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Give up your fears and get in the driver’s seat.

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When over 500 Gutsy people of all ages, and all nationalities converge in the Portland Museum of Art, you can be sure of one thing: there is a ton of energy bouncing around.

And when the theme of the event is, “How do we live a remarkable life in a conventional world?” with a mix of all kinds of artists, students, young and less young, entrepreneurs, travelers and non-profit leaders, you know that this is a group of people who are not afraid to take risks, live their passions and get back in the driver’s seat.

Chris Guillebeau wrote, The Art of Non-Conformity, and decided to put together this event during his 63 city Unconventional Book Tour. Together with an eight-member team, as well as many volunteers (those dressed in blue T-shirts in the video below), Chris created an “awesome” event. This seems to be his favorite word.

 

Highlights from WDS in Portland, Oregon, June 3-5. 2011

Some of the speakers in this video are:
Leo Babauta from ZenHabits, who’s topic was how to change your habits. follow the path of simplicity, and something we rarely hear, “Have zero goals.” Leo said he used to make weekly, monthly and yearly goals, but that became too stressful to achieve. So now he claims that by, “Letting go of goals, you’re free of the management of your goals.” I personally like his suggestion. Leo continues, “When you don’t have a destination, there’s no failure.”

Jodi Ettenberg from LegalNomads,

“Jodi knew she wanted to travel to faraway places.” She worked as an attorney for five years in New York and saved her money so she could travel. She says, “Find your passion and keep on the path despite the obstacles.” She believes that by keeping an open mind, freelance opportunities come to you, and that you have to believe in what you do. “We all have fear and anxiety, there will always be negativity and criticism, because people can’t understand.” 

There were so many inspiring authors, world travelers, artists and TEDx speakers, like Neil Pasricha from 1000 Awesome Things, that I shall share in future posts.

Chris Gullebeau has an amazing question which I’d like you to think about.

1). “What do you really want to get out of Life?”
and the second part to this is:
2). “What can you offer the world that no one else can?”

Please share your answers with us.
Thanks for stopping by.

If she can do it at 74 so can we.

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Ernestine Shepherd 74-years-old
Photo credit blackfitnessblog

What’s happening to women in their seventies? It seems like more and more are entering the Guinness Book of World records, and Ernestine Shepherd is no exception.
You may recall the post I wrote called: “Is 75 the new 45?” with “Paddy” Jones, the English salsa dancer with the flexibility of a young woman.

Well now we have Ernestine, and I’m even more motivated to keep lifting weights after watching this incredible 74-year-old woman. She’s a body builder and didn’t start working out until she was 56. Her goal is to inspire and motivate others to become fit naturally. She doesn’t take supplements or steroids and believes that you need to stay determined, dedicated and disciplined. She runs ten miles a day, at 4 a.m., and follows a strict high protein diet, starting with three liquid egg whites a day.

If you’d like to see her senior fitness class, please click on another short video here. She is on a mission to help and inspire everyone, young and old alike to get fit. As a personal trainer, she even trains men in their thirties.

I’m inspired by this one Gutsy lady. Are you? Her motto is: “Don’t let life pass you by. You can be fit.”

I’m off to the gym to do another set of bicep curls, and tricep extensions, what about you?

Memorial Day and what it means to me

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My son during parent weekend at New Mexico Military Institute

Memorial Day has taken on a whole new meaning in my life. Let me explain. Like many Americans, I believed it was a holiday signifying the start of summer barbecues, beach days and a vacation on the horizon.

But now that my seventeen-year-old son enlisted and started a nine week Army Basic training program, I have developed a new appreciation for what young men and women go through, and what other service men and women have done for us, and continue to do for our country and our world.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I have often taken our freedom for granted. If only we lived in a peaceful world where every single person on our planet could fall asleep without the fear of being killed, raped, and had a  safe place to live.

For the next nine weeks, my 17-year-old son, like all the other soldiers during Basic training will learn the following Seven Army Values:

* Loyalty
* Duty
* Respect
* Selfless Service
* Honor
* Integrity
* Personal Courage

“These values form the basis of your soldier character and they sustain a soldier in times of both peace and conflict.”

His daily training schedule will be the following:

Army Boot Camp 5 a.m. – Wake up
5:30 a.m. – Physical Training
6:30 a.m. – Breakfast
8:30 a.m. – Training
Noon – Lunch
1 p.m. – Training
5 p.m. – Dinner
6 p.m. – Drill Sergeant Time
8:30 p.m. – Personal Time
9:30 p.m. – Lights Out

And finally, let’s not forget the gas chamber training:

As explained on the basic training website: “The gas chamber is probably the most mentally challenging exercise you will have to overcome at basic training. Recruits have to breathe Ortho-chlorbenzylidenedimalonitrile. Wow, that sounds scary. Actually, it is just the active substance of CS gas. You might recognize the name better as the common riot control formula called tear gas. Now, the bad news is yes, you will have to go into an isolated room and breathe this gas in your lungs and it does sting a little bit. The good news is as soon as you walk outside, the exercise is over.”

