1,001 black women’s stories

At the start of this year, one of the items I plotted and prioritized on my Life Value Map was my goal to record the stories of 1,001 black women.

The desire came as a result of having taken the time to record a series of life story interviews with my grandmother in the summer of 2020.

The experience was not only profoundly revelatory for me, it also strengthened the bond between me and my grandma. This was our special thing. Something only we shared and I felt as honored to listen as she felt to be seen and heard.

Later in the year, I was introduced to the book ‘But Some of Us Are Brave’ a collection of womanist - aka, black feminist - essays from a variety of black woman scholars and writers. One such essay, entitled, ‘Debunking Sapphire: Toward a Non-Racist and Non-Sexist Social Science’ by Patricia Bell-Scott, highlighted the lack of ‘everyday black women’s stories’ in the overall study of black women and black women’s histories.

“Proponents… have concentrated almost exclusively on the lives of nationally known Black women. Implicit in this “life and times” approach is a class bias. The prevailing or resulting impression is that Black working-class or low-income women are inconsequential to the American experience. All this is not to say that the lives of prominent Black women are not important; however, their lives represent only a few of the least generalizable circumstances that Black women have experienced. Most Black women have not been able to rise to prominence.”

The essay was written in 1977, the same year I was born. And 43 years after its writing, I can see that there’s still a lack of celebration of the ‘everywoman’s’ story in black media and literature, even in black families. 

Much of the details of my womenfolk’s stories were never shared with me, but within them are the seeds of my own story. Any path that I chart to success or other destinations will be a continuation of their stories, but what I’ve often been encouraged to do is to look outside of my family and latch on to the stories of prominent or notorious black women as either templates for me to follow or emulate, or cautionary tales on what I should avoid.

It wasn’t until I was able to hear my grandma’s stories about her upbringing and values, her struggles and sorrows, her triumphs and adventures, that I could truly give a name to some of the shadow or not-fully-visible parts of myself and my own story. My process of self-actualization (i.e., becoming my authentic self) and self-definition would be unnecessarily difficult or even impossible if I did not ‘go back and fetch it’.

And this experience of loving compassion for another’s story leading to loving compassion for one’s own story is the experience I want to share with as many other black women as possible. 

The reason for the goal specifically being 1,001 is two-fold:

1. It seemed a number that was big enough to scare me a little, while still being achievable, and

2. It was inspired by the legendary heroine of 1,001 Arabian Nights, Scheherazade. A woman who literally saved her own life through her storytelling.

So! To accomplish this slightly-scary-but-still-achievable goal, I need your help. 

I’m asking for you to help me achieve this goal by recording the life story of an elder black woman family member (preferably, for the reasons stated above) or any black woman that you know and would be willing to interview, listen to and honor via this act of love.

I understand that the telling of one’s personal story is an intimate or even private event, so I won’t ask for you to share the recorded stories with me - though you are certainly welcome to! - instead, I will measure success or progress towards this goal by the number of ‘story pledges’ I receive. 

Not a perfect metric, but it’s one that respects the process more than the goal.

For all those who take this pledge, I will provide support in the form of:

• Step-by-step instructions and guides on how to prepare for the recording, what questions to ask, and how to interview your subject(s),

• Guidance on how to use the StoryCorps app or site as a completely free tool for recording your interview AND a way to have your story archived at The Library of Congress!

• My personal participation as an interviewer or facilitator, if you would like your own story heard and recorded, or if you feel like you could use an unrelated person to help bring out the story of a close relative (full disclosure: there will be a small fee to cover my opportunity cost)

So - will you help me reach my goal?

The 5 Self-Assessments I Do Before Goal-Setting

Every wise explorer carries something to navigate by.

Especially if what you’re exploring is yourself. 

Whenever I’m planning to make a major shift or a significant life change, I carve out time for a little self-exploration beforehand.

Why?

When I’m do something that doesn’t look like it makes sense to others, I have to be pretty sure of myself and the ‘big whys’ behind my big leap or big shift.

A few of the ‘senseless’ things I’ve done in the past:

• Quit my ‘good corporate job’ as a management consultant to invest in real estate

• Quit my ‘good corporate job’ as an IT project manager to become a freelance writer

• Quit my ‘good corporate job’ as a content strategist to move to Spain and teach English

And I recently quit my ‘good corporate job’ to start following my purpose.

