Gail Shapiro: Empowering Women Across Generations Through Financial Literacy, Advocacy, and Storytelling

In this episode, Gail Shapiro shares her journey of empowering women through financial literacy programs like the Womankind Financial Literacy Project, her book Money Order: The Money Management Guide for Women, and online workshops. She also discusses her STORM method for personalized organizing and her novel To Sisterhood!, which highlights women’s experiences during the social changes of the late 60s and early 70s. This episode explores the importance of financial education, organization, and preserving women's history.

Key Topics Discussed:

• How a deep understanding of women’s financial struggles led Gail to create the Womankind Financial Literacy program to help empower women with essential money management skills
• The ways societal expectations shape women's relationship with money and why financial literacy is crucial for personal independence
• What the STORM organization method is and how Gail uses it to help her clients create personalized and practical organizing systems
• The story behind Gail's most recent book, To Sisterhood!, a novel that captures the experiences of women during the social and political changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Key Takeaways:

• Financial literacy is a vital tool for empowering women to take control of their futures, and it’s important to address the unique challenges women face with money.
• Societal expectations often complicate women’s relationship with money, making it essential to approach financial education from a feminist perspective.
• Organizing isn’t a one-size-fits-all process, so creating personalized systems that work with individual needs is crucial for success.
• Understanding and preserving women's history, like the experiences portrayed in To Sisterhood!, is key to inspiring and educating future generations about the progress women have made.
  
  

Noteworthy Quote:

"Disorganization is not a moral failure; it's just that you haven't found the system that works for you yet."

Gail's Bio: Gail Shapiro is an editor, professional organizer, and Harvard M.Ed. graduate. She helps individuals, families, and businesses create efficient, practical systems and spaces. Gail is also the author of six non-fiction books, including To Sisterhood (2024). Her work and writing reflect her passion for clarity and order.

More About Gail:

Website: gailshapiro.com

Book: To Sisterhood!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Gail Shapiro: Author and Organizer
• 3:10 The Womankind Financial Literacy Project
• 10:40 Why Women Avoid Money Management
• 15:35 Professional Organizing: Bringing Order to Lives
• 21:50 Two Sisterhood: A Novel of Women's History
• 30:30 Organizing Workshops and Personal Systems
• 36:10 Final Thoughts on Life and Gratitude

Transcript

Lauri Wakefield [00:00:41]:
Hi. Welcome to the Inspired Living for Women podcast. Thanks for joining me today. I'm your host, Lauri Wakefield, and my guest today is Gail Shapiro. Would you like to say hi, Gail?

Gail Shapiro [00:00:50]:
Hello, and thank you so for having me today.

Lauri Wakefield [00:00:53]:
Yeah, thank you for being here. So Gail is an author and editor and a professional organizer. She holds a master of education from Harvard University. As a professional organizer, she specializes in helping individuals, families, and small business owners design and maintain personalized systems and spaces that are you'd call it practical and efficient, wouldn't you?

Gail Shapiro [00:01:16]:
Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I should. Yes.

Lauri Wakefield [00:01:18]:
So Gail is the author of six nonfiction books, including her most recent, which is a novel called Two Sisterhood. The book was released in July of twenty twenty four. So we'll get into the book a little bit later. But let's start off, Gail, with just a little bit about your journey. And without going back as far as the book goes back, but we'll go let's start with the Womankind Educational Resource Center that you started in '19, 1993.

Lauri Wakefield [00:01:45]:
Do you wanna talk a-

Gail Shapiro [00:01:47]:
Okay. In 1993, most people were still not using the Internet. And we had we opened a resource center for women here in the town where I live in Massachusetts. And most of the resources we had were on index cards and file cabinets. And women came in and said, I need a plumber, or I'm going through a divorce. I need a lawyer, or I need this or I need that, or preschool for my kids. Just it was just basically resources. It was not a crisis or anything like that. And what we found over time is that most of the questions that women asked or had had just didn't know about had to do with money, more specifically, women's lack of knowledge about money. With the board president, I was the executive direct founding executive director, the board president, my colleague, Anne Bickford Smith. We sat down and we said, we need to address this. There's a lot of there's a lot of information that women need to know about money. So we threw together I said threw to literally threw together in a room six, women financial professionals. We had a banker, a mortgage broker, a I think an estate attorney. I'm trying to think who the original people were. Anyway, six people who worked in the finance field in some capacity, and then six women who we just called the consumers, people who just were clients or people who came into the center. And we put them in a room and said, alright. You've got a day to come up with a curriculum. And Anne, my colleague, was a curriculum designer by she we met at we met when we were both doing our graduate work. And we came up with a six week curriculum, which we ended up calling womankind's financial literacy project. And the basis of the project is that every woman has something to teach as well as to learn. And we had such a great time. We here's what happened in the beginning. One of my life mottos, , is always be prepared for overwhelming success. Anybody can fail, but that's not you wanna be successful. Be ready for success. And here's what happened. We were ready to start the first class, and we decided to do a pilot program for 20 women. That was all our little center could hold. And somehow, and I don't remember how this happened, A reporter from the Boston Globe got wind of this that we were doing and put a little tiny notice in the back of the Sunday magazine. When I say tiny, it was like an inch, maybe an inch high, a little notice. This class is starting blah blah blah blah. Okay. That was on Sunday. On by Tuesday, we had 600 phone calls.

