head. I was hooked. As I watched those pageants, I would think, “I can do that. They walk across the stage, they have a speech competition, and they perform a talent. Yes, I can do that.” I started dreaming and imagining that one day I could be Miss ___________.

At the age of 14, I competed in my first local pageant, because it had a speech competition and because I had grown fond of the stage. I was already playing sports and was quite competitive, and now I had started modeling, so I thought I had a good shot. Even though I had never competed in a pageant before, I had watched enough of them on TV and had convinced myself that if I were good at modeling I could be good at pageants too. Besides, this pageant offered scholarship money for college and a variety of great gifts, and if I won I would have the opportunity to sport a huge rhinestone crown like I had seen on TV.

Turns out that my dreams were not too lofty, because in my first pageant I placed second runner-up, won the speech competition, and received positive feedback from the judges regarding my interview and stage presence. The pageant director and the judges strongly urged me to come back to compete again the following year and told me I had a good chance of winning. So I did. I spent the entire next year reading, staying abreast of current events, soul searching to get clarity on my platform, and practicing my interview skills. I also kept good grades, which was a requirement because it was a scholarship pageant. The preparation paid off because the next year I competed again and won my first title, Miss District of Columbia National Teenager.

My parents enrolled me and my brothers in sports at early ages. I played softball and basketball and ran track. These also came naturally to me and I got really good. Playing with my brothers taught me to be tough and to play more competitively. By the time I reached high school I had already played for the local Boys and Girls Club and had achieved all-star status in softball, track, and basketball. I didn’t reach my goal of being a coach but I was captain of my softball team, so I guess that was close enough. I tried out for the varsity teams in high school and was selected. As I achieved some of those childhood dreams, I built up a lot of confidence and assurance, which reinforced that nothing was impossible when I put my mind to something. So I continued to imagine and add more dreams to my list.

In high school I started dating and eventually experienced my first love. Then I began imagining getting married to the man of my dreams, having a family, and living happily ever after like I had seen in many love stories on TV, in the movies, and in teenage novels. When I went off to college, I majored in pre-law and imagined myself being a top prosecutor and then a family court judge. I was still dating my high school sweetheart and we were going strong. He was attending another college five hours from me on a basketball scholarship and was in his second year. He would drive to my college to see me and I would drive to as many of his games as I could to support him. We were talking about getting married after graduation and it appeared that more of my dreams would be realized.

When Life Happens and Dreams Are Shattered

Life Event 1: My First Heartbreak

Then a series of unexpected turns, tragedies, and transitions shook me to my core and redefined the trajectory of my life. The first event happened at the end of my first year of college, when my boyfriend became aloof and started acting a bit strange. He wasn’t calling as much and started making excuses as to why he couldn’t come to visit. When I would ask him what was going on, he would just shrug it off. The clincher came when we had planned to hang out for the summer break and he decided it wasn’t a good idea anymore. Finally I confronted him and demanded an explanation, and he admitted he had “found somebody else.”

I was devastated. We had made so many plans and he had seemed so committed to our dreams. I had been sure that he loved me, which he told me often, but now he was telling me he was with someone else. I was angry, confused, broken, and shocked all at the same time. This was the first time I had really fallen in love and the first time I had experienced this kind of hurt. My heart was shattered into a hundred pieces and everything we had dreamed together was now turning into a nightmare.

It took a while to get over the hurt, but after getting more engrossed in college life (attending campus fraternity and sorority parties, focusing on my major, holding down a part-time job, and hanging out with new friends), I moved on. In my last year of college I met a guy through mutual friends. We hit it off quickly and began dating. Eventually we fell head over heels for each other and I began imagining my life with him.

We dreamed of moving to Tulsa, Oklahoma where I would do graduate work in religious studies and he would complete his undergraduate degree. We both dreamed of having children and living happily ever after. We had no money, but we had a whole lot of hope that everything would be alright simply because we were people of faith and we were in love. After I graduated from my undergraduate degree program at the University of Maryland, we worked to make our plans and dreams a reality, and things seemed to be falling into place, or so I thought.