After 4 years of working in an environment that tested my self-confidence and my commitment to my personal values, I knew I needed to spend some time getting reacquainted with myself without the constant stress and anxiety that comes with being in a situation or environment that is just not the right fit.

I turned to several personality assessments - some I’d taken before, some I hadn’t - to help me dig deep and really put some effort into my answers to the questions: 

‘Who Am I?’

 and,

‘Why Am I Here?’

Answering these questions allow me to enter my life planning or goal-setting process with clarity. Not just clarity about what I want - i.e., what I want to accomplish, what I want to have more of, what I want to have less of - but clarity about who I am now, who I am becoming, and what will help me bridge the gap between the two.

Having the answers to these questions gives me the essential ingredients I need to begin writing my life story. To assume the role of the hero in my own story. To stop waiting for external achievement, relationship or reward to make me feel complete or valued.

I believe that each of us was sent to the world at the exact time we were born because we have a mission to complete. Some call that mission destiny, others call it purpose. But whatever you call it, it’s this driving force that will really help us feel fulfilled in life versus only feeling accomplished.

To make sure I get the maximum value out of these personality assessments, I developed a process of extracting the most meaningful bits of each assessment and using them as inputs to:

1. Defining my life story’s main character

2. Creating the outline for my life story

As with life, it’s not just about the results of the test, but what you do with those results that matters most.

Below are the 5 personality assessments I use before I begin life planning or goal-setting. For more details on how I use each assessment, and how I create my Declaration of Self and my Life Value Map from the results, click each link to explore further.

My 5 Go-To Self-Assessments:

1. Natal chart

2. Typefinder (aka, Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator)

3. Enneagram

4. Life Values Inventory

5. StrengthsFinder

The Life Planning Outputs I Create from My Self-Assessments:

• Declaration of Self

• Life Value Map

New Year, New Story!

New year, new me! 

It’s a phrase we hear a lot at the start of a new calendar year. What it means: we’re ready to summon the newest and best version of ourselves to begin the year ahead. The funny thing is, the ‘new me’ that we think of, aka, the evolved self, is usually revealed at the end of a journey, not at the start of one.

So, I think the more fitting proclamation would be: New year, new story!

Your story is the process of transformation, aka, the journey, that brings about the new you. 

Goals motivate us. Goals give us something to strive for. An accomplishment to go after. But stories inspire us. Stories give us something to live by. Stories transform us and provide meaning.

So, why are we not writing stories at the start of a new year instead of goals?

The good news is: When it comes to planning your year, or your life, you can write pretty much whatever story you like...

... as long as you know how.

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Ready to Write your Story?

Want a peek at how I use stories for New Year’s goal-setting? Click below to learn more about my 4-step process.

How I Use Stories for Personal Goal-Setting and Life Planning

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Using Stories for Goal-Setting and Life Planning: Write, Then Edit

Writing Your Life story isn’t just about being inspired.

Crafting your life story chapter by chapter takes commitment to a process, or at least, to a set of guiding principles or habits. Much of story-writing or storytelling involves following a process that transforms the artist into a craftsman.

I’m writing the story of my life each and every day. The quality of my life story will largely be determined by the guiding principles I follow and the habits I develop. These principles and habits should be organic enough to allow me to respond to what’s happening in the moment, but also structured enough to make sure I don’t lose sight of my story.

Some of My Guiding Life Principles

·       Flexibility

·       Experimentation

·       Experiences over possessions

·       Belonging is better than fitting in

Some of My Life Habits

·       Regular self-reflection

·       Time spent in nature

·       Travel

Editing My Story

You can’t edit a story while you’re writing it.

Writing requires you to be present in the moment. Editing is when you have time to analyze, critique, review and adjust. Editing helps refine the initial draft of your life story into a finished product that has greater clarity and meaning.

When I take time out for self-reflection and self-development, I’m editing my life story. As I’m writing my story – living each day, going on adventures, encountering success and failure – I’m in the middle of it all, I’m too close, too emotionally involved in the events that are unfolding to assess them accurately in the moment.

