by Jane Perdue | Women
In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders. ~Sheryl Sandberg
And when that day arrives, we’ll have no more need for today’s International Women’s Day, an observance that began in 1909 to commemorate the bold struggle for women’s rights.
Much work is needed to reach that milestone. Women’s issues need to become business issues. Women, men, and organizations need to work together to make respect, inclusion, and equity real for all. Women and men need to push for faster progress.
I’ve taken my five dreams for women and combined them with action items from the International Women’s Day (IWD) 2017 web site.
Take a look and see what items about making a difference call to you.
Dream #1…a woman can be outspoken without being labeled a bitch and a man can be compassionate without being labeled a wimp.
IWD action…champaign bias and inequality and work to:
• Query all-male speaking panels
• Pull people up on exclusive language
• Challenge stereotypes
• Call it out when women are excluded
• Monitor the gender pay gap
• Point out bias and highlight alternatives
• Call for diverse candidate shortlists
• Embrace inclusive leadership
• Redefine the status quo
Dream #2…just as many women as men are Fortune 500 company CEOs and that men no longer earn $1.22 to the 78¢ a woman earns.
IWD action…I’ll forge women’s advancement and work to:
• Decide to buy from companies that support women
• Choose to work for a progressive employer for women
• Support or back a woman-owned business
• Take a junior female colleague to a major meeting or event
• Build conducive, flexible work environments
• Appoint a woman to the board
• Mentor a woman and sponsor her goals
• Invite women into situations where they’re not already present or contributing
• Measure and report on gender parity gaps and keep gender on the agenda
• Create new opportunities for women
Dream #3…sex trafficking, domestic and other violence, stereotypes, and gender-driven discrimination have gone the way of the dinosaurs (along with the old boy network, too).
IWD action…I’ll campaign against violence and work to:
• Educate youth about positive relationships
• Challenge those who justify perpetrators and blame victims
• Donate to groups fighting abuse
• Speak out against the silence of violence
• Be vigilant and report violence
• Campaign for the prevention of violence
• Abstain from all violence, physical and otherwise
• Volunteer your help at a local charity
• Recognize coercive control and redress it
Dream #4…women no longer have to choose between being competent and being liked and that they, like men, are evaluated on both their future potential and past performance.
IWD action…I’ll celebrate women’s achievement and work to:
• Raise women’s visibility as spokespeople in the media
• Drive fairer recognition and credit for women’s contributions
• Launch even more awards showcasing women’s success
• Hail the success of women leaders
• Applaud social, economic, cultural and political women role models
• Celebrate women’s journeys and the barriers overcome
• Reinforce and support women’s triumphs
Dream #5…women are judged not by their attractiveness or bra size but by the strength of their character and contributions.
IWD action…I’ll champion women’s education and work to:
• Launch or fund a women-focused scholarship
• Encourage more girls into STEM education and careers
• Learn to code
• Value diversity for greater educational outcomes
• Support women inventors of new products and services
• Celebrate women researchers discovering new knowledge
Many opportunities exist for making a difference for yourself, your children, grandchildren, colleagues, and women everywhere in this list.
Pick any and all that call to your passion for respect, equity, and inclusion…and work to make it so!
How will you be bold today?
Image source: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Leadership
Google “songs about money” and entries like “40 best songs about money” and “12 best songs about money. EVER” pop up.
The search results are less abundant if you google “songs about ethics.” No 12- or 40-best lists appear. “Top 10 social and political songs of our times” is as close as it gets.
Emphasizing economics over ethics is a practice playing out in many workplaces and cultures. Money has become the end rather than a means to an end.
The pressures to conform to workplace economic norms are everywhere.
The axiom “you’re only as good as your last set of numbers” is a performance standard embraced many bosses. People in boardrooms are reminded “cash is king.” Resumes are packed with claims of “saving over $600k in payroll” and “grew profitability by $10m year over year.”
Suppose you understand the importance of economic performance. but you aren’t willing to do whatever it takes. No matter how hard you try, you can’t embrace the notion the ends justify the means.
What you want is personal and professional success based on ethics, justice, relationships, respect, equity, and inclusion.
