Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Unboxed, Unburdened, Unstoppable.
Speaker: I'm Michelle Madrid, and in each episode, I'll be sitting down with guests who have dared to unlock their hidden truths, unburden themselves from life's toughest challenges, and step into their power as the hero of their own stories.
Speaker: I hope these conversations will inspire you unbox your own journey, find your strength, and embrace the unstoppable within. Let's dive in.
Speaker: Kendra Erica Levitt is a beautiful soul who I've been connected with for a few years now. She lives in Southern Utah with her husband, two beautiful children, and two amazing cats.
Speaker: And you know what? She shares beautiful imagery of life on her Instagram at Kendra underscore Erica. I always love checking in on her life and the beautiful things she creates.
Speaker: Kendra teaches and plays harp. I just saw the other day on Insta, she also plays piano. She loves audio books, travel, Indian food, and all things raspberry and chocolate. And that's making me hungry right now.
Speaker: And I also should say something I want to delve into just a little bit. Kendra departed from the LDS religion of which she was raised, and she's been on a deep journey of unboxing, healing, and becoming her most authentic self. And don't we all want that as women?
Speaker: And I know we're going to explore more of that within this conversation, because I know without a doubt, Kendra has a whole lot of heartfelt wisdom to share. So hi, Kendra. Welcome in.
Speaker: Hello, Michelle. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. i I'm so excited to have this chance and opportunity to connect with you on this level because we have been connected through social media and that space for quite some time. I feel like I know you. And again, I just want to thank you for the beautiful imagery you do create and share with your followers. It's inspirational. And it's always that moment for me where I pause and just take in the sweetness of life and of parenting. And I think you exude that. So thank you. Well, you're welcome. Thank you for appreciating it
Speaker: Oh, absolutely. I thought we'd start like I always do at the beginning. And maybe you sharing with me and our listeners some of your earliest memories of childhood. What do you remember about little Kendra?
Speaker: What did she love doing and how did she spend her time? Like one of my very first things I remember loving to do was play Barbies. And my mom had bought me a dollhouse and I collected all these Barbies I had a cousin who she collected Barbies and she would put them in like a China closet.
Speaker: Some people call them different things, but like those kind of glass things that have doors and you can close them up and keep everything safe. But so I got that love of Barbies from my cousin, I would actually play with them because I was young enough.
Speaker: And whenever my mom would want to play, she'd want to change their clothes. And that's not how I wanted to play. wanted to play like, They were interacting, right, and having those kinds of real-life experiences, like creating a little movie with my dolls, I guess you could say.
Speaker: i grew to really love reading around the age of eight. My third-grade teacher, she started reading to us the Harry Potter series, and i didn't really like reading until those books. and she had read like the first two, and then but the third came out, and I just...
Speaker: went ahead and read it without waiting for her to read the series with us. a attribute my love to reading to Harry Potter and I would read a lot. and I would read one of my favorite books was Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, ah Beauty by Robin McKinley. It's a Beauty in the Beast story.
Speaker: So if you can't tell, I loved fairy tale stories I grew up on Disney, loved watching all the Disney movies, all the Disney princesses. When I was in kindergarten, I wanted to be, i drew a picture. We were asked to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up.
Speaker: And i drew a princess. That's what I wanted to be when I grew up. So... What do you think that imagery or that fantasy of being a princess, why did that resonate with you? Do you think so deeply as a child?
Speaker: I think it just had this thought of ah happily ever after in the LDS church, everything that you do is for the afterlife. You're living for the afterlife a lot of the time.
Speaker: and So there was always this idea of I wanted to have that happily ever after, i think. And for good or for bad, because there's always like that beauty of wanting to romanticize. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think there just needs to be a healthy dose of realism and also living to be present.
Speaker: And so i i think I just felt...
