Letting women know they are enough

Employment is the best pathway to financial independence and the opportunity to move on from disadvantage. Donna de Zwart is CEO of Fitted for Work, an organisation helping women to get and keep work.

I’m what you might call an unconventional CEO. I didn’t realise I had what it took because my career path looked different to your typical looking CEO. At least that was the story I told myself. I believed I was not good enough, not just in work but in most aspects of my life. I spent a large part of my adult life focusing on what I didn’t have rather than on the strengths and experience I did have.

Like every woman of a certain age, I have a story. The narrative of this story is so common, I won’t go into detail. Suffice to say events reinforced my lack of self-esteem and confidence. These are the two factors that come up time and time again in research around why women are not progressing up through the ranks of the Australian workforce. These two factors permeated every aspect of my life – how I parented, how I performed at work, how I behaved socially. I lived with a nagging persistent feeling that I just wasn’t good enough. Needless to say this held me back in many aspects of my life.

Then something changed…. I started working for a number of women who started to question this limiting and unjustified self-belief. Every time I threw up an excuse as to why I couldn’t be promoted, or wasn’t a good parent, they questioned me. Why? They forced me to self-reflect in a different way until I started to see what they saw. What I saw as weaknesses they reframed as strengths. These strengths displayed themselves in how I had overcome adversity, the fact that showed up every day and was truly present, the contributions I made not only to the bottom line but to the culture of the organisation. They weren’t interested in exploring why I had low self-esteem and poor self-confidence. They were unrelenting in their questioning, and as a result as time went on the limiting self-belief of “I’m not good enough” stopped resonating. In fact it started to sound down right ridiculous. Their validation and, more importantly, my growing self-belief changed me and the course of my life.

These inspiring women were real. They had their own obstacles to overcome, they were on their own journeys. They were fearless in their authenticity. They were never afraid to show their vulnerability despite their very senior roles and responsibilities. They did this with grace and humanity and no one got hurt in the process. They showed me that I could be enough just as I am, flaws and all.  They opened up possibilities. They showed me that resilience is not necessarily innate; rather it’s a skill to be learned. They sponsored me in finding the support networks that I needed.  They explained that I didn’t need to have all of the answers – I could find them in those support networks.

In a nutshell, what they did was so powerful and yet so simple; they held a mirror up to me. Through this I learnt to love and believe in myself just as I am. I now know that I am enough.

In my role of CEO at Fitted for Work, I see that old limiting self-belief every day in the women that we work with. The women that come to us at Fitted for Work all have a story. These stories cover the spectrum of human experience; physical and mental illness, abuse, disability, time spent in a correctional facility, arriving in Australia as a refugee, losing a partner, divorce…  and the list goes on.  Regardless of where they have come from and what they have experienced, we see the common theme of a limiting self-belief and lack of confidence.  Without these two critical elements it’s hard to see a way out, to understand that you have choice.

An important step to self-efficacy for a woman is financial independence. We know that employment is the best pathway to financial independence and the opportunity to move on from disadvantage. When you help one woman find work, and she is able to provide for herself and her family, there is a ripple effect. This one change in her life has an impact on the way she parents her children, the way she engages with her local community, the value and diversity she brings to her workplace and ultimately a profound collective impact on Australia as a whole.

At Fitted for Work, we like to think that we can give women the sense of possibility, hope and of power in shaping their lives, writing a new story for themselves. We believe that disadvantage can be overcome. We believe women are the catalyst for creating a more socially cohesive and prosperous society. To enable women to gain that confidence, to let them know in no uncertain terms they are enough.