Why emotional safety is so important for feminine souls in the masculinised world of entrepreneurship and business.
What I have discovered in my feminine healing and business work, is that it is not uncommon for a woman to hold a great deal of self-doubt around creating and expressing from the naturalness and ease of her feminine core.
Instead, she is taught that she is somehow flawed or unable to succeed in more conventional ways if she is not prepared to get out of her comfort zone, push past her limits or make big moves. There is an idea that her business success can only be found on the other side of this pushing. An idea that she should constantly force her way through discomfort and challenging feelings.
Yet I don't believe that this approach is supportive or enlivening for the feminine soul in business.
In fact, I have seen this firsthand in the majority of women who are drawn to my work and writings, where the conversation is often around feeling as though they should be pushing themselves to do more, yet they remain frozen. They feel that perhaps there is something wrong with them. That they are not bold enough. Not productive enough. Not courageous enough.
What I have discovered is that this more forceful approach to business feel harsh and intense to the feminine system. It feels unnatural and misaligned. And as a result, it creates deeper resistance and inaction, instead of inspiration and action.
The question then arises, ‘How can I move through this resistance/stagnancy and into a space where I feel inspired to take action? Where my soul doesn’t shrivel up everytime I think about having to meet these entrepreneurial norms in order to succeed?’
And this is where the importance of emotional safety comes in.
For many women, her emotional safety- which encompasses how safe she feels to be who she naturally is- was not sufficiently nurtured through her past environments. This may have looked like highly pressurised, emotionally dry or critical environments at home, not feeling safe to engage in her artistic, creative, spiritual and feminine aspects during her formative and adolescent years at school, or not having any significant adults in her life who she felt truly seen by, beyond how she could produce, perform and achieve externally.
This lack of emotional safety then becomes something that deeply affects her as she enters the entrepreneurial realm. She has a desire to contribute her authentic self, ideas and creations to the world- yet does not feel safe to do so.
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After working and connecting with many women on their creative and entrepreneurial paths, I have seen how honouring and tending to our emotional safety is foundational to our ability to create, express and see the value of our work in the world. In particular, I believe that as women with feminine cores, we hold an innate vulnerability and sensitivity in relation to our emotional body. Which means that this cultivation of emotional safety is even more vital- and thus more impactful if it is lacking or ignored.
When we cultivate emotional safety, we feel safe to tap into our creativity. We feel safe to try new things. We feel that we are inherently valuable, regardless of our success. We feel safe to be ourselves, and create from our hearts, rather than from what we think will 'work' the most quickly, or what we think we 'should' be doing, or what we think will earn us validation and approval.
On the other hand, if we start believing that we must constantly override our deeper emotional body in order to succeed, we find ourselves struggling to create and express (or, alternatively, we take action, but then feel exhausted and depleted).
In fact, I have seen that for the woman on the path to re-integrating her feminine nature, this entrepreneurial approach where she is taught to constantly ‘overcome’ herself, can deeply affect her self-concept and self-trust. It causes her to neglect her need for emotional safety and diminish the vulnerabilities of her heart. In this, she overrides the signals of her emotional body, disassociating from her feminine being and inner compass and powering ahead in a way that can lead to exhaustion, disconnection and masculinising her natural expression. Alternatively, she falls into avoidance and inaction without knowing quite why, leading to self-criticism and unworthiness around not being able to 'just do it' like she's been told she should.
For me, I feel like a lot of what I unconsciously ingested from my earlier stages of seeking out knowledge in the online business world, overwhelmed me and actually made me lose confidence in my own creativity, message and natural path. It made me lose belief in the idea that I could create an income while also honouring and working in synergy with the more feminine aspects of my being.
It made me feel unsafe to be in business. And as a result, I retreated a lot.
The idea that I would have to be this loud authority, this person who had to constantly be pushing for results, this person who had to be relentlessly active and engaging and certain and compelling, it all felt so exhausting to my soul. The online world, with so many ideas, opinions, problems (and their quick fixes) being relentlessly churned out in very public spaces that are open to the quick critiques of everyone and anyone, did not feel very safe. (In retrospect, I now see that of course our beings are not designed to be cycling in such hardened, frantic environments that see us having to commodify, contort and push ourselves and our work out in such indiscriminate ways).
Part of this also I think is the nature of my work. I think that anything in the realms of the feminine (so any work that is less tangible, more dependent upon feeling, subjective experience, artistry) can feel particularly challenging for us to offer through more masculinised frameworks of business. I know that for me there was this sense that things would be easier, that I would feel more confident to show up if my work was more traditionally “business-y.”
Yet I do feel that regardless of what we are sharing/providing/creating, there is this deeper vulnerability we hold when we enter the business realm as distinctly feminine beings who wish to move from our true nature. And while we can be taught to believe that our emotional being and our business are separate, I have seen that they are in fact intimately interwoven.
All of this to say-
Your emotional safety is important, and shouldn't be diminished in the realm of business and creation.
It is important that your natural vulnerabilities are not ignored in the rush to achieve success. Trying to do business through force, hustle and overriding your deeper emotional body is not a path that leads to authentic expression, creativity and feeling inspired and sustained in your work.
If you sense that your emotional safety is being compromised by doing business in the way you think you should- marketing in a certain way, structuring your offers in a specific way, showing up online on certain platforms- there is not something 'wrong' with you that you need to fix or get over. There is a reason for feeling the way you do and I have found in my work with women that these feelings are usually a nudge towards acknowledging and trusting your deeper nature. Trusting that there is a different way of doing things. Trusting that your natural rhythms are right for you. Trusting that your emotional being matters, even if you have been taught that it is invalid or weak to have emotional needs in a business context.
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As a woman here reading this, you obviously hold a deeper desire to create in some way that is unique to you.
There is a desire to trust in and believe in the value of your gifts, expression, artistry, knowledge, ideas, service- through receiving tangible income for what you offer.
Yet if you sense that you must constantly override your emotional safety in this pursuit, it can feel tempting to avoid business altogether. It can be tempting to stay tightly ensconced in the idea that there is no place for your feminine heart and emotional being in business. It can be easy to fall into that hardened space of resistance, where withdrawing into inaction or disassociating to push ahead seems like the safest option.
So many times we meet resistance with more resistance. With tightened fists, with a sense of needing to figure out what is wrong, with an underlying feeling that something (or many things) need to be fixed within us before we can meet the success we have seen modelled to us.
Yet emotional safety is cultivated when we feel valuable as we are. And almost paradoxically, this is when we actually feel naturally inspired to create, achieve and grow.
So if we are in business believing that the feminine core of us needs to be fixed, that we are inherently wrong in our naturalness, that it is only safe to create, express, share and sell in masculinised ways, then our creative power shuts down. Our resistance builds.
It is only when we come back and listen to our emotional body, when we acknowledge and honour the needs that run deeper than the conscious mind, that we begin to reconnect with this template of emotional safety. We begin to build up a relationship with the authentic nature of our being. A relationship that reminds us, 'It is safe to be you. You are valuable as you are. Your emotional needs matter. I am not going to trample all over your inherent nature to meet the demands of collective ideals that do not honour the vulnerabilities of your heart and the deeper desires of your soul.'
From this space, resistance is dissolved. A deep release is created. A release that naturally opens up different possibilities. Different ways of approaching business that allow for the naturalness and vulnerability of your feminine being to be supported, not overridden. And in doing this, you also pave the way for others to reclaim and believe in the value, gifts and desires of their own unique feminine soul.
Belinda x