Stay True to Yourself and Succeed

For much of my life, I would have described strong women as akin to live-action superfigures like Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem, and those who prevailed under the most adverse conditions. Climbing Mount Everest in bone-chilling temperatures, enrolling as the first female cadet at West Point, or raising four children as a single mother in Watts all qualified.

Under this definition, I wasn’t even in the running for strong womanhood.

But an extraordinary thing happened upon turning forty: I stopped measuring strength in black-and-white absolutes. Until then, one was either strong or a wimp, brilliant or stupid, obsessively driven or lazy. However, life became much too full for such a limited perspective.

I started measuring myself and others by a more humane standard. And the next time I took stock of myself, instead of the usual litany of “should haves” and “could haves,” I was finally able to take pride in my own accomplishments. This realization gave me the confidence to take the tremendous life risk of acting exactly like myself.

And that’s what being a strong woman is really all about.

Peggy Klaus, Communications and Leadership Coach,
President, Klaus & Associates

Excerpted from What Makes a Strong Woman by Helene Lerner. Andrews McMeel Publishing.