January 20, 2020

Happy Monday BOSLadies!

Thank you for your patience while I got my act together to send out our Doodle Poll result from last week. At our February meeting, we will be discussing The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety by Alan Watts. If any of your 2020 goals involve being more mindful, this is a perfect read. Insecurity has been a very prevalent theme in my life for the past few months and while I’d like to say that I’m doing better about meaning it when I say “it is what it is”, I definitely still allow anxiety through the gates. While I hope that you can’t relate too much, I do hope that something in Watts’ writing resonates with you in some capacity.

The Weekly Three all of our three this week were sent to me by Alexandra. Thank you for making my inbox rich and for so often being the source of what is shared here

• Something about your professional “secret sauce”: I did not think that I would be reading an article about an architect turned doula but that is exactly what this interview with Kim Holden is about. Holden has founded two companies: SHoP and DOULA X DESIGN. While starting the first, she and the other principals “looked for and embraced each staff member’s ‘special sauce’ – a passion or experience that helped define who they are”. After founding DOULA X DESIGN, she gives this advice: “keep doing what you love that doesn’t have anything to do with architecture, and guard that fiercely. Those passions will help fulfill you both as a person and as a designer”.

• Something about how making art is good for your health: In this 20 minute NPR Life Kit episode, making art refers to creating something, creating anything. It doesn’t matter if you choose clay as a medium and actually are not really skilled with it. It doesn’t matter if your creation is just swirls in the margins of your notebook. “Engaging in any act of visual expression activates the reward pathway in your brain” whether or not the visual being produced looks like something you’d want to post on your Instagram. NPR gives you six ways to make art a habit and you can either read or listen to get them…but if you listen, you can draw at the same time

• Something about going after what you don’t think you’re qualified for: Do you remember Sheryl Sandberg writing about “Tiara Syndrome”? It’s her term for the common expectation that women have that if they are doing well at work, someone is going to notice and reward them for it (place a tiara on their head). If you don’t ask and just wait instead, no one will know what you want it so you’ll never get it. In this article about a woman applying for a job she didn’t think that she was qualified for, she ends up getting a promotion down the line because her bosses knew that she wanted to advance. If she hadn’t applied, they wouldn’t have thought of her. You have to ask. The worst thing that can happen is that they say no.

Have a lovely week BOSLadies!