RSSCategory: Happiness
Speak Your Limits
August 29, 2009
We know what we don’t want. We don’t want our husbands to do this. We don’t want our kids to do this. Knowing all that isn’t really moving us forward or covering new ground. What we need to be asking is what we DO want. Then we have to say it out loud. Not inside our own heads and hoping others will hear.
Read moreSqueeze by Tracy Effinger
August 18, 2009
She’s gorgeous, she’s powerful, and obviously doesn’t buy into the Barbie body mentality that fitness people are probably pressured with, especially if they work with celebrities.
How fascinating would it be to have lunch with this woman. Her mind thinks way beyond the surface of things. Finding the connections between seemingly separate elements is one of the great talents of female brains. It always sends a spark in me when I see it.
3 Great Books of Summer
August 10, 2009
Walking for miles and reading for hours are summer’s glories. These 3 books are refreshing and imaginative departures from the serious theme and the places you might normally go in books.
Read moreColor Draping Challenge
April 18, 2009
If you’re a Winter, you can no more wear Spring’s makeup or hair than you can wear her clothes. You look drained to a not very gorgeous greeny-beige-grey shade. You would instinctively not wear the yellow-green – what am I saying? I wore Autumn’s Chartreuse which is close enough.
Since we did my colors, back in Demo : Online Color Analysis, Lora has kept a suspicion that I wasn’t Warm Autumn. She kept coming back to it and always wondered if I could be deeper than she thought, at least a Deep Autumn, if not even darker. When we did me, I provided her with a bare minimum of photos. We’ve learned a lot since. The photos needed would BEGIN as follows:
- outdoors on an overcast day with 10AM-12 PM light; a sunny day will overexpose everything and wash colors out; end of day light has too many yellow wavelengths
- your best and worst colors
- no makeup in any picture
- 1 shot of your hair down, the rest with it covered
- wearing black
- as neutral a background as possible
- wearing the exclusive colors of the 2 seasons you think you might be – or be prepared for the analyst to have trouble deciding, and request certain colors be worn and more photos taken
I’m not certain if Lora has fine-tuned the system any more since then or what her photo requests are today. She may ask for completely different photographic criteria. I have no doubt that she’d agree that the more pictures you send, the more likely you’ll be analyzed correctly. We’re talking more than 10 pictures.
Controlling the lighting is certainly the hardest part. If you can’t afford to see an analyst, or there’s none nearby, you can definitely get excellent guidance online. You’ll still be better off and more educated about what looks good on you.
One other pitfall is to take direction from hair color. If the hair and clothes match in any way (complementary, analogous, monochromatic), there’s a tendency for the eye to match the clothes to the hair and conclude that the color works.
With my Color Analysis trainer, once I was placed in a neutral gray room, wearing a gray cap and gown, and color draped for 3 hours, we still couldn’t decide. Lora’s very intuitive about color and her suspicions were right on. I’m very much on the border of Deep Autumn and Deep Winter. We tried again on the second day, fresh set of eyes, and Deep Winter won out. My skin is quite yellow and seems to support some warmth. But it was in the Winter colors that sharpened the edges of my face and cleared the yellow overtone away.
I felt no opposition to any of this. It was just so obvious.
Get rid of the orange in the hair? No problem. I could see that it clashed. I was adjusting well, even though I really thought I knew my colors before. My trainer said she had her season wrong for years and took 2 years to accept that she was another season. I felt so pleased that I got in sync so quickly.
And then she put the makeup on me. Cool red-pink blush. Neutral-cool lips of a similar color. Gray eyes. Cool ivory foundation. I got all weird. A wall went up. I thought I looked like a clown, felt completely insecure. I lost all objectivity whatsoever. My family telling me I looked completely different, younger. HA! My trainer’s husband, telling me he thought I looked better without makeup than with the makeup I had arrived in on the first day. How could it be so? All the respect I have for my trainer. Out the window. I could NOT accept it. The more I stared, the worse I thought I looked. Me who thought she was so objective and open-minded.
I’ve gotten over it. It took me several hours and a lot of reassurance. It was illuminating to have gone far enough with the analysis to experience that level of resistance. It’s good to have felt the inner struggle that must be overcome. It can be a big adjustment.
