Mariah Burton Nelson: Speech--The Courage to Lead from the Heart

"Think of yourself as an athlete. I guarantee you it will change the way you walk, the way you work, and the decisions you make about leadership, teamwork, and success."- MBN

Speech: The Courage to Lead from the Heart
Mariah Burton Nelson, 1996

On the occasion of receiving the Guiding Woman in Sport Award from National Association for Girls and Women in Sport (NAGWS), April 19, 1996

I learned about this award through an e-mail message from NAGWS executive director Diana Everett. It said, Dear Mariah, Congratulations! You have been named the Guiding Woman in Sport!

However, because Diana is new to e-mail, as we all are, she forgot to SIGN the message. So I knew that SOMEONE considered me a guiding woman in sport, but I had no idea WHO.

It reminded me of something that used to happen in sixth grade. At recess, we girls used to play kickball or baseball. Somehow I became the person who decided what we played, and who played what position. I don’t know how this evolved. The fact that I was already 5’7” might have had something to do with it. My memory of this is that all these little girls would stand around me in a circle, jumping up and down and waving their hands and asking, “Can I be on your team?” “Can I play first base?” “Can I pitch?” And I thought, Why are they asking me?

Nevertheless I tried to be fair and inclusive. I tried to make sure everyone had a good time. I was the perfect AIAW sort of kid. This was my first lesson in leadership: You never know exactly who’s looking up to you, or why. I concluded from this that I might as well become the kind of person who’s worth looking up to, just in case anyone’s looking.

I started thinking about leadership then, and noticed that some people lead by virtue of their institutional authority (as teachers or coaches, for example), and some people lead by virtue of their voice or vision: their passion or conviction or courage. And other people lead because they’re tall.

So when I received Diana’s message, I wrote back and said, Dear Mystery Person: I’m delighted that you consider me a Guiding Woman in Sport, and would be happy to come to your conference, and will be happy to give a speech, as you requested, and the subject of the speech will be leadership.

Then Diana wrote back and told me who would be here. I thought, Uh-oh. Who am I to talk to you about leadership? You’re the ones who are Real Leaders, Official Leaders, with leadership training and degrees and actual designated followers - students or athletes or a staff. Not to mention a salary. Not only do I not have any institutional authority, I don’t even have a real job.

Plus, women aren’t comfortable with leadership, or so they say. Supposedly, we want everyone to be EQUAL. Gloria Steinem has said that instead of looking UP to other women, we should look ACROSS. Plus, women aren’t supposed to talk about themselves as leaders. We’re supposed to be more MODEST.

But then I remembered that most of you in this room are NOT uncomfortable with female leadership. Most of you HAVE looked up to other women, and have benefited from and loved these leaders, these cherished physical education teachers and coaches. And you have in turn discussed your own leadership styles with the women you have mentored and groomed to be leaders themselves.

And I remembered that one of the strengths of feminism is women’s willingness to tell their personal stories.

And that that’s one of my strengths too.

So I decided (FINALLY) that it’s okay to talk about leadership, including my own. I gave myself permission.

THEN I realized that THIS is probably a key element of leadership, at least for women. Though we may have been born leaders, we were not born into a society that welcomed female leaders. So we have to give ourselves permission to go ahead and lead.

I was talking to a group of high school girls in Wisconsin about competition recently, and I told them that my mom had given me permission to compete: to take risks, to win, to lose. During the question and answer period afterward, one of the girls stood up and said, “Why should we need PERMISSION? Shouldn’t we just go ahead and compete?”

Ah, I thought, we ARE making progress.

But a lot of OLDER women - and I can put myself in that group now because I just turned 40 - still need permission to be different from the “sugar and spice, everything nice” little girls that we were raised to be. We need to give this permission to ourselves. We can’t wait for Mom to give it to us.

As I thought about what it might mean to be a guiding woman in sport, I looked up the word guide in the thesaurus. I found these synonyms: leader, teacher, authority, expert, guru, pundit, mentor. Then I got to MASTER and WISE MAN. At that point I thought, Ah, permission is not enough. We have to redefine leadership itself. We can’t trust the authorities to tell us what leadership is. Roget, after all - author of Roget’s Thesaurus - was a man.

In fact the history of women’s sports has been a history of women’s defining leadership for ourselves, defining teamwork for ourselves, defining athlete and victory and success for ourselves.

