Why Creating Inclusion at Senior Levels Requires Formal Sponsorship

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formal sponsorshipInformal sponsorship and mentorship can proliferate inequitable power dynamics in organizations. Organic sponsorship is a big part of how leadership proactively recasts the pipeline in the majority image. Meanwhile, the status quo power dynamic inhibits individuals who are in the minority among leadership from lifting others up behind them.

(This contribution from Pulsely dives into how informal sponsorship works to reinforce the glass ceiling).

Here’s one core way in which your organization is perpetuating inequitable power dynamics at senior levels: informal sponsorship and mentorship.

When you connect the dots of power, organic sponsorship is a big part of how leadership proactively, repetitively, and, by default, recasts the pipeline in the majority image. Meanwhile, the status quo power dynamic inhibits individuals who are in the minority among leadership from lifting others up behind them.

We offer a six point case for why leadership inclusion requires formal sponsorship programs that are deliberately disruptive in creating more equitable opportunities.

Mentorship and Sponsorship – What It Really Means

When it comes to career advancement, mentorship is both necessary and not enough. The common distinction is: a mentor talks with you, a sponsor talks about you.

A mentorship is 1-1. Mentors help you within your journey. They help you to navigate the intersection of your goals and career choices, identify and amplify strengths, and develop in core areas. Mentorship often acts as a trustworthy mirror for personal growth.

A sponsorship is more than 1-1. A sponsor relationship is 1-1+ an audience of power. Sponsors put skin and reputation in the game by leveraging their social capital (influence) in rooms you’ve yet to enter, and advocate for opportunities and advancement for you among their peers. The protégé also has the motivation of stepping up to the challenge because the sponsor’s reputation is on the line, too. Sponsorship often acts as a spotlight that shines on you to lift you up to the next level of career advancement.

As written by Rosalind Chow in Harvard Business Review, “Sponsorship can be understood as a form of intermediated impression management, where sponsors act as brand managers and publicists for their protégés. This work involves the management of others’ views on the sponsored employee. Thus, the relationship at the heart of sponsorship is not between protégés and sponsors, as is often thought, but between sponsors and an audience — the people they mean to sway to the side of their protégés.”

Why Informal Mentorship and Sponsorship Are Inequitable

“Regardless of education, motivation, and personal and professional success factors, being sponsored by a white man remains the primary accelerant to the career mobility of Black women.” (Stephanie Bradley Smith in HBR)

As this quote underlines, and Catalyst iterates in Sponsoring Women to Success, “Sponsorship is focused on advancement and predicated on power.”

The dynamic of organic sponsorship is ultimately majority promoting majority, with the same repeated outcome at leadership, save minor and temporary shifts. Even the common phrase of “winning sponsorship” has a blinding and dubious premise.

While data from different surveys inevitably differs on absolutes (for example, the % of people who report they have a sponsor is highly contextual to the criteria), what remains steady across studies is a debilitating power gap between individuals of the majority and non-majority when it comes to both sponsorship and who they are sponsored by.

Here’s what reproduces the current senior management and leadership profile:

1. Mentorship and especially executive sponsorship have a catalytic impact on career advancement for both protégés and sponsors.

  • Male managers with sponsorship are 23% more likely (female managers with sponsorship are 19% more likely) to progress to the next rung of the career ladder than peers who do not have sponsors.
  • Managers and executives who sponsor high-achieving junior talent are 53% more likely to advance to the next leadership level relative to peers who don’t sponsor.

2. Access to mentorship and executive sponsorship is highly variable depending on who you are, regardless of performance = inequitable.

3. Mentorship and sponsorship are especially necessary to advance women and people of color.

  • Black managers are 65% more likely to progress to the next rung in the ladder if they have a sponsor.
  • Mentorship programs increase representation of Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American women, and Hispanic and Asian-American men, by 9% to 24%.
  • Having mentors and sponsors who advocated for them is the single attribute shared by people of color who have progressed furthest in the leadership ranks.
  • Executive sponsorship has been proven to be the most effective organizational intervention to advance Black talent.
  • Latina women with sponsorship earn 6.1% more than peers who lack sponsors and black women earn 5.1% more.

4. But people tend to mentor and sponsor those just like them – and this means the majority (with the power) mostly sponsors the majority.

  • 61% of people indicate their mentorship developed naturally.
  • As much as 91% of white managers have no Black, Asian, or Latinx people in their immediate social network.
  • 71% of sponsors report their protégé is the same race or gender as their own.
  • 58% of women and 54% of men who sponsor choose a protégé because they “make me feel comfortable.”
  • A study of 72 protégés found that 100% of sponsors of white male protégés were men and the majority (73.5%) were white. Among Black female protégés, most sponsors were Black (57%) and 27% were women.
  • Payscale found 77.1 percent of male protégés said they had a male sponsor while women were about half as likely to have a male sponsor.
  • Payscale found 90% of white men and women protégés reported they had a white sponsor, while Blacks and Hispanics were 35% less likely to.

5. Not only are there far fewer female and minority senior leaders, but increased personal career risk can hinder their sponsoring.

  • Women hold only 1/4 of executive roles in the 1000 largest companies and BIPOCs make up only 17% of the C-suite.
  • Despite a desire and even a higher sense of obligation to lift others of similar sex/gender up (26% for Black leaders vs. 20% for Hispanic and Asian and 7% for Caucasian), Black senior leaders face higher scrutiny and are 26% less likely to commit to being a sponsor than white executives.
  • More than one third of black leaders report they never sponsor a junior talent who looks like them – despite often wanting to, at tension with personal career risk.

6. To further the gap, white and male sponsors hold more influence on outcomes of their protégé’s employment than those from the non-majority groups.

  • In U.S. law firms and among lawyers who had sponsorship, white men were half as likely (30%) as women of color (62%) to feel that the lack of an influential mentor was a barrier to their advancement.
  • Payscale found: black women with black sponsors are paid 11.3% less than black women with white sponsors; Hispanic women with Hispanic sponsors make 15.5% less than those with white sponsors; women with women sponsors make 14.6% less than those with male sponsors, and even men with female sponsors make 8.7% less than those with male sponsors. Payscale notes the gaps shrink after compensable factors are weighed in, but the gap remains.

If you want to introduce more equity into talent development, you cannot look away from the affinity bias-based pattern of those with high social capital using that power and influence to promote those who look like them into power, too, while also further advancing their own status. Nor can you look away from how the non-majority individuals who break through to leadership are inhibited from doing the same.

