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Ladies Who Launch: Embracing Entrepreneurship & Creativity as a Lifestyle
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Product Description
Ladies Who Launch is the first company to define the feminine approach to launching a business and to make the connection between starting a business and bringing creativity into your life with self-esteem and happiness. The nationally acclaimed Ladies Who Launch program has enabled thousands of women across the country to break out of 9-5 and thrive in entrepreneurial enterprises that reflect their true passions, skills, and desires. Located in more than 40 cities in the United States, the Ladies Who Launch incubators – workshops that give women the support and encouragement they need to embark on making their dreams reality – have inspired women to start businesses, grow existing companies, and tap into their creativity to develop essential services and products and enjoy the lifestyle of their dreams while doing it.
Available for the first time in book form, the 4-step incubator process, using self-tests, inspiring stories, and practical information, gives women the courage to dare to follow a cherished but unfulfilled dream. Through this unique program women are encouraged to
- Imagine it – allow a secret desire to come to light
- Speak it – choose a dream to pursue
- Do it – take effective action to make it reality
- Celebrate it – revel in successes, reward effort, and be good to yourself along the way
Ladies Who Launch provides a proven approach to igniting a fire under a long-smoldering dream, have more fun, and catapult a lifestyle, relationship or occupation to an infinitely higher level.
“If you want to pop the lid off anything you ever thought you couldn’t do, shouldn’t have or couldn’t achieve, you’ve bought the right book. All the tools you need to ignite a fire under a long smoldering dream, catapult a lifestyle, relationship, or career to a higher level are right here. Women tend to think of dreams as bigger than themselves, pies in the sky, morsels of imagination saved for a rainy day…in other words, out of reach. Well, guess what? Ladies Who Launch will reprogram how you think about your dreams so that they are as real as the coffee you drink each morning. They’re real and they’re all yours! To be truly happy and inspired by the life you’re living, you can take steps to wake up and launch your dreams right now. It is time to start believing that you can have what you really want. With the help of Ladies Who Launch, you will.”
--Victoria Colligan & Beth Schoenfeldt
www.ladieswholaunch.com
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #458334 in Books
- Published on: 2007-05-01
- Released on: 2007-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
You can do it! That's the message Colligan and Schoenfeldt, cofounders of the online networking and offline support system Women Who Launch, reinforce with this at-home version of their program. Emphasizing a more holistic approach than most business self-help titles, they take issue with some of the big tenets of M.B.A. programs, such as the need to start with business plans. Rather than step-by-step planning and checklists, they encourage would-be entrepreneurs to daydream as a way to define goals, whether it's a new business venture, changing course within a corporation or even a revitalized personal life. Along the way, they debunk commonly held misperceptions about glass ceilings and the mommy track, citing Labor Department statistics and their own extensive surveys. Offering exercises, questionnaires and additional resource lists scattered among success stories of women who have followed their advice, Colligan and Schoenfeldt urge readers to take action. Though the book appears to be written to promote membership in the authors' network, their enthusiasm for self-improvement will excite even nonjoiners into making positive changes. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction to Launching
We don’t like to limit any area of our lives that could be launched. For one person it’s a business, for another it’s a social life, and for someone else it might be an exercise program. Launching means getting anything off the ground, or at least into a more evolved state than it’s currently in. Anything can be launched once you understand the specifics of how to do it. You will no longer be the person who catches herself, years down the road, wishing she’d learned French, made a documentary, or started a matchmaking business. Once you have the tools to launch you will have the tools to get anything up and running, now and for the rest of your life.
Our philosophy is that launching doesn’t have to mean writing a business plan, selling the house, moving to another city, or even leaving your job. Launching is a state of mind, a way of thinking. If you don’t have the luxury to go away to a deserted island to write your novel, there is no reason you can’t get started in some significant way today. Too often we put off starting something because it seems too far-fetched or would take too much energy. Some of us don’t know how to follow through or fear it might change our lives too much. The reality is that when you have a map of how to get somewhere, it immediately seems much more attainable. If Everest were simply some Goliath peak in the sky, with no guidelines on how to scale it, do you think anyone other than crazy explorers would dare climb to the top?
Authors’ Note: How long can you stand to let your dreams go unnoticed? What daydream comes to you again and again? If wishing could make it so, what would be yours? Is there something you’re waiting for? How long are you willing to wait? How long is too long? Is now soon enough?
We’re giving you a map. You can go to the base camp or all the way to the summit. How high to go will always be up to you, but our experience has shown that once a woman figures out the launching process, she can’t be stopped. Launching becomes a verb that describes both her appetite for creativity and her ability to execute.
