The traditional tale
Once upon a time, all a girl had to do was be kind, beautiful
and helpless - preferably while locked in a tower, or lying in a
glass coffin, or being subjected to domestic abuse. But as long as
she waited patiently (while looking beautiful and being kind) her
Prince Charming was bound to find her, kiss her, and voila! They'd
live happily ever after and all her troubles would be over.
The
underlying messages from these tales have found their way into the
psyche of our mothers and grandmothers, into how society saw women,
how they have seen themselves and how they were expected to behave.
These legends and myths have also influenced women's ideas about
how they should approach their future: they were to adopt a passive
manner, never 'claiming' their place in the world. Those few women
who didn't wait patiently and who took control of their own
destinies were labelled as… well, I'll leave it for you to fill in
the dots.
Then came the F revolution and it all changed. We professional
working women now scoff at these myths and prejudices; we create
our own destinies; we craft our own futures. We buy our daughters
the post-modern renditions of those fairy stories. You know the
ones - where Princess Smarty-Pants gets rid of her unwanted and
unwelcome admirers to live on her own happily ever after.
We have well and truly let go of this Prince Charming myth.
Right? Wrong!
The modern tale
Sure, it is now completely socially unacceptable for a
self-respecting, intelligent, professional working woman to voice
out loud that she is planning to make herself look beautiful and to
behave kindly, while she passively waits for her Prince Charming to
find her and marry her and thus sort her life out for ever
more.
However, for some reason, many of us seem to think it is
completely acceptable to treat our career in this way!
Surely not! I hear you gasp in horror. Well, ladies (and the few
wonderful gentleman that read Professionelle regularly), let me
paint you a picture of the archetypal, bright, young, professional
woman I come across.
Our modern heroine is very determined and a hard worker. She
achieved top marks in her university courses and landed an
excellent first job as a graduate. She worked really hard on all
her assignments/cases/projects, diligently putting in the hours and
patiently delivering excellent results. She has been careful not to
shout her achievements from the rooftops as she is quite averse to
self-promotion. And anyway, she believes that she should be noticed
for all her hard work she's put in, and for the results she's
delivered.
Her thinking goes like this: someone (in a position of power)
will notice me and that's how I'll get my next career break!
Is this beginning to sound familiar? It took me a while to
realise it, but this is how my early career looked. And it's how
the careers of many other bright young women I meet and talk with
look, too. But this passive Prince Charming-driven approach to
careers is, like its fairy tale ancestor, an illusion.
No successful professional working woman I have ever come across
in person, or in my research, ever got to where she wanted to be by
waiting to be noticed by her career Prince (or Princess) Charming.
They all took control of their professional futures, mostly very
early on.
Just recently, I had a coffee with an incredibly bright young
thing to talk, in part, about her career. She is so talented and
hard working and, yes, modest. When once again, I heard her say
that she 'doesn't have any real career plans but she just thinks
that her hard work on this project she's currently doing will get
her the next project' I decided I had to write about it. Of course,
when I pointed out to her how similar her approach was to the old
'be beautiful, kind and passive and your Prince will find you'
approach, she was horrified.
And the moral of this story is…
We can drive our careers and we can make our own rules - and we
can do these things and still be feminine. But we can only do so by
taking control. We can also carefully and thoughtfully communicate
our worth to others, and do it in a way that is consistent with our
personal values and feels right to us. But we need to find that
way. None of us, no matter how young we are, should ever leave our
careers to be taken care of by someone other than ourselves!
I, too, waited for Prince Charming. Like others, I thought that
my hard work and the results I delivered would get me noticed and
that 'someone' (a powerful, senior, and, yes, male figure) would
give me my next career break. And it did work like that, but only
up to a point.
Finally, I realised that in order for me to have the kind of
work I wanted, doing the thing I love, in a way that works for me,
I had to actually take control of my own professional future. And I
never looked back.
© Professionelle Limited 2008
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