Redefining Wealth & Well Being With Patrice Washington

Hey Friend!

You’re in for a treat today. I have Patrice Washington on the podcast. Patrice is one of my favorites. Not only is this woman one of the most influential leaders in personal development, but she is also just a force to be reckoned with.

When it comes to growing a business in alignment with Christ, and someone who has her boundaries, morals, and heart in the right place, Patrice Washington is THE person you should listen to.

I met Patrice Washington in person. We’ve connected multiple times since then. I invited her to join me on the podcast to pour into you in several different areas. We ended up having the best conversation.

From her entrepreneurial beginnings, selling candy in third grade to building a seven-figure real estate business by twenty-five, Patrice Washington has succeeded in the online space, been on television networks, and so many stages.

There’s so much to learn from Patrice Washington

From her time in the hospital, Patrice Washington has gone through transformative surrender to become the foundation for personal faith, resilience, and growth. She talked about the concept of redefining wealth and success.

From blogging to national media, Patrice Washington has launched a podcast, and become a leader in this wealth space.

You’re going to learn so much. Reheat your coffee, cozy up with a notebook, and write down the core takeaways God has for you from this conversation. I know it will bless you.

Patrice’s Story

Stef Gass: Miss Patrice, I could not be more excited to hang out with any human being in my lifetime than you.

Patrice Washington: I bet you say that to all the girls, Stefanie. I am so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Stef Gass: I don’t! I really don’t.

We met about six months ago at a mutual friend’s speaking engagement. We clicked on so many levels with the same energy and heart for business. But we also have a heart for partnering with our faith. I had to have you on so I didn’t get to love you alone on Voxer and texting. My audience needs to meet and be blessed by you too.

Let’s start with your story. How did you become this powerhouse speaker with the Redefining Wealth podcast? Please take us on your journey.

It’s always been about entrepreneurship

Patrice Washington: First and foremost, I have always been passionate about entrepreneurship. In third grade, I was the school candy lady.

After they stopped letting the ice cream truck come to the neighborhood, I took my birthday money and bought Blow Pops and all the little candies and became that person.

Third grade is when the bug hit me that I could be the solution to people’s problems.

That passion followed me through college at the University of Southern California. Go Trojans! I majored in business, emphasizing entrepreneurial studies. I loved it and graduated with honors.

During my senior year in college, I started a real estate and mortgage brokerage. I continued with that after graduating. Entrepreneurship was the only thing that I knew.

By twenty-five, with my then-husband, that turned into a seven-figure real estate business with thirteen pieces of real estate. I thought it would go on forever. I’m a first-generation American from South Central Los Angeles, originally from Central America. I had never seen or heard of this thing I was doing. Then the recession hit!

Personal and professional challenges

When the real estate bubble first burst or was beginning to burst, I was on hospital bed rest. Because when I was twenty weeks pregnant, I fell down the stairs and went into preterm labor.

At the hospital emergency room, they said to me, “I’m sorry, but this baby is coming any minute now and there’s nothing we can do.”

I did the only thing I knew to do. Pray and ask other people to pray too. And what was supposed to be, “any minute now,” actually turned into me being in the hospital for ten weeks!

Five weeks into that stay, my doctor said, “Patrice, I don’t know what you keep stressing about, but that belt around your waist is monitoring the baby. If you don’t stop, you will leave here two years in a row with no baby.”

The year before in the same hospital on the same floor with the same doctor, I gave birth to a premature son. After five hours, he passed in my arms.

Time to surrender and develop my faith

Stef, that was the first time I remember ever having what I call an understanding of what it meant to surrender. I was not giving up, but I was willing to let go of the control that I thought I had. This is where I started to understand and develop my faith as opposed to trying to borrow my Granny’s faith.

When you grow up “churchy” and you grow up going to church 25/8 instead of 24/7, you don’t fully understand everything that is happening.

Because of how I grew up, I understood the little cliches, rituals, and legalisms. But I didn’t truly have my own faith. It was very difficult for me to be resilient. Resiliency is a built-in understanding of how you navigate certain circumstances.

There are so many tools, but which ones do you reach for when you have a difficult time?

So in that surrender, I asked them to take the television off the wall. I didn’t want to keep watching the news and allow myself to tune into the doom and gloom.

