In My Wildest Dreams: Simple Steps To A Fabulous Life

by Gail Blanke

Overview

Design the life of your dreams — starting right now!
Have you ever thought about how your life would be if anything — absolutely anything — were possible? Gail Blanke, founder of Lifedesigns, is a living example of this philosophy, and In My Wildest Dreams gives you her tools for transforming your dreams into reality, for defining your great life however you define great. Like the thousands of women who have come to Blanke's workshops, you too will understand that you can design a life as outrageously wonderful as you can imagine. Clearly written techniques and a step-by-step set of exercises will show you how to:
* Unravel the mind-set that keeps you trapped in the past
* Declare and redefine your interpretation of a great life
* Listen powerfully to discover new possibilities
* Connect to resources you have at your fingertips but may not see
* Create a strong network of women committed to your progress, who will remind you of your dream, and ensure that you follow through on your life's joy!
So stop settling and starting soaring, right now!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684853086
Publisher:	Touchstone
Publication date:	05/07/1999
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Gail Blanke is President and CEO of Lifedesigns, a company whose mission is to empower women worldwide. She is the coauthor of Taking Control of Your Life: The Secrets of Successful Enterprising Women. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Commitments

    In the external world, we tend to know each other by our titles, our economic class, our degrees, our position in the family, our neighborhoods, our race. I'm managing director of a chemical manufacturer, you say, but what you want to add is: I'm not really as much of a geek as that sounds. I'm a real estate broker, you say, knowing in your heart that you're a jewelry designer. You tell people how much you love being a stay-at-home mom, and it's true, but you find yourself wanting to add that you were accepted to a master's program ten years ago, even though you didn't go!

    Quick categories help people locate us, and they help us locate them. Unfortunately, they were all defined before any of us stepped into the box labeled "mother" or "oldest daughter" or "executive vice president." Boxes that are designed by others--our parents, our colleagues, or simply our culture--pinch and cramp us because they're never tailored to fit our unique soul. Yet we all want to know, quickly, who's the boss, and who's the guy we need to bribe in the supply room. And so we pigeonhole each other, even though when someone asks, "What do you do?" the question makes us cringe.

    So the first questions we like to ask the participants of our workshop are: What are you committed to? What are you out for? What do you love?

    Often, though, when our leaders ask these questions, they hear comments like that made by Lauren, a stunning Italian beauty with long auburn hair who, after thirteen years, quit her job as an executive in a cosmetics company. Unemployed for a year, Lauren has come to the workshop looking for what her next life will be. She wants to find something she can be passionate about.

"I hate that word," says Lauren. "It gives me a scary, suffocating feeling. It's funny, because when I worked for my cosmetics company, I was totally rah-rah! Now 'commitment' gives me the creeps."

WHY COMMITMENTS THREATEN

One of the definitions of the word committed is being trapped in a mental institution, by others, against your will--no wonder it drags a lot of baggage behind it! Commitments are scary, I think, for two reasons: We're scared we won't fulfill them, or we're scared they won't fulfill us. The first issue, I'll deal with later. It's the second one I want to discuss here.

    We have all, at one time or another, felt that suffocating panic Lauren expressed. Often we shy away from commitments exactly because most of us already know how awful it feels to be committed to organizations we no longer respect; projects we didn't design and don't believe in; relationships we've outgrown; and inherited ways of thinking about the world that box us in.

    Often, in groups of people--especially in corporations--commitments you've made can be used against you, to get you to do something you don't want to do. This happens because the word commitment is often heard--or misheard--as a promise to take a specific action.

    What's the difference? you might ask.

    A commitment is a looser framework than a promise. It's a steady, unwavering intention to go in a certain direction, rather than a specific set of steps to get there. If you have a commitment to learn to dance, for example, you could do it in a variety of ways--by going to a class, by watching ballet, by hiring a private teacher, by going to a folk-dance weekend workshop. A promise, on the other hand, is a way of speaking that generates action. It says: I'm going to register for that folk-dance weekend by Friday at five P.M. Now, you don't promise the predictable: You don't promise that you'll get up in the morning, or go to the bathroom, because that's simply stating the obvious. What you promise is the unpredictable. But because it's unpredictable, and because we live in an unpredictable world, it's not 100 percent sure. The truth is, we make promises not because we always know we can keep them. We make promises to help us stretch into the unknown.

    I may promise to be in a nurturing relationship with someone, to marry him, for life. But though I made the promise with integrity, I might not have known that, at twenty-two, committing for life might not be an appropriate promise to make. My fundamental commitment may be to be in a nurturing relationship, but at forty-five, "nurturing relationship" might not mean what it meant at seventeen. In this case it's possible to authentically say I need to revoke this promise. There are, as we all know, consequences to revoking a promise. But there are also many consequences to keeping promises that we can no longer authentically accept.

"My ex-husband is gay," interrupted Jenny, a banker who looks like a bigger and more exuberant version of Jodie Foster. "When he finally admitted that to me I insisted we stay married because I couldn't stand that he'd broken his promise to be my husband. It went on like that for three years! It was a farce! And I couldn't speak to him for two years after that, even though he really wanted my friendship, because even though I was remarried, I was still angry that he broke his promise. Even my parents were, like, Get over it! And I'm still, you know, fuming. I made a mess."

"Haven't we all," said Hafeezah, the workshop leader.

