Permission Granted

Changing the Paradigm for Women in Leadership

Marcia A. Coné

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781683503347
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

A clear, accessible approach to aligning your thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors with what you truly want so you can live the best life you deserve. Do you feel like you're waiting for something to happen? Waiting and hoping that someone or something will transform your current situation? Many successful leaders find themselves frustrated and stuck. You work hard, do the right thing, play by the rules, and still feel like you don't know how to shift gears to achieve what you really want. Writing with warmth and insight, Marcia Coné shares an inspiring and supportive approach for managing your professional growth. Building on her insight and experience in leadership, Marcia offers opportunities for discovering and understanding your current situation from a different, more aligned perspective. When you tap into your ability to change your circumstances, you can much more easily achieve what you most want. Permission Granted is profoundly actionable. It is imbued with a positive outlook about change—why it can be difficult, how to engage on a personal level, and how to reframe your success. Experience the magic that happens when you align your thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors with what you truly want.

How Did I Get Here?

“Thankfully, dreams can change. If we’d all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses”

—Stephen Colbert

I hear this over and over again from clients, students, friends, family: “How did I get here? How did this happen? How did I not see this coming?” Often, when we peel back the layers of how, the information was there all along, but we chose to ignore it.

We ignore the information we need for making decisions that are right for us for a host of reasons. “I don’t have time to deal with it now. I don’t like the information that’s coming in. If I ignore it, it will go away. If I work hard enough it will get better.” And more. Our wonderful coping mechanisms serve us in many ways – until we don’t notice that they no longer serve us and they become dysfunctional patterns of avoidance that leave us asking how we arrived at this place we don’t want to be.

How Much Effort Is Involved?

Have you ever gone out with a group of friends and ordered what everyone else was having? Or couldn’t decide where you wanted to eat so ended up at the same place you always go, eating the same thing you always order? There is nothing inherently wrong with having the same dinner at the same place over and over again, or doing the same thing over and over again, except when we do so because making a decision to do something different feels like it takes too much effort, or when we give in to the belief that we’ll eventually have a different experience that will lead to different outcomes. A certain amount of ritual and routine is human and helps with productivity, consistency, and efficiency, and there is a place for that. However, it becomes a troubling problem when you do the same things, even though you are seeking different results.

We often conduct our interactions at home and at work to essentially replicate the same conversational patterns. Our hope is that the receiver will suddenly understand or hear us differently. Or that somehow, a small tweak in our tone or seriousness will evoke the sense that we really mean it this time. When we don’t get the result we want, we tell ourselves we tried, we put ourselves out there, but really we set up the same situation and expected it to go differently. If we are honest, we find some level of comfort in putting the responsibility for the sameness of our lives on our boss, our colleagues, our spouse, our children.

A friend of mine always says, “Nothing changes if nothing really changes.” Have you ever noticed that you come home after a shopping trip with essentially the same blouse, skirt, suit, tie you already have a closet full of? We go out looking for something new and come home with our good old standbys.

When we are not intentional about what we want, and when we don’t act differently, it should come as no surprise when we keep serving up the same thing. Real change, lasting change, is going to take some effort.

At work, when we make decisions not to contribute to the conversation, to opt out of new experiences or opportunities, to not challenge ourselves or others, we are being quite selfish. Yes, I’m saying that holding back is driven by selfishness, because we are trying to avoid the discomfort or fear or pain that might come with being more true and honest.

Here’s where I am going with all of this: What if liberating yourself is the very thing that will liberate others?

We dress up our motivation and call it selflessness, when really it’s self-abdication. We make others responsible for our frustrations and decisions, for our likes, dislikes, lack of promotions, and careers rather than being truthful with ourselves and others about what we want, who we really are, and what is holding us back.

Do We Fit In?

Substantial psychological research has empirically demonstrated that a status quo bias is commonplace among humans. We want to fit in, because we consider it safe. Many of us work very hard at staying in our comfort zone and riding the status quo. We are wired to be biased toward the status quo, to keep things pretty much as they are and avoid change. This becomes irrational when there is no evidence that supports keeping things the same. When we are not producing our desired outcome by continuing to do the same thing – that’s when we need to risk a change.

Often, we don’t even recognize that there are other ways of doing things, because the status quo is all we’ve ever noticed. As humans, and certainly as evidenced by our culture, we are pushed, cajoled, shamed, and humiliated into assimilation. We may want very badly to fit in – even when fitting in means aligning with the counter culture. The human brain is evolutionarily wired to resist behavior that risks alienation because breaking away from the tribe used to mean danger and death. So we quickly and unthinkingly submit to what is standard, common, or accepted – instead of considering how doing so may have fatal consequences.

And so it is with our careers.