My then-husband brought me a red leather journal, a Bible, and an AirPod full of praise and worship music. I sang to my baby, off-tune, but with love for the next five weeks. I wrote prayers for her and I wrote what my vision was of her. And I brought that baby into the world.

She was born ten weeks prematurely, but she was healthy, and strong even at three pounds. They let us take her home when she was just over four pounds.

Seventeen years later

Today, she is seventeen years old, thriving, and driving. She is everything that I wrote in that red leather journal and more. Over these last seventeen years, I have become known:

• As America’s Money Maven
• For my platform, Redefining Wealth
• For my four years on the Steve Harvey radio and television morning show
• And for my stint on Dr. Oz

Even with all of the press and the things that go with success, the thing I’m most proud of today is that I have built a career and community, and have walked in a calling that makes that little girl proud.

My greatest gift is knowing that my daughter doesn’t have to go to Google or be confronted with anything online that would make her not proud of her mother. That’s who I am.

The Bathroom Floor Moment

Stef Gass: That is an amazing story, Patrice. Knowing your daughter through you, I cannot express the power of you speaking life and blessing over her during those months you did. She became the woman because of those blessings you poured into her.

What an incredible gift you gave her. She gave you an incredible gift and you gave her one by speaking life into her. I love that so much, and I’m sorry for your loss. That’s really hard.

Patrice Washington: Thank you.

Stef Gass: Can we go to your moment of surrender for a minute? In your circles, you call it the bathroom floor moment. You’ve heard my story and that breakdown moment. We’ve all been there and sure there’s more to come.

We know this world is full of hardship and moments meant to help us grow and persevere, but they feel impossible in the moment.

You said you didn’t give up. Instead, you let go. Can you share some tactical tips or tools for someone who is in that moment right now? For example, I know I need to let go of this particular thing, but I can’t do it.

Letting go

Patrice Washington: When I say there’s a distinction between giving up and letting go, that distinction is what we call surrender, right? For me, the giving up piece is when I can’t see it for myself.

I genuinely believe that in order to see what we desire, we see it first in our creative minds. You have to see it in your mind’s eye before you will see it with your physical eye.

Oftentimes, we give up prematurely when we’re frustrated, and don’t see physiologically with our two human eyes right now. When we can’t see it in our mind’s eye, we give up and say forget it. I believe this is how dreams get deferred.

At that moment, I could see my little girl playing. I’m a dreamer. I believe that’s how God has chosen to speak to me my entire life.

When I was pregnant with my son the year before, I dreamed I was walking around with a little girl. People kept saying, she looked just like her father. I would wake up from the dream and say, but I’m having a boy because I already knew the sex of my son.

Don’t give up on your dreams!

Because God had already planted so many seeds for what was to come for me, I couldn’t give up because I knew what I saw in my dreams.

I think this is important to say because as we get older, many of us stop dreaming. We become people who are just realistic. I’m just a realist. It’s another way of saying:

• I don’t allow myself to dream
• I’m just a realist.
• I’m just practical
• I’m just logical

We can intellectualize it and make it sound good. But at the end of the day, to create anything, you have to see it first in your mind.

When we talk about how God spoke things into existence, you don’t just speak. You’re speaking what you saw in your mind’s eye.

That time you were on my podcast, you talked about seeing yourself mountain biking and playing with your kids. To give voice to it, you have to envision it first. It’s important to tap into what you envision and make sure that you’re not letting it go.

When we say we give up, we can’t give up on the vision God gave us! God gave us that vision. Vision is not void. Don’t give up. Lisa Nichols taught me, to be committed to the vision but not attached to how you get there.

Stef Gass: Oh, that’s so powerful!

Be committed to the vision

Patrice Washington: Be committed to the vision but not attached to how you get there. When we’re not giving up, we’re just letting go, we are saying, ‘I’m letting go of the idea that every step on this journey has to look the way I thought it was going to look.’ Or it has to only come through the people I thought I would be connected to.

Some of us give up on the vision because we’re so committed to certain people supporting us. Eight months ago, I did not know you. But because of getting to know you and how you run your business, you have shifted my belief about relying on social media.

I believed that I needed to leverage social media in a certain way to serve people. Thank goodness I don’t have an attachment to how Patrice Washington in Redefining Wealth grows. I know I’m supposed to use it for the glory of God.

