What if you could challenge the expectations and societal structures permeating all aspects of life, big and small? Examine, question, and reconstruct your interactions and experience with the world and community around you? These, and questions alike, are the foundation of what author and serial entrepreneur Sharmadean Reid sets out to help women resolve through guided self-discovery, healing, and re-building in her personal manifesto, New Methods for Women. Though it can be easy to disregard as just another self-help book, it is much more than that as Reid, true to form, leads by example through divulging lessons learned and personal stories from her own experience and journey to empowerment achieved by incorporating the very methods shared throughout the book.
New Methods for Women was conceived upon Reid’s shocking discovery that not only did she relate to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, an extended essay on the constraints of marriage and motherhood written in 1928, but also to an allegory in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City Ladies written in 1405 to defend women as structurally significant and valuable to society. As her act of liberation from a cycle of patriarchal conditioning, Reid set out to uncover and implement methods that would transform her life. These methods, the titular New Methods, fall into five stages of personal growth – Understanding, Absorbing, Applying, Accumulating, and Trimming – across which Reid and women alike are able to reflect, take control, and build enduring radical independence.
Le Livre de la Cite des Dames, (The Book of the City of Ladies), 1410, by Christine de Pizan
The New Methods introduced in Part One: Understanding guide and challenge the reader through a symphony of questions designed for self-reflection. What are your preferences? Why? How do your environment, lifestyle, and relationships impact your physical health? Why? Your mental health? Why? The methods of Understanding are also about developing deep compassion. Internal compassion forges openings to discover techniques and systems that work on an individual level to both process and progress. In the same vein, compassion towards others, even if their path is unrecognizable to you, is just as important. Not everyone is on the same journey and that is okay.
After gaining a foundation of Understanding comes the practice of Absorbing. The methods of Part Two encourage becoming a sponge to your surroundings. It is learning to notice, and take hold of, resources uniquely available to you. This can be through active listening, meeting new people, monitoring media and social influences, or questioning sources, even in small conversations. Absorbing can also look like regular engagement with nature or discovering forms of healing that best support you. Being a sponge means building an open framework to be curious and inquisitive.
As the momentum builds from all you are Absorbing, the New Methods shift into Part Three: Applying. Whereas Part One and Two were about noticing and questioning patterns of behaviour, Part Three is about activating the habits required to see positive, lasting results. It’s like driving a car – first you learn about how cars operate and the rules of the road. Then you can get behind the driver’s seat. Applying New Methods centers around improving intuition, natural responses, and building muscle memory. It’s learning to see the grey, not just black and white. It’s discerning criticism from attack. And it’s honing in the ultimate application: your personal mission.
Part Four: Accumulating, answers what to do as the fruits of the previous methods grow in abundance around you. It can be easy to fall into old habits, to blur boundaries, to be fearful or retreat to a scarcity mindset. These New Methods are like little “notes to self”, friendly and kind reminders of the work you have done, where you are going, and what it will take to get there. Not everything is meant for you. There is enough to go around. Pay it forward. Pay it backward. Anything above 0 compounds. Celebrate both the little and big wins.
The power of compounding: anything above 0 grows.
After reaching Understanding, learning to Absorb, Applying new techniques, and Accumulating from the growth achieved already, it is time to Trim. Part Five balances the delicate act of curation and the art of letting go. It is learning to show up comfortably and intentionally through words and appearance. Reid’s methods are about picking your battles, resisting drama, prioritizing relationships, and practicing acceptance. To trim is to cut through the noise and soften the edges of the world you have been mindfully building around you.
New Methods for Women reveals itself to be an intersectional guidebook on becoming the architect of your life, equipped with a fresh blueprint and set of tools in hand. Born from Reid’s interactions with literature, the initial literary references continue throughout the book, creating a comprehensive list of related titles **to enable the reader to continue exploring topics of interest along their personal journey. With her gentle but firm writing style, Reid sticks the landing in a genre that can be hard to deliver with candor and sincerity, fully living up to its subtitle A Manifesto for Independence.
Learn more about Sharmadean Reid’s manifesto in her New Methods for Women blog.
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