Women Behaving Courageously: Finding your voice: Finding your tribe
As you’ve read the stories of all manner of courageous women so far, who excited you? Who scared you? Who inspired you? Who would you like to be like?
Women are so good at playing small, fearing that they can do nothing to change anything.
I once interviewed a female doctor in my early days of running women’s workshops, and she said several times ‘I’m just a general practitioner’!
Notice how many times you say ‘just’. The word minimises what comes next.
When I’m working with female groups I ask them various questions:
What did you want to be when you were a little girl?
Did your parents encourage you to follow that dream?
Did your teachers encourage you?
At what point did you give up on the dream?
When do you think you might revisit that dream?
What’s holding you back from making a start?
What roadblocks do you put in your way?
What would you do if money/children/partners/time weren’t obstacles?
What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
If you won Lotto, what would you do differently?
What do you regret?
What are you teaching your daughters/nieces?
What are your current goals?
What books do you read?
What TV programmes do you watch?
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Who inspires you?
Who would you like to help?
What gives you a sense of satisfaction?
?Often women will say they have no time to set goals or to start a new career or to set up a new business. I understand that. Busy mums, most mums now work; some ?have two jobs just to pay all the bills. Every day can be a blur of rushing from one task to the next.
To the women who say I have no time, I say make a donation of money to some charity you believe in. It doesn’t have to be a large amount of money; the price of a coffee once per month to a charity will make a whole world of difference. If 100 people donate $5, that’s $500; if 1000 people donate $5, that’s $5000. That’s a whole lot of services a charity can offer for the cost of a coffee.
However, choose your charity wisely; you’ve just seen the Red Cross and Oxfam are pretty suspect.
Before you donate your hard-earned money to anyone, check them out, in particular, check how much of your donation goes to admin costs and how much actually reaches the people it needs to reach.
To the women who say they have no money, I suggest give some time. Half a day at the SPCA once per month will help them immensely; a couple of hours once per week to sit with a lonely pensioner will change his or her world.
‘Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.’ Kahlil Gibran
If you are a woman OR man reading this and want to know more about my 25 Female Warriors and how you can help make a difference in whatever way is important to you, your family and your community, then grab a free electronic copy of the book?right here
Ann Andrews, CSP. Author, speaker, profiler, Life Member PSANZ
Author of:
Women Behaving Courageously:?How gutsy women, young and old, are transforming the world