so tell us a little bit about the progression from dropping out of school and some of the decisions you made that have put you in a position to be i mean a respected person in your profession a giver back to the to the region is the c e o of edgewater systems and of course we'll gloria will see is the purveyor here of his own insurance company and of course has got the winner's circle going on we're talking to denethor she went to she has even said so but what the west side and how she got there we're also talking about heroin in the area so give us a minute or two and then we're open up the phone lines at two one nine eight four five eleven one hundred here at eight fifty in the morning on monday march tenth and fourteen so need you to drop out of high school well when i was in high school i got involved with a group of kids that many of them weren't even thinking about school you know they didn't go to school have to time  plate a lot and i ended up you know dating a guy and i got pregnant and at the time although i did not want to drop out of high school there was i guess a policy that pregnant students were not allowed to continue school and so i had to drop out when i dropped out of high school i actually really didn't have any intention of going back and although i had always gotten pretty good grades and i was pretty smart thanks to my first grade teacher mrs kaufman i was a good student but i still had no intention of going back and my i was not from a family of individuals who attended college however my mother did work and she had to work at that time at a psychiatric hospital and she got me a job there because i was a young mother and i had been married but got a divorce and so she got me a job working with her and when i went to work there you know i was involved every day with all these professional people these nurses and doctors and the whole bit and i always felt that i was so ill equipped to be there even though i did well at the job that i had i knew that i had potential to do so much more so i talked to my mother and said i wanted to go back to school and she encouraged me in fact she made arrangements for me to go to a class and to study towards my ged and i did and x ray was told i got the highest score ever in the whole state of indiana when i took the test and i was very pleased with that and then i started saying you know i'm working around all these people who are nurses and doctors i can do that they're not any smarter than i am and i talked to my mom again about how to go to college and i did not have any money because of course we were a working family and there was no money in our family and she introduced me to a young man who told me about financial assistance and how i could go and get some of financial assistance to go to college i went apply got the assistance and actually got enrolled in  a in as an undergraduate and things just seem to go from there undergraduate degree in public administration and minor in criminal justice you've broken the statistical mold drop a single mother and the fact is i think the numbers a gary west side are pretty low for bouncing back out of that on the pretty much of all schools in the region i think that's got to be right near the bottom there so what is it i know you keep talking about mrs kaufman great lady i don't want to hear about her your grandmother great lady what is it about you that let you break that mold i think it's just it's because you know i was always the kind of person that if i got knocked down i always understood that well at least i eventually came to understand that it was up to me to get back up you know you go through a period of when you blame people for things that are going on you know in your life when things don't go right when you don't make the money that you think you should make on your job and when you don't get the break that you think you should have gotten earlier on and  through that period of blaming everybody else but i've come to understand that the way to get ahead in this life is not to be defined by somebody else's standards you define who you are who you want to be and then you pursue that course i mean you stick to it you go for it and you make it happen and yes are there going to be ups and downs in life there are going to be are there going to be challenges in life yes there are going to be but what are you going to do about it it's it you can't control everything that happens to you in life but you can control how you react to those things and i've taken a position that how i react is going to be that way which is going to be in my best interests granted the things that i do i'm not i don't do anything that i think is going on hurt anybody else or be detrimental to anybody else what i look for is those things that are going to be beneficial to me and to the people that i love and the people that i care about and so that's the trick that i pursue in this a track that i one that i love and the one that's actually on my signature for e mail at work is an open mind catches more riches than an open purse and open mind catches more i was basically when i left high school and i was told that you know that was it for me that was all i was going to do in life and i eventually decided that that's not going to be where i'm going to end up i'm going to do better than that and i'm going to go back to school starting with getting my ged so that was one period so you had negative people who are giving you the negative messages you have been hanging out with the rough crowd telling me that i was hanging out with the rough crowd i had people in my family and family telling me you're never going to amount to anything and i had difficulty with my dad always because my dad was always very he was very difficult to  deal with he i don't know i would say my dad was somewhat emotionally abusive and he always made me feel because i was always a very outspoken spoken child he always made me feel that that was not good that that was not a good sign and that i was not going to end up anywhere positive in life and he would tell me those kinds of things and that sort of stuck in my psyche and so i was a kid with low self esteem really i had very little self esteem early on and it took me a while i mean even through my adulthood to get over that and i'm still working on and i think we all do with that where i feel like i'm work in progress so i have not arrived i'm still working on myself and i'm working on me every day and i mean that's all you can do is try to be the best person that you can be and i don't think we ever get there we just keep working at it so you tell the story anywhere i have told it no but i mean it's not like you're a motivational she has anything you've written two books written two books you have written two books yes and one of those called the first book was power from within ok discovering what you already have to live successfully and that's really an inspirational story kind of talks about my story my background and how i got to where i am the second one is influencing today's youth and that one actually it's about two years old and it it's about how we as individuals can be an e's one of the compliments lady for this all comes back to taking responsibility for oneself and you know a lot of people in you and you've been you mention that they want to be the victim or other people try to beat you down because they're insecure with what the what what they've done with their lives then they don't want anyone else to succeed around them so i congratulate you you you've taken control of your life which a lot of people need to do when you've done it yourself and you know i'm sure you will thank people along the way but the outcome is you did it yourself and i congratulate you and i'm proud of you thank you all right now i gotta say there you go thinks you know what here in radio and when someone says to you you can't give one or two word answers you've got to follow up with that you took control of your life is that a major theme yes it is because again if you allow other people to control you you don't know where you end up at so i always feel that you set your sights you focus my husband tells me i'm probably one of the most focused people he knows and i'm sure that works against him once in a while  but you focus on what it is that you want to accomplish in life and you expect that there are going to be some things on the along the way that are going to deter you or to get in the way and but you have to be willing and able and just have the fortitude to continue towards that track and to make those things happen when i got to you got i knew you were going to pick up on their clothes well the story i mean everybody thinks people that are successful just get there it just happens if you could relate to that time that you were attending school at the university of chicago and well i was telling well a story about once i did  job that i was working it closed down and so i ended up getting another job thankfully in terre haute indiana as an administrator for a nursing facility it was a wonderful job but when i went in i was about six to seven months away from completing my second master's degree at the university of chicago but i agreed to take the job and to move to terre haute but i explained to them that i was almost done with my masters and i really wanted to continue with that what they allowed me to do that because that was one of the conditions of whether or not i would accept the job i was able to accept the job and i would drive one or two times a week from terre haute indiana to the university of chicago until i completed my degree for about seven or eight months because i was so close and i just refused to give up i refused to quit and i did it until it happened and i was able to walk across this stage of the you know at the university of chicago and receive my master's degree we were talking to didn't need a johnson who went to west side