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From Harvard to my Heart!

Our daughters need a new paradigm…

(EXCERPT FROM UPCOMING BOOK: Dancing With Our Daughters.)

Years ago a group of moms and I formed a mother-daughter group to empower our daughters as they became women. My upcoming book gives mothers of daughters a prescription for keeping their relationship with their daughters vibrantly alive during adolescent and teen years. This excerpt from the book chronicles my journey through career, motherhood, and my newfound delight in being a woman.

From MBA to mom—from Harvard to my heart!

Many of the moms in our Dancing With Our Daughters group came from successful careers and high-profile lives. Prior to embracing the feminine aspects of myself, I worked as a high-flying business executive. I earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and was on a high-roller management path in the telecommunications and computer industry. IBM bought my company and I quickly earned a place in their grooming field for top management. Then I was seduced away from my fast-track management career at IBM to be Director of Marketing at a small start-up company that evolved into the current cellular industry. Life was good for my ego. I competed in a masculine world with masculine ways and succeeded. I had a bet with one of my male Harvard classmates as to who would be on the cover of Fortune Magazine first and I seemed closest to the goal.

In 1990, I left my career when my first child turned three. I loved being a mom and had been struggling to be super mom and super executive. With a strong nudge from my husband, I jumped full-time into motherhood—a tough transition. I had never before even considered being a stay-at-home mom. Giving up the boosts to my ego from my career and being all right with cleaning, cooking, and changing diapers was a major course change. No one thought I would last—not my husband, my mom, my friends, or me. None of us anticipated the unfolding of my own soul as I reclaimed parts of me I had disowned to be powerful in a man’s world. In 1989 and 1990, I cried and lamented the loss of my “power.” In 2007, when my husband and I talked about the potential of my going back to work, leaving the life I had built with the kids– I cried even more.

When I first left the business world, after staying home for a month I was appalled at how “unproductive” my days as a stay-at-home mom felt. I was accustomed to being a corporate executive with agendas and meetings and a secretary and employees and plane flights and more meetings and deadlines and press conferences.   It was all very important. I had long lists of to-do’s that I ceremoniously checked off in order to feel good about myself. When I chose to leave all that and stay home with my first child, at the end of the day I could not figure out how I had been so busy since nothing seemed “done.”

In my fit of despair about how useless I was, a good friend told me, “You’re accustomed to being productive. You’re now being fruitful. Productive people can count their worth by what they accomplish each day and week. Fruitful people are like farmers planting an orchard. Trees take tending and bear fruit many, many years later. Only with patience and inner knowing can one take on the task of being fruitful. Your rewards are not today or tomorrow, but oh will they come.” And oh, was she right! The fruit of watching my son and daughters today as they live their chosen lives and being their friend and confidante is the most rewarding gift I have ever received.

I enjoyed both the power of being fully invested in my career and the glory of being fully invested in my family. Each blessed and served me. My path now is to learn how to integrate the gifts I received reclaiming my feminine nature back into a position of strength in the world—not to forsake the feminine to be powerful, but to embrace my true feminine power. That has been my goal for our Dancing With Our Daughters group: to empower our girls to be fully feminine and fully powerful. They no longer need to fade into the background of someone else’s story to be feminine or to hide their femininity to be powerful. The new paradigm our group strove to foster is both—is balance, is bold acceptance, and is empowerment.

            Dancing With Our Daughters has been the planting of great trees. The fruit has been in our girls and unexpectedly even in ourselves. Our girls have grown and are growing into women with minds of their own. They have become women who respect themselves, women who can say “I love myself enough to make choices that are kind to me.” Along the way, each of us mothers also grew, recommitted to ourselves, and found new strength in being women.

Our daughters—yours and mine—need new paradigms.

I encourage you to form a group of friends with young daughters—for them and for you. Form it exactly to your liking. Dancing With Our Daughters will give you ideas and inspiration. You will give yourselves your own form and your own path. You will bless your daughters and yourselves, now and in years to come.

