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Hello everyone, and welcome to another
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Mindset Tips, Tools, and Inspiration for Women in a Time of Change. I'm your host, Valerie Friedlander, and I am so excited to welcome Kate Alpert and Dorothy Rosen to join me today for a conversation about creating authentic connections in business, so I'll just give a little bit of an intro to them, and then we will, we will dive in and let them introduce themselves to you, so Dorothy and Kate started Women Belong in 2017 and Women Belong is an international networking organization that grew from a single Chicago circle into a global community dedicated to supporting women professionally and personally. Women Belong was born out of a vision they had for bringing women together in an authentic way. When we come together and explore business honestly and vulnerably, relationships form and connections deepen. These relationships create space and opportunity for a higher vision of what we can collectively achieve. And I am also a member of Women Belong. It has been a wonderful space to connect personally and professionally, and you both come from a marketing background and have had some really pivotal life experiences along the way, kind of almost like seems like solidifying that this was the direction that you really were meant to go in and build, so I'd love for you each to share just a little bit about yourselves as we get started.
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Well, yeah, it's been an interesting journey. One of the things a couple of years ago I started to think about, well, what's my hero's journey, which turned into what's my the heroine's journey, which is like all about the journey, internal journey from my perspective, and you know, being in corporate America, one of the things that felt really inauthentic was that I couldn't be myself, that I wasn't seen for who I was, that I felt like there were conversations that were happening that, while I understood them, they didn't seem to really get at what was important in life, if you will.
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Right, I've always been a relationship developer, which is why I went towards loyalty marketing and relationship marketing, because it felt wrong in those days. Direct marketing was all about acquisition, right. Who are we going to acquire rather than thinking about the full cycle of an of a customer, and so got into relationship marketing and loved it. And then I got a little tired of making a lot of money for the patriarchy, right, which I couldn't have articulated back then, but what I could articulate was that I wanted to see other women be successful in business, so that was a lot of my journey, and then my husband got sick, and it will be actually seven years next week that he, since he passed away, and going through that huge life. I mean, we all go through life events, right? Whether it's having children, the loss of a parent, the loss of friends, the loss of a partner, loss of children, God forbid, right? All of those moments create an impact who we are if we are aware and and Kate's doing this death and dying class, which she can talk to a lot more, but I feel like I've, I've experienced a lot of that because of my age, because of my experiences, right. So I don't know what else to say, other than the fact that the importance for me of my journey right now is the impact we have on others. It's not the financial gain, money is just a, it's just a measure, it's just a KPI, but it's not the ultimate KPI for me right now. Impact is what makes the most difference.
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Yeah,
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Yeah. So, my background, in marketing also, I worked more on the agency side for digital and database agencies, and so doing kind of a mixed bag of websites and online marketing, email marketing, and I was doing that business, working at an agency, when I met Dorothy, trying to build a book of business, being a new mom with what was a very high needs baby, who didn't take a bottle and didn't sleep well, and was just trying to navigate what that looked like to be a working mom that was all in on breastfeeding. And my mom breastfed, but she was a stay-at-home mom, and so I didn't really have a lot of archetypes for what that looked like, and I didn't understand why there weren't any archetypes out there, like for me I had this vision at the time of why is it okay for two men to be on a golf course, and that's like a vision of how a deal can be made at work, but two women breastfeeding together can't be how a deal at work would ever go, and I wanted to change that.
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I thought that we can do whatever we want, we can breastfeed and work at the same time, and that should be totally fine. And when I met Dorothy, Dorothy was in a place doing a lot of social emotional intelligence work, and bringing that to this business group that we were sort of a rogue chapter of, and I wanted all the pieces of whatever that was, because those two versions of Kate, the Kate that was the seeker, the Burning Man attendee, and the seeker of culture and community, and you know all the weird parts of myself, was not the worker, Kate, and when I found a place and a person that I was like, this is a vision of what we could build together, and so when we, when Dorothy and I got together and started talking about Women Belong and what it is, it was also at what was an unbelievably pivotal time in the world, and certainly in America, with an important election in 2016 and the birth of the Me Too movement, and just sort of bringing to consciousness and voice, like a lot of the things that women were going through, and so when we built Women Belong, it was with that intent of just having an organization that was exploring and being expansive for what we are as people and how we work in ways that are in service and purposefulness, and right, where money is is a KPI, but it's not the only. There's so much more that we're here to do.
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Yeah, it's one of the things that I love about Women Belong, and something that I have felt as well in my own journey, I also came from that, like I'm a connector, I am someone who really builds relationships. I was in corporate, I was a credit collections manager for many years, and so building relationships was how business worked, how I understood not just, you know, threatening people and stuff, but there is a very distinct difference of I can show up as an aspect of myself, but not as my whole self, you know. So I can be my personality, and I think there is some privilege in that as well, of course, and to be able to go like, but there's a part of life that I can't share, because it will be used against me, and a lot, a lot of people who aren't white men, I mean, and I would say also white men, for sure, too, just at a different level, have that experience where there's that peace that can't be shared, and what I love about Women Belong is how much it is a personal and professional. It's we're business women, and we're whole human beings that we can be whole human beings and do business. We can have multiple hats, we can have more hats than the one that we're doing business with, and we can still be really amazing business owners and professional women too, so that all really resonates a lot.
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Right.
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And you know, you say professional women, and one of the things that I want to actually hit on is something that has been a huge aha for this last year, which is that we think of professionalism, professional categories within a certain construct, right, and what we have seen is that a huge growth area within women belong is for those women who are I don't want to use the word dabble, but that's what historically society would say, that they're dabbling in the arts, right? They, these are women who embrace a lot of the what we would call the woo out there, right, and these are women who have been sidelined and and haven't found a place, and all of a sudden we're having conversations that are so much bigger, wider, deeper, richer, as a result of saying, why have we lived within this limited..
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oh, there you go, Valerie, this limited construct, right? And now we have an opportunity to absolutely broaden and. Every time, so there's there's we have one member who's an animal communicator, right, and I was talking in one of our circles about the fact that we've got an animal communicator in this other circle, and they're like, oh, I need her name, I need her name, I need her name, it was like everybody needs to have help with their dogs or their parrots or whatever their animals are, right, and it's like, oh, look at this. This is so much broader, and why do we think of business in such a narrow context?
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Yeah. Oh, that conversation about what makes someone professional, and yeah, actually, I thought you were. As soon as you were about, I could see you wanted to say something. I was like, I wonder if she's gonna say something about saying professional women, how often do we say, like, professional men, you know, or like the, we, where we caveat, right?
