In the UK, approximately one in four people experience mental health issues, according to the mental health charity Mind. Although illnesses including anxiety and depression arent a new phenomenon, research proves that mental health issues are at an all time high and national health services, like the NHS, are struggling to keep up with the growing need for more accessible resources.

Multiple studies have proven that technology, specifically social media, is detrimental to peoples mental wellbeing. However, tech is taking on some of the responsibility to help those struggling with their mental health. One project is the Flow app, developed by the Malm-based medical device company, Flow Neuroscience. The chatbot therapist aims to help those struggling with their mental health while they wait to be seen by a medical professional.

The free app, which is currently available on iOS set to launch on Android within the month engages users in daily conversations to offer self-help techniques, mood tracking features, curated videos to better visualize mental health, and meditation and mental exercises.

The app was created by a team of clinical psychologists and machine learning experts and is based on the latest psychology and neuroscience research. The virtual therapist guides users through 18 sessions on why sleep, exercise, nutrition, and meditation are the main pillars in recovering from depression while gathering mood data to offer personalized behavioral therapy.

The always-on source of therapy provided by Flow ensures people get the help they need as quickly as possible, Daniel Mansson, Clinical Psychologist, CEO and Co-Founder of Flow said in a press release. Flow can provide anonymity without the fear of being judged by others. This is great as some people feel anxious when it comes to talking about their depression to another human.

While theres hundreds of apps out there to help you better understand meditation and mindfulness, theres been little innovation in regards to treating depression. However Flow has been approved in the UK and EU to treat major depressive disorder effectively. The chatbot also works alongside Flows headset, a behavioral therapy brain stimulator to treat depression without the need for medication.

The New England Journal of Medicine and the British Journal of Psychiatry, outline that brain stimulation of the type used in the Flow headset had a similar impact to antidepressants but with fewer and less-severe side effects.

Depression is associated with lowered activity in an area in the front of the brain, as explained by the video above. According to Flows findings, 24 percent of its users overcame their depression completely while 41 percent felt at least 50 percent better after 6 weeks of brain stimulation treatment.

Currently, Flow is in talks with the NHS to potentially make its headset available on prescription, but for the moment it costs 399 in the UK.

As the company outlines, this type of behavioral therapy may not work for everyone, just like prescribed medication doesnt. While technology may not be the answer to diagnosing, treating, and preventing mental health illness, its exciting to see how innovative technology is being used for good while reducing some of the strain placed on the NHS.

Read next: UN-backed chocolate bar comes with a free blockchain token and a choice

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This bot that helps people with depression could be the future of therapy - The Next Web

Do you feel like a loser? Do your friends' Facebook posts make you wonder why they have better jobs, vacations and children than you do? Then I have some amazing news for you: It's time to embrace your failure. Cherish your failure. Because according to some of the hottest self-help books, failure is the new success.

The idea behind these books is simple: Failure is like kale horrible, but good for you.

Let's take a look at some books that should be in everyone's personal failure library. There's "The Art of Failure," "The Value of Failure," "The Wisdom of Failure," "Fueled by Failure," and "Failing Forward."

Did you honestly think you could fail without the help of a book? If so, you have been failing at failing. These books will help you be the best failure you can be.

Now, let's say you really want to fail, but you can't afford all these books. The helpful people at TED Talks will teach you to fail for free!

Watching TED Talks is like stepping into a magical theme park of failure.

Speakers offer such nuggets of insight as, "Don't fail fast - fail mindfully"; "The unexpected benefit of celebrating failure"; and "The fringe benefits of failure."

That last talk is by J.K. Rowling. I'm not sure I want failure tips from someone who's sold 500 million "Harry Potter" books, but whatever.

Which brings me to the point of this whole exercise in failure. I don't need books or TED Talks to learn how to fail. I've already hit the failure mother lode: since the age of 10, I've been a fan of the Cleveland Browns. In the past 20 years, the Browns have had 18 losing seasons. That's an enviable ninety-percent failure rate. After the 2016 season, their coach said that if the team lost all their games he would jump into Lake Erie. They did; he jumped; and then he was fired. No book can teach you to fail like that.

Whenever I find myself in danger of succeeding, I just ask myself: "What would the Browns do?"

But in the pursuit of failure, nothing's as easy as it seems. This season, the Browns have done the unthinkable: they're actually in first place in their division! Some people even think that their new quarterback, Baker Mayfield, could someday lead them to the Super Bowl. Now that failure is finally cool, it's just like the Browns to screw that up.

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Story produced by Dustin Stephens.

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Andy Borowitz on how to be a successful failure - CBS News

In June, 1994, at a pro-choice conference in Chicago, twelve black women gathered together to talk. One, Loretta Ross, was the executive director of the first rape crisis center in this country. Another, Toni Bond, was the executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund. A third, Cynthia Newbille, was the leader of the National Black Womens Health Project, which was among the first national organizations to be devoted to the wellness of black women and girls. After the first day of the event, which was hosted by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance and the Ms. Foundation, the group met in a hotel room. We did what black women do when were in spaces where there are just a handful of us, Bond, who is now a religious scholar, recalled. We pulled the sistas together and talked about what was missing.

Abortion had been decriminalized in 1973, with the Supreme Courts Roe v. Wade decision, but, with the passage, in 1977, of the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal funding for almost all abortions, the procedure had become too expensive for many women. In 1993, Bill and Hillary Clinton had proposed an overhaul of the health-care system, but reproductive-health coverage was sacrificed to make the reforms more palatable to Republican lawmakers. To the women in the hotel room, the conversation at the conference about reproductive health focussed too narrowly on choice. There had been no discussion of the services that black women needed most, such as fibroid-tumor screenings, mammograms, and pre- and postnatal care. (Black women have a higher risk of fibroids than white women, higher percentages of late-detected breast cancer, and a maternal-mortality rate that is more than three times higher.) Nor was there an acknowledgment that the reproductive and parenting decisions of black women were limited by poverty, unequal pay, lack of access to adequate housing and schools, and the abuses of the policing and criminal-justice systems.No one was talking about black womens health as a whole, Ross told me, not long ago. Too many people were examining policies through the lens of white supremacy.

The women created the term reproductive justice to describe the scope of their activism. They were inspired by the work of the black legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, whose research traced the history of efforts in this country to control black womens reproductive freedom, beginning with the forced procreation of enslaved women. Abuses had continued into the nineteen-seventies, when thousands of womenincluding some who were receiving public assistance in North Carolina and others who were incarcerated in Californiawere involuntarily sterilized. In Arizona, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington, state-court judges often offered black female defendants reduced prison sentences if they agreed to get birth-control shots or implants. (This practice was happening as recently as two years ago.) As Roberts observed, black people had turned to their families, friends, and neighbors for the family-planning services and child care that the government had denied them. Bond said, Reproductive justice offers us an opportunity to talk about the ways in which black women have exercised agency and been resilient even in the midst of reproductive and sexual oppression.

The twelve women called themselves Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice. After the meeting in the hotel room, they bought full-page ads in the Washington Post and Roll Call, publishing a letter to Congress that argued for unimpeded access to abortion as part of the full range of reproductive health services offered under health care reform, which should be available regardless of ability to pay, with no interference from the government. The letter stressed that reform should be comprehensive, and must include strong anti-discriminatory provisions.

