Why Power Turns Me Off (and Presence Turns Me On)

Last night, I sat in a restaurant across from a man who thought his portfolio was his personality.

He asked me questions, but didn’t wait for answers. Interrupted every thought. Decided who I was and what I needed before I could open my mouth…all while proudly declaring his commitment to empowering women - though not enough to let one finish a sentence.

The Body’s Truth

What unsettled me most wasn’t him. It was me.

My body started shrinking before my mind even noticed. Years of therapy, boundary work, conscious reprogramming - and still, I found myself nodding along to keep him comfortable. The old “good girl” software was alive and well.

I did push back - twice - but not with the full clarity of the woman who knows that her worth is not defined by anyone’s approval.

I left vibrating with incongruence. How had I slipped so easily into a role I thought I’d left behind?

The Illusion of Intimacy

This man genuinely believed intimacy could be bought. That success entitled him to admiration, attention - even love.

But intimacy is never transactional. It asks for presence, curiosity, vulnerability. It demands listening. It requires humility.

Money can purchase many things, but not connection. Not the ability to hold space for another’s truth. Not the courage to sit with someone’s complexity without trying to fix or define it.

(My friend Kapil Gupta writes beautifully about this very trap in his piece Why Success Can’t Buy Intimacy here).

The Familiar Pattern

If you’ve felt yourself go small in the presence of someone who confuses power with worth, you know this pattern.

It’s the pull to please. The impulse to keep the peace. The pressure to play the “good girl” even when your whole system is screaming otherwise.

And for so many accomplished women, this is the paradox: we’ve climbed ladders, earned respect, ticked every box - and still find ourselves silencing our truth in the presence of masculine authority wrapped in wealth and the very emblems of success and power we’ve been trained to respect above all else.

The women I work with know this intimately. They’ve followed the rules, gathered the titles, reached the milestones - and still something essential is missing. Often, in the pursuit of external success, they’ve abandoned their connection to their feminine essence: their intuition, their receptivity, their capacity for depth and connection.

The Cost of Shrinking

Every time we override ourselves, we pay.

We teach our bodies that our truth matters less than someone else’s comfort. We reinforce the lie that love is something earned through compliance instead of lived in authenticity.

And in doing so, we betray the very source of our strength. Every time we choose to operate from rigid, disconnecting structures - the ones our culture rewards - we abandon the fluid, intuitive power of the feminine within us. We trade our aliveness for approval, our creativity for conformity, our sovereignty for a seat at a table that was never built for us.

The truth is that the respect, the intimacy, the connection, the acceptance we crave will come when we fully embody our essence. That embodiment becomes magnetic; it's an energy that bypasses the mind and speaks directly to the animal body.

Awakening Through Discomfort

Here’s what I’m holding close: my discomfort wasn’t failure. It was data. My body refusing to fully play small.

Sometimes it takes these uncomfortable encounters to show us where we are on the map. To remind us how far we’ve come - and where there’s still more practice.

Because this is an iterative process. Each encounter becomes an invitation to show up more truthfully. Each awkward exchange, a rehearsal for sovereignty. With every cycle, the conditioning dissolves a little more, and the woman we’re becoming steps forward with greater clarity, greater courage.

The Reminder

So the next time someone tries to buy your compliance with their success story, remember this:

✨ You are not for sale.

✨ Your truth is not negotiable.

✨ Presence is ALWAYS sexier than power.

To the woman reading this who recognises herself in these words: your discomfort is not weakness, it’s wisdom. Your resistance is rebellion. And your longing for something deeper than transactional relationships is not asking for too much - it’s asking for exactly what you deserve.

The woman you’re becoming is calling. It’s time to answer.