Women’s March in DC

Happy New Year!

I hope your 2017 is off to an empowered start. If not, remember we always have the power to start again and again and again, we just need to hit the reset button.

I thrilled to tell you I am attending the Women’s March in DC on January 21. As the time approaches, I am feeling so excited and inspired. They are predicting over 100K people in attendance, WOW! Here is what the March means to me. It means letting my voice be heard for myself, my daughter, my sisters and all women. It means being in solidarity with women against sexism. It means saying out loud that Women’s Rights are Human Rights.

This is at the heart of my work. I want a world where more women are living on PURPOSE. I want a world where more women are in their LEADERSHIP. I want a world where more women let their VOICES be heard.

Let me share a short story. I was raised in the Catholic church and around the age of 9 or 10 I realized that girls were treated differently than boys. I did not have the language I do today, which I now know, I was seeing sexism. All I knew is that we, girls, were treated differently than boys and I did not like it. A couple things I noticed that I did not like, there were no female priests and there were no altar girls, only altar boys.

One day after church, with my Dad supporting me (yep, my Dad was awesome) I went up to the head priest at our church and said “I want to be an altar girl”. To my surprise the priest let me be an altar girl for one church service. I felt so empowered and what I learned in that experience is that my voice matters and I need to speak up. I did continue to speak up and mostly did not get what I want but I am forever grateful for that first experience because it helped me lean into letting my voice be heard more than not.

I think one way that sexism plays out in our culture is it tries to suppress our voices. It tells us that our ideas, our thinking do not matter. THIS IS NOT TRUE! And it is up to us to take a stand against those lies.

I think women struggle with getting clarity on their purpose due to internalized sexism. It is our job to fight against this thinking and we do this best when we are in community, being supported by other women.

I would love to know if you are going to one of the marches either in DC or any of the cities around the country. Let’s stay connected. If you want to go to the march but cannot make it happen, know that I march for you and that there will be more marches to come.

Please share your story. As women we all have experiences as girls when we started to see sexism. I would love to hear from you.

UPDATE:

Here is a picture of me with my family and dear friends in DC. The March was amazing, inspiring and powerful. I found myself unable to speak about it for a few weeks because putting it into words seemed impossible. But as time has passed it has integrated more into my heart and soul as I have continued to take action. I would love to hear how you have been integrating your March experience into your day to day life. Please, share, I always love hearing from you.