Each of us has an inner colonizer within us that tells us that we're supposed to be a certain way, act a certain way, dream a certain way. So this Decolonizing Your Life series is about burning it all down, about redefining and reclaiming how we want our lives to feel, to look like, and to be.

Today, we are talking about how we can decolonize our imaginations and our dreams, and if you're part of the Wholehearted Community, you know that this is something I talk about often: how our dreams can be limited within this box of what people tell us is possible for us, and today, SharRon Jamison is telling us to break out of that box.

A little about SharRon Jamison

SharRon Jamison is a life strategist, author, minister, entrepreneur, and corporate leader who is committed to helping people BE who they were born to be and not settle for what society has taught and told them to be. She combines the power of leadership, healing, spirituality, and justice to empower people to shed societal “shoulds” and courageously confront oppressive narratives to create environments where ALL can thrive.

Through her brave coaching programs, innovative workshops, wisdom-filled books, empowering sister circles, and speaking events, she provides tools, strategies, and time-tested wisdom to facilitate individual and collective change in faith-based, corporate, and change-making settings.

SharRon earned a Bachelor of Arts from Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia. She earned a Master of Business Administration from Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. SharRon is currently an associate minister at the Victory For The World Church in Decatur, Georgia.

Let’s get into today’s interview.

I would love for you to tell us what does decolonizing your life and decolonization mean to you?

Decolonizing our lives is the intentional, consistent, courageous untethering and unlearning. It’s an uncompromising way of questioning how we have been conditioned, how we have been indoctrinated in ways that don’t allow us to honor ourselves.

Decolonizing is challenging and confronting all the ways that we have been imposed upon, that we have been imprisoned by someone else's culture and customs and ways that they communicate.

It is the way of unleashing ourselves and unleashing our own power by simultaneously dismantling what we have learned and constructing a new understanding of who we are.

Decolonization is a process of self-definition, self liberation, and self-determination. It is what we must do to live a life of wholeness and wellness.

When we have been imposed upon, financially, systemically, spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally been robbed of our own culture, we are robbed of our humanity. We are robbed of our dignity. So, decolonization is reclaiming, recouping, rediscovering, reactivating, and reinterpreting who we are not only to ourselves, but to each other and also to our creator.

We are born and we were created in the image of our creator and what colonization does disconnects us from our creator and disconnects us from ourselves.

It is an intentional and courageous process that we have to do. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, but we do have to follow our souls.

It’s a way of activation that allows us to see what God had in mind when God created us and it's a powerful thing to do.

You touch on something that is a big part of decolonization — that it robs us of the belief that we are not whole. Whether that is a connection with God, with spirit, the process of colonization makes us feel like we are not whole just as we are.

When we think about decolonization, it's a process of fracturing us.

It makes us show up in a fragmented way and when we are fragmented, we are not full.

When we are not full, we are not forceful.

When we are not forceful, we are not faithful.

So, there's all these ways that is so systemic, it's a way of disempowering us. If you can disempower someone, you can affect seven generations behind them and seven generations before them you. Sometimes you feel like you don't have roots to rebuild, but I want people to know that's a lie. You can always rebuild. It’s not about what you lost, it's what you have left. So what part of you do you have left? That means we have to share our stories, that we have to talk to our senior citizens and our seasoned citizens.

It means that we have to talk to spirit to help us recoup and recapture, and even if we only have pieces, we still can make it with broken pieces and put Humpty Dumpty metaphorically back together again.

What has this decolonizing journey been like for you?

My journey started in the church. I’m a minister. My father is a minister. My grandfather was a minister.

One of the ways that you control people is to colonize their faith, to make them think that the way they believe is inferior. If someone can subjugate your faith and make you feel that it is God’s will, then they can control you not only from a place of government but from a place of God. That’s scary! So, I had to start my decolonization process from the church.

I was taught that God did not look like me. So, here I am, a little Black girl growing up in the 60s, integrating schools, and my life was hell. I endured a lot of violence and I thought I was at the bottom. I believed that was why I was getting beat up and bullied, because on this hierarchy of blessings, God blessed white men, white women, white boys, white girls, then Black men, Black women, Black boys, and Black girls.

I used to believe that God ran out of blessings when it got to me. So, my life was hard because God was tired by the time it got to me. Can you imagine that? Being 5 and 6 years old thinking God just ran out of blessings because you are inherently at the bottom?

When I told my dad this, he took all of the pictures of Jesus out of the church because they were all of a white Jesus, a white God. So, the decolonization process started when my father said,

“Listen, you have to to understand that you are born in God’s image and I’m going to make sure you don’t have unconscious or subliminal messages that God can’t look like you.”

That was the first way that I started seeing that God looks like me being in my gender and my race. That’s when I started understanding how important it was because I thought I was nothing because I was at the bottom. I had to change how I thought.

I had to decolonize my mind. I started learning this message in Catholic school that because I was Black, I was supposed to be a slave. Thank God my dad was a progressive thinker! I had to reframe my beliefs that I was meant to be a slave to another person. Instead, I realized that I was supposed to be a servant to and a steward for God on this earth.

My decolonization journey had to start with faith because faith was the center of my life and when a person tells you that you are nothing and you believe that God is cosigning that, you will never see yourself as powerful. You will never see yourself as loving, gifted, and worthy. And if I don’t see myself as worthy, I don’t see people who look like me as worthy.

That’s the danger when you don’t see yourself in the image of God.

With decolonization at work, that can sometimes be the toughest for me. There are all these “rules” or ways that we’re “supposed” to do. How does that show up for you and how do you manage that?

I think the hardest challenge is that people have not decolonized their minds to see brillaince in packages outside of whiteness.

For me, I don’t get to worry about procrastination or imposter syndrome. Instead, I have to worry if you see me worthy as a human? Do you see that I can be both brown and brilliant?

I have 2 margiinalized identities based on my gender and my color nad brilliance comes in a whole bunch of different packages.

Most of the work that I have to do in corporate America is protecting my sanity and protecting my wholeness in a culture that I always have to defend who I am, to prove why I should be at the table, to make sure I’m not invisibilized at meetings, and making sure that I am aware of people’s perceptions of me as a Black woman.

Even though companies say they are commited to diversity, equity, and inclusion, I do a lot of work in corporations where whiteness is still centered. If whiteness and Eurocentric perspectives are still the norm, anything that deviates from that norm is othered.

Tune into episode 157 of Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast to hear the rest of SharRon Jamison’s interview.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll love the rest of our Decolonizing Your Life series!

156 | Reclaiming your Roots with Emily Anne Brant

In this series, we are going to look at how we can decolonize our professional lives, our dreams, our spirits, our wellbeing and we are starting off with a wonderful guest, Emily Anne Brant – an Indigenous author, speaker, & mentor on a mission to decolonize the personal development industry. No matter what, I know you’ll get something out of these episodes, love.

158 | Reclaiming your Community with Marla Teyolia

When we think of decolonizing our lives, that is not a solo mission. It is an endeavor, a journey that we take in community. In this week’s interview, what really stood out to me was the importance of and the power of community as Marla Teyolia so vulnerably shared her story of decolonizing her life. I can’t wait for you to get to know her better.

159 | Reclaiming your Self with Asha Frost

Our final interview in the Decolonizing your Life series is with someone so incredibly special to me: Asha Frost. I truly see Asha as a changemaker. Asha shares openly about how difficult it was for her to use her voice and how she listened to her body and spirit in order to reclaim her self and her courage.

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About your host, Shirin Eskandani