Support is Sexy Podcast: How to Get Over "Good Girl" Conditioning and Own Your Power with Kasia Urbaniak
“You have no say in what you want.
You have no say in what you want.
You don’t make your desires. You have no say in what you want.
You do have a say in what you do about it.”
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Connect with the host:
Elayne Fluker
Instagram: @elaynefluker
LinkedIn: Elayne Fluker
Support is Sexy
Instagram: @supportissexy
Read the transcript:
Intro: Hi all, welcome to a new episode of Support is Sexy. My name is Sarah Tulloch and I am Elayne’s content coordinator. Today I will be introducing our guest Kasia Urbaniak. Kasia is the co-founder of The Academy, a company that teaches women to increase their power, agency and influence in all areas of their lives. While it looks like she has it all figured out now, Kasia had to fight to get to where she is and who she is today. For the first six years of her life, she grew up on the road surrounded by musicians. But everything changed when she had to go to school for the first time ever. Sitting in a classroom for eight hours a day was a huge shock to her and it kick-started her rebellious personality into high gear. She needed to do things differently. She wanted to live a different life than the one her school was pushing her towards. So Kasia rebelled and she kept rebelling until she found the new and exciting life that she was looking for. Cut to today. Kasia became a professional dominatrix, has practiced Taoist alchemy in one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China, and founded The Academy with her partner, Ruben Flores. In this episode, Kasia tells our host, Elayne Fluker, how she used rebellion to find freedom and The Academy's mission to increase women's power wherever they go. Now here's our host Elaine Fluker and our guest Kasia Urbaniak.
Elayne: So Kasia, thank you so much for joining us for an episode of Support is Sexy. I'm excited to chat with you today.
Kasia: I'm so happy to be here with you. Thank you.
Elayne: Of course. So our first question for you. When did you first fall in love with entrepreneurship?
Kasia: Oh, well, I don't even think I knew I was an entrepreneur or had a business until years in. I was raised by musicians, spent the first six years of my life on tour with them, and always thought of myself as an artist. When school began, it was definitely a series of artistic social experiments. It wasn't until my business partner – and at that time life partner, Ruben Flores – was like, ‘Hey, I think we have a business. I think we need to do some documents.’
But there is a great similarity between the self-employed musician and the entrepreneur. Namely, you're creating things out of thin air, you're responding to people and you're consistently having to check conventional wisdom against your own common sense, experience and intuition. So I am an unexpected entrepreneur.
Elayne: I'm so intrigued by your life on the road for the first six years of your life. How do you think that shaped who you are as a person today and as an entrepreneur? You just shared some of the similarities.
Kasia: It shaped my life in such such such profound ways. You see, on the road, me and my little sister, who's only a year and a half younger, traveled with the band and the roadies, and there was an incredible sense of purpose. My parents are jazz musicians so they gigged a lot and it was mostly throughout Europe. A new city every night or every three nights. Together we all saw ourselves as an essential part of the collective. So it might have been a really silly job, like in every train station I knew where the french fries were so that was my job as a five-year-old.
Elayne: That is a very important job, even today.
Kasia: When they were carrying all the equipment, I would carry the tambourine. There was an organic sense that I was not only part of the whole but useful and important. When normal parents or parents in different circumstances struggle with getting their kids to bed, there was no trouble with getting me and my sister to bed because we were tired and we were getting ready for the next day.
Now here's the pivot. Here's the crazy part that happened. I had to start school. I was sitting in a strict, Catholic school in first grade at a desk facing forward for eight hours a day with other students. The difference between me and them was that I was in absolute shock. It was like a fall from grace. It was I didn't understand why I needed to be there.
Elayne: Did it seem almost like a punishment?
Kasia: It was more than punishment. It was absolute confusion. I didn't understand why I needed to sit. Because of my earlier upbringing, these questions would organically arise in me. Why do I need to sit here? Why do I need to say back what they said to me? Why can't we run around? Why can't we talk to each other? It made school confounding and difficult. I think from that moment, I started looking for a new way to do things. So even at a very young age 10, 12, 14, I became very obsessed with is there another way? I would play this game where I had a sheet of computer paper and on each sheet, I would design a country with its own laws, its own flag, and I would get my classmates to sing the national anthems and later on the currency…we had crazy ideas together. I was obsessed with finding a different way because, in grade one, I was very shockingly introduced something that nobody could explain to me why we were here, why we were doing this, what we were doing.
Elayne: It's interesting because in the first six years of your life you’d done what a lot of adults hadn't even done. A lot of travel and going to different cities, like you said, a new city every day. It's not something that most children experience before the first grade so I can imagine that was an adjustment. You talked about creating your own countries and those things in school. How would you describe your personality overall, would you say that you were very much a leader?
