Weekly Poem: STILL I RISE

🌿 A poem a day keeps the blues away… 

🪴 Every poem I share is one that touched me that week.
Today’s poem is about oppression. 

STILL I RISE

🌻 You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise. 🌻

—Maya Angelou,
published in The Poetry Pharmacy by William Sieghart

🪴 Angelou’s words live in many places:

in history, in politics, in identity—and this week they met me in the workplace.

One of the reasons I love being an independent coach is that I get to work with people and teams across industries, professions, and geographies. But I increasingly feel conflicted when I’m asked to coach people to become more “resilient” when what I encounter is not fragility, but people being slowly worn down by cultures of hidden agendas, power games, covert hostility, and unspoken fears.

This is how oppression often looks in organisations.

Quiet. Normalised. Wrapped in performance language.

And then we try to fix it by coaching individuals to “cope better“.

🪴 When systems quietly trap us all

Before we blame people or managers, it’s important to name the system they’re inside—its incentives, its silences, its unspoken rules—in which oppressors are often themselves oppressed.

Most managers do not wake up thinking, How can I make today particularly miserable for my team?
And yet, harmful behaviour keeps happening, because targets, politics, fear of failure, and fear of disposability create environments where pressure flows downward and humanity gets squeezed out.

This is the soil in which oppression grows. And it often shows up in very subtle ways:

• unrealistic timelines with inadequate resourcing
• decisions made without involving those who will carry the consequences
• leaders who avoid real conversations in favour of executive summaries and soundbites
• instructions that bypass reporting lines, creating confusion and resentment
• people told to “stop complaining” and just get on with it
• politics and hidden agendas replacing open, trustful communication
• wilful blindness out of fear
• personal attacks disguised as “feedback”
• and the list goes on…

Over time, this becomes normal.
It becomes “the way things are done here.”

And when people begin to suffer under it, we don’t question the system—
we try to fix the individual.

This is the ultimate sign of subtle oppression disguised as a rescue.

We send them to resilience or stress-management training.
We give them a coach.
We ask them to adapt better, cope more, and regulate themselves.

There is something deeply wrong with asking a bruised nervous system to build resilience while leaving the bruising system untouched.

🪴 Survival is not the same as empowerment

Someone who shows up every day to a place that causes them pain
is not lacking resilience.
They are already demonstrating it through sheer survival.

What they often need instead is empowerment—
support to see what is really happening,
to reclaim their agency,
to speak up, to set boundaries,
and, if needed, to walk away.

Sometimes empowerment is having the courage to blow a whistle.
Sometimes it’s quietly updating a CV.
Sometimes it’s taking sick leave.
Sometimes it’s finally saying: This is not okay—I’m out.

None of that comes from being taught to endure more.
And none of it is naïve—we all know it comes at a cost.

But the real question is:
what’s the cost of enduring vs. the cost of taking action?

Only the person enduring can answer that.

And then another question quietly follows:
how do we influence the systems that make this kind of suffering feel inevitable? 

🪴 The fish stinks from the head

There’s a saying that the fish stinks from the head.
Meaning: if you want to change a culture, you have to start at the very top.

You can run workshops on psychological safety.
You can preach about structural transparency.
You can champion a coaching and feedback culture.

But unless your highest-ranking leaders are willing to role-model those behaviours—
and unless HR, Finance, and accountability systems are built to support them—
you are asking people to behave differently inside structures that will ultimately punish them for doing so.

And that, too, is a form of quiet oppression.

🪴 Why Angelou’s words still matter today…

Because this is not about enduring quietly or learning to endure even more.

It’s about rising:
above fear,
above defeat,
above silencing,
above injustice.

It’s about our beautiful, fragile, yet indomitable human spirit saying:
Still I Rise—as must the systems we build.

📌 What are your thoughts on organisational “oppression”?

How do you feel about trying to treat systemic ills with individual resilience patches?

🦋 Happy Sunday everyone! 🦋

With love,
Dina 🫶🏽