Adell Harris: Episode 316

Transcript

[0:00:17] RW: Hi, everyone. It’s Rae Williams, host of Author Hour, where I interview authors about their new books. You cannot hide from negative experiences in life, but you can control how these moments affect you and turn them into a source of energy. Our next guest and author of Refuse to Lose, Adell Harris is here to tell us about her own experiences with abuse and loss and offer us a clear step by step method to making adversity your advantage. With this book, you’ll learn to embrace everything that happens to you and make the most of it. Pain will not drag you down. Here’s our conversation with Adell.

[0:00:57] Adell Harris: I’ve known that I wanted to write a book that would help people in the way that books help me as a young professional in my 20, early 20s just graduating college. I started reading books when I graduated college because I needed to find a way to be successful. I didn’t have those tools and so I started reading books and I found the tools within the pages of the books and I was just blown away by all of these information and knowledge that I was learning about how I could too, be successful and make adversity my advantage or the problems that I had had growing up that I thought were going to limit me. I felt empowered by the books I was reading so you know, I thought, “man, I want to do that, I want to be the author of a book that helps people kind of make that transition from adolescence to an adult who is empowered to succeed and go after the things they want in life and not be limited by old belief systems or paradigms.” Or I was raised with one father or I’m black or I’m gay or I made these mistakes before so maybe on that adequate, I wanted to write a book for the 22-year-old version of me. That was the goal.

[0:02:14] RW: All right. So, tell us a little bit about your story?

[0:02:16] Adell Harris: Well, I start the book in the room in my mother’s bedroom in the house that I was raised in that I swore I would never go back to. And it’s the day of my mother’s funeral and I’m tired and I’m exhausted and I’m sad and I’m angry and I’m all of these things. And I’m in this house by myself and in the middle of not knowing if I want to cry or if I’m just so pissed that I’m by myself doing this huge task of cleaning out this house, a place where I swore I would never come back to. I kind of ask myself, I had a little pity party, “why me?” I was the victim for a while and then for some reason, all the things that I had learned in those books, 20 years ago, about empowering questions, that’s something Tony Robins talks about a lot. If life doesn’t give you the answers you want then you need to ask life better questions. And so, in my why me moment, I started asking, “why not me? What is this here to teach me?” Within 10 seconds, I got an answer and the answer was that you’re cleaning out your house. Like, this is a physical cleaning of you, letting go of all the things that you thought were limiting you in this space and now you can turn the chapter and move on. And so, I thought, I was empowered by it. I was empowered and at that moment, I thought “man, I have it, I have an idea of what I would write if I wanted to write a book about my journey up to this point.” And so, up to that point, a little bit about myself, I was born in Jacksonville North Carolina and put up for adoption at birth and so I don’t know my biological, any relatives, any family members, anything and at three months old, I was adopted by a couple from High Point, North Carolina, which was just about three and a half hours down the road. I was raised in High Point, I call high point North Carolina home, I call the family that adopted me my family. I was raised in a home where my mother and father, my adopted mother and father were divorced very early on. I think they were on paper divorced when I was three years old but I don’t recall them ever living in the same home and being together. So, my father kind of opted out of parenting at that point, didn’t, paid his child support, did all the things he was supposed to do from a legal government standpoint, but in regards to parenting and loving and supporting physically with his time and anything he’s never done that. And so, my mother raised me and my older brother and she went on to get married four more times and I was sexually abused by her second husband at the age of eight and so my story in this home starts with rejection. Rejection at being an adopted child, not knowing who your biological parents are. Having that detachment and rejection from my adopted father and then my mother who got married multiple times and, in my opinion, had put those interests above my interests, as a daughter, by creating environment that was protecting, I just felt like she did not do. She also had over 70 foster kids living in and out of our home so my home was more like a group home. Lots of change, lots of transition, lots of dysfunction, verbally abusive, sexually abusive, at a very high rate, most of my young adult life. And so, that’s really the foundation of my existence but also, intertwined in that was a game of basketball that I met when I was eight years old and then my faith. I was raised in a church, I went to church every Sunday, every Wednesday night and had a very strong relationship with my faith and the church and what that meant for myself growing up was huge. It was huge, it was necessary. I don’t know if I were to survive without either one of those anchors. And so, that’s my foundation.

[0:06:05] RW: All right. In your kind of journey out of that, that home that you grew up in and then into the “real world” which I believe the world was very real from the beginning for you but getting into the real world, what was that like, what was stepping out like for you?

