Power: A Woman's Guide to Living and Leading Without Apology - Softcover

Nekvapil, Kemi

 
9780143138020: Power: A Woman's Guide to Living and Leading Without Apology
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143138022 ISBN 13: 9780143138020
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

"This book is a miraculous event." –Elizabeth Gilbert, from the foreword

A transformative path for women to reclaim their power in a world all too eager to strip it away

Women know what it’s like to feel powerless. We have had power taken from us and used over us, and sometimes we have had to give it away for our own safety. But when power is built internally, it is stronger and more enduring than that bestowed externally. In Power, renowned leadership coach Kemi Nekvapil introduces a new framework for cultivating your power from the inside out.

When you tap into the power that comes from within, you have the capacity to rebuild yourself. You give yourself the opportunity to break free from chronic people-pleasing and start making choices that align with your needs and values. You stop living and leading with apology, and instead use your power as a force for good.

Through the principles of Presence, Ownership, Wisdom, Equality, and Responsibility, Power invites you to stop waiting for power to be handed to you and instead choose it for yourself and on your own terms. Drawing on stories from her own life as a Black woman in a society where power is often used as a tool for fear and obedience, and from the lives of leaders, gamechangers, and everyday women who’ve learned to step into their power, Nekvapil shows you how to practice, build, and feel your inner force.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kemi Nekvapil is a leading credentialed coach for female executives and entrepreneurs, a bestselling author, and a highly sought-after speaker. She has studied leadership and purpose at the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan as well as with Dr. Brené Brown to become a Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator, working with teams and organizations to create daring leaders and courageous cultures. Kemi is a facilitator for The Hunger Project Australia and a regular interviewer of industry icons, including Elizabeth Gilbert, Elizabeth Lesser, Martha Beck, and Marie Forleo, and has worked with worldwide organizations including Lululemon, Atlassian, Zoom, Dermalogica, and Omega. She is the host of the Audible Original podcast POWER Talks. With a level of compassion and wisdom gained only through extraordinary life experience and a twenty-eight-year yoga and meditation practice, Kemi is a powerful advocate for connected, values-based living.

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Introduction: About Power

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
—Alice Walker

Women today have more opportunities than our mothers and grandmothers ever had, and yet the societal structures we must navigate to claim and own some of these opportunities can still lead us to question our abilities and our power. For many women, “power” is abstract. Many of us have been and continue to be in­timidated by it. Throughout this book you will find that I have not used concepts of “soft power” or “personal power.” This is de­liberate. Power is power. We do not need to “feminize” it to make it more palatable; we need to redefine it. I want us to reacquaint ourselves with this word in a positive way.

Countless women were raised like me to believe that power belongs to others, that it is destructive, and therefore they had no interest in exploring or owning power for themselves. My rela­tionship to power has mainly been one of powerlessness.

In my experience, power was White—either a White man in a suit, or a White woman who was blonde and thin. A college education also meant power—if you had a degree, you had more power than someone who didn’t. Being able to get a college edu­cation was linked to privilege, which was linked to Whiteness, which in turn was linked to power.

At school I was Black, female, and overweight, and a college degree was not an option for me. Power, as it appeared to me then, was not a concept I recognized for myself. Over time I have needed to explore and define power on my own terms.

Julie Diamond is a woman whose work I admire when it comes to the subject of power—she is a leadership coach who has spent more than thirty years working in the world of human and organizational change. She is also the author of Power: A User’s Guide, in which she writes: “Power is neither good nor bad; it is energy, a human drive to shape the world, influence others, and make an impact. We need power. Power may be difficult to mas­ter, but it’s vital to have. It’s generative and creative.”

I like her explanation of power; it’s so much more inclusive than what I had experienced or been led to believe. Add to that the Oxford English Dictionary definition of power—“the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way”—and we have something positive to work with. We all have the ability to do something or act in a particular way. So power is for all of us; it is not for the select few.

In my book The Gift of Asking, I talk about the struggle many women have with asking for what they need and want. One of the reasons for this struggle is the belief that to ask is to rock the boat, to no longer be seen as a “good girl.” Being “good”—not asking for more, pleasing others, doing what we are told, and looking “good”—is a way for women to hold ourselves and each other powerless.

I have coached hundreds of women in my one‑on‑one practice and thousands of women in group settings. These are women in CEO roles, women running their own companies, entrepre­neurs, managers, women on the land, professional athletes, yoga teachers, activists, social workers, and coaches—women in vari­ous positions in diverse industries. Rarely do these women start working with me to explore their power, but in the coaching pro­cess most uncover their relationship with power in the same way they uncover their relationship to asking. They explore the times they owned their power, when they had their power taken away, when they gave it away, how they have stepped into their power, and how life changes when they own and harness that power.

I am writing this book now at a place in my life where I am no longer going to pretend I don’t have any power. And I am definitely no longer interested in being a good girl. And my intention is that by the end of this book, you’ll step out of your version of being a “good girl” and step into becoming a fully expressed woman.

Power that is created by a system based on a person’s gen­der, privilege, and “granted” status makes us believe it only be­longs to a chosen few. And the continuity of this system depends on the chosen few inviting others who look like them and have the same upbringing as them to the power table. The rest of us are excluded. If you are reading this book, you are undoubtedly one of “the rest of us” and you know how the system works. You know how it affects us every day—the world we live in has been set up to keep us small. For many years I heard “The system is broken,” but this is a rose-colored way of looking at things. It gives the impression that there was once, in the “days of old,” a system that served everyone equally, and somehow one day, or even over a period of time, that system collapsed. But let’s take off the rose-colored glasses and confront the truth. The system was meant to be this way; nothing got broken. The system was set up for men, it was set up for Whiteness. And the tragedy is that within that system, many of us have felt broken.

Whether you are reading this as a woman, a woman of color, a queer woman, a nonbinary person, or a disabled woman, you know. We all know what it feels like to be told we are broken. We internalize these myths—and when we do, we are complicit in the system and we keep ourselves exactly where we are told we belong.

I have learned, as many women have, how to live and lead “as an apology.” Let me clarify what I mean here:
·         I learned how to make myself small by not sharing my opinions, for fear of not being liked, because we are led to believe that being liked is our most important value.
·         I learned to pretend I didn’t have needs and wants because I didn’t want to be told I was needy or difficult.
·         I learned how to be a “good girl,” to only do what was ex­pected of me and toe the line.
·         I learned how to apologize when speaking, diminishing the power of my words by smiling, or giggling “to soften my meaning” or my voice, or by actually apologizing before I spoke: “I’m sorry to say this, but . . .”
·         I learned how to deny my leadership capabilities because my mind was fraught with the possibility of judgment and failure.
·         I learned how to live “as an apology” as a Black woman navigating predominantly White spaces.

This was my version of living and leading as an apology. What does your version look like?
In contrast, what does living and leading without apology look like?
·         It means that we take up space, without apology.
·         It means that we communicate our needs because we are worthy of having our needs met.
·         It means we operate in the world as full expressions of our­selves, creating our own unique paths.
·         It means we own our opinions and voices, without dimin­ishment or apology.
·         It means that if we want...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143138022
ISBN 13 
9780143138020
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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