FBW: Meghan from Meg’s Idle Chatter (Ms. October)

FBW stands for Featured Blogger of the Week. Each week we will feature one of our calendar ladies or gentleman. Mondays will be a post written by the FBW and Wednesdays will be an interview of the FBW. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

“Be the hero of your own life story.” –Alex Rover, Nim’s Island

I remember seeing the Blogger Body Calendar last year and thinking that I would never do anything like that. Not that I wouldn’t want to, but because I’m just me. Who wants me in a calendar? I’m just a mom with a blog. A woman with a blog and a lot say, but not anyone who would ever be in a calendar.

But now here I am. It wasn’t like I set out to “be” in a calendar. But sometimes life just goes in funny directions that you didn’t actually see coming. And now I’m in a calendar.

I often think of life in terms of being a writer. Something I’ve been doing since I was first able to put a pen to paper. And in the last few years as I’ve made a meager living (OK, not really a “living” but….) as a writer it’s been a roller coaster. But being in a calendar for bloggers, which to me is just another word for writer, is kind of a big deal.

We all have our dreams and aspirations in life. But so often we get mired down by the ins and outs of everyday life, that those dreams and aspirations just become treasures in a hope chest, things we dust off and look at every once in awhile and then put back in and never really do anything with.

We forget about those dreams as we work hard to do everything for everyone. To be everything for everyone. Mom, wife, volunteer, employee, co-worker, boss, friend, thin, energetic, happy, patient, perfect… etc. Sometimes our true sense of self gets so buried that it might as well be buried in that hope chest along with our dreams.

And being in this calendar is my chance to look at all of you reading this and say, dust off the dreams and take them out. Forget being who other people think you should be and be the person you want to be. Want to lose weight? Lose it. Want a new job? Find it. Want to be a better mom? Be one. Want to go back to school? Go. Want to learn to ballroom dance? Hop to it.

You are the hero of your own life story. The pen is in your hand, the next chapter is yours to write. No one else’s, so get busy writing. Because somewhere is a calendar with your name on it, waiting to show the world how awesome you are.

Happy living ladies!

You can find more of Meghan’s highly caffeinated and chocolate tinged musings at Meg’s Idle Chatter, Life360 or SheHeroes.org (where she is also in charge of New Media) and on Twitter at @meghan1018.

FBW: Michele from Scraps of My Geek Life (Ms. September)

FBW stands for Featured Blogger of the Week. Each week we will feature one of our calendar ladies or gentleman. Mondays will be a post written by the FBW and Wednesdays will be an interview of the FBW. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

I remember when I first heard about the Blogger Body calendar project and I thought, “How cool are those bloggers for participating.” There was no way I could ever do anything like that. Here I am a year later and I will be part of the 2012 Blogger Body calendar.

What changed my mind? Fear! I have spent much of my life worrying about what everyone thinks about everything I do, how I look and the choices I make. Enough is enough. I am a big enough critic of myself, I don’t need others to do it for me (even if only in my head.) I have two daughters ages 12 and 6 and my biggest fear is passing that bad habit to them.

I need to do something outside of my own comfort zone. I need to tell my girls how proud I am of me and of my body. But kids are smart. I can’t just tell them, I have to show them. You know, “talk the talk and walk the walk.” That was when I decided to not only show my girls how proud I am, but I’m going to show all of you too.

This won’t be easy for me. I have already gone through it a thousand times in my head. I can photoshop my boobs smaller or my thighs smaller, but I won’t.

What do I hope to achieve by doing this? That my world will not collapse if I am myself, flaws and all. I hope my daughters will see that I am not afraid to be myself. I hope that all of you will see the beauty in all of our bodies and stop being so hard on ourselves.

Dr. Phil once said that if we talked to our friends the way we talk to ourselves, we would have no friends. We need to be our own best friends. Stop the mean inner talk and only see the beauty in our lives and in our bodies.

Come September 2012, I will step outside my comfort zone and I hope to step out of the shell that I hide under and be myself. I am the only me there is!

Michele can be found on Twitter as ScrappinMichele, Facebook as Michele McGraw and Scraps of My Geek Life and LinkedIn.

FBW: Sandra from Body Bliss Central (Ms. August)

FBW stands for Featured Blogger of the Week. Each week we will feature one of our calendar ladies or gentleman. Mondays will be a post written by the FBW and Wednesdays will be an interview of the FBW. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

Looking at the world around us, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that the most important thing we must do every day is put a lot of time, money and energy into looking ‘hot’ – or at least as hot as we can!