When you come to see me and can’t agree to what the drapes tell us, I won’t worry that I’ve made a mistake. I’ll stand there calmly, smiling as my wonderful trainer did, and watch you coming to grips with the door you just allowed yourself to open on Your Deeper Self, your hand pulling on the doorknob and your feet braced against the frame like I was.
You’ll be like Jodie Foster in the very funny scene from Nim’s Island where she’s fighting with herself, trying to leave her safe home and face the unknown. (The trailer only shows a tiny part of that scene. It gets better.)
There is nothing better than a new way of looking at something you thought you knew. Like you, for instance.
-->If you’re a Winter, you can no more wear Spring’s makeup or hair than you can wear her clothes. You look drained to a not very gorgeous greeny-beige-grey shade. You would instinctively not wear the yellow-green – what am I saying? I wore Autumn’s Chartreuse which is close enough.
Read moreMidlife Re-Invention (There Is No Crisis)
April 12, 2009
I’m a doctor who wants to own a makeup and color company. I’m a sucker for every transition success story ever told.
More Canada April 2009 is about Joyful Re-invention (click on the magazine cover pic to see a list of contents). It was about finding ways to make change a happy thing. One brilliant woman left her job in Vancouver, moved to Paris to give guided tours to women tourists of the city she loved. Everyone tried to talk her out of it, of course. She’s swamped, of course. These business ideas are no-brainers. Every city needs this. The whole province of PEI needs it.
Also a good piece on why women tend to be very successful in our second careers, risk-averse that we are (or maybe because of it). And a good article on how the cost of buying mangoes and avocadoes in Canada in December will become out of reach as the cost of transportation and efforts to reduce emissions skyrocket, meaning we need to think of ways to cook rhubarb and beets. The Canadian Model Search Winners seem to be beautiful women in shoes that don’t feel good.
Welcome the midlife change
We all feel a ground tremor right about now. It could be the best thing that’s ever happened. It prevents the next 40 from being just more of the last 40. Some impatience and craziness is natural. It’s the energy for the change. The fact that we can even HAVE a re-invention, let alone a crisis, is a step forward. We have the possibility to live differently.
Maybe the crisis is pointing you in a bad direction, making you do things you know you shouldn’t. Yes, we all have a right to be happy, but sometimes these actions aren’t going to get you anywhere better. It may look better but listen to your gut telling you it’s going to be a pit of snakes. Listen if all your friends tell you it’s a pit of snakes. If you think you’re coming unhinged, get some solid counseling. If nothing anyone says registers anymore, speak to someone other than well-meaning friends.
The truth about the bad
Having an affair is the cliché of this lifestage. We have all seen romance give way to practicality, to a business relationship. How could it be anything else with 2 jobs, 3 loans, 3 kids, 4 parents, not enough sleep, and a body that hurts more than it used to? The idea of keeping love alive is fine but that doesn’t mean it exists just the way it did 20 years or even 2 years ago.
Nobody has a better marriage, healthier bank account, or smarter children. They may look like they do. If they say they do, they’re lying. They’re expending a lot of energy and cash to maintain the façade. They probably look at you and think of all the things you have that they don’t. Everyone with children, of almost any age, is walking on the edge for 20 years. Unmarried people can’t possibly get it. They’re just exercising the reckless courage of the non-combattant.
Have sensible expectations and remember that nothing stays the same. Romance will be lost from a marriage in the years with young kids. The exhaustion is nauseating. Thursday Date Night becomes Thursday Fight Night. It’s temporary. Just get through the day.
Remember that you’re not doing this alone. Your feelings may be so strong that you think no else has them. It is normal and common to despise your spouse and visualize his death. It is normal and common to dream of having an apartment of your own where nobody bugs you. It is normal and common to believe that you’d be happy to never ever have sex again. Nobody is willing to come out and say it but as soon as someone does, everyone has a story. It is also temporary. Wait it out.
Reframe the picture
Aging is the best thing that’s ever happened to me – but I recognize not everyone feels that way. I’m tired a lot, in Doctor’s offices every 3 months, have lines on my face and age spots, and I could care less. The thing I look forward to most on Friday night is getting into my bed at 8. If all that stuff is the admission ticket to where I’m going, I’ll pay it twice.
