Masculine Energy Vs. Feminine Energy

Welcome to the Design Your Dream Life Podcast where it’s all about designing your life on your terms and now your host, Natalie Bacon.

Hey there. Welcome to the podcast. I hope you’re doing well. I want to invite you to join me next week. I’m hosting what’s called a week of confidence. I’ve never done this before. It’s going to be a weeklong starting June 14^th, 2021. Head on over to nataliebacon.com/confidence. The way that I’m hosting this one is it’s free.

So you come to the training. It’s four days in a row. We’re doing Monday through Thursday. If you can’t make it to the trainings live, not to worry. Still register. Because if you sign up ahead of time, I’m going to be sending you those replays. It’s not something I’m sure I’ll do again, especially for free. But I want to try it, test it out, see how you all love it.

If you know someone else who you think would really benefit from a confidence boost, send them this link as well. It’s going to be really great information, and I want all of you to have it. Nataliebacon.com/confidence. We’re going to have a lot of fun.

So every month in Grow You we tackle a different topic, and we have a lot of fun with it. This month we are studying how to enjoy your life. Part of enjoying your life is understanding how you do things and whether you do them from masculine energy versus feminine energy.

So not that long ago I watched a TED Talk by Michelle Miller. It’s a TEDx Talk. It’s not new, but it’s newer to me. It’s called We Need to Restore Femininity. So after you listen to this, you can go on over to YouTube and just type in ‘Michelle Miller TED Talk We Need to Restore Femininity’. It will come right up, and you can watch it. It’s not that long.

What I learned from that TED Talk was a different way of exploring masculine and feminine energy that I want to talk with you and sort of apply it to my tools with thought work here. Because typically when we hear masculine energy and feminine energy, it relates to me and women in heterosexual relationships. That’s where I’ve heard it talked about most.

But what I want to do is take a much different approach to it. So I’m not talking about what sex you are, what gender you are. I’m not talking about how you identify. I’m talking about all healthy humans who feel emotions having masculine energy and feminine energy.

I’m actually not even going to talk about it with respect to relationships. There are lots of other good podcasts. You can just search the topic in your podcast app and episodes will come up. I know that because I did that when I was looking for more research on this episode.

I want to talk about it in a very different way. I want to talk about it as it relates to anything we do in our lives. So when I’m talking about masculine energy, I’m talking about focusing on the results. I’m talking about having goals and being competitive and having that drive and ambition. Just overall whatever you’re doing, you’re focusing on the result. That’s like the masculine.

The feminine is the opposite. It doesn’t focus on the result. It focuses on the experience. So it’s about the flow. It’s about being. It’s about creativity and having space. So I want to go through some examples with you and show you how you can do different things in masculine and feminine energy. It’s going to depend on how you’re thinking about it that’s going to drive that emotion.

So let’s take decluttering for example. If you declutter because you enjoy the process of removing items from your home, that is decluttering for the feminine energy. If you declutter because you want a specific result of it looking a certain way, having a certain amount of items, whatever the result is of the decluttering. Then that is decluttering from masculine energy.

Let’s say you do your hair and makeup every morning. If you do your hair and makeup every morning because you are going to be on video and you think that it looks best when your hair and makeup are done, then that is doing your hair and makeup for the result. For the masculine. If you do your hair and makeup in the morning because you enjoy the process. Like I really enjoy the process of taking care of myself and doing my hair and makeup. That is doing it from feminine energy.

I love the example of a workout class. So I have two really good workouts that I can give you examples of. One I do from feminine energy and one is masculine energy.

So taking a dance class if you really love dance is in the feminine. You do it because you enjoy the experience of it. So, for me, if I go take a hip-hop class or any other dance class and I do it because I enjoy how I’m moving in that class, that’s from my feminine energy. Contrast that. If I hire a personal trainer and I work with him simply because I need to build more muscle and get stronger, that’s doing it from my masculine. It’s the result.

Okay. Think about growing up and your accomplishments and going to school and going to college and taking classes. Most of the time we’re doing it for the result. Now some of the time we do it for just the experience. Let’s say you’re an adult and you want to take a class on how to cook or you want to take a speed-reading class. Or you want to take just other classes at your local college to learn more about, I don’t know, psychology, biology, whatever it is.

If you’re doing it just because you want to enjoy the experience of learning, then that’s from the feminine. For most of us, we go back to nursing school, we go to law school, we go to medical school because we want the result. It’s not because we enjoy reading hundreds of pages every week of old case law. It’s because no, I want to be a lawyer.

So my masculine energy really helped me achieve and accomplish. Very likely yours has as well. The feminine energy is what helps you enjoy the experience of it.

You can think about your job in this way as well. So a company always hires employees for results. That’s it. I remember I learned this when I took a How to CEO Program with Kris Plachy. I love that program. She said most people will make mistakes. They’ll keep people on because they like them. Or for some other reason they don’t want to fire them. But really every single company functions best when people are hired and let go purely based on results. Because that’s what keeps a company going.

