Author Archives: Amy Beilharz

Patience is my Challenge

I am not by nature a patient person.

After my second child was born, I remember visiting my high school best friend with my five- and one-year old. As we were saying goodbye after a fun day together for the first time in years, she leaned over and said, “You have really changed. I do not remember you being this patient!”

Having children taught me many things; patience one of them. It’s always a choice: I could be rushed & frustrated or patient & happy. I choose patience with my kids.

Yet, I still feel impatient in many facets of my life. I want my big ideas to take flight immediately. I want my employees to take on new tasks with speed and enthusiasm. I want each goal in my life to manifest as soon as I set it.

Bob Proctor sends out daily quotes, and I enjoy reading them in my inbox each day. They give me pause to ponder ideas from great minds. This one really got me agitated.

“Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience”. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

After reading this quote, I recognize my impatience may be one of my biggest stumbling blocks to realizing my dreams to their fullest. Even though my commitment and enthusiasm around my goals are important, my impatience is actually blocking the good I desire, and I never quite saw it before.

Although I coach women on business, much of what sets the groundwork for anyone’s success is a sizzling goal and belief you can achieve it — even if you do not know how.

Without that in place all my help with the how is like chasing your tail — lots of energy spent and motion happening but little to show for it.

Today, I got the ah-ha that when I set my goals, yet am impatient for their achievement. I am actually putting out energy that I don’t really believe they will happen — at least not as fast as I desire. That is inadvertently sabotaging my affirmations just like a lack of belief in myself or in my goal would do. It is a subtle sabotage but a sabotage just the same.

In fact, most of the ways we derail our dreams are not obvious. If they were, it would be so much easier for us to correct our mistakes. But they disguise themselves in things like enthusiasm and commitment, when they are actually impatience.

Are you patient like nature? It’s what grows towering redwoods and magestic cypress trees over hundreds of years. I choose to develop patience to a new level of calm, enthusiastic belief. I will let you know how I do.

Do Affirmations Frustrate You?

For many years I was extremely frustrated by all the buzz about the Law of Attraction and doing affirmations. All these people were raving it worked, but I was not seeing results in my life or in those around me also trying to use positive thinking to change their circumstances.

Then someone suggested I start to say, “What would it take for….?” Rather than, “I am…” You might want to try it. It was just the solution I needed.

My cynical truth meter does not go into high gear when I say, “What would it take for me to be healthy, strong and flexible?” It does goes into overdrive when I try to affirm, “I am healthy, strong and flexible,” when I’m recovering from a serious illness and have lost my strength. I would experience streams of doubts in my head that negated any benefit from the affirmation.

But now, when I ask “what would it take”, I have opened my mind to find solutions rather than argue with me.

Noah St. John recently wrote an article about this very thing. He uses, “Why am I healthy, flexible and strong?” The key is asking a question.

These are two very powerful ways to make affirmations work for you and remove the frustration you might be feeling if they haven’t worked.

What will it take ……?
Why am I…?

Maybe you have some variations of your own. I would love to hear them!

Achieving Balance During Life’s Biggest Transitions

On Mother’s Day, I watched one of my daughter’s graduate college, and in a few weeks, my youngest will graduate high school. Within full of appreciation for their achievements and excitement for their futures, I am sometimes caught by surprise by the deep effect their transitions have on me.

As a mom, my children’s transitions actually constitute transitions for my life, too. Will they be living at home anymore? What level of support will being their mom mean in their next phase of life? how much influence do I actually have on their choices?

I remember distinctly the day my son (and oldest child) first drove away at 16 years of age with his newly acquired license. I knew I had to trust that the job I had done would guide him to make good choices, because as much as I didn’t want to admit it—once out of the driveway, he could do and go as he pleased. It also meant I would no longer be driving him everywhere — a significant convenience, yet a loss of one-on-one talk time with him that I loved.

Have you experienced some of these transitions, too?

The tricky part with these relationships we cherish is investing our hearts in them, while still maintaining our own center of gravity. We require our own dreams and inspirations so that as our children become less dependent on us we are not left with a black hole in our lives. It is even true of our spouses, friends and work. Our center of gravity must remain in us, while we nurture, love and put our all into the things we care about.

I have not always been good at this balance — often being far more invested in others than myself. However, what has changed all this for me is having a BIG goal of my own! Even if I am fully investing most of my time in my children or my work, if I have identified my BIG personal goal and invest just a little time towards it regularly it establishes my own center of gravity, my own destination, and feeds my inner light. And ironically, I have found I am a better mother, friend and worker when my inner light and center of gravity is strong!