    Sometimes, though we haven't made a promise, our commitments are interpreted as demanding a particular action. Say you tell your boss you're committed to doing a great job, and you are. You do above and beyond the work your job entails, and you achieve results. But if the corporate culture interprets "being committed to your job" as a promise to work from eight in the morning to eight at night, then no matter how spectacular your performance is, if you're leaving in the afternoon to pick up your kids from day care, your boss may ask you why you're not committed. The men in the office may get pretty resentful if they assume that a mother of two is going to demonstrate her commitment the same way they do, which is to live, sleep, and shower at her desk. In a culture like that, it's no wonder we fear committing ourselves!

THE LONG-TERM POWER OF COMMITMENTS

Often when we're doing things we don't want to do because someone (or something, like the corporate culture) is "making" us, we're actually honoring commitments we decided to make to ourselves. We may not remember what our commitments are, because we made them so long ago that we forgot having made them. How many of us work with someone who's always martyring herself? You know, that person who constantly complains about her workload and swears she won't take on another project, and then does? She may say she's committed to balancing her life, but if what she's really committed to is proving that she's the hardest-working camper, then she'll continue to overcommit and overextend.

    And what about when no one's asking you to do anything? How often have you eaten something you didn't want to eat, or said something you knew you shouldn't say, feeling almost as if it was happening against your will? With deeply ingrained behaviors, which we feel forced to engage in even after we've recognized they don't work for us, the place to look for change is not at the level of will. Ultimately, we need to look back at the deep commitments these patterns reflect, commitments we made to ourselves long ago. We may not even know we hold these commitments, or remember that we made them. But if you think about it, we must be deeply committed if we persist, even in the face of repeated pain, in engaging in these patterns!

    So we may have a commitment to get thin, but at the moment we're eating, we're honoring a deeper, older commitment: I must get my share of pleasure, which won't come to me in any other way. Sometimes it can be as primal as: I must keep myself from starving. Or: we can desperately want to get married, and we can know that to do that, it would probably be a good idea to keep this relationship going more than six dates. But if we hold a deeper, prior commitment to not being trapped by somebody else's limitations, we'll do something to sabotage the relationship no matter how hard we think we're trying to sustain it.

    Whether or not we admit it, we already have commitments. We chose them, and now we're honoring them. Our commitments nearly always have consequences in the realm of action. And because commitments are broader than promises, and the pathways by which we can fulfill them are so many, the consequences of holding on to old ones can be enormous. The consequences of keeping one promise are minuscule compared to the huge, long-term consequences of honoring old commitments. Over the course of a lifetime it's like the difference between a shower and the water falling from Hoover Dam.

    Most of us intuitively understand the long-term power of commitments. We hesitate not because we're afraid of the unknown places where our new commitments might take us, but because we already know what it feels like to be imprisoned by commitments that don't give us joy. Sometimes we know the fit is bad; these old commitments become like that uncomfortable suit your mother gave you for graduation. But most of the time we've had that old suit so long, we don't even realize we're wearing it!

    Lauren, initially, did not feel she was committed to anything. But staying in a job you don't like for thirteen years reflects a profound commitment: to safety, to financial stability, to providing for your children, to maintaining respectability in your parents' eyes--to something!

"My father always told me I didn't need an education," Lauren added, "because I'd just get married. He was the typical Italian patriarch. He said, 'No man likes a woman who's too strong.' I guess all these years, everybody's always said what a great job I had, and how I should be so grateful. I've been just thinking I should go with the program, and not make waves. Now what I'm committed to is losing my makeup case, and everything that went with it."

    Thus, even though for six years Lauren has wanted to look for a new job, her prior commitment was not to become the kind of woman--the empowered job-seeker--who might threaten her father. Her commitment, as she finally put it, had been "to stay connected to her family."

CHOOSING THE COMMITMENTS
THAT MATTER

When you look at your commitments actively, you will begin to recognize that you're choosing them, and not the other way around. Accepting that you're not "committed" by others, but only by yourself, frees you to revise your list of commitments to reflect who you are and who want to be now. Some you will choose to reaffirm, others to reinterpret. In Lauren's case, she decided that staying connected to her family didn't have to mean believing what they believed all the time. She reinterpreted her commitment to mean that she had to start letting them know where she was and who she was.

"But not all commitments are so negative!" Elinor cried. Elinor is a telecommunications executive who, in spite of her young, freckly face and mounds of curly hair, practically radiates competency. She is married with two children. "I'm committed to my husband, who's terrifically supportive. We've been married nine years, and I think it's the thing I'm the most proud of in my life!"

    Elinor's point is important. The idea is to look at all of your commitments from a neutral place. Even if you're stuck in your life, it doesn't mean you necessarily ought to abandon all the commitments you currently hold. The goal is simply to identify what past commitments you're actually honoring. Then you can decide whether they still matter to you as much as they used to. In a later section of the book we deal with throwing away things: One of our leaders, when faced with this assignment, found that she still had on her key ring the keys to the first apartment she'd bought, which she had been able to afford when she was only twenty-three years old. Amanda was proud of her achievement--for her, that little studio represented economic independence. Holding on to the keys was asserting a positive aspect of her maturity: the fact that she had taken charge of her financial life very early on. She'd long since sold the apartment, but holding on to those keys was a way of holding on to that achievement.

    When she heard about the keys, another participant, Helene, a soft-spoken African-American professor of anthropology, tentatively raised her hand.

"You know," Helene whispered, "on my key ring I still have the keys to a truck I bought years ago, when I had a sort of carefree life and would go off into the mountains. A few years ago I got breast cancer. My two sisters had already died of it, and when I got it in my early forties, like they did, I was sure I'd die, too. I shut down, waiting and ready to die. But I survived."

