Today Show Appearance, Gratitude & More…

Wednesday is a big day for me. I’ll be going on the Today Show, talking to 2 million viewers about women owning and claiming their brilliance in the world. Whew. Ack! Yay!
 
Feeling all of those.
 
Am I a little nervous? Yes. Also very excited and ready for a fabulous time!
 
Good luck wishes and messages of support are very welcome – they matter and I feel the energy coming through them. .
 
If you want to watch or record, it’s Wednesday October 12, 2011 (new date), late in the 10-11am hour (with Hoda and Kathie Lee)
 
On a different note, my fall retreat is just around the corner – October 21-23. An incredible group of women is attending from all around the country. We still have a couple spots left. If you’d like to join in, learn more & sign up HERE.
 
Now…onto some reflections for the last day of the Girl Effect blogging campaign:
 
I created the Girl Effect Blogging Campaign because I have a passion for women’s voices being heard, for women’s leadership being unleashe to benefit our planet.
 
Most of my professional work helps women in the developed world. But the silencing of women’s voices is global. The revolution of unleashing women’s leadership must be global. My work feels incomplete without in some way helping to advance women’s empowerment where it is most absent.
 
I have read many of the more than 500 blog posts that have been written as a part of this week’s campaign, and I’ve been struck by a particular moment of recognition that shows up again and again in so many of them.
 
Many bloggers wrote a flash of recognition of the overflowing abundance and fortunateness of their own lives. They write about their own happy childhoods, the education that was so accessible it was taken for granted, and their freedom to marry when and who they choose.
 
Seeing that abundance is not a given. It is a pratice. if we don’t find ways to remind ourselves of our blessings, our attention will turn to what we think we lack, what we wish we had that so and so has. When we wake up to the abundance, we give.
 
The Girl Effect Bloggers also wrote about a second recognition: how they themselves could have been born as one of those other girls. How they, or their daughters could have been forced into child marriage, forced to become a mother as a young teen.
 
This is endlessly powerful. There is something sacred that happens when we recognize: “I could have been the girl sold into sexual slavery at age 8.” “I could have been the civilian killed by the US invastion in Iraq.” “I could have been the person born into extreme poverty – living in that other neighborhood in my town.” When we get this, we see the world differently. We form opinions and take actions that are both more wise and more just.
 
Of course, then we have to be careful. It’s easy to leap from “I could be her” to “so let me give her what I would want.” Instead, “I could be her” must be a passionate point of departure into listening to girls and women in the developing world to hear what they need, what they want.
 
Whether you wrote or not in this week’s campaign (and you still can write through end of day Tuesday!), I want to invite you into these two sacred recognitions. The first, seeing the great blessings of your own life. And the second, looking at the horrific realities suffered by so many other women remembering: she could be you. At some level, of course, she is you.
 
As we wake up to the enormous blessings of our lives, let us shift our attention from striving for more to giving from the abundance that is our reality.
 
Love,
 
Tara