Posts Tagged ‘power’
Power Tool #9: Tell Your Story
“Stories are medicine for our false isolation. A way to forge connection and community and help shift our course . . . the seed forms of culture we carry around within us.” ~Nina Simons, founder of Bioneers
Your story is your power and your truth.
My friend, the master storyteller and storytelling teacher Laura Simms, sees stories as a path to healing oneself and the world. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, told a story that changed how Americans thought about slavery and intensified support for abolition. It became the second best-selling book of the Nineteenth Century, behind only the Bible, itself a collection of stories.
In fact, throughout the writing of No Excuses and on the 9 Ways Blog, I’ve been most inspired by the stories of women, and men. They have moved me, mentored me, and taught me. I hopes their stories do the same for you when you read them.
I’ve told my own life story so often I am sometimes bored with it, but it is always what people are most interested in, no matter what other substantive content I might think I prefer to impart.
- What stories do you tell yourself about yourself? How do they enhance or limit you?
- What story would you like to share with us today? Please do!
- How have stories moved you to take action at work, in politics, or in your personal life?
Power Tool #5: Carpe the Chaos
Political talking heads slicing and dicing Nov. 2’s election results had previously declared this to be the year of the Republican rightwing woman. It wasn’t quite. Still, it’s a dagger to the heart of social justice feminism that the nation’s first two women of color elected governor are not women who support women’s rights to economic and reproductive justice–the two fundamental building blocks of women’s power and agency in this world. We have a lot of work to do.
It’s our job to find the opportunity–to carpe the chaos. To be a beacon of light when so many of our leaders are co-opted rather than courageous, and to take the initiative without delay. Post-election regrouping with its inevitable jockeying for power is the perfect launching pad for future victories. On the positive side, the Colorado ballot initiative that would have given personhood rights to the fertilized egg but not to the woman failed by a three-to-one margin. So let’s build on that to foster the paradigm shift in gender power that is sorely needed.
Read MoreEmbracing Controversy Means Standing By Your Convictions
Tuesday’s elections were disappointing, to say the least, for me as a progressive woman. But this isn’t the time to throw up our hands in defeat. It’s time to regroup and lead ourselves forward. Today I listened and tweeted up with the Name It Change It campaign. I learned that their polling data backs up my contention that it’s a good thing to embrace controversy, rather than run away from it, if you’re a woman in politics (Republican or Democrat–as pollster Celinda Lake commented “Sexism is one of the very few bipartisan things”).:
Read MoreCelinda Lake, of Lake Research Associates, spearheaded research measuring how gender-based attacks negatively affect voter perception of female candidates…Lake explains, “Up until this research was conducted, I often advised women to ignore toxic media sexism. But now, women candidates are equipped with evidence that shows they can recover voter confidence from sexist media coverage by directly addressing it, and standing up for all current and future women leaders.”
Questions for Democrats Post Election
In many ways, today is like where I came into national leadership. It was 1996, after the1994 Gingrich revolution Republican sweep of Congress, in a huge Tea Party-like backlash against the progressive initiatives of President Bill Clinton’s first term.
While I’m processing the key question in my mind–why do the Democrats never learn????–I want to share questions that Political Voices of Women’s Pamela Kemp put forward last night:
Read MoreIt’s Up to Women to Organize
Marylene Delbourg-Delphis reviewed No Excuses on her blog Grade A Entrepreneurs. She has generously allowed me to reprint the article here on Heartfelt.
Last Friday, Marian Scheuer Sofaer invited a few friends for a breakfast in Palo Alto, CA with Gloria Feldt, who presented her now famous book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think about Power. A great intimate setting early in the morning that did not diminish Gloria’s energy and determination to fight for the cause of women: “Women today,” she said, “are in the midst of an unfinished revolution.” While it is true that women have come a long way (“maybe”), parity is still not here – women’s salaries are still lower than men’s, and as of September 2010, the United States ranks 73rd among 186 countries in its percentage of women serving in national parliaments (not to mention the dismal percentage of women in the boardrooms, etc.). “Women need to lead their own way forward.”
Gloria Feldt states the problem unambiguously: “By far the most confounding problem facing women today is not that doors aren’t open, but that women aren’t walking through the open doors in numbers and with the intention sufficient to transform society’s major institutions once and for all.” The former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (who had given birth to three children by the age of 20), Gloria Feldt offers a relevant flashback on Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), who opened a birth control clinic in 1916. Not only did she transform her convictions into actions, she did not ask for permission: she did it.
The book evolves around a very interesting analysis of the relationship of women to power. Most of the time, “power” boils down to being a demonstration of force, through attitudes, rhetorical means and the like; in other words, the word denotes a “power over” things, situations, or people. This is a vision of power with which women are traditionally uncomfortable, as it reeks of centuries of servitude and bullying. Implicitly getting back to the actual etymology of the word, Gloria Feldt exhorts women to understand the term as designating “the ability to,” and speaks of a “power to…” This means: the capacity to accomplish things, and before anything else, the faculty of ridding oneself from the fear of coming across in an unfeminine fashion or a sort of “bluestocking.”
