By the way, this essay is a testimony.
I’ve always said: If you really want to learn something, teach it.
And I mean that on a molecular level. Reconstitutes you bite by bite.
Because that’s what teaching asks you to do. Stay with the thing in all its stages of breaking down to the most granular level until it can be transmitted somewhere else.
So whatever it is that holds who you want to become, teach that.
But the tender paradox of that process is that you start the teaching work from some awkward point pre-full-transformation.
You have to show up to teach while still the version of you carrying the doubts, and inadequacies, and wounds.
And sometimes you show up only knowing a glimmer of what you’re moving toward when you decide to teach, lead, create, be perceived while doing this one thing. Some specter of who you’re choosing to become.
And in the process, you can’t always tell the becoming is happening. Until one day you go to (spiritually) try on pants you wore last year only to realize they don’t fit anymore — they’re two sizes too small.
So if you must start before you’re sure, what’s enough to get started?
I think we take the plunge when all we know is: I can’t stay HERE any longer.
Sometimes it’s enough to just want to be who we’re meant to be and do what we’re meant to do.
[By the way, this essay is a testimony.]
This time last year, I plunged into offering group teaching online with so many doubts.
I questioned if I could summon up a full classroom (I did). And launched while holding the question “What if nobody (or not enough people) show up?”
I was insecure about my frameworks. “So what if they’ve worked for high school students and 1:1 clients? People who buy into a course online might have other expectations.” I refined and tested what I had, then offered it, still insecure.
I was unsure of my own capacity. So many memories of panic attacks, meltdowns, and burnout hovered as I tried to peer into a crystal ball to see HOW I’d possibly survive taking on expanded weight and visibility. Still unsure, I devoted myself even more diligently to tending to my somatic self and designed a launch that felt cozy to me.
Perhaps my biggest fear came from doubting my own authority or “right” to teach what I was teaching. I feared that my work wasn’t rigorous enough, peer-reviewed enough, or well-researched enough. I feared that I wasn’t the right person to teach it — what if I’m just a self-appointed fraud? What if I am a failure? What if something about me disqualifies me from having people listen and learn from me?
And underneath it all, it was this unfinished business in my own becoming story that made teaching Sovereign Storyteller, Ancestral Wealth, and Love Letters INEVITABLE for me.
Because right next to those doubts and fears I still held, was the overwhelming embodied antidotes to all of them — ones I’d carried all along, waiting for their chance to fill the gaps.
TEACHING THE ANTIDOTES RECONSTITUTED MY WHOLE EXISTENCE INTO MEDICINE.
I launched Sovereign Storyteller in May of last year, wondering who would show up to a class promising “decolonizing voice & visibility”, still testing the coherence of the premise and intentional to call in the most loving people who could co-create validity with me with care.
I told myself I’d be happy with 3 enrollees. Over 30 showed up.
And in that inaugural classroom, I remembered the gift I’ve long held — to make learning spaces where relational work that feels like magic happens (for so many it’s their first experience of this kind).
I became evidence to myself that the way I teach decolonial concepts of voice & leadership WAS coherent and impactful — helping others to shift in profound ways.
Confirmation was so many people of the global majority choosing this space. And the white people who joined were those willing and wanting to do the humble, necessary, uncomfortable work of decolonizing and moving towards right relationship.
By fall when I offered an expanded version of Sovereign Storyteller — this time with my first foray into spotlight coaching calls — I was ready to move through my doubts of:
Can I repeat success?
Do I have the capacity for more?
Do I even have the answers when they come in real time?
The lesson that met me in those wonderings was: I am only responsible to that which I know, to that which I’ve already become.
So when questions came that I didn’t have the answer to, when my answers landed awkwardly sometimes, when I failed to understand the question in the first place — the true expansion of myself as a teacher came in embodying the human who could fail out loud, fail in front of their students, and move with enough love, grace, trust, and rootedness to repair, to understand, to make room for all of our paradoxical experiences.
I learned I did have the capacity to hold real-time, complex, unexpected collective friction, shifts, wondering, trust, and vulnerability. And I could do it well.
While most days, I had good answers and insights came easily, what rewired me the most deeply was leading from my imperfect humanity — from the CHOICE I made to honor what I held — what resourced me to teach and give generously in the same body that makes mistakes, rather than to obsess over “perfection” or “authority”.
