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A man scammed twenty-six women out of $1.3 million, and the commentary went exactly where it always goes: why did these women fall for it? That's the wrong question. Season 2 opens with a conversation about discernment, not as a personality trait some of us were born with and some of us weren't, but as a gift of the Spirit that can be prayed for, practiced, and strengthened. Anchored in Matthew 7:6, we sit with what Jesus meant about pearls and swine, and why that teaching is about far more than your possessions or your personality. The pearl is you.

We go three places: pray for discernment, know your value, and establish your boundaries. We talk about judging by fruit rather than promises, believing people when they show you who they are, and why some people simply aren't positioned to receive what you're carrying. Plus, I share what's ahead this season, a recap of this summer's Work of Your Hands coaching series, and a new way for us to be in conversation — you can text me now, and I read every single one.

Additional Episode Resources:

• Ready to get insights and resources into your inbox? Sign up for my email list here. 
• If you want to see a brilliant Black woman in action, uncovering the problematic fruit of “Daejon Love, you’ll want to watch “DEEP DIVE: Daejon Love’s $1.3M SCAM | 26 Women, Fake NFL Career & Court Documents Breakdown” by Amber Off Record.

Connect With Me

Want to go deeper? Visit www.revneichelle.com to explore my work, my ministry, and how we can grow together.

Let’s stay connected! Follow me on Instagram and Substack for more inspiration and continued conversation.

Ready to transform? Apply for coaching - I work with ambitious Black women who are ready to partner with God to create lives they love.

Questions? Feedback? Just want to say hello? Drop me a line - I’d love to hear how this podcast is landing in your life!

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Season 2 opens with a conversation I’ve been holding close. I’m joined by my dear friend the Reverend Dr. Melva Sampson, a woman of many gifts and facets. She is a preacher, practical theologian, professor, festival co-founder, and the visionary behind the Pink Robe Chronicles, which this month becomes a book! The Pink Robe Chronicles: Womanist Wisdom for Healing, Liberation and Love, with a foreword by Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry, is absolutely stunning. Please do yourself a favor and get your copy. 

In this episode, we explore what it means to be a multi-gifted, multifaceted, and multi-vocal Black woman in a world that tries to convince us to “pick one thing and stay in our lane.” Melva powerfully reminds us that, “to ignore the multi-parts of you is to ignore the multi-gifted God who created you.”

We talk about the years of labor behind work that looks effortless from the outside, why there’s no gumbo without the roux, how a single word from a mentor freed her to say no, and what it means to move from scarcity into kindred abundance. 

Connect with Dr. Melva Sampson:

• Website: drmelvasampson.com
• Pink Robe Chronicles streams every Sunday at 8:00 AM EST on Facebook Live
• Instagram & Facebook: @PinkRobeChronicles and Melva Sampson
• One Love Festival (Winston-Salem, NC): 1lovefestival.com
• Assistant Teaching Professor of Preaching and Practical Theology, Wake Forest University School of Divinity

Grab your journal for this one, sisters. It’s full.

Connect With Me

Want to go deeper? Visit www.revneichelle.com to explore my work, my ministry, and how we can grow together.

Let’s stay connected! Follow me on Instagram and Substack for more inspiration and continued conversation.

Ready to transform? Apply for coaching - I work with ambitious Black women who are ready to partner with God to create lives they love.

Questions? Feedback? Just want to say hello? Drop me a line - I’d love to hear how this podcast is landing in your life!

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If it has been a week, this episode is for you. In addition to the collective weight of living through this socio-political era, many of us are navigating interpersonal and personal hardship. Maybe it was work. Maybe it was a relationship. Maybe it was the weight of simply being a Black woman in spaces that were not built to hold you.

But here's what we're moving away from today: the idea that we to surrender our peace and calm to the hard things. No, sis! Today, I'm giving you six strategies to help you shake the dust off your spirit and get back to it.  

Six Practices to Reset and Recalibrate:

1. Name what's real - Give yourself permission to be honest about what happened before jumping to gratitude (Psalm 142:1-2).
2. Return to your body - Rough weeks often live below the neck. Rest, move, eat, breathe. Physical care is spiritual care (1 Kings 19:5-8).
3. Tell yourself the truth about yourself - Not what the week said about you, but what God says about you (Psalm 139:14).
4. Reconnect with your why - A hard week cannot touch your calling (Jeremiah 29:11).
5. Do one small, sacred thing - Sometimes, just one intentional act can lead to the reset you're seeking. (Lamentations 3:22-23).
6. Get up - Know the difference between resting and ruminating. When you shift your body, you shift your atmosphere (John 5:8).

