Their Win Is Your Win
Over the past couple of years, I have heard one theme pretty consistently: that women do not support other women. When you dig deeper it usually sounds like this: mature women do not support younger women. Unfortunately, I know this to be true; about 20 years ago I was in a position to help a younger professional and I didn’t because I had not done the work of my inner healing and as a result I was awful to her–which I apologized for years later after lots of therapy, prayer, and honest moments with some trusted friends.
This message is to the people who are hurting and find yourselves unwilling to support or celebrate talented people within your profession. Here are three questions I invite you to explore:
Why is celebrating others so difficult for me? When I explored this question for myself, I found that I couldn’t celebrate others because I hadn’t yet fully accepted that I was worthy of being celebrated myself, which landed me in a vicious cycle of “how come they are so deserving?” The truth is that we all deserve to get our flowers.
How would supporting someone hurt me? There is a belief that if you help someone out, it will take you away from what you are supposed to be doing. However, what I have found is that not being a resource only hurts you. The person you don’t support will find other professional mentors and opportunities because the reality is that no one has the power to block someone's trajectory. We just simply aren’t that clever. Spreading gossip, being unkind, or, worse, taking credit for someone else’s work is draining and delays your ultimate path. The answer is simple: supporting someone else only adds to your community that will ultimately cheer for you.
Why am I threatened by another person's wins? This is probably the hardest question to explore because one view in the world is that there are have and have nots–and there is some very real evidence of this since we know that not everyone is destined to be unusually exceptional. However, I believe that everyone in the world, including the exceptional, struggles. Many of us are threatened by a person's win because we assume their process was easy. We envy the person with the recent promotion but don’t know about the lack of balance, or the person with the so-called perfect marriage but don’t know about the abuse they previously endured; and we envy someone’s business but don’t realize the depths of their debt.
I don’t believe in a have and have not world. I believe we are in a world where there are dreamers and doubters. If you dream, you live life to the fullest, amidst challenges, and are not consumed by chasing the ladder, envying others, or being on top. You are content with life and have decided that your life is more than sufficient.
Or, you are a doubter who lives with the belief that your income, career, or personal life needs to be significant in order to matter. You are never content because there is always someone or something out there that you are chasing who you believe has more. You have decided that living a full life means to live with more.
It is the doubter who hurts people, who can’t mentor or celebrate talent different than their own. It is a doubter who avoids healing because the work of being a dreamer requires being vulnerable, exploring the first moment when you decided you were less than, and stripping away all false pretense. Dreaming requires letting go of “the chase.”
It is a humbling, private experience and an exercise that you may have to go through twice, as I did, if you don’t fully reconcile this simple truth.
We are all hurting, we are healing, because we are humans; being humbled is the first ingredient to building a dream worth having and a life that is greater than more–a life that is yours.
p.s. Don’t forget to follow along with our journey via IG @belajoyful.
