Transcript
00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach, ritualist, and all-around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients.
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I created the Coaching Revolution Podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
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so that you can do even better client work and group work, grow your business organically, and know that you’re making a real difference in the world.
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This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do, and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts.
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Let’s get started.
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Okay, today’s episode is a biggie.
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It’s all about how women react and respond to other women and some things you need to know about this so that you can hold and lead groups and retreats where women can come together.
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And that’s whether you’re leading groups of all women or different genders.
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but you want to know how to hold and lead groups where women can come together and feel safe and vulnerable and happy to be part of the group.
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The topic of women reacting and responding to other women might also be showing up for you in business and in your marketing if you are a woman listening to this episode.
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And so we’re going to lightly touch
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on some business and marketing pieces around this as well.
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But real quick, before we get started, I wanted to remind you that in December, I’m hosting an in-person training here in Charlotte, North Carolina called Into the Depths.
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And it’s all about learning how to become the best of the best when it comes to facilitating and leading groups and retreats and circles and rituals and experiential transformational work.
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Over 4 days in person, we go very deep and I not only teach you, but I also model for you step by step by step.
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the skills that you need in order to lead groups where change is palpable, where there is authenticity and vulnerability, where learning is happening on multiple levels, where tears are shed in the best of ways, and where your participants emerge
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at the end of the event or the program, and they say, oh my God, that was one of the best experiences I have ever had.
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How did she do that?
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I’ll also teach you inside of Into the Depths how to create your programming and your curriculum, how to create experiential exercises that go deep and create breakthroughs.
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and how to develop your unique thought leadership.
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And of course, for those of you that need some support in marketing your program, you get some of that inside of Into the Depths as well.
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Into the Depths is one of my favorite, favorite things that I offer.
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I very rarely offer standalone retreats, and this is the place to do it.
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And it’s also one of my trainings that I don’t get to offer very often anymore, because the truth is I have too many offerings.
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So really, I used to offer it every year, but since COVID, I’ve only offered it once every three-ish years.
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It’s an intimate group.
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We go very deep.
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You’ve got a lot of access to me.
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You do a lot of your own deep inner work.
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And it is truly an experience that you will always remember, not just for your facilitation skills, but that you’ll always remember for yourself.
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There’s a special rate on Into the Depths for a few more days only.
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So if you’ve had your eye on it, now is the time to get in.
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I’ll drop the link in the show notes.
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And also, if you want to have a conversation about it, please get in touch.
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I’m happy to connect on it.
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OK.
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So let’s get into this.
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And I want to start with a story.
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So in middle school, there was a group of girls that I called the clique.
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And the girls in the clique, they always seemed to be laughing, to be in the know.
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They also happened to have the best clothing.
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This was the 80s.
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And these girls all had Ked sneakers and many different Champion sweatshirts in lots of different colors.
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And by contrast, my parents were immigrants.
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They were always looking for deals.
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And so I never had real Ked sneakers.
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I had only fake ones, and I had just one Champion sweatshirt.
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It was a hand-me-down, so it wasn’t even mine originally.
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Anyway, these girls in the clique, they generally gave off the feeling that not only were they cooler than everyone else, but that you could not penetrate their circle.
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There was no room for anyone else.
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No outsiders allowed.
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And all outsiders,
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were definitely not good enough for them or cool enough for them.
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And being the sensitive kid that I was, all of this really deeply affected me.
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I didn’t actually even know if I liked the girls in the clique, because the truth is I didn’t even really know them.
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But nonetheless, I wanted to be their friend.
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Even more than wanting to be their friend, I wanted to really be part of the group.
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I longed to belong, to be seen, and I wanted to be liked and appreciated by these girls that I just assumed were better than me.
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And even though I had
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a nice amount of friends.
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I had a lot of friends.
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I really liked my friends.
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This loomed so large in my psyche that not being part of this clique of this group of girls, it felt to me like a massive rejection, as well as a judgment on my value and my self-worth.
