Michelle Meyer, Author at Girl Authentic

Do you trust your instincts when they tell you to walk away?

Do you trust your instincts when they tell you to walk away?

By Michelle Meyer|2015-10-12T14:55:12-05:00October 12th, 2015|Blog|

This is my first post since May because the last few months have been so crazy-busy. I’ve essentially been working two jobs: First, continuing to pay the bills as a supply-chain management consultant, and second, getting a lot in place for Morf3D, the additive manufacturing business I’ve been developing with a business partner for the last two years.

So much was accomplished for Morf3D over the summer: Key agreements completed with equipment and service partners, a lease negotiated for a terrific new California location, and several major conferences attended to support business development.

Best of all, our new Chief Technical Officer found us. I’ve said from the very beginning that I wanted Morf3D to have a female CTO – and I must admit, I had doubts that we would ever find one. Then Melissa Orme sent us a letter telling us she wanted to join Morf3D. I couldn’t believe it! After years of hoping, here she is – and she is amazing.

Then, in late August, I walked away from it all.

An event occurred that caused a moment of complete clarity and absolute knowing for me – I’m out. There was actually a series of events that happened, all the previous ones of which I ignored, or reasoned away, or doubted my instincts. This one however, I chose not to ignore. I could not ignore that feeling of absolute knowing.

Have you ever had a moment like that, when you just know – no matter how it looks from the outside – that something isn’t right?

It might seem obvious to go with the option to avoid something that looks disappointing from the outside. Normally, to make things work, and do what would be expected, I can go into what a good friend of mine calls “Tetris mode” – I can spend my days constantly working to fit all the pieces together, trying to fix what I know in my heart cannot be fixed. This option can be quite seductive for me, since I’m really good at it. I know, because I have done it for decades. I know how to keep fitting pieces together. But I also know it’s a game that never ends.

That’s why, this time, I chose a different option. As soon as I knew clearly what was right for me, I chose to go with what I knew. And there was complete relief and calm in that. There was nothing to fix. I went with the option that works on the inside.

I invested a tremendous amount of personal, intellectual, and monetary capital in building Morf3D. And I got a great return for my investment: I met some of the industry’s leading executives. I learned a ton about a fascinating new industry. I met some terrific people I hope to come across again and pursue new ideas with in the future.

It just wasn’t going to work any more. So I chose happiness instead of what I knew was coming – that feeling of always having to make it work, make it right, when I knew it was wrong. That was going to leave me completely out of alignment and out of integrity with myself and with what I wanted Morf3D to represent. That, I couldn’t do.

It might seem unusual to walk away from my two years of effort. But I’m happy knowing it’s exactly the right thing to do.

I’m happy to be walking away. And I’m walking away to be happy.

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A podcast with CoActive Dreams

A podcast with CoActive Dreams

By Michelle Meyer|2015-05-21T15:10:27-05:00May 21st, 2015|Blog|

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I’m in a busy season right now, but not too busy to sit down for a few minutes with Cherrie McKenzie from CoActive Dreams. Cherrie blogs to help individuals or corporate professionals succeed at the intersection of career, self and family. She contacted me after she read a comment I posted on the NY Times website, and wanted to learn more about women building new structures in business. I was thrilled to spend some time with her and help cast the vision for women paving the way to create a better balance in the workplace for everyone.

[button colour=”accent” type=”squarearrow” size=”large” link=”http://www.coactivedreams.com/are-women-approaching-the-workplace-all-wrong/” target=”_blank”]Head over to the post on Cherrie’s site to listen now![/button]

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Betwixt and Between

Betwixt and Between

By Michelle Meyer|2015-05-22T19:55:22-05:00May 19th, 2015|Blog|

How do you get from where you are to where you want to be?

I’ve written a lot on this blog about the need for women to build new businesses – different kinds of businesses – if we hope to achieve a better balance in our workplaces and in our lives. But how does that happen? How do you live well in the world you have, even as you work to make a better one?

You live betwixt and between.

That’s what I’ve been doing. I spend my days moving between two worlds. First is what I have begun to call my “old world” – working independently to provide supply-chain management and large-program management consulting services, the way I’ve earned my living for a long time. Second is my “new world” – that of building Morf3D, a company of the type I’ve proposed women build in my GirlAuthentic blogs.