I don’t have an attachment to how. What does that mean? God can put me in the presence of people like Stefanie Gass. I can learn new ways to do things. I can receive and accept it.

Some of us don’t get to do anything because we’re so fixated on the idea that it has to look a certain way. God will put people right in front of you and you won’t see the blessing in that connection.

Dreaming

Stef Gass: This is so powerful! I can attest to everything you just said. There are a couple of points this reminded me of.

One: We stop dreaming because we’re afraid if we dream we are overcoming God’s will and not leading a godly life.
Two: The second thing is we have the dream, but because we don’t have the how yet, we will not take action.

Those are two things I think hinder us from growing and blossoming into what’s possible with God. I’m reminded of the verse in scripture, “Without vision, people perish.”

Can you comment on those ideas, Patrice?

Clarity comes in the doing

Patrice Washington: First of all, that was so good! This reminded me of something I’ve been saying for years. God knows what you’re waiting on when He sees what you’re working on.

Many of us will not execute the pieces of the vision that we can see because we don’t know the full path. We don’t know all of the steps. If you break down anything that you want to do, I guarantee that one task has ten subtasks to it.

Some of those things you’re not going to know until you get in it. This is why I say, clarity comes in the doing.

For both you and I, the reality is if God showed us all the things, all twelve hundred tasks that would need to be learned, mastered, and completed for us to be on this journey, we would have said, get somebody else to do it!

It’s a matter of faith

That looks exhausting. That sounds frustrating. I’m not interested. Get somebody else to do it. Thank God we don’t know all the steps. I consider it a blessing. I also consider it faith. If I knew all of the steps that were required:

• What do I need faith for?
• What do I need God for?
• Do I need to stay in my spiritual practices every morning?
• Why do I need to rely on a community?

I don’t need any of those things. I can sit here and wait until I know all twelve hundred steps. God knows what you’re waiting on when He sees what you’re working on. God knows the desire of our hearts because He put it there.

Stef Gass: That’s so true. If we don’t have faith and trust in Him, then we won’t grow into the purpose work He has for us. We have to take a step towards the dream without the how.

Let’s go back to when you worked in your real estate company and had this hugely successful business that kind of fell apart.

The time Patrice Washington’s business fell apart

Patrice Washington: Not kind of. It imploded! It blew up!

Stef Gass: There you were with a newborn baby and at a crossroads. What am I going to do again in business? You’ve always been called to be a leader and a businesswoman. As you were reborn into this space, what did that look like for you? What did you do? What was hard? Walk us through that part.

Patrice Washington: When I got out of the hospital, I lived off of my savings for several months.

After ten weeks in the hospital for myself on bed rest and then three and a half weeks with my daughter in the NICU, we had amassed almost $400,000.00 in medical debt.

Just a week or two into my hospital stay, I had been dropped from my insurance. I had no idea because the bills were going to the house, and not to me in the hospital.

Just that piece alone, I remember crying out to God and saying, “After all of the money I’ve made and all of the things I’ve done, why would You wait until my baby comes into the world to let this happen?”

I was the person who wanted to wait to have children. It wasn’t the background I came from. It wasn’t:

• Be stable
• Own a home
• Own cars
• Graduate from college

I came from a neighborhood where everyone has kids at thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old. So I felt like at twenty-six, why would God let me get here and do this to me?

Moving to Louisiana

It was a difficult season. Eventually, I had to lay off my entire team. I had sixteen loan officers and real estate agents. I had a full-time escrow person, a full-time receptionist, and a processor for the mortgage side.

Also, I had tenants who were not paying their rent while I was still floating mortgages. Everything that could happen, happened. Your audience may be familiar with the saying, ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul.’ I was transferring from one thing to the next and ended up leveraging credit cards and thinking I could ride it out. But I could not ride it out.

Eventually, I laid everyone off. My primary residence went into foreclosure. I went from a six thousand square foot beautiful home in Southern California to living in a six hundred square foot box of an apartment in Metairie, Louisiana.

In a weekend, we sold everything we could on Craigslist tried to take the last of our cash, and got to Louisiana where we owned some property. We thought we could use that, finish the rehab, sell it, and then get a good cushion. When we got there, the contractor we had been sending money to to do the work on the four units we owned had been stealing our money.

Applying for welfare

We got there expecting to live in one of our units while we rented out the other three. They had been stealing the money. There were squatters in our building. So we scrambled to find our six-hundred-square-foot apartment. We were there for months with no money and no family.

