The new book, "Fearless Female Leaders." shares empowering stories of women of all ages, who are pursuing a purpose and a passion.

In this episode, guest and author Kathy McAfee, shares her journey and mission to mentor and uplift others, particularly in the legacy phase of her career. With real-life stories of resilience and leadership, this episode is a tribute to women who refuse to let age define their contribution.

Key Takeaways:

The story of Eva Hausman, founder of the Mothers' Day movement, and Sylvia Whitlock, the first female president of a Rotary club, highlight perseverance, dedication to public service, and gender inclusion.

Being fearless ignites the journey, while courage sustains it. The episode encourages listeners to start their fearless journey and use courage to see it through.

Continue contributing. We are not done yet. Supporting female leadership to create meaningful change in communities is highlighted in this episode and the book.

Links:

TheFearlessLeader.com

FearlessLeaderBooks.com/bonuses

YouTube.com: @TheFearlessLeader

To join the Boomer Banter Community, Click Connect with us

Email me at wendy@heyboomer.biz

Today, we're going to talk about aging with purpose, particularly as a fearless female leader. You may be thinking that your days as a leader are over, but that is not true. You may be a leader in your church or your synagogue. You may be a leader in a neighborhood group. You may be a leader in your family and you are definitely a leader in your own life.

You also may have found a passion in this next stage of life that's thrust you into a leadership role. And in this episode, we're going to learn about a couple of women who did just that. They found a passion. A purpose, if you will, and they acted on that with fearlessness, my guest today, Kathy McAfee is an accomplished author and speaker, creative entrepreneur and business coach.

She thrives on helping professionals advance their careers and influence, and partners with organizations and communities to cultivate leadership diversity. Kathy is the founder of the Fearless Leader program, of which I am a graduate, and creator of the Fearless Leader book series. And today we're going to talk about the first book in this series, Fearless Female Leaders, which she co wrote with Rosemary Paetow.

biz and click on connect with us. And then you will be kept up to date on the latest information and supportive content. So go ahead, share that with your friends and do that now. And Be sure to rate and review the podcast. It really helps other people find us and let me know what you thought about today's episode.

I hope to hear from all of you. And now I'm going to bring Kathy on and introduce her to you. Hi Kathy. Hi Wendy. I love the display of books behind you.

Yeah. So I'm so excited to have you on the show again. Thank you.

Thank you for the invitation. And I'm looking forward to a great conversation about aging well and aging with

purpose.

Aging with purpose. One of our favorite things to do. So Kathy, talk to me about your motivation of starting the fearless leader program and the fearless leader book series.

And in addition to all I was seeing during the craziness in the world during the pandemic before. And even George, George Floyd's murder really catapulted me and focused me to merge my business life with my personal mission. And that is one of social justice. So it all came together. I built this whole course.

And then of course, met you and other amazing people who had incredible life journeys and stories, and we were all developing ourselves and empowering ourselves to lead in all facets of, of the world and including our own lives.

Mm-Hmm.

and I. It was striking that there was no, like, age group. I had 17 year olds and 20 year olds and 30 year olds and 50 year olds, and I had 80 year olds in the book.

So what I saw was people really taking charge of their leadership journey. at any age.

And I started to have that anxiety that a lot of us had. What am I going to do? What's going to happen? Do I just, as I like to say, fold my tent and go home? And I was standing in my office really wrestling with that, grappling with that feeling.

And I said, I'm not sitting this one out. I will not give up. I will find a way through, around, over, under, I'm going to learn, I'm going to invest. I'm going to position myself for success and growth when this thing is done. And I'm going to do that now. So, I just, I fell in love with the word fearless.

Later on, I found out that it's used a lot in a lot of different contexts, but I developed and coined the phrase, the fearless leader. And then when I went to write the book I wanted it to either be the fearless leader, but when we found out that all the stories that we were interviewing for and, and, and The ones that were the strongest, they were all women.

So then that alliteration that I love female leaders came up. So that's how, that's how it all merged. And. It's become a huge value for me. It's become my new brand. It's become how I see myself.

