Can’t speak up? It’s not a lack of confidence. It’s the Freeze.
Can’t speak up? It’s not a lack of confidence. It’s the Freeze.
You know this moment.
We all know this moment.
We are so familiar with this moment that it's gone without a name, been taken for granted and rendered a personal weakness rather than a universal phenomenon that took millennia of conditioning to ingrain.
Oh, you know this moment.
Women will often privately refer to this moment as
That time I didn’t stand up for myself and could have.
Or,
That time I should have said something.
Or,
That time I was weak and sold myself out by staying silent.
These private references are a mistake. Because the moment we are referring to isn’t the moment you chose not to speak. It’s the moment you physically couldn’t.
It's that moment when you want nothing more than to speak, when every cell in your body is burning to say something. It’s that moment when you’re on the spot, or in a position to stop something, change something, set a boundary, say no, claim credit, or even offer your own brilliant insight on the situation... yet absolutely cannot. It’s the moment you are frozen on the outside, but on the inside, fractured language, feelings, assessments are whirling around a racing heartbeat inside a body that doesn’t move and a mouth that just won’t make words.
Projects and opportunities die in this moment. Promotions, raises and credit are handed in the wrong direction in this moment. Consent gets murky, boundaries are violated, and great harm is done in the gap created by this moment.
Welcome to the Freeze.
The Verbal Self-Defense Dojo – Online Course
Fight back against interrupting, intrusive questions, bullying and other attacks on your boundaries or personal authority.
The Freeze – It’s not about women’s “confidence”.
The Freeze happens to women far more often than to men. Why? It's not that women lack confidence. Telling a woman she needs to have more confidence in order not to experience The Freeze is as insulting as telling someone placed in handcuffs to have better handwriting.
To understand why the Freeze affects women so disproportionately to men, it’s not confidence we need to address. It’s a question of invisible power dynamics at work, and how the conditioning of women over millennia has kept them at a tremendous disadvantage.
That is why, here at The Academy, when it comes to teaching power to women we begin with the defensive move of breaking the Freeze. (Get your first three lessons on the Keys to Power for free here.)
The Freeze:
a moment of neuromuscular lockdown; a state that renders women temporarily speechless. You cannot speak, or worse, you find yourself nodding yes – implying consent and agreement when in fact you’re desperate to say no.
But first, let's take a look at something rather peculiar. It’s a misconception that women only freeze when the stakes are high, when jobs are on the line, when they’re being sexually propositioned, when it’s a question of life and death. But women also freeze at other moments that seem trivial – when the consequences of speaking out are so low, it’s baffling why anyone would freeze at all.
“Nice view,” your new spin instructor jokes as you lean forward.
“I love how exotic you look,” says the guy on the next barstool. “Where are you from?”
A work colleague turns and says: “Are you planning to have children?”
No life or death consequences here if you bark back: “mind your own business.”
And yet...
A seemingly innocent comment or question comes your way, and for a moment, you’re paralyzed. Perhaps you stop breathing. Your mind searches frantically for a response, while your body is unable to move. You want to say something, you want to snap back, but you can’t. You’re just stuck.
This is perhaps what’s so maddening about it. Because here’s the truth: the Freeze has nothing, nothing, to do with high or low stakes.
What is The Freeze?
Our use of the term ‘The Freeze’ here at The Academy is quite specific.
The Freeze: a moment of neuromuscular lockdown; a state that renders women temporarily speechless. You cannot speak, or worse, you find yourself nodding yes – implying consent and agreement when in fact you're desperate to say no.
When you experience the Freeze, it’s not you. This isn’t a personal issue or a character flaw. It’s a larger phenomenon: this biological hijack and its mechanics and causes are woven into the fabric of every woman’s upbringing. The universality of this experience has one advantage: universal problems tend to have universal, not personal, solutions.
We’ve watched hundreds of women experience the Freeze in real-time as we train together in the school. And the women who come to the Academy as students tend not to be wallflowers. They are powerful agents of their own destinies, moving through the world in impressive ways. Yet in our live classes with male volunteers enacting scenarios of all kinds, there would always come a moment where the badass powerhouse sitting in the chair would go – Poof! She would vanish in the middle of a conversation. She would shut down and turn in on herself. Frozen.