We are fanatical about launching because we know that the movement toward your desires and dreams is the key to happiness and self-esteem. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his landmark book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, says it best when he writes:
Contrary to what we usually believe, the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
He goes on to say that optimal experience is something that we make happen and that is how you get into the flow of your life. Nothing is more active than launching; it is how you make things happen. It’s critical for your self-esteem and happiness to get you thinking about your dream right from the start, and get it out there as soon as possible. It’s one thing to have a dream locked somewhere in your head, be a decent human being, and feel good about yourself and your life. It’s quite another to let it out so that it can actually happen and so you can see what this does to how you feel about youself.
To further support our theories that women launch in different ways and for different reasons than men, and that launching brings happiness and fulfillment, we conducted a nationwide survey of Ladies within our subscriber base (women who have or who are developing an entrepreneurial spirit). We then surveyed corporate women outside our subscriber base as well as gentlemen, both those in corporate environments and others launching outside the corporate arena. The results were fascinating, challenging, and at times surprising. We also surveyed women who have been profiled on www.ladieswholaunch.com (the Featured Ladies) as our “success” stories. We consider them successful for reasons beyond their bank accounts or business models. These women are living their dreams; they enjoy amazingly rich lifestyles, have fascinating, industrious friends and supportive families, many have children, and naturally many of them have been rewarded with the financial success they so certainly deserve for their efforts. Key, though, to each of them, is the sense that a dream was imagined and carried out. Their particular “project” could have just as easily ended up a passing fancy . . . not a nationally known brand!
Launching and Self-Esteem
We knew that we felt better about ourselves after launching our businesses, so we wondered if launching could be a prescription for boosting self-esteem and happiness. In our survey we asked all the women and men if they felt good about themselves, and we all know that people who felt good about themselves are happier and have higher self-esteem.
The answer was a resounding yes, launching is good for self-esteem, especially for women. Look at the difference between the self-esteem index of Launching Ladies compared to their friends in the corporate world. Wouldn’t you like to feel almost 20 percent better? This isn’t to say that you feel down or bad, you just might feel better if you are taking actions that lead to a new venture. When you’re birthing something, from a new room in the house to a lemonade stand, your inner magic wand is in action. It’s not about what, but more about doing. This means that going out in the world, making things happen, and stirring the pot is more than just fun and possibly lucrative; it could save you big bucks on therapy bills and also fill in a few of
the holes that crop up and make you feel like something might be missing.
Shades of Gray
Some people see launching as black or white. You may be thinking, “I can’t launch because if I do, everything else will fall apart, or things will change so much that I won’t be able to handle them. Conversely, if I don’t, life will stay the same forever and fail to inspire me sometime down the road.” Propelling ideas outward doesn’t require sacrifice and perpetual change. The bottom line here is that reaching for dreams makes you feel good, and for a long time. So, if launching is so good for your self-esteem, why wouldn’t you launch? We asked that question of our corporate sisters and brothers in the context of entrepreneurship, one part of the launching concept, to find out what it is that holds people back.
It is scary to leave the stability of a paycheck and your health insurance and to put yourself on the line, to take that risk, when you may have a family at home or not a lot of cash in the bank. If you are in the corporate boat and not ready to get off, this book will help you think about launching in a slightly different way, and you can even use these skills and mind-set within a corporation. In the traditional model it’s been black and white—either you’re an entrepreneur or working in a corporation. We see things in a beautiful shade of Weimaraner gray. This gray area could be working full time in the corporate world, and possibly doing something toward your passion on the side, or perhaps pursuing something creative as a hobby. Looking back to the self-esteem question, those who work in a corporate environment and who are pursuing a dream and launching something on the side feel better about themselves. When we talk about launching, it’s easy to think we are only addressing it in the “start your own gig” sphere. This is partly true, but not completely. We know that women can launch in hundreds of ways that don’t necessarily involve work at all. There is a mind-set of launching that involves figuring out what you love and infusing some action in your life that isn’t necessarily pragmatic, obligatory, or purely functional. You may also be someone who has a burning desire to launch but doesn’t know exactly what it is you would like to do. If that’s the case, this book will help you sort it out.
Copyright © 2007 by Victoria Colligan and Beth Schoenfeldt. All rights reserved.
Customer Reviews
true disappointment with suggestions for other reading
After seeing the authors on TV, I ordered this book, as they were engaging and smart. I wanted to get an idea of what their "incubators" were like, as I was looking for some support for a new business idea. And I was hoping for some inspiration, like hearing real stories about other women who have started businesses and changed their lives. Ahead of time, I will say I don't mean to insult these women, or anyone who liked the book, but it was so off base as far as I was concerned that I wanted women who see things my way to save their time and cash. And I am a legit person-over the course of many years (I am 53) I have been a product and textile designer (for famous designers), a salesperson who ran a division of a corporation, and had my own design column in a newspaper. Plus have traveled around the world countless times for business. So I have some idea of what it takes to earn a living and be successful (and I only have an AAS degree, so I don't think you need to go to Harvard and get and MBA to do good stuff in the world) and if I had followed the airy nonsense these gals talk about, I would probably never have gotten a job.
