Rethinking What is “Tough” in Business

The heavy blanket of bright white snow envelopes everything out my office window. All is white, all is bright, and everything is buried. As I sit in my warm, cozy office illuminated by nature’s light and heated by a wood burning stove in a house built in 1877 when Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage were suffragettes, I imagine them bundling up to trudge outside to do chores, attend secret gatherings and envision a spring of new women’s rights.

Living in modern times we often forget about the luxuries and privileges we have including the comfort of our homes and offices, phones, refrigeration for food and snow plows that clear roads. Not only did the fore mothers have to work and live through harsher elements in the late 1800’s, they did so while fighting to win equality for women.

Without automobiles, phones, computers, social media and a much slower mail service, how did they communicate and gather with like-minded women? I think of Harriet Tubman and her decade of walking back and forth on foot to free slaves in all kinds of conditions – perhaps even in the amount of snow we received the past few days. If there is anything a blessed snow day should give women entrepreneurs is the ability to appreciate the modern times we live in that allows us to do work, talk and travel even when Mother Nature surprises us on the Ides of March.

Sure we might have a long to-do-list today, unhappy customers, and proposals that are rejected, but what we forget is our “rough” work day or snow day with our children home clamoring to play while we try to conduct business, is nothing compared to the tribulations the brave women who came before us faced trying to gain equality.

Today’s Wednesday Wisdom is to remind you during the half way point in Women’s History Month, to stop and appreciate the efforts of the women who worked during 1877 in much harder conditions then we do and how their persistence through heavy days gave us the freedoms we have at this moment. If shoveling the driveway, putting off meetings and rescheduling events seems tough, maybe we need to rethink what “tough” is by looking back in time.