Kasia: Because of the circumstances I was in, I was more rebellious than I was a leader.
Elayne: Did people label you as rebellious or do you think now looking back that you are more of a leader?
Kasia: No, I was clearly antagonistic. I was a rebel. I wasn't just saying, ‘why do we have to do this?’ I was like, ‘I'm not doing this. I don't know if I can actually stomach doing this.’ I was a very difficult student that way. I was obsessive and completely unrealistic. I was very intellectual and heady which also befuddled all my teachers because I was a terrible student. I remember there was one moment when my mother was losing her mind because everybody in class was reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was reading Hamlet. I was like, ‘Hamlet is much more interesting.’ I was inappropriate but also kind of shy. People don't expect this about me but I'm pretty introverted. And obsessive about finding another way, not taking things at face value. Wondering if there's another way that human beings live and organize themselves. Being unrealistic and sometimes inappropriate are two qualities that stayed with me from childhood to this day, and I'm very grateful they never got trained out of me.
Elayne: Yeah, I say that about entrepreneurship. At least for me, in my experience, it's believing that the impossible is possible and figuring out the impossible possibilities. It's impossible, but let's see if we can figure that out. How can we make this a reality?
Kasia: Especially things that are needed. A lot of things that are needed and we don't know how to. They're necessary, there's a need for them, and they seem impossible. If there is a need for it, ‘the how’ is usually found one way or another.
Elayne: I always say, ‘Let go of the how.” Look at the need first and the possibilities.
Was there a point in your journey when you realized that conventional nine-to-five was not going to work for you? You told us in the beginning that you and your partner got to a point where you said, ‘Okay, we have a business here.’ But even before that, when did your entrepreneurial journey really start?
Kasia: That's difficult to say. When did my entrepreneurial journey start? Okay, this is gonna sound kind of wild.
Elayne: We expect that. You're a rebel.
Kasia: When I was maybe 16, I read the Dune books, you know, Frank Herbert's sci-fi Dune books. There's a big movie coming out on the first book of the series. It's this intergalactic saga, but in it, there is a secret society of women that are pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes. They're called the Bene Gesserit. The leaders of the Bene Gesserit are called Reverend Mothers. When I was 16 and people were having conversations about what you want to be when you grow up, I was like, ‘I want to be a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother.
Elayne: Of course.
Kasia: I even remember saying things to my guidance counselor like, ‘I want to write essays, but I don't want to be an essayist. And I want them to go out immediately.’ Basically, I was describing blogs before blogs existed. This school that ended up getting started – almost against my will – very very much feels like my dream of being a Reverend Mother in the Bene Gesserit. It definitely feels like a secret society of women becoming powerful. Not so secret society now, but it definitely has that mystical, magical, wonderful feeling of women doing incredible things. I remember in the early days of the school, some of our women were in some pretty high power positions. They would use our tools for asking to make an outrageous ask, and we would see the result in the evening news and be like, ‘Oh, she did it! Now there's this particular program now that wasn't there before.’ Or, ‘There's this big business decision was made to shift everything. She did it!’
Elayne: Tell us about the school so everyone knows what you're referring to. This is your school, The Academy, right?
Kasia: Yeah.
Elayne: Tell everyone about that how that works and how it came to be.
Kasia: The Academy is a school for power. And we're really careful to use the word power, not empowerment. Empowerment is a wonderful word, but we want to be clear that we teach women tools of claiming and gaining power, and it's not a feeling of being powerful. It's not something that you do alone in a room or just in the class, you feel powerful. You can actually show that you have the skills to have your impact show up in the world. You have powerful relationships with people where what you're giving is honored and what you receive is the thing you want.
It started in the wildest, weirdest, most magical, wonderful way. I have 17 years of experience being a professional dominatrix while I was studying to be a Taoist nun. Which meant I was learning martial arts, I was learning medical diagnosis, I was learning how to body read people and on this spiritual path. To fund it, I was a dominatrix. It profoundly impacted how I did these sessions in a dungeon because I was practicing my Taoist skills in body reading, in moving people's energy in this unconventional context.
When I met my business partner, Ruben, he had just spent close to a decade working for Doctors Without Borders as a humanitarian building field hospitals in war zones. Our conversations about what power is in his context, even in a situation where he has to negotiate the ability to build a hospital in a hostile territory and negotiate with people, none of whom speak the same language. How much the body, your energy, your presence, how you use your attention, how that translates into power. These were experiences I'd been having in the monasteries and in the dungeon for years. This conversation started out as: How does one communicate power? Specifically, what are the stumbling blocks that women come across when it comes to making a powerful request or a command? What are the stumbling blocks when wanting to be heard or have your tender needs met?
