Nice girls grow up to not care anymore

Photo by Isaac Owens on Unsplash

Take a moment to think back to your younger self at the start of your career. What messaging did you receive about being likable at work?

Did you feel you needed to soften your tone to be liked by your peers?

Or did you need to be tougher to be taken seriously early in your career?

In my recent small-group coaching program for midlife women, Speaking with Presence, we shared some of our early work experiences.

One woman recalled feeling the need to appear tough in her field to be taken seriously, while another shared she had to soften her tone to be more likable as a woman of color. A woman from the South felt she had to be less direct due to regional expectations.

What all these women had in common was that they felt they had to change who they were at work to be accepted when they were starting out.

Whether it was due to working in a male-dominated field, being the only woman of color in the room, or facing societal pressures from their region, they felt they had to change to succeed.

To some extent, we need to adjust our tone and behavior to our environment. We wouldn’t behave at a board meeting the same way we would at a Bachelorette party.

Yet when does adjusting become performing, hiding, or denying our true nature? The double standard for women to be both powerful and likable at work is a burden. How did we bend ourselves or deny our true feelings to be considered likable in our careers?

Now, in midlife, many women have the opportunity to come full circle and return to who they were in their youth, reclaiming parts of themselves they felt they had to hide or mute during their careers.

The word “reclaim” originates from the Latin “reclamare,” meaning “to cry out against” or “to call back.”

I love this definition because it gives us permission to call back to our younger selves, reexamine what we felt we “had” to do to be accepted, and reclaim what we “want” to do now and moving forward.

The beauty of growing older is that we care less about what other people think. Like the hilarious Melani Sanders’ “We Do Not Care Club,” we have had it with performing and pretending that everything is fine when it clearly is not.

Whether it’s the “Wine Moms” of Minnesota protesting I.C.E. raids and brutality or celebrities like Halle Berry raising awareness of menopause and women’s health, more midlife women are speaking out about what matters, despite pushback or ridicule.

So take a moment to think about your early work experience. What part of yourself would you like to reclaim today?

Call back to your twenty-something-year-old self and see if she needs something from you today. She’ll thank you for it later.

Stay Calm & Speak On,

Jessica