The Most Powerful You

7 Bravery-Boosting Paths to Career Bliss

Kathy Caprino

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781400217496
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Women in Business
• Index: Business

Kathy Caprino guides women to take the reins in their careers by identifying and overcoming the seven most damaging power gaps holding them back from the success they want and deserve.

The business world has been forever changed by the important progress and contributions that women have made. Yet, with only 38% of manager roles and 22% of C-suite positions being held by women, women continue to struggle to achieve the reward, respect, and authority they have earned.

In these pages, career, executive and leadership coach Kathy Caprino helps women conquer the seven destructive power gaps within the workforce, outline the key steps you can take to access greater positive power, and become the true author of your life.

Through riveting real-life success stories of women overcoming these gaps, and proven strategies and solutions from more than 30 of the nation's top experts in fields that are essential to women's success, the exercises in The Most Powerful You will equip you with the strength to:

• See yourself more powerfully (Brave Sight)
• Speak more confidently (Brave Speak)
• Ask for and receive what you deserve (Brave Ask)
• Connect to your advantage with influential support (Brave Connection)
• Challenge and change negative behavior toward you (Brave Challenge)
• Be of service in more meaningful ways (Brave Service)
• Heal from past trauma and challenge (Brave Healing)

Most importantly, The Most Powerful You will reconnect you to the thrilling dreams you once had for your life and empower you to take the necessary steps to reclaim that dream while making your positive impact in the world.

POWER GAP

1

Not Recognizing Your Special Talents, Abilities, and Accomplishments

WHAT PEOPLE WITH THIS GAP OFTEN SAY:

“I have no idea how (or if) I’m special, unique, or talented.
I don’t think I have any special abilities.”

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

—ROBERTSON DAVIES

I met Karen in late 2017 when she came to me for career coaching. Karen is an accomplished single Asian woman in her early fifties who has a role as an epidemiologist with a local governmental agency. Throughout her nearly twenty-year public health career, Karen’s work has had an extensive data-related focus—determining how much disease is present in given populations, who within those populations are most affected, geographical and other disease trends, and possible reasons for observed disease patterns. This critical information is used to target efforts toward prevention and control of identified public health problems in communities.

Karen had been struggling with issues related to fulfillment, meaning, and purpose in her professional life. For her, it was missing a critical “human” element—a greater connection to those impacted by her work. Karen desired to leverage her analytical and problem-solving skills in a different capacity, one in which she could have authentic and direct engagement with people, while working toward tangible outcomes that she could see unfold. Ultimately, she felt blocked from experiencing herself as a person of positive impact in the world, which she so longed to be.

But as we dug deeper into Karen’s life and work, and into her thinking and emotions, another picture emerged that served as the foundation for what she had been experiencing personally and professionally. We both began to understand why she had been suppressing her own longings and dreams for many years, in part because of her cultural training as an Asian woman, and also because of experiences in young adulthood that taught her it wasn’t proper or right to put her needs and wants before others. Throughout Karen’s life, there had been a familial emphasis on stability, especially financial security. Karen had internalized these explicit and implicit expectations, which manifested in her fear of uncertainty and reluctance to initiate any significant life or career shifts.

Karen had grown up somewhat enmeshed with her family, meaning that the boundaries between her and other family members weren’t as defined as they needed to be in order for her to feel as if she were a separate, fully individuated, and “grown-up” person. As Karen progressed into midlife, she had begun to lose sight of who she was at her core, what she had to offer the world, and what she longed to experience both professionally and personally. Karen’s ultimate power gap was failing to recognize her immense knowledge, talents, and capabilities and how she could use those abilities for good in the world, in ways that were meaningful and joyful to her. At the time we first met, Karen lacked the understanding that she was valuable and highly talented and indeed worthy of making the difference she dreamed of, to others, her community, and to the world as a whole. And she just couldn’t see that she was a worthy person who deserved to be appreciated and respected in her work. And, as these two things often go hand in hand, Karen also didn’t seem to recognize that she was worthy of being cherished and loved by a wonderful partner.

Karen Begins to Develop Brave Sight

We embarked on a coaching process of helping Karen develop what I call brave sight—seeing yourself in a brave new way, with greater love, self-respect, self-esteem, and appreciation for all you bring to the world.