So we started experimenting in our living room. We started inviting couples and women to come over, and we started these experiments. Interventions in their communications, pointing out things that each one was doing or not seeing that they were doing. I started writing some of the findings on Facebook, and the women who had come to the living room for the experiments and the ones who were following along with my writing started asking for a workshop. Both Ruben and I were like, ‘We want to be artists now. We don't want to teach.’ They were like, ‘Workshop! Workshop!’ We reluctantly did the first one, but there were eight times more people signing up for the first one than there was room for. We were like, “Great. This is gonna be a side gig.’ It turned into the most intense six-year laboratory experience of my life.
One of the things that entrepreneurs and artists have in common, that I see in the school so much, is that you really can't do it alone. We learned so much from our students. We learned so much from what happens in this process. It's never a singular lightbulb idea that you then pay others to execute the vision. There's this dynamic organic process that happens with people that is so much more powerful when it's inclusive. It's collaborative.
There's a synergy that happens. It becomes a living organism, and that living organism has a heartbeat. What's great about a business that feels like a living organism is that it has the ability to provide more and sustain itself, to create momentum. It's not planting one seed that creates a fruit. It's planting one seed that creates a fruit that has more seeds that keep growing and growing and growing. That may be a little esoteric, but the thing is if the artwork or the project or the business has a heartbeat, it has its own needs, it has its own essence, and it also provides a lot more.
Elayne: What would you say that being a dominatrix for 17 years taught you personally about the dynamics of power?
Kasia: It taught me a lot. It taught me a lot about men too. It taught me a lot about how much a power dynamic is built on how you use your attention. In animal hierarchies, the alpha has their attention out on everyone and is giving instruction and the submissives. The followers are paying attention to themselves to check whether they're following orders or not. If they're currently in line or not.
One of the big themes I talk about in my book, Unbound – A Woman’s Guide to Power, and in the school is something we call good girl conditioning. We’re basically taught from a very young age to pay attention to how we are, not what we're doing. To check ourselves, to police ourselves, to self-attack ourselves if we're falling out of line, and that is a very inward submissive state of attention. If a woman in a powerful position is communicating with a man in a power position, the tendency will be that his attention will be out and he'll be giving instructions regardless of the nature of the conversation, and she will have her attention inward checking herself.
“The communication that happens with words is one level of communication. Where the attention is and how it feels is the second level of communication. That second level of communication is so important because if the words tell the other person what to think, the second level of communication tells the other person how to feel about it. ”
The communication that happens with words is one level of communication. Where the attention is and how it feels is the second level of communication. That second level of communication is so important because if the words tell the other person what to think, the second level of communication tells the other person how to feel about it.
Back to your actual question, which is what did I learn in the dungeon? What I learned happened when I started training other women at the dungeon to become dominatrixes. I saw the places where they stumbled. Their attention would be too inward. It would be like, ‘Here I am performing a powerful pose. You’re a bad boy.’ But their attention was actually not sinking deeply, strongly onto the client, the submissive. I noticed there's an absolute reluctance for women to, even with their attention and questions, invade the space of a man. That it feels very taboo. Yet it's very natural for men to do so. It's very natural for mothers, for example, to do that with their children. It's not a foreign state of attention following a new thing. It's about when we use it and how we use it. That's one of the things I learned.
The other thing is a long list of myths about what men think and what men do and what men want.
Elayne: You know you're going to have to share your top 3 myths with us. Teach us your ways, Kasia. But before you do, thank you for sharing this idea of attention. About women focusing so much on their performance and what they're doing as opposed to – let me know if I got this wrong – not even just that they weren't focusing their attention on the client but they also had hang ups about invading that space. I think that speaks to women's conditioning or good girl conditioning, us being conditioned not to invade a man’s space. If you think about even in a corporate setting, not speaking up, someone mansplaining something to us and not feeling empowered to say, ‘I already know what that means.’ As you were explaining it, I was thinking about how many times I've personally been in that situation when I'm unaware of it, but hearing you say it I was like, ‘Wow, that's an example of how a lot of us feel like we need to exist.’
Kasia: Yeah, and I have to add something to that. When you do this thing that I'm saying can feel like we're being invasive. It's also an act of power. It's an act of influence. But it's also an act of love. It's an act of caring. We've done these experiments where we tried to break down Woman in a Meeting syndrome, what is it going to take for a woman to get heard? When a woman kills it in a presentation and has a whole room captivated versus when her words fall flat or she's talked over gets shut down and doesn't know how to recover. This isn't a game of blaming women. This is just the reality of how many of us, not all of us, were raised and the impact of that.
