Successful Single Mom: Beate Chelette

Single Moms, here's a single mom story to give you hope, inspiration and a glimpse into your possible future:

Beate Chelette is a 43-year-old single mom, entrepreneur, and most recently a self-made multimillionaire. After receiving a degree in photography-and being the youngest photo editor on record for Elle Magazine in her native Germany, she immigrated to the United States in 1989. Most recently she published a book, Women Who Want It All and Get It, too! A single mom since 1995, Beate has lots of wisdom to share. Her daughter, Gina, turned sixteen this year. She believes being a single mom is a world of making sacrifices and focusing on a few very important things – starting with our children and our jobs. She says she really didn’t have time for anything else. She notes that getting organized and putting your priorities in order is crucial for single mom success.

In the beginning, and for many years, she didn’t spend a lot of time going out, treating herself to spa weekends or fancy restaurants. While still on a budget, her self-care consisted of things that were within her reach, such as going for a bicycle ride or taking inexpensive art classes at the local museum. “It made me feel like I was focusing on myself a little but it wasn’t elaborate.” Beate understood what I meant when I talked about “The Tunnel.” For her, this was the period at the beginning that was about self-pity and “What was I thinking? How did I pick this person?” While she never regretted having her daughter, she noted there is definitely a period of wrangling with the decision that seemed to have backfired so badly.

Her positive attitude became apparent when she said, “You say to yourself, ‘I can’t change it, I’m going to roll up my sleeves and move on.’” This is about making the decision that what has happened, what is happening, isn’t going to break you. You’re going to survive, thrive and flourish. Period.

That’s exactly what she did – she started a business with very little money and eventually sold it for several million dollars to a privately-held company owned by Bill Gates. “At the end of the day, I knew I was a good person and the joke could not be on me. I refused to accept that the decisions that I had made to get married, and have a child was going to be the end. What was the spiritual message? That I wasn’t going to be the loser. I was going to be the winner – I believed there was something out there for me. I accepted that the great love affair, the great marriage, wasn’t the thing for me at the time. I saw other single moms – they were so angry and so hateful. I said to myself, ‘I am not going to be an overweight, angry single parent that is going to eventually end up as a spinster!’”

She defines success as arriving at a point when you know you are self-sufficient, when you know you’ve made it. She says, “I know I’ve made it - I know I can take care of myself. I’m the queen of the world now, I can do whatever I want. I can relax and allow myself to enjoy the journey.” Today, Beate runs a successful consulting company, and is promoting her new book, watching her daughter flourish in school and out, and enjoying a committed, happy relationship. Her message for you, dear reader, is “You’re going to make it! There are lots of sacrifices but you will make it – I promise you this will pass and your day will come!” You can listen to my interview with Beate on my website at www.coachhonoree.com.

Now its time to focus on you. Are you ready? We’re going to work on cracking your code for the remainder of this book, so let’s get started! 

*The above is an excerpt from The Successful Single Mom book.

Honorée has dedicated her life to being a positive force for good. She writes personal and professional growth and development books, and The Successful Single Mom book series. As an executive coach and corporate trainer, she turns service providers into rainmakers, average producers into rock-stars, and dreams into reality. For more information on how she can specifically help you or your organization, click here.

The #1 Secret to Post-Divorce Dating

Note: Today's blog is written by one of my very favorite fiction writers, Deborah Coonts. You'll love this blog and her books (that is, if you love fun, funny and sexy murder mysteries ... set in Vegas.)

DEEP IN A SHALLOW WORLD 

I'm just not a casual sex kind of gal.

Which is sort of a problem. Newly re-single, older by decades than the last time I swam in the dating pool, I now live in Las Vegas, where the length of a relationship is generally measured in hours. A long-term gal in a short-term world. So, how does one find deep in the shallow end?

Certainly not in the local watering holes. A few glasses of wine and all the men seem to look better. While it might be fun, the last thing I need right now is to kiss another toad expecting him to turn into a prince. Been there, done that, bought the tee shirt.

And, to be honest, my luck sorta runs the other way -- I find an apparent prince paddling around the dating pool only to discover he's, well, really comfortable in the shallow end.
 

They say a fool is someone who keeps doing the same thing expecting a different result. Yup, I'm a dating fool.

Something needed to change. I needed to change. A daunting task considering I've been me for a very long time. But, you see, that's where I was wrong -- sort of. Let me explain.

I'm a fairly logical thinker, so my first step on the path through this morass of human interaction was a drink with a local shrink. He explained to me that most of us treat dating as a game. Perhaps unwittingly, but we all do it. When confronted with a new relationship, we all try to put on our best faces. We trot out our best manners, we accommodate, we facilitate, we supplicate to the detriment of what we want and feel, of who we really are.

