It Should Have Happened Naturally…

There’s something about my life that has really surprised me.
 
I had so much of what we all want every girl to have: I had a supportive family. I grew up hearing lots of praise and loving acknowledgement of my gifts. I had access to a great higher education.
 
So wouldn’t you think, that with all that, I’d grow into a woman who found it totally natural to play big? That I’d come away from all of that with a natural confidence? With courage to follow my heart?
 
That wasn’t what happened. In some ways, I excelled – got prestigious degrees and did well in my career in the nonprofit sector. But on the inside, I had given up a lot. I lost my creativity – writing, theater, and dance. Self-doubt and self-judgement gnashed everyone of those passions to pieces. I had rationalized my way out of my childhood dreams and took a safe path.
 
Turns out, I’m not the only one. I’m one of millions of brilliant women who has so much to share with the world and has the intelligence, vision and gifts to make a huge difference – but who has some trouble really believing that herself.
 
And if we don’t believe it, we don’t play big. We don’t think we deserve to be at the table.
 
I’ve spent the last few years in the trenches: finding my own path to playing bigger, working with hundreds of women to help them find theirs, and learning everything I could get my hands on about what helps women lead and become empowered.
 
I learned a lot from the many hours of sitting in my coaching office, across from brilliant women who longed to play bigger. When I coach, sitting there with someone who I so want to see soar and whose self-limiting stories are staring both of us right in the face, that’s when the rubber hits the road. You have to figure out what is going to change the pattern – what really helps women play bigger.
 

Here’s some of what I learned:

 
1. For most talented women, playing big doesn’t come naturally. It just doesn’t.
 
2. There are a few big ideas that make a huge difference. It makes a huge different to understand that we are hard-wired for fear – to avoid any possible emotional risk – to learn to manage the conflict between the safety instinct and the self-actualization longing. It makes a huge difference to realize, nope, that wasn’t your brain talking, that was your inner critic talking – and inner critics make up lies. It makes a huge difference to know that you do have a calling, and that no one has to think it “makes sense” – not even you. You just need to respect what has been planted in you. All of those philosophical shifts make a huge difference.
 
3. But I’ve also learned, we need more than ideas, practices and tools. As important on my journey as those ideas were, having a coach to call, or a supportive group of women to meet up with, were just as important. Having someone who held me accountable when the old ways reared their had was critical. It was in community that the concepts became real to me.
 

One Day…

One day a few years out in the future, you and I will make a pact. We’ll decide to make sure every girl in the world learns the basic ideas and tools she needs to play big in her adolescence. Fourteen year-olds around the world will learn about callings and their inner critic and their own value. It will become as rudimentary and as universal as seventh grade math.
 
But first, we have to staff up the faculty. We have to fill ourselves up with tales to tell of our own journeys to playing bigger. We have to walk an uncharted path. Because never before have women had so much power to play big. Now it is our time to do it.
 
That is why I do this work, and why I write the words you read here every week. It is why I created Playing Big, a six month journey for women who want to play bigger. Registration for Playing Big is now open. For the next 24 hours, I’ll be adding a gift – a signed poetry book, inscribed to you. I hope you’ll join me for the journey. Visit here to learn more and join the circle.
 
Love,
 
Tara