To have your attention and instruction out fully, there's something magical that happens to the body of the other person or people, which is they relax. You can see it visibly, their bodies shifting to a submissive mode where they're able to listen and receive. They're able to hear the instructions, the information. Until they shift into that mode, they're not following. They're still sitting there leading with their own opinions or leading in some form. They don't recognize you as leading at that moment. When a woman can put her attention out onto one person or onto a group in that powerful way and speak, it is an act of love. It is an act of caring, ‘I am holding all of you, it is safe for you to release everything you're thinking about, relax into listening to what I'm saying, and receive, consider and hear the message that I am transmitting with my words, my mind, my emotions, my body, my being, my presence.’ That element of presence, that element of authority, that element that all those pieces people talk about as confidence. People talk about all these other ways, and they miss the most important part, which is how much of your attention is out in order to hold people so they feel safe enough to surrender into listening? Can we trust this alpha leader for one comment, for one minute, or for an hour, for a presentation? Can we trust her to take care of us? If she exhibits that she's paying attention to the whole pack or to that whole being, there's a visible shift that happens in the body, they relax and can listen with all of themselves.
We are rightfully terrified of men. We have traumatic experiences. The thing is you don't need to overcome all of those things in order to do these practices. In order to spend 10 minutes, five minutes, one hour getting your message across, getting what you need, getting what you want, getting your request deeply considered. If you remember to use your attention in a way that's kind of unconventional for most of us in certain settings.
Elayne: Beautiful. These are things that The Academy teaches?
Kasia: Absolutely.
Elayne: How would you say, for those who are listening, that we can step into that power, whether it's for a minute on social media, in a presentation in a board room, or whatever the setting is? How do we step into that power and show that we are focusing our attention on the room or the recipient of whomever our message is meant to reach? Are there some tips or steps or practices that people can do starting today? I think people might be having a harder time with this because we’re not even in a room with a lot of people right now, because we're talking during the time of the pandemic, so people really need to know how to communicate their messages.
Kasia: There are a few levels of answer to this question, as there are a few levels of training in order to be able to hold a room powerfully or get your message heard. The really simple trick, the most superficial one, is to maintain the level of curiosity about where other people are at. Curiosity has this wonderful quality of reaching inward towards others – so it guides your attention inward towards others – but not coming to any conclusion. So while you're speaking, maintaining curiosity is really helpful, paradoxically, in coming across in an authoritative way.
But I would say that the precursor to that is the inside job. The inside job has a lot to do with identifying what you want very specifically, precisely, and honestly. We have a lot of tools and exercises around desire and asking for that purpose. When a woman is very clear on what she wants out of that presentation, what she wants out of that job, what kind of synergy she wants among her team, when she's clear on what she wants, and it's right-sized – meaning it's big enough to get her up in the morning, it's big enough to make any fear or hesitation worthwhile – then most of the job’s already done. Because the rest of it is, ‘I have this incredible gift even if it's a request opportunity to share, look what you could get out of it.’ Once you take care of the inside, you can just focus on leading others to where you want them to be.
That is a question that I could answer with the entire curriculum of the school, The Academy. When you find yourself stuck in a situation where you're inside, inside, inside, and can't get out. Asking someone else a question can oftentimes help break that pattern because they have to pay attention to themselves in order to answer the question, and you have to pay attention to them in order to get the answer. That's also a little trick, but we need more than little tricks.
Elayne: We need the curriculum. We need to sign up for The Academy.
Kasia: This isn't me pitching, but there is a lot of information and exercises in the website itself that women can get for free without paying a dime. Just because right now the world needs powerful women leading the way. I mean, what more evidence do you need? Just look at the countries that are coping best with Covid19.
Elayne: They’re all led by women, absolutely.
Kasia: 50/50 isn't even enough. Men, you're wonderful. Now step aside. Let us take a turn for millennia. We won't even need that much time. We have wonderful things to do.
Elayne: You're right, we could probably do it in half the time. You're so right and you're definitely not pitching. I’m an advocate for what I've seen of The Academy from the outside looking in. I was looking at your website again today before our call and diving into your blog posts. What you talked about with asking, I mean this whole podcast is around the importance of women, especially successful or ambitious women, knowing how to ask for support so I do want to dive into that.
Before we move on, I do want to ask you, based on your experience, what are one or two myths that a lot of women have about men, the dynamics of power and how this misunderstanding might be holding them back?
Kasia: Yeah, one thing is the assumption that men don't want to serve. What I mean by that is what I’ve found, especially in heterosexual relationships, and I know we're talking about business, but it ends up translating. What happens is the man wants to make the woman happy but doesn't know how. The woman, with her conditioning and training, will either say really vague things that are not actually instructions. Like, ‘I want you to respect me more. I want more quality time. I want you to be more affectionate with me.’ Those sound like requests but they're not. How do you know what ‘more affection’ means? How do you know what respect means? How do you know in order to lead someone? The best relationships, whether they're professional, romantic, between two women, or family members, are the ones where people take turns leading and following so they can learn from each other in a conversation. The listener doesn't stay listener the whole time, they switch. The listener and the speaker take turns.
