Entrepreneur Encourages Other Midlife Women to Embrace Self-care
(Pittsburgh) After 27 years of operating a communications business where she created a local 8-page professional development newsletter that later blossomed into a full-blown business and financial magazine called Onyx Woman, Ola Jackson transformed her hard copy edition into an online site to focus on helping the same women she assisted through her business workshops, seminars and sell-out conferences to focus on self-care for mature women.
As a magazine publisher, Jackson assisted 1000’s of women through her business workshops, seminars and sell-out conferences, but she saw some disturbing patterns – many women shared with her that they just seemed so overwhelmed. During some soul searching and researching self-care and middle-aged women, she realized that so many women needed to be inspired to engage in self-care practices. Her own personal experiences while becoming a caregiver to her 80 year-old mother and raising a son with autism, gave her a revelation that she needed to make self-care a mission in her next life’s chapter.
So, she created a lifestyle blog called, Your Stylish Ways (YSW) to provide style content that infused self-care advice and tips on encouraging women to combine their desire to dress stylishly, decorate stylishly and live stylishly with self-care practices.
“We encourage women to not just live life, but to experience it as well by doing the necessary things for them to make self-care a lifestyle habit. We attempt to end each story with self-care advice whether we are talking about decorating a room for a private get-away space, or planning a party to reconnect with friends.” Says Ola, the award-winning publisher.
Ola posted one of her first self-care stories on LinkedIn and was surprised to see that the first response when she suggested to women that they start each day by doing something for themselves by spending just 3-minutes on some kind of self-care practice, was a reader who commented, “One day I will have time for that.” Ola felt that the response was certainly a confirmation that women know they need and want to take time for self-care, but just don’t know what to do or how to do it.
Just as she started the journey 27 years ago, she realized that women in Pittsburgh needed a publication to enhance their personal and professional development skills. She wanted more than just to believe they needed help, so she committed to doing something about it.
Through her blog, social media, television production and speaking engagements, Ola is focused and ready to tackle the task of spreading the word on self-care, while encouraging and showing women how to make it happen.
“It is like deja vu,” says Ola, “Back when I started my Onyx Woman, I saw a need and asked; how can I help? Then I went into action by making it happen. I remember a card that a friend gave me decades ago when I started my magazine that read; “Some people see a problem and talk about it… you see a challenge and you do something about it.”
My mission is to do something about middle-aged African-American women making self-care a part of their lives. www.yourstylishways.com
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