It occurred to me that this in itself is a definition of a leader: a woman who defines herself and her world. To define is to make clear. Audre Lorde, the late poet, has been called Gamba Adisa, an African phrase for “a warrior who makes her meaning clear.”

So a leader makes her meaning clear. She defines for herself what it means to be a woman. She decides what games to play, what rules to live by. She decides for herself how to be the kind of person who’s worth looking up to, just in case anyone’s looking. And if the rules she lives by have integrity, and if she is creative and ethical and passionate and effective, others will follow.

At least, that’s one of MY definitions of leadership, part of how I try to live my life. As a nonfiction writer, my job is to tell the truth, to define the truth as I see it: to make my meaning clear. When I succeed - when other people tell me that my work has meaning for them - it’s usually because I’ve told the truth about subjects that matter to them, or people who matter to them, or I’ve told my own truth, and that inspires them to do the same.

How YOU define leadership will be different from how I define it, and that’s good: we need an ASSORTMENT of leaders. But I’ll offer you two more of my own guiding principles of leadership, in hopes that this will stimulate your thinking about yourself and the young women or men you mentor.

The first is what I think of as refusing to be subordinate. I also learned this in sixth grade, on that crucial cusp between girlhood and womanhood.

As I mentioned, the girls in sixth grade looked up to me. I was less popular with the teachers. One teacher didn't like me at all. She didn't like that, after school, I played football with the boys. She didn't like that my girlfriends and I wore shorts under our skirts, ready for any athletic opportunity that might arise.

(I have to interject here that last night, when I was dressing for the “black-tie optional” dinner, I realized that I’d forgotten the black half-slip I usually wear under my sheer black dress. I searched my small suitcase, but I didn’t have many clothes to choose from. However, I did discover a pair of running shorts. So, under my fancy black dress, I wore a pair of shorts. Some things never change.)

Anyway, this teacher didn’t like me. One time, after lunch in the cafeteria, she made me line up with the boys, explaining that since I was going to “act like a boy,” she was going to treat me like a boy.

This same teacher was the first person to call me a leader. She took me aside in the hall one day and said, “You know, Mariah, you’re a leader, but you’re leading people in the wrong direction.”

Another time she accused me, also in the cafeteria, in front of the whole fifth and sixth grades, of “silent insubordination.”

I wasn't sure what to make this teacher. I was just a 12-year-old kid with a passion for sports. But my girlfriends thought the whole thing was hilarious, and they helped me laugh about it. In fact I'm still in touch with several of these women - we went on to play high school sports together, and all of us are still athletes - and we still laugh about silent insubordination, and leading people in the wrong direction. Leaders need friends, I’ve noticed, and with the support of these girlfriends I started thinking about what was going on. I concluded that insubordination, whether silent or otherwise, is an important skill for women. For me, this has become another defining element of leadership: the refusal to be subordinate.

I was thinking about subordination again a few years ago, when I coached high school basketball. I was noticing that women often get accustomed to being subordinate, to being second class citizens, to being the second sex. It comes to feel natural to us; it's the water we swim in.

Before I arrived at this high school, there were four coaches for the boys, and three for the girls. Then the athletic director hired me as the assistant varsity girls’ coach. And immediately the men brought in three volunteer coaches. So we had four, and they had seven.

But what amazed me - and will probably not amaze you - was that the girls still practiced in the “girls’” gym. This was the 1993-1994 season. The girls’ gym is half the size of the newer gym - built for the boys. The girls played GAMES in the big gym, but they practiced in the small gym. While the boys practiced and played in the big gym.

Then they hired me. And I said, gee, there's this law called Title IX, anyone heard of it? How about if the varsity girls and boys share the big gym, and the other kids share the small gym?

What really amazed me was this: None of the other girls’ coaches wanted to do it. All three of them were women. Young women, even. But they had grown COMFORTABLE with the small gym. They thought it was sufficient. They thought of it as the girls’ gym.

I said, What kind of statement is this making to our girls?

They said, Our offices are here, near the girls’ gym. If we practice in the boys’ gym, we'll have to carry the balls all the way down the hall.

I said, Since when is basketball-transportation a major hardship on a coach?

And besides, why are your offices near the small gym, and the men's near the big gym?

