Excerpt from the Introduction of Kicking Ass in a Corset

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JANE AUSTEN’S 6 PRINCIPLES FOR LIVING AND LEADING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

ANDREA KAYNE

Kicking Ass in a Corset: Jane Austen’s 6 Principles for Living and Leading from the Inside Out

By Andrea Kayne Introduction What Would Jane Do? “I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.”

—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

What can organizational leaders in business, education, government, and most any enterprise learn from an unemployed, unmarried woman who lived in patriarchal, misogynistic rural England more than two hundred years ago? As it turns out, a great deal. I’ve witnessed this firsthand as a professor and director of the graduate leadership program in the College of Education at DePaul University.

My professional life as a leadership expert has coincided with my lifelong interest (some might say obsession) with Jane Austen’s heroines and, specifically, with their internal fortitude, steadfast strength, and quiet command in the face of extremely confining and sometimes oppressive circumstances.

For more than twenty years, I have taught countless aspiring school principals and superintendents and educational leaders in higher education about using their limited resources to navigate the challenge of education law, the restriction of the politics of education, and the often-fraught relationships among educational stakeholders. As a leadership consultant I have worked with many education, government, corporate, and technology leaders and organizations to assist them in maximizing their efficacy, improving their efficiency, and enhancing their impact in spite of limiting constraints, diminishing resources, and overwhelmed systems. For the female graduate students and consulting clients I work with, there is often an added layer of constraint to overcome. The ubiquity of gender discrimination, gender inequity, and a sense of gendered powerlessness have created additional obstacles and burdens for women occupying or seeking leadership positions.

Jane Austen’s heroines are inspiring and useful because they provide a way of finding one’s power and agency under great constraint and in trying times. The “corset” is an apt metaphor to describe the constrictions female leaders in many industries and organizations are facing these days. Women in the workplace may find it difficult to “breathe” as they are pushed, prodded, and squeezed by seemingly intractable forces beyond their control. The ubiquitous pressures on women leaders and aspiring leaders include insufficient credibility, disrespect, pressure to be likable, absence of mentors and sponsors, lack of confidence, inadequate visibility, office politics, limited negotiating experience, gender discrimination, financial inequity, gendered career paths, disproportionate family responsibility, limited access to networks, linguistic style, sexual harassment, and so much more.

These external aggravating forces make it particularly challenging to succeed as a leader, to survive as a leader, or to get promoted to leadership in the first place.

Although my theory of internally referenced leadership relates to other leadership theories, such as

Emotionally Intelligent Primal Leadership, Conscious Leadership, and Authentic Leadership, it is distinct and different in its focus. The internally referenced leader is emotionally intelligent, conscious, and authentic, and she also strives to achieve an overarching sense of personal agency and self-reliance in any and all external environments, no matter how challenging or even how advantageous. An unwavering internal locus of control directs her perceptions and actions and is always what is most important. This is what distinguishes internally referenced leadership from other leadership theories that focus more on dealing with external realities than maintaining an internal and unwavering state of well-being and equanimity despite what is going on. While some theories do address the importance of those internal states, they do not provide specific and integrated operationalized guidance for achieving them.

These principles of internally referenced leadership work together to help create leaders and organizations who truly operate from the inside out in order to withstand the pressure and vagaries of difficult external circumstances. Similar to the ice skater, mountain climber, or surfer who prepares for the demands of her sport by learning Pilates to strengthen her core, the internally referenced leader develops practices for strengthening the metaphoric core that enables individuals and organizations to remain steady, sturdy, and strong, no matter how precarious the environment.

The tools and practices of internally referenced leadership help us become leaders in our own lives, living on our terms, in spite of the pressure we feel to conform or capitulate.

This is the only leadership theory whose principles and guidelines have been inspired by the writings of an uneducated, unmarried female fiction writer from the 1800s. Along with my graduate students, consulting clients, and colleagues, those who have attended my speaking engagements and workshops appreciate the distillation, applicability, and relevance of these unexpectedly modern and relevant instructions for internally referenced leadership from Jane Austen, an unlikely and untraditional leadership expert. Austen’s characters provide a framework for success that is as revolutionary now as it was two centuries ago.

Each of these heroines represents an aspect of internally referenced leadership by sourcing her power from within even while living in confining circumstances. Through their various strategies, these fictional women from the 1800s achieve a kind of independence and personal agency that is astonishing and unexpected in patriarchal Regency England and is even revelatory today.

Jane Austen’s six principles for internally referenced leadership are as follows: 1. Like Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, know your own internal and inherent value, especially in external environments that intentionally or unintentionally devalue you or create other outer conditions of unworthiness.

2. Like Elinor Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility, respond to external tumult and adverse change with an internal calm, acceptance, and problem-solving resilience rather than as the passive victim of external circumstance and self-pity.

3. Like Anne Elliot from Persuasion, choose, create, and claim paradigms based on internal worthiness, hard work, and merit over external constructs that bestow the shortcuts of privilege, entitlement, and membership in the “right” club.

4. Like Fanny Price of Mansfield Park, insist on faithfully following your internal moral compass and normative principles, even in the face of external pressure, coercion, and material consequence.

5. Like Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey, protect and retain your internal childlike dreaming, wonder, curiosity, passion, and hope—especially in an external world that can be discouraging, disillusioning, and filled with despair.

6. Like Emma Woodhouse from Emma, constantly be willing to learn from an internal place of openness and humility rather than from a stance of perfection and superiority.

Again and again I have seen this two-hundred-year-old six-point formula for internally referenced leadership work not only for devoted Janeites but for all kinds of people in all kinds of situations. This book unpacks each principle by examining it in the context of Jane Austen’s original text, Jane Austen scholarship, and literature on leadership and management. The chapters illustrate how each principle relates to and further develops the theory of internally referenced leadership, illuminated with real-life examples and strategies gleaned from the pages of Austen’s work.

Austen has been a lighthouse for me, both personally and professionally, during those many times I have felt as if I’m flailing in the dark at the behest of external forces beyond my control. While she reminds us that “[w]e none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days,” she offers a way home—home to ourselves. This book attempts to articulate the need for and the way to internally referenced leadership by drawing our attention to Austen’s insights about our internal sources of power. We need Jane Austen now more than ever: we need her strategies about transcending her misogynistic environment so that we can transcend our own.

Excerpted from KICKING ASS IN A CORSET: Jane Austen’s 6 Principles for living and Leading from the Inside Out by Andrea Kayne (University of Iowa Press, 2021). All rights reserved.