Last week I went to the Simmons Women's Leadership Conference in Boston, MA. It is a one day conference for women and it has been held for at least a couple decades now. This was my first time attending. In one of the breakout sessions I attended, a woman spoke up in the audience to talk about how social media has had an impact on her life. She said she'd started her own blog because it was cathartic for her to write down things that were going on in her life. Recently when she had a really bad week she wrote that she was having a hard time and could not write in detail. She had an influx of e-mails from followers asking her if everything was all right and wondering if they could help in some way. She mentioned that she was shocked not just at the outpouring of love but at the fact that she thought her only followers were her closest friends and family! She realized then that some of what she had written had actually been helpful to others. That got me thinking about starting my own blog.
So here I am. I am not sure why I haven't started this before. I love to write and I love to read. I also have a passion for helping other women in the world find their path to happiness. Often that involves women in business, but I'm not picky about how I can help others! I mentor at least 5 women with which I work. I have been in management for 10 years now and I see very few women in management positions at my company. I am hoping to help other women find the confidence and training they need to make it into management.
My identity is multi-faceted. I still think of myself as a mom before anything else because I believe that's the most important job in the world. I love my children so much and can't imagine life without them. So from day to day I am facing an internal struggle over whether to spend more time on "work" or more time with "family". So I believe a lot of what I will write in my blog will be about work life balance. I certainly haven't mastered it, but I have learned a lot of good tips along the way on how to have the best of both worlds.
So welcome to my first blog posting. I admit that I don't follow many blogs, so I am not sure how conventional my blog will be. I think I will be writing as a way of expressing myself and it won't matter to me if no one else reads it. But also I will be writing in hopes to help someone else out there that is a mom, a business woman, or both. Maybe through my experiences, you, dear reader, will find a tidbit of knowledge that you can put to use in your life. I hope so anyway.
So my first tip that I'd like to impart is about the business world. What I have found after 17 years in business is that networking is so incredibly important and linked to your success. I learned in a leadership development program once that it's "not who you know, but who knows you know". I like that. It reminds me that the more people I meet, the more I show people what I'm made of, the better chance at success I have. The last several jobs I've had within my company came about from someone calling me, rather than me applying for the position. That's because they knew who I was and knew what I was made of. If you are like me, networking events can be viewed as scary and overwhelming challenges to tackle. I don't like putting myself out there where I have to meet a lot of new people. But I make myself do it, because it's those connections that I make that I end up utilizing at some point in the future. So next time you get invited to a networking event, give it a try.
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