Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, and Amazon.

In today’s episode, we’re talking about marrying your feminine and masculine energies together, why we’ve always married energetics and strategy together in business, the relevance of having both in your life and business, and how to integrate both into your life and business.

Prepare for a perspective shift to harmonize the masculine and the feminine in your life and business and if you’d like to know how to do this in your 2024 annual planning, listen to episode 8 first.   

Why we’ve always married energetics (feminine) and strategy (masculine) together 

I’ve always been an energetics girlie. If you haven’t listened to our latest podcast about annual planning, episode 8, then play it next because we’ll teach you how to annual plan in a way that most business consultants and coaches won’t.

Our ethos is centered around holistic harmony in life and business; we want you to be able to integrate the input and the output of your life. We see so many female founders rise to the top of their game in business, breathless, lifeless, sick, chronically overwhelmed, and unable to keep a practice of being IN their lives as much as they are in their businesses.

That results in pain…

The pain of what we all hear as what seems like business folklore

• That it’s “lonely at the top”
• That divorces, broken relationships, and broken friendships are the usual
• That you’ll be stabbed in the back by those you trust the most 
• That it’ll be a hustle, an uphill battle constantly, and that easy is never the way

Some experience a broken spirit, a body chronically in pain, and burnout has been at an all time high… being one of the most searched keywords on Google in 2022. 

This. Is. Why. We. Marry. Energetics. And. Strategy.

As a female founder, seeking to fully push forward in strategy only is what keeps us in this loop of pain. 

If you have all of the masculine structures in your business – think service suite, client experience, tools and systems, scheduling, the logical approach to the winning moves – without the feminine structures in your business – think intuition, BEING in your life and in your body and OUT of your analytical, logical mind, daydreaming and creating space to be in a flow space through aligned physical movement, or long showers and those lightbulb moments – then you’re missing one half of the yourself in every moment of your life. 

A quick story for you as we continue through the differences between the two approaches – both live inside of you, by the way, you’re not a feminine leader OR a masculine leader… you’re both, always… 

Picture this, it’s May 31st, 2023 and I’m celebrating the day that I left my startup job to officially pursue The Cheetah Company full time after building it for several months BTS on top of my day job, and I get a call that no one should ever get.

My husband called to say that my brother-in-law isn’t picking up his phone and no one’s seen him at work for days and both of his cars are in the driveway of his Florida home and we’re 500 miles away. My brother-in-law had passed away that weekend and that day was the day that I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get back up and do business as usual. I couldn’t even fathom when I would return to work truly as myself. I returned to work a few weeks later a shell of me, leveraging my corporate skills to put on a face to serve while quietly having breakdowns between meetings. 

We had a full roster of clients around the globe throughout our service suite and though we were in the midst of restructuring the business suite for more space, profit, power, and purpose than ever, we weren’t set to do so until the winter of 2023. 

As I walked through months of a grief journey, leveraging every tool and space possible to feel and heal, I recognized that though the company was already set up in a way that was powerful for our clientele… There were major energy leaks and drains for me.

And I began the journey of evaluating where I needed more masculine structures and more feminine structures to support my goal of truly running The Cheetah Company, my personal brand, and The House of Harmony in a way that prioritized feminine leadership taking the driver’s seat.

The difference between the masculine and feminine (doing versus being, logic versus intuition)

Masculine energy is most often characterized by DOING, achieving and is rooted in logic, reason, and systematic structure that has always worked. 

The feminine is most often characterized by BEING, with a hand in intuition, oriented towards receiving, allowing, ideating, creating, and being led by the gut instinct to move in a way that hasn’t been done before or isn’t the status quo. 

Bringing these energies into balance is how we can experience a greater sense of harmony and fulfillment in our lives beyond.

If you consider your business structures right now, you’ll see your ability to create masculine structures.

When I think of the masculine, I think of our systems that we can rely on in our businesses. I think of schedules, structures, the crafted client experience that’s documented to a T, the sales vehicles that are prepped and ready so our content and creations can be fluid, fun, experimental and fresh while leading to the structure that the client will be served with. I think of, in a nature-focused way, of riverbanks holding the structure for the water to flow within it. I think of masculine energy as the anchor to our businesses and to our lives. 

When I think of the feminine, I think of the white space we create in our calendars to ideate more, to create what I call a sensory experience for ourselves as CEOs to step into the Creative Director’s Chair and truly PLAY. I think of the content creation that influences us to feel like we’re in flow with our ideal clients, just having a conversation at a Parisian cafe without a timestable. I think of our ability to settle down with ourselves, close our eyes, and envision the future that we desire to create for ourselves and support our clients through. I think of our gut instincts that just know that to guide our brands and missions where they’ve never gone before, we will have to follow our intuition and know that on the other side of a risk is the reward of listening to our inner mentor and following our internal compass. 

When I think of most of our clients, I think of their powerful capability to move between the feminine and masculine in their lives and businesses. I think of their ability to easily shift from doing mode to being mode. Which leads us to our next point… 

The relevance between the two 

A little off cuff here, but I can’t see a reason why we’d only want strategy. I know a lot of entrepreneurs can get hung up on just “give me the strategy”, but I’ve not related to that in the three businesses I’ve owned because I do FEEL a lot. I’m a Leo Sun, Pisces Moon, and Cancer Rising in astrology… I’m literally SWIMMING in emotions while having the fire of a sun sign and it’s a whole mood, but as a projector in Human Design I’m always looking for ways to make things efficient, structured, and systematic. 

