What a waste! I’ve found that it’s the very rare case indeed where someone truly intended something bad to happen. Mostly, people are stumbling along doing the best they can, and wanting to do good things in the world, or at least do no harm. We need to change the script of the stories we create in our heads about why people do things. Right now, the scripts are overwhelmingly negative and the personal and professional costs are astronomical. On the flip side, what Joann Barsh at McKinsey found in her research about remarkable female leaders was that they practiced positive framing. In other words, one of the 5 key practices of very successful women included assuming good intentions. How about that!

I ran across this blog post by Jason Ivers that lists the reasons assuming good intentions helps you. I would add the instead of being angry, suspicious and on edge, assuming good intentions allows you to approach your work and life with a sense of curiosity and joy. Everything from how you interpret the email in your in-box to how you react to getting cut off in traffic changes.  It really is amazing! Making the shift is simple and profound. It also takes diligence. The media, our hard-wiring, the people around us are all like crabs in a bucket trying to pull us back in when we frame the world in a different way. Once you’ve made the shift though, it becomes easier and easier to stay in good intentions mode, and more obvious when you don’t. It’s a lot more fun on the sunny side of the street!

For those of you looking to launch a new business venture, take a spin around the Chic CEO website. It’s loaded with free resources from financing to marketing. They were named by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Entrepreneurial Sites for Women, and after spending any amount of time there, you can see why.

If you’re looking to make a career change or want to give your current career a bit of rocket fuel, check out the Career Coward’s Guide book series by Katy Piotrowski. There are five books in the series covering everything from interviewing to career advancement. Moxie is lucky to have Katy running our Northern Colorado Exchange – she was awarded the equivalent to an Oscar in her field of career counseling, and her books are loaded with solid, field-tested, practical career management advice and tools.

Finally, check out one of our favorite blog sites, Lip-sticking. Led by the fearless Yvonne DiVita Lip-sticking has been nailing topics for women since 2004. With a number of guest bloggers and perspectives, the Lip-sticking blog always has something to offer and plenty of ideas and food for thought to keep you moving forward.

If you have not done so already, I highly recommend you set a growth plan for yourself for the coming year. Think about what skills and experiences you want to add to your repertoire and give yourself the gift of learning! Enjoy the holidays and see you in 2012!

Never been a planner? Here are a few quick and dirty, ‘get it done’ approaches to making great plans.

1) Take stock. Ask yourself a series of questions: What went well this year? What were my/our screw-ups? What did I/we learn? How do I want my career or business to look at the end of next year? If I waved a magic wand and everything went perfectly, what is my career/business/world like?

2) Put it in writing. If you’re a small business owner, I love, love, love the strategy tools provided by the Gazelles organization. They are simple, yet powerful, and can really move the dial for your business. I think they do a nice job outlining personal goal setting at Mind Tools.

3) Create a system for execution. Your plans aren’t worth the paper they are written on if you stash them away with no mechanism for follow through and follow up. Like your plans, your execution strategy should be simple and powerful. For example, at each Moxie Monthly Exchange meeting, we carve out time to rewrite goals and set smaller monthly goals and priorities to drive the larger result. We keep our goals in front of us, and chunk them down to month-by-month. Figure out a way that you can have a rhythm and routine around reviewing and prioritizing next steps for your goal attainment, too.

Enjoy the process, dream big, and let us know how it all works out!

YOU OWN YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE.

You have to take action on ideas that are presented to you. You have to ask for more money if you want it. Only YOU decide whether you’re angry, sad, optimistic or exuberant. Only YOU decide what you’re going to get off your tush and implement. Nobody is going to do this for you, sister. The only one stopping you from starting a business, getting the promotion, landing the big donor is YOU. If you give up at the first no, you own that. If you let a crappy boss get the best of you, you own it. If you stay the course, do the work, have a ‘get it done’ attitude, you own it. If you’ve been at a Monthly Exchange where great ideas are shared it’s up to YOU to own what you’ve learned and TAKE ACTION on the ideas. Nobody is going to ride that horse for you.

I just finished reading “Kabul Beauty School” by Deborah Rodriguez. The glimpse it gives you into the lives of the women in the Middle East will give you pause. These women, against seemingly insurmountable odds, daily degradation, violence against women and no legal rights STILL are taking action, owning their experience and changing their lives for the better.

Should it be so hard for us, then, to own it?

We know that when you’re laughing, you’re learning and you may have suspected this already, but who you hang around really impacts how you feel. Some smarty-pants researchers at Harvard and UC San Diego proved it. At Moxie we’re aiming for a macro ‘pigtails and funny, smart girlfriends scenario’, where joy and growth dance the tango. It seems to be working there, also!

It’s important to think about how happy your workplace is as well. Kris Boesch, Founder of Choose People has the best blog out there on having happy employees. Choose People completed 1,000 hours of research and they have the secret sauce (8 key factors) for creating an organization where people feel good about coming to work. I’ll take fries with that secret sauce, please!

