Reconnecting with our brilliance
My daughter loves fashion so a few years ago I made her a card using collage. What emerged was a picture of lots of young women and, while they’re mostly models and we know that industry has significant issues, I still love images full of women.
Because what I see is brilliance and potential.
Strikingly what I hear when I work with professional women, mostly older than these models at 30-50, is doubt. A conviction that they’re not good enough and the certainty that everyone else has got it all under control.
And yet these are senior account managers, consultants, directors of IT, CEOs, teachers, programmers, entrepreneurs. All highly capable, ambitious women juggling busy professional and personal lives, but all living with an inner voice that criticises and undermines much of what they do on a daily basis.
I often say that these are the brilliant women who’ve forgotten how amazing they are.
The woman who’d hidden a mental health condition who shed her shame and unleashed huge ambition once she realised how much she was holding herself back.
The CEO who was off work with depression when our work started who coped with losing her job and went on to find not only a fantastic new senior role, but also a loving relationship.
The teacher who’d lost her way who reconnected with everything that she loved and was good at in her role who went on to secure an internal promotion and a new job. Now isn’t that a much more interesting dilemma to face?
The woman with the most brilliant idea for a business that she had the courage to set up having emerged from a period of huge loss, pain and sadness.
The woman, overwhelmed by her workload and grief after losing her father, who’d forgotten who she was at home and at work and how to look after herself, who learned to find balance and time – and ultimately herself.
I salute them all.
What I love about the work I do is the knowledge that change is always possible and that each and every person will find an inner voice that’s kinder and a way of living the life that they want.
Those simple words – change is possible – are so powerful and I’m proud to be in the business of enabling it to happen for so many incredible people.
