Silver Lining Story
Today I have a friend’s silver lining story to share with you. I was visiting with someone who I don’t see very often. As we were catching up, I was asking her how she feels about her current job and the fact that she had been overlooked for a vice-president position a couple of years ago. At the time, she had been very angry because she had been with the company longer and seemed to be the better candidate. That anger motivated her to go to the President and express her dissatisfaction. In order to keep her, because she was a valuable employee, they created a position for her that was a promotion and came with an increased salary. Her response to my question really surprised me. She said that her current position is really better than the vice-presidency would have been. This new position gave her broader responsibilities. She liked learning new things and it gave the people above her a chance to see her in a new light. They now saw her as having expertise in numerus areas of the corporation as opposed to just one. What initially felt like a disaster, which almost led to her leaving the company, turned out to be enriching and actually expanded her reach in the organization.
She did two important and healthy things here. First, she used her anger to create a new opportunity for herself. She could have just complained behind the president’s back or approached him with so much anger that she would have had to leave the company. Instead, she turned her anger into righteous indignation, which gave her, in the end, more than she would have had otherwise. Second, she made good use of this new opportunity. She could have stayed angry and hurt. Instead she used her anger to give her the energy she needed to do an outstanding job and find the blessings within the disappointment. I was impressed. She did exactly what we talk about on this show. And in light of today’s topic, she really used her masculine and feminine energies to create peace within the organization and within herself. She didn’t sulk and she didn’t go in with guns blasting or giving ultimatums. She took a challenging situation and created the best outcome possible that was satisfactory for both parties and then she turned it into a blessing for herself and for the company.
Balancing the Masculine and Feminine
The fact that she is a woman is not relevant. A man could have done the same thing. To be successful in our changing times, we need to create balance between our masculine and feminine sides, know when to use the different qualities that we have available to us and create wholeness. In Hebrew, the word Shalom, is usually translated as peace. In fact, it means wholeness. I find this really important because when we are whole, we are at peace; when we have peace within ourselves, we can create peace within the world thereby creating wholeness in the world. As we’ve said many times on this show, world peace, starts with each individual creating peace within themselves.
The balancing of energies within ourselves requires us to honor women and men. For too long we have been ruled by male energies, and it has led to domination, discrimination and war. As we discussed on our show May 28th with Dawon Washington, the earth is going through a time of balancing her energies. In order to eliminate disease and war, this balancing of the Divine male and Divine female energies is essential. Dawon has shared with me that it is the disrespecting of women and of the feminine aspects of ourselves that has led to disease and war in the world. We are entering a time now where this change is happening. The more each of us connects to this new respect of women, of feminine attributes, and of balance and wholeness, the faster we will move into the fullness of this time.
Women as a Growing Force
On September 25, public television broadcast a program called “The Women’s List”. They shared the following statistics: Women own 40% of US businesses; Women are the primary breadwinners in almost 50% of US households; Women influence 80% of consumer spending;
Women will control $22 trillion in personal wealth by 2020. They then said, “Some people call this progress, we say it’s time.”
They interviewed several successful women in numerous fields. One stood out for me, Sara Blakely, the developer of Spanx, the extremely successful undergarment for women. She said: “Being at this level of success and knowing I got here being true and authentic and kind–that’s more important to me than the destination or where I’ve ended up.” That’s part of the feminine approach to success. It isn’t about reaching your goal at any cost or the end justifying the means. It’s about how you get there and how you treat people along the way. She also said, when I was growing up, failure was not equivalent to not succeeding. Failure was defined as not trying. We all need to take a page out of her book. Clearly she needed a lot of masculine energy to create a business out of nothing and she balanced that masculine energy with her feminine energy of creating through authenticity and kindness.
I’d love to hear your thoughts: What masculine or feminine characteristics do you want to bring into your life to create wholeness within yourself?
