Happy International Women’s Day!

Happy International Women’s Day! For us, International Women’s Day is a time to celebrate all things awesomely women. To spread awareness about women’s empowerment, women’s rights, and overall gender equality. The 2020 theme for IWD is ‘I am Generation Equality: Realising Women’s Rights’, and gender equality has undoubtedly reached new highs over the last decade. The ongoing aim is to bring together the next generation of women leaders, transforming the conversation to be empowering and action-focused.

At L&A we are passionate about diversity in the workplace and we’re unique in that our leadership team is predominantly female, including our CEO and Founder, Gina Lednyak. We are also lucky enough to have incredible men and women on our team who are beyond supportive and help create an environment that fosters growth for everyone.

To celebrate International Women’s Day we wanted to share 5 tips from our team to you, which help us feel empowered to show up as our full selves every day.

1. Practice resilience.
To us, resilience is the art of persistence and bouncing back. While it’s important to acknowledge setbacks, resilience gives you the power to maintain a positive outlook, and envision brighter times ahead. This can be achieved by setting solid goals and maintaining a desire to achieve those goals. Resilience practices the power of being empathetic and compassionate, while not wasting time worrying what others think.

2. Approach the day with curiosity.
Guess what?! You have a professional licence to stay curious! All it takes is a commitment to ask questions and to explore new possibilities every single day. Remain fluid, stay agile and be an idea collector. Make an investment in exploring ideas, mixing new with old, to expand your knowledge and foster growth professionally and personally.

3. Be vulnerable.
Vulnerability and trust go hand in hand in a professional environment. It is not just a reactive response to a situation, but an important and respected approach that doesn’t have to be about oversharing personal business or losing composure. You can be a private person with professional boundaries, and rather than needing to always be the expert, you can ask questions instead of trying to do it all. Asking for feedback, taking accountability and learning from it allows you to be seen for the strength and struggle you might have, and studies have found people at work may feel closer to you, be more willing to share advice, and your team may begin to feel more horizontal.

4. Take up space!
Dolly Parton once said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”You are in your role for a reason and you deserve to take up space for your entire self – speaking and acting loudly, proudly and with conviction. Your voice and ideas are just as important as anyone else, but sometimes, taking up space doesn’t happen in leaps but in baby steps. Practice small ways you can assert yourself in different situations and you’ll start to truly believe that you belong in every room you walk into. Once you consider your voice as valid, there’s no stopping you!

5. No room for judgment.
Consider always looking at yourself and your peers’ career as a platform for success. To counteract judgment, engage in learning more about what you don’t know, become aware, join conversations, amplify your voice, give feedback and always show respect. With knowledge, comes power and an overall decrease in judgement.

For us, International Women’s Day means celebrating the women that came before us and paved the way. Honouring the women who stand by our sides and make the world the awesome place that it is. Finally, empowering the women to come, who will no doubt pick up the baton and keep pushing boundaries to make the world better and better.

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