The Wild Within: Reclaiming Our Leadership Power as Mothers
"A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving...", Clarissa Pinkola Estés I nher gorgeous book “Women Who Run With The Wolves”.
When I first read this, something familiar in me popped to the surface for a moment. Not just as a woman, but as a mother, a leader, and a coach working with brilliant, and mostly exhausted mums navigating the terrain of matrescence and leadership.
In our modern world, too many of us have become, as Estés describes so well, “meager, thin, ghostly, spectral.” Pulled into a performance of success and caregiving, we’re celebrated for how much we can juggle, how fast we can move, and how little we seem to need. We are praised for being the Superwoman. But in chasing this ideal, we become disconnected from the wild, instinctual knowing that lives inside us, we also become disconnected from our intuition.
What on earth is Wildish Nature and honestly, how is it even connected to Leadership?
Matrescence is not a detour from leadership. It’s a portal. Yes, yes I know I may lose some of the readers here. But hey ho.
For those who stayed on after the portal mention… on we go! Come with me!
In the work I do through Just Matrescence® Coaching, I see this over and over: the very same qualities that are forged in motherhood—clarity, empathy, perspective, prioritisation, are the ones we spend millions on cultivating in leadership development programs. And yet, culturally, we’ve been taught to separate them. To silence one when we step into the other and to keep the worlds separate, like two separate jobs.
So who is this wild woman? She is our intuition, she is the one who somehow knows things, she knows what to do and what to say, she knows better. She is not chaotic, she is connected and slower paced, she does not burn out to prove herself to others, she paces herself to go at her speed, she does not perform, and she leads with empathy and true presence.
It’s like a different, deeper level of wisdom that we can only access through the spiritual transformation of matrescence. Here we go, I said spiritual, off I lose a few more corporate readers. For those still with me, hear me out…
Mid-Matrescence: Where the Wild Woman Waits
I work with mothers at various stages of matrescence. That return from maternity leave is a very common time for obvious messy reasons! And gosh, you so do get in touch with your wild woman soon postpartum? You are carrying her with you, and you are her! It’s the wildest time of your life!
Saying that, many of the women I coach are actually in mid-matrescence, deep in the push-pull of raising teens while continuing to redefine themselves. As they go into peri-menopause their children still very much need them. Less physically, more emotionally and hormonally. These women are holding so much complexity: leading teams, caring for aging parents, managing households, and still wondering, Why do I feel so hollow? What is wrong with me? Did I do it all wrong?
If you have that feeling of hollowness or wrongness inside you, it may be a signal that you’ve outgrown the masks and metrics of the old world. That your inner wild woman is pacing, waiting to be let out. She wants to get in touch!
And when we do let her out and get in touch, everything changes. Quite literally everything is suddenly so so clear. You say “no” with ease, you lead without shape-shifting or adapting to the company culture, you mother without martyring without the guilt, you work with your full strength, both feminine and masculine energies integrated.
What We Must Reclaim
The older I get, the more mothers I work with, the clearer the path to me. We simply must reclaim value, not just in what we do, but in who we are becoming. I see a different world where we redefined strength and moved from strength being seen in how much we carry, but in how wisely we choose what not to.
We must reject the myth of the "Good Mother" and the "Successful Woman" and step into a new truth: that our leadership is not despite our motherhood, but because of it. We must let go of perfectionism, of proving, of performing. And we must trust. Trust that this messy, powerful, ever-spiralling path of matrescence is awakening a deeper wisdom. Remember I said portal? It’s a portal!
What if we trusted that reclaiming our wildish nature is not regressive, or odd and saw it as a strength and a new way of leadership?
To the Wolves Among Us
To the woman reading this who feels the ache to leap but fears she’s lost the power, she hasn’t. You haven’t. Your instincts, your intuition, your fire, they’re not gone, just buried under a culture that never honoured them. I invite you to start digging them out, do what you need to do re-wild yourself.
But not in an agree way, not a rebellion or them vs us dualistic way of thinking. In a soft, cyclical, steady, grounded, embodied leadership way that everyone, our children, teams, partners and communities, are starving for.