bio her sore value that she chose is like transition so we're going to talk quite a bit about that particular topic erica gordon is the founder of models with dreams university the educational resource the women who desire more she is a creative force and compiler of the amazon best seller motherhood dreams and success you can have a whole the host of the popular show moms with dreams and her weekly po despite being a teen mom erika was determined to be more than a statistic she persevered with our educational goals and earned her bachelor's degree in small business administration and entrepreneurship after fifteen fifteen years of taking classes in between taking care of her family she later acquired her master's degree in psychology and is a certified professional coach all of that while going through a divorce so eric has got a really  know tell us who you are while i'm a woman who really just always had a dream of going to school and and creating a life they i thought was magnificent and things didn't all it didn't turn out the way i thought they would so as you read i was a teen mom and that wasn't in the plan and i was supposed to go straight to college and become an attorney and being successful and all these things but that's not the plane the god had for my life and so i learned very early on that just because things don't happen the way we want them to doesn't mean that we should be deterred or feel as though we still can accomplish the things that we desire so fast forward a few years after having my son at seventeen i went to school and i was actually i started college on time i graduated on time and was still you know did well in the cut in high school and started college and then i met my husband and we got married while my ex husband we got married and had three beautiful children and i thought life was great we had everything that everyone desires to have when you're little right and you have a nice husband you have a home in the suburbs the children in the house even little dog we had a copy even i was and i thought life was good and i thought that i was living the dream that i had for myself but everything changed for me one day when i found out that he had been having an affair and had a daughter with a woman who was supposedly a family friend and so it was devastating i tried to keep the family together i didn't want to break up my family and i was really committed to keeping the unit together but it just wasn't meant to be ultimately we separated and everything from there that was the one thing that was the experience in my life that was the hardest thing that i've ever had to do because we had been married for fourteen years we grew up together i was really young when we got married and we built this life together and here i was betrayed and hurt by someone who i trusted and i thought he loved me and i shared my life with him and we built this  family you know we had all these things together and so it was a really it was really hard for me to get a grip on what am i going to do now as a single mother with four children and at the time i was only working part time so i didn't have the finances to i didn't feel comfortable stepping out of my own saying this is what we're going to do and i was so afraid of making my kids suffer like taking them through this whole process and then their lives are torn apart so i just had so many things going on in my mind and i was just so scared and hurt and angry and all these emotions and it took a while for me to really get a grip on everything but i remember the day vividly like it was yesterday i was laying in my bed it was a saturday morning and i was crying as usual and i was laying there and even though i was sad and hurt i was so i was tired of feeling that way i no longer wanted to be sad i wanted to be happy i wanted when i saw people who were laughing and couples who were together i wanted that life again and i just didn't know how to get it and so i started talking to god and i prayed to him and i said god if you will deliver me from this darkness th sadness and this fear and all these negative feelings or promise that i will use my story in my experiences to help other women and it didn't happen immediately but i felt the shift that took place after that it was almost as if it had been raining and pouring and cloudy and then all the sudden i could see the sun starting to come through shining through the clouds and it was in that moment when i made that decision that i wanted to change and i wanted to move forward that things started to turn around for me and so that's why i wanted to talk about life transition city because i feel like the one experience that i thought was going to kill me actually gave me a second chance in life that's fantastic and it's those are the types of sentiments that we want to share with people because there are there are hurting people out there and there are a lot of people out there who don't know where to turn and and all of that so having gone through that experience how did you end up being a book oh my gosh it was amazing once i made that decision it seemed like everything started to fall into place like i had i had a dream of going back to school and getting my master's degree but i just couldn't find the right time and then i said you know what now is the time because during that process of me picking myself back up i also had to learn who i was again because i had completely lost my identity being a mother being a why taking care of everyone else worrying about all the daily responsibilities that we have as women and so i took time to really reconnect with what i wanted and one of the things that i really wanted was to go back to school so i went back to school in the process of going through the divorce and got my masters degree and then i was presented with an opportunity to contribute to a book and science i said why not the worst my movie this is my second chance at life why not i contributed to that book it became a bestseller and i and then i had the opportunity to do my own book and what was the name of the first book the first book was the missing piece the missing piece that was like the year before i did this book i think but you know it's interesting how you know really the transition started for for you when you decided that you wanted to be educated you had to go and discover who you actually are and that was like the beginning of the whole process and it's i don't know about you but i know when i went through that it and then just things started start yellow i can relate to that nellie and i think it's also interesting that you ended up becoming an author as well because one of the other sort values that we have is what i call the writer's edge and really what that's about is writing your story to share with other people so that other people can learn and other people can see you know when you are in that place of darkness in that place of sadness and depression that you can work your