Day 122: Lavinia Weissman

January 30, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“I said ‘Now wait a minute.  I don’t want my precious moments of time when I’m relaxed to just be about sitting in a cushion to meditate to let go and go to a 12-step meeting to find out how I can accept the things I cannot change and change the things I can.’  I said ‘I’m going to go out there, and I’m going to enjoy myself, and I’m going to love nature, and I’m going to make my life work.’”

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Toni Reece: Hi, Lavinia, thank you so much for joining us today on the Get Inspired! Project, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Lavinia Weissman: Sure.  I’m Lavinia Weissman.  I’m from Boston, Massachusetts, and I work in the area of what I call “WorkEcology” where I’m looking at the whole workforce issue as it relates to the changing environment of work and how that’s affected by environment and health and economic sustainability.

Toni: Well thank you.  Lavinia, when you think of the word inspiration, who do you inspire and how do you do that?

Lavinia: Well, for people who have known me a really long time that are my close friends, they know that I’ve been through a lot of experiences around loss, death and dying, and complicated illness, and that through a number of years, I just keep getting up and moving ahead.  And so often I’m told that people approach me who are close to me and they say “I don’t know how you do it.  I don’t even know how you get up in the morning sometimes.”

What I’ve discovered is that they have come to appreciate the fact no matter what is going on that surrounds my life — like an experience I once had with my dad in intensive care for 65 days — that I just look forward and I say “Okay, what is there to enjoy and appreciate today, and what do I have to thank and be blessed for.”

Toni: Wow, that’s pretty powerful stuff.  So you inspire others by the example that you set going through the very difficult times you’ve been through.

Lavinia: Yes, and I think that I’ve been an early person in terms of being affected a lot by what people are so aware of right now around loss of health insurance, loss of jobs, and economic instability, because I actually was working for a firm where I studied and predicted downsizing and then, by the end of that time, I was going through a divorce, and there was a downturn in the economy, and my father was ill.  I was laid off and considered a high-risk employee, even though I met all my sales.

Toni: So, let me ask you this:  The way that you go about this, to keep moving forward and inspiring others, by setting that example, what do you do that you believe then helps people to explore their potential?

Lavinia: Well, a lot of people call me these days who have no jobs.  It’s from a variety of places, including younger people who have recently gotten out of graduate school and invested in two years in MBA in sustainability because their dream is to make a difference and there’s no jobs out there.  And they now have anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 worth of debt, and they don’t know what to do.

With those calls, the first thing I say is “Imagine yourself in an organization or a company” — because some people want to work in the nonprofit or educational sector – “and what is it, if you were waking up every morning and doing, what would you be doing and where would you be going to work, and how would you be relating to people, and why don’t you hang out your shingle?”

For example, for a woman that I’ve been mentoring who just completed Hope International School of Business MBA Program in Dubai, she had a dream years ago to be a marine biologist and lived in the UK, completed her education and was unable to get any job in the field of marine biology and ended up in the world of finance.   So then she thought “Oh, if I get my MBA, and I have this finance background and I have this marine biology background, I’ll be able to zoom ahead with what I’m most passionate about.”

We’re now seven months since she’s finished the program.  She’s had amazing interviews from companies that actually made decisions not to hire her; it had nothing to do about her.  She called me a few weeks ago and she said “Now what?”

I said “You’ve got a LinkedIn.com profile.  What do you want to do with this education?”  She said “I want to work in public relations and social media to educate the public on environmental and marine biology issues.”  I said “Great, hang that out as a banner.”  That’s what I’ve done every time I’ve gotten laid off.

Toni: Okay, so it’s really just taking someone’s idea of what they may want to do and helping them reframe that so that it stays a very positive situation.

Lavinia: Absolutely.  And then there’s another side that I also do that has to do with people.  A lot of people … I don’t know if you’re aware of this Toni, but 50% of adults in the United States are now chronically ill.

Toni: No, I didn’t.

Lavinia: Throw that data in with what’s going on with the economy, job loss, and loss of health insurance when you lose an employer who gives you health insurance and the cost of health insurance if you have to support that privately, and try to get up every morning.

Toni: Yeah, no kidding.

