Tycoon Women Moments: My moment of passion and connection

Turning over the next card and its moment number 5

Moment of passion and connection
these moments are associated with great loves, significant meaningful relationships, connecting with the people who have a significant impact on your life

It would be very easy to just pick meeting my husband as my moment of passion and connection or looking into the eyes of my first born for the first time on the day she was born, however, I've chosen someone who had a profound effect on the way in which I see things and who I credit with starting me on the road to personal development and positive thinking.

I had decided to retrain as a personal trainer and fitness instructor. I was deeply unhappy at work. I was managing the team from hell. I'm sure my senior managers at the time would explain it differently; however, it seemed to me that they had selected all the worst employees in the department and put them in my team as part of the reorganisation. It felt like I’d been set up to fail, however, being a fighter I was initially determined to prove them wrong.

Sadly the reality was I found myself being crushed by the lack of support and the constant confrontations with my team members who felt that, because they were black and I was a black manager, I should overlook their lack of performance, poor attendance and skills gaps. Which obviously I was not about to do, but the stress I felt due to the constant battles with my staff around performance was awful.

Retraining as a personal trainer was my great escape my chance to go off on my own and do something that I loved, or at the time I thought I would love doing i.e. health and fitness.

One of the women on the course was a woman called Merlyn that she was the liveliest, bubbliest, and most positive person I'd ever met. She has an amazing body - not the usual aerobics instructor look a.k.a. stick thin. She was really Rubenesque and well proportioned and she wore it so well. I would look at her in awe because she was the most confident person I had ever met.

One day I overheard her talking to someone about a very large scar that she had which ran from behind her ear and all the way across the throat. She was explaining how she used make-up to cover it up. As I have a large scar on my face too, the result of an altercation when I was 16, I was interested in what she had to say.

It turned out that this scar was the legacy of an incident in which she was brutally attacked and sexually assaulted by a man who had tricked her into going with him, by telling her that his pregnant girlfriend was in labour and he needed her help. He then attacked her, attempted to slit her throat (hence the scar) and finally in a bid to conceal his crime by destroying the evidence, set fire to the room she was in whilst she lay there unconscious.

Miraculously Merlyn had survived this terrible ordeal. I was stunned that this was her story. How could she have so much pain in her life, in her past and be so positive. I was struggling to remain positive because my job was getting on top of me. So I asked her what kept her positive and I'll always remember what she said.

She said: I realised that he had already taken so much from me I decided that I wasn't prepared to give him the rest of my life.

And that was it. She had worked out that if you choose to hold on to the pain and hurt that others cause you, you give them power over your life. Deciding that you are in control of your life, that you are in fact the CEO and not the supervisor is the greatest gift you can give yourself.

This was the start my journey of self development. The song that sums up this moment of connection for me is

Push It by Salt n Pepa because this was the track that I taught my first ever aerobic routine to. At the time I practiced with Merlyn so much that eventually I couldn't bear to hear the song anymore and this is the first time I've played it in a long while.

What is your moment of passion and connection and what song would you use to represent it? Please share your thoughts and experiences so others can benefit. I look forward to reading about them.