Kathy’s Award Winning Case Study: The Unacceptable Woman
Why in the world would anyone want to do business with me? I’m a fraud, who no one in their right mind would listen to. Or, at least, that is what I thought for many, many years as I bore the sins of my past and my skin color like the scarlet letter. It was only when a wonderful coach decided to take me through an exercise that my life ended up changing for good….She listened intently and then issued an assignment. I was to write a story about myself highlighting everything I thought was unacceptable about me in a positive light.
The turning point occurred during my first week of work as an assistant women’s basketball coach at the University of Mississippi. I was informed that one of the players on our team had bulimia and she could not get cleared to play until she got help. But she was refusing it. So they wanted me, as the only woman on staff, to talk to her. The irony was not lost on me. I realized as we walked to The Grove that I could give her a prescriptive pep talk, or I could come clean about my own struggles.
[My work with my own coach was] the first time I truly saw everything that made me different as an asset instead of a liability. It was the first time I truly embraced that everything about me, every struggle, every challenge, every setback and every unique attribute that I had previously seen as negative was part of a quilt that made me a powerful woman. How many times have you thought to yourself ‘if they only knew who I really was…’? Well, how is anyone going to be comfortable with you in business if you are uncomfortable with yourself; if you are convinced you are in some way unacceptable?
I struggled in my business up until that coaching session when I realized my word was “unacceptable”, uncomfortable in my own skin – literally – and unable to embrace my full self….What I realized through my own journey is that you can only be your most powerful self if you are able to embrace all of yourself. You can’t just choose the good parts.
As a leadership strategist, I have come into my own. I wear my unacceptability like a badge of honor and encourage others, especially women, to do the same…It still catches me off guard the number of people who are appreciative of my willingness to open up. The word I hear most often is “hope”. One interesting outcome of embracing my own unacceptability is that once I became comfortable with myself, my life and my business began to flourish. For me, the word unacceptable has come to represent power. It means that I am unafraid to be 100% me; The Unacceptable Woman.
Read more of Kathy’s story on our case site HotMommasProject.org, the world’s largest women’s case study library. Kathy is one of the top three global winners of our Case Study Competition.
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