In thinking through,
talking over, and writing this book, we’ve kept in mind three overriding
goals.
First, if you know
that your life is not where you want it to be, we’ll help you think and act
your way to a better place, or into a good or better outcome of a bad
situation. In the process, you strengthen your preventive muscles, so that
you’ll feel confident, competent, and capable despite the curves that life
will continue to throw at you. This is what we do with our clients, who
invariably are individuals with genuine strengths and who simply need a bit
of help in sorting out complicated lives. Our work with women in our offices
is the process we give you in these pages.
Second, if you
discover after some voice mapping and reframing that you really don’t need
or wish to do anything very differently at all, great! The process of change
is a choice, and it may be one you elect, with absolute confidence and
conviction, not to make. To decide to do what you’ve always been doing is as
powerful a choice as changing. But now you own your decisions and actions.
We can’t think of anything more satisfying than encouraging a woman, after
her careful self-examination, to feel more accepting of and more comfort in
who she is, just as she is.
Finally, in some of
the chapters that follow, we talk about taboos and silences, how so many
women don’t open up to other women in their lives—out of shyness, perhaps,
or self-consciousness, competitiveness, pride, shame, or embarrassment, as
much as because of too many distractions and too little time. We want to
urge you to start talking, which is the subject of our final chapter. Get
together with a friend or a small group and do some self-talk in the company
of women, and you almost surely will find others are going through or have
experienced some of the same doubts, worries, and frustrations, as well as
successes. As our own group of seven, we know that joining forces and
sharing our thoughts and experiences has informed us as individuals, and
validated and encouraged us as well. We wish the same for you.
In the address to the
graduating college seniors, Anna Quindlen went on to say that, despite the
voices telling her otherwise, she was not nuts at all, but a success on her
own terms. To her audience of twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds, she gave
this advice, which rings true for any woman, of any age and at any stage of
her life’s journey: Do not be caught up in lockstep, going along with the
crowd, because lockstep “tells us there is one right way to do things, to
look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart
hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.”