    "Could you speak up?" asked Alane, a software designer in her late twenties with short platinum hair and bright red lipstick, who was sitting next to Helene. Helene was speaking so quietly that no one could hear her.

    "I survived the breast cancer," Helene said again. "But then, a year later, I developed lymphoma in my eye. And that just about crushed me. I thought, how can this be happening to me? I guess ... I guess I started living to die," she said quietly, and began to weep. "I separated from my husband because I just withdrew into myself. I'm sitting here realizing that I'm living in a commitment to die gracefully. But"--Helene's tears turned to giggles--"it's not working. I'm alive!"

    "So," said Hafeezah, "I'd like you to write down what you're committed to in this world. You don't have to know, at all, how you're going to fulfill your commitments. Just spend a little time writing down what you stand for, what matters to you. What are your reasons for living? What are you committed to see happening, in the world and in your life?"

    "I don't know how to say this, but I want more passion in my life," said Page, a blonde in her early sixties who has enough accomplishments to fill three resumes.

    "Page--it must be hard when you're so inarticulate," quipped Amy Jo, a sparky forty-six-year-old who runs her family's business.

    "Really," said Page, "if you looked at my life from the outside, everyone thinks it's fabulous. I wear my wedding rings on the right hand, because I'm left handed, and they get in the way. A few weeks ago a colleague whom I've known for years found out that I've been married for thirty years, and said, 'I can't believe you're married! You seem so... happy.' And it's true, my life is terrific. But on the inside, you know, it just feels, well, drab."

    "I want to be at complete inner peace," said Debra. "I want to get my life back. And I want a home that's a refuge where I can go to get some quiet time alone."

    "I want to unpack the load that makes it foggy to see ahead," said Mary Scott, an African-American community activist who is associate director of a youth service project that creates programs for over three thousand kids. "And I want to create something for girls. But I'm very shy; I feel like a little girl in a grown-up body. I've only had a small vision. Told myself I couldn't do things. I'd like to write stories for young African-American girls and teach everybody to live in a multiracial world."

    "I want to learn to receive," said Jenny, "and to be able to make progress, and anticipate good in my personal life, not just my professional life. I want a better relationship with my husband and my body."

    "I want my work to be closely aligned with my values," said Julie, a thin, petite, late-forties brunette with strong, chiseled features and a serious look of integrity. Julie has worked at the same nonprofit for over twenty years, and she speaks almost plaintively, as if searching for a place in the world to do good.

    "I was an M.S.W., a social worker, and spent eleven years in counseling," said Sara, a therapist with huge, brown, empathetic eyes and a gentle midwestern accent. "Then I went to work for an HMO. I didn't know I was transitioning into workaholism! I want to free myself of my fears. I find myself apologizing for my lack of credentials when recruiters call me. I want to get off of this treadmill. And... there's something else I want to say, but I feel like I've been complaining so long I just had to stop talking about it. So it's hard to say, because if I say I want it, and then don't get it, it'll just make my current life unbearable."

    "And that is?" asked Hafeezah, smiling. Hafeezah has the presence and smile of Jessye Norman, and a way of making each woman in the room feel safe.

    "I want to be married and have a child," Sara concluded.

    "We're pretty much hitting the big categories," joked Hafeezah.

    What I'm asking you to do, in the following exercise, is to dare to stop dismissing your wildest dreams--even if you have a million reasons why they can never happen.

   

---

EXERCISE: IDENTIFYING YOUR COMMITMENTS

1. Write down I'm committed to ... at the top of a page in your notebook.

2. Now jot down, quickly, what you're committed to. What are you out for? What are you passionate about? What matters to you? What do you love?

    One note: For the purpose of this exercise, the word commitment simply means an important wish, one that gets you up in the morning even if you've never done anything about it.

    You may want to add to the list over the next few days, but try to get the most important commitments on paper in the next few minutes. Set aside any judgments of whether the commitment is frivolous. Set aside the question of whether fulfilling it would force you to promise the impossible. And set aside what you think it might say about you--for example, if you think that, as a mother of three, wanting solitude makes you self-centered, or greedy, or complaining, that's okay. For now, the idea is simply to say it.

---

    Once you've identified your major commitments, the next step is to home in, specifically, on why you want what you want. One way of doing this to ask yourself: What would that allow for?

    Asking this question helps you find the straightest path to what you want. Say, for example, that you're committed to getting married. Do you want to be married so you can have children? Or because you think being married would mean you are finally allowed to affirm your body, and let your hair go naturally gray? Is it because you want a companion to go to the opera with? Or simply because you want the intimacy inherent in that relationship? If, for example, you wrote down that you're committed to financial security: Do you want it because it will finally gain your father's respect? Or do you want it because it will enable you to fulfill your dream of living on a sailboat? Because it would make you feel successful enough to quit your job and work in an animal shelter?

    If you're stuck wondering what it is you're supposed to want, keep in mind that none of these commitments is inherently better, or holier, or more valid, than any other one. The scale on which to evaluate your commitments is simply how close or how far away they are from who you want to be, for now.

"What if you have a commitment you've had forever, but it doesn't really excite you anymore, but you don't feel you can let it go?" asked Shelly, a soft, slim southern belle in her mid-fifties. "I dropped out three semesters short of finishing my B.A. to marry Mr. Wonderful, and now, I'm not married to Mr. Wonderful anymore. Part of me wants to go back to school; part of me feels like, Forget it, it's too late."

