Helene Lerner's Blog, page 174

Taking the Lead, On Camera and Off

Lois Robbins was born an actor. At just five-years-old, she played the month of April in a school play, a role she still remembers today. “It was a very dramatic part. I had to cry on cue – April showers bring May flowers – and I found out I was quite good at it,” she says.

From that moment on, Lois was hooked. She continued to act throughout her childhood, often starring in school plays and acting on the side during her college years. Immediately following graduation, she landed her first big break on ABC’s daytime soap opera One Life to Live. She spent two years on the set, followed by another four on Ryan’s Hope and All My Children. 

After stepping away from television to pursue the New York theatre scene for over ten years, Lois will be returning to the silver screen with her latest film, Blowtorch, due for release in November 2013. In it Lois plays Ann Willis, a single mother of three working as a waitress in New York City. When her eldest son is murdered, Ann takes the investigation into her own hands.

“I’ve always been independent,” Lois reveals. “It’s a characteristic that I think is being included in more roles for women in their 40s. Just look at Helen Hunt in The Sessions – that was an incredible role. I think we need to write more films with stronger parts for women.”

Lois’s strengths extend far beyond her acting career. When she isn’t busy preparing for a part, she is often involved with giving back and paying it forward. “My dad died of lung cancer, so in 2005 I ran the New York City Marathon to raise money and awareness for lung cancer and start a foundation in his name,” she shares. “My parents were philanthropic and believed strongly that it was important to get involved and make a difference.”

It’s a message that she passes along to her own children, too. Lois’s teenage daughter is co-chairing an event for all New York City public schools to raise awareness about plastic pollution – and you can bet that Lois is behind her all of the way. “I have a responsibility as a parent to leave this world a cleaner place for my children; we need to keep our oceans clean and banning the use of plastics would be one step toward that goal.”

With principle photography completed for Blowtorch and only a few scenes left to shoot, Lois is already planning her next steps. She recently optioned another screenplay, and she is hoping to pitch a series to HBO or Showtime that a friend of hers wrote. “I find that every thing that I do prepares me for the next thing I tackle.  I’m still learning, as an actor and as myself.”

–Lindsay Putnam

Want to Experience a Sneak Peek On the Set of "In Her Power?"

I'm very excited. Starting in March nationwide, In Her Power, the television show, will be airing on public television -- check your local listings.*

The show highlights my conversation with four women from the book, In Her Power, who have reinvented themselves and altered the course of their lives, Laura Newberry, Karen Fitzgerald, Deepika Bajaj, and Robin Kahn. There are also poignant insights from actors Julianne Moore, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jane Seymour, and other self-made women from my past television shows. 

Here are clips from the making of the show (reality style) so you can get an intro to the women who will be appearing with me. And our wonderful make-up artist Bruce Dean Lindstrom.

I believe that the connective power of women is needed in the world today. We have the ability to find unity amongst our differences. 

It's my dream to have a series on the topic on a major network. Just think of all the wonderful women who would be acknowledged. 

*In Her Power distributed by APT, presenting station MPTV.

Video editor: Amy Stringer

Do You Put "Me Time" Into Your Day?

We all do too much, taking care of family, bosses and friends and relegate ourselves to last on our list. Well, you've heard that a lot, right? But the question is, what are you doing to change it? 

If you're anything like me, even with the best intentions I forget time for me and my mind, body and soul pay the price. For example, at the end of the day when my feet start hurting and my neck is bent out of shape, I remember that I took no time out.

What are your favorite moments of pleasure?

I luxuriate by taking a hot bath in the evening with great smelling oils. In the morning, at 6am, I walk out of my building to the health club and start my day with fifteen minutes of water aerobics.There is a glass bubble enclosing the pool so I see the stars as I do laps.

I recently got back from a week's vacation. I had a hard time deciding to go --you know the resistance that comes up when you are about to do something that's super good for yourself.

For 6 days, I was part of a community of women who had come together to exercise, share good conversation and eat healthy food. What a perfect way to start a new year. The trick is to now integrate a little ME TIME, everyday.

Can we make a commitment together to carve out some time just for us, each day?  If I start forgetting, please point that out.  And I will keep reminding you and myself that it's a necessity to put self-care first. 

Career Coach: Sleep On It!

Do you want to learn faster, better, and process those stressful emotions more effectively? Doing so will not only improve your mood, but also your adaptability to new situations. There is some very exciting recent research that confirms how critical our sleep is – not only for our health, but for our emotional resilience and our ability to learn new things. 

In Rosaline Cartwright’s book “The Twenty-Four Hour Mind,” she reviews sleep research and makes the following key points about what sleep really provides for our minds:

Time to reflect. As we move through 16 hours of awake time, we are paying attention to and interacting with the outside world. When we shut down to sleep for eight hours, our brains select from those new experiences which ones to be kept active, so that they can be properly filed into our memory. 