You can choose to dwell on the many wonders of youth, but to say it was ALL good would be untrue. The older folks like to remind us that “things were better 50 years ago”. Pffft. Who would go back there, especially as a woman? To a 50 year old, a 25 year old is still a kid, with all the limitations of kids.
If your age causes you to suspect that you’re less than you once were, others will feel the same way. Will you create the very thing you fear? Will you attract what you least want? In thinking about aging as something uninvited, in trying always to evade it, you will bring the negatives closer. Don’t dwell on what you don’t want for too long because next thing you know, you’ll be living it.
The hurricane in your head
Believe in the power that’s there. Feel it physically. Let yourself change and the past not be enough. You are setting yourself free of it. That ship has sunk. Swim away. Swim towards that sunny island.
Could we learn to just be proud to be given the chance to get old? It is denied to so many. The privilege of seeing one’s children grow to adulthood should never be taken for granted. At one time, I thought my obstacles were mountains. If I could but see them clearly, I thought I could dismantle them. Today, I see that there are no mountains. There never were. The landscape is warm and abundant and the fabric is unbelievably rich.
-->I’m a doctor who wants to own a makeup and color company. I’m a sucker for every transition success story ever told.
More Canada April 2009 is about joyful re-invention. Great articles abound.
When You Know You’re Rich
April 9, 2009
For her 15th birthday, my daughter wanted to sponsor a child with World Vision. This would be the same child whose favorite activity is watching Ice Road Truckers with her father.
Having more than enough
Barira is a 10 year old girl from Niger who sits on our fridge and looks out. It’s somehow ironic that she adorns the food repository. Her father farms as does my husband so she connected with all of us. He can’t feed his family in a good year and nor can Canadian farmers, but of course the scale is completely different. We know that.
We wanted to send a birthday gift. It had to be flat for mailing and not extravagant. My daughter wanted a musical singing birthday card, which I feared would scare the pants off the child. We find ourselves at the Dollar Store trying to find something not too extravagant.
We are TOO rich to find a gift for this little girl. Everything seems wasteful and excessively adorned. For us it’s disposable, for her unimaginably frivolous. In the cheapest store there is, where we could afford anything, our wealth is still too great to find an appropriate gift. Your whole frame of reference changes when you know what “too rich” actually feels like.
Money and the Law of Attraction
I’ve been reading Jerry and Esther Hicks’s recent Money and the Law of Attraction : Learning to Attract Wealth, Health, and Happiness. The book is as good as any of the previous and doesn’t rehash the old material. There are a lot of new ideas here, presented in their most practical and possible style.
I really like this stuff because it helps me get through the day with a real undercurrent of openness and joy. People who know me are ROTFL right now. Well, I’ll have you know I really am joyful. If I look more intense than joyous, it’s because I’m part Winter.
I’ve learned to find the best things about what I do, even the things I like less (except producing meals day after day). I’ve learned that we all create our own reality. I don’t have to feel bad for others who aren’t getting what they want because they can make different choices anytime they want to. What’s happening to them isn’t happening to me because I didn’t make their choices. I know nobody can block me or even slow me down from getting what I want because nobody controls the Universe – as a result, I am never irritated by the behavior of others. That’s quite a cathartic milestone right there.
How others have failed me is never important, only how I’ve failed me. There is never a need to get involved in the actions of others, only in my reaction to them. I do have control of my character, every aspect of it. Everything I’ve sent out there, good and bad, is on a trajectory aimed at my face. Energy stays equal so what goes out comes back in kind.
In this clip from the Abraham-Hicks site’s video clips, watch the 11th clip from the top on the right side. The video title is the same as the book, an excerpt from the DVD. Listen to how she (Abraham) answers the question at the end.
When does the creating start?
Though I thank Jerry and Esther for modeling such a powerful and easy way to learn calmness and happiness, I’ve run up against a question I can’t answer. This is it : I can’t think of anything I’ve manifested or attracted. However my life changed, it changed because I stuck my claws out there and made a few attempts to drag something in and finally got a hook that stuck. It never just came with “ease” (and by ease, I do not mean absence of effort; more like, you just looked up one day and there it was, like it had been there all along).
It didn’t come with struggle or worry either. I love doing it. I love the ride and my river moves fast because there’s a lot I want. I’m reading the money book to attract more of money to stay in the raft. Money is an energy (infinite) not a resource (finite). It’s flowing in the streets, kind of like guns. Just because you don’t have one doesn’t mean there’s a shortage of them. How many guns I have doesn’t affect how many you can have.
