Post by Gina Pujols, for The Girl’s Guide to Swagger

Elizabeth Gilbert Speaking at the WRC Leadership Luncheon

I recently attended a women’s leadership luncheon hosted by The Women’s Resource Center in Philadelphia. The organization provides free or low-cost legal outreach, career advice and other various important programs to help benefit women and young girls in the area. If you live in the Philadelphia area, click here to learn more about the center and see if you would like to join them in their volunteer efforts. The luncheon featured awards and highlighted the accomplishments of many significant women who have worked to improve the great city of Philadelphia. It was heartwarming to see so many people working to benefit women’s livelihood in the city.

But the best part was hearing the great author, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Commitment speak. She came to support the center’s mission and spoke about how women helping each other is one of our greatest talents and an invaluable resource. She also spoke about some of the trials and tribulations she experienced living in New York City in her younger years and also reminisced about some of her more solemn moments traveling around the world.

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If you are looking for some inspiration and a bit of advice on how to kick start your business and sharpen your message, you may want to talk to Lucinda Cross. She left her corporate job, which was working behind the scenes to make other people look good, in order to step out in front and start her own business.

In addition to advising entrepreneurs and speaking on panels, Lucinda has written two books. Corporate Mom Drop Outs contains the stories of women who left corporate jobs and made their own success working from home. Her second book The Road to Redemption: Overcoming Life’s Detours, Obstacles, and Challenges, advises us on how to grow and embrace the opportunities that life brings to us. It was published in 2012 and has been an Amazon best seller ever since.

What Lucinda loves to do is work with women to help hone their message. She helps them set a vision and be clear on it, along with identifying ways to make money with their business. She says “It is important to have a vision. Women can use their words as powerful vessels to heal. They can use the power of the tongue and pen to make a difference.” Read more…

Do you ever stop to think about what you believe? If you are feeling out of alignment with your life, you might take a minute to write a list of the things you believe. Is there any place in your life that you are not living your beliefs?

Here is a list I wrote recently. The very act of writing my beliefs made them feel stronger and more immediate in my life.

What I believe

I have the power to manifest my dreams.

All people are created equal and worthy of respect.

Non-violence is always the answer.

We are spiritual beings

We are here to fulfill a unique purpose.

Every person deserves the freedom to pursue happiness.

Every person deserves control over her body.

Higher confidence leads to better performance.

I believe that bold, strong, and confident women are part of the solution to violence against women.

Kindness is always the right thing.

The pause is as important as the action.

Have you noticed that while some people seem to achieve their goals and live their dreams, others who appear equally talented do not?

In my life working with non-profit and for-profit agencies, as well as college students, I have watched many people advance in their careers and seem fulfilled in their lives, while others are left behind wondering what happened. As I think about the reason for the differences, I remembered something a work colleague once said to me. “Those who succeed have the will to complete what they start.”

So here are my suggestions for how to be someone who completes a project they begin and succeeds!

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How do you wrap up the old year and move on to a new one? I like to spend some time with a pen and notebook and consider the past and get ready for the future. Below, I’ve listed some of the questions I asked myself this year. I gather questions from various sources and then add my own.

One of the questions I asked myself this year was: What did I learn in 2012?

As I reviewed my life, I found much to be grateful for: a home, a puppy, a strong network of family and friends, good health and getting to do work I love, which includes writing about confidence, nature and the outdoors.

In the midst of these blessings, there were also some hard lessons. I learned that I can give myself away a piece at a time and lose my swagger without realizing it. I was in a relationship with a man who progressively became more angry and controlling. So in order to avoid his anger, I stopped asking for what I needed or bringing up what wasn’t working for me. But after a scary confrontation that included him pounding on my doors and windows, I broke off the relationship and lived in fear of him for four months. After a series of threatening phone calls, he finally left me alone. During that time, I went to counseling and spent time trying to understand how I let go of my core values and began to live in fear. My skillful counselor helped reaffirm for me that my needs are as important as anyone’s else and that I have the right to get them met and to be happy. As I looked back over the relationship, I could see that I had begun to be silent on small things and then on larger things. It wasn’t that I needed to compromise more, as I sometimes felt, it was that he needed to hear and respect me. I did some reading that she had recommended, including the book “Why Does he do that” by Lundy Bancroft, I began to see how men have learned to get what they want by demanding it and that the behavior is a hard one to change.

After enough time had passed, I felt I was strong enough to talk to him again. We slowly became friends and I had the chance to express my anger and my commitment to never give up myself again for anyone or anything. He, too, had done some counseling and had begun to understand how some hurts from his childhood and past relationships contributed to his angry and controlling behavior.

Slowly, we’ve started to reconstruct a new relationship, based on mutual respect. I’m committed to getting my needs met and speaking up every time I feel disrespected in any way. The effort to always stand up for myself can be tiring at times, but I remain committed to the effort. In addition to seeing how I can give myself away a piece at a time, I learned that I can also recover myself and grow stronger in the process.

What did you learn last year and what do you want for the coming year? Here are the questions I asked myself:

2012 in review:

What were the successes?

What were the disappointments and failures?

What did I learn?