And I mean, there's been so much and you just powered forward. You're amazing, Kathy, very fearless. So thank you for for all that you do. And I Took away a lot from the fearless leader program, but I want to talk to you about aging with purpose because that's what we're about with this episode. And there are certainly women in your book about aging with purpose.

So what, what does that mean to you and where do you, what do you think that's important?

She's still painting. She's developing art schools. She's mentoring other people. And I actually said, I want to age with grace. That's the way I said it. And I want to be like Georgia O'Keeffe and keep producing. That, that was kind of how I envisioned how I would grow. And I wanted to be a hundred.

I still do. But now I realized that I had a choice recently when we first met early in the pandemic that, you know, financial advisor said, you're doing pretty well. I think you can retire early. In fact, you can retire in January, she said. This was in November. I'm like, that was kind of shocking and, and I, it, it made me pause.

Do I want to retire? What does retirement mean and look like? And am I done? Am I done?

It was somewhat of a crisis of identity. And yeah, how I saw myself and I, as you know, I struggle and I took your fabulous What's Next course,

me get clarity on what I wanted to do in this next chapter of my life.

And

I decided that. I would both enjoy some of the benefits of retirement, but I would also keep being a mentor and keep building and interesting, Wendy. I was applying for trademarks. I'm 60 at the time and I'm investing in my business, not shutting it down, not putting my feet up, not going on holiday.

I'm building. So that was, and people would say to me, you know, how's the retirement going? Yeah. Right. And I'd go, I failed. I failed.

You're messaging. About fearlessness, you know, I'm messaging about aging well, and, and we're inspired.

A platform to grow their business and career. So I'm looking to partner with first time writers and partner them with experienced writers, either me or someone else and right under the fearless brand. Because writing a book is a journey. It's lonely, it's confusing. It it's very it is hard. Don't let anyone tell you it's hard work.

But doing it with someone else collaborating. Super fun, super fun. So I thought, and I had so many ideas that they all couldn't go into this book. I can't you only do so many hundred pages. So the interviews I did, I kind of said, that's for a different book. That one's. So I have like 13 ideas fearless Latinas, fearless black women in business, fearless moms.

My next one, I hope is going to be fearless female cancer survivors. Did I say fearless educators? Yeah. So it just depends on who wants to partner. One in the world, right? And and creating a book that has both information strategies, tools, but it's these stories of real people doing these things.

That is the heart and soul of the book.

Although I think a lot of them were from the fearless leader program.

It's a unique kind of writing, a unique kind of research. So I took that course because I had something I really wanted to say to the world. And I learned about researching topics and issues. My op ed, which I worked really hard on, has not yet been published. But the discipline and what I learned about the barriers to women's leadership is all in this book.

So you're going to find a lot of history, a lot of current facts a lot of glimpses. And a lot of strategies and ways to help you or to, if you're not a woman to help, if you want to help women grow into leadership, this book will give you the insights and tools to do that. But yeah, that collaboration I think without Rosemary, it would have been a collection of really great stories.

I believe it's called an anthology and that's a different kind of book, a

And , like I said, in the opening, no matter where you are in your leadership journey, even if you're just leading your own life, , I think there are. Takeaways in this book that are very valuable, but I want to get to some of those stories because that's what I also find exciting. 1 of the things you mentioned, Kathy, is that you want to continue being a mentor and mentoring was a.

It was a path that you and Rosemary both found useful on your journey. And it also was a path that Eva Hausman took when she was one of the fearless leaders that you profiled. So she built a team to support her. And if you would tell us Eva's story, that would be great.

And this is a, this is not even a charity. It's a, it's five women getting together, raising money for other official charities, focused on women and children around the world, including the U S. And so every year they ask us to take, you know, I'm going to send flowers and buy some chocolate or take mom out to lunch just to carve a portion of that.

Maybe instead of a dozen roses, we give six roses. And then we use the money to donate for mothers around the world. If you will, they moved the apostrophe from mother, apostrophe S, my single, my mom to S apostrophe, which is possessive plural, mothers everywhere. So I knew, I knew Eva back in Connecticut when I lived there.

