Five "E" Themes | LAYC01

It's surreal for me to hear my voice saying those words out loud. You know, I've always had a dream to have a TV show, a radio show, or well, now a podcast. And here it is, the day has arrived!

I'm 66 years old, and never say never. Because the adventure continues. I feel like I've got the season's pass for a trip through Womanhood Wonderland. And I am always experiencing something new. Adding to my lifetime degree, which I call ‘QBE’ - Qualified by Experience, bringing me here to this day, after having written and published a book two years ago called “Who Am I Now - Feminine Wisdom Unmasked and Uncensored’. And it's that book that is the catalyst for this podcast. Because I'm sharing my story about how I grew up into womanhood and how I continue to grow into my superpowers and my CEO-ness in my life, that a marvelous thing took place. Other women started to share their stories with me too.

And it was in that sharing that we all discovered, it wasn't just us, we were not alone. In fact, there were a whole lot of things going on in silos in isolation that we were not aware of that together, collaboratively collectively, we can move forward at a much faster pace. And that's a bit of the underpinning of Lift As You Climb, which is a personal mantra of mine, it has been for decades, and it hints at the story of my life. I will talk to you more about how that shows up what it means to me, and why I created a movement called Lift As You Climb, live your legacy, and empower others to create theirs. But going back to the idea, the origins of this podcast, are thoughts about my own values, and life experience and learning that I wish someone would have shared with me earlier in my life, or more candidly, more truthfully. And that's what this is for. I'm here now to just share it all with you. Like the book cover says, unmasked and uncensored. Now you can imagine after 66 years of living full out, and I'll tell you, how I justify that, that I have a lot of stories to say, and a lot of things to share with you so that you can compare and vet how those are in your life. Now to be able to sort of keep a handle on what this show was going to be about. I thought about the values in my life now because I believe that our values grow with us. The values of trust and collaboration and uplifting and beauty are very important. And when I really thought about the most important things that I wanted to share with you, and I'm going to guess that you're a woman, maybe in your 40s 50s 60s, you are an entrepreneur, never too old to do something new, never too young to start.

The themes that are most prevalent for me are the themes of Experience. Evolution, Essence, Economy, and Encore.

