Ask Dr Sujay powerful podcast with power-filled women: Meet Dr Anita Gould

What if the greatest gift you'll ever discover is already inside you?

In this inspiring episode of Ask Dr. Sujay, Ambassador Susan Johnson Cook welcomes Rev. Dr. Anita Gould for a heartfelt conversation about faith, purpose, leadership, and the lifelong journey of discovering the gifts God has placed within each of us. From her remarkable career in federal government to ministry, education, and mentoring women in leadership, Dr. Gould shares how embracing her God-given calling transformed every area of her life.

Together, they explore spiritual gifts, healthy leadership, overcoming insecurity, navigating family responsibilities, publishing your life's message, and why it's never too late to step into your next season. Dr. Gould also shares her perspective on embracing artificial intelligence as a tool for advancing your purpose while remaining grounded in faith, reminding listeners that technology can never replace the wisdom and guidance of the Great I Am.

If you've ever questioned your calling, struggled with self-doubt, or wondered whether your best years are still ahead, this conversation will encourage you to trust God's timing, embrace your unique gifts, and boldly pursue the purpose you were created to fulfill.

Because your calling isn't something you create.

It's something you discover, embrace, and share with the world.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Do you ever wonder how faith fits into leadership or how to lead with both power and purpose? If you're looking for wisdom that bridges culture, confidence, and calling, then this podcast is for you. Here's Global Diplomat, Business Strategist, and Women's Empowerment icon, your host, Ambassador Susan Johnson Cook.

SPEAKER_02 0:30

Hi, I'm Dr. Sujay, and you've come to Ask Dr. Sujay. We are so excited to have you. My podcast with power and powerful people who are on the move. And today I'm so excited and ignited and delighted to have Dr. Anita Gould, longtime friend, sister, a mentor from our Black Women in Ministry program, but has a journey of her own. And today we're going to talk about it. So, Dr. Anita Gould, welcome. Thank you, Ambassador Suche. So glad to have you in my living room. Oh, it's good to be here. I think this is about a 30-year journey of us together. Yes, it is. We met first in federal government. And what were you doing then?

SPEAKER_01 1:08

I was a personnel specialist at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Well, at HUD. At HUD.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Okay, was Secretary Cisneros there then?

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Cisneros was there.

SPEAKER_02 1:17

And then we came in and did a special action office for President Clinton. And we developed really the first faith-based initiatives. We didn't have a name for it then. They did not have a name.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

I had been there since the Carter administration.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

Wow. Okay. So was it an appointed or you were a federal employee?

SPEAKER_01 1:35

I was a federal employee. I was a HUD urban intern. Really?

SPEAKER_02 1:38

Talk to us about what was that?

SPEAKER_01 1:40

300 people vibe for 30 positions in administration. And we learned the entire department, all the major program areas. Most interesting part is that I never applied for the job. Wow. I was moving to Houston, Texas. Really? And I got a call to see if I would come in for an assessment center for 300 people. I wasn't going to do that. Wow. But I did. And to this day, I don't know who submitted my application. Now this is post-college. This was post-college. Wow. I worked for Federal Highway Administration for three years. And then I got this job at HUD and I retired after 25 years from that agency. Oh my goodness. So you're an HBCU grad Morgan? Morgan State College University. Yes. Yeah, Baltimore, Maryland. National Treasure, and we are so proud. And we're proud of you too and the school. So where's your hometown? My hometown, I'm one of the few native Washingtonians.

SPEAKER_02 2:38

You're one of the few, yeah. I've transitioned through there a few times and back, and but wow. So you were in Washington under were you under Mayor Barry? As well as some others. Washington? Who are your mayors when you remember?

SPEAKER_01 2:52

I worked at the Eastern Branch Boys Club under Mayor Barry's Youth Opportunity Corps. Oh my goodness. So you really knew that.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

And he's still popular even in his death. The mayor for life and death. What do you think was his magic touch? People.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Because he loved the people. He loved the people. He lived in Southeast with the people and he cared about young people. Yes. He cared about actually the whole community. He loved Washington, D.C. And he lived with us.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

So quite a legacy for him. Absolutely. What do you think your legacy, what do you hope your legacy will be?