The Challenge: Pick ONE of these six practices and do it TODAY. Not this week. Not when things slow down. Today. Because the goal is not to recover from hard weeks faster - it's to be so rooted that hard weeks meet a woman who is already grounded.

Connect With Me

Want to go deeper? Visit www.revneichelle.com to explore my work, my ministry, and how we can grow together.

Let’s stay connected! Follow me on Instagram and Substack for more inspiration and continued conversation.

Ready to transform? Apply for coaching - I work with ambitious Black women who are ready to partner with God to create lives they love.

Questions? Feedback? Just want to say hello? Drop me a line - I’d love to hear how this podcast is landing in your life!

Text Me!

… and more Lessons from Walk Through Fire by Sheila Johnson 

Book: Walk Through Fire by Sheila Johnson

Happy Women’s History Month! This month is an extension of Black History Month for me - we continue celebrating the lives, legacies, contributions, and stories of Black women. In this special episode, I’m sharing lessons I took from Sheila Johnson’s memoir Walk Through Fire - the story of America’s first Black female billionaire and co-founder of BET.

This isn’t a typical episode, but I wanted stay in your ear and share some powerful insights from a Black woman’s story. Sheila Johnson’s journey - from a traumatic 35-year marriage to building a new life as a hospitality industry titan - offers so much wisdom about healing, identity-making, and becoming.

Key Lessons Shared:
1.The power of a measured response - How to respond to provocations and insecurities without losing your dignity

2.Use your single years wisely - Single seasons are for exploring your childhood stories, clarifying your identity and needs, and learning to love your own company - not just healing from the last relationship

3.Be discerning about whose advice you take - Some people will advise you out of their own spiritual deficit and unhealed experiences

4.Honor your journey, even as you take it - Accept your story for what it is, own it, but also recognize when “I’m not ready” becomes the thing keeping you stuck in trauma

5.Life is sometimes a matter of inches - Celebrate your process and growth as it happens, don’t despise small steps and small wins

6.The power of creating something - How creation becomes part of healing and identity-making. We don’t have to wait on God to perform miracles when the revelation is in what we create one step at a time

Plus: Updates on upcoming events including the Skylark documentary screening with Dr. Yanique Redwood (March 22, Atlanta), Seven Last Words service at Ebenezer Baptist Church (Good Friday), and the Greater Allen Cathedral Women’s Conference (April 9-11, Brooklyn).

Connect With Me

Want to go deeper? Visit www.revneichelle.com to explore my work, my ministry, and how we can grow together.

Let’s stay connected! Follow me on Instagram and Substack for more inspiration and continued conversation.

Ready to transform? Apply for coaching - I work with ambitious Black women who are ready to partner with God to create lives they love.

Questions? Feedback? Just want to say hello? Drop me a line - I’d love to hear how this podcast is landing in your life!

Text Me!

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:11 - "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart."

Summary: Are you sensing something shifting inside you even though nothing has changed on the outside? This episode is for you. I'm talking about the invisible shift - that inner transformation that happens before anything changes in your circumstances. The shift in how you feel, how you think, how you show up, before your life reflects that change.

Drawing parallels to the Invisible Institution (enslaved people's secret worship that laid the groundwork for the Black Church), nature's underground growth patterns, and my own story of sensing a job ending weeks before it happened, I explore how God transforms us from the inside out. The inner knowing that comes before outer transition. The spiritual preparation that happens underground before anything breaks through the soil.

I share what happened when I tried to negotiate with my spirit's warning instead of surrendering to it, and why the invisible shift is actually God's mercy - giving us time to prepare internally for external change we can't yet see.

Exercise: The Noticing Practice - (1) Notice the inner shift (what's changing in how you feel, think, show up), (2) Sit with it (what is this shift trying to tell you?), (3) Practice surrender (where are you negotiating instead of trusting?).

Connect With Me

Want to go deeper? Visit www.revneichelle.com to explore my work, my ministry, and how we can grow together.

Let’s stay connected! Follow me on Instagram and Substack for more inspiration and continued conversation.

Ready to transform? Apply for coaching - I work with ambitious Black women who are ready to partner with God to create lives they love.

Questions? Feedback? Just want to say hello? Drop me a line - I’d love to hear how this podcast is landing in your life!

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Scripture: Song of Solomon 8:4 - "Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires."

