Why did we shrink to begin with?

Hello beautiful soul

First and foremost, let me remind you in case no one told you this week... you are a true work of art.

Period.

I started like that this week because I want to talk about something a little more delicate today.

Something that I think about a lot as a coach and as a woman. Something I have lived. And something that I believe sits at the root of almost everything we are trying to untangle when it comes to women and leadership.

Every time I deliver this in a workshop I think to myself... 'I must make sure that other women really understand this.'

So this is that time. Let's answer that question.

Why did we shrink to begin with?

It starts young. Much younger than most of us realise.

There is a moment — and research suggests it often happens around the age of eight or nine — where something shifts in girls. The openness. The boldness. The willingness to raise a hand without knowing the answer. It starts to quietly disappear. Not all at once. Gradually. Buried under an avalanche of biological and cultural signals telling us to be careful, to be perfect, to avoid risk at all possible costs.

We are taught — not in words, but in looks and corrections and the subtle withdrawal of approval — that our instincts cannot be fully trusted.

By our teenage years we have already learned that many things about us are wrong.

Our periods become our dirty little secret every month.

Our bodies become subject to public scrutiny, inside and outside of the home. Suddenly we are public property. Comments land from every direction.

"You're losing your baby fat." "Your boobs are coming in."

And we are standing there in the middle of it all just trying to figure out who we are.

I call this time of life the Explorer phase, one of four achetypes we cycle through each month. Our Maiden era. It begins around adolescence and runs through our mid-twenties — the point where our brains actually finish wiring. And most of us arrive at that threshold already carrying a wound we didn't ask for and couldn't name.

The message that we are not enough.

Too smart. Not smart enough. Too thin. Too big. Too loud. Too much. Not enough.

So how do we cope?

Two paths tend to emerge.

1. Full-blown rebellion — burn it all down.
2. Or becoming the Good Girl. Proving our worth. Jumping into motherhood or throwing ourselves into responsibility. Growing up too fast. Earning our place before anyone can question it.

I want to pause here and ask you something.

Which one were you...?

Because hear me when I say this, when she is in balance — when she hasn't yet been told to shrink — the Explorer is magnetic. She is embodied, curious, fearless, full of vitality. She moves through the world with an energy that is almost electric. She is a magician.

But when the wound lands — and for most of us it does — she becomes something else. Performed. Disconnected from her own body. Waiting for someone else to tell her who she is and whether she is allowed to take up space.

That is what the culture does to her. To us.

We absorb all of it. And it compounds over time. Microscopic moments of questioning, of disapproval, of mistrust. 

Here is where a little science matters.

When we experience those moments in the world — the look, the dismissal, the subtle shift in someone's energy towards us — our nervous system registers it as a threat. The amygdala, the brain's threat detection centre, fires. Stress hormones flood the system. And the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for clear thinking, decision making, language, confidence — goes offline. Not metaphorically. Literally offline.

This is the freeze.

You might know it as the moment your mind goes blank when someone questions you in a meeting. The moment you can feel yourself shrinking even as you're trying to hold your ground. The moment the most articulate capable version of you disappears and you're left scrambling to find her.

That is not weakness. That is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. Protecting you from a threat it has learned over years and years of accumulated experience to take seriously.

But when you don't know this is happening, you might start to believe there is something wrong with you, like I did. 

I was in a marriage where I didn't fully understand at the time what my nervous system was navigating. What I know now with the deeper work I've done since is that I was often afraid. Not in a way I could have named then. But in the way that lives in the body. A state of quiet chronic alertness. 

There was a look my husband would get. A kind of detached annoyance. And when I saw it I would freeze. The best part of my brain would go offline. I would watch his face look at me as though I wasn't quite getting it. And I would feel something in me collapse inward — trying to take up less space, trying not to make it worse.

I didn't have language for any of this at the time. I just thought I was failing at something. I just thought I needed to do better. Be better. Be more.

But I wasn't stupid, or faulty or wrong. My body was doing exactly what she was meant to do. Protect me. 

And here is what I want you to know.

Women are not fragile. We are the opposite of fragile. We are the ones who keep things going when everything is falling apart. We hold the most complex emotional labour of organisations, families, relationships and communities — often without a single person noticing. We do not break easily. We are extraordinarily almost unreasonably resilient.

But resilience is not the same as ease.

The question I care about — the question that drives every single thing I do in my work — is not can we withstand it. Of course we can withstand it. We have proven that over and over again.

The question is: can we build lives that don't require us to merely withstand?

Can we create something that actually feels easeful? Vibrant? Spacious? Where we are not perpetually braced for the next look, the next moment of quiet dismissal, the next reminder that someone somewhere doubts us?

And I KNOW we can.

I know we can because I am living it. The woman who drove back into Georgia (where I lived with that husband) a few weeks ago and cheered — she is not the woman who left. She is not braced in the same way. She is not scanning the room for threats in the same way. She has done the work. She is still doing the work. And the life she is building feels more like herself than anything she has known before.

So I want to leave you with a few questions to sit with this week.

When did you learn not to trust yourself? What is your relationship with being enough? What were you like in your Explorer years — how did she dress, how was she different, what made her come alive? And what still brings that energy out in you now?

Because she is still in there. That version of you didn't disappear. She just learned to wait.

This is exactly the work we do inside Women Who Lead. Not just strategy or leadership frameworks — but the deeper unlearning. Tracing back the moments that shaped how we show up. Understanding our nervous systems. Learning to lead not from a place of constant proof and protection but from a place of genuine grounded trust in ourselves.

If you want to EXPLORE whether Women Who Lead is for you, we have a group starting within the next couple of weeks. Book a call with me here. 

You were never the problem.

Rooting for you always

Ruth x