Changing your life | The School of Visibility

Entrepreneurial visibility has a flavour all of its own

Visibility challenges are not all created equal.

Here’s one big difference; what it takes to speak up and feel confident talking about things you don’t have a personal investment in, versus speaking up about your own work (programs, services, products that you’ve created and nurtured into being).

If you’re an entrepreneur you’ll know what I mean. There’s a level of courage and vulnerability that’s needed to put your work into the world, to declare it worthy of consideration – not because someone gave you a seal of approval but because you know it to be so. There’s a level of confidence that’s needed to continue to tell more and more people about your work and not feel like you’re harassing them, or ‘being a bother’, or being scammy.

Entrepreneurial visibility requires a type of courage that – as women – we’re not conditioned to feel comfortable with.

As a gender … [Read More...]

What is patriarchal conditioning?

This is all about patriarchal conditioning and how it might be affecting you as a woman, particularly with regard to speaking up and being seen and heard in the world. NB: The topic of patriarchal conditioning could be a whole book or PhD in and of itself so consider this just a short introduction.

To begin to understand patriarchal conditioning, it’s easiest to think about social conditioning and the ways you’re affected by the society you live in.

Start with the community you grew up in. It had a set of rules and expectations about how you behave, show up for one another, who gets a say, who doesn’t, who’s valued and who’s not. Most children absorb all of that without anyone critiquing it for them, which means they simply take on those ideas as ‘normal’ and assume that’s just the way life is.

If you don’t ever take the … [Read More...]

Judging my entrepreneurial self

I’ve spent so much time finding and releasing limiting beliefs over the years, it amazes me that it took me this long to see this huge block to business growth. It’s this; my own judgment of entrepreneurship.

I had judgment coming in from every angle;

My social justice self thought it was too commercial, too immersed in capitalism.
My spiritual self thought it was too materialistic to earn money by selling things (what was being sold didn’t seem to matter, it was the fact of selling that was the problem).
My middle class self thought it was crass to sell things for a living when I’d already acquired a good education and really, should go and work for a big corporation or a government agency (that being a more respectable way to earn a living apparently).
As a feminist I felt guilty about selling to other women, knowing that

… [Read More...]

Ordinary, extraordinary lives

During the holiday break I deliberately spent a good bit of the holiday period away from my computer and social media and soaked up the pleasures of the non-digital world. During that time, an old friend of mine died, and it gave me great pause. I spent a lot of time thinking about his life. About what an ordinary, extraordinary life he’d had. He was a beloved husband and father of two small children, he was a nuclear physicist, and he was a guy who loved music, camping, and being with his friends. Although he’d achieved a lot in his life, it was his humility, his thoughtfulness and all his small kindnesses over the years that really stayed with me.

At that time I was also listening to season 3 of the podcast Serial (an excellent, and often distressing, piece of long form journalism about the criminal justice system in … [Read More...]

Visibility lessons from 2018, part 2: Australian Women’s Day

NB: this is part 2 of a 2 part post on visibility lessons of 2018. In part 1 I spoke about the visibility lessons learned as a writer this year.

Pursuing new opportunities

Having set up my year to write, I was approached early in 2018 to be a part of a new initiative – the creation of Australian Women’s Day (a national day to celebrate the women and girls of Australia).

This was something that immediately excited me. It’s 100% aligned with my vision for the world and with our work here at the School of Visibility, so I happily stepped toward the opportunity when it arose. It opened new doors for me, it saw me making connections I wouldn’t otherwise have pursued, I became part of a beautiful circle of women, and it coincided with a dream I’ve had for Australia and for the women of the world, … [Read More...]