Читать книгу Silenced and Sidelined - D Lynn D Arnold - Страница 20

When she feels silenced, it feels like she has contracted a virus. The silencing virus affects her cognition, emotion, spirit, and body. Cognitively it is like being in a mental spin, and she struggles with confusion on why things are so challenging. She replays conversations and situations in her head until she cannot think. Kris, the marketing executive, described it as “thinking something to death before I spoke up.”

She also suffers from deficit thinking and questions her leadership decisions. Here we see evidence of confidence surfacing in this phenomenon. Deficit thinking differs from a mental spin in that the deficit is specific to her leadership ability. Here participants described their lack of self-assurance, questioned their ability to lead, and described a sensation of overall failure that trespassed into domains beyond their leadership role. Women wrestle with imposter syndrome and feel a lack of trust in self and others. An executive for a chain of casual restaurants in the United States who had decades of success, only to experience silencing by her CEO later in her career, put it this way, “All I know is from that point on, I wasn’t willing to show up freely as myself the way I think I have been.”