And she, I was one of the 43 people she called after she read this article in the New York times. So this is a woman. There's an avid reader, a retired teacher, an activist she reads an article and it lights her up and gives her, her, passion and her purpose.

It was Nick Nicholas Kristoff. It was talking about his upcoming book, half the sky. If you haven't read that, I highly recommend it. Women do hold up half the sky and the premise of the book is if we, if we want to eradicate poverty and violence. In the world, the path is educate girls, like what that's simple and you eliminate and statistically it is proven.

So that was the premise. She loved that, but the book is so full of call to action and actionable things readers can do. Absolutely. I hope we have that in our book too. So she gets this, if you will a bee in her bonnet, she's got 43 friends. Okay. Eva has 43 friends. Maybe you have more, maybe you have less.

She sends them all a copy of the letter of the article. And then she says, I want to do something I want to raise money for. And one of the stories in the book that really, really upset her was about a 13 year old Ethiopian girl who had a fistula because she was forced to marry and got pregnant when she was 13.

And she had an obstructed birth, seven days of labor destroyed. The baby died, destroyed her body. She got a tear through her reproductive organs. And if you don't know about fistula, it's a repairable situation. It's almost unheard of in the United States, but it's rampant in third world countries.

So she goes on to tap these 43 people, gets a funder, you know, just gathers all her resources. She raised $10, 000.

Then her daughter says, that's great mom, but we're not done yet. There's more to be done. We can't stop. So then they end up starting this, this organization and it's been 14 years in the making. They've raised over a million dollars for 14 different charities and it's extraordinary. Can you imagine yourself, your retired teacher, you know, enjoying the fruits of your labor, maybe you have a pension and then suddenly you could have that kind of social impact.

Yeah. Now Eva, Eva to this day, I think she knows it's a big deal, but she doesn't really. And Eva would. You know, I, I, I hope I'm not breaking a confidence or she, she doesn't feel fearless. I have to convince her of her fearlessness. I sent her a necklace that said fearless and she said, I don't know if I have the right to wear this.

If you go back and look at your origin story, the first time you started to discover and develop your leadership. It usually is when you're a young person, but we've discounted that. That was nothing that happens to everybody. Well, Eva is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and the sister of a Holocaust survivor.

And those Holocaust survivors came to the United States by grace, an invitation, and they became entrepreneurs. And so her mother came up with this great idea to create a fashion business. She called it fashion on wheels. She got a big truck, they loaded it with merchandise they bought from the New York garment district and they went door to door and a lot of people to shop in their homes.

This was big in the fifties. It was like, it was very entrepreneurial.

And it wasn't until literally the book launched that Eva said, I never knew where I got all this from. I never knew where my leadership or even my fearlessness came from, came from my mom.

And you might know her, Dr. Opal Lee, she's in the book similar stories, all of their leadership started when they were young and it usually was through hardship.

There are mothers around this world that Really could use a hand. Yeah. So

Power right there. That's inspiration.

It is.

It is. What other story did you like in the book? Yeah. So I want to talk about this one. So knowing what you want and not being deterred by what others tell you is not possible. You call this. focusing on what matters most. So this focusing on what matters most applies to us as we're aging well, because a lot of times we'll hear, Oh, do you want to go on that kind of trip?

No, you're too old for that. You want to start a business in your seventies? What are you thinking? You know? So what we're thinking is what matters most to us. And we hear in the story of Sylvia Whitlock, how she continues to push through the status quo and focus on what matters most. So could you tell us her story?

So her mother made the decision to send her back to Jamaica to live with her grandmother and go to school, you know, kind of protect her. But she came back and she went to college in New York City at Hunter college. And even then she was discriminated against. Teachers didn't believe that she did the work.

She was accused of plagiarism. And her confidence started to cave. So it's a story of kind of how she got through college, how, how people told her she couldn't do what she wanted to do. And she kept persevering. She went on to get her bachelor's in psychology, her master's in education. She got her PhD at 43.