Speaker: Like even though some parts of my childhood were very magical, there were parts where I felt very kind of trapped. And like I was, I guess, in a tower, if you want to really relate it to Rapunzel being in a tower, being trapped, or even Beauty and the Beast being trapped still. You can't leave the house because you're supposed to stay here because that's the promise you made to save your father or whatever. i think it was a combination of my reality and I wanted to reach that happily ever after. And also that I was a child and it was, it was fun. And my have always been a romantic and love the magic and the whimsy and the pretty dresses everything.
Speaker: I think it was a combination of those two things. I just, and I i know our listeners um are feeling that tug at their heart, like I'm feeling right now, because you are such a beautiful, pure soul. And and one of the many reasons why I absolutely adore you.
Speaker: ah thank you for sharing that because as you were sharing, I remember having a fantasy world as a young girl that I created with my dolls and my Barbies. And to me, they were very real to me.
Speaker: They each had a name. They each had ah feelings. They each had their own individual unique personalities. In in my eyes, they they have feelings. And i spent a lot of time in my room with my dolls because I created a world there that for me felt very safe and a world that felt accepting who was even though as and as a young adoptee, I was very much without knowing it at the time, truly exploring my own sense of identity. And in my room was that place where I felt safe to do. Because out in the world, I i was i didn't feel a sense of safety in exploring parts of myself that I was so hungry to know. i didn't feel like I could do that out loud in front of others. I might be rejected or they might not understand. And so
Speaker: That world for me was very powerful too. It was very meaningful for me as a kid. I so resonate with what you just shared and Disney, Mine was Snow White, my dear friend, ken because I loved animals. I loved a nature.
Speaker: And Snow White had dark hair like me. No one around me in my world, my adoptive world, had dark black hair like me, but Snow White. So I resonated with her. And she also was hiding away.
Speaker: And I felt like a ah good part of my life experience at that time was hiding away from... the secret of me knowing or having a ah sense or feeling that um my birth family out there somewhere didn't talk about me and that I couldn't really talk about my real inner feelings about being adopted. And so there was a lot, I felt just a lot of secrecy. And I think that's another reason why I resonated with Snow White.
Speaker: And it's a a reminder how important those those types of um programs, if you will, films can be and how powerful those childhood memories are. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And how they drive our sense of reality and who we want to be, hope to be, dream of being, right? As we build those fantasy kingdoms, I think ultimately it was a very healthy thing for me, even though so much of it was done in my own isolation. Isolation.
Speaker: Yeah. I was definitely not, what do they call it these days? A living room kid, how they say that. My kids are, which I think is so cool that that says something, right?
Speaker: But I was definitely not. i wast I preferred my room. perfect but That felt the safest. If I was upset or hurting, I would even go in. had a walk-in closet. i would even go in my closet to calm down or whatever. Yeah. That's safe. It's a small space. It's manageable. I liken that to a cocoon, right? It's safe within everything.
Speaker: that cocoon and it helps us to regulate our nervous system. Exactly. Exactly. Back to center and around ourselves. think it was a very smart thing that you did as as a younger person to know that's what you needed and you gave that to yourself.
Speaker: It's amazing. Thank you. I'm wondering about the moment as we grow, I think, and and it's why Kendra, I am so passionate about sharing this unboxing concept and this unboxing coaching that I have now so passionately leaned into because I know how powerful it's been in my own life. I see the transformation with the women that I coach, but there is a moment and certainly as a midlife woman, and I'm talking about myself, you're not doing that, darling.
Speaker: Sometimes it feels like it. I will. Oh, I know. there's There does come a time where I think the the ways that we have, without even knowing it necessarily, box parts of ourselves away in order to fit in our lives, be safe, accepted, loved.
Speaker: That causes us, again, without knowing, to... diminish ourselves, to make ourselves smaller, to quiet our voice.
Speaker: And I used to liken it to living my life off the radar, right? And just like a stealth bomber. I'm just really not fully in my life, but tiptoeing around the edges of my life because I was, there was such an ever-present fear of being rejected, misunderstood.
Speaker: i didn't think that I could be fully me. And I'm wondering when that desire for you became really present, maybe crashed into your consciousness or a box started to rattle.
