BECOMING You.

If you didn’t get the opportunity to go to the IMPACT23 event, I want to just say, it was the most INCREDIBLE, life changing, perspective bringing, “Shake you alive” kind of event I’ve ever been to in my life. I wanted to share some of my thoughts, feelings, and take aways to anyone interested. Now, if you know me you know I am long winded, but trust me, I kept this SHORT compared to all of the gold that was handed to us on a platter in this event by all of these incredible speakers, and yet it’s still long. It’s definitely worth a read, and I hope you set aside the time! Like I do, I tied myself into it because it wouldn’t mean anything if it didn’t personally have an impact! If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that Information/Inspiration that’s gone into a brain and doesn’t come back out is useless… It would be a shame to walk out of that event, overloaded with inspiration, thoughts, ideas, and wisdom, and let it stop there.

To start, I want to thank Gavin Ekstrom for his energy, his dedication, investment, his obvious efforts towards putting this event together, as well as his heart behind it all and for choosing to allow his blessings in life to spill into SO many people. Not to mention the ‘Unseen’ stuff that people forget about, that doesn’t necessarily show in the forefront, like the lifetime of action, decisions, and choices that he has made in his life that have led up to attracting the people he is connected to and having the ability to get 5 INCREDIBLE, POWERHOUSE speakers into one event… I’m talking Damon West, Rene Rodriguez, Amanda Wolfe, Ben Newman, and ED MYLETT! (If you don’t recognize the names, that’s your first step towards ‘Becoming a Better You’, is familiarizing yourself with those names.) Connections like those don’t come easy, and having those speakers all brought into one room very clearly shows Gavin’s character without Any words spoken or accolades given. Not to mention his relationship with the BEST of all, my incredible husband Garrett Townsend! Gavin, thank you so much for who you’ve been and who you are, to be able to pull this all together. A life dedicated to growing other people isn’t an easy one, but I hope you are reaping the rewards in how many people left that room completely impacted by this event. I also want to thank the amazing staff that was leading, guiding, and smiling through the entire day… It didn’t go unnoticed! It was well organized, nicely put together, energetic, good music, great food, and tons of ‘tall walking’ people dressed to the 9s! They say, don’t put yourself into rooms where you are the smartest, the wealthiest, or the best dressed… Well, I can confidently say, I was in the right room of people!

Alright, lets get into it!

Other than my amazing, self-development junkie husband who told me about this event and wanted me to go, my reasoning to make the time was that I have always had this immense connection to my calling and my purpose in this short life. I believe we all have it, and life’s events and situations either amplify that connection or dissolve it. I personally have always felt this sense of “There’s more in me”. I have always felt like no matter what I was doing or what stage of life I was in, I wasn’t there yet… Like there was a “THERE” to get to… Almost like I was waiting for it to fall in my lap, or that through my efforts, it would eventually meet me where I was at. I have struggled with “unhappiness” throughout many stages in life, thinking it was situational, or possibly even depression, thinking “maybe I should not be so future driven, and focus more on being happy and content in the ‘now’…. But wait… God was the one that put this drive in me, so why would He do that if he didn’t intend on me using it to its fullest potential. Why would God build this engine in me if I wasn’t meant to go hard and go fast?” I went through constant back and forth with myself on all of this for many years, considering it was just the stage of life I was in, until I met Garrett. Meeting the man (I had no idea at the time) God created to be My Husband, created this catalyst of realizations in the fact that my happiness, or lack thereof, had nothing to do with my situation, but rather my lack of action in the right direction. When you’re created to do something, and you’re not living directly IN ‘That Something’, this level of discontentment comes into play because you’re a tool being used inadequately or improperly. Instead of waking up every day trying to be Her, the woman I always dreamt of being, I would wake up every day and just “do me”, do whatever I felt like that morning, no consistency, no focus… I never took a step back to look at the woman God made me to be, and reverse engineered that woman in order to create a “Standard” that would lead to becoming that woman.