SPEAKER_01 3:30

My prayer is that my legacy will be one who empowers people with the gifting from the inside out. It happens because I did not have that power as I was growing up. Okay. And once I discovered who God created me to be and I embraced that, it's been all steam ahead ever since. So 25 years in HUD. That's right. And then where did you go from there? And from there, I went into ministry. Okay. And I've spent the next 20 years exploring. I've got my Masters of Divinity from Howard University.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

Howard University, another HBCU. HBCU, you know. Yeah, you know. I got it from the business school, but it was an executive certificate program.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Which was wonderful. It was. And Howard has such a wonderful reputation for certificates. As well as graduate and undergraduate degrees. Exactly. Such a contribution in every way.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

So what was the church you ended up in the AME church, but you were Baptist at once? I was Baptist till I was 40.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

And when did the shift happen? What made the shift happen? There was, and this is where I am now, there came a sermon about spiritual gifts. Mm-hmm. And I often wondered what are they because it was not being taught. Right. And so I started visiting in AME Church under Frank Madison Reading. Alright. My spiritual mother loved Frank Madison.

SPEAKER_02 4:54

And my demon, our classmate. All right.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

And so one day we were late for church, going from DC to Baltimore, and the young lady said, Well, I know another church. And so we went to Glendale, Maryland. Yes. And there was Lee P. Washington. I didn't know his name at the time.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

And he would open up the congregation. The invitation was, come and offer your gifts to the Lord. I'm like, whoa. Wow. And I had written down a slip of paper in the Baptist book. Gifts you can open before Christmas. No, you did not. I still have that piece of paper when he affirmed it and confirmed it. And then he opened up a Christian educational ministry. My money started going there before I did. My goodness. Six years it took me to make that transition from my Baptist church of my youth to this new denomination that I knew nothing about. Now, have the Baptist Church affirmed your calling? No, I had not been ordained. Actually, Reverend Charles Green was going to be my catechist. Really?

SPEAKER_02 6:03

Reverend Charles Green, for those who don't know, was one of the men who was the president of the Hemphard Ministers Conference many years before me, but became a spiritual father for me. So when I became the first female president, he said, I want you to be the first lady president, and I want to live to see you as that first lady president. So Reverend Charles Green, a special man. Yes, he was. Yeah, we had special dads back then.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

That's right. Fathers in the Faith. And I supported him when he had the vision for the convocation center that the Hampton Conference is in now. Oh wow. Because I go back to Ogden Hall. Yes. And when Bishop Bryant first came to do his sermon. Yes. And I remember what he said during that Hampton Conference. The only cure for labor is delivery. Oh wow. And that is where I am now. Are you in the delivery room? I'm in the delivery room and I'm ready to give birth. I really am. I've been teaching spiritual gifts for 20 some odd years. How long has the labor been? The labor has been for almost 30 years. Actually, it's been 50 years because my education, my call to be a teacher, came when I was working in that Eastern Ranch Boys Club under the program by Marion Barry.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

Oh wow. It all comes together. So if I had to induce labor, that's what they had to do with me. They had to induce labor because Samuel, that doctor you met, didn't want to come out. But so you've been in labor, and what is the trigger that says now it's time to give birth?

SPEAKER_01 7:34

The trigger comes when you know all the other doors are closing. Wow. Not opening as in physical labor, but when all the other things are closing and you can't go but one way. That's a good analogy. Wow. It's time to come through the canal. Okay, okay. And come forth.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

And here it is.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

So let me be reintroduced to the new Dr. Anita Gould. A word we found during the Say Love by the Sea conference. We're in Leto Beach Resort in Sarasota, and we just had Sailor by the Sea 2026, and one of the words was allow me to reintroduce myself. So who is Anita Gould?

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Allow me to reintroduce myself. I am the Reverend Dr. Anita Joy School and a discernment advocate. I love it. One who introduces others to spiritual gifts that they might know the gift inside of them that they have been empowered with. We uncover those things that have been keeping us bound.