The mothers you’ll meet in this book have struggled with issues just like you have. We created a forum to help our daughters find their inner strength as women. We found a way to support our daughters’ and our own exploration. We molded a structure and rhythm that helped our girls traverse the pressures of our culture, their own inner innocence, and their blossoming womanhood.

This book is our gift to you, that you might be inspired to find your own form and process to dance yourself and your own daughters through this uniquely personal journey of being feminine in the twenty-first century. May you find in the process blessings and jewels as bright and deep and profound as we have.

What are you excited about?

“What are you most excited about right now?”  What a great conversation starter!  This article by Kate Northrup really highlights my mantra–do what you love, be passionate about what you do, find goals that inspire you and every thing else will fall into place.

Give yourself permission to create a beautiful vegetable garden feeling as good about it as running a multi-million dollar business. And give other women permission to do the same every opportunity you get.  Reminding each other that we are valuable in the small things we do, not just in our public successes helps us stay out of overwhelmed and under-inspired lives. My favorite thing Kate wrote is:

“THE ACT OF PASSIONATE CREATION ITSELF IS WHAT GIVES AN ENDEAVOR MERIT — NOT ITS VALUE IN THE MARKETPLACE.”

We women have been running the race to prove we are worthy of equal pay, equal opportunities and equal respect for so long we have forgotten to check in with ourselves and make sure we are doing what we love.

Really take in what this says.  “The act of passionate creation…”  When was the last time you did this?  The more often you create with passion, the more alive you will feel.  Guaranteed.  “…is what gives an endeavor merit”  Not what other people think.  Not how much you get paid for it. Not whether anyone else acknowledges it at all.  Nothing in the outer world can give value to or take value away from your passionate creations.  They have intrinsic value because you created them with passion.

What are you excited about, today?

Are you burned out?

I find when I am becoming burned out it is a sure indication that my days are filled with things I need to do but not things that inspire me.  I can work long and hard when I am inspired.  Burn out is a key indicator I am off track.  Forbes recently did an article about this very topic with 3 tips for combating burn-out.

Here is my strategy when I feel the heavy beast of burn-out eating away at my drive and my productivity.

The first thing I do is take time to break my daily cycle, whether it is an hour or a whole week away.

During this break I make two lists.  I list all the goals that would make me feel great if I was pursuing them or had accomplished them.  These aren’t plans, they are goals.  Things that make me stretch outside my current comfort zone and the successful outcome of would bring a huge grin to my face.

Then I make a list of what normally fills my day.

If I am not spending some time each day on things that move forward something on my first list I can be sure I need to change something.  Sometimes the change is drastic — like quitting my job.  But often it is just waiting until noon to answer emails and spending the first hour of each work day on a creative project rather than at the end of the day when all my “to-do’s” are complete–which rarely happens and I have little creative juices.

Making progress each day towards what really makes my heart sing is the key to my productivity — in everything else I do.  If you don’t know what makes your heart sing, take my free quiz and get a free meditation audio to help find it.

Equality

I love this quote from fellow Harvard grad, Sheryl Sandberg:

“A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half of our homes.”

Statistically, we are a far distance from this goal since under 20% of countries and companies are headed by women and possibly fewer homes are run by men.

Yet, maybe the first place we can find equality is in the small realm of our own home and family.  If each of us discussed with our partners a new plan that empowered us both, balanced the supporting chores like shopping, cleaning, and cooking between us, and the children felt equal involvement from both parents across the car pools, sports meets, and homework, plus financial and other major decisions were made through discussion and collaboration  — then we would be creating a microcosm of the world we want to create.  From this environment our children would be learning to expect and replicate equality in their outer world.

And what about our internal landscape.  Do we give equal weight to our own feminine and masculine sides?  Do we nurture ourselves?  Do we listen to our intuition?  Do we take time to ensure our own bodies are not polluted and abused?  If we balanced our inner masculine and feminine how might that improve our intimate relationships, our families, our daily world?

