Be more cat

Pride comes before a fall.

This phrase has been echoing through my mind for a couple of days.  

The last few weeks I’ve been feeling quite pleased with myself, I suppose. The pandemic, combined with my kids being away (whole other story) has given me more time for reading.

Every night I loll in the bath and scroll through the various feminist newsletters I receive: In Her Words from the New York Times, The Flock, Refinery 29 on Instagram, as well as dipping into the Harvard Business Review on Linkedin.

I’ve been reading about the data gap, the environment, vaguely worky stuff on social value and more.

I’ve been feeling pretty smarty pantsy, right? Feeling like I’m improving, getting a grasp of things that have previously been beyond my reach.

I’m also doing a leadership course, through my employers named ‘Aspire’ that’s got me looking out for stuff on leadership techniques, imposter syndrome and cultural change.

So I was feeling pretty full of myself – clever and confident about all this internet learning malarky. I was pretty sure I was ‘growing’ as a person.

Then I got into a thing with someone on my course.

Long story short, I felt that he wasn’t doing a good enough job leading his task. I offered to support him for weeks beforehand. He didn’t want my help.

It got to the night before we were due to present: no one knew what they were saying, the presentation we were giving was largely incoherent. I snapped, I took charge, I told him I was going to fix it. THAT IT WAS WHAT I DO FOR A LIVING AND HE SHOULD LISTEN TO ME BECAUSE I KNEW BEST.

I also told the course leader what I was going to do.

She told me not to – that I should ‘let the wheels fall off’ for my team mate. But I couldn’t. My professional pride at giving a presentation that was not well-written and polished was too fragile. I felt that I could ‘rescue’ the situation – and I realise now that I also wanted the credit for doing so.

I defiantly told her I was going to do it anyway. It gave me pleasure to polish and mend my colleague’s shonky Powerpoint jalopy, making sure it would pass its MOT with shining colours. The wheels were on and if not gleaming clean, certainly turning just fine.

At the same time, I felt a sort of shame in the fact that I had told her what I was up to. I could have just fixed it all and not made her aware, but I didn’t. That feeling of having ‘dobbed my colleague in’ was a squirm in my guts, a flush in my chest.

But the presentation went OK – we thought. The situation was saved. I received messages from the rest of the team thanking me. I felt pleased, but deflated. Relieved it was over, glad that we’d seen the back of it, a niggling annoyance that my colleague hadn’t thanked me for saving the day.

But really, who was I kidding? He didn’t ask me to fix his presentation. In fact, no-one asked me to fix it. I’d taken it upon myself to be the hero of the hour.

And then the real clanger. A request for feedback from the course organiser. She didn’t drop me in it, but she told the group that she ‘sensed tension’ – knew that we’d all been hiding something. I of course knew where her spidey senses were coming from, but no one else really did.

But as she probed, noone stepped up, noone offered even the slightest explanation. I felt let down by them all. And this is where my oomph ran out, and my tears began.

Pride comes before a fall. The origin refers to the ‘fall of man’ but it’s actually Eve who eats the apple and apparently causes the whole thing to go tits up.

What is it about bolshy women? But what is it behind that facade about standing up and representing something that makes my heart beat so hard and loud I can hear nothing else, my hands shake like I’ve got the DTs and the adrenalin pump so hard through my body it actually makes my kidneys ache?

Being brave or confident or confrontational causes me physical and emotional fall out. And it isn’t always what other people want.

So how do I rein that in? How do I wind it back so that afterwards I don’t feel like I’m dying, or I don’t feel ashamed of my temper, or I’m not crying like a baby?

Sophie Walker cried when she gave the first speech at the inaugural Women’s Equality Party conference. Then she wiped away her tears and carried on, to deliver a fantastic opening. There’s nothing wrong with genuine emotion.

People talk about being their authentic selves: I am a crier. When I feel strongly about something I pour my passion into it. But that’s not generally acceptable at work.

And that same passion that exhausts and drains me, can also overwhelm other people.

This is what my group fed back. That I’d said what they wanted to say, but that I’d come on too strong.

So how do I find that balance – that place where I’m not quite so ‘dog’, be it bouncy and fun, or barky and scary?

I’m not sure. I’ve come to the end of the week, a week in which women all over the world are raising their voices, and on the whole, I feel like if the same situation arose I’d do it again. I’d still stand up for what I believed, I’d still want to work hard to make something right. But what I have to figure out – as I become a leader – is how I bring the others along with me, without scaring them silly.

And I have to learn to look out for my own cues – when my heart starts to pound and my head starts to fizz and my eyes start to well. I need to get there first and cut this stuff off in its tracks.

My pride is pretty tattered right now, I’ve bumped my knees, yes, maybe even grazed my palms. But nothing broke in this fall.

In fact, I think I might even be a little bit more cat already, twisting to land on my feet, as I hurtle towards the ground.