This is a Personal Touch. A chance to check in with ordinary people making an extraordinary difference in the world. I’m Rebecca Cressman and today our guest is Whitney Johnson. She is someone who is helping women explore their possibilities, and when I say that you are doing it in such a unique way, it is the Dare to Dream Blog with messages daily to women about what you have learned in life and what you are learning as you talk to others about Daring to Dream.
Q: When did you decide, or I guess identify Whitney, that there was a unique ability that you had or desire you had to help women to move forward on the things that they have always wanted to be?
A: That’s a really good question. I think it probably first started when I moved to New York with my husband. I was just out of BYU and had a degree in music from BYU and wasn’t really qualified to do much more than be a secretary. And once I started working as a secretary and was around a lot of people that were very, very smart, working on Wall Street and had Ivy League degrees: they were very smart but I started to realize I was as smart as they were. And as I also started to look around and think, you know, I am going to be working for quite a long time because my husband is doing a PhD and it’s going to take seven years, if I am going to work, why make ‘X’ when I can make ‘ten X?’ And I started to realize, ‘I can do this.’ Yet when I looked at myself I thought, “I’m a pretty proto-typical middle class Mormon girl.” So if I can do this, then other people can too. By the time I got probably into my late thirties, early forties and I would talk to other women and I was very ebullient about, “Okay there are so many possibilities. We can go out; we can do this; we can accomplish this.” I started to hear them saying to me, “Are you sure? I’m not sure I really can accomplish this.” And yet I was looking across the table at someone who I found to be incredibly competent. And yet they weren’t seeing that in themselves. And that sort of triggered this desire in me to say, “You can do it! How can I help you make this dream happen? Or how can I help you find a dream and then make the dream happen?
Q: Which is interesting because I was talking to a woman who knows you very closely and she had said to me that Whitney can actually take someone’s dream and help them take those and map out the steps of what it takes for them to realize that dream, because sometimes we do hold a vision of what we would like to see us accomplishing, but we don’t see how we can take those intermediary steps to arrive there. And she says that you are truly gifted with that ability to help us see that with some concrete changes and concrete goals that dream can become a reality. So the gratification in you and working with women to do this it comes from seeing their lives change?
A: Another good question. It is interesting first of all that you say that you’re reflecting or the feedback that you received from one of our mutual friends is that I am able to help people outline concrete steps. I actually just wrote a blog entry this past weekend called, “Send Perfectionism Packing.” And what is fascinating to me is that I am a perfectionist by nature. And one of the things that I have had to do over the years is learn how to trick myself out of perfectionism by breaking things up into such small pieces that I could actually get the goals that I had accomplished. And so it is interesting to me that out of my own necessity or my own weaknesses I have developed a strength that has actually helped other women achieve their goals. And so I would say that I do derive satisfaction from that. There is something to be said for seeing someone who I see as being magnificent and see as having a lot of potential and they don’t see it in themselves and then helping show that to them and helping draw it out of them. It does bring me tremendous satisfaction.
Q: Interesting because you know you were talking about your blog and I am looking at the entry that says, “Send Perfectionism Packing.” And then I also see that it is not just your own life that you draw the lessons from in helping other women like me learn about how to develop the talents better within them. But you also draw from Pop culture for example. What is it we can learn from Pop culture that can actually help us achieve something in real life because in some sense that is kind of a fantasy culture?
A: That is right. I think one of the reasons that I am fascinated by Pop culture, you’ll notice that not too long ago I wrote about Ocho Cinco, a football player who changed his name, which I thought was fascinating in terms of our identity. I have written about American Idol a number of times. Part of the reason I will write about something like American Idol or a film is that it is something that we have all seen, and we are all familiar with, and it’s always the stuff of water cooler talk. So it gives us a common ground from which I can then say, “Okay we have all seen this; we have all identified this. I voted for so and so last night on American Idol, so did you. Why did you like them?” And so we are already able to sort of say, “Okay we have this common language now I can talk to you about what I think we can learn from American Idol,” for instance.
