I'm Lisa Villu and I went from housewife to co-founder of the billion dollar company Quests Nutrition and our president of Impact Theory. Our mission with this show is to empower you and all women to recognize you really can become the hero of your own life. Welcome to Women of Impact. Like Tectonic plates colliding to cause an earthquake, these two women coming together is in my opinion absolutely groundbreaking. Now individually these women are already trod blazers in the female empowerment space. Amy Stanton went from the first ever Chief Marketing Officer for Martha Stewart Living Omni Media to founder and CEO of Stanton & Company, a marketing and PR agency which primarily focuses on brands built by women. Her belief in the power of philosophy driven brands has led her to represent an incredible line of exceptional female athletes and lifestyle experts in the health and wellness space ranging from hockey plays to snowboarders to yoga instructors. And on the off chance of this badass TEDx speaker has some free time, she of course doesn't Netflix and chill, but rather she suits up and runs, completing five, yes five marathons. Those I'd like to introduce to you the incomparable Catherine Conners. As head of content for Disney Interactive's Women and Family, Catherine's contribution grew its platform to become the number one digital media network, reaching an unfathomable amount of women and families worldwide. But despite the success, she struggled to reconcile between the femininity of princesses and the fierceness of girl power. So she parted ways and co-founded Maverick, a creative network that reminds girls and young women that they have the power. Not hanging up her cape there though, she went on to write the smash hit her bad mother, where she talked the nobious approach to navigating motherhood and womenhood. This war account garnered the attention of the New York Times and Washington Post as well as CNN and ABC just to name a few. Oh, and did I mention that in between all of this, she snorkeled in the Caribbean, walked on the catwalk, escaped a burning house house and found herself on a hijacked plane. Eat your heart out Wonder Woman. Yes, it's no surprise that these two women coming together to write this book is like holding a match to a gas leak. It's explosive in ideas and burns all preconceived notions and stereotypes of femininity. So please, help me in welcoming the authors of the feminine revolution, 21 ways to ignite the power of your femininity for a brighter life and better world, Amy, Stanton and Catherine Connors. Good morning girls. Good morning. How are you doing? Great after that introduction. I am so blown away by the book and I want to start with being emotional. So the reason why I want to start there is because that's the one thing that my entire life I've always been, hide your emotions Lisa, don't cry in public, don't use your emotions to persuade people, don't use your emotions to win an argument. Like I was always very paranoid about that, especially with my husband. And I open your book and your first thing is being emotional, talk to me about how that started and what you mean by that. Well, I think it's contextualized by this idea that femininity has been perceived as weak by society. And then we've now inflicted this upon ourselves and potentially been hiding

some of our feminine qualities. So we take those feminine qualities, the first of which is emotionality, and show why they've been connected to the feminine, why they've been perceived as weak, and then actually show why in fact they're not only not weak, they're a power, they're a super power. Can you take me through that then? Why do you think that they started being perceived as weak in the first place? They've always been. But the primary thing that's at the core of that is that if a trait, if a value, if a characteristic, a behavior gets associated with women, then just by that connection starts to have this effect of, well, if women do it, it's less than. Part of this has just been the breakdown of our societies over time. Women have been in the private sphere, men have been in the public sphere, male strength has been associated with very public activity, with leadership, with you know dominance and ambition, whereas feminine characteristics have been associated with nurturing, caregiving and you know tending to the heart. The household, for example, or child rearing that historically, not this is something that not just men do, but we have as a culture separated from powers. So there's something that's just in the word that we immediately jump to dominance aggression, masculine forms of leadership, the roadmail, the superhero. And because we associate power with just that particular picture, it's very hard to step back from it and say, well, there are other ways of being powerful, right? If you define power as influence, if you define power as an ability to pursue your own fulfillment or others' fulfillment to pursue a good, a common good or a personal good, then it starts to expand the landscape. But we've historically, and this is across cultures and for millennia, looked at power in a very particular way and it's a masculine one. Historically, leaders in the workplace were men. So as women, we felt that we needed to take on more masculine characteristics in order to thrive in a man's world. And what we're saying is that may or may not be the case, we still believe that those masculine qualities, assertiveness, directness, confidence, that those are important. And that we value those enormously. And even looking back to sort of the impetus for why we wrote this book, my personal inspiration when I started thinking about this, which was actually five years ago, was starting to question whether I had developed too many of these masculine traits because I was so focused on my work life and my work developing my work persona and wondering if those were serving

