Brave, Not Perfect. Reshma Saujani

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СКАЧАТЬ internal pressure to say yes only gets stronger as we grow up. Like Dina, who works long hours as an attorney but somehow felt guilted into agreeing to be her son’s class parent. So many of us give our time, attention, maybe even money, to people or causes that are not a priority to us because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings (mostly, though, because we don’t want them to think badly of us).

      Boys, and the men they become, rarely feel this way. Janet, a forty-four-year-old manager at a clothing store, cringes anytime she reads an email that her husband, a general contractor, sends for work because she thinks his directness sounds harsh. He bluntly asks for what he needs or states his opinion, never softens critical feedback, and signs his emails without any salutations. No “best wishes” or even “thanks.” When she once suggested he soften the tone of an email to a vendor he worked with so as to not piss him off, he told her, “It’s not my job to be liked. It’s my job to get my point across.”

      She, on the other hand, peppers her emails to her boss and coworkers with friendly lead-ins, praise, and, occasionally, a smiley face emoji. She reads over every email at least three times, editing and reediting it before she hits send. “My husband thinks I’m being neurotic when I do that,” Janet told me. “I think I’m being thorough. But if I’m being really honest, I’d say I’m being cautious so I don’t annoy or offend anyone.”

      I work with an executive coach who tells me all the time that being liked is overrated. She does not say this to the über-successful male CEOs she coaches; she doesn’t have to. After all, their role models are men like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos who are notorious for not being people pleasers, so they don’t give a damn whether they’re liked or not.

      Despite my coach’s urgings, I do worry about being liked. Running for office, especially in New York City, I built a pretty tough skin when it comes to public criticism. But on a day-to-day level, I care whether my team likes me. I care a lot. I want them to think I’m the most amazing boss they’ve ever had—which makes giving them critical feedback really hard. I do it, because I know I have to be the CEO, but ugh. In my personal life, I get completely twisted up inside if I have a disagreement with a friend or if I sense my parents or husband are upset with me. I’ve definitely spent nights worrying about how a colleague, an acquaintance—even a complete stranger!—may have interpreted something I’ve said, and I’ve soft-pedaled way too many times when I really should have ripped someone a new one.

      Just yesterday a guy cut in front of me in line while I was buying a sandwich and even though I was pissed, I didn’t say a word because I didn’t want to be rude—and this was someone I didn’t even know and would likely never see again. And I too have been guilty of saying nice things even when I secretly think the exact opposite, so as to not offend (hello, salty lemonade). Haven’t we all?

      The result of all this toxic people pleasing is that your whole life can quickly become about what others think, and very little about what you genuinely want, need, and believe—let alone what you deserve. We’ve become conditioned to compromise and shrink ourselves in order to be liked. The problem is, when you work so hard to get everyone to like you, you very often end up not liking yourself so much. But once you learn to be brave enough to stop worrying about pleasing everyone else and put yourself first (which you will!), that’s when you become the empowered author of your own life.

       The “Softer” Sex

      One sunny Saturday morning in late May, I sat on a bench in a playground in downtown Manhattan watching my husband, Nihal, and our then sixteen-month-old son, Shaan, play. Or, rather, I was watching my son bop from the monkey bars to the jungle gym and back again while Nihal stood a decent distance away and watched. Shaan’s shirt was smeared with strawberry ice cream and his nose was filled with boogers, but he didn’t care—and neither did I. Still new to the whole vertical coordination thing, Shaan toppled over a couple of times as he waddled from one end of the playground to another; each time, rather than run to his rescue, Nihal calmly waited for him to get up and keep going. At one point, I looked over and saw him coaxing Shaan, who was a little scared, down the big slide. “You can do this . . . you’re a big boy . . . you’re not afraid!”

      Nearby, a few older boys were play-fighting using sticks as swords and chasing one another. Lots of happy hollering and a sea of dirty, scabby knees and elbows: a classic case of grade-school boys at play.

      Meanwhile, over at the sandbox, five girls who looked to be around three years old were playing quietly. No ice-cream-smeared shirts or booger-encrusted noses there. Wearing cute coordinated outfits, they took turns scooping piles of sand to make a pretend cake, while their moms watched intently from a few feet away. In a ten-minute span, three of the five moms jumped up from their perches and climbed into the sandbox—one to straighten her daughter’s headband and another to reprimand her daughter for being “rude” by taking the shovel from another girl. The third mom rushed to her daughter’s aid after her sand “cake” fell over and hurriedly helped her daughter rebuild it while making soothing noises and wiping the tears from the girl’s face. When the cake was fixed, the little girl smiled and her mom beamed with pride, “There’s my happy girl!”

      You can’t make this stuff up.

      Nearly everything I’d read, researched, witnessed, and interviewed experts about over the past year was playing out right in front of me. Go figure: a classic illustration of how boys are socialized to be brave and girls to be perfect, right here on a little asphalt playground less than ten minutes from my apartment.

      At the same time we’re applauding our girls for being nice, polite, and perfect, we are also telling them in not-so-subtle ways that bravery is the domain of boys. What I saw that day on the playground reminded me of another scene I’d witnessed just a few months earlier in Shaan’s swim class. Parents were encouraging their timid sons to “be tough,” and shouting with glee when their boys jumped into the deep end. If one of the little girls in the class was afraid to jump in, however, her fears were met with soft, reassuring coos: “It’s okay, honey . . . just take my hand . . . you don’t have to get your face wet.” This one really made no sense to me; I mean, how do you go swimming without getting wet?

      This isn’t just casual observation on my part. Studies show that parents provide much more hands-on assistance and words of caution to their daughters, while their sons are given encouragement and directives from afar and then left to tackle physical challenges on their own. We start with protecting girls physically, and the coddling continues on from there.

      So many of these patterns are perpetuated because as parents, we’re punished socially for violating them. A woman named Kelly told me a story about a group excursion she took to Oregon with her son and daughter, along with several other families. After taking a mountain bike ride, they hiked up a cliff where the rocks create a natural slide into the water. Their guide, Billy, helped all the kids out onto the rocks and offered them a push down the slide. The boys all went right away, but Kelly’s usually courageous daughter was nervous. Instead of encouraging her the way he had done with the boys—that is, by just giving them a little shove—Billy helped her off the cliff and gently assured her that she didn’t have to go if she didn’t want.

      Meanwhile, Kelly, knowing that her daughter is usually fearless, was hollering from the bottom, “Go, Ellie!” When it became clear that Billy wasn’t going to give her a nudge as he did for the boys, she screamed up the cliff, “JUST PUSH HER!” Everyone around was horrified. “Every adult on the tour gave me the side-eye,” she remembers. “They didn’t even try to hide their judgment about how I was encouraging someone to push my daughter to be brave. We’re not supposed to do that to our daughters.”

      The belief that boys are tough and resilient while girls are vulnerable and СКАЧАТЬ