With that foundation as your motivation, how do you step in the opposite direction—away from peer pressure, business norms, groupthink, and the power of conformity—to share a perspective that’s contrary to both expected and rewarded workplace behavior?
Thoughtfully.
Start by assessing your personal tolerance for risk-taking as well as that of your organization. You need to know if you can withstand the pain, loss, and opportunity that come with embodying truisms such as speaking truth to power, making your voice heard, and marching to a different drummer.
“Risk-taking is hard to adopt among leaders,” says Julie J. McGowan, professor at Indiana University, “Because recognized leaders have the most to lose and aspiring leaders may be discounted as lacking in knowledge or common sense.”
…there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right. ~Martin Luther King
Only you will know if the time is right for you to step up, take the risk, and speak out.
7 questions to ask before you make your voice heard
As you consider taking the first step in being different, explore these issues so the action you take is informed, thoughtful, and purposeful:
⇒Is this issue important to only you or do others share it? Will those who think/feel/believe the same speak up after you’ve led the charge, or will your voice be the only one that’s speaking? Are you ready to forge ahead regardless?
⇒How has your corporate culture reacted to those who have challenged the status quo? Are you prepared to accept the consequences of deviating from the norm? Are you willing to be singled out? To be alone? Are you equipped to lose your job?
⇒Are you willing to be the center of attention? To deal with your position going viral within the company? Are you ready to be emulated and/or attacked?
⇒Do you have solid solutions in mind? Are you disposed to collaborate with others and devise a solution that integrates the views of many? Are you willing to push for change? Are you willing to use your voice for other subjects as well?
⇒Have you brainstormed possible unintended consequences, both positive and negative, both personal and professional, of the stand you’re championing?
⇒Are you OK, mentally and emotionally, with the possibility of failure? Of success? Will your self-esteem survive the hit? Can your ego withstand the attacks if you fail or the glory if you succeed?
⇒Do you have the will to see it through? Do you have a support system to nurture you along the way regardless of the outcome?
Deciding to speak up or to continue go along to get along is a personal choice. Only you can decide if high risk/high reward is your calling or if low risk/low reward represents the boundaries of your comfort zone.
Be thoughtful. Be prepared. Do what’s right for you.
And, please be kind as you make your voice heard for what you believe in.
Image source: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Women
I found it poignant and creepy that Carrie Fisher passed away on my birthday after suffering cardiac arrest. Heart disease is a silent killer of women. Why? Because we insist we’re just fine even when we aren’t.
I know. I did just that.
Thankfully my loving husband ignored my “I’m fine” remarks and took me to the hospital. Because of him, I dodged the silent killer. I got to celebrate my last two birthdays.
That privilege, I’ve learned, comes with opportunities and obligations. Opportunities to live a life of purpose and an obligation (albeit a welcome one) to share, educate, and inspire.
So, about women and heart disease, here goes.
Risk factors
90 percent of women have at least one risk factor for heart disease that’s ignored. Think about your life. Feeling mental stress? Do heart problems run in your family? Feeling depressed? Do you smoke? Overweight? Is your diet convenient-food rich and fruit-and-veggie poor? Spend most of your day sitting at a desk?
A “yes” answer signals a risk factor to watch.
#1 killer
Cardiovascular disease and stroke, not breast cancer, is the number one killer of women, claiming one out of three women each year. While still serious, one out of every eight women develop invasive breast cancer across the course of their life.
One out every three women dying from a heart problem is a scary number. One that’s incredibly humbling as I nearly became one of those statistics.
Know the symptoms
Heart attack symptoms differ between men and women. Not knowing the difference isn’t uncommon. Even doctors mess up.
Women are seven times more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and sent home from the emergency room. Men’s symptoms—chest and arm pain—are widely recognized; women’s not so much. Women’s symptoms can include being extra tired for no apparent reason, experiencing unusual shortness of breath, feeling light-headed, or having pain in your neck, jaw or back.
I dismissed my episodes of dizziness and shortness of breath as signs of overwork and lack of exercise. That was almost a deadly mistake.
