Have you ever found yourself sitting in a meeting frustrated and talking under your breath: It’s so hard being a woman around here! No matter what I say or do, they won’t take me seriously! Welcome to the club, fellow female sufferer! You’re not the only one feeling that your efforts are in vain sometimes or that your voice is not loud enough in the tough man’s world. I hear you. No doubt there are situations in which women are still not fully recognized and appreciated and that there are individuals amongst us who still have reservations about women and their capabilities. But, is it really so bad? Or are we – women – making it worse than it really is?
I work with a lot of female executives and one in particular comes to mind. She was a product manager in a sector ladies don’t venture into that often. The only women on the team, and in fact pretty much everywhere she set her foot in, customer events, conferences, etc. She was intelligent, extremely capable and working (much too) hard. She loved her job yet she was exasperated, she didn’t see any future for herself in the company due to being a woman. Every time we met for our coaching sessions she had a story to tell and it would start with something like this: “Alena, would you believe what my boss told me today?!” “You should see how my colleague treated me in front of the whole team!” “This is pointless, they will always see me as a weak link!” She would go into great length to prove how unfairly she was being treated and how mean her colleagues were to her simply because she was a woman. I am not here to diminish the difficulties she had to face but I could see how she was adding fuel to the fire. When I tried to analyze the situation with her, I hit a wall. For her the issue was crystal clear: she was treated unfairly for being a woman.
Is that the truth? Or is that your truth?
When we experience frustrations and difficulties at work, it’s easy to blame others or external circumstances or misfortunes. But are they the true causes behind our career failures? Let me ask you this. How many times have you entered a meeting thinking it was going to be a disaster and it was? What about the time you finally met John, a guy you heard so much about and how hilarious he was; did he turn out to be just hilarious?! Or, this woman you met at a networking event; you had a bad feeling about her right from the start and when you got the chance to talk to her, bingo! She was just as obnoxious as you thought.
My friend, I am not a behavioral scientist, but there’s something that I am painfully aware of. The power of preconceived ideas, beliefs and biases that we all succumb to more often than not. I say painfully because some of these beliefs can be extremely detrimental to our careers, relationships and our overall health and wellbeing. Our life is a reflection of our beliefs. Our beliefs shape our reality because they influence our behavior and the behavior of others towards us.
What is a belief? It is an inner conviction, an acceptance that something exists or is true. It’s a feeling of certainty about something or what something means. Whether something is true or not, a belief makes it true for you. We have beliefs about ourselves, about others, about life, about the meaning of things, about what’s possible. We acquire beliefs during our developmental years, we also draw them as conclusions from our past experiences, we adopt them from the media or from others. Have you heard the saying, whatever you believe becomes your reality? That’s exactly it. Your beliefs become the lens through which you perceive others and the world around you and through which you interpret all that’s happening in your life.
So, what do you believe?
Let’s consider the beliefs you have about yourself. These are critical because they shape all your important decisions such as which career path you choose, whether you’re willing to voice your opinions in the workplace, ask for a promotion or raise. What you think and believe directly influences how you feel and how you behave. If you think you’re a failure, you’ll feel like a failure, and then you’ll act like a failure, which reinforces your belief that you must be a failure.
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Whatever your beliefs (about yourself or anything else for that matter), the confirmation bias kicks in. Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias in which one tends to search for, interpret, favor or remember information which confirms one’s preconceived beliefs, while undervaluing or ignoring information which contradicts those beliefs. In other words, you will tend to look for evidence that supports your beliefs and discount anything that runs contrary to your belief. Whatever your belief, whether drinking five coffee cups a day is a good idea because it improves mental performance, or that the death penalty reduces crime rate, or that your employer is actively trying to discriminate against you, you will always find the evidence that will support your belief! Seek and you shall find! Oh yes my friend. We love to be right and be proven right. We love when our ideas, assumptions and beliefs are validated! Or better still, if other people validate them. Check your library shelf, what kind of books and magazines do you find? To what extent do they support your beliefs and your view of life? Think about the people you most admire or people you love surrounding yourself with? To what extent do they share your beliefs? We have a clear tendency to favor people or information that confirms our assumptions or preconceptions (whether they’re true or not). And the moment we encounter something or someone that threatens our beliefs, we laugh at them, discount them, condemn them. We choose to see what we want to see. We’re constantly looking for reassurance of our values, because the contrary is uncomfortable. When our values and beliefs are questioned, so is our entire being, our way of life, our identity and that can be deeply disturbing. We’re shaken to the core because who would want to face the realization that maybe, perhaps they were wrong all along?