Formal mentorship and sponsorship programs are about deliberately disrupting the cycle of inequitable talent development that has strongly influenced your management and leadership to date. In the next article, we explore how in more detail.

‍Guest contribution: Originally published on the Pulsely blog, written by Aimee Hansen. Pulsely delivers diversity and inclusion diagnostics and actionable DEI insights to drive inclusion, equity, and performance. Pulsely’s scientific framework combines the power of understanding four key drivers of inclusion: diversity data, workplace inclusion, inclusion competencies, and performance indicators. To learn more, visit Pulsely, read an interview with Co-Founder Betsy Bagley, or check out the Pulsely blog to find more content like this. 

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Lead with Clarity: How to Change Up Your Perceptual Lens

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perceptual lensMost of us think that our beliefs are truth. But beliefs are not facts. Rather, they are a core part of
 our perceptual lens, and thus very powerful in shaping our everyday experiences.

Psychologists refer to this as a perceptual set – a predisposition to perceive things in a certain 
way, which leads us to notice only certain aspects of an object or situation while ignoring other
 details. I like to refer to these as perceptual lenses, because it’s literally the “lens” which you
 unconsciously and subconsciously perceive the world through that’s driving your behavior.

There are all kinds of perceptual lenses, and each of us tends to use, and overuse, our own few
 personal favorites. For example, when someone has a competitive lens, they will relate to almost
 any situation as though it is a competition, whether or not any such competition exists. Someone
 with a binary lens will relate to most situations as if there is only one right answer, and
 everything and everyone else is wrong.

Typically, we each have a few favorites that we apply no matter what the context. Because we
 are using these few lenses by default, they often are not appropriate to the context. We need to
 expand past our tired old playlist.

There are two kinds of lenses: generally helpful lenses, and those that are impeding when 
overused.

Generally helpful lenses:
  • Collaborative lens. The I-win-when-you-win-approach.
  • Optimistic lens. “Everything always works out for the best, even if it doesn’t seem so in the moment.”
  • Create possibility lens. It temporarily sets aside all perceived obstacles, problems, or doubts, in order to give you freedom to imagine an ideal.
  • Opportunity lens. With this lens, you ask yourself, “How can I find an opportunity in whatever situation I face?”
Impeding lenses:
  • “Problems to fix” or “what’s wrong” lens. With this lens, someone is always looking
 for something to go wrong; they are always wondering what can go wrong here, what
 will go wrong here?
  • Victim lens. “It doesn’t matter anyway.” “I can’t make a difference.” “Bad things always happen to me.”
  • Distrust/“It’s not safe” lens. A person with this lens operates from a default position that the world around them is inherently dangerous.
  • Binary/“black or white” lens. With this lens, a person tends to view situations as “either/or.” There’s no gray area, there’s no middle ground.

Each of these lenses has its own set of underlying beliefs and assumptions. You see what your
 lens shows you.

If you habitually default to the same lens all of the time, in every situation, then you are not 
perceiving the actual circumstances and environment around you. You are seeing only what your
 lens shows you. You are making assumptions instead of gleaning useful data that would more
 constructively guide your choices and actions.

You can’t be human and be without any lenses, but you can be aware of your lens, as well as be 
intentional about choosing an appropriate lens for any given situation. There is a place for a 
competitive lens and a collaborative lens, for a problems lens and an opportunity lens, and so on.
 What does not serve us is to blindly and automatically apply one lens across the board no matter
 what is actually happening.

Road Bump To Choosing A New Lens: You’re Attached To Your Story

You can’t change your lens while wearing your current lens. The people who have the hardest
 time transforming their leadership, or their lives, are those who hold onto their own story very,
 very tightly. Their self-image is dependent upon them being “the one who always_________.”
 The one who’s always right. The one who never gets what they want. The one who always 
achieves. The one who always cleans up after others. The one who’s the smartest. The one who 
is always betrayed. When you are so locked into your story, then a change of perceptual lens can 
feel destabilizing. If you aren’t the one who always is this or that, or who does this or that, then 
who are you?

When you step into the unfamiliar territory of using a new lens, you need to be willing to “try” it 
out. On some level you will feel some relief—because you are choosing a lens that empowers
 you— but on another level you are likely to resist the feeling of change.

Recognize your discomfort for what it is: your ego’s inner defenses against change. The 
solution? Acknowledge that discomfort while trying on the new lens— even though it feels odd,
 contradictory, or just plain impossible. You keep doing that again and again until the new lens 
can start to stay in place, and the new lens becomes the new you.

Initially, you aren’t going to have “proof ” that any of these helpful lenses will bring you better 
results than your current, impeding lens. You can only give them a try. Be curious, open,
 experimental. Lean into it. Doing so increases your options. And pay attention to what happens; 
observe your new results. Loosen up on your own story until you really get that your story is not
 you. That’s the only way that true change can happen.

By: Jody Michael is the author of Leading Lightly: Lower Your Stress, Think with Clarity, and Lead with Ease (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2022). She is CEO of Jody Michael Associates, a coaching company specializing in executive coaching, leadership development, and career coaching. She is recognized as one of the top 4% of coaches worldwide and is an internationally credentialed Master Certified Coach, Board Certified Coach, University of Chicago trained psychotherapist, and Licensed Clinical Social Worker.

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Op-ED: How to Navigate Your Career as a Working Mother in Technology

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Working Mother In TechnologyNavigating one’s career as a working mother in technology is akin to holding a porcupine, while jumping through a ring of fire, and trying to put mascara on at the same time. It can be uncomfortable, it can make you feel hot, and we try to look our best while doing it all. In fact, our survey of over 300 mothers worldwide, published in our book Pressing ON As A Tech Mom: How Tech Industry Mothers Set Goals, Define Boundaries And Raise the Bar for Success, revealed that 34 percent felt that working in such a hectic, high-speed environment was incredibly tough and sometimes downright impossible. Being a woman in tech is challenging, but being a mother makes it even more so challenging.


With just 27 percent of female representation in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) industries, women are underrepresented. Mothers who remain in these fields are even fewer, with 43 percent of women leaving full-time STEM employment after their first child (PNAS). Since women in tech studies report that $12 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025 with a more gender-diverse workforce, where balanced contributions can lead to the creation of workplaces in which “employees feel safe to innovate, knowing that their unique experiences and contributions are valued” (JAB), there are compelling reasons for change.

As mothers in tech, what can we do to overcome the obstacles, and rise above to thrive in our careers, rather than only survive?

