Who’s Holding You Back?

If you’ve decided the time is right to make some positive and lasting changes in your life, I salute you! It’s not easy and I hope you find some material on this site which will inspire and motivate you! That’s why I write it, after all.

Sadly, you will probably find that not everyone is supportive of your new outlook. It’s not usually because they are unkind people; in fact, it may be those closest to you who seem to be subtly undermining your efforts. And that’s because when you begin to change they can feel threatened.

Change is Good?

You are probably feeling great about having decided to make some positive life changes but for people close to us it can feel like a threat to the status quo. They may not even be aware of it on a conscious level but subconsciously they may be sabotaging your efforts, like offering the woman who wants to lose weight a cream cake!

Your decision to make changes in your life may be viewed as a criticism of what has gone before. They may feel they weren’t ‘good enough’ or that you have been unhappy and they didn’t realise.

Seek Support

You can avoid this by seeking their support early on. Ask them what they think of what you’re planning. Explain why you want to change. You can admit to feeling a bit unsure yourself and explain that their support is important to you. Involve them. Research also shows that women who tell people about their resolutions usually do better in achieving them!

Photo Credit: Pablonsky

What’s the Chances of Women Quotas on Boards with a Largely Male Government?

There are 648 elected MPs in the British Parliament

Women sitting in the House of Commons.

At the General Election of May 2010 143 women, 22% of the total, were elected as Members of Parliament, the highest number ever with one in five MPs now a woman.

Of these MPs:

49 are Conservative;

7 Liberal Democrats;

81 Labour;

1 Green Party;

1Scottish National Party;

1 Social Democrat & Labour Party;

1 Sinn Fein;

1 Alliance and1 Independent

Of the three main parties:

Labour has the highest proportion of women MPs, 31%;

the Conservatives have 16%

and Liberal Democrats 12%.

(Source House of Commons Information fact-sheets)

Will a male dominated government ever truly challenge the status quo? Will we see quotas for women on company boards introduced in UK?

Why so few women in parliament? Well, if you’re a regular reader you’ll know my response to that. Men designed how our parliament works and it works well for men. It doesn’t work well for women; it was designed with only one half of the population in mind.

My personal view is that until we do introduce quotas, little will change. It’s a conclusion I come to reluctantly.

Read what one of my favourite feminist journalists, Suzanne Moore has to say on the topic here.

What do YOU think?

Photo Credit: Ben G

Women, Take Your Place at the Table…the Right Place!

Meetings, meetings, meetings, your working life is probably full of them. Sometimes you’re no doubt temped to avoid a few when you can; I know I used to!

It makes sense to use your time wisely and some organisations get into meeting overload culture. However, make sure you are not missing any key meetings where crucial decisions are made or where people are selected to make crucial decisions. It’s very easy for women to get sidelined, particularly in large organisations. And it’s easy for women to be largely invisible in meetings too.

I’ve written before about the importance of making sure you’re voice is heard in every meeting and the tendency of men to interrupt and talk across women; this time I’m adding a few tips about body language in meetings.

Body Language Tips for Meetings

• If you’re presenting, stand tall and use open body language. If your body is saying ‘nervous and anxious’ you are likely to get a bored or negative reaction. Try to keep the energy up in your voice and sound as if you are really enthused by what you’re saying. Remember the nodding head trap….
• Make sure you talk to everyone, making comfortable eye contact with all, and not just focussing on the most senior person.
• Your choice of seat can unconsciously influence your relationship with colleagues; it all depends on the shape of the table. If at a square table the person on your right will be most attuned with what you are saying and will tend to want to agree with you. It could be useful to get your most difficult colleague in that position of possible. The person who will feel least sympathy with you will be the one seated opposite as the table is a very real physical barrier between you.
• Round tables can work well in helping everyone feel very relaxed, unless there is someone present who is much senior to the others. Then square table rules er… rule.
• Try not to sit with your back to the door if you are at a long meeting table. You will have less authority than if you were facing the door. Sitting at the short end of a rectangular table facing the door gives added authority (think Victorian fathers at Sunday lunch!)
• Be careful about touching anyone in meetings or being touched. Touching can be seen as an invasion of personal space, but it’s also about power too. Men touch women more than women touch men. Researchers think there is a strong link between gender and social inferiority, i.e. men tend to keep women on their dominant side; if they are right handed it will be their right side and vice versa. Research has also found that when men touch women it’s often seen as a signal of power (or a sexual advance). When women touch men it’s usually a sign of intimacy. Make sure your personal space is respected.

