514 SelfWork: Three Essential Questions To Identify Your Role Model

Today I’m focusing on three role models in my own life and giving you a path to find your own role model.

How does someone become a role model for you?

Someone in your life may know that you look up to them, that you want to emulate them in some way.

Others will never know it. You simply know of them. Or you’ve read their writings. Heard their songs. Watched them from afar.

 

Dolly Parton was a role model for many…

But sitting where I sit now, and grieving Dolly Parton’s death this past week (as many did who might never have known her but admired what she stood for) it’s made me aware of women I’ve looked up to.

What was it about them that paved the way for them to become role models for me?

Most of those reasons have to do with the time I was born into and the path that was showed to me that was possible and “appropriate” for a woman. My role models didn’t follow that path. Why? Because age and cultural norms and the fact that they were women didn’t stop them from following their own paths to fulfillment and success.

Today I’ll focus on two that I never knew personally, Dolly Parton and Maya Angelou.

The third was a woman with the nickname “Snooky.” And it was really her choices that made me realize there was another path a woman could follow, other than marriage and motherhood.

How do you choose a role model…

We’ll focus on three questions that are helpful to ask when you’re searching for a role model.

1. Who do you see that you admire and whose life reflects certain values? 

This obviously could be a religious figure, like Jesus or the Buddha.

But that’s not my area of experience. So, I’m talking about people that intrigue you, challenge you, or that you admire for a certain thing. And what I’ve seen over and over – and I hope have lived – is that these questions are better if they’re value-based. Not what they looked like, or how much status or money they had.

It’s how you see can the values they live by, reflected in the life they’re living. Try making a list!

2. How is that value lived out in their life?

All three of these women were born in times or in situations that wanted to dictate who they became. Yet age and cultural norms and the fact that they were women didn’t stop them.

Dolly Parton was born in poverty. Her talent as a musical prodigy got her out of Pidgeon Hollow, while she remained steadfast in her love for family, her religion, and that region of the world.

Maya Angelou, author, poet laureate of the United States, renowned speaker, wrote about the Black woman’s experience in a world with horrific discrimination. Yet she never seemed bitter, just determined.

Snooky was Jewish living in the Bible Belt South, where married white women were supposed to live their lives finding fulfillment in marriage and motherhood. She became a doctor after her children were born, eventually divorced, and built a wonderful career.

What’s are the values underneath these women’s action? Self-respect. Persistence. Determination. Smarts. Maybe even stubborn defiance.

3) What must change in your own life for you to emulate your role model?

This could be harder to answer. When you’ve not seen healthy values lived out when you were young, it can be hard to (as one of my clients said recently) fake it til you make it.

But if you spend time trying to understand how your role model is demonstrating their value, you can begin to imagine the steps you can take to build and demonstrate that same trait in your own life.

Becoming a role model yourself…

This episode gives you lots of tangible ideas to do just that!

The Speakpipe voicemail for today is talking about letting go of shame – as a listener asks a poignant question about how to do that – and also if generational trauma. couold be playing a role in that difficulty.

Important Links:

Click here to order the PHD Workbook!

Click here to find out more about Dr. Margaret’s PESI course on perfectionism and depression on November 2, 2026! It’s virtual!