Shift Your Mindset | See Life Different Summit

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the See Life Different Summit. I am your host, Zakira, and we are literally seeing life through a different lens. It's a mentality shift, it's an environment shift, it's a community shift. And without those three things, we would not be alive today. We would not be able to walk into our papers, and we would not be able to sit. to enter this new season, to be the woman, woman-identified human that we are, and fully be able to be of impact. The See Life Different Summit was born by that vision, that vision of not just me having monocular vision, but also the vision of seeing beyond, seeing beyond human capacity and being able to see what humans are capable of. And I know that we're not, we're not living in our Limit. Limit. We all live within our limits. We're not living limitlessly. And so, being able to have the See Life Different Summit means that I am empowering you as a human being, as a marginalized woman, to step outside of your comfort zone. Now, that's going to be hard to do because we have environmental factors that shape that. We have generational factors that shape that. We have circumstantial factors that shape that. But in order for us to really shift our mindset, it really starts with a lens of gratitude. It really starts with a lens of positivity. It really starts with a lens of embracing other lenses. So I was a cancer survivor diagnosed at 6 months old. And by the time I was 9 months old, I had a surgical— My parents could have let that define them and their lifestyle, but instead we used that to not only just realize, okay, there's a greater purpose beyond this. Statistically, I was not supposed to live past the age of 5. And my parents could have, you know, gotten divorced like statistically a lot of parents do when you deal with a lot of medical trauma. But it's not even about my medical trauma. We all deal with trauma. And so what are you going to do about that trauma? Are you going to take it and live with it? Are you going to take it and put it aside? Are you going to take it and bring it with you like everybody's bag lady and really just understand how to safely and productively unpack it? So, Seeing Life Through a Different Lens is based off of a book. My mom and I wrote a book. I know some of you probably have mother wounds, but when you get past those mother wounds, you can really unlock a lot of things generationally. So my mother and I together wrote the book Seeing Life Through a Different Lens, which then allows you to be able to understand where you came from so that you know where you're going. And when you know where you're going, then you can step into your purpose. So I've been blessed to be a creative for over a decade now. And while being a creative, I'm able to impact other women. First, it started out as a photographer. So the irony of my cancer, retinoblastoma, a very childhood eye cancer, is that it's only detected through sunlight. The sunlight has to hit the pupil, the camera flash has to hit the pupil, and without it being seen by sunlight, Someone who was able to pick up on that intuitively and say, something's wrong here. Otherwise, most commonly, parents don't pick up on that. And as a result of not trusting their intuition, it leads to death. And so we're here to live, right? Statistically, I'm not even supposed to be looking at you right now, but I am, right? And so how we're going to spend these next few hours, essentially, is really just shifting your mindset. But first you got to be able to do that, and first you got to be willing, okay? Seeing life through a different lens means that you got to step outside of your comfort zone. You may be in the comfort of your zone right now, and you may be thinking of all kinds of what-ifs, right? What if I can't make it out of this marriage? What if I can't make it out of this situation? What if I can't make it out of this city, right? You kind of got to shift your mindset and think the other way. In order for me to be able to do that and be able to talk to you about that, trust me, I had to go through a lot, overcome a ton of things. Not just cancer, not just being hearing impaired, which you probably wouldn't even notice because I can see you and lip-read, but just being able to understand how to advocate for myself too. If you can't advocate for yourself, how are you going to be able to tell your story? How are you going to be able to be that author? How are you going to be able to be that podcaster, that business owner, whatever it is that you know that 7-year-old girl wanted to do? So make sure that you are having access to the tools to be able to do just that. And so I'm not even going to talk too much more about me because we have so many amazing speakers here today who have embodied just that, and we're going to go right into it. I'll be back here and there telling my story. I'll be back here and there reminding you that if you haven't already gotten the Seeing Life Through a Different Lens book, be sure to do that. But just understand that having been a cancer survivor and still looking at you now, Means nothing. You can feel sorry for me all you want, that's fine. But what we're going to do now is just go right into the mindset. You know, the first step before you can even take that next step to embodying your purpose is mindset. And the best person— Amazing, amazing, amazing. Self-love. Self-love. Like, without self-love, how could we wake up in the morning and want to get out of bed? Without self-love, how can we ensure that we love ourselves enough to love others, especially when the others don't love themselves? Self-love. How can we continue to bring that amount of love and give it to everyone else? You know, I think about, in reflecting on the conversation we just had, the whisper that came to my soul is how we are all born with Abundance of love. But as time goes on and as our experiences overtake us and our trauma hits us, that we lose that, right? And being able to now continuously have the tool to be able to love ourselves, continue to ask ourselves questions before people ask us questions that we don't even know the answer to, to being able to love ourselves is definitely crucial with being able to See life differently. I love it. And so I'm going to dive right into the next thing. You know, I have this unique perspective that was shared in my story where I pretty much grew up middle class. For the most part, I grew up middle class. But I grew up with a dad that was always on the road, 18-wheeler driver for 18 years of my life. And so the blessing