Work/Career | The School of Visibility

The Visibility Compendium, July 2019

We covered some juicy topics in July; the one thing you can’t be doing if you want to call yourself an intersectional feminist, the visibility flavour of entrepreneurship, the value of listening if you want to be a good leader, and one key action to take if you’re feeling depleted, particularly as a mother. Below is where you can scroll through everything we shared and catch up on all the goodness. So grab a cup of tea, wine, or kombucha and let’s get into it!

FROM THE BLOG

Failure to act
[Topics: visibility blocks | women speaking up]
‘…in encouraging you to take action, I’m not suggesting you quit your job and spend every waking minute initiating conversations about race or class or sexuality.

I’m saying, when the situation arises, have the courage to speak up.

I can think of many people in my life who haven’t spoken up in

… [Read More...]

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...]

I can’t say that! It’s too controversial

One of the most common things women say about why they’re not speaking up on a topic they’re passionate about is; it’s too controversial. ‘People will be upset, challenged, they won’t understand me’ are some of the ways it’s expressed. So for the next couple of months, we’re running a mini series, where we’ll be diving deep into the topic of controversial visibility.

To begin, it’s important to remember this about controversial topics; everything that’s really important in the world is controversial in some way.

Think about a few controversial moments in history:

The Suffragettes were ridiculed for being so ‘brazen’ as to presume women would have something valuable to contribute to the political arena.
The second wave of feminists were considered to be destroying families and stealing men’s jobs for promoting a woman’s right to work.
Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for speaking up against racial injustice.
Oprah’s comment about

… [Read More...]

Why we judge women differently when they sell things

I just read an article by Australian feminist Jane Caro about how tired she is of being asked to be a free mentor over and over and over again, and it epitomises for me something I’ve been thinking about all week as I’ve been launching A Visible Woman.

It’s a low level of anxiety I feel about charging for anything I offer, including A Visible Woman. There’s a deeply ingrained expectation within me that I should give things to people for free – bonuses, additional content, something/anything – not because I think the program is too expensive. It’s not. (If anything it needs to be reviewed in light of the depth and significance of the transformation women experience. And to honour what it takes to really hold people deeply in a space of transformation for months at a time.)

No, the anxiety isn’t about the value of the offering. … [Read More...]

What would your business look like if…

What would your business look like if it fully embraced the values and energy of the feminine? That’s the topic du jour in this audio recording.

Here’s a snapshot of what you’ll find;

The invitation is to drop stereotypical, very limited understandings of gender (based on societal roles we’ve been playing for centuries), and come into a new way of thinking and being in the world. The businesses that understand this and that harness the power of the authentic masculine and feminine will be the ones that shine in the 21st century.

To get there you have to first understand that we come from a space of judging the feminine.

The consequence of being in the perverted masculine model we’ve been operating under has been an obsession with the mind, with push, and force and making it happen and success at all costs. There’s been a dehumanising of those of … [Read More...]