Women Consultants, Here’s Why You Need to Stop Telling Yourself to be Realistic

A meme that I’ve seen and heard tons in the last few weeks is ‘If I’m too much for you, go find less’.

And I think the reason it resonates for so many of us is that we’ve been told so many times we are too much, we are too emotional, we think too big, we need too much looking after. I’ve been told I need to work slower. I need to look older. I need to dress differently.

When people need you to squeeze yourself into a smaller space, we can spend our first decades trying really hard to make ourselves smaller. But what I find with all of my clients is that everything they are striving for comes from giving up that whole game and TAKING UP MORE SPACE.

I’ve been focusing on joy over the past year because the phrase that kept coming up for me when I thought about joy was ‘I don’t know if joy as a concept is all that realistic’.

The word ‘realistic’ is one we should be wary of because it’s a real scarcity word. It’s the word we use to shoot ourselves down when we’re aiming for big things in our businesses. I hear women use it all the time to make themselves smaller.

There’s nothing like telling yourself to be ‘realistic’ to suck the joy out of whatever you were thinking of, whether that’s where you’d like to go on holiday, how many sales you want to make this month, or what you want your business to look like in 12 months’ time.

So much of business isn’t strategy, copy, marketing - the things we often have as our go-tos - it’s energy.

This is why flow matters.

This is why joy matters.

Because so much of the time we attract the things that match our energy. When we are in flow, when we are experiencing and conscious of joy in our lives and businesses, when we are consciously creating opportunities for joy, we go about our interactions radiating this energy that people are really attracted to.

So don’t let other people say you are too much or your dreams are too big and don’t tell yourself you need to be ‘realistic’ about your ambitions. Show up with your energy.

Let me know in the comments, what do you say when you’re encouraged to play smaller?

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