So think about your job. Think about you’ve been hired to provide a result to the company or the government agency, wherever you work. However, even though this is true it doesn’t mean that’s the only purpose you can have in your job. You can bring in the feminine flow and experience into your job.

So let’s say that you’re a teacher. Your success is going to be measured by certain metrics that the school board or the principal has established. Maybe it also has to do with schools being measured based on the standardized test rates. I know that’s a big topic. There’s lots of other metrics, but it’s very measurable. Okay. So that’s the achievement masculine energy part of it.

You can also love teaching. And you can love reading to the kids and whatever else you do during your teaching job. So you can have both, but just notice that they’re different. So when you’re in your masculine, it’s very measurable. We can measure it. The feminine is not measurable.

So I notice this when I’m coaching women in business. So business is very masculine in so far as you’re measuring its success. So you can measure a business’s success based on those performance indicators that you choose. One of them is likely going to be revenue, profit, profitability, valuation. Kind of those metrics. That’s sort of how we measure the success of a business. That’s the masculine.

But you can also enjoy the process and do business for fun. I think the most successful students who I coach and teach in business are successful, not just because they measure the results but because they actually enjoy the process of it.

What I’ve noticed is that our culture and society is really heavily geared towards the masculine, particularly in the United States. I don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad thing. I think this is where innovation and success and achievement and organization and responsibility. Like I think that’s where it all comes from. I know personally without these things, without cultivating this masculine energy I wouldn’t have become a lawyer, nor would I have built a very successful business. So the masculine is so needed.

But the problem is that you can focus so heavily on that masculine energy that you get internally off balance because you end up chasing goals and results. You can get sort of into a hurry about it, and you can want the next one and the next one and the next one almost like it’s a drug because it’s this dopamine hit, right. That’s why we like goals.

So if you are a high achiever and you love to set a good goal, what I want to offer to you is that it might be time for you to do more of the opposite. To bring in more of the experiential. This is what we’re doing in Grow You this month. It’s enjoying your life. It’s how do you bring in more of the fun and creativity and joy and give yourself permission to feel that way. So you make it less about the masculine and more about the feminine. What I want to encourage you to do is to think about the energies and think about being in balance.

So I always think external balance is sort of a lie. We’re not going to work 40 hours a week, sleep 40 hours a week, work out 40 hours a week. Like we’re not trying to have everything equal externally, but you want to allot the right amount of time to each activity.  So you might decide five hours a week of working out is enough for me to achieve my health goals. For me to feel good.

Okay. What I want you to think about for this episode and this topic is being out of balance internally. I think internal balance is super important. I think that if you are internally out of balance with the feminine and masculine, you’ll end up having problems in your life.

So if you have too much masculine energy and not enough feminine, you end up in the bad kind of stress. Like stress that doesn’t go away. You’ll probably have too much anxiety to kind of manage. You will probably feel like you’re never satisfied, and you’re always looking for the next goal. You won’t have a lot of space to handle challenges that arise because everything is so measured and packed in that you haven’t created that space. You’ll probably also—this is one of the biggest signs I think—have trouble relaxing and having fun.

So I’ve done this in my life. I’ve been way too far into the masculine, and it was such an eye opener for me. So as I’ve done this work over the last year it’s made such a difference in my life. I’m just more present. I know when to kind of call on each and when to use the different energies. It has made my life so much better I would say and predictable. It’s not like I’m thinking that the next goal is going to create more joy. I can set a goal if I want to, but also, I can do these other things just for pleasure. Just for enjoyment.

So this year you know I started skiing. I took up chess. I took more time to read, right. Because this past year we were in COVID and lockdown. Chicago had to get a little creative with the activities. But I wanted to do things from a place of that feminine energy. I took a breath class. My breathing class was amazing.

Meditated. Sitting in 10 minutes of silence everyday cultivating that feminine so that I felt more in balance with the masculine, which I had cultivated so much of just over the course of my life in being a high achiever and pushed to pursue goals and achieve. Which I think is amazing. But for me, I wanted to bring in more of that feminine.

So if you have too much feminine, though, it will likely manifest in being disorganized and all over the place and not taking responsibility for your own life. A very specific example would be not taking responsibility for your finances. Sort of having this irresponsible approach where you really don’t ever look at outcomes or goals or results. Maybe you are always acting from your emotions, from a place of that primitive state and not using logic. So logic is very masculine and then your emotions are more feminine.

So it’s noticing, “Okay, am I off balance in either of these?” I have seen a lot of women who I’ve coached want to start businesses. They haven’t been able to do it because they are very focused in channeling their feminine and not willing to go into bringing some of that masculine. 

A business is like an ecosystem. It’s a structure. So there has to be organization, responsibility, results. That does not mean that you cannot bring in the feminine. Of course you want to enjoy it and love it and have fun, but business is all about math. Math is very results focused. So you just want to notice if you have too much of the feminine or too much of the masculine based on what you want to create in your life.

