Stacia Freeman is a ball of energy. And positivity. She’s fun and funny, warm and witty. She’s the mother of eight — yes, eight!– children. And as if that’s not enough to keep her busy, she founded a nonprofit called Epic Girl that works to empower young women to find their inner strengths. How does someone do all this? It starts with a commitment to the mission of what Epic Girl is all about. Stacia’s heart for the girls she serves overflows with passion and compassion.
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What is one of the ways Epic Girl is helping young women?
The people we perceive as the “bad guys” do a lot better job at building
Epic Girl has four levels?
Yes, first is the Identity Class. They can do that class and be done. The second is the class schedule. Completing the classes and getting that educational information under your belt. The third is graduating, and getting connected to healthy adults that can help you get to the next step and navigate life. And the fourth level is like a secret one that we only invite people into, but it has to do with using your voice to impact your community.
The whole idea behind empowerment is recognizing the things you’ve been through give you power and put you in a unique position to help other people.
Some have to go through a lot of hardships before they recognize that. I have a girl Jess who would love that I use her name, but I’m not allowed to say how old she is because she doesn’t want people to know. She was involved in exploitation, and she would do things that would scare the hell out of me. I would be like, “what do you mean you are doing this? That’s not safe.” But safety to me was very different than to her because she had pretty much been on her own since she was 12 or 13 years old. Now she’s in nursing school and using her voice. She goes around and speaks about her experiences. She “gets it.” She gets the secret stuff of Epic Girl; that’s the fourth level.
Who are some of the girls you help?
Last year, I saw 54 trafficking victims. We see them
Why is it like that?
A lot of places will only be for a short-term placement. So a girl might be in ten short-term placements before she can find one long-term placement. And that feeds the chaos in the brain, because in order to have stability where that starts to quiet, that person has to start feeling safe. And safety takes time and consistency. The secret is consistency.
Showing up, right?
Yes! I said that to someone the other day. I said, “I have discovered the secret that will make people get better, and it’s being willing to roll up your sleeves and show up, over and over and over again. Even when it’s hard. I will tell you, I have spent more time in my car crying.
What is some of the Epic Girl philosophy?
Everything about Epic Girl is about our story and our journey, how it impacts us and the world.
And getting connected to our inner hero is really about using everything, even the pains, to make ourselves better.
It’s also about serving others and helping them to find their own inner hero: paying it forward. So I think of journaling from the standpoint of past, present, and future. What is your story? Can you think of the good things that came out of the lessons that you learned? What are the hard things that you went through, but how did they make you better, focusing on the positive side of that. And present: how are you living in the positive from that? And if you’re living in negative from it, like your anger and your depression, how do you turn the things driving the negative outcomes into positive outcomes? If you could write a letter to your future self, what would that be? We are always focused on the positive.
For journaling, you say if you’re mad or upset, instead of writing that out, you remember something that’s positive and write about that?
Yes, because that gives power to the positive emotion and takes away the power from the negative emotion. We call it strength-based journaling. Always journaling from your strength zones even when you don’t feel strong. If they feel weak, we tell them to focus on something that made them feel strong. If they feel unloved, to focus on a time they felt loved. When they feel afraid, they write about a time they felt confident. Sad, think of happy. Always looking at the flip side with the positive. It’s another way of teaching people to be grateful. It’s the same idea around when you start your day, always being grateful for something. It changes your perspective.
Okay, backtracking to how you got started with Epic Girl. First, you were in the for-profit world?
Yes, for almost 10 years. It was accidentally, really. I was in medical research and development for 10 years. I’m a pediatric audiologist by training. I worked with the American Academy of Pediatrics to establish a standard of care around universal detection. My friend and mentor
Who did you work for at this time?
Natus medical. They are based out of San Francisco. I was running all of their research on newborn hearing screening and working on policy statements around early detection. I stopped to have children and found out about the issue of human trafficking. And then I thought, “how can you even know about that as a human being and not want to do something with it?”
And then you got involved with Natalie Grant, the Christian singer?