And what is so striking, is that each and every woman comes believing that the Freeze is her own particular weakness. Her own particular behavior – one that not only results in her giving her power away, but worthy of shame and self-attack. And as this shame and self-attack further compounds, the cycle of speechlessness returns over and over and over again.
We want to break that cycle. The Academy exists to break that cycle.
So if you look at your past and remember some of these frozen moments, or if you freeze TODAY, remember this: it’s not you, you are not alone, and it means nothing about who you are.
Asking a woman to be more confident in order to break the freeze is as insulting as asking someone in handcuffs to have better handwriting.
Befriend the Freeze
WHAT??
Yup.
Why?
Why would I make a suggestion that you befriend a phenomenon that can cause such harm?
Because the moment you begin to resent something, to resist something – that’s also the moment your mind loses the ability to accurately predict, observe, and undo this phenomenon.
Befriend the freeze so you can get to know the freeze. Particularly how it happens to you.
Get to know your Freeze so well, that you can feel it coming in real-time. Most of us don’t even know we have experienced the Freeze at all. Instead, we can spend days, weeks, months, even decades devising scripts of the perfect thing to say if only we could go back in time.
Now, every woman's bodily experience of this involuntary speechlessness will be slightly different. That's why it's important to track your own signals.
You might feel the Freeze as a tightness in your throat. You might feel it in your stomach, or as a lightheadedness or a mind-body separation. Even the slightest physical, tactile connection to what is happening in your body will help you learn so much faster. That’s why in our Verbal Self-Defense Dojo online course, we have students practice real scenarios with a vast array of unsavory characters in rapidfire. By provoking the Freeze in training, you can better anticipate when you might need to use the tools in real life.
Once you know what it feels like in your body, you'll be able to notice the shut down more quickly. Then, you can move to use the stupidly simple tools we’ve developed to prevent it from taking hold.
What to do about it: A stupidly simple tool for breaking the Freeze
Here at The Academy, we have a tool that any woman can use to break the involuntary silence and get her power back in the moment. It’s called ‘Turning the Spotlight’ and it’s deceptively simple.
Let’s picture a scene.
Your male colleague asks you: “Have you gained weight?”
Rude!
But now you’re on the spot.
You don’t want to answer the question.
You’re temporarily in the Freeze, without access to language or agency.
What do you do?
When someone asks you a confronting or inappropriate question, there are power dynamics at play. They are putting their attention out on you, and you’re internalizing that attention and turning in.
To get off the spot, you have to flip the power dynamic: turn the spotlight of attention away from yourself and back out onto the person who's asking. To do this, don’t answer the question. Instead, ask a question back.
"When were you taught that a question like that was appropriate?"
In asking a simple question back, you break the Freeze. You get access to language. You get back on top – even for a moment. Even asking a dumb question, like “Er...where did you get that shirt?” is enough. Breaking the Freeze is just about saying something. Why on earth would something so stupidly simple be so effective as the first line of defense?
Power dynamics. Because the moment you move your attention off yourself and start talking about them, you start to flip the power dynamic. Women are socially conditioned to play this game from the back foot. The freeze is just one where its easier to see.
How to flip the power dynamic
When you’re put on the spot, you’re in the submissive position and you’ll feel pressure to comply – to answer the question or nod your head. To flip the power dynamic, you need to switch into the dominant position where you can control the conversation. When a woman finds herself in the Freeze, her attention is stuck inward, her agency is stuck inward and her instruction is turned inward: she's talking to herself about what she should do.
To move from a submissive to a dominant role in a power dynamic requires putting your attention and your instruction out onto the other person, with enough pressure so they go inward, and even if for a moment, put attention in on themselves.
By asking them a question back, by turning the spotlight, you take the dominant position, even for a second. In the dominant position, you're ten times more likely to walk out of the room. You're fifty times more likely to stand up for yourself. And you’re a hundred times more likely to say no when you mean no.
