Tag Archives: powerful women

Mentors, role-models and inspiration

Did you know that some people’s mentors are not even alive, yet influence their success immensely?

It’s true. You can be led and guided just by learning about someone you respect and see as having reached greater success than you.  

That is why so many successful people read biographies of famous people–to learn their secrets as best they can. In Napoleon Hill’s work he talks about convening regular meetings with people long dead to review his problems from each of their perspectives, as best he could imagine having studied them.

Who might you convene, if you could, to help you find creative solutions to your own problems? Here are a few ideas to get your creativity going.

  • Mother Teresa
  • Oprah Winfrey
  • Marianne Williamson
  • Queen Elizabeth I
  • Eleanor Rosevelt
  • Golda Meir
  • Margarent Thatcher
  • Marie Curie
  • Margaret Mead
  • Indira Ghandi
  • Sandra Day O’Conner
  • Rosa Parks
  • Gloria Steinem

The list of powerful women is endless. Find those that you admire, respect, or even those with a certain quality you lack and would like to cultivate–even if you do not like the person’s views.

For this same reason, I bring to you each month my Interviews with Influential Women.  In each interview you get a glipse of what each of these women did to achieve their success, the stuggles they surmounted, and their views on issues facing women, like you, today.

To read this month’s interview, and any of the prior ones, click here.

the role of women in politics

Women in Politics

The 2014 midterm elections marked a series of exciting firsts for women in politics.

Did you know…

  • the first black Republican woman was elected to Congress.
  • the first 30-year-old woman was elected in Congress.
  • Congress amassed 104 female members for the first time ever.

Yet, there is still so much more ground to gain. Why? If we want to be fully represented by our government, we need women to be involved in politics–running for office, helping in campaigns and voting for women.

95 years after we have won the ability to vote, we are still far away from equal representation.

Here are some other interesting statistics from MAKERS:

  • Today, the Senate includes only 20 women.
  • Women make up nearly 60 percent of college students, and law schools are half-female–but Congress doesn’t reflect those numbers.
  • The number of women chairing committees has actually been reduced from 9 to 2, leaving less women in powerful positions.
  • 63 other nations have had past or present female heads of government.
  • 95% of American voters would vote for a well-qualified woman (up 20% from 1978, according to a Gallup poll.)

To feel fully empowered in our society, we will have to be creating the rules that govern us and have our views be part of the very fabric of each important discussion. Look hard each election at how you can help our daughters live in a world where women in leadership is a given, not a goal.