Yes, I found out Natalie Grant had a foundation, The Home Foundation, that was all about anti-trafficking. I reached out to her manager and said I would help spread the word about it. I went over to his house to get some marketing materials, and I said “you need help and I’ll help you. When my life settles down, I’ll help you.” By that time, I’d had my sixth child. Not knowing that I’m just one of those people who’s not ever meant for my life to settle down. So they called me about six months later and said they’d like you to meet Natalie. “We think you’re the right person to take the foundation to the next level.” I’ll never forget that as long as I live. I’d just dropped my child off at preschool.
I felt like the phone wires had to have gotten crossed. I literally looked up and said, “God, I left my well-paying job, and now you want me to go to work for this nonprofit and basically work for free? Okay then.”
And then you met with Natalie?
Yes, I went and met with her. I remember them saying “we want to pay you but we can’t afford to pay you much.” In my mind, I always say this, I was not being noble and saying, “no don’t pay me.” Three years before I had been involved with a company that had gone public. There was so much demand and so much of myself I had to give to that. I just knew that once you start getting paid, you become a prisoner to that. They would say, “you need to get on a plane to DC, you need to get on a plane to India.” But if I’m simply volunteering, they can’t tell me what to do. I really did it for self-serving reasons.
So you did it as a volunteer in the beginning?
I did it for the first two years as a volunteer. They didn’t pay me anything. After that, they paid me $5,000 a year, and eventually, I moved up to $15,000 a year. I was not making very much at all fo rate first five or six years. We went through a rebranding and became Abolition International in 2011. I was the CEO of that agency and was fully working and getting paid (not that nonprofit pays much). From 2006-2011 we were the Home Foundation, an agency allowing Natalie’s voice and platform to give funding to agencies in international and anti-trafficking efforts.
So we seeded a prevention program in Bangladesh, we worked with an outreach program in Mumbai, India. In 2008, I went to Moldova and Turkey. Coming out of the medical “for-profit” field and realizing the way those companies do things, they would get other small startups that are doing good work or have identified a niche product. Then they acquire, and that’s how they grow and cover more ground.
And I thought if nonprofits worked like a business, we would be able to have way more of an impact.
But nonprofits run parallel to each other, never allowing their missions to intersect, because we’re so worried that someone’s going to take our funding or our donor. I did go through that and realized it made me very toxic that way, always feeling in competition with somebody.
And these ideas impacted how you wanted to direct the Home Foundation/Abolition International?
Yes, I said to Natalie, we have to find an organization that’s bigger than us, one that’s doing work who would grasp our vision and allow us to cover more ground. Because we’d never be able to do the work that needs to be done by ourselves. We are one agency. So we were always open to that, and I met a guy named Ben. He had started out in the UK and I started talking to them about a merger. In 2012, we started talks, and in 2014, we merged with Hope for Justice. We took their name; they took our brand. I was the U.S. Director for a year, and moved into prevention and outreach and found that’s where my love was.
So then they gave you seed money to start Epic Girl?
Yes, they gave me the seed money to start. I collected all the data in 2015 and I went back and said, “I want to do this. This is what we should be doing.” And God bless them, they said, “we love that you are doing that, but it’s not our mission.” Which I think is really important, for nonprofits to stay true to their mission.
At first, did you think they would want to keep it as a splinter arm of their organization?
I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a certain amount of pride there. We were a $49,000 organization when I came on as the leader as a volunteer. Over the span of 10 years, after the merger when I left, we were close to $3 million. So there was a certain amount of pride, good and bad. Again, getting trapped in that whole idea of titles and salaries, even in nonprofit — it’s such a real thing. But also I’d been pouring myself into this and I literally had to let go of the rope. And then I spent some time finding myself again. I didn’t realize how toxic I’d become as a leader, just how unhappy I was. What I learned is I don’t tend to do very well in large organizations with all the bureaucracy and stuff.
I understand the need for that, but I’m absolutely through and through, a starter. I’m just a starter and I love that.
