We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Zakiya Holman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Zakiya, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
On May 13, 2024 The Empire Publisher announced the release of my book Streamline: Having the Audacity to Simplify Life’s Journey which launched on Amazon! To date this is by far, the most meaningful project that flowed through me because it signified that my childhood dream of being an author had been realized. As a child there was a period of time whereby I withdrew into myself as a response to trauma. Writing allowed me to feel a sense of connectedness. I felt closer to God. Each time I put pencil to paper it was as though I was entering a holy cathedral, a sacred place. Writing was cathartic, it grounded me. Fast forward 35 years, while sitting in my office at work, I was guided to write Streamline. It took 2 years and 2 weeks to birth this book. It was most meaningful because I was able to enter that sacred space again and give of myself wholeheartedly. This is the historical overview, if you will.
During the time I wrote my debut book. I was working for a neighboring school district, here in the Inland Empire, as a Board Certified Behavior Analyst in the Special Education department. I was feeling spent. It felt as though each day yielded diminishing returns. The more effort I exerted the less benefit I received. Job dissatisfaction compounded by my mom’s cancer diagnosis acted as catalysts for my journey toward streamlining. Streamline emerged out of a sheer need to engage life differently. Streamline offers a fresh perspective on navigating life’s complexities with renewed vitality and purpose. It poses a compelling question: Can we achieve greater fulfillment by expending less energy? The answer lies in a targeted methodology anchored in the concept of life congruence.
Streamline advocates for a transformative journey that merges self-cultivation with the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. It proposes a deliberate approach to harmonizing life’s myriad demands, empowering you to recalibrate your priorities, and unveil deeper meanings in your existence. By crystallizing your core values and embracing a spirit-led decision-making process, you’ll forge a path marked by fluidity and enriched experiences.
Through poignant insights and practical guidance, Streamline invites you to embark on a journey of self-discovery and alignment. Prepare to unlock new dimensions of fulfillment as you navigate life’s complexities with clarity, purpose, and profound inner harmony.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Sunny Southern California has been the place that I call home for 45 years now; it is where my heart is! I graduated from California State University, San Bernardino, in 2001, with a bachelor’s degree in communications. My ambition was to be a journalist, yet the divine had other plans!
An opportunity to teach children with special needs emerged. Captivated by this experience, I went back to school to obtain a teaching credential and Master of Science in Special Education, in 2009. Having worked with students with exceptionalities for quite some time, and having an affinity for lifelong learning, I subsequently decided to take a deeper dive into formal education, and attended the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. There, I obtained certification in Applied Behavior Analysis, in 2014, and became a board certified behavior analyst in 2015.
I worked in various capacities in the field of education for nearly twenty years now, taking a hiatus here and there to work as a mental health rehabilitation specialist, therapeutic behavior coach, and education and leadership consultant. I have a passion for all things creative; thus, I am a published poet, songwriter, designer of a specialty line of greeting cards, and an award-winning author. I recently established a sole proprietorship called Joint Venture, to provide enrichment coaching and consulting to streamliners who are invested in building their capacity and developing the spiritual capital needed to establish and maintain life congruence.
Have you ever had to pivot?
My call to streamline came about in 2015 when life as I knew it suddenly shifted. My mom was diagnosed with colon cancer which later metastasized into lung cancer but never smoked a day in her life. I vividly recall being enraged, I asked, “Why, God, why would you allow this to happen to your faithful servant?” I was grief stricken too because surely the diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence. Both were visceral responses. It was her faith and fundamental belief that life is for the living, that kept her and was my saving grace. The facts didn’t diminish her faith. She went on to endure surgeries, radical treatments: rounds of chemo and radiation. These seemed like thankless acts. These aggressive treatments were met by poorer prognosis. Still stage two progressed to stage four, yet she never complained. In fact, mom went on to live an enriched life, one in which she employed actionable intentionality daily, for another 8 years.
My mom knew something that I hadn’t yet come to understand. Experiences serve as content. Luminance is our context. Mom was lit from within. Her faith had predictive value whether she was called to cross the threshold of eternity or to continue to live in the full scope of now, either way, was a win win situation, her words not mine. While physicians prescribed medical treatments, without ceasing, she engaged in a non-pharmacological yet potent intervention, prayer. This was the backdrop of my booked and busy life: commuting daily 45 minutes each way to arrive at a less than cordial work environment, being a single mother to my three children, a support to my elderly parents, and engaging in avoidance coping and escapism as a means to dodge the reality that my mom was dying. It was her inescapable fate.