This latter is a term that ended up being used derisively to stigmatize educated women in the 18th century, targeting the members of the Blue Stockings Society, an important educational and social movement created in England by Elizabeth Montegu (and to which the first woman-programmer in history, Ada Byron Lovelace belonged!)
Read MoreIt’s Time for Women to Step Up
Nicole Baute from The Star asked me to share some of the central messages of No Excuses when she interviewed me last week. Here is an excerpt from that interview.
You called your book No Excuses. Do you think that women are coming up with excuses for why we aren’t getting a little more power and a little more pay?
The honest truth is that my title was Unlimited and the publishers made me change it. They wanted something more controversial. I tend to take the positive approach. I think this is the moment for women, but I did want to sound a clarion call to women to say, this is a moment, but you have to take it. Things won’t just happen.
Why would you have preferred Unlimited?
Because I am hopeful, I am optimistic and I believe that this is just an incredible time for women.
Why is now an incredible time?
Well, the rest of the world knows it. I’m not sure we always do. For example, the World Bank has done studies that found that Parliaments that have 30 or 40 per cent women on them make better decisions, they have less corruption, the performance is better. Marketers know that women buy 85 per cent of the goods.
That old thinking, why is it still persisting?
Read MorePower Tool #3: Use What You’ve Got
In No Excuses, I share this dream I had one night. I was in my out of control speeding car, and I couldn’t stop it. I slowly realized the keys to the car were in my hand, and they had been all along.
You don’t have to sit in the shrink’s office to figure out the metaphor in that dream! Have you ever had a similar experience?
To be able to use power, the first thing you’ve got to do is realize that you have it. I’ve found in personal life and in meeting challenges at work that what you need is usually there if you can only see it and have the courage to use it.
Here are just a few examples women shared with me about how to use what you’ve got:
Read MoreTime to Change How We Think About Power
Check out this piece I just wrote for More.com on why it’s time for women to change how we think about power.
I want women to reach parity while I’m still alive to see it. But at the rate we’re going, that will take 70 years.
Google “women and power conference” and you’ll get over 50 million results. Google “men and power conference” and you get 49 million. But a quick scan through the top-ranked conferences tells you that the majority of the latter are actually conferences about women and power that happen to mention men.
Full disclosure: I have attended many such events, including a few years back the invitation-only Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit during my 40 years of activism for women.. I believe in celebrating successes along the bumpy path to equality, and my new book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power , exhorts women to embrace their power and blast through the doors now open to us. I want women to reach parity while I’m still alive to see it. But at the rate we’re going, that will take 70 years.
Women are 60 percent of college graduates, 50 percent of the workforce, and yet according to the White House Project, constitute a mere 18 percent of the top leadership roles across all sectors of business and political office. So I get a bit testy about the proliferation of conferences that exist to puff up women’s egos around how powerful we are yet have no agenda to break through the remaining barriers, advance women who are not so powerful, or even to use their positions systematically to bring other women through the doors we’ve struggled to open.
Some remaining barriers are external. For example, hiring officials often assume resumes bearing women’s names represent less competence than the same resume with a man’s name attached, and the physical appearance of women running for political office comes under greater media scrutiny than that of men. Still, in my research, I found that with legal barriers down and almost every position having seen a “first woman,” most of the barriers that remain are culturally induced, They are lodged now within ourselves and how women think about and engage with power in our own lives.
Read MoreWhat Does Power-To Look Like?
On Monday I asked you when you first realized that you had the power to . . . And I gave you a brief glimpse at my definition of what power-to looks like. Here’s another look at what power-to means:
Power-over focuses on tactics for gaining compliance, while leadership focuses on getting answers and solutions in order to be able to accomplish something for mutual good.
Power-over makes people feel powerless. Even if it isn’t force or brute power, but a manipulative power such as political dominance, the feeling that one has no control over one’s choices makes her disgruntled, angry, or passive-aggressive.
Power-to makes us feel powerfull.
Power-to supports and enhances whatever power the individual brings to a project, workplace, relationship, or civic activity. It abhors coercion. It opens up the possibility of choices; the ability to choose is what makes us human. Choosing is the basis of morality.
Power-over is amoral. Power-to is responsibility.
Power-over is oppression. Power-to is leadership.
What are your thoughts about this definition? How does it change your ideas about power and leadership? Can you give examples of the use of either definitioneof power?
Read MoreWhat Does Power-To Look Like?
On Monday I asked you when you first realized that you had the power to . . . And I gave you a brief glimpse at my definition of what power-to looks like. Here’s another look at what power-to means:
Power-over focuses on tactics for gaining compliance, while leadership focuses on getting answers and solutions in order to be able to accomplish something for mutual good.
Power-over makes people feel powerless. Even if it isn’t force or brute power, but a manipulative power such as political dominance, the feeling that one has no control over one’s choices makes her disgruntled, angry, or passive-aggressive.
Power-to makes us feel powerfull.
Power-to supports and enhances whatever power the individual brings to a project, workplace, relationship, or civic activity. It abhors coercion. It opens up the possibility of choices; the ability to choose is what makes us human. Choosing is the basis of morality.
Power-over is amoral. Power-to is responsibility.
Power-over is oppression. Power-to is leadership.
What are your thoughts about this definition? How does it change your ideas about power and leadership? Can you give examples of the use of either definitioneof power?
Read More