5 PROMISES

Make These Promises to Unleash the 10 Forces Within You

A woman is the full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture and transform.

DIANE MARIECHILD

The bolder your promises, the richer your bounty.

VICKIE L. MILAZZO

5 PROMISES PROVIDE THE FUEL

I discovered the 5 Promises in 1982 when I faced the reality that I was unhappy with the direction my life was taking. It wasn't easy after putting hard work into becoming a registered nurse (RN), earning my bachelor's and master's degrees and working 6 years in the hospital, to find I was extremely disappointed by my career choice.

I'd gone in wide-eyed, thinking I'd have fun and make a real difference, cure people, help people to be healthier and, in my grandest ambition, even improve the state of healthcare, only to bump up against the reality that no matter how hard I worked, my efforts would never make a dent, much less an impact.

I was too mouthy and opinionated for an institutionalized system that only rewarded me when I kept my opinions to myself. I was also moving far too slowly toward financial success, having to work overtime just to pay the mortgage on my 1,100-square-foot condo and I was forgetting what it was like to have fun on the job.

Forget waking up early, raring to get to work. I was waking up 10 minutes before it was time to get out the door and rolling into work a little disheveled, no makeup and, if I didn't chug down at least one cup of coffee, a little crazed.

Looking in the mirror at a woman I didn't recognize, I asked her, “What's happened to me?”

Growing up in New Orleans, I was raised believing life was meant to be fun and work should be fun, too. Yet I was living more of a T.G.I.F. (Thank God It's Friday) life, when what I wanted was a T.G.I.T. (Thank God It's Today) life. Not only was my passion waning, I wondered if I might be wasting my potential.

A quick look at my colleagues who'd been in this career for 20 years or more showed me a future without excitement and passion. Burned out, unhappy and, worst of all, apathetic, these nurses had no interest in resurrecting their careers. I imagined myself 5 years, 10 years, 20 years into the future, and the vision was not pretty. All I could see ahead was more exhaustion, fewer highs and eventually a bitter, burned-out nurse, old before my time. Not even close to the New Orleans spirit I grew up with.

Dissatisfaction is the perfect antidote to complacency. I seized my dissatisfaction, stared hard at that woman in the mirror and demanded a different career destiny. I wanted a big, vivid, spicy, succulent life. I wanted to experience passion, fun and wicked success.

I still wanted to be a nurse, but on my own terms. My only option: Start my own business, be my own boss, make my own rules. With $100 in my savings account, I did just that.

First I had to get to work on me—to transform the Vickie who got me into this unsatisfying role at the hospital into a new, more radical version of me. The former Vickie had to go. I stripped bare and started fresh with 5 Promises.

Believing these 5 Promises would open me up to the woman I wanted to be and needed to be, I vowed to live them and they performed beyond my expectations. They became the 5 Promises I have continued to renew daily for more than two decades. The 5 Promises transformed not only my career but also what could have been a ho-hum life into an audacious life of fun, hard but rewarding work, joy, excitement, romance, love and exhilarating experiences at every turn.

The 5 Promises opened me up to the extraordinary strengths, or 10 Feminine Forces, that are inside every woman. The 5 Promises and 10 Feminine Forces have worked for me through all the passages of my development as a woman. They've bolstered me and goaded me for 29 years, propelling me from underpaid hospital nurse to business owner to inventor of a new industry to owner and CEO of a multimillion-dollar business to an Inc. Top 10 Entrepreneur and Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

In the 5 years since this book first came out, I've had the fortune to take these 5 Promises on an electrifying new test drive, over stubborn obstacles, through murky, unfamiliar waters and again they worked in a huge way. Guiding me through the harshest economic period since the 1920s and 1930s, they served as my board of directors in business and personal challenges.

Although it may sound unlikely (and you can ask my husband Tom if you don't believe me), I rise each morning overflowing with excitement and with the physical, mental and emotional energy I need to accomplish a remarkably busy schedule, even managing to find time for myself every day (yes, every day) for exercise and moments of quiet. And I take off 12 weeks each year.

That's how powerful these 5 Promises have been for me. Fully recession-tested, they continue working for me daily, and they can do the same for you.

