Last week our Tide Risers members gathered to examine and reflect upon our seen and unseen identities, especially with regards to our gender. Alberta McKnight, MPH and Maëlle Fonteneau joined me to co-facilitate an exploration of how our identities influence our leadership and inform our Emprise. We regularly do this work in community with one another within Tide Risers, as we believe one of the greatest resources we can provide is the development of a community of advancement and accountability. To that end, it is critical to deepen our awareness of ourselves and those around us in an effort to build trust and long-term, meaningful relationships.

Maëlle Fonteneau

This identity session is often the one in which a lot of our members really come to find their Emprise. I’ve thought a lot about why that is. Quite often we find ourselves in a place in our lives and careers in which we look back over time and realize we have subverted the things that make us who we are -- the things that really create our identity -- so that we can conform to the culture in which we find ourselves existing. We do this for a lot of reasons, ranging from the pressure to live up to others’ expectations of success to the need for safety and security, especially for people of marginalized communities. But when we get to this point in our lives, it’s really important to take time to really reflect on who we ARE and how we identify ourselves in this world, and then look back to our intentions and integrate how we want to BE in this world.

Last week during our session, we examined identity largely from a gender point of view. This is because a lot of what we internalize from the very beginning of our lives is attached to societal expectations of gender. The way we perceive women’s leadership, what it means to be a powerful female leader, and how we measure success are all very much influenced by social norms and expectations around gender. To understand who we are, how we can best be of service to our community, and how we can most effectively pursue our Emprise, we need to unpack and examine the aspects of our identity that are influenced by societal norms around gender. So we give Tide Risers the opportunity and the framework to do that as a part of our core curriculum.

There is, of course, a vast landscape that makes up the female experience, and generalizing about our experience as women is never going to be representative of any one person’s lived experience, just as it’s never going to fully express the intersectionality of identity. What I do enjoy about these conversations, however, is the incredible gift it is to share our experiences so that we can start to catch a glimpse of that vast array of complexity and beauty in this enormous landscape of what it means to be a woman.

If you’d like to hear more about my personal journey with an exploration into gender identity, and how it helped shape the concept of Emprise, I invite you to watch this video.

Lara Holliday is a Career Coach and the Founder + CEO
of Tide Risers

Why We Examine Gender