me in the rest of my life but also wondering if I was hiding some of the biggest most important parts of myself. So my emotionality, my sensitivity, I'm a cryer and starting to think, why am I hiding those things and why am I not bringing my full self, my full authentic self wherever I go? I love that and when you said, is it serving me in the rest of my life? I live my life under that. So anything I do, does it serve my goals, does it serve what I'm working towards or not? And if it doesn't, and I sideline it, if it does I do. And in business, as I was kind of working more and more, I was reading more books and everything you read, especially for women is don't cry in the workplace, don't get emotional. You will be dismissed if you do. And so it was like, it seemed like that made sense. Like, okay, yeah, actually get it. Men don't normally cry in business meetings. meetings. You don't want to be dismissed as being emotional so So I'm going to go in there and, you know, have like my, my guard up and make sure I don't get emotional, which is why I found this so fascinating, because I just thought this whole time I've been hiding my emotions, because I thought it served me, but could I have been tricking myself and actually it doesn't serve me. So, is there a fine line then in being emotional, whether it's like in public or in a work place or just in general, where it's like yes you should be emotional but up to a certain point, or is it like be yourself and just own it? I think the first, in the first instance, the question is how is how do we how do you how does one even think about emotionality so the first thing we want to do is unpack what being emotional even means because we live in a culture and this is a long-standing and cross-cultural thing where emotionality is considered a weakness that is, you know, that it's in conflict with rationality, with good judgment, you know, the whole idea of female hysteria, that we just, we have this baggage around emotions that we, that we're arguing we need to unpack. So step back and say, okay, our, is it a problem to be emotional? Arguably no. To your question, is there a limit to it? Sure, there's a balance, there needs to be a balance in everything, but it is to challenge the idea that there's something problematic about emotionality and that our emotions are a problem for us, whether it's in business, politics, and relationships with a home, and push ourselves to say, can I benefit and can we, as a culture and a community benefit by being more authentic in our emotions, being more willing to express and share and connect around our emotions? Obviously being attentive to a context, right? And to being mindful of how things are going to be received, But starting from the point of, why should I own my feelings? Why shouldn't I embrace them and think about them and bring them to the table and say, this bothers me? Or this is pushing a button that I want to address or deal with and open up different kinds of conversation about what's going to be effective and what's not going to be effective on the assumption that there is nothing wrong with emotions and in fact when you put emotions on the table along with reason and other qualities then you've just got a much bigger toolbox to play with. And one of the things she mentioned which we think is extremely important is authenticity. So we see this whole process of exploring our femininity and then bringing it forth as another way of getting at, how do you live your most authentic life? Because if there are these parts of us that we've been hiding for whatever reason, either because we believed that they were weak, we believed that others would think they were weak, then we're not showing up as our full selves. And there's no question that there are societal factors that contribute to that, and we need to be aware of them. So to your point, it's not like we're suggesting that we go above and beyond to cry more frequently in the office, but the point is, if you do burst into tears, most likely it's not because you woke up that morning and thought, oh, I hope today I am sobbing to my boss because that will make a great day. But more likely because you had a moment where you did lose control and that's human. And instead of beating ourselves up over those human moments, which we do, especially as women, how do you instead use that as a way of connecting more deeply with the person was across the table from you and saying, I'm getting emotional because I care, because I really am passionate about this work. And I tell a story in the book about, as you can tell, the crying piece, it's something I'm very passionate about. I tell a story about a couple of bosses that I had while I was running the marketing in PR for New York's Olympic bed. And one was from the finance world and one was from the political landscape. And they were super direct, very assertive. They just tell it how it is. And so they were used to that kind of environment and probably used to working with more men, frankly. And being the cryer that I am, I brought a whole new dimension to that environment. And I definitely burst into tears multiple times in our years working together, sometimes out of exhaustion, sometimes out of frustration. But what was interesting is, instead of getting to a place where they were so uncomfortable that it changed the dynamic in our relationship, if anything I actually think it brought us closer, I think about all the times growing up in the workplace where people have said, Amy, stop being so sensitive or you need to toughen up. It causes us to create this shell, this toughness,

which I'm just not sure in the end is surges us.