The assumption is that men are kind of a ‘no’ to doing a lot of things for women, but the truth is women withhold a lot and they're not specific with their requests. So say ‘more affection’ could mean two hours of cuddle time, watching Netflix without any other electronics. It could mean something very different. It could mean a particular kind of sex. It could mean taking out the trash. Say in this heterosexual marriage, the man is constantly guessing, he's trying to serve but he doesn't know whether it's a bouquet of flowers or taking out the trash that's going to make her feel loved and respected. He's lost. So that's one thing. If you know how to make an ask that feels good, that lights you up when you ask and is specific enough – has a beginning, middle, and end – so when it's done, you can actually test if that's the thing you wanted. You can go, ‘Oh wow, yet he did that.’ That's one thing. It raises them up. Men love to get it right.
Elayne: Yeah, remember an ex of mine. We're still friends. One of the things he told me is the hardest thing for a man is to feel like he's disappointed his woman again. We're talking about heterosexual relationships in this case, but he was like feeling like you’ve disappointed them or didn't live up to something, that is one of the most difficult things. So as you said, even if it's a lack of clarity around what you really want and you are disappointed, they can sense you’re disappointed. Neither one of you is communicating why. It can be tough.
Kasia: Yes. Also when the asks do come out, they're usually in the form of complaints. ‘Why don't you ever?’ A lot of the requests end up being not inspired or big enough. They're the kind of asks that get you from below zero to zero. Like, fix this thing that's wrong in our dynamic or in our professional relationship, right? It's not the one that's big enough to create inspiration. It's much more exciting to move into something that feels a little bit more outrageous, that's generative, that could create a new vision and new adventure than it is to ask for one that goes from the negatives to a baseline. ‘Okay, now that bad thing no longer exists. It's okay.’ It's like the carrot isn't juicy enough.
I could go on and on and on about the things I learned in a dungeon about men. One of them just had to do with bodies, body image, and body shame. Men love lots of different kinds of bodies.
Elayne: That there's not one particular ideal.
Kasia: No, it's something that we really strongly carry, I think.
Elayne: The dungeon. Is that what you refer to as a particular place, or does that just reference whatever space you’re in as a dominatrix?
Kasia: A professional dominatrix works in a dungeon just like a postal worker works in a post office.
Elayne: Got it. I want to talk about asking and the power of asking. I know this is something that's very much a part of your work. The power of women; knowing how to make an outrageous ask.
So how do you personally define an outrageous ask? And how do we get the courage to make those kind of asks?
Kasia: It's hard to talk about that without talking about the good girl conditioning that makes asking difficult.
Elayne: Okay.
“If a woman listening finds asking difficult or finds a particular kind of asking difficult – whether it’s financial, erotic, tender and vulnerable, or things that sound bossy and controlling – there’s a reason for it.
It’s not your own personal psychological weakness. It’s not a lack of confidence. It’s not a lack of self-love.
It is millennia of training.”
Kasia: If a woman listening finds asking difficult or finds a particular kind of asking difficult – whether it's financial, erotic, tender and vulnerable, or things that sound bossy and controlling – there's a reason for it.
It's not your own personal psychological weakness. It's not a lack of confidence. It's not a lack of self-love.
It is millennia of training.
For so long, the most a woman could hope for, the best and only place where she could channel her dreams and ambitions, was to marry well. In order to be a good candidate for marriage, there are certain qualities and conditionings that we have unconsciously promoted in order to be a great candidate for any marriage. We are still living that paradigm because things only changed and are changing right now. It's only been a few years in terms of human history. A good girl is good natured, cheery and accommodating. She does a ton of invisible labor. She's never too much. She never outshines anyone. She also never falls behind. She responds in a timely fashion. She never keeps anyone waiting. She's always two steps ahead. She definitely, definitely, definitely is low maintenance, super resourceful, can make do with whatever the household has, doesn't ask because she doesn't need, she makes do. She's easy to handle. She's not a burden. She's an asset. And she's really great at maintaining the status quo.
There's nothing bad about being of service. There's nothing bad about any of these qualities. My personal issue with them is when they come up without being chosen. If we are of service, but we are not consciously aware of it, there is no choice. Without awareness, there is no choice. Where there's no choice, there's just servitude.
That's exactly what comes up when women are faced with asking. They're in this double bind. They're afraid of being too much and too little at the same time. Bossy and needy. They're afraid that if they ask they'll be in debt. Afraid that asking makes them look weak. If they ask in a powerful way, they come across again as bossy. There is a feeling that they should be able to do it alone, to be resourceful enough. This also translates into the masculine John Wayne myth that you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, which is physically impossible and a total lie because men have invisible support systems everywhere. One of which is wives, right?