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Oh, yeah,
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And, and so that actually kind of leads me to one of the questions that I also always like to ask folks, which is, what is an unconscious limit? So, one of, as you mentioned earlier, Dorothy, like I wouldn't have thought to say that or call it that before, but those unconscious things that you have since unlearned, and how did you unlearn it?
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Okay, I'm going to jump in. All right, so this is a recent one, and I think that Kate referenced that I had done a lot of work in emotional and social intelligence, and there was one lesson that we were working on, which was rules, myths, and beliefs, right, and one of my recent rules that I was like, wait, where did that come from, and why, and it was around reading, so every day Kate and I have a growth mindset philosophy. What is it we're here to learn today?
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And Kate especially challenges, I mean, hello, she challenges has challenged so many of my beliefs and has raised me up and made me such a more bigger person, if you will, but so around reading it's been that I thought that I could only read at night, because we have a book club, right? We started, and one day I was like, "When do you guys read? Oh, I read at night.
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I used to read under the covers with a flashlight as a child.
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Reading was dessert. Reading was the last thing you consumed reading was the thing that you were allowed to do at the end of a day when you've done everything else that you are supposed to do. Wait, what? This one woman said to me at a book group, she's like, 'Oh, yes, I read every day from two to four.
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I sit on the couch, I'm like,'Wait, are you allowed to do that, right? so I mean it's a limiting belief, because there's so many rules that we live within that we don't question,
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Yeah, yeah.
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Well, and I love that you were talking about differentiating the myths, which are the bigger picture, like those social myths, and then the inner rules, and I'm very curious about that.
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I also want to make sure that Kate gets to share too...
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Sure. One that comes up for me a lot, and I don't know that I've unlearned this, but I certainly am conscious of it now. It's like this belief that I have to finish my work in order to go play, and is similar, I think, to Dorothy's, but as an entrepreneur, especially, there is no end to the work, and so in all of my working, this was a really disorienting thing, because, like, the end of the day would come, and I would be like, man, I'm not done, there's still so much work left to do, and I would have this really defeatist attitude of like, I have to stay longer, I have to keep working, and like, which is where burnout, right, burnout comes from, and everything else, but I would feel that I couldn't relax or play or vacation, or etc, etc, until it was all done, and so challenging that to really just say, like, no, this is I stop at this time, it'll be there, and making peace with the fact that it's undone, or yeah, I'm entitled to play, and I'm entitled to relaxation and rest.
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Yeah.
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I mean, in this, this thing about rules around playing, I mean, I have that in spades, right? My husband held the pole of play in our relationship, and I was like, so angry so much of the time because he's playing and I'm working right, and at what point have we not understood, especially as women. I think it's more prevalent for women than it is for men that play is not a part of what we should be doing. When I ran the office for Brierley, we had a foosball table, I, and I was the one who brought the foosball table, and I'm like, okay, we're gonna, you know, make this a fun place to be. And I was annoyed every time I walked by and saw someone playing foosball.
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Yeah, I always wonder if that's that, you know, there are those layers of standards that we're held to.
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We have to prove ourselves more, we have to do more in order to earn our place in the in this space to be seen as professional, to be seen as whatever, and that that pressure that we've internalized, then understandably comes out as frustration towards people who don't have to carry that and aren't even necessarily thinking of it, but then reimagining, I mean, I have certainly found as a parent, like watching my kids play and having them invite me into play, and I used to love imagination games. I led them, like let's be the My Little Ponies prancing around the playground, like I was all over that, and yet there's a resistance, and some of it is play looks different for me, and reclaiming what does play even mean in my life at this particular point? Like, what it sort of like going to that topic of like authenticity. We were just talking about all these places where we change, where things happen, and our perspective shifts, our way of being shifts, and so I would love to know, for both of you, you know, you've worked with so many women in community and building the space of authentic connection. What have you noticed, maybe for yourselves, maybe you know within the space that you've built around these shifts that we go through in life, when something something changes, and maybe it's a big thing, and maybe it's a small thing, but yet we still, we're in the, you know, we're together and we're being authentic, and we're also not the same person we were, maybe, you know, a month ago.
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I have one that comes up really easily, and I think it's true for us and members, and I see it over and over, and it's that we never dream big enough, like our visions as women are so small and so like stair stepped of like achievable next goal, and they are never big and audacious in the way that I think men just throw around their goals. I feel that when we get together and there is sometimes this magic thing that happens where people start identifying bigger goals for each other, and it's so cool to watch, but we, I even with some of the most badass women, I just think we, we set our sights too small.
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Hmmm. Yeah, I think that I'm thinking, actually, about my.. I did a trip to Egypt in December, which absolutely changed so much for me, and one of the things that the leaders of that trip said is we have forgotten more than we remember and that for me feels so true, that we go through this process of first of all, we go through this process of learning, and meanwhile everything is slipping out the other end, right? I think of Dumbledore and his pen seed, where he takes the wand and he takes the memory and he puts it into the bowl, and then when he wants to, he can retrieve it, and I think we lose a lot, right? We lose a lot from our childhood, like you, you were talking about Valerie, the sense of play, the sense of wonder, the sense of achievement, you know, that Cape talks about, like, when she's talking about how we dream small, we also celebrate small.
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Mmmm. Yeah.
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Right? And it's the other people within the circles, when they see our authentic selves, they're the ones who are lifting us up and creating a wider vision for us.
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Yeah, and I certainly see it with my clients, and I do think that there's very much a tie between how much we don't celebrate and how limited we make our vision, and I wonder also sometimes you all were talking about before the money part, often when we're talking about business, and we're thinking about the vision, we're thinking about how much we want to grow capitalistically, right, like unlimited growth forever and ever, and you know, while the podcast is about being unlimited, part of it is choosing limits, all right, instead of allowing. Knowing just the internalized limits, those places where we don't allow ourselves to go, but going, these are the boundaries that I want to create, like this is what's important, this is what growth looks like when I think about expansion. Yeah, I need the KPI of the money, but what is my vision, and a lot of times, when I'm talking to women, vision really has to do with the difference that I want to make in the world, so, and that, of course, ties to a mission that we have. I would love to know from both of you, what is the world that you want to create? Like, when you think about a mission, what is that for you? And maybe it's personal, maybe if it's professional, because I think it can be both. Usually they're related.
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That's a big one right now.
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Yeah.
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I think that there's so much, and I'm, I'm emotional because I'm thinking about all of the things that have been taken away recently, and how women are being slotted back into a place where we don't have autonomy over our bodies.
