The Power of Reframing Your Reality
You can’t control what happens to you, but you can always control how you react to it.
“You regain power by focusing on your own agency, then you realize that your impact always exists. No matter what anyone says, no matter what happens, you're still capable, you're still fully capable of growth.” - Morgan Mercer, CEO, Vantage Point
You can’t always control what happens to you, but you can always control how you react to it.
This is the power of mental reframing.
If you want to change something, be it how you feel, how you do things, or what you believe, begin by intentionally changing your thoughts and choosing to reframe how you see your reality.
Your thoughts about any situation that happens are always more powerful than the situation itself.
This week’s guest on The Global League Of Women Podcast is Morgan Mercer. She has been able to reframe her reality in order to stay grounded in the face of sexism, ageism, and racism as a young minority female CEO.
After spending years caring too much about external validation, Morgan discusses how she built up confidence by acknowledging her own power, and surrounding herself with other powerful female allies.
Today, she is using her power to help others understand diverse perspectives. She is the Founder and CEO of Vantage Point, a virtual reality training platform designed to build empathy and help companies prevent harassment and bullying.
In this episode we also discuss:
How to have productive and open conversations around hard topics like #BlackLivesMatter
How to own your mistakes without giving up your power
The importance of building powerful female communities
🎧 Listen on: Apple Podcasts // Spotify
Highlights From The Episode
On Being an Authentic Leader
Morgan: The work you do is only as great as who you show up as a leader. I believe everyone is a leader. A leader doesn't just mean Founder or CEO. If you're an activist within your local community, you're a leader. If you are a minority and you're going to high school to teach people how to code, you're a leader. Everyone is a leader. A leader’s work is only as good as they are able to show up themselves. I think that comes down to authenticity.
On Overcoming Queen Bee Syndrome
Morgan: Because we have lived historically in such a scarcity mentality where there's a scarcity of roles, there is a scarcity of women at the top, we have what's called the “Queen Bee Syndrome,” where we don't want to support other women because we think by supporting other women, it's going to take away from us. It’s going to take away from your opportunities so we pit ourselves against one another.
This isn't how we're going to take on this problem that we all know is much bigger than us. It's really important for us to create communities and create relationships so that we can overlap networks, resources, learnings, etc.
When you look at men, men have these networks. Men are really well connected to one another, and have the ability to overlap resources, ask for introductions and introduce one person to another.
On Being A Women
Morgan: I think to be a woman is to set your own rules…. [Ask yourself] ‘What frameworks have you adopted because society has imposed them on you, but not necessarily because you would adopt them for yourself?’
When you start to become aware of those, then you realize that even going against those frameworks is still playing into the frameworks. You're still playing into the overarching narrative…
Instead it's ‘How do I create my own rules? How do I create my own frameworks? If I were to completely adopt a suspension of disbelief, what rules would I set? How would I approach the world and how would I show up?
To me being a woman, no matter what way I look at it is to operate within a space where you inherently set your own rules for the way that you choose to show up and interact in the world.
🔥 Women We Admire
Tyler Haney returns to Outdoor Voices with a new vision. Lunya founder Ashley Merrill has recently joined the Outdoor Voices Board of Directors as well. Haney, Merrill, and the Board are still in search of a new CEO, and the focus is on hiring women and BIPOC. “I believe a diverse team is most important to the success and growth of Outdoor Voices, and that means having women in leadership positions,” Haney says.
Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox, has sold the company to Amazon for $1.2 Billion. Aicha was brought on as CEO in February 2019 after working 13 years at Intel.
Brynn Putnam, CEO of Mirror sold her company to Lululemon for close to $500 million. Before starting the company, Brynn was a former ballet dancer and small business owner. She signed the venture capital investment documents while at the hospital right before giving birth.
Marian Croak, a former Google Executive, shares how the racial bias she faced limited her growth at Google.
Do you know a powerful woman with a perspective and story that should be featured on The Global League of Women Podcast? Can’t wait to hear from you.
~ Lisa Carmen Wang, Founder, The GLOW // Connect on LinkedIn.