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…
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This full piece of writing now lives in the Gentle Creation ebook if you would like to read more.