[0:06:22] Adell Harris: Well, when I left home when I was 18 years old, I got a full scholarship to play basketball at Wake Forest University and I talk about, in the book, how that was the first time, you don’t really know that you’re different, maybe then someone else until you step out into a world that’s different than yours and you start to evaluate and assess the lives of other people, your peer group. And what I saw when I got to Wake Forest were kids that were living – had lived a totally different life than mine. And that was the first indicator that my existence was a little different and I felt it in that space and so that was a huge transition for me. To me, that was being out in the real world, leaving home for the first time and quite honestly, swearing that I would never go back. And you know, gravitating or holding on really tight to this game of basketball which had loved me, had supported me, had given me an identity, had given me confidence, had been the reason why people applauded me. You know, I really didn’t receive love in any other way outside of that. My grandmother loved me dearly, but I didn’t get the attention from anybody other than in that sport and so I went to college and play college basketball in one of the toughest athletic conferences in the country and at one of the toughest academic schools in the country, where there were only 3% of people that were black and looked like me and that was a challenge. Elite, white America is a huge introduction for someone like myself and Wake Foest academically in the challenges, academically and athletically were all a challenge for me and I write in the book that I didn’t have to change for it, they didn’t have to change for Adell. Adell had to change for it, if I was going to survive. Survive is all I really did. I did not thrive. I only survived and when I graduated, I guess that’s what most would consider out in the real world. When I graduated college in 2002, I was afraid that I didn’t have parents to go home to, I didn’t have resources. I didn’t have a safety net, you know, I didn’t even have the game of basketball anymore, I was done playing so I just thought, “how can I be successful? I just want to be able to pay my bills, that’s the furthest I could go on regards to success. I just want to pay my bills and be able to take care of myself because I know, nobody else will.” And I started reading books like I said initially, I started reading books and I just found myself finding tools and strategies to empower myself and believe in who I was created to be and so that was a huge transition and I did start coaching college basketball. And that was the way that I found success early on but it was in the pages of books that I was empowered to believe in the greatness that I am and not even deny the fact that there’s something really, really special about me. Don’t know how I’m going to manifest it and didn’t know sometimes doubt it whether I could base on the origin of my birth or my foundation, but I always knew there was something greater that I could achieve and that lived within me to help and serve other people. That was me jumping into the real world.

[0:09:33] RW: Awesome. Okay, getting into the book a little bit, what do you think is the central key message in the book that people, especially young people can take action on?

[0:09:44] Adell Harris: The key message is that you are the author of your story and no pun intended. But we all are living a story, we’re all playing a character in that story and my challenge to the reader is to not just be a character in that story that’s a victim or a villain because those energies aren’t sustainable to be the hero of your story. To actually take the pen and design the story exactly how you want, to work backwards from your death bed to where you are now and write the script exactly how you want it to look, feel and the people you want in place in that journey. And sometimes, that intention, that deliberate intention will create an energy where the universe will give you the answers to create that life for yourself, but when we don’t, we work from our birth bed to where we are and we just keep reliving the same story. I have no father, mother didn’t want me, I was sexually abused, I was – you just keep rehearsing the same thing and so this book is really the challenge of deciding. I’m not at the mercy of anything and that I can on own my own outcome. And there’s not one thing that I’ve been through or – and that I’m going to go through that’s going to define my entire existence unless I give it that much power. I think that’s the key challenge in Refuse to Lose.

[0:11:08] RW: I love it. Okay, you talked a little bit in the book about accepting your adversity and also acknowledging your adversity. What is kind of the difference between the two and what does that help us to do when we’re acknowledging and accepting our adversity?

