Why Can't I Be More Feminine?

Discover the real driver behind getting stuck in a masculine way of operating.

The masculine wasn't a preference, it was the price of entry.

Millennial women entered the workforce at a time when there were significantly fewer women in most industries. The numbers have shifted now, and there are still persistent gaps when it comes to leadership spots and pay. This is nothing new and something that is always slowly progressing.

Many women reading this are the first in their family line to be financially independent. That's massive, even if it's easy to stop seeing it properly after it has become fairly normal. What came with the want for a career, for growth, for financial independence, was a need rarely discussed openly: developing masculine styles of operating. Not to become a man, just because those were the traits that got rewarded. The same as anything, focus goes toward the skills, attributes, and ways of being that get rewarded, and it happens automatically, without ever being a conscious decision.

Some women it fits, some it costs.

This orientation lands easier for some women than others. Some are more naturally aligned with it and it fits without much friction. Others work harder at it, but they adapt, and it works. The job comes, the promotion comes, the money and the responsibilities become yours. And then leadership arrives.

Then comes the obsession with the moon.

Right in the middle of knowing the job inside and out, and becoming exactly who you aimed to be, a feeling arrives: this isn't actually how I am. Making it work for years starts to feel heavy, like a performance rather than a life. And you can't help but notice the moon, she pulls you in regularly. This is the calling back to the feminine.

Where it goes wrong: the Instagram version of feminine.

So the feminine calls, and you follow that call into Instagram, where you are met with all the feminine tactics like running back to back meetings all day, then a bath to sink back into feminine energy, followed by a soft evening in. The truth of most evenings looks different. You arrive home, hungry at seven, after a late meeting, with no plan for a high-protein dinner. You can't help but realise, if you were a man, the likelihood of having your dinner cooked for you is seriously high.

This is what earning inside the patriarchy looks like. The systems weren't built for women, and women have been making them work anyway, which, generally speaking, takes a masculine orientation to pull off. Switching it on for eight hours and off for four is mastery, and for a lot of women, that mastery is genuinely enjoyable. Some women are always going to be glad, thankfully, to stay in the workforce, and leadership needs them there.

Then there are the others, the ones who can't fully be themselves inside a patriarchal work setting, no matter how skilled they get at it. If that's you, it might look like masking, pretending, covering the tracks, managing it for years until it quietly eats all available capacity. Not burned out exactly. Disconnected. Left with the sense of having lost yourself somewhere along the way.

The actual answer is syncing with your energy and cycles.

Feminine was never a simple on and off switch, and a business will always need both energies anyway. The shift isn't finding the right ritual to bolt onto an unchanged day, it's building the business and the life around a real rhythm instead of performing calm at the end of one that was never designed for you.

That's where it starts getting genuinely useful. Content filmed at ovulation, when energy and expression are naturally higher. Lighter client loads scheduled around the bleed, when the pull is inward rather than outward. Evenings that don't assume someone else is cooking, because the business and the household both get shaped around what's true, not around what looks balanced from the outside. A business can be sculpted to your rhythm in more ways than most templates ever account for.

One isn't better than the other.

The goal is to be able to work in a natural state, how you actually are, not performing what's desired. It's dressing as yourself, it's being in your mix, and it's working with your natural flow of energy, which for most women changes over the month. It’s also being able to draw on what is a required for a moment in time not needing to alternate between the two - one professionally and one personally.