Know your numbers
If we run a company or a department, we know our metrics. We look at the numbers to know what’s going right and what needs attention. As women, we need to rattle off our blood pressure and cholesterol numbers just as easily as we do the bottom line business ones.
Not wanting the attention
Why do women continue to let heart disease be a silent killer? There’s many reasons.
We don’t want to make a fuss.
We don’t want to be selfish.
We don’t want to admit that something serious might actually be wrong with us.
If you’ve used any of these reasons to avoid acting, you have lots of female company. Women are far more likely than men to delay seeking medical treatment for heart conditions.
Share the love
Loving life and others starts with loving and taking care of ourselves.
February is heart health month.
To celebrate, start now. There’s no reason or excuse big enough not to act.
-
- Schedule an appointment with a cardiologist. Now! Go even if you feel just fine. Don’t let a risk factor sneak up on you.
- Encourage your gal pals to schedule appointments, too. Meet up for coffee after and compare notes. Hold each other accountable for self-care, for not downplaying symptoms, and for knowing your personal health numbers.
- Tell yourself—every morning—that self-care isn’t selfish; it’s smart.
As a gift to yourself, your loved ones, and in honor of Princess Leia, just do it.
Life—with all its delicious and dizzying ups and downs—is the reason why.
Image source: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Be your best you
Have you ever wanted something to be soooooooo perfect that you ended up doing nothing?
Recently that’s been the situation with me and my blog. I know I need to write a post or two, yet day after day goes by and I write nothing. Zip. Nada. That’s an outcome that gives me two gremlins to wrestle with—not having any blog posts written AND feeling bad about myself.
Ugh.
I finally found relief after remembering some advice literary agent Rachelle Gardner had shared with me. “To be a better writer,” Rachelle said. “Sometimes you have to kill your darlings.” I had a darling to get rid of.
In writing, the phrase “kill your darlings” means removing something precious that doesn’t move the story along.
My “darling” was believing that everything I wrote had to be profound. That mindset wasn’t moving me anywhere and, in fact, put crazy pressure on me. Pressure that was self-imposed. Pressure that stemmed from believing something, then forging ahead, thinking but without really thinking.
Belief is when someone else does the thinking. ~Buckminster Fuller
A strongly-held belief is a strength. Yet sometimes that same belief can also become a weakness. If a belief has hardened into dogma, that is, believing our position is the only correct one, than we’re in trouble because we’re not thinking critically about our thinking.
My position that all my writing had to be profound is a perfect illustration of what Drs. Linda Elder and Richard Paul call the “inherently flawed nature of human thinking when left unchecked,” i.e., when critical thinking is absent.
What critical thinking …
“…is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way.” ~ Dr. Linda Elder
“…is thinking about one’s thinking in a manner designed to organize and clarify, raise the efficiency of, and recognize errors and biases in one’s own thinking. One uses critical thinking to improve one’s process of thinking.” ~ Kirby Carmichael
“…calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends.” ~ Edward M. Glaser, PhD
7 actions to take control of your thinking
Drs. Elder and Paul suggest doing seven things to assure we’re thinking critically. I used their actions to review my “unchecked” thought processes:
- Explore thoughts underlying feelings and feelings underlying thoughts. I believe my writing must always be profound and inspiring or I’ll feel like I have failed.
- Develop intellectual humility and suspend judgment. Isn’t the mindset of always writing something profound rather self-congratulatory when you stop to think about it?
- Develop intellectual perseverance. Why must my writing always be profound? Why can’t I write for fun, to educate or just to share?
- Clarify issues, conclusions, or beliefs. OK, Jane, reflect on what happens if a piece of writing isn’t profound. Can’t people learn just as well from something simple? Not everything has to be intense, earnest, and researched endlessly. In fact, not all writing needs to teach.
- Questioning deeply: raise and pursue root or significant questions. Why am I so insistent on depth and complexity?
- Examine or evaluate assumptions. I want to make a difference and help others do the same. I want the world to react first with kindness rather than rancor. That means change, which is complex and requires deep thinking. Sure it does, however inspiration and learning can spring from lightness, too. Not everything meaningful has to be forceful.