Goals for 2013:

What do I want to be different?

What do I want to accomplish?

What is my vision for my intimate relationship?

What resources do I need to accomplish my goals?

How do I want this year to contribute to my overall life purpose?

What are my deepest hopes for the coming year?

Macy’s – 34th Street, Herald Square

I am one of those North Eastern “city dwellers” you hear about. I work and live in the explosive and thriving metropolis well-known as New York City…also known as Manhattan and its outer boroughs: Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island. It’s tiny on a map but ginormous in reputation. And to visitors, it can be exciting and stimulating, yet simultaneously overwhelming and mind-numbing, sometimes all at once. You either love the city or you hate it, but like the Richard Gere’s character said in the movie Pretty Woman about the Opera, if you don’t like it, you “may learn to appreciate it.”

And when you’re completely entrenched in an urban environment as crazy as this one, you often notice everything and nothing all at once. In fact, we New Yorkers are so jaded by the usual nonsense occurring daily in the city that we forget to be grateful for its gems. Between daily murders, fraud, crack addicts dancing on the subway trains, overpriced hole-in-the wall rooms…I mean apartments, beggars and the hustle and bustle of making a quick buck, we took this whole hurricane nonsense with a huge pretzel-baked grain of salt.

You see, the average native New Yorker is usually on a mission when walking down the street. He or she is urban-bound to tackle some magnificent obstacle they have set in front of his or herself, to achieve an ultimate form of “greatness.”  Year after year, it’s the same thing until one day, you might FINALLY get noticed and it’s all worth it. But as you can imagine, the pressure around a person who lives in a place like this can affect your emotions and the psyche on numerous levels. The things you see and experience on a daily basis attack the senses tri-fold and can energize you, depresses you, totally disgust you and invigorate you. It is irony meshed with magnanimity, and it’s also the reason why so many people come here, there is simply no place like it.

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Is there something that you’ve been pursuing your whole life or a theme that arises again and again?

At the suggestion of my writing coach, I recently looked at what I care about as a writer and also the events of the past that have had an emotional impact on me.  Both provided some insights into who I am and my purpose.  Some of the common threads are that I’ve always been independent and preferred to be outdoors rather than indoors.  I’ve always loved to write.  I see those patterns continuing in my life, as I write about women and confidence and also about nature.

What is the thread in your life? What do you love and continue to pursue with passion?

Here is a poem by William Stafford to help in your contemplation:

The Way It Is

Do you hear a new life calling, but feel afraid to take the leap?

Evolving Goddess Ann Thomas can help you find your bigger purpose.  Why? Because Ann has been there herself – working in a career that didn’t satisfy her deeper longings. Even though she heard the call to a higher purpose when she was 19, it felt frightening to her. She knew she wanted to help people and she thought becoming an attorney might be the way for her to do that.

After she had been practicing for a while – she heard about a woman who called herself “The Unhappy Lawyer.” This woman left her career as a lawyer to become a life coach.  Ann knew that this was also the right path for her “to be a true healer; to make sure that women learn to live life on their own terms. We all deserve to be happy.”

After this experience, Ann began to search for her destiny.  She says, “It took me time – therapy, workshops, lots of self help books. I felt like I was fumbling around, but all the steps were worthwhile.”  She says “I actually walked through the fire – it was a blessing.”

Now Ann helps women breakthrough barriers to find their true calling. She shares what she learned and is able to offer short cuts to her clients. Ann says that “women come to me knowing that they are meant to be bigger, bolder – they can feel it, but don’t know how to access it. ” Working with concepts of radical self-love, many women are surprised at how quickly they make the breakthrough.

It’s true that with new self-knowledge can come changes in your life – sometimes a dramatic shake-up; sometimes more subtle. Women leave a marriage or find the courage to take the plunge into a new relationship. They quit jobs, change professions, start their own businesses. By giving themselves permission to truly live their lives – many women find that new attitudes emerge. Women sometimes lose weight or make other healthy changes in their lives, like setting boundaries in their personal and professional relationships. Read more…

Guest blog by Rachel Prinz

At the end of 2010, in the midst for trying to reframe my life’s work, asking myself if I was actually doing what I REALLY wanted to be doing, I sat down for a couple of weeks and read. I read every book I could get my hands on that dealt with finding and then cultivating your true purpose.  When I read everything the library had and everything I could get them to borrow from other libraries, I sat with it… and I started observing my life as if watching from the outside.

The lost, the found, and the connectors

One of the first things that I realized was that I was surrounded by one of two types of people: I called them “the lost” – people who had no idea what they were doing or why, and in vastly greater numbers in my case… “the found” – people who not only knew what they wanted but were voracious at going after it.

I realized too that I was “a connector” in the modern parlance – I had lots of connected friends and I put them together regularly to help them achieve goals. Wow. That was awesome. But was that all I was here for? Wasn’t I supposed to be DOING something myself too?  I had successfully built a network of “manifestors” but I myself wasn’t one. Nor did I know how to become one. Because, if you ask a manifestor how they became that, most will look at you quizzically. If they can come up with an answer, it is usually something like “I just tried everything until I got good at (a few, or one) and I committed to that with every fiber of my being.”

