Early in my career, in my first Line Management role in fact, I felt like an uninvited guest.
Given the size and nature of the business, my role was necessary, but I am sure, not quite welcome.
The most senior leader of that business was a bully. Not something we recognised back then in the way we do today. There were the callouts, the disrespectful challenges in public and in private there were unbridled dressing downs reserved for some people. Personnel Management as it was called then, felt like it was there on sufferance, but perhaps because of my youth, maybe my gender, I was thankfully never on the wrong end of a verbal full on assault. I did have however what we might call now the gift of youthful directness, inclined to speak the truth as I saw it, rather than as the bully would have it be. Gratefully, a wiser, older mentor helped me temper my assertions and although he could be frustrating, he was a decent man, who abhorred such behaviour. He was a useful protector.
Inside, the experience of being in such tension daily, chipped away. I began to second-guess my impact, my assertions. I’d doubly prepare, I’d present the facts, withhold advice. The notion of ‘chewing the cud’ over people matters arising in the business was not possible. There was space for only one bombastic opinion. It wasn’t mine. Over 18 months, I did what many of us learn to do.
I girded myself. Pulled up on the inside, made myself stand taller and more upright than was natural, strained taut into a shape of confidence and authority, even when I felt neither.
I practiced that shape for a long time and eventually I paid a price - back surgery and twelve months away from work.
Here's what I've come to understand about what was happening.
When we don't feel safe, when belonging feels conditional, when our presence feels questioned, when we are fearful as I am sure at some deeper level I was, the body responds. It braces; if finds ways to protect itself, to fool itself even, working overtime to project the shape of something it isn't yet feeling on the inside. As I learnt, it can do this for quite a while before the cost becomes impossible to ignore.
The trouble is that performed confidence and grounded confidence may look similar from the outside but are completely different to live in. One is held up by effort, vigilance, and a quiet terror of being found out. The other is built from the inside — from a settled relationship with your own worth that doesn't require the room to confirm it.
My body, it turned out, knew the difference. I wasn’t listening, I don’t think I knew how to then - so it made the decision for me. In short, my back took over - it extricated me. ‘If you won’t do this, then I will’.
Older and wiser, I've learned that dignity and confidence are bedfellows. Not the performed kind — the kind you strain into when you're afraid. But the kind that comes from deeply committing to being who you are, and learning, slowly, how to take a stand for that from the ground up.
We can be shaken, of course. Circumstances will always test this. But somewhere, when the work has been done a kernel remains. Something that can find the way back.
Have you ever girded yourself into a shape that wasn't yours? What did that cost you — and what eventually brought you back?
