What is power? An Introduction to The Academy in 7 Questions
What is power? An Introduction to The Academy in 7 Questions
1. How did you become someone who teaches power to women?
I was training to become a Taoist nun, paying for my studies and travel by working as a professional dominatrix in New York City. Studying Taoism around the globe, I learned to watch the human body, and to see what elements bring it into balance, and throw it out. From my work in the dungeon, I learned all the ways that imagination can heal us, and help us to discover deep emotional truths. From both, I learned about power dynamics: influence on others that exists beyond the level of language alone. Our words tell people what to do, our bodies tell them how to feel about what we’re saying, and how we use our attention determines everything.
2. What’s “attention,” and what does it have to do with power?
At any given moment in every single interaction you have, someone is leading, and someone is following. Your attention is out when you’re asking a question; your attention is in when you’re listening to it, and it moves out again when you answer.
In every really great conversation you’ve ever had (and every great sexual experience, too) who is leading and who is following has switched back and forth seamlessly. That’s the flow of attention, or what I call “the conversation under the conversation.” If you can control that conversation—the flow of attention in any given interaction—you have power. I teach women to do this, both when that flow is happening naturally, and when it’s not.
Obstructions in that flow are at the root of many common instances of powerlessness in communications--for instance, when The Good Girl Double Bind causes a woman to freeze and she is unable to speak, or is gaslit, or chronically interrupted, and many more.
Congruence is what I call it when your body’s language is aligned with your intentions and words.
3. What’s the Good Girl Double Bind, and why is it so damaging for women?
A millennia’s worth of Good Girl conditioning has left most women worried about being too much, or too little. Either we’re too loud or we’re too mousy, too frigid or too slutty, a pushover or a bitch.
But when a woman is walking the impossible tightrope strung up between Bossy and Needy, any communication she makes has to squeeze its way through that compression. She doesn’t want to seem aggressive or domineering, but she doesn’t want to seem helpless or pathetic, either.
Contortions—verbal, physical, energetic—ensue.
That’s the Good Girl Double Bind, and it’s why it can be so very difficult for a woman to ask for something or tell someone to do something in a way that feels good to her and to the person she’s asking.
So we huff and slam cabinet doors instead of asking for help. We end up crying when we’re mad, and screaming because nobody listened the first ten times we asked. The invisible tightrope is why we hear ourselves ask a waiter for a cup of coffee like we’re asking him to donate a kidney instead of to do his job, and why it’s easier to walk down the aisle with the wrong guy than it is to tell him and everybody else that he’s Mr. Wrong.
Congruence is what I call it when your body’s language is aligned with your intentions and words. It’s hard to define, but impossible to deny when felt or witnessed. Achieving this is what I teach.
4. If you could give one piece of advice to help women be more congruent in their relationships--personal and professional--what would it be?
Too often, I see women begging for crumbs, accepting them, and then blowing a gasket down the line because they’re starving. The problem isn’t that they’re asking too much. It’s that they’re not asking enough.
If you’re not sure you deserve what you’re asking for, you negotiate yourself down before you even open your mouth.
Let’s say you only ask someone for 80 percent of what you want. The problem: when the other person gives you what you asked for, they’re not going to see you light up. You light up when you get something that really works for you--and the other person knows it. When the gift they chose or the erotic adventure they planned was perfect, you will overflow with pleasure and gratitude and joy, and they will feel it.
But if you compromise in your request, you’ve doomed them to labor in vain. No matter how grateful you act, your thanks won’t land. This is a case where even 99 percent right is 100 percent wrong. I teach women to get very specific about what they’re asking for—and to get comfortable with asking big.
Granted, that’s a process. Here at The Academy we have a mantra: Never move faster than you can feel.
5. “Never move faster than you can feel...”, what does that mean, and why do women need to hear it?
When women tell me they lost control of a conversation, they’re often describing a problem with pace. Maybe they felt rushed into agreeing to something they didn’t want to agree to, or found themselves listening impatiently while he mansplained. Often, they tell me that it was impossible to keep the topic of discussion on the issues they cared about.
I teach my students that they hold the remote control. They can pause the conversation long enough to check in with themselves. They can rewind and ask for clarification—and as many times as they need to! They can fast-forward through the boring parts. By controlling the flow of attention, they can always return the focus of the conversation to the issues that matter to them.
It’s not magic; these are skills that everyone can learn. But mastering them leads to a new kind of conversation—one that is fully embodied, deeply meaningful, and powerfully influential. Conflict well-paced can be extremely creative, exciting...even sexy. Conversation is what made the rules of the world we live in, and conversation is what will change them.
Conflict well-paced can be extremely creative, exciting…even sexy. Conversation is what made the rules of the world we live in, and conversation is what will change them.
6. You have an unusual take on conflict. Tell us more…
A lot of the women I teach come to me afraid of conflict. I teach them to seek it out, and to get good at it.
Conflict creates tension—but also intimacy and invention; let’s not forget that friction is how babies are made! It’s fun to get into trouble when you know you can get out of it. It means there’s no conversation you have to be scared of, no invitation you can’t extend, no correction you can’t issue, and no proposition you can’t decline.
7. If you could teach one skill to get every woman and girl in the world good at conflict, what would it be?
I’d teach her how to get off the spot. Every brilliant woman I know has frozen at one point in her life—and every time, it has really cost her. By the time she’s returned to her body, his hand is up her skirt, the job has gone to someone else, or she’s agreed to do something she really didn’t want to do. We have to know how to get ourselves off the spot, or how to play when we don’t know what to say.
I train women in a very simple form of verbal jiu-jitsu, which works every time. If you find yourself pinned to the spot by someone’s words, feeling trapped and speechless: ask a question back. The question doesn’t have to be clever; it just has to reverse the flow of attention from you to them.
A single question will break the freeze, even if it’s nonsensical: “Where’d you get that tie?”
If you’re still stuck—and this part takes a little training—ask another question, and another.
With every question, you’re turning the spotlight of attention. Don’t stop until you’ve got them where you want them.
Verbal Self-Defense is simple enough in theory. But it's not easy in practice.
To use these skills in your day-to-day life, on command, it takes training and preparation.
And that’s exactly what the Verbal Self-Defense Dojo offers.
Learn more about the first and only training to specifically tackle the Freeze and retrain the socially conditioned behavior that keeps women from accessing their full power and agency.
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