Why I Started the Journey in Feminine Leadership

Resource democratisation + awakening to approach life more attuned to our calling + knowledge sharing because of abundance rather than source domination

Hello lovelies!

I hope you had a great second week in January. Today I’m going to cover my reason for jumping into this area of exploration.

In my first ever Substack post, I explained the reason for choosing the name of my coaching programme, which has the words “radiant path”. And in another post, I talked about my personal journey of finding this passion. I didn’t do my personal story justice as I re-read the posts since they also spoke about other things. So, let me cover it here of the real reason. 

There are internal and external motivations that work like cogs in the machine to make me realise that I’m not called to be a practising product manager forever. Don’t get me wrong. I love my job and my current product at the company I work at. The teams are nice and hard-working, so I enjoy the product management dynamics. However, working on someone else’s goals means reducing the time allocation I can use to work on my calling, which is a life of knowledge sharing (that means I learn from other people as well) and elevating others by creating a community of people with a growth mindset. That’s my internal motivation. It’s similar to content creators about the topics where they used to or are still practising, such as doctors on YouTube, fellow Product Managers, developers, business consultants, product designers, writers, etc. At some point in their life, if they’re still routinely doing their day job, there must come a time to evaluate whether the day job is something to be maintained. That’s also the reason I’m putting my service offering to be a product consultant as well, so I can still cater to clients who expect my expertise put into practice for their organisations.

As for the external motivation, do you know that the economic trends go towards a more decentralised system? 

Photo: Loch at Drumpellier Country Park (nearby my flat)

With the abundant access to information through the Internet, learning and personal development has been more of a matter of intrinsic motivation. A student doesn’t need to follow a school teaching blindly as they can always cross-check the facts or shape up their opinion about a certain matter. This is an example of resource democratisation.

In a heavier tone, the behaviour that people are quick to snap a picture and post it does not always connotate with lack of privacy. Examples of injustice can be shared quickly, a tyrant in one part of the world becomes known in a matter of seconds; they can’t hide. Therefore, everyone has the right and opportunity to construct and deconstruct their belief system, even more likely than one or two decades ago when the information didn’t flow as freely as today.

Resource democratisation also brings forth business decentralisation. I can highlight two important trends, at least occurring in my field (but I’m sure you can relate as well), which shaped my conviction towards starting an entrepreneurial journey.

1/ The rise of the solopreneurs and content creators

Content creation has become a job, a sustainable profession. Social media and streaming platforms become the marketplace for connecting viewers and creators. You name it. Writing (just like we do on Substack), video creation, microblogging, vlogging, and so on. The content itself is the key: be it an educational piece of content, news, personal story, and more. There are always streams of people who want to consume all types of media. I haven’t even known about channels about parkours or people sneaking up dangerously into abandoned buildings to train their confidence, had my friend not introduced those to me. 

When you read the articles about solopreneurs, the internet is the key factor to support this lifestyle. Other factors include more flexibility and rediscovering their life passion. And it doesn’t have to be risky because you can run it as a side gig.

So, the infrastructure and the global movement of consciousness seem to favour those who want to dip into this way of life.

2/ Mass layoffs

Layoffs are traumatic. It’s right up there as one of the PTSD causes. Imagine you woke up one day feeling neutral, and then your boss or HR called you to deliver the bad news. Although people are getting fired from time to time, layoffs create a ripple of panicking and the blow of uncertainties in our economy. 

In tech especially, it doesn’t happen with just one company or business field, it’s massive. I was laid off from an oil and gas service company in 2015. Although it’s been almost a decade, the experience changed me for the better, staying with me throughout my life journey. For one, that enabled me to switch careers into tech (product management) and snowballed into a world of opportunities down the road. 

But the pandemic layoffs, the post-pandemic layoffs where companies are forced to course-correct their overhiring . . . those are tough times. It’s as if I can’t open LinkedIn at peace. No week goes by without any “This is my last day at XX” post, coupled with an “Open to Work” ribbon on someone’s profile picture. That’s heartbreaking because they could be the sole breadwinners, they could be a sandwich generation person, they might need next month’s salary to pay for their healthcare programmes, and so on.

The world is made aware that the standard dream (I can’t call it an American dream because it prevails in my home country, and many other cultures as well) HAS FAILED us. FAILING US.

I can’t emphasise this enough. People getting into debt to fund their higher education . . . got crumbs as their salary . . . working early and late and sometimes overtime . . . then needing to feed a family . . . 

All the ideas of going to college - starting a good job - living in a white picket fence house you buy from your savings and mortgage you can, surely, pay up in the next 20 years - only work in the past where job security, the primary actor in this situation, is present. 

This kind of path teaches us that there’s only one way to make money, which is to earn it from your salaried life. 