During the following months, Ross and some of the other women led a reproductive-justice discussion in Cairo, Egypt, and wrote a public letter in support of Joycelyn Elders, the former Surgeon General, whom Bill Clinton had asked to resign after she said that she approved of educating children about masturbation to avoid the spread of AIDS. In 1997, with funding from the Ford Foundation, sixteen groups representing African-American, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, Latina, and indigenous women came together to form SisterSong, a national collective advocating for the reproductive and sexual health of women of color. SisterSong was based in Atlanta, the birthplace of the civil-rights student protests and the home of several historically black colleges; the city also had the largest black gay population in the South. Activists there had already created a parallel system of care, encompassing the Feminist Womens Health Center, an abortion and gynecological clinic in the North Druid Hills, which grew out of a womens self-help health group, in 1976; the National Black Womens Health Project (now the Black Womens Health Imperative); and SisterLove, founded, in 1989, to tackle H.I.V./AIDS.

In the next few years, the leaders of SisterSong and of newer reproductive-justice organizationssuch as Spark Reproductive Justice Now, founded, in 2007, to include queer perspectives in the movementheld round-table discussions and met up for dinners and happy hours, as well as get-togethers at Charis Books, a feminist bookstore downtown. In 2004, after the passage of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, SisterSong, Planned Parenthood, and the National Organization for Women, among other groups, put together the March for Womens Lives on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. In 2010, after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, several Atlanta-based reproductive-justice groups sent their members to D.C., to protest the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which aimed to prevent federal funds from being used to pay for insurance plans that covered abortions. The current Democratic Presidential candidate Julin Castro, one of several politicians who have recently spoken about the importance of reproductive justice, told me that he was thankful to the Atlanta community who had launched the movement. Their voices are crucial, especially now, to get us out of our comfort zone, he said.

Oriaku Njoku was twenty-five when she visited Atlanta, in October, 2010, to attend the Atlanta Pride Festival. The daughter of middle-class Nigerian immigrants, Njoku had grown up in a mostly white neighborhood in Bowling Green, Kentucky. While attending the University of Kentucky, she came out to her siblings, then to her parents, and participated in L.G.B.T.Q. activism. After graduating, she worked in retail in Kentucky and Indiana. At the Pride celebrations, she was drawn to Atlanta, with its ambitious black residents and its queer scene, and moved there a few months later. In January, 2013, she attended an event held by Spark that was an introduction to reproductive-justice organizing, and later volunteered on a Spark initiative to stop the practice in Georgia prisons of shackling pregnant women during childbirth. Doing reproductive-justice work has been the one place where I feel like I can bring my full self to the table, she told me recently. Being a first-generation queer black Southern fat femme, I can bring all those identities to work and do it unapologetically. Njoku, who is now thirty-four, calls herself a giver. She has the Southern female tendency to go out of her way to put others at ease, filling in an awkward silence with a caring question, a compliment, or a wavering um. When she is frustrated, she is just as accommodating, but her voice takes on a slight edge. She likes to wear Igbo dresses and head wraps in vivid colors, and has a sprawling tattoo on her forearm that reads Love is lifeforcea quote from the queer Jamaican-American poet and activist June Jordan.

After the 2013 Spark event, Njoku started travelling to other reproductive-justice gatherings, including the annual summit held by the National Network of Abortion Funds, where people talked about intersectionality and abortion access. She briefly dated a trans man, a human-rights defender from Uganda, who was seeking asylum and trying to bring his children to the United States; she realized that trans men also had trouble exercising their reproductive rights. She began to ask people for their gender pronouns.

In February, 2014, Njoku got a job taking patients information and making appointments at the Atlanta Womens Center, an abortion clinic near the wealthy enclave of North Buckhead. As of that year, legislatures in Georgia and twenty-five other states had enacted laws restricting the coverage of abortion in the Affordable Care Act health-insurance marketplaces. Women who contacted the clinic were often struggling to come up with the money for their abortions, which became more expensive as their pregnancies progressed.

Njoku regularly directed such women to call the National Abortion Federation, which, in 2014, donated to more than a hundred thousand women based on their needs, with the expectation that the women would raise as much as they could themselves. Its hotline was often busy for hours on end. When Njoku looked for regional sources of assistance, she discovered only one in Georgia: the Magnolia Fund, which helped women pay for abortions performed at the Feminist Womens Health Center. (Magnolia closed last year.)

In May, 2014, Njoku and two colleagues decided to set up their own abortion fund to help women in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. I was, like, We gotta do right by our people, she recalled. Theres no reason that our folks should be calling multiple numbers and waiting on hold forever to try and get in touch with someone for basic health care. Kwajelyn Jackson, of the Feminist Womens Health Center, called abortion funds the conduit through which people are going to be able to get connected with care in the long run. That November, Njoku took a job at Summit Medical Associates, assisting in the operating room and caring for women in post-abortion recovery. Meanwhile, she approached the National Network of Abortion Funds for advice. Njoku and her colleagues worked from coffee shops and buffet restaurants, applying for grants and organizing fund-raisers, including a fish fry. Their fund, Access Reproductive Care-Southeast, began operating in May, 2015. Its first grant paid for a headquarters, in an airy arts center in downtown Atlanta. By January, 2016, Njoku was working there full time.

The following spring, Njoku went on a tour of the Deep South, hoping to form relationships with employees at independent clinics, which, in that part of the country, are more numerous than Planned Parenthood centers. At each one, she made note of the affordable hotels nearby, the schedules for intakes and procedures, waiting lists and patient backlogs, and whether there were translators on hand. The fund set up a hotline in July, 2016. As it received more calls, she needed more volunteers to take women to and from appointments. (Clinics require that women receiving sedation have someone with them to take them home.)

That year, ARC-Southeast gave funding and assistance to about fifty women each month; it now serves more than three hundred a month. The average cost of an abortion is around five hundred dollars, with later-term abortions sometimes in the thousands of dollars. ARC-Southeast gives most women between seventy-five and a hundred dollars. The fund now employs a staff of seven, who are mostly black and queer, and has more than a hundred volunteers. They provide a kind of care that might be considered familial, booking travel and hotel rooms, taking women out for meals, and even putting them up for a night or two in their own homes. We try to lead with love, Njoku said. In 2017, Njokus sister Dirichi, who goes by Chi Chi, joined the organization to run the hotline. A former nurse, Chi Chi had little knowledge of reproductive justice, but she felt a connection to the funds mission. When she was nineteen, she got pregnant after being raped by a friend and had an abortion, an experience she often shares with callers.

ARC-Southeast has found rooms for homeless women who would otherwise have spent the night outside the clinic, and counselled mothers and daughters who needed abortions at the same time. Not long ago, the fund referred an undocumented Honduran woman living in Atlanta with her two children, whose husband had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to the National Abortion Federation, which agreed to pay for her procedure. The woman was twenty-six weeks pregnant, six weeks past the limit for abortions in Georgia. She could have taken a bus to a state where the gestational limit was higher, but shed heard that immigration raids on buses were common. Njoku decided that the funds hotline operator, Crystal Zaragoza, who had previously run a clinic for queer migrants in Phoenix, should drive the woman in a rental car to a clinic in Bethesda, Maryland. Zaragoza and the woman stayed in an Airbnb for four days. The fund paid more than a thousand dollars for the car, the accommodation, the womans medication, and care for her children while she was away.