Finally we proposed to the boys' head coach that we should share the big gym. He said, Okay. He had been at the school for 20 years, ever since Title IX was passed, so he'd been expecting this for 20 years. He didn't fight against us.

But nor had he fought FOR us. All those years, and he hadn't seen it as his responsibility to give the girls equal access to the big gym. Like many men, he had not defined leadership as a commitment to justice for ALL.

So our varsity girls played AND practiced in the big gym. And the girls were thrilled.

The male basketball players, I'll add, were resentful. It was Laurie Priest, Mount Holyoke athletic director, who pointed out to me that when girls or women are given equal opportunities, men and boys often feel discriminated against. They're so used to having sexist privilege, they feel like 50/50 is unfair.

As you can see by these stories, if you give yourself permission to lead; if you define the rules of the game for yourself; and if you refuse to be subordinate, you will have opponents. Some will be women; some will be men. It takes courage to deal with these opponents, frankly - though no more, really, than it takes to be a female athlete in a male-defined world. The word courage has its roots in the French word, coeur, for heart. And courage always involves fear - if it's not scary, it doesn't require courage. So courage is when you're afraid, and you act from the heart anyway. Courage is cumulative, I’ve noticed: the more courageous you are, the more courageous you become.

Still, failure is inevitable. Susan B. Anthony said failure is impossible, and she was right, but this is true too: Failure is inevitable. Especially when you have high expectations for yourself - as leaders should. We know from sports that failure is just part of what happens on the way to success. Yet those of us who have high expectations tend to be very hard on ourselves when we fail to meet those expectations. We become our own opponents.

Which leads me to the final guiding principle of leadership I’ll share today: Forgive yourself immediately for all mistakes. This is something I learned when I entered seventh grade, and met my first real physical education teacher, Mrs. Bunting. Mrs. Bunting was also my lacrosse, field hockey and basketball coach, and she was the first woman besides my mother who accepted and encouraged my sports passion. She was very strict, very supportive, and very smart: in the seventh grade, in 1969, in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, she taught our basketball team two types of full-court presses. They worked, too.

And she taught us, among many other things, that there’s no time in life for self-recrimination. When, in basketball for instance, you miss a shot at one end of the court, there’s not a single second for you to stop and feel angry with yourself. You have to hustle after the rebound, or, if the other team gets it, sprint back down court and play defense. If you don’t, you’re making two mistakes. Basketball is like that: very swift. Life is like that, too. It flies by quickly, and for every moment you spend regretting what happened in the past, you’re missing a moment of the present. You can LEARN from mistakes, but there’s no time to get mad at yourself about them. You have to sprint back down court, ready for life’s next adventure, whatever that may be.

There’s a French writer, Emile Zola, who said: “If you ask me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.” I love that. I came to live out loud too. To make my meaning clear, to tell the truth, to refuse to be subordinate, even in the face of opposition, whether from women or men. And also to forgive myself immediately for the many mistakes I make along the way.
I can't define leadership for you, or even point you in the right direction, and fortunately you don't need me to. I do encourage you to give yourself permission to lead, and to define leadership for yourself - to figure out for yourself what it means to be the kind of person who's worth looking up to.

All of you have little girls in your lives - or women, or maybe also boys and men - who stand around you in a circle, jumping up and down, waving their hands, waiting for your instruction and inspiration and advice. “Can I play?” they ask. Or, “Can I be on your team?” You might know their names; or you might not even be able to see these people. But they're there, looking to you for permission, for a sense of what’s possible. They’re looking to you to learn how to grow up, how to be women, how to be leaders themselves, how to define the world in ways that make sense to them.

Gloria Steinem was right, I believe: we SHOULD look across to other women, from a position of mutual respect, teamwork, and support. I also think it’s fine to look UP to each other for inspiration and advice. With all of you, I do both: look up to you as my mentors and teachers and across to you as my friends and teammates. I’ve been inspired and befriended by all of you, as well as by NAGWS as a whole. For all of your guidance and friendship - as well as for this award - I'm very grateful.

For reprint permission contact Mariah, information below.

For more on this topic, check out We Are All Athletes: Bringing Courage, Confidence, and Peak Performance Into Our Everyday Lives

To contact Mariah about her presentations, call 703/276-8323 or write to her at Mariah@MariahBurtonNelson.com

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