MIAMI (CBSMiami) – Former First Lady Michelle Obama surprised a room full of high school girls at the Overtown Youth Center on Friday.

“At first I was like, is this a hologram?” asked Booker T. Washington High School junior Hilairee Lubin. “Are they pranking me?”

Mrs. Obama addressed girls in the Honey Shine program, started by Tracy Mourning.

“If I really want people to know who I am and how I got there it starts when I was your age really,” she told the crowd.

The goal is to empower and inspire teenage girls.

“I wanted people like you guys to understand that I didn’t just wake up as the First Lady of the United States,” she said. “I was very much like you girls, growing up going to public school, being worried about what people thought about me.”

Both the former First Lady and Mourning told their stories of growing up and how it led them to being the women they are today.

“We’re just like you,” Mourning said. “She was a little girl in a neighborhood just like this growing up. I lived here in South Florida as a little girl, so for them I want them to see we are the same, there’s no difference and the world is yours.”

It’s a message that resonated with the young women in the room.

“You have to learn to climb up a mountain in life,” said Lubin, “which you are going To leave a lot of people behind, but being that you are who you are, you have to know what your story is.

As long as you know what your story is you learn to speak your truth.”

Mrs. Obama is here on tour promoting her book “Becoming.” She will be at the BB & T center later tonight.