BEN NEWMAN (author of ‘The Standard’ and Incredible coach) made me realize, that burning feeling of not being “there” yet was just me “connecting to my burn”… Ben described your “burn” and the thing inside of you that drives you. Your WHY, essentially. The problem has been, I have failed to Intentionally connect with it. I have failed to CHOOSE to connect to it. I never created ‘A standard’, a routine, a DAILY (emphasis on daily) process to connect with that “Burn” inside of me. I have allowed my feelings (who God says are not to be trusted) to change how I show up. Feelings of imposter syndrome, feelings of unworthiness, feelings of “I’m too young for that”, feelings of “I’ll get to it tomorrow” to change how I show up every day. Problem is, it doesn’t stop there… Those deceiving, fleeting feelings of inability, unpreparedness, and unworthiness spilled into how I showed up in my relationship, how I showed up as a parent, how I showed up as a boss and a business owner, and a professional in my industry. Ben taught me that I was a “Trust the process” kind of person and he just about Screamed that terrible notion out of me from about 60 feet away. He couldn’t have been clearer that THAT notion is the killer of success. Don’t just TRUST the process, rather show up every single day and Attack the process! There has always been this void, that seemed like it was waiting for me to harness the woman God made me to be, to even start filling that void, and to even start feeling the level of completion and utility that I have always wanted to feel… It’s always been there, but I didn’t know how to get there, until this event.

A few Amazing take aways –

• Understand your burn, and connect to your burn every single day.
• Don’t just “trust the process”. Show up every day and ATTACK the process!
• Don’t let your feelings change how you show up.
• Change your environment, connect with your burn, and your behaviors will follow.
• Don’t HOPE it happens. It won’t. It doesn’t take hope, it takes action.
• If you have a problem in your life, and you fail to plan and then perform that plan, you will go right back to the problem, and then it’s just a little bigger.
• DESIGN YOUR DAYS, and make it your Standard.

DAMON WEST (author of ‘The Coffee Bean’ and Powerful speaker) taught me that, there is no “THERE”. There is no Destination to get to, or a Day you wake up and can say “Well I made it”. Every day is THERE, because There is where you Are. Your future is not something you arrive to… It’s an accumulation of your everyday decisions. Therefore, not a mystery… It’s a sum of your choices. He taught me that, every day you wake up and make decisions, you are either walking towards the person God created you to be and your purpose in this life, or walking towards a life of mediocrity and excuses on why you didn’t “Step Into Yourself”. Damon’s story is TRULY like NONE OTHER. Take my word for it, he is a speaker worth pursuing, and his book, worth reading. I’ll spoil some of his story for you… He was sentenced to LIFE in prison for crimes that no one got hurt, but contained drugs and robbery, and undoubtedly didn’t total to a sentence like that one, and yet, through his first many years of being locked up, he made decisions that made a difference in that place… A prison full of what I think he called “lifers” (meaning in there for the rest of their lives)… A place of no hope and complete despair, violence, absent of God. If being in actual prison isn’t the greatest excuse to give up, of all time, then I don’t know what is! But of course, he didn’t. He said the greatest thing I have ever heard in my life which was “Life doesn’t happen TO you, it happens FOR you” (Garrett shared that with me years ago when he learned it, and it was as powerful now as it was then.) God had a calling for him IN the moments and situations he was in, even from a life created by the sum of his own actions. This proved to me that there is NO ‘THERE’… It’s NOW, in your current situation, that you show up. Don’t wait for THERE to come, because it won’t come. God is present in our lives no matter what, even through our humanness, and our sins don’t surprise Him… He has a plan, despite. Walking out the purpose for your life isn’t void of human error, and situations that we don’t expect to happen, and it doesn’t just happen… It takes DECISIONS. Most importantly, the decision to be a “coffee bean” and allow who you are to turn your environment into “goodness”. If put into a pot of boiling water (Life), carrots get soft, eggs get hard, but coffee beans have the power inside of themselves to change their environment/atmosphere. Incredible message!!