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There are ways that women are being limited because it's, we're threatening, we are the creators, and I, so for what I want, I want a world where my daughter feels that she can go out and do whatever she wants, and that she can create the change that she wants, and that people are welcoming and loved on. I mean, there's so much wrong. There's so many things in this world that need to be fixed, and they don't get fixed if I'm concerned about my own hide all the time. It's about how the impact the richness that we have is about community and lifting up community and lifting up and changing the world, so that people aren't hungry, people aren't worried about we're talking this weekend about the homeless situation in Evanston, and how these people, they go to these shelters that are only available 31 weeks a year, and that you know they are kicked out at seven in the morning on a cold winter day.
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What kind of humanity do we exempt? exemplify if we allow this to happen, that children are hungry, that children aren't going to school and aren't being supported and loved on? I, although I don't know that school is the best thing anyway, but that's a whole nother story that we could talk about, but you know, there's just, there's so much hurt in the world, and there's so much opportunity. We are so wealthy and privileged, and it comes from a scarcity mindset.
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Yeah, I, I really see that. What we were just talking about, the play, how we can't play when I don't vision, like there are men who vision, but it's such limited visions, like the men who are visioning into what we're, what we're currently living in, it's so limited, it's so limited, and yeah, I really, there's a lot to learn. I've been learning a lot about the homeless situation, with, you know, the lack of housing, and how things are treated. I mean, if we're talking, you know, for the folks in Chicago, learning about how the accelerated housing events, you know, we think that they're fixing things, but only half of an encampment usually gets housing, if that, and then they're only allowed to stay there for two years if they can't get money, and they usually pair up the accelerated moving event with a sweep to close down the encampment entirely, so people can't see how much it's not solving and not actually caring for people, so there's a lot to learn there.
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I encourage anybody listening, especially those in Chicago, learn about what's going on, because housing is a real, a real crisis. But I think, yeah, it's all very related.
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And it's why Kate and I are so dedicated to Habitat for Humanity.
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Yeah, yeah,
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Absolutely. So, Dorothy mentioned this class that I'm taking right now, called Dying and Death, and it's got me really thinking about one of the things they're talking about, the class is how, if you're not living like truly living during your life, you're dying prematurely, and that when you know we don't talk about death, we're scared of it. We've taken it and given it away to hospitals and businesses, and it's not something that we deal with tangibly in our lives and.
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Yet it's 100% guaranteed that all of us are moving in that direction, and what are we working towards in that journey?
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And it has me really rooted in this idea of purpose. What are we doing with our, you know, one wild and precious life, and how are we making, leaving our stamp in our, and taking care of each other on this on this journey, because it really is all the stuff, all the money, all the status, all of it is meaningless at that point. None of it goes with you, and I think that as I'm learning more about what people's end of life's look like, there is that coming back to center. I didn't realize that there's a statistic that something like 90% of people die in old age, they die like, of just, you know, that's that's their end. Only 10% are taken prematurely, right? So most of us are headed in that direction.
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And what does that look like, right? And I don't know, I'm really just interested in being more conscious of my own and, and leading others to a fruitful life that also ends with a beautiful death, right? Because we should all aspire to have, have that be the goal.
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Yeah.
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Oh, think we think about it like how we want that to end.
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No.
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You know, and that's one of the questions I was asking Steve in his last couple of years, because if he was, he wanted to die every day, then okay, I knew, you know, I had a way of being with him, but were you wanting to live every day while you can, or you want to die if you go towards death, and it was just like one of those moments where we were like looking at each other, going, okay, this this puts a framework on how we're going to be.
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Yeah, it's it's an interesting juxtaposition, you know, I feel like the connectivity of, you know, living and death and play and big dreams, and knowing that we're going to have an end, and what does that mean, and I think about, like, the little ways that we show up and the impact that has on our ourselves and what we connect with and who we connect with as well as other people and how you know that that big dream, that big vision, you know, can be something that is big in its expansion, but not necessarily. I have to do this giant thing. I have to. I have a former client who was diagnosed with cancer and has been learning how to live, knowing that it's a terminal situation, and she's had a lot more years than she expected to have, and thinking about legacy, and what is a legacy, and that created a lot of pressure, and I think one of the things that, as I've also been sitting with a lot of death and a lot of grief, and thinking about, like, purpose, I feel like it just kind of naturally inclines you to think about purpose, like, what am I doing here, and purpose for me has to do with those little moments of impact, those ways that we show up with each other, and while I have a mission of difference in the world, because I think, you know, like, you were saying, Dorothy, everything that's happening right now is so heartbreaking, and hope lives in action. It's, you know, and that it's important for us to name our feelings, you know, the social emotional, like naming our feelings and recognizing when something's not about a feeling, it's about a doing, it's about a showing up. It's, you know, I think of gratitude as an exercise, it's a practice, it's not just a, you know, I feel grateful, it's because sometimes I'm not receiving things, but I can still practice gratitude, and I think hope is the same way, where I can practice hope, you know what does hope look like in this conversation, and so I would love to invite you, know, as we're thinking about connecting and authenticity and doing business, what is hope in action look like? For you all in the space of Women Belong
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For me, I think it looks like belonging, it looks like being in the flow and the feeling of community and connectedness when I'm in my own space alone and feeling disconnected from source, from purpose, from community. Those are those can get it, can get dark, and knowing that when I plug in it, it feeds me, and I know that it's mutual. It feeds the other people in community as well.
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For me, hope is connection. Hope is that next conversation that is so surprising. It takes my breath away. Talking to people like every week, Kate and I are talking to so many women around the world, right, and the connections are just like they are yummy, they are delicious, they are dessert, they are, they are the promise.
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Yeah, dessert for breakfast or anytime...
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Right?
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I mean, can I tell you, it's like I feel, and when I hear oftentimes women of my age saying, oh, it's hard, so hard to make new friends. It's like, really, I feel like I do it every day, and it's because we show up authentically, we ask the questions, we're curious, we're interested in the other, right?
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Yeah, it is hard in a lot of ways for people to make friends, and I think I think it's a contrived hardship, you know. We are much more manipulative the less connected we are from ourselves, from each other, you know. The loneliness is a, is a contrived thing to make us more manipulatable, and so I believe in rest being resistance, and I also believe in connecting with other people in an authentic way, in an open, as you said, honest and vulnerable way, where we don't have to be the expert, we can just be who we are, and and it goes into valuing our gifts, right? Like, if we've bought into the limit that we have to earn our value, then we have to produce in a relationship, whereas if I know that I'm valuable, then I can show up with you, and I can have space for your value too, because it's that scarcity, I'm not in scarcity, I'm in abundance, I'm valuable, you're valuable, and we're learning, we're curious about each other, we get to grow and learn, and I love that you all have created a space that uplifts that amongst women business owners, because I do think that we often very much internalize the patriarchal, hierarchical mindset of I have to be an expert and I have to look a certain, you know, way.
