The multifaceted nature of women's confidence
This weekend I attended UPFRONT’s first ever in person conference in Glasgow; UPFRONT and Centre.
Update: I no longer endorse UpFront as an organisation.
This weekend I attended UPFRONT’s first ever in person conference in Glasgow; UPFRONT and Centre. I participated in an UPFRONT Bond during my transition between leaving NHS Digital and founding Joy. I wrote about my experience of the bond soon after graduating.
Since then I’ve been a paid up member of the global bond, an online community of alumni. I have to be honest and say I regularly consider cancelling my subscription. It’s £20 a month and as someone who’s new to running their own business, I spend a lot of time analysing my finances. But the bottom line is I haven’t cancelled it and I’ll tell you why.
After pondering this for a while I realised the global bond serves a unique purpose in my life. It’s a space I feel comfortable to ask literally anything - personal or professional. I have tabled ideas I was too nervous to share anywhere else. I have asked for help with challenges I haven’t taken to friends or family. I’ve shared experiences that I’ve told barely anyone else about.
Why? Because the space feels safe. I think the term psychological safety is thrown around fairly liberally these days and I don’t profess to be an expert in what it takes to create spaces that truly are but I know UPFRONT have managed it because I feel it.
UPFRONT being for women and non-binary people only is part of what creates this feeling but there is much more to it than that.
It’s the lack of judgement and deep acceptance of difference that I think the feeling is rooted in. One of the biggest things I took away from my bond experience was this realisation that women knock each other down. We do. On a day-to-day basis we think other women are ‘too much’ or ‘too out there’ or ‘wrong’. I’ve thought it myself and I still catch myself doing it if I’m honest. You have to acknowledge this to move past it and we all have.
The feeling that you can be whoever you want to be and the people around you will not only accept you but cheer you on is special. That’s what I’ve felt and experienced online for the last two years (almost). And this weekend I felt it in person.
This was especially important for me because, post pandemic, I find large scale social situations anxiety inducing - especially if it’s with people I don’t know. I spent some of the break time just sitting by myself. I wore my cosy hat the whole day and kept my coat on. I left the party early because it just wasn’t for me. And all that was ok. We had a small WhatsApp group for people staying in the same hotel and instead of trying to organise for everyone to breakfast together, walk down together etc we gave each other the grace to be ourselves - knowing there were people close by if we needed them.
One of the best things about the day was bumping into people I didn’t know were coming. I ran into friends, people I know from my industry, people I’d spoken with multiple times in the global bond but never met. People I met continuously said that this was one of the best things about the day.
What I’m not going to do here is pick out highlights of share key takeaways. Everyone who spoke (or sang!) at the conference contributed something valuable and I’m sure everyone took away different learnings and challenges. For me, the best thing about the programme and the content was how multifaceted it was. I kept saying to people it was like getting a brain massage with all the different nodes you have being triggered in different ways.
This approach highlighted another aspect of what I think makes UPFRONT unique. The diversity of the day reflected the complexity of society and humans. It reflected the multi-faceted nature of confidence and how, unlike many confidence courses on the market, there is no one size fits all because we are all different and we all experience the world around us, and the biases it brings, in very different ways.
Above all I left with that feeling that I’d been at the first gig of a band that was about to get really big. In years to come I’ll be saying I was there at the very first conference and that’s a nice warm feeling.
If you’re a woman or a non-binary person reading this who’s interested in changing their relationship with confidence, or you know someone who is, Bond 7 is now open.
This sounds like such a great experience! Definitely going to check out UPFRONT and send to my female and non-binary colleagues :)