Don't let anyone make you feel smaller than you are!

Don't let anyone make you feel smaller than you are!

That sounds logical but doesn't always work in practice. In this personal story I take you through three work situations in which the other saw me as smaller than I was, and I tell you how I dealt with this in order to be seen as full. Because that makes the dynamic, if you start to feel small then the other automatically feels bigger and better, but at your expense and that is something you should never let happen to yourself if it were up to me.

Proving me wrong
I still remember the despising look of the wealthy client - even though it was thirty years ago - who looked at me extensively from head to toe when I walked up to him to introduce myself as his financial advisor, because my grey-haired male colleague was ill. I could see him think: woman-young-blond, that could never work out. This sparked a fire in me to prove him wrong; I pretended I didn't notice, remained utterly charming, respected him but also led the advisory conversation in a decisive and knowledgeable manner. A week later, he met me in that same hallway with a bunch of flowers and not only thanked me for the substantively sound advice, but also very courteously apologized for his earlier doubts about me. That's what I call having balls!

Taking back control
Twenty years ago, I - just new to the job - stepped into the room of an experienced colleague with whom I had to work a lot. On the threshold I briefly hesitated at the thought of his previous greeting: a handshake that did not let me go but pulled me just a little too close to him and his three soppy kisses, one of which almost accidentally (?) touched my lips. That wasn't going to happen to me again! I took a deep breath, stepped forward decisively, grabbed him firmly by his shoulders so I could determine the distance and took the initiative myself for three light kisses in which my lips did not touch him and his could not touch me. That way I was ahead of him and took back control. And I let him experience how intimidating it is when someone steps on you so firmly and does something you don't really want. Without wasting a word on this, we worked happily together for years and have greeted each other with a firm but respectful handshake ever since.

Not turning someone else's problem into yours
What really hit me was the nasty sneer from a colleague-manager who stood at my desk in the middle of a crowded open office over ten years ago: 'You don't understand strategy, you can't do it.' Silently shocked and frustrated that he didn't understand me, I doubted myself for a moment, felt tiny and really had to pull myself together in the following days and weeks. Now I understand that it was his typically rational reasoning - if I don't understand it isn't that way - that whispered this conclusion to him as the easiest way out to make his problem mine. Just last year I was thinking about this incident when I got my Energy Drives certification. It showed that I get energy from thinking in a complex environment and that I am good at vision and strategy, but I also learned that not everyone can follow me in this quite naturally. So the last one was probably his real problem, and my problem at the time was that I did not yet see this and was not capable enough to adapt my way of communicating to his way of thinking. This different way of thinking is not less, but simply a different one. 

Just as men generally think and act differently than women is a given, as much as I support gender-neutral collaboration. Men, by their very nature, are often literally taller than women and are also more often at the top of the ladder in the corporate hierarchy. And that does not help to break the big-small dynamic in the workplace, quite the contrary. 

These three examples illustrate my personal approach to being able to be 'one of the guys' in the corporate environment - because I worked and still work mostly with men - without losing myself in the 'manly' approach. How I do that? By not hiding my feminine intuitive empathic side, while also standing my ground in terms of decisiveness and result driven. By taking myself and others at face value and not making anything or anyone bigger or smaller than it is. 

I work a lot with the big-small dynamics, because it quickly reveals the core of the problem. And once all those involved see and feel this, then suddenly they are no longer opposing each other but standing next to each other, both looking at the same thing, in order to finish the job they are looking at it as equals, with mutual respect and in connection.