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It's hard to break out of that.
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I think it's tough.
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Yeah, you know, in the social emotional intelligence work that I had done, the leaders of that organization identified five primary yearnings that we have
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to be seen, to love and be loved, to be known or heard, to matter and make a difference. And I always thought matter and making a difference that resonated the most with me, because I knew that I was loved, and I knew that I loved, right, that was like a given for me. I felt that I was heard because I've got a big voice, and I often swear, not today, at this moment, but the matter and making a difference was always externally focused, like, how do I make a difference to you, how do I matter to you, and the last year and a half or so has been me reclaiming and understanding that I matter and make a difference, because I am what an opportunity for all of us if we understand that we matter and make a difference because we simply not simple, but simply are.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Thank you both so much for this conversation. I have really, I mean, it's, it's been a very much a heart conversation, so thank you. I like to wrap up with a couple questions before I do that, real quick. All the all the links will be in the show notes, but if you just want to say out loud verbally, how can people connect with you?
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Womenbelong.com is our website. There are tons of events to come to visit a circle. Which are chapter-based organizations around the world, and some are online, and some are in person, and it's free to visit. So, women belong.com/circles for that, or women belong.com/events We have book club and seeds for growth speaker series, and other networking events called introductions and connections, tons of opportunities to connect with other women around the world,
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Awesome.
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And all the links, as I said, will be in the show notes. And now, just as a final question, What does it mean to you, each of you to be unlimited?
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We were once asked whether we were going to go national when we were first one circle in Chicago, and I was like, oh yeah, and then, oh no, we're going international, no, we're going galactic, and that's what unlimited means to me, because I don't know what it means. It's a challenge, it's a constant challenge to think, well, what does galactic mean?
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What does, what is the bigger place that we can go to? So that's what unlimited means to me. Galactic.
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I'm kind of ditto what Dorothy said. I, yeah, I don't know that I can add anything to that.
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All right.
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Well, so final question for the Mindset Unlimited playlist. What song do you listen to when you want to evoke that unlimited feeling?
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For me, one thing, and this was hard because I am a person who skips around a lot. I do not have a one song that is the all the time song, but right now I have been listening to this song that my dad, who recently passed, he played at my wedding. It's the song Ooh Child by the Five Stair Steps, and I don't know, it's a, it's a song that, to me, the lyrics are about how today might not be the best, but it's a brighter future tomorrow, so just always the striving and the working towards the next thing.
00:37:14.885 --> 00:37:18.065
Yeah,
00:37:18.065 --> 00:37:22.235
Well, I've got two, I can't, I can't.
00:37:23.014 --> 00:37:29.960
That's all good. I've had to limit it when it comes to, like, an entire album, but I can go with two
00:37:29.989 --> 00:37:31.369
Unlimited selections, Dor.
00:37:32.239 --> 00:37:37.250
There's a, if there's an album, I'll link it in the show notes, but for the playlist purpose.
00:37:37.250 --> 00:38:10.130
The two songs, the two songs, one is, of course, because my name is Dorothy - Wizard of Oz was always a big thing, so Defying Gravity is like it gets me right in the feels. And then the song that I sang to my daughter at her wedding, and yes, I was loaded at the time, and I actually did a shout out to Kate, as I'm walking up to give my mother of the bride speech. I'm walking up and I'm yelling at Kate Alpert.
00:38:10.130 --> 00:38:12.829
We did it! We did it, Kate!
00:38:12.829 --> 00:38:21.170
There was an F word in there, though. And I don't know what the hell I was referring to, but I just felt in that moment...
00:38:21.199 --> 00:38:23.179
You thought you were at a Women Belong event.
00:38:23.210 --> 00:38:30.019
Women Belong. Right. It was, I thought it was a Woman Belong event... and that song is, I'm At The Top of the World.
00:38:30.019 --> 00:38:30.829
Yeah.
00:38:30.829 --> 00:38:38.704
If there's, when I'm feeling down and I call my daughter and leave her a message, I will often sing that.
00:38:38.704 --> 00:38:39.184
Yeah.
00:38:39.184 --> 00:38:40.474
yeah.
00:38:40.474 --> 00:38:44.164
I love it.
00:38:40.474 --> 00:39:09.710
Thank you both so much for being here. I really, as I said, really appreciate this conversation, and I encourage all the listeners to check out the show notes, check out the links. I'm in the Albany Park Circle, so yeah, and so yeah, come visit, and thank you, thank you, all, for listening, thank you for being here. I appreciate everyone.
00:39:09.739 --> 00:39:12.769
Valerie, what a pleasure. We really appreciate you. Thank you.
00:39:12.769 --> 00:39:13.130
Yeah, thank you.
00:39:13.130 --> 00:39:14.420
You're welcome.
00:00:08.130 --> 00:00:10.529
Hello everyone, and welcome to another
00:00:10.769 --> 00:01:47.650
Mindset Tips, Tools, and Inspiration for Women in a Time of Change. I'm your host, Valerie Friedlander, and I am so excited to welcome Kate Alpert and Dorothy Rosen to join me today for a conversation about creating authentic connections in business, so I'll just give a little bit of an intro to them, and then we will, we will dive in and let them introduce themselves to you, so Dorothy and Kate started Women Belong in 2017 and Women Belong is an international networking organization that grew from a single Chicago circle into a global community dedicated to supporting women professionally and personally. Women Belong was born out of a vision they had for bringing women together in an authentic way. When we come together and explore business honestly and vulnerably, relationships form and connections deepen. These relationships create space and opportunity for a higher vision of what we can collectively achieve. And I am also a member of Women Belong. It has been a wonderful space to connect personally and professionally, and you both come from a marketing background and have had some really pivotal life experiences along the way, kind of almost like seems like solidifying that this was the direction that you really were meant to go in and build, so I'd love for you each to share just a little bit about yourselves as we get started.
00:01:48.879 --> 00:02:27.379
Well, yeah, it's been an interesting journey. One of the things a couple of years ago I started to think about, well, what's my hero's journey, which turned into what's my the heroine's journey, which is like all about the journey, internal journey from my perspective, and you know, being in corporate America, one of the things that felt really inauthentic was that I couldn't be myself, that I wasn't seen for who I was, that I felt like there were conversations that were happening that, while I understood them, they didn't seem to really get at what was important in life, if you will.
