Does Internal Diversity Create Financial Abundance?

I’m going to start this blog with a quote from one of my favorite books of all time, Invisible Women : Data Bias in A World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez.  

She states :  

“Studies have repeatedly found that the more diverse a company’s leadership is, the more innovative they are.  That could be because women are just innately more innovative – but more likely is that the presence of diverse perspectives make businesses better informed about their customers.  Certainly, innovation is strongly linked to financial performance.”

Read that again if you have to (I know I did – two and three times again).  

I could wax poetic about what this means for the larger society and why we’re still talking about things like this in a book published in 2019 but instead I’m going to dive into what this means for each individual woman and the diverse leadership they have within themselves.

what happens when we don’t allow all aspects of ourselves to come to the table?

One of the biggest things I see in clients, when it comes to confidently owning the shit out of their business and the work they do, is that they do not allow ALL aspects of themselves to come to the table. 

Internally they have beliefs and ideas about who is allowed to have a seat (and it’s usually pretty limited, often heavily flavored by the expectations and assumptions placed onto all women about how they’re allowed to occupy space in the public sphere).

It often looks and sounds similar to something like this : 

Me : “If you could show up however you wanted, how would you show up?” 

Client : “I’d be way more direct” (said with gusto and a smile across her face) 

Me : (I smile back and take a pause)

Client : (Jumps back in, more serious this time) “I mean, nothing crazy because you have to be professional.  I wouldn’t want to fly off the handle ya know.”

Me : “Huh .. so someone inside would love to be more direct.  She came through loud and clear and that smile was contagious.  But then someone else quickly shut that down and took ‘direct’ to mean ‘crazy and flying off the handle?’”

Client : (Pauses, pondering) 

The example above is just one of many that I hear frequently as clients share what it’s like to be a woman owning and running a business in 2024.  

Internally, there’s a desire to be bolder, more direct.  To speak what’s on her mind.  To ask for things.  To share things.  To tell people what she needs and wants (in life and in running a successful biz).  

But this voice is small.  It doesn’t feel like it has a leg to stand on because there’s a larger voice.  A more oppressive voice that says “that’s not the way we (and specifically you) do things around here, you’re (the direct one, the confident one) not welcome here”.  So the direct, confident voice sits back down.  And all the energy behind being direct and asking for what she needs and wants rushes out of the room like opening the bathroom door after a steamy shower.

But then she feels anxious.  And doesn’t have the motivation to do the things she needs to do in order to run and grow her business.  She labels herself a procrastinator and says she feels nervous when she has to make big decisions because she feels like she just can’t settle on what the best option would be. 

Do you see where I’m going with this?  Internally, there’s something shutting her decision-maker-voice down.  Internally, there’s something telling the voice that would go and get shit done without giving it a second thought to move to the passenger’s seat because what’s more important is being “professional” or nice or likable or not causing a scene.

A Brief History To Consider

The average millennial (let’s take a thirty-six year old woman) was raised by parents who were (give or take) in their mid-twenties when they had her (making them in their early sixties now) and born in and around 1960.

** Using general math and timelines for all of this, to get an overall gist 

Keep that in mind and consider this quote below : 

“When President John F. Kennedy established the Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, he appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as chairwoman. In a televised 1962 discussion with Roosevelt, Kennedy stated, ‘We want to be sure that women are used as effectively as they can to provide a better life for our people, in addition to meeting their primary responsibility, which is in the home.’”

Did your jaw hit the floor?

Mine did. 

Their primary responsibility – is the home.  

Cool.  

Do you think there was room for them to be direct in the home?  To ask for what they (really) needed and wanted?  To share openly (and honestly) about their inner thoughts and feelings? 

Likely not (because also keep in mind this was at a time when being pregnant was a fireable offense, getting a line of credit in your own name wasn’t happening without a male co-signer, and even if you had the academic accomplishments to get into an Ivy League school, that wasn’t happening until at least 1968 (Yale) (.. though Columbia held out until 1983 (I’m literally scraping the bottom of my jaw from the ground)). 

But how does this tie into inner diversity you ask? 

Because our parents grew up in a time when women were only allowed to be one dimensional.  When they were punished (physically, emotionally, and financially) for attempting to be anything other than what was expected of them (and what was expected of them wasn’t very much).  And even if those very same parents were the most forward-thinking, progressive, feminist and feminist-like beings during their time, they were still surrounded, day in and day out by messaging that tried to tell them otherwise. 

This matters.  This makes a huge difference.  This is part of the journey of learning how to fill out your own diverse internal leadership exec board and welcome ALL parts of you to the table, not just the nice ones, not just the ones who want to keep the peace, and always be “professional” (even at the risk of quieting your truest voice and most authentics wants and wishes).

Curious about how to begin to FIND those other parts of you?  

Head on over to this blog post where I talk all about making a seat for everyone (at the proverbial table): What Does It Take To Actually Run a Successful Business?