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Now, as I moved into high school and then into college, while I was never part, exactly of the popular kids crowd, I had a lot of different friends.
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I tended to run with the out-of-the-box people, the people who were just kind of slightly weird in very interesting ways, just like I was.
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And through high school and then into college, I did slowly evolve to feel proud of how I was my own unique person and how even though my various groups of friends weren’t the most popular or in kids, I knew that they were real, that they were authentic, that they were loving, and that they were truly my people.
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And that felt really good.
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But that being said, there always lingered an itsy-bitsy need inside of me to be seen and loved by those women who I encountered in different places in my life, who seemed to be in exclusive groups, right, in cliques of their own.
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Women who ran in super tight circles, who seemed to know each other very well.
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And somehow those cliques seemed cooler, happier, more successful than me.
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And throughout my life, these cliques, for me, were always women.
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This was about sisterhood.
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And
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It was about the pain or the fear of being excluded from a special sisterhood in one way or another.
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I’m sharing all of this because I know I’m not alone in this phenomenon.
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And sometimes this phenomenon is called the sister wound.
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It’s the worrying about being in groups of women and not belonging.
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It’s the worrying about being judged by other women or not being liked by other women.
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Or sometimes the sister wound can show up as feeling jealous of other women or worrying that other women are jealous of you.
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Now, of course, the sister wound comes from many different reasons.
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Part of it is just simply the survival need to belong, right?
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We’re all wired this way.
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But that being said,
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I also believe and know that the sister wound is active and gets activated because of how women have been pitted against each other for millennia, because of how patriarchal culture has ensured that women
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may not always get along because patriarchal culture knows what can happen when women really come together fully.
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Change is bound to happen, right?
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When that does.
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And of course, we all, you know, the sister wound, it comes from culture, but we’ve all had personal
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incidents, like my incident with the click, or we’ve been bullied by someone, or our birth sister was preferred in the family.
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She was clearly the favorite.
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Or we’ve had a best friend who’s stabbed us in the back, or we’ve known that other women have been talking about us
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behind their backs.
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This is– a little bit of this is where the cultural intersects with the personal, meaning that, yes, these personal incidents happen on their own, but they also happen because of this cultural sense of women can’t trust other women or women being pitted
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against each other.
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And this is so big in our cultural psyche.
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This is why so many teenage movies about girls being mean to each other, even the movie Mean Girls, resonate so deeply, and not only for high school age people, right?
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For adults as well.
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And of course, I do believe in culture.
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We have
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come such a long way with all of this and that will continue to do so.
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But it is a thing.
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It still is a thing.
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And the sister wound can run really deep.
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And even for someone like me, and this may be you as well, who has done so much work on the wound over the years, even for someone like me, I’m confident in myself.
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I generally feel good enough and in my power.
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I have incredible, incredible relationships with women and groups of women.
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I feel like I belong.
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I know I’m loved.
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I know I’m appreciated by many of the women in my life.
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Even with all of that, the sister wound can still creep in for me every now and again.
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Sometimes I’ll walk into a party or a community social event where there’s a lot of people and I maybe I don’t know a lot of the people in the room.
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And then all of a sudden I kind of get that fear of, will these women here accept me?
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Will they welcome me in?
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It seems like they know each other so well.
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Will they be open to knowing me?
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Even recently, I went to a lecture and
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I stepped into a room.
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It happened to be– it was interesting.
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The professor was male, but all of the students in the room were female.
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And I stepped into this room of women.
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I knew a couple of them vaguely, but I didn’t really know anybody very well.
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But it seemed like all of these women knew each other so well.
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And I sat down in there, and while I didn’t feel as unsure of myself as I did in middle school with the original clique, there were definitely some quiet whispers for sure around, will I be liked here?
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Will they think I’m this?
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Will they think I’m that?
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And the sister wound can even show up sometimes
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inside of my business, less and less these days, but still it does.
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So for example, a number of years ago, I was organizing a very big joint venture project.