Lauri Wakefield [00:04:29]:
Wow.

Gail Shapiro [00:04:32]:
And all answered by me as the phone was in my little basement office. And so we quickly scrambled, and instead of having one pilot class, we had three. So we did that this spring, and then we had the fall classes were all filled up, and it just kept growing. And it kept growing, and it kept it was so clear. There was such A need for it. Knowledge, a high knowledge in that. And we ended up teaching this for a year several years. We expanded to train other women's in women's centers in seven states in Canada. We went in and I traveled and taught other people how to do it. So this pro program actually reached thousands of women. I don't know the exact number because we didn't keep track of who they are.

Lauri Wakefield [00:05:17]:
I don't know if this is a recent statistic, but it said that it's helped more than 8,000 women, but it could even be higher than that.

Gail Shapiro [00:05:25]:
That's the- that would be about my best guess.

Lauri Wakefield [00:05:28]:
Okay.

Gail Shapiro [00:05:29]:
And include the book because what happened is after a few years of doing this, we got an idea that well, what happened is people would come in to teach the classes, and everything was always on a we had a very a fee. And then if you couldn't afford the fee, there was a sliding scale, so we made it accessible to everyone. And the teachers would come in with handouts, stapled together handouts. And finally, someone said, there's all these handouts. Why don't you put them in a book? So we said, okay. Fine. Great. And we went over to our colleagues at the women at the, Boston Women's Health Book Collective, and we said, we wanna do for women's money knowledge what you did for women's health. And they were fantastic. And the head of the collective or the coordinator of the collective at the time said, great. So she took her book proposal, put it on the desk of her editor at Simon and Schuster, and they bought it.

Lauri Wakefield [00:06:25]:
Is that the money order book?

Gail Shapiro [00:06:27]:
Correct.

Lauri Wakefield [00:06:27]:
Managing your money? Okay.

Gail Shapiro [00:06:29]:
Yeah. Money or the Money Management Guide. Money Order: The Money Management Guide for Women.

Lauri Wakefield [00:06:34]:
Okay.

Gail Shapiro [00:06:35]:
And so, basically, it was the compendium of all the different lessons that we taught during the six week class plus plus some. And I edited it, and it was just yeah. It was phenomenal. And we had it all together in one book. It was great. So we're very proud of that. And yeah. So that's that story.

Lauri Wakefield [00:06:55]:
Yeah. So I also read that you were, named or you were awarded the daily point of light by president Bush in 02/2002. Yeah. And it was for your many years of volunteer service. So it's a that says I looked it up. It says but it's a daily point of light, and it just says that it's awarded to individuals and groups who are making a difference in their communities through volunteer work and civic engagement.

Gail Shapiro [00:07:17]:
Yeah.

Lauri Wakefield [00:07:18]:
So that must have been an honor.

Gail Shapiro [00:07:20]:
I was very proud of that. Yeah. I've been volunteering all my life, and I get that from my mother because she was consummate volunteer. And she was my I will I would just like to give her a little shout out. She was the longest serving UNICEF volunteer ever.

Lauri Wakefield [00:07:34]:
Wow.

Gail Shapiro [00:07:35]:
She was UNICEF chair in our town for almost sixty years, and that's where I learned it. So yeah. Just-

Lauri Wakefield [00:07:42]:
That's amazing.

Gail Shapiro [00:07:43]:
Yeah.

Lauri Wakefield [00:07:44]:
And I would imagine, yeah, most people would didn't even last close to that.