00:02:27.650 --> 00:04:22.459
Right, I've always been a relationship developer, which is why I went towards loyalty marketing and relationship marketing, because it felt wrong in those days. Direct marketing was all about acquisition, right. Who are we going to acquire rather than thinking about the full cycle of an of a customer, and so got into relationship marketing and loved it. And then I got a little tired of making a lot of money for the patriarchy, right, which I couldn't have articulated back then, but what I could articulate was that I wanted to see other women be successful in business, so that was a lot of my journey, and then my husband got sick, and it will be actually seven years next week that he, since he passed away, and going through that huge life. I mean, we all go through life events, right? Whether it's having children, the loss of a parent, the loss of friends, the loss of a partner, loss of children, God forbid, right? All of those moments create an impact who we are if we are aware and and Kate's doing this death and dying class, which she can talk to a lot more, but I feel like I've, I've experienced a lot of that because of my age, because of my experiences, right. So I don't know what else to say, other than the fact that the importance for me of my journey right now is the impact we have on others. It's not the financial gain, money is just a, it's just a measure, it's just a KPI, but it's not the ultimate KPI for me right now. Impact is what makes the most difference.
00:04:23.269 --> 00:04:23.329
Yeah,
00:04:24.329 --> 00:05:38.394
Yeah. So, my background, in marketing also, I worked more on the agency side for digital and database agencies, and so doing kind of a mixed bag of websites and online marketing, email marketing, and I was doing that business, working at an agency, when I met Dorothy, trying to build a book of business, being a new mom with what was a very high needs baby, who didn't take a bottle and didn't sleep well, and was just trying to navigate what that looked like to be a working mom that was all in on breastfeeding. And my mom breastfed, but she was a stay-at-home mom, and so I didn't really have a lot of archetypes for what that looked like, and I didn't understand why there weren't any archetypes out there, like for me I had this vision at the time of why is it okay for two men to be on a golf course, and that's like a vision of how a deal can be made at work, but two women breastfeeding together can't be how a deal at work would ever go, and I wanted to change that.
00:05:34.177 --> 00:07:17.175
I thought that we can do whatever we want, we can breastfeed and work at the same time, and that should be totally fine. And when I met Dorothy, Dorothy was in a place doing a lot of social emotional intelligence work, and bringing that to this business group that we were sort of a rogue chapter of, and I wanted all the pieces of whatever that was, because those two versions of Kate, the Kate that was the seeker, the Burning Man attendee, and the seeker of culture and community, and you know all the weird parts of myself, was not the worker, Kate, and when I found a place and a person that I was like, this is a vision of what we could build together, and so when we, when Dorothy and I got together and started talking about Women Belong and what it is, it was also at what was an unbelievably pivotal time in the world, and certainly in America, with an important election in 2016 and the birth of the Me Too movement, and just sort of bringing to consciousness and voice, like a lot of the things that women were going through, and so when we built Women Belong, it was with that intent of just having an organization that was exploring and being expansive for what we are as people and how we work in ways that are in service and purposefulness, and right, where money is is a KPI, but it's not the only. There's so much more that we're here to do.
00:07:17.175 --> 00:08:50.865
Yeah, it's one of the things that I love about Women Belong, and something that I have felt as well in my own journey, I also came from that, like I'm a connector, I am someone who really builds relationships. I was in corporate, I was a credit collections manager for many years, and so building relationships was how business worked, how I understood not just, you know, threatening people and stuff, but there is a very distinct difference of I can show up as an aspect of myself, but not as my whole self, you know. So I can be my personality, and I think there is some privilege in that as well, of course, and to be able to go like, but there's a part of life that I can't share, because it will be used against me, and a lot, a lot of people who aren't white men, I mean, and I would say also white men, for sure, too, just at a different level, have that experience where there's that peace that can't be shared, and what I love about Women Belong is how much it is a personal and professional. It's we're business women, and we're whole human beings that we can be whole human beings and do business. We can have multiple hats, we can have more hats than the one that we're doing business with, and we can still be really amazing business owners and professional women too, so that all really resonates a lot.
00:08:50.865 --> 00:08:51.465
Right.
00:08:51.465 --> 00:09:53.610
And you know, you say professional women, and one of the things that I want to actually hit on is something that has been a huge aha for this last year, which is that we think of professionalism, professional categories within a certain construct, right, and what we have seen is that a huge growth area within women belong is for those women who are I don't want to use the word dabble, but that's what historically society would say, that they're dabbling in the arts, right? They, these are women who embrace a lot of the what we would call the woo out there, right, and these are women who have been sidelined and and haven't found a place, and all of a sudden we're having conversations that are so much bigger, wider, deeper, richer, as a result of saying, why have we lived within this limited..
00:09:49.289 --> 00:10:30.585
oh, there you go, Valerie, this limited construct, right? And now we have an opportunity to absolutely broaden and. Every time, so there's there's we have one member who's an animal communicator, right, and I was talking in one of our circles about the fact that we've got an animal communicator in this other circle, and they're like, oh, I need her name, I need her name, I need her name, it was like everybody needs to have help with their dogs or their parrots or whatever their animals are, right, and it's like, oh, look at this. This is so much broader, and why do we think of business in such a narrow context?
00:10:30.585 --> 00:10:50.820
Yeah. Oh, that conversation about what makes someone professional, and yeah, actually, I thought you were. As soon as you were about, I could see you wanted to say something. I was like, I wonder if she's gonna say something about saying professional women, how often do we say, like, professional men, you know, or like the, we, where we caveat, right?
00:10:50.820 --> 00:10:51.149
Oh, yeah,
00:10:51.149 --> 00:11:16.544
And, and so that actually kind of leads me to one of the questions that I also always like to ask folks, which is, what is an unconscious limit? So, one of, as you mentioned earlier, Dorothy, like I wouldn't have thought to say that or call it that before, but those unconscious things that you have since unlearned, and how did you unlearn it?
00:11:16.544 --> 00:11:50.054
Okay, I'm going to jump in. All right, so this is a recent one, and I think that Kate referenced that I had done a lot of work in emotional and social intelligence, and there was one lesson that we were working on, which was rules, myths, and beliefs, right, and one of my recent rules that I was like, wait, where did that come from, and why, and it was around reading, so every day Kate and I have a growth mindset philosophy. What is it we're here to learn today?
00:11:50.054 --> 00:12:13.980
And Kate especially challenges, I mean, hello, she challenges has challenged so many of my beliefs and has raised me up and made me such a more bigger person, if you will, but so around reading it's been that I thought that I could only read at night, because we have a book club, right? We started, and one day I was like, "When do you guys read? Oh, I read at night.