Gender stereotypes impact us directly…
We also ought to know that the source of many of our negative beliefs are hidden in stereotypes. I recently read an article in the Harvard Business School Magazine about how gender stereotypes determine people’s beliefs about themselves and others. It’s been shown that women lack confidence in their ability to compete in fields that men are stereotypically believed to perform more strongly in, such as science, math, and technology. And that’s even if they receive positive feedback on their performance and are shown their brilliant results! Women tend to downplay their achievement or discount them. Similarly, women are less likely to speak up on topics in fields where they believe their gender is weak. Going back to my client and the issue of women in business. Beside the fact that my client had a whole array of negative self-beliefs she was unaware of, she also had very strong beliefs about others, in particular about men and how they actively try to discriminate women in business. Whether she acquired them during her childhood or as a result of gender stereotyping is something we’ll leave aside for now.
Imagine you have that same strong belief about men as my client and you get yourself into the following hypothetical situation. How do you think the story will unfold? Here’s what I think:
Your male boss asks you to fetch him a coffee on the way to a meeting room. The chances are you will feel infuriated by his request. Depending on your emotional maturity and communication skills, you may decide to bring him the coffee but in your silent anger you almost spill it all over his shirt; you may utter a remark with a heavy dose of sarcasm or you may loudly object to his absurd request, making him see his wrongdoing. Even if you don’t say a word, your body will radiate your fury which is something your boss is likely to pick up on from your body language and your facial expression. He gets a feeling that something is going on but he has no idea what. He may be very surprised by your reaction because asking his colleagues to fetch him a coffee is something he does habitually in order to gain time to set up his presentation in the meeting room. Depending on his emotional maturity and communication skills, he responds to you or not, in any case, he is likely to think, what’s wrong with her today? Or, isn’t she a bit over-sensitive? Depending on his previous experiences with women he may even think, for god’s sake who can understand them!? So hard to have women around here! And so the story goes… You both will probably end up feeling frustrated but with a comforting sense of certainty that you were right all along… For you it’s clear that men are discriminating against women and for your boss it’s clear that women are overly sensitive and difficult to work with…
What reality do you want for yourself?
Beliefs have tremendous power. They impact how you feel and how you behave which in turn impacts how other people behave towards you. Beliefs have so much power, that they can heal or kill and I mean that literally. You can do your own research on people who cured themselves of a terminal illness thanks to the power of their beliefs, and on the contrary, who died just because they believed a diagnosis that was later proven wrong.
There are empowering beliefs and there are destructive beliefs. We all have them and we ought to be aware of them. Only then we are able to decide which ones to cultivate and which to eliminate. Beliefs are here to stay and will get reinforced over time. That is, unless we actively challenge them, unless we introspectively question our attachments to our beliefs, to a particular ideology, to our patterns of thinking. I believe that just like our computer software, our mind also needs an occasional ‘upgrade’ for the most optimal performance.
And so, next time you feel frustrated at work and think how hard it is to be a woman in the tough man’s world, think about your own beliefs and biases and how they contributed to your situation…
Remember, beliefs create your reality, you have the power to decide what reality you want for yourself. Make it an awesome one!
My best wishes!
Alena
By Alena Huberova
Leadership Trainer / Keynote Speaker
Helping Women to Become the Bosses
People Love
www.alenahuberova.com
alena@alenahuberova.com
ABOUT ALENA HUBEROVA
Fifteen years in the corporate arena with roles in marketing, sales and communication, living in 5 different countries across Europe and Asia. Alena assists business leaders in developing a powerful personal presence on and off stage and delivering presentations that capture hearts, change minds, and inspire action. More recently, with her signature program ‘SHELeads’, Alena has been helping female executives build self- confidence, find their voice and become leaders that people love to work with.
Alena’s achievements include speaking at the TEDx UNYP 2017 conference, winning the second place in the 2018 Czech National Championship of Public Speaking, and coaching X.GLU, a team from the Czech Technical University to win the world title at the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2017 in Seattle, USA (in collaboration with Presenation.com).
Alena is regularly asked to speak at industry events and conferences. She is a contributor to various magazines and newspapers including Czech & Slovak Leaders and Business Woman. You can read her articles and follow her blog at:
www.alenahuberova.com