I'm not going to pigeonhole you. I love that women come in all shapes and sizes (despite what we see in our fashion magazines), not just physically but emotionally and mentally. No two women are alike in lifestyle, social upbringing or earthly desires, yet all women share certain strengths. Inside every woman, and inside you, is an amazing fire that, when fueled, can release volcanic potential.

Meet Suzanne:

In my years of stirring the fire for uncounted women, I know that summoning the phenomenal power of your 10 Feminine Forces through the 5 Promises will enable you to attain any future you envision and desire. The courage to commit is easily within the grasp of every woman on this planet, including you.

Begin unleashing the interconnected strengths within you by making my 5 Promises your 5 Promises. When you do, these 5 Promises will remind you to dream again and guide you in directing your vision to achieve truly wicked success.

PROMISE 1: I Will Live and Work a Passionate Life

My first promise took me back to my childhood and my Italian family in New Orleans. Life without passion and fun was considered no life at all. My family was passionate about everything, from the food we ate (after years of marriage Tom still can't believe my family will talk about what's for dinner while eating lunch), the ball games we played on the street, the card games we played with pennies from our allowances, to just sitting around on the front porch having conversations about who knows what. Passion and fun became inexorably intertwined for me.

I grew up in a hardworking blue-collar household—actually, a “no-collar” household, because in New Orleans, with no air conditioning, we wore T-shirts. We lived in a modest shotgun house, with limited material things, and that was okay because passion and fun were free. I grew up believing life was fun, and looking back, I know the expectation made it so.

My first job at age 15, I'm knocking on doors selling Avon to total strangers. Fun. Next job, selling burgers at Burger King. Fun. When I decided to become an RN, I believed this would be the ultimate thrill, and at first everything was fun. Starting an IV. Fun. Cleaning up a patient's crap. Fun. Saving a life, the most fun of all.

Then one day I woke up, and on that day, starting IVs and cleaning up crap? Not fun.

I wanted more passion, more joy in the part of my life that sucked up 10 hours every day. To ensure that I would succeed in leaving my unsatisfying job behind and would successfully start my own business, the first promise I made to myself was to live and work with that same passion I experienced as a child.

I couldn't help thinking back to when I was 8 years old, to one of the passions that ignited in me at that early age. For hours each day I taught an imaginary class. Every time my dad saw me absorbed in teaching he would come in and send the class to recess, encouraging me to play outside with my real friends. I would quickly call the class back to order and get back to the lesson of the day. No one in the family has any idea what I was teaching, nor do I, but I was darned passionate about it, and not even Dad could stop me.

We all know when we discover something we feel passionate about. We feel amazingly engaged and energetic. Desire becomes energy.

Have you ever experienced a time when desire overcame all physical, emotional and intellectual barriers? Remember your first crush, first boyfriend or when you discovered sex?

Why can't we experience that passion—that vitality and energy—not only in love or desire but every day? Believe me, you can. When you wake up every day to a life and career that are your heart and soul, a life and career you're passionate about, you will experience maximum joy.

So much of our life is spent working. Some women separate work and life, and the separation can only lead to dissatisfaction. We don't have two-compartment lives—a career life and a personal life. We only have one life. You can't turn off one and turn on the other. It doesn't work that way. Work is life, and for most of us life includes work. What a waste if we don't feel the fire in our careers.

Financially, my ambitions in starting my own business were modest. I merely set out to match my $28,000 annual nursing salary (pitiful, even 29 years ago, for people who save lives). My personal ambitions, however, were grand. I demanded a life of passion, freedom, flexibility and control over my existence and my destiny as a woman. After all, what is success without passion?

Within three years I'd tripled my income. Today, I own a highly respected and often emulated multimillion-dollar business.

As the New York Times reported, I “crossed nursing with the law and created a new profession” when I started teaching other nurses how to become legal nurse consultants. Creating a career, a product, a job or in my case, a profession that enables you or others to pursue and capture their own dreams, that's the kind of Big Thing that can happen when you commit to Promise 1.

My company grew every year, peaking at $16 million before the unexpected happened in September 2008, the worst economic crash experienced by any individual in this country younger than 70. I didn't see it coming, and when it did, I wasn't at all worried. By nature I'm an optimist and, after all, my company wasn't selling mortgages. We had glided through other serious downturns in the market, including the dot-com bubble and 9/11.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Like every other small business in the United States, we were jolted. Suddenly I was working harder than ever just to meet payroll for 23 employees who were in fear of becoming another unemployment statistic.

