Born to lead? Yes, you are, even if you hold no political office and are not the president of an international business conglomerate. Like it or not, on top of a mate, kids, a house, and a career to care for, you have a new assignment—to save the world by ensuring that it goes on for your children and grandchildren. The bad news is that men are not going to do it. (I think you already know that.) The good news is that it is up to you personally and individually. You are part of a generation of women who will cast the deciding vote on the viability of the human race.

You have to devise, along with 3.2 billion other women and girls, a new strategy that revolutionizes the way all of us think and stops the wholesale destruction of this magnificent planet we live on. Fortunately, you don’t have to go anywhere. There are no extra meetings to attend. You can do everything you need to do inside yourself and lead from wherever you are. Simply start with The Feminine Principle, which you live with every single day, then take a stand for a life in which you are a first-class, fully nourished person, with a voice for the visions and desires that every woman holds dear, and be that person everywhere you go. This is a time to shine in all your greatness. This book will show you how.

Ask yourself, “What is The Feminine Principle?” If you are like most people, you might think of the ways women act and what is important to them. Things like relationship, family, beauty, kindness, love, and grace might come to mind, as well as the way women walk and talk and gesture—what you might call the culture of being a woman. You might also think of the Goddess-worship culture, where The Feminine Principle is another name for the feminine face of God.

There is a third possible answer, but it is invisible to most people. This third answer is the core of this book. It is my premise that The Feminine Principle, like all human ideas, is a system of beliefs about who and what women are and about their role in human affairs. This system of beliefs (or model), with its attendant roles, is automatically taught to girls as what it is to be female. These beliefs might have nothing to do with physically being female. More importantly, they might have nothing to do with what is in the best interest of women—or even of men.

The first goal of this book is to help you understand how The Feminine Principle works as a model of human behavior, so that you can change it as you see fit. When you start changing your belief systems for your greatest happiness, pleasure, and effectiveness, you literally become a world leader, because in pioneering a new world for yourself, you also make a new reality available for everyone around you.

The second goal is to identify four critical elements that are missing from The Feminine Principle for most women because of the way they learned it, and to give you the thinking and tools to claim them. When you add these elements—namely, Capacity, Truth, Voice, and Stance—into The Feminine Principle, you become whole and fulfilled. You become a “woman of greatness” who: (1) develops full Capacity for life and leadership by nourishing herself and others; (2) moves beyond old beliefs about being second class and tells the Truth about herself and the world; (3) has a clear Voice for her visions, appetites, and desires; and (4) takes her Stand for the world she wants, as a unique individual in her own right (regardless of relationships she might have). Such a woman embraces her real genius—the power to enhance rather than destroy.

These four elements are the keys to a New Feminine Principle. When you make them a part of your belief system, you create a brand-new set of beliefs about being feminine that elevates your status as a human being and makes real change in the world available. You also discover that The New Feminine Principle is really The Principle of Wholeness.

Waking Up to a New World

Fifteen years ago, I had an epiphany, a sudden opening of my reality that catapulted me into a brand-new world and changed everything about my view of women and men. To my utter amazement, the very first thing I noticed after this epiphany was that I could understand clearly what the women around me were talking about. I witnessed a degree of clarity, complexity, and richness in the way women think and speak that astounded me.

Perhaps the most profound realization I had was that women live in a world where standard logic, a mental approach to life, is not the prevailing mindset. More precisely, women live in a world that is a-logical rather than illogical; it is a world where sudden leaps occur that transcend logic and open new vistas. Women include logic when it is useful, but are no more bound by it than quantum physicists are bound by Newton’s early theories about gravity. As one woman mentor of mine put it, “Men live in a cause-and-effect world. Everything must be explained and accounted for. Women live in a world of magic and miracle. We are not trying to control the world we live in. We want to cooperate with it.”

Women live in a world that is more closely allied to chaos theory, where at any moment a whole new condition can arise and a new choice can be made. Ironically, the same men who can see the intellectual genius of chaos theory are often annoyed when women actually put it into practice.

