So if you've listened to me for even a hot second, you probably know that everyone has one allyship superpower and that's what you should be using to be an effective ally. We talked about this in the last post, so if you're not sure what I'm talking about, head on over there and get caught up. But what you may not know is that everyone actually has two allyship superpowers:
Offensive allyship superpower
Defensive allyship superpower
You can use each of them for both offense and defense, but these names help get at the flavor of each one. So what do each of these mean?
Your offensive allyship superpower is what is fun and easy for you to do. You feel powerful, you can get into flow states, it feels great. You can usually trace this back to what you used to like to do as a kid: things you do for fun, naturally.
Fun fact! You can have more than one of these, and you might find more of them as you get deeper into your different parts.
As an example, my offensive superpowers are storytelling and games. It's why I'm such a great Dungeon Master (and so very humble too).
Your defensive allyship superpower is the shadowy part of yourself that stops you from getting to your offensive allyship superpower. Whatever doubt, fear, uncertainty you have about showing up as a powerful person will manifest as some kind of self sabotage. But once you defeat it you get BOTH your superpower AND all the strength you developed to stop yourself.
My self sabotage tends to be things like hiding, avoiding, over-intellectualizing, distraction, giving up just before the finish line.
Those all sound really bad, right? Counterpoint: each one of those things was something I used to protect myself from something I thought would be a really terrible experience. They actually had my best interests at heart. When you use them creatively in service of allyship they're actually hella effectively.
Ok but what does that actually look like? It's all well and good to say those nasty lil bits in yourself can be used for good, but how? Let's take an example. In my coaching, I use avoidance all the time. A client might bring up something that feels like a HUGE issue to them and say that they have to fight it in order to move forward. My response? Nah. We can just avoid it. We don't have to do that. Whatever part of you says you have to go down this hard path to be effective, we can just ignore it. Another example is when someone is getting really stressed and overwhelmed I might distract them, often with humor. You can't panic about the problem if you're not paying attention to it!
Turns out that makes me a wildly effective coach. I get to embrace what I used to call the lazy shithead that stopped me from doing things. That opens up the path for other people.
Drop in the comments what your defensive allyship superpower is: I love hearing them.
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