I live wealth like it’s happened. I look at my house, I see a castle. I used to worry that I wouldn’t be able to afford to educate my kids, but a friend said “Who do you know that didn’t go to University because they couldn’t afford it?”. I stopped worrying.
I quite get what they mean by Leading Edge. My toes are touching the line. I’m not impatient. Our needs are more than met and that’s the only story I tell. I’ve found that thing in life that I would do even if I weren’t paid. We CAN make things just by thinking about them, I’m convinced of it.
The question is not how to get more money, though to realize my dream will take more than I have. It’s how to have it appear by thought, not action. Nothing is getting created that I didn’t build. No doors are presenting themselves, closed or open, that I didn’t go out and ferret out. How will I manifest money if I can’t manifest anything else?
Was the manifestation that I chose these actions and not those actions? You could say that I manifested everything I live. Yes, right thinking brings right actions. There is just no feeling of letting it happen. I made it happen. And, anyone who has manifested money can measure it by the ways of our physical world. I have yet to manifest a cent.
Realizing a downstream dream
My Easter will be spent becoming a Color Analyst. If women could see themselves as their most effective, beautiful, powerful best, I’d be happy. That’s the vision I have of them when I meet them. That’s what I want to help them do – and learn to resist the marketing onslaught that makes us think age is more ugly, more abnormal, and more weak than youth. Aging, or more precisely “anti-aging”, is a marketing phenomenon and nothing else.
My speaking tour will be called You : Gorgeous And Fearless. Everything will turn out fine, but when does the manifesting/creating begin???
So, Abraham, from a purely intellectual perspective, what are we supposed to think next? The bank account is going down but I can ignore it with ease. I could sell the piano on eBay but that feels upstream so I won’t do it. Will it have to reach a crisis before I manifest something? Does the room have to be completely empty before the new furniture can fit? I don’t mind waiting but you might take the line “as early as tomorrow” out of your teachings.
Is this like dieting? You can start tomorrow but you won’t look different for a month. Until the new eating kicks in, you will look like your old eating patterns. In the same sense, until the new thinking starts to shift the Universe, life is still bringing you the rewards of your old thinking ways.
Keep your day job. And your fat pants.
-->Though I thank Jerry and Esther for modeling such a powerful and easy way to learn happiness, I’ve run up against a question I can’t answer. This is it : I can’t think of anything I’ve manifested or attracted. However my life changed, it changed because I stuck my claws out there and made a few attempts to drag something in and finally got a hook that stuck.
Read moreWhat Women Have Learned
March 25, 2009
Women often send one another words and passages that were uplifting in their humor and their sadness. The balance speaks for the experience we live each day. We are the bearers of our family’s emotional weight. We shoulder the role of stewarding a society’s acceptable behaviors (to paraphrase Tracy’s insightful words), whether we fully realize it or not.
A long time ago, a reader sent me the following in an email. I regret that I can no longer find her name, but I kept the email and have read it many times. Perhaps many of you know it already. It is a beautiful reminder of the many things our everyday struggles have taught us. At the end of a day that feels miserable, you just have to keep living. For how long? Until a ball comes at you that you can’t hit back.
Maya Angelou was interviewed by Oprah on her 70th birthday. Oprah asked her what she thought of growing older.
[[ Right there on television, she said it was 'exciting.'
Regarding body changes; she said there were many, occurring every day...like her breasts. They seem to be in a race to see which will reach her waist first. The audience laughed so hard they cried.
Maya Angelou said this:
'I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.'
'I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.'
'I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life.'
'I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as 'making a life.'
'I've learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance.'
'I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back.'
'I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision.'
'I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one.'
'I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. '
'I've learned that I still have a lot to learn.'
'I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.'
Please pass this on -- you will boost another woman's self-esteem. If you don't...the elastic will break and your underpants will fall down around your ankles! ]]
Maya Angelou seems an enviably serene woman who radiates simple honesty. I expect that the notion that looking your age is not good enough was one of those things she threw back. More of us should do the same. You will be held in higher regard if you share your true human warmth than if you glow only from the surface of your perfect skin.
