Brave, Not Perfect

From the time girls are young, they're trained to keep a lid on anger in the face of an affront, unlike boys who are trained to stand up for themselves, or retaliate. This explains why girls (and women) will do almost anything to avoid rocking the boat, and why they choose to downsize their personal power and swallow negative feelings, rather than be seen as boastful or face the horror of confrontation. Praised on the one hand by parents and teachers for being polite, agreeable, and "well behaved" and, on the other, punished by their peers for speaking out, the docility girls are rewarded for as children translates directly into a lifelong habit of suppressing their instinct to speak up and take a risky stand.

One problem is what girls focus on when they're given difficult feedback. When girls are told they got a wrong answer or made a mistake, all they hear is condemnation, which sears like a flaming arrow straight through the heart. They go straight from "I did this wrong" to "I suck" to "I give up", rarely stopping at "Oh, I see how I could do this better next time".
The bigger problem, however, is how adults respond. To spare the girls' fragile feelings, we naturally temper anything that sounds too critical. More protection, more soft-pedaling, more steering girls to what's "safe", more feeding the self-fulfilling prophecy of girls as vulnerable. But if they are constantly shielded from any sharp edges, how can they be expected to build any resilience to avoid falling apart later in life if (more like when) they run up against real criticism or setbacks?
Boys, on the other hand, have repeatedly been shown to bounce right back from criticism or negative feedback, so we don't hold back.

Imagine if you lived without the fear of failure, without the fear of not measuring up. If you no longer felt the need to stifle your thoughts and swallow what you really want to say in order to please and appease others. If you could stop berating yourself mercilessly for human mistakes, let go of the guilt and strangling pressure to be perfect, and just breathe. What if, in every decision you faced, you made the brave choice or took the bolder path. Would you be happier? Would you impact the world in the ways you dream you can?