Hello beautiful soul
This feels both ridiculously obvious and quietly radical to say, but the real flex for women isn’t just learning to love ourselves.
It’s learning to really love WOMAN.
Stay with me on this.
Because self-love is everywhere right now. And yes, it matters. A LOT. We need to stop abandoning ourselves, stop shrinking ourselves, stop apologising for our existence.
(heck, we need to make our whole lives feel like a whole delicious mood)
But I don’t think that’s the whole story anymore.
Because I don't think you can reeeeeeeeeally love yourself truly, madly, deeply and still not love WOMAN.
And I am saying like that because of course we love women, but I believe we are socialised to not love the concept of WOMAN. To see the concept as troublesome and somehow less than a man, on a deep cellular level. For example:
- You can believe in your own worth and still feel uneasy around the collective power of the feminine.
- You can feel confident individually and still carry internalised beliefs that woman — the messy, cyclical, emotional, intuitive reality of who we are — is somehow wrong.
And I think that’s the deeper wound.
Not that we don’t love ourselves.
But that we were taught, quietly and consistently, not to revere WOMAN.
Our culture doesn’t just neglect reverence for women — it actively trains us away from it.
We learn to distrust softness.
We learn to minimise intuition.
We learn to view emotion as instability.
We learn that changeability equals unreliability.
And slowly, without noticing, we become complicit in systems that make us edit ourselves to belong.
I can see this pattern clearly when I look back at my own life.
I was born in the north of England, and there was something about that early sense of lineage and the many cultural identities of the north that felt grounding, even if I didn’t have the language for it at the time.
Then we moved.
And when we moved to Bristol, I became fascinated by other cultures. Not from a place of distance, but from a place of longing.
They seemed to have something I felt I was missing.
Belonging.
Identity.
A clear sense of who you were within a shared story.
Looking back now, I realise I wasn’t just curious.
I was searching.
Because somewhere along the way, I had started to believe that something about me was wrong.
And when you believe that — even subtly — you start looking for identities that feel safer. Stronger. More acceptable.
You start becoming less of who you are and more of who you think you need to be.
And that is where so many women lose themselves.
Not through one dramatic moment.
But through a thousand small adaptations.
We watch leadership models that feel misaligned.
We watch women contort themselves to survive.
We watch people rise who don’t necessarily embody the values we hold.
And instead of questioning the system, we question ourselves.
Maybe I’m too much.
Maybe I’m not enough.
Maybe I need to be different.
But what if the real work isn’t becoming different.
What if it’s returning to reverence.
Because WOMAN — in all her difference — is not a problem to solve.
Our emotional intelligence isn’t weakness.
Our relational depth isn’t inefficiency.
Our cyclical nature isn’t inconsistency.
These are forms of intelligence the world desperately needs.
Women and men are different.
Not better. Not worse. Different.
And our magic lives in that difference.
Not in pretending to be men.
Not in rejecting what makes us women.
But in dancing inside what is uniquely ours.
I think a lot of women are still trying to love themselves while quietly distancing themselves from WOMAN.
Trying to be the exception.
Trying to prove they’re not like “other women”.
And honestly — I understand why.
We’ve been shown distorted reflections for a long time.
But maybe the deeper invitation now is this:
Not just self-love. Collective reverence.
Not just confidence. Recognition.
Because when we start to really love WOMAN — ourselves, each other, the fullness of our nature — something shifts.
We stop chasing approval from systems that were never built to recognise us fully.
We stop putting others on pedestals.
We remember that we were never less.
Just different.
And that difference has been magic all along.
If this resonates, two invitations for you:
The final days of early bird pricing for Women Who Lead are here. If you’ve been feeling the pull toward leading more fully as yourself, this is the moment to explore stepping in. Hit reply and let's talk.
Rooting for you always
Ruth x
Ps. If you want to fall in love a little more with WOMAN, check out my free microtraining: Lead with your cyclicality, not against it.
This will give you everything you need to start to be in a little more reverence to WOMAN, and is the foundation of the work we do in Women Who Lead together.
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