re: my secret desires for my children

Inspired by Josie's writing prompts and rather last minute due to the fact that I spent much of this week away training, here comes my thoughts on what I hope for my daughters.

What I want for them is something that has taken me many years to acquire and can suffer from a wobble from time to time even now at 40. It is quite simply to believe that they can do anything. I really want them to have the confidence to take on the world on their own terms.

I still have memories of my father spending hours with me as a youngster trying to teach me to dive. I was so fearful that even his patience ran out and he got irritated. Another early memory is of my mum being exasperated with me because instead of waiting for an adult to help me prepare the stamps for my budding stamp collection, I decide to remove them from the paper myself with dire results! Years later I remember how many hours I spent studying history books trying to get at the truth of a particular set of incidents. I would then carefully reproduce that which I thought was closest to the truth. That way I got A grades whereas when I put more of myself into an assignment I would only get a B. For all these reasons and more I grew up with a burning need to get it right and I lived by so many rules.

Now I am on a quest to be my whole self and to get an ever clearer sense of how living in harmony with my authentic voice can work in a materialistic world. So that's why I say my dream is for my girls to be free to be themselves and to retain some of that initial innocence and magic that makes them so special as little people.

That said there are other things I wish for them. One in particular is that they are fluent in at least one other language. I took European Studies at University which you could refer to as a liberal arts degree if you were that way inclined but it did include French, Spanish and Portuguese and a year in Spain. Apart from my early career, I have never really used my languages and I would like it to be different for the girls as being able to communicate in other languages makes the cultures of those countries much more accessible. It also allows one to establish a much deeper connnection and sense of rapport. So I am now inordinately pleased that they know all the colours in Spanish and the numbers 1-10 and yet I need to commit to using Spanish with them, a little bit each day because having a knowledge of another language between the ages of 3 and 5 develops a part of the brain that never gets developed at another time. Also little and often is a much more successful strategy than full on for a long period of time. Thankfully we are now past the period when they used to both shout Stop that noise!

Can you have it all?

Yesterday I had the great privilege of being part of the Network of Black Professionals and the Women's Leadership Network 's new mentee programme for senior women within Further Education. The participants were an impressive collection of women, many of whom were at Vice Principal level looking for tips on how to progress their career that bit further. It was a very interactive session with much of the input coming from the delegates and that could explain in part why there was such a feeling of openness and trust within the room.

I was surprised at how well the section on barriers to career progression went as women really made the most of the opportunity to share the challenges they faced. What saddened me however was the extent to which some of the external pressures had not changed. There were still references to the old boy network in the sense that conversation amongst peers tended to focus on football; huge challenges around family commitments and work/ life balance existed; and the experience of the glass ceiling was common. The most significant finding was the part that self-limiting beliefs played in many cases and/ or a lack of confidence in their own abilities to perform at a more senior level.

This shocked me and also made me realise that there is a place for the work of Minerva's Mind in these type of environments which has a focus on helping people develop their own leadership style and realise along the way that it is their imperfections that make them more accessible to others. It also made me realise how real the struggle is that many Mums face who want to work and have a role in which they are taken seriously alongside providing a loving environment for their family at home. Furthermore confidence or the lack of it is not just the preserve of those Mums who do not go back to work but affects us all wherever we find ourselves on the spectrum of to work or not. It is much clearer why Mums at Director level have decided to choose another path because having it all is a myth.