So what I want to encourage you to do is to bring in more of what you think you’re lacking. So I work with a lot of high achievers. So that will be bringing in more of the feminine. Which is why we are working on how to enjoy your life more this month in Grow You.

I think that one of the easiest ways to do this is to kind of put your mind in the headspace of whatever it is that you’re missing. So, for example, if you join Grow You this month, you’re going to get a course and coaching materials on exactly how to use these tools to really live life more fully.

I think there’s something to be said about being around other people, other women who are doing this work as well. Because you’re going to be able to connect with them. Just humans, it’s easy to pick up on what other people are thinking and feeling. We mirror people. So by getting around to other people who are doing this work, you’re really going to help yourself kind of get internally balanced just by being around it more.

So I wanted to give you some activities to try for each the masculine and the feminine. But remember, you can do anything with any underlying emotion. So I have cooking listed here as a feminine because you can really get into flow. But if you say, “Okay, I need to cook one new recipe a week. Or I need to cook dinner every single night.” That is very masculine. So I want you to think about what energy you are motivated to take action by.

So for me, I really only enjoy cooking when I’m in the feminine. I love cooking one recipe at a time and making mistakes and trying again and again and really getting in flow with it. I like that so much more than doing cooking from a place of masculine energy where I have to have a goal and it feels very forced to me. Like I don’t enjoy cooking when I do it that way.

Other feminine activities would be any sort of movement that you do just to enjoy it. Dancing being the most obvious one. Other activities would be breath class or meditation. If there’s anything that you can think of that you just enjoy, whether it’s writing or gardening. Anything else you enjoy just for the fun of it. That is doing it from the feminine.

Now, let’s say you take a gardening class. You love gardening so much. You decide you want to bring in some masculine and set a goal for yourself. That is not a problem at all. You can absolutely do it. I think the key is to have awareness of it. Like you could say, “Okay. My goal is to have 20 different vegetables growing in my garden this summer.” Or something like that. That would be bringing in the masculine of it.

Gardening just for fun and seeing how it goes without any goal tied to it would be the feminine. You can certainly combine them. I just want to encourage you to be aware of each. Because when we get internally off balance and we’re too weighted in a masculine or feminine energy, that’s where we sort of have problems show up.

Masculine activities, if you need to get a little bit more into your masculine, would be to set more goals. To get organized, to choose specific things to focus on every day, to work on your time management and calendaring and specifically managing your finances and taking responsibility for that. All things that I think are very worth cultivating. I have done an amazing job over the last decade cultivating my masculine energy.

Now I’ve just loved the last year or so getting into my feminine. I love to dance. I love breath class. I like cooking from the feminine. I like going on walks and reading books and lots of other things. Skiing, chess. What I just want to encourage you to do is think about what you really enjoy and doing more of that. Sometimes it can sound a little bit like a cliché, but I think that we focus so much on goals and goal setting that sometimes we can take away the fun of it when really the whole point is just for fun.

So neither is good nor bad. It’s not that you want to be all in the feminine or all in the masculine. It’s not that there is a right way or wrong way. Regardless of your sex, your gender, you want to just notice internal if you are out of balance with the masculine and feminine energy. You might notice that you’re not enjoying parts of your life. Like maybe it’s your job or your relationship. Because you’re too far weighted in one or the other.

I’ve coached a lot of women in relationships and sometimes in marriages. If you feel too controlling and like you’re forcing it, you can be too far in the masculine. So what you want to do is to bring in some of that femininity. That will help you solve that problem, basically, is typically how it goes in the coaching calls.

So think about where you’re at in your life, what phase you’re at. If you’re in law school or medical school, this might be the season where you want to cultivate more of that masculine energy. But you might find that, “Okay, since I’m so in the masculine Monday through Friday, Friday nights or Saturday mornings I want to make sure that I’m bringing in that feminine. I want to go on walks or go to a dance class or do something I really just enjoy without a goal attached to it.”

Or conversely if you’re someone who’s in the feminine so much, you might want to focus on bringing in some of that focus and drive and determination and goal setting so that you bring in more of the masculine. So that whatever stage of life you’re in, you have this internal balance to the extent possible. And no matter what, that you’re at the least aware of it. You’re aware, “Oh yeah, this is me in my masculine, and I want to be. This is me in my feminine, and I want to be.” And how you can kind of move through life using both.

I think this is a really big game changer for most people. It was a really big game changer for me. I love this work. It’s something I’m pretty passionate about right now. So, if you’re not in Grow You yet, I invite you to join us. Definitely come to the week of confidence next week, and we’ll be talking about this more. All right my friend. Have an amazing week, and I will talk with you soon.

If you loved this podcast, you’re going to love Grow You. Grow You is my virtual life coaching program where I take everything on the podcast to the next level. I invite you to join our amazing community of women and moms and deepen your own personal development. Head on over to nataliebacon.com/coaching to learn more.  

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