Summary: This Black History Month, we're celebrating Black love in all its forms - self-love, romantic love, sisterhood love. But not love as something that just happens to us. Love as something we choose, something we rise in, something that becomes a vehicle for our transformation.

Drawing from some of Toni Morrison’s powerful words in her novel, Jazz, I'm exploring what it means to approach love with agency and intentionality. Love as a classroom where we're constantly learning. Love as a mirror where we see ourselves in new lights. Love as a slow, long walk where giving and receiving happen at once.

I'm answering questions from a former student about what rising in love looks like in practice and how to maintain individuality while building relationship. And I'm naming the conditions that help us rise in love instead of falling into it: self-knowledge, readiness, reciprocity, and the wisdom to wait until love can be awakened at the right time.

Exercise: The Love Assessment - (1) Assess your readiness for love, (2) Evaluate your current relationships (are you rising or falling?), (3) Name your conditions - the non-negotiables that help you rise.

Connect With Me

Want to go deeper? Visit www.revneichelle.com to explore my work, my ministry, and how we can grow together.

Let’s stay connected! Follow me on Instagram and Substack for more inspiration and continued conversation.

Ready to transform? Apply for coaching - I work with ambitious Black women who are ready to partner with God to create lives they love.

Questions? Feedback? Just want to say hello? Drop me a line - I’d love to hear how this podcast is landing in your life!

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Scripture: Matthew 26:39, 42: Jesus's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane

Summary: What if prayer isn't just something we add to our personal development journey, but the foundation of it? In this episode, I'm exploring prayer as the primary site where we partner with God - the place where we self-empty only to become filled, where we take our questions and fears and find the courage to press forward toward our destiny.

Drawing from Susan L. Taylor's wisdom and fascinating research from Harvard Business Review, I'm sharing how prayer has led me through major vocational shifts - including the decision to restart this podcast and how I'm currently praying through building a bridge to my next chapter.

Jesus in Gethsemane gives us the model: honest, vulnerable prayer that brings our real desires to God while surrendering to divine wisdom. This isn't "name it and claim it" - this is the kind of prayer that transforms and opens us to supernatural power we can't access on our own.

Exercise: The Focused Prayer Journal - Choose one prayer request about your work, purpose, or destiny. For seven days, go deeper instead of wider, tracking daily revelations and watching how God progressively reveals clarity through focused, expectant prayer.

Useful Links:

All About Loveby Susan L. Taylor

Harvard Business Review: “Entrepreneurs Feel Closer to God Than The Rest of Us Do.”

HBR Working Knowledge: “Reflection: The Pause That Brings Peace and Productivity"

Connect With Me

Want to go deeper? Visit www.revneichelle.com to explore my work, my ministry, and how we can grow together.

Let’s stay connected! Follow me on Instagram and Substack for more inspiration and continued conversation.

Ready to transform? Apply for coaching - I work with ambitious Black women who are ready to partner with God to create lives they love.

Questions? Feedback? Just want to say hello? Drop me a line - I’d love to hear how this podcast is landing in your life!

Text Me!

Scripture: Isaiah 40:31 - "But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles"

Summary: It's my birthday episode, and I'm celebrating with a bold declaration: Old is the goal! In a culture that worships youth and fears aging, I'm claiming the privilege of growing older with my whole chest. This episode is about what my 40th year taught me, what I'm praying for in my 41st, and why the ease we pray for is often found in our willingness to let life's changes actually change us.

I'm sharing the power of surrender - not giving up, but letting go of old standards of energy, tolerance, and productivity that belonged to previous versions of me. I'm talking about why my prayer for 41 is less about transformation and more about renewal - being revitalized in the woman I've become rather than becoming someone else entirely.

Plus, I'm answering a beautiful listener question about self-forgiveness that connects perfectly to everything I've been learning about surrender and grace.

Exercise: The Renewal Practice - (1) Name what you're ready to release (old standards, fixed stories, resistance to change), (2) Practice the gratitude shift (people who sustained you, moments that carried you, simple blessings), (3) Write your prayer for renewal.

Connect With Me

Want to go deeper? Visit www.revneichelle.com to explore my work, my ministry, and how we can grow together.

Let’s stay connected! Follow me on Instagram and Substack for more inspiration and continued conversation.

Ready to transform? Apply for coaching - I work with ambitious Black women who are ready to partner with God to create lives they love.

Questions? Feedback? Just want to say hello? Drop me a line - I’d love to hear how this podcast is landing in your life!