I mean, sure, we could all be a little tougher

and understand how to be strong and powerful

in the workplace, but here's a new way at it.

Because if you look at your emotionality,

just that specifically, that's why you're able

to connect with people.

That's why you understand people to the degree that you do. It's why people understand you. See who you really are. So why would we want to hide such an important part of ourselves? Yeah, and I love that. But what happens when you're in an environment where the person that you're crying to or in in that same room thinks like It doesn't agree with you and absolutely thinks that your emotions is dampening the situation or clouding the situation. What do you do if someone's still just like this crazy woman like she just keeps crying? What are you doing in those situations? I think the most important thing in situations like that is to be in your own power around your emotion, right? So the first thing is to be able to get to a place where you're not ashamed of it, right? How do you get that then? Well, that's the personal work, right? And part of that is the work of unpacking why do we think of crying in the terms that we do or emotionality? Why do we think it's weak? Right? When this is a cornerstone of human connection and the human experience, why have we decided it's weak? So the objective isn't to be in the boardroom necessarily to be able to say, I'm going to cry freely and you all are just going to feel it, right? But it's to get each of us to a place where we can in a moment where emotional acknowledge the feelings the feelings. Have the feelings. Not be ashamed of the feelings. And use our judgment about how we're going to proceed. It might be, you know what? I'm going to excuse myself because I'm having emotional reaction, or I can feel myself getting emotional. I don't want anyone to be uncomfortable, so I'm going to remove it myself. It might be, I'm emotional right now and deal with it.. Right? That this is, that this is the reaction that I'm having and it's a valid one depending on the context. But I think the very first step just needs to be for us to forgive ourselves in the, in the softest way. But then also to say, this is me being human, right? This is me being me and it's real. And what can I learn from it? And what are my emotions telling me? Why am I feeling pulled to express myself in this way? And how can I use it? Rather than immediately go, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. I need that it's a problem. Yeah. And try to bury it. Because to Amy's point, in the burying it, we're constructing all sorts of armor and pushing all these very natural, laudable human qualities down that frankly I think we need way more of in our society. We need to be more emotionally connected. We need to be more compassionate. By the way, I think once you come to terms with the fact that it's okay to cry, you're not gonna cry as much. That seems interesting. Because of all this angst around the emotions that we're trying to hide, it's creating more problems. And not to mention that we actually identify a number of health benefits to crying. So it's actually really good for you. Oh, it's about health benefits. Very ideologically powerful powerful. It's a release. Look at how it is. Look at how it is. It's a valve, right? So the reason human beings cry is because it is a release valve. It's not a superfluous biological impulse that we have. It's a release valve. So it does our emotional, emotional mental and physical well-being gets attached to our ability to actually experience our emotions and express our emotions and to have the physical output of our emotions. But I think Amy's point is really important that part of, and crying is the best example of this, where when we frame something negatively, we're more easily derailed by it. Right? That's so easy. Because we frame it as bad. So it's like I can't get emotional, if I get emotional, if I get emotional, then I'm going to be seen this way or that way. But then you get emotional about being emotional. You get more sensitive about crying because you're fearful about crying. And it's in part because we've taken those characteristics and those behaviors and decided collectively for some reason, you know, that they're problematic. But I think that, as long as we're stuck in this rut of, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad, this is weak, we're always going to be derailed by it. You guys are literally changing me in real time right now because as as a joke, I've been with my husband for 18 years,

and he used to joke all the time saying I was dead inside.

Because I didn't cry.

And it wasn't like out of like, don't see me cry, let me go hide.

I just, I don't feel the impulse to cry.

But it doesn't mean that I don't feel.

And that was the first moment that I realized, wow,

I'm actually doing this to myself.

I'm actually pushing down like you were saying about the armor, right? I had built up armor and it made me go, how did I build up armor? Like, why don't I say even do that in the first place? So I went back in my life and started pointing out things that had happened to me that had led me to here. So for instance, my parents got divorced when I was young.

I remember walking into the room with my mom crying

and she would wipe all her tears and pretend nothing was wrong. So from an early age I learned that tears make other people sad and I don't want to make other people sad. But I recognize now, especially with you guys here, it might not be serving me. So now I'm like, how do I unwire it?

Because it's been like 25 years that I've longer than that,

...