Strong Inner Leadership: Cultivate Your Inner Masculine for Deeper Healing and Fulfillment
Why cultivating a strong inner masculine is important for men, women, and everyone in between — and here’s how to do it.
Life without a strong inner masculine feels like this:
- Emotional chaos and confusion
- Feeling lost, apathetic, and with an unclear direction for your life
- Lack of confidence because you don’t believe you have the skills to actually get your needs met
- People-pleasing and over-performing
- Feels like you’re drowning in either anger or shame (sometimes both)
Life with a strong inner masculine feels like this:
- Emotional clarity and calm
- Having a clear, purposeful direction for yourself and your life
- Unshakable confidence because you believe in your ability to get your needs met
- Presence in relationships — balance between clear boundaries and fulfilling connection
- You know how to channel all of your anger into productive movement and your shame into loving presence and belonging
This article is going to help you experience less of the first list and more of the second. Sound good?
Let’s dive in.
(Ps — I wrote this article that dives into the differences between masculine and feminine energies that you might want to read before you dive into this one. You can read it here.)
The Power Of Your Inner Masculine
There are two main goals or objectives that strengthening your inner masculine will help you experience:
- Cultivate mastery at identifying and meeting your needs
- Channel your fear & anger into a productive, purposeful, and clear direction for your life
What this looks like in real life is having unshakable confidence in your ability to meet every single one of your needs. This makes life way less scary, it makes other people way less scary, and it gives you a sense of freedom — like the world is truly your oyster and you have the skill necessary to get the most out of the rest of your life.
Sounds pretty great, huh?
Let’s get into how we do this through strengthening our inner masculine.
How To Strengthen Your Inner Masculine
There are three main ways to strengthen your inner masculine:
- Cultivate a strong inner leader
- Bring the bigger belief
- Say no when you mean no
Lets break these down.
Cultivate a strong inner leader
Here are a few ways that you can cultivate a strong inner leader.
Number one, build the skill of identifying, communicating, and meeting your needs.
The best resource I have found for this is the Nonviolent Communication framework (this is an affiliated link).
I know the title sounds boring as hell, but I promise you it will blow your mind. Like, please go buy the Nonviolent Communication book by Marshall Rosenberg if you want to drastically increase your skills in identifying, communicating, and meeting your needs.
The second thing you can do is to take imperfect action.
Take action even if you aren’t 100% sure it’s the perfect action to take and let the action you take be good enough.
This requires you to set boundaries with your own perfectionism. You need to cultivate an inner leader that is stronger than the pull of perfectionism in all its forms.
The way I do this is through telling my perfectionist part, “No, this action isn’t perfect. But it is moving the plot along and that’s what matters most.”
The third is asking for help and getting the support you need.
You are not supposed to do any of this alone. Extreme individualism is a real burden of our culture and a burden of the immature masculine.
Cultivating a strong inner leader means releasing the belief that you should be doing this all on your own and instead proactively getting the support you need to ensure you will get to where you want to go and have the impact you want to have during your one life to live.
The fourth is increasing your capacity to hang in the tension of uncertainty.
Cultivating a strong inner leader is about cultivating the skill of hanging in the tension of uncertainty, especially when the stakes feel high. It’s about learning to keep a level head and focus on what matters most, no matter how high the stakes feel.
Parts Work is the best tool I’ve found to cultivate this skill.
Bring the bigger belief
Bringing the bigger belief is about increasing your ability to lead yourself through fear and discomfort.
You are human. There is going to be fear and discomfort along your journey here. What beliefs do you need to cultivate to effectively lead yourself through that?
If you remember from this article, the masculine energy is the glass that’s holding the water. Your beliefs are the structure that creates the environment of your inner world.
Are you creating an inner world full of judgement or an inner world full of empowerment? Strengthening your inner masculine is about taking responsibility for the inner world environment you are creating for yourself on a daily basis.
Bringing the bigger belief is about consciously crafting the meaning you choose to make about a situation, about yourself, and about other people that will be most helpful and supportive to your continued evolution.
Say “No” when you mean “No”
The first step with this one is identifying the areas of your life where you are saying, “Yes,” when you have a part of you screaming, “No!”
All this really takes is slowing down long enough to get honest with yourself. Then, just literally start saying, “No” when you mean “No.”
Often we can get ourselves all worked up and confused about how to say no. Like, literally, you just say, “No thanks.” Simple — not easy — but you can do it.
This also includes setting more boundaries in your relationships that meet your needs and enforce them as needed.
Resentment is an indication that you have an unmet need. Instead of stewing in that resentment, a strong inner leader will identify the need that’s not being met, set boundaries with others (and yourself) that will create better conditions for that need to get met, and enforce those boundaries as needed.
A crash course on boundaries is outside of the scope of this article, but again, I highly recommend you check out that book, Nonviolent Communication, because it will help you significantly when it comes to boundary-setting.
Take This Deeper
Parts Work has been the most effective tool for me to cultivate a stronger inner masculine. As a result, I’ve moved from chronic shame to consistent confidence, and a life where every single one of my needs are dramatically met.
If you know it’s time to experience this for yourself, too, check out Parts Work Academy. It has everything you need to strengthen your inner masculine (and your inner feminine, by the way), release your trauma, and get crystal clear on the direction of your unique life purpose.
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