Maybe we are closer to achieving this outer goal of equality than we realize.  Maybe it will require some honesty about our inner landscape.  And maybe the result won’t be men running half of the homes and women running half of the companies and countries.  However, it must be that women feel empowered to create a life they choose and that the companies and countries they run, if they choose to, will listen to their feminine wisdom–not expect them to behave like men.  It must be that men are allowed to be fully engaged in their families, expect to pick up half of the “home making” duties, and are empowered to bring their masculine strengths to the running of a family home–not behave like a women.

Whatever the current reality is; we can change it.  Women and men will hold equality in leadership–it is possible.  It will take women finding our voice, speaking our truth, and expecting others to listen.  It will require listening to their truth.  It will require vision, courage and determination.  And most importantly, it will require women honoring women–in all walks of life, in all positions, in all ways.  If we were boldly supporting each other, no man or organization could keep us down.  And from a position of strength we can better learn to honor our male colleagues in a way that empowers greatness in us both.

When we learn to honor each others’ strengths, invite other people’s wisdom into the conversation and look for collaborative solutions–we will find our world gentler, more enlivening and prosperous!

Isn’t that the goal, really?

 

Take the leap!

Take a chance, leap, trust, go for it!  These are all great words of wisdom until you are paralyzed by indecision and afraid to make the “wrong” choice.  It can often feel overwhelmingly difficult to move forward in those moments when you can see the benefits of both options–or worse the risks of both.

Let’s take a deeper look at one of our recommendations for keeping on track to manifesting your dreams–take a chance.  We all know that the pros and cons of big decisions are rarely cut and dry.  The “right” answer often eludes us and at these moments we find our inner guidance too quiet to hear over the chatter of internal arguments going on in our head.  At these times the words “take a chance” can seem frivolous and definitely not inspirational.

Often we do not move forward with inspiration because we fear the effect on our life and others. And then the opportunity passes and we find ourselves in wishful agony about things we didn’t do.

So how do we create strength in ourselves to make these big decisions and get out of grid lock?

First, we need to assess the cost of not moving.

Sometimes opportunities are fleeting and we need to know the cost of not acting.  Make a list.  The lost opportunity costs can be financial gain, emotional benefits, lifestyle changes, and future opportunities that arise from this first decision.  The cost can also be timing costs–if the change is going to happen at some point anyway and we wait, we loose precious opportunity to start building the new.

Second, we need to get clarity on the real risks.

If a decision is emotional our perceived risks are usually tied to baggage from past choices–related or not–that make our perception of this situation overstated.  By writing down a list of the possible risks of taking this chance we can scrub off some of the story and see the real risks.  (A list does not have editorial space so it can limit the emotional story that builds each risk into something bigger than life.)

A technique I learned years ago to gain perspective on the “what if this happens” fears is to take each item on my risk list and ask two questions.  One, “How likely is this to happen?”  Give it a number between 1 and 10 with 10 being 100% likely.  Discard anything scoring under 4 –it probably should not be getting the weight it is getting in this decision.  The second question I ask is, “What would be worse than this risk happening?” I then come up with 4-5 things that I would dislike happening even more than the perceived risk keeping me from acting.  When I look at the “big” possible problems stopping me from moving in context to other bad things that could go wrong in my life they start to take their place in the range of possibilities.  I make better choices when I have a balanced perspective and my “boogy man” risks are reduced to their real size.

Once we have looked honestly at the risks to taking or not taking action we must turn our attention to the benefits of taking the leap of faith in ourselves and this decision.

Writing on a separate piece of paper all the positive outcomes we expect or hope for by making this choice will help give weight to them. We should let our imagination go, add details and how we will feel when we have accomplished our desired plan.  As we write about one outcome another may come to mind and be added.  This is not the pros and cons excercise that has been going on in our head.  It is the vivid creation of images that help us assess whether this decision really excites us and the potential of it happening gives us chills.  Because at the end of the day, those are the only things we want to invest our energy in anyway.

One last thing to assess–and often we need the help of a good friend who can be honest with us–is how much of what is holding us back is purely our lack of confidence in ourselves or our lack of investment in the things that make our heart sing?

