This is your life. Is it what you want it to be?
Maybe your answer to that question would fall somewhere along a continuum
from “Sort of” to “This isn’t what I had in mind at all.” If you’re like
most of the women we talk to, probably the last thing you’d say is, “Things
are working out exactly as I want.”
The fact is,
we’re faced with a thoroughly modern-day conundrum that is both exciting and
maddening. Arguably, there’s never been a better time to be a woman. In this
day and age, in this culture, a woman has unprecedented opportunities to
chart a course according to her own lights. But along with the abundant
possibilities comes the need to make abundant choices, many of them tough
ones.
More than
ever before, defining what it means to be fulfilled as a woman, living the
life you want to be living, is a personal challenge, one that you must meet
on your own terms. We’ve written this book to help you meet that challenge.
Rather than listening to myths, men, mother, the media, and other influences
that are all too ready to tell you what you should want, we will encourage
you to trust yourself, ask some good questions, and begin to reason and act
your way toward the answers that are true for you.
“We cannot
solve our problems with the same thinking used when we created them,” wrote
Albert Einstein, who also said that if he were given one hour in which to
deal with a difficult situation (we are, of course, paraphrasing here), he
would spend the first fifty-five minutes asking himself the questions that
defined the issue; once that was accomplished, he’d solve the problem in the
remaining five minutes. To you, we say: Once you get the questions right,
the answers—or better answers—become clear.
We call that
process self-talk.
Initially,
we considered using the title “1,000 Hours of Therapy for the Price of a
Book.” That notion was prompted by these facts: As seven psychologists who
have spent countless hours listening to our patients’ worries and
frustrations, we bring to the dialogue that follows a deep and varied
understanding of women’s lives. We hope you will feel as if you’re sitting
in the comfortable chair across from our collective selves, and as if we’re
talking. We will pose some questions and suggest some avenues of thought
that may not have occurred to you. We will work with you at sorting out
messages that are perhaps clouding the picture of your life, and at
considering the options you have.
Self-talk is
no mystery. It’s actually something you do all the time, for it is the
internal conversation that points you in one direction or another, toward
this choice or that one. It is a force you can take charge of and
harness—but only when you know who’s doing the talking. Are you actually
following others’ voices, thinking they are your own? How do you know? And
what do you do about it?
The
self-talk you will go through in the following chapters is the process by
which you learn to better understand what you really want, how you really
feel, and what may be the consequences of particular actions. Before we tell
you how it works, let’s briefly consider the major factors that conspire to
create feelings of discontent in so many women today.
