Your Point of View

I recently watched an episode of IMO, the podcast hosted by Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, featuring Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad.

I’ve long admired these two women. Not simply for their accomplishments, but for the way they seem to inhabit their lives. With grace, conviction, and an almost effortless sense of possibility. They belong to a generation of women who made room for themselves in places where room was not always offered.

During the conversation, a listener asked about the possibility of pivoting her career. Phylicia Rashad’s response stopped me in my tracks.

“Your point of view… your outlook is going to determine so much… Don’t give up on the creative power of your own thought… Whatever your career is, you kind of created that. And you can create something else. It’s your point of view. So let’s just eliminate the fear and the doubt and see what happens.”

— Phylicia Rashad, IMO

I sat with those words for a while.

Not because they introduced me to something new, but because they reminded me of something I had forgotten about myself.

I have always believed in the creative power of the mind.

Long before I understood ambition, manifestation, or even the language of intention, I understood that the life I imagined for myself did not have to resemble the one immediately in front of me.

Everything I have built began, in some form, as a thought.

My career has taken me through fashion, public relations, USAID, the United Nations, and corporate communications. I’ve moved between industries, environments, and versions of myself that might have seemed entirely unrelated to someone looking from the outside.

But to me, there was always a thread.

I had imagined these possibilities long before I knew how I would reach them.

The same has been true of my personal life. The relationships I’ve pursued, the places I’ve wanted to experience, the kind of love and partnership I’ve envisioned. So much of what eventually became my reality existed first in the privacy of my own thoughts.

And I believed in those thoughts with extraordinary conviction.

Not casually. Not as passing wishes.

I carried them with me. I returned to them. I allowed myself to feel what it might be like to inhabit those lives before they existed.

I’ve always believed that thought, when accompanied by deeply intentional feeling, has a remarkable capacity to shape our reality.

But I’ve also learned that believing in something does not give us authority over when or how it arrives.

There is a part of the process that remains beyond our control. Call it God, the universe, divine timing, or something for which you have no particular name. I believe there is something greater than ourselves at work in the distance between what we imagine and what eventually unfolds.

Learning to trust that distance has been one of the great lessons of my life.

And yet, somewhere along the way, I stopped trusting it.

Perhaps it happened gradually.

A disappointment here. An opportunity that didn’t materialize there. A dream that remained just beyond reach despite everything I thought I had done to bring it closer.

At some point, I began confusing the absence of an outcome with the impossibility of one.

I began to believe that getting older meant certain possibilities were quietly expiring.

That there was a window for some dreams, and perhaps mine was closing.

It’s strange how easily fear can begin to sound like wisdom.

How disappointment can dress itself in the language of experience.

How we learn to call our doubt practical, our hesitation responsible, and our surrender acceptance.

I had become very good at what I can only describe as practical, cautious doubt.

And perhaps the most unsettling realization was that I hadn’t entirely noticed it happening.

The girl who once imagined an extraordinary life without questioning whether she deserved one had grown into a woman who sometimes needed to justify her dreams before allowing herself to have them.

I was still ambitious. Still curious. Still capable of imagining more.

But somewhere between imagining and believing, I had begun placing conditions on what was possible.

And nowhere has that been more apparent than in my relationship with writing.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer.

Not simply someone who writes, but someone whose words live beyond her. Someone who can take an ordinary observation, a feeling, a fleeting moment, and give it a life of its own on the page.

Writing has always felt like one of the purest expressions of who I am.

And perhaps that is precisely why I have been so afraid of it.

For years, I’ve told myself that I didn’t want to turn something I loved so dearly into work. I worried that deadlines, expectations, financial pressures, and the endless demands of making a living might eventually strip writing of the very thing that made it sacred to me.

I didn’t want it to become another job.

Another obligation.

Another thing I had to produce rather than something I felt compelled to create.

There is truth in that fear.

But lately, I’ve begun to wonder whether it has also been a convenient explanation for something much harder to admit.

Perhaps I have been afraid to risk something I love.

Because pursuing writing seriously would require more than discipline or ambition. It would require a kind of vulnerability that I have spent much of my adult life learning how to protect myself from.

It would mean allowing people to see me without the familiar armor of professional titles, accomplishments, and carefully constructed competence.

It would mean putting something deeply personal into the world without knowing how it would be received.

And perhaps most frightening of all, it would mean giving myself permission to become the person I have always imagined being.

Without a guarantee.

I am still unpacking that.

I don’t have a neat conclusion about why we sometimes resist the very things we want most. Or why the dreams closest to our hearts can become the ones we approach with the greatest caution.

But I do know that fear has a way of narrowing our point of view until the life we once imagined begins to feel unreasonable.

And I know that I have allowed it to narrow mine.

Listening to Phylicia Rashad reminded me of the woman I used to be. The one who understood, almost instinctively, that a circumstance was not a verdict. That a disappointment was not necessarily an ending. That the distance between where I stood and where I wanted to be was not proof that I couldn’t get there.

I’ve had dreams unfold in ways I never could have orchestrated myself. Opportunities arrive long after I had stopped expecting them. Moments when I realized that what I once imagined in extraordinary detail had quietly become the life I was living.

Why, then, had I begun treating the dreams that remained as though they were somehow less possible?

Maybe the work now is not to dream bigger.

I’ve never had much difficulty with that.

Maybe the work is to recover the conviction with which I once dreamed.

To stop treating time as an adversary.

To recognize when caution is protecting me and when it is simply keeping me still.

To allow myself to pursue something I love without first demanding certainty about where it will lead.

Phylicia Rashad’s words were a reminder that I still have the power to change the way I see what lies ahead.

And perhaps changing my point of view is where everything begins again.

I don’t know exactly what this next chapter will look like.

But I would like to meet it with the same sense of possibility I once carried so effortlessly.

After all, I have spent a lifetime watching things I once imagined become real.

Perhaps it’s time to stop being surprised by what might still be possible.