Are you *this* kind of leader?

What Girlboss Culture Gets Wrong About Leadership

Last week I hosted the first call in a year-long mastermind I run. 

It was the most presence and thoughtfulness I’ve ever brought to my facilitation. I was so. damn. proud. of myself. It was a culmination of years of hard-won lessons about healthy belonging in business spaces—from cult recovery work, to classes in decolonization, and, most recently, six weeks of facilitator training focused on creating safety and belonging at scale, so that collective intelligence can pour through.

Girlboss culture taught me that I didn’t need to do any of that. It taught me that anyone can be a leader with the right Instagram filter. Step into my magical vortex and cash will flow to you effortlessly! 

Now listen, I love me a vortex—I just came out of one. 

(☝️  More on that later. The full impact of last week’s communal singing retreat is still unfolding. Whales and dolphins visit me in dreams. When I close my eyes, I hear the sound of my brother Quentin’s voice and feel his unmistakable presence.)

But you can’t live in a vortex. It is literally a tornado. 

I don’t know about you, but I want to feel safe and rooted within myself. When I sit down at my desk, I want to feel peace in my body and flow in my fingers as they move across my keyboard, my shoulders dropped and my heart open, ready to listen, to be a vessel for whatever wants to come through. 

There’s something frantic about girlboss energy, the relentless accumulation of all that you need, plus some more. Always more. It reminds me of a passage from The Prophet that goes, “Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable?”

What a line, amiright?! 

I don’t want to be recruiting more business owners to the unquenchable thirst. I want, well, I already said it: Safety. Peace. Presence. Open heart. Creative flow. Singing! That’s the energy I’m holding in the spaces where I facilitate, lead and coach. On this call, I was present in my body, and able to counterbalance the first-call jitters among the members which are always present, those feelings of, “Will this be worth the 5-figure investment?” and “Can I be fully myself and still belong here?”

Like I said, I was really proud of myself. 

…and today all I want to do is lay in bed eating Sour Patch Kids and watching Ted Lasso for the fourth time. 

I had Kraft dinner for breakfast, in bed, flicking through TikToks and worrying about the end of the world. That’s just how business seems to be right now. My therapist would call this the dissonance of trying to be productive in the context of facism. I just opened my Instagram to a video of someone talking about how the murder of Charlie Kirk was a conspiracy followed by a business coach’s reel saying, “You don’t need to make daily posts to make daily sales.”

What the whut now?

More than ever, we need spaces where we can be held in community and feel regulated, safe in our bodies, and present with all that is. A safe harbour while the storm is raging all around us. We need leaders who are rooted in themselves enough to hold others steady when the ground is shaking all around us. It is hard to know what to do next in business when the news cycle makes you want to crawl under the covers with a family-size bag of Doritos. 

Safety needs to come first, including psychological safety.

That’s work I’m committed to, creating spaces where peace and presence are possible. Yesterday I was able to provide that for my people and it felt good. 

But I’m also committed to eating Doritos and being in the energy of, “What the fuck is going on and how do we fix it?” I’m sitting with those feelings too, instead of pushing them away, or blasting the music of girlbossery so loud it drowns out everything else. 

We are in this together people. 

Let’s do our best to hold each other through it. 

xoxoxoxoinfinity

Tarzan

Tarzan Kalryzian [she/they]
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