How a reader’s question helped me reflect on the difference between what is necessary and what is important.
“Women don’t need help anymore.”
That’s more or less what a reader of my newsletter wrote to me last week. Kindly, and with a genuine question behind it. She had seen that I’m supporting GFS, a charity that works with girls and young women in Wales and England, and she asked: why only women? Most women today are strong, independent and capable. Surely anyone, man or woman, can need to feel safe, heard and valued.
I didn’t take it badly. I was grateful, because it’s a question I had already asked myself.
Rights or privileges?
A few weeks ago I answered an interview, and one of the questions was what is important to me today. Talking about women’s rights, I wrote about the privileges I enjoy now, and how proud I feel of them.
Carlos read it and, passionate as he is, got cross with me. He thought my comment was out of place. “Those aren’t privileges,” he said. “They’re rights. It’s normal.”
He has a point. They are rights. But even so, I value them so intensely that I can’t help seeing them as a privilege. Because not everyone gets to enjoy them.
In many places, these rights are still a long way from normal. There are girls and women who can’t study, who aren’t safe at home, who aren’t listened to or paid the same, or who can’t sit at a table without being made to feel out of place.
And even in the society I live in, it doesn’t always feel normal. For much of my career I was the only woman at the table. I remember one lunch after a long morning presenting to investors who had flown in from the US. Around the table sat the management team, my two bosses and the investors. All men. The conversation went from cars to football to golf, and I caught myself retelling anecdotes I had heard my husband tell, just to fit in.
Then my boss, laughing with one of the investors, pointed at me and said: “Well, we have another one.” He meant that there were now two women on the board. I smiled. Inside, I was furious, and I felt like a fish out of water.
If I could feel that out of place with a seat at the table, imagine the girls who don’t even get a seat. That’s why I know how much it matters for a girl to feel safe, and to feel she belongs. Because when girls feel safe, they flourish.
So yes, both things are true. Many women today are strong and independent. And many still need help.
Necessary or important?
But looking back, I realised my reader and I were answering different questions. She was asking whether it’s necessary. I was answering whether it’s important. And those are not the same thing.
As a former CFO, I can’t help seeing it in budget terms. Every budget has the lines that keep the lights on: salaries, rent, suppliers. Necessary. And then there are the lines that are always the first to be cut when things get tight: training, culture, the project nobody asked for but everybody benefits from. Not necessary. And often the most important lines in the whole spreadsheet.
Life works the same way. Some things aren’t necessary, and yet they are important. When we connect with them and give them our focus, something changes: we feel motivated, satisfied, full.
The problem is that it’s easy to live only on the necessary. Out of habit, out of comfort, or because life is busy and the necessary always shouts louder. We get through the week, we tick the boxes, and we wonder why it all feels a bit flat.
What is truly important to you? It isn’t a question you answer in an afternoon. But simply asking it can open the path to a fuller life.
But don’t let the crusade swallow you
There is a catch, though, and I learned it the hard way.
When we find something that matters to us, it’s easy to throw ourselves into it so completely that we forget the person doing the throwing. The cause becomes a crusade, and the crusade starts to eat into our sleep, our health and our peace of mind. I know that road very well: I spent years running so fast I forgot to notice I was exhausted.
And here is the irony. In our own lives, the first line we cut when things get tight is usually ourselves: our rest, our time, the things that fill us up. Not necessary, we tell ourselves. And yet it’s the most important line of all.
Looking after yourself isn’t selfish. It isn’t narcissistic either. It’s protecting the most precious thing we have: our own essence. Because only when we look after ourselves can we truly give what is important to the world outside.
At the end of my book Self-confidence is overrated, I wrote that I won’t always feel confident, but that whatever happens, I trust I will be there for myself. That, for me, is the real shift. It isn’t about becoming tougher or more confident. It’s about becoming a better companion to ourselves. Our own best friend.
So, back to my reader
Do women still need help? Some do, some don’t, and the ones who don’t can be the ones who help. That, to me, is the whole point of an evening like The Wonderful Women Movement in Cardiff this Wednesday: women lifting girls up, not because they are weak, but because feeling safe gives them room to become who they are. And one day, to take their seat at the table without having to borrow anyone else’s stories.
And thank you to the reader who wrote to me. Questions asked with respect are a gift. This one gave me a whole article.
Now I’d love to hear from you: what is important in your life, even if it isn’t necessary? And is there room for it in your budget, without cutting yourself along the way?