The Reign of the Girlboss is Over. It's Time for The Intuitive Entrepreneur.
Walk back in time with me, to the Year of Our Lord 2014.
Barack Obama was our President, and we loved him. Stay With Me by Sam Smith was on every single one of your ❤️Catching Feelings❤️ playlists. Crop tops were the lewk. Celebrities and people in suburbia dumped buckets of ice water on their heads and posted it to Facebook. A new organization, Black Lives Matter, marched in Ferguson, protesting the death of Michael Brown.
You had an Instagram, and you loved the Clarendon filter. And if you were a female-identifying person between the ages of 18 and 45, you feed was riddled with photos of chic women sipping coconut milk lattes (no oat milk yet, my friends) hashtagged with #girlboss. Millenial pink-backed quotes in a Sans Serif font perkily shouting at you to HUSTLE HARDER dotted popular influencers (a new term) pages.
The mood? Build an empire by working 18 hours a day, grow your Instagram follower count, HIIT workouts only because you're too busy and we need a six-pack NOW, empower other women but men can f*ck off, be kind but know your worth, ask for the raise, be so good they can't ignore you, life others up but don't be afraid to shine, demand to be seen, demand investment, demand respect, demand happiness, demand a seat at the table, demand to be able to breastfeed in the coat closet in between board meetings, demand for your company to pay for your eggs to be frozen because you work so much you haven't had a moment to even think about a healthy relationship in five years let alone date, demand a title bump, demand what is yours.
It was overwhelming. It is overwhelming.
They say that 2020 is finally — finally — the end of the girl boss, and for a good reason. Our priorities have solidified. We're not interested in killing ourselves for financial profit. We're not interested in work that isn't intersectional. We're not interested in merely retrofitting ourselves to the broken systems and structures of White supremacist patriarchal capitalist. We don't want a seat at that table. We want to chop that table up and burn it, and build a new one ourselves.
The good thing about the #girlboss craze of the 2010s? It pushed many, many people to think more entrepreneurially. Seeing proof on the internet that life outside of a 9-to-5 day job at a corporation was possible was meaningful.
That proof was enough to launch the businesses of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurial-minded people. And honestly, that's where the cracks started to show in the girl boss movement. Because as fledgling entrepreneurs began to find success (myself included), we also began to see the major problems with the system we'd eagerly just bought into with our time and attention.
So what's next? What's the chapter after #girlboss? The entrepreneur who knows better.
I got caught up in the fervor of hustling and striving and achieving. When I started Holisticism in 2017, I set out to raise money from investors. After working in tech for so many years, it honestly seemed like the only option. Bootstrapping — or self-funding your business with your own money and through revenue — seemed like a pipedream.
My fundraise was a brutal process that included many cross-country trips, getting groped by a potential investor during a meeting, many no's, and actually, a lot of yes's.
And as I got closer to raising the money I asked for, I felt myself go cold. I did not want this. I did not want investors who felt entitled to my body. I did not want to kill myself for the sake of growth. I did not want to take over the world. I did not want to settle or sacrifice my integrity for a couple hundred thousand dollars.
I wanted to follow my clear vision. I wanted the freedom to pursue what mattered to me. I wanted to be able to make my own rules. I wanted to use the Akashic Records to figure out my quarterly revenue goals and to pull a Tarot card before every company meeting.
What's next for those who've long since graduated from the girl boss movement? For those who never felt right claiming that title in the first place?
I think it's intuitive entrepreneurship. It's trusting yourself. It's embracing your intuition and intellect and marrying those sides of you together to bring structural change into the world.
There should be more businesses that prioritize impact over profits, but also make enough money to support their employees and founders comfortably.
There should be more anti-Capitalist and antifragile businesses that prove through their existence and success that there is another way to work.
There should be more founders who are queer, trans, non-gender binary, female-identifying, Black, POC, differently-abled. And we should be able to make our own structures — not try to wedge ourselves into the tiny space that's been made available for us by patriarchal capitalism.
There should be more workplaces that support rest.
I believe we can build these things, together. But I think that we'll need all the tools in our arsenal to do it — our wits, our charm, our intuition, our magic, our passion, our intelligence, our hearts, our histories. And I think we'll need each other, too.
This is all the stuff we talk about every single month in the North Node, our membership group for intuitive leadership and business building. Intuitive entrepreneurship and leadership take a lot of personal development, research, and, honestly, community. Teamwork makes the dream work.