Overcoming The Challenges Of Self Love, Part 2: Mindset Shift And Strategies To Unapologetically Love Yourself With Raven Thissel

Loving yourself is a task much easier said than done. There are a lot of internal struggles and challenges to self-love. In this episode, Dr. Kim Grimes sits down with Raven Thissel, an activist, communication consultant, holistic health coach, motivational speaker, and host of Raven Thissel Live. Today, Raven talks about her journey to falling madly in love with herself. She discusses the mindset shift and strategies that helped her live her life unapologetically. You deserve to show up as you are, with no pretense or hesitation. Listen in on their moving and empowering conversation and start living as you.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Overcoming The Challenges Of Self Love, Part 2: Mindset Shift And Strategies To Unapologetically Love Yourself With Raven Thissel

Falling Madly, Madly.. Did I Say Madly In Love With Who You Are!

When we talk about the show, it means being true to how you were created and not allowing people’s opinions to affect how you show up in life. We want people to talk because people are going to talk anyway, so let them talk. You have no time to be intimidated by the presence of others. Think little of yourself. You don’t have time for that.

When you show up without pretense and hesitation, the world can’t dull your glamour, and most importantly, you will be inspired to shine your light, share it and help others to tap into their own brilliance. With society’s rigid expectations, it can’t be hard to find your true identity. The feeling of being lost in clashing ideas, conflict and belief, COVID, and the flood of information can be overwhelming.

Most people dumb down or hide who they are. As a result, it pushes them into going into the flow or with the flow rather than expressing themselves authentically. There are many opinions and ideas that can make it hard for you to find your true self. Most of all, what you will do is go with what anyone and everyone are saying or doing. This leads to you dumbing down to a path of not your own creativity but instead, your creativity gets dampened because you are trying not to show who you are.

You are trying to hide it and dumb down. We all want approval from other people, for my family members, our friends, peers, parents but the approval is not from them. It is not about their approval. It is about our own and your own approval. You are approving yourself from within, your inner core. When this happens, that is empowering. We are going to be talking about overcoming the challenges of self-love.

I have a special guest here with us. I’m so excited. I can’t wait to introduce her to you to meet. She is a mentee of mine as well. We will share how we met but it was divine and something that happened. Before I even go any further, let me tell you who our guest is. Raven Thissel is an activist, Holistic Health Coach, talk show host, and Corporate Communication Consultant.

Raven’s Holistic Health education and background in Public Relations and Marketing have uniquely positioned her to exercise her passion for social advancement in a variety of ways. When she observed the climbing rates of suicide and stress-related illnesses among Black Americans, Raven founded Crowned & Calm Company with the mission of empowering Black communities with meditation and other holistic health tools.

She serves as the Marketing and PR Director of the Doug Williams Center, creating solutions for racial and gender disparities in the professional sports industry. She is the CEO of Thissel Consulting, where she provides executive leadership to cultural innovation initiatives and other solutions for impactful organizations. Raven is the host of Raven Thissel Live and IBMTV Network Talk Show, where she teaches holistic personal development to an international audience. Please join me in welcoming my mentee and friend, Raven Thissel.

—

Welcome, Raven.

I am so happy to be here.

I’m so happy that you said yes. I’m following your lead in a sense because you have your Raven Thissel Live Show. You are rocking it, doing what you do best, and that is being you. We will definitely share the information with our readers so that they can tune into you as well. What moves me and touches my heart, even more, is as I go back and think about how we met and the years in between that I shared earlier that it was divine. I want our audience to learn from you and how we met, so go ahead and tell the story. If there is anything that I left out when I introduced you, please share.

First of all, thank you for inviting me to your show. It is such an honor to be here. It is always an honor to share space and time with you. You are so cool that I still can’t believe you want to hang out with me sometimes. As far as adding anything to the bio, I always tell people that I’m an authentic being, being authentic. That’s how I lived, show up as me all the time, and I learned that from you. I will never forget how I met you. I was working for this hotel in Hampton, Virginia. I was so bad at that job and did not like it. I remember sitting at my desk, stressed and sad because I was not good at my job.

