Tag: leadership

Bossy Pants – Confidence and Leadership

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“Kid, you’ll move mountains.” – Dr. Seuss

The other day my 6-year-old daughter Miss O, came home from school and told me about a conversation she had with a friend at recess.

Miss O: You are bossing me.

Friend: You’ve been bossing me since Kindergarten

There are times as a parent that I try not to laugh. This wasn’t one of them – I burst into laughter and my daughter laughed right alongside me. It sounds so dramatic that way – so much better than just last year. It also reminded me how early that word bossy is introduced for these young and precious girls.

It’s the fear of being called bossy that has made my confidence as a leader falter. I say that after 20 years of having my own business, teaching employees and subcontractors and being accountable to a bottom line for both my family and my company.

In the years that I’ve had business partners for my computer consulting business, they’ve always been male and I’ve been far more comfortable with them providing the visible leadership. Even when I’ve had better ideas, more experience and am the one calling the shots.

About a dozen years ago, I owned a small office building with two business partners that housed my consulting company offices. We’d purchased the building in 2007 at the height of the market. When things got messy because one business partner told me of my husband’s infidelities and my husband was the other business partner, our partnership in my consulting business fell apart and I bought back their shares in that company. But we still owned the building together and after the 2008 crash, the value of the building was less than its mortgage.

My partners were no longer interested in being involved, the building couldn’t make ends meet and I had to do something. So I went to the Small Business Administration and asked them to restructure the loan for the building. The advisor gave me a list of things I had to do like changing all the tenant leases and restructuring the accounting.

Five months later I scheduled an appointment with the SBA advisor, showed him the list and all that I had done to meet each point. He sat back and said, “I’m impressed.” I wondered why because all I’d done was what he’d told me. He replied, “Because not many people come back after I give the list of what needs to be done.” I burst into tears. Even through my tears, he restructured the loan for me anyway and when the market came back enough so we could sell the building, I finally sold it and ended the partnership with those guys.

And still after all that, I didn’t have the confidence to call myself a leader until about age 50 when I had children as a single person and they looked at me asking “what are we going to do today?”

Brené Brown defines a leader as “anyone who holds him or herself accountable for finding potential in people or processes.”  Fortunately that’s a definition that is broad enough for me to confidently own my leadership. Given that I’ve been leading for years, one wonders why I haven’t had the confidence to do so til now.

“Bossy” says it in one word. I don’t want to be called that word that people use for girls as early as first grade (and maybe earlier).

Brené Brown has a model of types of power as they relate to leadership (link goes to a PDF of the model). She differentiates people who lead using power over “believe that power is finite and use fear to protect and hoard power” from those who lead using power with/to/within. Those leaders in the latter category “center connection and humanity with empathy-driven agendas, policies and values.”

Those are a lot of big words for a first-grader but I think it’s worth trying to talk to my daughter about how to build confidence in leadership and power. I think any leader, male or female, who works with the power with/to/within is more effective because they believe that “getting it right is more important than being right.” And building on my daughter’s sense of empathy, she can learn the confidence to work with others to lead and not fear being called bossy.

Have you ever been called bossy? Do you think of yourself as a leader? If so, what gives you confidence as a leader?

This is my fourth post about confidence. Here are the others:

I Can

Fear and Confidence

Growth Mind-set

(featured photo from Pexels)

To Sit or To Stand

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“Our bodies are our gardens – our wills are our gardeners.” – William Shakespeare

My friend Phil guided big mountains for more than 40 years. His adventures have included guiding Dick Bass when he dreamed up the Seven Summits goal to climb the tallest mountain in each continent, being the first American to climb the Chinese side of Mt. Everest, and after climbing all seven summits in his 30’s, he did them all again in his 50’s with his wife when she wanted to reach the goal. When I met him 20 years ago, he had just summitted Mt. Rainier for the 400th time and I’m not sure where the count stands today but somewhere around 500. All that is to say, he’s climbed and guided a lot. And the only person he lost in a mountaineering accident was his assistant guide on Mt. Denali. They had two rope teams coming back down from the summit when a client on the assistant’s rope team started having trouble with a crampon on his boot. The assistant guide unclipped from the rope to help and then fell to his death.

