Tip three in my mini series of posts about Femageism, that ‘curse’ which descends upon women of a certain age. They’ve been prompted by the research I’ve been doing around the issues that older women face. When people (sadly, all genders) see the phrase ‘older woman’ a whole load of images come to mind and very few of them are positive.
I want to challenge that. It’s a challenge for all of us to look at an older woman and see wisdom and experience, something of huge value, because we’ve all been subjected to negative brain washing about older women. There is a fear of older women; just think about the term ‘witch’ and how that came into being… We are powerful and it’s time to flex that power.
Older women have masses to offer society and employers who do not utilise this are missing out on a great resource.
Femageism Myth – Older Women Can’t Cope With New Learning
Some people believe that as we age we can no longer learn news kills and become stuck in our ways.
Piffle.
Learning new stuff requires learning new skills. We’ve been learning new skills all of our long lives.
An Exercise For Older Women (no gym membership required)
Take 5 minutes to try out this exercise. Think about all the skills you have acquired during your working life. Think about how you felt when faced when having to learn something. Older women are far less likely to get flummoxed by something new. We draw on our vast reservoirs of knowledge, sifting through previous experiences until we alight on something similar (see post two).
Our experiences of life helps younger colleagues, too. Yes, technology moves fast but that’s true for everyone. Never feel you can’t keep up because you absolutely can. It’s not surprising if you do get the odd confidence wobble because we are bombarded by negative images of older women. The exercises on my new course, Femageism, the Curse of the Older Women (‘pun’ definitely intended) are designed to help you overcome the confidence sapping impact of our femageist society and truly appreciate just how valuable you are.
Do take a look at tip one, which features another confidence building exercise for you to try.
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Posted on November 2nd, 2022 by Jane
