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The construction industry knows how to talk about the tangible—build your team; get off the tools; scale.
What gets less airtime is the internal work running underneath all of it — the identity shifts, the competing forces, the particular experience of the femme founder building alongside and within a male-dominated industry.
The Holistic Home Service Podcast is that conversation.
Energetics and strategy and everything in between for the women leading home service businesses.
As we rise, everything built around us does too.
I'm Edi Oduraa, and this is the Holistic Home Service Podcast.
I want to speak today and help alleviate a burden that may be on your shoulders.
And I'm guessing it may be on your shoulders because it's been on mine.
I turn around and I realize that it's crept back on there.
It's on the shoulders of a lot of the women I work with and a lot of the women I interact with.
We tend to internalize struggles that are largely external.
So what do I mean?
You're in your business, you're doing the thing, you're building, you're growing, you're scaling this enterprise by yourself, with your partner, with your non-romantic partner, and you look up and you find yourself further from where you expected to be at this point.
Maybe you imagined yourself as a strategist, you wanted to maybe focus more on the client relationships and doing sales and business development, maybe strategic guidance and more of that CEO type work, but you find yourself answering the phones, running invoices, handling the minutia that you were okay with for a bit but no longer work for you.
And the first instinct may be, how did I get myself here?
I didn't do this, I should have done that, I've been too much of this and too little of this.
I feel like that, our default so often is to say, I did something wrong here, I've gotten myself off track.
And while personal accountability and agency is incredibly important, I don't want us to internalize our journey so heavily that we ignore all of these external factors around us.
In the construction industry, it is a heavily male dominated industry.
And as such, we often see women relegated to the role of the admin support, the back office support, which there's nothing wrong with being back office support, admin support, especially if you want to be there.
But what is endemic in the industry is not accurately labeling the skills that women are bringing to the table.
So a husband may say, my wife helps with books, meanwhile, she's out here doing CFO, strategy level, financial forecasting, cash planning, and maybe she herself doesn't call it that.
She may not know that what she's doing is high level.
She's just like, I'm seeing that we're running out of cash, and so I'm creating a spreadsheet or some sort of system to keep track of it.
But this is a strategic role and strategic set of skills that she's implementing, but we just call it keeping up with the books, right?
Or she handles the client calls, but really, we're talking about a high level business development officer who is closing deals, who is wheeling and dealing and knows all the different clients and the quirks and the tweaks and is able to bring back clients, retain clients again and again and again.
And so when we look up and we find ourselves in a space in our business where we didn't really expect to be, we always have agency, right?
And we're grown adults, we've been walking this path, and let us recognize that the headwinds are prevailing against us accurately naming our skills and stepping into the role that is appropriate for those skills.
And when we internalize what we feel as failures or shortcomings, it gets harder to move.
We can get stuck in that place because we're not looking at the external levers that need to change.
We're just looking at ourselves and saying, okay, I need to stop doing this, I need to do more of this, da, da, da, da, da, da.
And again, more than likely, there are internal things that need to shift.
There are things to take ownership of that you have given ownership of.
And we cannot forget that there are these external forces.
And so there's external parties that will need to be brought in on this conversation.
If you're in business with your husband, there's going to be conversations that need to happen.
And there's probably pivots and shift within himself that he is going to need to be responsible for in order for you shifting to work, right?
And we need to continue having conversations in the broader construction industry about the role of women.
And I'll continue this even further in society in general, the conversation around women and the role of women.
You can't divorce these different things from each other.
And I think we so often do, right?
We feel like we're in our little microcosm of our business.
I know my people, I'm doing my thing, and we forget that there's all these other forces around us.
And I don't say this to make it feel insurmountable or to get on a soapbox.
So I do love a good, I love giving and listening to a good soapbox, but more to unravel some of the shame you may be feeling about where you're at.
You are doing a great job.
And when you are clear now that you want something different, you can take the steps, not just internally to quote unquote fix whatever led you here, but also to engage with the external world and engage with some of the prevailing winds that are preventing you from moving in the direction that you want to move in.
