The Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce celebrated its 20th Anniversary with a festive luncheon in mid-February headlined by keynote speaker Jeannie Ritter, Colorado’s First Lady. Her presentation on her favorite issue, mental health, was followed up by a tribute given by Mayor John W. Hickenlooper to Patricia Barela-Rivera, who accepted the Chamber’s Lifetime Achievement Award with a moving speech of gratitude toward friends, family, and colleagues.

Ritter began her discussion of mental health with a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke: “She who reconciles the ill-matched threads of her life and weaves them gratefully into a single cloth...” She then led into her talk about the wellness end of mental health.

“We’re not listening to one another,” she said. “When we ask, ‘how are you?’ we know what we want to hear. We need to practice listening to one another and be present and courageous to get the response we might not want to hear.”

Ritter discussed what is in place for community support. If we see a friend not acting like herself, are we comfortable saying so, and stepping forward to help her? She stressed the value of self care, of vacations, of family time, diet, and exercise. And she encouraged women in business to remember the mentors that might have helped them and to seek out opportunities to mentor others.

In accepting her Lifetime Achievement Award, Barela-Rivera, who was the U.S. SBA District Director for Colorado, pointed out that sometimes the people we think we should believe and trust can misdirect us. For example, when she was growing up as a young girl on a ranch in New Mexico, she learned to drive tractors, herd cattle, and follow a strong work ethic. “I never had role models or mentors, never had opportunity, I just went along in school as an A-B student,” she recalled. “My counselor told me, ‘You make good grades, you should become a secretary. Or, if you go to college, go into home economics.’ Now, today, with my background, I could have been a range conservationist, a veterinarian. There’s nothing wrong with those careers the counselor mentioned, but at the time I got smart and I majored in business administration.”

Barela-Rivera said she wakes up grateful every day to be alive and is thankful for her beloved friends who have gotten her through the great times as well as the challenging times. She also praised her “greatest mom and dad in the world”. She recalled how her mom said to her, “Now I can die in peace, knowing you can take care of yourself.”

She noted that in her career and personal life she always strived to share abundance, to attempt each day to give back to the community, to empower others, to make it a better world, to live each day with passion, to use the power each of us is endowed with.

“I know what it means to be discriminated against,” she said. “We are survivors. Two of my favorite mottoes are, ‘You can’t choose how you die, but you can choose how you live’; and ‘Do the things you think you cannot do.’”