Why Mattering Matters - And Why Women Struggle More With That Than Men Do
Includes a list of empowering questions to clarify your own sense of mattering — Part 1 of 2
Mattering at Work
Words spoken to me by a client in 1997 that inspired my research into mattering:
“All we do is work work work. No one listens. It’s hard to stay motivated when you don’t matter.”
My corporate client said those words nearly whispering to me with his shoulders hunched forward during a coaching session in my first office back in Duesseldorf my German hometown. I will never forget his face and the pain I felt in my own body resonating with his share. I was young and very new in the business of executive coaching. He was more than 20 years older than me and the first of many employees — men and women, high and low ranks — who confided this pain of feeling not to matter with me over the next 23 years.
No matter where I worked: Germany, England, Austria, Italy, USA, Canada, New Zealand, no matter which industry: Insurance, automotive, banking, consumer goods, aviation, logistics… it was the same story everywhere: People doubting that they matter, leadership frustrated with low performance, motivation, and loyalty, and no one seeing the connection between the two nor a way how to heal that pain… It seemed to me the whole corporate world is suffering from a non-mattering pandemic!
Mattering and the Pain of Lacking It
What kept the pain on one side and the resulting frustration on the other side in place? Shame and the resulting silence around it.
Where does the shame come from? When we believe we don’t matter we hardly ever attribute that feeling to a lack of appreciation or listening from our social environment. We nearly always attribute it to ourselves as proof, that there is something wrong with us. Not mattering becomes part of our identity. Feeling flawed, not worthy, less than… triggers deep shame.
Nobody — and especially not inside corporate non-private environments — wants to make themselves vulnerable by admitting they feel and believe they don’t matter!
It’s a vicious cycle that perpetuates itself. I had sometimes nearly comical situations in the same company: First, a team complains to me that their supervisor treats them as if they don’t matter, only to have that supervisor tell me he/she feels the same way because of the style of his/her boss’ treatment who then also tells me — under secrecy — that given the size of the global organization he feels his chief officer’s voice isn’t heard and he doesn’t matter in the eyes of the global headquarter’s leadership on the other side of the planet. Everyone is stuck in a web of not-mattering trying to keep face and hiding behind coping mechanisms.
Coping mechanisms to suppress the shame and feeling the pain of not mattering might show up as overworking and burning out to prove to ourselves and others how valuable our contributions are. This is a classic fight-response of our beloved triggered ego trying to protect us from emotional pain. Others might retreat within themselves and do a minimal job having resigned internally from the job while still being on it as a form of what’s known as the ‘freeze-response’. Others flee into numbing their shame through overeating, over-drinking, drugs, and other unhealthy obsessions with substitute objects. Shopaholics use consumer goods or sport fanatics use their sport. Maybe my 200th pair of designer shoes will prove my worth or my third marathon in 90 days will show the world that I matter.
It’s hard to follow a healthy self-care regime and set healthy boundaries when one believes they don’t matter!
And that’s why mattering matters more than we think.
Mattering and Human Needs
When you study human needs you will stumble for sure upon the pyramid images of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Without going into the public big critical debate about Maslow’s philosophy and the mistakes made in its representation I claim that those using the pyramid image are making a mistake with unknown consequences: Mattering is seen as part of the ‘self-esteem level’ coming as a secondary psychological need after ‘feeling loved and belonging’.
In my over 23 years of working as an executive coach, corporate leadership trainer, team conflict resolution, and empowerment mentor my experience shows a different reality: People need to know they matter even before they need to feel loved or belong. People who think they don’t matter, don’t trust that someone loves them because they believe they are not worthy to be loved. They don’t trust invitations to belong either because they believe someone who doesn’t matter, can’t belong to anything. It feels as if not mattering dooms one to be insignificant and to be closed to having one’s identity erased and vanishing into a liminal level of existence.
Mattering constitutes a stable identity and through that becomes a source of strength, resilience and the foundation for joy and happiness. That’s why it could be seen as the safety net for one’s identity and foundation for the higher psychological needs and one’s mental and emotional health.
Mattering and Women
Why women struggle more than men with truly feeling they matter is an effect of seven thousand years of male domination, of patriarchal societies in which women had only second or third status or sometimes were not even considered fully human. It is easy to understand that after 7000 years of being married off by fathers as possession, of sexual harassment and abuse, of centuries of witch hunts, of being denied access to money, ownership of land and houses, to education and professions, to positions of power in governments and organizations, that deep down in our subconsciousness, women came to believe that they don’t matter. We have to be silent and pleasant to be looked at yet not heard.
We all understand thanks to C.G. Jung and his concept of the collective unconscious, how individual women’s brain’s subconscious mind connects them to each other and throughout time with their ancestral sisters before them. And that women’s brains are wired by history and the repetitions of cultural patterns to doubt their self-worth, to believe they are not enough, to compare themselves constantly with others falling short in that process, and to collect evidence that indeed they don’t matter. Yes, we are finally woken up to all of this yet it will take its time to collectively write a new story and show women that they matter as much as men do!
As neuroscience has proven: We might consciously believe in gender equality and that we all matter equally, yet that doesn’t mean our subconscious wiring and feelings have caught up with this conscious modern zeitgeist!
Mattering and (my) Early Childhood
What my personal connection to the topic of mattering is, became clear to me when I wrote as a publisher the introduction to the multi-author book “You Matter — How Women Reclaiming Their Power Are Changing the World.” Teaching the contributing authors my philosophy of mattering made me collect stories and incidences in my own life where mattering played an important part. I’m sharing a few personal pieces to hopefully make the whole concept of mattering more tangible for you and relatable by triggering memories or awareness in you what mattering means for you and how it or the lack of it showed and still might show up in your life.