In our coaching work, Karen was guided to take small but powerful microsteps (see page 7) that stretched her beyond her limited and incomplete view of herself. Development of that brave sight would require Karen to break out of the tight box that she had been trapped in. She needed to step into new experiences, with new people, that elevated her confidence and helped her make the difference she wanted to in her career. These microsteps, seemingly inconsequential at first, grew more and more powerful, allowing Karen to see much more clearly and start living a life that was thrilling and energizing. These phased planful steps helped her see herself very differently—as a woman who could wield the power and influence to make the impact she longed to but also could build new, supportive relationships with inspiring people who were also making a difference in ways that she admired.

I knew from years of therapy and coaching work with women that Karen could close this power gap of not recognizing her great talents and immense value. And that would lead her to stop putting herself last and devaluing her wishes and longings. I knew that if she could finally see the importance and value of her skills and talents, and start putting them forward in a bigger way, she would finally understand that she deserved—and could much more easily create—a fuller and richer life, with a career and loving relationships.

In our work together over a year, Karen found the strength to face and release some deep trauma. As a teenager, Karen witnessed the dramatic decline in her father’s health. He passed away about one month after her sixteenth birthday. Karen was not able to process her father’s death because there was no open discussion within her family about what they were experiencing emotionally. So, she shut down. This experience with her father’s death silenced Karen’s voice and had profound effects into adulthood.

As an adult, Karen avoided conflict and did not advocate for her needs, either in professional or personal situations. She became a “perfectionistic overfunctioner”—one who strives constantly to be perfect, accommodating, and pleasing to everyone around her, and who bends over backward doing more than is appropriate, healthy, and necessary and trying to get an A+ in all of it. Sadly, perfectionistic overfunctioning is an epidemic among women today, and 95 percent of the women who come to me for career and leadership growth support demonstrate this trait. I learned about this behavior in my training as a marriage and family therapist as it pertains to couples and their dynamics. I learned that in a couple, wherever there is an overfunctioning spouse, there is inevitably an underfunctioning partner who will not do his or her part.

This is a dynamic where the two are drawn to each other for a reason and their functioning levels complement each other (it’s not random that you attract in a partner the level of functioning he or she has). Being locked into this dynamic keeps the couple in a homeostatic mode where nothing can change. That said, it’s a dynamic that leads to many unsatisfying relationships and experiences. Karen shared with me her belief that some of this mentality was the result of engrained cultural expectations. In Asian cultures, she explained, there is an overwhelming emphasis on excellence and responsibility.

For professional women, the upside of PO (perfectionistic overfunctioning) is that it pushes women to strive hard and achieve well. And that looks great on the outside. They perform at the highest levels and are often the top performers in their roles. Many times, they’re the “go-to” person at the organization because they always get everything done at the highest level. The downside, however, is literally devastating. The overfunctioning flattens women, so that they chronically disregard their own feelings and refuse to see what they do as good enough or worthwhile. And PO behavior pushes women to keep raising the bar higher and higher in all that they do so that they can never feel satisfied with what they’ve created and achieved, or with who they are. They’re simply never good enough. And that’s a very depressing, exhausting, and hopeless way to live.

Developing brave sight for Karen meant peeling off the layers of this learned PO behavior and walking directly through her fears in order to come forward and put her life first, for once. Karen finally opened to recognizing that she possessed and had honed extensive talents, knowledge, and abilities. And Karen recognized that she was valuable, worthy, and lovable. She finally felt ready to start bravely honoring her longings to use her talents differently, in the ways she dreamed of.

Karen had the courage to explore—and eventually accept—an amazing three-week immersive volunteer project in the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the North Pacific. There, she served as an epidemiologist for an international public health project, which involved mass tuberculosis screening of an estimated 27,000 persons, and subsequent treatment of identified tuberculosis infection and disease.

After she returned, Karen shared that this powerfully expansive experience pushed her way past her comfort zone, which in turn strengthened her confidence and self-esteem. Karen was able to “get out of her head” and really lean into the experience. She was able to truly immerse herself and focus on experiencing rather than thinking. Also, it helped Karen to see that it’s okay to be vulnerable, which made her more open to others. This experience led to many personal and professional breakthroughs, including helping her see how she could live more fully in the professional identity of an epidemiologist while having direct meaningful impact. And she saw firsthand how she actually had a great deal to offer the world in the way of helpful knowledge and skill.

Karen began to see that she could have a deeper impact, which in turn led her to see herself as a leader and a change agent, in ways that made her energized and wanting more. She engaged in a series of new and expansive actions that were confidence-building; each step led to another, more exciting ...