Know your Why; Know your Pie: What can we learn from forgotten candidates?
For every politician we write about at The Silent MP, there are thousands upon thousands of individuals who have given years of their lives to campaigning without achieving the successes of election. Notwithstanding the achievements of those who do make it to parliament, what can we learn from those who don’t? The Silent MP spoke to Canadian leadership and gender expert Betsy McGregor to find out.
As a leadership coach, Betsy tells the Silent MP that she once worked with a candidate who lived by the mantra of grit it out. You can get anything you want, she believed, if you just stick with it and grit it out. This method worked for a while; she even told her children, aspiring hockey players, that they can succeed if they just grit it out. Yet, despite campaigning with all of her might, and, indeed, gritting it out, Betsy’s candidate lost the election she was contesting. Clearly, grit it outhas its limits.
It is important not to attach too much personal blame upon failure. There are a substantive number of factors that can overwhelm individual excellence. The running individual has a very limited effect on the result of the election, says Betsy, only around 7 percent. The rest is made up of various factors, including party loyalty, ballot-defining policy, and the charisma of a leader. This 7 percent, your level of control, is your pie in politics.
Betsy reminds us that 95 percent of the women who run for office around the world have lost. This perceived failure brings with it both tangible (long-term debt, a breakdown of relationships), and intangible (depression, despair, insomnia) consequences. Betsy cites the example of female candidate Karen McCrimmon, who, in 2013, ran against Justin Trudeau for the leadership of the Liberal Party in Canada. A former pilot in Afghanistan, Karen was clearly no stranger to challenges in her life. During the leadership race, she was in every newspaper, and on every television, putting her heart and soul into campaigning.
Yet, election day arrives, and Trudeau is declared the victor. Suddenly, the lights go out, it’s over, and the cameras rush around Trudeau; ‘in a nanosecond you disappeared in the rubble, you are completely invisible, in debt, and exhausted’, explains Betsy. The reactionary emotions following election loss are characterised here by Betsy as ‘spinning out, bottoming out, climbing out’.
Yet, ‘[these] lost and forgotten women carry enormous lessons’, Betsy explains to the Silent MP. We must all be careful not to underestimate the value of those candidates who do not make it to office. Betsy knows this all too well, having ran for parliament herself, only to lose to an individual who was, following their years in parliament, convicted of election fraud.
Betsy tells the Silent MP that recovering from election loss is easier when you know your why, know your pie. Put simply, remind yourself of the reasons that drove you to run for office: your why; and remind yourself of your sphere of control: your pie. Keeping these in mind will make it easier to avoid internalising the loss, whilst still remaining motivated and determined for the future. In this sense, the loser of the election may provide us with just as much wisdom and insight as the winner. For every success we see, for every Kim Campbell, there are thousands upon thousands of candidates who are still lost in the rubble.
