Business is no place for a woman.
Truth be told, I agree. Business isn’t a game women invented, men invented it. It’s the modern day equivalent of caveman survival of the fittest – competition, sword swinging, fighting, conquering, dominating.
A game where their ego’s have dominion and can battle it out for who will win. Kill sabertooth, drag back to cave. It’s survival driven instinct for men.
But as a woman, it’s downright exhausting. Being pawed at by men all day. Having to weed through deception, hidden agendas and decipher who is authentic from who is a con artist (which in my experience, more cons than artists exist in the space of business).
I hate it. Truthfully. I find it draining to always have to have my guard up, filter through the massive, and I mean massive, array of egos that consume the business world, to keep making mistakes because I trust the wrong people and I’m just so very tired sometimes, I leave myself exposed and vulnerable to some shark with an agenda.
I see business as a necessary evil. A means to an end. Something I have to endure in order to get what I want. It is a sacrifice, personally, one I pay gratefully because I am so clear about where I’m going and why.
As a woman in business, you have only a few options if you want to play the game. You need to learn the rules better than they do, so you understand the game you’re in and can navigate yourself safely. It doesn’t come naturally for most women to fight, compete, dominate and destroy. So, you need to know the rules or you’ll get crushed in the undertow.
Next, you have really only 2 options: 1 – you put on your masculine pants, get your sword out and start fighting with the men. In my experience, this leads to women being burnt out, exhausted, alone, and all of their relationships destroyed. It is a sure way to lose the game. And, even if you win the game financially, you typically lose the bigger game of life, sacrificing everything just for that one thing, ending up alone, bitter and with your relationships in shatters.
Men are directional, they need their ego’s to fight lions and tigers and bears. It’s part of their genetic, biological make up. An ego for a man is what allows him to protect and defend, to charge into battle and risk life and limb.
But for women, we are relational. Everything for us is relationship. And, as one of my longtime coaches and mentors always says, ego is the number one killer of relationship for women.
Think about that for a second. When these women think the only way to compete in business is to put on their ego’s and fight with the men, not only do they work against their natural strengths, but they destroy the very core thing their heart hungers for, which is relationship.
And for men, when a woman shows up who is pretending to be a man, with her ego flying high, her sword out and her shield up, they do what they naturally know how to do. They fight her, defend against her or destroy her.
Or 2 – you find a way to maintain your feminine essence, leverage the rules of the game to your advantage and surround yourself with people who will defend, protect and drive forward against the incessant noise of the business world in which you are in to achieve the goal you have in mind.
When a woman shows up as a woman, in her feminine power, with a group of men, they know how to be in relationship with her. They will, for the most part, naturally want to protect and defend her, if they are good men. If they are snakes, con-men, have a self-serving agenda that involves your destruction or leveraging you to their advantage, or are psychologically damaged in some way, when you show up as a woman, in your feminine power, they will immediately either attack, react or repel. And in either of those cases, you’ll have weeded out a potential snake before he makes his way into your garden.
Showing up in your natural, feminine essence is a massive win from every direction, helps your intuition guide you and your natural gifts and power keep you safe and ensure you have the right team around you.
I speak from a laundry list of mistakes and experience on that one – having had so many snakes in my garden it was an infestation. I wish someone had given me this wisdom 15 years ago, thankfully, I have had the sage wisdom from the mentors in of the Living in Balance program for women entrepreneurs to help me navigate this for the past 10 years.
What we have forgotten as women, what society has beaten out of us and business has made no room for, is that our greatest strength lies in our femininity and our vulnerability and our core gift of relationship. If we learn how to leverage it.
If we could see that business is a game for men, it’s all about checks and balances, who is keeping score and the measure of success for them is money, or wins, or whatever. Cool. Got it.
For women, it is relational. So we are entering a domain that does not play to our strengths, with rules we did not invent. We need to understand those rules, build a team around us that we are in relationship with, and leverage those rules and our gift of relationship, to our advantage to succeed.
Rather than ending up as burnt out, bitter, angry, alone women who are entrenched in their own egos and masculinity.
I know this all sounds a little controversial. But after over 15 years in business, having sat on numerous boards as the only woman, with powerful, ego-driven men, had many different male business partners, and built numerous different projects with men and been under the direct, malicious attack of many psychologically imbalanced men who have wanted my total and complete destruction, I will say with much surety that it is true.
It isn’t about saying one thing is better than the other. We are just different. And when we can understand those differences, celebrate and include them, we can learn how to leverage them to succeed.
I think equality is a bit of a joke. I never want to be equal with a man. That would take away all of my strengths as a woman. We are different. It is the polarity of our differences, when we bring them together, that create so much magic in the world. When feminine meets masculine – creation happens, life is born, new ideas are generated, new ways of thinking birthed.
To whitewash the strength of our feminine gifts and attempt to make us equals only dilutes and depresses this magic.
One of my favourite things is to see an empowered man in business. I love how much they love it, how they play the game, compete and battle it out, how they navigate themselves, how they think and process information, make decisions and direct themselves. I admire it, and I honour it.
But under no circumstances do I want to compete with it, nor do I aspire to be like it.
It takes a monumental amount of courage to honour yourself in an environment that not only doesn’t encourage this way of thinking, but doesn’t really have a frame of reference for it. And a huge amount of trust too.
But what I promise you, if you can find the courage, the trust and the commitment to honour your truest essence, in business, you will be unstoppable and your results will be exponential. And men will gather around with perplexed and confused bewilderment as to how it was possible. Women are powerful, so much more powerful than we, or our society or business culture, give us credit for. We are multi-dimensional and exponential. We are soft power, we are the intuition, the unseen magic. We are the vessels of creation itself. Think about the power that that holds.
It’s time that we, as women, find our inner strength, voice and honour who and what we are at our core, and use it to create impactful, purposeful change on the planet.
Krystine McInnes is CEO and Project Director of Athena Farms and Grown Here Farms. Stewarding purpose-driven, change-making projects with a focus on Planet, People, Profit and a commitment to Sustainable Business models.
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