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And I was inviting business colleagues to collaborate with me to be part of the project.
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And some of these women that I was inviting to collaborate with me were women that I knew well, and I knew they would be happy to collaborate with me.
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And then there were some other women that I knew, but I didn’t know very well.
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And my perception of them was that they were all friends.
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They were part of the cool girls club of coaches.
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And I wasn’t part of it.
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And I noticed as I was organizing this project that the fear of rejection started boiling up inside of me, that I felt like I needed to impress these women.
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I wondered if they would accept me.
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I really wanted to be part of the Cool Girls club of coaches.
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I always feel like I’m not in whatever the club, the clique, right?
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So that was palpable, you know, and luckily it didn’t hold me back from organizing the project and making these invitations.
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And it was an incredibly successful project in the end.
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But that being said, it was definitely stressful because I was definitely concerned with
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Will she like me because I’m not part of the group?
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Will she say yes to my invitation, et cetera, et cetera.
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And if I’m being honest with myself and with you, dear listener, I am sure that there are moments where I’ve held myself back in my business because of the sister wound.
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I am sure there are moments that I held back on calling on the support of female colleagues because of this.
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I am sure that over the years, I’ve organized a couple of joint venture projects that I’ve held back on inviting certain women because I perceived that
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they didn’t want to have anything to do with me or that I wasn’t part of the club.
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So I’m sharing all of this with you today, not just to embarrass myself, and also not only to normalize so that you know that you’re not alone if any of this comes up for you.
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But I’m also sharing this
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Because if you’re leading workshops, retreats, groups, or circles of women, it’s so important for you as the leader and the facilitator to be aware of the sister wound.
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It’s very likely that the sister wound is getting activated for at least one
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woman in your group, if not more.
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I’m going to say that again.
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It is very likely that inside of your group, your retreat, your workshop, whatever it is, the sister wound is getting activated for at least one woman, if not more.
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And inside of
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coaching groups, transformational groups, women’s circles, retreats, et cetera.
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The sister wound can show up in a number of different ways.
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It can show up as I’ve already, one of the ways I’ve already mentioned, that fear of being rejected or of being left out or even being made fun of
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by the other people in the group, or judged.
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The sister wound could show up inside of your groups as distrust, right?
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Distrusting the other women in the group.
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It could show up as comparison, or let’s take that a step further, jealousy, being jealous,
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of other people in the group.
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Oh, she’s more successful than me.
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Oh, she’s moving faster, you know, to her goals than me, et cetera, et cetera.
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The sister wound can show up inside of groups as annoyance.
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Maybe a woman in the group feels like someone else is taking up too much space in the group.
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or is being too whiny and she’s annoyed.
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That might happen because of old family dynamics where a sister took up too much space in the family.
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Inside of groups, the sister wound might come up as a participant feeling upset because she thinks that the facilitator has favorites.
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Again,
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very similar to family dynamics.
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The sister wound might be showing up inside of the groups that you lead as women being scared that other women in the group don’t have enough boundaries, or a woman in the group is uncomfortable with closeness or community.
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And here’s another biggie, another way that the sister wound can show up inside of groups or retreats.
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It’s the feeling that a woman in the group might have, that she’ll be taken down by other women in the group if she shares her celebrations or if she’s too successful
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or if she shows up as her big empowered self.
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And when you facilitate a group, whether that group is a year-long group or many years-long group, or whether that group is a one-time retreat or workshop, whatever it is,
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You want for your participants to feel welcomed, accepted, and like they belong.
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And that feeling can’t only come from you, the facilitator.
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In other words, the group, the members of the community and the circle itself, need to also be in the energy of being welcoming, of being accepting.
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And this is something that you, the facilitator, needs to be able to activate for them so that they can show up in that energy.
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You need to be able to create a sisterhood and with it, a space where the sister wound is as deactivated as it can be.
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Or else your group likely won’t have as much vulnerability, deep sharing.
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openness, and trust as you would like.
