Meditation and Margaritas.

• Author: Roest, Karin
• Position: Mind & Body

I WAS ALMOST 30 years old when I arrived in Myanmar and prepared to have my head shaved at a monastery in Yangon. Shaving my head turned out to be the easy part. Living in silence for one year was the only hope I had to help me regain the balance in my life that had been lost.

Prior to the monastery, I had been working with celebrities as a jet-setting woman where the majority of my colleagues were men. I had the honor of working behind the scenes--as a celebrity talent scout and producer--with Grammy Award-winning musicians, highly paid TED Talks speakers, New York Times Best Selling authors, and many global influencers. Before I knew it, though, I was lost in the shuffle and became just another woman trying to climb the ladder in a man's world. The feeling of dread and frustration that comes with joining the race happens to way too many of us.

After leaving the monastery and picking up my career where I left off, it was not until I accepted all of the polarizing sides of myself--from serious to fun to contemplative--that I truly was happy, excelled in my career, and became financially secure. I used my time of reflection at the monastery to create a life system that balances all aspects of personality and experiences. I call it Meditation & Margaritas. It is more like a personal philosophy on a way of life, and a solidification of a trend that has been gaining momentum for quite some time.

Women constantly are bombarded with advice on how to climb the corporate ladder. Since the 1980s, the image of the working woman with broad padded shoulders and a "take charge" attitude has dominated the public's imagination. The problem with this portrait is that it inspires women to follow a very particular and narrow path of success. However, this path was created both by and for men. Women often are told that they must act like men to gain respect, or that they must have a singular focus, be more aggressive, and act less emotional.

Rather than differentiate ourselves, we often have been encouraged to suppress our femininity to gain respect in the male-dominated upper echelons of Corporate America, and discouraged when trying to do too many things at once. No matter how meticulously we women have tried to follow conventional wisdom, the outdated cultural and societal norms have stopped us from breaking the glass ceiling that limits our income, employment opportunities, and impact in the workforce.

We are not men. The strengths we have as women must...