What Women Really Want: Beyond Budgets and Botox

Several months ago, one of the members of my PWAC group (Professional Women’s Advisory Council)—which will be celebrating its one-year anniversary this month!—told me that she’d been giving a lot of thought to the comments of her female patients. A plastic surgeon, she was more intimately involved with them than most docs. And she found herself talking with them a lot, as one might expect a female doc to do, and hearing five resounding themes:

• women want to be beautiful and really like their faces, skin and bodies
• women want to become financially independent
• women want a female legal advocate
• women want to be deemed physically sensuous and enjoy beauty in their personal spaces
• women want to strive towards spiritual maturity and find meaning and purpose in life


She noodled on these conversations for months, trying to figure out how she might help her patients move more effectively towards these five goals while at the same time, meet the challenges of her own practice and its inherent limitations, as she believed herself to be professionally qualified in just one of these areas.


We met for coffee and she shared with me her concerns as well as a vision of how fellow women professionals might help women find what they really wanted. And would I have an interest in playing a role.


My immediate “of course!” has taken us, along with three others, to organize an event this week for women throughout Fairfield County who are seeking answers to some—if not all—of these issues. From consults with my plastic surgeon doctor friend to free facials to learning more about budgets and Botox: we will, together, aim to move more women forward.


Even as one of the five chosen to be part of this exciting evening, I find myself searching for answers as well. For trying to make more sense out of the nonsense going on all around us. Of reaching for books off my library shelf for a second read. Keeping the nightlight on past bedtime to read just one more chapter of a novella on spirituality. Trying to regain a calming, affirming sense of peace in this otherwise turbulent time. Confirming purpose. For faith is the one constant in life. Let’s face it: our bodies will age and our eyelids will droop; our finances will flux; we probably won’t confront legal issues on most days; and we will feel more sensuous some days and much less on others. But faith endures. Seeking spiritual maturity, walking further down the journey is something which, when strived for, only grows deeper with the passing years.


These other issues are important. Vitally so. And I am a firm believer that, as women, we need to get a grip in each one of these other areas. From my perch, too, I hear these same themes day in and day out. And I think that especially now, we yearn for extra compasses to mark our paths. For more clearly defined data points from which to draw conclusions and chart new paths.


We’re expecting almost two hundred women at our event. If you are just now reading this for the first time and would like to come, please, just shoot me an email. We’d love to fix you a wholesome goddess potion and introduce you to some women who may change your life! Information empowers people. And we want to be there as a way to give back to the community that information which has been hard-earned by each one of us over the course of our professional careers.


What women really want is information to make empowered decisions. To lead well-intentioned lives. To create lives worth living.


I hope you’ll join me!


All my best,


Carolina