00:12:13.980 --> 00:12:17.820
I used to read under the covers with a flashlight as a child.
00:12:17.820 --> 00:12:36.434
Reading was dessert. Reading was the last thing you consumed reading was the thing that you were allowed to do at the end of a day when you've done everything else that you are supposed to do. Wait, what? This one woman said to me at a book group, she's like, 'Oh, yes, I read every day from two to four.
00:12:36.434 --> 00:12:49.664
I sit on the couch, I'm like,'Wait, are you allowed to do that, right? so I mean it's a limiting belief, because there's so many rules that we live within that we don't question,
00:12:50.355 --> 00:12:54.480
Yeah, yeah.
00:12:50.355 --> 00:13:07.080
Well, and I love that you were talking about differentiating the myths, which are the bigger picture, like those social myths, and then the inner rules, and I'm very curious about that.
00:13:04.110 --> 00:13:08.220
I also want to make sure that Kate gets to share too...
00:13:08.210 --> 00:14:18.815
Sure. One that comes up for me a lot, and I don't know that I've unlearned this, but I certainly am conscious of it now. It's like this belief that I have to finish my work in order to go play, and is similar, I think, to Dorothy's, but as an entrepreneur, especially, there is no end to the work, and so in all of my working, this was a really disorienting thing, because, like, the end of the day would come, and I would be like, man, I'm not done, there's still so much work left to do, and I would have this really defeatist attitude of like, I have to stay longer, I have to keep working, and like, which is where burnout, right, burnout comes from, and everything else, but I would feel that I couldn't relax or play or vacation, or etc, etc, until it was all done, and so challenging that to really just say, like, no, this is I stop at this time, it'll be there, and making peace with the fact that it's undone, or yeah, I'm entitled to play, and I'm entitled to relaxation and rest.
00:14:19.774 --> 00:14:20.794
Yeah.
00:14:20.809 --> 00:15:05.014
I mean, in this, this thing about rules around playing, I mean, I have that in spades, right? My husband held the pole of play in our relationship, and I was like, so angry so much of the time because he's playing and I'm working right, and at what point have we not understood, especially as women. I think it's more prevalent for women than it is for men that play is not a part of what we should be doing. When I ran the office for Brierley, we had a foosball table, I, and I was the one who brought the foosball table, and I'm like, okay, we're gonna, you know, make this a fun place to be. And I was annoyed every time I walked by and saw someone playing foosball.
00:15:05.014 --> 00:15:10.909
Yeah, I always wonder if that's that, you know, there are those layers of standards that we're held to.
00:15:10.909 --> 00:17:02.975
We have to prove ourselves more, we have to do more in order to earn our place in the in this space to be seen as professional, to be seen as whatever, and that that pressure that we've internalized, then understandably comes out as frustration towards people who don't have to carry that and aren't even necessarily thinking of it, but then reimagining, I mean, I have certainly found as a parent, like watching my kids play and having them invite me into play, and I used to love imagination games. I led them, like let's be the My Little Ponies prancing around the playground, like I was all over that, and yet there's a resistance, and some of it is play looks different for me, and reclaiming what does play even mean in my life at this particular point? Like, what it sort of like going to that topic of like authenticity. We were just talking about all these places where we change, where things happen, and our perspective shifts, our way of being shifts, and so I would love to know, for both of you, you know, you've worked with so many women in community and building the space of authentic connection. What have you noticed, maybe for yourselves, maybe you know within the space that you've built around these shifts that we go through in life, when something something changes, and maybe it's a big thing, and maybe it's a small thing, but yet we still, we're in the, you know, we're together and we're being authentic, and we're also not the same person we were, maybe, you know, a month ago.
00:17:02.975 --> 00:18:02.315
I have one that comes up really easily, and I think it's true for us and members, and I see it over and over, and it's that we never dream big enough, like our visions as women are so small and so like stair stepped of like achievable next goal, and they are never big and audacious in the way that I think men just throw around their goals. I feel that when we get together and there is sometimes this magic thing that happens where people start identifying bigger goals for each other, and it's so cool to watch, but we, I even with some of the most badass women, I just think we, we set our sights too small.
00:18:02.315 --> 00:19:08.599
Hmmm. Yeah, I think that I'm thinking, actually, about my.. I did a trip to Egypt in December, which absolutely changed so much for me, and one of the things that the leaders of that trip said is we have forgotten more than we remember and that for me feels so true, that we go through this process of first of all, we go through this process of learning, and meanwhile everything is slipping out the other end, right? I think of Dumbledore and his pen seed, where he takes the wand and he takes the memory and he puts it into the bowl, and then when he wants to, he can retrieve it, and I think we lose a lot, right? We lose a lot from our childhood, like you, you were talking about Valerie, the sense of play, the sense of wonder, the sense of achievement, you know, that Cape talks about, like, when she's talking about how we dream small, we also celebrate small.
00:19:08.599 --> 00:19:09.619
Mmmm. Yeah.
00:19:09.619 --> 00:19:22.204
Right? And it's the other people within the circles, when they see our authentic selves, they're the ones who are lifting us up and creating a wider vision for us.
00:19:22.204 --> 00:20:49.069
Yeah, and I certainly see it with my clients, and I do think that there's very much a tie between how much we don't celebrate and how limited we make our vision, and I wonder also sometimes you all were talking about before the money part, often when we're talking about business, and we're thinking about the vision, we're thinking about how much we want to grow capitalistically, right, like unlimited growth forever and ever, and you know, while the podcast is about being unlimited, part of it is choosing limits, all right, instead of allowing. Knowing just the internalized limits, those places where we don't allow ourselves to go, but going, these are the boundaries that I want to create, like this is what's important, this is what growth looks like when I think about expansion. Yeah, I need the KPI of the money, but what is my vision, and a lot of times, when I'm talking to women, vision really has to do with the difference that I want to make in the world, so, and that, of course, ties to a mission that we have. I would love to know from both of you, what is the world that you want to create? Like, when you think about a mission, what is that for you? And maybe it's personal, maybe if it's professional, because I think it can be both. Usually they're related.
00:20:49.069 --> 00:20:51.380
That's a big one right now.
00:20:51.424 --> 00:20:52.085
Yeah.
00:20:53.134 --> 00:21:11.525
I think that there's so much, and I'm, I'm emotional because I'm thinking about all of the things that have been taken away recently, and how women are being slotted back into a place where we don't have autonomy over our bodies.
