I’m starting a movement – literally – and I want you to be a part of it.

This is going to make a big difference in your life and all it requires is one hour once a month.

Apart from some of your time, it’s free.

This movement will help you do the following:

• strengthen your finances
• develop more skills
• build your confidence
• create more options for you and your loved ones
• have more fun
• stay healthy
• build an all-important network of connections across the country to speed up your goal achievement

I’ll get to the “how” and the “details” in a second.

 

First, did you read this?

My weekend started off with this article, in the National Post section of my local newspaper, which stopped me cold. Author Kevin Carmichael says the following:

“… the data are conclusive: women have been hurt the most by [the pandemic], and there is reason to seriously consider the possibility that the recovery will be equally as discriminatory.

Royal Bank of Canada economists Dawn Desjardins and Carrie Freestone dug into Statistics Canada’s latest hiring data and found that almost 100,000 women have left the labour force since February, compared with only 10,000 men.”

He goes on to suggest this: “The math suggests a disproportionate number of women are on a path to long-term unemployment, a miserable state that feeds on itself because skills atrophy, making it ever harder to find a good job.”

 

What happens when I get angry

The last time that I got good and mad about a situation, I created the Women’s Money Group and pivoted my business to focus on women’s financial literacy.

That happened after I read Mariko Lin Chang’s book, Shortchanged: Why Women Have Less Wealth and What Can Be Done About It. Chang demonstrated that there is a massive wealth gap between men and women. It was a hard, but inspiring read for me.

Well, I’ve got all those feels once again.

Over the past twenty years, I have learned that it’s OK to feel angry, but it’s not OK to stay in that state. It’s counterproductive to wallow in negative emotions.

Instead, do something useful with the information at hand.

The most productive thing I can do – and it’s something I’ve taught my coaching clients – is to ask the following question:

“What do I want?”

Here’s how I answered that question:

I want women to finally have what so many men have – connections, a network of support, a sounding board, more confidence, and opportunities.

So, that’s what we’re going to create, together.

 

Harnessing the female advantage

For centuries, men have benefitted from the equivalent of a men’s club, a brotherhood of support.

Men have connected in clubs, organizations, and on sports fields to do business, find solutions, create broad networks, and swap opportunities.

They have reached out to each other, exclusively in some cases as was pointed out to me by Jennifer McGahan, a successful business woman in my area and a recent guest on the Women’s Money Group.

Jennifer shared a story in which she discovered that only men were invited to discuss a real estate investment opportunity. Their wives were not asked to attend, despite the fact that the money in play for the investment came from joint funds.

It’s not that the women were deliberately excluded; it’s that they didn’t even show up on the radar. There were no women present at that meeting.

You know what I say to that?

ENOUGH.

Let’s change that and create our own female advantage. After all, we are natural connectors, on the whole. It’s time to harness the female advantage and create opportunities for ourselves so that we can live life on our terms, regardless of the pandemic.

 

ANNOUNCING: The WMG Walk & Talk

Covid-19 has disproportionately affected women everywhere. Our vulnerabilities – working in hard-hit sectors, earning less, having less wealth, less access to opportunities, a harder time building skills – are hurting us.

However, we can start to reverse some of that by connecting and creating a network of our own.

It’s our turn to connect, to come together to share knowledge, contacts, ideas, opportunities, support, and connections.

I’m creating a worldwide monthly event called the Women’s Money Group Walk & Talk. You do not need to be a member of my paid Women’s Money Group to participate.

The Walk & Talk is free and open to every woman regardless of age, background, location, or circumstance.

Here’s how this will work:

1. Once a month we will connect in our respective communities to go for a walk and talk about personal finance.
2. I will set the date and the topic of discussion for each Walk & Talk. I’ll announce the date and topic each month in the WMG Community Facebook Group (see link below).
3. Pick a location in your area that would be fun to walk around in for roughly an hour and invite your girlfriends, relatives, and colleagues to join you.
4. If you organize the Walk & Talk in your area, you decide the time to meet. If the weather is bad on the chosen date, we’ll set the next day as the “Rain Date”.
5. I’ll share the steps on getting everyone chatting about the topic in play each month. There will be a simple process to follow to get things going, because most women aren’t YET comfortable starting conversations about money.
6. Don’t worry – you won’t be asked to share any confidential information. This isn’t an AA meeting!
7. Take selfies of your group and post them on the Women’s Money Group Community Private Facebook Group (free for all women).
8. Introduce yourself in the Facebook group. Let’s get to know each other and create connections with like-minded women across the planet.
9. Share one cool thing that your group shared, learned, or discovered during your Walk & Talk.

Next year, when the world is open once again, I will create an annual event for women to come together to continue the process of connecting and creating opportunities.

For now we Walk and we Talk.

 

What’s in it for you?

In a nutshell, it’s all about creating opportunities, finding solutions, building your skills, growing your network, and creating better options for yourself.

Have I mentioned having fun yet?!

The more you walk and talk, the more you will know about personal finance and the stronger your sense of confidence will become.

You will also realize that whatever your area of weakness, you are not alone. There are a ton of women in exactly the same situation.

Suddenly, that feeling of isolation evaporates. You have found your community of women for whom talking about money is normal. Who else can you do that with?

And when your confidence and knowledge grow, your results grow.

Here’s what else will happen:

Susan will tell Katelyn in Calgary that she’s looking for a new supplier for her business. Katelyn will say, “I know a woman in Toronto who sells that. Let me connect you with her.”

And Janet will tell her group in Montreal that her daughter is just about to head off to university and needs her first job this summer. Kyra will mention that she knows of a small business nearby looking for help in July and August. Kyra makes the introduction.

Rebecca in St. John’s will say that she’s intimidated by investing and Samantha will tell her about a group she formed with other women to talk about investing and offer mutual support. Does Rebecca want to join in?

Sonya in Washington will share that she was recently laid off and needs to develop her computer literacy skills to get a better job. Evelyn will point out that she knows of someone else who has just gone through that very process, and she’ll connect them for idea-swapping and mentoring.

Andrea will talk about a real estate deal she wants to put together and Dominique will tell her she knows of a few women investors. They set up a time to meet via Zoom to discuss it.

And that, my friends, is how we build our own network and close up the vulnerabilities that are harming us, while meeting other women and having fun.

 

The first Walk & Talk is Saturday, March 13th. Are you in?

If you’ve been reading this and thinking, “I want this for me!” then here’s what you do.

First:

Request to join the free Women’s Money Group Community Private Facebook Group.

Second:

Get on the mailing list for the Walk & Talk Events by clicking HERE. I will share details and upcoming events via this list and the Facebook Group.

Third:

Share this post with the women in your life and invite them to join you on March 13th.

Fourth:

Be Covid-19 compliant. Please respect all Public Health rules about gathering size, social distancing, wearing masks, etc. I’m organizing the March 13th walk in Ottawa and will restrict my group to 25 people as per the current Public Health guidelines. In addition, I will ask every participant to wear a mask.

I trust you to do the right thing in your area.

Finally:

My motto is No Shame, No Blame, No Judgement. I ask that all participants honour this. Every woman is welcome and we approach all conversations with NS, NB, NJ.

 

Please help me get the word out

Share this post with as many women as you can.

My goal is to get photos of women walking and talking about money, swapping ideas, from as many cities and towns across the globe as possible.

If it’s true that all ships rise in the ride, then it’s time to bring in the tide. Let’s see what kind of magic we can do when we come together to support one another.