Emma & Alans’ Story: from imposter syndrome to purpose this is a deeply personal journey with a shared mission.
EmPower: for people like us
We are launching EmPower Growth after a two-year period of research, testing, and piloting. We help people strengthen mental health and wellbeing. Please arrange to speak with Emma Gannon to learn more.
We cover the whole spectrum –
1. People who are in an OK space but who want to learn the skills and techniques to move them into an awesome space – for personal reasons or for career advancement.
2. People who have been in rather fragile places and who wish to take power over their own ability to recover and strengthen.
3. Everybody in between.
Emma & Alan: a Story
Hello, we’re Emma and Alan, the leadership team at EmPower: strengthening mental health and wellbeing.
Emma likes to identify with Andrea in The Devil Wears Prada, as she became unhappy and unfulfilled working in the fashion industry, and chose to leave to pursue a career that more closely matches her personal sense of purpose.
Alan likes to identify with Po in Kung Fu Panda as he is an adopted child who has a history of comfort eating and has fantasies of being in a gang of good people overcoming evil.
But for now, we will be Emma & Alan. Gulp.
We both lead purpose-led businesses so we look successful, particularly on our online profiles, as is demanded of one these days. Behind these profiles there lies some truth – we are successful people, although we find that very difficult to admit to ourselves. We’re certainly successful judged against the criteria humanity expects, but perhaps not so successful compared to our totally unrealistic expectations of ourselves – and therein lies the rub.
Our life stories are very different, but we share certain core beliefs that bond us and make us determined to make EmPower as accessible to as many people as possible.
We both have periods of fragile mental health on our life trajectories. We won’t go into the reasons why, which are very different. The outcomes are very similar: we’ve both had problems with self-image and food, we’ve both been anxious and suffered low moods but more than anything, we both suffer from the twin diseases of ‘imposter syndrome’ and ‘perfectionism.’
Emma Osborne-Gannon
These occasionally make us try too hard at things, to make up for some deficit we feel, and this puts us at risk of burnout, stress, anxiety, panic or <breathe> failure.
We both crave something very simple: to be able to relax guilt free.
We can occasionally achieve this state nowadays because we have worked out something extremely important:
Self-esteem is not about ‘me.’ We get our self-esteem from our relationships, our friends, our work colleagues and, critically, the people we are able to support through our work at EmPower.
We don’t manage this ‘impact and external’ focus all the time. Very few people do. But we manage it sometimes and when we do, we can truly relax. It’s awesome when we manage it.
We have a shared mission: to EmPower people from all walks of life to take control and strengthen their own mental health and wellbeing.
We know this is a big purpose and it will take time and diligence. We also know that for EmPower to become cost effective for marginalised people, we need to work on scale, investment, automation, and build cost efficiencies.
Alan Clayton
The only way we will achieve that is by having a successful start to phase one of the EmPower launch, which will mainly attract professional people for now. If it’s for you, please join us to help yourself think and feel better. You will also be Robin Hood types by helping us begin the growth that will eventually reach the people who cannot get support because of cost or accessibility. We know it will take time, so the faster we can get started, the faster we can get there.
Please start spreading the word by sharing this post as widely as you can. You’ll help a little by doing so … and also give our fragile self-esteem a little boost and earn our gratitude.
Thank you.
Emma and Alan
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