I needed the job but I didn’t want to meet it, and then my phone rang. I picked it up on the first ring, like, “Who is it?” I heard this radiant sunny voice that made me smile immediately on the phone, “I am Kim R Grimes and I’m a change agent.” She told me that she had this beautiful pitch about how she was trying to raise support, volunteers, and money or her initiative to help the youth in Hampton Roads. I remember telling her, “This hotel is not going to help you. They are not going to give you anything but I want to help you and be a part of what you can do with me.” We went to lunch. Not too long after that, I fell in love with her immediately. I have been hanging on to her coat for dear life ever since.

That is how we met. We literally met over the phone. I dialed the number and did not expect Raven to answer but when she answered, she said exactly that. I was so moved by that. I was like, “Come on, let’s do this. Where do you want to meet?” It’s history. We have been supporting each other since. When I told her that I was doing a show, she was like, “Absolutely, yes. I definitely want to be one of your guests.” I was like, “That’s a no-brainer.”

I’m so happy that you are here. Thank you again. Let’s jump right into it. We have a discussion about overcoming the challenges of self-love. I know that that topic or term is not a foreign term. When we say self-love, I’m going to go ahead and assume that we all know what that is. There are challenges in loving who you are. To kick off our discussion, let me ask you this question. What does it mean to you to be you unapologetically?

To be me is to ask myself hard questions and not be sorry about living out the answer. That is what that means to me. An example of that would be asking myself, “What do you need?” The response might be, “I need some sleep. I have a long list of things I have to do. I’m tired.” Not being sorry about how I live the answer to my own question, “I need some sleep.” That might look like me saying to Dr. Kim, “I know we have a call at 1:00 but I am exhausted and worn out. I’m sorry that I’m not able to show up for you in the way I had planned to but if I go through with this meeting at 1:00, I’m going to fall asleep on you, so I have to reschedule.”

That is me being me. I’m showing up as me. I’m not afraid at that point of your opinion of me changing or you are looking at me differently, not wanting to be my friend anymore. I can’t prioritize your experience of me over me being who I am and where I am now. That is important to me. Sometimes it is so hard but I promise you, that is the only thing in this life that I’m committed to working hard at.

I won’t work hard at anything else except being myself. That hard work of combating my insecurity about how I’m showing up, confronting my own feelings of unworthiness, and my Imposter syndrome, makes me feel like, “I’m not worthy of Kimmy’s friendship anyway. I’m not worthy of this job anyway. If I don’t show up perfect like everybody expects me to, they are going to see that I’m not good enough. I have to fight that to show up as me to not be sorry for who I am.”

That’s the hard work of my life that I’m dedicated to doing. I have to surrender the outcomes, too. Being myself unapologetically means the outcome of me showing up is not in my control. It’s none of my business. My business is to show up as the real Raven, who I am. Sometimes that means having faith in myself and finding the courage to be me in situations. I have a big personality and dreams. I like to get into people’s businesses and help them with their personal life.

Not in a messy way. I never ever share anything about people’s lives but I care. I used to be so afraid to be that part of myself, the nurturing part of me. I was afraid that it would turn people off. I was afraid that I would be rejected. People used to think I was fake because I was so nice all the time and friendly, and that used to be a hurtful thing for me.

Sometimes I denied being myself. I was sorry for who I was, and I didn’t show up as me out of that feeling and fear of being misperceived. Being myself unapologetically sometimes means I have a feeling that something is going on with that person. I have a feeling that I can help. I want to trust and move on that or I have a dream that I want to accomplish. I’m going to move on that and not going to be sorry for how I’m showing up.

The last thing that I think of when I think about what it means for me to show up as I unapologetically is for me to stop apologizing for the mistakes I make along the way. Falling madly, madly, did I say madly, in love with myself? has meant falling in love with my own path and methods of learning more like, “How can I learn if I don’t bump up against the wall sometimes.” If I bump up against you the wrong way, of course, I’m sorry that I hurt you but I’m also grateful that I was me in the situation and found a place where I can improve. I’m no longer sorry for the pace at which I learn. I’m grateful. I love the pace at which I learned because that’s a part of me being me.

One of the things that you said was to ask yourself the hard questions. That right there is priceless. The ability to ask yourself, not something simple or surface but something that’s hard. “What is it that I need? Is the person that I’m interacting with serving me? The way they are showing up, do they need to be in my life?” I loved that. Also, you talked about you weren’t afraid to make a mistake but you honored your mistake because that’s how you learn. Raven, I love your answers because you are inspiring the readers.