I’m spending 24-40 hours a week providing supply-chain and ERP implementation work, supporting a wonderful client I have worked with multiple times. I am also traveling and meeting with potential new partners and clients to help build Morf3D. It’s a common story you hear about many others who have started a new business: You use the current work to keep paying the bills and help fund the new business, “burning the candle at both ends.”

Living in both worlds leaves me feeling I’m not doing either very well. I am constantly working on one area while being asked to do something for the other, or thinking about the other. Some days it is exciting; other days it is exhausting.

And I’ve come to a conclusion: I just have to get comfortable with being in transition.

I know this will be part of the “story” of building Morf3D that I can share in the future with other women and men who I hope will also make the leap to build the kinds of companies we want to work in – companies that are involved in changing the world, in making our workplaces places we all want to be. But I also I have a feeling the anxiety, stress, and excitement of building Morf3D is going to be around for a while. So, I better figure out ways to be with it.

And that’s not easy! Prior to this level of activity with Morf3D, I felt I was pretty good at quieting my mind, being still, relaxing. Now, I realize I have a lot more to learn about how to do this. Stillness has been a struggle – at a time when I need it the most.

But I realize something else too: Building Morf3D feels right. This is our chance to build what we have said we wanted to see in this world in terms of the opportunities we want to create and the type of company we want to give people a chance to work for. This is just the beginning of this journey.

It might be a lifetime journey. Does anyone who is involved in building something new ever feel “done”? Or do they just get comfortable continually building, knowing they are never done? Are we here only for the finish line – or is “betwixt and between” exactly where we ought to be?

What do you think?

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What the world needs now is more wealthy women

What the world needs now is more wealthy women

By Michelle Meyer|2015-05-19T14:43:14-05:00March 13th, 2015|Blog|

What do Silicon Valley, the Catholic Church and the nation of Germany all have in common? If the articles I’m reading lately are any guide, the answer is an under-representation of women in leadership.

Germany has taken the strongest action this month, actually passing a law a few weeks ago requiring its major firms to allot at least 30% of the seats on non-executive boards to women. The same can’t be said about Silicon Valley, where a recent gender discrimination lawsuit is shining a light on a longstanding tradition of VC firms not including women in leadership (or funding them, for that matter). Meanwhile, the Catholic Church – despite some nice commentary from the Pope – may be the most entrenched organization of all. It’s unlikely to change its stance on women in leadership for centuries.

This matters. We need more visible women in leadership – because balance at work begets balance in life.

We will all experience more balance in our families, our social structures, our communities, our businesses when we first learn as individuals to value a balance of the masculine and feminine. We’ll learn that individual balance when we value and include women in every pursuit.

And we’ll value women more, when they have more wealth.

You read that right! Women having wealth is good for all of us. It changes social structures for the better. Women having wealth changes…

How our families operate
How we spend money
How our children are educated
Our business policies
Our political policies and approaches

There is a lot of resistance to change in most of our current corporate and political (and family and social) structures. More and more women are attaining leadership at Fortune 500 companies, for example – but the pace is far too slow. At our current rate of progress, we’ll reach parity – 250 female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies – in 411 years. I’m not that patient.

Putting more wealth in the hands of women brings the change we want. So how do we have women have wealth quickly?

Encourage them to start businesses – the willingness to trade creates prosperity
Encourage these businesses to focus on the long-term and the greater good
Encourage these businesses to seek a balance of the masculine and feminine – these will look, feel, and operate differently from what many of us know today
Match these business ideas with funding – from other women

Am I saying that wealth is the only way we can measure whether women are valued? No. But it is a wonderful leveler of the playing field. Money knows no gender – some peoples’ money even has pictures of women on it. Imagine that.

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When “Equilibrium” Means “No”

When “Equilibrium” Means “No”

By Michelle Meyer|2015-05-19T14:40:35-05:00February 13th, 2015|Blog|

One of the greatest forces we have for equilibrium is the power of our own choices.

I was reminded of this last month as I sat wringing my hands in Galway, Ireland, making a choice of my own. It was New Year’s Day, I was midway through a wonderful vacation with my family – and I was supposed to be working.

