Here's to New Beginnings!
- Meg Bower
- Jan 2, 2024
- 8 min read
January 2024
The Word of the Year
There are memes galore devoted to the blur that accompanies the week between Christmas and New Year’s. The week is usually obliterated by the chaos of family get-togethers, end-of-year tasks, and scurrying from place to place. Holiday activities consume so much time and energy that they leave me happy but exhausted on New Year’s Day.
Despite the dizzying churn, I always try to find sufficient quiet moments to contemplate life, rebirth, and new beginnings. Many people use this time to create resolutions to formalize what they hope to manifest in the year to come. For the past decade or so I’ve used a simple variation on this tradition, choosing just one word as the theme for the coming year. (The one-word version saves me from struggling to remember a whole list, reducing my risk of failure before the end of the first week). Past words have truly set a trajectory for the year. Choosing a word is a special internal task I save for the last week of the year, when life teeters on the brink of a new beginning.
This year our already-congested final week of 2023 was sidetracked by a few unexpected detours. My daughter’s junior varsity basketball coach decided the team needed extra practice, so he scheduled them for two-hour practices every day from Tuesday, December 26th to Saturday, December 30th. For my part, I decided on December 16th to prime my first major pursuit with the State of Maryland as Trunk Branch Twig Bud, committing to a proposal due on Friday, December 29th. These two activities weren’t easily compatible with each other, or with a week of relaxation, and the combination resulted in me sitting in the gym at multiple basketball practices the last week of 2023 with my laptop, busily assembling the components for the proposal.
A Strange Mental Stew
They play music during practice, so my head was filled with Run the World (Girls), plus the sounds of squeaking shoes and coach occasionally yelling “Freeze!” so he could review what they should have done instead of what they did. I was already mulling details related to community-building and how to organize an effective workgroup, how to build a study from the ground up. This strange mental stew combined with my meditative “word of the year” musings to produce a fabric of thoughts as strangely woven as any lucid dream.
Leading into this week, it was a near certainty that my word for 2024 would be SERVICE - a theme that has been on my mind for much of 2023. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how service works into my personal business model and noticing that a true service focus seems almost exclusive to new businesses. It seems that many businesses, once they achieve a certain level of success, establish goals based on market share, public prominence, money, or control, and in the process, service becomes something they say, but not always something they do. Other businesses somehow manage to retain the core purpose of providing something wanted or needed by their clientele - meeting their clients' needs first, and letting success follow. As my personal commitment to service has been reinforced, I’ve deliberately sought role models with successful businesses that have retained a service motivation even after achieving success. And being a woman-owned business, I’ve paid particular attention to those types of businesses created by other women. The reason is simple. Women manage differently than men. Women lead differently than men. Women serve differently than men.
Finding female role models used to be a challenge, but luckily, there are now many to choose from. The undisputed woman of 2023 is Taylor Swift – an astronomically successful entrepreneur, also known for her kindness and generosity, her grounded nature, and her hard work to provide a quality experience to every attendee at her concerts over the past year. She is a clear success story with a service orientation.
Another woman I watch is Rachel Pedersen – my marketing mentor-from-afar – a vastly successful young woman who is very open about her personal struggles, generous with her knowledge, and who advocates service as a business model. And one of my clients is an incredible female business owner and friend, with a career devoted to public service. Finally, this year has brought me closer to a distant cousin, a longtime relative but a new friend, and a woman I hold up as an example of gentle strength, whose entire life is about serving others and improving their lives.
This week, though, my thoughts courtside turned to a little-known female entrepreneur I first encountered in 2021 – Natalie White. A name common enough that if you Google her, a number of other Natalie Whites will come up before the Natalie White I have in mind.
Which Natalie White?
The Natalie White I’m referring to is only 25 years old, but she’s already in her fifth year as owner of a highly successful company endorsed and financed by Mark Cuban - and, as it happens, a business in service to a need which she was uniquely positioned to meet.
Here is the context.
Until 2019 (just a few years ago!) women had to purchase basketball shoes designed for men.
Even professional WNBA players.
Even if the colors were different.
Even if the size labels were replaced with women’s sizes.
The soles, the shapes, the width – everything about the shoes was designed for men’s feet.
And men’s knees, and men’s hips, and men’s weight…all very different from women’s knees, hips, and weight.
