111. Accessing Your Innate Feminine Power and De-Programming Patriarchy with Amy Young
Summary
Personal integrity and professional success are not mutually exclusive. If you’re searching for a real-life example of whole-hearted values integration, look no further than Amy Young. As a coach and leader, Amy supports wide-awake women in accessing their innate feminine power through a process of patriarchal de-programming she calls "The Undoing."
Erica and India welcome Amy to share details of her journey away from the safe, false persona she’d created into the filter-free, transparent business owner and advocate she is today. Amy’s transformation demonstrates how guided self-reflection, the resolve to incorporate feedback, and the ability to quit even lucrative relationships benefit anti-racist, anti-bias outcomes and ultimately support innovative business practices.
In this discussion:
Identifying our core values via deeper personal assessment
Questioning early lessons about our productivity vs. our worth
Breaking up with hustle culture
The perils of spiritual and emotional bypassing
Accepting people’s rejection of the authenticity in our message, our methods
Business evolution and the DEI journey
The privilege to explore discomfort
Permission to play with business structuring and conduct profitable experiments
Keep The Dialogue Going
Go play in your business -- find ONE thing to experiment with!
Amy’s journey represents the kind of transformation synergies we foster at our From Implicit to Explicit: Leading Through Your Values Masterclass. We’d love to see you at our next virtual small group session. Join Erica Courdae and India Jackson as they:
Help you evaluate the intersection of your personal and professional values and ethics,
Allow you to identify the values and ethics of your clients and your team,
Identify which values need to show up in your brand, and
Pinpoint specific traits your ideal clients hold based on the alignment of your values
Move into that space where you’re finally able to innovate and make leadership decisions based on your values. We’re honored to help you get there.
Article
When was the last time you examined what was going on around you? When did you last check in with what your body needs or what your spirit craves? Has this lack of awareness negatively impacted the way you show up in the world? Chances are, yes.
As a Pause On The Play client and Community member, Amy Young’s journey-in-progress provides a case study for the perils of generating output that’s disconnected from core values. Working with Erica and India has transformed Amy’s business relationships as well as her personal mindset.
Welcome Amy Young
Amy Young is a coach and a leader who supports wide-awake women in accessing their innate feminine power with a process of patriarchal deprogramming she calls The Undoing. She’s also a Pause On The Play client and has spent the last year tapping into her essential self, her beingness - something that so many people forget about when they’re stuck in doing mode.
The admiration runs both ways. “I'm so grateful to have both of you riding copilot [on] everything because it has been quite a journey,” Amy says, referencing her commitment to operate from her values fully, to walk her talk both personally and professionally. “For a long time, I think I sort of lost this level of personal accountability and integrity.” The refocus prompted her to transition away from the relationship coaching work with single, straight women, which had been the entirety of her business. She began broadening the conversations she had with women. “about who they wanted to be in the world, and where they were operating from, and outsourcing their power and not fully listening to themselves.”
As Amy’s focus on empowerment crystalized, a divine synergy led her to connect with Erica and India. “I was being shown all the places where I really wasn't fully operating from this place of personal power, where I wasn't really being my total authentic, transparent, honest self, especially in my business or in my online presence.”
The realization proved challenging to accept since she’d always counted authenticity and transparency among her core values. “There were things that I was hiding that I didn't even realize I was hiding, or there were things that I was hiding from in my business and in my life that I didn't even realize I was hiding from, she says, adding, “I was just sort of on the treadmill of running my business, showing up, doing the things, serving the people, and not fully tending to my human.”
Amy’s experience is a direct by-product of capitalism, the weapon of patriarchal value systems. To better help other women break free of these imposed limits, Amy had to liberate herself first. “I was sort of patient zero in my own undoing process.” She went deep, coming to terms with challenges and acknowledging the discomfort that comes with self-examination. “When you haven't really been living your truth, or you haven't been operating from a place of power, you've been playing small,” she says, of confronting those instances where she fell short of total integrity, “it’s been such a blessing to stand in that space...having fully done that deeper excavation work to get to the truth of why am I not showing up with full integrity?”
