RE-POWERING WOMEN

Insights from Dion Johnson’s #FastForwardDiversityInclusion Webcast. 23 August 2020

I felt powerful just by listening to Dion talk about her beliefs on what makes and propels a woman to step into her own power.  She’s that infectious. 

From the moment she said “I was born a champion” I was hooked. 

“I am a woman in a man’s world”

“I am black in a white person’s world”

“I am a Christian in a secular world”

“I am facially disfigured in a world obsessed with beauty”

Her advocacy has always been about helping women. From when she started her working life as a midwife to how she evolved to coaching executive women today. 

She describes herself a “midwife of the soul” as she told the story of how she responded to a "calling" and started focusing help for young, vulnerable teenage girls going through pregnancy. Helping them through it and beyond.

What resonated with me from our chat are the things we need to pay attention to if we are to “rise up”, meet our calling and make the world a better place.   

• The importance of self-healing. You need to look after yourself if you are to keep strong in helping others
  

• The importance of understanding how we are “wired”. Know thyself. To work on our understanding of what gets in our way. Make time to really learn, research, go deep, try something different, stretch and broaden our perspective and orientation. If we direct ourselves to what matters, understand our skills and finding a home for them in the world, then we are on track.
  
• Respecting the issue /what we are up against. What we are up against has been around for far longer than you and I have been alive. In some cases, hundreds of years of patriarchy, bigotry, racism… ingrained in culture, in genetic behaviour. We need to be strong and resilient to sustain the work to create the change we want to see in the world. 
  
  
• Developing a way to change things in an elegant way. We need to find a way to win the fight by staying present and steady, communicate our ideas without creating an argument and without caving in. But this requires us to know our inner compass. That deep and compassionate centre that helps us stay firm. 

Know thyself. Self-awareness is easy to understand in principle, but it is much more difficult to know yourself in practice. Especially in a world that is constantly persuading us to go for the next new thing or what we have is not good enough.

Instead of committing to time to know oneself, we obsess over things that we are not. Instead of searching for the best next thing “out there” why don’t we look for it within?

Stop. 

Pay attention to the possibilities within and ground yourself with how you are already valuable.

Watch webcast here: https://www.pscp.tv/Ethical_Leader/1eaJbzYnQBXJX