Unpopular Opinion

Welcome to Mostly, the newsletter for women who love leadership. Because yes, there are fewer of us than there should be, but that doesn't mean that those leading aren't loving it - most of the time.

The fun stuff follows, but something has been on my mind;

At my school, the Venn diagram of the smart and popular looked like a pair of binoculars. I would love to think it’s different now, but when I was in school, where I was in school, kids could be dickheads to each other.

I was smart, and so I wasn’t popular.

Internalising that false correlation took the sting out of being uninvited.

So, being smart became my thing. If I work hard, I will succeed. Working hard is good, and being popular is bad—or if not bad, perhaps lazy. When I entered the workplace, I worked hard and expected that to be enough. I judged those who invested in being liked.

I wonder if this sounds familiar to any of you.

But what I came to realise is that success in business is a team sport. There is no win unless we all win. Interestingly, Fortune found that 65% of the most powerful women in business played sports. But I digress.

Popularity has never sat comfortably with me.

This week, I reached 2,000 followers.

While 2,000 LinkedIn followers are hardly enough to get me invited to Strictly (though if anyone with authority is reading this, I am very interested!), it is still twice as many as I had this time last year.

The popularity sits uncomfortably with me.

And yet here I am. Grateful for the gift of your attention.

So, let's celebrate with a LinkedIn trope...

Unpopular opinion:

Mindfulness is not for everyone. For trauma survivors (61% of adults) , this form of connection doesn't always feel safe. Those who are selling mindfulness often fail to acknowledge this.

Manifestation and other mind-over-matter doctrines are victim-blaming and leave too many feeling guilty for situations beyond their control. On a societal level, cultural theorist Lauren Berlant described it as cruel optimism: the great lie that you can find individual solutions to structural problems.

Allyship risks very little , whereas solidarity work requires risking our place/privilege within systems to dismantle them. I am tired of allies.

Yoga without its cultural and spiritual context is cultural appropriation . Imagine a workplace that schedules a "Catholic workout" where everyone repeatedly stands, kneels and sits.

Supervision (a specialised form of mentoring for practitioners responsible for undertaking challenging work with people) is a value of the BACP Ethical Framework. It is unethical to encourage employees to take personal issues to their manager and not provide managers with BACP supervision.

Authenticity isn't always a virtue . The worst people you know are probably entirely authentic.

If you can bring your whole self to work , you are either an excruciating colleague or need more exciting hobbies. The best people I know won't tell you what they got up to at the weekend. It's not shame. It's privacy.

"Women are just better at this stuff" patronises competent men, excuses incompetent men and encourages people to negatively judge women who are not "just better at this stuff".

Working from home so that you can do more domestic work while your male partner commutes isn't the feminist victory you might think it is.

Too many women's benefits conversations begin and end with maternity rights. Women who are child-free by choice, women who are yet to decide, women who are going through IVF, women who have decided not to continue with IVF, transwomen and women for whom pregnancy is just not an option are all women too.