This means I’m constantly pulling on the feminine energetics that just naturally exist in me (every person, by the way, regardless of gender has masculine and feminine aspects to themselves) because Pisces and Cancers are out here just fully living in the spectrum of their emotions and influencing others to key back into their emotional bodies more often to truly feel connected to their physical bodies.

But as a Projector, I’m constantly in my masculine creating structures our brands, our renovation, alongside our clients for their brand portfolios… and that means that I’m going to have to master my own energetics again and again to be able to slip and shift from masculine to feminine and feminine to masculine.

Consider taking a peek at your astrology, human design, and the usual leadership development tools that we all used in our corporate lives like Clifton Strengths, DISC, MBTI, MDA, Gallap, and Ennegram. 

The relevance between the two: when you prioritize living only in one mode, most often in the masculine since our societal structures are based around the hyper-functionality of “doing”, you’re going to literally burn out one side of you when you have this other space, the feminine, the tap into so you’re not constantly going, doing, acting, working, hustling, etc. 

There’s a place for output in the masculine, but not without the input of feminine.

Practices to integrate masculine and feminine in your business 

I’m really going to go ahead and assume that you have the masculine side covered because most of our communities do; they know how to do, how to get something going, how to check off the to-do list until the midnight oil is burning too hot, so, we’re going to focus on integrating your feminine into the masculine structures you already have.

The only caveat here is that I do want you to look at your masculine structures and ideate with your feminine by taking some time at a cutey coffee shop if possible to just get into a new environment (something that always helps me) to re-design and renovate the way you’re currently approaching life and business. 

Here’s what to look at on your coffee shop date:

1. Are my current business structures set up to allow for space in-between meetings and in-between creating?
2. Do I regularly have to strategy switch – moving from meeting to meeting then content creation then admin then and then and then? Could there be a better structure for batching certain activities together to lower strategy-switching? 
3. At the end of the week, do I feel successful and grateful for the work I’m doing or do I feel drained and constantly overwhelmed with the next project or current timeline and schedules? 

Feel free to tag us on your coffee shop date; it would literally make Team Cheetah’s whole day. We love creating this show for you, but it can get lonely when we can’t see you – we love being in connection and conversation with you most! 

To integrate practices to be in your feminine sans shame, guilt, or pressure, try a few of these:

1. Literally laugh more; I used to wonder why I felt like a good funny video or a comedy at the end of a long week would put me at such ease and it’s because laughter does more for our bodies than I can even try to put into this one episode. We could have a whole series on laughter, truly, and it would be hella on brand. Set a date with your girlfriends a few times a month (in person or online) to just connect. I used to constantly be listening to true crime via podcasts or with shows on after work and it brought my energy down so much. I’ve noticed such an energetic change since fully ditching it – which I’ve been actively doing for years as someone who once wanted to be a lawyer and investigative journalist. 
2. Practice sharing your feelings, getting vulnerable, and asking for help. This will change your feminine from the inside out, but more than that, it’ll allow you to start creating new neural pathways that tell you it’s safe to receive and be supported which changes everything, but especially changes you as you welcome in team members, increase your client roster, etc. And it’s why masterminds, mini-minds, group programs, and memberships work so well for entrepreneurs… we need spaces to share our vulnerability and hardships, to be received and embraced, and to have a place where we’re held without the vulnerabilities being an Instagram post.
3. Create more white space in your calendar when you’re seeking to create for the business. Ideating is the entrepreneur’s childhood version of daydreaming. We’re literally supposed to daydream and envision new ways to make the world better and to move society forward in a positive way. When we create a day of the week where we’re not “doing” in the business, we create space for new ideas to populate that we can then integrate with the masculine to set a plan and get to action on bringing them to fruition. 
4. Allow your intuition to guide you. Similar to creating white space, we want you to listen to your inner mentor more often than not. There’s so much to be gained from education, but we’re in the age of information and people are overwhelmed with voices outside of them. Let yourself be connected to your inner mentor; create times of stillness in nature, moments in the morning as you rise to connect with your circandian rhythms by getting outside or near a brightly lit window as you intentionally wake-up without rush and hustle. Meditate, stare off into the distance, hike, ecstatic dance, stretch and and move air in and out of your lungs with a grateful moan.
5. Embrace your sensuality. I could go on and on about this as a survivor of DV/SA, but I’ll just note here that I’ve noticed I get into hyperdrive and hyper-functionality when I’m not connecting to my sensuality. I’ll let you decide what that looks like for you, but our DMs are always open to talk about anything and everything.  

Resources:

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, and Amazon.

Bio:

Ashleigh Henry has been in marketing, sales, and leadership positions for the last decade and it was exhilarating for Ashleigh to climb the retail, corporate, higher education, and start-up ladder holding positions such as Marketing Strategist, Copywriter, Social Media Strategist, Manager, Editor, Co-Editor…until it wasn’t. Alongside her degree, Ashleigh decided to bring all of her experience into the freelancing world until it became clear that she didn’t just want to pay the bills – she wanted to create a company that was foundationally built on cheetah print, legacy-minded marketing, and sexy sales structures that could stand the test of trend and time. The Cheetah Company, founded by Ashleigh, does this for female entrepreneurs through their education, coaching, and consulting services. Learn more about Ashleigh here.