Time to understand emotions. While dreaming, we are also processing our challenging or disruptive emotions that are attached to those new experiences so that we can move to a more positive state of mind. This happens when we dream by matching emotions and experiences with longer term memories to store some of the new material into memory and work through emotions. 

Time to evolve ourselves. We modify who we are when we sleep in such a way that our self-concept develops and it is this we take into our waking hours the next day. 

Time to adapt. This wake-sleep collaboration is how our behavior remains flexible, how we are able to retain new learning, and how we safely negotiate the bumps of unanticipated challenges. 

So what does this research mean for you? It verifies that sleep is critical to our health and overall sense of well-being. Although we know this to be true, most of us are seriously sleep-deprived and are suffering in ways that we don’t see because we have developed a habit. We also think we are too busy to get enough sleep, thereby perpetuating the problem. Our brains need enough sleep time to log in new learning and embed it into long-term memory, and to process our stress. No wonder why when we wake with too little sleep we wake up grumpy!

Here are some tips for getting the sleep you deserve and nee to be your most effective self:

Work sleep into your plans to ensure you log in eight hours of good quality sleep-time. 
Look at all your “good reasons” for not being able to get the full eight hours that are so vital, and create realistic and sustainable strategies to clear the time for sleep. 
When you are learning anything new, be sure you sleep on it to embed it deeply into your memory. Research has proven that people learn more quickly and effectively if they go to sleep after learning something new. Have faith that the saying, “It will be better in the morning,” has some science behind it. 

–Andrea Zintz, Career Coach

Be Bold, Be Brave

The New Year is a great time to make a fresh start. Leave all of your feelings of self-doubt behind, and prepare to step out in a bold way in 2013. Have confidence in yourself and your abilities, and know that taking risks pays off. Look to these inspirational words in moments of doubt, and remember that you have what it takes to succeed. 

–Video by Nina Giordano

Helping Students Excel, In College and Beyond

When Alex Bernadotte received her acceptance letter from Dartmouth College, she thought the hardest part was behind her. The daughter of Haitian immigrants, she was the first member of her family to attend college, and the pressure to succeed was staggering. “My parents told me the way I could honor the sacrifices that they had made was to go to college. That earning a college degree was the path to elevating myself, my family, and my community,” she remembers.

After arriving on campus, she soon learned she was unprepared for the many rigors of higher education. “I struggled academically, socially, financially, and emotionally, in every sense of the word,” she explains. Luckily, Alex was able to turn things around and make it to graduation. But nationally, a third of students don’t return for their sophomore year. 

“I began to think, ‘Why did this happen to me? Why does this happen to many students with similar backgrounds to mine? What could I have done differently? What could the institutions I attended have done differently to prepare and support me?’” Alex recalls. 

In an attempt to find answers, she landed a job as a funder at the NewSchools Venture Fund, where she worked with charter schools and charter management programs. “These schools were having great success with getting their students accepted to college, but when I asked what was happening to their students once they got in, the answer was that they didn’t know.” 

As a solution, she decided to start her own organization, one that would not only improve a low-income student’s chances of getting accepted to college, but also ensure that they had the support to graduate once they got there. In 2009 she launched her nonprofit, Beyond 12, a feedback loop between K-12 schools and post-secondary institutions to make sure high schools are preparing students for future success. The program also matches at-risk students with a college coach to assist in the transition and provides students with a network of peers to turn to in tough times. 

Beyond 12 is currently tracking 19,000 students and coaching close to 2,000 more at 28 different colleges and universities. The organization’s success has not gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, Alex was named a Fellow by Ashoka Changemakers, and she also won a three-year sponsorship from Intel. “The sponsorship could give us the ability to help students transition not just to college, but also into their careers and professional lives as well.” 

Alex attributes the secret of her success to a lesson she learned when she was an undergrad: “You have to be willing to ask for help. When I took that leap of faith to start Beyond 12, it was with the knowledge that I would not repeat the mistake I had made at Dartmouth. Ask for help, reach out to your network, and be ready to take the jump.”

–Lindsay Putnam

Career Coach: How To Turn Stress Into Resiliency

According to conventional wisdom, events cause stress. Someone drops a load of work on you, you experience stress. Your company reorganizes, you experience stress. The assumption here is that stress is caused by what happens in the world. But, what if this assumption is wrong? What if the true cause of our stress is not the events themselves, but rather our own inability to meet our needs in the face of these events?

For example, you find out your boss is ill and you have to deliver the presentation to the senior team in her place in an hour. You feel a jolt of fear. Is the stress a result of the call to present or are you stressed because you aren't feeling prepared for this?

Do you see how the assumption that events cause stress is flawed, and that stress instead comes from your struggle to meet a need? The difference is that if you believe your stress is being caused by what’s happening in the world, you’ll tend to complain and point fingers. But if you believe you’re stressed because you’re struggling to meet a need, you’ll skip the drama and focus instead on how you are going to meet it. 

