Words for the Woman With a Story to Share

During a coaching session last week, a client of mine shared one of her biggest fears with me.

Maybe you can relate.
 
It’s a fear that I’ve heard many women I’ve worked with express. 
A fear that I’ve grappled with ad nauseam. 
And a fear that still visits me each time I sit down to write. 
In fact this fear is riding shotgun right now as I type these words. 
 
It’s the fear of sharing her voice. In her work, and in her life. 
Without apology or negotiation.
 
I’ve heard this challenge from women so often, and have felt it so acutely myself, that it seems important to address. 
For the sake of all of us who have a story to share, or a possibility we're yearning to create— 
but choose to stay quiet, or hide out, or sterilize our point of view into something more pleasing and agreeable for the sake of others.
 
Here’s my plea to you:
 
We need your strong voices. Your stories are valuable. 
Especially voices and stories that share the truth. 
We need as many as we can get
The truth of your experience... the truth of your perspective...
Tell us like it is. 
It’s what keeps us connected, how wisdom is passed down, how we all feel a little less alone. 
Speaking our truth without apology is how we set ourselves free…
From the constant concern of how others will see us.
From the expectations of who we “should” be. 
 
One hard truth. No one will ever give you the permission to take up space or be vocal. 
That permission is only self-granted.
Not to gender generalize, but this is especially true for women. 
It’s sucky, I know, but it’s the material that we’re working with. 
Which means that it’s up to us to learn how to share our voices in way that is decisive and meaningful. 
It’s our work. No one can hand us the permission slip. 
In fact..

Either we tell our stories or someone else will shape them for us.
There are plenty of people who are happy to tell us who they think we “should” be. It’s often well intentioned. In the guise of friendly advice. It also shapes us in their image. Which is not necessarily the truth of who we are. Something precious is lost in our silence. 

1:: NAME THE ARCHITECTS OF YOUR GLASS CIELINGS

Somewhere in our lives we’ve learned to fear what might happen if we let our voices be heard. 
The concern of negative impact or outcome.
 
If we sift through the contents of our experiences we can probably name the moments when our personal glass ceilings were constructed. 
 
Perhaps it was well meaning friends and family who encouraged you to “never change”. 
Maybe it was the mocking or teasing you faced when you let yourself be vulnerable. 
Or the mythology that women should be pretty and quiet that seeped into your family tree. 
 
One of my thickest glass ceilings was built in the 4th grade, when my well-intentioned mom forbade me from performing at the school talent show. 
 
I was planning a one-woman lip sync to En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind”, complete with a neon-green leotard and floppy brimmed hat, circa 1992. (Lord, I wish I had photo of this.)
I thought I was hot shit. I couldn’t wait to do my show. 
She told me I would embarrass myself. And put the kibosh on my performance.
 
In retrospect, I can understand where my mom was coming from. 
I was a chubby kid in a neon leotard, and it is a song with undertones that I was too young to understand. 
Her intention was to save me from the ridicule of my peers.
 
But It’s the first time I became painfully aware that making myself visible would also make me look foolish. 
 
We all have moments like this, as we learned how the world works, and how to safely navigate it. 
It’s our jobs to recognize where our beliefs stem from. Understand who helped us build them and why. Then give them a bless and release. 
 
Sometimes our glass ceilings crack in the moment we witness their construction. 
Oftentimes, it takes repeated work.  Like a mantra we carry with us, to chip at our ceiling each time that we hit it. 
Breaking through means truly releasing the story with full-on blessing and understanding. 
Because when we release our old hangups, fears, and mythologies, it’s actually us who is released. 
 
(Thank you mom, for protecting me. I set that story free.)

2:: INTERROGATE YOUR ANXIETY

If you’re skittish at the thought of sharing your voice, it might be time to take it to trial.
Invite your anxiety up to the witness stand and ask it to make a testimony. 
Chances are the evidence it will present sounds a little something like this:
 
“What if I share what I have to say and no one listens to me?
Or worse. They think I’m a fraud?
What if I’m criticized for what I believe in? 
Or people think I’m arrogant or a know it all? 
What if I fall flat on my face (and prove my worst fears right)?"
 
Cross examine your anxiety with a little Socratic Questioning: 

Is it True?

How do I know it’s true? 

Could it be another way?  

2 :: INVITE YOUR FEAR TO RIDE SHOTGUN 

Sometimes the most skillful thing we can do is make space for our fear to come along for the ride. 
 
Fear is a shape-shifter, especially when it comes to speaking up for ourselves.
 
