Rest, Resist, Lead: Leadership Truths for Women of Colour at Work
Are you with me? Step into the light with me where being a woman of colour (WOC) at work is only an advantage — and our prowess, identity, and acute sense of surroundings make us unstoppable.
Leadership training routinely misses the individual. You are meant to somehow fill in the blanks and figure it out. Find your style and lean into your uniqueness. You might already be doing that without knowing it. Wherever you are on the journey, there are skills we can define and hone which we are disproportionately able to exploit.
Cultural Awareness
You always know when something is “off”. It might not feel quite right or it might be glaringly obvious where the awkwardness or tension stems from. It’s like you have this independently-operated antenna that’s perpetually aware of the cues, nuances, situational changes, and what’s said vs. what’s not.
This is your cultural awareness. There’s a hyper-vigilance many women of colour are raised in that teaches us how to present ourselves given a situation so we don’t upset the environment or people’s expectations. Gross, right?
But, also powerful.
This awareness also helps you:
read a room better
connect with a multitude of people, backgrounds, and experiences
speak truth to inauthenticity
be a stellar guide to others navigating their identity at work
Boundary-Setting
Don’t be a Roomba at work. Forget about the always-on, always-willing approach to being a “team player” that translates into thankless, unpaid, and unrecognized work.
You are a natural boundary-setter. You’ve had to be. Too often was guilt wielded as a weapon to shrink you or control you. And what you learned was how to protect your energy.
Perhaps your natural inclination is to give more or too much (mine was!), instead call on that guilt-free protective ability and:
maintain a reasonable connection to work
set hours that make sense for you (because we both know you’re getting the job done quickly and well)
set the example that work is not paramount or your first priority in life
speak about work not in militaristic terms but in terms of reasonable input and output
seek out moments of joy at work that replenish your energy
Intentionality
You move with intention and, in doing so, you create waves of influence. This can create micro or macro change in culture, environment, ways of working, access, and more.
Intention isn’t as much about results as it is about knowing and fully understanding the reason why or why not to do something.
This is informed by your thoughts, beliefs, and desires. It gives you the ability to see what something could be.
And without saying or doing much at all, you can plant seeds of potential, guide courses of action, and embody your role as change-maker.
Detachment
Your identity contains multitudes and not all of those may be safe to appear at work or in any number of settings. Sometimes we dissociate, hide, or code-switch to meet a moment that is not setup for our wholeness.
Embedded in this is a form of healthy detachment, where you can separate what you do from why you do it and how you do it. Meaning, you are the decider of the role work plays in your life, not how your life revolves around work.
You still care — about the work and the people — but you do not wear the work and its dysfunction personally.
Rest as Resistance
Tricia Hersey from The Nap Ministry said it best, “We will rest. Joy is our birthright. Pleasure is our balm. Rest is our resistance.”1
Your rest is neither a commodity nor a privilege. And neither is your joy.
You can be warm and giving without draining your power or energy. And you can be selfish when it comes to rest and recovery.
This is about reclamation. Reject the standard set for you at work, make it your own, and factor in the missing components: rest, joy, dreaming.
You Are Abundant
I embody each of these, so do you. They are innate. Their origins may be difficult to confront, but we can apply our power to use them to make us better leaders and relish in their abundance.
🔷
Hi 👋🏽 I’m Simren, author of The Art of Healthful Leadership, teaching you how to lead and live health-first.
I’m a Corporate Executive with 17+ years in marketing, strategy, and commercialization leading global teams, a Woman of Colour (aka strong, proud Indian woman) who knows what it’s like to be the “only one” in the room and is always working at uniting the multiple coded versions of herself, and a Health-First Leader (and ‘Lifer’) who lives with Stage 4 Endometriosis.
Thank you for reading 💚
Rest is Resistance, Tricia Hersey [book]