Superhumans At Work by Mindvalley: How To Break Free From Good Girl Jail
Read the transcript:
“For so long, the most ambitious woman, the woman who had the biggest dreams, the only way she had fulfilling those dreams was to marry well. What qualities make you marriageable in the past? To be low maintenance. “I’m fine. I’m not mad. I don’t need anything. No, thanks. I got it.” Right? To be low maintenance, that makes a good choice for a wife. A wife who’s resourceful, who’s accommodating, who doesn’t complain, who is harmonious, who does a lot of extra work, picks up the slack, makes do with what she has, she doesn’t ask for too much, her needs and her desires are not outrageous at all. That conditioning of not wanting to be a bother and picking up all the extra work. You know, the most badass powerful executive CEOs I have come to the Academy still feel themselves under the spell of the Good Girl Autoresponder.”
Jason: Hi everybody welcome back to Superhumans at Work. This is your host, Jason Mark Campbell. I'm so excited about this session we're going to have today where we're going to be able to step into a lot of words that could come as taboo used in the workplace. We're going to talk about power, we're going to talk about gender, our roles, how our society is evolving. How is it that men and women are working in the same place? And how are those dynamics evolving? Is it normal that there's a bit of chaos? Is it chaotic? I really want to get into these discussions because in the modern world where we're all working together, we all seem to be playing different roles and I want to see what are the discussions that happen when we start challenging these roles and what potential is unleashed when we really acknowledge our full selves in every role that we can possibly play.
Kasia Urbaniak is going to be here and sharing these insights and she's an incredible woman, the CEO of The Academy, a school that teaches women the foundations of power and influence, how to embrace this. She's spoken at numerous corporations, I'm talking about the Museum of Modern Art, the Wharton School of Business, the Yale School of Management, and she's already the subject of so much media attention, she's had interviews in The Guardian, New York Times Forbes, BBC capital, amongst others. And here's one of the fascinating aspects that I love is her background has been as a dominatrix, we're going to talk more about her background, why it's so important to know what has happened here has been applied in business, and you're going to be able to apply this in your career as well. Kasia, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming.
Kasia: Thank you so much for having me.
Jason: Now first off I want to say congratulations. I know you've recently launched your book, Unbound – A Woman's Guide to Power, and power itself is a word that seems to come with a lot of baggage. It seems like it's almost taboo. And so I wanted to open up with this question: why does that idea of power seem to unrest a lot of us? It seems like it's an uncontrollable energy. And what have you witnessed about this word and why it's so powerful to embrace?
Kasia: Well the first thing is that I like that the word power ruffles some feathers. Before a student takes a class, sometimes they write an email saying, “Why is power and not empowerment?” And there's this implication around the word empowerment. First of all, women are more likely to feel comfortable with something like “women's empowerment”, men are more likely to go for a book called Power. So it seems like this softer subset, right? There's also this implication that empowerment is inwards so you can actually be alone in a room and do your affirmations and feel great and become powerful in isolation. When power, in and of itself, is relational, like money, right, power is entirely about powerful relationships. It's a communication function. One of the fun things about working with, especially behavioral economics people, is redefining power with them in conversation about how it's not who has the most toys, but who has the most powerful relationships.
Jason: So it's very crazy as you mentioned this. I just had a vision of so many websites and some of the friends I follow that all do these Empowerment Workshops for Women, so you're so right. And then I was thinking, what are some of the things that attracted me, as far as literature or workshops, and the first thing that came to mind is when I was in my early 20s, I read a book like The 48 Laws of Power, and I don't see that literature being picked up as much as women.
And so, what gets left out, like what happens when women do not – and we're going to speak specifically to that since we've already differentiated that there's a natural attraction for men to go and seek that power – what is the problem where we see that women are not as much embracing it, and what happens when they do?
Kasia: Oh well, what happens when they do is their lives get revolutionized. As women claim their power, they're also redefining power. Again, one of the pitfalls of a word like empowerment is that implies that you can do it by yourself. Say, for example, in a woman's group – that's super super super necessary – but that sisters can pump themselves up, but then they go interface with men who have very different conditioning or circumstances in business. And all of the sudden it's like the magic's gone.
