 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
||||||||||||||
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
By LAUREL WALKER A Thursday morning workshop aimed at working women trying to balance busy personal lives with careers was titled "The Window is Wide Open." It struck me as an odd choice of words. Was the idea here that when women can't keep all the balls in the air at the same time, we just head for that open window and jump? Silly me. Presenter Fawn Germer of Tampa, Fla., a former newspaper reporter and now author and motivational speaker, was telling us to jump all right. Jump at a chance. "Risk is the only way to test your potential," she told about 60 women - and one man - gathered at the Merrill Hills Country Club for the first meeting of W.O.M.E.N. The group was organized for members of the Waukesha Area Chamber of Commerce who wanted a new vehicle for working women to share ideas and experiences. The name stands for Women Owners, Managers and Executives Networking. Germer jumped about three years ago. Dissatisfied with her career as a news reporter and editor - a job she'd done since her teens - and, as she put it, "bloodied by office politics" a little too often, she quit her job to work full time writing a book about women role models. The resulting "Hard Won Wisdom" uses her journalistic savvy and contacts to present the stories of dozens of accomplished women she interviewed who have made it in their own right, from a famed oceanographer to a Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist. Free therapy Their advice - for her, "a million dollars' worth of free therapy" - covers everything from "Playing with the Old Boy's Club" to "Falling Down." Falling down is OK, Germer told the W.O.M.E.N. women, because through some of your biggest failures you just might learn enough to succeed elsewhere. Long before Germer came along, my late mother offered some of this same advice. It probably wasn't an original, but the quote I remember hearing from her time and again was: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." Mom didn't even get a thank-you from me, let alone a speaker's fee or a book deal out of it. And she didn't sell T-shirts, either. Germer does all of the above. She was available before and after Thursday's workshop and a noon lunch to sell and sign copies of her book ($25) and offered T-shirts ($15) reading: "Well-behaved women rarely make history." A tough sell To her credit, Germer made it clear that taking risks can be, well, risky business. She had a hard time selling the book idea to a publisher at first. Then it came out one day before Sept. 11, 2001 - which could have killed it right there had she not been determined to do book tours even without her publisher's support. It wasn't easy, going from book signing to promotional event, day after day, driving from city to city. When the hours were grueling, she followed her own advice (and those of her mentors): "Just do the work." She wrote 29 letters to Oprah, and one finally worked. Though she never appeared on the show, her book did, along with three of the women mentors she wrote about. We all know that a little publicity on Oprah never hurt anybody's book sales. Germer, an avid bicycler and kayaker, said she just learned her second book about "hard-charging women" - tentatively called "Mustang Sallies" - was picked up by a publisher. In her mixed bag of other advice, Germer told her audience they should worry about the things that matter - family, friends and, perhaps, spiritual connections - and shouldn't fuss about all the rest that really doesn't matter. "At some point in your life, you have to admit you believe in yourself," she said. So now, she asked her audience at the end of the workshop, what change do you plan for yourself in the next 60 days? Clearly one woman understood the message about risk. She said she was going to Las Vegas. |
|
||||||||||||||
|
| Copyright 2007 Fawn Germer. All rights reseved. |