On the Brink

Are you ready to play a role in the future of women?

Now you can. A great opportunity is before you. I would like to personally invite you to join me and a powerhouse lineup of thought leaders, corporate leaders and entrepreneurs at the Women Business Collaborative (WBC) third Annual Summit: Empowering Through Gender and Diversity.

Register Now!

For many years I've been affiliated with Vistage International, the world's largest executive coaching organization, giving talks and leading workshops on topics ranging from culture change to Blue Ocean Strategy. Recently, I was thrilled to be a recipient of the inaugural Vistage Top Performer Award for 2020, a great honor. Part of Vistage's new Speaker Awards & Recognition program, the Top Performer award is an annual recognition of speakers who have presented 25+ engagements, maintained a 4.5+ average score, and have a 95%+ recommendation rating in the previous year. Having given more than 450 talks, with a cumulative score of 4.6, I think I qualify!

Now that we're hesitantly coming out of the pandemic, or even before that, have you found yourself asking those big questions like, Why am I here? Do I really want to be doing what I'm doing for the rest of my life? Is this all there is?

Good news: Yes, there is more. Yes, you can change the direction of your life, you can write a new story. And yes, you really can become the best that you can be.

I've been interviewed a lot lately! Happily, they've all focused on the topics I love sharing about: my new book, Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business, the challenges women and minorities face in the workplace, Blue Ocean Strategy, female entrepreneurs, the Simon Initiative, culture change, and of course, anthropology. So is there an underlying theme to these articles, which I share below? Yes. I would have to say that it is time to make change your friend. We've been through a pandemic. Millions have lost their jobs and businesses and are now trying to imagine what's next. Women are fed up with bumping into old myths that tell them what they can and can't do. New markets are being opened up by clever entrepreneurs looking for unmet needs. In short, change is all around us, and it's not slowing down. Time to embrace it, not flee from it!

I was recently a guest speaker on the Entrepreneur MBA podcast with Stephen Halasnik, and what we talked about was really significant. Yes, we discussed my new book, Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business, but we also delved into how the old ways of viewing gender and diversity are changing, not just for today but for generations to come. Stephen asked some great questions about the challenges women and minorities face in the workplace, and what businesses must do to change that negative environment so that inclusion becomes more than just a momentary catchphrase. I include below the press release about our podcast. To listen to our conversation, click here. My hope is that discussions like these will cause us all to think about what we can do to make workplaces, and society at large, less ex-clusive and more in-clusive. Enjoy.

Are you like our client Mary Beth who is feeling like she is out of steam? Is this really the story she wanted for her life? She is struggling to run her business, trying to raise her young son, and has none of the life she thought she could have as a successful entrepreneur. What’s missing? Is this all there is? She wants a better future. She wants more.

After starting to work with us, Mary Beth was ready to re-write her own story and create a much more exciting, “bigger, bolder” one as she said to us. Mary Beth saw the handcuffs she had put on herself. She just didn’t know where the key was to open them up and let her fly free again.

As we work with our coaching clients to help them tackle their personal and professional challenges, we find so many women like Mary Beth. She was ready to pause, step back and reflect on what she had created, and then change it. She just didn't have a clue how to begin and how to sustain the new changes she wanted for her family and her business. Sound familiar?

Are you a strong woman who looks at a challenge straight in the eye and gives it a wink? Maybe you are but today you are stalled or stuck, frustrated with your job, or tired of the life you have been leading. Isn’t it time for you to step back and ask yourself Why? Why am I here? What has been the path I have been on for a short or a long time and is it the one I want to be on for the rest of my life?

For many of the women I coach, the pandemic has enabled them to ask themselves these simple questions, as if the crisis opened them up to what they could be.

Is this you too? If so, ask yourself these 4 important questions:

For some of us, there comes a point in our lives when we choose purpose over profit. Janine Firpo, one of the amazing women profiled in my book, "Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business," has found a way to do both. You can get your copy here. And also take a listen to the podcast I did with Janine in February of this year, it's terrific.

I met Janine through my editor who said, "You should include Janine in your book. She is trying to change the way women manage their money across the globe." By all accounts, she's succeeding. It all started with a four-month backpacking trip through sub-Saharan Africa after quitting her tech job. When she returned, the internet was the new frontier and while she could have jumped aboard and become incredibly wealthy like some of her colleagues, her purpose had changed. Now she is on a mission to change the way women earn, manage and invest their money so that their investments align with what's important to them.

In the 1970s I was recently out of college, married, and ready for a credit card of my own. I was a graduate student, was working, and had no children. However, as a woman, no bank would give me a credit card without a husband’s signature — even if I was a famous (but unmarried) tennis star like the three-time Wimbledon champion Billie Jean King who faced the same obstacle. So what did women without husbands do? They had to handle all their finances with cash and checks, I suppose. Today this sounds crazy but back then, it was the norm. Pretty barbaric if you ask me.

This ingrained system of putting barriers in front of women to limit their capabilties is the focus of my new book, "Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business," which tells the stories of 11 very accomplished women who achieved great things in spite of the obstacles put in their paths, most often by male-controlled hierarchies. Get your copy here.

In 2020, there were over 400,000 women lawyers, making up almost 36% of all practicing attorneys in the US. Looks like progress, until you learn that women lawyers are 29% less likely to become partners than their male counterparts, despite the fact that over half the students in law school are women. Underscoring this statistic, the Law360 Glass Ceiling report for 2019 cited the lack of progress at the top levels of law firms for women, revealing that at the top private law firms, four-fifths of partners are men — which means that only 20% are women. You've come a long baby? Not so much.

This tug-of-war between what women are capable of and what they are actually "allowed" to achieve is the focus of my new book, "Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business," which chronicles the paths of 11 very different women who accomplished great things in spite of the obstacles put in their paths, most often by male-controlled hierarchies. Get your copy here.