When you focus on power and powerful communication and building powerful relationships, the evidence of your power is not your feeling. Power is not a feeling. It's an effect. It's what happens in the impact of the thing. And I think men are trained and conditioned to have more of their attention, for better and for worse, on outward attention states, meaning performance, the results, winning the game, you know, getting the date, whatever it is, for the performance, the provider. Whereas women tend to still be conditioned towards their beingness not their doingness, even though women are doing more than ever and sometimes double triple what men do. So calling attention to that agency, and that doingness and balancing out when we have our dominant outward states of influence fully out, and also our state, fully in where we're deeply connected with the truth of ourselves is super important for both men and women. The challenge and the road and the journey is totally different, because of our very different conditioning.
Jason: Which I want to go right into that conditioning. So women naturally have not been embracing it as much as men, yet we see that there are so many gaps in the workplace when it comes to senior positions, the glass ceiling, and women are just in the process of getting into the workforce and we're seeing that the cards seem to be stacked against them. And so, what is that conditioning and what can we do to break through a mental barrier as a woman and how do we get started doing that?
Kasia: It's a mental, emotional and physical body-based barrier, but before addressing the conditioning, I have to say that there are also other circumstances that make the senior corporate game, a less appealing when for a woman. Between sexual harassment, and having other values and family, there are other legitimate things that go on besides conditioning. But here's something that was really really interesting, I'll get into the conditioning in just one second. In the course of teaching, at some point I added a Power with Money class to the curriculum. And one of the things that inspired me and a lot of the courses are around being able to ask for what you want, ask for what you need, in a powerful and effective way shamelessly and like 100% of what you need in the workplace especially getting, you know the support that you need to do your best job. There was this tech website, and this was a story, a few years back, that noticed that women were applying for jobs and asking right away for lower salaries than men. So these like really really well meaning architects of this tech jobs website were like, “We're gonna solve the problem. We're gonna start putting up a graph for each position, and showing the exact average what's on the excessive side what's on the lesser side, a beautiful graph for each position. So, each person, man or woman, can look at it and get a sense of what the actual average is.” You know what happened? Men started asking for more. Women started asking for even less. And to me, this was such a huge, huge sign, such a huge red flag. Telling them what the averages were did not change their behavior. As a matter of fact, what it did, it made it even worse.
But let's talk about what I call Good Girl Conditioning. If you really think about it, women going from being property to being able to own property is actually relatively recent when it comes to human history. It actually happened kind of an eyeblink ago. In 1974, a woman couldn't even get a credit card in Connecticut without her husband's signature. We're not talking about, you know, millennia here, we're talking about a few minutes ago in the eyeblink of human history. All of a sudden, women can own property. Women can go to work. Women can have careers. It's foolish to think that the conditioning that comes to us from our ancestors, that's in the air, that's ubiquitous everywhere, would change immediately.
The Good Girl Conditioning Qualities. Let me put it this way, for so long, the most ambitious woman, the woman who had the biggest dreams, the only way she had fulfilling those dreams was to marry well. What qualities make you marriageable in the past? To be low maintenance. “I’m fine. I'm not mad. I don't need anything. No, thanks. I got it.” Right? To be low maintenance, that makes a good choice for a wife. A wife who's resourceful, who’s accommodating, who doesn't complain, who is harmonious, who does a lot of extra work, picks up the slack, makes do with what she has, she doesn't ask for too much, her needs and her desires are not outrageous at all. That conditioning of not wanting to be a bother and picking up all the extra work. You know, the most badass, powerful, executive CEOs I have come to the Academy still feel themselves under the spell of the Good Girl Autoresponder, if they're not paying attention. They'll say yes to something they don’t want to say yes to, they’ll make something extremely convenient for somebody else while bending over backwards going out of their way. When I have them log their invisible labor, work they don't get compensated for, reciprocated or paid for, sometimes it’s up to 80% of their daily hours. Mental labor, emotional labor, physical labor. The independent woman, her victory is super bittersweet. So many women who are kicking ass are actually doing three people and not asking for help because it makes them feel bossy or needy, not getting what they need, definitely not asking or receiving 100% of what they would need. They're not asking for the salaries, they’re not asking for the team they need in order to do their best work. And you know, there's a tendency that when a woman applies for a position, she applies for position she's already capable of doing, where a man looks into the position he wants to live into, right?