Gail Shapiro [00:07:48]:
Yeah. She was a girl scout troop leader, which I followed in her footsteps, girl scout leader, cookie mom, the whole shebang. So that's where, yeah, that's where that came from, and we were just really proud. People would ask me, why is this class just for women? Men need this information too. I said, of course, they do. And my little sound bite was always that, and it's still true. I know plenty of people, both men and women, who cannot or will not balance their checkbooks, but I have never heard a man giggle about it. And the message is we women need to take ourselves seriously when it comes to money because there's no one who's gonna take care of us but us. You'd look at numbers and the differential between, especially for older women, the differential between what women get for Social Security and what men get for Social Security. The differential is we still only earn 83¢ to the dollar, men. And 9090% of women who currently are supported by someone else will at some point be self supporting. 90%. So it behooves us to know and think about and take care of and be cognizant of our money.

Lauri Wakefield [00:09:08]:
Right.

Gail Shapiro [00:09:09]:
Yeah. So that's what that was about. And still what I have found is even in this generation of younger women, it it's still true. People may be a little bit there's a lot more information on the Internet and so forth, but there's still a lot of women who don't wanna deal with it. But a lot of men don't wanna deal with it too. I'm not pointing fingers here at certainty. I don't wanna do that. Why? Why do women not wanna deal with this? Because there's so many reasons. In fact, I have one of the workshops that I teach is 10 things every woman needs to know about her money, and there's one of the questions is why. It's boring. There's other priorities. We have other things to do, so forth. Anyway, that's

Lauri Wakefield [00:09:51]:
Mm-hmm.

Gail Shapiro [00:09:52]:
Or it's something I don't need to I don't need to think about right now because everything's okay.

Gail Shapiro [00:09:57]:
Yeah. Everything's alright, but you don't know what's coming.

Lauri Wakefield [00:10:00]:
Exactly. So let's talk a little bit about your career, which probably even during that time, you were still doing this in some capacity as a professional organizer. Your LinkedIn profile describes it as bringing order to people, places, and things. So do you wanna talk a little bit about what you do as a professional organizer and who you work with?

Gail Shapiro [00:10:18]:
Oh, absolutely. Thank you. Yes. I've been working in the organizing field. In fact, Money Order is a book about organizing your money and lot of other things that go with it. I do work with individuals and small businesses. Right now, I started at the beginning of the pandemic shutdown working virtually, and I never went back. I love working virtually. I help people bring order to their home offices, their kitchens, their closets, their whatever they need in the home or in their office. And I also help people organize their writing projects, particularly books. And that has been most of my clients lately are writing books, which I love doing because I learned so much about fields and things that

Lauri Wakefield [00:11:02]:
Right.

Gail Shapiro [00:11:03]:
I don't do fiction. I don't edit. I did nonfiction, and the clients are a very wide variety of of people, I have found that working virtually opened up a whole new group of people-

Lauri Wakefield [00:11:18]:
Oh, yeah.

Gail Shapiro [00:11:18]:
who don't want an organizer to come in their house and see all of their stuff. They want what I see. So we work by FaceTime or just pictures and by phone or whatever it takes. And it's easy for me to do that. I've done cross country moves. I've done whole house cleanouts all the which is really a lot of fun. I love

Lauri Wakefield [00:11:39]:
Yeah. Oh, I'm sure it is. I'm sure. Yeah. And it's people who would never have known about you or finding out about you because when you were doing it in a person, that's pretty much it was probably pretty much locally. Right? Yeah.

Gail Shapiro [00:11:52]:
Now it's all over the place. So yeah. Yeah. A lot of other organizers. I belong to NAPO, which is the National Association of Professional Organizers and productivity consultants, and they're all over the world.

Lauri Wakefield [00:12:04]:
Mm-hmm.

Gail Shapiro [00:12:05]:
And people can find an organizer if they want someone to be in person. Sometimes people call and say, I've gotta have someone here to hold my hand. I say, oh, I refer them to a colleague. It's a very collegial organization. It's very good. So, yeah, that's I just find it really fulfilling when I find that visual clutter makes me feel a little-

Lauri Wakefield [00:12:25]:
Oh, gosh.

Gail Shapiro [00:12:25]:
Yeah. Just and so when I put things I'm not saying this is gonna cure anxiety, but if you feel a little anxious and you look at clutter and you just clear it, it's calming. It's-

Lauri Wakefield [00:12:37]:
It is. Yeah. I was gonna say, like, I'll tell my husband. Like, when things are and I'm not, like, a neat freak at all, but I like things to be organized. You take something out, you put it back to where you got it from so you know where it is next time, Things like that. And I just if I see a bunch of clutter, like, it makes my head crazy.

