I've never been much of a Soaps watcher. The entire daytime phenomenon would have completely passed me by if I hadn't been terribly lonely and surrounded entirely by gay men instead of equally yummy straight men when the whole Luke and Laura thing almost passed me by.

I don't recall what initially drew me in, but once I understood that there was this woman who wanted to return to the love of her life, and she and he were yearning for one another, and he thought she was dead, and there were these tantalizing and endless scenes of her aliveness almost but not quite being revealed...well, I was hooked.

If you have been a Genie Francis fan - the woman in this emotional melodrama - you will know that in her field she is considered a leader. And in less than 2 minutes in this video, she describes something that holds a lot of us back: obedience. Take a minute and watch this video about her unconscious obedience to "stand on uour mark", which is what actors do when they are filming a scene.

We women are rewarded for obedience when we're young, while boys are rewarded for boldness. And those lessons are sticky. Gluey. They stick with us as mental/emotional set points that we don't even notice.

So today I invite you as a leader to get off your mark and move around your world in new and untried ways. No matter how small the change, the results will melt that glue off obedience, and reward you for being seriously bold.

I have seen the feminine way in action. It's powerful. It's empowered. It's compassionate and clear-eyed. It's full of conviction. It is inclusive of "the other". It has a soul and a mind of its own. It suffers no fools. It's successful.

And we don't do it. Why?

Complex topic, right? It includes the personal reasons, and the collective reasons. Into this complexity I offer these stumbling blocks as an answer to that question:

• We feel uncomfortable with going against the "norm"; the norm being the masculine faces of strength.
• We have not yet defined and become comfortable with what it means to take our power as women - in other words we are trying to embrace the whole of the "masculine leadership image".
• We are being unnecessarily obedient and apologetic. 

It will sound incredibly weird to say this, but we women have actually been masculinized in our mentality. We hold to these socially masculine ideas: Go for the goal! Never quit! Hold yourself to an unreasonable standard! Be prettier, sexier, more appealing!  We adjust our self-judgment and our actions to these so-called "norms".