So there's the secondary thing where, and I believe this is out of love, the daughters are always very well policed, looked after. If a woman wore too short a shirt and something happened, she would be to blame. So you had to watch your daughters. Watch your daughters. And once that atmosphere develops, any woman listening to this can probably relate to the constant self-policing that now needs no police officer, needs no parent, grandparent, needs nobody else to point it out. She's asking yourself, “Am I too much? Am I not enough? Am I too loud? Am I too quiet? Am I too feminine? Am I too masculine? Do I care too much about my career? Not enough about my family? Was this appropriate? Was that?” That attention turned inwards, but not in a generative positive way, that attention turned inwards. The cleverest prison in the world is the prison without any walls. It's the prison you can’t see. So breaking that conditioning is so much fun. It's so much fun, because it creates results so quickly. And it's one of those things that first is the horror of discovering something that was invisible to you that suddenly is visible. And then is the pleasure of overcoming it, and understanding that that barrier is antiquated, no longer serves, girls don't change the world. You know, it just becomes such a joy. There are some really simple techniques in each of these good girl autoresponder examples where I said earlier, are not just a mental barrier or emotional but physical too. It’s such a fast habit to respond to crisis to say, “Yes,” or to say, “No, I'm fine.” It's such a fast habit to when asked uncomfortable, inappropriate questions to give the answer right away instead of questioning the questioner.
“In Power Dynamics, the dominant one is the one who has their attention out and powerfully on the other person. The one who follows has their attention inward.”
Which brings me to this really important subject of how power dynamics work. So, when a woman freezes, this is a really good way to articulate power dynamics. Let's say we have a boy and a girl growing up – this is changing, but it's been in our culture for so long that it's still worth mentioning. So we have Billy and we have Mary. And we reward Billy, and we reward Mary at entirely different moments. We reward Billy when his attention is out. He scored a goal, he built a fortress, he got into a fight, he messed something up, he won a trophy, his attention’s out. He is rewarded when his attention is out. Mary, however, “Look how lovely Mary is. Isn't that a lovely dress? Look at her lovely manners. Is Mary getting chubby?” Her attention’s on her. So, what happens very often, is in power dynamics, the leader, the dominant one, the one of authority – and this was definitely influenced by discoveries as a dominatrix – is the one who has their attention out and powerfully on the other person. And the one who is following has their attention inward. And you can see this really easily in the beautiful dance in some of the most profound conversations that people have. You know, the conversation that keeps you up until eight in the morning. You can't stop talking. What's happening is when you're speaking you're paying attention to the person who's listening, and you're seeing what lands, and you're seeing what doesn't land, and you're rearticulating the things that don't land in order to make them stick. And then all of a sudden, something sparks in the other person, that energy rises and all of a sudden they're telling you their story, and their attention’s on you and they're tracking you, and it switches and there's this play of dominant and submissive states attention that go back and forth. Billy and Mary have been trained that in a moment of crisis their attention immediately shoot to very different places. Now this tendency is so strong that I tested it and I've tested it and I've tested it. Scare a man, his attention goes you. Scare a woman, her attention goes me. This was super relevant, and it still is, why women freeze in situations, for example, like where they have to justify explain themselves when they ask that uncomfortable question or a sexual harassing uncomfortable remark is made. You know my superpower CEO woman might be unstoppable in the office, but on the elevator ride home when her neighbor asks her if she's single she freezes. She answers. She doesn't want to answer. She gets into a conversation she doesn't want to get into. And this may seem petty and small, but actually our life is made up of these interactions that inform us about the kind of people we are. So this habit, this dominant habit, when a woman's attention is on her and her attention is on herself, she will get into a biologically frozen state. The way to flip that power dynamic is so simple. If she turns her attention out and asks the person who asked her a question a question, she's already flipped the script. “Why do you ask?” is sometimes enough. “Are you taking a poll?” if it's totally inappropriate. “What on earth are you doing asking a question like that?” Right? Putting the attention back on them.
“When you focus on power: powerful communication and building powerful relationships, the evidence is not your feelings, it’s an effect.”
And this is also really wonderful in so many ways because sometimes we mishear things or we don't understand where people are coming from. We make the assumption that some inappropriate comment is really full of ill intent, especially in the workplace, now everybody has to be so careful. I had this student who was telling a story about when her boss asked her where she bought her lingerie. Totally inappropriate question for the workplace, right? But this boss of hers she really liked and was a really nice, kind of sometimes awkward guy. Having taken my class. She asked him, “Do you realize that can be a really inappropriate question for the workplace? Do you realize how that might make one of your female employees feel?” And he completely stuttered and broke down and said, “Look, I have been out of the dating game for 20 years and it's Valentine's Day coming up and there's this woman I really like, and I'm sorry I just wanted to know where I can get her a nice gift.” Totally inappropriate but that got cleaned up like this, and it didn't escalate into some weird tension where later she's wondering if she can go on that conference, and wondering if going to the bar where everybody socializing is safe because he's there, is he going to make another comment, is she going to end up in his hotel room, you know all those things disappear. They get clarified.
