Archive for the Working Mothers

Last Thursday night I attended the 15th Annual Women Who Mean Business Awards Ceremony presented by the San Diego Business Journal and Procopio. I was among 111 finalists and I had also nominated two other women. I’ve never been more proud to be a loser! As I sat at a table of 12 people I didn’t know who wanted to know my story as an honoree, I watched and read the details of each nominee as they were featured on three large screens in the front of the room. I was in awe of the talent surrounding me. What an esteemed and accomplished group of women doing great things in our San Diego community.

It’s been so interesting to me lately to watch the faces of people when they ask me what I do and I answer that I’m a blogger. Of course, my answer includes a few other things too (executive coach, speaker, web 2.0 evangelist and a writer) but the blogger part always stops people in their tracks. If someone isn’t intimate with the blog community, their face gets distorted, they get a somewhat condescending smile and start asking questions. “You do what now?”

This post is my contribution to Blog Action Day, joining thousands of other bloggers to write about one topic for a single day. This year’s topic is poverty.

I grew up in Southern Ohio in a county with one of the highest unemployment rates in the state. Incidentally, also close to another county where the number of drug trafficking arrests were also high (no pun intended). Families who lived on welfare were abundant.

I’m sitting in Clay’s, La Jolla which is the rooftop lounge at the La Jolla Hotel. The west facing wall is lined with windows and the sun is setting. The whole sky is a beautiful pink, orange, purple, blue. (Yes, of course, before you ask, my close friend, Twitter is here and I’ve been Twittering away.)

Last night, I was appalled to have to share my Twitter with Rachel Pradhan, President of Blaze Interactive & Indra Successful Coach Marketing. (RACHEL! Did you not read my last blog entry????? Twitter and I are involved!)

You see, Rachel so graciously agreed to be a guest lecturer for a Six Figure Moms Club event in San Diego. Rachel and I spoke to a room of folks fairly new to social media about the almost endless benefits and ways to make money on the internet.

Ok, I admit it. I’m crazy in love with Twitter. Just like my historical attractions to men, this is happening with Twitter because I’m learning things I never even conceived. My relationship with Twitter started about six months ago when we casually started seeing each other. I signed up for a twitter account and then installed the Twitter application on my facebook account. By doing this, I could tweet and my updates would show up in Twitter and on my Facebook page as “status updates”. So efficient which really does it for me. I thought Twitter and I knew each other pretty well. But little did I know, our relationship, analogous to relationships with men, was to grow in layers.

I’ve talked with women all over the US about the loss of identity that often occurs when professional women have children. This feeling seems to be common among executive women that I speak to who usually range in ages between 30 to 45.

For example, I once interviewed a woman who was previously a partner in a very large law firm in Washington DC making over $.5 Million per year. Prior to deciding to start a family, she was the major breadwinner for her family. Once she and her husband embarked upon becoming three, they decided her husband’s career would become the focus and hers would take the back seat.

I wanted to pass along a great opportunity to participate in a conference coming up in Orange county on October 16: The Next Generation of Work Flexibility: An Innovative Forum for Employers and The Flexible Work Force.

The goal of the event is to help promote an open dialog about flexibility in the workplace for the many professional mothers and fathers who struggle with work life balance and the employers competing for talent in today’s increasingly demanding work environment. You can read more specifics about the event at their web site but below are a few of the highlights of the conference:

I just returned from an 18 day trip last night. My last stop was Blog World Expo ‘08 in Las Vegas. I went to the conference to enhance my understanding of the New Media industry and to learn how to better serve you, my readers, as a writer/blogger. Little did I know of the almost limitless benefits that this little four day trip would bring me. I’m still digesting everything I learned over the past few days and I know I will be for quite some time. However, the one gem of the conference is this:

I purposely didn’t write about 9/11 yesterday. Not that I didn’t want to honor the monumental event that occured seven years ago and to pay respect to the lives lost and the families affected but I wanted to avoid contributing to the negative energy that would inevitably be evoked by remembering. Like most of you, I remember exactly what I was doing that morning. It was three weeks before my wedding day.

Despite my efforts to stay positive, my day yesterday got off to a rocky start. Could the universal energy pool be off this morning? Is everyone’s energy is so negatively charged due to their memories of 9/11? I wonder…