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Women need to learn to set goals and take time for themselves if they are to survive the stresses of juggling work and family.
That’s the thrust of Potential Unplugged, a self-help seminar for women being held in Edmonton on April 21.
“It could mean fulfilling a lifelong dream of starting your own business,” said Edmonton businesswoman Linda Maul, one of the five women organizing and speaking at the seminar.  “Or something as simple as spending more time with a grandchild.”
Maul, 52, said women get so caught up with the many demands of jobs, children and volunteering, they forget about their own needs.”
That can lead to “great sadness, “ she said. 
A recent study found that balancing work and personal lives is the number 1 concern of employees.  Statistics Canada estimates stress-related disorders caused by overwork cost Canadian businesses $12 billion annually.
“We have to learn how to live up to our own expectations and not to other people’s,” said Maul, admitting she is a much happier person since giving her own life a major shake-up 10 years ago.
She left an unsatisfactory marriage and started her own company which helps firms to set up employee training.
The other four women involved in the seminar are also experienced in the fields of staff training and motivational speaking.
The day-long event has 12 sessions designed to “give women the tools to make changes in their personal and professional life.”
They include sessions on goal-setting, improving self-esteem, on quitting being a perfectionist, communicating with your partner, keeping sane under pressure, and learning to deal with fear and failure at work.  Another, entitled Connecting at Work: Do you Have Human Moments? examines how to build trust and respect in the office.
“It doesn’t have to be big things.  Just saying ’good morning’ with a smile or offering to help someone in a tight spot,” Maul said.
Humourous greeting cards are one of her standbys.  She buys a dozen or so at time and sends them to people going through rough times.
“It’s about making people feel good.  How can you feel stressed when you are laughing?”
The seminar will run at the Delta Edmonton Centre Suite, 10222 102 St. Tickets are $159 each with a portion of proceeds going to the Canada Mental Health Society and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
For more details call 1-888-256-2677.

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When the five whirlwinds behind the Potential Unplugged conference gather in one room, there’s so much energy generated you wonder if you’re likely to get hit by an errant bolt of lightning.
They’d say anything is possible, even taking on the U.S. giants of the seminars-for-women companies.
“We’re Canadians and from Alberta and we thought, “We could do this and make it more relevant and fun,’” says Tammy Robertson, who with Dawn Heartwell are the dynamos behind WorkHeart Consulting in Calgary.
Never doing things by halves, Robertson and Heartwell along with Sandi Harpham, Edmonton author of Living on Purpose: Life Beyond Mediocrity; Linda Maul of Corporate Source Inc. in Calgary; and speaker and facilitator Leeanne Lehman plan a four-city, 10 day conference tour for the end of April.
The 12 sessions in the conference aim to re-energize women.  They will offer tips on overcoming perfectionism; on the F words of business – fear, failure, staying flexible, focusing energy and finding fun; improving communication with men, particularly your partner; finding balance in life and connecting more strongly with loved ones; building synergy between professional and personal life; and, of course, juggling women’s many roles.
“Each of us has gone through life using tools for the industrial era,” says Harpham
“We want to give people a toolbox that will help them live in a world moving at the speed of light without burning out.  Tools to help them, right now.”
One of the most valuable tools each of these five women uses is simply a knowledge of her purpose in life.
“I was 42 years old before I thought ‘Why on earth are you here?  What’s Linda Maul all about?’” says Maul, now an international businesswoman and passionate grandma.
“I had lived according to what was expected of me.  Now I live life – personally, professionally, relationship-wise – for all the reasons I believe I’m here for.”
And why is she here?
“I am here to touch a million lives positively before I die.”
Heartwell has learned to appreciate every moment, and to deal with people as whole human beings.
“Fourteen years ago I was told I had two months to live.  I had my life in my hands, and realized my head and heart had to work together.”
A physiotherapist at the time, she had devoted her professional life to rehabilitating people, “but wasn’t touching people’s heads, hearts, minds.  Now I look back and think what a poor job I did in just dealing with the physical part of rehab.  Now I think more comprehensively about what I do.
“ . . . there’s such pleasure in the little things, like just watching children grow.”
“Everybody who lives, dies,” says Harpham.  “But not everybody who has died has lived.”
As a teen, she was diagnosed as a depressive and had the feeling “is that all there is to life?”
“I had to drag myself to get out of bed, drag myself to work, drag myself to make a phone call, drag myself to do the laundry.  No wonder I was exhausted – I was dragging 120 pounds around all day long.”
A social worker, she was frustrated by a career that had her helping people overcome an emergency in life, but prevented her from helping those people learn to live a better life.
“When people say, ‘Is that all there is?’ I’ve been inspired to say, ‘No, there’s more.’”
After 15 years stuck in an uncreative job, Lehman rejected the rigidity of rules in life. 
“I had been a bubbly, happy person, a people-pleaser to the extreme.”
She discovered she’d been pleasing everybody but herself.
Having learned how to live a fuller life, “I’ve become addicted to sharing my success with other people.”
