As many of you know, we find an insane amount of joy in celebrating and empowering women – I mean, could we have screamed it any louder from our digital-mountaintop last month? Perhaps it stems from our days having to play with ‘Malibu Barbie’ before ‘Presidential Candidate Barbie’ made her debut. Or perhaps it comes from our mothers who taught both of us to challenge the ‘supposed to’s’ of society. Wherever it stems from, it’s certainly impacted who we’ve become today.
And while we’ve found a PinPoint-niche in female focused projects lately, we’ve also found a PinPoint-pinpoint (pun definitely intended) in collaborating with female leaders, because the truth of the matter is society still sits somewhere between Malibu Barbie and Presidential Candidate Barbie when it comes to championing women in the workplace.
A few weeks ago, we had an inspiring conversation with a female exec who described her decision making mid-career. There came a moment where she was positioned to choose her side of greatness – be a great executive and a good mother or be a great mother and a good executive.
Truth be told, there is no right and there is no wrong when it comes to being a woman – at home, at work or anywhere in between. Yet everyday we are faced with black and white oppositions forced upon us by a multitude of varying pressures and expectations surrounding us. One of our favorite bloggers, A Cup of Joe, recently shared stories of shame and guilt many women feel when choosing to feed their newborn formula over breast milk – even when formula is the absolute best option for her and baby.
As we’ve grown into our niche collaborating with brilliant female leaders, we find ourselves in conversations like the ones above more often. We’ve had a rare career in which our job is to listen to people, many people, and empathize with their unique lives in order to design new futures – futures different from the ‘supposed to’s’ just like our mothers taught us.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the many conversations we’ve had with female leaders this past year, it’s that there is no ‘right or wrong’ or ‘black or white’. Instead, there’s a whole lot of gray and choosing gray often means choosing what’s best for you. If the Benjamin Moore paint wheel taught us anything in this pandemic, it’s that there’s a gray for everyone.
We each deserve our unique gray – derived from our values, our roles, our aspirations and our expectations. If there were only black or white to choose, life would be a whole lot blander or a whole lot dimmer. So here’s to finding your gray – whatever gray means for you. And whenever you need that little birdie in your ear to tell you white or black just aren’t for you, let us grab you a coffee. We’ve got your back.
