What Speaking at the Leadership & Career Conference in Prague Really Meant to Me
The very first time I got on a plane, I was 28. It was a 45-minute flight Vilnius-Warsaw, for work.
I was 33 when I first travelled abroad for a holiday and saw my first palm.
At 35 I relocated and came to Malta to build a better life with my broken English.
English that I had mostly taught myself by translating songs with a paper dictionary, guessing words and feeling very smart when I got them right. That English was good enough to show off back home. It was good enough to get me a job in Malta. But it wasn’t good enough to impress native English speakers.
I remember a colleague asking me to “help” him write down a list of event attendees by spelling their names out loud in front of the whole team. I couldn’t spell properly in English and was absolutely burning in flames of shame, thinking: I’m a grown woman and apparently I don’t even know the alphabet!!!
And yet, less than a month into that same job, I proposed something that not only helped the company withstand Covid, but very quickly took it to a completely new level that almost no one believed was possible. Me. With my broken English and terrible spelling. Ha!
What does any of this have to do with my speech in Prague?
Everything!
It starts with how much I still appreciate travelling. Flying has never become completely casual to me. I’ve taken many flights in the 14 years since that first one, but somewhere inside I still think: Bloody hell, I’m flying. Just like that!
Then there is the reason I speak about and to women. Because I believe somewhere right now there is a woman who doesn’t fully trust herself yet. Maybe she is divorced. Maybe she is between jobs or between countries. Maybe she has disappeared a little into motherhood. Maybe she has changed careers or lost a role she built her life around. Maybe she is approaching menopause and is scared of becoming irrelevant.
My speech will not change her life, I’m totally aware of that, but it might make her feel less lonely in her situation. And quite often, that’s the start.
And finally, standing in front of a couple of hundred women in Prague and extending my story, in English, making women laugh and making them think about themselves, their daughters and other women made me feel like I was part of something important.
Femme Palette and their tribe made me feel that something I have lived through, studied, questioned and thought about is useful to other women too!
I came home carrying hundreds (literally!) of messages, conversations, contacts, stories and new ideas with me.
And you know what? To this day, I still have to concentrate when spelling my own surname in English. But I have a handful of stories to tell that can make a room full of beautiful women laugh, or stay with me when those stories get serious. I think I’ll focus on that.
And you should too!😉