    There are three possible ways you can address an old commitment: You can reaffirm it, reinterpret it, or replace it.

    Suppose you want to go back to school. And when you ask yourself what that commitment would allow for, your answer is pretty much as you expressed it. Nothing excites you more than sitting in a classroom learning about medieval castles. In this case you'll want to reaffirm your commitment.

    Perhaps you're not sure you can go through with the whole degree, and you don't want to start if you're not sure you'll finish. Reaffirming can be frightening, even when you're sure it's what you want to do. Often we don't want to identify or declare or try to honor a commitment because we worry we won't be good enough, smart enough, dedicated or energetic enough to make good. Another version of this is that your friends won't be supportive enough, the world won't compensate you enough, the critics won't be appreciative enough, and so on. If these are your fears, you're on the right track. Read on.

    Suppose you think you should have a B.A. You want to be exposed to other cultures and perspectives. But the idea of going back to school with a bunch of eighteen-year-olds nauseates you. In this case, you may decide that what you really want is to take a yearlong trip around the world to expose yourself to the cultures and landscapes you've never seen. In this case you are choosing to reinterpret the commitment to educate yourself through a pathway that excites you.

    Say you want to go back to college because you work in a field where everybody has a degree. You now manage a staff of 153 people, all of whom have more advanced degrees than you, and you feel like a fraud. At the same time, you love what you do and don't want to take time off. In this case you may decide that though, all these years, you thought you needed that B.A., you've now decided that the greatest joy is learning to live without artificial certificates of self-worth. In this case you may decide to discard your commitment entirely, and replace that outdated need for a degree with a commitment to enjoy your own natural gifts and to help others live without needing artificial, outside validation. You may want to start, or join, a mentoring program. Or you may want to learn to grow organic tomatoes!

"I'm having trouble," says Page, "because I want to say I'm committed to solitude, you know, to find a higher purpose. But that would mean quitting my job, and my husband's unemployed right now, so I can't really affirm that. I'm stuck."

    One belief that can keep us from homing in on our passionate commitments is that often we think that if we affirm and lock ourselves into one thing, it can't include something else. When you look at them closely, you see that these either/or dichotomies or sets of opposing choices (healthy kids vs. high-powered career, entrepreneurial freedom vs. health benefits and perks, structure vs. freedom, artistic expression vs. financial security, etc.) are often choices other people had to make at some point in their lives. They then say, "That's the way it is in life."

    The more specific you get about what you're committed to, the more you expand the possibilities of what actions you can take to get there. One participant had a vague idea that she'd like to work for UNICEF, but given her economics, it wasn't feasible. So she was stuck. Yet when her workshop leader asked what going to work for UNICEF would allow for, Nancy identified that she had a commitment to fight hunger in the world. Immediately, the possibilities for how she might do that expanded. One woman suggested she donate money to a charity that feeds children; another, that she take in a stray dog, another, that she become a vegetarian; another, that she choose to give her leftovers to a shelter on a regular basis. All these were ideas she'd never thought of, because she'd fixated on how she wanted to, but could not, work for UNICEF! When you stop thinking that your commitment forces you to promise a specific course of action, you increase the possibilities for how you can do what you're passionate about.

    Chasing your heart's desire can sometimes feel like opening those Russian nest dolls that fit one inside the other. Each time you ask yourself "What's it for?" or "What would that allow for?" you look further inside yourself to see if there's a commitment you care about even more than the one you just expressed. On a fundamental level, when you're sure of what you committed to, you know who you are. I'll get into this more in Part II, but for now, I want to say that often your greatest contribution comes not from doing what you think is helpful, but from being the joyous person you were meant to be. Asking these questions helps you access that person and that joy.

REFINING YOUR COMMITMENTS

Three sisters I know from a big family of siblings illustrate how asking "What's it for?" can radically increase happiness. Though they grew up in the same family, each developed different techniques that helped them survive; the commitments they carried into adulthood were based on these survival strategies.

    The oldest sister, Barbara, who was put in charge of the younger siblings, developed into a ultraresponsible person. She was full of advice, and worry, for everyone. Now that Barbara's own children are settled in college, she has realized that she's outgrown the commitment to ensure that everyone else is taken care of. Barbara decided that this was a commitment she was ready to set aside in favor of one that would get her her own share of joy. Last I heard, she had stopped baking bread for her neighbor's kids' lunches in order to become a master silk painter.

    As a middle child, Vicki learned early on that more than one point of view exists on every issue. To keep peace, she developed a commitment, in dealing with her family, to recognizing others' points of view. As an adult, though, Vicki has now recognized that playing the diplomat has kept her stuck for over a decade in a job where she's been placating a difficult, unfair, and demanding boss. Currently, Vicki is assessing her finances and considering her choices. If she decides she needs her job, she may replace her commitment to keep the peace with a commitment to honestly assert herself at work. Or perhaps she'll redefine--reinterpret--her commitment as one to diffuse violence in the world: In this case, Vicki could decide to train to become a family therapist for violent parents. Maybe she'll decide that her commitment is still fundamental to who she is, and that she wants to reeaffirm it by working in a field that promotes cross-cultural relations.