For those of you who have fought for our freedom, and for those families who have suffered the loss of a loved one, please forgive my lack of understanding. I finally grasp the sacrifice that your son, daughter, father, mother, brother, sister, husband, wife, lover, friend, cousin, uncle, aunt, or other relative has gone through. No words can express the gratitude that I now feel.

Should we raise our children without gender identity?

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You’re pregnant and can’t wait for the ultrasound that will finally reveal the sex of your child. You have a desire to bond with your baby and to prepare for the arrival of your bundle of joy. You look through baby-name books and make a list of the ones you like for boys and girls, depending on the sex, or…..wait a minute… you don’t believe in gender identity?

I’m not talking about choosing Michael for a boy or Daisy for a girl, nor do I mean dressing Michael in blue and Daisy in pink. I’m talking about raising your kid to be genderless, like the Canadian parents of Storm, a four-month-old baby, who refuse to reveal the sex of their baby in the hopes of curbing sexual stereotyping.

Kathy Witterick, 38 and David Stocker, 39, are the parents of Storm, their youngest child who has two older brothers, Jazz 5 and Kio 2. Only the brothers, the two nurse midwives who helped deliver Storm at home, and a very close family friend know whether Storm is a boy or a girl. What prompted them to do this with baby Storm? They say to offer “their children the freedom to choose who they want to be, unconstrained by social norms about males and females.”

The grandparents, although supportive, resented explaining this lack of gender to friends and co-workers. “They worried the children would be ridiculed,”  and furthermore, most people said “they were setting their kids up for a life of bullying in a world that can be cruel to outsiders.”

According to Michele Angello, a U.S. psychologist, “There is little hard, scientific data on exactly what does make people feel and act like a boy or a girl, but some evidence points to gender identity being hard-wired.”

I’d like to refer to the book I mentioned in a previous post called, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein, where she says that when her daughter, Daisy, was born, “I was committed to raising her without a sense of limits: I wanted her to believe neither that some behavior or toy or profession was not for her sex.”  Orenstein then explains how on Daisy’s first day of pre-school at age two, she wore her favorite “engineer overalls” and her Thomas the Tank Engine lunchbox. “All it took was one boy who yelled, ‘Girls don’t like trains!'” and within a month, Daisy knew the names and gown colors of every Disney princess.

This brings me back to Storm’s brothers, Kio and Jazz. Were others told their sex and why have they both chosen long braided hair? All I can say is they must have incredibly strong personalities to stand up for themselves at school, as I am sure other kids have made hurtful comments.

Kathy and David state, “We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime (a more progressive place? …),” they said.

And David believes, “If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs.”

What do you think?

Are parents raising their kid to be genderless right or wrong?

I can’t wait to get a Gutsy discussion going.

Where are girls and women heading?

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You have probably heard of Sheena Upton, the California mom who claimed to inject her eight-year-old daughter, Britney, with botox to improve her chances of winning a beauty pageant.

After child protective services took her girl away to investigate the case, Upton claimed she fabricated the entire story for compensation. She was in fact paid $200 to hold a syringe with a clear liquid, and in her video stated that she didn’t even know what botox was.

So why is there a video of her injecting her daughter with a syringe? And why did Upton justify this by claiming that other moms give botox treatments to their daughters in order to play the tough beauty pageant game?

In one of the interviews which you can view here, her daughter said, “I just, like, don’t think wrinkles are nice on little girls.” She also said that it “hurts,” and that her mother also waxed the hairs off her legs and when asked why, Britney answered, “It’s not ladylike to have hair.”

The concern is how this will impact Britney psychologically, as well as any other girls who are going through the same loss of innocence.

I find it so depressing to hear about all the pressures girls seem to be going through today, especially after hearing Britney say that she puts up with the pain of botox injections to look “beautiful and pretty.” I am deeply saddened, as are most mothers and grandmothers. I wrote a previous article on what is considered a beautiful woman in different countries around the world which sparked several comments.

This topic relates to a book I am reading, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein, where she states,  “According to a 2006 survey of more than two thousand school-aged children, girls repeatedly described a paralyzing pressure to be ‘perfect’: not only to get straight As and be the student body president, editor of the newspaper, and captain of the swim team but also to be ‘kind and caring,’ ‘please everyone, be very thin, and dress right.’ …They now feel they must not only ‘have it all’ but be it all: Cinderella and Supergirl. Agressive and agreeable. Smart and stunning. Does that make them the beneficiaries of new opportunities or victims of a massive con job?”

Orenstein then continues, “It is as if the more girls achieve the more obsessed they become with appearance–not dissimilar to the way the ideal of the ‘good mother’ was ratcheted up just as adult women flooded the workforce.”

So where are girls and women heading in the next ten-twenty years? Any thoughts on this topic are welcome. I’m particularly interested in what men think?

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