Episode 8 - 5 Reasons You Need Feminine Energy as an Entrepreneur

Are you tired of your business leaving you burnt out and unfulfilled?

Discover how integrating feminine energy can transform your work, fostering holistic success and creating a spiritually nourishing business.

✨ Rewilding Your Business: We'll look at what it means to cultivate a soul/work balance that avoids burnout and move away from the capitalist, patriarchal structure of work your business currently emulates.

✨ Embracing Feminine Energy: We’ll talk about blending feminine energy into entrepreneurship and how it leads to a rhythmic, supportive, and pleasure-filled business that embodies surrender, flow, and impact over mere income.

✨ Sacred Business: I’ll show you how your businesses can be an extension of the divine, a channel for universal messages. This spirituality-infused perspective can help you build a transformative business, creating a sacred, spiritual tool for collective change.

Show Notes:

Hey sister, welcome to episode eight of Rooted Feminine. I'm excited today because I'm going to blend two of my worlds together. I've been an online entrepreneur for eight years now. Before that, I was a licensed psychotherapist and studied finance and marketing at a top 20 business school.

I've combined my skill sets, merging my masculine and feminine energies, exploring polarity in my business, rooted business, podcast, and movement. It's more than just a business or providing a service for payment. I consider it a movement.

In my journey, I transitioned from an uber-masculine financial planner to holding space as a licensed psychotherapist, and then back to being a business coach in the online space for eight years. Now, I find myself stepping into holding space again. I've noticed that business is structured to align with the masculine, even if it's unconscious.

If we can step out of that and infuse our businesses with the feminine, the sacred, and our divinity, we can have a profoundly different experience as entrepreneurs and business owners. This shift can lead to vastly different results. It's a topic I'm thrilled to discuss today.

When we embark on the feminine path, one of the first aspects to rewild is our employment. Often unconsciously, we choose how we make money. Shedding light on this and becoming aware of our choices reveals the influence of the feminine. Rewilding is about consciously uncoupling from social structures like the food system, healthcare, school, and beyond. It extends to examining colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and our micro and macro communities.

Making conscious choices such as homeschooling or rejecting an HOA can be seen as extreme, but they are normal expressions of rewilding. For me, rewilding began with my approach to birth control, health, and embracing my natural menstrual cycle. Rewilding employment was a significant step in my journey, though it wasn't the first consciously made decision.

Choosing entrepreneurship has various motivations: low wages, high taxes, toxic work culture, constricting hours and locations. We yearn for independence, time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom. The allure of the laptop lifestyle and the digital nomad experience drew many of us into online entrepreneurship.

Entering the online space, I was enticed by the idea of working remotely, having independence, and enjoying the suites in Bali. It was a natural fit for me, even though my path to entrepreneurship took a zigzag route, which is common for many of us.

What happens is that employment, being a patriarchal construct, has a long history that we can trace back. We can look at agricultural societies, even hunter-gatherer societies, where people had specific roles for the betterment of the community. There were hunters, gatherers, basket weavers, and everyone had a role, but it wasn't driven by the exchange of money. Capitalism introduced the concept of employment as we know it today, where commerce, money, trade, and greed came into play. Employment became a construct of colonization and patriarchy, leading to the feeling of being boxed in, answering to others, and lacking control over our work and decisions.

Interestingly, even when we become entrepreneurs and start our own businesses, we often recreate the same constraints and toxic dynamics we left behind. For example, we may find ourselves working traditional hours or adopting limiting mindsets such as believing that the harder we work, the more money we make. Our focus on productivity and achievement can overshadow our overall well-being and energy.

Understanding the roots of these patterns is crucial for rewilding and untangling ourselves from them. It's essential to recognize the different levels of maturity in both feminine and masculine energy within our businesses. We can embody the immature or toxic aspects of these energies, driven solely by results and lacking integrity. However, we can also embrace a healthy, mature expression of masculine energy when appropriate, while avoiding an overemphasis on output and achievement.

Signs of excessive masculine energy in our businesses include seeking power over external factors like revenue, sales funnels, conversion rates, and controlling the buying decisions of our customers. Instead, we should focus on having power over ourselves, responding to challenges, showing up for our students and clients, and taking care of ourselves throughout the process. By integrating feminine energy into our businesses, we can be empowered without exerting power over others, prioritizing self-power and self-care.

Alright, without the feminine aspect, in our business, when we're in a hyper-masculine state, we often end up trying to force everything. I've noticed several issues from my eight years in the online space. First and foremost is burnout. It's a common experience. Burnout often stems from setting ambitious goals and relentlessly pursuing them or ignoring our body's signals to rest, saying, "Just five more minutes" until we find ourselves awake at 2 in the morning working on a sales page.

The root of burnout lies in this forceful approach, this masculine energy, often in an immature and possibly toxic attempt at control. We often also get dysregulated when we are predominantly in our masculine energy. This manifests as being unable to relax, always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

For instance, if we have a day in our business where we have nothing planned, we tend to fill that space because we struggle with having a day without constant activity or productivity. The fear is, "If I don't do something today, my launch in three months will fail."

Consequently, we often find ourselves people pleasing. This may happen within your programs. Perhaps you have a defined scope, maybe you offer done-for-you services or coaching programs. But we will always encounter those clients who push the boundaries, asking for more. If your approach is too masculine, you may find yourself overextending. For instance, when a client asks for an extra template beyond what was agreed upon, you might immediately agree to create it.