You know that this is a series, so we are coming from different perspectives. That is the reason why we are having multiple guests with this discussion overcoming the challenges of self-love because we all deal with it and go through life differently. I want to make sure that it’s not my perspective or one guest’s perspective but that it is others’. With all of that being said, let’s talk about when did you first figure out who you were? What did that process look like for you? The process is different for all of us.

I’m having so much fun figuring out who I am. I’m having the time of my life figuring out who I am and creating who I want to be. This is my favorite type of conversation. For me, self-love is the act of creating and defining myself like that process of doing that. As I realized things about myself, different situations in my life helped me realize new things about myself.

Maybe a few years ago, when I realized my marriage was failing, I realized that I wanted things from my ex-husband when we first got married that I wasn’t willing to do for me. I wanted to be with somebody who would be curious about me, explore me over time, be so interested in me, and be excited about me. They would never stop finding the new things they like about me and celebrating those things.

I wanted that but I had never done that for myself. I don’t even know what it feels like or what it will look like on somebody else. Around that time is when I first started to play with getting to know myself. In that process, I did something important. You asked me about the process and the journey. This was one of the most important things for me and my process.

I realized that we have an idea about who we are and stay committed to that idea regardless of what we see ourselves doing and hear ourselves saying. We excuse ourselves from bad behavior and not showing up so that we can protect this ego idea of our identity. That’s not real. It’s something we constructed so we can think we’re a good person. I’m a good person. I didn’t mean anything by that.

You meant it to hurt them because you’re jealous. You didn’t feel like putting forth the effort. You were being lazy. Call yourself as you truly are. When I decided to retire, the idol that I had built of who I was as a person, I went ahead and dismantled that. It was scary because that meant that I had to be honest with myself and understand that I’m not the hero in the story all the time. Embrace that and say, “I see how I’m showing up. I can be unreliable at times. I’m not good at communicating when I’m feeling cornered.”

That honest place was a space from which I could get to know myself and appreciate all the beautiful things about me. I could say, “You are resilient. You are consistent at waking up on time and getting up out the bed when you wake up. That’s good.” I’ve noticed that other people struggle with that but you’ve got that. I can say, “This is an area where I want to see us improve. We could probably do this better. Let’s learn how. We don’t have the skills. How do we have a better attitude? You’ve got a bad attitude, shorty. How do we fix this?” That journey has been the path, and I’m still on it. It is so much fun.

What you’re saying is that you learn to own not only your greatness, the good things about you but also own those idiosyncrasies, your mistakes, and failures. Own those as well and hold yourself accountable for it. One of the things that I heard someone say, and I copied it, is that the easiest person to deceive is the person in the mirror. It is huge. Thank you for breaking it down because we can easily say, “How do you love yourself?” It’s always about falling madly, madly, did I say madly, in love with who you are?”

I say that it is not one level. You can’t say to me, “I’m in love with myself.” I will say, “I want to hear you say, ‘I’m madly, madly, did I say madly, in love with who I am?’” In sharing all that and saying that you basically own who you are, own your greatness and mistakes. You own that, which is magnificent. I also want to ask you how can those, who are reading this, be true to themselves when the world is constantly trying to shape us into something else? Can you give us some feedback on that?

This is so important, especially in a time when people are literally committing suicide because they cannot meet the impossible standards that nobody meets of what social media and the world around us tell us we should be. There are so many parts to doing this. It is a constant and consistent battle to protect an umbrella yourself through the rain of adversity around us that is telling us who we are supposed to be.

The conversation about who we are supposed to be starts when we are born, our families immediately begin indoctrinating us with their ideas about who we are supposed to be. “You are a girl. Girls do this. They don’t do that. You wear this. You don’t wear that. You show up here. You don’t go there. You are not supposed to talk to that person.” All these things are supposed to be. What if you are none of that? You are constantly going to feel like you are at war. You are missing something. Something is wrong with you.

The first thing that I had to do was physically remove myself from the people, social media, places, and things. In that place of silence is where you realize that you don’t know yourself and you have never listened to yourself. Your survival depended on you listening to other people, your mommy and daddy’s approval, your guardian’s perception of how good you are doing and how worthy you are to receive love, food, shelter, whatever it is that you needed to survive. Now you have to unlearn, unwind, and unteach yourself those things. It’s a process.