The essence of Promise 1, “I will work a passionate life,” saved my company from being just another statistic. I'll talk more about the strategies I employed, but the crux of our success started with passion—passion for our company and its mission, passion for our products, passion for each other and passion for our clients.

No matter what you hear, business is personal. I had to make personal sacrifices during this time to do what's right, not what would be easy. Passion kept me going. My passion rubs off on my staff, creating a powerful dynamic that kept us slugging away daily.

Promise 1 reminds me to never confuse success and passion, and for me there is no success without passion. At 8 years old teaching was passionate play. At 28, I returned to my passion by turning teaching into a business, and I've been playing ever since.

When you're successful, opportunities present themselves, but here's how powerful Promise 1 is: Throughout my ventures, I've been tempted by many flattering and interesting offers, the most tempting of which was to join a powerful law firm as a partner my first year out of law school. I turned it down.

Why? Because of Promise 1. When we live and work our passions, we take an uncompromising approach to being honest with ourselves and others about what we value and possibly redefining success in a way that others don't comprehend.

The more successful we become, the more likely we can find ourselves working 24/7, yet never finishing the work. That's why Promise 1 says “I will live and work a passionate life.” This promise reminds us to define success on our terms, not everyone else's, and to take time for living passionately, not merely becoming such an automaton that our only passion derives from work. Living a passionate life means carving out time for all the passions in our life, including those that renew body, mind and soul, as well as our bank accounts. That's why I take time each day, plus those 12 weeks of vacation every year, to enjoy my hard-earned success.

Commit to this first promise right now and use the ideas in this book to make it happen. Don't worry if you have no clue what your passions are, exactly. As you read and work this book, you'll discover the passions that will propel you to a totally fulfilled and wickedly successful future.

PROMISE 2: I Will Go for It or Reject It Outright

With a full-time job and the necessity to work overtime just to pay my mortgage, I wanted my dream of starting my own business to be more than an idea. How could I possibly make this dream a reality and not just a hallucination? Dreams, like angels, can lift us high above the world, taking us away from the daily grind. And oh how those dreams do lift and encourage us, until we let them fade into fantasy.

I've met women who admit, “I gave up my dreams years ago.” When we give up on our dreams, as those women have, the same dreams that once lifted us out of our daily drudgery now show up as failures and make us so miserable that we'd welcome a monstrous New Year's Day hangover as a relief.

I'm not much into hangovers. What I am into is making promises to my dreams. So the second promise I made to myself was to go for what I wanted all the way or to decisively reject it outright.

A dream or a goal you have may not be right for you, but whatever you decide, you owe it to yourself to buck up to the decision. Don't leave the dream dangling with “one day, some day, I might get around to living my dream” and the reminder of what you don't have the time, courage or enthusiasm to grab. Do it or forget it. Go for it or reject it outright.

Don't wait for the conditions to be perfect or for a guarantee you'll get the outcome you want. That will never happen. People who wait or dabble usually end up at their retirement parties rewarded with a glass of watery punch and a piece of plain white cake. Own up to your passions, then step out and grab hold of them with both hands.

After creating a new industry, I had no guarantee of outcome. I just grabbed my dream, putting into it everything I had and more.

Skydiving is a great metaphor for going all the way. When you skydive you can't be partially in, especially once you're out. Despite a fear of cliff-hanging heights, I stepped out of an airplane at 14,000 feet to skydive. I was terrified. Once out of the plane's cabin, I couldn't step back in. I was truly committed, even if not by choice, and the exhilaration I felt later at overcoming that lifelong fear proved to be a catalyst for future accomplishments.

Most of us stay in the safe cabin of everyday life because of our fears. Fears are simply growth opportunities, the opportunity to step out again and again. Yet so often we never step out into the audacious dreams that smolder and spark inside us. What would your life look like if you didn't have the choice of that safe cabin? If your only option was to grab that dream and dive into it? To go all the way once you made the jump?

Don't allow fear to freeze you in place, or one day, some day, you'll be sipping retirement punch regretting all the things you didn't do. Success is not about the achievement. It's not the pay raise, the thinner body, the better-looking husband. The achievement is stepping out. When you define success as stepping out, you can succeed every day because you can step out every day.

