Monday, March 2, 2009

Spread the Word, Life is Good!

I don’t know about you, but the air seems positively electrified these days. Perhaps it’s fear gone wild, or our medication wearing off, but I sense a hidden optimism just waiting to be tapped.

How can we as women help spread the idea that life is good? Statistics confirm that the lion’s share of new businesses started on our country are started by women. Many of us, without fear and with dreams in hand, gather around kitchen tables, in the parking lots of our kids’ schools, in the checkout line at the store, and even on treadmills in our bedroom, to brainstorm and dare to imagine the world with our solutions in it.
It’s this kind of authenticity that we’re celebrating as this year’s theme for NWW, and it’s definitely the ingredient you need to make sure your business will grow and thrive in spite of the downturn.

I recently reached out to a woman I met in March of last year, that I had included in our Networking, Women and Wine database and hadn’t heard from. Thinking our emails were languishing in her spam folder, I called her to reconnect. She began to tell me all the good things happening in her life and the lives of her family, including her move to a new city, saying that she has decided even to stop listening to her beloved NPR to keep the bad OUT of her life and leave room for the good.

In the midst of our conversation she asked me if I had any advice to help her network in her new city, as she is a social creature like most of us here tonight. In a flash of inspiration I realized she had just created her own solution. By telling me that she has so much good news around her and she’s tired of hearing about the bad she can begin connecting on that premise alone.

I told her how NWW started; a group of business friends who wanted to spend time together and offer each other support and friendship aside from the agenda of some structured business building model. I suggested she form a her own networking group by finding a couple of people who wanted to share and concentrate on good news. Through beginning a blog, a coffee meeting or connecting it with any other passion, she can begin to promote good energy and expand her sphere of influence.

You can do this too! Give something of yourself that offers help and friendship and then others will return the goodness. And from there your authenticity will grow and begin to heal all those around you.

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