Here are three key steps to navigating motherhood and their STEM careers:
  • Squash Imposter Syndrome – When we believe that we are unworthy of the role that we are in or feel that we lack the skills to be successful, we often feel like imposters. According to Forbes, 75 percent of professional women report experiencing this unsavory feeling. When these thoughts and ideas enter our minds, we need to invoke a strategy to dismiss that negative feedback loop. Instead of telling yourself “I don’t know what I’m doing,” leverage positive self-talk and think about the skills that you are bringing to a role or situation. If you are a leader, be mindful about providing positive reinforcement for a job well done and enable an emotionally safe space where giving and receiving feedback is welcome.

 

  • Find A Mentor And A Sponsor – Mentorship and sponsorship are one of the most important ways to enable a woman to rise. Yet in our survey for our book, we found that just 41 percent of women ever had the benefit of these champion roles boosting their careers. Understanding the difference between the two is one place to start: A mentor is someone with whom you can brainstorm ideas based on shared values. A sponsor is someone who can influence decisions about your career and/or compensation. Note that your sponsor and mentor can be male or female so long as they are your true advocate, in tune with your accomplishments and career goals. A second step to take is to seek these crucial advocacy roles out by simply asking mentor and sponsor candidates. Most people are willing to help, which leads us to our third tip:

 

  • Lift Up Other Women – Live by the “golden rule” – treating other mothers in tech the way that you want to be treated. In past decades, women like my mom recount stories of women mistreating one another in favor of their own advancement (“To climb the corporate ladder, I needed to beat out the other women who were vying for the same limited roles.”).  While competition can be healthy, mindfully supporting one another is most important to nurture a balanced workplace where women can rise, and thrive, together. Lend a helping hand to a mother reintegrating into the workplace after parental leave. Invite another woman to join an important meeting as part of a career development initiative. Oblige when asked to serve as a sponsor and/or mentor for others.

By being confident, seeking out allyship, and practicing benevolence, mothers in technology have a greater chance of breaking down barriers and invoking change. With more mothers staying in technology, a more inclusive environment will emerge that sets the precedent for future generations. So, while the day-to-day routine of a working mom may feel like a circus act, continue to show up. Persist. Persevere. Your efforts are part of our movement to change the future for our daughters and their allies.

Other resources to nurture and inspire your journey that we often use include:
  • How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, Or Job. In their book, Marshall Goldsmith and Sally Helgesen identify twelve habits that women typically have that limit their ability to grow professionally and ways to change those behaviors.
  • The Adventures of Women in Technology: How We Got Here And Why We Stay, by Alana Karen. Alana is Senior Software Engineer at Google, where she’s worked for over a decade. She has seen it all and remains loyal to her craft. Learn how she does it, and more importantly, why she is still in tech.
  • Nevertheless, She Persisted: True Stories of Women Leaders in Tech. This book by Pratima Rao Gluckman recounts the stories of hundreds of women leaders who faced adversity and hardship in their tech careers, yet managed to find success.

About:
Sabina M. Pons is a management consultant whose focus is on driving revenue protection and growth for technology companies. In her 20+ year career, she has led global corporate teams, managed multi-million-dollar P&Ls, and built teams from the ground up. Now, she serves as the Managing Director of the emerging management consulting company, Growth Molecules.

With a master’s degree in Communication, Leadership & Organizational Behavior from Gonzaga University and a bachelor’s degree in Communications from the University of Southern California, Sabina is passionate about igniting corporate transformational change. She also sits on several boards, participates in many mentorship programs, and recently obtained a First-Degree Black Belt in Taekwondo. Sabina resides in Orange County in Southern California with her husband, two young children, and Goldendoodle dog, Riley. Pressing ON as a Tech Mom: How Tech Industry Mothers Set Goals, Define Boundaries & Raise the Bar for Success is Sabina’s first book.

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Avoid These Four Leadership Failures To Retain Employees Through The Great Resignation

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Great ResignationFor more than a year, the employment world has experienced significant upheaval as millions of workers make a mass exodus from the traditional workplace: a phenomenon now commonly called ‘the Great Resignation’. Women leaders who recognize and avoid four common leadership failures in the workplace will be better placed to retain their best employees through these turbulent times.

World-wide, leaders are grappling to understand what is fueling ‘the Great Resignation’. Also known as ‘the Big Quit’ and ‘the Great Reshuffle’, this is an ongoing economic trend in which employees have voluntarily resigned from their jobs en masse since early 2021, primarily in the US.

Research into this phenomenon that is wreaking havoc in the employment world suggests that many people are rethinking their careers, seeking a better work-life balance, facing up to long-endured job dissatisfaction, and preferring the flexibility of remote work.

As ‘the Great Resignation’ unfolds, there has never been a more important time for business leaders to think smart to ensure their work environment appeals to the post-Covid generation of workers.

Here are the four fundamental leadership failures that drive good employees away. Recognizing and rectifying these leadership failures will provide women leaders with an edge to help them retain good employees amid a mass exodus.

Rectifying leadership failure 1: Treating employees as the primary customers

The first crucial leadership failure is not recognizing that the employee is actually the primary customer.

Employees are initially drawn to work for a company because of various reasons, such as the company’s reputation. Ultimately, however, good employees stick around because of how well a company looks after them.

 Employees should therefore be treated as the primary customer. This means that each employee should be treated, cared for, managed, and responded to in a way that is consistent with how the company wants its customers to be treated.

Not only does it set a good example to manage employees this way, but it also increases one of the most important assets of any company: credibility, and the trust it brings. Employees want to work with and for a company that they can trust.

Rectifying leadership failure 2 – Recognizing leadership is not management

Another crucial leadership failure is not recognizing the difference between leadership and management.

Most companies have a management culture, which is not the same as proper leadership. Management is important and is a part of leadership responsibility. Managers have to make people follow, but leaders make people want to follow. Managers bring about compliance, but what leaders are able to create is buy-in, and this increases the likelihood of employees bringing their best self to work.

Recognizing the difference between management and leadership not only increases the likelihood of recruiting and retaining good employees, it also increases the chances of having a team that gives their best effort and go beyond the regular call of duty.

Rectifying leadership failure 3 – Realizing valued compensation is not just financial

The failure to recognize that finances are not the only form of valued compensation is a third common leadership failure today.

This is a recent development and is clear when considering the work patterns of the Millennium generation. This is the first generation in some time that does not out earn the previous generation. And it’s not because this generation is not capable or competent, but rather because they value some things more than money, such as flexibility, being part of something bigger or being valued as individuals.

