I just got off the phone with a woman who was inquiring about my coaching services. She is in the middle of a personal and professional transition toying with the idea of owning her own business or changing careers all together.
She just moved from the big smoke to a small town an hour away.
She was telling me about her various career choices of the past, where she thinks she wants to go in the future, who was trying to steer her in one direction, who was trying to steer her in the other direction, the war between her passion and her practical voices, her feelings of inferiority with her finances, her confusion with where to go, how to get there and when it was all going to happen.
She blurted this out in about 2 minutes, her tongue not keeping up with her brain.
Then she took a breath. Silence. “So I don’t know if you can help me or not, I must be the only one that feels this way.” Pardon? You seriously think you are the only woman who ever felt confused, inferior, regretful of your past and worried about your future? Hello? You are talking to the poster child of ‘been there, done that’. Yup, me, the founder of Women On Top. The lady who wrote ‘How Big is Your But?’ Where do you think I got the information? Not from Desperate Housewives. I lived it, I breathed it…I was IT.
I can hear some of you saying, some of you Nay sayer’s…Who does she think she is, this so called Woman on Top? She thinks she is so much better than us with her fancy ‘coaching’ and ‘pearls of wisdom’. What makes her so special? Sound familiar? Yup, that’s my high school voice talking all over again. No wonder I never really liked it and no wonder I left home at 17 to explore the wonders of Europe…for 5 years. Fast track to the online social media era and The Facebook craze. I embraced this form of reconnection with my past kicking and screaming, for fear the ‘popular’ girls would find me again and I would sink into the abyss of my inferiority complex.
Guess what? I didn’t sink, I swam! Those popular girls? Well they thought I was the popular girl! Too funny! Here we all are, me thinking they think one way about me and they think the same way about themselves. As it turns out, we are all just messed up in the exact same way. And that’s a good thing. I see this same pattern in the women I coach, the women I mentor and the kids I raise. Girls and boys. Rinse and repeat.
So you ask; “Am I the only one that feels this way?” I am yelling at you now…NO YOU ARE NOT. You never were and you will never be. Someone else will fill your shoes. You do not have the special place on the proverbial pedestal of ‘being the only one.’ You are like the 30 something starlet who becomes too old to play the damsel in distress. You get to play her mother. Life sucks, but hey, it sucks for everyone.
So when you start to feel sorry for yourself and you start to think you hold the reigning title on ‘my life sucks’, think of me. Read my blog titled “It really is all about Me; Uncut, unedited, unreal” and then surf through my website www.businesswomenontop.com. Give me a call and ask me anything about my life then and my life now. Ask me how come I still surge ahead with my business, keep smiling when my personal life boomerangs in one breathless moment of silence and keep positive when life has thrown me a decade worth of experiences in a few short months.
Because I know I am not the only that feels this way. Or that way. Or anyway. I am part of the sisterhood. And so are you. Whether you like it or not.