Lavinia: The irony was that my original career was as a healthcare leader in systems and finance.  I got to do incredible things.  In that period of divorce and layoff, my ex-husband was supposed to provide me health insurance through his family plan through his employer, which he did.  And then one day I got a letter in the mail from the HMO that I had worked for that I was no longer eligible for health insurance through my ex-husband, even though the divorce agreement required that, because they have the right legally to throw me off the policy since we weren’t living under the same roof.

Toni: Oh, geez.

Lavinia: So, given that I also have a chronic condition, and I’m also chemically sensitive and environmentally sensitive, and I was a single mom and I had eldercare issues, I can’t afford to get sick.  I just really had to figure out without being able to afford health insurance what were my choices and what could I afford and what did I need to do to keep myself healthy?

So that’s the other part of my practice.  I work with people to embrace chronic illness, to not feel defeat, to figure out how they can work, to figure out how they can fund the resources — most of which for the chronically ill are not covered by health insurance, because a lot of what you have to do for yourself is at home; it’s not even in the doctor’s office.

Toni: What a great piece of  information, too, which we will post how to get a hold of you at the end of the blog post but to also help people to not feel that defeat, not only in work or their personal life but, you know, dealing with a chronic illness – that’s fantastic.

So let me ask you then, what do you need to be inspired?

Lavinia: Well, you know it’s funny.  You send me the questions ahead of time, and I cannot tell you how many times I wrote.  These questions are really powerful.

Toni: Well thank you.  And some of them are hard to …

Lavinia: I sent them out to my whole network.  All my ya-ya sisters — not people I work with – but, you know, my girlfriends.

Toni: Right.

Lavinia: I have a lot of friends who are single parents, and single parents historically are the ones who have the hardest time finding inspiration, in part because we’ve so much to do from the moment we get up till we go to sleep at night.  We don’t even have time to think about getting inspired.

Yesterday I found myself in this conversation with a friend of mine, and I said “You know, I’m in a new phase of this because I’m empty-nested, my parents have passed away, and now it’s just me.”  I suppose what used to inspire me when it was most difficult for me was that I would say “Oh, when my daughter’s grown” or “Oh, when my parents have passed on I will have my own life.”  And then looked what happened with this economy.  It was like “Oh, I can’t resume the career of my dreams.  Oh, I can’t do that.”

And then I said “Wait a minute, I am not going to accept this horrible idea of a future that nothing can work in my life at this stage.  I want to have fun.  I am not going to accept at this age that people are going to tell me ‘Oh, you’re not going to get any work because they always want to hire people younger than you.’  I am not going to accept the fact that at this time where I’m not on call from my cell phone because someone is sick or a child needs my attention or a corporate employer wants me on frenetic demand which is not something suitable to my personality.  I don’t want that life.  I’m going to have a life that works.”

How I inspired myself is literally looking in a mirror and yelling at myself, because I refused to accept the defeatist conditions that this country has got itself into.

Toni: So you really gave yourself a stern talking-to, to reframe your reality.

Lavinia: Right.  You know, that’s been extremely difficult, and it’s not easy.  Because when you’re a single woman in this country and you don’t have other people that you can fall back on or someone to share your rent or someone to share your home with and someone to whatever — even smile at you when you don’t want to smile — you’re home alone.  My first year of that, I ate 98% of my meals alone because people don’t even sit across the table anymore and enjoy meals with each other, which I think is very important.

So I just really had to motivate myself, and then I had to inspire myself to shut off the news and shut off negativity, because it’s all so easy when you’re a single person and you’re looking for company to go to all these support group meetings or community meetings and listen to people figure out how they’re going to get beyond what they’ve had a handle in dysfunction.

I said “Now wait a minute.  I don’t want my precious moments of time when I’m relaxed to just be about sitting in a cushion to meditate to let go and go to a 12-step meeting to find out how I can accept the things I cannot change and change the things I can.”  I said “I’m going to go out there, and I’m going to enjoy myself, and I’m going to love nature, and I’m going to make my life work.”  That’s not easy for me, because sometimes I have an environmental toxic exposure, and I get sick or something happens where I get sleep-deprived, which is a big challenge for my health, but I do it.  But you have another question.