way out and so the writing process in abel's us to be able to kind of get through all of our own emotions but then share it with other people so that they can learn something and perhaps be motivated by your experiences in your writing so that's really the whole absolutely and you know it took me time to get to a place where i could talk about what i had gone through because there was a period of time when i cried every time i try to think but before that before i even tr to talk about it i was so embarrassed that i didn't want to share and i guess there was a moment where i was trying to still part heck my ex husband because i didn't know if i was going to be with him still and i didn't want people to judge me or judge hammer upon me stupid so i had to build up my courage and then once i started sharing my story i realized the power in sharing info not only was a cathartic for me and help me heal but as you mentioned it helped me to connect with other women who felt like they had been alone going through this and helping them heal and relate to like i feel like i was able to restore hope by sharing my story because they could see themselves in me and if i could stand up and say you know what i was there and i am standing now you can also do this but you're also able to share the thing that it's your past leaving experience something in your past and people who are physically or mentally hurting in the present to say degrees and learn from in classrooms and read books but there's nothing like the personal experience and i feel like when you stand in front of a room and you talk to women who are in pain and they know that not only did you learn this but you actually lived through it y that it inspires them and it gives them that hope and it might just give them what they need to keep pushing to get through it so it just became really important for me to share my story and then to find other women who had been going through things not necessarily the doors but just the whole motherhood journey and valves is challenging and there are so many things that we do with women that we do like automatically run auto pilot a lot with things that we do and we inadvertently set our dreams aside because we're so busy focused on the things that we have to do when we forget about the things that we love so that was really a catalyst for me to really get the book out to inspire women to dream again that it's ok to want things for yourself and you can still be a fabulous mom and and go back to your dreams without having to feel guilty and for me i met you around the time when i had left corporate  america and i can i can remember exactly where i was in my house when i saw the message from you asking me if i wanted to participate in this book project i was in my room sitting at my desk and i was just like oh my god yes like before i could even think about it i was like yes because i definitely wanted to you know want to do some and i use is share with people i think there is a book inside of me and i also looked at this as a prelude to other things that i would like to write as well so can you describe a little bit about what that process was like for you as you were you know reaching out to people where what was it that you made that made you select this person or that person or whatever to kind of bring the whole entire thing together that's a great question it was a combination of things you and i had met i don't know if you remember but i had the moms with reality yeah and that's how we connect the i just f something but like i just i used a lot of my intuition when i was selecting the women i found some of them through social media some i had known mike through that are in my group that i had other women i had known from previous things or they might have been friends but i really relied on their my intuition the connection i felt and their story and their willingness to share because i had to cope some of them it was really interesting some of them it was their first time sharing their stories and and they didn't they  afraid because some of them me them really vulnerable things that they were sharing and so that experience was it helped me to really see the power in sharing her stories and really getting it out there and what it can do and so the process basically was that i use my intuition and i contacted women i reached out and i was stretching myself because i had never done that before it was a big it was a big project i still work on a full time job so i was managing the full time job the kids i think i was still in school all the time and then the book project it was a lot yeah there were thirty of us yes all over the world yeah and i haven't had the pleasure of meeting everyone yet but i hope that one day  wall gets to come together and be in the same room and to share you know the feelings and the emotion and so can you talk a little bit about your kids and how they were sort of as there are because i know i'm always fascinated by what we look life through the eyes of our children as we're you know overcoming obstacles and beating those challenges and going to score when i got my messes agree when i was like in my forty's and it is things like that so and i can remember when i was younger very young with my mom i remember watching my mother go back to school and get her ged and that just soul impacted me and i just thought it was incredible just watching that process of her going back in a conversation something that she really really wanted to do so can you talk a little bit about your kids and how they see all of the stuff that you do well it's funny they see me differently than how i thought they see me guys you know i'm really busy i'm doing my business i'm writing this book and i'm doing all these things and i just wanted to check in with them to see where they were to make sure that i wasn't doing too much and leaving them out and i was like you guys feel like i don't spend enough time with you and the know mom worked fine because i was on the verge of by putting everything on hold because my youngest son eric was having problems in school and of course i took responsibility i own that it was my fault because i couldn't study with him all the time you know things like  but see that inspires them and lets them know that they can do anything they set their mind to actually just by watching mommy i watch but it doesn't feel like that when you're the mom i just want everything in doing so much it doesn't feel like that but it's nice to know that that's really how they feel you know and i think it also gives them the message that it's never too late no matter what you may go through in your life it's never too late and that was one of the messages that i got from you when you were just sort of starting this whole thing of moms with dreams and all of that that it's never too late you could be eighty yeah and if you have something that you want to do you can make it happen it might be challenging or whatever