Five L’s

I recently was on a panel for Pasadena Magazine for an event focusing on Women in Business and one of the highlights of the conference was hearing a woman named Melinda Snyder who runs the LA Metro. She stated that women are growing entrepreneurs right now and if all the women running businesses created a country, it would be second in line to Germany as far as the most profitable and prolific. This was inspiring to hear especially since I am trying to build some sort of future for myself and my children. I’ve started reading Leslie Bennetts controversial book The Feminine Mistake which illustrates the reality that there may be many traps for women who give up the work force to be dependent on their husbands. Overtime most stay at home moms will face divorce, their spouse’s unemployment, widowhood or just the fact that their children grow up and fly the coop. It seems that as overwhelming the juggling act of balancing work and home is, the alternative is bleaker in many ways.

That day on the panel, the Melinda Snyder said something else which stayed with me: The happiest and most successful women learned to live by the 5 L’s. They are: Love, Labor, Learn, Live, and Leave. I understood the first four but to leave? Women have a hard time assessing when it’s time to say goodbye. The caretakers avoid saying no at all costs but truly to be happy you must know when it’s time to move on. I know this all to well in work and relationships. At what point do we finally accept the fact that a relationship is draining rather than fulfilling? At what point do we listen to our nervous systems? Like Nora in Ibsen’s A Dollhouse sometimes one must give up playing with dolls and face the reality of one’s life to become whole.