She had a wonderful teaching career. And then guess what? She got to retire, right? She got a nice pension. But Sylvie had such a love for public service that she joined her local Rotary Club. This is in California, Southern California in Duarte. So she becomes a member of this club and they're doing good for the community and she's having a great time.

And then people say, you should be, you should run for president of Rotary club, right? You're president. So she does and she gets elected and now she's, you know, she's the president for the one or two year period until she suddenly gets this letter in the mail from Rotary International. It says, I'm sorry.

And

the whole club, all members of the club, men and women were like, this is insane.

So lots of iterations, but the group bands together and they take it to the Supreme court. They take the case. It takes over a decade to work its way. I believe. Anyway, they win the Supreme Court case and it's not about membership, it's about civil rights. You cannot discriminate based on gender. So with Sylvia's leadership and that of her team focusing on what she wants and what matters most, which is to be of service, like I asked her, what was the fight like?

She said, I didn't care about the fight. I just wanted to be of service.

So what's interesting, there are three, I didn't mean this to happen, but there are three Rotarian women featured out of eight. And the other two that was only made possible because of Sylvia. That's right. So Sylvia was not only the first female president of Rotary,

In the world in Rotary's history, she also was a black woman, and that's kind of reminiscent of what's happening right now. We actually started to get female presidents, female presidents of color, and I'm super excited about that. So I did call Sylvia right before the show, Wendy, just to tell her about the show, and we're gonna be talking about her story and.

She tells me, well, I'm currently in Argentina. I'm like, Argentina, what are you doing in Northern California? You're 88. What are you doing in Argentina?

Right.

Leading. She's being of service. I don't have all the details on her trip, but I, I, she's my Shiro. I mean, it's incredible what she is doing with her life, her legacy and her purpose.

when was that ?

So I have my, Rosemary and I both have our origin stories in chapter two.

And what was remarkable for me is I've, I've known about this event in my life. It happened during college. And, but I always consider it such a failure and it was such an injustice. It was so not right. That, and I got stuck on the unfairness for years. I got stuck on the unfairness and I lost a lot of opportunity.

So it's about a story about my leadership, which was born out of dance. And then dance evolved to song leading, which is a derivative of cheerleading, but the dance version of cheerleading and leading school spirit and school teams and, and, and leading the crowd, right? We all discount that as being so silly.

That's so fluffy, you know, girls in short skirts and their song leader. I never realized leaders in the title of that role till just like a year ago

That's my gift. That's what, that's where I lead. And so I naturally auditioned for the Stanford dollies and boy, did I take a beating? I, I was the most qualified. I was like the Hillary Clinton of the Stanford dolly tryouts. Nobody liked me because I was too prim, proper, poised, disciplined professional.

They wanted loose, jazzy, sexy, cute. They wanted something else. And that was not me. And I didn't realize it.

The next year after they brutally rejected me the next year, I started to change my style to fit in attention. Readers don't do this. Don't do this. They still blank hand me. They just, they trashed me.

They knew they knew my story. And so then I went on this campaign of this is not right. And I appealed to every. I spent like a whole year of my college life trying to write this wrong until I was in my junior year at the very end. And I was sitting outside on a park bench at a green graduate library, beautiful spring day.

And, and this woman came and the student came and sat next to me and we just started chatting. And we ended up talking about business opportunities. It was the strangest thing. And we, we decided in that park bench first meeting that there was a chance we could start a business together. And so we did, we started Stanford aerobics, mind and body on the move.

but I was also ashamed to tell that story, you know, business, what was it? Exercise, you know, but that's my origin. And when I wrote that story, Wendy, I cried when I started writing about the park bench moment.

It

was such a release. I didn't have to keep fighting the injustice. I could discover new ways to lead.

And

so that also is available for all of your listeners. I mean, Eva Hausman, even when she left teaching with all her years of excellence. They were not nice to her when she left. And so it was a moment, you know, it's like almost like she wasn't fired, but it was almost had that flavor, you know so if we get stuck on the bitter moments, then we kind of, and we don't celebrate, you know, the new beginnings or find and release.

