Tag Archives: strength

Adapting Our Skills Is Our Strength! Use It!

Resilience, adaptable leadership and goal-driven are skills three women veterans in this Forbes article by Geri Stengel translated from military duty to entrepreneurship.  These are skills you too can bring to your business and evoke in those you work with.

I love how each of these women took their existing strengths in the military and found how well they translated into the business world — even though thet seem miles apart.  Unfortunately, most women neglect to recognize their own strengths, let alone capitalize on them.

I remember hearing a humorous story about a husband and wife bantering over dinner about who had the harder job.  The husband thought his wife, who stayed at home, was not “working” — as so many people do.  (I even caught myself saying the other day when I stopped working, referring to when I stayed home to raise my children!)  To settle the matter, they decided to trade jobs for a week.

As you might guess,  the story ends with the wife competently managing the family business and the husband exhausted, overwhelmed, and begging to trade back before the time was over.  It is a funny story about women being able to juggle schedules, manage ten things at once, deal with daily crisis, manage a tight budget, make quick decisions, and still have a delicious dinner on the table at the end of the day.

The real message behind the humor though is not being heard by most women.  What are all the skills you already possess?  What talents have you demonstrated mastery of in your personal, volunteer and work life?  You have a well of untapped potential.  Stop sitting on it and start using it.  Believe in your skills, even if they were not performed at the head of a Fortune 500 company.  List them, know them, be willing to brag about them.

One of the most poignant parts of this Forbes article was the end.  Geri points out that each of the three women veterans she interviewed ALL got outside funding for the businesses they started.  This is dramatically different from the norm, where women tend to avoid asking for money and perhaps do not feel qualified to get it.

You are qualified for so much more than you give yourself credit.  What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?  What would you consider doing if you did not have to ask someone else for money to get started?  Consider the possibility of doing it anyway!  The people who backed these three women entrepreneurs got their money back and a whole lot more.  Maybe you not asking for money is not only holding you back, perhaps it is actually preventing others from getting rich because of the value you will provide when you learn to believe in YOU!

To Achieve True Empowerment, Women Must Enlist Men On Their Mission

Below is one of the best and comprehensive discussions of why empowering women makes sense for everyone, not just women.

Read here: 3 L’s of Women’s Empowerment by Christine Lagarde

When talking about educating women, especially in third world countries where girls typically leave school around adolescence, Christine quotes an African adage, “If you educate a boy, you train a man. If you educate a girl, you train a village.”   But Christine does not leave us just creating schools in Africa, she addresses the gender wage gap and it’s affects on our global economies.  She then finishes with potent statistics about how women in leadership positions statistically improve the results of their organization.

It is not about us verses them, male verses female.  This is about us, we, all of us.  Gender diversity, not gender dominance.  When we honor both men and women and the unique strengths we each bring to our world, we will all win.

Read her article Christine’s article here.  It will help you see the bigger picture of what we are aiming for together.

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.

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!

A little Thelma & Louise in you?

Sometimes we secretly wish we had the guts to get up and go, throw caution to the wind, say no with so much force that there is no question what we mean, and to be in control of our own destiny–even if just for a temporary road trip.  That is the reason so many of us related to Thelma & Louise 23 years ago and still do today–not because we have done what they did, but because we secretly have wanted to!

Do you remember the first time you saw this movie?  Did part of you want to scream out “Hell yeah!” at the same time another part of you possibly squirmed and was shocked at Thelma and Louise’s audacity?   Which part is winning in your life?  Do you live the majority of each day doing what you choose and being who you truly are?  Or are you living the life you have built, feeling a little trapped by the role you have become?

If you are not saying, “Hell yeah!” to most of what you do then you are building an internal Thelma or Louise.  She may not take off on a wild road trip with her best friend and shock the world, but you can guarantee she is sabotaging your days and nights in more ways than you imagine.  She may make your life difficult and those around you too–until you honor the parts of you excluded by your role as a top lawyer, the PTA President, or the yoga instructor.

If you want to explore the role you have created for yourself and the parts of you you have disowned take my Feminine Balance Quiz or sign up for my upcoming Feminine Balance Retreat.  It is easy to start to reclaim these parts of yourself and life from a more authentic you, with support and guidance.  Once you do, there’s no stopping what you can do!