We Are Ready and Willing, But Something Holds Us Back

There are times when the idea of taking hold of our Power Tools is appealing but something holds us back. We compare ourselves to others and feel inadequate.

Grace was very eager to start working with Power Tools. She was earning a great income, owned her own home, and was raising a daughter from her first marriage when she met John. Remarried at the age of twenty-nine, she found herself quite willing to hand her hard-earned independence and power over to her new husband. She quit her job and became a stay-at-home mom. Grace felt that she had already proved to herself that she could accomplish a great deal and was eager to live a life of relative leisure.

However, when Grace was forty-one, a new clarity about her life emerged. She now wanted to reclaim her power, return to school, keep her marriage strong, and determine what she wanted from the next phase of her life. She said it wasn't always easy to figure that out.

"I can take something simple, like having people over for dinner, and what was a barbecue with hot dogs and burgers on the grill rapidly becomes lobster and caviar with a band," she told me. "Being a perfectionist, I can't seem to do things minimally. I need to take some pressure off myself. Take, for example, something simple like meals. People don't come to eat a gourmet repast; they come to be with me. I try to remember what someone once told me: 'Never compare your insides with other people's outsides!' I look at others, like my stepmother, and think that they're doing it right: the perfect job, a wonderful house, and an ideal life. I assume they have it all together. It makes me feel like I'm in a competition — one that I'm losing. But I've learned that we all have our own stuff. I remember that when I start practicing with my Power Tools. It helps me keep my focus on myself."

Grace needs to grab a Power Tool, like her Safety Goggles, and set some well-defined goals of her own. Envisioning an enjoyable, low-stress dinner with guests, a return to school, or a smaller house can help her get the self-focus she needs to move forward.

We Are Stuck

If you have strength and don't realize it, then that strength has little value for you. If you appreciate your strength but fail to exercise it, others won't be aware of it and will act as if it doesn't exist. Your history with Power Tools is no indication of how successful you will be with them in the future. Every single opportunity to use a Power Tool is a chance to succeed.

Maggie was at a crossroads in her career. She needed to decide if she wanted to stay on the management track in her firm or become an individual contributor. The pressure she felt about her situation was consuming her, making her unable to go forward.

As long as you are consciously using your Power Tools, you are taking action. And taking action enables you to move forward. The choice between a management track and a nonmanagement track should certainly be considered carefully. Discovering the answers to the following questions will allow Maggie to decide which Power Tools to use when she is ready to proceed.

• If I do this job for three years, how will I talk about it?
• How will I present this position to others?
• Will I be okay presenting this position that way?
• If I continue my professional pace, how will I talk about it?
• How will I present it to others?
• Will I be okay presenting myself that way?
• Which choice feels most like me right now?
• Can I make this decision and move forward without too many backward glances and what-might-have-beens?

Maggie's Power Tools will allow her to think ahead, to anticipate not only how others will view her actions but also how she will deal with that situation. She can use the necessary Power Tools to develop her confidence. The more confidence she has, the more she will use her Power Tools. It's a lot like the old chicken-or-egg argument. It's hard to know what comes first, but your confidence and your Power Tools go hand-in-hand. If you have one, you can have the other.

We must remember why we're using these skills in the first place. It's important to keep the goal in view if we want to overcome the fear of what others might think and to quiet that voice in our head telling us to forget what we want and just be happy with whatever we can get.

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Copyright © 2002 by Joni Daniels. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Women's Studies

About the Author

Joni Daniels is the founder and principal of Daniels & Associates, a consulting group specializing in personal and professional development. Her clients include FannieMae, Educational Testing Services, Marriott International, Merck, the Department of Defense, AIG Life Companies, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. More