Why we judge women differently when they sell things

I just read an article by Australian feminist Jane Caro about how tired she is of being asked to be a free mentor over and over and over again, and it epitomises for me something I’ve been thinking about all week as I’ve been launching A Visible Woman.

It’s a low level of anxiety I feel about charging for anything I offer, including A Visible Woman. There’s a deeply ingrained expectation within me that I should give things to people for free – bonuses, additional content, something/anything – not because I think the program is too expensive. It’s not. (If anything it needs to be reviewed in light of the depth and significance of the transformation women experience. And to honour what it takes to really hold people deeply in a space of transformation for months at a time.)

No, the anxiety isn’t about the value of the offering. … [Read More...]

What would your business look like if…

What would your business look like if it fully embraced the values and energy of the feminine? That’s the topic du jour in this audio recording.

Here’s a snapshot of what you’ll find;

The invitation is to drop stereotypical, very limited understandings of gender (based on societal roles we’ve been playing for centuries), and come into a new way of thinking and being in the world. The businesses that understand this and that harness the power of the authentic masculine and feminine will be the ones that shine in the 21st century.

To get there you have to first understand that we come from a space of judging the feminine.

The consequence of being in the perverted masculine model we’ve been operating under has been an obsession with the mind, with push, and force and making it happen and success at all costs. There’s been a dehumanising of those of … [Read More...]

Patriarchy has stripped us of our confidence

To round out the discussion we’ve been having over the last couple of months around visibility and entrepreneurship, I’ve recently been speaking on the blog and during Tuesday morning chats, the necessity for creating a visibility strategy. I’ve spoken about:

This last topic – deepening your understanding of visibility – points to why it’s so necessary to have a visibility strategy. Understanding your own ‘why’ is a deeply important thing to anchor into. Otherwise, you end up focusing on so many other aspects of your business only to turn around one day and wonder why everyone else’s business seems to be growing and yours is stagnating.

This is a very predictable pattern. It’s not personal. It’s not life … [Read More...]

Seeking visibility for all the wrong reasons

As with any area of pursuit – including visibility – the why behind your desire is just as important as the what. Meaning; if you’re going to work toward visibility, it’s useful to understand the deeper reason for doing so.

In the video I visit the three aspects of visibility we’ve been exploring over the last few weeks vis-a-vis running your own business; authority, connection, and traffic.

Today I invite you to consider the light and deep of each.

AUTHORITY V FAME

We pursue authority for a very different reason than our reason for pursuing fame.

Fame is about being known. Sometimes it’s about being loved. There’s often a good deal of ego attached to fame. See me, want me, desire me. It’s like trying to fill a bucket that has holes in the base. You can never get quite enough water in it to feel satisfied or like it’s … [Read More...]

Judging my entrepreneurial self

I’ve spent so much time finding and releasing limiting beliefs over the years, it amazes me that it took me this long to see this huge block to business growth. It’s this; my own judgment of entrepreneurship.

I had judgment coming in from every angle;

My social justice self thought it was too commercial, too immersed in capitalism.
My spiritual self thought it was too materialistic to earn money by selling things (what was being sold didn’t seem to matter, it was the fact of selling that was the problem).
My middle class self thought it was crass to sell things for a living when I’d already acquired a good education and really, should go and work for a big corporation or a government agency (that being a more respectable way to earn a living apparently).
As a feminist I felt guilty about selling to other women, knowing that

… [Read More...]