Speaker: And you said, I can't ignore that anymore. When did that calling to be fully yourself and go on that journey of self-exploration happen? It happened shortly after adopting Henry, actually. He's a person of color and that kind of, and it was, we adopted him during COVID. So like the week before he was born, everything shut down.
Speaker: That's the scene and Black Lives Matter was popping up. And so I was having this like inner kind of like conflict of,
Speaker: what I had been taught within the LDS church, because it's also, there are still teachings that are quite racist and even sexist and homophobic and all those kinds of problematic things.
Speaker: And to now have a child who is a person of color, a different race than me, I really had to wrestle with what I had experienced been taught versus what I was experiencing and what others were saying that they were experiencing.
Speaker: And I know that's not really quite your the answer to your question yet, but it's getting there because that is what adopting Henry is what kind of ah spiraled everything for me to start questioning everything about my religion because it was essentially, like it was what I was for so long. That was what I was my religion because i was taught to not be just a Christian, I guess you could say, but like every day, which I agree to some extent, like you should be who you are every day, right? Like you should just be a good person on Sunday, which I agree with that part.
Speaker: But it was my whole identity, which I do think is problematic because there's more to me than my religious beliefs or at this point, my non-religious beliefs, right? There's more to me than that.
Speaker: And so I had to really wrestle with this idea of oh, My child is a person of color and there are these racist teachings, even though they're trying to say it's something different, like they're trying to almost disavow it without actually just coming out and saying they disavow it. They try and gaslight us.
Speaker: And once I was delving into that, I started questioning like, Does it matter then how I dress because they're also very staunch in modesty and them their modesty is everything's covered up. And going back to when I was younger, i remember one day I was wearing like a bigger t-shirt and I had my shoulder exposed, one shoulder exposed and people kept like trying to fix the shirt to put it back on my shoulder.
Speaker: And so that made me think, oh, my shoulders are bad, right? That's the messaging I was receiving. But as I was going through this transformation after adopting Henry, i was 29 at this point, I was almost 30.
Speaker: I started experimenting with how I dressed and what I watched too, because a lot of the time we were taught not to watch anything R-rated, sometimes not even PT-13, nothing that had any nudity. They were more okay with violence, which is very troubling to me because that's something that's very hard for me to watch actually in I think nudity is when it's done, it's just, that's the human body, right? It's beautiful. It's normal.
Speaker: So I started opening up what I was willing to watch. And that was actually super healing to me, which might sound weird, but that's the truth. I talk a lot about how I started watching Outlander and it was very healing for me sexually because Again, another thing that i was drilled into me was don't have sex, don't have sex, don't have sex until you're married.
Speaker: And even after I was married, it was very difficult for me to have sex because I would i could experience pleasure. That wasn't a problem, but I would experience the pleasure and then immediately feel shame and guilt.
Speaker: And like I was a terrible person. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Watching Outlander and having seeing this love and sexual intimacy, not just emotional intimacy between two consenting, loving adults was very healing for me. And it was important that they were also married.
Speaker: Claire and Jamie, the main characters, they were married. That was very important because it would be very triggering if it was an affair situation that I would watch. would be very triggering for What I have come to know is good girl syndrome. I don't know if that is the actual term, but that is what I read in a book one time is that's what it's called.
Speaker: And so it'd be very triggering if it was an affair situation. So was very ah important that they were married that made it healing. Cause I was like, I want that with Ian. I want that with my husband. I want to be able to have that those experiences of sexual intimacy and closeness with him.
Speaker: without the shape. And that was very healing for me to be able to see that. And then just to experiment with my, my fashion, my style and show my shoulders more, maybe have a little bit lower cut and to have, to show my knees, to show my legs more and even my midriff and just experiment with what I feel good and what makes me feel pretty or powerful or even sexual in the right situations. Like experiment with that and just break away from this very black and white thinking. That was something that I had to do as well. When realized there's a lot of nuance.