Here is a few more take away’s that I ate up –

• Addicts give up their Goals to meet their Behaviors… Successful people give up their Behaviors to meet their Goals. (This one was very powerful for me, because we are all addicts of something, even if it’s as simple as scrolling through social media First thing in our day. A lot of what we choose to give our attention to sucks life out of us.)
• Be USEFUL, over anything else.
• Your identity cannot come from ANYTHING external, but rather what’s inside of you. (Sounds simple, but we are a world revolved around the popularity in people with misplaced identity. The more misplaced it is, typically the more “popular” they are, minus some great cases.)
• Nobody cares if you “win” or “lose”… people just care that you showed up to the fight, and got back up after you were knocked down.
• Anyone can be a messenger in your life – Don’t discriminate and fail to be receptive of who God may place in your life (Why do you think we are so divided right now? Prejudice creates division. Division creates close mindedness. Close mindedness creates hate and lack of understanding… Which is exactly opposite of what God calls us to be, and keeps people isolated from Him.)
• Your past doesn’t define you. Your past is a lesson, the present is a gift, and the future is motivation!

RENE RODRIGUEZ (Author of Amplify your Influence, and wonderful keynote speaker) taught me how to be more influential, how people’s mind work and how to capture people’s attention. This was a very cool presentation because he truly opened my mind to the changes I can make to be more captivating. If you don’t know this already, I am a 29-year-old business owner, owner of R. Grace Interiors which is a remodel and design business that has grown exponentially over the last 5 years… I have been chosen to design for clients who interviewed several people twice my age with 3 times the experience… But none of them want it more than I do, or will work harder than me, or be as invested as I will, and I know the clients can see that in me… Nowadays, I have the confidence to do what I do, and walk into jobs I never dreamt of having because of the confidence I’ve gained through years and years of proving people wrong. When I came into this, I “felt” young, I “felt” like somewhat of an “imposter” walking into my first clients’ homes, telling them what to do, like I had been doing this for years, and I “felt” undeserving. Truth is, I AM talented, and this IS what God created me to do, but I allowed my feelings of unworthiness to control my body language, my eye contact, and my overall confidence and ability to own the room. Rene really impressed on me that I am whoever I want to be and I can harness the attention of the people in the room even more with some intentionality around it. He talked about the simple fact that a piece of chicken without a story may be priced for 50 cents on the KFC menu, whereas a piece of chicken with a story, people will easily pay $50-$100 for on a menu. He made me feel like all the things I’ve been through just give my story and everything I’ve been through validation and ability to help reach and influence more people. This experience with Rene was intriguing and would highly recommend you seeing him speak. He can capture a room!

Here are a few take aways that I loved –

• Happiness is fleeting. Don’t allow that to be your goal… allow your goal to be UTILITY.
• When the floods of life come, I want to be the one that built the Arc, not the one who needs a ride. (LOVE THIS, don’t allow taking action to be an afterthought, when you’re already in the thick of it.)
• The best things in life are built on the back end of suffering (This hit me hard because of my past, and the level of trials and tribulation I have been through personally. Romans 8:28)

AMANDA WOLFE (Amazing speaker and Influencer, known as The She WOLFE of Wall Street) is a complete BAD ASS, as well as a financial expert that teaches “financial literacy” which I have never considered before… and let me just say, for the first time, I experienced complete and utter intrigue in a finance speaker, because she came at the crowd first with her story. Her story of growing up with nothing, and how she allowed her situation (past) to fuel her decisions, that made her who she is now. I have always struggled with finances, not in the sense that I just spend money right and left, but more so, that I have never cared to be personally invested in Knowing my money, having a budget, and being my own “CFO”. I am also a “creative, right-brained” human, which makes numbers “not fun”… She laid it on that regardless of how you “feel”, you MUST know your money to be successful. She also gave me a hard hitter on the fact that I live in a “Scarcity mindset”, because of growing up the way I did, which she explained that you develop your thoughts and perspective on money around the age of 7. Growing up, we always had money, rich or poor, we always had shelter, food, school, clothes, etc. As kids, even after my parent’s divorce and then through the rockiest of times, we never struggled so bad (to what we could see) that I changed my perspective on money, and savings… And now as an adult, I have lived with that thought, that I will always have money, and that it will always just be there. Good months and bad, I have ALWAYS survived and figured it out. I think the greatest thing Amanda taught me was this thinking process, and waking me up to my perspective on money. I truly don’t want to just survive, I want to be able to follow my heart and give generously, I want to be able to help people, do things for my children, and experience life with my husband, family, and friends… To have all of that to its fullest, I now know after hearing her speak that I need to have an understanding of my money to the fullest of my ability… as well as to stop “over-delegating” the money items in my business, to be invested in the time it takes to know my money… Because no one cares about your money the way that you do.

