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January 11, 2006
Conf. day 2
Finishing the second day of the conference and still having one more, my mind is still a bit immersed in the whole thing. Overall so far, I have been highly impressed. The content has been geared towards providing pertinent information in an empowering tone. How could it have not been empowering? Well, I don't feel empowered when people sit around playing the blame game. Thank God that this wasn't the tone. This conference makes me even more proud of the company that I work for.
Plain and simple, yes there are gender discrimination issues, but we are making great progress ... true progress has to be a joint effort though. It was actually discussed (these are my words though) that women folding their arms and waiting for things to be fixed or fighting for others to make people fix it does very little. You (each of us) have to take the initiative to lay your own path the best that you can.
Most of this came out more in the fact that actual skills, needed by both men and women, were taught. What makes it focused towards women? A few things. For one, most of the skills are ones that in general men have more naturally. The other aspect is networking and sharing stories between 5,000 women allows for networking to occur in a different manner than our normal work environments.
The talks that I have heard have been quite wonderful. I still have thoughts from the day in my head. Here are a few. This may seem obvious and they aren't new thoughts to go through my head, but I feel a revived sense of belief in a few things that I have taken away so far:
- No one can take your power away unless you give it (knowingly or not).
- Confidence is key.
- You have to know who you are and what you want before you can become what you want to be.
- There are far more highly successful women than I have ever noticed (if they can do it, isn't that proof it can be done?)
Oh yea, I also got a few new books, including: Never Eat Alone and Women Don't Ask
Posted by layla at January 11, 2006 8:10 PM