Tara Mohr's Blog, page 15

A Dispatch from New Motherhood

Good morning –

And then the day came…when mom could find an hour to sit down at the computer to write!

I’m so happy to share with you that in the very first hour of this year, our daughter came into the world.

She’s amazing. Super snuggly. And radiant.

These have been very sweet weeks of learning about her and of experiencing new motherhood for the second time (it’s so very different, the second time).

I can tell you from the front lines of witnessing an early life: we are absolutely all miracles. Special reminder: you were a baby once, too. You are, therefore, definitely a miracle, too.

Today I want to write to you about something I’ve been thinking of in these weeks of nursing, rocking, walking. It’s a contrast I keep reflecting on as I watch my newborn daughter and my young son.

Being around a baby makes it so damn obvious that every human life is precious. This amazing thing happens – we grow in a womb and come out and keep growing. And we are adorable and gorgeous and have bodies that know just how to grow…

But as a collective, we do not treat each human life as if it is precious. We especially haven’t been treating each other that way lately, in our most public spheres in American life.

And watching my son and daughter, it’s so obvious that we start out utterly innocent, good-hearted – only wanting to connect, to love, to hold and be held, to get our needs met. And yet, right now our public rhetoric seems to have forgotten this basic innocent goodness of human beings and our most core instinct to care for one another.

My son and daughter – and all children – make it clear: We start as love. If we are met with love, we continue to be and give and extend love.

You and I can not know all the pain, the indoctrination, the hurt that happened along the way to harden the hearts of those we now see spreading hate, violence, and fear. But we can be the mothers and grandmothers and warrior guardians of the collective and say, “No. No. Not this. Not here. Not on our watch.”

We can take the simplest and most important stand there is … a stand that manifests in myriad ways across different issues and different moments, from the most personal to the political. The stand that every human being is a child of the divine. The stand that kindness matters. The stand that we must take responsibility for the harm we do to others, and make amends. The stand that we are sisters and brothers with all human beings. Let’s take that stand in every way we can.

With love, from the terrain of new motherhood –

Tara

B-School is Open! Plus My Special Bonus …

I’ve got something special to tell you about today … Registration is now open for Marie Forleo’s B-School!

If you’ve been following this month’s series on entrepreneurship, you know I’m a big fan of this program – for its quality and practicality, and because it has helped me so much with my own business (not to mention how it’s helped many of my colleagues and dear friends, too!)

You may not know this about me, but I LOVE coaching women on their businesses. When we get into a conversation about how to design your business, you’ll get a blend of my MBA training, my own lessons learned as an entrepreneur, my coaching toolkit, and my experience working with thousands of women to help them play bigger.

When you enroll in B-School and take the steps below, you’ll receive special resources & training from me to help you build your business. After B-School finishes, we’ll come together in June & July as a smaller community for special webinars and interactive sessions on these topics:

Here are the details:

Bonus Session 1 with Tara Mohr: Share Your Authentic Voice and Do Bolder Work

You’ll learn:

   • How to cut past the fluff and access your distinctive voice

   • How to identify what’s truly unique about what you have to bring to your industry/market

   • How to be more authentic and bold in your work

Bonus Session 2 with Tara Mohr: How to Design a Business that is Sustainable for You Personally and Highly Profitable

You’ll learn:

   • What makes a great business model and how that applies to your business

   • How to prioritize amongst possible business activities and directions

   • What creates abundant profitability in your business

Bonus Session 3 with Tara Mohr: How to Quiet Self-Doubt and Fear

You’ll learn:

   • How to handle self-doubt and comparison to others

   • Tools to use when fear of failure arises – it will!

   • Why trying to become more confident isn’t the answer

Bonus Session 4 with Tara Mohr: Bringing Spirituality, Heart and Intuition into Your Business

You’ll learn:

   • How to quiet the outer noise and tune into your own unique inner wisdom

   • Ways to integrate everyday spirituality and intuition into your business to guide decisions, support your motivation, and make the entrepreneurial path even more fulfilling and joyful

You can attend these bonus sessions live, or listen to a recording at your convenience. Recordings will be provided within 24 hours after each session.

These bonus sessions are included as part of your B-School tuition but only if you sign up through my unique links below.

I fully believe in the power of this work given my personal experience with the B-School course content and may earn a referral fee if you purchase through my link.