And many of us do do that. I used to do it myself, for years! I was so dedicated to measuring up to the Official Body that I chose to restrict my food often, spend a small fortune on diet books, programs and memberships of weight loss groups, make the harshest judgements about my self based on how closely I was following the diet plan, and I’m embarrassed to say, I hardly ever took my kids to the beach when they were little because I was so ashamed of my body.

I know, crazy.

I bet you have a little list of things you wish you hadn’t avoided doing because of the way your body looks, or that you will do one day when your body’s perfect.

Now, from the wise old age of 49 I look back at that young mother and I want to give her a good hard kick followed by a long warm hug, and tell her that it’s okay to not be perfect. To help her see herself with the loving eyes of her children. To help her hear what her body actually wants and needs, and trust herself to give that to her body, 20 years earlier than she did.

Sadly I can’t do that, but what I can do is what I’ve been doing for the last six years, and that is help as many women as I can to allow themselves to give themselves that approval, that love, and that freedom.

When I first found the Body Blogger Calendar I had just finished running the second series of The Body Image Revolution. One of the speakers, Claire Mysko, is a powerful body image activist who turned my belief about myself as a reporter of body image activism to one of being a body image activist. So it was with this new awareness that I came to the Body Blogger Calendar and I thought it was a blog. I decided to join in and add my voice to the project.

I was literally shocked when I realized I had to provide a picture of myself! Like so many women, I’ve always pointed the camera so I didn’t have to be in the picture!

My instant response was “I can’t do that!”. Next response: “Why can’t I?” And my answer was step up: it’s the final step of this learning path, and the first step onto a new path. I have no idea where it’s leading, but when I asked my photographer girlfriend if she’d help me out with photographs she joined me in a laugh fest at my foray into being a calendar girl. Believe me, this was not on my bucket list and it’s way outside of the old comfort zone!

Which is exactly where we all need to be if we’re serious about stopping the merchants from telling us how we are supposed to look so we will be happy and successful. I honestly believe that government regulation is a small part of this picture. Market forces, driven by consumers, make the greatest changes. We are those consumers, now, here.

For me, being a calendar girl is a weird kind of freedom, and trust me, if I can declare in this way that I am enough just the way I am, you can too. And then, what else is possible?

Sandy blogs at www.BodyBlissCentral.com, and is the founder and host of the international telesummit series, The Body Image Revolution, which helps thousands of women transform their relationships with their bodies. The series brings together the leading thinkers and activists in the field of improving body image, in conversation with women who want peace with their bodies.

FBW: Mazarine from Wild Woman Fundraising with a Message of Hope and Survival (Ms. June)

FBW stands for Featured Blogger of the Week. Each week we will feature one of our calendar ladies or gentleman. Mondays will be a post written by the FBW and Wednesdays will be an interview of the FBW. If you want to know how you can be a part of the Blogger Body Calendar project, please click here.

I’m just gonna come out and say it. I had three years of abusive bosses. First, I worked at a women’s shelter.  I raised more money with appeals and grants and events than they had ever raised before. I came to work on time, every day with a smile, and my boss didn’t care about that. I did my job, but despite that, she just seemed to get people on her shit-list and then she decided it was time for them to go. She went through 30 people in a 20 person agency in 18 months. She was an abusive head of an anti-abuse agency. She refused to meet with me for 6 months. I kept trying to meet with her, and she just kept putting me off.  Then she decided I should leave. No warning, no performance review, no nothing. Just out the door. After I got fired, one of my co-workers got fired for absolutely no reason at all.

After that, she decided that she would take staff away from a shelter that needed 24-7 staffing. Women we were sheltering started prostituting themselves out of the shelter. She eventually found out, kicked the women out, but didn’t call the cops, because then it would have come out what a bad leader she was. She didn’t want to take responsibility for her actions. So she kept using the shelter, despite the fact that it was now known to pimps and johns all over the area, and was no longer a safe place for women in crisis. This is the kind of bad boss that I had. Thankfully she “resigned.”

The boss after her was even worse. He took the government grant-mandated cost of living raises for the social worker staff and put it into his own salary. He took donor-allocated funds of $50,000 from a woman who willed her savings to a program and put those into his own salary as well. He got paid $120,000 per year, and everyone else got paid $10-$14 per hour. He was never in the office, never did any fundraising, never supervised anyone, put one of his cronies into a program director position (a person who didn’t even know how to use email), took himself out to dinner with the nonprofit credit card, and got it taken away from him because of that, but he still didn’t get fired.

