Welcome to Krystal Rowe Impact, a space dedicated to

empowering you to be the change that your bloodline has been waiting

for. Join me and together, let's inspire change. Kia

ora whānau and welcome back to episode four of the Krystal Road

Impact podcast. And I'm going to share with you today how

my resilience actually started with my sacrifice. Many

years ago, I was in a situation where

I just conformed to keep the peace. I

just thought that my resilience to my external life

was just what it was and there was sort of no way out.

until I realized if I made a few sacrifices, everything

could completely change. And so I did. I

actually put my hand up and I said, enough is

enough. I don't know what the heck I'm doing with my

life anymore. But what I do know is

I don't want it to be like this. And so I found myself in

a woman's refuge with my six children. And

one of the ladies actually said to me, These are

the rules. You may not like them, but

you have to follow them if you want to stay here. And I

turned around to her and I said, I honestly do

not know how to fix my life right now, so I'm

going to look at these as guidelines. And if you know how

to do your job right, I should get out of here and

be able to start a new life. And that's

exactly what I did. I started a life of sacrifice and

I started a life that was changing the trajectory for

my children. The sacrifices that I took

to get myself to the women's

refuge were things like the judgment of

others, what everybody would think of

me for taking my children away from their father. How

would they talk about me to others? I sacrificed my

own worth and my own belief to have

this perfect family and not to break up

the mum and the dad. And I would sacrifice so

much of my soul to actually be seen when I

was never ever going to be seen in that situation. And

I sacrificed myself to

have the chance to have a different life for my children. And

so a part of that journey was realizing that

I had to put my old self down and everything that I

had known myself to be, all the worthless thoughts

that I had in my head and all the self-doubt

and all my inabilities that I had believed to

be true about myself, I had to literally put

down and realize that If

I just stopped the cycle right here, maybe,

just maybe, there's something else that

can actually become my life, that there

could be something different than the life that

I was living. And so when I arrived

to the refuge and they spoke about these rules, I

sort of felt like that they were like

my earth angels. They were my

guidance. They were the people that knew how to get

me out of a situation that I didn't know how

to get out of. Like the first couple of nights before

we landed at this particular refuge was absolute

hell. We had one night in

a motel that was so dodgy

as shit. Like, it was so scary that

I couldn't even sleep because there was things

going on in the other rooms. The people barely gave

us any food. And so it was a really, really heartbreaking

moment for me to realize that I had put

my children in this situation. But

I also knew that there was

help on the other side. And so I

was able to sacrifice my, I

know what to do, I know it all. I

took off my stubbornness, I put my stubbornness aside or

my pride aside and I just said, you know what,

I've had enough, please help me. help me

save my children. And so I did,

I went and they did help me. They showed

me how to do a few different things with

my children. They showed me how to understand

myself and my situation and that I

was going to be okay if I let them help me.

So the moment I accepted help and The

moment I realized I didn't know what I was doing and

that it was going to be okay and to trust this process,

everything else started to fall into place. There's one

quote that I love and it's make one right choice and the rest will

follow. And it seemed to be the case for myself. So

upon leaving, well, upon living

in the refuge, they helped us with

a series of events and structure.

I realized after spending some time in the refuge that

my resilience was starting to grow stronger. to

the external elements, to the negative feedback

that was coming my way, or to the negative comments and

situations that were being created around me

being in the refuge. And when I actually realized that

I was stronger and more capable of

overcoming this situation, I realized that

I had been resilient the whole time, I just didn't explore

what that looked like. And so once I actually started

to make different moves, And

things would come up, I'm like, oh, I've been through worse,

or I've experienced something far worse than this,

so this is easy. And then once I started to actually

analyze my situations and my

experiences that I was finding myself into, I was

like, I'm actually quite good with this situation.

And then I could kind of relate to my grandmother and

her sacrifice and her resilience being a

migrant to New Zealand. So I realized that my resilience

actually stemmed from a long line of women. that

were so resilient to the environment around them and that gave

me so much courage and it empowered me to

really stand into my truth and stand into my power and

know that whatever I was faced with that I would be able to

overcome. So if we just understood the sacrifice

and the resilience that the generations before us

had, then we would have so much more

understanding of the sacrifice that

they made. Then we would respect where

we've actually come from a lot more. When I realised the sacrifices

that my great-grandmother and my grandparents and

my father had to make to actually move

to New Zealand from Niue, I actually started

to have a whole new profound level of

respect for them. In the beginning, all

I knew of my culture and my

grandparents was just this really shut off kind

of persona. They didn't want to talk about culture. They didn't want

to talk about past or anything like

that. And there was no interaction around what they overcome or

Anything like that, it was just this already perfect world. So

when I started to go through my own experiences and

I got familiar with what it was like to

be resilient to something, I actually started

to understand that, hold on a minute, my

dad must have had to go through something. His

parents must have had to go through something. Where is

this resilience coming from? And then it took me

back to my great grandmother, and I realized the resilience

that she had as a woman to be living in a in

a city that she was so foreign to. And

I realized that my strength actually came from within my

bloodline. And I actually appreciated the

sacrifices that they made. And I believe that if our generation

now could understand the sacrifice, if our children understood

the sacrifices that we make as parents every

day to give them a better future, if we understand

the sacrifices our parents and their parents and their parents made

for us to be here right now living, It

will just change your whole mindset. Imagine

understanding the pain and the sacrifice that

your great-grandmother went through just to raise your

grandmother. If you understood everything

that she went through, maybe you'd have a little bit more respect for

it. Maybe a bit of gratitude. And then

when we operate from a place of gratitude, our whole

world changes. Imagine the top five powerful

thoughts of your heritage, of your grandparents, of

your parents. Imagine thinking five

amazing things about them. Imagine having respect for

their journey. Imagine understanding their journey a

little bit more. We would be so much more

grateful. We would be so much more appreciative. And

we would actually understand that their resilience And

their sacrifice has given us the life that we

have today. It has given us the opportunity for

us to actually create any type of future for

ourselves and our children. We actually live in

an amazing world where we're limitless if

we only stop limiting ourselves. Thanks for listening. If

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