To access your B-School Bonus Sessions with me:

STEP 1: Enroll in the B-School training through my link here.

STEP 2: Sign up to be a part of the special bonus sessions with me here.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email our team at playingbig (at) taramohr (dot) com.

Love,

Tara

A Different Way of Working

When I think back on these past several years, I’m so grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to decide how I want our team and business to show up in the world.



Our philanthropy.

Our compensation policies.

Our approach to customer service.

My team and I believe that each is a way to express our values, to remember that what we put out will come back to us, and to pioneer a new, more loving way of doing business.

To give you a little taste of how we roll, here’s what my business manager added to her employment contract:

This text was written by my business manager, drawn from her own sense of the job and of our team. It also came from conversations we’d had in the hiring process, like the one when we talked about my heartfelt request that everyone on the team always tell me if some part of the job is feeling “icky” – draining, aggravating or misaligned to them – so we can make a change.

We are living in a time when we need women’s different ways of working, our different ways of seeing the world, and of relating to one another. To me, this text – both the substance of it and the irreverent act of putting something with this tone into a formal contract – offers one glimpse of what’s possible for a new way of working.

What women are doing in their businesses has a tremendous impact on changing the culture – often by starting at the margins with small businesses or true innovations – and then working their way into the mainstream.

So here’s my question for you today: What would you like to create – not just in terms of “what” your business creates, but the “how” of how you do business? Because on the entrepreneurial path, that’s yours to decide, too.

And a reminder, this month I’m excited to let everyone know about Marie Forleo’s fabulous free video series for current and aspiring entrepreneurs. I’m a graduate of Marie’s B-School program and it really helped me which is why I’m choosing to be an affiliate partner and spreading the word. Check out the video series HERE. You will find actionable steps you can take today that will reap benefits for years to come.

Love,

Tara

What I Love Most About Being An Entrepreneur

With our focus on entrepreneurship this month, I’ve been thinking about what I most love about the entrepreneurial path.

Right now, for me there are three things that stand out:

1) Doing Work That’s Meaningful.

I do this work because I believe we need to unleash women’s voices, women’s power, women’s leadership – for the sake and survival of our world. As I speak with women I hear this theme again and again; we want to start our own businesses so we can do work that we believe will make a positive impact and change what must be changed.

2) Creating.

I love making things – whether a new blog post, or a new program, or a new speech. My entrepreneurial path has allowed me to be in my happy-blissed-out-flow place – creating – a lot of the time. This is another big theme for so many of us women: we start businesses because we have a longing to create. Sometimes that longing is accompanied by a very specific vision of what we want to bring into the world – sometimes not – but either way, I want you to know that longing to create is real and valid and important.

3) Fluid Motion.

The third thing I love about the entrepreneurial path is this: I get to keep growing and changing.

The more I get to know life – by tuning into myself, by raising kids, by witnessing how life events unfold – the more I see how living things always change. They evolve. They shift. They grow.

As a self-employed person, I have the opportunity to work in that spirit of fluidity and change. I can start writing about new topics when it feels right. I can quickly create new offerings when I’m struck by inspiration. I can make a change in how I schedule my work week when it’s needed.

In other words, I can be responsive to what’s arising in me at any given time. I get to align with the fluidity and constant change of life, instead of being in a static role, institution or industry that is more like a rock than a flowing river.

For those of you who are entrepreneurs, I’d love to hear: what do you love most about this path?

For those of you thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, what benefits are you most longing for?

The third video in Marie Forleo’s business series is available today and it is truly inspiring!

You’ll get to hear from other female entrepreneurs about how & why they run their own businesses, and how collectively we’re creating a new way of working. Marie also addresses some of the top concerns that can come up when running your own business, or when you’re considering starting one.

I’m a graduate of Marie’s B-School program and it’s really helped me which is why I’m glad to be an affiliate partner in spreading the word.

Clck HERE to access today’s “No Excuses” video and download your Fun Sheet. (You might want to grab some tissues, too — some of the stories are very moving.)

Love,

Tara

Taking Time Off to Figure Out What’s Next

While I’m caring for my new baby, I’m sharing some favorite posts from the past few years. This is one of them – enjoy!   ~ Tara

A few years ago on my book tour, I met a woman named Lisa. After twenty years doing something that she felt was “just a job,” she’d taken a few months off from working, hoping to find her passion and figure out what kind of work she really wanted to do.