Jason: Now, you just went through an amazing overview, and I remember seeing – by the way if anybody has not seen the TEDx that Kasia does which goes over these concepts which I think is phenomenal and is one of the reasons I definitely wanted her on the show to share these concepts with you, definitely go check it out. And the one thing I just noticed is you've explained the whole situation of conditioning, what's happening. And at first when you're explaining I was like wow, is this the reality of things? Is there nothing that we can do to change this or accelerate the transformation? And then I noticed how you shifted and said something I was not expecting. You said, “the process of liberating yourself from that invisible prison is absolutely fun.” And now you've actually switched into giving us some prescriptions on what to do, and asking a question when the question has been asked to you is such a powerful reversal of those roles. I was going to ask, it doesn't seem like it would naturally come for most people, like right now we're sitting, or if somebody's listening they're in that car and they're like, “okay, wow that makes sense.” But when that moment arises, there's definitely like that emotional jolt that kind of triggers the lizard brain. And so my question to you would be, as I'm aware that asking the question when the appropriate question comes is one of the best ways to kind of shift the dynamics, what can I do to train myself to be more ready for those moments because I will always default to my natural at those times? Does that make sense?
Kasia: Yeah, well that's why we train. I mean, there's a lot of things we do at The Academy that any listener can do. Here's a really good one. People who are afraid of hearing, “No”. That's a general human experience of not wanting rejection; abandonment being one of the worst punishments. You know, primal, tribal. You get banished, you get rejected, it's worse than death. Death before dishonor, it's what gets people in the military. Again, there is a difference between how women and men respond to no, so I know more about how to train women to respond to no more than I know about men. But one of the things that happens, I think for both, however, very very very acutely for women, is because their attention is on themselves when they're asking, when they hear the no they take the hit as though it's a no to their existence and not to their request.
“‘No’ is a gateway to incredible power and incredible intimacy. Sometimes it’s better to get a NO to your first request than a YES. What you get to do, is to find out what the other person actually cares about.”
So once again, the prescription is actually the same, which is when you're making a request where you might get a no, keep your attention on the other person. You hear the no, you don't break the kind of connection of attention, because the person saying no oftentimes will experience that break in attention and feel like they've done so much damage just by speaking their truth in that moment. And that guilt will very quickly turn to anger. One of the things that we do is when we train a woman to hear no, we actually do, “No, no, request, no,” over and over and over and over again. She hears no, she keeps her attention on the other person then asks another question. Gets curious. Not, “Why not,” because that's trying to crush the resistance because anytime somebody resists something they have an internal reason for it. No is a gateway to incredible power and incredible intimacy. Sometimes it's better to get a no to your first request than a yes. Because what you get to do is you get to find out what the other person actually cares about. Most people don't say no in order to be asses. Most people don't like to say no, and if they're in a position where they're saying no it’s because something got triggered that they need to protect and if they value it enough to say no. And if the person on the other side can stay curious and connect with that thing that they value, the no either disappears or the entire nature of the conversation changes to a far more generative and powerful one. Because now you know something about the other person. Now you're connected with something tender that the no was designed to protect. And if you can get to that place to genuine curiosity when you hear no, it stops being about you. It even stops being about the request and it starts being about what's there on the other side that I can connect you to create an incredibly powerful relationship and generate a new possibility that would not be there if the person said yes.
If we had more time I'd go into a crazy dungeon story about the discovery of how boring it is when somebody always says yes, but resistance is a gift and it's something that we have two fixed ways of dealing with. Somebody meets resistance, internal in terms of like keeping a promise, or being disciplined, or externally meets resistance and another person in the form of no. We have this incredibly ineffective way of dealing with no. It’s is called crush or run. Imagine a little tribe, right, and another tribe is coming across the hill and the men go to crush that tribe, and the women run for the hills. Crush or run. Resistance is such a hotspot of incredible information and a matrix of power that stepping into and navigating through that no to get to what the other person really cares about creates a synergy where oftentimes the new proposition is so much more powerful and the vision is so much more profound than if the initial request was like, “Yeah sure. Let’s do that. Fine.” So my students hunt for no. They're hungry for no. When they hear no, they go, “Game on. We're going to get to something good.”
