Author and empowerment expert Gloria Feldt will launch her latest book at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix on September 18 at a special event. The Intentioning Book Launch & Brunch at 9:30am - 11am will include an-person launch event, and ticketed book signing and breakfast. Tickets here.
In the wake of two pandemics that shook our world to its core and revealed deep fault lines in our culture, Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take the Lead for (Everyone’s) Good (Forefront Books) shows how we can seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity created by massive disruption to build back stronger with women at the center of the recovery.
Through the lens of women’s stories, Feldt delivers a fresh set of leadership tools, skills, and concepts that help women reach their own highest intentions, purposefully creating new norms while guiding institutions to break through the remaining barriers to gender and racial parity—for everyone’s good.
The former Texas native and Scottsdale resident started out as a teen mom and went on to become CEO of the world’s largest women’s reproductive health and advocacy organization, a New York Times best-selling author and Co-Founder of Take The Lead, a non-profit with a bold mission to break through the internal and external barriers to gender and racial parity in leadership 65 years faster than the most optimistic predictions.
Feldt came out of semi-retirement to start Take The Lead after discovering for herself how to break through those international barriers of culturally-learned ambivalence about power that hold the marginalized back from aspiring to their goals. She then developed the concept of Intentioning to pave the rest of the way to parity.
Recognized by the City of Phoenix Human Relations Commission with the Martin Luther King Jr. Living the Dream Award, Feldt is urging all who identify as women – of all diversities and intersectionalities – to embrace their personal and collective power to lead with intention, confidence, and joy.
She points to the recent fact that it was women, from world leaders to working mothers, who stepped up the most during the global coronavirus pandemic. It was women who protected their families and often the general public, and female leaders in the U.S. and abroad who took the virus seriously and made changes to protect their populations from infection.
There is an opportunity now for women to take the leadership lessons learned from this crisis and create a better world for all through the power of intention. Feldt not only unveils the next step in advancing gender parity in all spheres of business and life, she also lays out the vital next steps in the overall advancement of our economy and our civilization.
The Lead Like a Woman framework and the 9 Leadership Intentioning Tools she presents through stories of women who have successfully leveraged them is designed to prepare, develop, inspire, and propel women of all diversities and intersectionalities now so that by 2025 women will have attained their fair and equal share of leadership positions across all sectors of industry and society.
Feldt believes we simply cannot squander women’s talents when so much hangs in the balance. Women must be at the vanguard of reimagining and constructing a vibrant and sustainable future for us all.
This book shows how intentioning prepares you to lead, be, and sustain change by using the mantra of Vision, Courage, and Action, helps improve your impact in meetings and presentations, and builds habits that sustain your leadership journey and filters out “power demons.” It demonstrates how intentioning turns your obstacles into assets and helps you to use your ambition as fuel to achieve your intentions. And through stories of intentional women, Feldt unveils 9 Leadership Intentioning Tools, along with practice exercises for each.
This is a great book for any women who have struggled with 'imposter syndrome,' low self-esteem, or who function in a competitive, stressful, negative or hostile environment.
Intersectionality is also part of intentioning and Feldt shows how to build social capital, unpack implicit bias and turn men from sexist obstacles into assets who can partner with women to achieve parity.
But how does she see the future of LGBTQ women - including transgender women - taking more leadership roles and helping to challenge unsustainable paradigms of power and leadership?
"I love this question because it gets to the heart of so much about power, intention, and leadership," Feldt told OUTvoices.
"Gender is a social construct, and like most social constructs it is rooted in power or, perhaps more accurately, designed to allocate power by and for those who hold the most power in a culture.
"LGBTQ women face the challenge of bucking the social constructs that have so often discriminated against them. And at the same time, they have the opportunity to use the Leadership Intentioning Tool #8 in my book to the hilt in order to thrive in the world as it is while changing it: Unpack Implicit Bias and Turn Its Effects on Its Head, because then you can make its effects your superpowers."
"By that I mean that anyone who has been 'othered' gains unique insights that in turn build strengths such as empathy, ability to read the room, and mental agility. What sets you apart can become the very thing that gets you ahead if you embrace it as a superpower and use it to shift the power paradigm from oppressive power over to generative power TO," says Feldt.
Gloria Feldt
For more information, please visit www.intentioningbook.com
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Visit: www.gloriafeldt.com