Unbound: A Woman's Guide to Power - Softcover

Urbaniak, Kasia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593084527 ISBN 13: 9780593084526

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The ultimate guide to owning your power--and mastering how to use it.

How can so many women feel "good and mad" yet still reluctant to speak up in a meeting or difficult conversation? Why do women often feel like they're too much--and, at the same time, not enough? What causes us, at the most critical moments in our lives, to freeze?

Kasia Urbaniak teaches power to women--and her answers to these questions may surprise you. Based on insights from her experiences as a dominatrix, her training to become a Taoist nun, and the countless women she has taught to expand their influence, this book offers precise, practical instruction in how to stand in your power, find your voice, and use it well.

Learn how to:

Embrace your desires as the pathway to your destiny.

Ask for--and get--what you need in your life, work, and in the bedroom.

Skillfully navigate hearing "no" and any resistance, even your own.

Flip power dynamics when someone crosses your boundaries and puts you on the spot.

Create new and expanded roles for the people in your life with precise, targeted asks.

Whether you're getting crystal clear on exactly what you want, or turning the tables on a man who has shut you up and shut you down, Urbaniak's methods teach women to stand for themselves in every interaction.

Part manual, part manifesto, part behind the scenes look, Unbound is a how-to guide to the impossible, the outrageous, the unimaginable--a field guide to living your wildest, best, and most satisfying life.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kasia Urbaniak is the founder and headmistress of The Academy, a secret school that teaches women to fully embody their confidence and power. Her teachings, based on insights from her experiences working as an expert dominatrix as well as her training to become a Taoist nun, have been profiled in The New York Times, The Cut, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Through her courses, corporate sessions, and more, she has trained thousands of women - artists and politicians, philanthropists and aid workers, lawyers and judges.

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Introduction

 

This book is a training manual for battle. It will prepare you for war when it's necessary, and skillful collaboration when you desire it. It is a field guide to the impossible, the outrageous, the unimaginable. It contains instructions for achieving unattainable goals, ones so far out of your reach you feel stupid or crazy thinking them, let alone saying them out loud.

 

It is an education in breaking the ingrained conditioning that keeps women silent and accommodating when we should be expressing ourselves and having influence. It will teach you to know what you want and how get it, which will change the world around you.

 

It is a guide to power.

 

 

My name is Kasia Urbaniak, and I spent seventeen years studying to become a Taoist nun while working as one of the most successful dominatrices in the world.

 

These seemingly contradictory tracks gave me unexpected and unprecedented insight into how power works. In studying Taoism around the globe, I learned to read the human body, so I'd know a person's intention to attack or retreat before they'd moved a muscle or uttered a word. It taught me to follow and trust what's most alive-what's humming with energy and possibility.

 

From my work in the dungeon, I learned all the ways that imagination can heal us, and help us to discover deep emotional truths. In playing games with power, I learned to differentiate between real authority and a performance of it.

 

From both, I learned about power dynamics: influence on others that exists beyond the level of language alone.

 

In 2012, I founded a school with Ruben Flores, an emergency field coordinator for the humanitarian organization MŽdecins Sans Fronti�res (Doctors Without Borders), to teach other women what I had learned. At the beginning, our school felt like an exclusive but growing secret society of powerful women whose headquarters just happened to be my Manhattan apartment. We were a modern-day, real-world Bene Gesserit, a coven of the righteous, planning world domination and achieving it.

 

But in 2018, many women began speaking out about their lived experiences of sexual harassment and assault, which gave rise to larger cultural conversations about feelings of powerlessness in family units, in romantic and sexual relationships, and in the workplace.

 

As the #metoo movement gathered speed, women at large started speaking a truth that my students already knew and had trained for: that most-if not all-of us had clutched in a high-stake, high-stress situation.

 

When it was most important for us

to know and speak our truth,

we were unable to.

 

The world is on fire, and the concepts I teach are ones that every woman should have access to. That is why I am writing this book.

 

This book will inoculate you against "no" and resistance of all kinds, including your own. It will help you to identify the life-force, the juice, the beautiful moving energy in every interaction, which is the key to understanding true desire. It will provide you with a constructive channel for all of the rage every woman has spent her adult life tamping down. And it will teach you to harness one of the most powerful weapons we have-your attention.

 

And while there will be erotic absurdity and transcendent insight, what I really want to share with you is what I discovered underneath every interaction. Because power isn't a mood, an outfit, a moment, or a pose. It is the ability to access your deepest desires, express them fully, and use them to influence other people and the world at large.

 

Ultimately, this book is about relationships-in the den, in the bedroom, in the workplace, in Congress, and at the bar. It is about the dynamics that define them and decide their fate. It is about strength and vulnerability, dominance and surrender, and how each affects the flow of love, power, and influence.

 

I use binary terms-man and woman-when I speak about gender, not because I see gender as binary, but because my work is so deeply rooted in the cultural conditioning that all of us received when we were assigned "male" or "female" at birth. Regardless of how you identify now, the expectations of and treatment by your parents and society at large imprinted you, and make a difference in the way you behave in relationship to others.

 

You'll also notice that many of the examples I use are heteronormative. Much of what I teach addresses the ways that women have been conditioned to interact with men, including as romantic partners. But the behaviors outlined within these pages can be used with a spouse, sparring partner, coworker, friend, child, parent, or lover of any gender. Breaking the ties that bind will allow you freer, more powerful communication-with everyone.

 

When you play skillfully with power dynamics, the world changes. You stop being a servant of the life you're living, and become a creator of the world you want.

 

Let's get started.

 

Part One

 

It's Not You

 

Revealing the Invisible Bind

 

Chapter One

 

The Conversation under the Conversation

 

The Hidden Architecture of Power

 

Women are furious.

 

Instead of frolicking through fields of equal pay and the state-funded child care our feminist foremothers fought for, we're hanging on by shredded fingernails to rapidly eroding fundamental rights. Sexual assault doesn't seem to disqualify a man from public office; instead, they brag about it like it's a qualification. And every news cycle seems to bring a fresh story featuring our girl children, trafficked for the pleasure of wealthy, powerful men and covered up by their cronies.

 

We know that it has never been more important for us to speak-to be able to communicate the truth of our experiences, to ask for what we want, to be able to articulate our vision for the future we want to live in, and then make that vision happen.

 

And yet what I hear most from women is self-blame.

 

Truly badass women tell me about freezing-moments when they know they should say something, moments when they need to say something, or maybe it's too many things, but when they open their mouths, nothing comes out. Sometimes this freeze happens in high-stakes scenarios, when a job or their safety is on the line. On one hand, this makes it worse, and certainly more dangerous; by the time they've returned to their bodies, his hand is up their skirt, the job has gone to someone else, or they've agreed to do something they really didn't want to do.

 

But on the other hand, they can't understand why it happens in ultra-low-stakes scenarios, too-like when the guy making their latte asks if they're single. And why can't they predict when this speechlessness is going to set in?

 

Baffled women confess that they don't know which version of themselves is going to show up for a meeting. Will it be the deer in the headlights, peeling herself off the conference room floor only to get steamrolled again-the one who mumbles a brilliant idea into her mug, just so the guy next to her can helpfully restate it and take the credit? Or the fearless Amazon who effortlessly holds the room in the palm of her hand, whose logic and charisma make her so irresistible, she could ask her team to ride to hell and back? Mansplainers and manterrupters exist in every workplace; so how come she's mostly able to neutralize those guys with a cocked eyebrow-except on the days when she sounds like a harsh, bitter shrew, even to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593084527
• ISBN 13: 9780593084526
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland