One World Women
One woman’s life lived in service touches many lives yet to be born in places she will never see. One woman changes the world. What about three?
Every person wants to be relevant. Every person wants to make a ripple in the waters of life (and sometimes a full-on tidal wave). Wanting is not the same as doing. This writing is in dedication to the doers.
While doing something monumental is not actually required to live a life in service to Good, I am honored to know people who have said yes to a larger calling and whom, in spite of fear, are saying “yes” to being agents of change and leading the way. There are many of them all over the world, but I am going to focus on just these two for now. Tshering and Madalene.
In a country that often times can feel a little too self-righteous, individualistic, and overly singularly focused on it’s own existence, it can be easy to forget (or even to believe) that there are smart, driven, courageous people living in all corners of this world who are actively working for a better tomorrow for all. I am here to tell you that they are there and now they are here. I could not be more thrilled!
For four months, I have the honor of hosting two incredible women from two other far corners of our world. Tshering from Bhutan and Madalene from Zambia. East Asia and the Southern region of Africa. Two places that most Americans will never see, visit, or think about when they think about women working for a better world. Do you know where these countries are? Google them. I’ll wait here until you get back.
Both women have started non-profits in their own countries to help women learn how to start businesses and how to raise themselves and future generations from poverty. They are focused on preserving culture, putting in place practices to support sustainability for our planet, and creating a more equitable and safer world for women and children not only in their countries, but beyond. Not only for their own families, but for generations of families across communities.
These women are brave and determined. They joined a program that allowed them to spend four months working abroad without pay in order to learn and connect and plan. They travelled half way around the globe to spend four months in the company of people they had never met, working with successful organizations where they could contribute and learn. They left their families, their husbands, their children in order to submerge themselves in leadership growth. Their growth is happening quickly and profoundly and they will return stronger, connected, and with a deeper understanding and education to benefit their efforts and expand their impact. The difference they will make will be rooted in more than passion and purpose, it will be backed by a larger network and knowledge than before.
They are part of IREX.ORG and are working directly as my team members at NAWBO.ORG for four months. They came here to learn, and as they fulfill their objectives, they are doing something even bigger; they are expanding everyone that they work with. We are learning together. We are expanding each other. We are all learning and something we have learned the most is that we are not the United States. We are not Bhutan. We are not Zambia. We are One World.
We come from three corners of the world, and we share one heart. We want a better world for our children; our children of the world. We are One World Women and we are making a difference together.
Blog Revival
The time-space-continuum of the 2020 – 2022 conundrum occurred. What does this mean? Two years disappeared from relative existence since my last blog. How? I wish I knew for sure, but it seems that this is a phenomenon that many people experienced. Time worked differently in the past two years than how it did before the pandemic. It is time for a Revival. It is time to get going again.
It isn’t that I have a specific thing to say to share with you this moment that is prompting me to write again. Instead, it is that I have too many things to say and they are all swirling around together making soup of what could be something useful or relevant if I could take it out of its current context of too muchness. Two years is too long for me be outwardly silent when there is so much happening inside.
I know I am not alone in this. I am seeing articles everywhere about overwhelm. I am seeing coaches focused in on helping people sort through their piles of shrapnel left behind by the past couple of years that were added onto the previous amount of flotsam and jetsam that they were already carrying around.
In short, many of us feel too “full” but are struggling with how to get relief. A vacation or week away just isn’t enough to undo it now. So where do we start? How do we start?
Start here. Right now. This moment. Take a big breath.
Remember when we were kids and we would take in a breath so big that our bellies would stick out and we would laugh and say “Look at me, I look pregnant!”? Do a big breath like that again. Let your belly out as far as it can go (don’t worry, it won’t stick like that). Hold that breath for a count of four. Let it out. All the way out. Breathe it out until it is gone and then give it one more little push. Clear those lungs. Do it again. Heck, do it five times. If you get dizzy, take a break and then try it again. Get some clean oxygen into your body and get the stale stuff out.
No, it won’t fix it all.
Yes, it will help calm your nervous system and clear your mind a bit…for a moment. But isn’t this moment really all that we have? Let’s start here.
Get the relief you can, where you can, as you can.
Breathe in so big that you belly sticks all the way out and your chest rises full.
Breathe in love, breathe out confusion.
Breathe in love, breathe out frustration.
Breathe in love, breathe out negativity.
Breathe in love, breathe out everything else.
Revive in this moment.