The world of women’s thinking and communication is more complex and subtle than that of the world of men. Gesture, tone, body posture, feeling, energy, and emotion are as important as what is said. Sometimes, what a woman omits from conversation is more important than what she does say. This comes from the fact that women have traditionally been suppressed and have had to develop more complex and subtle ways of communicating. It might also come from the fact that women are generally more open than men, and are therefore able to express at many levels simultaneously and take in large amounts of interrelated information as they speak. Women, by necessity, open themselves to express their sexuality and to give birth. The very fact of opening might be a crucial determinant of the energetic richness in which women live because it allows them to feel completely normal operating as an open system.

To my great surprise, I have discovered that I can switch back and forth between the masculine and feminine styles to take advantage of what each offers, and I am even able to merge them. I live nearly full-time in The Feminine Principle, not because I desire to be a woman—I really enjoy being a man—but because it gives me more of what I am looking for. In the world of women’s thinking, there is deep relationship; global, nonlinear thinking; creativity; sensuality; a sense of something bigger to which I am connected; and playfulness. Like a person who owns two homes, I also live in the world of men’s thinking when I want to make clear decisions and demarcations; when I require time and attention for myself; and when I want to simplify information.

After fifteen years of this journey, it is clear to me that both aspects live in me and that I require both to be whole. We come from parents of both genders and have an inheritance that is female and male. To cut ourselves off from one or the other sentences us to a life where our sense of wholeness can only be achieved by finding what we think we are missing in someone else. The New Feminine Principle is a model that allows us to combine the strengths of the feminine and masculine models to become whole, while sidestepping the pitfalls in each model that get in the way of fulfillment.

The Challenge of Leadership

For the last fifteen years, I have championed a new style of leadership that has the power to generate a world where we would all be happy to live. It has been my pleasure to train and coach hundreds of women and men to use this new thinking and style to develop personal strategies that give them more of what they want. Naturally, women learn this model more easily, because it starts from the feminine belief that everything is connected; however, they also have a hard time extricating themselves from the downside of the feminine model as it is culturally taught to them. Because leadership outside the home has been the traditional territory of men, women often buy into men’s evaluation of them, which is based on men’s beliefs about leadership.

It has been more challenging to teach this way of thinking to men. When men open themselves to women’s perceptual point of view, they experience an almost immediate, overwhelming fear, often articulated as “not wanting to be like a woman.” This fear of emasculation is real and powerful, though it has no basis in fact.

Though the jury is still out, it might be that men past a certain age will never to able to use The New Feminine Principle. The mindset that masculine equals male might be too firmly established and the fear of changing it too strong. Or, like adults learning a foreign language, they will always have a heavy “accent.” The basic belief in relationship of The Feminine Principle model might be more easily transmitted to boys growing up under the care of women who recognize the power of the model to enrich the lives of their sons. These boys, along with their sisters, will become adults who speak and think fluently together in a new Principle of Wholeness.

Finally, what makes it clear that The Feminine Principle is a model is that many women have been able to master the masculine way of thinking. Women who came into the business community thirty-five years ago had no choice but to learn to think like men, so they did. In interviews I did for this book, women who learned to think like men were not necessarily threatened by the idea that they would become men. It is fascinating to note that there is no equivalent word for emasculation that applies to women.

Each year, many people—women and men—question my championing of The New Feminine Principle. They assume that only a woman can effectively present this information. This might be true if—and this is a very big “if”—all women were seen as first-class citizens. Unfortunately, often they are not.

When a woman says the way women think is our best starting point for a new, viable future, the culture at large ignores her. When a man says the very same thing, his voice has a better chance of penetrating the cultural mind set. There is power speaking about this as a man.

This “deaf ear” is also indicative of the changes in attitude that must occur to have the voice of women’s leader ship heard as the brilliant alternative it is to the kind of leadership that has us in war after war and is fast destroying our environment.

