Business women don’t have to mimic male leadership

Though the newest generations are changing, most of us are trained from birth to nurture other people – we were given dolls to care for before we could even speak (yin). In contrast, throughout history – and more virulently in recent days, we are taught that being successful in business requires us to crush everything in our path (yang). But before we file our first fictitious business name, negotiate our first contract or enter our first board meeting, we are forced to reconcile the steel walls inside our minds that place us at the sidelines. This mental barrier is not due to biology, but due to society’s conditioned view of the feminine. This is why trans women, in addition to dealing with the pain of being systematically excluded, also experience these conditioned, painful levels of self-doubt and limitation.

The notion that we must energetically “off the heads” of our competitors – that we must dominate in order to win – is not only a tricky dichotomy – it is the framework that has brought us to this point in political time. Indulging in the grandiose assertion that the US is #1 – has put a treasonous person in the white house; the basic tenants of our democracy are dissolving around us. In seeking some kind of pristine racial purity, white supremacy has polluted humanity. Under the guise of humans as the most intelligent animal, we have been the bumbling fool species that is extinguishing our planet with cosmic idiocracy.

Still, undeniably, in order to create a sustainable business, we must utilize some part of this aggressive impulse. We need to narrow our focus – from holding the world, to holding ourselves steady. We may build with each other in order to be stronger together, but we must also forge ahead on our own. We have to learn to balance the seesaw of this dichotomy, stand in the middle and utilize both aspects (as many young, gender non-conforming people embody). There is a gift in fluidity and rigidity. In order to gain some small thing (sustainable independence) we must push, with immense force, against everything (culture of cruelty).

It is a lie that, in traditional Chinese medicine, yin and yang are solely defined as opposites. Yin and yang are in opposition to each other, but they also consume each other, interdepend on each other and become each other. Balance is the equal acceptance of each force. Women business owners must build this balance into our somatic and professional experience.