What lies beyond the compliant zone?
You should be a doctor
You’re a girl, you should cook and clean
You should go to Church every week
You shouldn’t go to dinner with your friends
You shouldn’t talk back so much
You should do what I tell you
This is a list of commands every PI person will hear at every stage of your life typically from your parents, extended family and elders. This has a very real impact; many people pursue one path in life due to influence by their culture and parents, these important life decisions have long lasting impacts on our personalities and the course of our lives.
A Harvard Business Review article refers to this as the compliance zone. Whereas stepping outside your comfort zone can help you build confidence, resilience and new skills, stepping outside your compliant zone means discovering your true self – the part of you that reflects your authentic passions and interests.
I know this from personal experience, having grown up – and chafing against – with precisely these sorts of messages. Every so often I would respond (from a very safe distance of course) with a ‘but I don’t want to do that’ or ‘why, that’s sexist’ or ‘but how come my brothers can do that?’ and the typical response I would get was either a projectile object being thrown with speed and precision at my head and/or the PC version would be ‘just do what I say, or else ….’.
We can’t be too hard on our parents though. Many of them emigrated from the Islands to developed countries precisely in order to provide better educational and labour opportunities for us. Their frame of reference is therefore very different to ours, and that includes what a “success” looks like for a person and how they can be achieved.
As a result, clashes can arise when we suggest anything that deviates from their expectation that success = lawyer, doctor, engineer, or professional athlete, and that anything else means you’re a failure. In short, they often don’t have a full appreciation for how diverse the world of work actually is and that our youth have special talents, soft skills and technical skills that open up so many more pathways to us than the few lucrative professions they have grown up familiar with.
If you genuinely are passionate about those areas of work, then by all means pursue that path. However, we need to be more open minded about other work paths and supporting our youth with these ambitions and trying to link up to PI members already working in those roles and industries. The professional options for us can’t just be rugby player, doctor, lawyer or engineer and if you don’t fit into one of these highly competitive industries, then off to a factory or construction site for you.
There is a very real medium out there which can provide just as lucrative salaries and fulfilling careers such as Mining, Advertising and marketing, Financial services, Fashion, Technology, the Arts and music, Pharmaceuticals and Property development to name just a few.
We know our parents love us, we can feel it and see it through the sacrifices they made to give us better lives – the thing is, that sometimes when they’re trying to ensure we enter into degrees and jobs that they equate with security and wealth, they actually prevent their kids from exploring their natural talents and interests which could very well lead to fruitful and secure careers.
