I have taken the last four weeks off from the blog world of our site. Sometimes life just happens. Recently, launching my networking efforts, the old fashioned, real world ones, has been the focus. During this process, I stumbled upon a spiritual blog which prompted an interesting realization.
I have often gone off the deep end trying to understand the Jungian concepts of the masculine and feminine within each of us. This particular rabbit-hole quickly leads to “mental masturbation” or “thinking about thinking.” Like most people in the second half of life; balance is of critical importance to me. The blog linked to above talks about the concept of balance when applied to the different gender forces that influence our behaviors and capabilities as complete human beings. Related back to my current focus, this resonates to me as learning to leverage the feminine energy of creation along with the masculine energy of outreach into a balanced dance of driven and guided innovation.
I work with my start-up clients in a three phase process; Vision, Validate and Venture Launch. The Vision stage is very much feminine energy; it’s all creation, all the time. It quickly becomes easy to feel somewhat out of balance, because in this phase we are not doing anything outside our small circle of friends and advisors.
In the Validation phase, much of the work is still inward focused and feminine with just a smidge of masculine energy added in the form of risk based outward thinking to allow for figuring out how to let the creation manifest in the form of a potentially viable business.
The final stage, Venture Launch tends to draw almost exclusively on masculine energy, if we are not careful to remember the concept of balance. We must be consistent in looking for the advantages and avoiding the potential pitfalls of either too much or not enough of either masculine or feminine energy. In my own case, I began to fall out of balance with all of the networking I have been doing. I left myself no time left for creation. When I read that blog entry last week, I began to schedule some time to get the “fun” creative tasks back into my life; things like writing this blog and beginning to define new programs to be launched in the fall.
I first learned about the idea of interior masculine and feminine energy influences Dr. Chuck Gallagher who was working with Marriage Encounter at the time. He described living while relying solely upon masculine energy or feminine energy as being akin to flying a jet airplane with only one engine. It requires a great deal of work to keep the plane headed in a straight and balanced direction. That was over twenty five years ago and finally, I feel like I have figured out what that means and how to implement balancing masculine and feminine energy in my daily life.
The good news here is that for people in the second half of life that “have to” work at authenticity and balance, it is relatively easy to do within the context of launching the life you were born to live – AT LAST. The idea is to balance your creative efforts with your business efforts, thereby increasing and enhancing the output of both. Isn’t that why creatives want to launch a late life business in the first place?