So I’m grateful for them for the friendship and the grace that they showed me during that time, because they could have said, “what in the world is wrong with her?” But they knew my heart.
If you’re a starter, do you see a point where you might step away from Epic Girl and start something else?
We’re starting C-4, the boys program now. but I don’t know that I will ever start something else again. My heart is really for the kids that I serve here in Nashville. I feel like it’s part of my soul, who I am, doing this. Someday I would like to teach other people how to be leaders in the nonprofit community, and what it looks like to collaborate effectively, why it’s necessary. How can we really look at a collective impact from a funding perspective, where we’re not always chasing after dollars and competing with each other? How do we stay in our lanes and do things effectively but not run sideways to each other? It’s just not productive. So I hope someday I’ll have the opportunity to empower other leaders.
I think there’s a real intersection that can happen between nonprofit and for-profit in ways that could be very meaningful to our community.
But I think we oftentimes start out too big, and then it seems overwhelming. We want to solve world hunger, but
So you started Epic Girl, and Hope for Justice had given you the seed money. How did you actually begin?
When I was with Abolition International, there was someone at another nonprofit who, at one point when she was feeling very competitive with us, would say, “Oh they’re just a conduit agency.”
What does that mean?
I took it as such a negative, but I now think it’s a beautiful thing. She was saying, “don’t give them money, give us money. We’re the ones who actually do the work; they’re just an organization that gives money to other organizations doing work.” But when I left Hope for Justice and started Epic Girl, I thought, “I’m going to be a conduit agency.” I’ll educate, and then when girls say, “I need a counselor,” I’ll say, here are 12 counselors. We’ll find resources for them.
How did the girls take to the classes?
At one of my first classes, a girl waited for me after class. We would give them a sheet of paper that would allow them to say what they needed like mentoring, counseling, information on how to stay safe, all these kind of things. So she had that paper in her hand, and she said, “Miss Stacia, I probably need all of this stuff on this list. But what I really love is what we just did today. We sat around, we ate candy and hot chips, and talked and laughed and played games, and talked about some hard stuff but it didn’t feel hard. When can we do this again?”
I walked away from that thinking these kids really want connection. And I just felt so convinced over that. I had been invited into this opportunity that I could not walk away from. And I had all these things going through my head. I’m white, 68% of the girls I serve are African-American. They’re not going to believe me. They’re not going to trust me. I live in an area that they don’t live in; what do I do with that? It felt guilty to me, sort of, like my bubble. What do I do with my bubble?
I went through all of those things in my head, but I kept knowing that what I had to do first is show up. So I just kept showing up.
Because you feel showing up is what these girls need: people who show up for them.
Yes, and I believed in real, authentic, relationships. Those are the things that have changed my life, so I thought, I can do that. Shortly after that, I had a girl that a came to my class. She was a chubby-faced girl with a piercing in her cheek, and she had checked on her form she was interested in mentoring. We decided that we were going to start the mentoring program, so I reached out to her about two months later to tell her we were starting it. A call clicked in from the other line and it was another girl calling to say “that girl that was in our class just got arrested for murder.”
Something inside me came alive in that moment. I didn’t know a lot about her story, but I knew she didn’t have people.
And I thought, she needs people. So I reached out to my friend who is the coordinator/administrator at Juvenile Court now. And she connected me to the public defender’s office. I ended up seeing that kid for a year and a half before she was sentenced and went into the adult prison system. She had been eighteen for six days when that happened, so she automatically went into the adult system. And I learned more about juvenile justice and the adult system, the way we treat kids, and the way trauma will hold them prisoner to a lot of things.
How is she doing?
She has seven or eight more years. She’s doing great because she doesn’t have a choice. When you’re in jail, you follow the rules, or you don’t follow the rules and you pay for that. She says that having somebody show up for her and write her letters really changed things for her.
Did you always plan for Epic Girl to be a six-week class?
