Have you ever wondered what “real power” looks like when it isn’t tied to manipulation or the patriarchy’s playbook?
In this eye-opening episode, I sat down with Kasia Urbaniak, former professional dominatrix, long-time Taoist practitioner, and women’s empowerment coach, to reveal the subtle ways we give up our power—and exactly how to take it back. We’re talking about personal agency, unapologetic desire, and how to step into every room—boardroom or bedroom—with the kind of confidence that amplifies your voice and serves your well-being.
If you’ve ever found yourself holding back from asking for a raise, a favor, or even a simple upgrade because you fear rejection or being labeled “too much,” this episode will be your game-changer.
Key takeaways
Redefining power as agency
Power isn’t about dominating or manipulating others; it’s about having agency over your own life. Kasia reframes power as the willingness to ask for what you want and the freedom to walk away when something doesn’t serve you.
Dominant vs. submissive energies
We all have dominant and submissive modes, and both are essential. The trick is to identify when to lean into a more commanding role (attention outward) and when to be receptive (attention inward). Neither is “better”—they’re just tools for deeper connection and authentic expression.
Harnessing curiosity for influence
One of the most effective ways to shift a power dynamic is to stay genuinely curious. By asking thoughtful questions—even in uncomfortable moments—you guide the conversation and invite the other person to reveal more about their motives, fears, or desires.
Breaking good-girl conditioning
Many women struggle with the fear of being labeled “too much” or “too needy,” which keeps them locked in a narrow band of acceptable behavior. According to Kasia, embracing our “bad girl” side—our shadow desires—helps expand our emotional and behavioral range for healthier expression.
The fog around money
Women often experience a mental and emotional “fog” when dealing with finances. Recognizing this fog as socially conditioned rather than personal “failure” can free you to ask smarter money questions, engage in negotiations, and ultimately build greater wealth.
Daily desire practice
Kasia advocates for tapping into your deepest desires every single day. By getting clear on what truly lights you up (financially, emotionally, sexually, or otherwise), you reinforce your ability to claim it without apology—and that, she argues, is real power.
Notable quotes
“You can’t choose something you can’t imagine. Limiting your imagination is the easiest way to limit your power.”
“If you’re focused on how you’re being perceived, your attention is inward and you lose the power to lead the conversation.”
“We’ve only been allowed to have our own money for a few decades. Recognize that the fog around money isn’t ‘you’—it’s history showing up.”
Episode at-a-glance
≫ 02:04 Defining power and agency
≫ 07:34 understanding power dynamics
≫ 21:48 The role of asking and audacity
≫ 23:13 Money, power, and social conditioning
≫ 29:55 The fog of financial awareness
≫ 40:53 Analyzing women’s experiences in meetings
≫ 41:20 The dynamics of attention in communication
≫ 44:44 Addressing systemic barriers and prejudices
≫ 47:55 The good girl double bind and social conditioning
≫ 59:51 The bad girl protocol: embracing the shadow
≫ 01:02:20 Turning the spotlight: A 10-second practice
Kasia’s Links:
Unbound: A Woman’s Guide to Power
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Meet Kasia
Kasia Urbaniak is the founder and CEO of The Academy, a school that teaches women the foundations of power and influence. Kasia’s perspective on power is unique. Over the course of nearly 20 years, she has worked as professional Dominatrix, practiced Taoist alchemy in one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China and obtained dozens of certifications different disciplines, including Medical Qi Gong and Systemic Constellations.
Since founding The Academy in 2013, Kasia has taught over 4,000 women practical tools to step into leadership positions in their relationships, families, workplaces, and wider communities. She has spoken at corporations and conferences worldwide.
Transcript:
Kasia Urbaniak:
If you wanted to imprison somebody, if you wanted to totally repress and control somebody, the hard way were to be create laws and punishments and prison bars. The easy way would be to limit their imagination, because you can’t choose something you can’t imagine. So that is the number one obstacle to free will, and the power of being able to leave your identity for a moment. In my case, I was the people pleaser who pretended to be a dominatrix, but it didn’t stop there. If you don’t have to be yourself, and you can try on different things, you discover that you are much more multifaceted and that you have a lot more options than you thought.
Tori Dunlap:
Hello, financial feminists, welcome to the show. I’m thrilled as always to see you. I have one last Christmas decoration that I’ve not put away, and for our audio-only listeners, he is a Trader Joe’s snowman with a fun little air plant hat. It’s a plant though, so I don’t feel like I want to put him away. I don’t know, I’ll figure it out, he’s cute. And I guess he’s winter themed, so he can stay on my desk for a little while longer. If you’re new to the show, hi, my name is Tori. I am a money expert, a multimillionaire, a New York Times bestselling author, and I fight the patriarchy by making you rich. And we teach women all over the world how to save money, pay off debt, start investing and start businesses, but really we teach them how to use money as a tool to build the life that they love and to be able to leave situations they don’t want to be in and put themselves in great ones, and that’s what we do. So thanks for being here.
Today’s episode is a really, really fun one and one of my favorite conversations. I know I feel like I say this all the time, like, “One of my favorite conversations I’ve had in a while,” but truly this one is meaty, this one is good. You’re going to have to take notes on this one, and then go to therapy right after, because boy oh boy oh boy, this is a perfect one to send to a friend and then go get drinks and talk about it after, because every part about this episode is going to completely change the way that you are moving through the world and thinking and processing, and this one’s a good one.
