Choice
As human beings, our natural tendency when things go badly is to fall into familiar and often unhelpful patterns of thinking and feeling, and my suspicion is that as disabled people, we are particularly good at jumping onto the hamster wheel of negativity based around our experiences.
It's interesting to look at this and see whether we are in fact, being controlled by our feelings rather than choosing to feel a certain way.
So can we exercise choice about how we feel?
Limiting ourselves
If we choose to consistently feel negative about our experiences of barriers and discrimination and focus on this as the overriding reason why we are not moving into positions of influence and leadership - might we be limiting ourselves?
If we feel angry that all employers are either too afraid, unsure, or disinterested in employing us, or won’t adjust for us when they do employ us, are we holding ourselves back?
We all know that it's not as it should be 'out there' but if we were to explore how we might take more control of our feelings then we might free ourselves up to achieve more.
Is this something we can learn?
Choosing to feel differently
Jon Adams, a long standing Sync member talks about what happened when he started to make choices about how he was going to think and feel about his experience of dyslexia.
'The hiding years, of course were very much to do with my impairments and my experience as a dyslexic, of being bullied and ridiculed and how I chose to feel about that - not worthy, not allowed and not important. That's all changed now, I'm very much on the move.... I travel into a range of arenas and I now longer fear authority or hierarchy in the same way I did because that fear really held me back'
Read review on DAO of Jon's solo exhibition at Pallant Gallery, Chichester in 2009
Taking control of choice
Deepak Chopra defines the tiny space between a happening and the response to it as ‘the gap’.
He describes this as ‘a space of infinite potential, where positive or negative choices over what we feel, happen.’
The gap is your connection to the field of pure potentiality. It is that state of pure awareness, that silent space between thoughts, that inner stillness that connects you to true power. And when you squeeze the gap, you squeeze your connection to the field of pure potentiality and infinite creativity.
(The Seven Miracles, Deepak Chopra)
There are many ways we can think about the gap and use it to have more control over our feelings.
Whether it's an elastic band on our wrist that we ping to stop us reacting on impulse, or the 24 hour rule where we leave an email response for a night and day and see how we feel with a gap in between, or moving outside into the fresh air, shaking off the 'why men?' feelings that often come so naturally to us as disabled leaders.
Try it and see if it makes a difference. Taking control of our feelings will undoubtedly give us more energy for leadership!
Sarah Pickthall, Sync Coaching