Abortion in Georgia is legal up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, and fourteen of the states seventeen clinics are in the Atlanta area. Calls come in to the fund from all over the Deep South; for some women, the clinics near them have closed, or offer only limited services. In South Carolina, there are just three abortion clinics. In 1995, the state put into place regulations requiring that all clinics terminating second-trimester pregnancies meet the same design and construction standards as ambulatory surgical facilities. Ostensibly meant to insure womens safety, the regulations dictated, in overwhelming detail, specifications including the width of the corridors, the number and size of procedure rooms, and the size of the janitors closet. Pro-choice organizations and physicians agreed that the regulations were politically motivated; the necessary changes would be too costly for most clinics to make, and, ultimately, they would do little to improve patients care. More than half of the South Carolina women who had abortions in 2017 travelled outside the state for their procedures.

Spring is the funds busiest season. (As Chi Chi put it, People get it on in the winter.) In April, 2018, ARC-Southeast assisted a hundred and eighty-two women. This past April, it helped three hundred and ninety-seven callers, and Njoku spent much of her time in her car. One morning, she woke up early to pick up a woman from her home in south Atlanta and took her to the Atlanta Womens Center, in the northeast of the city. There, she met up with another woman, who was accompanied by her partner and their child, and gave her cash for food and a hotel. Then she took the first woman home and headed back to the office. In the parking lot, she received a call from Chi Chi about Naomi (a pseudonym), a woman who was waiting at Summit Medical Associates, four miles away, in need of an escort. Naomi had driven more than two hundred miles that morning, from Columbia, South Carolina, for her appointment. She believed that she was fourteen weeks pregnant. Twenty minutes after the call, Njoku arrived at the clinic and signed Naomi in. The process for second-trimester abortions, known as dilation and evacuation, usually takes place over two days. After the first appointment, Njoku gave Naomi a ride to her motel and learned that she and her partner were not speaking, that her best friend had wanted her to have the baby, and that she hadnt told her parents she was pregnant, because she was too ashamed. Naomi knew that she needed an escort, but another friend, who had agreed to accompany her, had cancelled at the last minute. She had hoped to persuade the clinic to make an exception.

When I recently talked to Naomi, she still hadnt told her family about her abortion, and she said she would take the secret of it to the grave with her. On her first night in Atlanta, she recalled, she had been in pain and lonely, and had slept badly. In the morning, when Njoku picked her up for her second appointment, Naomi was amused to see Njokus Pomeranian-Shiba Inu mix, Marley, in the passenger seat. She felt comforted by Njokus presence. I didnt have nobody there with me, and just in the moment of time being in that car with herthat really meant a lot, Naomi said.

This past spring, after the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, in October, 2018, legislatures in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Utah all passed bills that placed restrictions on abortion, which were intended to undermine Roev. Wade. In May, Alabama passed a bill that, if it goes into effect, would outlaw abortion, even when pregnancies are the result of rape or incest, except in cases where the mothers life is at risk; doctors who performed the procedure could go to jail for up to ninety-nine years. The new law is being challenged in federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood on behalf of Alabama abortion providers.

In Georgia, a heartbeat bill was passed, banning abortion after about six weeksbefore most women know that they are pregnant. In June, the A.C.L.U., the A.C.L.U. of Georgia, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit, representing SisterSong, Georgia medical providers, and their patients, arguing that the law disproportionately affects people of color and rural and poor residents. Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia on a platform that included a call for reproductive justice, described the law, on Twitter, as a forced pregnancy bill.

When I visited the ARC-Southeast office this summer, Njoku and Chi Chi were worrying about the bill, too. Ive probably only had one or two callers who were under six weeks, and that scares me, Chi Chi said. Because, when this law happens, whats going to happen with all these other women? Hows it going to be like next year when these women call me and I have to tell them that they cant do this? Abortions arent going to stop, even if they make them illegal. And then I wonder, Well, whats going to happen to me? Am I going to get in trouble because Im helping these women? I told my sister, Ill go to jail. I want you to keep fighting for this.

In May, Njoku and her colleague Quita Tinsley made the same tour of clinics that Njoku had in 2016, anxious to see how abortion providers were faring in the aftermath of the legislation. At the West Alabama Womens Center, in Tuscaloosa, the director, Gloria Gray, a gruff, kind woman in her sixties, wearing dark-blue scrubs, greeted Tinsley and Njoku in the reception area. She showed them into her office, which was decorated with pictures of her grandchildren and Alabama football mementos. Affixed to the back of her computer monitor was a bumper sticker that read, If you still support Trump, stay 500 feet behind. I dont trust your judgment.

Gray and Njoku talked about the recently signed Alabama abortion law. Njoku explained that many callers to the fund assumed that it had already gone into effect. One woman living in Gulf Shores had called all the clinics in her area and discovered that they had closed. She had surmised that the ban was to blame. But the closures were more likely due to a range of licensing requirements known as the Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws, which have been passed by the health departments of Republican-controlled state legislatures since the nineties. As in South Carolina, the stipulations in TRAP laws are cumbersome, usually having little to do with medical necessity, and, in recent years, they have become more onerous. In ten states, including Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Mississippi, doctors performing abortions are required to have admitting privileges or similar arrangements at a nearby hospitalprivileges that some hospitals, for political or budgetary reasons, refuse to grant. As a result of various TRAP laws, the number of clinics in Alabama has declined from twenty in 1992 to just three. In 2016, the Supreme Court struck down Texass law requiring that any doctor performing an abortion have admitting privileges and that clinics be set up as ambulatory surgical centers; the decision, in Whole Womans Health v. Hellerstedt, deemed that the requirements placed an undue burden on people seeking access to abortions and were therefore unconstitutional. Last week, the Court said it would hear arguments in a case from Louisiana that is nearly identical, raising concerns that the 2016 decision will be overturned.

In 2015, Gray hired the renowned abortion doctor Willie Parker to replace the clinics former physician, who had retired. Parkera well-known Christian reproductive-justice advocate, who has been honored by the United Nations Office of Human Rights and by Planned Parenthood for his work in Mississippi and Alabamaapplied to the local hospital for admitting privileges, but was not granted them. The clinic had to shut down for eight months. It filed a lawsuit, and reached a settlement on the admitting-privileges requirement. But Gray said that she had sensed an unwelcoming atmosphere at the hospital ever since. The West Alabama Womens Center was often surrounded by protesters; one of them, Gray noticed, was the wife of a doctor at the hospital. Abortion is a safe procedure, but, in the rare case that a woman experiences complications, she needs to go to the hospital. I hate to send a patient out there and not know how shes being treated, Gray said. As a result, at the end of 2015, Gray decided that the center would stop providing abortions to women who were past the seventeenth week of pregnancy. A clinic in Huntsville, about a hundred and fifty miles away, was now the only one in the state that did late-term abortions.

Some obstacles had arisen from less expected places. In March, the Alabama reproductive-rights scene was shaken when Parker, who had also worked in the Huntsville clinic since 2016, was accused by the reproductive-rights activist Candice Russell of sexual assault. He denied any misconduct, but resigned his chairmanship of the board of Physicians for Reproductive Health. We lost a very high-profile, vocal person who spoke out on womens rights, because everybody is cancelling his speaking engagements now, and thats unfortunate, Gray said.

The day after the stop in Tuscaloosa, Njoku and Tinsley visited the Huntsville clinic, which was homey, with lilac walls. Its nice to finally meet, the receptionist said. Yall send us fundsyou got to know who youre working with, honey.

