I’ve been wondering recently how much of what we call our personality is actually our true personality.
It’s not a question I hear discussed very often and yet it sits underneath so many of the conversations I find myself having, particularly as it happens, with women.
One of the phrases I hear most often is some version of “I’m just conflict avoidant” and “I’m just not a confident person”.
Now, they may be right of course and they may very well be describing how they experience showing up today. What interests me more though, is whether how they are showing up today is really who they are or how they have learned to be?
Having coached people from most backgrounds for over 30 years, and having been my own work in progress for much of that time as well, what I have come to the conclusion about it if we have spent a lifetime managing other people’s reactions by modifying our own, then after a while we risk believing that our learned behaviours, our often limiting beliefs about ourselves and how we experience ourselves is who we are and how we’ve always been.
My own experience tells me that this is very rarely, if ever, the case.
When I explore this with people, and especially women, most of them tell me they’re just being sensible, they’re keeping the peace, being realistic, picking their battles, managing a difficult relationship, avoiding unnecessary conflict, being professional, being safe, being kind, being understanding, being patient or being the bigger person. All of which are perfectly reasonable explanations when you examine them one at a time.
The challenge however is that when you place enough of them together and repeat them often enough and over a long enough period of time, something else starts to happen. We slowly begin to adapt ourselves around the people and the systems we is navigating, usually so gradually that we don’t notice it ourselves.
With the women I have been privileged to work with over the years it can start with becoming a little less direct, a little less visible, a little less likely to challenge something she knows isn’t right, a little more likely to explain herself when no explanation was ever required and thus a little more likely to smile and say “Yes” when what she really wants to do is to shout and say “No”.
“Over time, what began as adaptation starts to feel normal and in many cases it starts to feel like personality”.
I know something about this because I spent much of my life believing things about myself that I now know simply weren’t true and indeed were never true but that doesn’t necessarily make them easy to undo, at least quickly.
Growing up in the north of England in the 1970s with a highly abusive father, one of the many lessons I learned was not to bother trying to become successful because sooner or later I would fail or that I would be found out to be a fraud, that was my father’s teaching to me. That was his own deep insecurity and self-loathing speaking of course although I couldn’t have known that at the time. If I stood out, I would be found out. If I put my head above the parapet, people would eventually realise I wasn’t intelligent enough, clever enough, talented enough or worthy enough to be there in the first place.
My foundational belief was that I wasn’t good enough.
The interesting thing is that I never experienced any of this as conditioning. I experienced it as truth and thus it gradually became my reality.
That, I think, is one of the reasons I find this question so interesting.
When we talk about limiting beliefs, conditioning or learned behaviour, we often do so with the benefit of hindsight. We can look back and see the pattern; we can identify where it came from and we can then begin to understand how it was formed. At the time however, none of that is visible and so it simply feels true.
The woman who hesitates before speaking in a meeting doesn’t usually think to herself, “Ah, there goes my conditioning again.” She usually describes to me that she feels a tension or constriction in her body first which leads to a hesitation and then an uncertainty that makes her think that she should probably be better off not risking a potential confrontation or being seen to be difficult because she is not the sort of person who likes conflict.
The man who believes he isn’t capable of becoming a leader doesn’t think, “I am experiencing a limiting belief.” He simply experiences the belief as reality and behaves accordingly.
That is what makes learned behaviour so powerful. We stop seeing it as learned and we start seeing it as who we are.
In all my experience as a coach and an observer of human behaviour around the world, especially through the lens of leadership, I have come to the conclusion that women are fundamentally the most natural leaders. I am not saying men are not, I am simply saying that to me women are.
Women make life and death decisions as part of their life; men generally only do this in the role they have taken. Women are naturally more disposed to be inclusive in their thinking; men tend to be more solution focused.
Over the years, thousands of women have sat opposite me and described some version of the same experience to me. They wanted to say something and didn’t. They wanted to challenge something and didn’t. They wanted to ask a question, raise a concern, offer an alternative perspective or simply disagree with what was being said and yet somehow found themselves remaining silent.
What I find fascinating is that when I ask them what happened, very few begin with their thoughts. They begin with their body and what they felt. They describe a tightening in their stomach, a tension in their chest, a sudden feeling that perhaps now isn’t the moment, a shallowing of their breath…perhaps they should wait, perhaps somebody else will say it, perhaps it isn’t worth the hassle.
The feeling arrives first; the explanation arrives afterwards.
What if that matters?
What if what many women are describing as conflict avoidance is not actually conflict avoidance at all but a learned response to environments where speaking up has historically carried a cost?
I have never met a woman who hasn’t experienced being ignored, dismissed, talked over or had her idea credited to somebody else at some point in her career, even and often in the same meeting but I have met plenty who have spoken up brilliantly when they felt safe enough to do so.
The same woman who describes herself as conflict avoidant in one environment can often be articulate, challenging, courageous and deeply influential in another.
Which rather begs the question: If you can do it there, why not here? The answer, I suspect, lies less in personality and more in safety.
Children become extraordinarily skilled observers when they have to. They learn to read mood, tone, energy, atmosphere, the sound of a door closing, the way somebody walks into a room, the difference between a healthy silence and a dangerous silence. Many women become experts at exactly the same thing, not because they are weak or overly emotional or lacking either ability or confidence but because adapting to insecure male behaviour is often the safest thing available to them at the time.
As I’ve written before…the trouble is that adaptations which help us survive one environment often follow us into environments where we no longer need them.
So now we are dealing with habit and the good news about habits is that given the right environment, support and encouragement and determination, we can unlearn and change them.
One of the most useful things we can do is start looking for evidence.
Fear loves absolutes like nobody listens to me, everyone will think I’m difficult, people like me never do that or women who speak up always get punished.
The problem with these statements is not that they are entirely false, as enough women will have experienced every one of them sadly. The problem is that they are almost never true all of the time. Look for the supporting evidence.
Where have you spoken up and been heard? Where have you challenged something and been respected for doing so? Where have your ideas been welcomed, acted upon and encouraged? Where have you felt able to be more of yourself rather than less?
You see, once you have reminded yourself that those places, people and experiences exist, then perhaps the story isn’t quite as fixed as it first appears.
Men have a very real responsibility here too because in the majority of cases it is men who have created the majority of these environments and cultures. We need more men willing to challenge interruptions, recognise contributions, create psychologically safe environments and become aware of behaviours that many women have spent a lifetime navigating.
This is one of the reasons I became so interested in understanding insecure male behaviour. Not because I believe men are the enemy, as I’ve written before, I don’t but because I spent much of my own life being one of those men. Insecure, defensive, needing approval more than truth, confusing control with care and confusing being needed with being loved.
Looking back now, I can see that many of the behaviours I now help women navigate were behaviours I once displayed myself, albeit in ways that seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time.
“That is the thing about insecurity; the person carrying it rarely experiences it as insecurity. They experience it as logic, common sense, leadership, protection, love, standards or expectations”.
Only later do they begin to see what everyone else was experiencing all along. The question that keeps returning to me therefore is not whether women are conflict avoidant. It’s whether some of the things we believe most strongly about ourselves are actually true because if a behaviour was learned, it can be unlearned and if a habit was acquired, it can be changed.
So, if what you’ve been calling your personality is actually an adaptation that helped you survive a particular environment, perhaps the most important thing isn’t learning how to become somebody else.
Perhaps it’s learning how to become who you’ve always been once again so you can bring your greatest gifts to the party.
With love,
James
Fantastic article… thank you for writing and sharing