Whereas paying employees so well that they tolerate toxicity in their working environment – often called ‘golden handcuffs’ – may have worked in the past, but will not work in the future.

Rectifying leadership failure 4 – Recognizing that EQ is the IQ multiplier

Last, but certainly not least, is the leadership failure of not recognizing that EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is the IQ (Intelligence Quotient) multiplier, especially now during ‘the Great Resignation’. 

It’s not that employees are avoiding work, or that they prefer to stay at home, but rather that many have had a glimpse of what it’s like to work in peace and don’t want to return to a toxic work culture.

For this reason, building Emotional Intelligence is a core leadership competency. Fortunately, building EQ is possible, and requires attention to each of the four qualities of EQ, briefly described below.


The four qualities of EQ
  1. Self-awareness, referring to how well you are aware of yourself as a leader.
  2. Self-management, which is the ability to manage yourself based on what you know about yourself.
  3. Social awareness, or the ability to discern the difference in others’ relationship management approaches.
  4. Relationship management, which is determining how different people communicate, comprehend and are motivated, and the ability to lead and respond accordingly.

In a post-COVID work world, dominated by ‘the Big Resignation”, being an emotionally intelligent leader – able to manage yourself and others – is key and critical to recruiting and keeping good employees.

By: Dr. Dharius Daniels is an emotional intelligence expert, author of Relational Intelligence: The People Skills You Need For The Life Of Purpose You Want, and former professor at Princeton University.

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Mental Health Month: Racism and Women of Color at Work

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women of color at workIt is no secret that the workplace has been completely transformed since the global pandemic and racial reckoning that swept 2020. Some of the disruption has been good for business, forcing an agility on companies who must learn to be more responsive in a rapidly evolving marketplace. It has been good for people, too, with remote work offering the increased flexibility we’ve been wanting for years but were slow to implement. For women at work, flexibility is becoming a stake in the ground instead of the benefit it once was. For women of color, however, the story is much more complicated.

According to a recent survey by Fairy Godboss and nFormation in 2021, one third of women of color planned to leave their workplaces in the next year, with burnout being the leading factor at 51%, followed by different career/greater purpose and salary/benefits tied at 47%. When we dig deeper, “burnout” for women of color is fueled by multiple competing ideas: more work with less appreciation, more discussions about racism without meaningful and effective mitigation of its effects, and greater focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion softened by little measurable progress.

Despite statements about commitments to diversity, the same survey revealed that nearly two thirds of women of color aren’t satisfied with their company’s diversity and inclusion initiatives, with 60% saying their companies are not properly prepared to handle racist incidents in the workplace.

Is it no shock then that merely 3% percent of Black knowledge workers want to return to full-time on-site work, as opposed to 21% of their white peers, and that Asian and LatinX also prefer a hybrid or fully remote work environment.

Many are wondering why, with dominant assumptions centering on the ability to manage home and work harmoniously. While flexibility has in fact brought unintended benefits to many women, especially those with young children, the pandemic has given women of color another gift that’s growing more valuable with time: psychological safety.

According to McKinsey and LeanIn’s 2021 Women in the Workplace study, women of color are far more likely to be on the receiving end of disrespectful and othering behavior, which includes race-based insults or inappropriate comments. These microaggressions, or subtle acts of indignity that communicate to outgroups that they do not belong, can range from judgments about attire or hairstyle, to ignoring one’s presence in a room, to discounting input or decisions, and even tolerating overt acts of racism or gender discrimination.

During the pandemic, Black and brown women enjoyed a respite from race-based offense and trauma. Working from home meant the avoidance of harmful people, conversations, and spaces while still receiving (most of) the critical information they needed to do their jobs.

Racism wears women of color out, literally and figuratively. The emotional and psychological weight associated with bracing for offense, overthinking whether and how to respond to offense, feeling unsafe in the world and consequently at work, and knowing you must work harder to achieve half the credit and opportunity is not only burdensome, but extremely damaging to the mental and physical health of women of color at work.

We can’t afford to dabble in healing. For businesses that desire to thrive into the future, the path forward is multi-dimensional and urgent.

Be courageous and compassionate.

As a leader, you have an opportunity to “show up” for the people with whom you work in ways that help and heal. When harm is inflicted upon their communities, engaging women of color at work with curiosity and compassion helps them feel seen by you. We want to be seen at work, and ignoring racial trauma makes people feel their pain is invisible to you. Failing to make compassionate connections during times of emotional need also chips away at psychological safety, which is key to creativity and innovation, and a precursor to true inclusion. Another way to show up for people is to intervene directly and immediately when you personally witness race-based offense.

Beware of overwork and undervalue.

Many women of color feel overworked and undervalued. In a LinkedIn poll I conducted earlier this year, the comments section overflowed with anecdotes about this very imbalance. Black women have long felt they must work twice as hard as their white peers—a feeling that is validated by Gender Action Portal research that revealed they are evaluated more negatively than Black men, white women, or white men. This “overwork” requirement stands in sharp contrast to the underrepresentation of women of color, who enter the workforce at 17% but hold only 4% of top jobs. Clearly, it is not paying off in greater opportunity. It’s every leader’s responsibility to ensure they are not requiring more proof, more effort, and stronger results from women of color than from others at work, and that you are not seeing some as perpetual “doers” and others as “leaders,” the definition of which is often based on white male models.

Build bridges.

For every practice or process we interrogate, we should build a relationship across difference. Relationships are the great accelerator in the workplace, and while systems matter greatly for sustainable impact, getting to know the people on your team – what they aspire to, what they’re good at, what their concerns are, what great looks like to them – is a powerful way to open doors for others and make them feel they truly belong. Belonging is an antidote to the isolation and trauma racism creates in any given environment and is foundational to racial equity. Your women of color need to know they are not alone, yes, but also that they are an equally valuable member of the team. Women of color, and especially Black women, aspire to higher levels of contribution. The inability to realize career aspirations can erode general optimism and taint one’s belief in their career possibilities.

Racism has long been a destroyer of people and places, and work is no exception. It divides us, harms us, and prevents us from working collaboratively in life and in business. Every leader has an opportunity and responsibility to better understand the roots of racism and how it manifests in your given work environment. Assessing your employee experience is a critical first step. Then, take responsibility for what you learn, and commit to a safer, more equitable future. This is the workplace culture your women of color, and all your employees, deserve.

