We Have the Power to Change the World
If you were born female, you were born into a world that is set up to keep you small.
The good news — if you live in a country like Canada or the US or most parts of Europe or Australia — is you have the option to rise up against this. You can choose to make noise. You can choose to take up space. You can choose to confront and work to dismantle the systems that for thousands of years have been working to tell women and girls that the best way for us to be and behave is polite, small, docile, agreeable, and servile.
The majority of women I work with struggle with confidence. Many have imposter syndrome: they know that they are smart and capable of great things and yet there is something that keeps them from feeling safe, stepping up into the limelight, claiming their full power, shining as brightly as they could.
This fear of shining has been baked into us.
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Margaret Atwood once said this in an interview.
If we are going to change the world, if we are going to make it safer for women and children, if we are going to end poverty, address climate change, end the madness of the capitalist system that pretends that we live in a limitless world, women need to come together as a community, claim our power, and rise up.
We are the most powerful group in the world if we can work together. And it starts with one woman choosing to face and reprogram the beliefs that have kept her feeling inadequate, small, limited and unsafe. This is not who she is. These are beliefs that have been given to her to keep her from her power.
I absolutely love the work I do. Helping other women to see what’s in the way of their feeling free and powerful — helping them to find who they are beneath the layers of patriarchal programming — ignites something inside me. The immediacy of the feedback of watching another human discover they have wings and can in fact fly is so potent that sometimes I forget that beneath my drive to help a single woman to claim her freedom is something bigger: an aching desire to bring a new paradigm of leadership into the world.
If you think that your life cannot change, you have bought into a system that is trying to keep you from accessing your true power. It's trying to keep you feeling alone and powerless. It’s not that you need to change, it’s that you have been carrying the burden, the weight of centuries, of generations of fear and limitation imposed upon you by the patriarchy.
Yes, claiming your confidence, claiming your space, shining brightly, making lots of money, choosing not to serve in a docile way, but to serve from your power is a revolutionary act. This change starts with you. It starts with you choosing to model what strength and power look like to your children — not the toxic, aggressive form of power that is demanded through control and domination, but the nourishing, heart-led, healing, ruthless collective power of feminine leadership.
It starts with you choosing to feel the rage, the sadness, the grief, the joy, the humour, the utter extraordinary fullness of life that you can channel into change if only you’re willing to face the fear and shine, to be brave, and to challenge the systems that have been keeping you and your forebears small and caged for millennia.
Once enough of us release ourselves from the shackles of our fear and claim our power, we will be an unstoppable force for good.
For now, a good start is to recognize that your desire to grow as a human being does not mean that you are broken or deficient. Your change is a shedding. You are ready to let go of all of the baggage and weight of obligation and trauma that does not belong to you nor was it given to you with your permission.
Setting goals to grow and shift can be freeing. Rather than punishments and reminders of your deficiencies, your goals can be the choices to have more fun, to claim the extraordinary life you desire, to stop punishing yourself for being born a woman.
Now is your time to shine. Take a powerful first step. Make big plans. Enjoy small things. Be kind: not only to others but also to yourself. Examine your thoughts and stop believing the ones that make you feel small. You are extraordinarily powerful. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Love,
LJ
