Mask Off: Breaking Free From The "Twice As Good" Trap

In this episode, Zenica explores the pressures women, particularly black women, face in the workplace, emphasizing the concept of 'performing fine' as a survival mechanism. She discusses the cultural armor that women wear, known as the superwoman schema, which includes the obligation to appear strong and suppress emotions. Zenica highlights the emotional toll of these coping mechanisms, leading to burnout and isolation and encourages listeners to reflect on their own experiences while providing actionable steps to take off the mask and prioritize self-care. 

Wanna go deeper? Let's chat about creating your very own VIP Day to Detox From Overwork. 

Chapters

00:00 The Burden of Performing 'Fine'
03:19 Cultural Armor and the Superwoman Schema
06:39 The Consequences of Overwork and Isolation
09:32 Reflection and Permission to Change
12:20 Taking Action Towards Self-Care

Transcript

Zenica (00:00)
Welcome back disruptors. Now on the last episode, we talked about how your silence and your strength can be misinterpreted by everyone around you, including your boss. But on this particular episode, we're going inward, we're turning the mirror on ourselves, and we're gonna talk about why we feel like we have to perform fine in the first place. And by the end of this episode, I'm gonna show you how.

your performance of fine is not just about your personality, it's not just a character trait, it's actually your protection. But before we get into it, I wanna tell you about a woman that I met a couple of months ago. So I was doing a VIP group session with a group of female executives and I met this woman and during the session she let me know that she was a marketing executive. So much like me, I understand what that means, anybody in a strategic communications background, was, I think she had like.

four or five projects at the time that she was managing. But in addition to having an extremely heavy workload, she was also one of those people who would just raise her hands for everything. So she was also taking it upon herself to mentor junior level employees in the workplace. She was on the DEI committee, which we know how I feel about that, but that's for another podcast. But she was on the DEI committee and every subcommittee and this and that and the third.

And she was also mentioned that, she was often praised for being the person that people in the workplace could rely on, but not just rely on, but rely on her to consistently show up in a way that made everybody else feel calm under pressure. But during one of the breaks, she pulled me aside and she said to me that despite all of those things, she was feeling like she knew that she was starting to unravel because she had recognized that

There were many nights, more nights than she cared to count that she was not sleeping. She felt like she was starting to develop anxiety. ⁓ Her hair was starting to thin. She would cry either on the way to work or when she got to the office, she would have to take a few minutes to get herself together. And she knew that she was unraveling because she said, I felt, I feel like this is just what success looks like. This is just what success feels like.

I really, I understood exactly where she was coming from because that's just such a hopeless place to be in, right? When you're functioning in that way. And this was a young woman, like she probably has, she got another 30 so years to be working. So if you think about, hey, this is how I feel now. I've got a long ways to go. I'm only looking to go up. But if this is what success feels like, if this is just how it is, that's kind of hopeless.

but she's not alone. I think I asked her to kind of share some of that with the group. And what we discovered is that she was not alone and many other women in that room were feeling exactly the same way. And I bring that up because I want to be clear that this is what it looks like. This is how it manifests when you are carrying around the unspoken pressure to be twice as good.

to be twice as good as everyone else, to work twice as hard as everyone else, to get to a certain level. And when you are smiling through the stress and smiling through the pain, and it is that smile that's the mask. And the mask is your survival mechanism. So where does this come from? Where do we learn to put on this mask? I actually read a stat.

And I think it's leanin.org did a study with McKissie, it's called McKenzie, Women in the Workplace Report, but it says that black women are more likely than any other group to feel that they have to prove themselves. And so growing up, and I like to say this when I go into big groups, I often start with, finish this sentence, you have to work and everybody knows what comes next. You have to work twice as hard.

to get half as much. You have to be twice as good to get half as far. Things like, ⁓ and we're taught things like, you better not let them people see you cry. Don't give them people a reason to call you lazy or don't give them a reason to call you angry. Things like that, that we're taught at a very early age, we learn some way along the line that there's a different way that we're going to have to show up.

to succeed or to survive in life. And so when we go into workplaces, that narrative is simply reinforced because I don't even know, I try to think about this in myself, but I don't even know when I realized that I needed to quote, I needed to code switch. But we know that black and brown women are more likely to experience code switching. It's something that we just do, but I don't even know when I learned it. It was just instinctual that I recognize, hey,

I better show up in a different way if I want to succeed in this particular environment. So when you think about ⁓ themes like this, you really do start to see that we're not talking about personality here. That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is a skill set and a way of being that's been taught and passed down to us to ensure our survival in places that were not built for us.