As always, it circles back to choice. How you’re showing up, who you’re hanging out with, what you’re doing as a company. I’d love to hear what you’re doing in business and in life to create joy and growth for yourself and those around you. Extra credit for pictures of you in pigtails!

Read this article and research on the sponsorship effect and you’ll start to get fired up about why having sponsors is critical to changing the game for women in business. Game on- let’s get ourselves some sponsors!

I hate the knowing/doing gap so now that we know, what do we do? This is where things are simple but not easy. If you are looking for sponsorship relationships, identify those senior leaders whom you know have acted as sponsors for others in the past. Build your street credibility with them- be smart, resourceful and willing to learn. Then show a little moxie and ASK. Remember, the guys are, and they are killing us in terms of pay, promotions and influence. ASK, ASK, ASK (consider this being your mantra for the year). If you’re in a position to be a sponsor- do it! Pick a few women you believe in and advocate for them, take some calculated risks, and watch them thrive.

What Babcock found is that women don’t realize what opportunities for negotiation exist and are worried about the social consequences of asking. I saw this play out with my own kids, who are working for my husband this summer. He asked them both how much they thought they should make per hour, and had them tell him independently what their salary requests were. My daughter: $8 per hour. My son: $12 per hour. When he asked their reasoning, our daughter shared that she was happy to have the job and that she didn’t want to impact the cash flow of the business too much. Our son was all about how having him around would be a huge help to his dad and that he deserved at least that amount… and could he have a cut of profits, too? Classic female/male behavior.

So what’s a woman to do?

Change your mindset and start to think about just about everything as negotiable. You’ll be amazed at what’s possible. Babcock suggest starting small, and practicing. Ask the cleaners to have your clothes ready a day earlier, ask if there’s a fresher cut of fish at the market, ask for an even lower rate at the hotel and an even later check-out.

Become a master negotiator. Set a goal for yourself to become an expert (or at least proficient) on negotiations. Read Babcock’s books. Take a class. Read up on negotiation skills.

Educate. Share the research and results with your daughters and colleagues. Mentor young women on how to ask and negotiate. Watch how your responding to your kids when they ask for things (I know I am!) and congratulate and encourage the girls in your life when you see them asking.

ASK, ASK, ASK!

Things are just good enough that they are killing us in terms of forward progress.  The dial on critical factors (pay, executive positions, board of directors’ seats, elected office…) has barely moved in the past 15 years. It’s a sad state of affairs.

What to do? Step up, step out and move the dial:

-Ask for a raise, negotiate contracts, don’t discount your pricing. Sounds simple but one of the key reasons women make less is because we don’t ask for more. The guys do, and it shows up in their paychecks.

-Get a mentor and get a sponsor. Ask for help, learn from people around you, and get someone who believes in you enough to ‘draft’ for you.

-Invest in yourself, your relationships and your development. It’s astounding to me that men will drop $100 for a round of golf without batting an eye because they know it will help move them forward and women will bitch about spending the same amount (or less) on their own development. Get over it and make the investment.

-Learn everything about business and make it known that you want to serve on boards. No excuses- learn about finance, read the Wall Street Journal, become a business junkie. If you want to play, you have to understand the rules of the game.

Get out there and rock your moxie!

Although it’s been hectic, we really wanted to start mobilizing the moxie in the next generation of female leaders as quickly as possible, so we decided to go for it! We’ve actually had to cut off registration for the girls because we could only accommodate a certain number in the workshops, which tells us we really did need to push the envelope on this one.

Thanks to all of you who shared your ideas on social media with us about what it means to be a leader. Your ideas are being included in the event program, and we’re plastering the walls of the venue with them as well.

Thanks also to our Wonder Woman sponsor: Pretty Brainy- an incredible company that has “smart goods for smart girls of any age”. Check them out at www.prettybrainy.com

A final thought- Getting Moxiefest off the ground this quickly has me thinking about the limits we set for ourselves. We took a risk- we didn’t have the time or the money to pull this off, and we still went for it because it was in alignment with our values and what’s important to us. It’s a great reminder that the timing will NEVER be right, and we have to do things that make us uncomfortable.  There might be a million little screw ups during the event, but we know that overall we’re going to make a difference for girls. There’s a huge difference in aiming for perfection versus aiming for excellence. Ask yourself what IS possible instead of why something can’t be done. Rock your moxie!

The amazing Dana Zurbuchen will be leading the charge as the local MoxiExec. Dana brings a wealth of business acumen along with her loads of moxie, and we’re excited to have her and business and professional women in Wisconsin’s capital city join the Moxie fold. “I am so stoked to get these great women together to experience what Moxie is all about. I have no doubt that Moxie is going to change their lives,” says Zurbuchen. We couldn’t agree more!

The inaugural meeting in Madison will take place on March 15th, 3:30 – 6:00 at Gray’s Tied House.