More recently, my dear friend, Gina, sent this. She knows I’m a terrible facebooker, but wanted to be sure that I saw it, so she e-mailed it direct.
These words, between a poem and a song, celebrate the small wonders for which we make time each day. Women are sisters and friends and soulmates and cheerleaders and we are each other’s beating hearts. We find ways to heal ourselves and each other with our truths and our deep connection to life’s most basic energies.
Alone, we can be frightened. We shortchange the value of our contribution to our homes and our workplaces. With two of us together, our bravery more than doubles. We can take on the world.
-->Women are sisters and friends and soulmates and cheerleaders and we are each other’s beating hearts. We find ways to heal ourselves and each other with our truths and our deep connection to life’s most basic energies.
Read moreThe Male Business Model
March 13, 2009
It often feels like we’re going at it alone. We dream of another life, or at least being able to opt out of the one we have temporarily.
My body cooks up funny problems to take me out of circulation for a few days. It knows when I need to sign out of my own life for a little while and it grounds me with some strange unimportant abnormality.
I bring it on myself by the Law of Attraction. I think “I wouldn’t mind having a minor ailment. How wonderful that I could have 2 or 3 sick days and no one would expect me go to work. I could just stay home, my favorite thing.”
And sure enough, just like you get everything if you think about it enough, I get this. This is why my problems are always gynecological. Men are not empathethic creatures where pain is concerned, but they will back off with this kind of pain. If I had a simple gash in my leg, the men around me would feel I should be at work because they would be. Lots to prove.
The male business model’s paradigm is always PUSH.
And if that works, what do you do next?
And if it doesn’t work, what do you do?
Same answer.
PUSH HARDER.
That mindset believes that if you haven’t put in a 60 hour work week, you haven’t been worthwhile, a “hard-worker” worthy of respect from your kind and yourself. Interesting that these guys still easily carve out time on the golf course.
This is the male version of abundance. It’s the thinking of a certain upbringing (small towns), a certain a generation (wartime), and the attitude about life that results (life is a competition because the amount of good stuff out there is limited; if you win, someone else loses so you better beat everyone else to the cash and prizes). The female mindset of abundance is the hamster-on-a-wheel life that women set up for themselves. In both cases, busy-ness and exertion can fool you into thinking that changes are taking place.
And then after they’re done pushing harder, they’re busy wanting MORE. There’s no line in the sand that says to them ‘enough’. They’ll risk what they already have. In fact, they’ll put it up on the auction block and sacrifice it altogether and allow it to be destroyed to get MORE. The financial meltdown was an example on a grander scale of the male business model needing to forever prove itself with MORE.
The male world sees it as a big deal to leave work at 2 to pick up a child. In the female version, where everything is available and possible, it’s very natural. The family is who we do it all for. There’s no way we’ll do anything that would jeopardize that. Men say they do everything for the family too. But it’s not true. They do it for themselves, for their sense of self-worth and to fulfill their idea of what a MAN does.
Men have taught us that one income at a time must be pivotal and protected. They put all these impediments on us to sustain that because it suits them very well. They find they get less interruptions and more eagerness to be accommodated. Women swallow the small seed of fear and resign themselves to “Whatever would we become without that income??”
Allowing that belief is how we’ve been kept down and kept each other down. We will never make that system work or play naturally within its boundaries. You look at your job for the things you really love and they’re not there. You feel scared and hassled with no control.
We can see the posturing and the bluffing, the bluster and the swagger, for nobody’s benefit but their own. We don’t belong. We know how artificial it all is. This is how they assure themselves that they’re doing something important. Some of them have figured it out – that busy doesn’t mean productive or successful.
They don’t mean badly. They’re just following a pattern that we’ve all been taught. Nobody wants to reinvent a system that, on the surface, seems to work for everyone. Or looked like it did for our parents. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe we can want and have more than our mothers.
All we can do is to stop playing. It’s so deeply embedded in our culture that the only ones who can see it are those women who consciously decide to pull away and make up something new. Who realize that it can be whatever you see it as being.
The more I pull away, the more bizarre the thing looks. It becomes ever clearer that money can be soft-earned and not at the expense of what we already have, including family, a huge non-monetary asset, and health, which is the most valuable commodity that exists.