“I think so many times we can be given a prescription of what business needs to look like or what marketing or visibility or anything needs to look like,” India says, “and we can fall into that trap of being on the treadmill of somebody else's workout plan instead of creating your own.”
Erica agrees. “I think often people don't stop long enough to recognize whether or not they do or do not want to do this,” noting the considerable lack of permission we allow ourselves when it comes to personal assessment.
Amy applauds Erica and India for guiding her toward more emotional and revelatory conversations from the start of their working relationship. “I had to kind of get used to the fact that the work that you do and, really, I think high-quality DEI work, in general, is not something that's formulaic,” she says. “There was so much more of a personal inventory that needed to take place, and the process that both of you led me through was really...it really made me reflect so much and look at the choices that I was making, and why was I really making those choices. And also, like, who were those choices ultimately benefiting? What systems was I upholding by being a yes for, you know, certain indoctrinated marketing strategies or rules, quote-unquote?”
Successful business owner that she was, Amy hadn’t thought to question how her adherence to “standard” harmed her. “I think that's been one of the biggest things for me is realizing, ultimately, I know when something is off, and I know when something is wrong, and I know when I’m making a choice from a place of trying to please people or trying to uphold a certain image or not trying to rock the boat or whatever it might be.”
Prior to taking personal inventory, she stuck with the status quo. “Getting to fully check back in, I was like, ‘this is painful to have to look at,’ you know? It was hard for me to have to come to grips with some things.”
Amy hadn’t ditched her values system before working with Erica and India, she just knew she needed help making impactful adjustments. “I think that's probably a big reason why it is hard for people to be a full yes to doing this kind of personal inventory and professional inventory because you know that you're going to have to come to terms with where you're not in alignment,” she says.
Fear Factor
If you’ve placed some of your values on the back burner to make a buck, you’re not alone. That path, though, is set with traps. You lose yourself - your why - along the way. “We're all like these little business islands, and you don't always know what's happening on someone else's island. But when you pull back the curtain on your own stuff, it could be like, Wow! There's a lot of stuff happening in here,” Amy says. “Having both of you reflect back to me that I definitely wasn't alone in it and that this is very par for the course was such a comfort.”
Erica understands the fear. “I think there's this big piece of people assuming that shifting your business or checking in with where you are, where you actually are versus where you think you are with diversity, equity and inclusion, anti-racism, anti-biased, any of these things,” she says, “there is more fear about being the extreme of it than the willingness to acknowledge where you've stitched enough of the threads in it that you need to cut those out.”
We’re not talking about you putting on a white hood every time you walk out of the house. “That still doesn't mean that there aren't white supremacists, or patriarchal, or just extremely harmful, shitty behaviors that are happening that might not be good for everybody else, but they're damn sure not helpful for you.”
To assess their beliefs and behaviors, POTP clients are given a workbook to help them name what needs to change in their chosen industry. Amy shares an example from the coaching and personal development space she inhabits: the obsession with quick fixes, hacks, and shortcuts. “Just the sort of baloney of like, you can change this one thing in your mindset, and then you'll be a millionaire, you know?” In one of their earliest sessions together, When Erica challenged her about her use of such tactics, Amy realized, “Oh my God, I totally have!”
There is no quick fix embedded in the POTP process, no hacks, only challenging questions and answers based on accountability. Amy recalls that her response to Erica’s inquiry felt icky and uncomfortable, but also illuminating. “It felt so good to be able to point to it and say, ‘Oh! That's why that felt wrong!’ I was subscribing to something that I don't believe in.”
They Don’t Like Me - and that’s OK
The revelations continued for Amy as her business shifted toward spiritual healing and energetic work. She became aware of the spiritual bypassing around her, the inability for some people to sit with certain realities, especially regarding white supremacy and racism. “When I'm talking about patriarchal deprogramming, I'm talking about white cis hetero-patriarchal deprogramming because we can't really talk about one of these systems without including all of them,” she clarifies. “This is why I've avoided going in this direction for so long because I don't want to feed the machine of love and light all as well. We’re all one. I can't get behind that.”
Because it’s not true.
