I guess I was about 40 years old when I really began to "come into my own." I had moved to Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 37 to work on my children´s cancer foundation, but I still felt a calling to do something else. The one thing I knew I could run without question was assisted living communities. As I looked around the middle Tennessee area I felt something was not quite "there" in the senior living culture that currently existed.
Okay, time to change the world again!
Coming from a corporate background, I was always disillusioned by where I felt the "heart" of the assisted living industry was headed. Often it seemed the attitude of "resident´s first" in some of the bigger corporations was not really a priority. That disturbed me. Our elders deserve respect. However, sometimes all we give them credit for is the aggravation we feel when they are driving too slowly and we just happen to be the unlucky one following behind them.
It was time to start a company. But its philosophy - and my life´s philosophy - really took root when I had the opportunity to attend a weeklong seminar in Los Angeles called CEO Space.
CEO Space is an organization that invites a team of leading Fortune 500 CEO/Coaches who provide MBA-level lesson plans, including day and evening on-demand team coaching. It´s endorsed by Tony Robbins and the like. And it has 350 corporate trainers and major law firms on its faculty. The program covers everything from starting a business at the so-called "napkin" stage to taking your company public.
My original reason for attending was to learn more about how to expand my children´s cancer foundation, but it wasn´t until I opened Maristone Senior Living that I really begin to apply those concepts. Branding, strategic planning, niche marketing, and serving our customer - it’s all part of creating a business, an ENTITY in this senior living world. Now, Maristone was on its way.
Whoa! Wait! Hmmmm. I started thinking. "Strategic planning." "Marketing." "Branding." All of these concepts that we typically think of as having only business applications can also be applied to us as individuals. Isn´t that interesting? You see, as cancer survivors and business women we are already "branded." We have a track record of our achievements. We always still have the possibility of achieving great things. Often, that is done by giving back and giving our knowledge to the other women like ourselves and granting them opportunities that they may not be receiving.
Just because you may be in a certain place or at a certain time, you don’t have to sit on the sidelines. There is always a time for growth and reinvention. So the questions we must ask are varied. What exactly is our strategic plan? How are we "branded" to make us what we need to become in order to live this life we have been given and to accomplish great things? How do we define who we are and how do we take our knowledge as business women/survivors to a higher level in our communities and in our relationships?
Start doing this and you too can change the world one person and one day at a time.