System Change is Not Enough: The Solution is Inside Out

I used to think system change was the solution but it’s not the full picture.

In my early 20s, I visited South Africa and was told Apartheid had ended two decades earlier. But everywhere I went, I saw hospitals, schools, and places of worship still marked “Black” and “White.” And the financial disparities between these groups were just as stark.

Maybe the system had changed but the beliefs hadn’t. Racism was normalised and entrenched.

That’s why system change alone is not enough. Inequity doesn’t vanish just because the rules do. It lingers in minds, behaviours, and cultures long after laws are rewritten.

So yes ✅ gender pay gap reporting matters. But for as long as we hold internalised (unconscious) beliefs that women’s work is of lesser value, nothing changes.

📉 Employers will still low-ball women. 🤐 Women will still struggle to negotiate higher pay and position. 🔁 The cycle of external and internal devaluation continues.

That’s why disruption of any systemic inequity starts with an internal paradigm shift. We have to change the way we think and feel about ourselves to influence the world around us. We must believe differently to behave differently.

Western society teaches us that to feel good or safe, we must receive external validation. So we try to convince other people of our value through proving ourselves, people pleasing, and overgiving to feel enough. But it doesn’t work because it’s not a reflection of how we really feel on the inside. This keeps us stuck on an exhausting hamster wheel 🐹hoping that the next pay rise, promotion, or title change will finally fulfil us.

But it’s the wrong way around.

✨When we recalibrate our inner world, we show up fundamentally differently. By changing our own perception of self, we influence other people’s perception of us too.

You know that person whose presence lights up a room. It’s got nothing to do with social status and everything to do with the glow of someone who knows how damn valuable they are. 💫

When you know deep in your bones that you are worthy, you shift from asking for more to commanding (not demanding!) more.

People feel it. They respond to your energy, your authority, your grounded self-trust. You become memorable and magnetic. ⚡

We don’t need to wait for system change to disrupt the gender pay gap. We begin by disrupting our own internalised narratives of devaluation. When we know our worth is not negotiable - not tied to title, salary band, or metric - we become free. And the journey to attaining more becomes joyous, rather than fraught with fear of being a fraud.

That’s far more powerful, palpable, and energising than fighting a system determined not to change. And it means we call in higher pay and position through resonance, not resentment.

🏔️This is the kind of disruption that moves mountains. Not through systemic bargaining. Through our own worth recalibration. ⚡