If all you’ve ever DREAMED & DESIRED isn’t what you want for your life now or in the future, Go DARE!

Do you DREAM of losing weight to get healthy? DESIRE to move to a different city? DREAM of starting a new career or starting a company over 40? DESIRE to master the guitar? Whatever your own DREAMS & DESIRES, they’re well within the realm of possibilities for women over 40 that want to pursue DARE-ING endeavors.

There are millions of other women over 40 who feel the same way. It’s all part of our innate DESIRE for individuation, to look that identity crisis right in the eye, and to get out and DARE to discover. So, assert the right to your own reinvention, and if anyone challenges that right, be prepared to retort “How DARE you suggest I’m too old to DREAM & DESIRE!?!

To get in touch with your grown-up DREAMS & DESIRES, you need to put your “inner editor” on hold, and indulge your “free-association” muscles.  First, you need to capture them for future reference. Just let your mind wander, take notes, or clip, click, draw, paint, paste or doodle them – whatever works for you.  Don’t worry that they may seem unedited, disorganized, or grandiose.  Don’t dwell on how you’ll make them happen.  Here are just a few ideas:

1.     Put some index cards wherever you hang out for more than an hour, so you can jot down some ideas that come into your head when you least expect them. Instead of fuming about being stuck in traffic, or complaining to yourself about how boring the elliptical machine is, let your mind wander to explore DREAMS & DESIRES. When you’re focused consciously on something else, that’s when your sub-conscious spits out longings you didn’t even imagine you could have.  Jot down your impromptu ideas on your index cards, and put them aside. After a month or so, take them out, and note which ideas seem appealing enough that you could envision DRIVING them to fruition.

2.     On your laptop, start a journal, and password-protect it, unless you truly want to share your innermost thoughts with everyone in the free world. Write in it daily – at least three pages, but no more than ten.  Write as soon as you wake up, or right before you’re going to bed, because that ’s when your mind won’t be so alert that you’ll edit yourself.   Write down all the things, people and places that are making you happy or driving you crazy. Write for at least 20 minutes and you’ll eventually generate ideas for what you want and need to accomplish. When you go back and re-read your entries weeks and months later, you’ll see a pattern of DREAMS & DESIRES your subconscious is bringing to the surface.

3.    Go With Your Flow. The landmark book, Flow, by renowned psychology professor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, became one of the most popular books ever on the topic of tapping into our deepest DREAMS & DESIRES.  The author defines the concept of “flow” as a state of such intense concentration and immersion in a pleasurable activity that you completely lose track of time. To tap into your own flow state, take note of the next time that hours seem to fly by without your thinking about food, water, or the fact that your husband hasn’t fed and bathed the kids (which would otherwise be obvious if you looked up long enough to see they are eating the contents of a 20-gallon drum of Costco popcorn right from the floor).   Then note the following:

• What activity are you engaged in?  Is it work-related, or completely different? If it’s work, does it feel like work, or is it too pleasurable to be considered work?
• If it’s not work but has engrossed you in fun for several hours, is it something you could see DRIVING?  Write it down.
• Here’s an exercise that’s just as powerful – note when you feel you’re in torture doing a work or extracurricular activity. If you have to endure it, what could you change to help you make it a more optimal experience now, or to replace it?

4.    Break out of your rut. Harvard Medical School scientist Dr. Herbert Benson is renowned for his 30 years of respected research on stress, productivity and creativity.  His best-seller, The Breakout Principle, has helped millions get unstuck and land on new solutions and even “breakout” discoveries.  Try these four simple exercises:

• Set a time to immerse yourself in the problem, challenge or task you’re trying to achieve, with both sides of the brain in focus;
• Then, move away from the task, and do something right-brain oriented, such as dancing, skiing, having sex, eating chocolate, etc.;
• Talk over your challenge with a reassuring source of comfort, either a friend, your spouse or a pet (hey, you know who you are and it’s perfectly normal);
• Eventually, return to the challenge, with a fresher perspective that often leads to a “breakout” idea.

5.   Your life’s an obstacle course?  Take a different course – go back to school! Surf course catalogs from the college, university or vocational school of your choice.  Let your eyes wander, and click on courses that appeal to you simply by their titles.  Read through them quickly and print those you want to consider further.  Don’t be concerned right now about any prerequisites, what the costs are, whether you’ll have time, or whether there will be anyone as “old” as you in class. (As a college professor, I assure you there will be classmates as old as you, and much older).  Put the print-out aside for just a few days.  Then take it out, read through the list of courses again, and decide on at least one you want to take.