At the end of the four months, she didn’t have answers. She had even more problems, including the loss of much of her savings which she’d spent down during that time, more confusion about her next steps, and now having feelings of regret and failure about her time off.

This is pretty much what has happened to everyone I know who has taken time off to “figure out” what they want to do next, including myself. No one I have known has ever figured it out during long stretches of downtime.

Instead, during that downtime, we tend to get more confused, overwhelmed, and isolated. We end up spending way too much time in pajamas, and with reality tv and almond butter.

I’ve come to believe we don’t really ever need full days to sit around and “figure out” our next big career steps.

Instead we need a recipe of elements including:

1. Courage to be honest with ourselves about the ideas and inclinations we already have and probably have had for a long time.

2. Some daily practices for dealing with the fear and self-doubt that come up in times of transition.

3. A little time for reflection and research (but as the side dish, not the main course).

4. Support to take action from people outside our usual friends and family circle (peers on the same journey, a supportive group, a coach or a therapist).

5. Lots of opportunities to do small experiments with different possible directions, and to therefore learn by doing.

The Inner Mentor, Inner Critic, and Leaping chapters of Playing Big[image error] can help with many of the things above. And there are so many wonderful resources for finding support from others, whether a Playing Big course or another kind of circle or coaching relationship.

If you are looking to figure out your next chapter, don’t expect to go it alone or figure it out by yourself. See how you are doing with the items on this list, and fill in the gaps.

Love,

Tara

The Path of Entrepreneurship, Part 2

You may remember that this month I’m sharing a series of emails about entrepreneurship.

Here’s why I’m passionate about this topic:

Becoming an entrepreneur is a way to do work that is more meaningful and fulfilling for you, to become more bold and visionary in your work, and to have more autonomy and flexibility in your day-to-day life.

Those are some of the great parts of the entrepreneurial path.

Then there are the hard questions and challenges:

How do I get started without taking major financial risk?

How can I take a struggling business and make it more profitable?

How can I structure my business, so it’s sustainable — both in terms of work hours and in terms of the revenue it generates?

How should I choose among all the different things we could be focusing on?

What I’ve learned is that mission-driven entrepreneurs often have all the great content and passion in the world, but they can REALLY benefit from some training and guidance around these questions.

We can spend a lot of time beating ourselves up for what’s not working about our business or worrying about how it might not work, OR … we can get going with some great training that will help us create thriving businesses.

That’s where Marie Forleo’s B-School comes in – it’s there to teach you how to create a strong, profitable business that you love.

As I mentioned before, I’m a graduate of this program and it really helped me, which is why I’m choosing to be an affiliate partner in spreading the word about it.

Marie Forleo is sharing a free video training series this month with some of her core principles and helpful frameworks. She shares practical tools and skills that you’ll be able to use right away and can shift the way you think about doing business.

She released the second video today and it’s chockful of strategies for how to take your passions and create (or strengthen) your business. I especially appreciate Marie’s focus on how to create a business you love that can make a positive difference in the world. She also covers:

    • 13 keys to creating a thriving business

    • how to reach the people that most need your offerings

    • why this is such a fabulous time for conscientious creatives to build businesses

    • the big picture questions you must answer for yourself to set your business on the right track.

Click HERE to watch. If you are an entrepreneur – or want to become one in the future – this is for you!

Love,

Tara

The Path of Entrepreneurship, Part 1

There’s something remarkable happening in our time. It’s new, it’s growing, and it’s quite amazing.

It’s the power and opportunity offered to women through the path of entrepreneurship.

In unprecedented numbers, women are starting businesses to do work they love and to make an impact in the world.

Maybe you are already on this path, or perhaps you are hoping to move on to it soon.

For the next month, I’ll be sending out a series of emails about entrepreneurship.

If you are currently running a business, OR if you are thinking about starting one in the future, this series is for you.

It’s also for you if you are hoping to start or grow a nonprofit or social venture. The skills needed there are the same.

Today, here’s what I want to tell you about — a dynamic, fun, and incredibly useful training program for entrepreneurs: Marie Forleo’s B-School.

I’m a graduate of this program and it really helped me, which is why I’m choosing to be an affiliate partner in spreading the word about it. B-School helped me to develop my work to reach lots of people, be sustainable in terms of my life and schedule, and really work well financially for me and my family.