was that I was able to see the world. Right? I was able to literally see life differently because from the age of 5 on up, I was able to see multiple states. And it wasn't until my first international trip to Costa Rica, I was super scared, right? But again, I wasn't loving myself that much yet because I was so afraid of what are people going to say about my fake eye? What are people going to say about, you know, these big old things in my ear? Which, you know, now they're smaller and not so hideous, but— You know, by the time I got out of— onto that airplane, into a different soil, into a different time zone, a travel bug unlocked, essentially what they call it. And I knew that I could do anything. You know, if me, the one who had been afraid of seeing through one eye, me, the one who had always been afraid of not being able to hear all the sounds that are going on in any place that I travel to, I knew that I could then see life differently. But of course we gotta rewind a little bit. Now that costs money. It does cost money. Now how do you get there, right? And so that's where, you know, the next speaker is really gonna kind of dive into that a little bit more, right? Because sure, you know that, okay, maybe your parent told you, maybe your parent didn't tell you that, okay, we got rent to pay and I can't give you your toy today. Or we're about to move so I can't, help you with XYZ, which other toy or vacation or whatever it is, right? So not everyone was blessed to really have those conversations. Gratefully, I had those conversations with my mom and dad. If I was like, why can't we go to the movies today? They would tell me that, right? But as you get older and you start to really kind of take with you, especially if you're entering the entrepreneurial space, you want to enter the entrepreneurial space, you want to leave that comfort zone of the 9 to 5, it tends to get scary. Right? You got to step outside your comfort zone again. So being able to unleash your inner wealth creation, it's going to take a lot, but it's not impossible. Yeah. Wealth, wealth, wealth, there's never too much, never too much. Go ahead and sing that Luther Vandross song if it came to your mind. All right. So now we're going to take a shift a little bit. We're still not going to stop talking about business, both figurative and literal. But right now, we're going to do a few more envisioning exercises. We're going to do a bit more storytelling. And in order for you to do that, we got to remember that 7-year-old. We got to go deep and remember that 7-year-old. So if you want to write it down, write it down, internalize it, internalize it, put it in your digital notes, we're going to do that. So I want you to just think back and remember before you had all the Financial responsibilities, the debts and assets and profits and losses. Before you think about all of that stuff, think about this 7-year-old. What were you doing? Where were you? How did you feel? Think about it as a day that it was after school, it was— maybe you were homeschooled, or it was a day off of school. You have no other responsibilities. Your mom, dad, guardian is not asking you to do any chores. You don't have to go do anything for any of your other siblings. What were you doing? Think about that day. Because that day, believe it or not— I'm saying the age 7, that's the age it was for me, but it could be anywhere between the age of 7 and 13— that's the day your purpose was unlocked. You may not realize it because Again, all the trauma, all the debt, all the hate that you may have generated for yourself build up. But you got to unravel and think deeper as to who was that little girl and what was she doing? What made her genuinely happy and in love with herself? I was 6 years old when my mother introduced me to a canvas. I was in kindergarten, we moved around a lot, and I just Wouldn't talk to people. I didn't want to talk to people. You know, I'm that empath, I'm the intuitive person, and so naturally I will read people before I want to speak to people. And so my teacher thought, and told my mom this, I think she's mute. Is she mute? And my mom was like, no! Because I was super chatty at home. We have come to the end, and it's not exactly the end because this is the beginning. This is a new beginning. This is a new season. This is a new month. New year, and if you follow astrology, it's also a new— what's the word? We've come out of a spiritual pandemic, literally a spiritual pandemic. So being able to see life differently now, how are you going to see life differently now, right? What were your favorite, you know, questions, reflective questions that this speaker gave to you? And literally, what are you going to do about it, right? Because it could be like, oh yeah, this is great, and then you go on the next day and then do nothing, right? That's why you had quote-unquote homework assignments for the next 24 hours from the speakers. So make sure that you are seeing life differently and doing life differently, being different. And the only way you can do that is you gotta self-reflect. You gotta go backwards in order to go forward. And so One of the easiest ways to continue to have that, you know, reminder in your background, make sure if you have not already, to tell somebody to tell somebody in regards to just educating about eye cancers, since that's one of the things we're talking about, but also make sure that you are supporting all the speakers with all of the items that they said, the limited time offers, and also make sure that you are continuing to share about Seeing life through different lenses, the book and the theme and the model, right? Even if you're like, I ain't got time to read, listen to the audiobook. Even if you're like, eh, I'm bored by the audiobook narrator, listen to the podcast. There are various versions where we dive into literally all of the topics that you just heard about today. So make sure that you are continuing to build out your purpose, build out your brand, utilize social media. Don't let fear get in the way, and don't let your own hate, self-hate, get in the way. You know, that really has been a huge factor, even beyond the fear, the hate that really stems from things that are beyond our control, things that other people have said to us, it tends to really get in the way. So make sure that you are doing that first and foremost. If you got nothing else from anything else, make sure you stop hating on you. Right? Stop hating on you. And continue to use the hashtag #SeeLifeDifferentSummit. We want to see what you came up with. We want to see how you're feeling. All right? All right.