but the possibility of making it happen is always going to be there i think we get so caught up in age and time and all of that but once you get to a certain point and you realize that all of that is irrelevant and it's all about just bringing out all of those gifts and all of that stuff that's inside you then you can look at it from a different perspective so that's a very powerful message that you send to your kids as well and you know and i agree totally with that because people they first of all we have to respect time but we have time to do the things that we want to do in our lives we just have to sit down and say ok what do i really want to do with my life like first you had to have to for the that the cell the discovery the discovery i had to go through the same thing ok like who it w didn't get information on how to do maps and you know but we first have to figure out what we want but it's never too late i look at the party look at his success really and really came after fifty he reinvented himself  get to the next level because sometimes what trips us up when we have these big dreams as we think about that how like how we're going to do this i'm only this doing this right here how me going to get over here and so when we let go of the how and his focus on what we clue and not that you can but you need to yes because like most we talked about were setting examples and our children are watching even when we don't think they are like mikey's i had no idea that's kind of me and so we need to be careful of the example that we set and women as mothers as daughters as well whomever right we all were put here for a purpose and it's our job i feel that we need to live out that purpose absent an end to do what we can while we're here because yes we have time but we don't little bit about some of the things because you've been doing some incredible things since the book came out so can you give us a little bit of a roadmap in some of the cars i know you have the miles with james university and also has a so how did you get from that book to miles with dreams university well let me tell you this book although it's a cumbersome huge project it was like though the gate it opened the gates to everything else so once i did the book and did that and i got through that i'm like soon well what next and so i'm really passionate about education and learning and i feel like there so much power in knowledge and so i wanted to create something to it as an extension of the book i was just so passionate about helping women at that point an extension would be helping them to now step into those dreams and oftentimes one of the things that hold us back is lack of knowledge having too much knowledge being stuck in analysis paralysis not having the support or access to the resources and so that's kind of where the university came from because i was just like when i was really on the gone back to school for my ph d them and so i decided to i was i mean i thought about i'm like i really want to go to people find you and that sort of thing thank you for asking so right now i'm actually redesigning it restructuring the platform last year we ran it as a real university but it was just online as far as having live classes taught with professors who were experts in certain areas so we had personal development courses business courses you know whatever your desire was you could learn personal development and professional development this year i was changing up a little bit and i'm not going to have as many lives courses i'm going to have more of like self study online all ok and group classes where we do like mastermind oh night yeah so the website is still there and you can take a look at the offerings it's on moms with dreams university  really didn't like the live piece of the radio i wanted to do something right i could go back and and record it in and so i just wanted to switch up this season so i started my pod cast in may and i absolutely love it the  empowering women to live out their dreams in the midst of motherhood so each week i have different guests on the show sometimes their mom mostly their mom printers who have businesses or or their authors or speakers they're just following their passion and then i also have experts who come they're just inspired by my story and how genuine i am like i always want to come across as being genuine because really it's just me talking and speaking from my heart and they're saying how grateful they are for me to step up and be courageous because it really took a lot of courage for me to do this although i might look like i feel i'm i really really an introvert so i really would prefer to be in the background and so but i'm winning the award for empowering women and helping  with their dreams and just go for what they want excellent excellent so we only have like another five minutes or so so i want you to do two things number one what are those final words of wisdom that you want to leave with our audience and then i want you to repeat your websites and everything because i want to make sure that people have that information so that they can go and visit your website of this into your pocket thank you so my parting words of wisdom are just to go for it and know that your dreams are in your heart for a specific reason and they didn't belong to you they wouldn't be there and then now is the time now is your time to step up and to step in here and dreams do it even when you're afraid because once you take that first step everything will fall into place you don't have to know what to do just be willing to take the first step and my contact information is moms with dreams dot com that's my connections outside of this program so i want to always make sure that people know who is my guest and how can i get in touch with them and all of that and i also have all of our guests featured on the places store dot com our web site so people can kind of about with us working on the book prodded together and different conference calls and all of that this is literally the first time that we've ever actually met in person so i feel so blessed i feel like you must and all of that and this writing and coming out with a book is of our process but the learning one it is exciting one specially after you get it after you get that first copy that they sent to you is like i  when i was like oh my gosh we actually ten years we have this book when they're here international best selling author i was just like oh my and as a matter of fact the fact that i'm here is really because of that book because around the time when we hit that that's got that title we were at art all night and i met a woman there by the name of sharon who has a show here and so we started talking and everything and gal says oh and again here are quite well i ring ok so i want to thank our audience for joining us at the place to saw it every member you heard it here you can store as high as your heart desires we'll see you next time thank you