Hi👋🏽 I’m Kat. I help navigate difficult conversations and teach women how to negotiate on their own terms. Welcome to my version of a newsletter where I’ll be reminding you how to be kinder to yourself. You may listen (above) or read (below). You’re doing great, sweetie. Remember you’re all you have. So welcome and thanks for being here.✨
Vulnerability has often been perceived as a weakness. And no one likes to be seen weak so we pretend to be strong by acting tough but is acting tough the same as being strong?
Women have learned to cope in this world by toughening up, exuding overt confidence through gritted teeth mostly to protect ourselves. In the effort to protect, we learned to mask traits we deem that would make us more susceptible to vulnerability. Most of these traits are our feminine qualities. At work for instance, we try not to be emotional. Heaven forbid we show our feelings or openly cry in the office. And because organizations and leadership roles have traditionally long been male-dominated, women learned to do as men do. So we learned to run our careers, businesses and negotiation deals leaning into our extreme masculine qualities. Aggressive, combative, controlling and rigid. And sometimes we run our personal lives in the same manner. We treat conflicts as conquests instead of a conversation or an opportunity to connect and communicate. But researchers discovered that the school of thought where women lean into masculinity to compete with men or other women is outdated. Societies are experiencing a shift where feminine leadership qualities of openness, responsiveness and vulnerability are critical in running businesses, communities and countries.
I know a lot of women who try to act tough for various reasons. But acting tough can come with a price. Suppressing vulnerability invalidates our feelings. We start convincing ourselves and people around us that we don’t need support because we got this. And because we put up that front, people leave us alone while we secretly drown and suffocate in our pride: She can stand on her own. She’s a strong, independent woman, she can take care of herself. But just because you do (or have been doing it), doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.
If personal experience taught me anything, we humans are exceptionally fragile creatures. It only takes the one right kind of wrong that can trigger us into falling into pieces. And curiously, the seemingly tough ones are often the hardest to fall when no one is watching.
A few years ago, a peer passed away from suicide. She was young, headstrong, intelligent, ambitious, passionate, successful who was unrivaled in so many ways. Her sudden departure reverberated the shock within my network of friends because a lot of us didn’t see it coming. But then again, do you ever really see that coming. It was a friend in grief who forced me to seriously rethink my own tough girl act. She told me that her friend’s passing prompted her to reach out to the “strong women” in her life realizing that they’re the ones silently carrying the biggest burdens that the world knows nothing about. I can only imagine the kind of desolation that pushes any one to the edge. If loneliness and desperation can lead brilliant women to extremes, imagine all the people quietly suffering on the brink of falling apart.
We become so good at pretending that nothing can hurt us that we actually start believing just that. That nothing should hurt us. And when things do, we punish ourselves for allowing others to have an affect on our feelings. We find ourselves thinking: how dare they for doing this to us. And in the same breath we wonder: how dumb and weak are we for feeling this way. Strong women especially masquerading in their tough armors are spectacularly gifted at reserving their anger for themselves.
Because not many of us wear our hearts on our sleeve we give off the perception that we are unbreakable. But when things really hurt us in a big way, we never learned to cope because we just learned to pretend. We quietly swallow our sadness and disappointments that when big heartbreaking events finally occur, we fall apart. In solitude. We’re too proud to admit vulnerability. We’ve done it for such a long time trying to be tough that we forgot that getting hurt is normal. It’s our humanity reminding us we’re alive and we need to lean on others to survive.
It takes courage to admit that we need people to stand by us and that we don’t want to do things alone. It takes strength to admit when we need to take a break, that we need help, or finally speak up when we know we deserve more than what we’re being offered. Vulnerability isn’t what weakens us but our pride is what slowly tears us apart. We can’t hide behind the fear of what makes us fully human. We can’t hide from life. We can learn to stop pushing people away and instead give others the space to take care of us when we need it.
As the brilliant Brené Brown says, “Vulnerability is not winning or losing. It's having the courage to show up when you can't control the outcome.” So stay open and vulnerable, ladies (with the right people, of course).
xx
Kat✨
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