My own journey to deeply knowing I matter had started young. As an only child, my parents would often tell me: “You are our sunshine.” “We live only for you and through you.” When you hear those kinds of sentences daily throughout your childhood you start to believe them. You think “when this is true, that must mean I matter.” I didn’t have the awareness as a child that there is a huge difference between THINKING something and SENSING it as a deep inner knowing in your body.
I knew my parents loved me, and I loved them deeply. But as a child, I had no idea that both my parents were suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from their own childhood experiences as refugees during World War II. I didn’t understand the full impact of the multiple traumas they experienced until I was in my forties. Talking about the war was so much of a taboo in German society, that the impact of World War II on my parents’ generation — the so-called “children of the war” — was rarely talked about until the early 2000s. It was not until 60 years after the end of the war that a congress of German psychotherapists was held in Frankfurt to discuss the impact of World War II on the German collective psyche, and the effects of epigenetically inherited trauma that is carried across generations.
Mattering and Trauma
For someone whose psyche is stuck in an old trauma, it is nearly impossible to connect with another human being on a mutually felt level of reality. Trauma causes disconnects within ourselves, and those disconnects make it difficult to connect with another human being. Sensing and believing you matter without connection is impossible.
As a so-called “grandchild of the war”, I grew up, along with millions of my generation, understanding a lot of things just intellectually yet avoiding feeling much emotion. Feeling the truth was just too painful and overwhelming. Living in my head was easier than facing the collective demons of the past, which had been swept under the rug of the German “Wirtschaftswunder”, the miraculous post-war economic recovery.
I grew into a superficially uber-confident young woman with a marvelous intellect. Always the best in class with everyone projecting that I would have a stellar future filled with wealth and success. Yet what neither they nor I understood was that beneath a conscious belief of “I matter”, was a subconscious abyss of self-doubt, inherited anxieties, and never-good-enoughness.
Hello, any “Superwoman” or “Superman” reading this who can relate to that discrepancy between image and inner world experience?
My passion for learning, my insatiable hunger for books and education, degrees and certifications had concealed a hidden, starving monster that was pushing me to please, to hustle, to be perfect. I created multiple self-sabotaging habits which made me undervalue myself, selling my services for too little and costing years of potential income. Those habits cost me health and fulfillment, turning me into a “man with boobs” competing in a world designed by men for men. I became the classical superwoman trying desperately to prove to myself that “I matter”, while desperately trying to fill a void I wasn’t even aware of.
Part of my search to heal this ‘energetic hole’ I sensed led me to a spiritual development training called The Avatar Course. During the nine-day long training was an exercise that trained your ability to feel. But not just to feel your own emotions, the state of your organs, limbs, or mood, but to feel nature, to feel other people, their moods, how their body might feel. Despite my two university degrees and brilliant mind, I failed these exercises miserably. I literally couldn’t feel! It was one of the most ego-destroying experiences of my life. Instead of always being the first in any class to be done, I became close to being thrown out of the training for being stuck in my head and in my resistance to feel anything.
Mattering is not something you think. It is something you need to feel.
I discovered that what I was resisting was a fear of what I might feel and what would happen if I truly started feeling. I was scared of being flooded by a tsunami of suppressed emotions that I somehow knew I had kept bottled up inside. Thanks to the patience of my teacher, I prevailed. I moved through my fears of feeling. My head reconnected with the rest of me, and a gate to an unknown world opened up inside me. This new world was full of moments of bliss, oneness, and unity which are beyond my ability with words to describe.
In this unity the question “do I matter” or “does anything even matter?” disappeared, and instead of a question was a choice. The choice was between whether everything matters or nothing matters.
I choose to live in a world in which people and things matter.
Mattering and You
What can you do, to know you matter? Here are a few questions I invite you to answer quickly in a first-round without overthinking them, then read your answers, and then go deeper and journal about the question and your answer with more depth!
- How do you define ‘mattering’?
- Remember three moments when you felt you mattered. (If you can’t, imagine them.) Describe those moments. What were the key elements which made you feel you mattered?
- Fill in the blank: “I matter when__________________”
- Fill in the blank: “I matter because ________________”
- Remember moments of self-doubt when you were convinced you don’t matter. What was missing in those moments?
- How can you bring more of what you answered to questions 2 and 5 into your life?
I’m well aware that most people define the sense of mattering as a reaction to the treatment they receive from other people. Yet what if you could learn to feel you matter independent from others? What if mattering first will then empower your relationships with others as a secondary effect? Here is a self-coaching process that is designed to empower you to create that experience:
7. Step into believing you matter. Use your memories of moments when you experienced mattering from Step 2 above. Feel it in your body. Place your full attention into your body. Use the power of interoception (perception of sensations from inside the body) to consciously own how the sensation of mattering manifests physically in your body. Describe it. Write it down. Then shake yourself. Arms and legs. Take a few deep breaths. Close your eyes. Now deliberately create the sensations of mattering in your body. Intensify them. Walk gently with your eyes open around while feeling that you matter. Look into the world. Look at things and people. How does your perception change when you look from a place of mattering? Great! You are now able to train yourself to create the sensation of mattering in your body independent of external circumstances!
Congratulations! You’ve done more for world peace by answering these questions and doing the last exercise than you might think.
Thank you for reading my first article on Medium. That makes you matter to me. This was part 1 of the article. You find part 2 here.
Let love lead. Always.
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About the author
Sylvia Becker-Hill
on a mission to inspire you to find many ways of your own version of mattering. She believes the biggest pain is a wasted life. Dying after creating a life that mattered will be like leaving a wonderful party: Happily, spent, and filled with gratitude for the experience.
Find out more at:
coaching + art: sylviabecker-hill.com
writing + publishing: becker-hillbooks.com
