This week the British Library Business and IP Centre are presenting a series of events for Women in Business and yesterday I attended an afternoon of ‘Speed Mentoring’.
During the course of three hours I managed to spend some time with four different mentors ranging from an Entrepreneur to a Marketing Maestro and the buzz in the room was electric. Everyone wanted to talk about their business ideas and get guidance and advice from the ‘experts’ but the most stunning results for me came from simply sharing my story.
I’ve been coaching women back to work after maternity leave for the past six years and recently decided to write a book about it but when I started talking about it with this group of unknown people I was totally unprepared for the reaction I got. Obviously I believe in the project because I’m on the inside, but when I saw that so many outside people thought it was a great idea I felt a real shift.
The process of sharing was so powerful that when I got home I emailed the entire delegate list asking for people to interview and was subsequently bombarded by messages of support and offers of help.
As if this wasn’t enough, on the train home I came across this article in the Evening Standard about ‘Forget bathtime: working parents can’t have it all’ http://tinyurl.com/786epw4 so even the universe was encouraging me to discuss the elephant in the room and allow Mums to have their say about how it really feels to be torn between work and home and what ‘having it all’ really means to them.
Sharing works for me – try it and let me know if it works for you.
Posted by Cheryl Goldenberg (‘Gold’ Founder & Principal Coach) http://uk.linkedin.com/in/cherylperformancecoach