Story of the Month: March
Seek that Elusive Internal Balance
Iron Butterflies often struggle to find that elusive internal balance between masculine and feminine skills and values. It’s a worthy struggle because when you can strike that balance, it provides you with an enormous range of resources. The masculine side helps Iron Butterflies deal with male-dominated environments; they can push that project over the goal line as well as any man. Their feminine side enables them to act as agents of transformation because it infuses their environment with more inclusive, emotional, cooperative, and intuitive approaches.
What can impede achieving this balance is an over-reliance on external approval. Women will limit themselves to one dimension or another in order to gain acceptance. I call women who give up their feminine side and act more like the autonomous males Amazons. I call women who give up their masculine side and limit themselves to the traditional self-sacrificing woman Shape Changers. Whether Amazon or a Shape Changer, these false selves result from the limitations women impose on themselves in order please the dominant group and win approval. Amazons will hang out as a boy to gain that approval, while Shape Changers hang out as everyone’s support system to get it. Both take care of everyone but themselves.
In truth, we all need and seek approval from others just as children do. It is an endearing human frailty we share. Sensitivity to other people’s reactions and expectations can lead us to behave in ways we hope will meet those expectations. But when the drive for external approval overrides our true and authentic selves, when external approval becomes a substitute for self-acceptance, and when external approval relies on denying your needs, then we invariably lose our balance.
Iron Butterflies often find themselves swinging pendulum-like from one end of the spectrum to the other to find that balance. But by bringing opposites together, taking a little here and putting it there, you can create a new balance that expands rather than limits the way you express yourself.
The life of Alison Godfrey, the CEO of LifeWaves, an organization that creates health through an unusual exercise program designed by Alison’s husband Irv, has been full of waves, first as an Amazon woman and then as a Shape Changer, and finally, to her authentic self. In her early twenties, Alison worked as the world-wide director of marketing at Johnson and Johnson, a stunning accomplishment for a young woman, but the position carried a big price: she needed to become an Amazon. “I behaved like the typical business male in a woman’s body,” she confessed to me. “Dictatorship, take no prisoners, business as aggression. The entire management system was brutal. Nothing about dealing with the employees as human beings. It was doing anything you needed to do to get more productivity out of people. And it didn’t matter if it was eighteen hours a day or seven days a week. You burned them out, turned them over and started again. They would bring in young people, because you could pay them less for the same cycle. It was a very angry place. It was awful.”
To succeed in this environment Alison needed to turn up her aggression, something that didn’t come naturally to her. “To have that aggressiveness, I needed to be angry all the time, be very confrontational. Part of what drove the aggressiveness was that I felt I was never enough. I had to be better, faster, badder, because deep down, I felt incompetent.” Alison camouflaged her vulnerable feelings of inadequacy by putting in a minimum of twelve hours a day. But eventually her future husband, Irv, a doctor, would kindle a nagging doubt about the wisdom of working in such an environment.
Irv, as different from his wife’s corporate cohorts as you could imagine, set about rattling the cage that Alison had built for herself, calling her a drone and little more than a cog in the machine. Although his words upset her, especially since she felt so proud of her elevated status, the seed he planted in the back of her mind sprouted and began to grow. Something, she realized, was wrong with her picture of herself. It all came to a head with downsizing. When corporate bigwigs decided they needed to get rid of an entire level of middle management men in their fifties, they assigned the task to Alison. She made it through three interviews. The first one ended when the man started to cry. The second concluded with both of them crying. By the third one, Alison burst into tears before the manager even walked in the door. With her feminine, empathic side awakened, she went to the VP and said, ‘You can take your job and stick it. This is inhumane.’ She stormed out leaving her Amazon self behind.
Alison started her own business importing heart monitors, a product that complemented Irv’s heart wave program. As time passed, Irv’s project became bigger and bigger and Alison became more and more of a support system for him. “I was doing whatever I had to do to get this brilliant man to where he needed to be.” She might have left the Amazon behind, but she now found herself morphing into a Shape Changer dedicated to supporting someone else’s dream. “I wasn’t human anymore,” she recalled. “I had no needs or expressed any. I just did everything for him. If he needed me to listen for hours about what ever was going on, I would stop whatever I was doing right then and there. I’d gone from the worst stereotype of male leadership to being a stereotypical female support structure. I had completely abandoned myself again.”
Married and with two children, Alison became everyone’s caregiver: taking care of the kids, taking care of the home, caring for Irv and his work, opening their home to his clients and building his business. “It was an easy way to not take responsibility for dealing with myself,” Alison admitted, “and for how other people dealt with me. I could blend in and go away. It was about not being there for me. It was tricky for me because my personal life was so intertwined with this shared vision of Irv’s work. It’s what I wanted too.”
Although Amazon Alison was aggressive and Shape Changer Alison was accommodating, both modes turned her into a chameleon that blended into her environment. And in both cases she abandoned an important part of herself in order to gain acceptance. However, constantly changing colors gave Alison insight, because she finally saw that no matter what role she assumed, she was giving herself away. She and only she was making herself invisible to herself and to others.
As you seek that internal balance remember to ask yourself, “What do I want?