Meet Shayla Foster

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Shayla Foster. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Shayla below.

Hi Shayla, so excited to have you with us today and we are really interested in hearing your thoughts about how folks can develop their empathy? In our experience, most folks want to be empathic towards others, but in a world where we are often only surrounded by people who are very similar to us, it can sometimes be a challenge to develop empathy for others who might not be as similar to us. Any thoughts or advice?

Almost 15 years ago I attempted to commit suicide. I was very depressed, didnt graduate college, ex boyfriend was abusive and impregnated someone else and I just thought my life was over. I had diasappointed my family for not graduating. I had put tremendous pressure on myself. After taking many pain reliever pills, i woke up the next day still living no complications or anything. I realized at that time it was time to live for ME. So now that I went through that i have much empathy for others, I can see when they’re hurting, I listen, I encourage, and I write for those who feel unheard.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

My cousin Ronisha and I make up Poets Unashamed. Were a poetry community who writes as a means to heal. We both are born and raised in Pittsburgh, pa. Our social media handle is simply poets_unashamed. We have a poetry journal, bookmarks, & mugs. We plan in the near future to have a our Sultry Sunday lives, and poetry events in our community.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Being unashamed, authentic, and supportive to other brands. That helped us become more visuable, people connected to our realness, and they suppported us because we supported them. The advice to other brands early in their journey is to never forget why you started. Dont lose sight of what you first sought out to do.

Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?

Currently were facing a loss of momentum on our social media page. We need more trending topics for people to write about on our topic tuesdays. We also are having trouble balancing life, work and business. We had a social media intern for a several months and it was a great help. If anyone knows of any or is one please reach out.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Poets_unashamed
• Facebook: Poets_unashamed

Image Credits

Bad101