The 12 Secrets of Highly Successful Women. Gail McMeekin
in the papers back then. Pat was the Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from Colorado from 1973–1997 and then went on to become the CEO and President of the Association of American Publishers for eleven years. As Pat says about her days in Congress, “I was always so high profile. I kept warning myself to engage my brain before starting to speak, but there were some days that I didn't quite follow my own advice. I would end up on the front page of the paper for something I said and my mother would say, ‘I can't believe you said that.’ The classic that almost put my mother over the edge was when about the fiftieth person said to me, ‘how can you be a mother and a congresswoman?’ And I finally lost it and I said, ‘I have a brain, I have a uterus, and they both work, next question.’ You know, of course, I have had to eat those words forever. I often got in trouble that way.”
Pat talked about how she worked hard for programs for the people, especially women, children, daycare, and veterans, and that the guys in Congress and the press would just roll their eyes when she brought up these topics. As she says, “They really should be issues for both men and women and yet, somehow in our culture, they're not. I used to always say to the guys when they'd say, ‘Oh there you go again,’ I'd say, ‘Well look, if you want to bring it up, fine, I've got all the talking points right here. I understand their hesitation because they never had anybody in Congress talking about family issues. They felt those were kind of girly man issues or power issues. I don't know what they wanted me to talk about, but it was always a constant struggle that way. But I think, to be honest, that women find this in the workplace all the time.”
We need to free ourselves from the limitations in our minds and support ourselves and other humans in the quest for fulfillment. Exploding these myths and having the courage to craft your own path mandates support. Whatever personal challenges you may face, you increase your likelihood of success if you admit you need support systems to stay focused and brave. More about that later.
The world is changing so quickly that it has us all reeling. Everything is changing in terms of how we work, how we communicate, how we spend time (or not) with people we love, having multiple careers and not retiring, and so on. It is a lot to absorb and can put extra stress on us. Change is constant, we know, but we are living in a time of radical changes—and that can be unnerving.
I mentioned earlier that Victoria Moran moved herself and her family to NYC because that's where writers live and thrive. She is a popular speaker, and she speaks all over the country. She has a radio show and takes a special interest in spirituality and health. She also writes about being a vegan, and she knows every good vegan restaurant in the city. Anyway, she is a sassy woman who has been independently self-employed for many moons. When I asked her what she still feared, she said “financial insecurity.” When I asked her more about that, as she has clearly been successful as a writer plus other things, she said, “I have been preparing for the idea that old writers don't retire, they just die. But now, writers young and old are having a lot of trouble getting paid. I mean, the magazine work I used to do is largely gone, the Web doesn't pay, and opportunities for speaking have been depressed for a couple of years. The need for revolutionary reinvention in order to be financially viable is a big challenge. But I look around my life and I think, ‘Oh my, this is amazing. And I think the most important thing about feeling good that is to keep that overall sense and not let what goes on in any particular day shake that.”
Victoria wants to do more with TV, radio, and as a corporate spokesperson. She is writing a new book she is passionate about called Main Street Vegan: Everything You Need to Know To Eat Healthfully and Live Compassionately in the Real World. She will reroute herself just fine. Anyone who is a writer now needs to pay attention to what is happening with e-books, apps, video, and social media and develop some new strategies. Whatever field you are in, change is happening—things are disappearing and creativity will give you a real edge in the marketplace right now. Think about how you can make or invent something new.
I asked Victoria for her intuitive sense of what is happening out there in the world right now and she replied, “We went to the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street last weekend, which was so interesting. The overarching impression that I left with was how cyclic the economy is. It goes up and down; it always has. I don't understand the fine points of economics, but I do have a very strong belief that we are generally taken care of. I understand that there are people who fall through the cracks, but when I look around at large groups of people—you go to a sporting event or a concert and you're looking at a few thousand people—I want to look around and say, ‘Oh my goodness, these people are all being taken care of!’ And I see the New York City pigeons and the squirrels in Central Park being taken care of and I just keep that in my mind.”
Once you can let go of these outrageous limiting beliefs and embrace a “can-do” attitude, you can move into action mode and make a space in your life to let more of the “real you” emerge and create. In my training classes with creativity coaches, as well as with my regular clients, the question often comes up of how much to reveal about yourself on your website, in your business name, in your artwork, and in your life. Creativity is about personal expression, and our creative efforts should be directed at things we feel called to do and are strongly connected to. Our choices reveal what we value and what we are thinking about.
Authenticity is a key dynamic in relationships and support systems of all kinds. People want to feel that they know who we are and what we are about. When we live a false life, it is tedious and unfulfilling, and can even be dangerous.
Olga Aura is a Master Your Destiny Mentor who empowers women entrepreneurs to unleash their “gold” power in the form of a bestseller, a big event, or even a blockbuster. She calls herself a modern-day shaman. In 1996, Olga's team won an Olympic gold medal in Atlanta for rhythmic gymnastics. She'd come from Ukraine, where she had been training since the age of five. She came to America at age fourteen, and she didn't get back on the bus. Instead, she accepted the invitation from a family in North Carolina to stay in the United States, go to school, and learn English. After finishing high school, Olga went to college. Then the challenges began.
Olga says, “In my freshman year of college, I had an identity crisis that most people encounter in mid-life. I had retired from professional competitive gymnastics, and my body started changing. I gained weight. For women especially, a lot of our identity is woven into our body image—whether you are a gymnast, a businesswoman, or a mother, it doesn't matter. That is just the culture of women. I hit a big depression. Well, I had been depressed for a long, long time—but that's a whole other book and story about Soviet oppression, domestic violence, and alcoholism in my family and how that inevitably propelled me to become a victor and not a victim in life. If I can share one thing with women who are making a difference in the world, it's that most of us don't know how to express our needs, so we suffer silently for too long and then hit a wall and collapse.”
Olga went on to say, “We don't want to burden anyone with our troubles, and I was following that same perilous journey. It's the archetypal heroine's journey for all of us who are highly successful women. You go through the dark forest, you go through the dark night of the soul, and you fight the dragon in the cave. I attempted suicide when I was eighteen. That crisis, I see now, was really a jolt to true spiritual awakening. I overdosed on three big bottles of pain medications, but I didn't actually want to die. What I wanted was to fall asleep and not have to wake up to such a harsh world, where my family in Ukraine still lived on a household income of $100 a month. I wanted to break free from oppression, but I did not know how.
“Historically, women have rebelled against the status quo to the point of hurting themselves in the process—burnout to breakdown. In retrospect, I was to pioneer a new way for all of us. While I was asleep, I had a dream. All the walls and rooms disappeared, and there was just white light as far as I could see, both backward and forward. There was no past, no present, no future—nothing. Those seeking enlightenment would call it an Ego death. And I felt a weight lift off my shoulders, and a voice said, ‘No matter what mistakes you think you have made, the truth about who you are is unchanged.’ I thought, if the truth about who you are is unchanged, then my slate is always clean. So, I figured I may as well dream big and write a brand new awesome story for my life. And that's exactly what I did.”
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