Amy’s journey has led her to come to terms with the “bro marketing” tactics she felt pressured to use in the past. As a result, she’s more mindful of the space she wants to inhabit now. “I want to stand for acknowledging all aspects of an individual's experience and not just trying to whitewash anything.”
Signs of realigned values integration are most evident on Amy’s Instagram feed. “The way that you showed up and how much you chose to show up and what you chose to talk about changed so dramatically as you went through not only acknowledging this and seeing this but being, like, ‘Shit! I don't want to feed this machine; I don't want to be a part of it,” says Erica.
“I'm willing to be disliked, and I'm willing to be misunderstood. And I'm also willing to make people mad,” Amy says, noting the peace that comes with letting people make their own decisions about how they feel towards her rather than constantly convincing them to like her. “We all have this false belief,” she says, “that it's like, ‘well, if I can just keep people comfortable and be palatable and please people, then everyone will like me, then I'll be safe.” Ultimately, it’s the exact opposite.
“Now that I'm operating more from a place of unfiltered truth and sharing more of what I really believe and what I stand for and what I'm seeing, you know, the people who are for me, are 1000% for me.” She draws a correlation between this more attuned way of showing up in life and her previous work as a relationship coach. “You have to show up to the date, date one, and you have to be your fully-expressed self, you know, because otherwise, you're doing the thing of trying to be what you think someone else wants. And that's always going to be unsustainable.”
The Privilege to Get Uncomfortable
India is excited to see Amy leading by example, giving other people permission to live as their fully-expressed self, refusing to curate an image for mass consumption.
“I think it's just a byproduct of giving fewer fucks,” Amy laughs. She acknowledges that she enjoys a level of freedom and liberation that every human is seeking to exist as their fully authentic self, be accepted, valued, prioritized, and feel safe doing so. “If I'm rejecting parts of myself or I'm unwilling to show up in a more transparent, unfiltered way, or I'm censoring myself in different ways...that's what I mean when it's like, I'm not walking my talk then ‘cause I can't tell you to do something I'm not willing to do.”
Erica wonders how Amy’s shift toward honest self-expression shows up in her professional relationships. “What happens when you have to then have that whole inventory of peers of like, okay, either we need to talk, or we need to become unbenefited because I can't do this with you?”
Honestly, it can get painful. While most of Amy’s clients and peers are on the same page regarding anti-racism work and advocating for marginalized or underrepresented communities, she’s disconnected from others due to a lack of values alignment. “Those aren't fun conversations,” she confirms, “and I think that's why most people don't have them is because it's uncomfortable and because you're afraid of upsetting someone.”
White privilege plays in her ability to enter into those conversations in the first place. “I think both of you have helped me sort of come to this place of, like, both/and,” she says of Erica and India’s guidance. “I'm allowed to be uncomfortable with the fact that I have to have that conversation [ ] and I can also acknowledge that those feelings are privileged, and then I can still have the conversation even if I am uncomfortable, or even if I am afraid of how it's going to be received. It doesn't matter; it's about still showing up and doing the thing.”
Staying silent, avoiding discomfort at all costs, is more uncomfortable than operating from one’s truth and integrity. Taking a stand for what you know is right - not because there are cookies involved or a good white person award for doing so - takes practice, not performance.
Amy explores the resistance that often comes up for people around speaking up for Black lives or doing DEI work, bringing up a phrase Erica uses frequently - imperfect allyship. “It's this unwillingness to be imperfect in it,” she says. But the more she flexes those muscles, “the less scary it is [ ] opening my mouth and saying the hard thing, or advocating for someone, or amplifying someone else’s voice.”
She’s also willing to be corrected - an essential part of imperfect allyship. “You realize this isn't scary, and this isn't actually anything to be worried about; this is actually beneficial for me, and it's beneficial for my community, and it's beneficial for the mission and the work that I'm trying to do in the world.”
“It's like the more that you do these things and have that repetition, the easier it gets,” India says, clarifying that ease refers to confidence, not trouble-free conversations.