By: Tara Jaye Frank is a sought-after Equity Strategist and author of The Waymakers: Clearing the Path to Workplace Equity with Competence and Confidence (May 3, 2022). Tara has worked with thousands of leaders at Fortune 500 companies to help solve culture-based and leadership problems. Before founding her culture and leadership consultancy, Frank spent twenty-one years at Hallmark Cards, where she served in multiple roles, including Vice President of Multicultural Strategy and Corporate Culture Advisor to the President. Frank’s work, fueled by a deep belief in the creative power and potential of everyone, focused on equity and building bridges between people, ideas, and opportunity.

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Mother’s Day: Tasks at Home and Work that Hold You Back

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working mothers dayAs we aim to reduce inequities in pay in the workforce, we need to focus not only on how men and women spend their time at work but also how household duties are divided at home. Research shows that women who have male partners and work outside the home handle more tasks at home. A study by Oxfam and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research looked at the amount of time women and men in the US spend on unpaid labor in the home. Women who work full-time outside the home spend almost 5 hours a day on unpaid work at home compared with about 4 hours for men. If you are one of the women who picks up the slack, this is unlikely to surprise you. Data on the division of household tasks suggest that people in same-sex relationships divide household tasks more equally than those in opposite-sex households.

There are things you can do to lighten your load. Talk with your family about how communities and societies function best when everyone shares equitably in the work. List all your household’s chores and who currently does them. If they’re not assigned equally, then reassign tasks to the family members capable of doing them. Relieving yourself of an excessive workload at home matters because our research shows that you may not be overloaded only at home. As previously written on theglasshammer, women are subject to a double whammy of doing more of the thankless tasks at home in addition to more non-promotable tasks (NPTs) at work.

Non-promotable tasks help organizations move forward in a myriad of ways, but they come with a catch—they don’t necessarily benefit the person who does them. While it is important to help co-workers, organize events, or make presentations look great, no one gets a raise or a promotion for doing unrewarded work. Our research definitively shows that women are much more likely to do these tasks, and that this shrinks their potential for advancement. Their organizations suffer too. When women handle the non-promotable work, their organizations forfeit the contributions women could be making to the bottom line.

We want to change that, and here are five ideas you can use to free yourself (and your female colleagues) from this dead-end work. These changes will help not only you, but also your organization!

  1. Determine how much non-promotable work you should do. Start by identifying the non-promotable work that you currently do. Learn what your organization values for its growth and for your career advancement. Those activities, the promotable tasks, are where you should spend most of your time. You’ll still need to do some non-promotable work, but you don’t want to do too much. Start discussing NPTs with your co-workers. What type of NPTs are they doing, and how much time are they spending on them? Your goal is to have a load that is similar to that of your peers—women and men.
  2. Balance your load of promotable and non-promotable work. Identify what you should and shouldn’t be doing. Gradually, remove the non-promotable work to focus on the tasks that benefit your organization (and your career) the most.
  3. Learn to say no. This, unfortunately, is harder than it sounds. Women are expected to say yes, and you need to use caution to avoid backlash. Understand when and how you can say no. Explain what work will suffer if you take on the task. Offer an alternative (“I’m leading the new product launch, but I think Joe has some time since he’s just completed a big project”), or turn the request into a negotiation (“I can take it on if you reassign one of my other tasks”).
  4. Communicate alternatives for assigning NPTs. Suggest that everyone takes turns recording meeting notes, or that event planning is randomly assigned. These are such easy solutions, and so fair, that it’s hard for anyone to object to them
  5. Identify allies to help create broad organizational change. Both you and your organization will be better off if all employees do NPTs—and your organization is ultimately responsible for this. But you may need to start the process, and you’ll need people who have influence to help you kick start the change. These may be supervisors, women’s affinity groups, people in HR or DEI, and the men who champion equality for women. Men with daughters or female partners can be particularly sensitive to the demands placed on those they love. Help them see how this burden is harmful.

When you lighten your load of NPTs, you’ll be able to make even greater contributions to your organization. By distributing NPTs the right way, your employer will be using its talent to the fullest, which means an improved bottom line, a more engaged and satisfied workforce, lower turnover, and a reputation for being a great place to work. Remember too, to relieve yourself of the burden of thankless tasks at home–you can use some of the steps above to do that. When you have achieved the balance you want at work and at home, you might find that the next Mother’s Day will look a whole lot different for you.

Contributors Bios: Professors Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart are the authors of The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work. They can be followed here: @thenoclub on Twitter, #thenoclub on Instagram, and www.thenoclub.com

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Why Micro-affirmations Matter as a Leader

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micro-affirmationsWhile microaggressions and micro-inequities contribute to experiences of exclusion for many at work, frequent experiences of micro-affirmations could help to cultivate a culture of inclusion. Every single person is capable of being an agent of micro-affirmations – and as a woman leader, you’re more likely to be ahead of the curve.

Microaggressions and Micro-Inequities Create Exclusion

Microaggressions are the brief and everyday slights, insults, indignities, and denigrating messages sent to marginalized groups. Though often unconscious, they perpetuate a devalued “otherness” by: establishing the majority group as the norm, “highlighting a person’s ‘difference’ from the majority represented group” in a way that diminishes, discomforts or disapproves, and reinforcing thinly veiled stereotypes. This includes “complimenting” an individual in a way that implies “exception” to a hidden underlying group assumption.

Verbal examples that different members of BIPOC communities experience include:

  • “Your name is hard to pronounce.”
  • “You’re so articulate.”
  • “But, where are you really from?”
  • “I don’t see color.”
  • “Your English is really good.”

In a similar vein, micro-inequities are “cumulative, subtle messages that promote a negative bias and demoralize.” These reaffirm the status quo of power dynamics and discourage, devalue and impair workplace performance for non-majority groups.

Common gender related examples that women face include:

  • Asking the woman in the room to get the coffees
  • Mansplaining and manterruption
  • More multi-tasking on phones while a woman is speaking
  • A woman’s idea being dismissed and later mis-attributed to a man
  • Women in the room receiving less eye contact from the speaker

Microaggressions create cumulative psychological harm – impacting upon mental, emotional, and physical health. Long-term exposure is associated with symptoms of depression, anxiety and can be corrosive to self-worth and self-esteem.

In Forbes, Paolo Gaudino suggests that one effective way to measure inclusion is to ask people whether and how often they have incidents of exclusion. The sum impact of microaggressions and micro-inequities is the substantial harm of exclusion.

Micro-affirmations Help to Creating Inclusion

According to Mary Rowe at MIT, “micro-affirmations” are “apparently small acts, which are often ephemeral and hard-to-see, events that are public and private, often unconscious but very effective, which occur wherever people wish to help others to succeed.” They foster inclusion, listening, comfort, and support for people who may feel unwelcome or invisible in an environment. Micro-affirmations can proactively affirm belonging, value and sense of self.

