She showed up after I became her

Letters from The In-Between, No. 19

It is Saturday morning, not yet six. The house is asleep, the coffee is hot in my hands, and the refrigerator hum is the only company in this kitchen. I have been sitting here since the light was still gray, thinking about eight o’clock on Tuesday morning.

I went into her office carrying an idea I had been turning over since a piece in Harvard Business Review sent me down a rabbit hall a few weeks earlier. Bespoke AI workshops for leadership teams, grounded in the neuroscience of trust, and in what is actually happening in our brains when we sit down with these tools.

She listened all the way to the end.

What I noticed, sitting there, was that I had stopped bracing. I have spent most of my working life in rooms with half my attention on the idea and the other half on how I was landing, and that split costs you more than you can see while you are paying it. It is not thinking. It is surviving with a notebook open. In her office the second half went quiet, and I could hear myself.

Then she said, “This is brilliant, and here is how you go about getting this done.” She pulled a scrap of paper toward her and started writing names, in the order to go to them, and slid it across the desk.

What I keep returning to is not the list. It is the part before it, when nothing in me was defending anything.

This morning I want to tell you why it took most of my working life to sit in a room like that with a woman.

What I could not find

For all fifteen years at General Motors, I was quietly hungry for a female mentor.

I had mentors, and they were good ones. Men who opened proverbial career doors, men who told me the truth about how decisions actually got made, men who put my name in rooms I was not standing in. I am grateful to every one of them.

And still there was a part of me that was “dying” , that is the honest word, dying for a woman to walk ahead of me and turn around. I wanted to watch one of them carry herself into a room that had already made up its mind. I wanted to hear how she said no. Mostly I wanted someone who knew in her body what that table cost, because she had paid the same bill.

The one I prayed for

A woman at the C-suite level at GM; agreed to mentor me, and I felt like I had won a million dollars. I walked out of the building that day lighter than I had walked in for years.

It took me a while to see what the altitude had done to her.

She was brilliant and she had survived, and to survive up there she had adapted. Her office ran at the clipped pace of the men she sat with, with the same allergy to anything soft. Except an orchid on her desk.

She was harder on me than any of my male mentors had ever been, and she was harder on purpose. If I was going to make it in a man’s world I would need thicker skin and a shorter voice, so she gave me the training she had received.

She said, “You are not putting in enough hours and effort.”

I was working twelve and fourteen hour days. I was doing an analyst role, a project manager role and a planner role; and carrying a third that had never been backfilled. It took me a long time to count them.

I did not defend myself. I wrote it down as something to fix about myself.

I sat across from the woman I had prayed for and never once stopped performing. The thing I had been looking for had been trained out of her long before I arrived.

She gave me a great deal, and none of this is a complaint about her. What she showed me, without meaning to, was the shape of the hole. I knew precisely what I had been yearning for, because I was sitting two feet from where it should have been.

So I became her instead

When I left corporate, I made myself a quiet promise. I would be the female mentor I had spent all those years wishing for. If I could not find her, I would be her for somebody else.

Through the consulting years and the years running schools, that is what I did. I told women the truth with kindness attached to it. I named their gifts back to them before they could argue me out of it. I let them watch me be soft and effective in the same meeting, because I had needed so badly to see that combination exist in one person.

A few days ago this came through on my phone, from the teacher who, I sensed was in need of having someone believing in her more than she was able at the time to belive in herself (the way I yearned someone to believe in me):

“With back to school season upon us, I have been doing a lot of reflecting lately and wanted to express gratitude. Thank you for all of the coaching, mentoring, guidance, grace, patience, pep talks, manifestations, and the million other ways you supported me in my growth. Thank you for believing in me before I believed in myself. So grateful we crossed paths.”

I read it standing at the counter and had to put the phone down.

Believing in me before I believed in myself. She had described in one line the exact thing I could never find at GM.

Which brings me back to Tuesday

The woman whose office I sat in this week is the mentor of my dreams.

She listens all the way down, past the words to the thing underneath them. She challenges me and my ideas. And most importantly she believes in me in ways that I can not see or recognize, yet..

Here is the part I keep turning over.

I am not sure I would have recognized her twenty years ago. I would have been too busy performing to notice what she was handing me. I spent all those years pouring encouragement into other women, naming their gifts out loud, believing in them early. That is a long apprenticeship in what the thing looks like up close. So when it finally sat across a desk from me at eight in the morning and let me think out loud with nothing in me braced, I knew it on sight.

I am suspicious of anyone who tells you the universe keeps a ledger. What I will tell you is that giving something away for years is how you learn its face. You hand it to other people without a receipt, and by the time someone finally hands it back, you know exactly what you are holding.

There is a reason I want this on paper and not in your head. Your nervous system believes what you write in detail. The detail is the whole instruction.

So here is your work this Saturday, before your head talks you out of it.

Line one: the name of one woman you could be that for this week, and the exact sentence you are going to say to her. Not a compliment. The thing she cannot yet say about herself.

Line two: the mentor you are still waiting for, in present tense, as though she is already in your life. Not her title. What she says to you when you bring her the thing you are afraid of.

Line one is how you learn to recognize line two.

With love from the in-between,

Magdalena

P.S. Hit reply and tell me: who was the mentor you were dying for, and did you ever find her, or did you become her? I read every one.

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