Text Me!

In this New Year episode, I'm sharing something I'm living in real time - a different way of approaching 2026. I'm off to a slow start this year, and I'm completely okay with it. Actually, I'm more than okay - I'm intentional about it. Going slow is allowing me to ground for the year in ways that rushing never could.

Drawing from Deborah's story in Judges 4, we return to one of my favorite examples of seasonal leadership. Deborah wasn't always on the battlefield - most of the time, she was under her palm tree. This was her primary posture of leadership, and it's exactly where we need to be in January.

This episode is an invitation to plan differently this year - planning backwards from your values and vision instead of forward from obligation and hustle. Instead of setting goals you'll abandon by February, I'm teaching you how to think in quarters, how to create rhythms that honor different seasons, and how to be strategic about the support you need before you start building.

I'm sharing three mindsets that are shaping how I'm approaching 2026, and a grounded planning practice to help you think and discern with intentionality and strategy. 

Exercise: The Grounded Planning Practice - A five-step process to start 2026 from groundedness instead of franticness: 

(1) Name your gains from 2024

(2) Clarify your 3-5 core values for this year

(3) Plan your Q1 vision (just January-March, not the whole year), 

(4)  Identify your support needs to make that vision sustainable,

(5) Create your winter ritual - one grounding practice you'll commit to this quarter.

Connect With Me

Want to go deeper? Visit www.revneichelle.com to explore my work, my ministry, and how we can grow together.

Let’s stay connected! Follow me on Instagram and Substack for more inspiration and continued conversation.

Ready to transform? Apply for coaching - I work with ambitious Black women who are ready to partner with God to create lives they love.

Questions? Feedback? Just want to say hello? Drop me a line - I’d love to hear how this podcast is landing in your life!

Text Me!

Scripture: Psalm 77:11-13

As we close out 2025 and prepare to step into 2026, this episode is about something essential: reflection, release, and learning to flow instead of force. This is my end-of-year offering - stories, wisdom, highlights, and what I'm choosing to let go.

Drawing from Psalm 77:11-13, where the psalmist reflects on God's deeds and wonders, we explore what it means to look back on our year with both honesty and grace. Because here's what I believe: the year wasn't just hardship and lessons. There was also joy! And I'm refusing to let the hard moments eclipse the beautiful ones.

I'm sharing three key lessons that shaped my 2025:

Flow, Not Force - When you've crossed over into trying to control the uncontrollable, you've moved from flowing in the will and power of God to forcing things in your own power. I'm talking about the exhaustion that comes from trying to make things happen instead of partnering with what God is already doing on your behalf.

Align Your Efforts - Don't exert effort in one area of your life only to negate it with decisions you're making in other areas. This lesson showed up for me in unexpected ways, and I'm sharing how misalignment was costing me peace and progress.

Love Your Body As It Is - Even as you work to transform it into the body you want to live in. This one is tender and necessary, especially for Black women who've been taught that our bodies are never quite right, just as they are.

But I'm not just talking about lessons - I'm also talking about moments of grace and goodness. A lot of my joy this year happened because others held doors open for me to be in new and exciting spaces. I call this practice "adorning my crown," or, recognizing that I didn't just survive 2025, I also thrived. There were moments of genuine delight, breakthrough, and blessing that deserve to be named and celebrated.

And finally, I'm naming what I'm releasing as I step into 2026.

This episode is an invitation for you to do the same sacred work of year-end reflection. To sit with your lessons even if it means revisiting hard stories. To adorn your crown by finding the joy even among the ashes. And to release what's not yours to carry into the new year so you can step into 2026 with more space, more love, and more flow.

Exercise: The Year-End Reflection Practice

1. Reflect on the lessons - What did 2025 teach you? Sit with the hard stories long enough to extract the wisdom.
2. Adorn your crown - Name the moments of joy. Where did you thrive? Who held doors open for you? What jewels belong in your crown?
3. Release what's not yours to carry - What are you choosing to let go? Name it specifically so you can step into 2026 lighter and freer.

Connect With Me

Want to go deeper? Visit www.revneichelle.com to explore my work, my ministry, and how we can grow together.

Let’s stay connected! Follow me on Instagram and Substack for more inspiration and continued conversation.

Ready to transform? Apply for coaching - I work with ambitious Black women who are ready to partner with God to create lives they love.

Questions? Feedback? Just want to say hello? Drop me a line - I’d love to hear how this podcast is landing in your life!