For Female Leaders: Use Resentment as a Guide
When I start working with a new female-identified coaching client, I often assign the homework of making a resentment list. This means that the client keeps track of the moments where they notice a feeling of resentment in the body, taking notes, with curiosity, every time they feel that feeling — and noting what happened right before that, and what, if any, thoughts they have about what happened.
If you’re a woman, I’m pretty sure that even if you don’t know the exact textbook definition of resentment (“bitter indignation at having been treated unfairly”), you know exactly what that feeling is. Every time I ask a woman “how does resentment feel in your body?” I immediately get answers: “Tight chest,” “nausea,” “stomach pain,” the list goes on and on. The feeling registers differently in every body, but I’ve never encountered a woman who says, “what’s resentment?” There is an immediate recognition of what that term means and how it feels. And it’s not tough to conjure up examples of situations that are related to that feeling.
When I mention this assignment, I get some pretty hilarious reactions. “Oh, hell no, there’s not enough paper in the world” was a favorite. I also hear some fearful reactions: “I’m so afraid that if I let myself feel how much I resent, I won’t be able to function.” I hear sharp intakes of breath, groans. Also, some version of “please don’t ask me to stop doing everything I resent or everything around me will grind to a halt.”
And these lists — whoo hoo, these lists. Pages and pages of stored up indignation. Maps of all the places where women are holding things that really aren’t theirs to hold. Collections of the things that are falling on their shoulders because they feel they can’t unload them, or that there is no one else to take them. All the words that they are storing that haven’t been said out loud. All the places and moments where they feel small. Creating these lists is a powerful way to connect with all these places and bring them sharply into focus. Of course — the process of bringing them into focus is not always pleasurable (an understatement). My favorite list of all time started calmly and by the 25th bullet said “I AM NOT YOUR F**IN SECRETARY” about her co-founder constantly leaving her with the clean-up of emotional wreckage he caused with the leadership team.
I started using this exercise because it’s very clear to me how much space resentment — and the underlying conditions that generate it — takes up. Resentment is nearly always tied to doing too much for others and not enough for oneself, which can result in our feeling invisible and unappreciated. It’s often related to an uneven distribution of labor (either actual work or emotional labor) at home or at the office, or unrealistic expectations we have of ourselves. Resentment is a valuable tool for noticing all the places in our lives where we are deprioritizing ourselves and our own needs and where we need to ask for (demand!) more from the people (and organizations) around us.
Women are generally excellent at getting shit done — big stuff, little stuff, our stuff, other people’s stuff. We can run companies, deal with human emotions all day and still remember that our kids are about to outgrow their socks. We can be like vacuum cleaners that suck up everyone else’s problems and emotions — and make them seemingly effortlessly disappear (often so effortlessly that others may not even be aware we’ve solved them, so the work is completely invisible…adding even more resentment to the mix).
It’s great to be so efficient at making problems disappear. It can make us feel very valuable and needed. But here’s the problem: If you’re a leader or a company founder, doing all the small things can keep you from having to sit in that big existential crisis of learning a whole new set of skills that terrify you, or from feeling the isolation and loneliness that can come from your role. Which is why it can sometimes feel easier to do all the things and feel all the resentment, which is at least familiar, than face the terror of stepping into the chasm of doing things we don’t know how to do.
But here’s the thing: To really grow as leaders, we have to be willing to sit in the empty space of facing our fears, of looking directly into the eyes of our demons. Resentment takes up a whole lot of space, but it’s also trying to tell us something that we should listen to. We have to allow ourselves to stop using our old, over-functioning muscles of overcommitment and fixing-all-the-small-things to give ourselves the space to focus on building new muscles that are unfamiliar and need time to develop. We have to get out of the weeds. To be connected to our creativity and to be connected to the biggest vision of ourselves (and of our companies), we have to, in the words of my colleague Ali Schultz, give ourselves time to steep in our dreams of the future. In other words, if you’re spending all your life force on doing all the small things for everyone else, you aren’t going to have a lot left over for yourself or your own actualization.
So what’s the way out? The next stage of working with this list is adding another column. What action are you going to take for each item on this list? You likely can’t stop doing everything on the list, but I imagine there’s a lot that can be changed. What can you simply stop doing because it’s not necessary or not important? What do you refuse to do? What can you let go of because it should belong to someone else? What are you holding in that needs to just be said out loud? What do you need to renegotiate because the resentment is telling you it’s not working for you in its current incarnation? Where do you need to expect more — insist on more — of your partner, peers, co-founder, or team? With practice, we can get to a place where it gets faster: we feel resentment, and we say “what is this telling me? How do I renegotiate this so that it works for me?”
