The First Step in Going After What You Want
Earlier this week I spoke at a Ladies in Leadership event that serves as a forum for bringing women in the military together to network, build mentor and mentee relationships and address topics that are pertinent to women in the military, and more specifically women in the military who serve in leadership roles. (P.S. we are all leaders, no matter the job or position we hold.)
The three main topics of discussion for this event were:
“If you do not go after what you want, you will never have it. “
“If you do not ask, the answer will always be no.”
“If you do not step forward, you will always be in the same place.”
I was asked to speak about the first topic and share what it means to me to go after what you want in life and so, I thought I’d share my thoughts here with you.
Sometimes as women in a professional world that’s predominantly made up of men it can be challenging to go after what we want or what we think is right. This is not at all to say that the men around us are unwilling to listen or consider our ideas, but as women, we have such a drastically different world view. Resultantly, we come from such a different place and often have a perspective the men around us have never even considered.
When I arrived to my current job in the summer of 2016 I was a First Lieutenant who was tasked with advising people (most of whom were men) who had been in the Air Force longer than I’d been alive. Daunting right?!?! It was my first big girl job and the experiences I carried with me about the Air Force were far fewer and often far less meaningful than the experiences the people around me carried with them. While I was the strategic communications expert in the room, I was not an expert on the Air Force and in a lot of ways I still had a ton to learn.
In meetings I was often one of only two women in the room, and I struggled to speak up, add my thoughts to a conversation, or bring forward my perspective during important moments. It was not at all that I didn’t think my perspective was important, but it was obvious to me that I was thinking about the situation or topic in an entirely different way than the men in the room had communicated they were thinking about it.
So I would sit in those meetings, formulating my ideas and trying to figure out how to interject with my thoughts in a way that was relatable while the conversation continued on around me. While I was doing this, I would often hear the voice of the only other (far more experienced) woman in the room provide her thoughts to the discussion. Surprisingly enough, often she would present a narrative that was very similar, if not the exact same as the one I was tossing around in my own head. Although our experience levels varied, we are both women and because of that we share a similar world view. . . we think about things through a different lens than the men we work with do.
As time went on, I lost count of how often we were thinking the exact same thing in those meetings. And soon I started to realize that the men sitting at the table were always, always receptive and often times grateful for her addition to the conversation.
A lot of times we think about going after what we want as taking some sort of physical action. We think of going after what we want as applying for a job or selling our house and all our stuff to move into a traveling sprinter van. Yes those are 100% examples of going after what we want, but to me, the simplicity of the idea of speaking up when your perspective may be drastically different than those around you is a foundational example of going after what you want.
Speaking up and having a voice is the first step towards going after and ultimately having what you want in this life.
I am so grateful for the example this woman set for me in the first six months of my time in South Carolina. She is known for consistently going after what she wants and also for speaking up for what she believes in. Without her example and the reassurance of her voice being heard by the men who sat at the table with us, I may still be spending meetings caught up in my own thoughts, which isn’t all that helpful for anyone BTW.
Having the confidence to have a voice in all situations, whether you are the most junior person in the room, the only woman in the room, the only person of color in the room, or even when you’re just the person in the room who is known for always having off-the-wall ideas having a voice is so incredibly important for our own personal growth and also for the growth of our organizations and our relationships.
So if you’re thinking about going after what you want, I challenge you to speak up, put it out there and see what happens next! Truthfully, the whole world is counting on you! :)
Light, Love & the Highest Vibes,
Lon
