Embrace your superpower!

My first experience at HLB was at a conference in Dublin in 2009. I remember being in this massive room with probably 200 other people who all seemed to know each other, and I knew no one. If I hadn’t been there to represent COGEP, I would have gone upstairs, crawled under the quilt and ordered room service.

I was lost and intimidated and then these two ladies from the Netherlands and the US just started talking to me as if I’d always been there, from there everything got easier and here we are in 2024.

You can call that allyship or simply being human. To me being an ally is not about fancy speeches and big announcements. Being an ally is doing the simple things we can all do on a daily basis. In the same way that these women welcomed me to the HLB network, we can all be someone’s ally:  a simple ‘good morning’, a kind smile and a laugh can often pave the way to a long-lasting relationship of trust.

Because let’s not forget that allyship is not something we can mandate but something that grows over time. My first takeaway is therefore: We can all be the person who puts someone else at ease.

My second learning, and this became clearer over the years, is that if you genuinely want something, go after it. Your path will likely be a winding one with many hills and dips rather than a straight career highway. I myself have often wanted to give up, just to carry on and come out at the other end wiser, stronger and more resilient. Be brave enough to turn today’s dreams into tomorrow’s reality because what’s the point of dreaming if that’s where we stop.

I love Will Guidara’s mantra ‘what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?’ And I would add ‘what would you ask for if you knew the answer was yes?’ Like many other organisations HLB provides a great platform for making your dreams come true but whether it happens doesn’t just depend on others and their willingness to assist you but also on you.

Go towards people, take initiatives, introduce yourself, ask for help and share your own ideas.

My final thought concerns cultivating your superpower. Women have spent so long trying to be like men and then trying to be like other women that many have never thought about cultivating their very own personal superpower. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this at length in his book ‘David and Goliath’: don't imitate them but surprise them with your superpowers, do something that's completely different and that nobody is expecting. After all, ‘the powerful are not as powerful as they seem – nor the weak as weak.’

In conclusion, we can wait for people to support us, to mentor us and to be our allies. But what if we decided to activate our support networks ourselves? What if we went out there to ask for help, to ask if we can help, all with the idea in mind that failure is just not an option.  

As one of the persons who encouraged me the most over the years reminded me just last week: It’s not about one person being better than the other, one speaking all the time and the other one listening all the time, one having all the answers and the other all the questions. It’s all about the relationship being mutually beneficial. It’s a two-way street.