I applied for welfare and ended up on food stamps. I went to the government office and cried at this woman’s desk. She was so over me. I said, “I don’t belong here!” She said, “Do you want these food stamps or not? Because there are a lot of people that do.” “I don’t, but I do. When can you put it on the card?”

It was a trying time. The day the power company came to turn the power off because we were behind on our bill was the final straw.

When Patrice’s faith was challenged

I had adapted to think good thoughts, be positive, and read scripture. I was saying scriptures but I don’t know if I believed them! When those lights went off and I realized it was because the power had been cut off, I chased the power man down the corridor with my baby on my hip and begged him to turn the lights on.

I’m so grateful because he took pity on me, But he said, “They’ll be back, and maybe tomorrow.” I said, “I just need until tomorrow. If you turn these lights off, I won’t have money to get milk for my daughter. My milk will spoil. I cannot afford for these lights to be off.”

My then-husband came and took the baby to give me respite so I could go for a walk. I got in the mirror and said, “God, why me?” I did everything I knew to do:

• Go to school
• Get good grades
• Get a good job
• Start a business

I’m taking care of other people. I have been so good to people. Because of the shame, guilt, and weight of the embarrassment, I did not ask for help until my back was up against the wall. No one even knew what was going on with me.

Seek Wisdom

I cried out to God, “Why me, why me?” I have been a good person, operate by integrity, and treat people well.” That turned into an ugly cry, bawling, snotting, in a fetal position on the bathroom floor. Then I sensed a still small voice saying, get your bible. I landed on Proverbs 17:16, “What good is money in the hands of a fool if they have no desire to seek wisdom?”

That’s why my name on Instagram and all social media is, Seek Wisdom. It’s been since the very first time I got on social media. My name is Seek Wisdom. It is my reminder. I knew:

• I would get back
• God wasn’t done with me
• I lost all my money, but my mind wasn’t bad
• I wouldn’t be there forever

I wouldn’t be there forever but Seek Wisdom is my reminder. It’s always my responsibility to go and get what I need.

Stef Gass: That’s so powerful!

The difference between knowledge and wisdom

Patrice Washington: I knew it would be my responsibility to seek wisdom. Here’s what God also told me. You don’t know the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

I thought this was getting very offensive. This has been a rough day. So I looked up the definition of knowledge versus the definition of wisdom. Knowledge was information and education. Many of us think we know because we listen to podcasts, we buy the courses, we do all the things and have so much information.

Wisdom is knowing how to apply the information that you have. I had built my business in real estate and mortgages all over Southern California by:

• Leading homeownership workshops
• Debt elimination workshops
• Teaching people how to save

I was doing all these things because I was a reader and a nerd. I would say, “Come down to the Holiday Inn on Saturday morning, get your bagels and orange juice, and learn these strategies.” As a nineteen-year-old, well before online marketing existed, I was going out to see those types of things on infomercials.

Seeking wise counsel

I was always fascinated by it. And so I was collecting and gathering loads and loads of information. I didn’t have the wisdom to apply it beyond the very narrow way that I knew to apply it. That piece is a big part of why I am big on seeking wise counsel today.

I am grateful for the community. I’m grateful for coaches, consultants, community, and podcasts like ours with these resources.

Over the last several years, the thing I’ve learned is I still have the right to reject any advice that does not feel aligned with what I feel God has assigned me to do.

That’s the way I navigate now. I’m always down to learn new ideas, thoughts, and perspectives. Then I need to run it through, ‘in this season, how does that align with what I’m being called to do?’ If it doesn’t, then I have to release it.

Applying Wise Counsel and Wisdom

Stef Gass: I love that so much. Seek wise counsel, seek wisdom, and the how to apply piece. So you hear this word from God to seek wisdom. Did you go back to real estate?

Patrice Washington: I did try for a little while. I hung my license with a company that had a national presence. It was very humbling because I had been the broker. I passed my broker’s exam on the first try. And now I was in a whole new terrain.

Seventeen years ago, I was in Louisiana. As a black woman, it was not well received to think highly of myself when I was going to speak to other brokers and real estate agents. I had run a company of sixteen loan officers and real estate agents, including myself as a performing broker, doing seven figures in gross revenue and commissions. So I was going to places.