I have to occasionally pause and reflect on everything that’s happened to put it in context, and determine what adjustments need to be made. Regular self-reflection allows me to mine the newly-written parts of my life story for jewels that I can use to keep creating better and better storylines.

My Daily Self-Reflection Practices

I use some combination of the following on a daily basis:

• writing,

• voice notes,

• meditation,

• quiet thinking,

• listening to self-development podcasts

• reading an essay or listening to speeches (e.g., Ted talks)] 

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So, let’s recap the steps to taking a story-based approach to goal-setting:

1. Define Your Main Character

2. Understand the Backstory

3. Outline the Plot

4. Write, Then Edit

While it’s a bit more detailed than traditional goal-setting, I think that the outcome of the story-based approach is much more meaningful and makes me way more excited to pursue my goals.

Next, I’ll share the steps I use to turn my Life Value Map into a ‘neverending story’ that makes me feel like an overachiever even when I don’t accomplish any of the goals I originally set.

Using Stories for Goal-Setting and Life Planning: Outlining the Plot

Now, it’s finally time to begin plotting the story – what is the quest that the main character will go on? What will she encounter on her journey? What dangers and perils await her?

This step is similar to traditional goal-setting, but it’s placed within the context of an overarching life story.

To begin outlining my life story’s plot, I start by asking myself the following questions.

Questions for Outlining My Life Story

What do I want?

•  Who do I want to be?

•  What change do I want to see in myself? In the world?

•  Who do I want to help?

•  What problem(s) do I want to solve / fix? What wrongs do I want to right?

•  What do I want to leave behind?

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The Powerful Woman Wheel

I created the Powerful Woman Wheel as a way to define the areas of life that a powerful black woman (versus a strong black woman) would focus on. Since, ‘becoming a powerful woman’ is one of the key quests of my life story, I use the Powerful Woman Wheel to help define the main categories of my life story.

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Who / what is going to help me?

• Mentors, role modes

• Right associations

• Centering practices / beliefs (big why)

Who / what is going to stop me?

• Shadow self

• Vices

• Unresolved trauma responses; attachment issues

• Wrong associations

What lesson(s) do I want to learn?

Before my story is finished, I want to be able to say:

• I’ve mastered…

• I’ve studied…

• I’ve learned…

• I know something about…

How far can I go?

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A MORE SIMPLE METHOD: Instead of answering all of the questions above, I can draft a pretty good life story outline by asking myself, ‘How do I feed my ‘X'-factors’ ?’ My X-factors are the personal archetypes that I uncovered while defining my main character. They are also included in my Declaration of Self.

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The Life Value Map

I wanted a way to keep my answers to the life story outline questions close at hand. Something that would act as a living ‘map’ that I could refer to regularly and that I could quickly and easily add new quests, adventures and story elements to over time.

Borrowing from agile project management, the Life Value Map is like a backlog of all the things I want to do in life - a running list of my goals, dreams and visions - organized in a kanban board layout.

I use the categories from the Powerful Woman Wheel as my column headers and I add the answers to the life story outline questions under the relevant column(s).

I prefer to keep my life value map in a digital project management tool like Trello or Asana. This makes it accessible anytime and anywhere. Which means I can always use it to add new items to my life story outline.

Next: Write, then Edit

Using Stories for Goal-Setting and Life Planning: Understanding the Backstory

After defining my story’s main character – her traits, qualities, strengths and struggles, the next step to crafting my personal story is to define my main character’s backstory.

That is, what are the most recent and / or the most relevant events that have occurred in my main character’s life? What brought the main character to this moment, to the current situation or state of affairs?

For this, I took a day over winter break and did my own year-end-review. I made a written list of all of the major or meaningful moments from the past year that I could remember. I scrolled through social media posts and pictures on my phone to help me recall some of the moments I’d forgotten.

I probably could have done this exercise in less than a day, but I allowed extra time for sentimentality and emotional segues and side roads I tend to wander down when reflecting on the past.

Storytelling and Letter-Writing as Backstory Exercises

Earlier in the year, I’d also done a couple of storytelling exercises that helped me clarify my backstory.

One was a series of recorded interviews with my grandmother. By listening to her stories, I could see how my own life story was a continuation of hers and how much I could draw from her story to help shape my own.