How to Read This Book

This is a how-to book focused on self-discovery that is not primarily written for an academic or scientific or business audience. It is written for people from all walks of life who want to live and lead in wholeness. It is written with the intention of your recognizing, not my proving. There is no pressure to believe anything. My advice is to take what is useful and discard the rest.

This book is, by and large, addressed to women, though I would be personally delighted if many men read it and used the material within. If you are a woman, you will recognize the material in this book on a powerful intuitive level.

I have spent more than twenty-seven years involved in the movement to end hunger and starvation worldwide in our lifetime. It is one of my primary commitments. After nearly three decades of educating myself, I know two things for certain:

1. When people are chronically malnourished, their ability to grow and thrive physically is stunted.
2. When people are systematically deprived of the opportunity to express their genius, to speak about their visions, or take a stand for their greatness, their spirit is stunted and their potential is limited.

Because of this, nourishment is the “master key” to the other keys, particularly Capacity. Frankly, you cannot even begin to speak about The Feminine Principle without honoring the nurturance that is a primary aspect of this belief system. If you are a woman, the opportunity is to use The New Feminine Principle deliberately and consciously to nourish in yourself what has been systematically starved out of a thousand generations of women. To break the chain of that starvation in yourself might be the single most powerful act of leadership you can make. If you are a man, this will almost certainly be a brand-new world for you. Think of this model as relocating to France and learning to live the way the French people do. I also recommend that you use the material presented here to open up powerful conversations with the women in your life.

The ultimate aim of this book is to create a wave of effective new leadership based on the basic belief system of women and filled out with powers and privileges that are traditionally re served for men, allowing anyone to use it consciously and powerfully. How you use that power is your unique contribution to leadership in our world.

As a reader, if you come away from this book with the idea that what you call reality is only a series of beliefs, you will have gained an immense power to create as you go. If you follow some of the guidelines in this book, you will unleash that power in the direction of more freedom and effectiveness for you and the people around you.

Last of all, a secret! Though this is a serious subject, the best thing you can do to learn the material is to have some fun with it. There is no right answer to get. Do the experiments that appeal to you. Use the smorgasbord approach: take what you like and leave the rest.

It is undeniable that the clock of our final chapter as a species is ticking loudly, and that if left unchecked, the havoc that we have created worldwide will inevitably kill us all. It is also certain that in the bodies and souls of more than three billion women and girls and the men who champion them lies the genius, the spirit of our wholeness and sanity that can be expressed in a coherent model that gives everyone power. This spirit, which has always expressed itself in the privacy of family life, is now finally demanding to be expressed in the world at large.

As such, it is an amazing and miraculous time to be alive.

Acknowledgments

To Marie Butler-Knight, my publisher and editor, I would like to express my deep thanks for recognizing the material in this book as something of value to women and for her ability to organize the material so that it made the most sense.

To my agent, Judy Frank, I would like to express my gratitude for her commitment to have my work in the world at large and for standing by my side as I go out into the larger public.

To Mary Keil, who, more than anyone else in these last several years, has been my partner in launching the ideas in this book into the world and who has stood unyieldingly for the value of this work, I am deeply indebted.

My thanks to Lauri and Charles Kibby and Lynda Paulson and Hunter Quistgard, who have provided family roots in Southern California.

There have been so many people who have championed this work, without whose love, encouragement, and personal contribution none of this would be possible. And so, my thanks to Ellen Nash, Val Cook Watkins, Carole Alexander, Deborah Kelley, Reverend Goddess Sofreeyah, Reverend Barbara Thomas-Smith, Mary Elizabeth Young and Bob Bolender, Sarah Harper Lansburgh, Diane Covington, Fay Freed and Jewel Baldwin, Loma Alexander, Burke Franklin, Andrea Martin, Richard Gellernter, Peggy Francis, and Reesa Manning.

Finally, I would like to deeply acknowledge Joan Holmes and the people of The Hunger Project who have taught me to think new futures and have shown me how to do it in ways that have grown and fed me.

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