The Power of Three - Trialogue 4: Female Force

Welcome ladies to another of our trialogues on subjects, which we believe will resonate with many other women in finance. Today, we invite you to an exploration in finding your female force with us three ladies, talking about the power of femininity.

The key highlights:

● personal reflection unlocks an unspoken power inside us all, why not tap into that for extra support?

● we accelerate our thinking by stepping into action and taking chances

● in an unbalanced world, full of stereotypes, we can call upon our female force to show us how to be what we cannot always see

Paula (PK) To start us off, I really want to provide some context around what we think about when we hear the words ‘female force’. In preparation for this trialogue, we consider the female force to be the energy and the passion that move us as women from our social conditioning into forming social connections. Harnessing our emotive powers to bring together and elevate to a potentially higher form of connection. In this trialogue we want to accelerate your thinking and explore what female force might mean to each of us.

For me female force means lifeblood, it’s my DNA, something that gives me strength and vitality and helps me to explain how I'm showing up in the world of business, and in my personal world. My female force allows me to be visible, so that I can actually own who I am, I can actually understand who I am, and perhaps even stronger it helps me to love who I am.

Alena (AB) Wow, I love that Paula. Talk about getting deep, fast. Female force to me is strength. Now, strength is one of those words that I think out of context is perceived to be quite masculine and it's something that I've battled with. Because I'm from a Tongan culture, I am naturally big boned and quite sturdy. And so my whole life, I’ve been worried about being quite different to others. It's made me stand out and I’ve interpreted that as standing out for the ‘wrong’ reasons and I've spent my whole life wanting to and trying to fit into a white caucasian society. Now, through my life experiences, I'm quite happy to step into that and own the fact that I am a strong female and that's certainly been a life's journey. So for me, female force is authentic strength. There's a relevant story here about this because when I started my business I was trying to come up with the company name, and “Authentic Strength” was what I wanted to call it. When I was canvassing friends around that name they said, no, it's too forceful, it's too aggressive, it might disengage people. But now here I am, what four or five years later, and being posed with this question what is my female force, I think, yeah, it's authentic strength.

Sue (SR) Female Force - I see it as being our ability to be truly feminine and being transformational leaders, which means breaking down, as you said at the beginning, some of our social conditioning that tells us this is what a leader looks like in that masculine form or in terms of in corporates, he has to look like the middle class, middle aged, white man with a stay at home wife, and he has to have that old command and control kind of behavior, where he’s assertive, making decisions, competitive. And we have to break down that social conditioning and actually champion all of the things that we can bring, as both strong and feminine women, such as compassion and collaboration and empathy and think about actually how we take off the masks that sometimes we've had to wear in order to assimilate into those environments where, you know, Don Draper from Mad Men is the ideal! And going well actually I don't think I can be him so, how can I put that mask down?

Our feminine force to me is actually being able to put down the mask and step into the full breadth of our possibilities and embracing the whole spectrum of those leadership traits from more feminine to more masculine.

(PK) I think you touched on it there, Sue, it's about balancing that deep feminine and the deep masculine. So female force is not some kind of airy fairy female new language for how we're going to assert our power. I mean the deep feminine and the deep masculine is in all of us, that is the essence of really being human. And so it's not to say that men don’t have feminine traits too so it's really tapping into that. So, I think, helping our audience to think about what does my female force look like, it's always great to share how we see ourselves to give people some ideas because this might be totally new to people listening and reading. So, I've touched on this already in the trialogues and in the group that we are commencing, around being ferocious, and I just have this beautiful vision, this symbology around what ferocious means and it's totally different to what the dictionary says. Being ferocious is not being cruel or savage, actually it’s being fiercely decisive in a way that powers me forward. And that really engages deep inside of me, whether I'm having a good or a bad day, that deep ferocious energy stands shoulder to shoulder with me in every moment reminding me that ‘you've got this’. That's my female force. It really gives me a lot of clarity on who I am, how I'm showing up and how I want to live my life. I am all about getting clarity, my catch phrase is ‘clarity is contagious’ and when you get clarity then everything else just flows.

(AB) That's amazing Paula. I've literally just set myself a goal of trying to distill it into one word like you because I think that just makes it so easy to call upon when you need it. But I love what you've done by identifying the meaning you attribute to it, and then contrasting that to the dictionary. I think that's just synthesised just about everything we try we are talking about today. That's awesome.

(SR) Beautifully matched to the image that you've put in the Facebook group as well, because that ferocious image was a tiger, as I recollect. And that also relates to the whole kind of tiger mother thing which is not about being savage or cruel, it's about being protective. Being ferocious in what we are protecting is where I went with that in terms of thinking of the tiger and, and the idea of ferocious. The tiger is ferocious when it's protecting its own or itself.

(AB) Yeah. Hmm. So, what's my female force? I've not distilled it into one, but I do hope to get there soon. I suppose the things that come to mind when I think about my female force, my authentic strength, is that it's sourced in a belief in self, which has its foundations in energy and confidence. A confidence in self worth which - you know we've talked about that previously - is about the confidence that what I have to bring to the table is worthy. I think I also have a strength in my willingness to seek and explore opportunities and possibilities and shift possibilities and know that it's okay that in doing so, my ideas might be different: I might be different. And, and then I think my superpower, or our superpower as a female collective, is that we do the work. Sue, you used some great words earlier, and the words I've written down here are empathy, curiosity, and humility. Humility is one of the strengths that is always one of the top values of a lot of the women I work with right and their perception is, ‘oh well humility is not going to get me anywhere’. But empathy, curiosity and humility set us up to do the deep work in the background that allows us to show up with authentic strength, be visible, and I reckon - to borrow your word - be ferocious.

“Every moment in our journey we are either growing into more or retreating into less” - unknown

(SR) Beautiful. So I'm going to move just slightly to the other end of the spectrum in terms of seeing my feminine force. I also don't have one word, but I see it as being the ability and the openness for holding the space for other people to fully bring their whole selves to a situation, because that then provides them with a springboard from which they can create their own next stage. So it becomes about the kind of nurturing and empowering that we can do as women that I feel has been so undervalued and it ties in with that piece about humility. You know humility is about being able to acknowledge our mistakes, to be open to new perspectives and to not wall ourselves off behind one point of view. So I think it's that empathy and openness.

(PK) And it's a great subject that we can, we know we can talk for hours on but we want to try and keep these short enough so that they are punchy and powerful as well. But I guess what it comes back around to is how we are starting to accelerate our thinking around female force and around actually waking up that leadership potential that we have inside of us. So, thank you ladies for a beautiful trialogue number four.

Our key reflections:

● In order for us to step into our executive power with authenticity and presence we need to understand who we are and own our female force of power.

● We know that we cannot be what we cannot see, to help motivate, inspire and support us in our every step it’s helpful to have symbology of our own super powers

● Removing the masks we wear opens us up to exciting new possibilities

One of the criticisms I’ve faced over the years is that I’m not aggressive enough or assertive enough or maybe somehow, because I’m empathetic, it means I’m weak. I totally rebel against that. I refuse to believe that you cannot be both compassionate and strong.” - Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand. Leader of the New Zealand Labour Party