Inside Every Woman: Using the 10 Strengths You Didn’t Know You Had to Get the Career and Life You Want Now by Vickie Milazzo (2006)
Vickie Milazzo says that, from being a trained nurse, she rose to build up not only a successful and growing business training nurses, but also good relationships and a joyful life. Her book springs from her experience of creating success out of what she refers to as “passion,” which she defines as “more than emotion… strength you build, a strength that provides a platform for everything you want to achieve.” She shows how by opening up unexplored possibilities in working with feminine energy, flagging enthusiasm can be revived.
One has to discover one’s “fire” to live passionately. She begins by identifying “five promises” that a woman has to make to herself “to unleash ten forces within.” They are: (1) “I will live and work a passionate life”; (2) “I will go for it or reject it outright”; (3) “I will take one action step a day toward my passionate vision”; (4) “I will commit to being a success student for life”; (5) “I believe as a woman I really can do anything.”
She then discusses the “ten forces”: (1) Inner fire to live passionately, (2) Intuitive vision, where imagination is more powerful than knowledge, (3) Engagement—to overcome fears and act without being a perfectionist and do the right thing instead of what is easy, (4) Agility (the ability to adapt and be able grab new opportunities), (5) Genius, or intensifying one’s intelligence for accelerated success and stress on collaborative effort hard work and self-trust, (6) Uncompromising Integrity, (7) Endurance, or fueling one’s endurance in the face of setbacks, (8). Enterprise (to be the “CEO of your own career life”), (9). Renewal, or re-claiming our depleted energies through frequent renewal at the physical, emotional and spiritual levels, (10) Female Fusion, that is, fusing with kindred spirits and engaging in team work which make it “more than a women’s group.”
The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (1952)
Dorothy Day was one of the greatest Catholic thinkers and social activists of the last century. She was brought up in a secular middle class atmosphere in the early 20th century America, with very little talk about God. “Yet my heart leaped when I heard the name of God.” She describes her first twenty-five years as a time when she was “haunted by God,” “searching.” Starting early in her youth as a writer journalist in the 1920s she was living a bohemian life among artists and intellectuals. At her conversion to Catholicism, the man she loved and lived with left her. She began to turn her attention to social activism, writing extensively as a journalist and engaging in peaceful methods of social struggle to achieve social equality and justice for the labourers and the poor.
Her meeting with Peter Maurin, thinker and activist, was a turning point. Together they founded The Catholic Worker, initially as a publication and then as movement which fought on various fronts to help the marginalized people of America. They used non-violent protests to protect the rights of the poor. She was arrested many times, including in her old age.
But the real force behind social change is love: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” She visualized community as the social answer to the long loneliness—not just the basic community of the family, but also a community of families with a combination of private and communal property. She also lamented the loss of true reverence in modern culture, when it is replaced by political ideologies led by violent leaders. True reverence (for God) was to be restored in order to restore the dignity of the human. Here is a woman on fire, who was both a courageous social activist and a mystic in love with God.
Prof. Gigy Joseph
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