So in the school, and if there are some adventurous listeners listening right now, we do this exercise called The Asking Practice. Which starts like this.
Read the sentence, “I could ask _____ for _____.”
And you fill in the first blank with the name of a person, and the second blank with something you want or you think you want. It is incredible what comes up when a woman does this exercise. These are just imaginary asks, you don't have to ask them in real life. It's so confronting just to write down 50 or 100 imaginary asks. All of this stuff comes up. ‘If I ask for this, I will look like this.’ ‘If I asked for this, I will be in debt and I will have to repay the favor.’ ‘If I even admit that I want this, they might do it and I don't want to give them the satisfaction.’ The entire landscape that holds all of these outdated mental ideas starts getting released. With it a lot of emotion comes.
As that list grows we have them do asks that specifically are needy, specifically are bossy, specifically are financial, erotic, tender. Ones that are practical, ones that would make you seem lazy if you had somebody else do it for you. Remember, this is just an inventory in the imagination.
Right now, I'm teaching a class called ‘Ask Anyone of Anything at Any Time.’ So this is very topical. It's such a huge inner expansion that happens. Working through how all of a sudden you don't remember anybody's name anymore. The imagination dies. You have to bring it back to life.
You asked a specific question about what we call an outrageous ask. An outrageous ask is big enough to change the relationship, to change the status quo. It changes the role of the other person. A lot of women think that men – and again, I don't mean to be specifically talking so much about men, because this curriculum works with power for women with everyone – but in the case of men, a lot of women think that if they ask less of a man they're doing them a favor. Your asks indicate the kind of role you're putting them in. Ask less of them. Many of my students find that they have been putting their significant others in the role of useless worm couch potato. Not making an inspiring, big enough, outrageous ask that would have him show up as a hero or show up as somebody phenomenal in their lives.
Another thing is finding the right size ask. Remember how I mentioned before the ask takes you from a complaint to zero, everything's okay. An outrageous ask goes above that so that the ask creates an inspired opportunity. What's outrageous to one person is not going to be outrageous to another person. This is a body test. Do I want this? Does this feel compelling, exciting, and terrifying? Am I likely going to get a no to this? Which is also another exciting opportunity. So those are some of the qualities of an outrageous ask because they're game changers. They change the status quo. They change the relationship.
“This is a really good time with what’s happening in the world for people to balance and redefine their relationships with everyone in their lives. Asking is a great way to do it.”
This is a really good time with what's happening in the world for people to balance and redefine their relationships with everyone in their lives. Asking is a great way to do it.
Elayne: Do you think when you have women do the exercise of filling in a name and then an ask, even though as you said it's just imaginary or an exercise for the imagination, do you find that most women get more caught up on the person they're asking or what the ask actually is? I ask that because I think sometimes it is the ask itself, sometimes it is worry about the judgment of the person that we might be asking, or sometimes it's both. I just wonder if you've seen women get caught up on one part or the other more?
Kasia: The specific nature of this exercise is to open up the inner landscape. So we encourage women to include as many names as possible, as many requests as possible, and branch out even to your third grade teacher because this is an exercise in the imagination. If they're getting caught up on a particular person or a particular ask, it's because they're not asking broadly enough, in terms of what they could possibly want, or who they're including – who makes the cut, who doesn't make the cut. Usually the first thing is you only get family members, significant others, co-workers. The people who are closest and not going further out. It's actually easiest to practice some of these things with people who are a little bit further out. The idea is to open up the inner landscape. Every woman will see something in this exercise that has her go, ‘Wait a minute, this is an imaginary prison. I could totally ask that. Why? Hmm.’
The other thing in the class is, we give instruction that nobody actually make any of the asks for the first week or two, depending on how long the class is. And the cool part is, in those first two weeks, the things that are written are oftentimes offered by the person that was on the list.
Elayne: They put it out into the universe.
Kasia: Yeah, I mean, you could have a magical approach to this. Like, ‘Wow, that's such a coincidence.’ But really what you do when you do that is you clean up your inner signal.
Elayne: Yep.
Kasia: You regard the other person. It's very easy for, especially the most powerful, independent women who have done it by themselves and do everything, to regard others as how they've shown up in response to that. Useless. Once you put someone on a list and start regarding them as potentially not useless, how the subtlest signals get sent and received start to change. You become more open to receiving that and they can feel that it's safer to offer some of that.
Elayne: They can sense that even if they don't know that you've just done this exercise where you put their name on the list.
Kasia: After doing this exercise with 1000s of women over the years, we have not had a single class where the first two weeks things on the list did not happen by themselves. It always happens.