Gail Shapiro [00:12:53]:
Yeah. I feel I I find that if one person in the home starts decluttering or making things, putting an order, it's catching. Other people must do it too, but I will never do anybody else's stuff. Go organize my husband's closet. I'm not doing that. But it's really it really does bring harmony to the home.

Lauri Wakefield [00:13:16]:
Yeah. So do you wanna talk a little bit- before we get into your current book, do you wanna talk a little bit about the- we talked about the Money Order book. The other two that you have Get that Grant and a Pocket Full of Change?

Gail Shapiro [00:13:28]:
Yeah. Sure. It's- they're all about organizing. I did, pardon me, many and all throughout the years, I didn't have a linear career. Everything I always did everything all at one all at the same time. So I've done fundraising for many years. I've done charitable giving consulting. I still do that very occasionally. And my partner, Carla Cataldo, and I, my business partner, taught a workshop about grant proposal writing. And she's still working in the development field. I'm retired from that now. And I think it was in late nineties, we wrote a book called Get That Grant because it was the culmination of all these years of teaching people how to do grant proposal writing, most all for nonprofits. And somebody said, you really should take this and put it in a book. People kept telling us to write it. So that's what we did. And it's a very small book. It's only 74 pages. And it has the essence of what you need to write a grant proposal, which really is not really different from any organizing project.

Gail Shapiro [00:14:34]:
It's say what you wanna do, where are you now, what's in the way, and how are you gonna get from here to there? It's pretty simple. Although the world of grant proposal writing has changed quite a bit since I've retired from it. The principles are the same, but the machinations are very different. Anyway, so there was that. And pocket full of change is how to make a difference even if you don't have a lot to give. And it has a lot of really practical information, thinking about how your giving is not just about who you're giving to. It's about how it meets your needs. People don't usually think you get if your house is like mine, come starting in October, you get hundreds of gives in this.

Lauri Wakefield [00:15:23]:
Yep.

Gail Shapiro [00:15:25]:
And they're all good causes, but you can't give to everyone. Exactly. How do you make a choice? How do you how do you decide, ? What do you- how do you decide who to give to?

Lauri Wakefield [00:15:34]:
I have regular organizations that I give to, like, for once a month, give to different ones. The other ones, there are some that I'll choose to at some point in the future, and then there are some that I just I don't. But as far as choosing, like, I give to to Saint Jude's for kids because that's my heart. They're kids, they're children. It's like they- their parents shouldn't have to stress about finding a way to take care of them. I give to some Christian organizations, and I give to- I it's for veterans. It's for, like, housing for them once they get out of the military. Like, basically, ones who are, who've sustained injuries, like, where they need certain things within a house in order to be able to- I have a heart for that because, like, they defend us. They go, maybe not all of them, but they sustained injuries and they're- it's not right to not help them.

Lauri Wakefield [00:16:26]:
So, I mean, that's why I- It's more for things like that. Just like we're I don't like, helping those that aren't that don't have a way to help themselves in the way they need to be helped.

Gail Shapiro [00:16:36]:
So you really, your priorities clearly are people in need, and that's. Other people's priorities, and that's your choice, and there's so many choices.

Lauri Wakefield [00:16:46]:
Oh, yeah.

Gail Shapiro [00:16:47]:
Other people's priorities are supporting the arts, support animals, this, that, and

Lauri Wakefield [00:16:52]:
Oh, animals. I give to animals too. Yeah.

Gail Shapiro [00:16:54]:
Health organization. There's so many. And people come to me and say, I wanna give to everybody, but there are well over a million charities. And, yes, you can't give to everybody. So the book is about how to make these decisions. What is it that you want your gifts to do for you? What do you wanna do for others. You told me what most people will say is what I wanna do for other people. These are the causes I care about, but what do you wanna get out of your giving? And that's what this book is about.

Lauri Wakefield [00:17:27]:
Okay.

Gail Shapiro [00:17:27]:
People don't usually think about it in those terms, but it, the bottom line is it makes me feel better. Whether it's just to get a tax break or whatever, but it makes you feel better. But why and how? And so it really is a guide for how to make the decisions, how do you give, what do you give. Your volunteer time is very important too.

Lauri Wakefield [00:17:45]:
Right.

