Source | www.forbes.com | Kathy Caprino
Several years ago, after 13 years of career coaching (and before that 18 years of corporate work and 4 years of serving as a family therapist), I decided to pull back my “viewfinder” and take a look from a higher level perspective at the coaching work I was doing. I began observing some powerful (and frankly, alarming) trends in terms of the key challenges my clients were coming to coaching to address.
I sensed there were some new patterns emerging that revealed what was going wrong in so many thousands of people’s lives and careers around the world. I began to track and study these patterns more closely and what emerged from this research was what I now identify as the 7 most damaging power gaps professional face. In working of women and men around the world, it’s evident to me that while both men and women often experience these gaps, women process and experience them in very different ways. And women seem to internalize them more deeply than men do, and the negative effects are longer-lasting.
These “power gaps” are specific areas in which we lose confidence, self-esteem, self-authority and the ability to stand up for ourselves and shape our lives and work as we need and want to. The gaps are formed through a variety of significant factors and influences, including societal programming, biases around gender, family influences, the roles we unconsciously play in childhood, how our boundaries are formed, how our bosses and colleagues treat us, what happens to us in our work cultures that hurts us, and more.