Some of it evolved over time. We thought we would do the identity class and then mentoring. But we realized, oh, we need to spend more time with them before we connect them to a mentor. Sometimes it could be six months. Because when they get connected to a mentor, I want to know that they’ve been set up as much as they can to be successful. 50% of the time, it’s not successful for a lot of reasons. A lot of people get into it because they think, “this is the right thing to do.” In theory, it sounds amazing that I would take a girl that maybe doesn’t have the means, and she would meet me for coffee and it will be so great. She’ll love me and I’ll love her, and it’s not that simple.
It’s heart work, and heart work is the hardest work. You’ll hear me say that over and over.
I’ve had lots of good friends of mine who are great women who want to
So you had the vision of the classes. What was your plan for those?
When I left to start Epic Girl with the pilot data, I had data on about 187 girls. So I had enough information to know what I needed to do differently. Then I took a small group of three girls — I am going to say their names because they’re all 21 now: Sierra, Alexis, and Mikayla. I invited them to be part of my first mentoring group, and to actually find the core principles of what Epic Girl was, and to start talking about the curriculum and what we need to teach.
They taught me a lot of stuff about how to ask the questions, how to set realistic expectations. And the curriculum evolved. Two of them did engage in the mentoring program. All three are still connected to me. We just did a study with Meharry and the researcher said one of girls said she wished we would have more classes. I was like, really? Six weeks is not enough?
Tell me more about how you find the girls who enroll in Epic Girl.
90% of our girls come through the juvenile court, most of them are status offenders. Kids come into the court a couple of different ways, but the easiest way to remember it (Judge Calloway may say I’m getting this wrong), but the easiest way to remember it is detainable offenses, which are the delinquent charges, those are the things you can hold kids for: handgun possession, robbery, obviously murder, assault, some of those things. And then there are the things we call status offenses: running away, curfew violation, truancy issues, shoplifting, theft under $1,000. Those are the kids we think are least likely to need a more serious approach.
And there is a trend in juvenile justice in recognizing that kids getting involved in the court system increases their likelihood to be involved in court systems.
The runaways, — that’s a lot of where my girls start, with truancy, not going to school, or running away. Which is a huge indicator that may there’s other stuff going on. The court right now is talking about taking some of the low-level offenders and trying to push them out to agencies within the community, which I’m all for. But the runaways are really important. Those girls are the ones that end up either picking up charges
Do the girls come to your house?
No, we have rules around that because they’re minors. So they’re not allowed to have any involvement with my family. Once they’re eighteen, then the community can surround them. I have a girl right now, she was never part of Epic Girl, but I met her through a Youth Detention Facility that one of my girls was in. A lot of the girls in those facilities, when they see that I’m working with girls and I’m consistent, and I come and bring them food, and they say, “that’s my white mama.” Then when they leave, they’ll give me their number and say, “I know I’m not in Epic Girl, but I’m about to leave and I know I’ll need support. Can I stay connected to you?”
We’ll point to those relationships that really made us.
So what about for you? Who are those people for you?
I’d say my grandmother. I spent a lot of time with her growing up. She planted seeds that taught me all people are worthy of respect regardless of the color of their skin. She was my dad’s mom, and they were sharecroppers on a farm. I don’t think they had indoor plumbing until the 1970’s. A lot of my grandmother’s friends working in the cotton fields were strong black women, and she would tell me stories about Clemmie and all these women she loved. She would say, “when you meet people, look in their eyes. Because it’s not about the color of their skin. It’s about their soul. Always see their soul by looking in their eyes.” I just remember that lesson early on.
Also, my young life leader, Dean Crowe. She leads an organization now called the Rally Foundation which looks for cancer cures for children through research. But when I was sixteen, I had just moved to Columbus, Georgia, and she was 24 and newly married. Her husband traveled for work Tuesday through Friday, so I would go to her house and spend Tuesday night through Friday. And I told Dean things I would never tell other people.
That sounds like a genesis of Epic Girl. As a teenager, you had an older woman who wasn’t related to you who became a safe place and a sounding board.