Life Event 2: Near-Death Car Crash

The second event happened in the summer I graduated from college. I was still planning to move to Oklahoma and start my graduate program, but I had never been there. Three girlfriends and I decided to take our first cross-country trip, from Maryland to Oklahoma. This trip was a great opportunity to check things out. We made the twenty-one-hour drive and arrived safely. During the five-day visit we had a blast. My closest girlfriend decided to check out the school for her own graduate studies as well, so we attended orientation sessions together, toured the campus, met our professors, made new friends, found an apartment near campus, signed the lease, and registered for the fall semester. We didn’t want to leave but were so excited to return as roommates and grad students and start the next chapter in our lives. While we attended orientations, our two other girlfriends explored the city, did some shopping, and attended the conference with us every evening.

It came time to return to Maryland. We reluctantly loaded up the car and began the drive back to the East Coast. Not being much of a long-distance driver, I sat in the back seat on the passenger side. With three other people who could drive for hours at a time, I knew we would be on the East Coast before it was my turn to get behind the wheel. I don’t remember what happened from this point on, but I am sharing this story as it was told to me.

My friend and I had been asleep for hours in the backseat when at approximately two o’clock in the morning our lives changed forever. We had started in Tulsa and reached West Virginia. The highway we were on was a narrow two-lane road with very few cars traveling in the wee hours of the morning. It was under construction. The shoulder of the road was blocked off by a concrete barricade lined with orange and white striped cans. It was pitch black with no street lighting.

Sometime around two o’clock the driver pulled off onto the side of the road to switch with the other front-seat passenger. I remained in the back seat, asleep. My girlfriend sitting beside me woke up during the driver switch. As the car got back onto the road and headed east, the one who had now taken the wheel realized she had not buckled her seat belt, so she reached down to lock it. Seconds later she looked up and saw the car heading into the concrete barricade and the orange and white cans. She violently turned the steering wheel to the extreme right to avoid the concrete barricades, and lost control of the car.

The car flipped over and careened down an embankment to several feet below the highway. The driver, who had just buckled her seat belt, was shaken and received some scrapes and bruises. The front-seat passenger hit her head on the windshield, shattering the glass. The car flipped a second and third time, ejecting me headfirst through the back window. The car flipped a fourth time and landed on its side twenty feet down the embankment. It was now a mangled mess of steel and broken glass. The driver was still seated under the wheel. The police speculated that the buckled seat belt saved her life.

Bloody and bruised, the driver began to scream for each of us to identify our location. Darkness made it impossible to see each other. Our voices were the only way to signal where we were. They called out for each other until they were able to hold hands. One, two, three accounted for. But where was Shirley? “Shirley, where are you? Please answer.” Their cries went unheard.

One of the passengers later recounted that she got down on her hands and knees and crawled around on the ground trying to feel for me. Hurt and bleeding, wading through broken glass in the darkness, her efforts were futile. The driver ran in the direction of the highway. One car had already passed us by with no knowledge we were stranded down the embankment, twenty feet away. Our driver stood by the side of the highway and frantically waited for the next car or truck.

Within minutes, an eighteen-wheeled tractor trailer sped her way. The trucker, with his lights on high beam, spotted her waving her arms in the air and jumping up and down in a panic. He stopped. He immediately radioed in a call to the local police, then grabbed his flashlight from the truck and helped the women search the area for me. I was found thirty feet from the automobile, motionless and unresponsive, covered in glass and weeds, bleeding from my head and arms. The flashlight beamed into my face. I did not move. My friends continued to call my name. I was still breathing, but no one knew the extent of my injuries, so they did not move me.

Moments later sirens sounded in the distance. Two of the passengers and the trucker ran to flag down the police and ambulances. The flashlight and the truck’s high beams were the source of light for the emergency brigade. Within minutes two additional ambulances arrived to transport the four of us to the medical center in Wheeling, West Virginia. We arrived at the hospital emergency room in less than 30 minutes.

According to my friends the hospital was very quiet that night and visiting hours had long since ended. The atmosphere abruptly changed when we were brought into the emergency room. Nurses and doctors were standing by and had been thoroughly briefed on our condition by the EMTs. Our vital signs were checked by the hospital staff. We were wheeled into separate exam rooms and immediately examined for internal bleeding, broken bones, and concussions. I was still unconscious. I have no recollection of my time in the emergency room.

The next morning the police investigated the scene of the accident and, after viewing the massive amounts of glass and shredded steel, shook their heads in disbelief that anyone could have survived. That same morning the headline news reported, “Four Women Survive an Early Morning Car Accident”. The report stated, “It was a miracle that anyone survived since the car was so demolished,” and “God was apparently in the car with the young women.” The story went on to report that “police officers found nearly half a dozen Bibles scattered about the scene that apparently had fallen out of the car during the crash.” What a testimony! A news report of a car crash that spoke of a miracle by God! The other ladies watched the amazing story from their hospital beds. I was still unconscious.