In one moment, it may seem that we have our anxiety licked— after we’ve stood up for ourselves in a new way, or shared our story in a way that is brave and honest. 
And then…
Our anxiety puts on a different hat and shiny new shoes and manifests as a fresh doubt or hesitation when we’re reaching for our gumption. 
Slippery little sucker. 
 
Rather than trying to fight, crush, battle, or do something equally aggressive to our anxieties, take a moment to recognize that Fear’s main job is to look out for us. To keep us safe. To make sure we don’t hurt ourselves. 
 
Anxiety is actually our advocate, in a twisted, often misinformed way. 
 
When we recognize that our fear of sharing our voices is simply a personal defense, we can turn and look at it head on. 
Perhaps even thank it for it’s information. 
And then make space for it to ride shotgun in the front seat with us. As we go ahead act bravely anyway

The Power of our Personal Narratives :: SONIMA article

click for original publication 

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 4/24/15 ON SONIMA.COM

 

In Ancient Greece the three Moirai were goddesses who handled the thread of our lives.

The first of these “Fates,” as they’re sometimes called, was a goddess named Clotho, the spinner. She would arch over her spindle and weave human life, spinning a thread from its moments. Her sister Lachesis, the allotter, took stock of our threads with her measuring rod, deciding when our story was woven to completion. The third sister, Atropos, would then decide the final act of life, and snip our thread with her shears, bringing the story to completion. Her name means “inevitable” or “unturning”; the cessation of spinning, the story we can’t escape.

This myth is a story about stories; an answer to questions that were hard to define and even harder to prove. Why are we here? Who is calling the shots? It’s a story about the weaving of our stories, both personally and collectively—a means of understanding who we are as people.

Humans have told stories to make sense of the world since the beginning of time. The earliest stories are in the Lascaux Caves of Southern France. Primal narrative of the art of survival, the ritual of the hunt, painted on the walls in 13,000 B.C. Aesop crafted his fables of ethics and virtues, tales of what it means to be human in 500 B.C.; tales that we still tell to this day.

Our ancestors took sounds and created speech, symbols and created language. Alongside opposable thumbs and a sophisticated prefrontal cortex, stories are the trademark of being human. We’re distinctly wired for narrative, both that we collect and that we create.

If you’ve ever sat down to meditate, it’s easy to see the narratives that we spin, on and off the cushion. We have an unobstructed view of our thoughts: One moment we’re in the future, planning our dinner, our presentation, how to allay the outcomes we fear, and create the ones we desire. The next moment we’re in the past; analyzing a conversation we had on Tuesday, what we could have said differently, the tone of our partner’s response. We sift through our stories to collect meaning and information, weaving our threads from the contents we find, building our perspective on ourselves and the world around us.

The novelist Virginia Woolf once described our sense of self “like a butterfly’s wing…clamped together with bolts of iron.” And indeed, our mind flitters like a tiny time traveler, riding the length of our stories.

Cognitive science and psychology agree, with the study of narrative identity pointing to the flexibility of self. It’s the measured assertion that we don’t just tell stories, we are our stories; bound together by our beliefs and experiences. This makes our stories, and the qualities of our stories important to who we are. The question then becomes, what are the stories we’re telling ourselves if they’re the script of who we become?

The ancient Greeks gave our life’s story to the Fates, but may have misunderstood the place of the narrator. The power of any story is that it’s infused with a point of view, and told through the narrator’s interpretation. In other words, we own our stories; no one else can tell them for us.

There’s an old Chinese fable of a farmer and his neighbors. One day the farmer’s only horse escaped from its corral and ran away. The neighbors came when they heard the news and stood around shaking their heads. “Oh what bad luck!” they lamented, but the farmer simply shrugged. “Perhaps.”

About a week later, the horse returned, bringing a whole herd of wild horses with him. As the farmer and his son corralled their new stock of horses, the neighbors stood by and rejoiced. “Oh what good luck!” they declared, and the farmer replied, “Perhaps.” The story continues like this with an unfolding of good luck and bad, but to the farmer, a matter of perspective.

We can’t predict the cards that we’re dealt, but we have agency over how we interpret them. A tragedy, a blessing, a story of redemption, forgiveness, revenge: Regardless, we are the narrator.

Some of our narratives are so entrenched that the story begins to tell us. That’s when story becomes dangerous; when we’ve lost ownership of our interpretation. We begin to view things as “just the way it is”, which breeds cynicism, passivity, and doubt.