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One of the many facilitation and group leadership principles to always remember when you’re leading groups is that the power of the community is as powerful, if not more powerful, than you are.
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When you’re leading a circle or group or program,
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It’s not just about you, your exercises, your thought leadership, and your curriculum.
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Of course, all of those things are so, important, but it’s also about how the members of your group show up, how they share or don’t share, how they support and acknowledge each other, how safe they feel with others in the group.
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et cetera, et cetera.
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And again, all of this, it’s so much about belonging.
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Remember, the more that people feel like they belong, the more engaged and invested they’re going to be in your group in doing the work that they signed up to do inside of your program.
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Okay, so then with all of this, the next question is, how do you do it?
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How do you deactivate the sister wound?
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And how do you create sisterhood and belonging and community inside of your groups and inside of your retreats and workshops?
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Well,
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The good news is that it’s not a mystery or I just throw spaghetti at the wall and hope it works when it comes to leading your groups in ways that women and really all participants feel safe, vulnerable, open, excited, interested, invested, and like they belong.
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It definitely takes some instruction
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to master the skills that you need for all of this, but you can absolutely learn them.
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They are so very learnable.
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And I know this because I’ve trained so, many women on these skills over the years in the Into the Depths training.
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We learn them step by step and I model them inside of the group.
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Some of these skills are facilitation skills, and some of these skills are going to be woven into your curriculum itself.
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And I’m going to list out some of the biggies here, some of the skills you really want to pay attention to when it comes to deactivating the sister wound and creating really strong community sisterhood belonging.
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Number one, you want to set and uphold really strong and solid containers.
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If you’ve been in a training with me on group facilitation and one-on-one facilitation, even inside of Sacred Depths, you know that the container is everything.
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It is where everything starts.
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And when you have a strong and solid container, when you take the steps, step by step by step to create that group container, and then throughout your group, whether the group is 3 hours or a year to uphold that strong and solid container, that’s when people feel safe.
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That’s when they allow themselves to be vulnerable.
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That’s when they’re more interested.
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That’s when they’re more engaged.
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One of the big mistakes that a lot of group leaders and facilitators and teachers make
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is that they jump straight into their curriculum and they jump straight into their thought leadership at the beginning of a group program or retreat or even ritual or ceremony.
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And they don’t take the time to set the container to bring the group together.
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to create that safety inside of the container, to make sure that there aren’t leaks in the container, right?
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So you want to really be intentional about how you set this up.
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A second skill that you want to really pay attention to when it comes to this community and sisterhood piece,
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bring your participants fully present in their hearts and in their bodies.
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So this is a small nuanced piece, but it’s actually a small piece that’s a big piece.
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Because the sisterhood wound is so pervasive, because it is something that is kind of happened so quickly.
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inside of people, the fears, the beliefs, all of it around other women and how they’re going to be accepted or not accepted or what they think, all of it, happens so quickly in the mind.
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It can be really, really helpful to bring your participants out of their minds or not to be 100%
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in the cognitive in their heads, and to bring them into their bodies and bring them into their hearts.
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Just this simple, using different activities so that from the get-go, your participants are in their hearts and bodies.
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It can automatically
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create more open-heartedness.
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It can automatically create more openness to others.
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Now, it’s not the whole thing.
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It’s right.
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It’s not a magic pill, but it can do a lot.
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Another thing I want you to really pay attention to so that you can deactivate the sister wound and so that you can create really strong and powerful community
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is to manage the share time with skill.
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Manage share time inside of your groups, inside of your containers with skill.
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So that group shares become opportunities for the group to be strengthened, for the wisdom inside of the group and from participants in the group to really shine.
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so that people can feel seen, heard, loved, admired.
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When you manage share time with skill, it also helps for experiences to be normalized.
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And when normalization of experience happens, people naturally bond.
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So again, I’m going to repeat what I just said.
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Manage share time with skill so that group shares become opportunities for the group to be strengthened, for the wisdom of the group to shine, for experiences to be normalized, and for the group to feel more bonded.
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All of this is so key.
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Also, not to mention, because we’ve all been in a group
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where the facilitator has not managed share time with skill, right?
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And we’ve been a participant in the group where we’ve gotten annoyed at the facilitator for not knowing how to gracefully and effectively support the big talker in the room to keep their shares brief and relevant.
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We’ve all been in the room when a facilitator hasn’t skill
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responded to a share.
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We’ve all been in a room when a facilitator hasn’t known how to leverage one individual’s share so that it feels applicable to everybody in the room.
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And when any of this happens, the container gets leaky, people get annoyed, they get disengaged, they get bored.
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Another piece to keep in mind when it comes to all of this is I want you to be really intentional about how you craft partner exercises.
00:33:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if you want to deactivate those sister wounds, if you want to create community,
00:33:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
you will include some partner exercises.
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And this is whether you are in person or you’re online.
00:33:36 Joanna Lindenbaum
You will include opportunities for the individuals in your group to be able to connect in these ways.
00:33:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And how you craft your partner exercises, how you set them up, and then how you craft them
00:33:54 Joanna Lindenbaum
is going to be key to the quality with which partners, and when I say partners, it can be groups of two, it can be groups of four, it can be groups of eight, whatever it is, but how you set all of this up, how you craft the exercise.
00:34:11 Joanna Lindenbaum
is going to be key in terms of the quality of connection inside of those partner exercises.
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It’s going to be key in terms of the quality of depth, of sharing, of folks supporting each other inside of those exercises, et cetera.
00:34:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
So many other skills that we could look at when it comes to all of this, but there’s just one more piece I want to mention in terms of facilitation skills on the sister wound right now, which is that sometimes in certain cases,
00:34:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
depending on your group and who’s inside of your group and the makeup of the group, what about the group, whether about this going into the group or it just, it comes, it rises to the surface in time in the group.
00:35:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
Sometimes you might need to build in specific exercises that directly speak
00:35:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
to whatever specific sister wounds or community wounds are coming up for the individuals in the group.
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So know that you’ve always got that in your back pocket as well.
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Now, what I’m going to say next is really important.
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along with all of the actual skills that I just mentioned and many more that I didn’t mention because we’d be going on and on for hours here if I did and if I gave all of the instruction on it.
00:35:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
But along with all of that, if you really want to create strong and loving and bonded community inside of your groups,
00:36:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is vital to align your own energetics around community and around sisterhood.
00:36:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
The reason why sisterhood and community can sometimes be so hard for some group leaders or facilitators to create inside of their own groups is because of their own
00:36:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
sister wounds that have been unattended to.
00:36:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
In other words, in order to bring groups of people together in powerful ways, you’ve got to work through your own sister wounds.
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And as I always say, no myth of perfection.
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It’s not like you need to be completely on the other side of it to have aligned energetics, but you need to be working through it.
00:36:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
Energy follows energy.
00:36:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you’ve heard me say this a number of times, right?
00:37:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
Energy follows energy.
00:37:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if you haven’t worked through some of your own stuff around being in groups of women or being in relationship with women, then it’s going to be challenging for you to create a loving, accepting atmosphere among women.
00:37:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
inside of your own group.
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As always, all of your client and group work starts with how you are showing up.
00:37:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you want to start to go deeper with all of them, you want to take a deeper look at your own sister wounds.
00:37:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I recommend
00:37:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
taking some time with a journal and answering the question, the first question is, what are your own sister wounds?
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And write them down, list them out.
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And even if you think you don’t have any or you’ve worked through them or any of the things, my guess is that there’s still some pieces in there to take a look at, right?
00:38:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
Because
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It’s always a journey.
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We’re always looking.
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We’re always unfurling the wounds.
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I certainly still am.
00:38:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
And the thing is, the reason why I can be so certain that there’s more to, always more to unfurl on the sister wound is because of what we mentioned earlier, because of culture.
00:38:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
Culture,
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the cultural messaging on this when it comes to women, it’s so pervasive, it’s so baked in.
00:38:49 Joanna Lindenbaum
Even after we’ve worked through these pieces, we can still be inundated with more of them, right?
00:38:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
So we want to continue to work on them, to unfurl them.
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And also because I’d be willing to bet a good amount of money that for all of us, we’ve had
00:39:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
at least one, if not many, interactions or incidents with other women in our lives that might create fear, that might create unhelpful beliefs, right?
00:39:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
Whether those women are your own sisters or cousins
00:39:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
or close friends or schoolmates or colleagues or teammates.
00:39:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
Maybe you’ve gotten bullied, maybe you’ve gotten backstabbed, maybe you’ve gotten abandoned or judged, et cetera.
00:39:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
Right?
00:39:48 Joanna Lindenbaum
So you want to look a little bit deeper here.
00:39:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
Where do you have trouble or inner blocks?
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or anxieties or fears when it comes to belonging in groups.
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And you can look at groups of women, you could look at mixed gender, right?
00:40:12 Joanna Lindenbaum
But still inspect this.
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Where do you have trouble when it comes to being close with others, when it comes to trusting others?
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when it comes to accepting others or feeling that you are accepted by others.
00:40:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
Maybe for you, it’s important for you to look at where you still have jealousy or misaligned competition issues coming up.
00:40:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
Maybe for you, it’s important to take a look at where you have some fear of
00:40:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
of maybe losing yourself and who you are inside of a group, right?
00:40:56 Joanna Lindenbaum
And maybe that’s because you got lost inside of your family unit when you were younger or inside of a school group or a community, et cetera, et cetera.
00:41:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
Maybe for you, want to take a look at, is there a part of you
00:41:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
that maybe thinks it’s weak to be vulnerable inside of a group or to receive support from a group?
00:41:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or do you have any preconceived notions about how women become catty when they get together or too cliquey, et cetera, right?
00:41:34 Joanna Lindenbaum
So it can be so, valuable to look, to become more aware
00:41:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
And then to use this awareness as the beginning of some deeper inner work so that you can really transform your own inner dynamics around sisterhood, around community.
00:41:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
Once you have this awareness, you may want to do some inner work around befriending the fears that come up for you.
00:42:08 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or you may want to do some inner work around rewiring some of those unhelpful beliefs
00:42:13 Joanna Lindenbaum
around sisterhood, or you may want to look at your own shadow of jealousy or competition, etc.
00:42:23 Joanna Lindenbaum
Doing the inner work around these sister wound energetics will help you bring a much, much more empowering energy around community, sisterhood, and belonging to all of the groups that you lead.
00:42:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
because again, energy follows energy.
00:42:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
The energetics that you bring can make all of the difference in combination with those other skills that we spoke about.
00:42:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
So I hope that the episode today was helpful.
00:43:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
I hope I stirred the cauldron and helped
00:43:07 Joanna Lindenbaum
activate some ideas, some new understandings about groups, about relationships with women.
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Maybe you’ve started to look inwards on this.
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As always, please let me know what did you love about the episode?
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What did it activate for you?
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What are you learning?
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If you have loved what I’ve shared here, and this is your jam, and you love leading groups, and you want to go deeper into your facilitation skills and into making your groups and circles more engaging and more transformative,
00:43:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
please, consider joining us for Into the Depths.
00:43:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s in person.
00:43:51 Joanna Lindenbaum
It is one of the few trainings I offer.
00:43:55 Joanna Lindenbaum
That’s like once and done.
00:43:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
You don’t have to make big, long, many months long commitments to it.
00:44:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
And it is one of my favorite trainings because we get to go deep into facilitation
00:44:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
into ritual, into ceremony, into creating experiential experiences for groups, into really becoming that group leader and curriculum creator and thought leader that you know you’re meant to be.
00:44:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
Of course, as always, if you love this episode, please give us a five-star rating, leave a good review, and share it with someone who you know would really appreciate it.
00:44:41 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’ll see you next time.