By the next morning, friends and relatives of the driver had driven from Washington, D.C., to the hospital. The driver and the other conscious passengers shared the details of the accident. Several women surrounded my bed and began to pray. They continued praying without ceasing. I started to hear noises but couldn’t make out anything, nor could I open my eyes. I remember that one of the women pulled my arm as if to lift me up. I slowly awoke from my comatose state.

A few minutes later I opened my eyes and saw strange people standing around me in a chain of locked hands. I had no idea where I was or what had happened. I remember looking at the clock in the room and seeing that it was 3:00, but I didn’t know what day it was or how long I had been there. The last thing I remembered prior to this was being asleep in the back seat of the car. When I awoke, I began to ask for details about what had happened and where we were. The nurses later explained that I had suffered a severe head concussion, received ten stitches in my forehead and twenty in my right side, and had glass lodged in various parts of my body, including my scalp.

We went home to Maryland two days later under my doctor’s and parents’ care. Over the next few weeks I would feel a sharp pain while washing up (I couldn’t take a shower for several weeks due to my injuries); it was glass working its way out of my body. The glorious news is that I had no internal bleeding and no major organs were damaged. I was badly bruised and severely stiff, had scars in many places, and was in a lot of pain, but I was determined to get better so that I could move to Oklahoma.

I had not forgotten the amazing experience we had while attending the college weekend orientation. I remembered the peace and excitement that had come over me while I was there. But as I recovered on the couch at my parents’ home, I spent hours wondering, what if my dreams were just a figment of my imagination? Would they actually come true? I wondered, What if I had lost a limb, lost my sight or my hearing, or worse, lost my life? Since I had come so close, I began to think about how precious life was and that I couldn’t take anything for granted. I was sure I wanted to move to Oklahoma and start graduate school. A month later the doctor released me to travel and complete my recovery and therapy there. So my mom, my brother, and I loaded up my car and made the twenty-one-hour cross-country trip from Maryland to Oklahoma. I was excited to start this new chapter in my life.

Life Event 3: Getting Married, Getting Divorced, and Having a Baby, in That Order

My first year in graduate school was amazing. I made lots of new friends; I adored my professors; my boyfriend, who had now become my fiancé, had moved to Oklahoma as well; and I had been hired at a local bank. That following summer, my fiancé and I got married. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had faith, love, and each other, and we thought we could conquer the world. As I write about this more than thirty years later, it sounds so cheesy and childish, but it seemed real at the time. What was also real was that we didn’t want to take life for granted, especially since I had experienced the near-death car accident the year before.

When we told our parents about our marriage plans, they warned against it insisting that we were too young. My fiancé’s parents went even further, insisting he was not ready to take care of another person and needed time to mature. We ignored their warnings and chalked it up to them being overprotective because they had gotten married at the same age we were. I planned the wedding all summer, and that August, before we went back to college, we got married at our local church in Maryland, and then returned to Oklahoma.

Five years later we would prove our parents right. Our lack of maturity, ongoing problems and disagreements about money (or the lack thereof), unrealistic expectations, and unwillingness to accept responsibility drove a wedge between us. Love and faith were not enough. I resented bearing the brunt of the responsibility and not feeling valued. On top of that we had not developed proper conflict management skills and thus were constantly bickering and blaming each other.

As we made the decision to terminate the marriage I found out I was pregnant, again. Two years earlier I had suffered a miscarriage and was devastated as I went through that loss. This time I was thrilled to be past my first trimester and all was well, but at the same time I was having a baby while facing the prospect of raising it as a single parent.

We went back and forth and considered working things out but our talks fell apart again and again. He moved on to dating someone one else and I decided that trying to fix the marriage just because I was pregnant was not going to fix all of the issues between us. It would only exacerbate the situation and put a child in the middle. So I went through with the divorce, after much consternation.

Talk about shattered dreams and all the things I had imagined my life to be! We had dreamed about living happily ever after—not going through a miscarriage, experiencing financial bankruptcy, or having a child while going through a divorce and raising that child apart from each other. If anyone had told me this would be my reality, I would have cursed the ground they were standing on. But this is where I found my life. It was another defining moment that caused me to ask again if my dreams were just figments of my imagination.

