Trust yourself

I have often found that women don't trust the truth of their experiences. Believe me, I have spent many years feeling that way, too. Slowly but surely, we can learn to trust what we feel, what we experience, what we know deep inside to be true for us.

For me, trusting my own experience came as I spent time in the company of other women. As we shared our stories and received validation, affirmation and encouragement from one another, we empowered each other. As they say, we "listened each other into life". We helped each other find our voices and speak our truth. We began to trust our own judgment, our own experiences, our own opinions.

Because of that, I always encourage women to support each other. It's so important to have each other's back, to support the cause of women. We don't want to return to those days when we were young and in competition with each other for that date to the prom. We still see lots of instances of women sabotaging and putting down other women as they vie for male approval. Having said that, I want to clarify that we need not set up a women vs. men atmosphere either. But we also don't want to simply focus on pleasing the men in our world. We want to learn to trust ourselves—and each other as women. There's nothing like a strong female support network to help us build self-esteem and self-confidence.