As you’ll soon see, Marie is a dynamic, funny, fabulous teacher. Her B-School program has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and perhaps you’ve also seen her on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday.

Today I want to invite you to meet Marie and check out the first video in her free training series for entrepreneurs. When you sign up here, you’ll get access to the video series.

If you are looking for support to create a fulfilling, meaningful, successful entrepreneurial career, this is for you. The videos are super informative and inspiring – enjoy!

Check out the video series, and Marie’s great 6 Pillars Map Funsheet here.

Being on the Transition Team

While I’m caring for my new baby, I’m sharing some favorite posts from the past few years. This is one of them – enjoy!   ~ Tara

Recently I wrote to all of you:

If the angels could have sat you down for a chat when you were on the way in to this life (among some other comments about love, fear, and your glory), they might have said this:

Now, my dear, a little context: you are entering into a transitional time.

The past: A world led, designed and defined by men.

The future: A world led, designed and defined by women and men.

The present: The transition. Yes, we’ve put you on the transition team.

I’ve been captivated by this notion of all of us being on the transition team.

Imagine you were hired into a company to job x – let’s say to manage the marketing team. You notice that the old way of doing things at the company doesn’t work so great. In small pockets of the business, you see a new way of doing things emerging – a way that makes a lot more sense. You keep hearing side conversation where people are talking about the business in such a wiser, healthier way than what you hear in the mainstream conversations.

But none of this is so relevant to you: your job is just to be the marketing manager.

But if you had been hired for a different kind of role? What if you’d been told, yes, your job is to manage the marketing team, but also, to be a key player on the transition team, as the company moves from the old way to the new way?

If you knew that, you’d do everything differently.

You’d communicate and coordinate with other people on the transition team.

You’d look for opportunities for everyone to taste the new way.

You’d look for opportunities for people to feel how the old way was limiting them.

You’d expect resistance from those invested in the old way, and you’d accept it as a part of the process.

On an emotional level, your experience of the two jobs would be very different. In the first scenario, you’d probably be exasperated by the push-pull between the old way and the new way. You might experience it as a kind of whiplash. But if you knew you were on the transition team, you’d see that push-pull between old and new ways as an evolutionary stage of a process that was leading somewhere. You’d breathe, smile, and keep going.

So, today I invite you to walk through your work, whatever it is, in some new shoes. Step into the idea that you are on the transition team, here to help forge the path from a world led, defined, and designed by men to a world led, defined and designed by women and men. It’s part of your role to help women’s authentic voices, women’s wisdom, women’s ways of working, become a guiding force in your corner of the world.

Or course, a major cultural transformation is different than an organizational change. The transition we are really speaking about will be less organized than an organizational change would be. It will be more distributed, more bottoms-up, and made up of thousands of strategies, not a centrally developed one. But the metaphor of a “transition team” inside an organization can help us imagine our work and our roles in this more oceanic transition.

If you step into that role as being on the transition team, how do the challenges you face at work and life look differently?

How do the things that drive you crazy feel different?

How does your role change?

How does your engagement in your work and life change?

Love,

Tara

 

P.S. If you are thinking of joining us for a course or training program this year, be sure to check out our recent post about what’s coming up in 2017 HERE, so you can plan ahead and sign up to get early information on programs you are interested in.

Ridiculous. Naive. Who Does She Think She Is?

While I’m caring for my new baby, I’m sharing some favorite posts from the past few years. This is one of them – enjoy!   ~ Tara

***

A few years ago, while I was getting prepared for a speaking event, I found out that someone quite famous (famous in the women’s leadership world, anyway) would be attending, sitting in the room for my talk.

Let’s call that person Judith, for the sake of this post.

Here’s what I knew about Judith: she’s super smart, she’s well-known and well-connected, and she and I disagree about a LOT of things in the women’s empowerment conversation.

My inner critic took all that in and started feeling really worried about what she’d think of my talk. I started feeling unprepared, less than, not my normal self.

During the speech, from time to time, I’d get so distracted by thinking about her presence, that I’d fall out of flow and stand outside my words, listening to them and imagining how they might sound to her.

And of course, in my mind the answer to that was always that they sounded incoherent, irrational, mundane to her.

After I finished, I went over to one of the hosts of the event and said I’d love to meet Judith. After all, despite all my worries, I did also have a lot of respect for her, and wanted to say hello.

