Right now, most of my clients that I work with in my business are women. I help people to start up businesses. One of the biggest obstacle for women starting up is how they have completely internalized the idea that they are there to help other people. It is very difficult to get women to actually believe they can charge people money for what they do.
Most of them are older women who have quietly given their own dreams and ambitions away to support their spouses, children, siblings. It is only after a lot of individual work that they will open up with me and share about how they have never had anything for themselves and that finally, as they near retirement, they believe it is time for them to have their moment.
I have one woman who is super Southern, sweet, down to earth lady. I don’t know how long I worked with her before I learned that she had a son who went to prison and raised his children in their early years. She had started up businesses several times only to have these obligations take away her dreams for herself.
A lot of what I teach is about business as a form of deep service to others, and that mental attitude really helps women to imagine what it looks like to succeed in a way that that they can relate to.
The big thing that motivates women isn’t having money, or power, but having their time back.
Women get to be age 55 and their time has been robbed from them. I have so many women clients who have to cancel meetings because they are caretaking for a parent or a child. I had one client who had quite a powerful career and is so intelligent. She is in a very macho organization trying to be seen, but also has her own business. She spent the past 2 years caring for her mother in law while trying to also run her own business. She is finally out of the caretaking situation. One of our biggest accomplishments was realizing that she had to put as little effort as possible into the male dominated organization that is taking so much of her labor and build up her personal business.
I have worked with men as well, and men never fight this internal battle. It’s almost the opposite, where they were taught that the world is their oyster, but they are completely fixated on making money and acquiring stuff as a route to happiness. They seem to have very few tools for connecting to people in meaningful ways. It’s easier to get women to own their own power than it is to get men to find ways to create love and connection.
I had one client who kept telling me his vision of success was kind of like being a rap star with a fancy car and magazine covers, and it’s strange to me because he is an excellent, caring teacher, but he literally cannot state what drives him to do his work beyond this weird idea that everyone else will see his financial success. He ends up working with a lot of scammy people and buying into a lot of toxic ideas, and it breaks my heart because when I see his videos and the work he does with people, there is really something special in what he does.
The biggest thing I am working on now is figuring out how to connect to money. Women are just not given the money that men are. It is still much harder for women to get loans and grants. I am learning as much as possible about the processes, but women have to treat money as precious and men get a lot of opportunities to fuck up with money in ways that women aren’t.