    The youngest sister, Margaret, always got the hand-me-downs and the leftovers. Not surprisingly, Maggie developed a commitment to vigilantly protecting her share--to getting her due and helping others get theirs. She became a litigating lawyer, a job she loves. She has, she says, her dream job and house and life. But a few years ago Maggie realized that she was bickering over "portions" in every area of her personal life. At the holidays, Maggie was driving Barbara and Vicki nuts, insisting that they each contribute the same amount of cooking, of money, and even of the time required to make the phone calls to organize the event. Even her conversations with the checkout clerk at her grocery store seemed to end in a debate about whether Maggie would get what she fairly deserved! When Maggie heard Vicki talk about her commitments, and the struggle she was going through, Maggie decided to reinterpret her own commitment to get her share. What she wasn't getting her share of, Maggie realized, was peace of mind! Maggie adopted a new commitment: to recognize other people's points of view.

    Each sister, you will notice, uncovered commitments she'd previously rejected. In the process, they learned more about each other and deepened the bonds among them. Maggie gained new respect for Vicki, whom she'd always thought of as a wimp. And Barbara, who used to treat Maggie as if she couldn't live without the advice of her older sister, has even started to call Maggie for advice on how to negotiate with galleries on the sale of her silk paintings!

    When we find ourselves on a regular basis tangling with the people in our lives, it's often because we think we know--but don't--what their commitments are. Or we take a defensive position and put down our loved one's commitment to save whales, because we assume that it conflicts with our commitment to care for our aging parents. We take the defensive position that our own commitments are morally superior. Or we chide ourselves and put off pursuing our joy, because while everybody else's commitments seem valid, ours seem trivial. I'll go into this more in the chapter on paradigms, but again, I want to reiterate that though we're all pros at putting all kinds of spin on the commitments we and others hold, none of them is morally superior.

"What about the rest of you?" asked Hafeezah. "Those of you who haven't spoken? What are you out for? What are you committed to?"

    After a few more minutes, Zully Alvarado, a designer with a disability who owns her own corporation in Chicago, threw her huge red scarf over her shoulder. Zully is from Ecuador; she was raised by an American family in Chicago after a priest, who had taken an interest in her, brought her to the States for medical care. She has blackberry-colored eyes, a dazzling smile, long black hair pulled back into an elegant knot, and an elegant, stylish outfit that I--sitting in the back of the room in my dark, tailored suit--envy. Ten years ago Zully quit her job and went back to school for fashion design, eventually starting a company that creates stylish, one-of-a-kind shoes for people with hard-to-fit feet. She has come to Lifedesigns because she's looking to widen her world even further.

"I want to share myself totally," said Zully. "Just to share myself and be fully self-expressed. I want to get rid of the belief that I shouldn't let people get to know me, because they'll use what they learn against me."

    "That's an assumption we'll be looking at," Hafeezah said.

    "I work at the Women's Self-Employment Project," said Josie. "I'm a successful trainer of other women--WSEP got the first presidential award for microenterprise. But I haven't yet achieved personal success. My grandmother said, 'Don't put your shoes on the top shelf of the closet.' I know I'm not achieving, because I'm waiting for approval. I want to do what I want without needing approval."

    "I'm having trouble," says Mary Scott. "I know there is a story inside me I want to tell, but I don't know what it is, or how I'd go about it."

    "Sometimes identifying your passion is a totally new discovery," said Hafeezah. "Sometimes it's more like remembering what the world taught you to forget, taught you that you couldn't have."

    "I want to move to Italy, create design software for a fashion company, and marry a fabulous Italian man," said Alane.

At this, even the most serious and self-important woman in the room roared with delight. Alane blushed and threw her face over her hands as she laughed. But Zully, who was sitting next to her, grabbed her elbow.

"No, you know, that's great," Zully cried. "I love that! Ten years ago I left my job, and went to school to become a fashion designer," Zully continued. "And I'm a success. But what I want is to be more self-expressed."

    "I've known Zully for ten years," Mary Scott said. "We came here together. Whatever she does, it's with style. Look at her gorgeous cane with the ivory handle, how it matches her outfit! I had meningitis when I was ten, and got a stunted leg. I've always been in hiding, because I didn't want people to see that I have two legs that are different sizes. The message I got was stay in hiding. But seeing Zully, who's elegant and created this beautiful life, I realized why I'm overweight wearing flowing clothes. I thought if... if you're not perfect, people won't like you. I've been committed, all these years, to not letting people see I'm not perfect!"

    "Maybe a commitment you want to replace," said Hafeezah.

    Whenever I'm sitting in a workshop, the question of what I'm committed to gets me right in the gut. And my answer varies from week to week and from day to day. Right now, as I write this book, what I'm out for is to interrupt traditional thinking, to interrupt any limiting assumptions about what you're capable of, and how the world works. Each time I force myself to write it down my answer varies slightly, but the act of answering the question recharges me as quickly as a bolt of lightning.

    Identifying your true commitments--as opposed to the old ones that have been running you--frees up enormous amounts of blocked energy. It enables you to redirect your natural energy, enthusiasm, and determination in the direction where you want it to go. Once you know what you want, and what you're working for, your commitment becomes a jet forward, rather than the ball and chain around your ankle that keeps you where you are. It's easier to get into shape to fulfill a dream to compete in the fifty-five-and-over National Figure Skating Championships than because your doctor told you to fix your cholesterol ratio. It's a lot easier to make partner in your law firm because the idea of being the first woman in the partners' portrait gallery lights you up than because your father always wanted to make partner in his law firm.

[CHAPTER ONE CONTINUES ...]

Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction
Designing your life, as opposed to waiting for it to happen; moving past politics and taking responsibility for your own joy.
PART ONE: BREAKING THE GRIP OF THE PAST
Chapter One: Commitments
Discovering what you're committed to; refining your commitments; the difference between a promise and a commitment; speaking from your commitments as a way of connecting; listening for commitments in others.
Chapter Two: A Different Kind of Listening
Listening to the present vs. listening for old beliefs; how listening structures what we perceive as reality; five common filters to our listening.
Chapter Three: Incompletions
How incompletions keep us in the past; distinction between finished and complete (realm of action vs. realm of language); taking an inventory of your incompletions; methods for coming to completion.
Chapter Four: Paradigms,
Assumptions, and Rules
Recognizing beliefs you inherit from your culture and from your family, which are not authored by you; early decisions you made and the rules for living that resulted from them.
Chapter Five: Fact vs. Interpretation
Exploring the profound distinction between fact and interpretation; realizing that you live in a world comprised of few facts and myriad interpretations; choosing empowering, yet authentic, interpretations; costs vs. benefits of buying into disempowering interpretations.
PART TWO: DESIGNING THE LIFE OF YOUR DREAMS
Chapter Six: The Source of Action
Speaking — declaring — a new future; speaking as the source of action; declaring, and continuing to stand for your commitment; moving from automaticity to choice; who gives you permission.
Chapter Seven: What Lights You Up?
If anything were possible, what would you like to see happen? Your deepest desires and passions as commitments to guide you.
Chapter Eight: Creating New Possibilities
Listening generatively; creating space for people to offer ideas; brainstorming in a conversation for possibility.
Chapter Nine: An Inspiring Challenge
Homing in on your field of passion; focusing on your commitment within that domain; defining, refining, and declaring a breakthrough project.
Chapter Ten: The Mountaintop
Thinking backwards; designing pathways from your dream life back to your present one.
Chapter Eleven: Completing Your Breakthrough
Enrolling others; listening for others' commitments; creating and maintaining support structures of committed listeners; taking your ground; registering your accomplishments.

Introduction

Introduction

The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes.
-- Marcel Proust

Recently I had breakfast with a woman who had come to talk with me about women. She was a high-powered executive recruiter, and someone had told me she had her hands on a ton of information about where women are now. I was in the first few months of starting my company, Lifedesigns, and was still chasing every fox down every hole as I tried to figure out what shape the company would take. As we ordered coffee, the woman began talking about the numbers pointing to women's lack of opportunities, the progress women haven't made, using familiar terms like backlash and glass ceiling. And she showed me the studies documenting the fact that women's pay scale really hasn't risen much since 1970.

As she spoke, I nodded, having no doubt that her facts were accurate. She's the kind of person you'd trust to measure out explosive chemicals. At the same time, as I listened and nodded, I felt my throat tighten up. My mind wandered off, anxiously, to all the decisions I had to make as the head of my own company. Her facts seemed to spin a web of impossibility around me and my venture. Finally, I interrupted.

"You know what?"

She sat, her face expectant.

"I don't care," I said.

Considering I'd said about the rudest thing anyone could say in a business meeting, she took it pretty well. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"I don't care," I said again. I had absorbed her facts, and I was even willing to admit that her interpretations of these facts were valid. But I couldn't listen to any more of them.

Because while the facts were most l engineering construction even after her first husband died. As I sat in my office, I imagined Carolyn, sitting in her office after the bankers she'd approached for a loan to buy her first truck had laughed in her face. And I began to laugh at myself, thinking about how much more she had overcome.

Carolyn's astonishing journey had stuck in my mind for years. Or rather, the question of how was she able -- how anyone is able -- to remain undaunted in the face of overwhelming adversity. How had she created a terrific new life out of the remnants of a miserable one? How had she gone from living in the woods to landing the largest U.S. Air Force paving contract ever awarded to any female-owned business?

Then the obvious occurred to me: Being disadvantaged is a sort of advantage, because people who come from behind try harder. I started to get mad -- not at the woman who'd served as the messenger of the bad news at breakfast, but at myself, for buying into the conclusions I thought those facts implied about my future.

It was an anger I remembered. I'd felt it once before, in a swimming race, when I was a kid. At twelve I had qualified for the semi-finals of the U.S. national freestyle competition. As we poised ourselves on the starting blocks for the next-to-last race, the girl beside me swayed back and forth in an odd way, and when I turned to look at her I lost my balance and fell into the water, feet first. A second later the judge shot the gun to start the race. Though I looked at the judge to rule it a false start, he shook his head no, telling me it wasn't. I was furious! But at that moment, I had to make a decision. I could either be right, and insist on my version of the facts, or I could st art swimming.

I'm sure I swam the fastest I've ever swum in my life -- though everybody else had taken a racing dive, I came in second in that heat. And ultimately I won the final.

What I needed, after that breakfast, was an interpretation that empowered me to swim. I could not ignore the facts the recruiter presented, the interpretation I chose, after our parting, was that women needed the Lifedesigns technology exactly because we have definitively proven that biases and obstacles exist. We've proven they exist, and we've also proven we can fight harder and work longer and give more, that we can compete and win -- or at least place -- in other people's races. The question now is, What race do we want to be swimming in? This is what the Lifedesigns program is about, and why, I decided, it was so desperately needed.

