Women Empowerment Month – Guest Blogger Our Girl, Al Carraway
Once again, Happy Women Empowerment Month to all you amazing Women out there! Today we are excited to introduce you to our girl Al. She is the best of the best, please enjoy and remember how special each and every one of you are!
- Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am a best-selling author, public speaker, wife, mother, awkward expert, taco enthusiast and hardcore optimist, lover of all things Jesus & God, whose adamant about speaking up about hard things and uniting others together.
- What's been your biggest hurdle thus far?
I don't fit the mold for anything. I don't fit the mold of how I look in my religion, my community, and what I'm trying to tackle and talk about. How can someone succeed when everything about them in their demographic implies that they shouldn't. It's like I was failing before I could even start. Sometimes fears are in our head and we imagine worst case scenario and that's enough to stop before starting. But not in my case, mine was a reality. I couldn't go anywhere or post anywhere without terrible stares, mean comments, rude remarks, people looking at me and walking the opposite direction, emails saying I should kill myself and God could never love someone like me. It was a long time of loneliness and heartache and weight and judging and confusion and anger.
- How did you overcome it?
It was a process. But I got tired. I just got tired of being upset and feeling down and being mad. I got tired of second guessing and closing up and being everything I wasn't. And for what reason? People I would never see again? I decided to worry about me and worry about my reoccurring thoughts. Because our crazy, wonderful reoccurring thoughts is how our soul speaks to us to reach what we were meant to do all along! The only way we can make progress and THRIVE is pay close attention to our soul. It's smarter, and more powerful than most any other force, if we but take a chance. Because if we aren't doing what we love, we're missing the point. Because life is too short to be anything but happy.
- What advice do you have for other women?
We spend so much time pleading for things to be over, or things to be different. Whether situational or about ourselves. People see their differences as a weakness or a setback. But what so many fail to recognize is that it is exactly what is different about us is what we need to GROW in. It's our individual differences that make progress, success and change for the better. If we were all the same, how stupid would that be? We has humankind literally wouldn't get anything done. Because it is exactly my differences, it is exactly my hurdles that I explained above that has brought me to everything I have and am doing now. It is everything that makes me different that has made me help others and succeed into something far bigger than I ever could have imagined. And I hate to imagine my life any different.
Take confidence in you. Take confidence in your hard. Take confidence in your different. It's perfectly and divinely there. And every bit of it will lead you on the most beautiful, amazing, unexpected ride of your life. And your SOUL will thank you! And others will thank you.
- Share with us one of your favorite inspirational quotes.
"Mother Teresa didn't walk around complaining about her thighs, she had sh*t to do." —Sarah Silverman.