Then, Go DARE! Start exploring the next batch of DREAMS & DESIRES that could change your life!

DARE-INGLY yours,

Liz DiMarco Weinmann, MBA
Chief DARE-ING Officer,
The DARE-Force Corporation



Next:  February’s focus will be on your Deal – how to maximize strengths and opportunities to achieve your DREAMS & DESIRES.

© The DARE-Force Corporation, 2011.

by Liz DiMarco Weinmann, MBA , author of the upcoming book, Get DARE From Here!â„¢ – 12 Principles and Practices for Women Over 40 to Take Stock, Take Action and Take Charge of the Rest of Their Lives..

All rights reserved.  Please note:  all of the content on this website and in the other content-driven products and services of The DARE-Force Corporation are based on sound business principles and practices of strategy, operations, leadership and marketing, as well as current and emerging trends in those business principles and practices.   None of the content is intended to be, nor should it be perceived as, or applied as, counsel, diagnosis, or treatment for mental, emotional or physical health conditions.

For some women the reality is that, regardless of our intentions to get a good head-start in January, by December we realize how hard it is to get there from here. Something or someone (maybe even ourselves) puts up virtual roadblocks in our lives.  We hit a traffic jam, or we’re still in “park” or, worse, we’re stuck in “neutral.”  Well, DREAM on!  It doesn’t have to be that way!

Sometimes it’s fear that DRIVES us to fulfill a resolution.  In other cases, pride (aka “vanity”) is the DRIVING force.  Sometimes, we just need better DREAMS & DESIRES.  If what you’re seeing in your rear-view mirror these days are the ghosts of resolutions past, maybe you need some new and thrilling DREAMS & DESIRES to DRIVE you! Whatever is DRIVING your resolutions, or hopes, or goals in 2011, we hope you truly believe that you can get there from here.  Or, more to our point: Get DARE from Here! What’s more, we’re here to tell you that you can actually enjoy the DRIVE!

Whatever the force, anything that DRIVES positive change over 40, can also be fun. It also makes you resilient.   I know this because if it weren’t for fear, pride and enrolling in Weight Watchers online two years ago, I never would have lost 60 pounds in the course of 12 months.  I also committed to following a calorie-blasting exercise regimen.  To do all that plus everything else I was juggling in my life, I needed exceptional DRIVE.  As my destination became more visible, I began to enjoy the DRIVE.

Guess what?  So can you! It’s no coincidence that DRIVE is the very first of the principal tenets that inform our work with women over 40 at The DARE-Force Corporation.  In fact, the “D” in DARE-Force is all about DRIVE.  (DARE stands for: DRIVE, ADVANCE, RULE and EXPRESS EXPERIENCE & EXPERTISE Over 40).  If you really want to accomplish something meaningful in your life you have to have DRIVE. If the fulfilling, meaningful goal you want to attain is also a difficult one, then you can’t begin to accomplish it without exceptional DRIVE. That means you have to want to DRIVE.

Yes, we know that’s easier said (or blogged) than done.  The practices inherent in DRIVE at The DARE-Force are focused on Dreams & Desires (your aspirations) first and foremost, but we’ve lived long enough to know that over-40 women have to Deal.  Your Deal comprises the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that affect your Dreams & Desires. The third priority for DRIVE in women over 40 is a vision for realizing your Dreams & Desires – a Design – which helps you maximize your strengths and opportunities in spite of your current Deal, so you have a long-term view of your ultimate goals.

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who inherited Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat early in 2009 when the latter officially assumed office as United States Secretary of State, is a quintessential DRIVER who obviously has a long-term view of her ultimate goals. She came to the Senate with strong Dreams & Desires to affect – and effect - important legislation. She had to Deal with many challenges, not the least of which being that she was presumed to lack sufficient EXPERIENCE and credibility.  Undeterred, she set out to Design a vision for achieving her legislative priorities.  By the end of 2010, Gillibrand’s DRIVE resulted in bringing about landmark legislation, including the 9/11 healthcare bill that provides benefits to the heroic firemen and police who were first responders at the World Trade Center disaster.  She was also pivotal in the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” military policy that discriminated against gay members of the U.S. Armed Forces.

A recent article in The New York Times praised Gillibrand’s DRIVE:

“Her efforts have won grudging admiration from critics, adulation from national liberals and gay rights groups, and accolades from New York politicians across the political spectrum, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who once shopped for potential candidates to oust her.  Even her relentlessness, which once drew mockery, is now earning the highest compliment of all: professional jealousy from her more senior colleagues.”