I had no certainty that my company would survive the recession, especially when it persisted, leaching the blood, sweat and marrow out of us for months and then years. It was like being tossed out of an airplane without a parachute. Talk about a breathtaking growth opportunity. To survive this crisis, we had to step out and go all the way. Defining success not as more revenue or more profits but as bucking up and stepping out helped me to keep my eye on the ball, make tough decisions and do the things I needed to do for our success.

When the credit markets shut down, students could no longer get educational loans from Sallie Mae to fund their education for our program. Overnight our business model had to change. So what did we do? If Sallie Mae wasn't going to loan our students the $13,000, then we would. We had to decide right then and there. We didn't have months to research and deliberate the decision. We barely had time to even think about it, and absolutely no guarantee of success. We had to go for the idea or reject it outright. Overnight we became our own “finance company.”

When you're putting out the cash, instead of cashing the cash, the bottom line is not pretty. It would have been easy to second-guess ourselves. Had we just rushed into the worst decision of all time?

As it turned out, this single bold decision is one essential reason we survived the recession. I've had no business training, but I can tell you no business school trained anyone to successfully handle what all entrepreneurs confronted during these dismal recession years. We dove in all the way and did what was needed.

One thing that always helps me go for what I want is perspective. My mom Marise gave me that. She had a dream of traveling far beyond New Orleans, where I grew up. She read books that took her to the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and the Sistine Chapel, and she planned on visiting all of them. Then she met my dad. She often said, “When we have enough money, we'll travel.” But then she had children, and she said, “When the kids are grown and out of the house, we'll travel.” Then the kids were out of the house and my mom died—at age 48—from breast cancer. Her travel dreams never came true.

Is it possible you're waiting to live your dreams? If so, what are you waiting for? When you get enough money? When you lose enough weight? When your job is perfect? When your spouse is perfect? Don't wait.

My mom's death taught me that the time is now. When I'm afraid to take a risk, which is often, and not just during a recession, I honor my mom by asking myself, “What's the worst thing that can happen?” The perspective of knowing it's not cancer or death helps me to do the thing I fear.

It's perfectly okay to admit that a commitment is not right for you and to reject it outright. This is your life, your wicked success.

What's not okay is to hold back and put less than everything into a commitment that is your passion. If you want something, go for it all the way and go for it now. When you do, you won't always succeed but you will wake up every day to a life and career you love.

PROMISE 3: I Will Take One Action Step a Day Toward My Passionate Vision

How was I going to pull off my business idea? Not only did I have a full-time job, I was creating a new business model—consulting with attorneys on medical-related cases.

I envisioned beyond the horizon to an alternate world where the nursing and legal professions merged, a world as a legal nurse consultant. My new world did not yet exist, but I believed I could make it so. And while belief in my vision was crucial, belief was just the beginning.

To achieve the reality, I coupled belief with action. I vowed to do something every day to move my vision forward. My TV found a new home in the closet. I cut back on socializing with friends and knuckled down to doing at least one thing daily for my business, no matter how exhausted I was at the end of the day.

When a national news anchor from CNN asked me how I got to where I am today, in light of my humble beginnings, I was hoping to say something profound. But the truth was, I did it one step at a time. Dreams and visions are great, but without action they are nothing more than hallucinations. Without daily action, my visions might have scudded away and dissolved like clouds. I've met many smart people who had dreams and ideas but never did anything to make them real. They didn't take action.

Like anyone striving to accomplish any whopping big goal, I had to take a lot of steps—talk to that first attorney, get my first project, build my first client relationship. Most important, I had to take action every single day. And it worked.

I lacked business savvy, yet with each small step I gained both knowledge and momentum. Sometimes I glided through and other times I strained to inch forward, but the accumulated effect of all those steps brought me to where I am today. What I learned in the process and what still applies now is that it's less important what I do and more important that I do something. I was developing the habits and discipline necessary to make my vision a reality.

Yes, I acted on a breakthrough idea in my profession, but others could have done the same. What separated me from another nurse who may have had similar ideas was that I took action steps to realize my dream. The idea comes first, but success is in the motion.

We're never measured by how we show up in the good times. We're measured by how we show up for challenges and crises.

When the recession hit hard, I was passionately invested in not downsizing. I did not want to put this company on a course of spiraling deterioration, although I confess my hit list was ready—I knew exactly who would go first if I had to pull the trigger.

