Uncovering your awesome

What have you done lately that was awesome? What are you brilliant at? Will you tell me about those things?

From both my own personal experience and what I’ve seen from women I’ve worked with, an awful lot of you reading those questions just did a reflexive little curl in on yourself, trying very hard to make yourself smaller and hide away. It makes many of us squirm in our seats just to think about the ways in which we are brilliant, let alone to tell anyone about it.

The problem is that this is holding us back. It’s commonly quoted that men will apply for a promotion or a new role if they satisfy around 60% of the requirements but women are much more likely to wait until they fulfil all requirements before they will. We feel like we have to prove ourselves first rather than owning what we are already good at and seeing how we can grow and so we miss out on opportunities.

The reasons for us doing this can be many and varied but there are often common themes to the beliefs or back-stories that we hold:

• ‘Good girls don’t boast’
• ‘I don’t want to seem big-headed’
• 'It’s vulgar/not lady-like/rude' etc
• ‘I don’t think I’m actually that good’
• ‘They’ll find me out’
• ‘I get embarrassed by telling people I’m good at things’
• ‘I’m not actually achieving very much’
• And so on, and so on, and so on….

Which of these rings true for you?

If any (or all!) feel familiar and the idea of stepping up and owning your brilliance feels somewhat like climbing Everest then I’d invite you to work through the steps below. These are aimed at helping you to step out of your own way and start to recognise where you are being awesome.

Stop and look at what you are achieving. In fact, write it down. Write down all the things you have achieved in the last week. And I mean EVERYTHING. This doesn’t have to be award winning projects or promotions, though obviously anything like that should be on the list! This can include managing to keep small humans alive and fed, writing that report for that committee meeting, coaching that client, supporting a colleague, being a listening ear for a friend, doing the washing, doing your gym class. Look at just how quickly that list becomes pretty long! And then think what it would look like if you extended that to cover a month, or a year. These might seem like small things but, especially in the current world, these are all things that YOU are achieving. YOU ARE AMAZING.

Take the external view. Imagine you are a friend or a colleague or a stranger looking in at your life, looking over that list you just wrote. What would that person say about what you are doing? I want you to find at least 3 awesome things they would say about you. And I want you to write them down and say them to yourself every morning for the next week.

Check on the ‘little voice’. My suspicion is that somewhere through the previous two steps, a little voice in your head started saying ‘but….’ or ‘what about….’. Maybe it is saying ‘yes you did all those things on that list but you SHOULD have also done xyz’. Or it’s saying ‘yes your friend would say you’re doing well but you know they’re just being nice’ or ‘you know they’re doing it better than you are’. Firstly ask yourself a really important question, and be very honest here, IS THAT THE TRUTH? It isn’t, is it? So be aware of that. Our little inner voice gets worried and tries to trip us up but we can choose not to believe it. A good approach to this is to notice that little voice when it speaks up and thank it for it’s concern but recognise that you don’t agree with it.

These steps are about stepping around the blocks that we’ve created that are often getting in the way of us even seeing that we are awesome, let alone being able to show our awesomeness to other people. Over the next couple of days I’m going to invite you to take the next steps and start celebrating and sharing your brilliance.

Personally, I think owning your awesomeness is like a feedback loop. The more you do it, the easier it becomes and the more you step into that awesomeness and become even more brilliant. Because that’s what you are: BRILLIANT.