My December hadn’t gone the way I thought it would. I’d been planning to have that whole month at home, not traveling, to work on a long list of things I wanted finished by the end of 2014. Among them was a January blog post for this website, GirlAuthentic. I like to send these posts to my creative team by the beginning of each month so we can workshop things a little. So December was my window.

Well, that didn’t happen. Instead of being at home working, I found myself traveling every week of December – right up until Christmas. Two days after that I left for a 2-week vacation in Ireland and the U.K. with my kids. That’s how I got to Galway. Behind on my work. With friendly e-mail check-ins and reminders coming from my team. Where was the January post? Would it be ready soon?

You know that “ugh” feeling? I had that feeling.

And I had a choice to make. I could take time away from my kids to write a blog draft – which I chose not to do. I could get a little less sleep one vacation night and write the draft at the end of one of our long days together – which I chose not to do, either. Or I could choose to not work, to just be present with my family, even if it meant waiting until February to get the year started for the GirlAuthentic blog.

That’s the choice I made. For me, that choice was equilibrium (although it didn’t completely relieve that “ugh” feeling).

At the top of this page you can see the tagline for GirlAuthentic – “Equilibrium at Work.” It’s a brilliant phrase suggested by a brilliant woman who helped me put a lot of the look and feel of GirlAuthentic together (thanks Jessica!). Over the last year and a half I’ve found this play-on-words can mean a lot of different things to different people.

Is “Equilibrium at Work” about equal numbers of women and men in the workplace? Is it about a feeling of balance or equilibrium for your team – or for you personally? Is it about what happens after we achieve this equilibrium, when it begins to truly work for us?

Last month, for me, “Equilibrium at Work” meant one word: No. It meant I had a choice, and I could use that choice to feel more balanced in my own life. You can, too.

As someone else reminded me last year, it helps to look at the big picture. This person pointed out that true progress, considering all GirlAuthentic represents, is measured best in terms of decades. I had always had that thought in the back of my mind, but also sort of felt like I wasn’t living up to delivering on expectations (I’m not sure whose!) if I didn’t make things move faster.

It was such a relief in a way to give myself permission to approach this effort in terms of decades, not just months. Skipping one month of the blog, in the course of a couple of decades, wasn’t going to be the end of the world. But it would increase equilibrium in my own life.

And now – back to work.

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Bye-bye to the Long-Hours Culture

Bye-bye to the Long-Hours Culture

By Michelle Meyer|2015-05-19T14:43:59-05:00December 11th, 2014|Blog|

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The title above was the subtitle of a recent article by Lucy Kellaway, a columnist for the Financial Times. This full-page piece ran in the Business section of “The World in 2015,” by The Economist. I was so excited to see a global periodical dedicate a full page of commentary to changing attitudes on work hours.

Why? Because women have been leading the way on this issue for years – but it’s not actually a women’s issue.

Kellaway says it will soon be “cool” for executives to put a stop to unhealthy work habits and start working more efficiently between 9 and 5. Her piece describes the future like this: “Holidays will be holidays. The out-of-office email will no longer be followed by a reply from the ski-slopes. A spare jacket will no longer be needed on the back of the office chair, as going home will be all the rage. To get your work done by a reasonable hour will not be a sign that you are a slacker, but that you are working efficiently.”

I’ll take it! And Kellaway isn’t alone – there has been a lot of writing this year about how we need to adjust the culture that rewards workaholic behavior. I think the conversation starts by asking “why”: Why should taking time off work (for anything – children, sabbaticals, taking care of a sick parent, simply taking a break, whatever it may be) mean you automatically get dinged in terms of salary or promotions? Why do we assume that if you forego those activities you deserve higher pay or an earlier promotion? That simply reinforces a workaholic reward culture – or worse, it actually rewards a person for being less productive and less efficient with their time.

Of course, this piece was published in The Economist – a European periodical. Our friends across the ocean have been leading the way for a long time on healthier attitudes toward work. European workers take more vacation and work more reasonable hours than their American counterparts. How flabbergasting for us that they still manage to have global economies!

It isn’t just Europeans leading this conversation – it’s women. We’re lucky in a way – because this has mostly been framed as a gender issue or a women’s issue in the past, we’ve gotten to frame the conversation, ask the questions, and create something new.