00:21:11.525 --> 00:22:17.029
There are ways that women are being limited because it's, we're threatening, we are the creators, and I, so for what I want, I want a world where my daughter feels that she can go out and do whatever she wants, and that she can create the change that she wants, and that people are welcoming and loved on. I mean, there's so much wrong. There's so many things in this world that need to be fixed, and they don't get fixed if I'm concerned about my own hide all the time. It's about how the impact the richness that we have is about community and lifting up community and lifting up and changing the world, so that people aren't hungry, people aren't worried about we're talking this weekend about the homeless situation in Evanston, and how these people, they go to these shelters that are only available 31 weeks a year, and that you know they are kicked out at seven in the morning on a cold winter day.
00:22:17.029 --> 00:22:55.160
What kind of humanity do we exempt? exemplify if we allow this to happen, that children are hungry, that children aren't going to school and aren't being supported and loved on? I, although I don't know that school is the best thing anyway, but that's a whole nother story that we could talk about, but you know, there's just, there's so much hurt in the world, and there's so much opportunity. We are so wealthy and privileged, and it comes from a scarcity mindset.
00:22:55.160 --> 00:24:09.005
Yeah, I, I really see that. What we were just talking about, the play, how we can't play when I don't vision, like there are men who vision, but it's such limited visions, like the men who are visioning into what we're, what we're currently living in, it's so limited, it's so limited, and yeah, I really, there's a lot to learn. I've been learning a lot about the homeless situation, with, you know, the lack of housing, and how things are treated. I mean, if we're talking, you know, for the folks in Chicago, learning about how the accelerated housing events, you know, we think that they're fixing things, but only half of an encampment usually gets housing, if that, and then they're only allowed to stay there for two years if they can't get money, and they usually pair up the accelerated moving event with a sweep to close down the encampment entirely, so people can't see how much it's not solving and not actually caring for people, so there's a lot to learn there.
00:24:05.555 --> 00:24:19.670
I encourage anybody listening, especially those in Chicago, learn about what's going on, because housing is a real, a real crisis. But I think, yeah, it's all very related.
00:24:19.670 --> 00:24:24.019
And it's why Kate and I are so dedicated to Habitat for Humanity.
00:24:24.019 --> 00:24:24.890
Yeah, yeah,
00:24:24.890 --> 00:25:00.065
Absolutely. So, Dorothy mentioned this class that I'm taking right now, called Dying and Death, and it's got me really thinking about one of the things they're talking about, the class is how, if you're not living like truly living during your life, you're dying prematurely, and that when you know we don't talk about death, we're scared of it. We've taken it and given it away to hospitals and businesses, and it's not something that we deal with tangibly in our lives and.
00:25:00.065 --> 00:25:11.119
Yet it's 100% guaranteed that all of us are moving in that direction, and what are we working towards in that journey?
00:25:11.119 --> 00:26:15.005
And it has me really rooted in this idea of purpose. What are we doing with our, you know, one wild and precious life, and how are we making, leaving our stamp in our, and taking care of each other on this on this journey, because it really is all the stuff, all the money, all the status, all of it is meaningless at that point. None of it goes with you, and I think that as I'm learning more about what people's end of life's look like, there is that coming back to center. I didn't realize that there's a statistic that something like 90% of people die in old age, they die like, of just, you know, that's that's their end. Only 10% are taken prematurely, right? So most of us are headed in that direction.
00:26:12.170 --> 00:26:35.555
And what does that look like, right? And I don't know, I'm really just interested in being more conscious of my own and, and leading others to a fruitful life that also ends with a beautiful death, right? Because we should all aspire to have, have that be the goal.
00:26:36.125 --> 00:26:36.634
Yeah.
00:26:36.755 --> 00:26:41.509
Oh, think we think about it like how we want that to end.
00:26:41.509 --> 00:26:41.569
No.
00:26:41.569 --> 00:27:12.875
You know, and that's one of the questions I was asking Steve in his last couple of years, because if he was, he wanted to die every day, then okay, I knew, you know, I had a way of being with him, but were you wanting to live every day while you can, or you want to die if you go towards death, and it was just like one of those moments where we were like looking at each other, going, okay, this this puts a framework on how we're going to be.
00:27:12.875 --> 00:30:06.244
Yeah, it's it's an interesting juxtaposition, you know, I feel like the connectivity of, you know, living and death and play and big dreams, and knowing that we're going to have an end, and what does that mean, and I think about, like, the little ways that we show up and the impact that has on our ourselves and what we connect with and who we connect with as well as other people and how you know that that big dream, that big vision, you know, can be something that is big in its expansion, but not necessarily. I have to do this giant thing. I have to. I have a former client who was diagnosed with cancer and has been learning how to live, knowing that it's a terminal situation, and she's had a lot more years than she expected to have, and thinking about legacy, and what is a legacy, and that created a lot of pressure, and I think one of the things that, as I've also been sitting with a lot of death and a lot of grief, and thinking about, like, purpose, I feel like it just kind of naturally inclines you to think about purpose, like, what am I doing here, and purpose for me has to do with those little moments of impact, those ways that we show up with each other, and while I have a mission of difference in the world, because I think, you know, like, you were saying, Dorothy, everything that's happening right now is so heartbreaking, and hope lives in action. It's, you know, and that it's important for us to name our feelings, you know, the social emotional, like naming our feelings and recognizing when something's not about a feeling, it's about a doing, it's about a showing up. It's, you know, I think of gratitude as an exercise, it's a practice, it's not just a, you know, I feel grateful, it's because sometimes I'm not receiving things, but I can still practice gratitude, and I think hope is the same way, where I can practice hope, you know what does hope look like in this conversation, and so I would love to invite you, know, as we're thinking about connecting and authenticity and doing business, what is hope in action look like? For you all in the space of Women Belong
00:30:06.244 --> 00:30:44.029
For me, I think it looks like belonging, it looks like being in the flow and the feeling of community and connectedness when I'm in my own space alone and feeling disconnected from source, from purpose, from community. Those are those can get it, can get dark, and knowing that when I plug in it, it feeds me, and I know that it's mutual. It feeds the other people in community as well.
00:30:44.138 --> 00:31:12.509
For me, hope is connection. Hope is that next conversation that is so surprising. It takes my breath away. Talking to people like every week, Kate and I are talking to so many women around the world, right, and the connections are just like they are yummy, they are delicious, they are dessert, they are, they are the promise.
00:31:14.059 --> 00:31:16.789
Yeah, dessert for breakfast or anytime...
00:31:16.789 --> 00:31:17.119
Right?