You don’t have to live in the male world. That net that restricts all your limbs can be gone. Let the wind move to your back. You don’t have to want people who don’t want you. Don’t think of it as being rejected. Better to see it as a wonderful stream of selection that brings you the people with whom you can thrive. The other kind can screen themselves out.
The male world, by the very way it’s set up, holds women away. They can’t see it and we can’t either, but the fit isn’t right. John Fowles said “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. It is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.” We’ve become too afraid to laugh.
There is no single right answer where all the outcomes will be joyful. There are more choices than we admit, fewer consequences, and even less risk.
PS – In searching for the Fowles quote, I looked first at Aldous Huxley because I was certain he said those words. I was wrong, but he did say these : “Maybe this planet is another planet’s hell.” Depressing but funny, and freakishly out-of-the-box, consistent with much of what he said and wrote.
-->It often feels like we’re going at it alone. We dream of another life, or at least being able to opt out of the one we have temporarily.
The male solution is always to Push. And then to PUSH HARDER.
That mindset believes that if you haven’t put in a 60 hour work week, you haven’t been worthwhile, a “hard-worker” worthy of respect from your kind and yourself. Interesting that these guys still easily carve out time on the golf course.
Book Review : Secrets of Six-Figure Women
March 1, 2009
Like many women, understanding any aspect of finance, wealth, or investment by staring at charts and graphs gets me nowhere. Women don’t learn that way. It makes our eyes glaze over, causing the male financial advisor across the table to conclude that we’re bored or too dumb to get it.
Presenting information to us in the way that is effectively presented to men does not work. Bring on the female financial advisors who can explain in pictures, or with stories, and we’ll get it. Women care about money. We may attach odd values to it, but we especially want to look after those we love. We don’t want to be in the dark, but there is a linguistic issue here.
Armed with knowledge and understanding, women will become very powerful in dealing with money (and probably bigger risk-takers than the men). In fact, the more knowledge women have about a topic, the better and more confident their decision-making. Think about this : is the same true for men? I think it’s the reverse, actually.
Barbara Stanny’s book, Secrets of Six-Figure Women: Surprising Strategies To Up Your Earnings And Change Your Life, first published in 2002, does not contain any stock charts. It’s not even about how to invest or manage your money. It enters the picture sooner than that, with how to make the money in the first place by creating an inner change. Fulfillment and empowerment, with very practical and realistic advice on how to get there, are the biggest landmarks on the road to financial success.
Stanny is the daughter of Richard Bloch, one of the founders of H&R Block. Her first husband lost her trust fund through bad investments, leaving her with huge bills and no knowledge of finance. She was forced to face up to a common trait of inherited wealth, namely big insecurity about her ability to support herself. Her journey is recorded in her first book Prince Charming Isn’t Coming : How Women Get Smart About Money , and this one.
Barbara Stanny
For Secrets Of Six Figure Women, Stanny began by interviewing hundreds of women in many income brackets, searching for traits that were common among the high (and low) earners. If you take a group of equally bright, equally educated, very capable women, why is it that some of them will always struggle financially while other will earn ever-rising amounts? Is there a shared set of characteristics that can be found repeatedly among women earning more than $250,000 per year?
Turns out that there are at least 7. And since they’re not personality traits, but rather ways of guiding decision-making, they can be learned.
This is really about finding that thing that you were born to do with love and passion, whether you are paid or not, and from there gaining the self-esteem to charge what you’re worth. Lessons in uncovering your own set of underlying values, in not being a victim, in finding gratitude for obstacles, and so many of the thoughts that resonate strongly with women, are found here.
There are chapters on facing fear and declaring intention, about pulling away the safety net, and about negotiating on your own behalf. The information comes to you through stories about how other women cope with these issues, how they succeeded and how they failed, and what they learned from it.
There is some great advice to be found on speaking up for yourself. This is probably the spot where women are weakest. The biggest reason that men make more money for the same job is this : THEY ASK for it. Until you learn to take yourself seriously, nobody else will either. Learning to do this can be extremely intimidating for girls and for women. Most of us need all the help we can get at using our elbows.
Chapter 11 is entitled Claiming Our Power. With some thoughts about how women lost it in the first place, and continue to give it up to keep the peace instead of compete, and finishing with some beautifully motivating words about taking up your own space to the fullest, Stanny has written a book that any woman who is thinking about her life will find great meaning in. You’ll read many sections that you’ll feel were written for you personally. What would it be like to be at the center of your world and have all the rest spin around you for a change, instead of whirling around the periphery of the lives of everybody else all the time?