It just takes one initial big breath to start. It’s okay if doing this makes you cry a little. It is a release. It often hits me this way and letting some of this go feels so good. It all starts with one big breath…which led me to one blogpost…and now we have begun again.
We are All Changed.
2020 is three quarters finished. It seems like we have been in this year for a decade. In other years, September would arrive and I would get the feelings of “this year is almost over already!”. This year I am staring at the September calendar and thinking “still three more months until this year can be officially OVER.” I am not one to wish time away (it is the one resource we can never get more of and we don’t even know how much of it we actually have). But, like you, I am tired. This intensity of upheaval in this year was more than unexpected and I am changed. We are all changed.
What has changed for you? Your job? Your location where you work? Your ability to travel? Your health? Your plans? Those are just a few of the surface things that have changed. They are the outside view of what has been shaken, broken, redistributed and realigned underneath.
Underneath the pandemic, the racial injustice, the politics, the economy crashing, the passionate and widely opposing views of all of those things is where we are wounded, bleeding, and many are healing. We have seen ourselves – our deepest selves – and now must decide who we will be going forward.
We have been faced with stark realizations that we are not as free as we want to be. We are not as safe as we hoped we were. We do not know the hearts of many that we once saw as allies. We have lost loved ones to illness, we have lost others to the shock of seeing our morality based differences. We have had to look hard at ourselves and what we are willing to tolerate, accept and actually be. We are not done. None of this is done.
The unknowing of what is coming next looms over everyone. We have had our eyes opened to the fact that none of us ever knew what was coming before; we just lived our lives as if we were safe and in control of our own destiny. We took so much for granted; especially our most valuable pieces of life; our time and our connections to each other. We found ourselves in a world of questions and conflicting answers and what made it worse was that we found ourselves widely alone in a social distancing nightmare. For those of us who naturally try to gather and connect during crisis, this was particularly hard. No gathering in person. No hugging. No being physically close.
For many of us, our homes which used to be our sanctuaries became our prisons. We were told to stay in them, separated and alone – relationships on the computer screen or cell phones. Supplies disappeared, and we felt the fear of lack that we had not known before. Menial things took on great importance: basic things like toilet paper and hand sanitizer. We covered our faces, or refused to. We stopped seeing the faces of others in person or when we ventured out in public. Public now came with a new sense of “unsafe.” Connections in our humanity got harder to recognize. Are they smiling at me or wincing? Can you tell from 6 feet away? Lines between us began to be drawn on which sources of information we would now believe and follow. Anything that weakens our ability to connect from a place of humanity puts us in danger.
Our sense of belonging and security was all questioned. Everything was questioned. Everything is still questioned. That is not necessarily a bad thing as many of the questions were long overdue. Still, more lines between us are drawn as some of our answers are so vastly polarized from the answers of others. Eyes have been opened whether they wanted to be or not. Many minds have expanded while others have slammed shut. We all think we are right when our beliefs are strong. What I am seeing and hearing now though is this; Our differences don’t seem to be rooted in skin color, gender, political party or neighborhood, they are rooted in our hearts. Open or closed? Either way, this year has done something excruciatingly well: It has changed us all and there is no going back.
Mind your change. Make sure it is the one YOU choose from your own place of love. Fear will separate us and destroy what is good. Love makes room and our humanity grows. What pieces of you have changed? What is changing you most? Fear or love? Where are you choosing to put your power?
In all honesty, it is fear that changed me when the many crisis and struggles of this year started coming. I grappled with fear for months. I searched for my footing, my true core beliefs. I fell numb for a short time to try to adjust to a world, a life, a daily experience that was all unexpected, strange, painful, and whose duration was unknown. I felt fear stealing my power to create. I was reacting to the pain and scared. I will not tell you otherwise. This year has been unbelievably difficult and being a coach, therapist, leader (and chronic over-achiever) has added an extra layer of pressure to try to get myself together faster and stronger than others. I am okay with that. We are stronger than we think we are.
I am still holding tight to my belief that the majority of people are inherently GOOD and that love will ultimately win. Most people are resilient, adaptive, and want a more loving, just and peaceful existence. We are making hard choices and finding new ways of being who we choose to be, not just whom we were told to be. We are letting go of things (and sometimes people) that are not part of the future we want to see. This is a time of awareness and action and doing hard things (even if the hard thing to do is to stop doing what we were doing before).
I believe in love and our collective humanity and while fear woke us up and started this change, I believe it is up to use to now consciously put love in charge again to choose what changes next.
Women Leaders: Why We Need Them; How to Be One!
