How To Empower Yourself As A Woman: Where To Begin

By:  Priscilla Wainwright, Ph.D., CPC

            Women’s empowerment doesn’t begin with self-esteem, assertiveness and the like.    It starts with fully embracing your glory AS A WOMAN.    We have unique qualities as women that are wonderfully powerful and glorious in their own right.

            Women’s empowerment, then, does not just focus on learning to like and value yourself, becoming assertive, etc.     Of course, those are critical.    But for us, something else comes along with it.

            Women’s empowerment involves getting back in touch with your Inner Feminine Spirit, some of which you may have lost while striving to succeed in a male-oriented achievement system.

            It means embracing and developing those power qualities that are strictly female that men typically cannot duplicate, and learning to treasure being female.    This is the added critical dimension.

            You can be empowered as a “person”, but if you have not fully reconnected with your Inner Feminine Spirit, something will be missing and you may be powerful but not sufficiently fulfilled.   I want to make clear, at the outset, that “feminine” does not equal “girly”.    Both “girly girls” and “tomboys” can be fully feminine.

            “Feminine”, as I use the term, refers to those innate qualities in brain and body that go with being female.    The female brain structure is different in key ways than the male brain structure.    These unique female brain structures give us qualities of thinking, feeling, and knowing that are unique to women, that men typically cannot develop as easily.

            Women’s empowerment focuses on those qualities to help you maximize the gifts of those female brain structures as part of the overall self-development process.    These structures involve emotion, empathy, intuition, whole-brain based creativity and understanding, and connectedness to others.

            These are strong power sources that males, by virtue of their brain structures, cannot typically develop as well, in the same way.

            Growing up in the Patriarchy, some of these qualities have been denigrated by men over the years, and therefore, also by some women.    We need to bring those qualities out of the shadows, dust them off, and re-elevate them to their rightful place as key elements of the feminine nature.

            In my next Blog, I will deal with these power sources specifically.