Going through the divorce affected my self-confidence, sense of self-worth, and ability to trust and to believe in my dreams, for years. But I didn’t have time to stop and grieve, be bitter, or try to deal out revenge. I was about to have a baby. I was faced with all the challenges of single parenting, but mostly I was faced with extensive financial obligations. I would characterize myself as being flat broke, living paycheck to paycheck, not being able to make ends meet, and operating with a poverty mindset.

I had a lot of debt (grad school loans, credit cards, a car payment, rent, and other loans), and I was behind on most of them. I was borrowing money and getting cash advances from high-interest credit cards, taking out loans from check-cashing companies, and borrowing money from agencies that would take your car title as collateral. I was selling personal property (jewelry, a stereo system, designer purses) at pawnshops just to pay basic bills, and I was getting high-interest-rate loans—at 25 to 30 percent—while not knowing how I was going to repay them.

My daughter was born six months after I filed for divorce, and while she was the best gift I’d ever been given, I also felt the weight of the world on my shoulders trying to take care of her. I was in bondage (mentally, emotionally, and financially), I was stressed out, I was losing weight, I felt hopeless, and I was alone. One day I got tired of being sick and tired. I had been living this way for years and I really didn’t know how I was going to make ends meet. So I did what many of us have done in this situation.

I prayed that famous prayer, “God, if you get me out of this, I promise I’ll never get into it again.” I had prayed it before, but this time, I meant it. I had hit rock bottom and I needed a miracle. I promised God and my daughter that I was going to get out of debt. I was going to do whatever it took to make the shifts and changes I needed to make to get out of this cycle and pit of despair and desperation.

My ex-husband (my daughter’s dad) had moved on and remarried, and we were not on good terms. But regardless, I had someone depending on me and, if I wanted better for my life, I would have to make changes. I would have to make some sacrifices, and some difficult choices. That meant getting some counseling and coaching, having some accountability. It meant taking control of the way I was living and of my financial situation. It meant I had to go through a process, with a step-by-step plan. It meant having the right resources and the right people around me. And most important, it meant adopting a new and different mindset. I wished that all of my situation was just a bad dream, but it wasn’t. It was real and present.

Life Event 4: Bank Robbery

The fourth experience came when I was working at a bank as a supervisor while living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was 9:00 a.m. and I had just opened the front doors for the few customers waiting outside. I stopped at the supply closet near the doors to get a few pens and some packs of tape for the teller machines. At 9:03 a.m. three masked gunmen stormed through the doors. Two of them rushed to the teller line and jumped over the counter. The third one grabbed me, pointed his gun directly at my forehead, and yelled at everyone in the bank, “If anyone in here moves I will blow her brains out.” He was talking about me. All I could see were two barrels pointed right between my eyes, and even though the gun wasn’t touching my skin, my two eyes made direct contact with the two silver barrels.

Immediately I was gripped with fear and couldn’t move, think, or comprehend what to do. My body fell onto the floor and into a fetal position on my side. All I could do was pray. Once I hit the floor I couldn’t see where the gun was pointed, but seconds later the gunman yelled again, “I told you, if anyone in here moves I will blow her brains out.” I could hear his voice above me, so I knew the gun must have still been pointed at my head.

An indescribable fear hit me again and I began to brace myself to be killed. I prayed harder, as if with my last breath. Within a few seconds I heard footsteps running from behind the teller line, and then I heard his footsteps move away from me and toward the door.

The next sound I heard was the front door shutting. I didn’t move immediately. I was still paralyzed with fear and not 100 percent sure the bank robbers had really run out. Others in the bank began to move and speak, and someone yelled, “Lock the door.” I turned over slowly from my fetal position and waited for the customer who had yelled to lock the door. As I heard the deadbolt click, I started to get up, but I couldn’t stand up straight. I was in disbelief, shock, and fear like I had never before experienced. For a moment it felt like I was living a bad dream—a nightmare—and I tried to wake up from it but I couldn’t. Even now, as I tell this story, I can still see the event vividly in my mind.

So many questions flooded my mind after that experience. The next day when I woke up I wondered, Did I just have a nightmare? Did I really live through a bank robbery? Had I again survived a life-and-death situation like the car crash? What was God trying to tell me? What could I have done differently that morning? What if I had been shot? Would I have died with regrets and a lot of dreams unfulfilled? What if they never catch the bank robbers? How will I go back to work each day without fearing they would rob us again? What if I should be doing something else with my life?