Learning to be a great leader takes training. There are countless leadership training courses, classes, videos, books and even degrees available for people who truly want to be great leaders. Much of the training available is excellent; especially when looking for training from some of the icons of leadership such as Darren Hardy, Dale Carnegie, Tony Robbins and more (I am sorry if I left out your favorite this time around). When you look at the majority of the great training out there, it was developed by men for men. Women can still use it, of course, but very little of it addresses the differences between male and female energy and how that changes leadership.
With all of the great training resources out there on leadership, why in the heck don’t we have more great leaders? More specifically, why do we have to look so hard to identify and name great female leaders to learn from?
Women make great leaders. This fact is becoming more irrefutable as the male-dominated business world comes to its senses and starts to realize that corporations, political parties, and all organizations benefit greatly by including women leaders in the top offices and board rooms. Female leadership energy is different from male leadership energy and having a solid mix of both makes leadership inclusive and stronger.
Women have been banding together with some very exceptional men to level the playing field and open the doors of opportunity into leadership for everyone for a very long time. Yet, progress has been slow. The time has long passed that it made sense to have more women leaders, but here we are. How do we speed this train up? What in the world is truly in our way?
Being a person without a victim mentality (oh, I am sure I had one once, but I have long left it behind), the question I like to ask even more than what is stopping me is “how am I stopping myself?”
So, since I am a woman, but am not ALL women, the question then expands into “How are we stopping each other?”
One of the biggest blocks I have seen in working with women entrepreneurs of all ages and women executives, comes down to this: We have been trained this way.
Since we were little girls, we have been getting messages that have created blocks to leadership not only for us, but for most women. How do the messages do this? By pitting women against women. How do you stop the most powerful force there is? Get it to fight itself. We have been trained to do this and we all are affected.
We have been trained in two extremes and it is time for find our balance. Our extremes include our “good girl” training and our “mean girl” training. We have all had both. In between these two extremes, our most powerful self exists!
One one side of the extreme is our Good Girl. Good girls don’t talk back. They don’t argue. They don’t show anger. They are complacent and they are grateful for every darn little crumb of nothing that is bestowed upon them. They don’t show other people up by being too successful. They have opinions, but they are too polite to voice them if they are not in alignment with the rest of the room. They want to say “no”, but they are more concerned with hurting someone else’s feelings than they are about burning themselves out, so they over-commit and lay themselves out for the benefit of others until they are too exhausted to breathe.
Mean girls can wage war from stealth mode. They are on the other extreme from our Good Girl. Mean girls can injure their opponent without ever being identified as the attacker. They can divide and conquer. For the meanest of the mean girls, it becomes a game as they sabotage the success of other girls just because they can. They gossip and exclude and pat others on the back with all claws out. They are envious and mistrusting of other women. They have been trained to believe that resources are scarce and that there is only room at the top for the chosen one or two. Forget it, just one. A country can’t have two queens, after all.
But wait, there’s more. Some girls have been trained so well that they don’t even realize they are mean girls, just as some good girls don’t realize they are slowing down women’s progress by being overly accommodating. Again, it is an awareness that we need to be brave enough to truly see. Some of us are so well trained in the finer art of higher level strategic thinking that we may not even realize that the tactics we are using to get our way or our methods to “keep the peace” are causing unnecessary damage to all of us.
Nobody wants to be believe that they have the making of a doormat and a tyrant inside; but we all do. From the time we were three years old, we started to learn the difference between boys and girls and what was expected of each. We were taught to be pretty (but not too pretty), to be smart (but not too smart), and to be polite so that others would think well of us. What other people thought of us was ingrained as more important than what we thought about ourselves. That’s just bad training, isn’t it? Let’s help each other unlearn that.
Once we got to school where there were other girls, we were quickly trained to protect ourselves from them. Girls fight differently than boys. Boys yell, they hit, they get bigger and in your face. Girls fight with carefully placed words and social hierarchy of inclusion and exclusion. Judgement is our sword, where boys are more apt to use fists. Girls gather together and, if she is a mean girl, she will be your friend until that fateful moment when she is NOT and you run the risk of being ostracized from the entire group. You learn quickly that the fastest way to stay “safe” is to play the game (joining in on the gossip and trying to stay in favor of the girl in charge) or you separate and identify yourself as someone who “doesn’t belong”. Either way, the message of “you are not good enough” is a strong one and we are trained to feed it to each other. We are taught that our worth is something determined by someone else.