Well, people are getting smarter and something’s gotta give. This is the business revolution we can see happening at this very moment of our lives.

The economy evolves in the background:

From a decentralised model where people work on siloed family businesses and communities → to big corporations where the masses are shaped into employees by plugging them into higher education that favours working → back to a decentralised entrepreneurial lifestyle today.

More and more people will take back the control of time in their hands. 

Back to my internal and external machination, I didn’t think that far about what skills I could leverage to contribute to this democratisation. I’ve got years of product management experience, a digital-savvy, and have consumed lots of content as well, so I somewhat know what to expect. As such, I naturally gravitate towards product management knowledge sharing.

That leaves another part of my interest: feminine leadership.

Last year, I came to know about the feminine power, or nurturing your divine femininity, to achieve the life that you dream of. Many influencers and articles feature this topic, and I even went further by reading a few books on healing – that although not being specific on femininity, knowing and healing your body are integral parts of the journey. 

Only recently I’ve been loving being a woman, and over the years, I realised I’d been too much in my masculine energy: always achieving, always on the go, rushing from one goal to another. Yes, what I want needs proper preparation, covering an expansive playground of actions, and naturally having more than a couple of items on my daily to-do list. However, as I journeyed deeper into my body, I knew she didn’t like it that much.

I’ve been in my mind for too long, neglecting the health issues, what my body wanted, and the lifestyle I could have that supplies me with satisfaction.

Then I learned about intuitions and gut microbiomes. Although they don’t seem related at first (you might frown your head reading the first sentence in this paragraph), our gut microbiomes are the foundation of our immune system, mental health, and many more. In a way, the “gut feeling” is real. It’s your intuition speaking to you, sometimes requesting you to override your logic.

Since it’s in the gut, I need to focus more on the body. There came my practice to improve my lifestyle, starting with a daily walk outdoors or indoors (following YouTube videos), more exercise, more balanced meals, and so on. I stumbled quite a few times as you can read in this post about my eating habits. I’ve been doing my inner work, from learning about my trauma, CBT, and panic attacks, and eventually figuring out about my gut health.

During the process, I consulted with my body more about my decision-making, and it felt right. I needed to course-correct here and there.

The way I make decisions is as follows:

I want something → breaking down the details → asking questions to God because He’s my company board and I’m the CEO → God is found in silence, prayers, and meditations → those three simply means connecting back with my body instead of just my cerebral thought process → finding the answer → refining the answer → and consulting again if unsure.

The cycle requires me to come to God, in body, mind, and spirit. That’s a double purpose there:

• Knowing what’s going on with my body to understand her more in receiving the answer

• Presenting my body well in God’s presence, as God’s grace: by being mindful of what I consume, amount of exercise I do, the regularity of my sleep schedule, and so on.

From the holistic view of the habits that I’ve been practising, I feel much more stable in my life. I find that garnering insight from my intuition is easier, and the intuition becomes sharper. Of course, I can talk about synchronicities and instant feedback from God through the universe, they are examples of how my “radio frequency” is always tuned in to receiving guidance. I’m less stubborn than I had been for many years.

I want more people to benefit from this practice, especially women. We’ve been in our masculine energy too long, chasing, chasing, and rushing. Now that the world has raised the general consciousness towards a more sustainable lifestyle, why don’t we combine:

Resource democratisation + awakening to approach life more attuned to our calling + knowledge sharing because of abundance rather than source domination 

Into this community building, and eventually coaching?

(That’s why I started writing this newsletter — if you love writing, too, hop on to Substack with the button below)

That’s the story of my change.

Asceticism

But lately, I’ve come to the term “equanimity”. Combining it with my healing journey, some stuff about Stoicism that I practised without being aware they’re Stoicism at first, I finally knew that there’s a label to my lifestyle: of being mindful, of refusing the temporary pleasure for the long-term goals, be it in food (hyper-palatable ultra-processed versus whole foods), social media (doom-scrolling versus creating), mental diet (mindless absorption versus the flow state), and so on. People might call it Dopamine Detox, but a broader term is sufficient, which is modern asceticism. Minimalism is part of it, and as a nomad minimalist, I can vouch for the happiness of living a simpler life regarding material possessions.

It might sound counterintuitive at first to combine ascetic teaching (albeit in a modern structure) with feminine leadership. What does a hard life have to do with femininity?

Stay tuned for the next post discussing this. One thing I can say for sure, asceticism declutters life and introduces the necessary discipline to embrace my femininity more deeply.

Part of it has to do with embracing pleasure in maintaining discipline for long-term satisfaction.

I’m going to deep dive into asceticism topic in the next newsletter.

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Hello,

If you would like to understand more how feminine leadership might benefit you in your personal development, feel free to book a free 30-min call with me at

Until then,