And I always looked for the safe people in my life. I’ve always done that and I still do that today I had a meeting at Johnson Alternative School, and we’re going to start doing our boys program, “C-4,” there. Their principal, Mr. Franklin, is one of my people. I met him once and spent an hour with him and said, “he’s one of my people.” There’s a certain type of feeling you get from someone who “gets it,” and he gets it.
Joel, who’s running the C-4 program, was working at DCS when I met him. And I immediately knew, he’s one of my people. You get good at it after a while. And that’s what I love about the girls — they’re my people. Mark, my husband, is also my people, thank God. I watch that show on Netflix sometimes, Girls Incarcerated, and Mark is like, “why do you want to watch this?” And I say, these are my people. I mean, I really feel this commonality with the girls who I serve.
When they say, “you’ve changed my life,” I say, “you’ve changed mine.”
And the whole reason I am pouring into you is that you’re made for great things. You’re supposed to do something amazing. And the reason I’m so excited to be able to provide programming at Johnson Alternative is that a lot of people are writing those kids off as a lost cause. The school-to-prison pipeline is real. I want them to know kids like Cyntoia Brown are the world-changers. The people who go through great adversity and then use that for power and find purpose in their pain and can inspire someone else. Those are the real world-changers. That’s your super-strength, your superpowe
Tell me more about your background?
I went to Valdosta State University. Then I went and did my masters at UT and that’s where I met my husband Mark who was in law school. We got married when he finished law school, and we lived in Memphis for six years. Our first two children were born in Memphis. And that’s when I started working for the medical company based out of California. And then we came to Nashville in 1997, right before our third child was born, and we’ve been here ever since. I’ve been in Nashville longer than I ever lived anywhere. My family moved around a lot when I was growing up, and I always thought that in and of itself was a weakness.
I always had to size people up and figure out where I fit. And I never really felt like I fit anywhere.
In Arkansas, when I was in elementary school, a lot of those kids’ moms stayed at home and my mom worked. My mom was 19 when I was born. She was much younger than a lot of my friends’ parents, so she didn’t want to be friends with them. And I just felt like an outcast a lot when I was little. And then I moved to Jackson, and I remember sitting trying to figure out where I fit. I moved to Georgia when I was in 10th grade and remember the same thing, wondering where to sit in the lunchroom and worried I was going to sit by myself.
Worried I didn’t have the right clothes on. That valley prepared me for a lot of the peaks. Being the new kid prepared me for a lot that I’ve done in life. I never meet a stranger, I don’t really care about what other people think, because somebody’s gotta be different! Somebody’s got to be outside the box. It taught me a lot about being open to the journey. The pain of loneliness prepared me for a lot. I’ve learned and I’m still learning to be alone with myself. I don’t really like to be alone.
Do you ever have time to be alone? When I’ve interviewed women in the past, I tend to steer clear of the question of handling work and children, because I don’t think we would ask a man that question. But I have to ask
I think it’s
I thought living with all those kids was just paying my way through grad school, but I learned it was God’s way of preparing me for life.
And for Epic Girl.
For everything! Which just shows everything we go through is to prepare us for the next thing that comes. So I remind myself constantly which I learned from my friend James Pond. He told me we always have to remember, we’re not raising children, we’re raising healthy adults. I remind myself of that. I want my children to see me serving.
Our generation doesn’t feel that way, do we?
We want to hover over them, nurture them. And my friend Diane, who was our pediatrician for years. She would say, “Stacia, are we preparing our child for the path, or preparing the path for our child?” Are we moving obstacles out of their way?
Because we have to recognize that building resilience happens by allowing our children to struggle or suffer and make mistakes, within reason.
I think we live in this generation now where we don’t want them to suffer. I don’t think having eight children is difficult because I invited them into this process with me. We talk a lot about the girls we serve. I have another “daughter” who I feel like I gave birth to. I got her through Epic Girl, and she just turned 19.
Does she live with you?