Elayne: I believe it. I remember a friend of mine, Dawn Shadrick – I took this workshop, called Momentum, in New York a few years ago, changed my life totally – and we were talking about relationships. She told me about creating space in your life when you're looking for a partner. Even from the point of, ‘Do you have room in your closet for this person to be in your space? Where does this person fit into your life?’ In my mind, I was thinking, ‘What do you mean? That doesn't make sense?’ I'm being more practical, like they're not gonna move in right away. But it was this idea of in your mind, in your energy, just like you just said, creating space for this person that you want to come into your life.
Kasia: That is the perfect metaphor.
Elayne: And I am very conscious of that now. My closet has a little bit of room in it. Somebody could squeeze in there.
So I want to ask you, Kasia, before you go. We've talked about asking making an outrageous ask, but what about hearing, ‘no’? How do we handle ‘no’ and how do we not think that ‘no’ says whatever we think it says about us?
Kasia: First thing, how one feels about ‘no’ is dependent upon your previous experiences with it. So getting my students to have positive experiences with the word ‘no’ is challenging, number one.
To backtrack a little bit. Remember that I mentioned that we are raised to police ourselves? We are raised to have our attention inward? Women will often times default to an inward state of attention, which can be beautiful because it means we tend to be more attracted to meditation, yoga, and inward practices. But also the dark side of this is that when we hear ‘no’ we don't hear no to the request, we hear ‘no’ to us. The pain of hearing not just ‘no’ to the request, but, ‘You had no right to ask.’ So what we need to do is uncross those wires, and have a woman have a positive playful relationship with the word, ‘no’.
How do you do that?
Well, the first thing is realizing really basic truth. When somebody says ‘no’, most of the time it's not because they're trying to be a jerk. Most of the time, it's because it's bringing up something that may threaten something they want to protect, something they care about, something that's important to them. It doesn't matter if it's unimportant to you. It's important to them. Their vanity, order and the rules, or something much more tender. So when someone says ‘no’, I'm not saying to go violate without consent and go, ‘Why not? You're stupid.’ Right? I'm saying ‘no’ is actually where a very new conversation begins. Because if they're saying no to protect something they care about, that is an opportunity for an immense amount of intimacy. You wouldn't call it intimacy in a professional situation; in a professional situation you’d call it potential for collaboration, for strengthening the relationship, for understanding what the goals are. When you're faced with ‘no’, the first thing to do is make sure you're keeping your attention on them. When a woman hears ‘no’, her tendency is to attract all of our attention back onto herself, feel the pain, go, ‘ow’. The other person feels energetically dropped. If you stay with them and get curious. Don't use the words, ‘Why not?’, because those words feel very attack-like. But get curious about what this ‘no’ is trying to protect. What does this person care about that this ‘no’ is necessary for?
If you show care and interest in the thing that they're trying to protect, a lot of the time the ‘no’ will vanish on its own. The person themselves will feel safe enough with your request that their ‘no’ becomes a ‘yes’. Other times you have a desire, they have something to protect meaning they have a desire, you can start a new conversation that gets both of you what you want and you're on a whole other level.
“Here’s the thing about getting a ‘yes’. It’s already part of the status quo. It’s already there. The land of ‘yes’ doesn’t have a lot of transformation in it. It’s great to get yeses. It’s even better to get ‘no’. ”
Here's the thing about getting a ‘yes’. It's already part of the status quo. It's already there. The land of ‘yes’ doesn't have a lot of transformation in it. It's great to get yeses. It's even better to get ‘no’.
When you get ‘no’ and can navigate that skillfully, you start creating really powerful relationships with people. Really powerful ideas. Something new can be generated. Getting a ‘no’ is better than a ‘yes’.
My oldest students, when they hear ‘no’, they go, ‘Hell yes. Let's get in there. Let's find out. Let's get to work.’ This requires a little bit of practice and training because the first part is to not contract into the body.
Elayne: And you also said not to ask, ‘Why not?’ So how do we show our curiosity to that person instead? If the question isn't, ‘Why not?’, what could be a follow up question?
Kasia: There are some softer suggestions, but always depends on context. It's hard to come up with universal answers, but I'll offer some that tend to be a little bit more universal in personal settings.
‘How did it make you feel that I asked you that?’
When you ask, ‘How did it make you feel that I asked you that?’, they can start revealing a little bit about whatever it is that came up for them that had them say ‘no.
‘How does this request sit with you?’
‘What is it about this that makes ‘no’ a good answer for you?’
A lot of the work will be done by having your attention out and by asking curious questions about the person in a way that has them feel safe. The more attention you have out, the more you project that you care about the conversation you're having, you care whether this is going to hurt them or not, the more likely they are to open up.
