Not sleepy tired. Soul tired. The kind of tired that does not go away with sleep -- that lives in your chest and shows up in the way you answer when someone asks how you are doing. "I'm fine." When you are so far from fine that fine sounds like a language you forgot how to speak.
EmpowerHer Vibes is for the woman who has been giving everyone her best and keeping nothing for herself. The woman who says yes when she means no. The woman who has been showing up for everyone else while quietly disappearing from her own life.
Hosted by Kolanda -- AI R&B artist, creator of the Finding Me album, and a woman who spent years shrinking herself to keep everyone else comfortable. She stopped. And every Wednesday she sits down with you to talk about what that actually looks like.
What you will hear every Wednesday:
-- The real truth about why women shrink -- and what it costs them -- The psychology behind self-worth, self-abandonment, and real self-love -- Tools you can use this week -- not someday, not when you feel ready -- this week -- A featured song from the Finding Me album that carries the emotional truth of the episode
-- A community of women doing this work together
EmpowerHer Vibes is not a podcast about having it all figured out. It is a podcast about the ongoing, imperfect, and deeply courageous work of choosing yourself. Again and again. Until it becomes who you are.
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Not the kind of gratitude you write on a list when everything feels fine. The hard-earned kind. The gratitude that comes when a woman who has been through the fire looks back and says — that made me.
In this episode, Kolanda breaks down the difference between real gratitude and toxic positivity, shares her own story of surviving the season she would have traded away, and gives you three tools to build the kind of gratitude that creates strength. The survival gratitude list. The self-acknowledgment practice. A letter to your hardest season. Featuring "Grateful" from the Finding Me album by Kolan Melody.
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SPEAKER_00
I used to hate when people told me to be grateful. Like, I'm in the middle of the hardest season of my life, and you want me to write in a gratitude journal? I wanted to throw the journal through a window. But here's what I understand now that I didn't understand then. Gratitude was never about being happy that things hurt. It was about being able to look at the hard things and say, that didn't destroy me, it built me, and I am grateful for what it made me into. That is not toxic positivity. That is power. Today on Empower Her Vibes, we're talking about what real gratitude looks like for a woman who has been through something real.
SPEAKER_03
Couldn't understand why I had to go through. Couldn't see the bigger picture. When I was drowning in a fight, but now I'm sitting on the other side. And I can see a clip. Every single thing I wanna do had a reason for being here. The baby, baby, for purpose. I am only not a saving. Even for the seasons. I'm the reason. For the people who want to get a fabric face for every single thing that I'm baby.
SPEAKER_01
Real. They asked you to look at some things that are not easy to look at, and I do not want to rush past what that requires. Before we keep going, I want to stop and acknowledge something. You did the work. You showed up. You let it land. That matters. Today we are talking about gratitude, but not the kind you write on a list on a Sunday morning when everything feels fine. Not the performative version. Not the kind that required you to minimize what was hard in order to feel thankful. We are talking about the hard-earned version. The gratitude that comes when a woman who has been through the fire looks back and says, That made me. Not I am glad it happened, but I like who I became because I survived it. That is the kind of gratitude we are building today, the real kind. Let's go. There is a difference between gratitude and positivity. Toxic positivity asks you to be thankful for everything, to find the silver lining, to look on the bright side, to reframe your pain as a gift. And while there is something useful in perspective shifting, toxic positivity has a shadow side. It asks you to minimize what actually hurts you in order to get to the thankful part faster. And that minimization is its own form of self-abandonment. Real gratitude does not require you to be glad the hard thing happened. It allows you to hold both, the pain and the growth, at the same time. You are allowed to be grateful for what the hard season built in you without being grateful that the hard season happened. Both of those things can be true simultaneously. What has happened in your life that you would never have chosen, and that built something in you that nothing easier could have given you? That question is the beginning of real gratitude, not the sanitized version, the lived in, complicated, honest version that only comes from actually surviving something. I want to tell you something about my own story. There was a season of my life where I would have told you I had nothing to be grateful for. I was in the middle of losing something I thought I could not live without. I was in the deepest self-doubt of my entire adult life. I did not know who I was without the relationship, without the role, without the version of myself I had built around keeping someone else. And I was not grateful. I was broken, and I was angry, and I was exhausted. But here's what I know now looking back. That season, the season I would have traded away without a second thought, was the season that built the woman who started this podcast, who wrote those scripts, who had something real to say because she had lived through something real. The woman I am now was assembled entirely from the seasons I tried to escape. That does not make those seasons good. It makes them useful. It makes them mine. And reclaiming them, not as wounds but as material, is one of the most powerful acts of self-respect available to you. Here is the shift this episode is asking you to make. Stop measuring the value of a season by how it felt while you were in it. Start measuring it by who it made you. A season that felt like failure that taught you your own resilience, that season was not a failure. A relationship that ended in grief that showed you what you actually deserve, that relationship was not a waste. A version of yourself you are ashamed of that forced you to grow into someone you are proud of, that version was not a mistake. Every hard season in your life has been building the exact woman who is sitting here right now. And the woman sitting here right now, she is worth being grateful for. She is because of it. Own that, honor that, be grateful for that. Not in a performed way, in a real way. You already know it's tool time, tool one, the survival gratitude list. This is not your blessings list. This is your survival list. Set a timer for 10 minutes and write down every hard thing you have survived, every loss, every ending, every season that broke something in you. And next to each one, write one specific thing it built. Not what you wish it had built, what it actually built. This is your real gratitude list. Tool 2, the self-acknowledgement practice. Every evening this week, before you go to sleep, say out loud, today I am proud of myself for blank. Not an achievement, not a task, a quality. Today I am proud of myself for being honest when it was uncomfortable, for showing up even when I was tired, for choosing myself in that one small moment. Stack that evidence every night. Tool three. Write a letter to your hardest season, not to the people in it, to the season itself. Thank it specifically for what it gave you on the way through. This is not about excusing what happened. It is about reclaiming the outcome as yours. You survived it. You grew from it. That growth belongs to you. Gratitude is not a feeling that arrives when everything is fine. It is a practice that builds strength when everything is hard. You are still here. After everything, you are still here. That is worth being grateful for. I love you. I will see you next week. Before I let you go, a sister check-in. How are you actually doing? Not the version you tell people when they ask in passing, the real version. Are you still giving yourself permission to be in the middle of your becoming without rushing to the finished version? Because the middle is not a failure. The middle is where all the real work happens. The middle is where you are right now. And right now, in the middle, you are doing something most people never do. You are choosing to see yourself clearly, to name the patterns, to do the uncomfortable work of reclaiming who you actually are. That is not small. That is everything. I am grateful you are here. I will see you next week.
