Hi First name / Friend,

 

Grade nine in the 1980s meant a lot of things: big hair, shoulder pads, neon everything, and Cyndi Lauper rallying girls to just have fun. It was also the time to complete the guidance counsellor’s handwritten survey that would determine the course of your professional life.

 

I filled it out dutifully. I love math, sports and analytics. I love talking to people and making my friends laugh. The computer did its "thinking," and out came my destiny: bank teller.

 

I laughed. Then I quietly set it aside, because something in me already knew that wasn't the ceiling. I didn't know exactly what was possible, but I knew it was more than that (no disrespect to bank tellers, it was just not for me).

 

My mother was born in the 1940s. When she finished high school, she had three career options: nurse, teacher, or homemaker. It was not a lack of ambition or intelligence, but because that was the width of the lane available to women in her era. The ceiling was sewn into the fabric of society.

 

By the time I came along in the 1970s, the lane was wider. The survey got it wrong and I knew it, but I also absorbed, without realizing, a version of what was reasonable, what was realistic, what women in business could expect to achieve. Some of those assumptions I questioned. Some of them I carried quietly for years without ever examining where they came from.

 

Then my daughter started researching careers. She came home talking about Earth Sciences and environmental science. I had to Google it to better understand what it meant. Entire industries that didn't exist when I was filling out that survey are now career paths she considers as naturally as I once considered retail or marketing. Her ceiling is a different sky entirely.

 

And that made me think about all of us.

 

The external ceilings have shifted dramatically across three generations, but one question nags at me: if the world has changed that much, why do so many of us still carry the old version of what's possible? Not the ceiling someone built above us, but the one we built ourselves, quietly, out of assumptions we never thought to question.

 

The bank teller survey didn't limit me because I questioned it. But what about the assumptions I didn't question? The ones I absorbed so gradually that they stopped feeling like assumptions at all, and started feeling like facts. That's the ceiling you don't see.

 

So here's what I want you to consider:

Those questions are harder than they sound, and the answers rarely come quickly.