The student outcomes from that round of teaching felt miraculous. People who’d been frozen from fear for so long were now moving into action — working together, creating community spaces, showing up online, launching businesses or programs, making radical art.
The outcomes felt spontaneous after months spent in real community, integrating the methodology, practicing showing up in rooted power and voice.
I can’t help but wonder, though, if the secret ingredient to my students’ emergent magic was the months they spent absorbing my presence as safety — proof that an imperfect, quirky, spirally, spectrummy, human like me could make a difference — that maybe they could too.
Before that notion could fully crystallize, I was already in a full-system upgrade in another part of my life and the internet. Ancestral Wealth brought a vision I’d been carrying for years — a vision I thought I wouldn’t actualize for many more years to come — soundly into the present.
My friendship with Simone Seol catalyzed a quickening of becoming for both of us to meet the present needs in our worlds.
The Ancestral Wealth launch tested divergent, disruptive, and decolonial leadership on a wider scale and showed us (and others) that this work is now.
I found myself saying to Simone in the pre-launch process (a time ripe with insecurities and ‘what-ifs’): “All we have to do is change the internet, then change the world”.
She agreed, so we gathered our courage and jumped. I think we made good on our word.
Bringing Ancestral Wealth in to the world brought me into the daily presence of my most prolific, trusting, resourced, reverent, rooted, and interconnected self.
As I did the work, I witnessed myself with more grace, ease, and mastery in my teaching work.
The Ancestral Wealth classroom was a space for me to watch how I moved in more challenging leadership positions — ones that required me to tow the line, name uncomfortable truths, assert relational protocols — so that I could lead many into profound perspective shifts, choices, and building.
And as I led in this way, I saw that my capacity for this kind of work had ALREADY BEEN FORGED in the decades of teaching, mothering, leading, creating, and existing that had preceded this moment.
Positioned in a room of other strong, experienced leaders, I became even more clear on what my role is and what gifts are mine to offer.
This teaching experience fundamentally shifted my relationship with my vision from speculative to tangible — from “one day when” to “you start right now”.
Who I’ve become in the process of teaching since last year has only started to come into focus in the months since, away from the classroom.
A season where this metabolized reconstitution shows up in my home, in my neighborhood, in my alone time.
Witnessing your own power in leadership nags at you to make coherence in all the other versions of you too — the ones that others know as mama, partner, daughter, friend.
All the ways I’d ever shirked my responsibility to BE POWERFUL in small spaces were now asking for Teacher Joey to be present there too.
And it’s been in these sacred moments of tending to matters at home and within that I was revisited by that familiar adage of mine: “Teach whatever it is that holds who you want to become.”
Because now I see her everywhere.
The one who is brave enough to break generationally-encrusted patterns of sweeping dirt under the rug. The one who tows the line and asserts relational protocol. The one who knows imperfect humanity does not disqualify us from leadership, dignity, and impact.
I’m writing to you today from a place of fullness, lack of fragmentation, confidence, and peace in being me — exactly who I am and where I am — that feels like a cycle of becoming has been completed.
It also feels like the work I do is INEVITABLE. I must teach what I’ve become.
I have too much evidence to do anything else.
In my process of becoming, I’ve emerged in all the ways I pray for when I teach. Which is to say, I want this for you too. There is a version of you on the other side, so full, intact, powerful, and free.
If the vision I hold for my teaching is an outcome with the most human humans thriving together in a flourishing, interconnected world… then just being who I am right now — evidence of what is possible when we devote ourselves to becoming who we are meant to be — makes the vision feel already complete.
If your vison for liberated humanity is a lot like mine and you’re hoping to pull who you’re meant to become into your present-day molecules, my classroom spaces are grown specifically for you.
SOVEREIGN STORYTELLER is a 6-month long cohort for paradigm-shifting leaders & creators to sustainably expand their wisdom-sharing practices, creative expression, & radical leadership into their most powerful, rooted, and decolonized voice & visibility.
LOVE LETTERS is a self-paced course + ongoing live office hours for knowledge-workers, healers, educators, and leaders who are ready to share what they hold with the people who need it while honoring their own integrity & their people's agency.