Speaker: I just taught everything was super black and white. Things were good and things were bad. And sometimes again in the movies and the shows I would watch, I would be surprised to realize that maybe the bad guys were not the bad guys I thought they were.
Speaker: And maybe the good guys were not the good guys I thought. There was some gray there. There was some nuance there. What makes the superhero killing a bunch of people to save people? How is that any different, really, than the bad guy, the villain, who is also doing the same thing?
Speaker: yeah A lot of the times, not always, but a lot of the time. And so just breaking the LDS rules and experimenting with what I watched, how I dressed, what I read. Aquatar was very healing, Court of Thorns and Roses. that one was also very healing just to again, the whole thing and that there was consent in the sexual intimacy that was going on when realizing it's The important thing is consent.
Speaker: It's not that sex is bad until marriage. It's that there needs to be consent between two adults. So just opening a whole world for me.
Speaker: Well, number one, let me just say there's so much that you just shared that is so profound and is really hitting me at the core.
Speaker: And i know our listeners as well, backing up, just saying everything felt so covered up at one point. And I'm thinking about how we are so often as girls, as women, conditioned to cover up our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions, our desires.
Speaker: And that feeling that people around us are trying to fix us. And perhaps we're questioning in our heads, what is so wrong with me that needs to be fixed?
Speaker: Right? I can remember having those distinct thoughts in my head. Why do I need to be fixed? Is there something so severely broken about me and I'm trying to figure it out.
Speaker: Why do I feel so bad when I just am trying to be me? I'm trying to explore the depths of my identity, my wants, my desires, and I'm trying to dive into the gray.
Speaker: a That's where life is an experience, right? And exploration And what you just shared with us, I want to also state is the beginnings of the unboxing.
Speaker: And the first step to the unboxing process is to name the box. And you said shame and guilt. And those are two of the most common boxes women struggle with.
Speaker: A sense of shame for having those real human emotions, desires, and the guilt that we feel, the good girl syndrome, when inside we're trying to figure out what that means and inside we're screaming out, I just want to be a real girl.
Speaker: and want to live my life. I want to make the mistakes. I want to discover more of who I am here to be and all I am here to share and do. That is such a real human desire and journey of womanhood into womanhood and but You said so eloquently, what makes me feel? i just, what makes me feel?
Speaker: i want to identify that for myself. I'm so honored and deeply moved that you're sharing so vulnerably with me and with the listeners today, because it is, again, it's so deeply relatable. And in your sharing, I feel less alone. And I know so many others will as well.
Speaker: Because that is brave, courageous work. It is the work of unboxing your life and all of the things that we've been taught that condition to believe about what is good, what is bad, what does it mean to be a good girl or a bad girl? or And again, all of that boxes is boxes us feeling like we can't even truly know ourselves.
Speaker: And we're here to know ourselves and to live the fullest expression of who we're here to be. Yeah. And i know that the thought of choosing yourself can feel really radical.
Speaker: It can. It felt kind of selfish, honestly, at first. Because it is a rising up against or a questioning of all that we've been taught and the choosing of yourself. How did you deal with that?
Speaker: That sense of, okay, okay, I want to choose myself. That feels radical. But even beyond that, that feels selfish. How did you How did you come to terms with that in your mind?
Speaker: i'm That is a very good question. I'm not sure I thought about it that way. i think it helped a lot that I'm married to Ian and he's always been, always, except for maybe right there at the beginning, he's always been that person that's like, you do you.
Speaker: Stop asking me for my permission. like He's always been supportive. I will support you either way. If you want to do this harp gig, I will help you take the harp there. If you don't, i that's fine too. He'd even say things like, stop asking me if it's okay to buy this these clothes.
Speaker: Yes, of course it's okay to buy the clothes. So he's always been super supportive of me. And I think that's i think that's how I was able to be able to start choosing myself because he was already without actually screaming, but screaming at me to choose myself in the ways that he was like, stop asking for ah permission. You don't need my permission. Go ahead, go and do it. um i early on, before I had actually left the church, I i had really been wanting to get double piercings. That was also ah very big no to not have double piercings, only have one piercing in each ear.