Think about it. Our happiness, health, and productivity are all being undermined by our tendency to misdiagnose the cause of our stress. What can we do to turn things around? Based on the exciting work of Charles Jones and the technique of Adaptive Inquiry, we can...

1. Examine our own mental habits to identify situations we tend to misdiagnose as stressful and notice the challenging emotions such as anger, frustration, anxiety, worry, resentment, and fear that arise from them.

2. Then, retrain ourselves to accurately diagnose the need behind our emotion going forward. For instance, the need behind anger is to assert our rights, behind resentment is to air our grievance, and the need behind frustration is achievement.

3. Then shift the focus of our attention to strategies that can help us meet our needs. This might involve a change in our beliefs, behavior or our environment.

Let's take the example of the sudden presentation. Your boss put her faith in you to cover for her when she was ill. The stress isn't really about the presentation, but your concern about being fully prepared.  You catch yourself with this realization and shift your attention to the hour for preparation. When you grab a colleague to act as audience for a few run-throughs using the slide deck in the vacant conference room down the hall, you build your confidence with the material. The stress resolves in favor of a growing readiness to step in front of the leadership team. 

In coming blogs, I will address some of these challenging emotions in a way that will enable you to find your resilience through a more powerful and adaptive response to stress. 

–Andrea Zintz, Career Coach

Break a Bad Habit

In a world where self-improvement is often undercut by pessimism and fear, some naysayers have come to regard New Year’s Resolutions as little more than wishful thinking. This year, banish that defeatist attitude along with your bad habit! No matter your vice, use these strategies to start your year off on the right foot—and keep traveling in that direction for months to come.

Uncover the stakes. What do you lose by indulging your habit? Is it time? Money? Confidence? How much? Once you’ve quantified whatever it is, decide how you want to redirect those costs in the future. Get excited about the possibilities that will open up once you’ve freed up resources to pursue things you truly value. Having concrete rewards to look forward to will help you stay on track.

Consider your strategy. Are you a cold turkey kind of gal, or will incremental improvement soften the blow of change? Should you share your goal with friends, or keep it to yourself for now? Different methods work for different people, so give the matter some thought..

Distract yourself. Focus on what you can add to your life, not what you are taking away from it. Now is the perfect time to tackle a lighthearted project that will keep you from fixating on the behaviors you’re trying to kick. Start a blog. Redecorate your room. Think fun and exciting, not boring or practical. Your undertaking should be a source of pleasure, not obligation or dread.

Replace the ritual. Some habits, like late-night snacking or watching TV, are things we do out of boredom rather than for pleasure. Think: What could you substitute instead? Could you drink tea instead of eating chips? Could you spend 15 minutes writing in a journal before bed instead of mindlessly flipping through channels? Instead of seeing your swap as a concession, think of it as a new aspect of your self-care routine.

Call for backup. If your habit is fairly innocuous, such as hitting the snooze button or forgetting to wash your face, you may well be able to conquer it on your own. However, it bears noting that more severe addictions can require professional attention—or at least moral support. If you’re struggling with substance abuse, eating disordered behavior or anything else with serious physical and emotional consequences, reach out for help.

Our behaviors do not define us, and our minds are stronger than we think. Good luck, and Happy New Year!

—Emma Aubry Roberts

Career Coach: The End of the World as We Know It

Well, the world didn’t end on 12/21/12 as some folks predicted. But as 2013 unfolds, we each have an opportunity to reflect on our personal endings and beginnings. What is the world you want to create around you? How will you bring this about?

Reflect on your life for a moment. What, up until now, brought you joy and satisfaction? What goals did you achieve and how have you developed strengths that provide a foundation for future achievements? Take time to appreciate yourself and those who have inspired and assisted you. What about your world is challenging to you? What frustrations, anxieties, fears, and resentments do you carry? Our feelings point us to changes we may want to target in ourselves. 

What is the “stand” or commitment you wish to declare for 2013? We sometimes call these “New Year’s Resolutions,” but those fizzle out. By making our goals SMART, we have a greater chance of laying a realistic foundation for achievement. To be SMART, your goals must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. 

Bringing these goals to fruition requires you to create strategies to do that. When you experience emotions such as frustration, anxiety, fear, and anger, it is always because you lack a workable strategy to meet an important need. If we focus our attention on the need that is revealed, we can create strategies to reach a desired goal. 

In my blogs this month, I will discuss practical steps we can take to translate our challenges, obstacles, and stresses into strategies for meeting our needs. If 12/21/12 marked the end of the world as we knew it, then from here on out we can create the world as we want it. 

–Andrea Zintz, Career Coach

Celebrate the New Year

It's a new day and a new year. Ring in 2013 right with these inspirational thoughts. And remember, you have the power to accomplish whatever you set your mind to in the coming months.

—Video by Nina Giordano