I could feel the fear. My staff was used to 20 to 30 percent bonuses and fat pay raises. Not just the executive team, but everyone, down to the guys in shipping. I wanted them to know this wasn't only my challenge to deal with, nor just management's problem to solve. It was theirs too. If they were to share in the good times, they had to share in the not-so-good times. They'd have to buck up and invest their energy and passion in keeping our company viable without fat raises and bonuses.

Fear and worry are useless emotions. Yet we're human. So how do we focus energy on our vision and purpose when fear rips at us? Through action. For me action pushes the fear out.

I challenged the team at Vickie Milazzo Institute to formulate a recession strategy. We started with an all-day brainstorming session, assessing our budget and where we could cut without compromising the integrity of our product and the service to our customer. My company is an open book. Everyone knows exactly how much we take in down to the penny. We'd always been fat, never worrying about budget. We had one, but if we went over—hey, no problem. The coffer was always full.

But overnight the world had changed, and we had to merge with the change or get run over and flattened by it. Somebody was going to feel the pain, and if we didn't want it to be the customer, it had to be us.

To their credit, my staff busted their butts going after this project as though their jobs depended on it. And their jobs did. They effectively reduced our budget 50 percent.

They didn't accomplish this amazing feat in one brainstorming session—it took five—but the result led to a profitable year in one of the worst down economies of our time, and we did not have to downsize a single employee. And not a single person took a pay cut, which was most companies' second reaction to the recession after downsizing.

Success is not about what you do when the road ahead is golden and every dip and turn smoothes your way. Success is about how you respond when you hit the biggest, nastiest roadblock of all time.

Successful women love the action as much as the dream. By taking action every day you develop the habit and discipline to make your vision a reality. When you focus not just on the idea but on making it happen, you stay in motion, not merely dreaming your passions but living them.

Make this third promise now, that you will take at least one action step every day for the next 30 days on the Big Thing that will bring you closer to your passionate visions in a big way. Once you're hooked on the natural high of action, focusing on more impactful actions and taking giant leaps comes easy. Start with the first 30 days. Turn that into 60 days, then 90 days...

Success is in the motion. The more action you take, the easier it is to step out and do your next Big Thing. Anything you're going for: advancing your career, starting a business, improving a relationship … Do something!

PROMISE 4: I Commit to Being a Success Student for Life

I pioneered the industry of legal nurse consulting, so there was no one to teach me how to do what I set out to do. Yet I didn't feel alone. I gathered the biggest CEOs and successful business owners in the country—at least those who'd written a book—and devoured everything I could find about launching a business. I became a success student of business strategy—for life.

Some of the best advice I received when I started my business was, “Vickie, you will encounter many challenges you will not know how to handle. But there's always someone out there who has already successfully handled that very challenge.”

Luckily, we live in the midst of an information age created by a revolution in communication possibly even more world-changing than any of the past, including the Guttenberg press, radio and television. Our children are growing up with technology we think of as a tool, but which they consider to be a natural extension of their hands and minds. The skills they master before third grade, and take for granted as akin to walking, for some of us still must be learned—or maybe not learned. We must be willing to grow, to learn and to adapt, even if that means having a child teach us how to embrace the next big technology advance.

All great athletes and performers practice every day, with coaches to keep them practicing perfectly. Even after they achieve a level of success, they continue to practice and take instruction from their coaches, learning new ways to reach higher levels. They are lifetime students.

Success breeds success. Becoming a success student for life is about practicing being successful. What's hard today is easy tomorrow—with practice.

There are two ways you can learn:

• The hard way—through trial and error, making lots of mistakes. You're going to do some of that anyway, but this is a slow, expensive path to success.
• The easier way—through the experience of others who've already successfully overcome the problems and discovered the answers. This is the quicker path to success.

So much to learn—so little time. Why choose the hard way when you can choose the quicker, easier path to wicked success? Don't we always say, “I wish I'd known when I was 20 what I know now?” When we're 80, we'll be saying, “I wish I'd known when I was 40 what I know now.” Find a 40-year-old and an 80-year-old and collaborate. Leverage for yourself what others have already learned.

I've been in business for nearly three decades, and I still learn every day—from my students, staff, favorite writers, speakers and business experts. When I find myself discarding other people's ideas all too readily without fully listening, I ask myself, “Vickie, would you rather be right or listen and be successful?”