Let alone success is a different in animal, but in places that were actually not even built for us to be in. And so when you think about these themes like never let them see you cry, never let them see you sweat, working twice as hard, da da da. These are not just cute little sayings that we learn from Big Mama and Nana. These are not just cute little sayings that our aunties taught us. When you think about it through this lens, you start to understand that this is cultural armor.

that has been passed down to us. And for black women, that armor has a name. She has a persona and we know her as the superwoman. Now all of us give her different names, but we know her as the superwoman. And this is not going to be a shock. You all have heard me talk about this body of work before, but the superwoman schema is a study that was done by Dr. Cheryl Giscombe to examine the coping mechanisms of black women.

and how it relates to other health disparities that black women specifically experience. And so I'm going to go through the five characteristics of the schema really quickly, but they are obligation to appear strong, ⁓ obligation to suppress emotion, resistance to being vulnerable or dependent, motivation to succeed despite limited resources, and the fifth is prioritizing caregiving over self-care.

And I want to be clear that, and I think Dr. Giscombe actually lays this out, she has a book on the topic as well, that for black women, these coping mechanisms are important, I think. I'm not the coach to sit here and disillusion anybody to say that our experiences in the workplace are not different. I 100 % believe that black women are having completely different experiences in the workplace.

than our white counterparts. 100 % believe that because I've lived that and I see it in my clients. So these coping mechanisms are important, but the problem is when we start using these coping mechanisms that are designed to get us through the actual instance, the actual experience, we start using them over a long period of time. That's where it becomes a problem. That's where we end up showing up like our friend earlier who was starting to unravel.

Right? And so I also want to be clear about this because people hear the word superwoman. And for many of the women that I have spoken to or coached, let's just be real about it. I actually, when I did Disrupt Live last year, there was a woman in audience who really did show up like our friend that I talked about at the top of the pod. But one of the things that she said, and I'm so glad she said it and was honest in saying it was,

Yeah, I'm that person, but I kind of like it. I kind of like knowing that people can count on me and rely on me. But at the same time, I'm exhausted. I'm tired. Sometimes I want to tell those people, why y'all asking me for the information, right? And so, but I want to be clear that when we talk about the superwoman in this instance, we are not talking about your ego. We're not talking about that stuff. What we're talking about is coping mechanisms.

to help us stay alive and thrive inside of systems that celebrate overwork and punish softness. That's what we're talking about. And so that's where the mask has become a form of protection that cultural armor was designed to keep us safe and our aunties and our nanas and our grandmas, they meant well by sharing this information with us.

But there comes a point when if we're not careful, the armor can become too heavy. If you wear it all the time, the armor can become too heavy and the armor can become a prison. The armor can make you feel isolated because we know that we're suppressing emotion. So now you are emotionally isolated and you're kind of in your own feelings.

And you might even be frustrated because you're thinking, wow, I come to everybody else's aid all the time because one of the tenants is that we are ⁓ prioritizing caregiving over our own self care. So you might be sitting there thinking, hey, I come to other people's aid all the time, yet I'm in my feelings and I need somebody and nobody is coming to see about me. So you're isolated. Nobody is coming to see about you. And the reason why nobody's coming to see about you is because we've trained people not to.

That's the other reality of it. And so we're sitting in this, in this isolated spot. And so the armor can start to feel heavy. It can start to feel like a prison if we're not careful. So think about it this way, living and wearing that armor, having that protection on all the time and functioning from that place, it's like running your life on a backup generator. Now I'm from the South. I grew up on the coast. So we have a lot of hurricanes.

For many of us, our backup generator was just, it's just a way of life, right? And so what happens is, storm comes in, kicks out the power, the backup generator kicks in, and you hope that it can keep, it can keep your house running, certain things, essentials running long enough for the power company to come back in and turn everything on. And so in life, when we are, when we are operating that backup generator, sure, it kicks in when things feel like they're falling apart.

