It’s Monday evening and I am on the “Genius Jam” call with my fellow coaches and members of Kathy Mallary’s Empowerment Club.  The club’s focus is our marketing.  Monday’s call, though, is about something wider – how are we contributing to our own progress and success?

I am curious when Kathy says to one of my colleagues:  “If you want things to change, you need to start by accepting the way things are”.  The fact that this resonates with me tells me I need to sit up and listen.

I sit and listen.  One of my colleagues likes to work with women at a time when they realise that, in order to move forward, they need to step fully into being who they truly are.  I recognise how much this applies to men and women alike.  So much of our education shapes us to seek out other’s expectations of us and to try to meet them.  This process continues in the workplace.  Lurking beneath this way of thinking is the idea that we have to be someone else – someone other than who we are – if we are to succeed.  This is an “I am not OK” or “I am not enough” position.

Along the way, many of us also feel the need to be authentic in our lives, so that we can feel torn between two worlds.  The mythical “midlife crisis” denotes the time when we can no longer sustain a way of being that keeps us so alienated from ourselves, or even a way of being in which we show one face to the world whilst also nurturing our true selves behind closed doors.  Sooner or later we want to “come out”.  This is not to say that the choice to come out in this way leads us through a door and straight to an authentic self.  For many – most?  all? – people, this is a step-by-step process of learning and discovery.

So, I ask myself, why did Kathy’s assertion resonate so strongly today with me?  I choose to see it as an important marker.  Of course, if you want to plan a journey from A to B you need to know where A is as well as B (though this is clearly true).  This is one reason why, if you want things to change you have to accept the way things are.  More than this, though, I ask myself, am I accepting myself as I truly am?

Our call finishes at 8pm so I cut myself some slack and decide to sleep on it.  No doubt this is a question to which I shall return.