The clinic has a majority-black staff. The full-time physician, Yashica Robinson, who was polished even in scrubs, with dark, curled hair and elegant jewelry, greeted the women warmly. Dr. Parker says this is Wakanda, she said. She led Njoku and Tinsley into a tidy linoleum-floored break room, where she and Dalton Johnson, who started the clinic, in 2001, were having lunch. The Huntsville center was the last abortion clinic to have been certified in the state; TRAP laws had made opening new clinics prohibitively expensive and difficult.

The main thing with us is the constant financial strain, Johnson told Njoku. In March, a man had sued the clinic, claiming that when his girlfriend had had an abortion there, two years earlier, he had not given her permission to do so, and calling the termination a wrongful death. A county probate judge allowed the suit to proceed under the personhood amendment to Alabamas constitution, which passed in November, 2018, with the intent of declaring and affirming the public policy of the state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children. Johnson said that, in April, the clinic had paid its lawyers fifteen thousand dollars in retainers.

Robinson joined the clinic in 2005, and in 2013 she applied to Huntsville Hospital for admitting privileges. The hospital stalled for such a long time that she hired a lawyer to push her case. The privileges, when they were granted, meant that she had to be within a thirty-minute drive of the hospital at all times in order to keep them. This is standard for ob-gyn providers in the area, and other doctors had formed groups to cover one anothers shifts, so that they could travel, but they excluded Robinson. Some of them did not want the lady who does abortions to deliver their patients babies, Robinson said; others were afraid of attracting protesters to their offices. She was desperate to hire another doctor for the clinic. She laughed, darkly. Its going to take somebody with a strong backbone to come and join us, and to put up with all it takes to live and work in this community, she said.

After the passage of the Alabama and Georgia restrictions, in May, Senators Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand and the comedian Kumail Nanjiani encouraged their Twitter followers to donate to abortion funds, praising the work of ARC-Southeast and Yellowhammer, a fund that a University of Alabama graduate, Amanda Reyes, had co-founded, in September, 2017. By mid-July, ARC-Southeast received more than three hundred thousand dollars in donations. Yellowhammer, which funded three hundred and thirteen abortions in 2018 and is extremely active on social media, received more than two million dollars; it had not taken in as much in its entire existence before then. The singer Maggie Rogers pledged profits from her merchandise sales, and, in July, Pussy Riot played a sold-out concert in Birmingham benefitting the fund and Planned Parenthood.

While Njoku and Tinsley were in Tuscaloosa, they went to supper at a Tex-Mex restaurant with Reyes and some of her employees, including Candice Russell, the activist who had accused Parker of assault, who had recently joined the Yellowhammer staff. We all introduced ourselves, giving our preferred pronouns. The pro-choice movement, Russell said at one point, used the term reproductive justice too freely. Russell referred to Yellowhammers work with underhoused people, a near-synonym for homeless that Njoku and Tinsley later confessed they had never heard before. The dinner was surprisingly tense, with the Yellowhammer staff mostly ignoring their peers at ARC-Southeast, and Reyes focussing her attention on me. Later, when I asked Njoku about the tension, she shrugged it off, saying that she still hoped the funds would continue to work together on the cases of people in Alabama.

In June, the local news outlet AL.com published a story in which the directors of Alabamas three abortion clinics and a former Yellowhammer board member complained that Yellowhammer had used its donations for inflated salaries and unnecessary purchases. Reyes denied the claims, saying that the money was being spent appropriately. When I asked Reyes about the complaints, she said, Things moved so fast, and the speed at which we went from a really small organization with an all-volunteer workforce to becoming an organization that was poised to be so much more... resulted in those misunderstandings. Since then, she said, Yellowhammer had sought management advice and had hired a communications firm.

Njoku was glad that the abortion bans were inspiring people to donate and to volunteer. On social media, people were posting selfies of themselves wearing Everyone Loves Someone Who Had an Abortion T-shirts. Now everyone was an intersectional feminist, she said. But there was a danger, she thought, that people would forget the black women who had founded the movement to address ongoing injustices. Its not because its cute or because its sexy or because Stacey Abrams said reproductive justice in the State of the Union response, she said. Its because its real.

One Monday morning in June, Njoku and Chi Chi were training a new intern, Imani, a sophomore at Clark Atlanta University, to answer the hotline. Slight and bespectacled, Imani grew up in the Bronx and attended an all-girls Catholic school, where talk of sex and abortion was hush-hush. She had become a convert to reproductive justice after attending a conference hosted by the advocacy group Civil Liberties and Public Policy.

Njoku pulled up on her computer screen the voice mails that had been left over the weekend. She and Chi Chi have a teasing rapport, and make videos of themselves as Nigerian aunties who critique rap lyrics, a pastime that often makes its way into the office. Are you starting from the bottom, now were here? Njoku asked Chi Chi, quoting a lyric from a song by Drake.

Chi Chi said that she was; Njoku would start from the messages at the top of the list. Imani scooted her chair over to Njokus screen. Njoku turned on one of the Samsung Galaxy phones they use for the hotline. This is the trap phone, she said, referring to the prepaid cell phones typically used by drug dealers. Imani laughed.

Part of the job, Njoku explained, was to help callers by brainstorming how to hustle for the money they needed. They encouraged women to ask their family and friends for help with their abortion fees just as they would if they had any other bill they couldnt pay. Just because theres shame and stigma around it doesnt mean we cant still use that same energy to make sure you get what you need, Njoku said. Chi Chi added, Its sort of like, Were your friendwere your friend who you never met who will steer you in the right direction. She and Chi Chi often call clinics on behalf of patients who are a hundred or so dollars short of the total fee and ask the staff to see them anyway. More often than not, the clinics agree.

Njoku returned the call of one woman whose parents were against the idea of abortion, and urged her to ask to borrow money from them anyway. Folks dont need to know all your business, you know? she said. Its enough to be, like, Hey, Im needing some help right now. Yall think that you can lend me a little bit?

Later, Njoku and Imani listened to a message from a woman in Florida. A child could be heard crying in the background; the callers voice sounded small and panicked. When Njoku called her back, the woman told her that she was in her early twenties, with two children, and that she was on Medicaid, unemployed, and eight weeks pregnant. Her abortion, scheduled for the next day, would cost nearly six hundred dollars, and she had only a little more than two hundred. Njoku asked what she had been doing to raise more money. The woman was thinking of pawning her wedding ring. Oh, goodness, I dont want you to have to do that, Njoku said. Hold on to that. Well figure it out before it has to get to that point.

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Fighting for Abortion Access in the South - The New Yorker

Prince William, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, and Kate Middleton have come together for a very special reason that s near and dear to all of their hearts. Theyve easily slammed all the rumors of a feud while lending their support and voices to a mental health PSA for a new initiative called Every Mind Matters.

Prince William, Prince Harry, Markle, and Middleton can be heard narrating a short film thats part of a new initiative with Britains National Health Service (NHS). Other celebrities involved are Gillian Anderson, Glenn Close, Davina McCall, and former cricket player Freddie Flintoff.

Every Mind Matters is a new online program, with Harpers Bazaar explaining that the website allows people to create a personalized action plan that recommends tailored self-care actions to help deal with stress, boost mood, improve sleep and feel in control.

The video begins with Prince William noting: Everyone knows that feeling when life gets on top of us. All over the country, millions of us face challenges to our mental health. At all ages, at all intensities and for all sorts of reasons. We feel stressed, low, anxious and have trouble sleeping. Me, you

Prince Harry continues, your brother, your mother, your friend, your colleague, your neighbor. Waiting. Wondering. Hoping. Hurting. We think theres nothing to be done. Nothing we can do about it.

