Finding Fertile Ground: Stories of Grit, Resilience, and Fertile Ground

Dr. Ronnie Taylor was born to extremely young parents who divorced after a few years of marriage. His mom converted to Mormonism and moved the family to Salt Lake City to start a new life. Unfortunately, the missionary who converted and recruited her failed to tell the church Ronnie’s family was Black. They weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms.His mom worked and went to college full time, and eventually she remarried. Growing up in Utah as a Black Mormon was tough. Ronnie moved out when he...

Dr. Melissa Jenkins Mangili is a neuropsychologist and medical school faculty member who has reinvented herself as a fashion and fitness model. Her life began with grit and resilience. She and her three siblings were was raised in poverty in rural Maine by a single quadriplegic mother. “The nice thing about being from a small town is that everybody knows each other…and rallied to help us. (My mother) couldn't drive at first. She had to relearn how to drive and get an adapted c...

Vernita L. Bowe is a survivor. As a smaller-than-average child, she experienced bullying in school. When she grew up she married the wrong man and wasn’t able to get out of that marriage for 24 years, three kids later.Parenting has been about huge loves and losses for Vernita. Her middle son landed in prison, and four years ago her oldest son Byron died in a car accident.“You really don't wanna bury your children. But what I've learned is all of the promises are gone…all of the things that yo...

Happy Pride! What better month to launch this fun episode and celebrate a wonderful queer story.Growing up in Germany, when Nicole moved to the U.S. as a teen she never felt like she fit in. Then she joined the military during Desert Storm, and she ended up playing Taps for 600 funerals of her colleagues. That nearly broke her. She married a man before coming out as gay, and her dad and sisters rejected her.Around the same time of that rejection, her beloved mom—the only family member who tru...

This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Cheryl Parks, sales and mindset coach. Cheryl works with my business coach, Liz J. Simpson, and has provided me invaluable advice and confidence boosts as I reboot my business. Cheryl and I immediately connected, and I was especially lucky to meet her in person in early March, since the Big Money Movement coaching program happens all on Zoom and social media. It was a delight to delve into her background and discover how many w...

Michele Heyward is a civil engineer who built the U.S. power grid. Now she's a tech startup founder building the future of work at PositiveHire. Michele grew up in rural South Carolina in a three-bedroom house full of kids. She had four siblings. She describes herself as the weird kid, really good at math.Encouraged to pursue science and engineering, she went to engineering camp 30 years ago at 13 years old.“But what really got me sold on engineering was when I was 12, a Category Five hu...

When Gresh was a kid, his military dad worked overseas for a year and this English major/entrepreneur started a family newspaper to keep his whole family up to date on what was going on. His first business was born!This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Gresham Harkless, Jr., founder of CEO Blog Nation and Blue 16 Media, and host of the I AM CEO Podcast + CEO Chat Podcast. Gresh graduated from Howard University and Georgetown and has interviewed more than 1,000 CEOs, ent...

This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Chantal Cox, a special educator, author, speaker, and Transformation NeuroCoach™. Chantal lives in Wichita, Kansas, now but she grew up all over the world. Her birth dad is Mexican, but her mom remarried when she was three years old. Her adopted dad was in the army, so the family moved every two years. They lived in several states as well as Panama, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands. Chantal was born a shy, timid introvert. ...

This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Devin Tomiak, founder of The Biggies Cards.After losing her youngest brother Grant to suicide 7 years ago, Devin Tomiak became driven to understand resilience--in particular, how to build resilience in kids. As a mom of two young boys, her preoccupation had a unique urgency. She created The Biggies cards, an innovative, research-based take on conversation cards designed to spark fun discussions about BIG social emotional concep...

This week on the Finding Fertile Ground podcast, I interview Mahlena-Rae Johnson. Mahlena was born in Arkansas but grew up on the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Mahlena is a speaker, comedian, author, and communication expert for introverts.After graduating from the School of Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University, earning her MBA at the University of Southern California, and working a variety of jobs, she felt her potential was being wasted in Los Angeles. She d...