As shared by The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University, “Micro-affirmations substitute messages about deficit and exclusion with messages of excellence, openness, and opportunity.”

Drawing on her own experience as an executive at an international engineering firm years ago, Change Catalyst CEO Melinda Briana Epler, defines micro-affirmations as “little ways that you can affirm someone’s identity; recognize and validate their experience and expertise; build confidence; develop trust; foster belonging; and support someone in their career.”

University of Kansas research found that being aware of a male ally who is vocal about gender equality reduces anticipated feelings of isolation for women in STEM and increases anticipation of support and respect. Research has shown that experiencing micro-affirmations – such as “affirmations that people of your culture/ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation are important contributors to advancing knowledge,” “affirmations that you are a scientist,” and “affirmations that you can complete your degree” – help increase student’s integration into the science community and intentions to persist in the STEM field. Other research has suggested that integrating micro-affirmations in academic advising in the college environment could fuel optimal student development and better engagement, retention and graduation outcomes.

Rowe hypothesizes that regular practice of using micro-affirmations could increase one’s tendency to be “universally respectful” to others. Affirming others has the potential to create a positivity loop that ultimately fosters a more inclusive culture – supporting both marginalized voices in the workplace and your female peers and colleagues.

What Do Micro-affirmations Look Like in Action?

As found in the Women in the Workplace 2021 Report, employees report women are more likely showing concern for the overall well-being of their reports, supporting them emotionally and checking in on their work/life challenges

“Allyship is really seeing the person next to us,” says Epler. “And the person missing, who should be standing next to us.” She encourages us to all be allies to each other.

Here are examples of everyday micro-affirmations that you can use to help support others, especially those underrepresented and marginalized voices in your teams:

  • Give your undivided presence when others are speaking or presenting. As a leader, you have the opportunity to model being attentive to and listening to others. Notice when you go for your phone or an e-mail. Ask thoughtful questions that reflect real engagement.
  • Be an active listener. Use reinforcing body language. Eye contact, nods, facial expressions, tone of voice and choice of words all contribute to convey care and listening. By repeating back key points that struck you, you can let others know you were attentive and valued what they shared.
  • Invite individuals from marginalized communities into the room with you to be part of the discussion. Also help to create the space so they are heard, which may include leveraging your position of relative power to intercept an interruption. Using your voice to advocate for the voices of others is empowering to everyone.
  • Echo good ideas that members of your team raise and attribute those ideas back to the person, especially when you see their ideas being overlooked or highjacked. Support your female colleagues and underrepresented voices to receive the due credit for their contributions. “Building upon what Jasmine said” is one approach.
  • Publicly acknowledge the accomplishments, expertise and skills of marginalized team members and help raise their profile with others, especially as many have to reassert these more just to be heard. Reflecting back qualities or contributions you appreciate to individuals can also impact upon feeling seen and valued.
  • “Mirror” the language that people use to describe their identity. Epler emphasizes to listen and learn to how people describe themselves so you can use that language. Pay attention to how someone refers to their gender or pronouns. Don’t make assumptions about sexual orientation. If you don’t know how to say a name, ask and then, get it right.
  • Create openings for the underrepresented voices in the room. If someone is consistently quiet or not participating, check in on them, also as they may feel more comfortable to share ideas in another forum. Invite the less heard voices in the room to contribute on topics where you know they have value to add and encourage in confidence with your desire to hear it.
  • Give opportunities for visibility. When you receive an invitation to a networking opportunity, consider if you can bring an underrepresented individual along. When you have a speaking invitation, can you also use highlight an expert in your team and share the spotlight? For events you participate in, hold event organizers accountable for having diversity of representation. Refer and encourage underrepresented people to go for opportunities – help to close the confidence gap and mentor or sponsor them.
  • Acknowledge important moments – birthdays, milestones, holidays, anniversaries – which shows that you are paying attention to others and care. Overcome affinity bias by taking a genuine interest in people in your team who are less like you and in what their lives might be like outside of work.
  • Provide honest feedback, formal and informal, and both positive and constructive. Epler notes women tend to receive less quality feedback, and more on communication style than actionable developmental skills. While everyone needs to hear what they are doing well, make sure you are not shying away from giving constructive input to anyone out of discomfort, if it will serve their growth and development.

As Rowe says, micro-affirmations may often even be unconscious, too, as they just feel like caring. But you can actively create inclusion for others by intentionally affirming the value and contribution that we each bring to the table.

By Aimee Hansen

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How To Weigh The Risks Of Your Next Career Move

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Career Move“The Great Resignation” has been circling headlines for months as employers look to fill open positions post-pandemic, and employees look for greener pastures with a career move. The job hunt is increasingly competitive as 44% of employees are actively looking for new roles and 53% are open to leaving their current job.

The good news is that there’s no shortage of open positions. As of January 2022, the U.S. had 11.26 million jobs available — a 55% increase from January of 2021. The pressure to hire has encouraged employers to consider increased pay, benefits, and flexibility at work.

Diving into a new job presents plenty of opportunities to develop your career, skills, and financial wellness. It can also be intimidating to learn new processes, develop new relationships, and potentially find yourself in a less-than-ideal working environment.

After refining your resume, applying to positions daily, and attending a few interviews, you may finally find yourself presented with a job offer. A gleaming opportunity that may offer higher pay or a more prestigious job title, but you can’t be sure of its work-life balance or career challenges yet.

Some well-deserving workers may even receive multiple offers to consider. These situations create pressure to make a decision relatively quickly. It’s a good spot to be in, but having the skills to evaluate risk and rewards lets you fully enjoy the moment and guides you to make a confident decision.

If you’re in the middle of a job hunt or considering other career opportunities, here are some steps to help you weigh the options.

1. Identify Your Priorities

Your individual needs for your next career move are unique to you, and understanding those goals helps you create a framework for comparing offers. A majority of workers (56%) are looking for a pay raise, but there are several job benefits to consider, including:

  • Health benefits
  • Job security
  • Flexibility at work
  • Career goals
  • Employer culture

Take time to list the potential benefits of a new job and rank what’s most important to you. This is a great practice before you start applying so you can save your time and energy for positions that best fit your needs. It can also help you decide how well your current position matches your needs to consider if you’re ready for a change or not.

Next, make a spreadsheet or other list that includes all of these benefits and rank how well each job opportunity meets these criteria. This creates an easy and objective reference to compare jobs that you can update to reflect your needs as they evolve.