Photo Credit: Michelle Ho

Are You Making the Most of Life?

I was listening to a young teenage girl talking about ‘growing up’ the other day. She had such amazing life plans and ambitious goals and I really hope she fulfils them.So often though events tend to knock us off course and we need to take a bit of time to revisit our early ambition and put ourselves back on track.

Can you remember what your dreams and plans were before you left school? At one point in my early teenage years (and I hardly know how to confess this to you) I thought the pinnacle of being a successful woman was to support a good man! I can remember thinking “I must learn how to make proper coffee so I can be a good hostess”. Good grief!

Well, one ambition achieved, I can make bloomin’ good coffee! And I do support a good man, but crucially he also supports me in my life choices.

Later on, with maturity, my ambitions changed, and although I didn’t ever contemplate running my own business at a young age, I knew I wanted to have a degree of  independence, and I knew I wanted to be in a role that was useful. Actually, I wanted to change the entire world but that’s another story…

Look Back

What were your ambitions for your life? Did you set yourself goals in your early life? Did you have a clear picture of how you wanted your life to look? I was asked by a journalist recently what was the point of setting goals in life? Now, there is a whole raft of material there and goals can be small, big and in between, but basically my answer was - if you have an idea of where you want to be, it helps with all your decision making and helps you make the right choices for you.

Sometimes the right choice for you will be not to have a clear direction, but to take more risks and live more in the moment. The point is that it helps if we regularly review where we are and check out if we’re heading where we want to be, or if we’re drifting too far from our ultimate destination. Only you can know.

If you’re feeling vaguely dissatisfied with life don’t push the thoughts aside; take some time to consider why. Life is not about being happy all the time, but neither should it be about unhappiness. Take some control. Ask yourself:

• Is my unease/unhappiness caused by my personal relationship?
• Is it colleagues at work?
• Is it my role that is too demanding/undemanding?
• Am I bored too much of the time, in need of more stimulation?
• Do I see a clear picture of where I’ll be in a year? Three years? Five years?
• What can I do right now to take back some control of my life?

Despite what it may feel like from time to time, there are always things you can do. Take a look at some of the material on this site for a start, and also look at the inspirational women section on the site. There are some really good stories there from women who have truly grabbed back control. Or if work is not floating your boat at the moment, take a look at my book. You can simply talk to friends, ask their opinions and advice; remember you don’t have to take it but they may something that gives you a good insight, or sparks a train of thought for you.

Life is not always perfect, and a lot of things will happen that are not in our control. But a strong woman knows that how you react to life’s events is always in your gift. Don’t let yourself drift, grab a paddle and start steering your own direction!

Photo Credit: Vince Petaccio

Take a Fresh Look

I have just been away for ten days or so on a writing break (look out for my new ebook soon!). We arrived home last last night with the energy to do nothing but fall into bed. This morning, however, I had a glorious surprise.

During my few days absence my garden has burst into bloom. Everything looks totally different and utterly gorgeous and I am relishing it to the full. The small tight buds which were modestly clinging to the branches when I left have now burst out into glorious, trollopy, rapturous colour and scent. It was literally breathtaking.

Yet, if I had been here as the buds began to unfurl I probably wouldn’t have noticed such a transformation. I would have appreciated it, most definitely, but I doubt I would have seen the full effect as I am now, or that it would have had such an impact, because I would have been living with it on a daily basis. We just don’t fully appreciate the incremental changes.

Your Life

And life is a bit like that, isn’t it? We don’t always notice out achievements and acknowledge our successes because we’ve been so busy pursuing them. We’ve been so busy living our lives that sometimes we forget to take a few moments to stand and stare, and acknowldege just how far we have come.

Try it now; close your eyes and imagine you are describing your life for someone else. You’re only going to highlight achievements and successes because we spend enough time doing the other thing. Just think how far you have progressed and travelled and the skills and experiences you have acquired; bask in those thoughts for a moment before plunging right back in there!

