HF3 Encore: WILD CARDS | How to Be Confident In Yourself…(even if it upsets people) with Lauren Currie

The whole amazing thing about what you've shared is that you, even though the vision was you were going to be, you know, the female Steve Jobs, that there's so much that The word is not charitable, but there's so much like really helping humanity in everything that you've done, which I think is the missing thing for so many of us as entrepreneurs, like especially as women, I feel we often have this, we want to have impact and purpose.

And we often feel like what's stopping us is the confidence, is the self-belief to do that.

And also like you shared, when you're in a room full of a bunch of white men, it doesn't really build your confidence to it.

Yeah, because you feel like an imposter, right? Because you are one.

It's like those spaces were not designed for people like

you.

Yeah.

Who do you emulate if you just can't see what that looks like for you? And it's so hard to put yourself in that, especially because I know for you, you were so young when you first got into this.

I think you were, what, 25, 24? I'd say so.

23.

Imagine being 23 walking into that room and there's no one like you and you can't act like them because that's a totally different way of being.

I shared with you before we started recording that

while this show is for people who are starting businesses or they're new in them in three years, it's also for people making pivots.

becoming more visible or starting new business, maybe expanding a team.

And we were saying how a big thing that stops you is that confidence.

But I also think there's certain unconscious leadership norms that you see that makes women a little bit more invisible or like keeps us from being at the table.

I think there's so much around what a leader should look like and should sound like and women get so many conflicting messages of how we should be and what we should be.

And all of those things really influence how we are evaluated, how we're promoted, how we're supported.

But we also know that those norms do penalize women.

Like all of the data shows us that women are penalized for visibility, confidence, ambition.

We know that when a woman shows up at work in a way that is confident, direct, decisive, that they are going to be more likely to be disliked, labelled as aggressive, difficult.

And scientists call this the likability penalty.

But it's such a difficult place to be because we are constantly trying to walk this tightrope of being competent and being liked.

But yet all of the data tells us that the more competent we seem to be, the less people will like us.

I think that is ultimately the biggest challenge unconscious norm and all the habits that spin from that, that we are facing, that we need to overcome.