If we invest in ourself and the worse thing on our list happens, we still might be better off than if we stay in a place where our own actions do not validate our worthiness.  Here are some great quotes to help motivate bold, inspired action.

“It’s better to be boldly decisive and risk being wrong than to agonize at great length and be right too late.”  ~ Marilyn Moss

“The only limits in our life are those we impose on ourself.  The cardinal principle of decision-making is decide right where you are with whatever you’ve got.”   ~ Bob Proctor

“What lies before you and what lies behind you are tiny matters compared to what lies within you.”  ~ Emerson

“Children are happy because they don’t have a file in their minds called “All the Things That Could Go Wrong.”  ~ Marianne Williamson

“This is the time to take off the shell of your past and step into the rich possibilities of your future. God does not give us dreams that we cannot fulfill. If you want to do something great with your life-whether it’s to fall madly in love, become a teacher, be a great parent-if you aspire to do something beyond what you are doing now, this is the time to begin. Trust yourself.”  ~ Debbie Ford

“If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”  ~Thomas Edison

“Do you really want to look back on your life and see how wonderful it could have been had you not been afraid to live it.” ~ Caroline Myss

“So, what can’t you take? Decide which of the two options is harder, and do the other. That way, no matter how hard your choice turns out to be, at least you can find comfort in knowing you’re avoiding something even worse.” ~ Josephine Andelini, Starcrossed

“Don’t be an extra in your own movie.”  ~ Bob Proctor

And when all else fails remember to take yourself less seriously!  My first boss reminded me of this and asked me to assess all my successes and failures in the light of, “What will this mean to me in 1 year, 5 years, 20 years?  What will this mean to the rest of the world?  How important is it in the scheme of things, really?

 

Creating our own “Good ol’ Boys Club”

Do you work hard and have great ideas but just somehow feel like you are swimming upstream or just don’t quite get where you thought you would? Do you question your abilities, your credentials, and maybe wonder if you really have what it takes? At a Harvard conference last year I learned some things about women and success that just might change your trajectory!

I spent two days at Harvard Business School reconnecting with classmates and getting to know others as 800 women (and a few brave men) gathered to celebrate 50 years since women were first admitted to HBS!

It was a powerful group of women — full of life, wisdom, and ability to make things happen. We laughed at stories from the early days, were inspired by women who have shaped our world, and were informed by new research about the state of women’s lives and careers.

What struck all of us was how far we had come and yet how much had not really changed in many areas. Robin Ely, HBS Professor and Senior Associate Dean, showed research about where Harvard women are today. I was overwhelmed at some of the statistics about the world my daughters face. Somehow being highly educated, having a successful career, and tucking my head in my own family and business life has left me with the illusion that women are getting close to parity with men in areas of influence.

I learned this is not true. We only hold few spots at the top of corporations — a percentage that has remained flat for the past 10 years, few are heads of state in world governments, and a mere 4-7% of venture capital funds go to women entrepreneurs, despite the large influx of deals presented by women. Why fifty years after entering the Harvard business school do we still hold so few positions of influence?

If you speculate, like I did, that many women leave the workforce to pursue family – the research says 90% of women surveyed were still in careers. We cannot point there.  We can also no longer point to less opportunity in education. In fact, more women graduate with high-level degrees than men today. So what happens?

Two critical things that you and I can influence are paramount to what we found.

First, men have years and generations ahead of them willing to mentor and help them move ahead, get a deal, and fund their ideas.

Women, ironically, do not use their gift of connecting when it comes to business and government. We choose to “earn” our way, prove our worth and ensure we are confident before we proceed – rather than ask for a favor.

In fact, Sheryl Sandberg’s talk pointed to the idea that women will go for a promotion only when they meet all the criteria (maybe even a few extra) whereas men will go for it when they meet 20% of the job requirements assured they will learn the rest! Men will use their contacts, after hour gatherings, and other venues to get promotions, funding, and basically advance their career.

Men are also more willing to bet on each other with their checkbooks. And they fund people they are more like – white males.