Here are a few awesome take aways –

• You can’t move forward with intentionality around your money unless you forgive yourself for the past sum of poor money decisions.
• Don’t have a negative connotation around the idea of wanting money. Money is a tool we use to build our dream lives. It’s okay to want to have money and be financially set.
• Time is your GREATEST asset. Delegate, but DON’T OVER-Delegate… because no one cares about your money more than you do.
• You don’t have a money problem… you have a money-management problem.
• Don’t spend all your time making money and no time learning how to manage it, or you’ll work the rest of your life to make money and have nothing to show for it in the end.

ED MYLETT (There is perhaps some debate on this, but I’m telling you… Number 1 speaker in the world, and need I say more, but the King of Achievement, Growth, and Self Development/Betterment)

Before I get into Ed’s teachings, I want to start by saying that personally, Garrett and I have been going through a very financially “trying” (to put it lightly) season over the last year and a half. Garrett is in Mortgage and truly the BEST out there, and as we all know, for mortgage professionals, the market hasn’t been in an ideal place. Though my work has been incredible, I am not able to support our lives by myself at this time, and this mixture of things has caused us to have to cut in ways that have been Extremely hard and uncomfortable for us. To keep from sharing all the details, it’s been a season full of unexpected “lows”, things we couldn’t afford to do, the sale of our Arizona home and many possessions, cutting off services that we didn’t need, a lot of tears, a lot of arguing, and a lot of RAW, REAL, HARD truth… Not to mention a lot of very personal developments that we felt God called us to do, but were extremely difficult and confusing…

Can I just say, this “low” is the BEST thing that ever happened to us.

Though I knew God was bringing us through this season for a purpose, there were many moments where I just couldn’t understand why God brought it on so heavy or helped us build so much just to take half of it away. We had been hit so hard that the struggle went from being money related to all-encompassing in every realm of life. Brutalizing both of our attitudes, our confidence, and our joy, which really impacted the way we “showed up” in the day to day…. Though I KNEW God was in it, and like the Buffalo does, Garrett and I were charging the storm and doing everything we could to be strong have faith that there were clear skies on the other end, going to this event still hit me so hard.

I showed up last Friday in that room desperate, and I didn’t even know it. When Ed got off the stage and walked towards my row, he looked me in the face, as I videoed him 10 feet from me, and started speaking about our ‘RESPONSE ABILITY’ to the events and situations in life. Something I’ve never thought of or considered. “Have you developed an ability to respond?” He even said, “When the market changes, do you have an ability to not react, but to respond?” Then spoke about the fact that he is in one of his hardest seasons, but that he is in complete PEACE, and that his “response” when adversity happens isn’t, “Lord please make it better!”, it’s, “Lord please make ME better. What are you trying to teach me?” This moment with Ed meant EVERYTHING to me because of where we are at in our lives. “If you can survive the temporary, you will get to meet a better version of you on the other side of it”… and I CANNOT express how true that is. Garrett woke up one day in the middle of this horrendous “Low” we are in and said “I don’t want to be a ‘one trick pony’ anymore. I was created for more. I want to get to my final days at the end of my life KNOWING I left it all out on the table, and that I don’t have anything left in my tank.” I won’t go into the specific details of what choices he made following that, or what he did, but I watched my fiancée, at that time, go to the depths with himself. He didn’t have to think about it too much, make detailed plans or to-do lists, he just got up and hit the gas. He started doing more motivational videos than I’ve ever seen him do, he met up and did lunches and coffee with more people than he ever has, he started spreading joy and positivity more than I have ever witnessed him do, became a business partner in a couple different businesses, helped me do more with my business, and became Useful in every sense of the word, in many many areas. What I love about this season, is God knew we were “comfy”… I’m talking curled on the couch, fuzzy sock, with the fire on, cush and comfy… Sometimes in order to really live out the calling God has for us, He has to do something that shakes us and gets us COMPLETELY uncomfortable, so we get up and start moving, searching, wanting, finding, praying, and doing whatever it takes. God can’t steer a parked car. We are still facing this storm today, but TODAY, I woke up with a “Bring it” mentality, just like Ed said, and asked God to help make me better through it… Not change it, not make it go away, but to bring on the adversity, bring on the storms, bring on the difficulty, bring on the uncomfortable, and then, “Help make me Better through it”. I think the most powerful thing Ed said, in my opinion, was “Can you imagine going to Heaven, and God introduces you to the Woman (or man) you COULD HAVE BEEN if you kept doing “one more”, if you kept waking up every day and pushing yourself, and choosing greatness… and that person doesn’t recognize you?…..