Once I physically separated myself, I’m going to get specific. I grew up in extreme poverty, not regular poverty but literally hungry. My grandmother is from Philly. I was from the country, North Louisiana. It wasn’t because my grandmother wasn’t neglectful to me was because she was doing the best she could. What I now understand is that I internalize the message from about the age of three that my needs are too much for the people who love me ever to meet.

I need to be quiet or else they will feel bad about not being able to meet my needs. I wouldn’t even tell grandma I was hungry because I didn’t want her to feel but I knew how much she loved me and would hurt her if she knew that she was not meeting my needs. From that tiny age, I started silencing myself, and I taught myself how to ignore my own instincts and my needs, how to quiet my inner voice. No one made me do that. I did it because I love my grandmother. It was my choice.

Moving forward, going through youth, my mother was very neglectful because she was nineteen when she had me. She was trying to figure it out for herself. She was a kid. My needs went unmet. I didn’t get the need for attention and somebody’s time met, being heard, feeling included like a person, none of that. That’s from a mom who loved me and was doing her best.

When I turned nineteen, I made the decision. My mom is unable to love me the way that I need to be loved, even now. I have got to create some space between us. I need some space from her. I cut her off. I blocked her. She was doing some toxic things. I was in college at the time. I had some friends who meant well but I noticed how they were making me feel. I felt bad about myself after I spent time with them.

I separated myself. I started doing that and isolated myself. I felt at the time what I was going through was depression because it was so lonely. In hindsight, what I was doing, was creating space for me to figure out who I was. I didn’t even realize that’s what I was doing. You can’t ignore yourself forever. There’s a tipping point where you start to be like, “Everybody has that point.” You may not even realize that’s what you are doing. The spirit inside you will move you to create space for yourself at some point. That’s what I was doing.

In that period, I isolated myself for the first time, and I began to do things differently. I always had long hair my whole life. People would compliment my hair. I thought I was very ugly and unattractive. I believed that but I was okay with it. I didn’t feel bad about it. It was like, “I’ve got to be smart out here in the street and make people laugh. That is what I’ve got.” I relied on my personality for things anyway.

I decided during that period of isolation, I was like, “I’m passionate about taking care of myself and my body. I want to learn how to do that.” I don’t know where to start. I know there are chemicals and stuff. I don’t know what it is. I decided to cut off my hair. I went natural. I started doing research on holistic health.

I went vegan for the first time. I decided to try that. I started exploring my real interests. I was passionate about Black advancement. I went to a predominantly White institution for college. I love books. I have always been an avid reader. I started a book club for White students so that they could learn about the truth of Black History.

That’s something that I would never have had the competence to do but because I isolated myself, I freed myself from the opinions of people around me. Who was I? Who’s going to listen to me? I was like, “I’m going to do it anyway.” If nobody shows up for the interest meeting, I will show up is what I want to do. A big part of the process of not caring what other people think required me to make decisions that other people would not like. I decided to make the decision to cut my mama. She was furious. She talked about me, everybody in my family.

Everybody thought I was on one. She went to college and got on drugs. Who knows what they were saying about me? I decided to make decisions that would piss people around me off. That’s when I started to separate myself from the audience’s opinions. What I was surprised to learn was by me stepping back and disappointing people, accepting that I would disappoint some people in the discomfort of that or I was a people pleaser, President of the People-Pleaser Society. I will send you my badges.

When I made that choice, I was surprised to see that people started to like me. I’m baldheaded, talking about stuff that makes White people very uncomfortable, and I don’t have any money. I don’t have time to hang out with anybody. I’m not giving anybody anything except for what I want to give them, which is almost nothing. I needed all of my own energy.

People were telling me I was beautiful and then I began to believe it. “Maybe I’m not that bad after all. I liked the baldhead.” I kept that look for a while. That’s why I love your hair all the time because it was when I shaved my head that I realized I was beautiful. I didn’t know. I know I have gone off on a million tangents but I would say for anybody who wants to create some space between what other people think and who you are, you have got to be dramatic about it. Be dramatic, cut them off, and be ruthless because you’ve got to be you and figure yourself out.