[NEW YORK TIMES Article: Record and Share Your Family History in 5 Steps ]

The second was a letter-writing exercise in the book, ‘Write Yourself Into Your Dreams’. The book guides its readers through a process for unpacking unhealed trauma and unresolved inner conflict with one’s parents.

Though I was initially skeptical of the process, it was surprisingly impactful and helped me to offload some emotional baggage that the main character of my soon-to-be-written life story did not need to be carrying around.

[PSYCHOLOGY TODAY Article: Transactional Writing: Letters That Heal]

[SNAILED WITH LOVE: Letter Writing to Create Connections]

Next: Outlining the Plot

Using Stories for Goal-Setting and Life Planning: Defining The Main Character

Whether I’m working on a project or writing a story, the first thing I do is identify the key players, aka, the main character(s).

Before I began this year’s goal-setting, I spent several days (5, to be exact) doing some self-assessment. For this, I relied on a few personality assessments, a values inventory exercise, and an in-depth review of my natal chart.

Even though I’d taken most of these self-assessments previously, I still found it extremely useful to review and remind myself of the natural gifts and talents that I’m working with before I began writing my story.

Learn More About Each of The Self-Assessments

• Natal Chart

• Typefinder (MBTI)

• Enneagram

• Life Values Inventory

• StrengthsFinder

Since each of these assessments provides a lot of information to wade through, I came up with a way to condense the key insights from all of them into a mini-manifesto. I call it my ‘Declaration of Self’.

The Declaration of Self acts as a sort of over-arching intention that drives and motivates my life story’s main character. Regularly reviewing and reciting this intention statement will help re-energize my main character and keep her focused when the journey gets rough or there’s a lack of clarity.

In a future post, I’ll share the exact method I use to turn the results of my self-assessment into my Declaration of Self - so you can create your own!

Next: Understanding My Backstory

How I Use Stories for Personal Goal-Setting and Life Planning

I don’t know about you, but goals haven’t been working for me lately.

To be honest, goals haven’t been working for me… ever.

In the past, my personal goal-setting pattern has looked something like:

• set a goal that’s ‘SMART’

• Start down the path of pursuing the goal

• Get some early wins and feel extremely motivated by my own commitment and initial action,

Then… life starts happening. Work gets crazy, or I have trouble in one of my primary relationships. Or, maybe my ‘shiny object syndrome’ kicks in and a new more exciting or more urgent goal pops up. I start losing momentum, promising myself that I’m going to get back on track. But weeks pass, maybe months, and I may completely forget about the original goal or decide that it wasn’t really that important to begin with.

So, this year, I decided to take a different approach. Instead of starting with goals (aka, the trees), I decided to start with a story (aka, the forest).

I’m a big picture thinker, so context and the larger story are always important to me. When solving problems at work, I usually start by getting an understanding of the systems, people, and structures surrounding the problem or challenge, because that’s… what a good consultant does.

So why not take the same approach for my personal life?

Next: Defining My Life Story’s Main Character

This year is f***in' hard.

This year is f***in’ hard. And we’ve still got a ways left to go.

I swear, it seems like each week of this year has started off like an epic, emotional, unpredictable adventure that brings victory coupled with loss. Severs old ties to fertilize new ground. Makes you get rid of yet another old comfort so you can grow yet another new branch for yourself.

I can barely get my bearing from the last tidal wave of WTF, before a new one starts charging right at me.

It’s a tough time, but it is also a potent time. This swirling energy that’s upsetting so much normalcy is also charged with possibility. With manifest-making magic. You are knee-deep in it, and if you can just keep focus, engage your core, not get swept away in the current, you can make things happen that you only imagined before. And they will come fast, hard, and unexpected. And they will last.

So be very intentional about what you are creating and calling forth now. With the relationships you begin and end. About how you are entering into contracts, projects, relationships. What is created now will not be easily undone.

And if you have not been focused on creating, if you have just been being tossed about or holding your little piece of normal ground with your head tucked down, that won’t do any longer.

It’s time to make the most of the rest of this year.

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Kisha Solomon is an Atlanta-based writer, knowledge worker and serial expat. She is also the founder of The Good Woman School. When she’s not writing, working or travelling, you can find her in deep conversation with herself or her four-legged familiar, Taurus the Cat. www.lifeworktravels.com

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