So our task – yes you and me, is two-fold:

Join groups, make contacts, and find other women to become your “good-old-girl” network. Start to look at other women as your source of power. And for the love of God, start asking for what you need. Call on other women (or men), ask someone to mentor you, write that letter or make that phone call asking someone to give you money for your idea or to help promote it. Stop waiting until you’re sure you or your project is a completed masterpiece.

Second, start to look for ways to empower other women and younger women.

What do you know, what can you share, who can you mentor? Rather than continue to push in on the existing power structure, we women need to change the game. All new innovation from the Declaration of Independence or Facebook changed the game – they did not just incrementally make email better, or improve the monarchy!

Join with me. Join with other women. Ask for help. Give help in money and time to other women.

Let’s change the game!

Quiet Revolution

Change the game, not who you are!

Sometimes the best strategy is not to fight for a change to the problem or to expect those in control to change their mind.  

When Gandhi wanted the British out of India he did not try to go to war with the strongest empire in the world at the time.

How many slaves were freed through the Underground Railroad well before law freed the rest?

How many small acts of faith did Mandela use to overrule apartheid?  

So maybe the answer to women only getting 7% of Venture Capital money or less of Investment Banking money is to change the game—rather than fight the status quo.   Maybe the answer to so few women Heads of State, CEO’s, Board of Directors, and other positions of influence is NOT to change who we are and be more like men!  If in the last 50 years this is all the progress we have made despite the numbers of women MBA’s, the number of women entrepreneurs, or the number of women Investment Bankers, and the number of women graduating college—than becoming more assertive or confident is not the solution.  Looking at the world through new lenses is.

Rather than try harder, work longer, and change more to be like men—lets look at the inherent strengths of being feminine and use these things to make a difference.

What are these feminine strengths?

  • The art of collaboration
  • Community building
  • Large results with many hands contributing small efforts
  • Rallying large numbers of supporters
  • Finding solutions
  • Mentoring and encouraging

The Internet and social media have given rise to many new ways of business—changing forever traditional marketing, sales, order fulfillment and raising capital.  These changes provide a remarkable platform for women to make a difference in the funding of new ideas, new businesses, new non-profit organizations, and to market directly to each other.  Women comprise over 80% of the purchasing power in the United States even though we represent less than 15% of the heads of corporations making the products and services we buy.

The time is ripe for change.  Women are more educated, have more resources, and have more time than ever before in human existence.  We can be the change we are seeking in the world by starting a new paradigm.

Think big.  Think bold.  Think of what you would like your community, your country, and your world to be like.  Let’s cease putting another moment of energy into what is wrong and what we do not like.  Let’s create the world we desire.  Let’s create a balance of power shift so subtle, so substantial, so sweet that once it is obvious what happened even those who would fight us today will be happy we did!

Join the conversation.  What does your utopia look like?  What small change can you initiate?  What would you do if you felt you could, if you felt no glass ceiling, if you had all doors open wide?  

Your New Life Awaits — Part 2

After talking to countless women and noticing my own journey I have categorized our paths into three general themes—career woman/power path, mother/nurturing path, and beauty queen/sensuality path. Let me describe them briefly and in gross generalization to paint a picture.

The career woman on a path of power has developed her masculine side and knows how to compete in the world. She has chosen her field, become good at it, and directs her energy to her accomplishments—past, present, and future. She often prefers the company of men, has little in common with women who fondle over the newest baby, and if she spends time exercising it is to stay on top of her game or to socialize with others in her field at the gym.

The mothering woman on a nurturing path has chosen to take care of others whether in her own home or in her career. Often a mother, she may not be. She can also be a caretaker of her elderly or disabled family member, a nanny or housekeeper for other people’s families, or a nurse or psychologist. In some way her primary activity is in helping others. She is often uncomfortable around powerful people because she has spent so little energy feeling good about her looks or her own personal status in the world and this becomes obvious in their company.

The beauty queen woman on a path of sensuality learned early on that her looks gave her power and so she has invested much of her time keeping her body in shape and her clothes put together. Whether she is buying expensive clothing or shopping at thrift stores she knows the image she is looking for. She rarely goes out without feeling put together. Not always, but usually she has a stronger connection to her body and sensual life than the other two. She may be a mother or a career woman, but her priority to herself and her looks did not take second fiddle to her family or her career.