You didn’t go off on a tangent. You gave so much value that I did not want to interrupt. They not only need to know it from me. They need to know it from you and different perspectives. With that, thank you so much for sharing that. You said earlier when I asked you that you are still learning and figuring yourself out. In that process, there has to be a time when you find it challenging to be yourself. Share with us what’s that looks like.

It happens all the time. It is happening less and less. In 2021, I grew so much externally. In addition to my internal growth that has been happening for all these years, now there is external growth happening. I’m starting to receive a lot of the things that I have always wanted. What’s happening in that space of me receiving these things is all those feelings of unworthiness coming back up, all that self-doubt coming up, and things that I have not experienced before are bringing out things in me that I didn’t realize were there.

One of the most powerful things that help me continue uncovering what is covering up parts of me is the love of my friends and the people in my life. Their love for me, being so sincere as it is, touches me in places I didn’t know were still wounded. I didn’t know that it was tender. How can you know if it’s tender if nobody ever touches it?

Nobody can ever touch it if you never let anybody in, show your vulnerability, let people know that you are not perfect and you don’t have it all together. That part of the journey is what does the revealing work for me. I get to see, “I’ve got insecurities. This is uncomfortable.” In an effort to be authentic, I will assert myself in how I feel about something in a situation, only to realize then what I’m going to do with them. That’s my stuff. I’m projecting my stuff on them. I’m making my stuff their responsibility. It’s not. A conversation with Dr. Kim, she will get you right. She had to tell me, “No, ma’am.” She does it with so much love. You don’t need to know you are getting whoops.

That process of me noticing the places where I’m not me is times when I am trying to hide insecurity or I’m afraid I’m going to lose the love of the people in my life if I expose my truth, and we do that. That’s playing games because we are not giving people the opportunity to see or love us. When we hide our vulnerability and truth, when I say we, I mean me, what I’m doing is I’m disqualifying myself from real love. When they love me, I think to myself somewhere, and if they knew the real me, they wouldn’t love me. Why don’t they know the real you? You are not showing it to them.

I have to have that conversation with myself like, “Raven, I know you value this space, job, opportunity, and person. You are maybe afraid to lose it. You are afraid that parts of you are unworthy of it. This is your life. Do you want to spend it being someone else? Do you want to receive the things that are meant uniquely for you?” That’s the conversation I have to have with myself. I want those things that are uniquely for me. I want to die knowing that the people in my life knew who they were loving.

Along the way, throughout my life, every day, I can receive that love knowing that it is me who is being loved. It makes me feel all the more worthy. It tells that voice, “No, look at this. All of this is because of me being me. How can you be right about your own worthiness? How could you be right about me not being deserving? How could any of that be true? Look at the evidence. This is evidence of what happens when I show up. I finally decided to start being myself.”

In these conversations or situations that come up, they still come up with times where I am challenged with, “This is what’s going on. Are you going to tell them how you feel about it? Are you going to be quiet?” Are you going to stand up for yourself? Are you going to speak up for yourself? Are you going to do that thing? Are you going to stay asleep? Are you going to stay in bed or show up?” Those are the moments where I have to make a decision every day, every moment, minute by minute, even with my children.

It’s scary sometimes to be real in front of them because their opinion matters more than anything to me. I want them to have a great childhood. I want to do a great job raising them as their mom and help cultivate them into fabulous people. Whoever they want to be, I want them to know that person is loved.

Sometimes I’m not sure how to do it. I beat myself up, not intentionally but somewhere in there, there is combat going on saying, “You are not good mom anyway.” You say that but I have to show my children who I am. Your mom is weird. I’m not like the other moms. You are not going to get June Cleaver. Mommy does not feel like cleaning off the table, and I’m not going to do it. You all going to eat in the playroom.

You are showing them that you are you and how to be themselves as well. You are giving them that permission because you are taking permission to do it with yourself, which is absolutely amazing. One of the things that I always say and want to point out because you had mentioned it a couple of times, is your responsibility to teach those around you how to love you. They will get it wrong. I guarantee you every time if you don’t show them how to love you. How can you show them how to love you when you don’t know what it requires to love yourself?

