A route to meaningful work: The power of uncovering our stories
One Monday morning, as a tween and early teen, my sister Katie and I found ourselves surrounded by a group of eight older boys. As we pressed our backs against the wall of the pub by our bus stop, we were spat at and called names I won’t recount here.
They had taken exception to Katie removing a circus poster that had been pasted to a telegraph pole. She had spent the weekend asking local shop-owners displaying the same, to remove it from their windows, on her quest to end the cruelty of performing animals.
Whilst Katie tended to take direct action, when the world didn’t make sense to me, I’d write to politicians and young-people’s newspapers. My letters covered topics from making cruelty-free food production more affordable, to a plea for bullying in schools to stop. My views were naïve, but I had a need to express them, and making them public was one small way I could take a stand for a fairer, kinder world.
But that morning, as we stared at the pavement, praying for our bus to arrive, the notion that girls should be seen and not heard was brutally reinforced. We were taught it was best to keep our opinions to ourselves. And in the words of the boy who led the pack that confronted us “nobody gives a f**k what you think.”
In recent years, I’ve developed greater compassion for why I found it so hard to express my opinions during my corporate career. Particularly in meeting rooms where men outnumbered women, which was the case most of the time.
I had valuable thoughts to put forward, but would clam up, only to feel frustrated afterwards. When I did offer my opinions, often they were so diluted or sugar-coated that they were understandably ignored.
As an entrepreneur, the same pattern has caused me to avoid stating clearly who my work serves and what I stand for. Until a couple of years ago I avoided visible marketing entirely, because it took so much energy to ‘put myself out there.’
The most authentic expression of our leadership tends to nestle close to our wounds: the strategies our smart, resourceful, younger selves adopted to keep us safe. It is easy to berate ourselves when these patterns hold us back, but they are there for a reason.
My coaching clients want to affect meaningful change within their organisations and beyond. And yet what stops them, like a crosswind on their path to a deeper sense of purpose, is usually their own survival-based patterns.
Rather than ignoring the resistance that will inevitably pop up on this path, or making ourselves wrong for it being there, it can be useful to gently uncover the stories that have shaped us. To look at them with tenderness. From this stance, we are more able to make the journey our heart is calling us to make, with more joy, and less fear.
This excavation isn’t a quick fix or a one-off exercise. But once we begin to show ourselves more compassion, we can move through our inner struggles with greater ease and have the impact we are longing to.
Email me at claire@clairemackinnon.com with your reflections, comments and questions, or join the conversation on LinkedIn.
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