Q: I’m curious too, and I want to make it clear for those who are learning about you and your Dare to Dream Blog for the very first time, that this is on the side.
A: Yes absolutely.
Q: You also have a full time career managing Hedge Funds in the small town of Boston, Massachusetts, I guess. There is a little teasing there.
A: [Laughs] That is correct.
Q: But this is a passion of yours to help others and inspire others. What are Resolutionaries?
A: Well there is something called a Resolutionary Challenge that a friend of mine, Heather Staker, had started last year and it was at the beginning of the year. It went for twelve weeks and it is a play on the word of revolution and resolution. And going for twelve weeks, we would make a commitment to do ten things a day. Everyone put in twenty five dollars and at the end of twelve weeks some people would get some portion depending on how well they did. Well she was pregnant with her fourth child and I asked her if I could take it over this year. So I have been running the challenge if you will or moderating it this year, and it is interesting because her necessity allowed me to take something on that very much dovetails with Dare to Dream because I get to really participate in the challenge. But then also encourage other women as they are trying to every day make their bed or exercise for a half an hour. See them meeting these very small bite size goals which are accumulating and they are unmasking some changes on a daily basis that are becoming habits. And again it goes to the Dare to Dream piece that if we can start to implement these small things in our lives, they allow us to gain the discipline and the confidence and the resolve to go after some of the bigger dreams that we have.
Q: Well. And that’s interesting because some people might look at this and say, “You know what we are, especially now in these economic times, we need to be practical.” But interestingly as we look at your blog, you are saying that dreaming has a real practical purpose to it. It actually lifts us. Tell me a bit about that?
A: Well there is a very famous economist John Keyne and he made, and I am paraphrasing, but he made the statement: the social object of an investment is to fight back fear. And if you look at fear as having an opposite, it would be hope. And so one of the things that’s important for us to do is to do things that help us be hopeful because they fight back the fear. So I think that there are times where we go out and we say, “Okay here is my vision and I want to go climb that mountain.” But then there are other pieces or pragmatic steps that we need to take to get there. I think that we need to have both and we alternate between the two, and sometimes when in the winter time for me in particular, because it gets darker and the days are shorter, I find myself wanting to concentrate on some of the smaller things. And then as I concentrate on those, I am building a foundation for the spring time when we sort of burst forth with new life and can go back to focusing on some of the bigger and grander ideas that we may have.
Q: I wanted to ask you one more follow up, because I know our time is always tight and I appreciate you sharing your time with us. You say that in some ways women in America can be a little placated or maybe even stagnant and often that will bring us feelings of depression. Give me an example of the type of dream that can take us from that placated state to one where we are enjoying our life in a greater degree?
A: The type of dream is going to completely depend on the person—not only on the person but on the stage of life that they have. For instance for me, I have dreams around having a full time career and really achieving things professionally. I also have a dream to be able to balance that with being a mother and having a satisfying family relationship. There may be other women who really want to have eight children and that is their dream. They want to have this bustling household of eight children and they want to on the side sew some beautiful quilts or dresses. And so the dreams are going to be different, but I would say at its essence: dreaming is about hanging on to your identity. That piece of yourself that was you when you were born. When you were one and two and three years old and making sure that in the process of connecting to other people and caring for other people, whether our spouses or children or neighbors or friends and also remembering to connect to God, that we also remember to connect to ourselves. And that is the kernel of this. That is what the dream is and that is what we need to do. So the dream will take different forms but at its essence it is hanging on to our ‘I’ or our identity.
Q: Whitney Johnson, thank you so much for giving us inspiration to dream again. I was thinking of that: the Mother, the successful full time worker, and now a motivator to encourage each of us to reach inside and remember who we are and work towards being happy with the goals that we set. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you.
And I’m Rebecca Cressman and we want to thank you for joining us for this week’s edition of A Personal Touch. Be sure to check your email next week to find out who else like Whitney Johnson is making a difference in our world with A Personal Touch.
End of interview.