Gail Shapiro [00:17:45]:
In terms of dollars, volunteer time, what do you what do you give, when do you give, how do you give. And so forth. I'm really just I'm passionate about this subject. It is it's just a way to organize your charitable giving. And I guess the motto of that book is to be proactive instead of reactive. Instead of waiting for all those letters in October, think about it and make decisions about how you're gonna do it. And I will give you a little a tip. And for your listeners, there is there are these paid solicitors that will call you sometimes and say, you gotta give to this and then they can answer every objection except for one.

Lauri Wakefield [00:18:22]:
Oh, yeah.

Gail Shapiro [00:18:23]:
There's only one line they can't answer, and that's the one I use. I'm sorry. Thank you for your call. It's not in my charitable giving plan this year.

Lauri Wakefield [00:18:32]:
Mm-hmm.

Gail Shapiro [00:18:33]:
They have no answer for that.

Lauri Wakefield [00:18:34]:
Mm-hmm.

Gail Shapiro [00:18:36]:
Call me next year. Send me information. I'll look at my Right. Down. And I never give over the phone because you don't know who they are. Exactly. Anyway, so what's next?

Lauri Wakefield [00:18:48]:
Okay. We'll talk about the current book. The current book is called To Sisterhood exclamation mark. The book description I'm gonna read the book description that I saw on Amazon. So it covers the formative and turbulent period in the lives of these four friends through August 1972. A time when chaos in the streets echoed the chaos within families divided by the Vietnam War war, changing social wars and expectations for women of all ages. It takes place during the beginnings of the women's liberation movement with many topics still relevant today, such as access to to birth control and abortion. So do you also, before we before I before you start talking about it, the the four friends that are in the novel are Ellen, Laurie, Diane, and Nina. So so when I was reading a little bit about the characters in there, are they, like, loosely based on people that you had in your life, or they're just people that you made up?

Gail Shapiro [00:19:46]:
It's an interesting question. And people have said, are any of the characters you? And I said, yes.

Lauri Wakefield [00:19:51]:
I, let me guess. Let me guess. I think it's the last one, Nina. Is that right?

Gail Shapiro [00:19:55]:
No.

Lauri Wakefield [00:19:56]:
Oh my goodness. Okay. Let me think.

Gail Shapiro [00:19:59]:
No. Stop. Partly yes and partly no.

Lauri Wakefield [00:20:03]:
Okay.

Gail Shapiro [00:20:04]:
They're all me, and they're all you.

Lauri Wakefield [00:20:07]:
Okay.

Gail Shapiro [00:20:09]:
They're all of us, and that's what it is. That's what sisterhood is. There's so many aspects of each of the characters that you can relate to, that I can relate to. They're not based on any specific person; but I've taken, obviously, events from that time in my life and what was going on in the world and push them all together. That's the best way to say it.

Lauri Wakefield [00:20:30]:
Okay. Yeah. So do you wanna talk about each of the characters, and then we can talk about what the book the purpose of the book is, and what the, what message you wanted to share or people to get from it. Okay?

Gail Shapiro [00:20:40]:
Yeah. The message of the book, I will talk about it. I'll answer that backwards if that's okay.

Lauri Wakefield [00:20:45]:
Sure.

Gail Shapiro [00:20:46]:
The message of the book right now, and it's why I wrote the book so that my daughters and my granddaughters and my nieces and other young women could understand what we did, what you and I did for them and for women to come. In the beginning of the book, it talks about the fact that, for example, in the Boston Globe so the beginning of the book is set in Boston. When you looked for a job, you looked in the newspaper. You remember that. And the job ads were help wanted male, help wanted female. There was no crossover. Married women couldn't get credit in their own name. You couldn't get birth control in Massachusetts unless you were married and had a doctor's prescription. Abortion was illegal everywhere and odd. It was a very different time, and young women don't realize what it used to be. There was no, if you were fired for review for refusing your boss's sexual advances as did happen to me, tough luck. You're out of a job. There were no laws against that. There were no laws against sexual harassment in the workplace or any place else. Domestic violence didn't even exist as a term. My wife beating happened. But a police officer who responded was much more likely to tell the-

Lauri Wakefield [00:22:16]:
Start with the husband.