All Hustle, No Flow
Hustle culture. Urgency. Productivity. On the surface, these buzzwords don’t appear to have much to do with DEI values integration. Working with Erica and India has helped Amy realize the racist roots of these damaging professional norms.
“I was showing up, and I'm doing all the things and over-giving, and overriding my own boundaries, you know, for the sake of service and being of use to others,” Amy says, to the detriment of her physical and mental wellbeing. “As soon as I would get a little bit of liquid in my cup, it's like, okay, let's just dump this out into something; let's dump it into a new project.” She fell into the cycle of doing. Recovery has been a long process of slowing down, deciding what was essential to her business and what the brand could live without. That included revising her offerings and her platform presence, as she did with her Instagram account.
The restructuring has provided Amy with a more holistic assessment of her worth. “[I’m] not basically whoring myself out to my business so that I can see, you know, see a return. That makes me feel safe.”
India often encounters clients like Amy who believe that they must provide long-term program offerings to facilitate the significant ROI. That sentiment is another nod to capitalism - and the codependency it fosters.
“People think codependency or caretaking in that way is like a kind thing or something, but it's not. It's really disempowering to another individual to say, ‘Oh, I don't think that you can figure that out for yourself.’” Amy says. She’s shifted her business model away from constant project managing her clients to supporting them in cultivating more agency within the client/coach experience. “It's like being more self-governing and autonomous in terms of how you participate.”
Unfettered accessibility - which is also rooted in fear, scarcity, and people-pleasing - is often used to justify a coaching program’s price point. “I am so grateful that you [Erica and India] don't make yourself available to me 24/7,” Amy says, “because it makes me value the time that we have together.” She calls out self-sacrificing coaches for perpetuating such an unsustainable business model. “It's like, ‘Oh! Because I'm spending this money now, I get to have access to this in a way that, you know, suits my needs.’”
Since Amy has held firm to her boundaries and trusted that her clients could take care of themselves, all parties involved have enjoyed a new degree of spaciousness within the client/coach relationship. She’s also attracted different people to her business and brought in revenue with revamped offerings - a result that both Erica and India predicted. “I was shocked!” Amy says. “The thing is, if we don't have someone on the outside, you know, necessarily willing to reflect the sometimes obvious stuff [ ], we can't always see other options and possibilities and things that might be obvious to you or anyone else.”
Play it Forward
Experimentation proved to be another theme to the work Amy has done with POTP. “[Sometimes] we create a business or a brand and we forget to play with it,” India says, “We can experiment and we can learn from those experiments and throw things away and start new things instead of always feeling like it has to be this finite answer.”
Amy acknowledges that permission to play or test-drive options can seem riskier when you’re an established business or brand rather than just starting out. Ultimately, however, she concluded that even now, she still had nothing to lose. “I think it's important for anyone out there… who, like, what you're doing is working quote/unquote, but maybe it doesn't light you up in the way that it used to. It doesn't have to be that way. That's the biggest thing I just want to say is the light going out doesn't have to be just the norm.”
She encourages everyone to lift up the hood of their business and tinker with what's no longer working. “I'm in such a better, more spacious, satisfied spot, and I'm able to be so much more authentically of service in the world as a result of that.”
Innovation is the byproduct of playing, while beingness results from living your values. Make space for both.
Quoted
Amy Young
“I was sort of patient zero in my own undoing process.”
“I'm willing to be disliked and I'm willing to be misunderstood, and I'm also willing to make people mad.”
“Imperfect allyship, it's this unwillingness to be imperfect in it.”
Erica Courdae
“So many people are stuck in the doing and they forget about the being.”
“There's a huge lack of permission to actually take stock of how do you feel and why do I feel this way and is this how I want to feel?”
India Jackson
“I think so many times we can be given a prescription of what business needs to look like or what marketing or visibility or anything needs to look like, and we can fall into that trap of being on the treadmill of somebody else's workout plan.”
“I think when we can step back into playing with things, we can find our way back to our values.”
Guest Contact & Bio
Amy Young is a coach and leader who supports wide-awake women in accessing their innate Feminine Power. She does this through a process of Patriarchal De-Programming she calls "The Undoing".