We started our women's business series on Friday.

Thanks Harrison College for partnering with me to bring this information to women.

Our first day we talked about how the course will work and began small group discussions on personal branding.  Guest speakers Kristen Garvey of the Indiana Commission for Women and April Morris, founder of Thin Gloss spoke to our group.  What did we learn?
*  Women are still getting a lesser wage than men in many circumstances.
*  Never never giving up is key to making your dreams come true.
*  Clarifying your values and understanding what is important to you in life can be transferred to creating a successful career for yourself.

Next week we'll continue working on developing the personal brand and getting clear on where you want to head personally and professionally.  Karen Caprino Burg will tell her story of re-creating herself over the years.  Her magazine, Indy Metro Woman, is read by thousands of women.

What do you think we should make sure to cover?  What are the problems women face in business?  How can we move all of us forward?

April Morris told us about how she came up with the idea for her company.

Women's Leadership Workshop...so fun!

Women Like Us Real Stories and Strategies for Living Your Best Life

Use Your Feminine Power to Change the World

Using your Feminine Power .  Are you ready?

Picture this.  Your life is fulfilling, you have a happy family and your career is doing fine.  Your relationship with your family, your partner and your friends is good.  Yet there is a nagging feeling that something is missing. You have a sense of something not quite in balance.  You watch the world news, the reports about the tragedy an earthquake in Haiti, the drama of the lives in turmoil due to an oil spill off the coast of Lousiana.  And you look around.  Sure, the economy is a struggle right now, but you will be okay, you think.  Yet there’s that nagging feeling deep in the pit of your stomach, that little bleep in the back of your brain that says…you should do something.

Or what about this picture?  You know that as a female you are a part of more than half the population in the U.S.  And yet you feel like you’re not living up to your potential and you don’t get it.  You do all of the right things.  You’ve learned how to “work like a man”, you’ve learned to use the opportunities given to you in the corporate world so that you can climb the ladder of success, you understand the need for analysis and accomplishment which is part of the success strategy model of the corporate world, yet you feel unfulfilled and perhaps even a bit of a fake at work.  You have that same little nagging feeling that there must be something more.  That feeling that you’d do things differently, if only you could.

What you are feeling just might be the beginnings of awakening toward a journey that will get you on a different and thrilling track. On that “road less traveled”. Yet, on the road that more and more women are realizing is their birthright. That sense of needing something more, that sense of wanting to be present as a contributor to the needs of the world, could just be what can become the start of change in your life, and the beginnings of identifying your passion for clarifying the real you, the woman you want to become. A journey  that will help you discover how you can use your passion to create change in the world, use your feminine traits of collaboration and relationship to satisfy your own yearnings for contributing to the greater good and living your life on your terms.

 By recognizing your innately female traits of nurturing and consensus, you’ll notice that little nagging in the pit of your stomach, that bleep in the back of your brain, starts to quiet.  Because you will have decided, maybe for the first time or maybe to begin again, that you can be who you are.  You, a woman like you who is, a woman just like us, like all of us, who can bring forth that true and unique human being that is within you and in turn change yourself and change the world.

The previous is a portion of the introduction to the next Women Like Us Book Series...Women Like Us;  Creating Change in the World which will be available August, 2011.