So what does this look like?
What does not internalizing your journey look like?
It means building the muscle of recognizing when somebody may be in the wrong headspace for where you're trying to go.
We don't want to talk about this, right?
I can even feel myself hedging around it, but some of us have been or are in partnerships where our husband really struggles at the idea of you taking a bigger leadership role.
Even if you guys are in this together, even if you say you're building this together, we can call a spade a spade.
Prevailing society is uncomfortable with women in leadership, with women taking up space, with women calling the shots, and that may have seeped into your partnership.
And it feels more tangly because this partnership is with someone who's not just a business partner, perhaps, but also a romantic partner.
But we have to recognize that and name it.
It's also recognizing that you may have more responsibilities outside of the business that are preventing you from stepping into your fullest potential in this role and asking yourself, what do I need for this to succeed outside of myself, not just me taking on more as superwoman, but what kind of support do I need from my community?
Not internalizing your journey means giving yourself grace.
It looks like giving yourself grace as well.
When we think this journey is a solo journey, a lone journey, a journey you have brought upon yourself that is not a part of a larger context, it can be easy to be harsh with ourselves to say, why can't you just get this?
Why can't things just shift?
Why am I like this, da, da, da, da, da, right?
But when we recognize and we externalize what needs to be externalized, and we recognize that this is a part of a larger conversation and we are one person navigating it, we can give ourselves grace and understand that things are likely not going to be fixed overnight.
If we are in a partnership that is thriving, that is really built on mutual support, then maybe one conversation is all it takes to shift.
But honestly, even then, there's the process of building the systems and building the business in such a way that it is no longer dependent on this labor from you that is not aligned with you.
Not internalizing your heroine's journey looks like also giving yourself the support you need.
Community is one of the biggest ways to dissipate the heaviness of internalization.
When we get into community, when we get into sisterhood, when we sit around the sacred circle, as people call it, gathering together with intention, and we share our stories and we recognize that, oh, you're also struggling with this.
You're also dealing with this.
Oh, you dealt with this.
This is how you got out of it.
Oh, you recognize that there's all these other things at play.
We realize that we, again, are not alone.
This is not a unique circumstance that we have found ourself in.
And that means that the solution doesn't have to be unique.
We don't have to reinvent the wheel.
We don't have to struggle and fight this on our own.
When we believe that our individual situation is purely driven by individual factors, the factors that are holding us back continue to perpetuate.
If we believe that we are just not good enough at articulating ourselves, that we don't have enough of a backbone, or that we're not clear enough, or we're not smart enough for people to take us seriously, and that's why we're at where we're at, then the concepts of sexism, of not honoring feminine wisdom and what we bring to the table perpetuates because we continue to internalize instead of facing this bigger issue and this bigger concept and speaking to it and speaking against it and crafting our lives in a way that we're no longer plugged into that narrative.
And so I want to deeply encourage you to reflect and see, first of all, where am I feeling dissatisfied with the way things are in my business?
And you can extend this to life, right?
And then where are the places where I'm assuming there's something wrong or broken with me or maybe there's more at play?
And again, getting in community can make this so helpful, bringing these things to people who are in a similar space as you, who are understanding and empathetic, can really open the floodgates.
I have a friend who we send voice notes daily and long-ass voice notes, like legit podcasts.
And from our conversations, we have grown tremendously in the years that we've known each other and also shed so much guilt, shame, internalization.
As we're talking, we realize, oh, you've dealt with this and you've dealt with this and oh, we see this larger picture and this larger conversation and we're able to navigate it more elegantly with grace for ourselves, with grace for others, with self-compassion because we see that we're not alone.
And while there are internal factors and internal levers to be pulled, we do have agency, we do have sovereignty.
Some of this energy needs to be directed towards the external and shifting things in the external.
So this was a bit more of a theoretical to a degree podcast episode, but I hope it was helpful.
When we stop internalizing everything in our business, in our life that we're dissatisfied with, we can then truly move into resolving it and not being weighed down by self-judgment and self-blame.
Until next time.