Markle adds, But now, theres a new way to help turn things around. Every Mind Matters will show you simple ways to look after your mental health.

Middleton explains: Itll get you started with a free online plan designed to help you deal with stress, boost your mood, improve your sleep, and feel more in control.

They further note: We can all benefit from taking simple steps to look after our mental health and help those around us. Because good mental health makes such a difference.

The 60-second version was released today, but the full two-and-a-halfminute version will air Monday at 8:45 p.m. on all major British TV networks.

The royals each recorded their piece individually at theirhomes at Kensington Palace and Frogmore Cottage in September.

Both the Sussexes and Cambridges have been involved in initiatives involving mental health, with Health Secretary Matt Hancock sharing the couples bravery at a screening of the new film. Hancock shared: I want to put on the record my admiration for the way that the Princes and the Duchesses have contributed to changing how our society here in the UK and I think around the world think about mental health, and their own bravery in speaking out about it.

He continued: This is one of the most clear examples of them taking that lead and they do so much for so many people. Our health both mental and physical is an asset that needs to be nurtured. Every Mind Matters will benefit us all with an accessible tool to help manage our wellbeing at the click of a button.

PHE chief executive Duncan Selbie further noted: Every MindMatters aims to help people to better handle lifes ups and downs. This is notabout the very severe end of mental illness. This is about a preventionintervention, a digital innovation. Its about reaching people with the helpthat theyre looking for.

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Prince William, Kate Middleton, Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle Reunite for This Special Reason - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Monday Motivation here we come! This is for those of you who slog through your Monday mornings. If you lament the end of the weekend and dread returning to the office, you may need our Monday Motivation quick tips. Grit Daily offers an avenue to connect with others like you. Were here to help get your work week off to a good start. Pump your fists its time for Monday Motivation!

If you can relate to our headline image, then this is the column for you. You need Monday Motivation as desperately as the rest of us. Me too. Here I am trying to write this column, in the wee hours of a dull and rainy morning, which translates to nightmare commute into the city. Sigh.

But Im on the case! Im constantly reading books knowing that I will learn at least one thing from each. There is always something that I highlight or a page that I photograph to go back and refer to at some point. Plus, there is some magical thing that happens in your brain which connects the dots and brings new thoughts together with past experiences. From it, new ideas, strategies, and plans emerge. Its quite amazing how this happens.

Of course, along the way, dont forget to enjoy the ride. It cant be all work and no play. Without reward, youd struggle to stay motivated. Especially on Mondays ugh!

Over the weekend, I read the book, The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. Was there anything Earth-shattering in there? No. Nor was there any silver bullet or panacea for figuring out what to do. There never is with self-help books. But if a person who became a self-made multi-millionaire in his 20s takes the time to write a book about how he did it, you should read it. Its that simple.

The concept is simple and parallels what we know from Steven Coveys book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In a nutshell, you have to push through doing things (or not doing them) until they become a habit. You keep doing whatever the new behavior is that you desire until you no longer think of it as a new behavior. Somewhere along the way it morphs into part of your character and a standard part of your routine.

Monday Motivation follows the same trajectory: you keep at it, week after week until youre no longer the girl thats falling down the stairs every Monday morning because youre ready to embrace the week. Bring. It. On. Thats your new battle cry.

Again, no magic pill makes this stuff happen. Only YOU can change whatever it is that you desire to change. Monday Motivation takes focus, discipline, a warrior mindset and the grit to git er dun. Here is the science behind changing behavior and why it works if you attack the problem one change at a time. And a checklist if you want to do everything that you possibly can to ensure that you will be successful. Personally, I find this checklist a bit daunting: too many things to think about at once but thats how I see it and you may look at it differently.

Dont overwhelm yourself. Thats an easy thing to do. We can all pick ourselves apart then find ourselves wanting to change our hair, weight, relationships, living environment, job, how much we drink or go out and so on. But thats not going to accomplish anything. Pick ONE thing and change it. Not tomorrow. Not later. NOW! Begin immediately. Do this new thing until you no longer resent doing the new thing. Then, add something else and begin changing that.

I was an overnight success, said no one. Most fine artists are not celebrated until theyre six feet under. Musicians often struggle with their craft until they get noticed by a connected agent. New mothers dont drop all their pregnancy weight upon the birth of their child. Multi-millionaires (not trust fund babies) are made, not born. Everything takes time. Be patient, and be kind to yourself while youre making the change.

Theres a double edge to this last tip. The first is that you have to embrace a change that can be made over time. Something that you are in control of and can modify through new behaviors. The second aspect of keeping it real is holding yourself accountable. For example, some people like to use calorie trackers if they are trying to lose weight. Others join communities for support and to put the pledge to change out in the open so that everyone hears it and keeps the person changing on track.

Whatever it is that you want to change, know this. You CAN make simple changes in your life, which, over time, will add up to something bigger and better. The success of doing one little thing differently will have a positive ripple effect throughout your personal and professional life. So its worth doing, even if its going to be tough.

And, this is Monday Motivation, which is sensible thinking for every day of the week. Not just Mondays. Hold your head up high, youre fine as you are if you feel that youre fine. If you feel like you want to make a change, then make it. Whats stopping you?

Now its my turn to hit the crowded buses, trains, and subways but Ill be doing it with a smile. Because, as of today, Im counting my calories on my path to weight loss. BRING. IT. ON!

The rest is here:
Monday Motivation: Change One Thing - Grit Daily

Almost everyone I spoke with feels that the county overspent during the gas boom years, and that the bill is coming due. We got wasteful and stupid, and now we have to go back to common sense, Corrine Weatherly, who owns a dress- and costume-making shop, Sew What, told me. Ms. Weatherly also runs the county fair, and so she shows up to almost every Quorum Court meeting.

This worldview will continue to affect national elections. The most dominant news source here is Fox News, which I think helps perpetuate these attitudes. Theres another element, too: For decades, the dominant conservative theory of politics is that government should be run like a business, lean and efficient, and one of the biggest private employers here is Walmart, where Mr. James was working when he was elected.

Theres a prevailing sense of scarcity its easy for people who have lived much of their lives in a place where $25 an hour seems like a high salary to believe there just isnt enough money to go around. The government, here and elsewhere, just cant afford to help anyone, people told me. The attitude extends to national issues, like immigration. Ms. Hamilton told me shed witnessed, in Texas, a hospital being practically bankrupted by the cost of caring for immigrants and said, I dont want my tax dollars to be used to pay for people that are coming here just to sit on a government ticket. Mr. Widener, who described himself as more libertarian than anything else, told me his heart goes out to migrant children who are held in detention centers at the border, but he blames the parents who brought them to this country.

Where I see needless cruelty, my neighbors see necessary reality.

The people left in rural areas are more and more conservative, and convinced that the only way to get things done is to do them yourself. Especially as services have disappeared, they are more resentful about having to pay taxes, even ones that might restore those services.

And many of those who want to live in a place with better schools, better roads and bigger public libraries have taken Ms. Hamiltons suggestion theyve moved to places that can afford to offer them. This includes many of my peers from high school who left for college or jobs and permanently settled in bigger, wealthier cities and towns around the region.