I personally have experienced physical illness as a result of this imbalance. In the first two years of my business, I developed adrenal fatigue, a condition caused by a flood of cortisol, the stress hormone, that your body can't flush out, fatiguing your adrenal glands.

On top of all these, there are feelings of failure. We often strive so hard for external measures of success that when they don't happen, it feels like a failure. Every entrepreneur experiences this – launches that don't go as planned, negative interactions with clients, or courses that don't meet expectations. These feelings of failure often relate to financial outcomes in my case, but it could manifest differently for others.

When there is an imbalance of masculine energy in your business, when there is too much force, too much power exerted over everything, it often results in feelings of failure. These disappointments usually occur when our locus of control is outside of us.

You're exerting too much masculine energy in your business. Let's flip that around and discuss what happens when you incorporate feminine energy. When you do, you're going to build a rhythmic and supportive business. There will be times where you're in an energetic sprint, or times when you're buckling down more. This is absolutely normal and a season of your business. You can plan these seasons quarterly or even monthly, syncing them with your menstrual cycle. This way, you can anticipate when it's time for more visible, outward energy, and when to focus inward. This rhythmic approach allows for built-in seasons of rest, and remember, rest is restorative. It can involve activities like going for a hike, visiting botanical gardens, or just being out in nature.

When you're able to incorporate feminine energy and detach from the outcome, you can enjoy these restful seasons. This allows you to reap the harvest of your efforts, to savor your success, and to find joy and pleasure in your work.

This leads to a good life, embodying the essence of feminine energy: the lazy mornings, listening to your body, and satisfying its needs. Maybe it means not starting calls until 11 in the morning, or ensuring a daily walk. Whatever it is that makes your life good, that's the feminine energy. It's not about the boastful displays of jets and luxury cars.

When you feel in your body what you truly want from your business, when you feel spaciousness, lightness, room for creativity, that's feminine.

So now we know what's possible, and what the benefits are of having more feminine energy. How do we incorporate this? The first thing that more feminine energy in your business helps you do is surrender.

My friend, Megan Hale, teaches "good, better, best" goals. If you were operating purely from masculine energy, you might say, "I have to sell 20 spots in my next program, or else." This approach sets you up for failure, for burnout. Instead, try to hold a range in your mind. If your target is 20, your good goal is 12, your medium goal is 17, and your best goal is 23. With these in mind, you can then say, "Whatever happens in this launch, I surrender. I acknowledge that whatever is for me in this moment, it's this or something better." This surrender, this return to an internal locus of control and self-responsibility, transforms the experience of your business. Instead of a death grip, you're holding a container, which you can then let go.

By surrendering, you release your toxic tie to the result, giving yourself freedom from burnout and over-functioning. This allows you to regulate your system rather than being dysregulated while trying to chase sales.

Feminine energy is beneficial for your business as it helps you flow. We're not trying to force, we're aiming to bring more flow into our business. This can manifest as the seasons of rest I mentioned earlier, acknowledging there are times to exert and times to rest. It also enables you to read signs. When you're in your masculine energy with a tight grip on your business, you might ignore valuable data. For instance, maybe you're trying to sell a six-month program, and in response to your sales emails, several people have asked for a self-study version. If you're rigid and stuck in your masculine energy, you might disregard these requests. However, if you're in your feminine energy, open and receptive, you may recognize these requests and consider a self-study version.

Having feminine energy in your business lets you release that tight grip, allowing you to pivot sooner if needed. Your surrender to the outcome simply feels much better.

Another advantage of having more feminine energy in your business is the ability to settle. This helps regulate the fear-based reaction of needing to fill every day with activity, allowing you to rest and relax. Often, people who have automated much of their business and gained time and location freedom find themselves unsure of what to do with their newfound freedom. They might start a second business because they're accustomed to the cycle of achievement and instant gratification. However, incorporating more feminine energy into your business allows you to settle, to enjoy what you've built.

When you bring more feminine energy into your business, it becomes more about impact. The feminine is for the betterment of you and the collective. Just as the roles in hunter-gatherer societies contributed to the community, we can use our businesses in the same way. We live in a capitalistic culture, so we need money, but the recent trend in business has been valuing impact over income.

The feminine principle remains persistent, reminding us of its presence. The concept of business impact doesn't negate the focus on revenue. It's crucial to maintain balance and polarity in our lives and businesses. However, we should start considering how our businesses can benefit more than just ourselves. Perhaps you're aiding a team member's children's education or donating a percentage of your sales to a cause. By releasing the tight grip and surrendering to the soul of your business, you can better your life and, consequently, the collective.

The final point to bring femininity into your business is to incorporate the sacred. Your business can be an extension of the divine. If we're too caught up in the masculine energy and holding on too tightly, we might miss this. Yet, what if your business was a channel for universal messages? It could be a means to raise collective consciousness, turning your business into a sacred, spiritual tool capable of changing the world.

By allowing the sacred to enter, we can act as conduits. This invokes the power of the divine feminine. If you're interested in bringing more feminine energy into your business and need assistance, feel free to connect with me. You can follow me on Instagram or join the Rooted Collective, where we delve into different feminine archetypes throughout the year. Each month, we focus on a different archetype, intentionally bringing that energy into your business to make it more sacred. You can find this at rootedfeminine.com/collective.

If you're uncertain where to start in infusing your business with sacredness, take my quiz. It'll indicate your current stage of re-routing and guide your next steps on the path towards the feminine cycle. You can find this at rootedfeminine.com/quiz. I look forward to catching up with you next week in Temple Space.