what most of our success really comes down to

Greetings! I shared this uncomfortable truth on Facebook last week and felt called to share it again, here, in case it may support you on your journey:

Two years ago almost today, I quit my job, drove across the country, moved in with my partner, and went full-time into my business after four years of dancing with the idea.

So much of that leap of faith I accredit to luck, co-creation and sheer perseverance. It was a big scary move for me. I had almost nothing in the bank and I had no idea if I was doing the right thing. I was leaving everything behind for love and a dream.

Despite the turbulent growing pains that have been the past two years, I am so so grateful for that uncomfortable decision.

Now, I could end the story there. Wrap up this post with some inspirational shtick about how if I can follow my dream, so can you! And if you believe in yourself you can make anything you want happen! And leap and the net will appear! The only one getting in the way of your success is you!

But I would be misleading you if I didn't also add that much of what enabled me to make that leap of faith was a whole bunch of privilege.

The color of my skin, my parent's seed money, my health, the education I received, my upbringing, my family's sacrifice… and many many other visible and invisible legs up that I have received throughout my life have deeply contributed to where I am now.

This unspoken narrative is often pushed aside. We love the idea that all of our successes can be solely attributed to our hard work. We also love believing that we in no way contribute to the deep racial and gender inequality we have in our culture today. And we definitely love painting pretty pictures for the sake of “inspiration” even if it has very little basis in reality.

But it’s this narrative, it’s our privilege, that is statistically more correlated with our ultimate success. If we ignore our ancestral and current privilege, we are misplacing our emphasis, from hustling and Universal powers… to violence, hatred, greed and abuse that got a lot of us white folx where we are today.

We are inherently perpetuating violence under the umbrella of “empowerment” by ignoring that there are so many factors that goes into one’s ability to get + have what one wants.

And listen, honoring that there’s more than just heart and hustle that got you to where you are today doesn’t make your story less inspiring. Quite the opposite, it makes it more real, more accessible to a greater number of people, and more grounded in the world we live in.

And I am much more interested in becoming a better human in the world I live in, than operate as if the world is something that it’s not.

I see the same ignorance to privilege happening with Ivanka Trump {You can have it all! you just have to work hard! Balance is possible! Oh yeah and I have ten million nannies}… and Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP {Let's talk about how to everything is toxic and how to stick a stone up your vagina, without any regard to actual health issues in our country like healthcare}… and within almost every well known white female coaches brand {Look at my perfect skinny lifestyle! I'm just a girl from bumfuck so if I can do it so can you! All you need is MY secret!}. Heck, I see it within most of my posts in the past six years. It’s like the only problems we are addressing are white women’s problems, with no consideration that there’s more to our world that the challenges of a few.

If we want to REALLY empower women, we’ve got to do better. We’ve got to start to notice the white lens we wear, commit to seeing our privilege and knowing when to check ourselves. This is how we will actually become “revolutionary.” And it can change everything.

To your worth,