It comes on automatically because for many of us turning that mask on is automatic. It doesn't even require any effort anymore. It just automatically happens. So it kicks in when things are falling apart. But if we're not careful, if you have a storm that comes in too long, there comes a time when that backup generator just burns out.

just like you'll burn out if you keep trying to live from a place of survival mode.

So as we get into our reflection points for this week, I want you to think about that. And the first reflection point that I want you to noodle on, so get your journals out, get your pen and pad and write this down and really spend some time with this, is where did I learn, where did you first learn that softness wasn't safe?

And then the next point of reflection, so you've got two reflection points this week is what would it look like if I took the mask off just for a little bit, just for a few minutes, what would it look like if I took the mask off with someone that I trusted?

And I wanna make sure that I really hone in on that part of someone that you trust.

And furthermore, this week, because y'all know I'm a coach, we're going to take some action. So I have a little challenge for you and it's a fun one. It's a fun one. You can have some fun with this is I want you to write yourself a permission slip. And I don't care how you do it. You can just pull out a piece of paper and maybe just write the words. You can get as creative as you want to. If you want to go in Canva and make you a little permission slip, or if you got ⁓ creative people around you, littles that have stuff that you can color and mark and things like that. ⁓ Pull that stuff out.

And make yourself a permission slip and simply write the words, today I give myself permission to blank. Whatever that is for you, set a boundary, rest, put my phone away.

Whatever that is that you need, I give myself permission to say no. Because I know for some of y'all, there's somebody out there that's waiting on an answer from something they asked you to do and you told them you was going to pray about it as a means to stall time. You know you ain't praying about it, you're just trying to figure out the best way to tell them people no. Just tell them no. Give yourself permission to do that. Whatever that is.

And if you're listening to this and you're realizing that, I've been running on my backup generator a little too long. I want you to recognize that it's also not your fault. You have been doing exactly what you have been taught to do to survive, but survival y'all survival is not the goal. Survival ain't it. I want you to be fully charged.

powered up, getting on something that is real and sustainable, fully charged with life, with love, with joy, with peace, with ease, with confidence, whatever that is for you, I want you to be fully charged with that and ready to go.

And if you're listening to this and you're like, hey, that sounds good, but I'm not really sure where to start. I might need a little help with that. This is exactly the kind of stuff that we do inside of, I have a overwork VIP day where we detox you. And this is an intensive coaching session that is solely focused on you, what your beliefs are around overwork. And we start to unravel. Where did those things come from?

who said what to you, and we start to reprogram your way of working so that you're working from a place of ease, enjoy, or whatever that thing is for you, right? And you're not running on exhaustion. So if that is something that you are interested in, I'll put my email in the show notes and I want you to email me the word detox. Now, of course, I mean, put your name in the email, but email me the word detox in your name and that will just trigger me to say,

this person wants to learn more about the VIP detox over work day. And ⁓ we'll go from there and we'll set up some time to talk. We'll talk through exactly kind of what you're looking for, what you're struggling with and how something like a VIP day can actually help move you forward. And for those of you who are like, I'm not quite ready there yet, start with your reflection questions and your challenge. Start there. But I want to hear from you too now. So I want to know what are you giving yourself permission to do?

today or this week. What are you giving yourself permission to? And come back next week. So next week we're gonna drop another episode. We're gonna go even deeper on this. I wanna see, do I have my phone?

because I want to look up what our next topic is. So give me a second. Let's see, because I've got, I got a lot planned for y'all around this. Ya feel me?

You feel me? So if you are listening to this and you're like, hey, I am not quite ready to go there yet, then I want you to start with those reflection questions. Spend some time with there, stay there, sit in that for a little bit. And I wanna hear from you too. Let me know what is it that you are giving yourself permission to do. And I want you to come right back here next week because we're gonna keep going with this series and then we're gonna talk about.

why the system is rigged against you and why you're burnt out. We're gonna talk about how the system has us all trapped and why it's the reason you're burning out, okay? So make sure you come back next week for part three in this series and we will keep the party going. I'll catch you next time. Catch you next time. Bye guys.