Standing In Your Power

Performing strength is exhausting. Real power is quiet, certain, and almost always built in private.

There is a version of strength that looks impressive from the outside and is completely hollow on the inside.

I lived there for a long time.

I was capable, competent, and always available. I delivered results, met deadlines, absorbed pressure, and kept moving no matter what was happening beneath the surface. People described me as strong, and I accepted that description because I did not yet know the difference between performing strength and actually having it.

Performing strength is exhausting. It requires you to constantly manage how you appear rather than who you actually are. It means saying yes when you mean no. It means tolerating behavior that diminishes you because confronting it feels like weakness. It means shrinking your needs to fit the comfort of people who benefit from you staying small.

Real power is different.

Real power is quiet. It does not need to announce itself or defend itself or prove itself to anyone. It simply knows. It knows what it will and will not accept. It knows where its value lies and does not negotiate that value downward for the sake of someone else’s comfort. It acts from clarity rather than from fear. It holds boundaries not as punishment but as self respect.

Most of the women I work with are not lacking power. They are buried under the weight of carrying everything for everyone.

A woman today is rarely just one thing. She is often a business owner, a leader, an employee, a wife, a mother, a daughter caring for aging parents, a friend holding other friends together, and the person who remembers everyone’s birthday. She holds the calendar, the dinner plan, the emotional temperature of the household, and the to-do list nobody else can see.

She is told she should ask for help, and then no one is listening when she does. She is told to lean in, and then mocked for being controlling. She is told her intuition is too much, her ambition is unbecoming, her grief is taking too long, her body is failing her on a schedule no one consulted her about.

And still, she is expected to perform strength.

Standing in your power inside that life is not the same thing as quitting it. Most of us cannot quit it. The kids still need to eat. The mortgage still needs to be paid. The aging mother still needs the call returned. Standing in your power inside a life that is asking everything of you means something more difficult and more important. It means recognizing that the cost of being everything to everyone is your actual self.

Real power, for a woman today, looks like this. Saying no to the meeting that should have been an email. Saying no to the family dynamic that has not served you in twenty years. Saying yes to the rest you have not allowed yourself. Trusting the gut feeling about a person, a situation, a decision, even when nobody around you sees what you see.

It also looks like this. Believing the women who came before you. Listening to the women coming up behind you. Standing beside the women who have lived something unspeakable and finally said it out loud. There is power in numbers. There is also pain, anxiety, fear, and trauma in those numbers. Both are true. The strength is real. The cost was real too.

I think about this often. Our matriarchs paved a road that did not exist before them, and most of them did it without recognition or rest. Our young women are inheriting both the freedom they earned and the unfinished work that came with it. The women in the middle of life right now, the ones I write for and work with, are the bridge between those two generations. We are carrying our mothers’ legacy and shaping what our daughters will inherit, often at the same time, on the same day, in the same hour.

That is not a small job.

Standing in your power is a one woman job. But it does not mean you do it alone. The women who come into a Clarity Call with me are not weak. They are tired. They have been holding so much for so long that they have forgotten the difference between the load and themselves. The work is not to teach them strength. They already have it. The work is to help them remember it, name it, and stop apologizing for taking up the space they are entitled to.

You were not put here to make yourself disappear so other people could be comfortable.

You were put here to show up fully. All of you. Exactly as you are.

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If you have been performing strength and you are tired of it, that is exactly where a Clarity Call starts.

Book a Clarity Call

There is no rush. You do not have to be ready today. Just stay.

Always, Lorri