Last night I was watching the latest series of The Real Marigold Hotel, where a group of older, familiar faces are spending a month together in India to check out whether they could retire there.
And one thing in particular made me laugh out loud. It was Selena Scott’s reaction when the male chef told her how to roll her chapatis. “There’s always a man telling you what to do isn’t there!” she exclaimed and shook her rolling pin at him when his back was turned. What made me laugh was not just that this was quite amusing, but the immediate flash of recognition. The ‘oh my god that’s just like me’ moment. I remembered all the times I’ve reacted that way too. And I know I’m not alone. There are, without doubt, times when it really does seem ‘there’s always a man telling you what to do’. But however infuriating this and #mansplaining might be, the real problem isn’t really men. The real problem is women like us not owning our power.
You see, many of us have a deeply ingrained habit of giving away our power to the masculine or the authority. Unconsciously of course. And these needn’t necessarily be a man. As a result we’ll either submit and go along with what it says, or we’ll resist and react against it. I’ve certainly had more than a few run-ins of my own but until I understood what was really happening it definitely seemed like ‘they’ were the problem.
There were the ‘cowboy’ builders, for instance, who took advantage so I got annoyed, pushed back and it turned quite unpleasant. There was the ‘incompetent’ hospital that mis-diagnosed my condition but I ignored my intuition and accepted what I was told. Or the ‘know it all’ business expert who strongly advised me to take a course of action and against my better judgment I did, only to regret it further down the line.
There are also women I’ve coached, struggling to make themselves heard in the boardroom, striving to fit in to a masculine work structure or doubting their abilities because they prefer to do things differently.
All of these are real examples of how we can involuntarily react to the ‘masculine’ or the ‘authority’, and seriously compromise who we are and what we want. And fighting against it is really no better than going along with it. This is still just a reaction based on our deep subconscious relationship with it.
The true path to freedom and empowerment is when we really get to see what’s going on, shift our focus, connect with our truth and intuition and fully own our power as a woman.
If this resonates, or you’d like to learn how to make the shift from reaction to empowerment please get in touch.
PS I’m not suggesting this is the case with S Scott by the way.