Over the summer, after the uproar about Ms. Singletons pay, library supporters gathered signatures for a special election that would have slightly increased the amount of county property taxes collected for the library, helping it pay off the new building and stave off closing altogether. It set off a new furor, even though the increase was estimated to cost about $20 a year for properties assessed at $100,000, and many people have properties valued at much less than that.

Read more here:
In the Land of Self-Defeat - The New York Times

For airports across the globe, providing passengers with a seamless travel experience whilst protecting the airport systems from risks are two of the most important priorities. Here, Wilma van Dijk gives an insight into how Schiphol is working towards securing both.

The ultimate goal for any airport is to make the boarding process as easy and as quick as possible for passengers. Many airports are turning to new technologies that can optimise operations and improve efficiency to achieve this.

At Airport IT & Security 2019, Wilma van Dijk Director of Safety, Security & Environment at Royal Schiphol Group gave a presentation on how Schiphol Airport has focused on creating a more enjoyable end-to-end passenger experience. Following this, International Airport Review spoke to her regarding the recent trials of biometric self-boarding systems using facial recognition and CT scanners, to gain an insight into Schiphols vision for the future in terms of both the passenger and the security systems.

Schiphol Airport have implemented the Seamless Flow programme; a public-private cooperation in which the government, the airport and airlines are closely working together to explore the best way to secure a painless passenger experience.

The Seamless Flow programme aims to create a seamless journey for passengers through all obligatory checks at the airport. Within this programme, there have been several separate pilots on biometric boarding and border passage. Recently, the airport has started a pilot in which passengers test enrolment, border passage and boarding, all using biometrics (facial recognition).

Schiphol has also completed the roll-out of CT scan technology for cabin baggage in all security filters in the non-Schengen area of the airport. This means that passengers can keep both liquids and electronic devices (including laptops) in their bags during security checks. CT-scanners from several manufacturers have been tested and this will continue in order to further improve systems and keep track of the latest developments in the market.

It is planned that complete implementation of CT scanning for cabin baggage in the Schengen security filters will occur in 2020.

When implementing new technologies, there are of course economic and environmental concerns that have to be considered.

Therefore, business cases at Schiphol always include among other themes both economic and environmental elements.

The executive team ensure that all decision-making strikes the right balance between testing new technologies and balancing environmental and economic implications.

The long-term vision at Schiphol Airport is to further improve processes with a next step being fully automated self-service security for certain travellers. The team therefore focus on constant incremental improvements and new technologies in the security process that improve the passenger flow. This is always subject, of course, to national and international legislation on aviation security.

Schiphol is part of a community of airports, airlines, security providers and relevant government agents. Discussions with our trusted partners help us to be prepared and to pro-actively take necessary security measures.

Aviation security at Schiphol is an eminent example of cooperation between all parties that are involved within the aviation processes. At an airport, aviation security is the result of cooperation between a myriad of partners. Schiphol looks for win-win solutions that not only keep improving aviation security but facilitate the processes of all partners. At Schiphol, a Platform for Security, Border and Public Safety, whose membership consists of all public and private parties working on security at the airport, has been instituted. The objective of this platform is to promote and create an integrated approach of counterterrorism, public order and safety, crime and border control.

Wilma van Dijk believes the key to success here is that cooperation between all public and private parties involved takes place based on equality and commitment.

Wilma van Dijk, Director of Safety, Security & Environment at Royal Schiphol Group, has been in this role since October 2015 and is responsible for aviation security policy and operations, access control, cyber-security (CISO of Schiphol) and company security. This includes contract management, contacts with (inter)national government agencies, private security companies and technical development companies. She is also responsible for policy on safety and environmental issues and for the airport fire brigade. Next to this, van Dijk is responsible for Seamless Flow, the innovative programme that aims to provide a secure, hassle-free and paperless passage on the airport by using biometrics.

From 2009 to 2015 she occupied several posts within the Ministry of Justice, for example, Deputy National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism as well as Director of Cybersecurity.

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Schiphol Airport: Striving towards seamless flow and self-service security - International Airport Review

Though its mild, paradoxical and perhaps a bit prurient to say so, Slave Play is a happy surprise.

Its mild because Jeremy O. Harriss play, which opened at the Golden Theater on Sunday, is one of the best and most provocative new works to show up on Broadway in years.

Its a paradox because what could be happy in a play about pain? A play so serious, so furious and so deeply engaged in the most intractable conflicts of American life that it became both a cause clbre and a scandal before it opened?

And its a bit prurient because when we talk about the provocations of Slave Play and the people who saw it downtown last year at New York Theater Workshop have been talking about it almost nonstop since what we usually mean is sex: the whip, the dildo, the nudity, the boots, the bondage, the orgasms both achieved and aborted. Those things are indeed a surprise, at least if you havent watched television this millennium.

But sex is more than titillation in Slave Play; it is the crucible in which Mr. Harris performs a thought experiment. If black people in intimate partnerships with white people felt safe to say how they needed to be seen, would their white partners be able and willing to comply? Or are black people forever condemned by the legacy of slavery to live squarely in the blind spot of their nonblack partners myopia?

Though the experiment is carried out in a complex format one that blurs satire and minstrelsy and comedy and drama this is not some avant-garde nonsense producing microscopic results. In focusing on three messed-up interracial partnerships, Slave Play has nothing less than the messed-up interracial partnership of our whole country in its sights.

If only our whole country could go on a weeklong retreat to explore these issues, as the three couples do. (Read on judiciously if you want to preserve the plays surprises.) Their retreat, at a former plantation outside Richmond, Va., has been designed to help the black partners process their anhedonia their inability to get pleasure from their white partners through a series of exercises including, on Day 4, role play as slaves.

In that role play, Kaneisha (Joaquina Kalukango) takes on the persona of a disgusting little bed wench to Massa Jim that is, her husband (Paul Alexander Nolan), putting on a Southern accent. Phillip (Sullivan Jones) portrays a cultured house slave who agrees to be dominated by his partner, Alana (Annie McNamara), playing the plantations neurotic mistress. Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood) casts himself as a field slave in charge of a white indentured servant played by his narcissistic boyfriend, Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer).

In the plays first section, called Work, these three couples try to reconnect sexually in their antebellum alter egos (and in Dede Ayites witty costumes) while Mr. Harris and the plays director, Robert OHara, press every outrageous button they can. (Its just the beginning when Kaneisha twerks to Rihanna, begging Massa Jim to call her a Negress.) For some audience members not to mention social media kibitzers just seeing black characters take on reviled stereotypes may be too much to bear.

But the plays ambition is built on this outrageous foundation. In the second part, called Process, the couples discuss the outcomes of their role play under the guidance of two psychologists Te (Chalia La Tour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio) who developed the therapy. Here, Mr. Harriss satire of academic gassiness and self-help psychobabble does double duty: Its hilarious (even if a bit overdrawn) and yet illuminating. As the couples begin to pry ever more deeply into their troubles, we are the beneficiaries of their painful insights.

What we learn in lockstep with them is that the black subjects Kaneisha, Phillip and Gary are prized by their lovers despite their blackness instead of because of it. The role play, designed to flip that polarity, has forced the white partners to look at color and see it deeply, even at the risk of mortification.

This dynamic is pushed to a thrilling conclusion in the plays third section, called Exorcise, in which one couple faces the fallout of their work. A brilliant little play in itself, Exorcise is as wrenching a portrait of moral gridlock as anything in Arthur Miller, as weirdly lyrical as Tennessee Williams and as potently heightened as Suzan-Lori Parks.

