How Lightening Up Works

Not sure where self-advocacy actually starts? Most advice about speaking up starts too late. Here is the order things really happen in, and where each of my tools fits.

Most advice about speaking up starts too late. It tells you to be confident in the meeting, when the real problem started weeks earlier. When nobody explained the decision. When you were sent to the third wrong department. When you ran out of energy to chase it again.

Everything I build follows the same six steps. Not because it makes a neat model, but because this is the order things actually happen in when you are trying to get a system to listen.

1. Understand

You cannot advocate inside something you cannot see.

This step is about working out what is actually going on. Which system you are in. Who holds the decision. What the rules say, in plain words. What they are allowed to ask of you, and what they are not.

Most people are handed a decision without ever being shown the map. Understanding comes first because everything after it depends on knowing where you are standing.

2. Prepare

Preparation is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that changes outcomes.

Knowing what you want to say before you are in the room. Having your three points written down. Knowing the question you need answered and refusing to leave without it. Having your history in one place so you are not reconstructing it from memory while someone waits.

Preparation is not about being polished. It is about not having to think clearly under pressure, because you already did the thinking when you were calm.

3. Speak Up

This is the moment people picture when they hear “self-advocacy”, and it is only one step of six.

Saying the thing. Asking the question. Naming what is not working. Disagreeing without apologising for existing. Asking someone to put it in writing.

It gets easier when the first two steps are done, because you are not inventing your position while you deliver it.

4. Take Action

Speaking up is not the end. Something has to happen next.

Sending the email. Lodging the request. Asking for the review. Escalating when the answer was no and the answer was wrong. Putting your request somewhere it has to be responded to, rather than somewhere it can quietly disappear.

5. Track

This is the step almost nobody tells you about, and it is where most things are won or lost.

Who said what, and when. What was promised. What date they gave you. What has not come back. The pattern that shows this is the fourth time you have asked.

Systems rely, often without meaning to, on people not keeping records. Tracking is not admin. It is evidence. It is the difference between “I feel like I have been waiting ages” and “I requested this on 3 March, followed up twice, and have had no response in eleven weeks.”

6. Create Change

Your experience is not only yours.

The thing that happened to you has almost certainly happened to other people. When individual experiences are gathered carefully and with consent, they stop being complaints and start being patterns. Patterns are what change policy.

Not everyone wants this step, and that is completely fine. Advocating for yourself is enough. But for people who reach the point of saying “I do not want anyone else to go through this”, there is a path from one difficult experience to genuine system change.

Why it is built this way

Every tool, course, planner and app I make sits somewhere on these six steps. Some cover one step properly. Some carry you across several.

It means you can start wherever you actually are. If you have a meeting on Thursday, you do not need the whole framework. You need step two. If you have been fobbed off for months, you probably need steps five and four, in that order.

You are not behind. You are somewhere on a process that was never explained to you.

Where to start

If you are not sure which step you are on, the Self-Advocacy Check-In will give you a clearer picture in about three minutes.

If the problem is the system rather than your confidence, try the System Advocacy Check-In instead.

And if you would rather start from whatever is actually happening this week, go to What are you dealing with right now?

Madeleine x