If this is hard to imagine, just imagine this in reverse. Imagine somebody asks you something and you say ‘no’. Saying ‘no’ is hard sometimes. Now imagine how you would like to be approached. What’s behind that ‘no’ might be very difficult to talk about. You’d rather just say ‘no’ and have it done away with. If somebody is going to approach you and say, ‘Hey, I really care about why you said no. I really care about what it is that you said. What does this mean for you? What is this doing? Is there any way that you could reveal a little bit more so I have a better understanding of what your desires needs, plans, goals, agendas, where you sit with this.’ Wouldn’t that feel amazing instead of just saying ‘no’, or giving a false ‘yes’? And then feeling obliged and weird?
Elayne: Yes, I think too. It's so important. I love that you mentioned to not say, ‘why not?’ Because when you put it into reverse, if I say ‘no’ to something, which is already hard enough, and then using ‘why not?’, then it's doubly hard because then you feel like you have to explain yourself. Which is why I think sometimes people even avoid saying anything. If you reach out to someone, and that's my biggest one of my pet peeves, if you reach out to someone I'm always like, ‘If the answer is no, just tell me.’ That's hard enough, but what people might be fearing is you saying, ‘Why not?’ You know what I mean? That's really so they're like, ‘I'm just not going to say anything. I'm just not going to respond.’
Kasia: Absolutely. It’s not just about taking care of people. The goal is to get what you want, right? We know that tyranny and force doesn't work. It works in the short term, but not in the long term. The ideal way to get somebody to ‘yes’ with something you want, is with their actual consent. With all of them
Elayne: And for them to feel good about it.
Kasia: Yes! So that they want to do it, so that they can contribute their genius, their talents, their time, their heart, their work, their faith, their belief. In order to do that, you have to meet them on all those levels. It seems like a lot of work; it's just an investment up front that gets you so much more in the long term.
Elayne: Last question about this. What do we miss out on by not making an ask? What do you see women especially miss out on because they're afraid to ask for support or make whatever the ask is? They're doing everything themselves, especially as we talked about successful, ambitious women, which are women I speak to. I think sometimes we think, ‘I'll just do it myself. I'm the only one that can do it right.’ Or all these other reasons that we don't make the ask, but how do you articulate what we're really missing out on when we don't make those asks?
Kasia: The cost is tremendous. It's huge. As a last question, this could be an entire interview.
One is we think that if we ask and hurt someone, it's worse than the pain they suffer, the pain the world suffers, the pain the other person suffers by not being asked. You do so much damage to relationships by not asking, so much damage to the nature of a workplace by not asking as you carry the charge of that energy anyway.
One thing that also happens is independent women who have to do it all alone are less likely – they're starting angry and resentful, trying to hide it, white knuckling it – to have anything to contribute to other women who are also following their path.
The biggest cost is that an ask is a confession of a desire, and if half of the world's population struggles with confessing their visions, their dreams, their ideals, their desires, what we have is we're missing half of the world's population’s vision for the world, vision for how a workplace should be, vision for how love should look, how family should look, how religion should look, how all of it should look. Everything is born of desire, and asking is how you invite somebody to see it to collaborate with it. Asking is how you confess it how you expose it. You can use asking, you can use the word ‘inviting’, you can be bossy and say ‘commanding’, whatever it is. That information withheld is one of the most precious hidden resources that we're not tapping into.
Women are doing a lot. I want them asking a lot. I want them speaking a lot from their deepest, most outrageous, most radical, most self-expressed, most unreasonable desires. This is the time to be unreasonable. These are crazy times and it's time for women to be unreasonable.
Elayne: Unreasonable gets stuff done.
Kasia: Yes.
“Women are doing a lot. I want them asking a lot. I want them speaking a lot from their deepest, most outrageous, most radical, most self-expressed, most unreasonable desires. This is the time to be unreasonable. These are crazy times and it’s time for women to be unreasonable. ”
Elayne: So in closing, if you think over your life and career and you had the chance to thank only one person whose support was critical to you, personally or professionally, who would that be and what would you say?
Kasia: Oh wow, there's so many candidates to choose from. I would choose my father. My father was born in Poland during World War II and broke out from behind the Iron Curtain to become a jazz musician who played with Miles Davis and lived around the corner from Carnegie Hall. He's the ultimate unrealistic, unrealistic, unrealistic person who made the impossible possible. Having that as an example, more than anything else. He has always questioned the rules. He challenged all the record companies. He got into all sorts of trouble. Watching him as a girl and then as a woman, first horrified and embarrassed, and then seeing the sense in what looked senseless, how he just keeps on and kept on being completely unrealistic, following his dreams and his heart, forcing everyone else to adjust to what was most alive. Not to some arbitrary agenda, but to what really had a pulse.
What was beautiful, and I think in watching him, I learned how to worry less about the rules and breaking them and more to question the existence of why they're there in the first place. Because right now there's a lot of rules, especially implicit rules that need breaking.
We need a lot of bad girls to break a lot of rules.
“We need a lot of bad girls to break a lot of rules. ”