Collect white and gray matter wherever you can find it. I joke that typing a question into the Google search box is one of the most effective ways to search for answers, because it seems there's not a single question that hasn't been asked and answered from a dozen different viewpoints.

Intelligent women know what they don't know and when to seek answers. Smart women appreciate that what works today won't necessarily work tomorrow, and that aggressive learning is a competitive advantage to achieving any desired goal.

Surround yourself with as many successful mentors as possible. And don't limit yourself. When people ask me, “Who's your mentor?” I can't pin it down to one person. I've been mentored by different people in different ways at different times.

One person can mentor you on starting a business, another on balancing family and career. If you model or collaborate with only one person, you'll always be one step behind her; but if you model many, you can one day be the wickedly successful woman mentoring other women.

Choose mentors who have something interesting to say and an interesting way of saying it. Learn from their mistakes as well as their successes. Think of your mentors as a collective genius with whom you can bounce ideas around and perfect your vision. Magnify your wicked success through theirs.

Be smart enough to ask for what you need. You may be surprised at who is willing to help you.

I prefer to listen and learn from mentors who are far more successful than I am. I attribute much of my success to choosing wisely: mentors who elevate me to new levels. I don't want to learn from someone who's not walking the talk (like a relationship expert who's not in a relationship, or a business expert whose business is writing books about business, not running a business).

Commit now to being a lifetime student, to actively seeking out new, challenging experiences and people who will push you to your next level.

PROMISE 5: I Believe as a Woman I Really Can Do Anything

Success is not determined solely by IQ, experience, or good looks. Women who succeed believe in themselves enough to take calculated risks.

Belief is a choice. You can challenge any limitations that are placed on your belief. Belief is not wishful thinking. Belief is the mental acceptance that something is true even though absolute certainty may be absent. Belief is what pushes you to go all out—to put your heart and soul into the effort. Do you really put your all into something you don't believe in? Think about it. After you found out your parents were Santa it didn't really matter whether you were naughty or nice.

During the era of the telegraph, people believed that's all that was needed. Then someone believed there could be so much more and invented the telephone. Surely the telephone was all that was needed, until someone believed there could be so much more and invented the cell phone. Surely the cell phone was all that was needed, until Apple turned the world on its ear with the iPhone.

Faith is a powerful thing, but seeing is believing. When Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile, the previous world record had stood for 10 years. Bannister believed he could break it, and he did, at 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. But what's really interesting is that a month and a half later another runner broke Bannister's record. And in the next 40 years, more than 700 more runners cracked that 4-minute barrier. They achieved that milestone because knowing someone else had done it helped them believe they could do it, too.

I had imagined what I wanted—and, yes, that's the essential first step. We imagine, then we must believe if we're going to achieve. Imagine. Believe. Achieve.

I was lucky to go to an all-girls high school. Coed schools have advantages, too, but when I grew up men were expected to be the business geniuses, women to be helpful homemakers. I gained confidence in those formative years from not having teachers telling me the boys were smarter, or calling on them instead of me. As a young woman I honestly believed I could do anything. Believing you can do it is 90 percent of the win.

But six years into nursing, a profession that receives minimal positive feedback, I'd been stripped of my youthful confidence. So when I walked into my first interview with my first attorney-prospect, my legs were literally shaking. I was so nervous I wasn't sure I could make it through that interview, much less secure him as my first client.

What got me through was remembering who I was, an RN whose specialized knowledge this man needed, even if he didn't know it yet. As a critical care nurse, if that same attorney was in a hospital gown with his backside showing, I would have no problem introducing myself with one hand and inserting a Foley catheter with the other.

I managed emergencies as easily as making the bed every morning, making split-second decisions that, for patients, were the difference between life and death and I'd handled these life-threatening situations while the doctors were nowhere to be found. If I can succeed in such complex situations, I decided, I can easily do something as straightforward as talk with an attorney.

Talk I did, and despite that clumsy start I walked out with my first client, one who would eventually pay my mortgage, plus six figures annually in consulting fees, for years to come. Not bad for a woman with no business education or experience.

