Are you tired of shame, blame, regret, and fear of failure holding you back from ultimate happiness and wealth? Kim O’Hara, the host and author of Gone with the Gunk: Permission to be Happy and Wealthy Women, believes it’s time for women to permit themselves to celebrate, inspire, and bask in a new paradigm!
Life is too short to suffer in silence. This panel brought women together, and I was honored to participate. We talked about how to clear the gunk in your life. It was hosted at the beautiful NeueHouse in Venice Beach on August 29th. The main goal:
Allow women to give themselves permission to live happier, more prosperous lives.
Expert Insights on Granting Yourself Permission
About the Host:
Kim O’Hara is a book coach in Los Angeles who spent years in television before becoming a book coach. She’s the author of the self-help book No Longer Denying Sexual Abuse: Making the Choices That Can Change Your Life. She has contributed to the LA Times and prestigious literary journals as an essayist. She writes a weekly Substack column, “I Give You Permission,” based on her up-and-coming book, Gone with the Gunk: Permission to be Happy and Wealthy Women.
About the Panelists (from left to right):
I talked about my life for over a decade, building two successful startups (Glassdoor and Lever) as a journalist, brand builder, and content marketer. Upon the birth of my third, I felt lost and took the plunge to build a venture and podcast, MomShine—while still writing in tech and honoring that side of myself.
Jae Wu is a lifelong entrepreneur who owns a residential real estate business in West Los Angeles. She loves the life she has created and enjoys sharing how she conquered life’s challenges to fulfill her dreams. She is the mother of 2 amazing boys, happily married to her husband of over 20 years. She enjoys staying physically active through beach volleyball, pickleball, running, and almost anything that involves movement.
Allison Andrews Canter was wired for success from a young age and chased every opportunity she could. This led her to create San Diego Fashion Week, the longest-running and biggest independently owned and operated fashion week. She did all this while raising three little kids and authoring the book Ownership. In Ownership, Canter encourages you to get out of yourself, reach for the ultimate soul version of yourself, and inspire those around you to improve.
Before starting her coaching and consulting practice Becoming Better Together, Jen Mayer led Teach For America’s national Staff Learning and Development team, which designed and facilitated leadership and liberatory-consciousness-based work for more than 1,700 people.
4 Questions Central to Giving Yourself Permission
1) How can you stop fearing failure and make friends with your past to live a more fulfilled life?
If you want to be an entrepreneur, I hate to break it to you, but there is a lot of failure along the way. There can be some things you view as failure where you shift your thinking not to fear it so much but embrace it. I love how Dr. Emmett Miller referred to losing in this episode about Becoming Your Best Self. He turned that thinking into a simple analogy you can teach your kids.
You Either Win or You Learn
With that one simple shift, you can change how you look at failure so it’s not a fear but a welcome partner on your journey. There is always something to learn, even when things don’t go your way. Rewriting outdated scripts and learning resilience empowers you to succeed and view each milestone as a learning instead of a loss.
2) Is there a way to put shame, blame, and worry in the trash?
According to Allison on the panel, shame, and worry can be tools to self-reflect and look at something else to help guide you on a better path. If you aren’t regretting some things to some extent, you aren’t growing, and those signs could be something to look deeper into for answers. So, regret could be your tool and catapult your growth. As busy moms, you can worry all day and regret many things. That’s why there’s repair.
But shame should be put aside to protect women’s health. So many women don’t look into health problems because of the shame we are taught at young ages, and it doesn’t serve us. Instead, we often suffer in silence when we’re told the symptoms are normal and a part of our everyday lives.
I like how Gemma Allen discusses it in this Forbes article with Dr. Mary Claire, a doctor, and influencer in this space with over 3 million followers. She writes, “Menopause is finally coming of age via a generation of women refusing to accept stigma and generalizations and instead demanding an inclusive, shame-free system that is as broad and nuanced as the lives and experiences of those it serves.”
3) How can you be ok not knowing the outcome when granting yourself permission?
As women, we overanalyze, thinking we are supposed to know the return on investment (or ROI) of everything we set out to do. We are under societal pressure to perform and not fail because we have been pushing upstream in mud for so long. As the moderator and host, Kim assured us that the best accomplishments are when we dive in without knowing the answers and instead follow our hearts.
For me, it was wanting to quit a year into MomShine and then waking up to the show being honored multiple times by the Communicator Awards. I still don’t know the outcome, but stick with it if you feel called to something! You do have to enjoy your journey and compete with yourself daily as your barometer of success. Only by embracing the struggle can you be ok with whatever the outcome might be.
4) How can women feel more powerful and not give power away?
Jae drove home a strong message in her response to this question on the panel. Her adversaries and critics constantly commented on her energy and overconfidence. Her reply: “I shouldn’t have to make myself smaller, so you feel more comfortable.” I couldn’t agree more with this statement. Women should own their confidence and positivity in their day-to-day lives and tune out the external noise that doesn’t serve them. The more you can tap into your power and own it, the less others will feel enabled to take it away.
I also believe in ruthless prioritization as a busy mom. How can you become a “one less thing” gal and take something off the never-ending list of to-dos? How can you shift and simplify to focus only on what will catapult your growth? These areas fire me up and inspire me to continue interviewing experts and pumping out great content for MomShine—helping simplify all the daily things busy moms struggle with!
MomShine is Here to Help You Prioritize Yourself for Success and Happiness
Follow the MomShine show for more clips from the panel, and subscribe to our newsletters to learn more. I’d love to see this intimate panel and discussion in the Bay Area soon, so stay tuned for more! It was a night where women left feeling connected, enabled, and more powerful to say no and give permission to grow, change, and learn on their journeys to success and happiness.