Claim Your Contradiction, a survival story
Status check: Women receive more personality-based feedback in assessments (performance reviews and student evaluations) than men, and it is more often critical. Women leaders navigate the so-called “double bind”—likability and competence are negatively correlated for women, and likability is a key component for women’s career advancement (neither is so for men).
This week, I asked participants in Changing the Future for Women at Penn State (C.T.F., our leadership program for female faculty) to share negative personality feedback they’ve received. The Zoom chat flooded. The top four traits: sensitive, nice, bossy, and aggressive.
If you just laughed, you know. Women leaders find themselves attempting to walk the line between being penalized for being too soft (sensitive, nice) and too hard (bossy, aggressive). Our founder, Brigid Moynahan, has been speaking about this for more than 30 years—naming it a “High Wire Act” for women leaders.
Our strategy: Own and celebrate the strength inherent in negatively intended personality-based feedback with our tool “Name It To Claim It.”
I next asked C.T.F. participants to claim the strengths they see in the negative feedback. The top four: empathic, committed, assertive, confident.
What had been perceived to be too soft, named and claimed as empathic and committed. What had been perceived as too hard, named and claimed as assertive and confident.
In this, they owned for themselves and reflected for one another value that no one can diminish.
Before I walk you through the “Name It To Claim It” exercise, a quick high-drama personal story from Friday.
One thing I’ve been called is “too whimsical.” I shared this in the training room, along with my positive reframe, “liberating.”
Cut to Friday morning: I wake up at my brother's empty house in Upstate New York to a beautiful snowstorm with the whimsical—ahem LIBERATING—notion that a delightful way to start my day would be a quick polar-bear hop outside—in the nude—on the second story balcony. With no neighbors for miles, I figure it’s safe. I jump out and feel the invigorating crystals hit my skin. Feeling quite proud, I grab hold of the doorknob—and it’s locked.
I’m naked, in a snowstorm forecasted to go until nightfall, on a second story balcony. No human for miles. No phone. No shoes. Immediately, I begin screaming alternatively to Alexa to call 911 (no response) and into the wildly howling wind (also no response), while banging every hard part of my body against the door. Realizing it’s not breaking and that I have little time before the cold attacks, I fireman-slide down a wooden pole onto the lawn. Checking all doors (locked), I run to the barn in the back, grab a rusted metal gate, and throw it through the kitchen door.
Later that day, I sat down to share our weekly C.T.F. update—and I recalled that the word I’d reclaimed was “whimsical.”
I am whimsical! So whimsical that I run outside naked in snowstorms! And a moment later, I am fierce. Enough to save my own life. The thought that fueled me; not letting my dying out there be something my young nephews have to live with.
I am whimsical AND fierce.
Update, I’m safe and well—with new regard for caution—and the kitchen door is being fixed.
Now to the exercise! In a journal, complete the following prompts:
Part 1: Name It To Claim It
1. List any words for personality-based negative feedback you’ve received.
2. Looking at these words, what’s a strength or strengths you see inherent in them?
3. Choose one word that starts with the first letter of your first name to create a superhero name. For example, Empathic Ellen, Strong Sarah, Passionate Pamela.
Part 2: AND
1. Looking at the word you chose, complete the sentence:
I am___, except when___.
2. What strength shows up for you under the circumstances just described?
3. Complete the sentence:
I am (initial strength) AND (seemingly opposing strength).
As the poet Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.).”
In naming to claim your multitudes, you’re defining your specific contribution. You’re charting a new path, undiminishable by old ways of thinking.
Leave us a comment with 1. Your superhero name and 2. Your AND statement! Then pass the power by passing this tool onto a friend.