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".

You would think that being "nice" was a good thing!

When a "Good Girl" - a woman who follows the rules even when the rules are wrong and stop her from succeeding - takes being nice as her standard as she goes onto the Sales Field to play the Sales Game, she is bound to fail.

She might think it "rude" or "pushy" to ask for the sale. She is bound to lack the creative ways she could use to unlock the doors that the prospective customer could walk through, wallet open. She thinks that being assertive in sales might just be about manipulation, and that leaves her feeling conflicted because she knows that "manipulation" and "nice" just don't go together. So she goes into charm and niceness as deeply as she can. 

And it just doesn't get the job done.

The Fundraiser misses her sales opportunity. The Saleswoman uses niceness to excess and misses, sometimes entirely, the benefits of service through assertiveness and strength. 

It's clearly well beyond time to jailbreak through that "niceness" moniker and taste the free air of successful sales by seeing everything about it through a service and caring lens uninhibited by personal disempowerment.

So, what can the Good Girl do? What should she know that she doesn't know? How can she get the sale without jettisoning her inherent sense of service, and care for others?

I was a young and naive 16 years old when my mother's friend, Dilly (short for Millard), gave me one day of work at his film company.

It was 1973 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and life was far simpler. But for me, I was primed to approach this mission of living up to parental and parental friend's expectations like a soldier going to war. I had to prove that I was good, and good enough, and that I would be approved of and that I could do what was essentially my very first day of my very first job, short-lived though it would be.

I knew how to type faster than the wind, but I didn't know how to send an overnight package. I had never had to do so. But this shocked Dilly. I don't know if he thought I was supposed to come in genetically predisposed to know how to be a secretary, but his shock felt frightening to me. I couldn't just look at him and say, "No, I don't. Why don't you show me?" I felt like a failure. Hard on myself? You bet! WAY too hard on myself. Insanely so. 

After I had finished the day - literally sweating while sitting at the typewriter (yes, children, there WERE no personal computers) - Dilly called my mother and, understandably perplexed, asked her why I was so nervous! ​

​This was courage. Unadulterated courage.

And it was so. very. much. MORE.

Her emotional vulnerability plus strength.
Her downloading to us of core emotional information, through her high simplicity.
Her refusal to be goaded into reactivity or defensiveness.
Her graciousness under the most extreme pressure.
To say I am a fan is to put it ridiculously mildly. But there was so much meta information happening here that all I can say is: Listen up! We have been given some p o w e r f u l lessons and information here. So, yeah, that's what I'm gonna say: LISTEN UP!

Let's just get this out here, right out front: We  women are not allowed to be angry.

It scares the men.

And when they're scared, we get frightened too! Frightened that the we will be seen as unlikeable, unattractive, unlovable. Frightened that now we are "too masculine." Frightened that the reaction could be physically more intimidating. Frightened ​because we don't know how to handle it ourselves, so we

Why can't you just "kick the good girl to the curb" easily?

​You have worked diligently to become stronger, more self-confident, less self-doubting, more self-accepting and authentic. ​