It is time for a new paradigm shift in leadership!

This title may seem fuzzy and unclear at first, and yet I am sure that it resonated with you on some level and I hope that by the end of this article they will make sense for you in a new way.

When you look around you, Leadership is potentially everywhere. 

In your personal life, you can see leadership in how you lead your life, how you lead your professional career, how you lead your couple’s life, your children and your family, how you manage your priorities, the choices that you make that eventually shape you into the person that you are, and will hopefully impact the people around you. 

On a collective level, leadership is all we see in politics, in industry leaders, in the media, with influencers, with religious leaders, with the people who are supposed to shape our society, our world, who are supposed to make difficult decisions to bring positive changes, to protect the minorities, to protect our planet, to engage in peace talk, to prevent wars, or to be the next Nobel Prize. 

For our personal leadership, the personal development and coaching industry brought a huge shift in our consciousness, and gave a second life to our destiny as humans. It gave us awareness, tools, and resources to understand how we work inside, to identify our internal processes and to teach us how to become better humans, and hopefully better leaders, if we are able to set an example for others. 

But for the collective leadership, you don’t have to be a genius to see that something is not working and that the world is in a state of chaos and extreme polarization  where almost nobody trusts our “political leaders” to lead us to a better place anymore, and people are turning to extremism, to the woke movement, to nationalism, religion and other strong belief systems that is “supposed to” save them from drowning in this world that has no real leadership. 

I am sure that there are a lot of explanations and analysis on this phenomenon and I haven’t studied them all, but I want to offer you a different take on what is happening. I look at what is happening from a masculine vs feminine leadership perspective. (Not men vs women, but masculine vs feminine.) 

Let me explain. 

I believe that we are all – men and women – made of masculine and feminine dimensions and that we all need both of these dimensions to be balanced inside ourselves in order to find our personal alignment, but also to allow true collective leadership. 

The masculine dimension is made of ego, power, ambition, competition, decision making, authority, rational thoughts, need for recognition, and clarity on the strategy, on the steps to take. 

The feminine dimension is made of soft skills, communication, empathy, intuition, collaboration, selfless acts, negotiation, patience and clarity on the full picture and the long term impact. 

I am sure that while reading this, you are probably already taking sides and trying to decide which one is “better” or which one you prefer, or which one you can identify with the most. But the truth is that there is no “good” or “bad” dimension. We need both and we need to find the right balance between the two. 

The same is true for the masculine and the feminine leadership – we need to access both in order to reach true leadership, within ourselves, as well as for the collective.

And that’s where the Paradigm Shift in Leadership comes in. 

The paradigm shift is that this approach to Leadership is not defending one way to or the other, it is showing a way where we can have enough self awareness and enough understanding of how each leadership works, that we are free to choose which dimension we want to use depending on the situation, and not based on our education, social pressure, our DNA or social standards. 

But for this paradigm shift to happen, we have to understand what happened until now and how the world had to go through extremes before we could be ready for this balanced and aligned New Leadership. 

For the first thousands of years of our era, the masculine dimension was in the forefront because we needed to build the world, both literally and figuratively. In the beginning, we needed action, power, strength to build this new world and that’s mostly what men did. They took the front of the scene and made the world go through many stages including the industrial revolution which is allowing us to have the life that we have today. 

The feminine dimension was not as needed in the front of the scene during all these years, that’s why women were busy backstage, creating lives, populating the planet with actual human beings and making sure they stayed alive to ensure the continuity of our species. 

But I am going to stop right there – because I know what you might be thinking. You are thinking that I am confusing masculine and feminine dimensions with men and women gender. But I am not. At the time, those dimensions were most of the time connected to a specific gender. It is only in recent years that we have gone through an elevation of consciousness and that we know that those dimensions can be found in both genders. 

It is only in more recent years that we saw how contraception changed the primary role of women, how women started to earn money and how both genders started to interchange roles. That’s when we started to see how both feminine and masculine dimensions could be found more and more in both genders. 

Now, because women came later in the game, they have some catching up to do and they need to rebalance the collective unconscious around women’s role, build their self worth and self confidence that they did not have until recently, to share the front of the scene with men. 

And while women do this, men are also going through changes while they are allowing themselves to be in their feminine dimension, overcoming social pressures of virility and egos and discovering other parts of themselves that they like. 

By going through these transformations, both women and men are preparing the world for this paradigm shift for a new leadership where we will – finally – be able to enjoy both masculine and feminine dimensions in order to become true leaders. 

Being a true leader is being able to choose how we feel, think and act based on our own internal alignment between those 2 forces and based on the external situation that we are presented with, and to make choices, not driven by personal good, but for a collective good. 

This paradigm shift is not only the promise of a better world, but it is also a perspective of true leadership that will combine the personal and the collective, the masculine and feminine in order to grow as humans and contribute with what we have to give to this world. 

That is precisely why I created this Global Network of Jewish Women Entrepreneurs & Leaders. 

Because I believe that the first step of this shift is to raise consciousness around women, to learn more about both dimensions, to stop thinking that women are only made of feminine dimensions and men of masculine, to understand the different types of leadership in order to create the New Leaders of tomorrow who will naturally integrate both dimensions. 

Why women? Because women need the self confidence and the self worth that they are equal partners in this equation, and they need to realize that they can also express their masculine dimension without forgetting their feminine dimension and vice versa. Because, it starts with women.  

The next step will be to bring the shift to men, so that this awareness can give them the courage to connect to the different dimensions inside themselves, so that they are not “ashamed” of their feminine dimension, and that they know when to use their masculine dimension for the good of others, as true leaders. 

Why Jewish? Because I believe that it starts with Jewish Women who will show the way and be a light for the others to follow, just like the Jewish People has been a light and showing the way for thousands of years. 

Why Women Entrepreneurs? Because I believe that each entrepreneur is already a leader of her life and of her destiny and that has a potential to contribute and have an impact on the world. 

My deepest and most sincere wish is that the Global Network of Jewish Women Entrepreneurs & Leaders will succeed in its mission to bring the power back to amazing women who are already leaders – but are not always aware of it – and that by doing so, we will create this paradigm shift in Leadership, so that there will be more balance, peace and joy in the world. 

Will you join me?