Gail Shapiro [00:22:17]:
Yeah. Go and take a walk around the block, buddy, and cool off. There was no there were no law there were just no laws. That didn't happen. So a lot of things have changed, but a lot of things haven't changed. And in some ways, we're going backwards, and I don't wanna get into politics. But whatever you believe about the current political situation, one of the messages of the book is we've been here before. We've been here before. Maybe not in this complete scenario, but in those days, especially during the Vietnam War era, families were divided. Brothers were divided against brothers, sisters from brothers, parents from children. As I told my young friend who has long hair, I said, if you were in Alabama and you just went to put gas in your car if you're traveling there, someone might shoot you. You go, what? I said, yeah. Because you had long hair. You were a pinky, camo, whatever, camo, blah blah blah because your long hair spoke your politics. And whichever side of the fence you were on, it was as divided as the country is now. Only there was no social media, so we didn't hear everybody's opinions about things. It just was.

So one of the messages of the book is of hope that we were divided. We came together. We're divided now. We'll come together as a nation. I hope so. I hope so. Let's hold on to hope. There's that. The characters are very different from one another. Ellen lives in Vermont. She has a she comes from a background where her one set of grandparents are farmers and the other run the general store in town. It's a very small town. And she is desperate to get a good education. Her great aunt went to Radcliffe, and she decides that's the ticket out of things like Vermont. It's a fictional town where she just desperately wants to go to Radcliffe so that she can learn with women and just be among the finest teachers and brains and that's her goal. Laurie is a Radcliffe student, and that's how they meet because Ellen goes for a a visiting weekend, and Laurie is the one who takes her to this women's conference. These four women meet at the women's conference, which actually happened on 05/04/1969 at a menu. Okay. And Diane is from a, a blue collar working class family in Cambridge, and she hears about Harvard trying to take over properties in her neighborhood and stuff, and she's interested in neighborhood stuff. So she goes to the conference, and Nina is a very sophisticated New Yorker. She's a little older than the other women, and she wants to be the very best alternative journalist that she can. She works for newspaper, and she comes to cover the conference as a as a reporter. And they all meet, and they become friends. And then the book this is the my my true confession. The book was supposed to cover this women's friendship for forty years and cover their whole lives. And I had 600 pages, which is half again longer than the novel should be, and I was only up to 1972.

Lauri Wakefield [00:25:31]:
Okay.

Gail Shapiro [00:25:34]:
So I said I have to stop here, cut it off, on the sequel right now. And that's where we are. It's so much happened in those three Yeah. Changed everything.

Lauri Wakefield [00:25:42]:
Yeah. I was gonna ask you. Okay. So it must have been fun creating like, when you were creating the characters, so they evolved as you wrote.

Gail Shapiro [00:25:49]:
Yeah.

Lauri Wakefield [00:25:50]:
Okay.

Gail Shapiro [00:25:51]:
They talked to me.

Lauri Wakefield [00:25:53]:
Yeah.

Gail Shapiro [00:25:54]:
They actually talked to me, and I have never written a novel before. And I just honestly, I started this because I thought it would be fun. It wasn't.

Lauri Wakefield [00:26:01]:
Oh, okay.

Gail Shapiro [00:26:01]:
But it turned out to, it was a wonderfully rewarding experience, but fun, I wouldn't put up there with the adjectives. I just waited for them to tell me their stories. And they started to tell me their stories, and I wrote them down. And that's how it came to be. And the relationship between and among the women wasn't always lovely. Most of them were very good to each other. Sometimes they messed up just like we do as women. So I'm really looking forward to publishing the sequel, which will present these women as midlife. They're in midlife.

Lauri Wakefield [00:26:36]:
Okay. Okay. So have you started that? Or-

Gail Shapiro [00:26:39]:
Yeah. It's about Okay. About a third of the way done. Okay. Hoping to finish this year if, God willing, and the creek don't rise as they say. And, yeah, it's really been, it's really been a very interesting journey. So that's where I am. People have asked me, how long did it take you to write this book? And my answer is fifty five years because I lived it first.

Lauri Wakefield [00:27:03]:
Yeah. True.

Gail Shapiro [00:27:04]:
Yeah. So that's where I am. And I really hope my goal here is, and as I said to you in the email, I said, it's not to sell books. That's not as important to me. I want women to read this book, Lauri. If your library, your local library doesn't have it, you can ask for it. They'll order it. And I really especially want young women to read it because I want them to know what we did and where we were and are now. And hope I hope they will take the lessons we learned and with better lives because there were more choices for them now than we had.

Lauri Wakefield [00:27:37]:
Okay. So did you have anything more that you wanted to add about the book? Because I was gonna talk about the workshops that you offer, the virtual workshops.