As a former skier, I know all about gender differences in the Q-angle, and as a mom of a player, I know all about the tendency for female basketball players to experience knee injuries. I know about the importance of proper footwear in sports, so when my daughter went shopping for her first basketball shoes in 2018 and they directed us to the boy’s section, I remember being dismayed.
In 2018, Natalie White was a college basketball player who questioned this status quo. She’d played her whole life in men’s shoes. The last straw came when she noticed professional WNBA players wearing shoes named after famous male NBA players. She wondered why everything women did in basketball was grounded in men. Why the very foundation of everything they did, including the soles on their feet, was based on men.
A year later, Natalie White, a gutsy 20-year-old college sophomore, researched and learned and innovated and pitched – and finally created Moolah - a brand-new basketball shoe designed by a woman for women. A quality shoe. A shoe that is 100% styled to fit the needs of women who play basketball.
A shoe now worn by many WNBA players…including Mark Cuban’s girls…and my daughter.
A shoe sold in Dick’s Sporting Goods, nationwide.
If you are curious, check out her story on the website at www.moolahkicks.com . She talks about everything from her inspiration to the box design, what they mean to her, and what she hopes they mean to girls – to have a foundation that is grounded in their passion, work, and skill, without leaping off from something men have made or done.
Questions
Sitting beside the basketball court, contemplating my role as the lead on a team that turned out to be all women, headed by a new woman-owned business, for a project led by a woman, while watching two teenage women play ball in shoes created out of the mind of a woman barely out of her teens herself, I found myself thinking less about service and more about foundations. The first step. The bottom rung. Beginnings. Professional Dialogue has taught me to frame good questions, so the thoughts rattling in my head beneath the music formed as enquiries.
What gave Natalie White the courage to step out and do the unthinkable, to create something completely new and needed, something with which she had no experience?
What gives woman entrepreneurs like Rachel Pedersen, Taylor Swift, my client, and my cousin - people with huge service-driven hearts - the grounding to build a clientele around new in the world based solely on their personal talents?
What allows me, a relatively new business owner, to rally a team and submit a proposal to a new client with the confidence that our team, if chosen, can deliver?
And finally, what can we do now to give women like my daughter the self-confidence to fulfill their potential in the world? What do they require to have confidence to take the metaphorical jump shot? My thoughts kept going to those shoes, and the difference they made for so many ball players., literally and metaphorically, from the ground up.
The foundation of it all
I realized that the answer to most of my questions had surfaced in one of the last sessions of the Dialogue conference, back in October.
From a Dialogic perspective, effective communication is related to sincerity. The idea is simple - if you want people to understand you, you have to be clear in your intentions, your actions, and your words. Peter Garrett, at the time, referred to this consistency as “integrity” – pure alignment between inner and outer self, between thoughts, words, and actions, with no spin. In the building industry, the word integrity can be used to refer to the soundness of a structure, going back to the foundation and the manner in which the pieces are stacked up from the bottom. Anyone who has played Jenga can understand this concept. Disrupt the structure and the whole thing tilts.
The Oxford Dictionary has two definitions for integrity. The more common definition is “The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.” The other, closer to Peter’s usage, is “The state of being whole and undivided.”
These two definitions seem the same when applied to people in business. If you are consistent with your intentions, thoughts, words, and actions, your intentions will be clear and consistent, leading to a trustworthiness people will recognize. If you have integrity, you will be honest about what you can do and fair in your dealings with others by default. All of this is consistent with being service-driven, the goal I’d started with in the beginning.
The key is the alignment of internal with external, matching invisible desires with externally visible accomplishments, and maintaining a strong integrity of parts – mission and work product; player and shoe; talking the talk and walking the walk.
Sitting by the court I realized that the role models I’ve chosen have retained their service focus long after success by maintaining an alignment between their inner values and their outer actions. This, I realized, is the secret to holding onto service, no matter what the outward context. Doing the work and then knowing one’s own inner strengths, one’s offerings, and one’s skill, and aligning one’s actions to that is what allows the entrepreneur to take the leap or my daughter to take the shot while retaining the link to the heart of the service motivation that started it all.
And so…in the end, the word INTEGRITY – the alignment of intentions, thoughts, words, and actions - is what launches with me into the new year. Like a jump shot in the right shoe. Like a leap of faith with a new team or a new project. But with a heart devoted to serving client needs.
Like any well-grounded new beginning.
Happy 2024, everyone!!!
May it be a good one, from the ground up!
Meg
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