Re-learning the basics…
A few weeks ago I joined a group of 7 other extaordinary women entrepreneurs at a retreat at a beautiful hotel in Westlake CA. We worked on our businesses and gained clarity about what we wanted to create in the upcoming year. In addition to lots of movement and shifts I recognize 6 personal takeaways that have stuck with me from the time we spent together. These are things I have to re-learn all the time but they are important.
1. Don’t compare yourself to those around you. This goes for biz and life. Period.
2. Stay out of judging people and sizing people up with first impressions. Every time I slip and do this, I then learn the story and realize why I was wrong to do this.
3. Everyone has a story and everyone is dealing with something. It may be different than your something but it is just as important.
4. Unplugging from real life is where the creativity and magic can happen.
5. Women together are a powerful force and connecting with like minded women keeps you moving in the direction you want to go and you can stay inspired!
6. We all need a tribe. Who’s yours?
Says who?
Summer Reading by the Pool….
One of my self proclaimed titles is “The Word Detective” I have always been fascinated by words and language and how it arose…and by what it can create. I love noticing and analyzing the way words and phrases often imply something unconscious and often unintended. The reason this is important to me is because I believe our words lead to our thoughts and in turn, our feelings about others and ultimately ourselves. So basically, words and phrases can subconsciously color our world.
There are two recent examples that come to mind that are quite common among certain peers, both in the category of describing people. The first one is “She is so well-read” OK, so well read, according to whom? According to whose tastes? Whose standards? Why do we say this? To imply others are “less well read”? I notice this because everyone in my world reads a lot but has very different interests. For some, the standard is The NY Times Bestseller List, for some it’s just classics or just non-fiction, science fiction, personal growth, memoirs, historical fiction, Oprah’s Book Club, or a selective smattering of all of the above …you get the idea…
Are phrases like this really ours? Are they power structures that were once used in the past to separate classes or people? They seem kind of shallow and irrelevant today in a multi-faceted world where people have knowledge in areas that never even used to exist. I find myself wondering.
The second phrase that catches my attention is “she has a great figure” or in some cases I’ve heard “a darling figure”. Again I ask, according to whom? Some of the people I’ve heard referred to as having such, I find myself personally repulsed by. They look like a bag-o-bones to me. Who are we to decide what figure is good or bad? Can’t there be a range? Why is there such a narrow description? Are we that distorted by our culture and media? Are we aware that when we say something like this that we are further contributing to a distorted and very limited standard of beauty? If you don’t look like said darling figure, do you deduct that your figure is “bad”? Do we realize this is what we are doing? Who’s paradigm is it?
What will we do to shift it? I believe it starts with the simplicity of noticing what comes out of our mouths. Phrases like these are all around us. I invite you to share the ones you notice.
Spring Cleaning-Internal Inventory
Lately I have been thinking about this quote by Jim Rohn: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” I know how important it is for me to spend time with people who help me move into my dreams and want to talk about what is possible as opposed to what is not. Spring cleaning (on all levels) offers us an opportunity to take inventory of who is around us and what we may be feeling because of their influence in our life. I encourage you to surround yourself with people who make you laugh, support you and help you focus on the good.
Moving along
We just got back from a wonderful summer vacation- A Backroads biking trip with another family through the Ireland countryside. Well, I am here to confess I truly hadn’t mounted a bicycle in over 30 years- and even at that I was never much of a cyclist. Our friends proposed this fabulous and intriguing trip idea to us and because our
kids are good friends and we really like this couple, we said yes. For the months leading up to our departure, I kept saying I was going to get on a bike and start training… There were not going to be a lot of hills and the terrain was supposedly not difficult but I knew I better do something to prepare. After all, I have been scared to death of biking on roads with cars and am unfamiliar in every way with the sport. So I procrastinated and procrastinated and NEVER got on the bike- until the morning we were leaving and I went out behind my house on a friends bike and was scared to even descend the very small downslope in the road. So off I went to the airport laden with fear and anxiety…there is a part of me that wants to challenge myself but this was actually crazy…I kept telling myself I had endured far worse emotional and mental challenges and now I could just do it with a physical challenge. Nice justification for my procrastination.
So what was the outcome? Well, I had a great trip. First of all, the company, location, scenery, food and culture were phenomenal. Furthermore, I rode that bike, had fun, was scared to death, felt the fear and did it anyway, felt a bit out of shape, pondered the reasons why I procrastinate (still pondering) challenged myself and felt successful. Luckily, my body could handle it even though I was extremely sore in strange places and exhausted at the end of our 20-30 mile days. This was a constant reminder of how I could have been better prepared. I got in the van a few times when the hills were too much. I knew if I had trained, I would not have had to do this. I thought a lot while riding for miles and miles and had time to recognize my patterns and where they show up in my life. Procrastination is a big one for me. It is something that I know I really need to look at so I am actually grateful that I unconsciously created the opportunity to do so. It was really a gift- I could have been beating myself up for it but decided to look at the lesson in it. So I will continue to keep my eyes open and to remember the learning never ends…and it is sometimes a windy, hilly and bumpy road.
A Numbers Game
Headline: Who Wore it Better?
So I sat down for my pedicure, grabbed an US magazine and this is what I read on the first page I turned to:
Kelly Killoren: 67% Kourtney Kardashian: 33%
Victoria Beckham: 71% Emma Bunton: 29%
Now, just so you know, I don’t read these magazines often, I pretty much banned them from myself years ago but every now and then you’ve got to pick one up. Wow, what a great study they are. I often am fascinated how so many women, including me, end up comparing ourselves to other people. We have all of these self imposed “Measurements” to meet up to. Numbers once again…
I have been looking at all the places in our lives where we use numbers to live up to our own or someone else’s definition of what success “should” look like. How many things did you get done today? How much did you eat? How many times did you exercise this week? What’s your child’s GPA? SAT score? How many colleges did he get into? The list goes on and on. We categorize things this way to make sense of our world. But sometimes we don’t realize the voice that comes up inside if we haven’t met that “number” that day, week or year. The voice that then tells you, you are not good enough, thin enough, worthy enough, young enough…. Not enough of anything.
Obviously headlines like this further play into the most external form of this phenomenon and take it to the highest level by comparing two beautiful, talented, accomplished, and I am sure very nice woman standing next to each other. Wow- I think- if SHE only got 6% then what the heck would I get?! Again, one more reason for that “voice of my inner critic” to turn up the volume and make me “not enough” I even feel badly for these photographed women who obviously work really hard and deserve more than this. The truth is, we all deserve more…and it starts with us. Who is making these numbers matter, after all? Who gives them value? Where in your life do you use the number formula and make yourself not good enough and unable to measure up? I invite you to count the ways with me 
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