Goals that thrill? Cat Puke and Underwater, Overwhelmed Executive Women
My husband jokes that we should invent an alarm clock that wakes you up with the sound of our cat gagging.
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING rips us from REM to upright like the sound of the cat potentially puking on our oh-so-soft and luxurious area rug that surrounds our bed. Avoiding the hours of picking bits of not-even-chewed “beef feast” out of the fibers of the light grey rug and then the inevitable cycle of soap and water, pat, pat, pat. Let dry. Baking soda. Vaccum. Repeat. It’ll have us standing up before we’re awake, in order to drag the convulsing cat to the hardwood.
Last week I learned something new: the art of setting a personal goal or target that shoots me out of bed in the morning so I don’t miss an instant of the day to get to work on it.
I was in a presentation led by Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit, The Advice Trap and Do More Great Work and I was asked to think how to really stretch my clients. Michael’s formula for this was to give a goal that had to meet the following:
It has to be thrilling
It has to be meaningful
It has to be hard
We were asked to come up with one for ourselves as part of the workshop. I dug deep and came up with this:
Seek out women leaders who are desperate for change, who have been shattered by lack of recognition for their incredible contribution in the largely patriarchal workforce in Corporate America (and Corporations around the world). I want to teach them the tools to stake their (well earned) claim in the corporate world, achieve pay equity, get credit for their work and for their ideas and to realize sefl-actualization.
And then before I could chicken-out I posted that goal on LinkedIn immediately.
And I sort of freaked out.
And then Michael actually commented on it, which was really cool, kind and a definite ego boost. :)
For me the goal is thrilling, it’s meaningful and it’s hard. And, I’d managed to publicly scare the shit out of myself.
It was the kind of challenge that encompasses some of my core values: high achievement, making a real difference in the way women feel and are treated at work and standing up against an injustice that impacts me viscerally.
It scares me because women are up against MASSIVE challenges and an entire system built to reinforce those challenges.
Here are some examples of real stories from women I’ve spoken to recently (names changed):
Ann is a Partner at a highly established architecture firm. She works 80-90 hour weeks. Before she made partner she was working on a project that caught one of the male partners attention. He thought it was really brilliant and encouraged her to make a whole collection and submit it to a well known art gallery. Ann busted her butt (on top of her 80-90 hour work week) and submitted a body of work to the gallery. It was accepted! Oh the joy for a creative person! When she visited to view her work on display, she was horrified and devastated. It had a plaque attributing the artwork to the male partner who had encouraged her to create it and submit it. Not the firm’s name. His name.
Sophie is a Vice President at a major consumer goods brand. She had a forward-thinking, new idea for a global platform. Everyone told her “no”. One man in particular was particularly vocal and nasty in his belittlement of the idea. But Sophie knew in her bones that it was a great idea, that it would launch them into something incredible. She kept pitching it. Fast forward three months. She’d won everyone over and it was deemed an “officially great idea”. Budget was approved. The nasty naysayer? Promoted to lead it. He will now be her boss.
These women are my dream clients. They are smart, hardworking, think-outside-of-the-box women executives. And they are getting absolutely shit on. You can only take so much disappointment, devastation, gaslighting, demeaning treatment, and abuse before you question your self-worth, your value, your contribution, the meaning in anything. You get exhausted. You suffer burnout.
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Back to scaring the shit out of myself. I brought up this fear to a master coach who was facilitating a discussion on our thrilling, meaningful, hard goals. “What if I don’t have the right SKILLS to help the women I want to help the most?”
I am an accredited coach, I have 20 years of international corporate experience, I have deep empathy for these women. I am angry at the way they’ve (we’ve) been treated.
The absolute magic of coaching: I DON’T HAVE TO HAVE THE ANSWERS.
Because my clients have them.
In their bones.
They know in their bones what is really right. But no one has listened for so long they no longer know if those answers are right.
I’m here to tell you, you know it in your bones.
We need to listen to the pain, the frustration, the disappointment, the devastation, the anger, the resentment, and the exhaustion. These things are REAL. You aren’t imagining it. You aren’t making it up. You aren’t “just a woman”.
You’re a fucking powerhouse of a woman.
And I want to listen.
#kamrinhubancoaching