An opportunity

Then, a dear older architect friend of mine who is often more mentor than friend sent me a link to an award she thought I should apply for – a scholarship named after my best friend Jason Pettigrew, who died several years ago on the eve of his 30^th birthday. She thought that I would be a natural fit for the award, which would pay for the study materials and the exams required for the Architect’s Registration Examination, which besides being prohibitively expensive is also the hardest endeavor an architectural designer can make, taking months if not years of study and 7-9 extremely rigorous tests in everything from structural engineering to architectural design to civil engineering to architecture history.

Not only do I find the test extremely intimidating, but ANYONE finding me worthy of an award in Jason’s name, I thought was completely undeserved. Jason was not only thriving in his practice, but successfully finishing the exams, a leader both in state and national AIA, active in his community AND finishing up seminary when he died. He was one of those rare leaders who made everyone want to come along, made everyone feel empowered and capable, including me. Which is why, when I found out I was going blind, I moved halfway across the country to be near him. If anyone could save me from myself as I grappled with my diagnosis, he could. And he did.

In my mind, I wasn’t worthy of any award in his name. I saw myself as just another architectural designer, of no real note or even purpose. But I wanted to see if I could be worthy of such an award.

My purpose

Then, it all started to come together… I already knew from my time sitting in the silence of “what am I here for” what I was. I was 100% sure that I wanted to be an architectural educator. I LOVE architecture. I love talking about it, and from many perspectives – how light and shadow make us feel comfortable, or tense, and how we can use that tension to make people awake, alert, centered, hopeful… or the reverse.  I love how architecture relates to psychology and art and science. I love the flow of it. How traditionalists and modernists battle for a voice in the vortex of spatial mediocrity we find everywhere around us. I knew my objective. And I had a collection of friends who were good at making things happen. I remembered the advice… “commit to that with every fiber of (my) being.” I didn’t think I could get a job teaching architecture in the academies without some credentials, but a friend gently prodded me one day, saying “So what? You want to teach? Then TEACH.”

Action and response

So I started talking. And writing. I approached anyone with anything to do with anything architectural, asked them how we could share ideas that would connect us in our purposes. I put the ideas out there, for free. Through blogs, through tweets, through Facebook… I shared my knowledge. In the year since I started sharing, I have been invited to speak to community groups, to the Historic Preservation Commission, to the Arts and Culture District, to the state archaeology convention, to 200 non-architects at the design series Pecha Kucha… eventually I even got invited to speak to an audience of 700 at TEDxABQ , which was posted on youtube, then picked up by one of the architecture newsreels and eventually seen by thousands of people. From there I was asked to come to colleges and speak to students of art and historic preservation.  I started collecting new friends from all over the world on Twitter and Facebook, and through sharing our ideas and our ideals freely, we started seeing ways we could work together to achieve real changes in our communities. I was working too, and whenever I could, I would connect the people with a problem with the people with a solution. I was cultivating both my connector and my manifestor, and I didn’t need to be a professor to do it. I was teaming up with great people, bringing architectural education to everyday people, all over the world.

My own unique voice

So this year, the time has come again for the applications for the AIA Jason Pettigrew scholarship. And this year, I might just apply. Because I learned how I could REALLY make a difference, with my own unique voice, and in a powerful and uplifting way. I learned how to go for it even if it made no sense to anyone around me. I didn’t need permission. I just needed to look for opportunity and then be brave enough to try. More often than not, I was actually able to manifest making a difference. I think Jason would have liked that very much. I know I do.

Find out more about Rachel and her work at http://www.archinia.com/. To those whom my life may touch in slight measure, May I give graciously Of what is mine….

Links:  TED http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmkIE0hfVko

Pecha Kucha http://vimeo.com/26635579

Do you ever feel like you are emerging from a fog?  Maybe the fog has been brought on by working too hard, being dominated by someone else’s agenda, or maybe it is just that our bodies and minds experience cycles of clarity and cloudiness.  I am working on embracing the times of cloudiness, as a necessary part of the creative cycle.  However, I really love the times of clarity.

The beginning of a new year can be a great time to raise your eyes up from the day to day and think about what you want for the future.  With every thought, action, and word we are creating a new future for ourselves.  If you have a vision of what that future will be, your unconscious will begin to direct you toward that vision.  If you couple the power of the unconscious with intentional goals, you will begin to move in direction of your dreams.

Here is one possible way to approach the process:

1. Take some time to day dream.  What would you love to have more of in your life? What do you want less of? Who feeds your energy and your creativity, who drains it? If you were looking back on your life, as you were dying, what would you be most proud of that you have done or that you will do?  Make some notes or draw some pictures or cut out pictures from catalogs and magazines to post someplace you can see it.

2. Write or draw your vision. What elements stay with you from your day dreaming? What was most exciting to you? Where do you feel your energy rise and where does it fall?

3.  Identify a time period for action. I like to have one piece of paper for the coming year – 2012, one for the next year – 2013, and one for a point in the future, like five years – 2016. On each page write down the steps you will be taking that year to achieve your goals. Read more…