Over breakfast my daughter gave me a perfect example of a thought that I’d been mulling over since the Women of the World (WOW) festival last week. 4 year old daughter asked 6 year old sister “Do you want to be a mummy or a daddy?” she replied “I don’t want to be a mummy or a daddy I want to be a paleontologist.” So, apparently gender fluidity is ok (that’s a topic for another day) but in my 6 year old’s head you can’t be a parent and a paleontologist.
She may not want to be a parent and a paleontologist and that’s fine, however presenting it as a choice between either parent or paleontologist is a false construct. The WOW festival celebrates women and girls, and looks at the obstacles that stop them from achieving their potential. At their mass speed-mentoring event last week I coached three women for 15 minutes each around a professional challenge and the fourth was a performance artist who spoke to me through the medium of a stuffed toy, which challenged my own constructs of what a coaching conversation might look like.
What struck me about these women and many of my clients is that they often present their challenges as an ‘either / or’ choice which to my mind is so often a false construct:
- I can’t support my family financially and do a job that is true to my values…
- I can’t be a good mother and do an interesting job…
- Leaders are old white men and I’m a woman so I can’t be one
- I can’t be freelance and employed…
- I can’t be successful and a good person…
By presenting their challenge as an ‘either /or’ choice they close down their options, and potentially hinder themselves from achieving their potential and ability to create what they want in their lives. However, through coaching conversations we can expose and examine those ‘either/or’ choices as false constructs. So often, and I write from personal experience, we’re not even aware of what we’re unconsciously holding as an ‘either/or’ choice. Is the construct true, or is it a belief? If it’s a belief is it true, is it helpful, could another belief serve you better? Can you turn your belief from a construct into a powerful question, e.g. how can I support my family financially and do a job that is true to my values? That question holds a lot more possibility and opens up thinking instead of closing it down.
So, who knows if my daughter will be a parent and a paleontologist or something altogether different, but I will certainly continue to look out for and question her false constructs and my clients’ (and my own) when I hear them, and in so doing aim to open my daughter’s and my clients’ eyes to their limitless possibilities.
What choices are you seeing as either / or? Are they really mutually exclusive, or in fact false constructs? These are the kinds of conundrums my clients tackle in our coaching sessions.
Get in touch if you might just have some false constructs lurking in plain sight and want to open up your sense of what’s possible.