Thoughts on Inspiration from a Woman with Some Life Experience.

We all want the young girls in our lives to be inspired to go after their dreams and goals, but what about us older gals and our friends? There are many mixed messages out there these days for sure, messages that can affect our confidence, trust, and energy no matter what age. I have been thinking about what we could do to encourage our daughters, granddaughters, nieces, sisters, mothers, friends, or ourselves to have the inspiration to work toward some positive goals.?For me personally, I am constantly trying to find ways to encourage my students as well as myself.

There seem to be so many related issues but here are five things I have been thinking about. I am a firm believer that you cannot help others until you have helped yourself. I need to be in a good place first and feel positive and motivated about things. But why does it feel so much harder to accomplish now than before?

I have to admit that since Covid, I have been going through what I can only describe as the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The grief was all about what I lost. I lost a lot of my freedom. I no longer could go to work and lost my livelihood. I missed the entire social aspect of my life. I lost my mom to the virus and found myself housebound and afraid for my own health and future. I feel lazy and don’t really care about a lot of things anymore. I know that is some sort of depression and I need to get out of it. Maybe you can relate and maybe it is not just about being a woman. These are the things I have been working on.

I guess this weekend has made me think more about freedom and how lucky we are on so many levels and should be questioning everything to keep it that way. That is a theme for another article though. I want to just focus here on what I am feeling these days, how I got there and how I am going to try to make some corrections.

When it all started, the virus and new behaviors that became necessary were so hard to believe. I felt like I was part of a sci-fi movie, or even worse, a vicious thriller about chemical warfare. It was all so unreal, and I tried to deny it. Then, all the big cities started dealing with endless violence and police issues, along with the election and change of administration that compounded everything beyond anything I have ever seen before.

Frankly, the media, who twisted everything in order to be more sensational, just pissed me off. To them, everything needed to be super-amplified, and if they could not do that with the truth, they made it up. It does not seem to matter what channel you watch; they all are just stating their opinions. This is not the news. I have stopped watching and feel much better.

I am not sure about the bargaining stage of grief other than I kept trying to accept things even though I did not want to see or believe what was happening. I was trying to somehow justify how confused I was. I am a Libra and need things to be in balance. I was trying to make some sense of what I was seeing on the news. I found myself deeply disturbed by what was and still is going on in America. I do not want to accept where we have landed and am fighting it all in my mind. The state I am in has prompted me to try and get back my positive outlook and get motivated to do things.

I think this depression, or whatever you call this funk that many of my friends and I am feeling, brings about feelings of negativity. There is so much pressure from the media on women. The fact is, there has always been a lot of pressure on women. It is not new, simply different now. I was able to handle it before and need to get that mindset back.

The young women of today do not know what someone my age went through to fight for something that resembles equality, to have personal acceptance of what we looked like, and let’s not forget about moving past harassment in the workplace. I used to travel a lot and had to not only get tougher but smarter. I learned fast. After dealing with fondling and sexual jokes regularly in the workplace, once being hired because I was good looking and willing to wear hot pants, and once not being hired at all because I was a woman in a man’s profession, and let’s not forget being attacked in an elevator by the president of the American Heart Association because he thought he was entitled, it was all part of the process. The young gals today do not understand that they are where they are because we fought to get us there, not unlike how the previous women fought to get me the opportunity to travel for work and give a knee to the president of the AHA without thinking twice about who he was.

The process over time led me to be empowered. I have always tried to encourage that in the people around me, and not just the females. We all need to feel special and strong. We need to encourage those around us to speak up and make sure they know the value of their opinions (fact check, please), so that they’re never scared to use their voice. In order to do that, we need to listen.

Part of being a supportive friend involves being understanding of whatever it is that your friend is going through. Whenever they do or say something that you don’t really quite understand, put yourself in their shoes and try to see things from their perspective. Instead of closing our minds to opinions that are different from ours, we need to listen and learn.

Closing that gap in communication would make me feel less afraid of the future and more positive. It would be helpful if people stopped yelling at each other and started watching and listening. We are Americans and need to celebrate that today along with all of our freedoms. We forget how lucky we are. I have been meditating and saying thanks for what I have.

We need to support the passions of those around us and help others to reach their goals. I have always tried to be an advocate for my female friends and colleagues. This may be more possible today than in my day when women bosses never helped the other women in the workplace. They were too busy trying to be like men in order to get ahead. It was difficult back then to be on the same playing field as the guys. I always think about Ginger Rogers who had to do the same steps as Fred Astaire, except she had to do them backwards and in high heels. He still got top billing. Women need to work better in the workplace to empower one another to speak up and be considered more equal to our male counterparts.

The best way to combat all the negativity is to constantly work towards being more positive. Think about all the great stuff and people you have had in your life. I am trying to look back at my life and celebrate the accomplishments, my skills, and my relationships.

Please join me and help wipe out some of the negativity around us. Be a role model or mentor. Whatever we put out there is going to come back to us. If I am a good listener, encourage positive behavior by mirroring it, be open-minded and honest, show up, offer to help, as well as think through my actions and opinions, I know I will be able to feel that positive energy come back to me. I can accept that.