SPEAKER_02 8:41

Wow. So when we first started the Real Black Women in Ministry program that you've been under wonderful mentor for of a woman named Masua Stevens Morrison, I said, make a list. The first column is who am I? Who do I want to be? is the second column. What will it take to get there? So when you list to who am I, you just reintroduced yourself, but you also now are going into a matriarchal position in your family. Um, a recent death of a mother, and my condolences to you, an executor of an estate. So when you have that list, how do you prioritize, which is that last column? What will it take to get there? What do you need to do at this stage of life?

SPEAKER_01 9:21

I believe my priority is I'm shifting for myself and I'm feeling the freedom that I have to make choices, and I have the freedom to travel and to serve. But my calling now is to do what God has called me with publishing. That's first. That has always been on the low end, but I move closer to publishing now. What do you want to publish? I have within me five books that have been birthed through my doctoral project. And I've been struggling with that for the past five years. What was your doctoral project? My doctoral project was spiritual gifts to grow healthy congregations in the capital district of the African Washington Conference, African Methodist Episcopal Church. But the key was spiritual gifts for church growth. Healthy congregations. Yeah. Because all growth, as I learned from my pastor, is not healthy.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

Well, also with plants, you'll see they're still growing, but they've got these little brown things, and you have to clip what's not growing appropriately. That's right. So what if you had to clip in your life?

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Oh, in my whole talk about circles of friends, if you will. Yes. And those which we learned this week. There are people who will come in and invite other people in who are not spiritually or like-minded. Right. And I've just very easily just no longer in this room.

SPEAKER_02 10:51

I understand that. So my four words are consolidate, collaborate, delegate, and eliminate. And that's sometimes eliminating things, and sometimes you can eliminate people who were good or maybe not even good for a season, but they certainly are not right for right now. That's right. And so you don't want to have a heart attack. You want to have a heart that's thriving and thriving appropriately. What else do you need to clip in your life?

SPEAKER_01 11:16

I need to clip the sense that sometimes I feel there's an inadequacy in myself. I'm still trying to overcome that. But as I pray, and I said, my prayers are being answered almost instantaneously. So these insecurities that I feel are really brought on by the family that I am now the matriarch of.

SPEAKER_02 11:39

Okay, and so you can identify the source of them. And that's part of really growth. Once you can identify where this is all coming from, then you can manage it. You can't manage what you can't identify. That's it. You know, and so that's good for you. So how many siblings did you have? I am the oldest of six. And they're all alive too.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

And there are two remaining.

SPEAKER_02 12:00

Oh wow, two remaining. Okay, okay. I'm sorry, there are four of us remaining. Okay, two who are deceased. Okay, okay. So and matriarch and executive of your mother's estate, and so all the things that come in dynamics around the death of the mother. That's right. You know?

SPEAKER_01 12:16

And my dad passed in 2004, mom passed in 24. Okay. And they collaborated. Yeah. And so what I'm feeling now is that I have responsibility for things that they agreed on. Yeah, which is so nice. And now the siblings, I have one in particular, who is saying, why you? Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

So I have Well, matriarchy is very interesting because it's not just the eldest, although chronologically people say that, but in a sense, people have to make you matriarchy. Your deceased parents desire was for you to be the one. But like I have cousins and nieces and nephews, and I am the eldest daughter now on both sides of the family. And it doesn't always mean that everybody wants me to be the lead. Exactly. And so you just kind of navigate it, just as we've had to navigate through life, and those who want who I am or what I have will come. And those who don't, it's okay. And for this season, we're okay. You know? That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

And if they don't come back, we're okay too. Well, what I did, I have my sister, who's the next oldest. Uh-huh. We share this executive ship. Okay. Okay. Did not do it on my own. Right. I did intentionally, and she's the one who has the optimism in everything. Okay. So it balances the balance, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 13:41

What are some of your dreams besides publishing?