Jason: It's so incredible because the ways that you've approached this is not instinctual. I've never heard it be explained this way and it's so true because in essence, it's almost like we're in a polite culture and so we're always defaulting to the Yes, and I'm someone who's a very big passionate person about sales. I'm actually working on my own book about selling with love, and this is it. When the no comes it's an opportunity to discover and the way you've laid it out is so magical. And so, as we get more comfortable with that we've talked a lot about a lot of the issues of conditioning around women. I want to also throw one insight for men who are listening to the show right now. Because as we're seeing the dynamics the women, we're seeing some transformation. People like you are teaching the right methodologies for women to come into the workplace to embrace their power. So now, my question would be, what are some of the responsibilities that we can take as men, so that we can make this a more powerful workplace by embracing the differences we have, as well as making sure that we have certain behaviors that we keep in check possibly to ensure that we have the most output, and the best time, as we're going towards working in the workplace making an impact including both genders in the most powerful way?
Kasia: I’m about to say something very controversial.
Jason: There we go. That's why we do this.
Kasia: I'm only speaking for myself, because this is a very controversial thing to say. I was assigned the task of teaching men how to behave themselves regarding sexual harassment in corporations. And I found that what they are trying to do absolutely does not work. Jason I'm going to give you 20 behaviors that you are not to engage in. Remember them all, learn them and make sure you don't do them. If I tell a female student don't do up speak. Don't finish your sentences like the question. Remember to dress not to like this and not to like this. And remember to do this. If we're litigating those small behaviors that's not how human beings learn. Human beings learn socially. So this is the controversial thing. When you teach a woman, when she feels frozen or attacked, or undermined by a man, when you teach a woman to flip the power dynamic get connected to the other person. Ask questions, get information, get curious, develop a powerful ally. Find out if that person really is an enemy, or if they just didn't know. Then what you have is a woman who's growing in her power – side effect, she's teaching, socially, in the moment with social reward in the moment, the best behavior for any man or for any other person to take. I think we have a crisis when it comes to men right now, and I wish there was a teacher who was teaching this kind of thing but in reverse for men. Because what we're really forgetting is that, just like women have been conditioned to be the perfect wife for millennia, men have been conditioned to violently divorce themselves from their emotions in order to be able to go out to war and die for us. The sacrifice of that deep connection to emotion and the taboo of a man being sensitive or deeply connected and how that's not powerful, not strong, and how it shows up is absolutely horrendous. We live in a culture where empaths actually envy sociopaths, and any book out there on empathy is how to deal with the burden of feeling other people's feelings, and any book on psychopaths and sociopaths is like, “what you can learn from them without being one.” And this stuff about stoicism, stuffing down your feelings, and just keep pushing, and let's keep producing. We don't need any more of that in the world and it's not going to create powerful, beautiful, generative, life-giving things. It's just part of part of our suicide mission and death drive.
Okay, simple answer. Men can ask questions. They don't expect to get the answers because the truth is that, you know, especially in heteronormative, heterosexual relationships, women are getting angrier and angrier and more withholding and men are getting more and more uninformed, kind of dumb. How to make a woman happy, how to treat a woman right in the workplace, how to treat a woman right at home. How to do that, no information. Women are freezing, not communicating, getting shut down, getting angry, and men are like, “Where do we go from here?” So I could say, you know, ask them some questions. If all of their needs are being met or if there's something else. You'll probably get a, “No, I'm fine.” Unless it's an Academy student or a woman who's worked. You know done that work on not empowerment, but on power and power dynamics. It's such a crisis in the world right now: the ability to be able to actually see another person. Ask them where they’re at and where they’re coming from instead of making assumptions that what has just happened is a full-on assault. Cancel them. Fire them. Murder them. Right? But actually check in. Even if the person’s misbehaving. Actually, especially if the person’s misbehaving and you’re physically safe. Right, that's a caveat, if you’re physically safe. Find out what's behind there. It's gonna be a lot easier for women to Break the Freeze and start locating where men are at than the other way around. Because women shut down so fast because because of our conditioning. When that happens, but maybe just to be aware that this is happening.
“When a woman feels undermined by a man, you teach a woman to flip the power dynamics. Get connected to the other person. Ask questions. Get information. Get curious. Find out if that person is really an enemy or they just didn’t know.”
