Rise Of The Female Entrepreneur: Deborah Dooley

Rise Of The Female Entrepreneur: Deborah Dooley

What Is Your Passion? The starting point of a Female Entrepreneur

Can spending a childhood moving every two years to a different state lead you to a career path? That’s precisely what happened to Deborah Dooley.

Deborah was constantly starting a new school. I would call it a state of anxiety. Still, showcasing her 4 decades of psychology, Deborah stated as such, “it created me to be “objective perspective,” or I never needed belonging.” And this constant move, stemming from her father’s military career, came Deborah’s start point for her own career. “I felt like something was missing inside of me, and it gave me motivation,” Deborah continued. And out of that simple personal desire to solve herself, she found a career focus. She calls her career a “symptom” of her life. Still, as I listen to her talk, I hear it as her passion. “I was motivated by a sense of wanting to feel whole within myself, and that was my start point, true that was my passion point,” she continued.

As we began to discuss Deborah’s entrepreneurial life of personal discovery, she reflected on entrepreneurs she met as a young girl. “As I look backward, women from my generation were never called entrepreneurs; it was more of a description of a woman having a passion. And their career was a development from that passion,” she explained. So having a passion point can catapult lots of careers.

There are many current-day examples of passionate people with their work, and Deborah expressed ones that came to her mind. Greta Thornburg is the most recent one who didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur but sparked her passion for global warming. Being 4’11” with head-to-toe drive, she embodies her book title “No one is Too Small to Make a Difference.” It can give the most disheartened feel empowered. Passion is indeed contagious.

Deborah also mentions Malala Yousafzai. Malala was a young girl in Pakistan who wanted to share her experiences, even writing under a pseudonym. Out of that driven desire, she was targeted for attempted assassination and is currently

an activist who is the youngest ever to have received a Nobel Peace Prize and known for making The Daily Show host John Stewart speechless. If you have ever watched John Stewart, that is no easy task.

Deborah continued to point out that even the most successful women are the ones who may even integrate their passion into their careers later. Maybe even use their profession to launch a passion focus. Perhaps an earlier career creates the breadth and depth to hit a hot point they’ve carried their whole lives. Goldie Hawn is an example with her nonprofit mindup. org. Goldie Hawn, who dealt with her own anxiety, focused on greater mindfulness, especially for grade school children.

“What we are talking about here is emotional intelligence as well as passion,” said Deborah. “As women are moving into leadership roles right now, at a record-breaking rate, I am hoping emotional intelligence will also become part of their personal power,” she continued. “We as women need to bring our emotional intelligence into our leadership roles,” Deborah emphasized with a healthy smile.

Think back to a moment you felt stressed. You finally yelled or just felt an overwhelming sense of duress. We tend to get lost in the symptoms: neck pain, a migraine, or tight, highly raised shoulders. We need to stop and think about where that stress stems from and what we can do about that feeling. Most humans are getting lost in their symptoms versus having an objective perspective. So, we don’t really solve our stress point. We basically put a band-aid on it.

The good news right now is that people are starting to understand this, and we are turning a corner.

Perhaps at some level, we are moving backward to a time where passion and values are the driving force of females in our endeavors. Women coming out of COVID are tapping into enthusiasms and trying “side-hustles” or doing a complete career change. Perhaps going backward with a new lens is moving forwards.

Meditation Failure

If you have ever failed at meditation, that is no surprise, according to Deborah.

“Meditation is a war of your thoughts and you trying to control your thoughts,” she stated. It makes mediation a war between your thoughts and breath. And this war, you can’t possibly win until you learn to focus on your breath.

So are you feeling stressed or under duress right now and wondering what to do? Deborah says, stop and notice your breathing. “What do you notice about your breathing at this moment?” she asks every new client at their first session. She always hears words such as shallow, rapid, and quick. This shallow and fast breath typically comes from the upper chest and is usually an overactive sympathetic system. It is a symptom of being under too much stress and not knowing how to regulate this anxiety.

Deborah quietly stated, “Slow your breath down into your belly. Take your time to feel your breath into your belly, feel your breath expanding your ribs and now to the back of your spine. Now feel your breath expanding your sternum and creating more space between your sternum and your heart. You can now become the master of your breath; you can now be your boss,” she stated with emphatically.

Deborah Dooly has been working and teaching in the psychology field for four decades. She specializes in the neuroscience of brain balance with an emphasis on personal skill development.

www.deborahdooley.com (SF Bay Area)