Do you ever have “Blonde Moments”? In Jacinda Ardern’s book, “A different kind of power”, she tells a story. Pregnant, in power, and balancing crazy hormone changes and the exhaustion of carrying a baby and running a country, she recounts having a conversation with another woman with impressive credentials. She had a moment of forgetfulness and laughingly saying, “Oops, baby brain.”
The woman to whom she was speaking apparently didn’t laugh. Instead, she said, “You cannot say that. You absolutely cannot say that.”
Why? Because in doing so, Ardern risked giving her opponents an opportunity to say that she, or any woman expecting a child, had no right to be in a position of authority.
This made me think about myself. How often, when I forget something, or when my brain is running too fast for my mouth to catch up, I laugh and point at my hair and say, “That’s a little blonde moment!”
I don’t know when I started saying this.
Probably as a teenager in South Africa, when “blonde jokes” were incredibly popular (perhaps a South African thing, or perhaps a 90s thing – either way, they were popular). I remember saying it when working as a waitress if I forgot to bring the pepper sauce with a steak, and then when I entered the corporate world, if I forgot to add an attachment to an email. And now, I say it when I am training or facilitating and do something that I feel is silly or forgetful.
People laugh. I laugh! It’s supposed to be funny. But what I wonder now is whether that little comment is what people remember, and if, rather than humanising me, it reduces my credibility in the eyes of the people I’m working with.
I can’t imagine anyone would look me in the eye and say, “Ha, ha, you had a little blonde moment there. Silly old you!” If they did, unless they were a good friend, I’d probably be a bit taken aback and take it as a criticism. So why do I speak about myself, to others, like that?
I think I’ve said my last, “Just a little blonde moment on my part.” Now I just have to stop THINKING it 🙂
Perhaps you have your own version of “baby brain” and “blonde moments”. I think these little self-criticisms, clothed in humour, are not uncommon in women or men.
I wonder if perhaps you, too, might want to make 2026 the year when you stop this sort of self-deprecating behaviour?