You don’t know that at all. I want you to share. There is an exercise, and I talked about it in my why episode. The exercise is called Path to Greatness, where you are doing work in uncovering your greatness. Over and over, time and time again, we all are great. We were born in greatness, and life happens. It covers up our greatness, so we lose focus. We can’t find what our greatness is. Let alone, and we don’t know our identity. There’s an exercise that I put you in because we worked.

I hear and see the self-work, and I’m sitting here so excited as you are answering the questions. I know that the work that you put in, the effort. You put in the time and work and did the work on yourself. What I would like you to share is how did that exercise impact your life? What did it do? What was it about that exercise that helped you to see, Raven?

I was living in Italy, a dream come true, a beautiful villa and house. I had my second baby. My marriage was falling apart. I was very depressed. I had come out of being suicidal. I had been suicidal for about a six-month period while I was pregnant because I was going through postpartum from my first pregnancy while I was going through my second pregnancy. Coming from that dark place, the thing that pulled me out of it was a decision. I had decided that my life was worth living. That’s a decision that I have stood on ever since but I was not out of the woods. I had to figure out how was I going to get out of this scary marriage.

I’ve got an email one day from Dr. Kim R Grimes. I don’t remember the content of the email but it didn’t matter. It was the fact of seeing her name. I hadn’t talked to her in probably two years at that time. Seeing her name in my inbox gave me hope. I’m going to let myself do it unapologetically, too. I remember thinking that she loves me and will know what to do. I didn’t know what to do. I called her. I don’t remember if I emailed you, and we set a time or whatever but we ended up on the phone. She listened to me and was so patient. I was gone.

I was in my walk-in closet on my knees crying when I talked to you that day. I was telling her about my marriage, how afraid I was. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had been a stay-at-home mom. I didn’t have any money. I was in a panic. I felt trapped. I was confused. I didn’t even remember who I was anymore. She gave me an assignment. I was desperate. I would do anything.

She told me to go into the mirror twice a day for two weeks to tell myself what I like, love, appreciate, admire about myself is, and she gave me an example. “What I like about myself is my dad’s winning smile. What I love about myself is I can talk to anybody. What I appreciate about myself is I can go anywhere and do anything. What I admire about myself is that I light up every room I would walk into.” She was ready.

When I was on the phone with her, I was like, “Okay. I’m going to do it. I had already made my mind up. I’m going to do it.” When we hung up the phone, I remember thinking, “This isn’t going to work. What’s that going to do? I need a job. I’m going to leave my husband. I’ve got the kids. I’m going to be a single mom.” I had committed to doing it way because I trusted her.

After my kids went to sleep that night, I stood in front of the mirror and could not think of one thing I liked about myself. I stood there, looked at myself, and cried. The next day I’ve got up and tried to do it again. I had to try to remember nice things that other people had said about me. I plugged that in. I didn’t believe it but I was saying it in the mirror.

That next night came, I did the same thing. I tried to come up with something. By the seventh day, she checked on me. She called me to see how it was going. I told her, “It’s going all right. I’m doing it.” By the end of the second week, I was looking at myself in the mirror and, without a pause, telling myself, “What I like about you, Raven, is that I can trust you. You are a trustworthy person. What I love about you, Raven is that you genuinely love the people that you meet. What I appreciate about you, Raven is when you smile, you smile from your heart. What I admire about you, Raven is how you are about to glow up out of this situation.” I was going through it with genuine ease.

On the last day that I did it, I cried for a very different reason. Through that process of simply doing that to myself in the morning, and I say, “Simply, it’s simple, but it’s not easy.” Through the process of doing that every day, I reminded myself of who I am and encouraged me from the soul, so I kept doing it. I didn’t stop. That was a few years ago. My life is completely different now. I’m completely different. I’m me now and still do this exercise.

I stopped for a while, and I remember calling you and was like, “I’m confused.” You were like, “You stop doing it. You are supposed to keep doing this. You have to keep doing this.” As Dr. Kim calls it gook of life that covers up your greatness is always there to cover it back up. You have to cultivate your own greatness regularly. I still do this in the mirror. It leads me into a conversation with myself in the mirror. When you taught me that, you didn’t tell me all the science behind it.