No, I would let her, but she doesn’t like my dog. And I’m like, “I love you and everything, but I’m not getting rid of my dog.” When she was in a Youth Detention Facility, we were writing goals preparing for her to get out. Because I don’t want her to go back to some of the things she was doing before and end up in the system. I said, “let’s write some personal goals.” And she said, “like graduate from high school, have a family, buy a house, get a car?”
I said those are good things but you don’t want to set a goal that’s so far off that it feels unachievable. Then you feel discouraged by that. What’s a personal goal, like have you ever traveled anywhere? She said Chattanooga. I asked where would she go if she could, and she said New York or California. I said, okay, accomplish your goals, get out, get enrolled in school, and I’ll take you to New York or California. So she went with me and my three daughters to New York. Now all the girls say, “I want to go to New York!”
When you started Epic Girl, how many people were on your staff? Did you start out with your office at the Oasis Center?
Yes, I got that office through Oasis Center. When I found out about the Youth Opportunity Center there and that collaboration, I wanted to be a part of that. Before I left Hope for Justice, we rented space there. Then when I left, I kept it. I have one tiny little office, and for a
How many other schools are you in besides Hillsboro? Otherwise, do girls take classes at your office after school?
We see 80 girls a year through Hillsboro and Maplewood, and about 150 girls a year through the court system. The girls we get through court come to an identity class at court. Then they have a choice if they want to engage in what we call the Empowerment Curriculum, which are six additional classes. Those classes are taught at the Youth Opportunity Center which is where Oasis is, Girls and Boys Club, Big Brothers/Big Sisters…
Yes, Epic Girl is a six-series program. The first class is identity, and there are six additional classes. Some girls only come to the identity class and say, “I don’t want to do this.” Then there are girls who will say they don’t want to do it, but when they get in trouble again, they reach out and decide to do it. I had a girl on Saturday text me and say, “
But she said, “I need to come back.”
She’s 18, but I said
Where are the different places girls participate?
Our three programs are the court program, the school program, and the detention program. They’re all the same curriculum but in three different avenues.
I’m confused about the difference
The court program is kids that are mostly status offenders, so they’re going to get sent as an “outpatient” to take our class. But the detention program
What’s the difference in a Juvenile Detention Center and a Youth Detention Center?
A Juvenile Detention Center is like
So 80 girls a year through Hillsboro and Maplewood…
The schools started reaching out looking for programming for their PLT (advisory period). There’s no money for it, nobody pays you to do it. You’re just fundraising for it.
So the girls that come to your classes at Hillsboro and Maplewood have not necessarily been through the court system?
Many of them have. Maybe running away, or a curfew violation. Mostly what we ask for at those schools are we want the girls who are least likely to graduate, most likely to end up in trouble, usually the ones who are fighting and getting into trouble for fighting, I start every semester with about 10-12 girls. They all want to come see me because we bring food.
By the end of the semester, I’ve usually lost 4-5 of them to alternative school, because they’ve gotten in a fight or something’s happened and they send them on.
And then how many total a year do you see?
About 250-300, depending.
But for many of them, once they’ve completed the program, they’re still involved.
Yes, but you have to realize, if I see 250 girls a year, 180 of those may be girls I’ve just planted seeds with. We’ve educated them, we’ve tried to say “this program exists if you ever need us.” They may not go through the whole program. Some may only take that Identity Class and we may never see them again. Or they may go through half of the Empowerment Classes. Some of them may complete the whole Empowerment Class and not want to get a mentor. We try to give them as much choice as we can. The girl I’m telling you about who’s like my daughter, I’m on her case all the time about “be your best self. Be your best self.”
Until she decides she wants to be her best self, she’s not going to be her best self.
It’s just like my biological children: we can tell them “that friend is not good for you; I don’t have a good feeling about that friend.” But until they decide? In a sense, we have to be a soft place to land. So we have contacted 250-300 girls a year. Will they all complete the program and get mentors? No, I wish. But I’ve had to get comfortable with being a seed-planter.