As a result, the first part of a relationship is like a Cary Grant movie -- a handsome man with a great . . . laugh track . . . and free-flowing Champagne. But, eventually the movie ends and you're left with a scruffy Cary Grant with morning breath, scratching places even baseball players don't touch, no clever dialogue, no real mutuality of interests or values, and a pounding Champagne hangover -- okay, I could still handle Cary Grant like that -- for a little while. Bad analogy, but you get my drift.

Reality rears its ugly head. You're in bed with a stranger. And it isn't him. Okay, maybe it is him, but it's also you.

Oh, the games people play -- with each other, yes, but mostly with our selves. We pretend in order to perpetuate the fantasy. This is called the masking effect -- and apparently it can last for the first eighteen months or so.

That got me thinking. Did I do that? I certainly didn't intend to present a different me than the me I wanted to be. But, come to think of it . . . Heck, I was raised in the South -- I might as well have "co-dependent" tattooed on my butt. Pleasing others, elevating the needs of others, putting myself waaay down the list, is part of my genetic coding.

So, if I'm hiding me, how can I dare hope for the kind of relationship I dream of -- one of mutual respect? Yes, yes, along with all the other stuff.

I needed to get real. The world isn't a Cary Grant movie and I better quit scripting the parts -- especially my own. No more pretending to be a pretty pin-up content to play second fiddle. No more going along in order to keep the peace. No more putting up and shutting up. No more hiding the fact that I have a brain stuck in overdrive -- an insatiable curiosity. My career and my dreams are as important as anybody else's. In short, I turned me free. Heck, if I couldn't like myself, my real self, who else would?

Unmuzzled and unshackled, I began living the life I imagined.

I also quit worrying about the whole dating thing and began to enjoy my own company. I hadn't spent quality alone-time with me in, well, in forever. And, while I can be a pain in the ass, I'm not all that bad.

Several months into my relationship with me, I had taken myself to the gym, as usual. This particular day, the gym was quiet. Pounding out miles on the treadmill, I was alone except for two guys on ellipticals behind me. They chatted about work, and I couldn't help but eavesdrop -- stories are my life's work. Call it professional interest. Right.

Apparently one of the guys taught at the local college and he was waxing poetic about a website called Rate Your Professor. Much to his delight, some of his students had not only given him high marks, but had also awarded him chili peppers -- evidence of his "hotness".

As I stepped off the treadmill, he said to his friend, "Can you believe it? They think I'm hot."

Call it oxygen deprivation, or an inability to resist swinging at a hanging curveball, but I stopped, looked him up and down, and said, "They're not the only ones."

He turned bright red. I wanted to crawl in a hole. I figured he'd turn and run the next time he saw me. I was wrong.

We're engaged. We've made it through more than eighteen months and we still laugh, love books and movies, travel, and sharing life. And he's still hot.

So, find yourself, like yourself. The right guy will show up and like you, too -- the real you.

© 2011 Deborah Coonts, author of Lucky Stiff & Wanna Get Lucky?

Create a New Story

I bet you’ve told your story over and over and over again, sometimes to help you process through what happened, sometimes to garner sympathy, and sometimes just to throw Homer under the bus, release some anger and make yourself feel better. Did you really feel better? I don’t know about you, but when I focus on the details of my failed marriage, I just get all fired up again … angry, frustrated and mad at myself for choosing him in the first (damn) place.

I have found instead that by focusing on the many blessings of the relationship, first and foremost my daughter, I can keep my positive mental attitude in check. Then I focus on the lessons learned and distinctions I made that empowered me to move on and create new and improved results in my life. Additionally, when I take responsibility for the fact that I chose him and began to dig deeper into the circumstances that caused me to do so, I began to experience something new, better and different. You can, too.

Why don’t you let the last time you told your story be the last time you told your story? That’s exactly what I told Laurie, a single mom who I coached when writing The Successful Single Mom book.

I heard her story at least three times within the first week of knowing her. As a victim of spousal abuse, she left with just the clothes on her back to live in a battered women’s shelter with her son. Eventually she ended up on welfare prior to starting her own business. Repeating her story was not serving her and what she was saying she wanted. By focusing on the ugly past, she was preventing herself from moving forward. It also affected her self-esteem and feelings of worthiness. Staying in that story kept her right where she was and when she took my advice, her life made a major positive shift almost immediately. Its important to note she chose to not only let go of the past, she replaced it with a new story of where she was going.

Let’s change your focus to all of the cool, great and wonderful things you learned in that relationship: things you did well, things you would want to have happen again in your next relationship, distinctions you made about how to be a better partner, and choosing a better partner in the future. 

What happens next in your life is up to you. It's up to you to decide how you'd like it to be, and starting taking steps in that direction. Perhaps today. What do you think?