And so here I am in my home office, speaking to you - you out there, wherever you are in the world. And I am about to share a very intimate, but truthful exposure to what I believe I have learned in my lifetime. And what I still would like to learn more about. So in terms of thinking about experience, and you'll notice that those five themes for the podcast all begin with the letter E, and I'm not sure why. But since my last name is Banerjee, which sounds like energy, perhaps that's how that came to fruition. But experience is what I consider our vault of lifetime value, and the ability to stop and take stock periodically, and remind ourselves of just how much we do know, the tacit knowledge that we have accumulated. The strengths that we have refined and grown and the skills that we have acquired, the knowledge that we have from everyday living and doing is equal to considerably greater than education in a formal institution. And I'm not saying that, just because I graduated from high school at the age of 16, and walked away. But I'm saying it, because I do believe that there are many forms of education. And they all add up to the sum total of our lifetime value. Evolution, we build on our experience and the knowledge that we have, and the life experiences. And we continue to evolve and grow. It's extremely important to me to always feel like my life is expanding another e word, and that I challenge myself, to learn, to associate with others who can teach me to share what I know, with others as well. And to always have a bigger vision for my life, and what I can do to impact others, and live my legacy. Well, I'm here now to enjoy it to be a role model for my children, and my grandchildren, and my nieces and nephews, and the people around me, my family and my community, and in the business community that I am in and the philanthropic duties that I have all of that learning, and growing and evolving, then brings me to the next realization, and that is that I'm continually changing. No wonder, I have reached several pivotal times in my life when I've said quite emphatically, who am I now, because I am no longer that person. I have evolved and transformed and reinvented so many times in my life. And how grateful for that am I even though candidly, truthfully, some of those transformations, I have resisted, and I clung on to what was familiar for me in the past, and the identity that I felt safe in. But to continue to explore and refine, who I am now is really a privilege. I get that. And I encourage you all to the key words are just coming out of everywhere today exploring now encouraging to know that your identity is not fixed. It is not frozen in a period of time in your life, or career that you had, or a last name that you had a relationship that you were involved in. It is fluid and expansive and growing all the time. The essence of you is there. But it gets to be more refined as you get older, and as you are open to that exploration of yourself. Now, I'm an entrepreneur, again, the E letter. And so entrepreneurial factors are extremely important to me, the economy, to be able to empower myself as an entrepreneur, to be independent economically, and to have the power to grant wishes, starting with my own, but have the ability to have enough to share and plenty to spare, and be able to help and influence others, which is always a part of Lift As You Climb, being able to support and invest in others as well. Economy means influence for me, what am I doing that will influence the quality of my life, my growth? And how will that allow me to influence positively other people. And the fifth he that I want to focus on in this podcast for the next while, is encore. Because for me, it's all about that realization that when I didn't know who I was, for a period of time in my life, and I was lost feeling like Who am I, that I realized that then with great joy, that I had the opportunity for an encore role in my life. And that if I looked at my life as that opportunity to be the star of my own life center stage, that I could choose the script, write it for myself, produce it, choose the cast and crew that is going to support me in that next and best role in my life. And that's been absolutely Lovejoy of freeing myself up to going, No, I don't have to fit in a box, that society said at some time in the past, that I should fit into when I'm a white female in my 60s living in North America, and that I am a grandmother, and that I should, you know, be ready to slide into retirement. No, another e word, expiry, I don't have an expiry date. I'm looking forward to now imagining and executing, oh my gosh, ease or flow. What I'm going to do for the next 1020 3040, who knows maybe 50 more years of my life? And how do I have a greater vision all the time, growing, setting examples influencing others, creating greater impact for me, for the people close to me that I love, but also having that impact ripple out around the globe, so that more women and children are economically empowered, and independent. And that affects all of the population. Now my conversations and my thought and my heart are not excluding men. On the contrary, we're all holding on equal responsibility on the planet. And we I believe each have feminine energy and male energy. And we need both of those for success in all areas. But my heart does belong to helping other women supporting them and encouraging that growing attitude that women empower each other and create a very wonderful ripple, a positive impact around the world. You know, I began as a girl on a farm. I didn't have the storybook childhood relationship with my father. I had a challenging relationship there and domestically. You know, there more reasons to want to walk away at the age of 16. And not go back, even after I found out at 16, that I was already pregnant. After I'd left home, I had $75 in my pocket, and one suitcase. And I thought I had one shot to figure it out. Who was I going to become? Because I was presently, in that moment, a child. And I was about to be responsible for the life of another human being. Fortunately, for me, growing up on that farm, equipped me with a lot of strong skills. I had a strong work ethic, I observed my parents in entrepreneurial capacities, I worked for other entrepreneurs. And I, I had acquired a lot of skills, even though I wasn't cognizant of it at the time, that I was learning, customer service and cash management, and teamwork and reception skills and bookkeeping skills, and on and on and on. Unfortunately, those helped that skinny scared 16 year old, stand up straight, look more confident, see much more mature than my actually years, and enabled me to get employment, and be able to provide for myself and my growing little family can continuing through that experience I learned as I took on each new job to ask for more work, more than I was capable of more than maybe I was ready for. But the fact that I keenly asked to take it on, and did my best to learn and do really well for my employers, they continue to give me more and more responsibility. And for that I'm very grateful. Because that was the underpinning for me to be able to become an entrepreneur, and to build my own company just a few decades later. So for now, I just like to leave you with the thoughts that we are evolving constantly in our lives. And that every time we do something new, we take on something new, like starting a podcast at age 66 that we've never been that before. We've never been that me before. But each and every time that we take on this new role, this new identity, this new, huge goal, our life before our skills, our experience, our strengths, have been preparing us for exactly that. And each and every time we figure out how to be that next us. I'll leave you with that today. I look forward to sharing more. And I invite you to take a look in the mirror and see who you are now.