It has also made these transitions smoother and more joyful, even if I do still cringe that the part of my parenting journey where my children are living at home is coming to a close — I have more energy invested in my future than grieving what is past.

Here is to gloriously smooth and joyful transitions for your life!

My Mother & Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou has been one of my all time heroes! She always inspires me and this beautiful video with Oprah is one of those brilliant moments. Maya reminds me of my beautiful mother, who would have been 91 today and is another of my heroes. Mom was always grateful for her health and vitality and was spunky right up until the day she died at 87. I miss her deeply and am so grateful I was able to enjoy her joie de vivre for so many years!

To the Graduating Women of 2015

Graduating women of 2015, congratulations! You have achieved your goal and are about to embark upon the next journey of your life.

You may receive advice from parents, friends, and other well meaning people on what job to take, where to live, or any other significant decision you are making as you leave the container of college. Yet, no matter what path you choose there are some things that can help you on your way.

Believe in your capacity to do great things. Maybe you are naive, idealistic, and impractical. Good. Stay that way as long as you can. Thinking outside the box is the only way new and wonderful things have come to humans, so let yourself believe — regardless of what others say. As a serial entrepreneur, I have found believing in myself the most important thing I have done to create opportunities and succeed.
Know you will probably encounter gender bias at work and in life. It is still an unfortunate reality. However, more important is to remove any internal gender bias you might have that will hold you back from shining. Two ways young women do this are either to retract into sweet, non-assertive mannerisms to avoid offending the men in power over them, or to over masculate their mannerisms–hiding their feminine nature. Neither work and both will leave you in a one down position. Be yourself. Bring your feminine and masculine strengths to your life. And speak up for yourself with the expectation you will be heard, not with the expectation you will have to fight for your rights. Stay alert to your own subconscious gender bias lest it sabotage your success before you even start or creep in slowly without warning. Other people cannot hold you back if you are enthusiastic and believe in yourself.
Find women you admire and connect with them. Having strong women in your circle will help you in ways you cannot imagine, until it happens.
Take a leap of faith and do what your heart is calling you to do. You are not commiting for a lifetime, so let go of the fear this has to be “the right” choice. When you follow your heart, and not your head, you will avoid spending decades in dead end jobs that seemed responsible. Plus, you will have spent your energy pursuing what excites you and there is no telling today what great things will come out of that tomorrow. To bring your innate gifts to the world, you have to pursue what you are passionate about. The world needs your passion and creativity, not some mindless motion of another cog in the wheel.

I look forward to learning all the amazing and wonderful contributions you make to our world!

Vote with your pocketbook

Do you realize the power you wield to change the world?

Women represent 85% of the purchasing power in the United States and worldwide hold trillions of dollars of wealth.

What are you doing with this power?

I advocate you pay attention to where you put your money through purchases, investments, and even payroll in your company to make sure your part of the solution to ensuring women have equal access to jobs, opportunities for advancement and access to capital to start and grow businesses in parity with their male peers. You may not realize it, but white women still make 78 cents to every dollar men make in the same jobs. Hispanic and black women fair even worse!

The Anita Borg Institute has created a list of the top 13 companies in the world for women to work and advance. Although you may not want a tech job at one of these firms, knowing that they employ and advance women is good info when making purchase decisions. ABI investigated 35 companies with almost half a million employees and ranked them on women at entry, mid and senior positions. They also looked at recruitment and promotion of women.

Based on their findings, here is your go to list for personal and business choices (not in ranked order):

BNY Melon (investment company)
Accenture (management consulting)
American Express (yep, possibly in your wallet)
Apple
eBay
GoDaddy
Goldman Sachs (another investment firm)
Google
IBM
Rackspace Hosting (cloud management)
Salesforce (cloud computing)
T. Rowe Price (investment firm)
USAA (insurance)

The list may not be part of your standard purchases, but it is a start. It makes me interested in looking for information about women in leadership positions in consumer product companies, as well as other categories of companies that will help us make informed choices.

Happy Mother’s Day Working Moms!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the women who have birthed, cared for and nurtured our young. It is the one job that cannot be done over or easily be replaced.

If you are a working mom, and worry that choosing your kids over work held you back in your career, you are not alone. So many women think they are unprepared to reenter the business world after staying home with their kids, or scaling back their career for many years.

If that is you, watch this video!

Our future is riding on you, so thanks for contributing so much, and Happy Mother’s Day!

How to Keep Women Engaged in Jobs and Careers

Women are leaving the IT industry in droves, according to a recent article in CIO.

The article goes on to describe six things women want in order to stay engaged in any job. Although the things they cite are important, they are not the full picture.

What are women looking for?

