Women in the LEAD

WOMEN: Rest, Reflection & Renewal

Recently, I had the wonderful experience of visiting with a friend in the midst of a great RENEWAL. After a long and painful journey spanning nearly a decade... she emerged from a bad relationship with a new burst in her career success and a personal reinvention in progress. How uplifting it is when we stand up and take full responsibility for our destiny --- there is a beauty in the RENEWAL that cannot be denied. Seeing her so radiant and alive was so inspiring!

At this moment, I'm feeling like there is not only a need, but a DEEP DESIRE for renewal. It feels like I've inadvertently allowed myself to get a little off balance. TOO MUCH WORK --- too little time to RENEW. How about you?  So I decided yesterday to begin refreshing my VISION ---- enlarging it to include all the important parts of my life. So I am choosing to spend part of this holiday season to clear out and prepare for what I want to claim as an extraordinary year. Want to help me?

Perhaps one of the most exhilarating feelings is recognizing you have chosen to break away from the bonds of creeping along. When you fly high above the noise, your intended route may not be clear, but with soaring comes a knowing that you're headed in the right direction. It's hard to soar when you are burdened with clutter --- not just stuff stacked up, but junk we carry inside. Rest, reflection and renewal are the holdiay gifts we can give ourselves. Even in the buzz of activities, you can begin with just a few quiet moments of dreaming.

"One can never consent to creep, when one feels an impulse to SOAR."

--- Helen Keller
author, speaker and advocate for the
blind, deaf, social issues and women's rights

Are you creeping along or responding to that wonderful call to SOAR?

Debbe Kennedy

Visit us at Women in the LEAD at the Global Dialogue Center

Tolerance Feeds Success

Until you have learned to be tolerant with those who do not always agree with you – until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire – until you have formed the habit of looking for the good instead of the bad there is in others, you will be neither successful nor happy.

Napoleon Hill  “The Laws of Success”

It is in our most challenging interaction with others that we discover our greatest learnings.  Tolerance leads to understanding and understanding leads to peace.  These great attributes are rooted in our ability to show kindness and to see the good in others.  If our contribution in the world is one of kindness and compassion we will in turn receive kindness and compassion.  The choice is yours.  How do you choose to live?  Again, we are all interconnected; we affect each other deeply. 

Maureen Simon

WOMEN: Making a Difference

I've shared the story below, using it in the context of Changing the World. I wrote...

"Oh, I would like to be a part of it [changing the world], wouldn't you? Leaving just a little imprint on creating a world that works for everyone. If we just thought more about each other. About people we don't know or can't see. If we just became a little more conscious and aware About what is happening around us every day. If we listened more; objected more; paid attention more...
What difference would we make?"

As we approach the end of another year, it's sometimes difficult to tell whether all the effort and hard work you put into your own personal contribution is making a difference. This happens not just at the office, but also with all the work we do with our families and in the community. Whenever I have even a moment of doubt, I always remember Loren Eisley's Starfish Story. Our contributions don't need to be big and public. Actually, much of the good we do may go unmentioned, or even perhaps unnoticed --- much is more about our influence, actions and example person-to-person, don't you think? Now and then, we get that wonderful gift of looking out to see that in some small way we "made a difference for that one."

The Starfish Story
by Loren Eiseley

"I awoke early, as I often did, just before sunrise to walk by the ocean's edge and greet the new day. As I moved through the misty dawn, I focused on a faint, far away motion. I saw a youth, bending and reaching and flailing arms, dancing on the beach, no doubt in celebration of the perfect day soon to begin.

As I approached, I sadly realized that the youth was not dancing to the bay, but rather bending to sift through the debris left by the night's tide, stopping now and then to pick up a starfish and then standing, to heave it back into the sea. I asked the youth the purpose of the effort. "The tide has washed the starfish onto the beach and they cannot return to the sea by themselves," the youth replied. "When the sun rises, they will die, unless I throw them back to the sea."

As the youth explained, I surveyed the vast expanse of beach, stretching in both directions beyond my sight. Starfish littered the shore in numbers beyond calculation. The hopelessness of the youth's plan became clear to me and I countered, "But there are more starfish on this beach than you can ever save before the sun is up. Surely you cannot expect to make a difference."

The youth paused briefly to consider my words, bent to pick up a starfish and threw it as far as possible. Turning to me he simply said, "I made a difference to that one."

I left the boy and went home, deep in thought of what the boy had said. I returned to the beach and spent the rest of the day helping the boy throw starfish in to the sea."

What small difference will you make today?

Debbe

Debbe Kennedy
Founder, Global Dialogue Center
Home of Women in the Lead

Light is Generous – Welcome Winter Solstice

If you have ever had occasion to be out early in the morning before the dawn breaks, you will have noticed that the darkest time of night is immediately before dawn.  The darkness deepens and becomes more anonymous.  If you had never been to the world and never known what a day was, you couldn’t possibly imagine how the darkness breaks, how the mystery and color of a new day arrive.  Light is incredibly generous, but also gentle.  When you attend to the way the dawn comes, you learn how light can coax the dark.  n       John O’Donoohue “Anam Cara”

As we approach the shortest day of the year it is to our advantage to realize that from this day forward the light will begin to grow. Light is generous and gentle and essential to our well-being.  During this very special time of year notice the different tones of light and allow yourself the joy that comes from the dark.  It is time for inner reflection.  It is time to honor the light. 

