The Blows You've Taken

Building entrepreneurship with well-being at the heart.

Recently I’m beginning to write a book about my career in international horse racing—and it’s wonderful to remember a lot of it. My marketing and business development work there is what gave me all of the skills to do this work and I also travelled the world and experienced amazing things that I had dreamed about. But revisiting it also brought up visceral memories of all the blows a woman trying to succeed in work too often faces. Listen if you are a woman and have “done well” at anything I know you did it despite these blows. And so often we don’t even talk about them, we just end up quiet quitting and often leaving all our gains behind.

I was trying to work through it while I spoke to friends over the weekend and the weariness we all felt when we discussed the individual occurrences that stuck with us even after all this time was so palpable. I can remember my work being stolen by the CEO when I was in my early 20s, getting my first Vice President title only if all the men I worked alongside also got it because that wouldn’t be right if it was just me, etc. No wonder so many of us are heeding the call of entrepreneurship and are out here trying to build something different.

One of my goals for The Resiliency Club has been to make sure that what we do together keeps your well-being in mind. Particularly if you’ve weathered a lot of the blows that had nothing to do with your talent.

• Every blow that you had to take as a woman to defend your spot at the table.

• To be heard in rooms not designed to listen to you.

• To carry a male colleague along with you because it was the only way you were allowed to go to the next level.

• The rooms and events where access was only granted to men. Especially the ones you didn’t even know existed for a long time! You had to fight sooooo hard to be in those spots and honestly would have preferred not to have to be, but it was necessary for any career growth in that atmosphere.

These things on top of all the same things in every day society wore us out and some did real harm.

I want us to actually enact our values that pushing through isn’t the answer and if it takes a bit longer to decide to take action because of that, we’re ok with it. We have to make the consent culture we need even within ourselves. We’ll give ourselves the care, the information, the time to make that choice when it doesn’t hurt us. I know we have so much fear that this moment of choice and action will never come and we have to just force ourselves. But what I see instead is that the internal fear/self knowledge of that impending hurt stops people from taking action forever! A short delay while you care for yourself through the decision process is huge progress compared to never-going-to-happen.

And with some time and self kindness if you still don’t want to do the thing, that’s your decision made too. So many of us take on ideas of what we are supposed to want to do that actually don’t resonate. Free yourself from it and start actioning what it is you actually want to do! Yell ‘plot twist!’ and get on with the fun of figuring out what your really want.

I want you to know that I’ve been there and I know the impact of these past blows are often doubt and freeze or frantic hurry to try and do it before someone stops you. And I’ve got you while you try to figure out how to do things you dream about in a way that won’t consume you.

Susie

PS. If you feel like you don’t know how to start or how to help yourself understand what you really want I’ve got a rich, short audio course that will help you. How to Give Yourself Permission gives you a framework to figure out what it is you want, how to make the decision to move towards it, and what action looks like. It’s a great place to start. It’s 20 minutes of pure Aha!