“Oh,” they casually said, “she couldn’t make it. Her child got sick and she needed to stay at home.”

It was the oddest moment.

All that worry, for nothing. I had been steeped in my fears about what she would think of the talk. I had imagined her presence in the room as I was speaking – and her judgments, her criticism, even her scoffing at some of what I had said.

But she was not in the room.

All that imagining was simply that: imagining.

I immediately thought: Ok life, I get the joke. I get the metaphor.

This was such a great metaphor for what I often do. Special guest or not, when I’m writing something particularly vulnerable or risky, or when I’m giving a talk to a group that intimidates me, I often find my mind imagining and projecting the most critical, skeptical, even mean view on my work. I imagine Judiths, people like Judith I’ve never met. I imagine some figure saying my worst fears: “That’s ridiculous, Tara. That’s naive. Who do you think you are?”

I know I’m not alone in this. Women have been trained into fearing that critic – that individual or collective critic raging or scoffing at what we have to say.

And the truth is, those imagined voices and judges are almost never really in the room in the way that we imagine them to be. They were more present for our great great grandmothers than they are for us.

And when they are still there for us, we can find an internal resourcefulness to handle it. We really can.

What I’ve learned is that sure, there will be a range of responses to my work, but most of the time, the external criticism I encounter is so easy-peasy compared to what I fear, so deal-with-able, so simply “it is what it is” – nothing like the big boogie-man my own fears make it out to be.

If you’re not doing something because you imagine the harsh criticism that could come your way, or if your joy and full expression is diminished because like me, you hold in your head what the skeptic would be saying about your work, ask yourself: how would I behave if I knew that voice was really, truly not in the room?

And then do that.

Love,

Tara

P.S. If you are thinking of joining us for a course or training program this year, be sure to check out our recent post about what’s coming up in 2017 HERE so you can plan ahead and sign up to get early information on programs you’re interested in.

Want Clarity on Your Purpose?

While I’m caring for my new baby, I’m sharing some favorite posts from the past few years. This is one of them – enjoy!   ~ Tara

***

You can listen to this post in audio, too. Click the player to download an mp3 file, or you can read below …



 

Doing the work I do, I’m often in conversation with people about this question: What is my purpose?

My answer, my conviction, is this: we all have the same life purpose.

We have it by dint of being born on earth.

Our purpose is to create more love and light on this planet that is a dense and tangled mix of light and dark, love and fear.

Our purpose is to repair what is broken, to heal what is wounded here.

Our purpose is to make this place a little more worthy of the souls that inhabit it.

There are as many ways to do that as there are moments, and we don’t have to find our one big way, or our right way, before we start living that purpose.

We can each live that purpose in whatever job we are doing today, whatever circumstances we are in today.

I’ve written about this idea before here. But today I want to delve into one aspect of it, one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: how that purpose is our shortcut to joy.

Watching my son play when he was around 9 months old pretty much debunked for me the contemporary California-y spiritual notion that we should be able to be perfectly content in the stillness, in the emptiness, just witnessing our breath.

I watched him – always reaching for the next object, in love with novelty and stimulation of all forms. I watched him work intently on challenges that he devises – how to get the shoe in the basket, how to clank the two cups together, how to pull the lid off the container. In him, I see so clearly how much we are wired to problem-solve, to work with purpose, with a goal. When he fell into focus intently working on one of those problems, with none of the squeals or screeches that come with boredom, I saw in him the part of all of us that is so content when we are absorbed in a puzzle, a project, a problem.

What I want to suggest to you today is that there is one grand puzzle that we are all here to solve and that is always available for our devotion. When we become devoted to it, we have found our shortcut to joy.

It is the problem of how to light a candle in the darkness.

It is the puzzle of how to let kindness flow forth where harshness is present.

It is the question of how to let love rule.

It is the challenge of being a ray of light in the world, discovering what that means in its every application.

The remarkable thing is that life absolutely fills our days with opportunities to work on this problem, if we move through the day with the mindset that it is our job to see those opportunities and to step up to the plate to meet them.

When you make this deep and big work your purpose, you receive clarity and contented absorption and fascinating daily adventures in return. And, you have your shortcut to joy.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Love,

Tara

P.S. If you are thinking of joining us for a course or training program in the coming year, be sure to check out our recent post about what’s coming up in 2017 HERE, so you can plan ahead and sign up to get early information on programs you are interested in.