Many women tell me, “If I could change my career or my relationship, I'd change my life.” That's not the way it works. You change yourself, you change your career, you change your relationship. Einstein said, “You can't solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it.” These are powerful words challenging us to recreate ourselves when we want something new. To transform anything you must transform yourself, and a huge part of the transformation is believing in your own wicked success.

Expand what you're willing to believe about you. I've met many women who use their children as a crutch for why they don't achieve wicked success. “I've got two children. I don't have time to succeed big.” One woman entrepreneur who created a million-dollar company expanded her belief. “I'm solely responsible for my three children. I don't have time not to succeed.”

Any time I hesitate to go for what I want because I've stopped believing in myself, I invoke Promise 5 and remember, “I'm a woman. I can do anything.” I'm so practiced at believing Promise 5 that when the recession first hit us, I wasn't worried. Then it lingered and lingered, and lingered some more. I found myself doubting my decisions.

Was selling a $13,000 education program to RNs who earn $50,000 a year a hallucination? The fear I avoided at the beginning gripped me and wouldn't release. I couldn't deny the fear, and fear opened the door to disbelief. I had to be in the moment, feel the fear, feel the pain and come out on the other end of that fear, believing I could thrive again.

So I looked to my 29 years of experience as an entrepreneur, to the experience of the team at the Institute and to all we'd accomplished. Normally, I spend little time basking in past accomplishments. I focus on the now. But reviewing my past successes helped me to remember the challenges I'd tackled and how I'd survived them.

Along with that belief in myself and my team, I tapped into my belief in the universe. I couldn't deny that my business world was different and frightening, but I believed the universe would not abandon me. I'm not one to go around Barbie-dolling it with a fake smile, so I'm not saying the path through these hard times was easy, but I tried to embrace the good in every setback and every soul-sucking hour.

What was my foremost recession lesson? I couldn't buy into everyone's fear and expect to succeed, so I shut out the naysayers and got deep with Promise 5.

Anytime you're afraid, look to your past successes and find your own examples of personal or career accomplishments that give you pride and encouragement. Acknowledge your successes, let them push you forward and bolster your resolve. Any time you're not grabbing the opportunity, tell yourself, “I am a woman and I can do anything!” If you believe you're strong, that you will achieve your goal no matter what the challenges and no matter what anyone else tells you, you will succeed.

HARNESS YOUR 10 FEMININE FORCES WITH THE 5 PROMISES

The 5 Promises not only helped me to launch and grow my business, they advanced a stronger Vickie. Not in a masculine way, in a more feminine way. In 1982, when I launched myself full speed into my vision, business advisors and mentors were mostly men. I belonged to an entrepreneur group in the 1990s and was the only woman member. They were great men, and I learned from them, but I was determined not to be one of those women who emerge from success as a more masculine form of myself. I'd met a few of those women, and they could easily have turned me off entirely to wicked success. Fortunately, I believed I didn't have to be one of them.

The 5 Promises helped me to realize success on my own terms, as a woman who loved being a strong woman with 10 Feminine Forces—fire, intuitive vision, engagement, agility, genius, integrity, endurance, enterprise, renewal and fusion. These forces are not purely women's domain. Men certainly exhibit many of them. But women synthesize these strengths in a potent energy that is distinctively female, and we should not be afraid to express them.

Most of us see ourselves as having one strength—for example, “I'm persistent.” At most we rely on two or three to get through our day. Or we only summon all 10 when we're faced with a crisis.

Dorene shared with me, “I never thought of myself as strong, but I've endured 14 hours of labor, not once but twice. If I can endure that, I can endure anything. Now that I know I have these strengths, I can use them to my benefit to achieve any goal.” Like Dorene, you can harness these strengths now. Don't wait for a recession or any other crisis.

You'll hear from other women in this book, women who've applied the 5 Promises and 10 Strengths themselves. I'm not asking you to trust me on this. I want you to honestly explore and test these 5 Promises and how they will guide you in harnessing your 10 Strengths. If you don't commit, you'll never know just how wickedly powerful they can be for you.

The magic of the 5 Promises is that they are not complex; they can work for any goal and will lead to instant success. They will be your board of directors, nudging you, encouraging you, guiding you to be stronger and holding you accountable for living and working in a way that honors you as a woman. This proven life plan works. Commit now and I'll walk you through it step by step. Embrace your amazing new life of wicked success without limits.

Promise Big and Promise Now!

I resolved to take fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT