The article below is excerpted from the eye-opening keynote on Feminine Power Claire Zammit gave at Emerging Women Live 2013, and from my Grace & Fire podcast with her before the event. Claire is the co-creator of the Feminine Power training courses for women and co-leads a thriving learning community of hundreds of thousands of women throughout the world. She is a gifted and highly trained specialist in transformative education that gives her audience access to life-altering shifts, leading to embodied and lasting change. Read on to find out her definition of Feminine Power and why we all need it to make our destiny a reality.
“Masculine power is the power to create those things we can control and predict. Feminine power is the power to create those things that we can’t control.”
CP: Six years ago, you made the decision to start trusting yourself and your abilities so that you could thrive in life. How did that decision come about?
CZ: I spent years of my life waiting to be “discovered.” I always felt like something was going to happen, or should happen, that was going to enable me to become all that I knew I could be. And I was very sad and confused when those opportunities never came.
And so late one night, by candlelight, I prayed for guidance. I knew I couldn’t just skip over this and continue on the course that I was on, and I didn’t know the answer, but I knew I needed to make a commitment to find out. And so, in the darkest hour of that dark night, I just surrendered, open, and I said, “Help, universe,” even though I doubted anybody was there listening.
And I had a very deep and powerful experience. It was almost like a mystical experience where I felt an inner voice say to me, “Claire, you have to have faith in yourself. And you have to believe that all of life is organizing around your success. Even though you don’t have any evidence for it, and even though you don’t know what to do, begin to make choices and take actions in your life aligned with a sense of faith.”
“You have to believe that all of life is organizing around your success.”
So I went to sleep with that thought, and I woke up the next morning and I said, “Okay, what would I do if I really believed in myself and I believed that life was organizing around my success?” And immediately I had access to a very deep intuition that said, “Go and get an office space.”
It was kind of crazy because I’d just moved to LA from Australia, and I didn’t really know anyone, and I had given up my coaching practice 5 years earlier. But with my last $1,000, I went and I got an office space. And that’s how I met the woman who became a close colleague of mine, Katherine Woodward, and within a year we started teaching programs and creating courses together. And I met my husband and soulmate, Craig Hamilton, and the relationship that we share together is beyond anything I could have imagined.
I’m really so honored and grateful to say that having created a foundation of success in my own life, I began to fulfill on that dream of really standing for the global empowerment of women and girls. I wake up and I feel like I need to pinch myself because this outer life reflects the deeper possibilities that I always sensed, but I couldn’t quite see how to get there.
CP: Wow. So what happened?
CZ: I began to create my life from Feminine Power, and it really changed everything. And I know it can change everything for other women as well.
How many women in their clearest moments sense that they have gifts and talents that the world has never seen before and will never see again after they’re gone. And that even that they have a critical role to play in shaping the future of our world. And how many know exactly what that’s going to look like?
CP: There’s a big gap.
CZ: Yes, and this is significant. This yearning that’s waking up inside of us, it’s not just a desire to accomplish – to have a nice house, to have a nice car, to get married. What’s waking up inside of us is an impulse to actualize our higher creative potentials in service to something larger than ourselves.
“What’s waking up inside of us is an impulse to actualize our higher creative potentials in service to something larger than ourselves.”
We don’t just want to have the relationship our parents had, we want to have the experience of intimacy that’s beyond that. We don’t just want to get a job, we want to express who we are and we want to develop our creativity and get it out of us in a way that impacts others.
We don’t just want to get more status or have more stuff. We want to become ourselves and create a life that reflects who we truly are. What we’re yearning for is our destiny: the greatest possibility of who we are in service to something bigger than ourselves. And the nature of destiny is that we don’t know what it looks like in advance, so it’s very hard to create a strategic plan to get there, or even put it on a vision board to be able to manifest.
So the system of power that we’ve been mastering as women over the last 50 years is actually a masculine system of power. It’s a power system that based on logical and linear thinking. So if you have a goal that’s predictable or controllable – you want to build a house, get a college degree – then the masculine power system is the way to go. The problem is, we’re no longer yearning to just accomplish goals. What we’re pregnant with are these higher possibilities.
We can’t get there with just a power system that’s based on analysis and logic. We need to have a power system that based on a much more intuitive, receptive, co-creative and feminine system. Masculine power is the power to create those things we can control and predict. Feminine power is the power to create those things that we can’t control.
“We need to have a power system that based on a much more intuitive, receptive, co-creative and feminine system.”
CP:When you’re in a room with other women and see that maybe another woman is not living from a place of Feminine Power, do you reach forward and try and draw her out?
CZ: Well, that’s a great question. In our course, we have a whole new set of shared agreements that we teach about creating a culture of empowerment between women. And the point in which you can really partner to stand with someone and for someone is when they step forward in self-responsibility.
We can’t go into rescuing if that woman hasn’t yet said, “I’m committed to realizing the greatest possibility of who I am. And I’m standing to be responsible, to see myself as a source of my experience up until that point. And I am open to receiving support.” I think a woman has to step into that for the support to become really conscious and powerful and potent.
“I think a woman has to step into that for the support to become really conscious and powerful and potent.”
I think generally speaking, we want to be finding ways to extend that invitation to women to actually step forth into that level of commitment, to stand for their own greatness. So I think rather than saying “Oh, I see you,” we want to mirror the possibilities. I think it’s, in many ways, so true. We want to mirror the possibilities. We want to reflect opportunities everywhere we go. We want to see and relate to the most powerful version of others.
And I think more than anything I want to encourage women to take that stand for themselves as a foundation for them being able to join other women in partnership, to be able to feed each other power. I think you can create a culture of empowerment between women when everyone’s stepping forward in self-responsibility as the price of admission for that.
“We want to mirror the possibilities. We want to reflect opportunities everywhere we go. We want to see and relate to the most powerful version of others.”
To hear more from the amazing Claire Zammit, don’t miss her free webinar The Three Keys to Feminine Power on May 14th. Read more about what you will learn HERE. You can also see her in New York City, where we are so honored to have her back as a keynote speaker at Emerging Women Live 2014 in October.
About Emerging Women Live 2014:
Emerging Women Live aims to support and propel the emerging movement of women who are stepping up and changing the world. #EWLive14 is a one of a kind conference that helps women to harness the power of the feminine, rock the business world, and create a new paradigm for success. Join us in NYC for a truly extraordinary, one-of-a-kind event!
