Think Twice Before Apologizing For This

A dear friend of mine and I were meeting for coffee last week when she started to confide in me how frustrated she was with the lack of availability of help from her husband. You see, he had a job that required an enormous amount of travel.

In the next breath she then said, “but I really shouldn’t feel frustrated because there is nothing I can do about it. It’s his job and it is what it is.”

While she is correct – there is nothing that she can do about his availability, that is, unless he quit his job – I was stopped in my tracks.

Why shouldn’t she have the right to feel the way she does, in spite of this reality?

The more I thought about this, the more I realized this was an incredibly common theme that runs through the conversations I was having with other women. They felt that, though perhaps unconsciously,  if you couldn’t do anything about something, you had no right to feel a certain way about it.

Well that is just plain crap! 

Ok so, you can’t do anything about the horrors of the Holocaust so no sense in feeling anger about that, right?

Too extreme? Perhaps, but you see my point here. 

You have every right to feel whatever it is you feel.

I am a believer that even as women continue to hold leadership positions, it is still with the expectation that we need to “be like a man.” And while this may be appealing to some in order to rise above others in an industry, it is taking away a very important and powerful aspect of what it means to be a woman.

Our emotions, though overwhelming and confusing at times, are incredibly strong indicators of our passion. In fact, we are lucky as we have not only the strength of our brains, but also the strength of our hearts that guide our decisions.

And yet, over and over again, there is this underlying expectation that we shouldn’t let our emotions interfere.

I will tell you from personal experience, my emotions have led me in directions that may have otherwise been missed. And while I work every day to ask the right questions in order to clarify what they mean (that’s a different conversation), I still believe they are an invaluable element to what makes me successful.

xx

– Elle

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