2. Research The Position

The internet age has given us a range of resources to evaluate employers and job expectations that too many employees don’t take advantage of. While you likely studied a company, its values, and the position itself throughout the interview process, another review before signing on is worth your time.

Start with the company itself and explore its communication channels. YouTube videos, press releases, and the About page can help you identify cultural values, how the company has and continues to grow, and insights into management. Some companies even go as far as to share their hiring secrets — a great reference in the interview phase.

Review sites like Glassdoor provide a peek into the employee experience through position and interview reviews. Check out the site to vet your priorities against what other employees report their experience with the company was. You’ll also have access to salary ranges that will help you negotiate your pay.

Finally, you’ll get the best information straight from current and former employees. Check out the company’s LinkedIn page to find current employees and search the company name to find anyone who previously worked there. You can connect with workers and send a quick chat that you’d like to know more about their experiences. You may be surprised to find how willing people are to help you find a job that fits.

3. List Your Risks

Most people stuck between two options are worried about making the wrong decision more than they are making the best decision. They’re hung up on the risks, wondering if it’s a step backward or if they’re really cut out for the position.

Imposter syndrome aside, it’s important to consider the risks of a new position. To compare the risks of staying and leaving, you need to start by identifying them. Sit with the moment and feel your excitement, fear, hesitation, and joy. What’s the root of each of these feelings? You may think:

  • “There’s no room to grow in my current position.”
  • “What if I don’t work well with my new manager?”
  • “If this career change doesn’t work out, I may have to restart where I am now.”
  • “If this startup goes under, I have to job hunt again.”

List these risks under the decision it ties to. Visually seeing the number of risks for each choice is helpful, but not all risks are equal. Place the biggest risks at the top of each list and continue the list from most to least risky.

moving careers

 

4. Evaluate And Control Risk

Now that you have clear lists of your potential risks and rewards, go back and consider how you can negate some of the risks. Here are some examples from the previous exercise:

  • If there’s no room to grow in your current position, is there a new skill you can develop to open higher career opportunities?
  • If you’re worried about your next manager, can you set up a meet and greet through the employer?

This practice can also uncover that the risks aren’t holding you back so much as a fear of change. That’s absolutely natural. Especially considering the economic turbulence of the last two years. Still, 80% of employees that quit their job in the last two years have no regrets.

5. Make The Decision That’s Right For You

Changing jobs is an excellent way to advance your career and financial health. Salaries increase an average 14.8% with a new role — especially if you’re early in your career. On the other hand, you’re placed in a new environment to develop new working relationships, which comes with its own networking benefits.

Ultimately, there’s probably not a right or wrong answer. No matter what you choose, you have the option to continue looking for new opportunities if you don’t love where you land. If you land in a position that helps you thrive, that’s a huge win for your well-being and career.

Following the steps above can give you peace of mind that you’re making the best choice with the information available to you. But remember that your next job is far from the end of the line, and there’s always another opportunity around the corner.

By: Bri Marvell is a content creator from Austin with interests in financial wellness and career development. When she’s not at her desk, you can find her exploring the city with her dog, Miko, or getting creative with a new craft.

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Unlearn, Learn and Relearn: The Key to Career Change and More Meaningful Work

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learn and relearnWith four in 10 women considering leaving their current roles, “Unlearn, Learn, Relearn” could well be the mantra for executive-level professional women looking to switch tracks to more meaningful work.

Despite the ‘passion at work paradigm’ being around for more than six decades, there are downsides to that approach. It could be a straight path to (self) exploitation, says journalist Sarah Jaffe in her book Work Won’t Love You Back. You may have heard the talk about it leading to even high-salaried staff burning out or tackling depression in the workplace.

Unlearn

Canadian academic Galen Watts, based at the Centre for Sociological Research in Belgium, writes in The Conversation that the passion pursuit could be underpinning the Great Resignation currently sweeping through the world.

He suggests first ensuring you have a robust social safety net before searching for more meaningful work. That means valuing work and your family, friends, and hobbies, not prioritizing one over the other.

Your next professional move should see you focus on work-life balance. Here’s why that’s important: McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2021 report shows half of female senior leaders are burned out, about 42% are exhausted, and about 32% are chronically stressed.

Before you agree to a job offer, do more than your usual due diligence in researching the work culture of the organization.

Learn: who are the key players for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in your target industry

“Set your standards high for would-be employers regarding their diversity, equity and inclusion strategies and activities. Too many organizations focus on just the optics rather than making a difference aligned with a stronger purpose,” says Nicholas Pearce, Clinical Professor of Management & Organizations at the Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management.

He advises looking for companies that:

  • Link their DEI efforts for individual and collective purpose
  • Prove their DEI achievements through transparency
  • Work with similar organizations to progress humanity

Those exemplars may well rise to the top anyway, as those just paying lip service will “abandon their DEI efforts”, says Pearce.

Relearn: The side hustle or internal path to entrepreneurship

You might have a hobby, interest or small business you’ve been nurturing while in full-time employment. Beware the stereotypes that may be deflecting you from entrepreneurialism.

A recent study published in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice found that one career path doesn’t fit or describe all women. It debunked the swathe of previous research that took a broad brushstroke to all professional female entrepreneurs marking them as less-economically motivated in their concepts of success, and less qualified as managers to run businesses.

The published study found that women entrepreneurs varied, more than converged, along a “single universal prototype”. It drew on career data from more than 800 female graduates from a U.S. business school over six decades. Those researchers advocate for a career path perspective or framework that sees entrepreneurship as a series of pathways or activities over time.


Carve your own entrepreneurial path, but be aware of what stereotypes you may come up against, such as when you pitch for start-up investment, as according to Crunchbase, just 2.3% of venture capital funding goes to female-led start-ups.

If you still have a side-hustle itch, consider if your current employer has a program to identify and support corporate social intrapreneurs. Nancy McGaw, a senior advisor at the Aspen Institute’s Business & Society Program, describes such intrapreneurs as on-staff and on standby to drive needed changes.

Take the initiative rather than wait to be tapped on the shoulder. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2021 report points to a ‘broken rung’ still existing – the first step up to manager level. It means companies are inadequately laying foundations for women’s sustained progress to more senior levels. In short, women are under-represented across the higher ranks of the corporate ladder, as you no doubt know.

You’re not just after a ‘job’

You might reconsider confining your career move to ‘job titles’. If you have experienced your day-to-day role verging further and further away from your ‘job description’, think how to build skills for the next role.