Photo Credit: Neil Witty

Is Being Assertive Too ‘Male’ for Women?

Do you think that running seminars in assertiveness is selling women short?

As a specialist in women’s development and someone who runs courses for women, and coaches women regularly, I obviously read a lot on my subject and try to keep myself as up to date with the research as much as I can.

I read something recently which pulled me up short and caused to take a serious look at what I do professionally. I’m quoting out of context but it’s the essence which is important. I was reading some research by a serious academic writing about communication styles and she said, in effect, that teaching women to be more assertive could be seen as teaching them to be more like men. And if you’ve read much of my work you’ll know this is emphatically what I don’t want to do, yet I do help women behave more assertively. Crikey!

So am I being hoist by my own petard here? It has caused me to seriously reflect on what I am actually doing when I work with women to feel more in control and to behave more assertively. Am I teaching them to behave like men or am I helping to increase their confidence in handling potentially difficult or fraught situations, and in dealing with men in the workplace?

A Short History of Assertiveness

I think it might help to define terms at this point.

Obviously assertive behaviour has been around since the year dot. In recent history the Civil Rights movement in the US in the 50s adopted many assertive principles when they respectfully and peacefully challenged the discrimination laws in the southern states.

The actual term assertiveness was probably coined somewhere around the nineteen sixties when psychologists began to study human behaviour in the same way that anthropologists had always studied animal behaviour. Books like ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’ were very popular, and different communication styles were looked at. This being the 60s I would agree the concept was very male centric as there was no serious challenge then to the notion that being male was the norm.

In the 70s the women’s movement took up the notion of assertiveness and used it as a means of growing in confidence to possibly play men at their own game. Movements like ‘Reclaim the Night’ sprung up when women were ‘taught’ to walk tall, not look like victims and have assertive body language. Late night walks were organised with the aim of dispelling victim fear among women.  I have no problems with being identified with that.

It’s in the 80s that I think it all went wrong. The eighties were generally a time of me me, greed is good etc and predictably courses in assertiveness followed the fashion. I had my first encounter with assertiveness training then, a full week’s residential course and I remember thinking, “well, if this is assertiveness, you can stuff it”.

It was awful, very much a case of  ‘I’ll win and you’ll lose.’  Is this a male way of thinking? The course leader was male, most of the writing was by guys, and most of the participants on my course were male. Research shows that when men talk amongst themselves it tends towards competitiveness. This way of looking at assertiveness was all about winning, competing. Much of what we had learned about good communication was also appropriated by sales trainers and used to establish a false rapport to sell more. I saw it more as a manipulative technique rather than a useful tool. Assertiveness got bad name during the eighties.

The next time I seriously began to think about the concept of assertiveness was a few years later when working with women in abusive situations. The issue boiled down to one of self respect: the personal issue, I mean. Obviously there is a whole raft of material and theories on why men abuse women which has little to do with women respecting themselves. I’m talking about the link between self respect and choice of partner here. These women had very little self esteem. Helping them to be more assertive in their daily lives increased their self esteem, their confidence, and consequently their ability to deal with the situations they were in. We did not work with them to behave like men.

Some years ago, shortly after setting up my own  business, I was asked at short notice if I could take over an assertiveness course within an organisation as the previous person had left suddenly. I agreed but was shocked by the course details presented to me. The previous tutor had been male, had actually been a car salesman in a previous life (nothing wrong with that, just filling in the background) and his course was firmly rooted in the 80s, you won or lost, according to how you played the game. Needless to say I designed my own programme, which incidentally was well received by both men and women.

Definition of Assertiveness

I think assertiveness is about respecting yourself, valuing what you bring to the table, and having the confidence to speak up. It’s not about being aggressive, or staying quiet and being passive or any combinations thereof. Essentially it is  about extending that level of respect to others. You have the right to say what you feel and believe honestly, and others have that that right too.

So on reflection, no, I don’t think what I do is about teaching women how to be like men. I think it’s about self respect, self esteem, and confidence and valuing self and others. And that doesn’t belong to any one gender, surely?