[0:11:21] Adell Harris: Yeah, it’s a great question. Step one is acknowledging what it is. Adversity, you know, this is going to happen almost every day of our lives, we’re going to be faced with something. And some things are macro, some things are micro but as long as you’re here on this earth, there are going to be things that occur. And often times, these things are distractions and they get us off course, they cause resistance in our energy, in our confidence, in the things we want to go after. And so, acknowledging one is acknowledging that bad things will happen. It will happen, you will get a flat tire, you will get a ticket, your mom will die, someone will get sick, you won’t get the job you want, your boyfriend will cheat on you. There are so many, it will happen. Acknowledge that things will happen. One particular story I share in the book about acknowledging is that my grandmother, my maternal grandmother loved me for 10,000 people. She made up for all the love that I never felt like I got in my home. My mother never told me she loved me at home. She didn’t tell me she loved me until I was an adult. My grandmother loved me and I could feel it just when she looked at me and so I knew I was special to her. I knew I was significant. Well, my grandmother passed away shortly after I graduated college or think she – I think I was 23 years old when she passed away. I could acknowledge that she was gone, but I wasn’t accepting it. I was not accepting a life where she wasn’t in it. I was rejecting that. I could not embrace the idea of living my life without her and because I could not accept it or I chose not to accept it, it created resistance in my life and I was adopting toxic behaviors to deal with this thing because I wasn’t even allowing myself to grow and evolve into the next phase of grief because I was just holding onto the idea that this just didn’t happen to me. And I think sometimes we can acknowledge things; your boyfriend dumps you. You can acknowledge that you got dumped or you got cheated on or whatever it might be. But accepting it like this is a part of my life now. I fully embrace being adopted, being sexually abused, being in a verbally dysfunctional home. I accept all of – I accept my grandmother’s death, my mother’s death. I accept who I am, my black skin, my full body, whatever it is, once we can embrace all of who we are, the acceptance piece is about loving all of you and your journey and knowing that it was all for you, all of it. The good and the bad, the highs and the lows. It’s contrast in life, we would not even have a clue what joy was if there was no pain. And so, I think it is easy often times to acknowledge something and sometimes it is not. You know drug addicts can’t acknowledge that they’re addicts or alcoholics struggle to acknowledge that they’re alcoholics. So, I think those phases of it, we can maybe see ourselves in often times, but I know when I could acknowledge something and I also could feel when I was resisting it and I wouldn’t allow it in. A lot of my life had to do with being able to accept and embrace your full story, Adell Harris, and so that is the difference.

[0:14:42] RW: All right and then another chapter I wanted to touch on because I found that it grabbed me is Take your daily G and E vitamins. That is the title of one of your chapters. What does that mean? What are the G and E vitamins?

[0:14:55] Adell Harris: Yes, so this gets into strategies. This gets into things that we can implement into our daily life and E and G vitamins and I call them daily, E and G vitamins because I think it is something we should do every day like taking your vitamins, but E is for empathy and the G is for gratitude and I think these are tools that we can implement every day and they are free. You don’t have to go buy these. You don’t have to – like these things we can do independently and practice every day that will shift and change the way we see the world. It changes the lens in how we see things. Our perspective changes when we look at something through the eyes of empathy and through the eyes of gratitude. And so, empathy hit me personally hard but it’s defined as seeing yourself in someone else. You know you might not have your story and I may not have yours, but if you talk to me then I can see myself in you because we are both human beings. We are more alike than we are different and so I don’t need to be white. And I don’t need to be a male and I don’t need to be black to know and feel you when you’re hurt because I have things that hurt me too and so that empathy is a lesson I learned when I was the primary caregiver for my mother for the last two and a half years of her life and watching her die and she was in and out of hospitals and she is deteriorating and you know, I sat there at the foot of her bed and just saw a human being. I didn’t see a mother who was trying to raise a bunch of kids and who had four husbands who didn’t do this and used to yell and scream at me, who never told me she loved me. I just couldn’t see any of that. I just saw a human being who was on her death bed who wasn’t going to live a complete life you know? She was limited by her life of thinking and she passed away because of diabetes and just didn’t take care of her body. Didn’t put the right things in her body and it caught up to her. And so, I watched her on her death bed with not a lot of visitors, not a lot of people coming to check on her and I felt sad and so I learned that lesson like “wow, I was judging her all these years for her role as a mother when there are so many layers to who this person is.” And I saw myself in her. I saw myself in her, watching her die and so that was very powerful for me and it changes the way I live my life now and I always try to see myself in others before I judge them for their decisions, for their beliefs, for the mistakes they make, I just try to always see myself in other people. And then the gratitude is just the superpower. It is something that you practiced it every day there is no way you live a negative life. There is no way depression sets in when you every day you can express verbally or you ride it, how much appreciation you have for the things you have and for me I have a trigger person, my grandmother, if there is every a bad feeling I can go right to how grateful I am that I met her. And that our lives crossed paths and that she loved me so deeply when I didn’t see that anywhere else, she was a perfect example and how much I meant to her and how she is so proud of me even though she is not here physically. It is hard for me to look at my glass half empty. My glass is overflowing and it’s because I can go directly to things that I am so, so grateful for. My life could have been turned a whole lot of different ways and gone a lot of different directions. But I don’t have any problems being grateful for the things that have happened, the people that I’ve met, the love that I found, God’s grace, my health. There’s so many things and I write a list of those things in the book, but I think that those are practices that it is up to you. You can wake up every day and decide to do both of those things and can change your whole world. So, these are strategies that I challenge the reader to implement every day to make adversity their advantage.

[0:19:02] RW: All right and then just tell us some of the ways that some of these principles and some of these experiences that you’ve had and that you have shared with people in the book have impacted lives. And I imagine over your basketball career, your coaching career, you had a lot of people that you came into contact with that you are able to impact. So how did you see that manifesting or unfolding?

