Breaking Knowledge Barriers Series: Womxn of Color in the Workplace

5 MIN READ

This article is the 1st in a series on "Breaking Knowledge Barriers".

I have had the opportunity to work for some amazing visionaries and leaders in Southern and Northern California. I landed some of my first jobs out of college thanks to the help of staffing agencies who liked that I could type over 100 words per minute, knew ten-key, had loads of customer service experience, and was visibly eager to make a difference somewhere. As I grew in skills, roles, and responsibilities, I watched myself stretch and reveled in the expansion that can only happen when you’re granted the opportunities to. My supervisors were pretty good at spotting my drive, resilience, growth mindset, risk tolerance, and desire to learn as much as I could. After being an Executive Assistant, Office Manager, Accounting Coordinator, Program Specialist, Grant Writer, and then Executive Director, I found my passion and strengths as an operations executive. With that passion, I helped start a statewide nonprofit that supports over 15% of California’s public 6th-12th graders with college and career planning tools, and I’ve consulted with multiple nonprofits and leaders to help them achieve their visions.

The moral of this short story for me is that every step of the way, when I had the opportunity to bet on myself, I did and often, I won. What I skipped in the story are the massive mistakes, failures, misperceptions, wrong assumptions, and poor leadership that I had to struggle through in order to get new roles, take on new responsibilities, and absorb new skills. If this sounds anything like your own journey, then perhaps like me, you also had to navigate strong bouts of insecurity, depression, loneliness, codependency, nagging self-doubt, and creeping suspicion of everyone and everything. If this sounds like you, then I invite you to keep reading.

​"What Can I Give Up?"

Eventually I, like many of you, reached a breaking point. I was no longer effective at work or at home. My negative-nancy-monkey-mind was on full blast during my waking hours which flooded into my half-awake-half-asleep hours. I was a living, breathing, ball of anxiety and I couldn’t find joy in the simple things. So when a best friend recommended I try the Calm app to help me start a mindfulness meditation practice, I was all open heart and open mind because I had had enough of the suffering.

After trying the Calm app on and off for a few days, it turned into weeks. The ability to track my progress as “streaks” aimed right at my overachiever heart and weeks turned into months. My longest streak of meditating every single day (often multiple times a day) was 601 days. I’ve since restarted my streak and look forward to caring less and less about the number. 

​So what did I get out of this practice? What do I still get out of it that keeps me coming back to the cushion every morning before work, sometimes in the shower, often in bed to help me sleep? Because it helped me get to the first question that I really needed to ask myself - “What Can I Give Up?” If I don’t like what I’m feeling, if I know I’m the only one that can do anything about it, then what do I have to give up to start feeling some relief? The answers came slowly at first.

They sounded like:

• My need to achieve.
• My desire for praise.
• My constant striving.
• My fear of disappointing.
• My need to DO.

And then they grew into:

• My need to always know what’s going on.
• My need to know many things across many subjects.
• My need to know what people think about me.
• My need to KNOW.

Until finally, they reverberated in my heart and soul into a thundering:

• I need to give up my need to be anything other than who I am, right now, in this very moment.
• I need to give up my need for something more than what I have, when I have so much to be grateful for, right now, in this place, as I am in this very moment.

Hearing myself tell myself what I needed was so powerful, I still shiver just thinking about it.

"What Can I Give Up" Activity
Check out my “What Can I Give Up?” Activity that I often share with my clients to help them figure out how to let go of certain things holding them back in their lives. I show a personal example of my use of SMART Goals to create actionable steps towards giving up a specific habit. Included is a free printable for you to do the activity as well. Enjoy!

​Do you watch Parks and Recreation? If so, then this moment of realization for me was like Leslie Knope owning, “I am big enough to admit I am often inspired by myself.” In this moment of telling myself that I was enough, that I didn’t need to be anything more, that I wasn’t something broken that needed fixing, I tuned into who I was again - someone with love and compassion who can inspire the best in others. I had just gone so long without aiming my strengths at myself. 

I continue to learn from this lesson, to break it up into smaller chunks, to dig deep into the nuances of my needs. I have some take-aways that I want to share with you as strategies for leadership development and self-care. This is aimed at entrepreneurs, managers, and those who run businesses, teams, and projects. But really, these strategies are relevant to anyone who is struggling with a leadership challenge in their personal or professional life. I have written a separate blog post for each strategy in this "Breaking Knowledge Barriers" series. Click here to go to Strategy #1 on Practicing Mindfulness.

About Author: Meredith "Mer" Curry

Mer has always had a passion for education and helping historically underrepresented groups achieve access and success to higher opportunities. She has consulted nonprofits, educational institutions, and businesses in addition to her volunteerism and mentorship of students.
Learn more about Mer at www.meredithcurry.com.