Give reasons, and evaluate evidence and alleged facts. Look at all the articles that take a light-hearted approach and are successful. Not everything has to be deep and full of meaning.
Their process worked. When I took the time (that and a sprinkling of self-reflection fuel the process) to think about my thoughts, I realized I was being arbitrary. I’m going to walk through those seven steps more often!
Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. ~John F. Kennedy
What about you? Has your own thinking ever tripped you up? How did you manage the situation?
Image source: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Character
“After the first finger was pointed, the meeting went downhill fast,” said a distressed friend describing a really awful day at work.
“Everyone was in a race to the bottom to throw each other under the bus. Such hateful things were said that I wanted to disappear.”
What a lost opportunity! Imagine if someone had stepped up and stopped the downward spiral with what I call the “Charleston approach.”
That’s choosing to act with grace, curiosity, appreciation, and kindness.
That’s what the family members of the victims of the horrific Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina did a year ago.
In facing the one who took the lives of their loved ones, they could have resorted to rancor and labels. They didn’t.
Incredibly, they reached across the divide and offered not judgment but forgiveness.
The lesson I’ve taken from their example is that if one chooses, the grace of goodness can transcend polarization.
Leadership is both something you are and something you do. ~Fred Smith, Founder Fed-Ex
Hate won’t win. ~Emanuel surviving family member
We get to choose.
That’s incredibly powerful. The surviving Mother Emanuel family members could have pointed the “I’m right, you’re wrong” finger.
No one would have thought ill of them if they had.
What they chose was to transcend differences of thought because they saw a greater good.
To see the greater good, they had to think big. Not thinking bigger—that is, not looking for the greater good that rises above individual preferences—gives rise to mistrust.
Mistrust then fuels all the ugly “isms”—racism, sexism, ageism, and the like—that divide us unnecessarily.
Wrapping ourselves in our “rightness” and others in their “wrongness” builds walls, not connections that serve a greater good.
In a world where the six degrees of separation have become four, where we’re dealing with the hate and horror of the Orlando shooting, where we’re experiencing the animosity of a contentious presidential campaign, it’s time, isn’t it, to replace mean-spiritedness with curiosity, compassion, and a skoosh of vulnerability?
Being mean and lashing out is easy.
Deciding, choosing, and using the “Charleston approach” is hard. Really hard but really purposeful.
It means stepping up to be our best self. We must develop self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-control, and open-mindedness.
It means being eternally vigilant in assessing if our beliefs have hardened into dogma. When we’re no longer open to considering what others have to say because we know our position is the right one, we’re putting our lack of skill in doubting on display.
It means being mindful of the degree of our skepticism. Asking questions is a good thing that can become a bad thing if we’re unwilling to believe other’s answers.
It means being willing to seek out the hidden flaws and virtues that lurk in our blind spots and being gentle with others regarding theirs.
If we choose, we can replace our unfounded judgments—thoughts like liberals are idiots, feminists are bad, and the like—with curiosity. When curiosity takes the lead, we approach what’s different with the orientation that there might be something to be learned from other’s points of view.
When we chose to make this shift, we let go of our absolute rightness. When we let go of the need to always be right, there’s room to accept ambiguity and paradox because we’ve decided to exchange automatic rejection based on selective facts for openness.
That choice is liberating.
When we use the “Charleston approach,” we’re choosing to think big, not small.
We’re choosing to react with curiosity and compassion, not hate or violence.
We choose to be the tipping point in which we start to appreciate differences rather than work to extinguish them.
Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong. ~Lao Tzu
To end the “-isms” that divide us, we have to resist being the rock that sees anger, judgment, and harshness as the answer.
When we decide to be the water, we can:
- Bridge the distance between races, sexes, and generations in a world primed to respond with bias and ill will.
- Celebrate the power and possibility that comes from differences in thought, opinion, and perspective.
- Engage in courageous-yet-respectful conversations in which we use our head to manage and our heart to lead.
If I had enough “Charleston approach” pixie dust and the help to spread it, we could end the polarization that gets us nowhere. Ready to be the water, join in, and scatter some “Charleston approach” pixie dust in your corner of the world?
Image source before quote added: Pixabay