You can keep up to date with our nation’s demand for skills, knowledge, and abilities via the OECD’s Skills for Jobs interactive website. Here you can zero into categories of skills that interest you. Here’s how I see them roughly split into skillsets:

  1. Analyst: analytical, reflective, critical thinking, digging deep into the data
  2. Linker: human-face including the human-computer interaction
  3. Sentry: security (cyber and physical), safekeeping
  4. Artist: creative, entrepreneurial, right-brain, communications
  5. Career: health, wellness
  6. Maker: fixing and maintaining
  7. Civic: keeping the status quo, public service, foundational
  8. Sustainers: care for the earth, resources

To ensure your next move is more meaningful to you, take heed of lifelong learning – the overarching theme for unlearning, learning and relearning.



Nicholas Wyman is CEO and Founder of IWSI America. He has sought novel ways to connect youth with the jobs of the future. Wyman believes the ‘learn by doing’ approach has much to offer in a new world straddling the fault lines of a ‘skills mismatch’ and has innovated market-driven solutions to address the long-term workforce issues faced by employers, education institutions, and governments. Wyman has also built a global conversation around the need to change the status quo in job skills training. His research work and thought-leadership articles are widely published and internationally recognized, and he’s the author of Job U: How to Find Wealth and Success by Developing the Skills Companies Actually Need. He is an international expert in workforce development issues and models. Wyman has an MBA and has studied at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government and was awarded a Churchill Fellowship.

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Personal Transformation in 2022: What are You Harmonizing With?

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transformationThe transformational story of caterpillar to winged butterfly has arguably become an overused and often abused analogy for rebirth. Yet, the crux of the journey is neither the caterpillar nor the butterfly, but the dissolution and uncertainty in the void of the chrysalis.

The messy process of transformation, the surrender of what has been for what will come, both terrifies and excites us. As humans, we face uncertainty in the transformation journey many times in our cycles of personal growth.

It is partially the willingness to go the liminal place of uncertainty that determines our capacity for personal evolution.

We also face a challenging matter the caterpillar does not: how resistant the human ego can be when it comes to letting go of who we have perceived ourselves to be, and the worth and value we have attached to it.

Separate Your Worth From Your Roles

Identity, according to Psychology Today, “encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self.”

In her book Warrior Goddess Training: Become the Woman You Are Meant to Be, Heather Ash Amara speaks to how we often attach value or self-worth to the roles we play within our lives. Any role that we identify with, no matter how valuable it may be to our sense of self, also becomes a too narrow script to ultimately live in.

A role can range anything from a “loving mother” to a “successful executive” to a “good friend” to a “resilient entrepreneur.”

We tend to have a script for every role we play, one that was often written before us. How you perceive yourself and how others perceive you can become a trap. Being stuck to being something you have been proud to identify with can be as much of a cage as being boxed into a role that you never asked for, if you have to keep acting out the script of that role to feel worthiness.

If you’ve attached to the image of being a world traveler, you might buy a ticket when you truly crave a home. You may not even be able to admit to yourself that you crave a home. If you’re attached to being a loving mother, perhaps your script does not include taking the personal break you really need. If you’ve attached your worth to being a good friend, you may have written yourself into a contract of being available more than what is now kind to you.

In order to be free to move authentically in our lives between roles, to both redefine who we are and to expand, we must be able to release ourselves from any script we’ve attached our worth and value to.

So take stock of the roles you are playing:

  • What roles have you currently attached some sense of worth or value to?
  • What is the script you have defined for each?
  • What worth do you derive from playing these roles?

When it comes to change, we have to be willing to question where we have displaced our sense of worth. We rather come to source it from our inherent selves and sometimes tear up or simply re-envision our scripts to fit who we are now.

As Brené Brown often speaks to, we have to stop hustling for our worthiness, which ultimately comes from shame and fear we are not enough. We must realize, as Meggan Watterson writes, “Worth is not given, it’s claimed.”

From a place of knowing our inherent worth, we give ourselves permission to shed who we have been without losing our sense of value in the world, and more importantly, our connection to ourselves.

Harmonize To Where You Want To Be

Inside of personal change, there is often a time of dissolution between a previous reality and the one that you are moving towards. And while you might not be able to see it, you can still harmonize towards where your inner awareness is taking you.

Imaginal cells are like the blank slate of the becoming inside the chrysalis. The caterpillar is gone. Possibility exists. At first, imaginal cells operate like disconnected islands and appear to be a threat to the organism. It is only once enough imaginal cells begin to vibrate at the intrinsic tune of butterfly and communicate with each other that they reach the tipping point of collectively becoming the butterfly.

Often, a time of transformation does involve re-imagining our lives. It’s not only new outcomes we might envision, but begins with our beliefs about ourselves, others and how the world works, as these are often shaping the reality we are operating within. If all the cells still vibrated at caterpillar, the change would never occur.

As Joe Dispenza writes in Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, “a state of being means we have become familiar with a mental-emotional state, a way of thinking and a way of feeling, which has become an integral part of our self-identity.”

Just as with roles, the truth is that we can derive worth and value and reward from our limiting beliefs about ourselves and the world, even if that value is the ability to stay comfortable inside of our limitations. We must not only be able to see the pattern, but desire to evolve, by actively challenging the more well-oiled perceptual pathways within so that we shift to and harmonize at a new level. As we begin to do this, we notice change begins to happen.

In her book How To Do The Work, Dr. Nicole LePera, also known as “The Holistic Psychologist”, shares her writing practice of leaning into growth through her Future Self Journaling prompts she used to ground new experiences in her body.

For the new experience she wishes to cultivate (eg restoring balance to her nervous system), LePera writes what she is practicing today, why she is grateful to be practicing it, what she is doing, how will she know when she is doing it and what the change will allow her to feel.

This journaling practice is a way to resonate more with the woman she is becoming and with the balanced nervous system she wishes to cultivate. Often we need to practice not only thinking in the direction we are moving, but feeling into it. This act of attention is infusing the conversations happening within the cells with a new way of being within the body.

Even when we don’t know our next big landing place, we can often feel the internal pull to evolve from within even as we must overcome ourselves, just as the being in the chrysalis must release the caterpillar to the open possibility of the imagination of cells.

Are you able to release yourself from the bounds of roles in which you have previously cast your worth? Are you able to harmonize more of your feelings and thoughts and actions with the being you can feel you are becoming?

In the uncertainty of the chrysalis and transition within a human life, this may look like nothing. But little by little, these small practices become the change.

By Aimee Hansen

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