I wish I could see what Mr. OHara, who often directs his own coruscating plays, could do with those authors. (His staging of A Raisin in the Sun at the Williamstown Theater Festival this summer was revelatory.) His showmanship both leavens and deepens difficult material and was crucial in turning Slave Play into the event it was downtown.

Uptown, his staging has grown broader and funnier but no less trenchant in the 800-seat Golden than it was in a space one-quarter the size; the continuous embroidering of marvelous detail fills any gaps that might have opened in the expansion. (Watch Phillip take refuge under his hoodie when he gets overwhelmed, or Alana scramble after her notebook as if it might protect her from what shes learning.) The returning cast especially Mr. Cusati-Moyer as the boyfriend who pathetically insists he is not as white as he looks has likewise amped up the emotional volume; they have a bigger house to bring down.

Their performances make that of the only new cast member Ms. Kalukango even more distinct and grave by comparison. As Kaneisha becomes the center of the plays argument, you see her struggle to express herself playing out on her face before she has the words. When the words do come, they are all the more devastating.

Devastating and, for white people, or at any rate for me, painful. And why shouldnt they be? The best plays arent just about empathizing with the oppressed; theyre also about accepting our connection to the oppressors. With asperity but also love, Slave Play lets us all see ourselves in the muddle that is race in America now. Theres even a giant mirrored wall in Clint Ramoss set to make sure we do.

Such reflections are no longer common on Broadway. If Slave Play can bring them to a bigger audience even an audience that is shocked or offended it will be a happy surprise indeed. Shock and offense may be just the ticket now.

Slave Play

Tickets Through Jan. 5, 2020, at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; 212-947-8844, slaveplaybroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours.

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Review: Slave Play, Four Times as Big and Just as Searing - The New York Times

The more confident and assertive women present themselves, the easier it will be to ask for what they needand the less theyll care about being unlikable to theirboss.

As part of my series about the five things we need to do to close the gender wage gap I had the pleasure of interviewing Elizabeth Pearson. Elizabeth is a professional life coach, spiritual seeker, writer, wife, and mother. Elizabeth specializes in getting women unstuck so they can achieve their highest goals in all aspects of life. Throughout her 15-year sales career, Elizabeth has worked for brands such as VitaminWater and Coca-Cola, as well as managing accounts for Amazon, Target, Whole Foods and others. During her sales career, Elizabeth discovered her true passion in lifeBeing of service to other women.

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us the backstory that brought you to this career path?

I started out as a young and hungry sales rep for a scrappy startupVitaminWater. I was an intern for the company during college and, after graduation, promptly moved from St. Louis to Chicago after accepting a full-time position with the company. I loved my new city, the company I worked formy exciting life.

After the company was acquired by Coca Cola for $4BB, I sharpened my corporate sales skills by managing national accounts for Coke. I got to travel, eat at fabulous restaurants, and network with heavy hitters in the field. At this point, I was happily married and ready to do the next logical step (or so were told), move to the suburbs and start popping out babies. I was always an overachieving rule follower, so I bought the big house, had the kids and climbed the corporate ladder.

Then one day, after a yoga class, I began crying for reasons unbeknown to me. Looking back, I can now admit I must have been having some sort of spiritual breakdown or breakthrough. Something deep inside of me was urging me to take some risksGo for the gold, do more with my life than settle deeper into my comfort zone.

That moment was the catalyst to my exploration of all things self-help, both spiritual and empowering. I followed my passion for helping other women and began coaching. Fast forward 3 years later, my husband and I moved our kids across the country to sunny southern California, I own my own thriving coaching business, am writing my first bookLife is good.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this career?

The most interesting thing thats happened is how many times Ive been blindsided with self-doubt. I knew there would be bumps in the road to entrepreneurship, but I always saw myself as a confident person. This journey to starting anew in so many areas of my life has destroyed all the armor I thought I had. I have days when Im sobbing with regret for walking away from my lucrative sales career, and Ive had days where Im sobbing with gratitude for my new life. The ups and downs are way more intense than I could have ever predicted.

Can you share a story about the funniest or most interesting mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

The most interesting/cringeworthy mistake I made when I first started was not really listening to my clients. I used to coach from an I know whats best, just take my advice and youll be good mentality. A good coach does the opposite. An effective coach listens and looks for underlying messages or emotions from their client. Thank goodness I figured that out sooner rather than later, or I wouldnt have a successful business today.

Ok, lets jump to the main focus of our interview. Even in 2019, women still earn about 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. Can you explain three of the main factors that are causing the wage gap?

1. Women not asking for more

No one will give you what you dont ask forso if a woman wants more money, more responsivity, a higher-ranking title, we need to start asking or demanding it from our employers. According to a survey published by Glassdoor, Women negotiated less than their male counterparts. Sixty-eight percent of women accepted the salary they were offered and did not negotiate, a 16-percentage point difference when compared to men (52%).

Some factors as to why women forgo the opportunity to negotiate their salaries stems from a lack of confidenceThey doubt theyre qualified enough for a promotion or deserve a raise.

Another factor may be whats commonly called the social cost of negotiationwomen feeling awkward or greedy when asking for more money. Men dont seem to have this hang up though, therefore its critical to avoid this costly mistake if we have any hopes of closing the wage gap.

A great option to feel more comfortable negotiating is to list out and quantify everything you bring to the organization. When women see the financial value they bring, its much easier to ask for a bump in their salary. Another great option is to take an online course on how to negotiate, as there are a ton of them available now.

2. Employer Bias

Many companies have a conscious or unconscious bias towards women which becomes evident when they overlook or undervalue the work their female employees do.

There is a reason to feel hopeful though, a recent Glassdoor study found that Based on over 425,000 salaries shared by full-time U.S. employees, men earn 21.4 percent higher base pay than women on average (or women earn 79 cents per dollar men earn). However, comparing workers of similar age, education, and experience shrinks the gap to 19.1 percent. Furthermore, after comparing workers with the same job title, employer and location, the gender pay gap in the U.S. falls to 4.9 percent (95.1 cents per dollar).

3. The Motherhood Penalty

Research shows that many mothers encounter some workplace-related backlash after having a childalthough it may be subtle. When compared to childless or male colleagues, moms can be viewed as being less committed and face higher expectations to prove their commitment to the company while receiving less consideration for a promotion. Some studies show the pay gap between mothers and childless women as an even larger gap than the one between men and women that gets the most attention. Moms earn approximately 7% less per child than childless women.

Theres a financial cost of being a stay at home momStay home, and you miss out on opportunities to earn and build wealth. The opposite is true for men because new fathers typically see earnings increase after their child is born. Why? Because it signals stability to the organization and that they are less of a flight risk if they are seen as having a heavier financial responsibility.

How do we start to fix this problem? Give mothers access to affordable, good quality daycare and give men the same 12-weeks of use-it-or-lose-it paternity leave that women get.

Can you share with our readers what your work is doing to help close the gender wage gap?

The joy of my life is helping women get reacquainted with their powerit never goes away, but sometimes it gets ignored for a few years. I encourage women to see their potential for the life they want to live, and then we take massive action to help them attain their goals, many of which are financial. By encouraging more women to take their seat at the proverbial table, we will have more women dictating wages and, hopefully, we can then finally close the wage gap.

Can you recommend 5 things that need to be done on a broader societal level to close the gender wage gap?