What’s the something new? The idea that this is not a gender issue after all. This is a labor issue. Many men are looking for as much freedom from the old behaviors as women are – women have just been more vocal about it thus far. But this isn’t a “women’s issue” – it’s a human issue.

I love conversations like these, because they help us create a better future. But I still believe it’s going to take a long time to actually change the culture of unhealthy work habits – and I’m impatient.

That’s why, over and over at GirlAuthentic, we’re proposing a shortcut. Instead of waiting for the old businesses to change, we need to be about creating new businesses with healthier cultures that will bring sanity for those who want it.

Who’s going to create those businesses? Women, we need you to lead the way again.

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It Was the First Time There Was a Line

It Was the First Time There Was a Line

By Michelle Meyer|2015-05-19T14:41:51-05:00October 12th, 2014|Blog, Women and the Workplace|

I was going to have to wait in line to use the restroom. And I couldn’t have been happier.

I’ve been attending my profession’s annual global conference since I was a junior in college in 1987 (I’ll let you do the math). There was often a line for the men’s room, but never for the women’s room. It was, we used to joke, one of the perks of attending our profession’s conference as a woman. You could get into the bathroom any time, no waiting. There just weren’t that many women in our industry.

And then, this year, it was different. I walked in to the restroom – and there was a line! I was a bit taken aback. I had been so used to attending the conference, and there never being a line. Another woman and I just stood there looking at each other, realizing we were sharing the same thought.

This was terrific!

That moment, we knew, represented a turning point. It’s something I am proud of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) for helping to make happen in our field. And it didn’t happen by mistake.

I was lucky – I was part of the first wave of women who benefited from my profession’s efforts to create opportunities for women. And it did take specific efforts! Over the years, CSCMP has worked tirelessly to help advance women in our profession. So have many great companies. So have the terrific universities and professors that are educating the next generation of Supply Chain Management professionals.

What did they do? They started by having the right conversations and asking the right questions. What can we do? How do we attract more women? How do we support them? They do research to show whether women truly are advancing in the field, and they actively seek out women to interest them in their profession, their university programs, their companies, and the terrific jobs this field provides.

Contrast this with the International Manufacturing and Technology Show I attended with one of my business partners a few weeks earlier in Chicago. There were more than 113,000 attendees at the conference. But twice during the four days we were there, I found I was the ONLY person in the women’s restroom. (It was sort of spooky, really.)

Two professions – very different gender balance.

There is tremendous opportunity today for women – in both supply chain management and in manufacturing technologies. We may have made more progress in supply chain management today, but we can do the same in manufacturing tomorrow. We’ll do it the way we do anything in the professional world. We’ll work at it. We’ll make an effort. And, women can lead the way by building these companies of the future.

I can’t wait to wait in more lines.

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Walking the Talk

Walking the Talk

By Michelle Meyer|2015-05-19T14:44:50-05:00September 15th, 2014|Blog|

I have great business partners. When I launched GirlAuthentic in early 2013, one of them said to me, “That’s great. Now when are you going to start walking the talk?”

He was right. He and I had been talking for a couple of years about starting a business together. Now I was talking at GirlAuthentic about the need for women to build significant businesses – but I hadn’t moved beyond talk in my business plans with him.

So 12 months ago, we started putting one foot in front of the other.

I’m happy to say we’ve made good progress, all while we were both working paying the bills with other full-time work. In the last year we’ve incorporated Morf3D. We have a business plan. We have a market approach and strategy. We own our name and all associated URL’s, we have attorney and accounting relationships in place and we have added our Chief Sales & Marketing Officers to our Executive Leadership Team. The Morf3D website just went live, and we will be talking publicly with other companies starting this week.

It’s one thing to talk about building a different kind of business. That conversation is really important – it’s why GirlAuthentic exists. But while we talk, we also have to walk.

There is lots to do! At Morf3D, we still have key positions to fill on our Executive Leadership Team. We have target clients to talk to, more budgeting and planning to do, and more people to hire. We need to keep learning ourselves, and we need to completely extract ourselves from our current lives in order to completely focus on building this new business. We still have lots to figure out.