Now that’s a DARE-ING woman over 40! DRIVE on, Senator! DARE On!

For the next three months, the principle of DRIVE in women over 40 is going to be the focus of this blog, and January is all about DREAMS & DESIRES.   So, if you’re ready to DRIVE new and exciting things for yourself over the next year, let’s get going!  First, you must be DREAMING! Ignite some fire in that DESIRE!  Push past the roadblocks and think hard about the DREAMS you want to pursue over the next year, and what you DESIRE for this year to be different.   Focus on purpose, on the things that could really DRIVE you.

You can Get DARE from Here! In fact, Getting DARE now that you’re over 40, really is half the fun!

DARE-INGLY yours,

Liz DiMarco Weinmann, MBA

Chief DARE-ING Officer,

The DARE-Force Corporation

Next: Why you NEED to DREAM On!

© The DARE-Force Corporation, 2011.  Based on the upcoming book, Get DARE from Here™! – 12 Principles and Practices for Women Over 40 to Take Stock, Take Action and Take Charge of the Rest of Their Lives, by Liz DiMarco Weinmann, MBA.  All rights reserved.  

All of the content on this website and in the other content-driven products and services of The DARE-Force Corporation are based on sound business principles and practices of strategy, operations, leadership and marketing, and on current and emerging trends in those referenced business principles and practices.   None of the content on this website, nor in the other content-driven products and services of The DARE-Force Corporation, are intended to be, nor should they be, perceived as, practiced as, or applied as, counsel, diagnosis, or treatment for any implicit or explicit mental, emotional or physical health conditions.

I hope the only LAUGHS you seem to have during the holidays aren’t from the bubbles up your nose when you guzzle that full glass of champagne as your father-in-law attempts to regale everyone at dinner with details of his annual physical. If they are, you definitely need a lot more to LAUGH about. TREAT yourself to this LAUGH instead:

LAUGH #2. Anything by word-genius Nora Ephron, but for sure her new book, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections.

Are you a woman over 40 whose workstation is so covered over with reminder Post-It notes that you could weave them together as a comforter?  Then TREAT yourself today to this new book from one of the funniest authors alive – at 69, that’s something to LAUGH about!   Writing about the annoying and alarming things that plague most women over 40, Ephron makes me LAUGH so hard I can almost understand the reason manufacturers of adult diapers are in business. But I won’t bring myself to forgive them for their insufferably awful commercials.

Ephron’s last book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, obsessed about that body part while making fun of older women who celebrate their wisdom (OK, I confess:  even I LAUGHED at that).  Sit down with her new one, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, and I promise you will never again think of Aruba merely as a pleasurable island getaway.  Nor will you ever again take your elbows for granted.

Screenwriter, film director, producer, novelist, playwright, journalist and, of course, blogger, Ephron could easily add stand-up comic to her portfolio.  During TV appearances to promote her book, she is both visually and audibly droll and hilarious. She is somewhat like your sardonic friend who isn’t really trying to be funny when she talks about her latest horror show in front of a three-way mirror, but who has everyone screaming with howls of laughter and empathy, and repeating her stories for weeks afterwards.

Ephron is the DARE-ING master of the kind of humor based on the cruelest facts of life, especially for women over 40. This somehow makes those inescapable truths easier to bear – for us and for her.  In fact, she managed to turn one of the truly awful periods of her life into a major therapeutic catharsis: the novel Heartburn, based on her discovery of then-husband Carl Bernstein’s affair with a mutual friend.  In the novel, Ephron describes the anti-hero husband as being “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.”  I could only envision the literal manifestation of that phrase and how it would’ve cut the thing short – ba dump bump.  But I digress.  The novel was turned into the hit film by the same title, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.  Ephron doesn’t allow herself to get stuck at “life sucks.”  She moves immediately to yucks, and then to bucks.  If only all of us could be that talented.

Not only is Ephron’s talent for making us LAUGH serious business, her genius is in taking on subjects of style and substance that very few other writers would DARE with such courage and conviction.  One of my favorite examples is her grave and passionate excoriation of her own alma mater, Wellesley, in one of her earlier books, Crazy Salad.  Ephron tells readers that a certain Wellesley dean was advocating for graduates a life of, as Ephron puts it, “glazed politeness.” The dean was in essence advising graduates to plant themselves firmly in some middle ground of “tolerance,” about which Ephron objects:

“How marvelous it would have been to go to a woman’s college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument. Women by the time they are eighteen are so beaten down, so tyrannized out of behaving in all the wonderful outspoken ways unfortunately characterized as masculine…We all graduated from Wellesley able to describe everything we had studied… yet we were never asked what we thought of any of it…”