Speaker: And i just really wanted him. And Ian was about to take me and be like, here, get your double piercings. Cause I wouldn't stop talking about it. I wouldn't shut up about it.
Speaker: And i did finally go and do it. And he's they're so sexy. And it's not really the double piercings that were sexy. Right. It was that I was choosing myself. I was taking back my autonomy that i never had honestly, because I was born and raised in this church.
Speaker: I was always taught that God gave me my body like on a loan, the thing that God loaned me my body. So I owed it to him to stay pure, to stay chaste, to be modest, to not have any crazy color hair or more than one piercing or tattoos. I was supposed to take care of my body because it's not mine.
Speaker: And then even another layer, saving myself sexually for my husband. So then again, it's not mine. It's all these men, these men own my body.
Speaker: a being that I've never seen a sky daddy, right? Like I've never seen him. He owns my body and now my husband, like, how's that fair? And again, not that Ian was like that, but that's just what was taught to me and doing these little things where I was getting a double piercing and I actually do have a tattoo. It was always, it was very empowering to be like, oh my goodness, i this is my body. I can do with it what I want.
Speaker: I'm not hurting anybody. And I'm expressing myself. Yes. And the soul isn't is expressive. The soul wants to express, right? And I always go back to living the fullest expression of who we're here to be. And these acts that you're talking about getting the double piercings or wearing the shirt a little off the shoulder or getting the tattoo one of the most freeing things Kendra I ever did for myself was getting tattoo I would show you mine but it's on my ribs so I'm dressed for you mine is on my arm and it's the name Julia Dawn which was my name before I was adopted it's beautiful felt thank you
Speaker: it felt like it did feel like a radical act of liberation, but I felt like it was an outward expression all an inward transformation. That's exactly how my double piercings felt. Like this is me taking back my body.
Speaker: And I actually cried not because of the pain, but I cried because of that like release of, oh my goodness. This is so freeing. This is like you said, liberating. It's so liberating.
Speaker: And i also did cry a little bit getting my tattoo again, not because of the pain. It actually didn't hurt that bad. weirdly now but But it was just, more I've been wanting this for so long and now i have it and I'm okay. I didn't get struck by lightning. Like I thought I would be, know I'm still here.
Speaker: Yeah. yeah And God still loves me. right that's, I have learned in my life to be, less harsh on myself and to give myself that beautiful offering of self-permission. What I love so much, so many things that I love about what you're sharing with us and I still appreciate, but that self-permission is such a beautiful gift.
Speaker: But you also have Ian, your husband, who is urging you on. And sometimes, oftentimes, when we have those in our lives who remind us that we are allowed to give ourselves the self permission.
Speaker: It's so beautiful because that's self full. I think it's filling up the self. It's not selfish. The only thing ah feel like that we take away when we deny ourselves and believe me in my life, I have denied myself a lot of things growing up, believing that I couldn't really feel what I was feeling.
Speaker: because I might disappoint someone or hurt someone. if they It was only depleting me. was taking away from me on the daily, telling myself I didn't have permission to feel that, to think that, to do that.
Speaker: What would they say? And all I did was abandon myself. The moment that I said, no more, I don't want to, I'm not, that is the most tragic abandonment of them all, self abandonment.
Speaker: Yeah. To give yourself, to honor yourself, to give yourself that permission is coming back home to yourself. That's what I, and i think in the doing we do in, in, in the unboxing,
Speaker: which I clearly see you doing in your life. It's so powerful. And the putting down of the burdens, the weight of those judgments that you grew up, that I grew up believing were real for a very long time. When we unburden ourselves, we find that unstoppable energy. And you mentioned the becoming unstoppable.
Speaker: Yeah. And I'm wondering what that word means to you now as a woman, as a mother, your two beautiful children, your beautiful family. How do you embody that energy of unstoppable each and every day in your life?
