I was raised like a boy. Logic, analysis, math, computation, science, knowledge, language, words were all highlighted at home. I was a closeted empath and artist. I felt everything. I sensed people’s pain. I was constantly expressing myself through creative arts such as dance and drama throughout my educational years. When this shut down to focus more on studies, the conflict drove me to become a highly aggressive teenager and later a borderline alcoholic in my 20’s with a lot of relationship issues (connections with people). Until I got into my 30’s that I realized that I was actually a right-brained person. My years of meditation and mindfulness practice gave my brain the much-needed break to fall back into what it naturally was designed as. I had been forcefully training it to be masculine because it was expected of me. When finally, in the space of being open and non-judgmental during meditation, it had a free run for the first time, like a caged bird being released. Creativity, art, painting, pottery, yoga, tai chi and qualities like patience, wisdom, intuition, empathy, flow, rhythm all poured out like a dam breaking. I truly started to know myself and began finding a new power within me. And today it takes using both hemispheres equally to be balanced. I write with my right hand but drive with my left, I can apply nail paint perfectly with both hands, I have become ambidextrous in the last decade.  I can do right-brained empathy-based work like therapy and coaching and be left-brained logical and highly focussed in business, I can be right-brained and create art and pottery and be left-brained and do the number crunching at work.  Funnily, my younger sister, also raised the same way, is a highly educated and successful scientist and works in Artificial Intelligence. Right-brained. She is also a closeted yet talented and trained pianist, guitarist and singer. I am waiting for the day she turns to that and embraces it fully.

Studies over the last few decades on the feminine and masculine brain have proven that women have the qualities it takes to be successful, to be leaders and be in power positions, artists and scientists equally. We are literally built for it all. Talk about not just taking the cake, but taking the bakery! Not saying that men aren’t. They have to evolve into it. We naturally have it. And we do not use what we have.

What qualities are required to be successful or to be leaders and handle responsibilities with fortitude?

As a woman, you require intuition or gut feeling that supports you to know exactly where you are going, foresight and planning to get there, empathy and connect with people who work with you, expression and language skills to win people over, great decision making ability under pressure, being a good listener and learning your way up. Being successful isn’t about power play. It is about being in power. About knowing what you are naturally and effortlessly great at and being unapologetic about it.

Unfortunately, the way the working world had been structured, people needed to have power play instead of being powerful, empathy has been seen as a weakness, you need to commander instead of being a listener, and do things as they are supposed to be done instead of going with the gut. Over the centuries, more emphasis has been on these qualities as corporate boardrooms used more war strategy than any other skill set. But with this scenario shifting in the last few decades, the rise of the feminine leader or the feminine way of leading and success has created ground-breaking leaders and disruptors around the world and gifted us with more innovation, technology and services in the last 50 years than we had in the last 200.

So, what are these feminine qualities that women have and that men have had to develop?

Let us take a look at the feminine brain that is wired for such success.

• It is known that most women employ the right side of the brain and men, the left side. There are people who engage both and sometimes men engage the right side and women the left a little more. We are referring to the majority for the moment.
• The left-brain functions are analytical, methodical, structures, single-tasking, focussed, computing, is more academic, language/words and logical
• The right brain is more about creativity, arts, intuition, flow, emotions, empathy, connection of things, imagination and rhythm.
• Women’s brains have greater connections between both sides of the brain both through the amygdala and also between the right brain and the body. This makes a woman more likely to make emotion-based intuition from the right side and talk about it through left-brain language, she has a greater capacity to sense stimuli, pain, and health changes in her own body.
• They can problem solve and keep cool due to the smaller developed amygdala which is responsible for anger and aggression. Although the masculine brain has more neurons than the feminine brain, it has lesser connections between these neurons which make him better suited to mechanical and focussed, single-tasking. Whereas the increased interconnectedness of the neurons in the feminine brain makes the woman multi taskers.
• Women’s prefrontal cortex of the brain is 11 times bigger than men’s and matures faster, this area is responsible for long term planning, expression, decision making, and social behaviour all thanks to estrogen which develops this area of the brain.

Conclusion:

Women are more predisposed to empathy and multi-tasking,  intuition is well studied and established as one of her strengths, she engages more parts of her brain during waking hours, she is first to begin meeting deadlines and prefers finishing in time rather than complete under last-minute pressure and panic, her brain is wired for speed and accuracy that is if she decides to use it, she expresses herself and her emotions better and therefore creates deeper connections with people, the memory area of the brain, the hippocampus is larger and conveys in words to the auditory cortex so she is better at learning, evolving, listening and languages. Women’s brains are designed for collaboration/connection, intuition, learning, planning/strategy, more controlling of impulses, and communication.

It is truly a wonder why more women are not successful?

This can be broken down simply. There aren’t as many successful women and enough women leaders in the world is because of a certain structure that exists in place that emphasizes a different set of qualities needed to be successful or be a leader.

With a breaking of stereotypes in the last few decades, there are way more women business owners in the world today than before, more women as leaders than we ever had and women in political and powerful positions in the last 30 years than ever before. The coming apart of the structure where the woman is made to feel ashamed for having these naturally amazing qualities and is now nurtured for having them is making a massive difference. We still have many women who feel shame and guilt for being emotional and see it as a bad thing or suppress their natural intuition because they don’t have a college or Ph.D. degree and feel less than or feel burdened with the responsibility of taking care of home and family as it is what the structure expects of them.

Unless women know and see that these brilliant qualities are actually her superpowers and it’s what sets her apart to be successful, she will not choose it. Whether people around her are willing to give her the permission or not, she needs to give it to herself. It has been studied and published that having your feminine brain imprisoned by the left brain and suppression of these natural qualities left brain of women have often led to symptoms like depression, ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), Melancholy, Anxiety and Panic, Feelings of Apathy and worst-case suicidal tendencies or physical illnesses. Thus, we can conclude that following your intuition is good for your health, following your natural impulses to lead and be successful is great for your mental and physical health in the long run, and being successful what you desire to do naturally makes you a better contributive member of society.

Can you rewire your brain? Yes. It requires disciple and undertaking activities and thought forms that support the brain in reconnecting differently. To be yourself, you need to bring yourself to a point of complete acceptance of the way your brain is currently wired. Then to start making simple changes to it and gear it up for greater success. Emotional barriers, tasks, choices, decisions all influence and impact our brains.

The 3 primary blocks that women need to get past are shame, isolation and feeling less than. And these are always in comparison to a false greater image of what is considered important in the world. When a woman dives within herself and discovers her natural gifts and talents, she feels powerful for the first time in her life. It gives her brain a chance to light up more and with the qualities that being right-brained bring her, it becomes the guiding force to her success. She may need to borrow what the left brain does from time to time and allow her to perhaps use both sides as and when required. Artists, Leaders, Revolutionaries, Disruptors, Innovators, Geniuses are mostly right-brained or function from both hemispheres. Having to function only from the left brain makes us almost robotic. And with the women’s both hemispheres constantly talking to each other, there is no limit to what can be created and achieved.

Love,
Aditi Nirvaan