You told me, “Raven, this is what you need to do.” I trusted you I did it. I’m so glad I did. Now that I know that when you talk to water, it changes the molecular structure of the water molecules. When you say positive things to water, it makes these pretty snowflake patterns. When you say mean stuff to the water, it makes these dark evil misshaped, and we are 70% water.

What I tell people is I’ve got to get off the phone with you at 10:00 because I need to go talk to the water in my body. I’ve got to clean off the water cells in my body. Who knows? Social media is telling me that I don’t have a big enough booty. Work is telling me I’m not smart enough. My kids say my food is nasty. All of these messages that other people are speaking to the water in me. I need to go make it right in the mirror.

Thank you so much for breaking that down and sharing the intricate details of your life, journey, and how you did it. Even with that exercise, that is something that I have shared with the audience as well. It wasn’t easy for me but it is something that I did. That’s how I was able to begin to uncover my greatness. Not only that began to own my greatness and walk and live in my greatness.

I want to share with everyone how they can connect with you. This is the reason why I had her on the show. She is the epitome of showing up and being her true self. When I say you are you unapologetically, I’m definitely talking about Raven. Please share with our audience how can they connect with you? How can they get to learn more about you? Tell them about the Raven Thissel Live. Share all of that. Give them parting advice and a little nugget that they can take with them from this episode.

I do a lot of things. There are a lot of things that I would love to share with you. First of which is Raven Thissel Live, which is my new talk show. It’s produced by IBMTV Network. It can be viewed in 44 countries on any of IBMTV Network’s platforms, as well as my own YouTube Channel, which is where I like to send people. You can go on YouTube, type in Raven Thissle. You can subscribe there and see the live episodes of Raven Thissel Live.

You can also go to Facebook and search Raven Thissel Live, join the Facebook page there. You can find me on Instagram, follow, @RavenThissel and on TikTok, I do something fun and special. I come on there all the time and give advice, thoughts or things that I learned. I might make you laugh. Follow me on TikTok @RavenThissel. If you join on Facebook, you will be a part of an exclusive community that gets a live broadcast and interviews me on Tuesdays.

As Dr. Kim mentioned, I’m a Holistic Health Coach and a Life Coach. I do relationship coaching as well. If you would like to connect with me for coaching, you can DM me on any of the platforms that I have named or you can email me at RS.Thissel@Gmail.com. Two more things I know in my bio, Dr. Kim mentioned that I am the Founder and CEO of Crowned & Calm Co.

My organization helps Black Americans find mental wellness solutions. There is the only meditation and mindfulness system created specifically for Black men available at CrownedCalm.com. The last way you can connect with me is I am a Communications and Business Consultant. If you are interested in consulting support, you can visit, ThisselConsulting.com, and send me a message there.

For my parting advice, I know I shared a lot of different things that I do. For some people, the questions that I get are, “How do you do that? Aren’t you tired?” My answer is no. I’m not tired because I’m doing what comes naturally to me. For me, these are the outer workings of who I am. I would encourage you to out what are the natural outer workings of you being you?

It doesn’t have to be five different things. Maybe it is 1 thing or 30 things, and you can’t decide, do all of them. You don’t have to limit yourself and do them all at the same time. “Day by day, how can I represent myself as I truly am?” That’s what I would say. Thank you so much for having me. This has been so fun.

Thank you so much for being here. We truly appreciate your gifts, talents, abilities, and what you shared with us. It made a difference and will make a difference in someone’s life. Again, thank you, Raven. I really appreciate you. To our audience, thank you, guys, so very much for being here and allowing us to pour into you and help you to be who you were created to be unapologetically. That’s what’s important. You being you because you are you unapologetically.

This is what I know. No one is better at being you than you, and I dare you to find them. Be true to yourself, show up and be yourself, regardless of who is in the room or what they think about you, be you unapologetically because, as I said, you are you. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Overcoming The Challenges Of Self-Love And Falling Madly, Madly, Did I Say Madly, In Love With Who You Are? I look forward to seeing you all and you all joining me on the next episode. Take care now.

Important Links

• Crowned & Calm Company
• Doug Williams Center
• Thissel Consulting
• Raven Thissel Live – YouTube
• Raven Thissel Live – Facebook
• @RavenThissel – Instagram
• RS.Thissel@Gmail.com
• @RavenThissel – TikTok