Ephron’s intelligent point of view on DARE-ING to have a substantive voice resonated with me when I first read Crazy Salad some 30 years ago. But now that I’m in my fifties and observing younger women, in my work, in the classroom and in social settings, it resonates even more.  Aside from the shrill spectacles of media-maniac celebri-tots and faux-cialites gone wrong, some young women today seem so tentative and polite about everything. Everthing except exposing their cleavage and midriffs at inappropriate times in frankly unattractive outfits (more like costumes). And all the while they are affecting intonations in their speaking patterns that result in their punctuating, with an emphatic question mark, even their most assertive declarative sentences:  “Wow, Miley is really rocking that SKIRT?” (Emphasis added to make my point.)  In my opinion, what they really need to rock is a double dose of Ephron!

For all DARE-ING women but especially for women over 40, Ephron is the real deal. Unlike other writers whose work seems an obvious pastiche of ghostwriters, agents, publicists and others assigned to famous authors’ production line and marketing teams, she makes you feel that she’s been through what ails you, she’s still recovering, and she’s got the cure.  In fact, “Ephron” even sounds like the name of a great new drug for women over 40.  Imagine:

For all those cranky people you know:  “Get over your bitching.  Take two Ephrons and brawl me in the morning!”

Not in the mood?  “Sorry, not tonight, babe. I’m having a major Ephron moment.”

Can’t sleep?  “Heading to the kitchen for warm milk and an Ephron, dear.  Don’t wait up.”

So, go ahead and TREAT yourself with Ephron.  You’ll LAUGH until you cry, or pee, or fall asleep happily exhausted.  And, who knows, at your next family get-together, you might remember something Ephron wrote about older men who hog the spotlight, just as your father-in-law is about to regale everyone with a frame-by-frame analysis of his colonoscopy.  TREAT yourself to a little more Champagne, and pray that your LAUGHS are loud enough to drown him out.

Next blog:  More LAUGHS from two great comics over 40.

Super-BLOOMING Woman: Paula Deen

Late BLOOMERS are all the rage. How about the over-40 women you see on the screen: Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Helen Mirren, Sharon Stone─these empowered, confident women are great models of success, tenacity, and re-invention. Modeling agencies report that there is more demand for beautiful women over 40, and over 50, to help marketers sell to us boomers.  Everyone from cosmetics companies to car makers is courting us.  Some of the most popular women on TV are over 50, and certainly many of them are late BLOOMERS.

One of the most popular is Paula Deen. This well-known Southern cook suffered so badly from agoraphobia in her 20s that she wouldn’t even leave her house.  Today, no one would believe that about this brassy, loud, fun and totally BLOOMING broad!  She’s written 5 books, owns a restaurant in Savannah, has her own line of signature pies at Wal-Mart (but, of course, “Y’ALL!”), and hosts several shows on the Food Network. Her brazen, butter-everywhere, innuendo-infused (“Now, beat your meat, Y’ALL!”) commentary may not be for everyone, but her fans adore her. As a businesswoman who recognizes a shrewd mogul when I see one, I love that she has parlayed that platinum-poufed, gutsy-guffawing persona all the way to a big bruiser bank.  More power to her!  She  demonstrates that it takes determination, sweat, and some serious tilling of the soil for us to enjoy new BLOOMS (not to mention BLOOMING profits) well into our 40s, 50s and beyond.

So, to paraphrase Paula Deen, what about “Y’ALL”???? What’s in BLOOM for you this month?

Liz Claiborne: Super DARE-ing Woman!

I am so excited that my book is about to be published at the end of the month, hopefully in time for my birthday on June 19^th.

Entitled appropriately “Get DARE From Here™!” it the result of much research into the desires and achievements of women over 40 in our culture─ our dreams, motivations, and issues. In my research I came across inspiring stories of exceptionally passionate women over 40, some obscure, some famous, but they all had powerful traits in common. They all bravely applied their energy and leadership to empower themselves and their families, the companies where they worked, and their surrounding communities and society at large. A few good examples are Jean Nidetch (founder of Weight Watchers), Mary Kay Ash, Liz Claiborne, Julia Child, and you may know many more.

From the model set by over-40 women such as these, I devised the  DARE system, laid out in my new book,  to inspire, guide and challenge all you brainy, gutsy, passionate women over 40 who crave or need to pursue, develop, or lead something more fulfilling in your personal lives, careers, or communities.

You can Get DARE From Hereâ„¢!