Back story, I did 75 hard last year (and failed on day 37) and as much as I was convinced it didn’t do much for me, it did, my perspective was just wrong on the whole thing. However, the greatest thing I did during that time was that I Finally started a blog. If you know me, you know I want to be an author, and I have many writings that I have posted places and gotten really wonderful feedback on… I finally started my blog and put my favorite writings on there, and I was stewing and stewing on what to call it… I felt like one night, God woke me up in the middle of the night and told me the title would be “Becoming You.” I wrote it down and thought, “What does that even mean? I AM me. How can I Become me?” But that’s what I called it, and I went back to sleep. It wasn’t until later on while I was knee deep in my bible, in the story of Esther actually (the irony), where I felt God impress on my heart that ‘I was becoming Me’…. The ME that He created me to be, not the Me that I have been trying to be. As if “Becoming You”, is stepping into that woman or man God created you to be… I believe Ed’s thought in meeting yourself in the afterlife really put foundation and weight in this belief for me. That my Goal in my life is to help people ‘Become Them’ and reach their maxed out potential, find their passion and go for it, and it truly helped give meaning to that title “Becoming You”… Which will be the title of my first book.

Ed truly made and impact on everyone that day, and I could go ON and ON about the things Ed said that were absolutely life altering but I’ll make a list of my favorite take aways along with my thoughts –

• If you were once _______, and now you’re not, you can help people. (Think about that. Your past can fuel your purpose.)
• Things with our kids are CAUGHT not TAUGHT. (Focus more on ‘who you are’ and ‘what you do”, because that is what sticks, rather than ‘what you say’.)
• You’re neglecting your kids if you are not in pursuit of your dreams, and becoming all that you are created to be (This one hit home, because kids either learn with you, or against you, depending on the message you give in your actions. They will either want to be like you, or nothing like you.)
• When you stack up “ONE MORE’s”, it will change your life. (You don’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to always be motivated, you don’t even have to feel like it, just at least do ONE MORE. “Compound Pounding” – Incredible message!)
• You’re not that far away from that “life” that you want. That person that you want to be. Change your belief system and patterns around your depth perception. (This quote impacted me deeply, because I always see the woman I am GOING to be as this far away vision, but its not. It will only be far away if I HOLD HER THERE, in the ‘far away’. I’ll never become her if I see her as this destination to arrive to “one day”.)
• COMPETE! Want it! Become obsessed with it! Keep score!
• God doesn’t make defective products (Read that again. Get out of your head.)

I wish I could share everything, but these were the hardest hitters along with the personal impact this event has had on me this year… an impact that is rightfully titled “IMPACT23”. Notice how I used a lot of past tense, “I was”, “I used to”, “I did”… well that Is because this event sparked the burn in me like I’ve never experienced before, and as dramatic as this sounds, the woman that walked into that room, didn’t come out. When God gives you a message like that, and that many things imprint on your heart, it’s Him saying “You’re not here today by accident”.

So Gavin, even though he KNOWS he hit it out of the park with this event, took the time to text Garrett and tell him it was lovely meeting me, and to ask me what could they have done better at the event… In Gavin fashion, even knowing it was a complete WIN, is still looking to get better, be better, and help people in a greater capacity and magnitude… So my answer to you Gavin is, “Keep showing up. Keep opening doors. Keep bringing people to the table. Keep God at the center and, boy, you talk about impact… There will be no stopping the ripple effect of impact this event has on the world as it grows”. I am SO beyond thankful to have been a part of the very first one. THANK YOU for the opportunity. I am ALL in, and I will fight for a spot at this table if I have to 😉