This is entirely action-oriented. She knows that failure, rejection, debt, insecurity, and mortgage bills exist but small change is still change. What she really says is this : Women hold themselves back by believing that avoiding stress and responsibility is pro-family. I do that. I know more women who choose this avenue on purpose for this reason. I’m beginning to see that Big doesn’t look like I think it does. Big is where the choices are.
So many of us can feel another woman living inside us that the world has never seen. We keep her buried because we don’t have time to become her, or think about what she’s like, and besides, we’re a little afraid of her. We feel the things she could be, but she’s so far away from the day-to-day role we play that we don’t know where to start. Whether you become a high-earner or not, Secrets Of Six-Figure Women will help you discover Your Deeper Self.
Have a look at Barbara’s blog. She posts about once a month, but it is worth reading. This is money and life advice written for the way women understand and learn. My favorite entry, at the end of this page, is entitled “Fear Got You Stuck?” In it is a line I’ve repeated to myself a thousand times :
What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
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Presenting information to us in the way that is effectively presented to men does not work. Bring on the female financial advisors who can explain in pictures, or with stories, and we’ll get it. Women care about money. We may attach odd values to it, but we especially want to look after those we love. We don’t want to be in the dark, but there is a linguistic issue here.
Read moreBook Review : Staging Your Comeback
February 26, 2009
The full title of Christopher Hopkins’ book is Staging Your Comeback : A Complete Beauty Revival For Women Over 45.
If you don’t know the book by Hopkins (a.k.a. The Makeover Guy), you have several hours of hugely enjoyable reading and thinking ahead of you. It recognizes our particular needs in a terribly honest way. He’s not too big with indulgence either, the talk is straight up, as in “ …you are not the right temperament for hair color.” Fun moments abound.
You will read some pretty raw admissions (“I am no longer interested in attention from men.”). The makeovers begin with 12 mommies and grannies, women way out at one end of the I-let-myself-go spectrum. He’s got every Before stereotype covered and achieves 12 remarkable transformations.
Check out the Befores right here. See you in about an hour.
Christopher proves that it’s not only certain men and women who can be more attractive than ever as they age. It’s all of us. Every single one. We make excuses for why we don’t care what we look like but the only result is to further and further weaken ourselves.
Nobody cares how old you think you look. We all know that’s a choice. If you don’t want it to be that way anymore, this is the guy to help take you through a transition.He has vision and imagination. There is so much that can be done before you even think about seeing a dermatologist for Botox or fillers. It doesn’t cost that much money. You use face cream anyhow, right? You do get haircuts, don’t you? We all go out in sweats and sneakers sometimes but there are a thousand small differences that matter.
What I love about this book:
1. The women are real. They’re not suspiciously gifted with wonderful skin or fabulous eyes just waiting to be revealed. You know me. I have little use for anything that’s not Real World, unless it’s meant as an entertaining diversion.
2. He’s brutally honest about what age does to bodies but still respects and enjoys the company and confusion of older women. You also know that I love aging, which I see as an opening of doors. And I love older women and their mind-blowing and completely unrecognized (especially by themselves) potential.
3. There doesn’t appear to be any Photoshopping going on, at least not too obviously. A beauty book with a pixel of Photoshop is rendered useless, IMO. Right away, the whole thing is out of reach.
4. He really really gets how to wear clothes, not just for aging but for all body types. Here’s one I never knew, but it’s obvious when he says it as all correct ideas are : The tighter your sleeves, the bigger your chest. OK, I can use that.
5. The pictures are bona fide, cringe-worthy renditions of the I’m-too-busy/old/young/comfortable/ugly/hot – to care. They are not forgiving or concealing anything. I got a few jolts because I think I saw me.
6. He’s not trying to get you to spend useless money. Quite the opposite actually. One of my favorite lines, “In the beauty industry, live and learn is taboo. Forget and buy is the name of the profit game.”
7. It’s comprehensive. The clothes, shoes, bra, buttons, hair, makeup, nail polish… all covered. He hits on every cliché and has noticed every detail.