Her advice is to go big, or go home.
Robertson is devoted to bringing fun to life – her own and that of everyone within hearing distance.
“My mission is to create an environment of unlimited potential for myself and others,” says Robertson, who believes humour is an essential ingredient to life, and to prove it, pops on a red and white Cat-in-the-Hat topper.
She works “in a lot of organizations to show them how to make people feel more valued and important.  You create human moments at work through civility, honestly, being real learning people’s names and how to spell them.  Sounds easy, doesn’t it?”
Life itself sounds easy, the five point out.  It’s the living that provides the difficulty.
“You have to learn from experience, and you get experience from making mistakes,” says Harpham.
Being perfect (swallowing the SuperWoman myth, for instance) is inherently limiting.
“We’ll only take on about two percent of what we could do, because only by doing the stuff we know can we do it perfectly.”
Too many women, say the five, are stuck personally and professionally, following the old model, abiding by the rules, thinking about how their lives will be better in the future and wondering why things don’t change.
“You can’t say, ‘I’ll be that somebody a year from now,’” says Lehman.
“You’ve got to start being the new you now.”
“I hope women will leave ready to take risks, making assessments about how to live and believing they have the potential to do what they want.”

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It's that sudden snap-awake feeling.  At its simplest, it happens when you arrive at your destination, suddenly realizing you can't remember any part of the drive across town. 
Snap!
Or more significantly, you look up at the clock and realize your spouse is inexplicably two hours late.  Or you walk into work and are told to accompany the security guard to human resources.
Snap! Snap!
Now you're awake, aware and thinking.
According to Sandi Harpham, an Edmonton social worker and author, too many of us are half asleep most of the time, carrying out our lives like characters in Night of the Living Dead.  Zombie-like, we shuffle off to work in the morning, home at night, spend a few hours in front of the tube and repeat, day in and day out for years, decades and entire lifetimes.
"Life is flat, monotone -- each day looks almost identical to the last," says Harpham, 34.  "Part of us suspects there must be something more, but we don't know what that is."
Harpham, an Edmonton social worker and facilitator, has written and self-published a new book titled Living On Purpose, Life Beyond Mediocrity.  It is Harpham's hope she can kick us in our psychic rear-ends and awake us to life's potential.
Hers is not the first work to deal with this notion of unconscious living.  Buddhism, for example, stresses living in the moment and focusing on what is at hand.  Twelve-step programs encourage members to live life one day at a time and to seriously reflect on how they're living it.  The notion of unconscious living was once called sloth and even made up one of the seven deadly sins.
Harpham says all of our daily lives are filled with small decisions.  Too often we ignore different choices in favour of routine.  Living unconsciously, we do the same thing over and over -- just because -- even if the end result is a bland or unhappy life.
"Making these choices consciously is living on purpose, while making them unconsciously is living by chance," says Harpham.
Worse yet, we might remain in mediocre relationships, marriages or jobs because we haven't had the courage to really look at how our life is playing itself out, or what our choices might be.  Do we need to spend more time talking intimately with our spouses, or risking a new assignment at work?  Maybe even more drastic choices need to be made.
Ask unconscious people how it's going and they'll shrug and smile wanly.  "No complaints," they'll say.  How about any happy surprises?
Harpham asks us to make all of our small, daily decisions consciously.  Once started, we can't help but become more conscious of our routines and begin to question if that's all there is.
When was the last time you contemplated whether your life was interesting, challenging, fulfilling and fun?
"We can be so numb to it all," says Harpham.
Harpham says people should ask themselves tough questions, such as: "What would I want to have different in my life?"
Unfortunately, most people, even if unhappy, won't move off the couch until the house is fully engulfed in flames -- until emergencies arise which motivate us to change.  Harpham says we needn't, and shouldn’t, wait for catastrophe to get us moving.
So what do we do?  That's not easy to answer, says Harpham, because one person's bliss is another's boredom.  The key, she says, is asking ourselves what is important to us.  What makes us feel alive, creative, engaged?
"Who am I?  What do I want? Where am I going?" says Harpham
She had her own bout of depression in childhood and believes it was caused by unconscious living.  Harpham says she wanted to be living a kind of big, creative life, but was holding back.
She was left with the overwhelming impression that she was a loser.  She wasn't, of course, and when she stared to try new things and take risks, her confidence soared and all kinds of new choices became clear to her.
"The payoffs are huge," she says.  "There is a real difference between living and being alive.  But so often we just do things by rote."
She suggests daily meditation as a path to gaining a clearer, more conscious impression of what life means to us.  She also encourages people to do one thing everyday for themselves.
She meditates, exercises or establishes a heart-to-heart with someone.  But she doesn't pretend to know the exact thing everyone else needs to do.
Try new things, explore and experience, she says.  The fun and the rewards can come in the exploration, rather than the destination, she says.
And it is truly depressing, she says, to go through life missing opportunities to grow and explore.
"If we get beyond the routine, the mediocrity, there is a life beyond imagination for any of us," she says.