As we begin the twenty-first century, women -- in the United States, at least -- have significantly shifted their place in the world. Many of the struggles of the last hundred years have been about getting what men had that we didn't: the vote, the chance, the independence, the freedom, the partnerships, the salaries, the promotions, the board seats, and so on. Though the world still presents us with structures that are male-designed and -dominated -- I know someone who has the facts to prove it -- it is impossible to ignore the deep and significant gains we've made in access to opportunities. But even the women who have broken through, who have the partnerships, the salaries, the promotions, and the offices, are often wondering, Is this all there is? It was the question I had asked myself when, in the spring I turned forty, I got an office overlooking Centr al Park as part of a promotion. As I sat down on my gorgeous white couch on my first day, a sinking feeling overtook the luxurious atmosphere of corporate privilege. The fabulous office with the breathtaking view, I knew, wasn't "it." I had achieved the trappings of success that many people spend their lives trying to get. But, like many women, I had been so busy fighting to get there I hadn't allowed myself to question whether "there" was where I wanted to be. I'd been afraid, with my nose to the grindstone, to look up.

I think I was feeling what Gloria Steinem talks about in Revolution from Within: that like many women who have achieved "success," satisfaction was eluding me, because the "success" I'd achieved was preordained, predefined, prepackaged. And the question of why -- of what it's for -- remained obscure, because the demands of my daily life discouraged the sort of long-term thinking that would clarify or refine a higher vision.

Sometimes, by the way, we never even develop a vision of what "it" is! Women are taught from an early age to fit in, to be nice, not to stand out, to be pleasing. Often, they're waiting to be recognized or rewarded -- or rescued -- by others, before they acknowledge their dreams to themselves. They're waiting for the "right" answer to appear from outside, never knowing that they get to -- and have to -- make up what that right answer is for themselves. Women have the children, and are increasingly responsible for aging parents; we're taught to be responsible, and responsive, and to wait until those responsibilities ease up before we define and pursue our dreams. We're waiting to be married, or divorced; waiting until the children are a little ol der, until things calm down at work. And while we're waiting, while we're looking the other way, another window of opportunity to move nearer to the life of our dreams quietly closes. Until, if we wait long enough, we have a moment when we realize that something fundamental that we wanted in life has passed us by.

Now, in my office that day, I hadn't yet missed the boat -- at that point I still hadn't defined what my boat was. All I knew was that my definition of great wasn't all the things I'd thought it was. It wasn't about having everybody think I was drop-dead gorgeous, or marrying the greatest guy, or having a bunch of stuff, or fitting in well enough to earn the great promotion that merited the office.

A few years later, I listened to Women of Enterprise winner Judy Bliss describe how she developed her $1.4-million business, Mindplay. Because her family had little money -- her mother took in ironing to make a living while her father was in prison -- Judy had grown up making cardboard cutout toys for her two younger sisters, to entertain them. Much later in life, as a computer programmer and the mother of a six-year-old son, Judy had decided to quit her job because her boss refused to listen to her predictions about the coming popularity of the personal computer. Judy's son had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, or ADD, and was having difficulty learning to read. Judy herself had always had difficulty reading, and had read very slowly; for years, her strategy for staying ahead had been to wake herself up at four a.m. each day and read for a few hours before going back to sleep. Now, having quit her job, and working at her dining table, Judy began to see clearly that her son was not learning to read. She began to design programs to teach him to read. But kids being kids, whenever her son knew he was supposed to be learning, he refused to execute Judy's programs. So Judy began to invent games -- as she had for her sisters, years before -- to get her son to learn. These games became the products that Mindplay sells.

As I listened to Judy's story, something occurred to me -- again, something so obvious I almost missed it. The women I'd been listening to all these years, I realized, didn't set out to create astoundingly successful businesses. Carolyn Stradley didn't say to herself, while living in the woods, "You know what? I think I'll start my own firm, become a renowned woman entrepreneur, and be honored by whoever is elected president of the United States in 1992. It'll be fabulous." None of them, in fact, had ever mentioned setting out to make a lot of money, to be recognized, to smash the glass ceiling, or to become powerful. What they'd done was to develop a vision of what they wanted their life to be, a vision so compelling that they'd created resources where there were none, surmounted insurmountable odds, even re-created themselves. Not because they'd hit bottom, or because they'd set goals, but because what they were going after mattered to them more than anything else in their life. Judy cared more about creating a world in which her son would learn to read than about anything else. Her extraordinary success came in the pursuit of something very simple: how she wanted her life to go.

This held true, I realized, on whatever scale women were operating. I'm on the board of Trickle UP, an organization that helps people start businesses in third-world countri es with an initial investment of about $50. At the three-year mark, these entrepreneurs, the vast majority of whom are women, have an extraordinary business success rate of over 85 percent. These women have fewer children, and they achieve literacy rates far higher than women who are urged by governments to do things that are good for them. They succeed not because the industrialized world says they're supposed to, but because they need to in order to chase their dream of economic independence.

When you develop a vision that matters -- a statement of what's already most important to you -- you can achieve breakthroughs. You don't necessarily need to work harder, or expend more effort, but simply to identify what it is you're working for.

My own moment of vision came on a plane after working for corporate America for twenty years, after a conference during which I'd announced, without permission, that the huge corporation I worked for could actually sell women's empowerment and self-fulfillment. Unfortunately, they'd seen the program I was developing as a marketing tool, or a human resource tool to inspire salespeople, not as a product in itself. "What does that have to do with anything?" the other corporate officers had asked me later. "We have to make our numbers!" The listening they offered, and the responses they gave to my ideas, were skeptical and lukewarm at best. On the plane home, the words of the high-powered marketing consultant I'd retained as I was designing the Lifedesigns program echoed in my mind: Is this a business or a cause? When I'd replied that it was both, he'd corrected me. No, he'd said, you have to choose. As I drifted in and out of sleep, I think I subconsc iously recognized that like so many corporate women, I'd earned success at the expense of being fully female. You can ride in the front seat where we make the money, the men seemed to be saying, but only if you put your values and your causes and your caring about the world in the trunk. When I woke up I had acknowledged to myself that I would never be able to realize my vision within a corporation -- any corporation -- that hadn't been designed to my specifications.

On the back of a tattered envelope I pulled from my purse, I wrote down: M.O.B. These initials stood for My Own Business. I jotted down notes of what I pictured: myself as a motivational speaker who would do appearances, create seminars, and produce books and tapes that made a difference in other women's lives. On this envelope I made a small, quiet declaration of my future. I decided that I could design Lifedesigns to help women who wanted to make a difference, make it. That I would challenge the notion that the stock price and the bottom line were incompatible by creating good, and joy. And -- dare I say it -- money.

I left everything I knew, and had succeeded at, to create Lifedesigns. The program was developed with the input of consultants, employees, colleagues, friends, husbands, daughters, the workshop leaders, and, of course, the participants. Transforming that initial seed of a declaration into a profitable motivational company took three years. During that time I experimented with many ideas that partly worked -- and partly didn't -- all the while defining and refining the way I was going to make my vision a reality. The experience shifted how I thought. Radically. It convinced me that we're not just here to survive, t o get through, to function impressively, or to support someone else's dreams, that none of us is here to settle, to compromise, to allow life to happen and hope it's not too bad. We're here to live fully and passionately, to allow ourselves to be fully who we are. Not to have it all, but to spend it all, to use it all up. I love this quote from Shaw's play Man and Superman:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

What I want on my tombstone is not: SHE COPED, but rather SHE WAS HERE...AND IT WAS NEVER THE SAME.

The Lifedesigns program is designed to provoke profound shifts in thinking. My mission is to provide you with the skills, confidence, and capability to create your version of a fabulous life. I'm out to explode your sense of personal and professional possibility, to give you a method for designing and creating a life you love, to support you, and help you support yourself during your transition. And I'm committed to your knowing that you're not alone in pursuing your goals.

One of the skills you'll develop, in the course of this book, is reaching out to others, and especially other women -- either in informal groups, formal professional organizations, or larger networks. Perhaps one reason some women now hesitate to identify themselves with such a valuable movement as feminism is that it's picked up such negative vibes in the popular mind-set. A feminist is often now perceived to be a woman who's angrily fighting against something. The image of the women's movement that seems to be floating around in the culture these days is of a bunch of women coming up over a hill with pith helmets, with picks and axes! But when you define and then declare your precise vision of what you want in life, you blame no one. Making a commitment to design and create your dream life is a stance that is not against anybody or anything, but for joy and self-satisfaction. And declaring your dreams creates an almost instant community of supporters. Declaring what you want, rather than attacking what is, creates a positive force that brings others, including the men, along. The model of being chosen makes martyrs and victims of women in all kinds of little ways, all the time, whereas the model of choosing, and continuing to take responsibility for those choices, creates an inclusive space that says: This is my journey, to my dream, and I want you to come. There's plenty of room, and anyway, I need your help. It's a stance that's too loving to resist.

Since you're not creating a practice life -- since this is the only life we're sure of having -- I invite you to make your life burn brightly: to look past the frustrations, to dump the old beliefs that aren't working, to create and refine a vision for your life you can stand in -- and stand for -- now. Whether you're at the point of wanting to reconnect with your dreams and passions, or you're pursuing them tentatively; whether you're "successful" but dissatisfied or you're satisfied and happy, yet seeking to make a greater contribution -- wherever you are in your life, my goal in this b ook is to convince you that the life of your dreams is a matter of your design, your power, your control, and not something that "happens to you." Scary as it may be, I'm inviting you to chuck the idea that it's any harder for women. To shed your belief in -- your conviction in -- what holds you back. To peel off the fear that you're too old or too young; a little too big, a little too small; that you're too enthusiastic, or too emotional; that you're "too black" or "too white" -- or just a little too female. To quit having to be right about how wrong it is, and was, and how wrong it is around here. To abandon the desire to be provided for, to stop waiting for the world to serve up the perfect environment in which to develop and express yourself. To design and create that environment yourself. To declare your passions to others, and to reach out to support other women's dreams. Most of all, to consider the power of your own possibilities, the power of one individual -- a single woman -- to make a difference in the world.

Thousands of women have participated in Lifedesigns. Whether they're CEOs or homemakers, actors or artists, students or mothers, entrepreneurs or athletes -- we've even had a Rockette! -- they all had in common a dream of making a greater difference in the world. Over and over, I'll be asking what "great" looks like to you. The exercises will encourage, beg, and badger you to define success in your own terms; to define, refine, and then declare a vision that matters to you. Once you've put what you want out into the world, the book will walk you through the process of making your dream real, a process that will serve as a template for change in any area. If this sounds grandiose, keep in mind: I am now living the declaration I made on the back of an envelope.

So I will begin by declaring, again, that my vision is to empower women, worldwide, to design and live the life of their dreams. This book is a catalyst to enable you to do just that.

Copyright © 1998 by Gail Blanke Enterprises, LLC

Editorial Reviews

Chicago Tribune Helps women design and live the life of their dreams, urges readers to action.

Self magazine Gail Blanke and her book are a living example to women everywhere that if they can dream it, they can do it. Practical and inspirational...exercises promote confidence and prioritizing.

Grace Fill Booklist For any woman with a specific dream or a desire to live fully, this is a thoughtful approach to empowered — and empowering — action.

From the Publisher