[0:19:23] Adell Harris: You know what, Rae? I think this is something that you watch in everybody’s life. If you watch close enough, Tiger Woods wins a couple of weeks ago, the Masters. And we can pull back those layers and we could probably do some research about how he made adversity his advantage. At some point, he acknowledged what it was and then he had to accept it and then at some point, he decided he was going to rewrite the story and decide, “look this is the direction I am going in.” And he reprogrammed his self to be the newest version of his self and I can go on and on, but there is not a person that exists on this planet that hasn’t utilized some of these tools in order to get out of the valley and back up towards the top of the mountain or progressing towards the top of the mountain again and so yeah, it is a very common thing and we can discuss it in sports, specifically, but it is every human being, every story, every movie we watch. I mean we have seen the comeback story where the person goes from victim or villain to hero and they start working out more or they play the theme music in the back. We see it, but when we are in it, we don’t think we could get out of it and we start to maybe think that we are alone and nobody else has been through this before. And so, part of the messaging in the book is that you’re not special because you had a tough time. Going through something doesn’t make you special. When you decide to believe in yourself so much or the newest version of yourself so much or embrace the fact that there is something great about me and I am going to go after it, I don’t know if it will work but I am going to go after it. Then you can’t help but operate in this way where you start to be grateful for things and you become a little bit more empathetic. So, you can deal and manage and work with people and serve others and so, I really don’t have specifics. I have a lot of personal stories that are in the book about how I’ve come to these realizations through very, very intense traumas, death and I’ve got a DUI, driving down the one-way street, and you know I’ve had these things happen in my life where it’s been so obvious that, “wow, how in the world did you get out of that? How did you turn that into a good thing?” And so that’s because I have a testimony, that’s one of the reasons why I decided to write a book. But looking at it, I see it in everybody’s life now. Everybody who’s had a moment in the valley I can see and they’ve come out of the valley I can see what happened with the formula was, there’s a lot of overlap.

[0:21:58] RW: All right, awesome. So of course, you have given us a lot of challenges and action items but if you had to issue one overarching challenge, so something that people can go ahead and just do right now today this week that will change their lives forever what would that one thing be?

[0:22:16] Adell Harris: Ooh, change your life forever. I would probably say decide that you’re going to be a dreamer and by dreamer I just mean someone who is going to be intentional about how they live their lives like, “I want to be the best mother, I want to be the best daughter, I want to be the best wife, girlfriend, I want to be the best employee at that job, I want to be the best I could possibly be in all areas of my life.” And then that decision will force us into some sort of thought and action behind it. Because when you make those decisions in my opinion, I think all of us like if I want to be – if I say out loud when I said it out loud actually because this happened to me. I said out loud, “I want to be the best daughter I can be.” That declaration evokes emotion and anytime a thought is attached to a feeling, then we naturally go into action. It’s not even like, the universe, the energies, the way we are wired, we act based on how we think and feel. Thoughts and feelings come before our actions. Anytime there’s an intense feeling attached to a thought, “I want to be an incredible daughter.” If I had children, I want to be an incredible mother. Just decide, that would be the first course of action and put the thing in writing and read it out loud to yourself daily and remind yourself when you don’t feel like being the best daughter or wife or employee or whoever it might be that that’s the intention and that’s the agenda you’re on. I think the world will be a whole lot better place, I think we would serve the people around us better and leave something behind that will live longer after we’re no longer here.

[0:23:57] RW: All right, awesome. I love that and so powerful. How can we get in touch with you if we want to learn more, if we want your coaching, if we want your expertise, how do we get to you?

[0:24:06] Adell Harris: Yeah, my website is rtladell.com is my website and you can see all the services I provide on my website as well as all social media outlets. Twitter, I’m @RTL_AdellHarris. Same thing on Instagram, @rtl_adellharris and I’m also on Facebook as Adell Harris and my company, Refuse to Lose as well as YouTube and LinkedIn. I’m all over the place social media wise. You can call me. Call me direct, text me. I welcome anyone who wants to talk about how to empower themselves, how to enlarge their vision of what’s possible and anyone who really wants to roll up their sleeves and do the work of not being the victim of their past circumstances or the difficult things that may happen to you because the difficult things will happen. You can call me on my cell, you can text me, 910-470-1356.

[0:25:04] RW: All right, awesome, thank you so much Adell.

[0:25:06] Adell Harris: Thank you, Rae.

[0:25:07] RW: Get Refuse to Lose right now on Amazon.com and read Adell’s full story as well as figure out how to level up in your life. Join us next time for another episode of Author Hour.