I think of this story when I realize I’ve extended myself too far to help someone. I have a very strong tendency to “dig deep” when I need to access that extra gear to pull through. I learned it from climbing – that extra push to get to the summit and that auxiliary well to draw from when the conditions change and getting to back to the parking lot is farther and tougher.

With parenting, I find myself digging deep a lot. When a child needs help with that last 1000 feet to the car and I put them on my shoulders. Or something falls through with child care and I need to take care of my kids in the day and work at night. Or another parent in our village has an emergency so I change my plans to pick up the slack and have to cancel my self-care time. Or COVID hits and everything is canceled…

All very worthy reasons that I’m more than happy to dig deep for. But when I climb into bed exhausted for the 300th night in a row and my hips and back ache because I spent another day “digging deep,” I wonder if this is the way to live. That is to say, am I destroying myself because I don’t know my limits when I should say stop and rest?

Then this delightful post from the MSW Blog reminded me of something else I learned from mountain guides. It was my very first climb when I learned this maxim from them: If you can stand, you can sit and if you can sit, you can lie down. And when I see Phil these days, he exudes that. He’s retired from guiding and looks as completely at ease sitting back in his leather chair as he did on the mountains. And he’s still full of mountain wisdom that tells us you can’t lead a team if you aren’t caring for yourself too.

Discovering our Plenitude

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“When little people are overwhelmed by big emotions it’s our job to share our calm, not join their chaos.” L.R. Knost

Yesterday was our first day back to “life” after our short vacation to Whidbey Island. My toddler had to go back to daycare, my 5-year-old daughter had nothing planned because it was the first day of summer break at home and I tried to work while my nanny hung out with my daughter. After the little bit bumpy jarring of re-entry, we were all together last night and found ourselves gathered around the strawberry planter on the back patio. The warm weather and lack of pickers for few days meant it had about eight perfectly ripe berries.

My son, who at almost two years old doesn’t have a perfect picking technique and sometimes will eat the stem, was first to get his hands in there. Which led my five-year-old daughter to want to control the process. She started grabbing berries and instead of eating them, just holding them in her hands. She then grabbed one out of my son’s hands in an effort to pluck the stem out for him and he started to melt down. In good circumstances, he lets her do most everything and she’s quite supportive of him but in that moment, all the pains of the day descended and for everyone, THERE WASN”T ENOUGH!

I was trying to manage the scrum all the while observing the feeling of when life doesn’t go our way. When we get parked in our small spaces because something has been hard or tiring and suddenly there’s no energy to be expansive, to recognize that there’s enough. Everything centers on one moment when that ball in the gut feels like it needs to get fed or else.

This is one of the first times that I observed that happening collectively to us as a family. Probably not because it hasn’t happened before but because I wasn’t tuned in to see it. When it happens to me as an individual, if I can have a split second of awareness, one deep breath helps me start to break the pull of it. But the group dynamic flummoxed me until the cat jumped onto the fence and everyone looked up at the sound and it broke the tension.

I don’t like these moments. They pull me out of my happy place, or my I’m doing fine place, whichever I am at, and remind me of my humanity. When we break into a collective feeling of scarcity and panic, I feel like walking away. I heard Melinda French Gates once describe a family as a mobile and that moms often take on the job of keeping the whole system balanced. Sometimes I don’t feel like leading but the strawberry scrum is so ripe for a teaching moment, for me and for my children. It offers the chance practice awareness, distraction and feeding our possibility, expansiveness and calm and because I know they’ll be many more, also gratitude for the opportunity to remember we always have enough.

Parenting in a Pandemic

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“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” – Pablo Picasso

On this 263rd day of coronavirus shutdown, my five-year-old daughter asked me “What are we doing today?” as she has for most every day. It made me realize that parenting and parenting in a pandemic has made me a leader. Which probably makes me a little slow to get it, especially if you go with University of Houston researcher Brene Brown’s definition of a leader as “anyone who holds him or herself accountable for finding potential in people or processes.”

I don’t think of myself as a leader. Instead I think of myself as independent and that is how I choose to become a parent as a single person. I also think of myself as a nurturer and that has fostered my relationship with my healthy kids. But naming that I’m called to be a leader of my little family has some usefulness – it makes the work more intentional and it makes exploration, play and boredom seem like essential tools of the job. It also amplifies my gratitude that I can say on many days, “I don’t know, your aunt or nana will be here soon!” Because parenting in a pandemic is hard and even leaders need a break!