A joyous winter solstice to you.

Maureen Simon

Life Is Either A Daring Adventure, Or Nothing

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Helen Keller

I can’t imagine a more truthful bit of wisdom.  The question is how daring do we want this adventure – our life – to be.  I believe Helen Keller was a model for daring and a model for living beyond all restrictions.  When I think of Helen Keller I begin to evaluate my own potential. As we move into the new year the opportunity for new beginnings abound.

1.       What are the restrictions in your life that hold you back from seeing life and living live as a daring adventure? 

2.       What will it now take for you to move into a new realm of possibilities and adventure in the new year to come?

3.       What is one small step that you are now willing to make to live more in the world of adventure and possibility?

In conscious living it becomes our responsibility to stop all busyness and to reflect on what is possible.  As we enter 2008, give some thought to the questions above – because it is in your thoughtful inquiry that newness and opportunity is born.

Maureen Simon

WOMEN: Beginning Again

Sometimes our life lessons come from unexpected places. As we look to the new year coming along quickly, we have this promise awaiting: We always have an opportunity to begin again. I remembered writing about this less in an article I wrote a while back entitled After a Storm the Birds Sing.

Beginning again...
With the music blasting as I was doing Saturday’s one’s and two’s a few weeks or so ago, a favorite old song came on the radio. It was Carly Simon singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” As I began to sing along with Carly’s rendition of the well-known nursery rhyme, I realized for the first time that I was singing about the same familiar life pattern that goes on in all of life. It recounts one of the defining moments in a spider’s experience.

“The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. Out came the sun and dried up all the rain, and the itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.”

Obviously, she chose, in a new day’s sun, to risk it all again — to go on.

Debbe

Excerpt from After a [i]Storm the Bird Sings[/i] by Debbe Kennedy

Debbe Kennedy
Founder, Global Dialogue Center
Home of Women in the Lead

The Secret of Life

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to…and the most important thing is – it must be something you cannot possibly do!

-- Henry Moore

I’ve always welcomed a good challenge: something that stretches me, makes me think and moves me beyond where I am today.  I love the idea of having a task that feels “like something I cannot possibly do”.  I know I have lived most of my life with this challenge and to my amazement many of the things I felt I could not possibly do – I have accomplished.  That is a secret of life that I want to share.

I have now come to believe that we can do anything we set our mind and pure intention to accomplish.  It has now become clear to me that by setting the goal of achieving something that feels greater than me that I am allowed to move far beyond small thinking and into the world of all possibilities.

As we move towards the new year, consider a specific accomplishment that you feel is impossible to attain or reach.  Make a commitment to accomplish it in the new year.  Notice what happens. 

Maureen Simon

WOMEN: Special Leadership Qualities

I hear the world calling all of us, do you?  For women leaders in organizations, in the community or on the home front, the message is clear. We are being asked to step up to think, question, explore new ways of doing things --- to put our differences to work appreciating our uniqueness and treasuring our diversity. We have a chance to positively influence a better world right where we are. The world needs our leadership.

A study, which included a valid and reliable personality assessment, the Caliper Profile, as well as demographics and indepth interviews with 59 women leaders in 19 business secotors from some ot the top companies in the United Kingdom and United States revealed these three findings:

Finding 1:
Women leaders are more persuasive than their male counterparts

Finding 2:
Women leaders feel the sting of rejection, learn from adversity and carry on with an "I'll show you" attitude

Finding 3:
Women leaders have an inclusive, team building leadership style of problem solving and decision making

Finding 4:
Women leaders are more likely to ignore rules and take risks

Do you agree?
How are you putting these unique qualities to work?

Debbe Kennedy

Visit Women in the Lead at the Global Dialogue Center

A Sense Of Belonging

All creation is an organic whole.  No

Man is independent of this whole.  Man

Makes himself miserable by separating

Himself from others.  Separation is death.

Unity is eternal life.

Sivananda

The world will look very different when we all fully believe in the oneness that we share.  This statement goes beyond the planet Earth. We share through our deep intuitive connections.  When we see and experience thegreat wholeness that we are connected to daily--we begin to realize that none of us are truly independent. We then learn to care at a much deeper level.  It is through care and compassion that our world will reach a state of harmony and we will all experience the beauty of eternal life. 

Maureen Simon

A

Believe Passionately

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it.

The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

n       Nikos Kazantzakis

Go for your greatest dreams and never look back.  For unless you feed your dreams with passion, they will remain a non-reality.  When we sufficiently desire our dreams and believe in them passionately, anything can become a reality. 

Maureen Simon