Speaker: I think I do fill myself up first because you can't give from an empty cup, right? And i think it's even more than that. i want to be so full.
Speaker: i want myself to be so full that's overflowing. And then it just naturally gives to other people. And I think that's how i am growing to become unstoppable because I'm just doing me.
Speaker: And by doing me, I'm filling up my cup and I'm happy and I feel powerful. I feel empowered. I feel unstoppable. I feel like I can do anything. and I, but that I have to take care of myself first.
Speaker: I have to push past what used to feel selfish and say, no this what but its the word you use? Self-ful.
Speaker: Because when i feel full, then it's going to overflow and I can help so many other people. I don't want to have this scarcity mindset that I can't have because then somehow that means that others can't have too. When it's no, when I have, and I have an abundance and I have more than I need, I can then share that with other people versus, oh, I can't have that because that's taking away from somebody else, which is not the case.
Speaker: There's plenty to go around. And when you feel that fullness for yourself, it's much easier to then give to everybody else because you have, you're just taken care of when. Yeah, it's beautiful. but answer your question?
Speaker: well it ah and then some, my love, because we are conditioned to think we have to put ourselves last. as women and mothers. And I can remember being when my kids were much younger, everyone else eats first. And then if there's something left over, I'll eat or I won't eat at all because I've got ah I'm doing the dishes now. And I had this limiting belief that there just not enough time for me. It's intentional daily like practice to fill ourselves up, to put ourselves first, prioritize ourselves, understand this is not
Speaker: at all selfish, but it, what happens and you describe it so beautifully is we fill ourselves up to overflow. and You can just close your eyes and imagine this beautiful overflow of just living, loving water, right? And it's an effortless power that we can connect with as women and as mothers. And you're describing it so beautifully.
Speaker: And it is the definition of why it's so important to put ourselves first to care for ourselves and to keep ourselves as a priority in our lives as women and mothers. I have a couple of more questions. I just want, I feel like that's a beautiful flow into your creative self, your music, the playing of the harp, which is what a gift, what a talent, the piano.
Speaker: How has that creative part of yourself and expressing your creativity helped in your healing and transformation process? Oh, immensely, because I can just sit down and get my feelings out as play and Or even if I need to just shut everything off and play, whichever one is the most necessary in that moment.
Speaker: But because music helps us feel right. And so i think it can, that's what it does, but it's also very mathematical. It's very logical. There's a, there's patterns and there's numbers that like, it's just, there's just like a mathematical part to it. And it balances my, both of my brains a little bit because it's like a creative way to be very logical.
Speaker: Wow, I love that. That's how i see it, at least, is like it it makes sense. I'm not just creating something out of nothing, which that's cool too. That's just not my talent. Like I like to, I'm very visual. So I like to see the music and then I can play it. So I see the notes on the page.
Speaker: And so it's already there. My creative part is just how I interpret it, but I obviously didn't write the music, but then to be able to use my own own emotions in this very,
Speaker: logical sequence is very grounding to me. And I think I just lost the plot a little bit. I can't remember the question you asked me. It's beautiful that it is. We are creation, right? We have been created and we live in this beautiful world, which is,
Speaker: an incredible gift of creation. And when we open our, when we're able to express ourselves through our creativity, and I would say that every person alive is creative sometimes. oh I think so too. i think so too. Even scientists, even mathematicians, architecture people, like all the different jobs. I think that's what like kind of unites us is that we're all creating something somehow, I think.
Speaker: So yes, I think. even the most logical of careers is you're creating something. You're trying to make something better or more beautiful or fit together.
Speaker: Yes. Oh, that's a beautiful way of describing creativity. Thank you for that. i i When I see you playing the harp or the other day you posted and you were playing the piano, and this was before our conversation, i just saw a woman...
Speaker: coming into herself. Now I'm going to get teary, who is asking those deep questions of herself, desiring to know herself and to fully reveal all the expressions of who she is.
