I want to be a pirate, but the problem is, I’m a good girl…
I want to embrace my inner pirate, but I’m a good girl and it scares me!
I have just finished reading Sam Conniff Allende’s inspiring book ‘Be More Pirate’ and am convinced we ALL need to be pirating on one level or another. We don’t have to be as extreme as Sam, who recently projected a massive ‘The Wrong Pirates Are In Charge’ image onto the Houses of Parliament in honour of Trump’s visit to the UK, but we COULD all do small acts of pirating to make the world a better place.
I guarantee you, there is a lot about pirates you don’t know — have a read of this, and see if you are as surprised as I was about how forward thinking pirates were in terms of workplace organisation…worker’s compensation, self-management principles, democracy and even same-sex marriage were all part of a pirate’s working environment.
They made their own rules on what life should be like, and in the meantime, stuck two fingers up at the Establishment.
Be More Pirate argues that all the good changes in the world came about by people who didn’t follow the rules, who challenged the status quo and instigated alternative ways of doing things in defiance of the powers that be. Eventually, those good things became mainstream, and were absorbed into our society.
But to get there, the rebels had to make ‘good trouble’. They had to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, with drawing outside the lines, with breaking the rules.
And that’s the hard bit.
Am I brave enough to refuse to sit down on a plane, to save the life of an asylum-seeker who is being returned to almost certain death in his country of birth? You’d think that would be a no-brainer. But every neural pathway in my brain tells me not to make trouble, to just sit quietly and follow the rules like everyone else. What if I was to be arrested? One stern look from the flight attendant and I’d probably crumble. I can hardly think of anything worse than ‘getting in trouble’. I’ve spent my life avoiding it. Good girls don’t get in trouble. We are the ones people ‘trust to do the right thing’.
But what is the right thing? What is the right thing at a time when we KNOW leadership around the world is failing us. How can we really follow the rules of leaders who seem to have lost all ability to make brave calls, to guide us through the challenges of climate change, shifting demographics and a global dearth of compassion. Apart from New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, and maybe Justin Trudeau, is there a leader we can believe in? And if we don’t believe in them, how on earth can we believe in their rules?
“Being more pirate can bring out the best in you, but it’s up to you to know what your best is.” — Sam Conniff Allende in Be More Pirate
I’m a coach. I work with people to help them step up and be their best selves. So, if part of being your best self is to do a bit of piracy, then it begs the question, how can I bring pirating into my coaching? How can I support others who might want to be a ‘bit more pirate’, but struggle like I do? I imagine it would look something like this…
(inspired, if not stolen in true pirate style, from exercises in ‘Be More Pirate’)
- Doing some values exercises, really defining what values are important to you, and that you would fight for
- Figuring out the one injustice you feel you were put on this earth to tackle. This could be big or small. It could be the pot-holes in your local road (here’s a delightful example of pot hole piracy, here’s one that is a little more risqué) or it could be setting up your own refugee rescue boat.
- Finding the smallest rule or convention you could break related to that injustice and getting comfortable with the idea of breaking it (there’s a difference between breaking rules/conventions and breaking laws, we’ll probably stay away from actually breaking laws in my coaching)
- Practicing getting comfortable with being uncomfortable — lots of stuff we can do here!
- Exploring why you feel you need to be ‘a good girl’ and challenging that belief
- Discovering your personal pirate role models so you can think of them and be inspired when you get a bit wobbly about making good trouble. Maybe we will make ourselves a modern pirate vision board to look at every morning!
- Going back through your past and making note of the times you DID stand up to power and remembering how it made you feel
“Knowing what you love, how it feels when you’re at your best 20 per cent, knowing what you do well, what makes you feel alive and what you’d die for, and then doing that, and to hell with the 80 per cent that is the forgettable rest … that is being more pirate.” — Sam Conniff Allende in Be More Pirate
- Designing your OWN pirate flag
- Going back to your favourite injustice and brainstorming what ELSE you could do to challenge it, with varying degrees of pirateness
- Writing new rules for dealing with that injustice
- Finding ways to share your new rules with others, so you can see who else might be challenging the same stuff. Figuring out where you might find your fellow crew members
- Writing your own pirate code. Getting it down on paper. Probably blogging about it! (Be More Pirate suggests taking that story to the most “dangerous, contentious or incendiary place possible”, maybe the Daily Mail? We might need to do a bit of comfort zone work here as well I suspect!
- And if you’ve got that far, deciding whether to take it to the next level and do some of the bigger stuff on your injustice list. I suspect by this time, you (and I) may have pirating in our blood and are ready to challenge the status quo whenever we see something that needs questioning. Perhaps we’ll be pirate enough to stand up on a plane and save a man’s life. That’s a place I’d like to be. Come join me.
“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules.” — Banksy (Wall and Peace)
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Have you lost your mojo at work and itching to make a greater contribution to the world — but just don’t know how to get started? You’d love to try something different, but you’re not quite sure what that is, and how you can do it without losing everything you’ve already worked for?
You are not alone! I work with women who are doing exactly that. I help provide the structure and support that will take you from stagnation to ‘flourishment’ so you can wake up excited to make your mark in the world.
Your first step? Book in a complimentary Discovery Session with me on Skype and we’ll just have a chat — let’s see if we can finally do something about those dreams!
