Sharing your process to hold onto your personal power

I was on a zoom call last week with a woman from Germany. That's her in the photo. We've never met in person. We live across the world from one another. I'm probably old enough to be her mom. Doesn't matter. Connection happens. We happily nerd out together about neuroscience hacks, emotional intelligence, neurodivergence and more.

B?rbel was one of the first people to read my new book, Paddle Your Own Boat, after it was published on the first day of December. Paddle Your Own Boat: Stories and strategies from a leadership coach and her clients: Saxon, Cristine: 9798867199562: Books - Amazon.ca

She liked it a lot. As we talked about bits of the content, she zoned in on one concept I created: share your process.

Without having named it as share your process, it turns out that B?rbel has been doing it for years. We decided to co-write this article to help you understand the concept and find ways to use it yourself to paddle your own boat.

Have you inadvertently been giving away your power?

Sharing your process involves sharing what you know about yourself so that others are less likely to misunderstand, mislabel or misinterpret you. It feels good to be understood. Like me and B?rbel, you may inadvertently and unknowingly give away your power, at times, by allowing other people's automatic brain activity (biases, assumptions, rescuing or sympathetic reactions, judgements, past experiences) to guess what's going on or to make up stories about you. Often unintentionally, people will then treat you according to these false truths that their unconscious and, in this case, unhelpful brains developed in the absence of you providing any counter-evidence.

Helping people understand you, on your terms, is a powerful way to paddle.

Sharing your process can be simple. You could say: "I'm tired today, so you may notice that I'm quiet." This simple statement shared in the moment can take the light off of you, and decrease the likelihood of being seen as moody, unpredictable, disengaged or aloof. You're simply tired.

As B?rbel knows, I live with fibromyalgia, an invisible disability involving daily chronic pain and brain fog. I've been learning to share my process to avoid being seen as incompetent, fragile, or faking it (a previous GP wouldn't even say "fibromalgia" -- it was like his own forbidden 'f word'). It's vulnerable to share this with you today, and I'm doing so with courage, my own and inspired by B?rbel's.

Here's B?rbel's story of how sharing her process helps take back her power and improve her relationship with herself and others.

"Being a direct and straight-shooting woman in a society where it’s still kind of a social rule to be mostly soft, kind, caring, subtle and somewhat submissive in social interactions, leads to lots of misunderstandings and conflicts.

Adding to the pile that I identify as autistic (undiagnosed) and due to a car accident, I’m paralyzed and I’m using a wheelchair. Just stop right there for a second and have a close look at the picture your precious unconscious created for you of me. Let it sink in for a moment and compare it to reality at the end of this article.

So having a different operating system than the majority of humans and additionally having a visible disability, almost always opens the door to all the biases and judgements people do have and WILL project onto you. It’s normal. That’s how we all survive. We put people into vague categories so we can make quick decisions in an emergency or focus our energy on the person in the group we wanna mate with. While this is a more or less helpful concept if you cross paths with a stranger in a dark alley, it’s not applicable to in-depth social interactions and connecting on a deeper level with humans.

We know that biodiversity makes systems healthier and more balanced. Same goes for neurodiversity. There’s a reason for why we’re all different in some ways. We’re all adding value to the system by being our highly individualized self. With all the strengths we had to acquire to survive the struggle we call life, nature and nurture, our upbringing, education, past trauma, personality, values, weird interests, weaknesses and whatever makes you being YOU.

That’s a whole lot to grasp in a few seconds observing another human before your brain starts categorizing. It’s impossible to not do it or to be totally right about your conclusions. Mostly we project what we fear the most or what we desire. So what’s the deal here? How can we reduce our false information we basically just made up in our own head?

We have to actively put effort into it to give people the information they need to make their conclusions and/or decisions about us. So why not giving them at least the right kind of labels to work with by being honest to ourselves and the person we’re interacting with? The hardest part comes later: making it work even with all the interesting differences.

Here come two of Cristine’s strategies into the game:

1. Notice it. Name it. Navigate it.
2. Share your process.

For me this means to observe your own patterns of being (notice), label it (or name it) and find a way to make it work with another individual (navigate) + sharing it so the other person has the opportunity to do the same.

How does it look like in real life situations?

It could be as simple as:

“I’m autistic. I have a tendency to be more direct than you might be used to. Don’t mistake it for me being confrontational or wanting to start a fight. I’m just really interested in who you are.”

Or “I have fibromyalgia and I’m in pain right now so if I appear unconcentrated that’s why and it has nothing to do with how interesting I find our conversation and how much I care about you.”

Try to be just confident enough to address your struggle, be aware of and ask questions to clarify your own assumptions and biases and try to be more of yourself if you’re trying to make it work and connect on a deeper level.

Also: It’s not always working out. If we accept that we’re all inherently different in many ways - we have to accept that we can’t make everything work out with everyone. But hopefully more often than not - at least in those cases where it really matters to us.

Happy authentic paddling guys."

May you paddle your own boat in the ways that serve you best,

Cristine and B?rbel

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