Imagine being a woman in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and 100 colleagues gathered in upstate New York to reevaluate a popular story line. The question was “What does it mean to be a woman?” and they didn’t believe in the assumed answer. It was a story that was so deeply embedded that we as a society mistook the status quo for truth. There’s a popular adage in public relations; “If you don’t like the conversation, change it”. I’ve never worked in PR, but I’ve always loved this saying. It’s a permission slip of personal agency, and reminds us that our story is in each of our hands.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton decided it was time for a new narrative, an updated story that would answer the question of who we are, and 19 years later Wyoming was the first state to grant women the right to vote, with the rest of the nation following suit, tipping the scales of women’s equality.

Our cultural heroes and those who have changed our collective conversation possess diligence and faith, but most of all, imagination; they saw a story that needed to be told and told it.

On a personal level, all change begins by recognizing that we are the narrators of our stories. If we believe that we don’t deserve it, or that others are generous, or that the grapes are sour anyways, then we’ll act in ways that confirm our suspicions. The psychological term for this is confirmation bias; but we can call it the power of personal narrative. We’re always seeking out information that colludes with our story, and behaving in ways that confirm it.

Stories run deep, often the length of our lives, and are not always easy to change. Sometimes shifting our narrative requires splicing, healing, or the force of Atropos’ proverbial shears. However as long as we recognize that we own our narrative, the stories we collect and the stories we create are under jurisdiction of our point of view; they can be rewound, reinterpreted, reviewed, and reimagined.

Moment by moment we choose the ones that we tell.

Notes on Hope: Rebecca Solnit

To hope is to gamble. It is to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet, it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. 

I say all of this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the couch and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures, and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. 

Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action, action is impossible without hope. 

At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, "The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong."

To hope is to give yourself the future, and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. Anything could happen, and whether or not we act on it has everything to do with it. 

-Rebecca Solnit; Hope in the Dark 

The Pitfalls of Pursuing Your Purpose :: SONIMA article

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 3/18/15 ON SONIMA.COM 

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The trajectory of my 20s reads like a dilettante’s handbook, or a drunk pirate’s treasure map; winding, dabbling, non-linear. Like most children of the 80s, I was raised in the height of the self-esteem movement, with its encouraging maxim that I could do anything I wanted to do, and be anything I wanted to be. Thankfully I’ve also had the privilege of parents who supported this view. When I proudly announced in 4th grade that I would be the first woman president, no one batted an eye. When I decided to move to Manhattan after high school, I was given a hug, two cans of mace, and a membership to Bally’s Sport’s Club; just in case I wound up homeless and needed a place to shower.

I had faith in my own resourcefulness and in the benevolence of mankind. I didn’t have a plan, per se, but I was on a mission to find my purpose. Oh, sweet purpose. The final frontier.

The importance of purpose is not a new concept, but one that seems to be on our minds quite a bit these days. According to the 2015 Deloitte Millennial Survey, 60% of the millennial generation listed a “sense of purpose” within the organization when asked why they chose their current employers. Purpose-driven books topped the New York Times bestsellers list in 2014, with titles like Your Life Calling by Jane Pauley, and The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change by Adam Braun. And ranking third in the Top 10 most watched TED Talks of all time, Simon Sinek asks us what “our purpose, our cause, our belief” is; urging 21 million viewers worldwide to connect with our “WHY.” I’m responsible for at least 30 of those views, I’ve shared this gem so often.

On one hand, I find this turn toward purpose incredibly heartening. In a culture that traditionally values metrics of success, it suggests that we’re asking ourselves how to live by our own standards, collectively elevating meaning over measurement. When I was a Girl Scout our motto was: “Always leave things better than you found them,” which is an idea reflected in the popularity of purpose. We’re consciously contemplating what we’re built for, and how best to contribute to the world.

On the other hand, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that all of this “find your purpose” business is somehow missing the mark. There’s something lacking from the conversation; and it’s the small but mighty distinction between having a purpose and living a purposeful life.

It may seem like a matter of syntax, but syntax is important. The way that we talk about things reveals our relationship to them, and ultimately, how we approach them. In the case of purpose, it’s the difference between seeking the keys to redemption and revealing what’s already there.

During my decade as a dilettante, I would lay awake, fixed on the water stain above my bed wishing for some sort of map. I had tried my hand at acting and spent a year in film school. I wrote sketch comedy on the side, worked in food advocacy, studied design in undergrad, and worked enough crappy waitressing jobs to redefine my notion of humility. I had a passion for travel and yoga, but could that truly be my purpose? I’d always had a knack for organizing, but was this my soul’s North Star?

When given too much gravitas, finding “our purpose” can be frustrating, and at worst, a trap of paralysis. If we truly have a calling, a single purpose in this world, what if we never find it? Are we destined to go through the motions, a half-lived vessel of unrealized potential?

