If your upbringing was anything like mine, you spent a lot of time being told to be nice, to make people smile, to make people like you. Now, I'm sure my grandmother and my mother and my aunts and their friends were very well meaning with this advice and with some of these reminders, but the result is that I've grown up not really sure that I belong somewhere and that my opinion matters.
The sad thing is that I am far from unique in this. There's nothing special about my context, and this message is not one that only I have heard. For most women, this is a constant background hum in our internal monologue.
The cumulative effect of this is that many of us are plagued by impostor syndrome, insecurity about whether our opinion matters, and whether we belong in the room, whichever room that is. So how is this often expressed?
For too many of us, we hear ourselves say “Sorry, can I come in on this…”, “Do you mind if I just…?”, “If I could only add…”, and similar phrases. We use these softening phrases, qualifications and hesitations, and we deflect compliments. In effect, we create the space to be discounted and ignored. This might sound silly and it might sound small, and on the surface it may seem inconsequential, but the reality is it is important and it does matter. Think about how often you find yourself saying something like this, or you hear your female friends and colleagues say something like this, and then think about how it makes you feel to say and hear it. We all need to stop doing this to create the space to stand in the room.
Overcoming it is difficult. It's a lifetime of learning, of social pressure and social conditioning to be gentle and not to make waves. This week is International Women's Day. We'll be reading lots of articles about how women's role in society has changed for the better, which is true for many of us. I am immensely grateful to my mother's generation and the generations before her for facilitating that. We'll be reading lots of articles about how we need to be strong, how we need to conquer the world, believe in ourselves, and own our place in the world.
But this is much easier to say than do.
Trying to unlearn a lifetime of messaging takes time and it takes effort, and it takes being nice to yourself. Don't try and make massive changes in one big go, because we all know from our lifetime of experience that these don't work. Recognise that change is incremental and that it will take time to make these changes in yourself. You can't stop the voice that says “I'm sorry… If I could just… This may sound silly but…”, but that doesn't mean you have to externalise it. Saying things out loud gives them power. It takes power away from you and gives it to other people.
Pause before you speak and remind yourself that you earned your right to be in this room. You earned the right to speak. You earned the right to be heard. Make a conscious decision not diminish what you say, even if that means saying it on the inside but not moving your lips. Hopefully, eventually, for all of us it will fade and we will be comfortable standing and owning our space in this room.
Respond