Gail Shapiro [00:27:44]:
No. Just about just about the book, I think that I think people will be surprised. It's a little sad in places and it's funny because there's things you probably, people who lived through the era have written to me and said, wow. I forgot all about that. And because it's set in different places, it's set in Boston, in New York, on The Cape in Cape Cod and in San Francisco. And I've lived in all those places. So some of it is local knowledge of Athens, and so it was, yeah. So it was really fun to write. It was really that I said it wasn't fun, and I alright, I'm taking that back. Part of it was fun.

Lauri Wakefield [00:28:23]:
Parts of it were not, right? I can understand that. I published a a book of poetry. It was actually stuff I had written, like, when I was in my teens through my-

Gail Shapiro [00:28:32]:
Yeah.

Lauri Wakefield [00:28:32]:
Probably mainly through that and my late twenties. And the really, the reason- I didn't publish it to sell it, it was more so that I would have a copy of it, like a written a book. But, yeah, it wasn't, parts of it were not fun, even though it had already been written. But I was gonna say too, about the To Sisterhood! book. It was there, it's historical in some ways. It's factual. And then but it's also things from your perspective too. So I think that makes it interesting too and unique. Okay. So let's talk about the workshops. You used to do some of these in person, and then after the COVID epidemic, you end ended up going to virtual.

Gail Shapiro [00:29:11]:
By the way, I will say one more thing about the book and that is, and I say I really don't care whether or not people buy it. I want them to read it, but I really love reviews because reviews, because then other people get excited about it. Read the word and have other people read it.

Lauri Wakefield [00:29:24]:
So yes. And it's not that you wrote the book make money. It's you wrote the book because you wanted to convey a message and you wanted to teach people something too.

Gail Shapiro [00:29:34]:
Yeah.

Lauri Wakefield [00:29:35]:
Alright. So the workshops that you do, it's something that you do periodically. They're not offered all the time. Okay. So you go ahead.

Gail Shapiro [00:29:40]:
Now, I say they're available all the time, but I do them when I don't do a lot of selling these days. As I said, I'm older, and it's a little bit slower. I'm taking things a little more slowly, and that's okay. It's all good. I think the most recent one I did was in December, and I have another coming up. And that was for Dorot in New York called 10 Things Every Woman Needs to Know About, every long living woman needs to know about her money. And it's a financial literacy project, but it's also really 10 key pieces of information we need as we get older. I don't know if you're familiar with Dorot. It's for people over 65 to keep them connected, and it's wonderful. Look into it. They have wonderful virtual programs. It's really it dorot.org. And we had, and with this is why I still feel so energized by this. I thought, oh, I wonder if people will come to this. We had I think it was a, 48 people came to this workshop, which is, they were even surprised that people sign up and then they don't show up, but they all showed up. It was an hour and a half. So I offer that, and I'm maybe doing that again for a local organization. Yeah. That's my that's probably my favorite. I teach charitable giving, how to mindful charitable giving. How to make-

Lauri Wakefield [00:30:55]:
And then the organizing you do.

Gail Shapiro [00:30:57]:
And then I do just do organizing. I have really a very basic presentation that I do is it just really starts disorganization is not a moral failure. It's just you. It's just you don't have to be organized. This helps keep things run running smoothly. And I have found because a lot of my clients have learning disabilities and challenges with organization, there are many different types of organizing.

Gail Shapiro [00:31:26]:
Some of them are keeping things like I personally like things that are uncluttered. Many of my clients have to have everything out in the open. And I would look at it and see I would look at it and see clutter, but they know where everything is. And they can find everything, and they have to visual. If you for example, if you take a person who has ADD or ADHD, and you put something in a filing cabinet, it doesn't exist anymore. I'm making fun. That's the way their brain works. So for them, I would set up file folders that are sitting on the desk and holders usually with colored folders so different they have different colors so they can for one part of their life and a different color for another part of life. And I try very hard to work with people to make a system that works for them. I can't come in and there is no one size fits all in organization.

Lauri Wakefield [00:32:19]:
That's really interesting. Yeah.

Gail Shapiro [00:32:21]:
Doesn't work that way. Yeah. I have a few basic strategies that I use. I have something I call the STORM system, s t o r m, to start with sort, toss, organize, review, and maintain, main where people usually fall down. Even if you have someone come in and organize it with, if you don't for example, just take your mail, it takes fifteen minutes a day to process your mail. But if you let it pile up

Lauri Wakefield [00:32:50]:
Exactly. It turns into a monster. Yeah.