Speaker: And is inspiring and it's lovely. And I just want you to know how deeply i am moved by your journey and and how your voice is so important.
Speaker: And I really want you to know that. And you reached out to me on Instagram a few weeks ago and you shared something about your journey through the church and unboxing, unburdening.
Speaker: things that you'd been taught, ways that you had been conditioned to think. And i was immediately like, Kendra and I have to talk on this podcast. And this conversation is is why I knew it was so important because you are so vulnerably expressing so many things that we all feel as women and mothers and souls, physical experience, what we go through and what we need and And must at some point unlearn to arrive to who we really are and who we're here to be.
Speaker: I think my last question, Kendra, would just where you are now and looking back at your younger self, the version of you who maybe still believed or maybe was still complying. That's how this all started. Because I and so i was complying everything, saying yes to everything. Because didn't want to disappoint anyone.
Speaker: Yeah. And maybe the girl who didn't ask the hard questions yet. he The woman who is asking those deep, important, hard questions now, which is, again, it's where we find our power and it's where we unbox the things that are are holding us back and locking the most essential parts of ourselves away and it's how we liberate ourselves. But what would you say to that young girl now, if she was sitting next to you, is there anything you would just share with her?
Speaker: I would, I don't want to change her because she got me to where I was. Right. So I don't want to, I don't want to say anything that would change our trajectory per se, but I do want, I do.
Speaker: I would want her to know that she has loved she is worthy exactly how she is. She doesn't have to be perfect to be loved, to be worthy.
Speaker: She just needs to be. She already is worthy because she exists and to make the mistakes because she can learn so much from mistakes and mistakes aren't bad.
Speaker: They're just a way to tell you, oh, you need to course correct, or you need to change this or whatever. And it's okay to make mistakes. That's something I tell my daughter because she's in school. And I see a little bit of perfectionism trying to come through in her. And I'm like, it's okay to make mistakes.
Speaker: Let's learn from them. It's okay. You don't have to do this perfectly. Honestly, you don't have to get straight A's. That's okay. I just want you to be better at whatever you're doing today than you were yesterday. i just want you to learn from whatever the mistake was.
Speaker: If you missed that math problem, let's figure out why you missed it so that maybe next time you won't miss it. And that's what I would tell my younger self is that she's worthy and she's allowed to make mistakes and she's allowed to change her mind.
Speaker: And she's, it doesn't make her wishy-washy anything like that. It's just human. It's human to learn something and then change our minds and sometimes you change it back.
Speaker: That's human. Yeah, it's beautiful. And I, those words are medicine, my love. They're medicine. And I hope that like I do, I have a photo of myself as a little girl and I do talk to her so often and pour those beautiful healing words for onto her because I know that she's listening and little Kendra is listening. And as you pour into her, you're pouring into yourself as a woman and you're giving yourself those healing words and those words of affirmation and belonging.
Speaker: And we all are experiencing the gift today of receiving your words as well. And so I thank you so much. And I, how can people find you and connect with you beauty?
Speaker: How can they do that? I'm mostly only on Instagram and I'm at Kendra underscore Erica. And that's where I post all of the little bits of my life and you guys can piece it together and see a bigger picture of who I am. So we'll go and connect with Kendra. It's worthy of you stepping into her world because as you can now understand,
Speaker: It's a deep, beautiful ocean to go swimming in and learn so much about ourselves through connecting and sharing a part of your life. Kendra, thank you so much for being with me today. i'm I am eternally grateful that you're in my life and that you have len lent to us this time of sharing your story and your voice and helping us to do that beautiful work of stepping into our unstoppable power.
Speaker: Thank you. Thank you, Michelle. the Thank you for joining me on Unboxed, Unburdened, Unstoppable. If today's story unboxed something within you, share this with a friend, subscribe, and commit to walking this path of power and purpose with us.
Speaker: Remember, you have everything it takes to be the hero of your own life. Until next time, stay unboxed, unburdened, and unstoppable.