Businesses and organizations all have a cultures of their own – both formal and informal. Employees quickly learn the ropes about how, when, and where to line up. We are indoctrinated about how things are done and advised to see how the chain of command really works. Even if you’ve been hired to be the disruptor or the innovator, the push to assimilate and to align with company culture and norms is enormous. More often than not, the new employee who’s brought in to be a disruptor starts to look, sound, and work according to the rules. They do so in order to survive. It’s human nature to do all we can to survive.

But it’s also human nature to grow.

Where’s the Proof?

We get stuck in perpetuating assumptions, myths, fear, and resistance to change, even when they don’t serve us or our cause. We make assumptions every day and test them out routinely. We assume that 30 minutes is enough time to get from our home to the office, that meetings will finish on time, and so on. In general, we are okay with making these assumptions and updating them to avoid miscalculating time or resources if something has changed.

When we try to revise our assumptions about our careers, however, we can trigger some hefty emotions that trip us up. Suddenly, our ability to take risks and to revise our calculations regarding time, and resources related to the risk paralyzes us. We evaluate what we will and won’t do at work based heavily on our assumptions.

Harvard researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey developed a coaching process called Immunity to Change. What was pivotal for me about learning their process was realizing the opportunity it gives us to face up to our assumptions and take on the task of challenging them. Identifying an assumption helps us see the barriers we have constructed and test the assumption, and that may inform and change beliefs we’ve held that are holding us back. Challenging our assumptions is a way of reframing that can powerfully shift thinking and free us to move forward.

As Kegan and Lahey also point out, it’s our hidden assumptions about competing commitments that keep us from achieving what we want. We may set goals or entertain dreams for our careers without really considering the intended and unintended outcomes. Other times, we may be so buried in overthinking that we forfeit the intended and unintended outcomes without ever taking a shot at it.

Similarly, adopting myths as truths can wedge its way into our thinking. Accounts and tales of what happened to other employees, about who is eligible for a promotion, about speaking up, offering ideas, having opinions, about working hard and keeping your nose to the grindstone, about getting noticed – such myths are part of what helps keep us stuck in an idling state. Many of us spend so much time working hard and get frustrated when we realize our hard work isn’t paying off. Usually, at that point, we push ourselves to work even harder, assuming that, somehow, more of the same hard work will make a difference.

And so the cycle continues.

We perpetuate the myth of hard work and psychologically punish ourselves over and over. Hard work for the sake of hard work is a self-punishment. When we are in that space we cannot see that we are limiting ourselves. We are saying that there is something wrong with us and/or our work ethic, rather than evaluating the situation more closely to see what is really happening.

I’m not advocating that we not give our best work. Quite the opposite. Our best work doesn’t come when we are forcing ourselves to try to make things happen through hard work when working harder cannot achieve our goal. No amount of air can fill a punctured tire. The tire requires a patch or replacing. Your repeated efforts to fill the punctured tire – your hard work toward a direction you may not want to actually go – has no bearing on the reality of the situation. In fact, your focus on the “hard work” has kept you from seeing the bigger picture and finding solutions.

How Do We Respond?

Playing it safe with your career and in your current position can also be a major factor in getting you to a point of feeling stuck, dissatisfied, or unclear about what you really want. Playing it safe means that fear directs your actions or inaction. Playing it safe at work can look like this: not networking with colleagues or others in your industry and beyond; not scheduling one-on-one meetings with your boss and other leaders in the company; not asking for feedback; doing it yourself because you don’t trust your team; not asking for opportunities or assignments that stretch you.

When we are about to do something outside of our comfort zone or normal way of being, our bodies signal to us through a physiological reaction informing us there is some threat. If you take a moment and think about a specific time when you were about to do something new, you can likely conjure up the feelings of discomfort and where they lived in your body.

That’s the physiological response. What’s crucial is what happens after that response. Often this physiological response is all we pay attention to, so we decide that the perceived threat is real and we stop before we even get started. The flight-or-fight response is very real and provides important information for us to consider. In many cases, the response doesn’t signal a red light, but rather a yellow light telling you to proceed with caution. Yet many of us misinterpret the physiological information over and over again without ever questioning our response or getting curious about what the information is telling us.

We have the opportunity to challenge ourselves and process the physiological information we are receiving by asking a few simple questions:

• “What other information do I need?”

• “Is what I perceive actually true?”

• “What assumptions have I made?”

• “What myths am I preserving?”

• “What small steps can I take to test out what I’m experiencing?”

• “How can I move forward?”

Even when we have answered all of these questions and determined that we are safe to take a risk, we can still be resistant to change. Volumes of research from the fields of psychology, health care, social work, and other disciplines tell us that humans are resistant to change even ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 How Did I Get Here?
• Chapter 2 What Keeps Me Here Where I Don’t Want to Be?
• Chapter 3 Why Am I So Afraid of Change?
• Chapter 4 What Do I Really Want?
• Chapter 5 How Do I Get What I Really Want?
• Chapter 6 What Happens If I Need to Change Again?
• Conclusion How Does My Life Look Now?
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Thank You