Expression with Fiona English

As a society, we do this time and time again. We position people who happen to be very good at one thing as if they are experts on everything else. We confuse success, power and billionaire-dom with wisdom. That is a gross miscalculation. It is not to lessen their pedigree or ability in their chosen industry but to recognise the limitations of that expertise and success. Do not mistake a high IQ and technical excellence as proof of the ability to make choices which will benefit everyone. Technical expertise does not guarantee ethics. Mastery and success in your chosen area does not make you suitable for deciding on the fate of humanity. Knowledge and power do not equal wisdom.

One of the hardest jumps in leadership development is the move from technical expertise to leading people. It is an even harder jump to move your focus from leading and growing your company and to pivot towards making choices that are in the best interests of the entire planet. I know very few people who are able to detach themselves from what success looks like for them and focus on what success looks like for everyone. Not to mention that capacity to hold others at the centre of your choices appears to have an inverse correlation with the amount of power and money someone accumulates.

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Last year, I spoke at a number of events for female entrepreneurs. Shortly after one of these events, I was an attendee at a different event for the corporate community. Perhaps because of the close proximity of the events, I noticed how different the dress of the women were. At the event for entrepreneurs, the women arrived dressed in different styles, different colours, all along the spectrum from informal to formal. At the more corporate event, the women almost universally wore formal attire and the colour palate was more muted. Clothes and fashion do not fall into my wheelhouse of expertise, but the difference was so glaring I’ve thought about it a lot since. Because it was not just about the clothes, it was revealing something deeper. There was a freedom of spirit to the female entrepreneurs I didn’t experience from the women at the corporate event.

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On Finding Our Centre - And Our Way Back to Each Other.

It feels like we have hit peak division. This is going to get worse before it gets better. For it to get better, each of us will need to play a role. In contemplative and meditation practices, we talk about finding your centre. A point of stillness inside yourself. Your inner centre. It is in this place; you find equilibrium and a sense of congruence. It is from this place of calmness we make our wisest decisions. We need to find our collective centre. To start walking back towards each other. That will only occur if each of us work to maintain our own centre. We don’t find that online. We find it away from our devices in silence.

In the eye of the storm – in service of our collective future - can you pause and find your centre?

Expression with Fiona English | Substack

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One of the major challenges of modern life is that we live in our heads. We describe our lives rather than experience life. We narrate our lives rather than be present to sensing and feeling our lived experience more deeply through our bodies. By living life in this manner, we create a distance; slightly disconnected from who we are and life as it is.

Staying in our minds, simply narrating our life dampens our experience of being alive. When we engage with personal development in any manner, we don’t simply want more goals to achieve or purpose to strive for, we want to feel and experience life in a fuller, more meaningful way. This is why we talk about the importance of being ‘present’. We must be present to what we are feeling and sensing to experience life in a new way.

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When women tell me they are attending imposter syndrome training to improve their confidence, I always tell them; stop wasting your talent and time on imposter syndrome training. All that energy focused on fixing yourself when there is nothing wrong with you. You ARE an imposter. Capitalism is a system currently serving the few not the many. Of course, you feel out of place. Feeling like you don’t fit into a system that has many many problems is your superpower. It gifts you the ability to see more clearly what needs to change. Now that you have freed yourself from the additional labour of more training, you can use that space to ask bigger questions of yourself. I have no doubt the corporate system wants you. But what do you want? What would it look like if rather than trying to appease the old, you found the courage to have a vision for something new?

This matters because the problems of the world are too big for you and I as individuals. But they are not too big for business. We have to harness the power of business if we want to see real change in the world. That can only happen through us. This is true irrespective of your gender. We must develop the clarity and the courage to become the leaders that make business better.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fionaenglish.substack.com/subscribe

Expression with Fiona English | Substack

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fionaenglish.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fionaenglish.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fionaenglish.substack.com/subscribe

Power can scare people. I see why. There are so many bad examples of power in the world today: primarily aggressive power and the use of power for personal gain. We shy away from power because we know that we don’t want to embody that version. But if the rest of us reject even the notion of power and don’t take the opportunity to demonstrate power in a better way, what will we be left with: Just one dangerous archetype of power in the world. 

The word power comes from the Latin ‘potere’: to be able. Accepting that you have power is about acknowledging the agency you have in your life (and the world). One of the reasons we don’t like to accept that we have power is that there are consequences to acknowledging this agency. The primary consequence is that we can no longer pretend to be disempowered. Power is not the problem. We all have power. The problem is deciding what we will do with it. We get to choose to be the example of what power can look like in the world. To demonstrate that power can be positive.

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