Gail Shapiro [00:32:52]:
Exactly. Fifteen minutes maximum. Some days, it's in the mail. I'm talking about mail, email, everything else if you keep up with it. So where most people fall down in the organizing process is they don't realize that it's not just physical clutter. There's time clutter, and there's also emotional clutter.

Gail Shapiro [00:33:11]:
And a lot of people who have clutter in their house who call me, I said, who whose voice are you hearing, like, in this house? You and it's usually a I'm sorry. This may be off topic, but I love like a it's basically a you can't make me you can't make me clean up my house. You can't whose voice is that? Is it your parents, your partner, your sometimes it's who knows? But a lot of times when I say to people, okay. How do you wanna live? What is your goal? Never mind what anybody else around you wants or what you heard from your childhood or your teachers or whatever. What is it that you want? And then we make a system, a home, a space, a calendar that works for them. And people are really grateful. And I just feel I find it so incredibly rewarding. My goal and this is not a good business model, but my goal is that people don't need me anymore.

Lauri Wakefield [00:34:08]:
Yeah.

Gail Shapiro [00:34:09]:
You know? I just I wanna teach them. It's transfer of knowledge. I wanna teach what I know so they can do it, and I can go work with somebody else.

Lauri Wakefield [00:34:16]:
Exactly. Yeah. You must have, even though your mind's very systematic, obviously, to be able to set up systems, but you have also have a creative mind to where you're able to and probably intuitively too, where you're able to just look at that individual. And that's really interesting because, I'm sure a lot of there are people who teach organizing things, decluttering, and things like that, but it's just a general, that's not adapted to the individual.

Gail Shapiro [00:34:39]:
There is no one, as I said. There and, honestly, the only time I like when people call me back, where I work with them is if there's a life challenge, they have a new baby, or they just had surgery or something, then they need some hands on help, some practical help. But, mostly, I work with clients, and they're graduated. That's what I-

Lauri Wakefield [00:35:02]:
That's a good thing.

Gail Shapiro [00:35:03]:
Yeah.

Lauri Wakefield [00:35:04]:
So is there anything else that you wanna add to the to what we've talked about?

Gail Shapiro [00:35:08]:
No. But I love what you're doing, and I like the podcast. Thank you. We have, yeah, we have a lot of road ahead of us. I really think about that. And when you get to about my age, I figured, I am I'm gonna be 75 on my next birthday. And my parents, may they rest in peace, died at 95 and 99 just a few years ago. So I figure I have a long way to go.

Lauri Wakefield [00:35:35]:
So you do. You do it. You've got stuff to look forward to, the book you're writing, and just the things you continue to do. And yeah. And there's, like being more selective about what you're gonna do and not being so busy all the time. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a good thing.

Gail Shapiro [00:35:49]:
Yeah. Just go outside every day. And I think the days when it's hard in these chaotic times, when it's hard to find joy, you can always find beauty. You just look out,

Lauri Wakefield [00:36:00]:
Yeah.

Gail Shapiro [00:36:01]:
I live on a beautiful pond, and I can look out the window and it sparkles, and it's great. Yeah. There's a lot to be grateful for. Gratitude is really the key.

Lauri Wakefield [00:36:10]:
Yes. It is.

Gail Shapiro [00:36:12]:
So glad that you we got the chance to talk.

Lauri Wakefield [00:36:14]:
Yeah. Me too.

Gail Shapiro [00:36:16]:
No. I was just saying I'm enjoying being here and talking.

Lauri Wakefield [00:36:18]:
Yeah. I like, before we got on the call, because I truly enjoy talking to people and meeting people and finding out what I can about them and just the different, everybody's different, and everybody has a life that has its own stories. So it's just yeah. I find it fascinating. So that's gonna wrap things up for this episode. Thanks so much for joining me today. If you'd like more information about Gail, you can visit her website at gailshapiro.com, s h a p i r o [dot] com. I'll link to her website in the show notes, and I'll also include links to her book and to the services that she offers. Actually, I'll leave one for the books and then the book. That's actually the most current book on Amazon. If you'd like to see the show notes for today's podcast, you can find them on my website at inspiredlivingforwomen.com. The show notes will be listed under Podcast Show Notes Episode 14. And if you'd like to join me as I continue my conversations with other guests exploring topics for women over 40, please be sure to subscribe to the Inspired Living for Women podcast. Thanks again, and have a great day.

Gail Shapiro [00:37:21]:
Thank you so much. Take care.

Lauri Wakefield [00:37:22]:
You're welcome.