Related: How Making Time for Reflection Can Help Unlock Your Potential

Defining our purpose as a destination or a single pointed direction bears resemblance to searching for “The One”. Even if we do find our forever person, or the mission statement we can live by that fills our days with meaning, there might always the lingering question of whether we’ve made the right decision, if we’re missing out. Even if we feel a sense of certainty, it’s easy to attach the expectation that it will always remain the same; which pits our hopes against the laws of ever-changing nature.

Purpose was just another way of chasing that magical “someday” that precluded my self-acceptance.

If you had asked me about my purpose when I was 7, I would have given you a cock-eyed stare, most likely because I was busy discovering the world through first-time experiences. Everything had purpose; from crickets to kickball to Paula Abdul.

It all clicked into place during one of those crappy waitressing shifts. This wasn’t, by any stretch, my forever career. I smelled like fried calamari and had ketchup in my hair. However I decided to try an experiment. What if I tried treating all of this like it mattered? What might happen if rather than approaching this like a sidebar to my life’s purpose, I brought purpose into my approach? What if I am purposeful instead of waiting for one to redeem me? The answer is that I stopped looking for my purpose—the one I claimed ownership to—and allowed purpose to flavor my moments.

I can’t help but think that rather than having a purpose, we simply have purpose. It’s something akin to dignity or meaning, an inheritance of being alive. We can direct our purposefulness through clearly chosen intentions, but ultimately, it’s a quality we possess, not a statement, a job title, or a place that we find.

My friend Marisa once told me a story of an MTA employee who worked in a Brooklyn subway booth. Each morning she would emerge from the train, and he would lock eyes with her, and greet her warmly. They became familiar through their daily exchange; a wave, a smile, a connection. She talks about how this always made her mornings, they joy he brought to his booth, his generosity of spirit. After some weeks she noticed that she wasn’t alone. This tollbooth employee had a relationship with every regular commuter, exiting the train and waving. Some mornings there would be dozens of people who would wave, and stop to say hello on their way to the subway stairs.

This man’s purpose wasn’t raised on a banner for the rest of the world to see, but rather he connected to the world through the act of purposeful living.

If you’ve decided that this is the year to find your purpose, the good news is you can relax. It’s already there and best lived through you. The way to find purpose is to apply it generously; to the crappy jobs, and the sleepless nights, and the hours stuck in traffic. If our lives are purposeful, then nothing gets excluded.

Our moments, after all, only have the meaning we give them.

GONE FERAL: An Ode to shedding Convention and Living by Instinct & Intuition

Feral women trade rules for rituals.

Listen to the language of the bodies. Hear the call of adventure whispered on winds and follow.

They give themselves permission.

Feral women peel off perfectionism and stand patiently exposed.

Blossom from within. As everything in nature does.

Feral women know that the root of "humility" means "close to the earth" and shed their feathers to fall on their knees when necessary.

They draw a line against injustice, love like children, play like animals.

They travel lightly. In packs. And barefoot when possible. Their only home is in their skin and regard it as a worship ground. Scale trees for ripe fruit without avoiding bruises.

Feral women speak from a place just below the navel and speak up even when their voices shake. 

They occupy both soul and spirit, shadow and light.

They embrace their impermanent nature and choose not to squander mortality in an effort to keep things fixed and controlled.

They're discerning, pragmatic.

See elegant design and structure in the systems of nature and recreate them in their lives as an act of reverence.

They're wise, intuitive.

See unsustainable design and structure in systems built by man and defy them in sacred rebellion.

They seek out the stories of their grandmothers and keep them close for their daughters. Recount them to each-other to keep our core mythologies supple.  

They are paradox. 

Both In the moment and on the precipice of pure potential. 

They are you, they are us.

Liberated and welcomed home.

An Ode to our Adequate Whole-ness

We are complete, comprehensive and complex. 

We don't come with an instruction manual.
We come with Instinct. Trust it. 

We are plenty, we are full, we are exquisitely elegant by virtue of being alive. 
We don't need fixing. We don't need "more".

We have everything we need.

WE ARE SUFFICIENT.

Our Sufficiency is our birthright. 
Instinct is our inborn wisdom. 
Intuition, the golden thread that connects us all to the greater whole and details we cannot yet see...

There are moments when we've forgotten our nature and scrunched ourselves in tiny boxes to Fit In when all we wanted was to Belong. 

Our messy parts: whitewashed, 
Our vulnerability: armored
Our voices: edited, silenced, subdued.

Perhaps we found our wildest wishes unsightly or just beyond our grasp. 
Perhaps we've just forgotten who we are. 

Perhaps we just need a little practice Trusting Ourselves...