It's Marie Forleo, and you are watching MarieTV, the place to be to create a business and life

you love.

Now, if you ever feel that your dreams are out of reach or maybe even impossible, my

guest today proves that you can achieve anything you put your heart and your mind to.

Dr. Tererai Trent is one of the world's most acclaimed voices for women's empowerment,

and Oprah's Favorite guest of all time.

Tererai received her doctorate from Western Michigan University and teaches courses in

global health at Drexel University.

She's published two highly acclaimed children's books and is the author of the award-winning,

The Awakened Woman: Remembering and Reigniting Our Sacred Dreams.

Tererai serves as a president of the The Awakened Woman LLC, a company dedicated to empowering

women with tools to thrive as they achieve their dreams.

Tererai, it is such an honor.

It's honestly a dream to have you here.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

When we met a few months ago, I felt like it was soul sisters from a whole other world

and we're like jumping up and down and hugging each other.

and I was like, "Oh my goodness, can I possible talk with Tererai?"

And I know I shared this with you, but I feel like the universe bring us together.

You didn't know, but I had been working on writing my book, and so I had been researching

your story and looking at it from every angle because there's one particular chapter that

I wanted to write about you, and then all of a sudden you showed up in my Twitter feed

and I'm like, "Wait a minute, she even knows who I am."

I was like, "What is happening here?"

I do.

You are the queen.

You are the queen, my love.

No, you are.

You are.

So I want to start off with something that you shared in the introduction to your book,

which is amazing.

You shared, "I come from a long line of women who are forced into a life they never defined

for themselves."

Take us back to those early days in your village in Zimbabwe.

I want folks to understand the picture of what life was like for you as a 14-year-old.

You know I always talk about coming from this long line of generations of women, women who

had been denied the right to their dreams, the right to their education.

I always visualized my great-grandmother when she was born, she was born into this race

that she never defined and she was born holding the baton of poverty, early marriage, illiteracy,

a colonial system that never respected her, and she's running into this race with this

baton.

She ran so fast, she hands over this baton to my grandmother.

My grandmother grabs that baton of poverty, illiteracy, she runs, she hands over that

baton to my mother.

My mother grabs that baton in a race that she never defined because of the circumstances

and she runs, runs, and she hands over that baton to me.

I never wanted to be part of that baton.

I found myself getting married at a very early age and having babies.

Before I was even 18, I was a mother of four children.

Without a high school education, with nothing.

But all I wanted was an education.

And when I talk about this baton of poverty that's being passed on, I also talk about

the wisdom that is also passed on from generations before me.

So in our lives, my grandmother used to say that you have the power to decide whether

you keep on running with that baton of poverty, the baton of illiteracy, or you run with a

baton of wisdom to re-change and re-shift this baton, so that you become the one who

breaks the cycle of poverty, early marriage, lack of education, abuse, and all the ugly

things in our lives.

So when I was hardly 22 years of age, my country, we had just gained our independence.

Because all along we had been colonized by the British, and here I was, a mother of four

and my country had gained that independence and strangers started coming in, Americans,

Australians.

And these were women who would come to the community.

And there was this particular woman, she sit with me and with other women and she asked

me one question that I'll never forget in my life, "What are your dreams?"

I never knew I'm supposed to have dreams because I was an abused woman, a silenced woman.

Remember, I had four children.

And actually one of the babies died as an infant because I failed to produce enough

milk.

I was a child myself.

And I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, "Am I supposed to have dreams in my life?"

And other women started sharing their own dreams and I was quiet.

She looked at me and she said, "Young woman, you didn't said anything.

Tell me, what are your dreams?"

I couldn't bring my dreams.

I knew I had these dreams in me, but for some reason I couldn't because there was so much

noise in my mind.

I had been shaped to believe that I was nothing.

And maybe it was the way she kept on looking at me, the way she nudged me to say something

and when I opened my mouth, I became a chatterbox, and I said, "I want to go to America.

I want to have an undergraduate degree.

I want to have a master's and I want to have a PhD."

There was silence.

The other women looked at me and I could feel they were saying, "Are you crazy?

How can that be?

You don't even have a high school education."

And I guess there was something about these American women, when they were coming to my

village, there was this sense of empowerment, sense of loving thyself, and I wanted that.

I would see them getting into their backpacks and removing books or papers and they would

look at those books and open and they would put on their glasses, spectacles, and they

would talk to each other and put back those spectacles back into their bags.

And thought, wearing glasses was a sign of education, and I wanted that.

So when I talked about these degrees, I had these women talking about these degrees, and

I wanted to have an education to change my life.

And she looked at me and she said, "Yes, it is achievable.

If you desire those dreams, if you desire to change your life, yes Tinogona."

Tinogona in my culture, in my language, it means, "It is achievable."

I never heard of a woman declaring herself to believe they can achieve their own dreams.

And when I left that place, I ran to my mother and I said my mother, "I have met someone

who made me believe in my dreams."

My mother looked at me and she said, "Tererai, if you believe in what this stranger has said

to you and you work hard and you achieve your dreams, not only are you defining who you

are as a woman, you are defining every life and generations to come."

And I knew at that moment that my mother was handing me an inheritance.

My mother knew that I needed to be the one to break this vicious cycle of poverty that

runs so deep in my family and in the community.

I needed to redefine the baton, so that I would never pass on this baton to my own girls.

I needed to get this education so my mother said, "Tererai, write down your dreams and

bury them the same way we bury the umbilical cord, the bead cord."