00:31:17.119 --> 00:31:38.615
I mean, can I tell you, it's like I feel, and when I hear oftentimes women of my age saying, oh, it's hard, so hard to make new friends. It's like, really, I feel like I do it every day, and it's because we show up authentically, we ask the questions, we're curious, we're interested in the other, right?
00:31:38.615 --> 00:33:14.644
Yeah, it is hard in a lot of ways for people to make friends, and I think I think it's a contrived hardship, you know. We are much more manipulative the less connected we are from ourselves, from each other, you know. The loneliness is a, is a contrived thing to make us more manipulatable, and so I believe in rest being resistance, and I also believe in connecting with other people in an authentic way, in an open, as you said, honest and vulnerable way, where we don't have to be the expert, we can just be who we are, and and it goes into valuing our gifts, right? Like, if we've bought into the limit that we have to earn our value, then we have to produce in a relationship, whereas if I know that I'm valuable, then I can show up with you, and I can have space for your value too, because it's that scarcity, I'm not in scarcity, I'm in abundance, I'm valuable, you're valuable, and we're learning, we're curious about each other, we get to grow and learn, and I love that you all have created a space that uplifts that amongst women business owners, because I do think that we often very much internalize the patriarchal, hierarchical mindset of I have to be an expert and I have to look a certain, you know, way.
00:33:09.875 --> 00:33:14.644
It's hard to break out of that.
00:33:14.644 --> 00:33:18.184
I think it's tough.
00:33:18.184 --> 00:33:28.384
Yeah, you know, in the social emotional intelligence work that I had done, the leaders of that organization identified five primary yearnings that we have
00:33:28.384 --> 00:34:25.429
to be seen, to love and be loved, to be known or heard, to matter and make a difference. And I always thought matter and making a difference that resonated the most with me, because I knew that I was loved, and I knew that I loved, right, that was like a given for me. I felt that I was heard because I've got a big voice, and I often swear, not today, at this moment, but the matter and making a difference was always externally focused, like, how do I make a difference to you, how do I matter to you, and the last year and a half or so has been me reclaiming and understanding that I matter and make a difference, because I am what an opportunity for all of us if we understand that we matter and make a difference because we simply not simple, but simply are.
00:34:25.429 --> 00:34:31.579
Yeah, yeah.
00:34:25.429 --> 00:34:51.574
Thank you both so much for this conversation. I have really, I mean, it's, it's been a very much a heart conversation, so thank you. I like to wrap up with a couple questions before I do that, real quick. All the all the links will be in the show notes, but if you just want to say out loud verbally, how can people connect with you?
00:34:51.574 --> 00:35:27.679
Womenbelong.com is our website. There are tons of events to come to visit a circle. Which are chapter-based organizations around the world, and some are online, and some are in person, and it's free to visit. So, women belong.com/circles for that, or women belong.com/events We have book club and seeds for growth speaker series, and other networking events called introductions and connections, tons of opportunities to connect with other women around the world,
00:35:28.730 --> 00:35:31.744
Awesome.
00:35:28.730 --> 00:35:45.034
And all the links, as I said, will be in the show notes. And now, just as a final question, What does it mean to you, each of you to be unlimited?
00:35:45.034 --> 00:36:07.849
We were once asked whether we were going to go national when we were first one circle in Chicago, and I was like, oh yeah, and then, oh no, we're going international, no, we're going galactic, and that's what unlimited means to me, because I don't know what it means. It's a challenge, it's a constant challenge to think, well, what does galactic mean?
00:36:07.849 --> 00:36:15.815
What does, what is the bigger place that we can go to? So that's what unlimited means to me. Galactic.
00:36:15.815 --> 00:36:23.405
I'm kind of ditto what Dorothy said. I, yeah, I don't know that I can add anything to that.
00:36:24.065 --> 00:36:28.175
All right.
00:36:24.065 --> 00:36:38.179
Well, so final question for the Mindset Unlimited playlist. What song do you listen to when you want to evoke that unlimited feeling?
00:36:38.179 --> 00:37:14.885
For me, one thing, and this was hard because I am a person who skips around a lot. I do not have a one song that is the all the time song, but right now I have been listening to this song that my dad, who recently passed, he played at my wedding. It's the song Ooh Child by the Five Stair Steps, and I don't know, it's a, it's a song that, to me, the lyrics are about how today might not be the best, but it's a brighter future tomorrow, so just always the striving and the working towards the next thing.
00:37:14.885 --> 00:37:18.065
Yeah,
00:37:18.065 --> 00:37:22.235
Well, I've got two, I can't, I can't.
00:37:23.014 --> 00:37:29.960
That's all good. I've had to limit it when it comes to, like, an entire album, but I can go with two
00:37:29.989 --> 00:37:31.369
Unlimited selections, Dor.
00:37:32.239 --> 00:37:37.250
There's a, if there's an album, I'll link it in the show notes, but for the playlist purpose.
00:37:37.250 --> 00:38:10.130
The two songs, the two songs, one is, of course, because my name is Dorothy - Wizard of Oz was always a big thing, so Defying Gravity is like it gets me right in the feels. And then the song that I sang to my daughter at her wedding, and yes, I was loaded at the time, and I actually did a shout out to Kate, as I'm walking up to give my mother of the bride speech. I'm walking up and I'm yelling at Kate Alpert.
00:38:10.130 --> 00:38:12.829
We did it! We did it, Kate!
00:38:12.829 --> 00:38:21.170
There was an F word in there, though. And I don't know what the hell I was referring to, but I just felt in that moment...
00:38:21.199 --> 00:38:23.179
You thought you were at a Women Belong event.
00:38:23.210 --> 00:38:30.019
Women Belong. Right. It was, I thought it was a Woman Belong event... and that song is, I'm At The Top of the World.
00:38:30.019 --> 00:38:30.829
Yeah.
00:38:30.829 --> 00:38:38.704
If there's, when I'm feeling down and I call my daughter and leave her a message, I will often sing that.
00:38:38.704 --> 00:38:39.184
Yeah.
00:38:39.184 --> 00:38:40.474
yeah.
00:38:40.474 --> 00:38:44.164
I love it.
00:38:40.474 --> 00:39:09.710
Thank you both so much for being here. I really, as I said, really appreciate this conversation, and I encourage all the listeners to check out the show notes, check out the links. I'm in the Albany Park Circle, so yeah, and so yeah, come visit, and thank you, thank you, all, for listening, thank you for being here. I appreciate everyone.
00:39:09.739 --> 00:39:12.769
Valerie, what a pleasure. We really appreciate you. Thank you.
00:39:12.769 --> 00:39:13.130
Yeah, thank you.
00:39:13.130 --> 00:39:14.420
You're welcome.
