Being powerful doesn’t mean you’re a B*tch
Lately, a lot has been coming up for me and my clients around power. How when do things like have confidence in our abilities, or set boundaries, we can feel like we’re being mean, or b*tchy.
Logically, I know this isn’t the case, but it still caused some icky feelings to come up. So I decided to delve into them.
About 5 years ago, my agency client was participating in a program called SeeHer. It’s a program about gender equality in the marketing and advertising - think all the cleaning product ads that show the “little woman” cleaning, or the woman who’s incompetent doing something until the miracle product shows up. Insert my huge eye roll here.
At the dinner with the head of the program, she asked me about times I’d been made to feel smaller because I was a female. I’d been pretty luck at that point to not have dealt with sexual harassment in the work place, and only a little bit of sexism….or so I’d thought.
Very quickly, the first moment came to mind. I was early 20s in ad school. It was my first strategy class and I was voracious about learning. I asked a lot of questions - not to be challenging, just wanting to understand how and why things worked. The instructors were two guys my age, currently working in the industry. In fairness, none were trained instructors. What wasn’t fair was that one of them put in my evaluation that I was “combative.” Asking questions = combative.
This was then thrown in my face several months later when I was taking a class with the head of the school, and I challenged him in a class. Yes, in that case I did challenge him. But let’s be real. If I was a guy, I would’ve been seen as assertive. Instead, I got a talking to, and he told brought up that I was combative.
Even remembering this, I still have a massive FU to both of them.
I ran into this more in my first two agency jobs, and then I changed myself. I started to overcompensate being “nice.” Apparently I did it so well, that much later in my career I started getting feedback that I wasn’t “assertive enough.” Around the same time, I did personality tests that started to show up much of that power I was suppressing.
I started taking my power back when I left my job. Single, no plan, straight up quit. Then, I ran into a whole other revolution of empowerment.
I won’t go into allll of the things that occurred my first three years of biz ownership. Instead, I’ll share the two things that made the biggest differences in embracing my power, and not feeling icky about it.
Boundaries
For the most part, I’ve always felt I had pretty good boundaries. I was lucky to learn about client management (different than client service) early in my career. I also set up my calendar availability to maximize my energy vs being available all the time, every day.
Then, I started reading Boundary Boss. I talk a little more about the book in this post. The author talks about how women can feel like they’re being mean when they start to put boundaries in place. Knowing that it was a common thing, gave me the permission to release those feelings. Hell, I give myself a gold star now when I set and enforce them.
The actions of setting and enforcing boundaries, keeps your energy for YOU which can then empower you.
Let’s do an exercise:
Think about how often you over-deliver for clients, or did work outside of your normal hours.
Now, how many of those time were you doing it because you truly wanted to vs felt like you had to (not because you needed the money, but because of feelings/pressures/etc)?
Any time you push yourself because you think you have to, or overdeliver to the point of burnout - regardless of joy - you’re leaking energy, which leaves you feeling a little less powerful.
I know, because I’ve done both of these. I also can tell you that when I started to look at boundaries as a way of caring for myself, it turned out better for my clients. I show up for them lit up, and able to give them all of my focus. I give them my full best self, which benefits them and me.
And on the days you may be struggling, remember this: you do work for your clients, you do not work for them.
Confidence
Raise your hand if you’ve experienced the very real: strong women are seen and treated as b*tches, men are seen and treated as assertive leaders.
I’m not going to rant about gender in the workplace, but I am going to state very clearly that it is there. Progress might be made in some places, but I still know far too many examples happening daily.
My confidence hit its lowest 2014-2018.
Toxic workplaces, gaslighting, managers with low EQ, sexism + burnout, stress, and flare-ups of chronic illness. Is it a wonder I refused to work for anyone else again?
It took me almost 4 years to not only get my confidence back, to truly embrace it. That’s when I started feeling kind of icky. Was I going to become this megalomaniac? Literally, this is a thought I had.
The answer is ‘no,’ which may help some of you when you’re starting to feel confident, embodying your full power, and start to question it.
If you’re in the place of not feeling confident, here are some things that work for me:
List out all of your past “wins.” Any positive feedback you’ve received, even years of experience count as wins.
List out your strengths. If you feel stuck, as trusted friends what they see as your strengths, or take Clifton StrengthsFinder. Both of these were helpful for me.
Look at your lists frequently. If you like doing affirmations, write some of your wins or strengths as affirmations. Consider writing out why you’re good at X. No matter how unconfident you feel, you ARE good at things.
The last thing I’ll add is this: small steps lead to massive transformation.
This is how it worked for me. It’s the slow and steady race, because with everything we all have going on in our lives and work, most of us can’t just go sit on a mountain top somewhere for a few months or years. Instead, we can still make progress doing it one bit at a time.