I come from a culture that believe so much in indigenous knowledge, ancient wisdom.

When a child is born, the female elders of the community, they take that infant, they

snip the umbilical cord, bury that umbilical cord deep down under the ground with the belief

that when this child grows, wherever they go, whatever happens in their life, the umbilical

cord would always remind them of their birthplace.

So my mother said, "If you write down your dreams and you bury those dreams, your dreams

will always remind you of their importance, that you need to redefine your life, that

you need to break this cycle, that you need never to pass on this baton, this ugly baton

of poverty, illiteracy, early marriage."

So I wrote down my dreams.

Four: I want to go to America, I want to have an undergraduate, I want to have a master's

and a PhD.

And I was ready to bury those dreams deep down under the ground when my mother said

something so profound, which really has changed my life.

She said, "Tererai, I see you only have four dreams, personal dreams, but I want you to

remember this.

Your dreams in life will have greater meaning when they are tied to the betterment of your

community."

And I looked at my mother and I'm thinking, "What does that even mean?"

My mother repeated, "Your dreams in this life will have greater meaning when they are tied

to the betterment of your community."

I would end up writing down my fifth dream, number five.

When I come back I want to improve the lives of women and girls in my community, so they

don't have to go through what I had gone through in my life.

I want to come back, create employment platforms for women.

I want to come back, build schools so that girls, they won't be marginalized.

And I buried my dreams and it would take me eight years, and I call those "eight freaking

years."

Yes mama.

To gain my high school diploma, because I was going through correspondence.

I was an adult.

I couldn't fit into a classroom so I would do correspondence, and my mother was very

poor.

I didn't get enough money to pay for my tuition.

I needed five subjects, classes.

English, math, biology, history, and Bible knowledge or something.

And we were still under the British system of education so I will do my correspondence

two subject at a time whenever my mother was able to sell ground nuts or any produce, she

would give me $20, $40 to register for my classes, and I would write my exams and send

these papers to a place called Cambridge.

I had no idea what Cambridge is.

And I would wait three to six months for that brown envelope from Cambridge to come.

And I would open that envelope and I would realize I have a U, ungraded, I have an F,

failure.

And I wrote back to my mother, she would give me more money and I would write again and

wait another six months.

I open that brown envelope, I have a U, ungraded, I have a failure.

And I would go back and I would wait and write and wait and finally, I opened that brown

envelope from Cambridge.

I had a B and I had an A. I never give up.

Eight years I never give up because I knew I was on a journey to redefine my life.

I knew I had what it takes to achieve my own dreams in this life.

And then after eight years, I would find myself at Oklahoma State University.

And I did my undergraduate in agriculture.

I mean even just pausing there for a moment.

There's so many things to underscore and highlight that I am so moved by your spirit, and your

vision, and your heart, and your tenacity.

I mean when you buried those beautiful dreams in the can and you put them under the rock,

you were still in poverty, you were a mom with an abusive husband.

Yes.

Yes.

And you did those correspondence courses for those eight freaking years, and then to get

yourself over to university here in the States.

As you wrote, you came over with money strapped to your waist.

Exactly.

Yes.

And that wasn't even...

It was still a long journey after that.

It was.

So before we go on to that piece of the journey, I just want to highlight your incredible,

precious mom.

I feel like you and I share something.

My mom was the one that taught me everything is figureoutable, and your mom was at touchstone

that said, "You deserve to dream."

The wisdom that she had, in terms of your fifth dream, it feels like that changed everything.

It does.

And I think in many ways she was pointing to the secret to our success that is not about

the education.

It's not about the personal goals, neither is it about the personal financial goals,

but it is about how our education and how our personal goals are connected to the greater

good.

That's what makes humanity, that what makes who we are as a people.

Yes.

And so my grandmother would always say to me and my mother, "You have the power within.

It's not your past that's going to define who you are, but it's what you believe about

yourself, it's what you believe about your own expectations, what is it that you expect

from yourself."

And she would tell me and my mother that, "You go to that place where you buried your

dreams, you visualize the life as you think it should be."

So I would spend hours and hours sitting in that same place, visualizing myself getting

into an airplane.

I'd never been in an airplane in my life, and I'd never seen one.

The only airplane that I knew were the helicopters that would fly during the war.

Because I was born and raised in a war-torn country.

And I would visualize myself sitting into that helicopter, imagining myself flying to

this place called America, and I would see these tall buildings.

And my grandmother would say, "Feel those mental images, see those buildings."

And I would see them and I would even smell the life that I wanted.

So when I got onto that airplane, there was this déjà vu, "I think I've been here before."

Even when I arrived on campus, I felt I've been in this place before, because I had spent

so much of my time wanting to change my life and so much of my time visualizing this life

that I wanted, visualizing this life that I was not going to pass on this baton to my

girls, and I wanted to change it all.

So when I started my classes, I found pure joy.

I was always the oldest student in any class that I've taken and sometimes older than the

professor herself or himself.

But I never cared because I knew I had the power to change my life.

Yes.

And your life, when you got here, was still wrought with so much challenge.

I remember when I first learned about your story in Half the Sky from Nicholas Kristof

and Sheryl WuDunn, you were feeding yourself out of trash cans, your children were cold,

the husband that was abusive for a period of time, he was still here.

Yeah.

You know because Zimbabwe, where I was coming from, the weather is different, and there's

always this community cohesion.

You can leave your kids with the neighbors and what have you.