For some of them, you actually get to see the fruit grow. You consider yourself a person of faith. Is that hard for you to separate that from Epic Girl?
I purposely founded Epic Girl
You think of the story of the loaves and the fish. He did that because he had something to say and he knew that they would not be able to listen if they were hungry. So he understood and really mirrored the whole idea of meeting people where they were. I felt more attuned and more connected to my faith. I think relationships are driven by my faith because I think every person has value. At the core of who we are, we want to connect and belong to something that matters. And that is the basic principle of what my Christian faith says.
By not being a religious organization, it opens you up to being able to work better with the State, I’m sure, and the court system and all of that? And I guess all the girls and all their backgrounds? Was it a conscious decision? Natalie’s foundation was a Christian organization, so you left a religious one and founded a non-religious one?
Yes, for a lot of reasons I made that choice. One is, I was very frustrated with organized religion. I was in the same church for 17 years and then we left it 5 years ago. Sometimes we forget that the people that make up the church are just human beings, and we’re all broken, and people make mistakes.
And I try to tell my own children, all of them, you know that, no matter how much I love you, I will hurt you, because I’m human.
There will be things I will do that will not make you happy because I’m a person. So don’t put your hope in people. Put your hope in something bigger than yourself, whatever that is for you. So it hasn’t been hard at all for me not to talk about my faith because I want girls to come to their own conclusions. I want their faith to be their own. Because here’s the deal: the girls that I love and I’ve worked with have been forced to say and do a lot of things they didn’t have a voice around, and one of the things I try to teach them is how to use their voice.
So who am I to say, I will love you, I will do for you, I will give to you, but you have to follow this same God that I do? I have been stretched in every way imaginable around my faith. Everything that I had questions or conflict around from the way I was brought up, I’ve been challenged in that area. And I always just take it back and say “Okay what do I do with this?”
And I’ve never gotten a different answer than to just show up and love them.
Did you say that God put it on your heart to start this
Absolutely. I have a great friend who was a donor (she could fund the whole agency if she wants to, and I wish she would)!. She called me and she said, “you know, I really want to invest in your leadership because I feel like you are set aside from something really great in terms of leading.” And I thought, really? I don’t have a Ph.D., you know, you go to that negative narrative in your head of why you couldn’t do it, instead of starting to believe the things that say you can. But I’m so grateful that she said that to me, and she said: “I want to send you to Christian leadership.” It’s a program in Chicago and you have to commit to 2 1/2 years.
I was accepted, and I finish in January. This amazing man who’s one of the leaders, came to me and said: are you a 7 on the Enneagram? I said, “Yes, how did you know?” He said, “because I’m a 7 on the Enneagram and all those books are stressing you out, right? You’re just seeing the big picture.” I told him yes. He said to just get out of it what you need to get out of it, which might be teaching yourself to be still. He said just learn to be still. I’ve learned a lot about myself in learning to be still.
You can’t ever be still! You’re so busy!
I know but
So that gives you the centering, so then you know you can go forward and engage with the people you need to engage with and meet the needs of all these other people?
Yes, and it reminds me of what’s important. And the responsibility of it. And that people aren’t always going to get it. People say, “oh Stacia, you need to mind your boundaries; these girls take advantage of you, they always want you to buy them food, they’re manipulating you.” And I go “manipulation is their first love language. I’m cool with it.” But also, the girls I love, unfortunately, don’t schedule their crises from 8am-5pm. And I’m not going to be like that, but I also realize that being responsible for myself, I have to take those breaths, so going for a long run, going away to Chicago for a weekend for a retreat. Those things refuel me.
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Next time I am feeling lazy, I am going to think of Stacia and her eight children, and the energy she gives to the nonprofit she started and all the young women she serves with Epic Girl. Stacia had read my post on journaling and asked me to come and talk to the girls at one of her classes about strength-based journaling. It was a delight.
For more information on Epic Girl, including how to join their mentoring program, click here: www.epicgirl.net
To read my post on journaling, click here: 3 Ways Journal Writing Can Improve Your Life
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