Do you stand tall in your life now? Have you stood tall in the past? I always felt I was standing tall as a young girl, confident, at ease. Then there was a time in my life when I moved to Europe and staked a lot of my independence on a marriage and career that I thought would last forever. When the walls of that marriage came tumbling down, I realized that I had surrendered a lot of my ability to stand tall to the other (I don’t think the other really needed that). For the sake of compatibility and ease I unraveled my independence, lost some of my confidence and had to rebuild it.
I was caught in trap that confronts many women…to please the other and stay connected. This comes from our desire to take care of, collaborate and make connections (all natural attributes). When we are extreme in our desire to do these things we tip the balance and can end up losing ourselves. When we use our gifts of collaboration, and care in a positive way, we can stand tall and create it all because we know our needs, have healthier boundaries and can come to the table with more confidence, grace and a far better sense of self.
Learning to understand and develop our feminine attributes is the focus of our hour and a half teleseminar Stand Tall: Claim It All our hour and a half long teleseminar You can find out more at www.theessentialfeminine.com.
| Maureen J. Simon |
| Founder and Creative Director |
| The Essential Feminine™ Company |
| Author |
| “Awakening The Essential Feminine: Claiming Your Influential Power” |
| maureen@theessentialfeminine.com |
http://theessentialfeminine.com/shop#living |
| www.theessentialfeminine.com |
Women in Business — Today’s Needed Leaders
Posted in Comments on World News, Maureen Simon, Women and empowerment, Women Influencing Now, tagged collaboration, creative thinking, discrimination dressed up as impartiality, feminine attributes, gender equality, insidious forms of discriminaton, Rachel Ball, Sydney Morning Herald, team building on February 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald by Rachel Ball (a lawyer at the Human Rights Law Resource Centre (www.hrlrc.org.au) where seventy percent of the centre’s board are women) caught my attention recently. It was reporting on a recent action by the French National Assembly approving a bill requiring listed companies to ensure that by 2015 50% of their board positions would be filled by women. Her statistics for Australia state that women hold 8.3 percent of board director positions of ASX 200 companies and chair just 2 percent of boards.” She goes on to say that, “Anyone who thinks that prevailing practice in board recruitment is merit based is kidding themselves. Women make up more than 50 percent of the population, 45 percent of the workforce and are more highly educated than men. There is no good reason why they should be so vastly under-represented in leadership positions.
Far from being merit-based, the status quo is discrimination dressed up as impartiality. The elusiveness of meaningful equality can be partly attributed to the more insidious forms of discrimination that are entrenched in our institutions and social structures…”
She points out that “…Quotas are not the operational and financial burdens that they are often made out to be. In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true. Numerous studies have shown that companies with a higher proportion of women on their boards out perform their more male-dominated competitors. Greater gender equality in the workforce also improves national productivity. Equality and efficiency are mutually reinforcing.”
These findings are not surprising to me as they match with the research I have been doing into feminine attributes. As women, we are predisposed towards qualities of leadership that are different from the usual masculine oriented leadership so predominant in business and politics today. These qualities include collaboration, team building, creative thinking, intuition and peacemaking. Because of the cultural environment we grew up in, these attributes have been devalued in our lives and often go unappreciated and undeveloped. This is a disservice to ourselves and to the world we live in.
We are now living in a world that is unbalanced and needs the qualities and gifts we, as women, can bring to it. Not only will developing our attributes help us to live more satisfying lives but these attributes will help the world get into balance as well.
http://globaldialoguecenter.blogs.com/women/
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