Do you remember when we met? We were at the counter having breakfast. I was talking about when I turned forty, and I forget who said, “How are you forty years old?”

I say this because if you can imagine, at twenty-seven years old, I looked young. For some people, I go in with this resumé and say, “Here’s what I would like to do.” And they’re offering me two cents on the dollar. It was really weird.

The Starbucks moment

I was trying to go back but God said, “I’m calling you forward.” Making me look younger than I was, was a part of the whole thing. It was like, “No, I’m calling you forward.” I’ll never forget. Two things happened.

One: I was walking with my daughter. That’s all we used to do was walk everywhere. I’m pushing her in the stroller. It’s super hot because Louisiana is muggy. So we see a Starbucks but I have no money. But I go in anyway to get water.

And I see these women sitting around the table. They all have laptops. They all have babies. And one of them comes up to get sugar or something for her coffee and she’s standing across from me. And I asked, “Are you guys a Mommy Group?” because I didn’t know anybody there.

She said, “We’re Mom bloggers.” And I said, “What is a blogger?” This is late 2008. So I said, “What is a blogger?” And she’s like, “Online, you have a blog.”

Interestingly, I had never heard of such a thing. My company was a literal brick-and-mortar business. I had never heard of any of this online stuff.

She gave me a brief definition of blogging. I found it interesting, but also a little weird. I’m thinking, why would I want to talk about my baby in a random place where strangers would look? It was mind-blowing to me. That’s weird!

The bookstore moment

I had these little prayers that I would say. “God, show me what I’m supposed to see. Lead me to what I’m supposed to read.” And every time I would find myself, sometimes in weird sections of the bookstore. It didn’t matter. I just let my Spirit guide me. I also found a book entitled “Coach Yourself to Success” by Talane Miedaner.

I opened it, flipped to a page, and it said something about the idea of looking back over your life to all the times that you were energized or in flow. Or when you felt like you were using your gifts. That resonated with me. So when I went home, I did my list.

I thought about back to being a little girl in third grade and what would always excite me and light me up. And I started to draw connections between different things.

The first-grade moment with Miss Boyton

It made me think of my first-grade teacher, Miss Boynton. I used to have this habit of always wanting to be the person who had all the answers. If there was a question, I’m raising my hand, me, me, me! Miss Boynton taught me in first grade. One day, she said, “Miss Cunningham, that’s enough! Put your hand down.”

Put my hand down! I’m the only smart one in here. That’s what I was thinking in my six-year-old-year-old brain.

What do you mean? I was so frustrated by her telling me that so I put my hand down and head down. I was hot. And she said, “You will stay in for recess!”

She’s going to take my recess away? This is crazy. All because I’m smart? The nerve.

She kept me in for recess and said, “Miss Cunningham, I know that you’re smart. I know that you have all the answers, but it’s not enough for you to know something. If you know something, you have a responsibility to share it with your friends. If your friends do not know, we cannot move on, and nobody is getting ahead. You need your friends to know. So when you know something and you realize your friends don’t know it, it’s your responsibility to share.”

First grade. I got the lesson. To this day, seven years and twenty million downloads on the Redefining Wealth podcast, every week I show up. I see it as an opportunity to share with my friends.

That book and those women talking about being bloggers at that table in Starbucks inspired me.

Starting the blog

When I had my bathroom floor moment – a few weeks later, I started a blog. It was free, ugly, and very scrappy on blogspot.com.

I’m not going to write about my daughter. I’ll read through Proverbs and find all the lessons on money and business, break them down, and share them. That was how my blog started.

From the beginning, the same way that Proverbs 17:16 pulled me together on that floor and gave me things to think about. I was already reading Proverbs regularly every day, the day of the month. I’m going to marry the things that I’ve always liked.

I grew up churchy. Faith has always been a big part of my life. I like helping people. That’s what I did in real estate. I love talking about finances, wealth, business, and strategy. That’s what I did all through college. It’s how I built my business.

I went through and figured out all the things I had always loved and said, “God, let’s reimagine it.” And here we are sixteen years later.

The What But Not the How

Stef Gass: Isn’t it like God to give you a solution that makes no sense? It’s like blogging. You don’t even know what it is or what you’ll blog about. You don’t even have any resources to make it pretty.

It’s just like God to tell you the what, but not the how. And it often makes zero sense based on where you’ve been.