Toni: No, that’s okay, that’s all right.  I want to, though, ask you, just in this word inspiration — and I understand that what inspires you when you allow yourself to think about it is that you’ve inspired you and you’ve had to lift yourself up and move, and whatever that took to do that — but do you find yourself when you’re running low and you’re looking around things, do you find yourself reaching for certain things that help to lift you up?

Lavinia: I do.  I make sure that I get off the speed pace and I relax.  I just get quiet, and I make sure that I’m in touch with my inner voice, and then I also make sure that I surround myself with music, that I go to a meditation group.  I’ve been having a need around meditation and music and other things lately.  That was very hard for me to find when I returned to Boston six months ago, because every kind of community group I’d go to, it was just so regimented or it was so prescriptive that it wasn’t filling my need.

And then you know, I just finally said “I want to find a small group of people who have a meditation community who really enjoy relating to each other.”  I did that, and then I started going out to music, and you know, like all of a sudden I met two other women who’ve both been through difficult single parenting situations, and now we’re having lunch once a month.

I now have a group of five women around me who have all been challenged to keep a roof over their head and sustain what they want in life, to do what they want.  And then I just decided that I really needed to go for it in terms of establishing my non-monetary incubator and innovation center for work, health, and environment — which I’m doing — and I ended up having people come to my door that are helping me that also inspire me.

Toni: So basically it was not letting the fact that you couldn’t see right in front of you what was available at your fingertips.  You created  your own and kept looking and looking until you found what you truly were looking for and then other doors started to open; that’s what I’m hearing you say.

Lavinia: Right.

Toni: The final question is, when you find yourself … and you are meeting new people and doors are opening for you, what else do you do to explore your own potential?

Lavinia: Well, I just constantly learn and bring myself in the conversations that are relative to my work, and that’s a complex set of research.  But, your final question about achieving my own potential, that one was really hard on me this weekend, because I got very honest with myself in a place where I just have not inspired myself.  And that is that through all the years and just through my upbringing, it has totally escaped me to ever have the small modest home of my dreams that I want, that is my place, that is my home, and I can’t find out from a landlord that they’re going to sell it so I have to move, or I have enough control over it that I can make sure that I don’t have to deal with environmental toxins and other things.

I have to thank you for that question, because I got really stubborn with it over the last few days, and I’ve really been talking honestly.  And I guess it’s really about my belief and candor to the people that I’m close to, and I’ve said “You know, I’m not being honest with myself, so I’m not being honest with my friends, and I have no idea how I’m going to do this, but what I really need at this point, not just to inspire me but to really help me move beyond the place where I’m at to really work my full potential is the home of my dreams that I’ve never had.”

Toni: Boy I’ll tell you, I really appreciate you being so honest in this interview and sharing with everyone just your take on this, and how difficult it is to answer that question, what are you doing to fulfill your potential.  And it allows you to go “You know what, there’s one thing out there yet that I’m going to go for and …”

Lavinia: And I have no idea.  I have no tangible evidence.  I don’t have a lottery ticket that I’ve won or a million dollars in the bank.  I watch Extreme Makeover like everybody else, but I don’t even qualify for Extreme Makeover, because I don’t have a home that they can reconstruct, and I no longer have a family and children I’m taking care of, you know?  So it was like, you know, this one is like “Whoa, you know what I want?  A home in which I can have my home office for my organization” — which is global because I work in Australia, I work in the United States, I work with people in Europe.  I want my dream virtual cottage, and I have no idea how I’m going to create that.

Toni: Well, I would imagine though, every image you have set in this interview, that I would go back to something that you said very early on that motivated you and that I … is that you do not want people to feel defeat, and you said that and that what you do to inspire your friends and family is that you set an example.  So, you put a stake in the ground, and I know that you will not feel that defeat, and I appreciate everything that you’ve said in this interview.  It’s been very enlightening, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people that are going to gain a lot of value from this.  Lavinia, I wish you the best.  I wish you to keep moving forward yourself, and thank you for everything you’ve shared with us today.

Lavinia: Thanks so much, Toni, take care.

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For more information about Lavinia Weissman:  www.laviniaweissman.com

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