The anger, the sadness, the grief, the loss. Once you can release that, the world is your oyster. You can go on to do something, guess what? That matters most

Well, they say, well,

88 in Sylvia's case or 97 in Opalie's case, you can lead at any age.

Hey, boomer, because it was a reaction to the, you know, the millennial. Okay, boomer. And I felt that was such a put down. And then I said, you know what? I'm not in that space anymore. I am all about looking forward, aging well, finding the tools to do that with. And it's so much more, it gives you so much more energy.

Yeah, you don't have enough experience. Ages and when you're older, all your too old by your too old, you're done. But with women, there's ageism in the middle. Oh my God, you're childbearing years. We can't hire you because you might get pregnant. And now there's even a higher risk because women don't have any control over their bodies, right?

The government wants to make those decisions. So ageism for women is a, is a. happens throughout their lives. And so what you don't want to do is you don't want ageism to go internal. Don't let your inner ageist stop you from doing what matters most to you.

I had to establish a new relationship. It's not, it's not the enemy. It can be a teacher, much like failure. Failure is not the enemy. Failure is your greatest teacher. So don't try to avoid your greatest teacher. Embrace it. So, you know, when I get rejected, I often say to myself, you know what, either next Or there's like 8 billion people on the planet.

There's plenty of opportunity. There is room for all of us, including me. And I also remind myself, I celebrate who shows up. I don't lament all the people that didn't come. No, three people that show up. Those are the right three people. It's somewhat of an abundance mentality, but it's also my mind for not like not getting stuck on.

And guess what? That college rejection. That's, that's the anchor. It got, it got locked.

So what really matters most to you, Kathy, it's not rejection or being rejected. It's having the impact that I want. It's fine.

But there's a lot of tools that you talk about in the book, Kathy, and we haven't had time to dig into those. So I'm wondering if There are a couple of those tools that you might think would apply to us as we're aging with purpose that you can leave us with.

It's called the fearless leader manifesto, and it's something that we do in the fearless leader program. You did a beautiful one. In fact, you're one of the examples we have that we share in our book bonuses. We share Wendy's Fearless Leader Manifesto, but it's an opportunity to renew and examine your values.

Like, what do you stand for? What's important to you? And sometimes we forget that because society and culture and we just get caught up in the, , wave of populist ideas. So getting in touch with your values, getting clear on how you want to show up as a person and claiming that, claiming who you want to be.

As a leader, what people can expect of you, and it changes your limiting beliefs to empowering new beliefs. So there's like six, five or six steps. You can go through it. There's a free download exercise as one of our book bonuses. By the way, we have eight book bonuses.

We'd love for you to do this book as a book club discussion, but even if it's a different book, this kit will help you get organized. We have a Shiro's journey guidebook. In Shiro's journey, there's a model of leadership in the book that you'll want to study. And this workbook guidebook kind of takes you through a case study and asks you to be the observer in this other person's journey.

And then learn and then think about what's my sheroes journey like

At the fearless leader. So all of these will be in the show notes. But there, yeah, lots of information.

We have one from the granddaughter of Dr. Opal Lee, so you can learn more about the featured women. In this book on our YouTube channel.

We're going to explore why this is important, what can be learned through intergenerational connections. And why Skye is talking about this is she's the one who did the documentary called Lives Well Lived. And if you haven't seen it yet, Search for it on any of the streaming channels. It's really a powerful documentary of people in their eighties, nineties, and even a hundred that have lived really, you know, it's not like, it's not like they've changed the world, but they've made an impact they've had really meaningful lives.

And then they used this documentary in some programs. In college courses, and they have found the impact that this has had on ageism and, you know, impressions that some of the students had of older people and how that's changed. And then they started to come together and form relationships and connections.

So it's really been a beautiful experience. So Sky will be our guest next week. And. Each episode of Boomer Banter is an invitation to listen, learn, and apply the wisdom that you've gained to your own life. We're a supportive community, so reach out and join our community. Kathy, it's been so delightful to have you on again.

Thank you, Wendy. I