More Hard Lessons Learned Sooner

Over the next seven years, I experienced more turns, twists, and transitions in my life that continued to cause me to wonder if my dreams would ever come true or were just figments of my imagination. A few years after the divorce I accepted a new job that relocated me back to the East Coast. It felt like a fresh start for me and my daughter. Life eventually stabilized. I had been through financial counseling and had worked out a plan to get out of debt and improve my credit rating. Some of my financial obligations had been written off. Others were on a payment plan. I was now making enough money to pay my bills, but more important, I was keeping my promise to God and to my daughter not to get into that kind of debt again.

I opened up my heart to trust again and got back on the dating scene. It was a bit challenging having a young child and trying to juggle new relationships, so I was more guarded, or so I thought. I ended up learning more heart lessons, but interestingly enough I was learning hard lessons sooner. One guy I got involved with turned out to be a master manipulator. He was able to identify my weaknesses and vulnerabilities by listening adeptly and keenly to where I had the greatest needs, and he was skillful in tapping into those things. He wined and dined me and gave me wonderful gifts. He said and did all the right things.

But I found out that he had no intention of being in a committed, monogamous relationship. When you learn that the person giving you all these gifts and planning this great life with you is also telling five or six other women the same thing, it can make you feel completely insignificant. It was hurtful, but it wasn’t the end of the world, and I quickly moved on because I had a daughter to raise and I didn’t want her to be exposed to that drama. There would be a repeat performance with several other suitors, but each time I was keen to move on when they showed their true colors, and I took an assessment of the lessons I had learned.

The first lesson was that I recognized a flaw in me. I’ve always prided myself on being the kind of person who looks for the best in other people and assumes positive intent. This has worked in my favor in some instances and against me in others. In this case, I realized that I attracted and settled for men who were either very needy or insecure and used me as a crutch and a caregiver.

I didn’t know at first that the person wasn’t healthy for me, because I took their words as truth and didn’t see the facade until I was well into the relationship and had become emotionally invested. By then it was too late to back out easily. I tried to make it work by trying to change them for the better. This wasn’t an implausible approach because by nature I am a caring, generous, nurturing soul and have the heart of a teacher, a coach, and a missionary. So while I learned more about why I chose the kind of men I did, I still had work to do to avoid being a magnet for that kind of man.

A second lesson was that I learned to open my eyes wider and not get so involved too quickly; I learned to step back and observe behavior more and ask more questions. I started introducing my serious dates to my closest friends sooner so they could observe and give me objective feedback. Most important, I learned never to underestimate the power of my inner voice. On several occasions it sent me a message that something wasn’t right about a person, but I ignored the warnings and drowned out the voice with my own rationalizations.

There were more lessons. I learned never to be so needy or so lonely that I would settle for crumbs and compromise my value. I recognized that I must not allow the external things I am looking for to overshadow the things that count the most—things that are matters of the heart and soul—such as integrity, honesty, character, trust, respect, commitment, and the like.

I learned these hard heart lessons after living through abusive, disruptive, and hurtful situations that could have left me bitter, unstable, addicted, in prison, in a mental institution, or dead. Nevertheless, I survived.

Wanting Better in Life

These experiences that happened right out of college and into my early adulthood were defining moments in my life. They shook my foundation and introduced me to the real world. They hijacked the dreams and imaginations I’d had as a kid and overshadowed my innocent belief that anything was possible. As I moved into my thirties I was battling the effects of my twenties. Those years had eroded my trust, diminished my self-assurance, caused me to build walls of protection around me, and led me to adopt many disempowering beliefs and insecurities about myself. But I didn’t want to become one of those people who died at age 30 and waited to get buried at age 85—just existing but not living.

I wasn’t pleased with my life or where I was headed, but I was grateful to be alive. I could have been killed on several occasions, but my life was spared. I didn’t want to take life for granted, and I knew that if God had allowed me to live and to survive the many tragedies I had already suffered, then He had a plan for my life. I just had to figure out what that was.

I had to take a journey of self-development in order to get to self-actualization. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, quick, or pain free. It was going to take time, honesty, and courage. I had a lot to unpack and a lot to bury. I wanted to dream again and not allow my past to make my dreams mere figments of my imagination. I wanted to believe they could become reality. I wanted to heal from the pain of my past and the effects of my poor choices. I needed to explore, expose, and then expel the self-imposed limits I had placed on myself. And I had to get out of my own way so I could start living the life I was destined to live.

Here begins my journey.