Everyday Bliss For Women In Leadership

My buddy Donna Steinhorn, of the Association of Coaching Excellence just tapped me to reply to a post she made over at her blog on what we do to give away our power and how we can get it back. I’m happy to oblige with a few thoughts on the matter…good question!

Hey Donna, Donna!  For giving away power, I’ll have to go with you and say it’s getting dragged *back* into things that I had already found support on…then found support staff wasn’t doing what I needed them to. I’ve made out reams of instructions, spent personal time, taught them how to teach/create/whatever, and even set up a support help desk.

Yet, when the salami hits the fan, my students and customers complain directly to me as the buck really does stop here, on my desk. Sometimes though, no matter how much I gently redirect their complaints to the help desk, or counsel with an employee how to deal with the complaint on their own, I still occasionally, find myself embroiled in the thick of things.

This is a liminal time. Liminal, in the sense that it represents both a challenge and an opportunity. An opportunity, that comes to me in the form of empowering others to deal with things on their own that I have told the Universe I do not wish to deal with anymore. And by golly, it’s working, and the staff do their jobs really well for the most part. A challenge though, to shape gently and minimally, letting others do their own work without the temptation to become re-involved.

I stand on the threshold of two doorways, a hallmark of liminality.

One doorway, holds the new life I have affirmed over and over and over (and over…) that I want to lead. Not doing the "busy" in my job, but handing it off to others who are so much better at it. Not doing the main bulk of teaching in the post-graduate program I created, but hiring brilliant and qualified teachers from my own pool of graduates. Not coding every webpage and shopping cart item in my online store, but jobbing it out to the nicest VA’s in the world, who also run my help desk with polish and elan.

Life is good through this beautiful doorway. Life is as I want it to be. With this support system in place, I now have the time to create again that I badly needed, to cause my business and life mission (the two are indivisible really) to take off and truly fly. And lo and behold, it has.

But annoyingly sometimes, there is that other doorway. Rimmed in flame, in my imagination. The doorway through which previously ingrained pattern behavior wants to pull me backwards into the mental maelstrom of "no one can do it as good as I can!"  and "it takes me as long to teach them to do it as it would be for me to do it myself!".  Cue energy and power flowing away and down the drain.

That way lies insanity. Here there be Dragons.

While I have strayed back through the Flaming Door a few times in the past few months, such jaunts are becoming rarer and rarer. And it’s really okay if some folks think I’m a bitch because I don’t continually give and give and give to them of my time, expertise and energy, asking them instead to deal with the appropriate staff member. That nearly always happens when you make a shift like this. (watch for it…) And it’s okay if the staff doesn’t do it perfect, doesn’t get it right the first time or makes a spelling mistake (aaaaggh!!! pet-peeve-o-rama!) in official correspondence. Really, it is.

How I’ve made trips to the past in terms of pattern behavior dwindle to nothing is first by doing energy work, such as NLP processes, EFT, ZPoint Process or others on the patterns I know sabotage and weaken me. That done, I focus entirely on feeling good, to quote Wayne Dyer and Abraham-Hicks. Taking a page from Dr. Andrew Weil, I eschew the news more and more for reading things that educate and make me feel better and take also his prescription of a deep belly-laugh at least one a day…but you never can chuckle just once, can you?

And I take a leaf out of my own book on Bliss in slowing down, way down, no matter what. It’s a lifesaving move, and one you’ll thank yourself for. I remember Kim George’s sage quote: that nothing which is meant for me can be lost, and I reflect that I have all the time in the world, all I’ll ever need. That is a richness of reserve that keeps me looking towards the beautiful door, that keeps me going through it every day when I wake up, with singleminded intensity. 

Andy Andrews said that to truly succeed at anything, we must persist without exception. I choose to be happy every day. I choose to go through the beautiful door and live in the life I am dreaming into being. I choose to persist without exception in these things. That’s how I do it. There’s no "Secret" to it, there’s no magic other than consistently persisting in making these pivotal choices.

So how about you, dear reader? How do YOU give your power away and what do you do about it when you notice your energy going down the tubes to a power drain?

Leave a comment and let Donna and I know! 

And…I’d like to tag Krishna De, Jasmine White, Tara Katchaturoff, Suzanne Falter-Barns, Andy Wibbels, Jennifer Louden and Ellen Britt! Tag, you’re it!

Have you found this? Because we have such different ways of processing and working together, experimentation is rife, ideas flow and merge and new forms are created.  Lucy Ward and John Carvel of the London newspaper, The Guardian, found this to be the case:

“ Teams of workers come up with the most innovative ideas if they are made up of even proportions of men and women, according to researchers. A study published yesterday by the London Business School found that professional teams with an equal gender split were much more likely to experiment, share knowledge and fulfil tasks, regardless of whether the team leader was a man or a woman.

An even mix allowed "a psychological safe communication climate" and self-confidence among members, which in turn provided fertile ground for innovation, says the report from the school’s Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business. ”

If you’re gender segregating your teams, now might be the time to integrate.

Read the whole article here