Each of these paths has both their gifts and their demons. If we are fluid in each  then we can tap into their gifts as needed. If we are stuck in a role, then the gifts of the other two are often out of reach. Perhaps the demons of the role we are stuck in are more apparent than the gifts to which we once aspired.

Some of us have been on more than one of these paths at different times of our lives. Many of us have shunned at least one of these paths as foreign territory. Some of us are proud of our accomplishments in our path and others of us feel shame. Yet, ultimately when we put the ego aside the real test of if our path is whole is — how alive do we feel at the end of the day. Are we drained or are we fulfilled? How complete do we feel? Is our life full and rich and juicy? Can we tap into more than one aspect of being feminine? Or do we feel envious or judgmental at women strong on another path?

(If you want to learn more about how balanced you are in these areas and receive a free meditation to help you increase the richness of your life take my Feminine Balance Quiz.)

If you find you are more often exhausted than exhilarated I suggest you have become stuck in a role your path dictated rather than being yourself on this path. Roles and masks can keep us from really living. The good news is they can be unraveled easier than you may think. Our goal is to be fully alive, celebrating our strengths and growing in the areas we have left untouched lately—being able to be fully feminine in each aspect of the feminine.

Most of us do not attempt to let those other parts of us out because we are afraid of the affect it might have on our cherished existing life. We may have buried memories of past times we became more sensual, powerful, or vulnerably nurturing and something bad happened. Often when we cannot stand our role and hiding behind our mask any longer we shatter our existing life causing all sorts of wreckage in ours and other’s lives in order to break free.

I suggest neither staying stuck or major revolution is necessary. If you do the inner work to reengage with the whole of you the changes will happen organically rather than violently. And you will create a life that enlivens you and honors where you have been—all at the same time.

We will talk more about that inner work next time.

Do you dress for success?

What does that mean to you?  A recent article about this in the Houston Chronicle tickled my thoughts about how executive women dress.  In the 80’s it meant women (me) wore blue pin strip suits (skirts not pantsuits), padded shoulders in their jackets (I once was told my jacket had more padding than an NFL player), cute little bow ties replicating the material of men’s ties, and starched button down shirts.  A perfect replica of executive men, albeit put together with expensive high heels.

We moved through a number of iterations of “power dressing” to pant suits.  Today, women are beginning to show some feminine flair and still be taken seriously.  Hallelujah!  Across the globe western women are also waking up to the emotional cost of hiding parts of ourselves to be successful. We are starting to reconnect to this rather large piece of who we are (uh, yes you were, are and always will be a woman whether you are also a MD, lawyer, executive, etc.) .

So the question is, do you remain hidden behind the suit of armor of your profession or do you start to let the real you show in your professional clothing?  And more importantly, do we collectively wait until the world accepts our feminine nature and sees us as powerful leaders, movers, and doers before we bring our flair to our clothes?  Or, maybe as we individually start to wear clothes that make us feel more alive and represent more clearly who we are we will walk into the room with the clear energy of a leader, mover, and doer–simply because we are connected with the source of our power, not hiding it!  And just maybe as more and more of us do this, the world will begin to recognize feminine leadership, not women masquerading as men!

Clothing is our second skin says Liana Chaouli and because of that we have to feel comfortable in our skin in order to walk into a room with all the strength and grace we desire.  Most of us change our wardrobes unconsciously as we buy new items here and there, get presents of this and that; then one day we wake up wondering why nothing in our closet makes us feel good. Others of us have a wardrobe full of things we think we are “suppose” to wear based on the type of work we do.  None of this will give you the reinforcement of your internal power, but rather it steals it from you because you feel like a farce that someone will find out.

So take a peek tonight at your closet.  Pull out the clothes you love to wear and learn what makes you feel good.  Now find adaptations that you will feel comfortable with in a work setting.  One day at a time, one outfit at a time start showing up more and more as YOU!