Equal pay
Flexible work schedule and paid leaves
Female role models and mentors
Recognition
Opportunity for advancement
Meaningful work that makes a difference beyond their job.

Although each of these items may be important, the discussion in this article, and in most conversations on this topic, ultimately revolved around women leaving to raise families, not being welcomed back after having children, or marginalized as they juggle both career and families. These are problems.

Yet, this perspective continues to perpetuate a stereotype of women not prioritizing work and career advancement as the cause of lower pay and career opportunities. However, a study at Harvard Business School of alumni showed that high powered and well trained women, with plenty of career drive, still earned less than their male colleagues, did not rise to as high of positions, and were often left out of critical business deals necessary for their success–even though 93% of them never left the workforce to raise children.

As Sheryl Sandberg noted in a recent interview, how many men are asked how they handle work and family? She is asked this all the time.

Women continue to be underrepresented at the top of organizations–large and small. We can continue to “fight” this, and probably should continue to make waves, until true equal rights have been achieved.

But more important than fighting this, we need to change the game. How do we do that?

Actively look for ways to promote and support other women. We represent 51% of the population. If we put our influence in numbers behind each other, we can do more good than demanding changes from the status quo. When Gandhi pushed the British out of India, he created force through numbers–rather than attempting to increase the power and influence of the Indian population within the status quo.

If women move their purchasing power, their investment money, and their own hiring practices to promoting women we could greatly shift the balance of power–within a much shorter time horizon than our current trajectory.

Look for women you can promote, mentor, buy from or invest in. They are all around you.

Your choices can make a difference.

One Trick to Help Reach Your Goals Faster!

Here is a big twist on reaching your goals that might make the difference in your success!

Usually when we want to achieve something we focus on the outcome of what we want. There are even hundreds of books, audio recordings and training programs telling you to imagine your goal achieved–I often advise you to do it too!

However, psychologists Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor did a study looking at the effect of visualizing three different aspects of your goal:

Imagining the goal achieved,
Imagining having the habits that would achieve the goal, or
Imagining having both the good habits AND achieving the goal.

Which do you think got the best results? Well, it surprised me because I assumed number three, visualizing both would have the highest reward. But it was visualizing the habits to get there!

Visualizing the habits to get there had the best results!

This could be a huge step in your success at any goal. Instead of focusing on being successful, visualize yourself as someone who has the productivity and decision making of a successful person. Rather than imagining yourself thin, imagine yourself with the habits of someone with a healthy, slender body. The possibilities are endless!

Apparently, the reason this is so powerful is because it decreases anxiety over achieving the results and increases your likelihood to plan for success. After thinking about it I realize it makes perfect sense. It’s why I coach women to work on their chief priority first…then fill in the day! It is the same reason I advise you to carve out time each day to move forward on your goal, even if it is only 30 minutes a day.

Both of these are habits. And by developing success habits, you create success! It really is that simple.

Do you have a goal in mind that you can refocus your attention to the habits required to achieve it? Start visualizing yourself with those habits, today!

5 Ways to Increase Abundance

So often do we wait to get something before we give. It is an unconscious hold-back to ensure there is something in the pot before we offer it to someone. However, as in most life lessons- (ironically), the pot gets filled when we offer it. Here are 5 ways to increase abundance in your life.

I love what Judith Orloff, M.D. says about it in her article, The Power of Random Acts of Kindness, in Forbes’ Women’s Media.

We are not without influence!

Even small acts of generosity return great rewards just by how they make us feel. How we feel affects EVERYTHING including…

How we act
What we think about
Our effectiveness
Our emotional resilience
Our energy
Our compassion and empathy
Did I mention EVERYTHING?!

We have a beautiful tree native to Central Texas called the redbud tree. They are small trees, sometimes scraggly–but in early spring, they always burst forth with deep fuchsia pink blossoms that take your breath away. You will find them on the roadside, hanging over fence lines, across creek beds and in random hillsides. Each one is so colorful that they become a spectacular show by themselves.

These redbud trees make their spring debut with flair — whether we have a hard winter or a soft one, a rainy spring or a dry one. They show up for life regardless if things show up for them!

Here are a five suggestions for how you can show up in your life with more enthusiasm and generosity that are easy:

Compliment at least one person every day
Do one nice thing for someone every day. (i.e. buy their lunch, bring them flowers, do their chore, etc.)
Send someone a thank you note (out of the blue) for something they did for you — maybe years ago, that meant a lot to you
Send 5 people a text right now telling them what you appreciate about them
Donate your time to a cause you feel inspired by

PART OF INFLUENTIAL WOMEN, INC.

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