8. The hair chapter is outstanding. If there’s anything that we all get wrong in every conceivable way, and that ages us the most, it’s hair. He covers it all, from color to cut, with a very comprehensive discussion of the very common problem of thinning hair.
9. He’s heard every comeback. He’ll tell you your fears before you tell him. Your objections get pretty weak when they’re No. 5 and 8 on the Exposing Your Excuses list.
10. His goal is to give you things you can do yourself. He just wants you to see differently, where seeing yourself is the hardest thing of all. He’s never showing himself off.
11. He’s funny. I spewed my smoothie on the line about the biscuits.
12. He can be brutally honest, ( I know I said that already) , almost sarcastic, in trying to get these women to see that they are so much more than they believe. Your best friend can say things nobody else can, not strangers or family, because you know he/she loves you and you can entrust him/her to take care of your feelings. Nothing is held back.
13. He doesnt’ see what is. He see what is possible. Possibility is what it is all about. Learning, change, it’s all in honor of what is possible. And there are very few limits.
See the man himself on YouTube.
He says his frustration with makeovers is that women don’t continue to practice what they learned, they just go back to the familiar. It may be because the transformation is too much of a leap to adjust to, too much like a fantasy. It can’t be incorporated into the woman’s life fast enough, so it just gets forgotten like a dream or a week on a Carribean island. Even I couldn’t maintain myself in the After Pics and I already use all this stuff. If you presently wear no makeup but would like to try, you’ll need a friend who knows how to do this or a makeup artist. Ask around. Book a private appointment, not a MAC counter on a Saturday afternoon.
Another reason women don’t stay with the changes is the time it takes. I don’t know about you but my tightest commodity is time. Change does take time. It takes trial and error and error and error too. So take on one thing at a time, and pretty soon, you’re in a whole new place, looking back and thinking “That WAS me but it isn’t me anymore.”
He writes a blog. I liked this post on aging. Considering the world of appearance that he lives in, he finds a good balance.
His personal experience with plastic surgery, the new addiction, and how easy to go a little too far with just a little more is here.
Enter the Sweepstakes to win a makeover with him!! for US residents only (how could they?).
We’re not trying to look 21. Or 31. We’re trying to look like fantastic 40’s , 50’s , and beyond. OK, maybe a fantastic 60 does look 50, but not 30!!
Sometimes the way you look IS what’ s holding you back. It’s not a symbol of the shallowness and superficiality of our world. This is completely internal. The whole thing is happening inside yourself. It’s your message to your subconscious that you’re slowing down, that you don’t see yourself or your future as worth the effort. If you believe the future looks just like the present, why expend the energy?
What you believe about the world makes it the way it is for you. If you can sincerely say “I like my life and I don’t want anything to be different, ever, not one single thing”, then you’re doing fine. Otherwise, change starts with you. You don’t have to see or know the endpoint. You don’t have to absorb the entire scope of possibility immediately. You are just signaling your subconscious that you’re changing your brain waves. It will get it. It works for every human being and it will work for you. It never doesn’t work.
If you look like you can take on more, this could be the first step in convincing yourself that it’s true. We’ve all seen (or been) the woman who got an amazing haircut but didn’t keep it because she couldn’t match her personality to that cut. Certain behaviors accompany, and are expected of, certain appearances. Amazing, subtle, and true.
Everyone else automatically believes what you believe about you - I mean, what your subconscious believes. You can strut all you like; if your subsconscious has doubts, that’s what others will hear. Can you know ahead of time where the break in the clouds will happen? No, that’s not part of the deal. All you’re doing is saying “I want the cloud cover to lift. I’m ready to think about a new chance.”
By the end of the book, you feel like you’ve travelled a little journey of empowerment with these women. He has given them back so much pride in themselves. In the After pics, they’re laughing and moving and playing in ways they probably never would have again.
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If you don’t know the book by Hopkins (a.k.a. The Makeover Guy), you have several hours of hugely enjoyable reading and thinking ahead of you. It recognizes our particular needs in a terribly honest way.
The makeovers begin with 12 mommies and grannies, women way out at one end of the I-let-myself-go spectrum. He’s got every Before stereotype covered and achieves 12 remarkable transformations.
Get daily makeup and colour updates. Join the 12 Blueprints Fan Club on Facebook! A Click on the box will take you there.
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A Greener Tea
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