
By Dana Bristol-Smith
Last week I was given the opportunity to interview Marcus Buckingham, best-selling author and management guru, about his newest book Find Your Strongest Life - What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently.
I was thrilled to ask how his findings and the Strong Life Practice can help women who have overcome adversity (isn't that all of us?). He has some very practical suggestions that ANYONE - man or woman, can use to really zero in on how to live a happy and successful life. Being a researcher, Marcus has tons of data to back up what he proposes and reports - in fact he received over 100,000 online responses to his workshop that he gave for Oprah's audience! And, that's where the idea for this book came from.
A very unexpected and exciting outcome of our discussion is that Marcus is very interested in meeting the graduates of the Speak for Success Women's Leadership Institute and hearing their stories. In fact, he's planning to visit us here in San Diego in November! Who knows what might be on the horizon for our Women's Leadership Institute!
Stay tuned....
Hi Marcus! Thanks for speaking with me. In our Women's Leadership Institute, we are working with women who have overcome adversity – domestic abuse, addiction, and homelessness. We provide coaching and training to help women rediscover their goals and dreams and start creating action plans to move their lives forward.
How would our women benefit from the Strong Life Practice?
Marcus: I think they would, and frankly, anyone would. Just to put some context to it, Dana, the focus of this book, Find Your Strongest Life, is that the trending data shows that regardless of what kind of life you are having, as a woman in America today, regardless of whether you are married or single, wealthy or not, women today are less happy than they were 40 years ago, and they are less happy than men, which for me was a surprise, because of all the advances in opportunity, power, and influence and all of the choices that women have today.
I decided to study women who have bucked that trend.
If you study women who have been able to find strength in life, which was the focus of my study, obviously they are very different from one another, but if you were to drill down and say what do they have in common? What can we learn from them? The first thing I found is that they follow Martha Washington’s advice, the first, first lady who said “the greater part of our happiness depends on our disposition rather than on our circumstances.”
So on some level, these women decided that no matter what life threw at them, they were going to try and find a way to determine meaning and purpose. On some level they were optimistic in that life would help them find a way forward. So I focused on strong women and the strong choices they made.
The second thing we see in these women is that they seem to find that the way to success and satisfaction is not to look at goals and dreams and grand things, but to look at moments – life throws a whole lot of moments at you, and some of them invigorate and strengthen you, and some of them don’t.
Your first challenge as a woman in life, or as a man, is to look for moments in your life, and say, are there any specific moments that invigorate me that I know for certain make me strong? And, can I start to build my life around those moments and go step by step? Then I can gradually tilt my life to have more of these strong moments that strengthen me.
One of the women I interviewed for the book was a pastor’s wife who found out that her husband was a serial rapist. To make a long story short, her whole life fell apart in front of her eyes. In order to rebuild her life, she started from one moment in her life that she knew was true and rebuilt out from there.
Dana: Wow, what a terrible story. What about the idea from Stephen Covey – starting with the end in mind? Really having a clear vision of what you want in your life, having something to walk towards, to strive for. Doesn’t something like that pull you forward in life?
Marcus: Yes, but I think you have to be terribly careful to know what you build the end out of, because intentions and goals can be misguiding. And you need to make sure that you are building your goals out of the right material.
Dana: So are you looking at these moments as the right material? These moments that have given us strength and happiness in our life.
Marcus: Yes, you start with right now. You don’t build castles in the sky. You start right now in my awful rotten life, if I am walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Even there, right now there are certain things in life, certain reactions I have, certain people who I know to be true. That is if I’m going to build a vision of the future that’s better then, I need to build it from what I know to be true today. Otherwise you might actually be building a life, or shooting for an end that is actually achieved but doesn’t make you happy at all.
Dana: Let me tap into something about meaning and purpose in life. When we interview women who have survived domestic violence, many of them want to use their experience to help other women. Our graduates say to others, I’ve turned my life around and you can too. They feel that their own horrible situation has served a purpose that now strengthens them and strengthens others. Is that what you are talking about?
Marcus: Yes, I believe they are showing other people a model of what life could look like. Sometimes change follows the focus of your attention. I talk a lot about that in the book. If you have people who are standing up and talking about what positive change can look like and focusing people’s attention on that, then the more you hear that as an individual who is stuck in the middle of a terrible situation, you can come to believe that that it is possible for you too.
One of the funny things in life is that you never really solve a problem on its own terms. You have to change the angle of attack to solve the problem. Take the Middle East for example; we know so much about the problem, but we really aren’t any closer to solving it. Take domestic abuse situations; you can dive into the problem, and the bigger it can get. I think with women, talking about what moving out of that problem looks like gives other women the chance to see that you can change the angle of attack, you can give other women the chance to see what moving forward looks like.
Dana: Did you find that working towards a higher purpose is one of the contributors to women having a happy life? That meaning and significance were important?
Marcus: Yea, whatever your purpose may be in life, it has to be a full expression of who you are. One of the things that these women who put their life on track, and got unstuck found, was that they had the answers within them. That if they listened closely enough to the voice inside of them, they had strengths, activities, people that strengthened them. And, if they truly had those, they could build for themselves a mission, a purpose, a goal and a future that was true for them. So the power comes from within.
These women, and I’m sure you found this that women who take positive action to get unstuck, are ones who on some level take themselves very seriously and don’t abdicate their responsibility of their happiness to anyone else.
Dana: Our women have learned so much about themselves through adversity and learned about the strength that they have. One of our graduates got on a Greyhound bus in Pensacola Florida with one of her four children and $17 and came all the way to San Diego to escape an abusive husband. She knew that her husband wouldn’t come this far to find her.
By taking this step and proving her own courage, she’s build an extraordinary life for herself and now has all four of her children living with her. She spent two years going from shelter to shelter to shelter until finally saving enough money to get her own apartment.
Her name is Lana and she is now in charge of our Graduate Speaker’s Bureau and speaks out in the community.
Marcus: Wow! I’d love to hear from her about what she did and what was going on in her mind and her heart when she did it.
Dana: I’d love to have you meet all of our graduates! They are extraordinary.
Marcus. I would too – We’ll set that up!
I’m reminded by that story of Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. He was interred in concentration camps in World War II. How do you find meaning? He was a psychology professor and he survived by trying to put lesson plans together. If he was going to try and teach his students about this experience, how would he talk about it? Somehow he managed to stay sane.
I don’t know if the person you described did something specific, or just used raw courage. It would be lovely to hear those stories.
One tool that you might want to use is free online. It is the Strong Life Test at www.stronglifetest.com. So many times women don’t believe that they have something special and unique to offer, they don’t believe that they are worth listening to, or their voice has led them down some bad alleys. This very simple test can help you identify your lead role. It’s not going to answer all questions but it can help you find where life can offer you strengths.
Yes, Dana, you are right, they look for higher purpose out of specific moments they know for certain. Even if you are in a terrible situation, start with those good, powerful, true moments so you can claim your power back. Build your life from those moments.
If we can help people know that they have the answers – if we can get women to trust their choices and make stronger choices, women, men and children will all benefit as a result. We will be doing a lot of good for a lot of people!
Dana: Thanks so much for your insights, Marcus, and for the work that you are doing in the world. I look forward to having you come and meet our graduates and seeing where this might lead!
Marcus: Thank you Dana – I look forward to it!