The progress that is being made is encouraging, however well need these 5 things to happen to close the gap:

1. Sustained action from businesses.

Equal paternity leave for new dads so they can carry more childcare weight and free-up moms to go back to work.

2. Government support.

Affordable childcare for new and single mothers is critical to ensuring women return to the workforce.

3. Awareness of biases.

Companies will need to take a good look in the mirror, and at their payroll, to see if there may be underlying biases and sexism happening within their organizations.

4. Women becoming skilled negotiators.

The more confident and assertive women present themselves, the easier it will be to ask for what they needand the less theyll care about being unlikable to their boss.

5. Parents overriding socialized norms for girls to be people pleasers and nurturing.

When we empower our youth to see girls as equals, we raise men and women who expect to pay women at the same level as men.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

The movement Id love to see happen is a Care Less Movement.

Care less about what others think of you.

Care less about fitting in.

Care less about doing things that you dont enjoy.

Care less what your parents and siblings think of your choices.

Be Happy. Do what you want to do.

Your only purpose in life is to be happy. Care more about that and less about everything else.

Can you please give us your favorite Life Lesson Quote? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, its always your choice.Dr. Wayne Dyer

When clients seek out my help, theyre usually feeling somewhat powerless in an area of their lifeSome are even miserable in a toxic work environment. I always recommend that they use those feelings as a catalyst for change and improvement of the situation. Complaining about it will only keep it in your vibration and therefore in your reality. When you make a choice to be grateful for everythingwell, thats when the magic of transformation happens.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why?

Id love to have met the mentor-in-my-head, Dr. Wayne Dyer. His books and lectures have been a game-changer for me, and I feel he was way ahead of his time. Id love to have some thick pancakes and a great cappuccino and talk to him about the meaning of lifea topic which Im sure he has all the answers. Oh, and if we could snag a 3-top, of course Id want Beyonc there.

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Five things we need to do to close the gender wage gap, With Elizabeth Pearson - Thrive Global

Marianne Williamson recently burst onto the political scene as a somewhat unconventional candidate vying for the Democratic Partys presidential nomination in the United States.

While she has never garnered more than two per cent in the polls and did not qualify for the third debate meaning its likely her run will come to an end soon her remarks during the first two Democratic debates, as well as her personality and unconventional campaign parlance, have provoked many media responses.

What distinguishes Williamson from other candidates is her personal and professional background. Prior to her foray into politics, she was an internationally renowned self-help and spiritual author and speaker, known for penning bestsellers like A Return to Love.

A child of the 1960s, Williamson was significantly involved with the New Age and Human Potential movements, even spending time working at Esalen Institute in California, the American mecca of alternative spirituality.

Today, shes known as Oprah Winfreys spiritual adviser, and remains an outspoken advocate of mindfulness meditation, yoga and therapy as ways to achieve spiritual and social transformation.

Williamson unapologetically infuses her interest in spirituality into her political campaigning.

On her website she calls for a a moral and spiritual awakening in America, speaking to those who are seeking higher wisdom. And in her closing statement at the first Democratic debate, she proclaimed that she will harness love to defeat President Donald Trump.

A number of pundits have mocked Williamson. But the more common reaction is puzzlement: many just dont know what to make of a renowned spiritual and self-help teacher running to lead the Democratic Party.

I believe this is largely because few are familiar with the history of alternative spirituality in North America and its ties to progressive politics.

We have seen a dramatic rise over the last few decades in the number of North Americans who self-identify as spiritual but not religious.

Read more: What does it mean to be spiritual?

Those in this group, while certainly diverse, have deep spiritual interests, often champion something like the existence of a higher power, remain wary of orthodoxy and place a premium on individual autonomy.

It is these people to whom Williamson appeals. And while they might view themselves as seekers who dont adhere to traditions, there is a longstanding tradition of alternative spirituality in the West.

In Spiritual but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America, religious historian Robert Fuller sheds light on the various metaphysical movements that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries in America.

These include Swedenborgism, Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, Mesmerism, Theosophy and New Thought, each of which despite being relatively unknown to most people have significantly shaped the spiritual but not religious trend.

These movements were certainly theologically different, but nevertheless, like Williamson and her followers, they postulated the existence of unseen forces and championed the importance of both mystical experiences and individual freedom. If channelled appropriately, those forces could purportedly lead to self-empowerment.

Read more: Why you should know about the New Thought movement

The influence of these movements was far from marginal in American society. They often attracted well-known writers, politicians and artists. Ralph Waldo Emerson, often called Americas national poet, was an avowed Transcendentalist, as was Henry Thoreau, committed civil rights activist and author.

Others who belonged to some of these movements include psychologists William James and Carl Jung, philosopher Rudolf Steiner and biologist Alfred Russell Wallace.

Historian Leigh Eric Schmidt of Princeton University usefully traces the historical ties between these movements and progressive democratic politics in the U.S. in Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality.

Schmidt observes that many of the leaders and spokespeople of these movements were ahead of their time, both socially and politically.

For instance, Margaret Fuller, an early Transcendentalist and confessed mystic, was also a staunch advocate for womens rights in the early 19th century. So was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a womens suffrage activist who sought to claim the privilege of autonomy for the female sex in The Womans Bible , published in 1895.

Walt Whitman, the famous American poet and writer - as well as a curious inquirer into clairvoyance and Spiritualism - championed, in cosmopolitan fashion, the good in all religious systems, according to Schmidt.

Felix Adler, a Reform Jew and founder of the Society for Ethical Culture, published in 1905 The Essentials of Spirituality, wherein he championed the importance of doing justice to that inner self in order to do justice to others.

Finally, Ralph Waldo Trine, proponent of New Thought and author of the successful In Tune with the Infinite, depicted God as a spirit of infinite life akin to a reservoir of superhuman power.

And though Trines doctrines were eventually appropriated by entrepreneurial and materialist ministers such as Norman Vincent Peale in the mid-20th century, Trine himself was a staunch progressive and social reformer. He was also a committed vegetarian, playing an active role in the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

In light of this history, Schmidt concludes:

The convergence of political progressivism, socioeconomic justice, and mystical interiority was at the heart of the rise of a spiritual left in American culture.

Its therefore worth asking why a candidate like Williamson so boggles the modern-day mind.

In part, it has to do with the way alternative spirituality developed over the 20th century. The New Age movement of the 1970s was arguably the most prominent. And while the New Age label may today be out of fashion, many ideas that were once championed under its banner remain strikingly popular.

In fact, its likely that many who call themselves spiritual but not religious subscribe to a set of ideas and engage in a variety of practices that were once central to that counter-cultural movement. And carrying forward a long-standing tradition, these ideas tend to appeal to the left.

Religion, after all, is increasingly associated in the U.S. with social conservatism. In turn, for many progressives, especially millennials, religion is no longer considered a viable option.

So for those with spiritual interests, the cosmopolitan and inclusive spirituality of Williamson has an obvious appeal.

Of course, one of the tenets of New Age thought, at least in its most radical form, is that politics is a distraction from what really matters: self-transformation and spiritual enlightenment.

This may be why the image of Williamson as president is so difficult to entertain: we tend to think spirituality and politics just dont mix.

But thats at odds with the actual history of spirituality in America. Perhaps those who are spiritual but not religious will stop drawing a line separating the spiritual from the political. And if this happens, maybe the thought of a Williamson presidency wont seem so implausible.

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Marianne Williamson and the religion of 'spirituality' - The Conversation CA