Be Introduced To The Three Dimensions That Help You Win
What I gain from championing forbidden art of compassion & playfulness.
Here’s the truth about my 16 years being a corporate bee. My colleagues despised me & I couldn’t win at work.
The dope on why I wasn’t exactly ‘legend’?
No, I didn’t suck at what I was doing. I was really good at my job. But I took ‘Lean In’ just too seriously. And wound up on the losing side. I couldn’t bag coveted promotions or salary hikes despite doing the grind well.
You see, I took it way too seriously. I was always reading up on how smart women like me could succeed fast like the men. I hopped onto the trend of millennial women ditching ‘ladylike’ so they could win big. The word ‘ladylike (goddamn it), from 18th century Jane Austen itself had an anti-feminist ring to it.
This is who I was when I ‘leaned in’ seriously to win:
- I never apologised for mistakes
- I took care not to preface requests with ‘please’. Mine were orders
- I overplayed issues at work. Infact, I played to a gallery, not pausing to see if there were spectators
- I never smiled or showed I was happy in any way. On most days I resembled Stalin from the Iron Curtain days of the Soviet
- I didn’t do anything altruistic
- I never asked for help
- I behaved like I knew it all
- I was always full of myself
I was a know-it-all, self-righteous, self-centered, biased, two faced, unhappy, pompous, overdramatic prick.
I even wrote an article about why it helps to be an asshole at work. Here it is for anyone interested.
Four months down the line having explored ethics, integrity, kindness & fun I am ready to eat my earlier words for breakfast, lunch & dinner.
Of course, I won’t take the article down. That was part of my evolution just like this is.
These weird to do lists of what women should & should not do, skim the surface of an ethical issue. The alpha male driven world of aggression & finishing at any cost looks at winning as a zero- sum game. In this kill or be killed Universe, kindness is akin to being weak & aggression to being strong.
But life is rarely zero sum. Even as I was living the ‘strong’ woman story, I instinctively knew such ‘strength’ stemmed from insecurity. The very human condition of being afraid to give up lest others overtake me. The state of my inner judge lying to me that negativity, aggression or brutality are needed to win.
If I now feel the fallacy so strongly, chances are other humans feel it too.
Truth is, human life is made interesting by three dimensions- strength, compassion & playfulness.
Lack in any one dimension makes our story incomplete. More importantly, the lack leads us to abject failure, not successes as we like to think.
Yet we champion strength as the only dimension worth building. Anything else will fall short of success we are told. When such lies are parroted by successful women, we normies further lap it up.
A study of metals shows us why we fail when all we have is strength. Iron is considered the strongest metal. Yet we don’t use it much in industry. Do you know why? Because iron’s strength plays against it & makes it brittle. But add a bit of carbon & chromium to it & you get stainless steel- a highly useful metal.
Human life & work are similar. Too much strength can literally get us seriously injured. Adrenalin is the hormone that gives us immeasurable strength. The downside of an adrenalin rush is injury. Compassion & playfulness are what work to give balance. Compassion helps us be in tune with our human-ness & indicates to us when to step back. Playfulness gives perspective. The perspective that tells us it’s not life or death & we need to give it a rest.
Think of the big bad corporate wolves.
With only strength most of them burn out. Like in the brutal Iron Curtain era of the Soviets. Kill or be killed can become the mantra.
What about an overdose of compassion? We would all become like the flower children of the 70s. Get nothing but live in a haze of love, drugs & sex. At work we would probably just hug each other, tell stories of how it will all be okay & spin excuses for falling short.
Too much playfulness? Don’t we all know the consequences of that one!
But the balance of strength, compassion & playfulness combine to create the three dimensions that help us win.
Now that I know better, if I was still in a 9–5 workaday, I would ‘lean in’ to my human ness & win differently.
- I would apologise with sincerity. We don’t intend to hurt or damage when we goof up. But hurt or damage we do. What we fail to get is that apologising does not make a big deal of our faults. It helps us evolve beyond them.
- I would make my requests sound as such. Because nobody owes me help.
- I would play the work game with gusto & sincerity, but ditch the seriousness
- It wouldn’t hurt to be funny once in a while
- I would ease others burden when I can. And make a mental note to ask for favours when it’s my turn
To shy away from being human is to be disconnected from the evolved ‘sage’ within. But living in the ‘sage’ is to discover real strength. The strength to be moved by compassion for our very human condition of erring. And to feel compassion for the ones affected by our mistakes. This kind of cool strength springs from the highest of values ‘ethics’.
What a different world we would live in if more of us embraced our ethical feminine- compassion, kindness & forgiveness!
After all we are capable, grown women & men. We can get into badass mode without being petty about it.
