What you can learn as a woman from Nancy Pelosi

Last night, Nancy Pelosi, in a beautiful blazer with a matching face mask, was re-elected as Speaker of the American Congress. For another 16 days, she will be the most powerful woman in American politics. Starting January 20, she will have to relinquish the top spot to Kamala Harris, who will become vice president, but something tells me that Pelosi does this willingly because if anyone embraces having women in prominent positions, it is certainly her.

People often talk about Pelosi's father because he was active in politics, but it is primarily her mother who shaped her. Her mother who wanted to study law, who wanted to become an auctioneer, her mother who developed a beauty product and wanted to bring it to market and only needed her husband's signature for that. Which she did not get.

Nancy Pelosi also wanted to study law but was not allowed. She had children and did volunteer work. Pushing the stroller, she handed out pamphlets. She worked so hard that eventually the mayor of San Francisco, Joseph Alioto, almost forced her to accept a job. She brushed it off, let-me-do-volunteer-work, but he kept insisting. Someone with her dedication and ambition deserved to have decision-making power too. Eventually, she started to believe it herself and said ‘yes’.

When Pelosi started working in the American Congress, there was no restroom for women and it took years before women were allowed to wear pants. Although Pelosi had already been wearing the pants for a long time.

She is now 80 and has simply tacked her non-working years at the beginning of her life onto the end. Not a little golfing and ordering your first cocktail at lunch, but just working, working, working.

Here are some nice quotes from La Pelosi.

When she received a lot of criticism from her own party:
“I think I’m worth the trouble.”

When people thought she was patting herself on the back too much:
“Self-promotion is a terrible thing, but evidently someone has to do it.”

A final lesson for now from the little big woman: share others in your success, don’t take all the credit for yourself but give everyone their applause. That makes her beloved (not by everyone as she missed five Democratic votes) and thus she creates a lot of goodwill.

More Pelosi? For example about her own vineyard and her millions?