So why do it? Because we believe in walking the talk. My partners and I are passionate about building a company that reflects all of the ideas we have begun discussing here at GirlAuthentic. Ideas like:

A balance of the masculine and feminine vibrations. At Morf3D, we are PLANNING and TARGETING to hire women in additional key executive and other leadership roles. We are also planning to find great young women to join us – yes, there are lots of young women out there who want a cool place to do engineering, design, operations, and consulting! And any of the great guys who want to come are welcome too.

Different structures. For our consulting delivery teams, “full time” will mean Monday to Thursday at our client and Friday to Sunday at home every week. For operations teams, “full time” will be 3-4 days a week at 36-40 hours. It’s different. And yes, we believe it’s totally doable.

We’ve established Guiding Principles for Morf3D, and we’ve thought about how those principles will translate into day-to-day experience:

[table type=”striped_minimal”]
[trow]
[thcol]Guiding Principle[/thcol]
[thcol]What This Looks Like[/thcol]
[/trow]
[trow]
[tcol]“Doing work you want, with people you want, where you want”[/tcol]

[tcol]Having fun and being happy.[/tcol]

[/trow]
[trow]
[tcol]“Life comes first”[/tcol]

[tcol]Everyone takes 2-3 months off per year.[/tcol]

[/trow]
[trow]
[tcol]“If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t”[/tcol]

[tcol]Anything can be resolved through conversation – if in doubt, communicate.[/tcol]

[/trow]
[trow]
[tcol]“No assholes allowed”[/tcol]

[tcol]If we make a mistake and hire an asshole, we fix it and fire them.[/tcol]

[/trow]
[trow]
[tcol]“Think big, think globally, think fast”[/tcol]

[tcol]Revenue of $100 million or more in 5 years.[/tcol]

[/trow]
[trow]
[tcol]“Creating opportunities for others”[/tcol]

[tcol]Good, long-term jobs providing people a living wage. People want to stay with us.[/tcol]

[/trow]
[trow]
[tcol]“Creating wealth and abundance”[/tcol]

[tcol]We have the opportunity to do and build other things we are interested in.[/tcol]

[/trow]
[trow]
[tcol]“Leaving a positive legacy”[/tcol]

[tcol]This business is around to pass on to the next generation if we choose to stay in the business.[/tcol]

[/trow]
[trow]
[tcol]“Focusing on the greater good”[/tcol]

[tcol]We’ll regularly ask, how are we helping our community? Are we working on creating things that will help people?[/tcol]

[/trow]
[trow]
[tcol]“Being kind”[/tcol]

[tcol]Life is hard enough, why would anyone intentionally add to the hardship?[/tcol]

[/trow]

[trow]
[tcol]“Important ways of being”[/tcol]

[tcol]Trusting, Honest, Having Integrity, Creative[/tcol]

[/trow]

[/table]

For me, that’s what it’s looked like to walk the talk for the past year. I can’t wait to see these values and ideas continue to become real – because that’s how the world changes. It will happen one new business at a time.

What about you? How are you “walking the talk”?

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You want a horse? Go get a horse.

You want a horse? Go get a horse.

By Michelle Meyer|2015-05-19T14:42:30-05:00August 12th, 2014|Blog|

I wasn’t even 6 years old when I discovered something I really wanted: My own horse. My family had just moved to a much more rural area where EVERYONE had horses – well, except me. I knew I wanted a horse.

My parents got me lessons at the local stables, and many of the neighbors were kind enough to introduce us to their horses and let us ride. But, I refused to stop bugging my parents. So my dad came up with a deal he figured would put off the need to get a horse for quite a while. He told me, “When you can saddle and bridle a horse all by yourself, I will get you a horse.”

Six months later I showed up in the yard with my friend Debbie’s horse all saddled and bridled. My dad asked, “Why do you have Debbie’s horse?”

“You told me when I could saddle and bridle a horse by myself, you’d get me a horse,” I told him. “So I got him ready all by myself and rode him over here.”

My dad just looked at me. “I did say that, didn’t I?” he finally said. And I had my own horse not long after that.

I was only 7 years old, and I knew what it meant to be authentically powerful as a girl. I wasn’t questioning my abilities or worrying about how others would respond to what I said and did. I knew what I wanted and what I was capable of. It felt natural. It felt like me.

