Feminine energy is all the nurturing traits it takes to connect to human beings in a meaningful and fulfilling way. It’s compassion, kindness, empathy, patience, and emotion. This also includes embracing your intuition and creativity. It can be fluid and free.
One of the keys to being a good communicator is understanding how to best use your personal resources. For example, you can use what you know about how others feel, act, and react and adjust how you communicate with a particular person or in a specific situation. For women, we have something called feminine energy to help us better interact with the world around us. It shouldn’t be strictly reserved for use with men; it can also play a vital role in how you communicate with other women.
It’s essential to note that there are no hard and fast rules that work 100% of the time when communicating with men or with other women. There are generalizations that can help point you in the right direction, but it is necessary to use the power of observation, improvisation, and adaptation to leverage your feminine energy most effectively.
Leveraging Your Feminine Energy Is Not Manipulation
You may wrestle with this idea of leveraging something that you have, such as your energy that is strictly feminine. It may seem as though the intent is to manipulate the people around you when the goal is to use what you have, understand who you are, and realize how you can best use that in relationships, meeting new people, networking, or other group settings. Rather than manipulate, the goal is to understand more about the people and situations around you and how you can best act and react for the most positive interactions.
One time, my parents had a huge argument right before heading out the door to join another couple for dinner. When they arrived at the restaurant, my mom engaged happily with the other couple, enjoyed dinner, and smiled through the reciprocal conversation throughout the night. As the evening ended, and my parents hopped back into their car, my dad was almost seething when he looked at my mom and said, “How could you walk into that restaurant, feign a good mood, and come off so happily? How can you be so fake?”
As you can imagine, that probably didn’t end so well for my dad (haha), but my mom’s response was simply that sparing others from private turmoil is not fake; it’s respectful. While I’m not sure my dad 100% bought into her reasoning, at least initially, the lesson is that it’s entirely possible to behave, act, and react a particular way when you deem that the people, person, or situation will benefit most when a person is adaptable in social situations.
1. Don’t Deny Your Feminity
This first one may seem obvious, but in a world that rapidly amplifies deficiencies in other people, it leaves us to sometimes think that we must work hard or go out of our way to be someone we’re not. Especially if we start believing we are the target of those accusations. For example, if you have suppressed your compassionate and empathetic traits, thinking it will benefit you in your career, there’s good reason to reevaluate the benefits of these characteristics that are uniquely you and more distinctively feminine. Rather than suppress empathy in a situation because it may not seem fitting in the office or in a group of men, consider how you can adapt your approach.
Scenario: You’re in an office meeting, and your profession is largely male-dominated. Your co-worker Bob shares in the meeting that he was not awarded the contract for a deal you know he’d been working on for over a month. Consider the following responses:
- Ah, I’m sorry to hear that, man.
- Oh, Bob, I’m just so sorry to hear this. I know how hard you’ve been working; this must be a huge letdown. I know how anxious you were and how many times they asked you to re-write that proposal before they’d give it a final consideration. You must just feel terrible, and that’s perfectly understandable considering all the work you’ve put in and how you were looking forward to this new project. We are all proud of your hard work, regardless.
- You worked hard on that proposal, and I know you are still just as qualified and capable of moving that client forward to what they needed. Now you’ve got time to start working on some other ideas, and there’s always the possibility they’ll come back around.
Answer A: is an example of denying your femininity. It’s abrupt and lacks compassion, but if you’re attempting to mirror the male energy in the room, this might seem like the best response.
Answer B: Because women are naturally more compassionate and empathetic, a default response might be to lavish others with words that express these traits. However, if you’re not adjusting to the person or people in the room, this can easily become too much and inappropriate for that person or setting.
Answer C: combines an empathetic response with intellectual encouragement. Bob did work hard, he is qualified, and he deserves recognition but not in an overtly emotional way.
In this scenario, Answer C might be the best way to leverage your feminine energy for both Bob and the rest of the people in the conference room.
2. Adapt
You know how it is when your smartphone starts to get below 10%, and you’re already planning and plotting the nearest place to plug it in for a charge. Then you realize you forgot your charging cable. Your friend offers you theirs, but they have an Android phone, and yours is an iPhone. The charging cable is useless to you unless…there is an adapter. We all use the same outlet in the wall to pull power and charge the battery in our phones; it’s just that some have a different way of connecting. Being adaptable immediately increases the usefulness and creates possibilities that never would have been there otherwise! The same is true for how we use our feminine energy for positive outcomes in a variety of situations.
As I mentioned earlier, not all men require abrupt communication where they want you to hurry up and get to the point or at least make your point first before going into detail, but many men do appreciate that. Conversely, not all women want an overabundance of ooey gooey emotions and physical displays of compassion like a hug, but many of them do. I’d say that most people are a combination and fall somewhere in between, which means that one of the best ways to leverage your feminine energy is to be adaptable to the person or situation.
Rather than approaching every person the same way you always would because, “That’s just who I am…,” you’ll be far more successful at assessing other people a bit more and responding in exactly the way that suits them best. This allows you to tap into your feminine energy, be uniquely you, and consider them as you improvise and adjust.
3. Balance
You don’t need to become more feminine, nor do you need to work to acquire more masculine traits. This simply comes down to finding the accurate balance of the two. I once attended a company party with a friend of mine. I was her “plus one” and was only somewhat familiar with her employer and the company’s services. Honestly, I could have simply enjoyed the dinner and drinks and been thankful for such a lovely evening.
However, in our seating arrangement, I was placed next to Howard, the owner of the company. I tried to push past small talk as I observed that after a few pleasantries, he’d love to share more about his business with me. Rather than smile and nod, I asked leading questions about the product they supplied, and when I knew any part of his industry (I didn’t need to be an expert), I used that knowledge to ask more questions. At the end of the evening, we could both agree that it was a fulfilling and productive conversation.
Rather than this scenario being specifically masculine or feminine, it highlights the importance of balancing your energy. My more feminine tendencies might have been to talk about family, hobbies, dinner, and drinks; instead, I chose to use a combination and tap into what might be considered a more masculine side of the conversation. Howard was delighted and commented that most people don’t seem to have such an understanding of what he and his company do, while the reality is that I just asked better questions and let him do the talking.
The Takeaway: You Must Value Your Feminine Energy Before You Can Leverage It
It’s impossible to leverage something without first placing a high value on it as an asset. Leverage your feminine energy to profit everyone around you when you use it as a highlight, then add adaptability and balance.
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