By Vera Chidi-Maha
People are taught before they can climb the ladder to the top. For women to get to the top, they have to be taught and only those who allow themselves to be taught will get to the top and stay there.
Teaching is crucial to obtaining. It makes one familiar with an otherwise strange terrain. It releases insight, equips and guides. People who are not taught cannot excel in the area where they lack the appropriate knowledge. However, teaching faces a serious problem if the prospective students are not teachable. There could be many reasons for this, but top of the lot is low self-esteem; those that see themselves below what they really are. Before now, women were treated as those not worthy to be found in top positions and as a result, they were ignored, resisted and by passed in anything that had to do with the top. You would not find women going the extra-mile to equip themselves for a higher position. A school of thought rightly pointed out that self-esteem is personal, whether high or low. It comes from within. And if it is low, it prevents and restrains her. Low self-esteem isolates. When a person has inferiority complex, he or she selects his or her needs from a wide range of inferior choices.
The faith to aim higher is lacking and so flight upwards is impossible. Women were barred from the top mostly not by men but by their sense of self-worth. The messages, programmes, opportunities and schemes in society, though not verbalised, ‘chose’ secondary positions for women. There were feminine courses in the university, feminine vacancies in companies, feminine this and feminine that. The top was dominated by men. One also observed that not all women accepted this state. Some rejected and resisted it. These groups of women alienated themselves from whomever and whatever would keep them down. They sought information to empower themselves.
They fought this cruel and artificial law of gravity. They went up. Most importantly, they dealt with self.
Instead of measuring themselves low, they increased their worth. They excluded themselves from the legion of women that accepted and consented to inferiority. They noted that the top is not masculine; it is gender blind. The thing about the top is, nobody who doesn’t want it gets it. People that get to the top prepare for it; they pay the price. Only those who are taught withstand the rigours and the sacrifice for the top. Teaching is what erodes inferiority complex. It arms one to forsake the lies one has been believing about oneself. Who said you can’t get to the top? Who said you are inefficient? Teaching in the long run affects, positively, the way we are. In turn, what we are determines where we are. The candle for the candle stick, the bird for the sky, the fish for the sea. What you are places you in your appropriate habitation. The more transformed you are, the more your ability to fly to the top. So, what’s the message? Change becomes new and different.
Teaching enforces changes because we change with new information. When you yield to be taught, you are yielding to the power of elevation. It has got nothing to do with your gender. It is the stuff you are made of. It is about what you have equipped yourself for. There are so many vacant positions above your present level whether you see them advertised in the newspaper or not; they exist. Limiting yourself to only the positions available where you are is a great error. There is life beyond where you are and what you are doing now. It’s not only the top we know that we can mount. There’s also the top that can be created. Secondly, you cannot mount the top that you are not fit for and you can never stay too long on a seat you are too big for. To be fit, you have to become adequate. To move upwards from your present seat, you become more than adequate. If you find yourself on one seat for too long, it simply means that the seat is still your size. Become bigger and better and you can actually be ‘taller’ than you are.
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