The older we get, the better we get. We either learn to embrace our own self-worth and support each other, or we hone our skills of manipulation, sabotage and exclusion to mastery levels. While this might move one mean girl to an elevated status, it bogs down the progress of women’s leadership as a whole. Staying on the extremes of Mean Girl or Good Girl keeps the stereotype of women leaders as “troublemakers” or “untrustworthy” or “too emotional” or “too weak” alive in a male-dominated business world looking reasons to keep us at bay. We must un-train from this thinking through choosing different actions. It is no big secret: A band of powerful, well-connected and strong women moving together for the good of everyone is exactly what the world needs; and it is exactly what scares the misogynistic system into continuing the messages that divide us.
It begins with awareness. We must be courageous enough to identify within ourselves where we are too much the Good Girl and where we slip into the Mean Girl within our own thoughts, attitudes and behaviors.
One of the keys to this is understanding your own power and how you use it. Embrace your own personal power, respecting the power of those around you and help lift up those women who are struggling to find theirs. Women become unstoppable when working together; we need to use our power to support women who are leading the way and make sure to keep our internal mean girls in check while doing so.
Another key is accurately assessing your own level of self-esteem. Your courage to Un-train will require you to find the parts of you that need to be strengthened and then it will take more awareness and a firm choice to make changes for your greater good.
Third, we must all get better at identifying the gaps around us and being brave enough to fill them with pro-active, confidence-building support for ourselves and each other. Stop the gossip, the cliques, the exclusionary tactics that divide us and find a way to reach across to other women. The change begins with us; every one of us. We can change this in ourselves, assist our women friends in shifting too and leading the way for the next generation of women coming up.
All aboard the Un-train! Let’s go!
Laugh Lines of Graceful Distinction
I don’t mean to discount anyone who is wrestling with the aging process or anyone who is really truly vested in never looking like they have been on the planet as long as they truly have…but I had an experience yesterday that continues to play in my mind and now I will write it here so it can leave me alone.
I have crows feet on my face. On each outside corner of my eyes are lines. They are deep. They don’t go away when my face is relaxed. They get very deep when I am talking, or laughing. I laugh a lot. My lines are permanent. I can’t see them unless I am in front of a mirror or looking at a photo, but I know they are there and they don’t bother me. I have spent many years smiling and I hope to have many more.
Yesterday, while making my way through one of the most prominent (aka expensive) shopping centers in my metropolis, I was stopped by a man handing out a sample of something. It looked like jewelry cleaner (it had a diamond on it). It has been a while since I have cleaned my wedding band, so I stopped (rarely do I do this when I am firmly aware that I am about to be sold to). Turns out it wasn’t jewelry cleaner, it was skin care. I say “care” loosely here as it was really cosmetics designed to alter the appearance of your skin whether or not it is actually “good” for your skin to use them.
Not being a rude sort of person, and realizing it was ME that stopped and gave the green light, I patiently spent 30 seconds (no laughing!) to listen. Before I knew it, there was a magnifying mirror up to my face and a cotton swab of goo being dabbed next my eye.
“How does that feel?” was the question being posed. “sticky” was my answer. Not what he was looking for, I’m sure.
The mirror returned. “do you see how those lines are already going AWAY?” Um…I guess so. “just wait another few seconds and you will see.”
I felt a sudden fear of loss that didn’t seem quite reasonable and sort of surprised me. “Hey. I am on my way to a meeting, am I going to look like Bell’s palsy victim with one eye drooping and one crazily open?” I asked. Humor is my favorite defense mechanism.
He was UNAMUSED.
Then the slight fear turned into something closer to annoyance and I finally said it. “Why do you think I need to lose my laugh lines? I got those from years of being happy. Why would I want to give them up?”
“Of course” he says. “You EARNED those. But don’t you want to age GRACEFULLY?”
That was it. I’m done. Apparently I do NOT want to age gracefully if that means putting up with being sticky and gooey (and broke – that stuff was expensive!) and having some young man without my life experience give me advice on growing or losing anything – even my laugh lines, crows feet, or whatever you want to call them. I left that twisted, self-judging, version of graceful with him as I laughed and said “Nope! I guess not!” while I turned and walked away.
Yes, I am sure he disagreed with my philosophy. I am also pretty sure that he chalked his encounter with me up to just one more crazy aging woman who doesn’t get how important looking oddly young for your age is. I am sure there was someone else to take my place just moments later and who may have actually forked over the $400 to age “gracefully” with gooey, puff-less, line-less eyes.
Not me. I am old enough to know better and thankful to have so many smiles that they stayed.