Patrice Washington: Let me tell you why it also doesn’t make sense. I was broke at the time. I’m facing eviction notices regularly. Chasing the power man when my lights get cut off. We are riding dirty, meaning we have no car insurance with a car that’s not registered. We are in the worst possible financial season I have ever known, seen, or personally experienced.

I grew up in the hood, but we were not broke. I didn’t live in a good neighborhood. You couldn’t tell me after graduating from one of the most prestigious universities in California and on the Dean’s List that I would end up in this place. At this point, God said, “Now let’s work.” That’s crazy!

Stef Gass: That is crazy. So you start this blog. What happened? How did God work through those seventeen years? Was there one moment, Patrice, where God gave you a breakthrough and one of those big opportunity moments? Where was the explosion? Where was the overnight success?

From blogging to guest writing

Patrice Washington: Girl. So I will say this. I started the blog, and it’s still up. As long as the Internet exists, it will always be up because I can’t find the old email address or password that goes with it.

I started this ugly, Seek Wisdom Find Wealth blog on blogspot.com. See how much notoriety and credibility I had. I remember someone getting mad at something I blogged about. They said, “Why would anyone listen to someone with blogspot.com and their URL?”

And I thought, should I get a custom domain name? Is that what that means? It’s so funny. I started the blog and then pitched other blogs to see if I could write guest posts.

Those turned into writing for some big websites, like Black Enterprise. Upscale Magazine was a big one for me at the time. Hello Beautiful was a part of the Radio One, Interactive One family of properties.

Through writing for those outlets, people would debate pieces of my writing in articles. They didn’t necessarily agree or like something I said, they would randomly debate it on different radio shows. Back in the day, I would get tagged on Twitter. People would say, “We found her. This is the woman.”

At first, I was like, this is exciting. What did they find? Then I could tell from the comments they didn’t like me. What’s going on?

From guest writing to radio

So I went on a Texas radio show in around 2010 to try and defend myself. I soon realized I wasn’t cut out to talk in sound bites. They talked all over me and honestly, made me sound stupid.

I didn’t do a good job holding my own, but it put a little fire in me to learn how. If I ever get that opportunity again, it will not go that way.

Some months later after investing in tiny courses around media and different things, I could see something budding. Let me keep moving forward. By 2014, I ended up interviewing on the Steve Harvey Morning Show to promote my second book.

During this time, the blog led to writing for other websites and magazines. That led to me writing my first book and then my second book.

From radio to Steve Harvey

The second book caused me to get the invite to launch on the Steve Harvey Morning Show. That was in January 2014. Right before that interview, I met Lisa Nichols, who told me, “Stay committed to the vision, not attached to how you get there.”

I came into this opportunity and saw it as a chance to share with friends. Now more friends can listen. I’ve worked on my media and my presence. That was supposed to be one interview. It went so well, that I was invited back a few weeks later.

They said, “Do you want to come back next month?” Sure! By May, I was officially a weekly feature on a nationally syndicated radio show. Within a year, I ended up on Steve’s talk show too.

I did three years on the talk show and four years on the radio show. From there, I would say that’s where things took off!

From Steve Harvey to Podcasting

Patrice Washington: As I say this, I have to share one thing. In 2018, that still small voice came back. This is now four years doing radio and television, being invited to speak all over the country, and doing book tours.

I’m doing all of those things. Now I’ve launched the Redefining Wealth podcast. This only happened because someone at iHeartRadio said, “If you ever want to monetize your segment, do a podcast. That’s the next big thing.”

I said, “Well maybe because that sounds like work and I’m busy. I’ve got a lot going on.” So they said, “If you want to do it and be included in our sweeps, you would need to make it happen in the next three weeks.”

I had no name, no concept, no anything. But I had a pebble experience where different things were happening and God was calling me and telling me, you may want to do something different moment.

I had been playing with ideas but didn’t have time to execute them. I was busy in the hustle and grind. But they said this and I felt released in my spirit. I looked up and the podcast movement was happening at the time. It was good being in California not too far away from me. I cleared my schedule and within three weeks in September 2017, the Redefining Wealth podcast was born. It’s cool. I’m learning all the things and I’m learning my voice.