Remember that? That’s “GirlAuthentic.”

Every once in a while someone will ask me about the name “GirlAuthentic.” They might have noticed the dual meaning in our logo (tie, dress) or our tag line (Equilibrium at Work; Equilibrium at work). Then they often move on to our name – because words do have power, and do shape things.

For me, “GirlAuthentic” is a call to remember.

For working women of all ages, or for those still in college or younger, it’s a challenge to never forget what it feels like to be authentically powerful as a girl. The workplace needs more of the feminine, not less. So “GirlAuthentic” is a challenge not to hide or mask what comes so naturally to you – no matter what well intentioned coaching, (but bad advice), you might receive to do the opposite.

For others, like myself, “GirlAuthentic” is a challenge to remember what we have forgotten. Today, too many women are trying to be empowered through a masculine vibration, not a feminine vibration. Some of us have gotten very good at it! But there’s a price we pay for doing so.

Three years ago, as I was reading Barbara Marciniak’s “Earth,” I realized that I had mastered the masculine vibration. But I had lost my own true voice along the way. In fact, my “success” was so complete that I am having difficulty finding that authentically powerful girl. I’m having to work to bring her back.

But I know I will. She’s in here, somewhere. I remember her.

And she wants a lot more than a horse.

When do you remember feeling authentically powerful?

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Is your workplace built on love – or fear? Here are 2 ways to tell.

Is your workplace built on love – or fear? Here are 2 ways to tell.

By Michelle Meyer|2015-05-19T14:45:19-05:00July 17th, 2014|Blog, Women and the Workplace|

We are embedded in fear – more deeply than we realize, much of the time. It’s ingrained, so we don’t even realize it much of the time. It’s become part of our autopilot at work – and in life.

If you want to see whether you’re operating mostly out of fear or out of love, there are two places to look: the actions you take and the language you use.

Fear actions:

Monitoring people’s time at work (because you’re afraid they won’t work otherwise)
Not talking about whether the women are being paid the same as the men for the same job (because you’re afraid of retribution)
Tolerating abusive, bullying behavior (because you’re afraid of being labeled a “whiner”)
Continuing to work somewhere where you’re not happy (because you’re afraid of the unknown)

Love actions:

Allowing people to manage their own schedules (because you trust they want to do good work and will get their work done)
Paying women the same as the men without being asked/coerced (because it’s simply the right thing to do)
Enforcing the “No Asshole Rule” (because you love others)
Moving toward what feels good or right in your career (because you also love yourself)

You can see this fear-versus-love dichotomy in the actions we take all day long – or you can look for it in the words we use. How do you talk about competitors, colleagues, customers, and other institutions?

Fear language aligns us against others:
Win, Beat, Dominate, Crush, Annihilate, “War on…”, Adversary, Knockout, Attack, Closed, Control, Kill, Defeat, Faction, Enemy

Love language aligns us with others:
Trust, Serve, Join, Collaborate, Share, Open, Transform, Build, Give-and-Take, Care, Seek, Generosity, Allow, Build, Partner, Connection

As we focus on operating from love, not from fear, we can create environments that help and support us. We may not know exactly how that is going to look – which makes us afraid. But we can have the faith that we are being presented with everything we need at the moment – which is living in love.

I believe we can use these perspectives, behaviors, and language to create the companies and social structures we all want to operate in. What do you think?

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Michelle Meyer

About Michelle Meyer

How do you get from where you are to where you want to be?

What do Silicon Valley, the Catholic Church and the nation of Germany all have in common? If the articles I’m reading lately are any guide, the answer is an under-representation of women in leadership.

One of the greatest forces we have for equilibrium is the power of our own choices.

I was going to have to wait in line to use the restroom. And I couldn’t have been happier.

I have great business partners. When I launched GirlAuthentic in early 2013, one of them said to me, “That’s great. Now when are you going to start walking the talk?”

I wasn’t even 6 years old when I discovered something I really wanted: My own horse. My family had just moved to a much more rural area where EVERYONE had horses – well, except me. I knew I wanted a horse.

We are embedded in fear – more deeply than we realize, much of the time. It’s ingrained, so we don’t even realize it much of the time. It’s become part of our autopilot at work – and in life.