SPEAKER_01 13:44

Oh my goodness. I now have this bug to travel. Okay. And just kind of locally up and down the East Coast. Yes. But I see that is something that's coming back now. I have a friend who it just came back from Europe, and I want to see those things.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

Good. I say dreams don't have an expiration date. And you're never too young and you're never too old. I think one of my the gifts my parents gave me was like we hit the road almost as soon as we were born. Back then we couldn't fly a lot of places, but we could drive and just being with my parents and seeing things I hadn't seen before. And then somewhere around seventh grade, my father discovered Puerto Rico. And, you know, from New York, there were direct flights. And we started going to Puerto Rico as a family, seventh, eighth, ninth grade, and then in tenth grade, I had been bit by my own bug, and I got to study in Spain, in Malaysia, Spain, and they let me go on my own because they're like, you know what to do. You know, you've been trained. So what seeds were planted in you when you could say, I know what to do?

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Oh, actually, they were implanted by my community. Talk a little later. They were implanted by my community, and I know that because there wasn't a lot going on in the house. There was love in the house. But I don't know as I reintroduced myself, I am the daughter. I am the daughter of a former sharecropper.

SPEAKER_02 15:14

Okay, and I'm the daughter of two former sharecroppers.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Yeah. So my dad was from Pennsylvania. They were farmers. Right. Mama was a sharecropper from North Carolina. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

What part of North Carolina? They may have been in the same field. One mother was Monroe. Wasn't the long way. Rocky Mount. Rocky Mountain. I remember my mother talking about that a lot.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

So what seeds, because you know their history, what seeds have been planted in you to not end up back in the fields?

SPEAKER_01 15:44

My dad insisted that I would not be a secretary. But he also let me know that one day computers were going to take those jobs. Now he had that for he was born in 1917. He had that foresight. Wow, that's amazing. One thing I had to excel in was math. And so being an elementary school teacher, I also explored being a mathematician.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

So you worked for HUD, you're a minister, and in between you were an elementary school teacher?

SPEAKER_01 16:11

I never, it took 30 years for me to teach elementary school after I graduated.

SPEAKER_02 16:16

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

My first second grade class was after I retired, and Reed Temple opened up a Christian academy. Okay. And I taught second grade, which is what the Lord told me. And how many years did you teach? I taught one year. He keeps his promise.

SPEAKER_02 16:34

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

So at least you got the. But you weren't supposed to stay.

SPEAKER_02 16:37

No, no, no. So I learned that lesson. So your dad had the foresight in terms of computers coming. Now we've been exposed to AI. Oh my. And we have the greatest teaching this week at Salem by the Sea. What's one thing that you want to say to those who are watching about AI? What's your foresight for them?

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Do not be afraid of AI. I have been very skeptical. I've tried to take everything off of my computer, and now I have a new friend to play with. I've learned how to help AI understand me and my language and how I can communicate through AI. And that has helped me immensely. In fact, advancing how I'm going to proceed with publishing these books.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

So the A is for advancing, and the I is I'm going to do it. So we learned from a wonderful woman named Barbara Pender, and you can Google her or find her on LinkedIn, and she's going to be a guest also at Ask Dr. Sujet. But I also said to her, we need to have the debate about the AI meets the great I am. In other words, it's not replacing God, it cannot. But to be able to handle it because God gives to each generation new tools and skills. So to her point, don't be afraid of it. Use it ethically and make it with social responsibility. And you can see the difference it can make. So the A is for advancing. I is like, I'm going to do this thing. And we want to just thank Anita. The A is for Anita. And the G is for Gul. The Reverend Doctor who has reintroduced herself to us. And I'm Dr. Sujay. Let me reintroduce myself in this podcast to you. You can always come to me, write to me at askdrsujay.com. Look for me on thewowfactor.live for information about Selah and any things we're doing for women to advance women. And you can always reach me on drsuja global.com. That's D-R-S-U-J-A-Y Global.com. But go to askdrsujay.com and find out what we're doing. Listen to it on Apple or any platform you're on. But don't only like it, but share it and please comment. You've been listening to Ask Dr. Sujay with the Reverend Dr. Anita Gul. Thank you for sharing. And our camera people, a shout out to the great, inemitable Kim George.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

So that's it for today's episode of Ask Dr. Sujay. Head on over to Apple Podcasts, iTunes, or wherever you subscribe to listen to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a $15,000 private VIP day with Dr. Sujay herself. Be sure to head on over to askdrsuje.com and pick up a free copy of Dr. Sujay's gift and join us on the next episode.