Embrace the actual source

I’m going from a four to five-minute radio segment to keeping space for thirty, forty, or sixty minutes. I’m having to find my guests and do all this stuff. In January 2018, the Holy Spirit said, “You’re going to have to give up what you think is the source for the ACTUAL source.”

Steve was a resource but he was not THE SOURCE. What? Are you sure?

But by this point, I had this whole year dedicated to ‘what my life would look like if I listened to God. What would my life look like?’

Goodbye to Steve Harvey

This happened around late January or early February. So, in late March or early April, I gave them notice that on my fourth anniversary, I would say goodbye to the audience.

I thanked Steve and the whole team. I remember sharing with people, Stef and they would say, “But millions of people hear you every week. Why would you do that?”

When people were booking me to speak or bringing me to all these things, they were saying, “I heard you on the Steve Harvey.” They were always referencing Steve Harvey.

And I heard, clear as day, when the Spirit said, “I’m your source! You have to go all in!”

Considering most of my media came from the fact that I was the Money Maven of the Steve Harvey Morning Show, this was scary to do.

But in May of 2018, I decided to leave. I was very clear that people who heard me on the Steve Harvey Show had stumbled upon me.

Be the solution to someone’s problem

I believe people who heard me on the podcast were searching for me. They were searching for me.

As sure as I knew in third grade that I could be the solution to someone’s problem, it came up again. You are the solution to someone’s problem. When they hear your voice, they will know that you are assigned to them. You are not just here to keep building a bigger and bigger and bigger audience. You are here to serve the people assigned to you in this lifetime.

That doesn’t require millions of people stumbling upon you. It requires you to be intentional and thoughtful.

Not Just the Money Maven

Patrice Washington: And also knowing the bigger vision for your life is because you are not just called to be the Money Maven. You have a daughter ready to go to middle school who needs you. You have a family who is going to need you.

I didn’t know:

• I would move back across the country
• The challenges my daughter might experience
• That a divorce was ahead of me
• That my mom would have a stroke and need me

I didn’t know! But listening to that still small voice gave me the space to operate from a place of grace so that I could do those things.

Doing what I’m called to do

Patrice Washington: Even though I’ve had different pivots, twists, and turns, I’ve been rock solid in my conviction that I’m doing exactly what I’m called to do. I’m not always committed to how I do it because sometimes I’m confused.

Like everyone else, I ask God, “Why are there so many steps sub-steps, and sub-tasks?” But I’m committed to the conviction that I am operating in what I was called to do. From a purposeful place, I am doing what Miss Boynton told me: ‘You have a responsibility to teach your friends.’

As long as I keep showing up with that heart and saying, “God, whatever You say, whatever You like, and whatever You do, I’m here.”

I’m an open and willing vessel. Let’s do it. That’s it. I believe that has more than sustained me. I’ve rebuilt seven-figure businesses. I’ve done it all.

I have beautiful relationships with my mother and my ex-husband. We’re great co-parents. My child is the light of my life. She is incredible. After my divorce, I’m in love again and having an incredible experience with love and relationship.

All of it is centered around everything we’ve discussed, seeking wisdom and making sure that everything I do is aligned with what I believe God has called me to do.

Connect with Patrice Washington

Stef Gass: There are so many nuggets in this conversation: encouragement, faith builders, and tactical applications. It’s like you’ve lived a thousand lifetimes. So much of it resonated and reminded me of where I walked and even where I sometimes sit today.

I would encourage everyone to find the piece of Patrice’s story where you sit. I hope you glean as much belief in this story as I have.

You teach so many incredible things that can help my audience. So Patrice, if people want to continue this conversation and learn more from you, where can they hang out with you further?

Patrice Washington: Please come over to the Redefining Wealth podcast. Peruse the backlog of four hundred episodes and see what speaks to your heart.

Redefining Wealth is built on these six pillars of wealth. My background is also in financial psychology and behavioral finance. I love to talk about the parts of our lives that impact finances and the way we show up in business without even thinking about it.

So come on over to PatriceWashington.com. Take the quiz and see if you learn something new about which pillar impacts the way you’re showing up in your business and finances.

Stef Gass: This was so powerful! Thank you, my friend. You’ve been such a blessing. I’m honored to have you here today. I love you so much.

Patrice Washington: Love you too. Thank you!

Stef Gass: You’re welcome. Friends, I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I’ll see you soon.

APPLE PODCAST | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE

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