On top of that, I raised him $130,000 in grants, (up from $40,000 the year before I came on) and $100,000 more with an event and he didn’t care, he screamed at me anyway, whenever he felt like it, then he stopped meeting with me too, and then decided to fire me with absolutely no warning, no performance review, nothing. He was a horrible person. After him, I just didn’t trust bosses anymore. I didn’t trust any organization that had an “employment at-will” contract.

I got an up-close and personal look at workplace abuse. I even wrote extensively about workplace abuse in my book and on my blog, so that other people surviving in these situations could help themselves understand what was going on. I am telling you my story so that if you are in a bad situation, you can see that there is hope, there is life after your workplace abuse.

When I was fired in 2009, I was incredibly scared, yet exhilarated. I was stuck in the middle of the swiftest and most decimating downturn our country had ever seen. And worse, I was in one of the worst cities in America to be in, aside from maybe Detroit.  I was in Portland, Oregon, with a city motto of, “The City That Works.” This city had a 25% unofficial unemployment rate, and people I saw around town wryly joked that Portland was “The City That Doesn’t Work.” Thanks to excellent marketing, and a cheap cost of living, people moved there in droves from 1995 to 2009, which kept wages low, and unemployment high, making it the self-employment capital of America. Mostly in food carts, as far as I could see.

My low-paying nonprofit jobs and high county taxes had left me with no savings. Even though I was a very successful fundraiser, raising more with events and grants than had ever been received before, I had given all of my hard work to corporations that didn’t care about me anymore. Without my title, I was suddenly a nobody. I didn’t know what I was going to do. My family had never understood why I wanted to change the world, why I had to go off to the west coast and deny their continuous advice to become a dentist. They didn’t have much sympathy, and I knew I couldn’t go back.

So I fired off resumes every week, went to networking events, asked around in my social circles, and even with my interviewing skills, after seven or eight interviews over the course of four months, and hearing that they had decided not to hire anyone at all, or hire a consultant instead, I started to see the pattern.  Manufacturing had left Portland for cheaper shores, and with that, a lot of money. There were a lot of shops closing up. No one could afford to buy. Goodwill was bursting with newly desperate people clutching third-hand shoes. It became a low-paid service economy, like much of America. Nonprofits didn’t have money to hire because their own donors didn’t have as much money. I had to abandon this dying economy.

So I decided to vote with my feet and get out to Austin, Texas, which had a slightly better economy than much of the rest of America. As soon as I laid eyes on sunny Austin on October 5^th, 2009, I loved it.

But then the problem became, “How do I get started in a new city where I have no network at all?” I started to read about internet marketing. I bought a domain, created my first WordPress site, and started to blog professionally in November, 2009.  Since 1999 I had been writing on the internet in one form or another, and had a personal blog, but never thought of blogging as something that could support me.

Then I started to read. I realized that I had the tools and the time to create a reputation for myself that no one could take from me with the whims of the economy. I started to write. I started to blog about nonprofit management and fundraising 5 days a week in February 2010. My stats skyrocketed to 7,000 readers per month. In April 2010, I started my own newsletter. I got 100 subscribers quickly, and worked hard on my social media marketing, and when I published my first book in November, 2010, I sold copies quickly all over the world.

Suddenly, I was getting calls to speak, to get syndicated, to endorse products, and people were asking me to fundraise for them, and to teach them how to do what I was doing. It’s a far cry from being an unemployed nonprofit nobody living on spaghetti and scouring craigslist for free wood to heat the apartment.

In 2011 I’m speaking all over the country, my book was called one of the top 10 nonprofit books of 2010 by a famous blogger and activist named Beth Kanter with millions of followers, and I’ve been consulting with organizations to implement their digital media presences as well. It all could not have happened without blogging and the hard work of building a community.

This is my story of violence and survival. If you are in a bad situation, whether it’s domestic violence or sexual violence, whether it’s a workplace abuse situation or an elder abuse situation, just know that there is help, there is hope, and you can have a better life once you leave. My life is 100% better now. Your life can be too.

Mazarine Treyz is the author of The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising speaker, workshop presenter, social media expert, and encaustic art teacher. She’s passionate about teaching people how to change the world.