I remember sitting in my cubicle at work. At the time I was working for the Special Education Local Planning Area (SELPA) as the Behavior Specialist. It was there that the charge was given to me from my inner visionary, “be where your life is occurring” which to me spoke of orientation, prioritization and congruent living. I became curious about my intrinsic telos, questioning what’s the supreme end of human endeavor! I set out on a quest to reverse engineer enrichment by asking queries like in the context of death what matters most? Am I living in congruence with my beliefs and values? Does my lifestyle choices, activities of daily living (ADLs), conversation, and thought life reflect what I hold to be ethical and salient in God’s sight. I knew I had to pivot. I had the desire to acquiesce to my inner knowing. However, being as though I was the sole provider in my single family home, and was without an exit strategy. I was stuck.
Here’s the thing when we adopt misguided ideas and fixed beliefs like “being stuck” assuming it to be a certainty, an accomplished fact, fait accompli (in Latin), we asphyxiate alternatives, deviate from our divine identity and cease living from our core. Engaging in faulty thinking like this is devastating because it entices us to underestimate our intrinsic value and outsource- transfer our energy to somewhere, someone, or something to provide what we need. Alternatively, suppose that we relied on the assumption that each of us has the innate ability to create from void. The question then becomes what do you want to create. How about, new ways of interpreting the content of your our lives and new response forms so irrespective of the circumstances: be it dealing with your loved one dying, a failed marriage, a toxic work environment, or trauma of any kind, you are equip with the knowing that each serves as enrichment (enhanced and extended learning opportunities that add greater breadth, depth, and beauty to our journey).
This shift in consciousness not only enabled me to take audacious action and pivot which initially meant taking a $20K cut to do what mattered most to me, care for my mom during the end of life. Pivoting also enabled me to begin to see divine order in everything! From the moment to the present doors keep opening!
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
The disconnection, mistrust, and utter rage that I internalized initially, at the hands of my adverse childhood experience, was distressing, and long lasting, to say the least. As a means to cope with it, I went into hiding mainly because I equated being seen with being exploited. So, I was essentially socially distancing decades before that was even a thing. Ultimately, I disassociated from displaying vulnerability, until now! I am learning to overcome my trauma responses. I now perceive it to be possible for all things to work together for my good. What I know for sure is that, through recovery and healing, trauma can have a paradoxical response, an outcome that is the opposite of what was expected! Believe that!
Here I stand ready to serve the world. I am on a hiatus from hiding! I dare others to take the audacious action to come along side me and be seen. Come out of hiding! For far too long perhaps you played by the rules of your hypothesized self. You took an educated guess on who you were, based on your experiences and external markers: your race, age, gender, body type, weight, economics, education, role, zip code etc., and traveled along that path, a path that as you well know, with respect to fulfillment, dead ends there in the distance.
There is, however, yet another path that offers different rules of engagement. The path of the actual self, the self that seeks to see divine order in everything. This is why I can say that trauma has served me well. It has been a painful yet valid experience. It has refined my ability to assess my beliefs to see if they hold up under scrutiny. So this belief that being seen equates to being exploited had to be unlearned or at least reinterpreted. I realize that my cousin’s unharnessed urge and unmet need for intimacy no matter how legitimate, was perversely misguided. His act of molestation had less to do with me than it did his opportunistic grab for power and pleasure.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ZakiyaHolman.com
- Instagram: z.k.holman
- Facebook: ZakiyaHolman
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakiya-holman-97171565
- Youtube: https://l.instagram.com/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutube.com%2F%40spirituallyspeaking1220%3Fsi%3D5UfYFbEsRYhNZ9y_&e=AT3h_h71gogzHbALk0de7qb-si5DN0ARYfCsIC4gUl519eKxUzHoTtJIAI-cAad60V41wTW0b0DSj-qxJ7pFGuPmWblS99j9psMUfEU
- Other: TikTok: https://l.instagram.com/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tiktok.com%2F%40z.k.holman%3F_t%3D8lUyiBXAcPe%26_r%3D1&e=AT2_AEkXa078F93zav6wjZuGXIZM5sRmMlP1BcXMB9JJ-J9KTTW8Pl0kLE0_MUczHSMg95LPejcPGSo7gUoz1mTN3M6-vEzm78f2J_c