In the dominant position, you’re ten times more likely to walk out of the room.
You’re fifty times more likely to stand up for yourself.
And you’re a hundred times more likely to say no when you mean no.
Why This Matters So Much: The Hidden Costs of the Freeze
What’s the most recent thing you didn’t want but didn’t say ‘no’ because you couldn’t break the freeze?
Did you not say no to doing more work for no extra pay?
Did you not say no to sex?
Did you not say no to having another baby?
This is the first, devastating cost of the Freeze: things happening that women do not want to happen, and feeling powerless to stop them. Women using their most precious resources – money, sex, time and energy – in unwanted ways, or agreeing to an agenda that they know deep down in their hearts is wrong.
The moments when you Freeze can be the moments where the course of your life is being decided: which job you have, which relationship you have, where you live. It's so much harder to say no after you've said yes to a salary or a marriage proposal you didn't want.
Women living with the consequences of things we really don’t want is already too dear a price to pay. But there are other, less obvious costs to the Freeze. One of those is the other party walking away with an assumption that just isn’t true.
When women freeze, the offending person gets no feedback, and since people are programmed to repeat what works for them, the cycle continues. When women can turn the spotlight and speak, they get a chance to clarify and cut through any ambiguity. Is this a malicious abuse of power? Or just a well-intentioned man using extremely clumsy communication? Breaking the Freeze to speak gives a woman a chance to stand her ground and give valuable feedback where it is needed.
And perhaps the least obvious, but most important cost of the Freeze isn’t just the horrible things that happened. It’s the beautiful things that never do. Brilliant ideas. Meaningful contributions. Life-changing conversations. The innovation and creativity of half the world’s population.
The Agony of freezing in the 1% of moments when your life is decided
Most of the time, students of The Academy don’t freeze. They are the kind of powerful badasses who will holler back at a creep, and who can bat most inappropriate questions away like a bored cat.
But this is precisely what is so dangerous about the Freeze: a woman can be in her power 99% percent of her life, and then freeze during the 1% that counts the most. These are the moments we train for.
You always need to be able to flip the power dynamic so that you can buy yourself time in the moment. Once you’ve agreed to joint custody even though you know your ex has a drug problem, once you’ve stood silently by as an arms dealer was appointed to your Board—it’s much harder to change course once it’s set.
The most important cost of the freeze isn’t just the horrible things that happen.
It’s the beautiful things that never do.
Brilliant ideas.
Meaningful contributions.
Life-changing conversation.
Why the Freeze is the enemy number 1 of women
Real power is a result of where you focus your attention. If you don’t know how to say no—or how to play with someone’s attention on you while you decide whether you want to say yes or no, then you are powerless. When you add up all the times you weren’t able to speak, you may come away feeling that you didn’t really have influence —“that my vote didn't count because the ballot got stuck in my throat,” as one of our students memorably described it. This is how the Freeze limits the influence of women, and why the Freeze is enemy number one.
This is why we work to break the Freeze.
When you break the freeze, you are working to break free of the impact of millennia of Good-Girl conditioning, and you take another step in your journey toward a new kind of power. There is so much joy and pleasure and fun to be had in having power, in having a voice, in knowing what to do when you Freeze so that you can be yourself again.
Training to break the freeze is not about self-love, or even self-confidence. It's about modeling a different pattern of communication in times of conflict. By training to break the Freeze, you’re creating a better future for yourself while leading the way for others – men and women alike. When you break the freeze, you show other women how to stand in their power and use their voice, rather than just telling them that they should. And that is the greatest gift you can give.
It’s powerful, powerful work. And it will take patience, practice and time.
Whether you sign up for the Verbal Self-Defense Dojo, or whether you get on the phone with a friend to practice for scenarios when you freeze, I hope that you remember this one thing:
We are the women of the pivot.
It took thousands of years of conditioning to get here.
We have the potential to turn the tide in our lifetime.
And that is something worth celebrating.
Ready to train with us?
The Verbal Self-Defense Dojo is a practice-based online course for women to train to break the Freeze, turn the spotlight, and flip the power dynamic without appearing aggressive or shutting down.
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