I understand that this book is meant to encourage and get you revved up about an idea, not tell you how to exactly turn your idea into something concrete, but it was filled with anecdotes about women and their ideas that were uninspiring and offered nothing that seemed real. Not only do I feel like I wasted my money on this book, I feel like I was being talked down to. If you have never examined your own feelings and thoughts, have little or no experience in the real world of work, and want touchy-feely writing with no true info to back it up, this book is for you. It felt like I was reading a long informmercial for the product called "Ladies Who Launch," since this phrase is repeated about ten times per page. This is like a self-help book for women raised in the 50's...
It is fine to advise women to examine their feelings about what they want to do with their lives, but if you have ANY real life business experience, especially in a creative field like writing, design, advertising, TV, you will be insulted. The authors use the word "creative" to describe just about every thought or action a person might experience, and just because you can bake a nice cookie, for example, it is unrealistic to think that you can run a bakery. Some of the little things they suggest you do to pump yourself up and feel good about yourself are almost like parodies of that Saturday Night Live act, where Stuart Smiley looks into the mirror and tells himself, "I am good enough, I am smart enough, and goddamn it, I like myself."
I also stopped short at the suggestion that we read "The Secret," that book promoted by Oprah. So if you like that kind of stuff, I will apologize now for insulting your taste, but I find it just laughable. Yes, I do believe that what you put out there affects what you get back, but I have to say, I do not think that the thoughts we put out create our universe. Otherwise, I bet all of us would not be at our computers right this second, but someplace else we asked the universe to send us. I do not think that by praying or saying affirmations to be wealthy, for example, I will wake up the next day being offered a job at $500K/yr which is the sort of stuff that "The Secret" book and DVD suggest.
AND there are little charts all through "Ladies" that offer statistics about different life issues, broken down by headings like Ladies Who Launch, Gentlemen Who do this or that...the use of the words ladies and gentlemen just annoyed me as it was over and over....who are the people they talked to? Their relatives? How many were there? You can't talk to 6 people and if all of them say yes to an idea, say that 100% of people say yes to something. And all of this is a shame as the incubator idea sounds really interesting but I am am afraid that whomever leads them would sprout all this new age stuff. I would suggest people read the life stories of women who are successful. There is a design magazine that looks kind of too-cute but every issue covers sa few successful artists or creative business women-Mary Englebreight's Home Companion. You can learn a lot from reading about how they all started their business. Almost all are women, almost all started with a small idea at home, they show photos of their studios and how they got their start.
This book would have made an excellent magazine article.
I would also suggest the book by Anne Lamott, "Bird By Bird." It is about the true work of being creative (she is a writer) and how to go step-by-step to attain something. She mixes humor, autobiography, writing advise that can be applied to almost any endeavor....good luck, save your bucks.
Disappointing and unoriginal
This book is a complete re-hash of "you can do it" pop-psychology. It offered absolutely nothing new in terms of real concrete getting things done. The repeated references to "take time for yoga" and have parties to sell your products to friends is annoying.
The surveys and "studies" mentioned in the book are invalid in terms of how they were conducted; no marketing expert or sociologist would give them any credence.
The book appears to be a marketing tool for the author's own business, a franchise of Incubators which cost hundreds of dollars to join. Don't waste your money; the book itself is an advertisement for a poor product.
Launching my new life
In Oct 2006 I attended the LIVE event in San Francisco hosted by Alison Covarubias (the San Francisco Incubator Leader). It was at that event that I made the decision to write the book I'd had in my head for years. And so, "Every Single Girl's Guide To Her Future Husband's Last Divorce" was born.
The idea behind Ladies Who Launch is unique and its about enhancing and developing the idea in your heart, not someone elses idea of what you should do. Beth and Victoria have created a sensational structure to take your creative or business ideas and bring them to life. I know that my life will be forever changed for the better because I had this experience.
For me, during the incubator, what I discovered was that women communicate and develop their creative ideas differently than men, and that I needed that hefty dose of estrogen and unconditional support to propell my idea forward and stay the course.
The incubator changed my life for the better in so many ways, not the least of which was showing me that my dreams were always within reach. Add to that the ongoing monthly meetings and personal mentoring by Alison Covarubias and there was no way I could fail.
For any woman thinking about starting her own business, or who has a creative idea, I highly recommend reading this book and signing up for an incubator near you!
