When you are born with the freedom to do whatever you want are you taking advantage of it and defining life like you want, or are you defining it based off expectations and what is right in front of you? Malcolm Gladwell identified factors that affect success in his book Outliers. These factors, or outliers, were reasons why people like Bill Gates, Mozart, Bill Joy, and the Beatles had great success. If we look at these outliers we can look at what might affect our success and how we identify what it means to be a woman.
Demographics. Where people are born provides them with a set of opportunities. The opportunities I have in the Midwest are different than the opportunities my daughter has in Dallas, or that someone might have in India. Location makes a difference. Bill Gates was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of an opportunity to program over eight hours a day, six days a week, before people had home computers. An opportunity few others would have had when he was in high school.
Social. Parents have a major impact on our future success. Even if they did not set us up for success, we can change that, and our kids can change their path, but we must understand how they affected our lives. Being born to wealthy or poor parents makes an initial difference. Wealthy kids will have opportunities that poor children do not. Wealthy parents are heavily involved in the lives of their children and schedule learning activities for them. Poor parents tend to provide less structured activity.
Our parenting theologies affect our children and affected us. We adopted a theology of life from our parents. Our family background has played a big part in defining who we are today. Our idea of what it means to be a woman often comes from the women in our lives. Left unexamined we may be following a path we don’t want for ourselves. If we don’t examine our lives we won’t see the societal forces that impact us. Families that don’t question their lives won’t encourage us to question ours. If we haven’t had a good life crisis we may never question the status quo. We may never give ourselves the opportunity to be honest about what we want and don’t want. Dreams may be buried within and die with us.
Legacy. Gladwell refers to legacy as the culture, history, and the world outside that affects our professional success. It refers to where we grow up, our heritage, and cultural legacies. It’s about where our parents grew up and where their parents grew up. Legacy affects the roles we find ourselves in. Now start thinking about your role as a mother and woman and how your legacy affects that. Are you following a similar pattern as your mother and her mother? If so are you okay with that?
An article, by Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D., in psychologytoday.com discusses the work of social psychologist Geert Hofstede and a study conducted of IBM employees from 50 different countries. Hofstede found that people had distinct value systems. Hofstede’s research provided a paradigm for understanding the differences between cultures and those dimensions are applicable to us and can affect how we define ourselves.
- Power distance refers to how much inequality we tolerate.
- Uncertainty avoidance is how afraid we are of unknown people and ideas.
- Individualism dictates how dependent we are on our extended family.
- Masculinity/femininity is how we feel a man and woman should feel and behave.
- Long and short-term orientation refers to whether we focus on the present, past, or future.
- Indulgence versus restraint tells us how we look at life. Is it fun or is it a serious matter?
I can walk out my front door and drive where I want to drive. I can quit my job on Monday and do nothing. I can enroll in a new degree program, leave my husband, date who I want when I want, never talk to my children again, or talk to them too much. I can move across the world and back again. I can eat calorie laden sweets or live off of vegetables. I can love myself or no one. I can wear jeans or tight pants. Wear a lot of make-up or none at all. I can run for office or never vote. I can participate in my community or live in the outback of Alaska. I was born with a lot of freedom, but unanalyzed outliers define who I am if I let them. Am I the culmination of what I see in front of me or what I see within?
Our freedom is always challenged. The world is unfair and provides challenges where there shouldn’t be any. I might not always get the promotion or the opportunity I am qualified for. I might not get treated fairly at work, home, or in life. Others might not give me opportunities that I am qualified for and some may overlook me altogether because I do not fit their idea of what is right. I am free to try again or give up altogether. I am free to fight for what I want and push for the rights that have been given to me.
Defining your freedom.
As a U.S citizen born in the Midwest in 1969 I was born with the freedom to do pretty much what I want despite obvious constraints and challenges. I didn’t have to fight to vote, work outside the home, go to college, join the military, or do what I want with my body. It was inherent in my entry into this world. Perhaps because it was just given to me I took it for granted. Since I didn’t have to fight for anything I slipped into what was safe. I didn’t work very hard to enjoy the freedom that others fought for.
Demographics defined my life at first. There were a specific set of opportunities available and many that weren’t in my small Midwest town. My parents provided a strong example of what life looks like. The women in my life established what it meant to be a woman. I picked up a lot from my stay at home mom turned career woman, from my grandmother who helped manage a 400-acre farm turned artist, and my steadfast mama who worked her entire life and did nothing else. That is what it meant to be a woman. What it means to be a human was defined by my father. He invested a lot into ensuring that I grew up having a big vision of life and the world. He ensured that I had a mind that could see the big world and he encouraged me to find my place in it. He wanted me to see beyond my legacy, culture, and him.
What defines our lives? A potent midlife crisis has been one of the greatest gifts I have ever received. It has given me an opportunity to question everything and to redefine what is important to me. It is a gift to be able to redefine your life based off increased maturity, knowledge, wisdom, and the understanding that a majority of my life has been impacted by outside forces and I may want to venture past them and create my own path. I am enjoying this defining period much more than when I was twenty and had less of everything.
Examine what has defined who you are as a woman. Have the courage to question—everything. Examine how your demographics, social environment, and legacy have affected your idea of what success is. If we had been born at a different time, in a different place, with different parents, and in a different culture our lives would be very different than they are now. Look at that. Start figuring out if the woman you are today is the woman you want to be. Explore other demographics, social environments, and legacies to get an idea of how changing those can change you. Open your mind to becoming a woman you might not even realize you want to be. A woman that you don’t see in you or in front of you. If you discover the status quo is perfect, after analyzing all options, and you are who you want to be then embrace the life you have created. If not use the freedom you have and change.
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Musings as we age,
Marcy Pedersen