We’re talking about power today on the show. When we talk about power, though, very few people can actually define what it is in terms of the power they do want, because I think we associate power with rich guys in a really big chair, in suits who are diabolical, and like an Austin Powers villain who has a white cat. That’s not what we’re talking about. When we’re talking about power, we are talking about agency and the ability for us to control our own lives. So much of our existence is dependent on how powerful we are and how we exert that power, not in a way that’s manipulative, not in a way that’s controlling, but rather in a way that feels like again, we have agency.
In this incredibly powerful episode, we are talking about how we can get power, not only what it actually is, but how we can use it to better our lives. Kasia Urbaniak has helped over 4,000 women learn how to get their power back by stepping into leadership positions in their relationships, families, workplaces, plus hundreds of thousands more through her videos On TikTok, Kasia is the founder and CEO of The Academy, a school that teaches women the foundations of power and influence. Over the course of 20 years, she has worked as a professional dominatrix, practiced Taoist alchemy in one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China, and has obtained dozens of certifications in different disciplines. Today on the show we’re talking about why power dynamics are the way that they are and why women are so afraid to step into positions of power, both in their interpersonal relationships, but also professionally. We’re also chatting about how she uses the principles of her life as a dominatrix to teach women how to embrace both their dominant and submissive energy to get what they want.
This was so fascinating and is life-changing information. We also discussed the common pitfalls women come across when attempting to embrace a more dominant energy, and how we can begin to practice taking back this power in small scenarios so we can exercise that when it really matters. We’re going to chat about how to stop suppressing your emotions, because not only are your emotions valuable, but of course are important for your health and your happiness. We’re also going to discuss the 10-second practice to take back your power in any situation. This is one of those good episodes that you are going to come back to over and over and over again. Please share with your friends and family. And without further ado, let’s get into it. But first a word from our sponsors. Where are you at in the world?
Kasia Urbaniak:
Right now I’m in New York City.
Tori Dunlap:
Nice. Brooklyn or Manhattan?
Kasia Urbaniak:
Manhattan.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Okay, cool. It’s my favorite place.
Kasia Urbaniak:
I’m right by Central Park, it’s one of my favorite places.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, lovely. Beautiful. We’re really excited to have you. We’ve been looking forward to this episode for a while. You have probably the most fascinating background of anybody we’ve ever had on this show. You have worked as a professional dominatrix, you have learned under Taoist nuns in one of the oldest female-led monasteries in China, you have dozens of certifications, and then you now teach women how to harness their power. So talk to me about the start of your story, what led you to be a dominatrix, what led you to the stuff after that, tell me everything.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Without disparaging all the people who are deeply kinky and love BDSM, I only went into it for the money.
Tori Dunlap:
Great.
Kasia Urbaniak:
And I was 19, and I was obsessed with the idea of becoming a superhuman with superpowers. So it wasn’t even a metaphysical quest that was spiritual, I had a comic-book fantasy in my mind. And it was definitely a result of some female wounding, where I was like, “I’m going to become impervious, I’m going to become supernatural. And no one will mess with me, I’ll be the most powerful superwoman in the world.” And so even the teachers I saw were ones that had abilities more than ones who would be able to transmit peace. And I got into domination because especially at that time in New York City, it was probably unfortunately the best way to be able to pay for an education that was accessible to me. And really quickly, when I got really deep into the training that I was doing, and it was so important to be able to read a human being, whether it was in Taoism, Taoism is where Chinese martial arts and Chinese medicine come from. So to be able to look at somebody and diagnose them and see every little detail about their energy, their energetics, where they’re coming from, what they’re about to do, I was obsessed with that study.
So I very quickly came to notice that I was analyzing my BDSM clients that same way. And then when you add the power dynamic, in a dungeon, especially, you have a fake name, your client’s using a fake name, you’re making up an imaginary story. And to propel the plot forward, you cannot count on anything real. In a sense, you’re just telling lies. And somehow in that space, the truth of human beings starts to show up, because you can’t rely on words, you can’t rely on what they’re saying, you have to be able to feel it. Even the punishment, like, “You’ve been so bad,” and they’re pretending to be sad about it. So what happened was after a few years I started getting obsessed with the dungeon as a laboratory for watching humans. And I’d go study, I’d come back, and I’d see these humans. There was just this moment where I was in a dungeon and I felt like my vision had popped into a new dimension, and it completely changed the way that I was going through my 20s, and my friends were going through their 20s, my female friends especially, because I would be watching human behavior in a different way.
And so over time I became really good at identifying these little behaviors and states of consciousness that women are patterned to hit, that are signs that they’re stopping themselves from what they want for no good reason, making assumptions that don’t work in their favor. And then that way I became a teacher by accident. It was like I didn’t know the job I was studying for 15 years, then school began and I was like, “All right, I’m done with the boys. Now I want to help the women. I’m done with that.” And at this point I’ve been teaching for almost as long as I did anything else. That in and of itself became another education, a laboratory where we would try everything to get a woman to get her out of her own way, roleplay, catharsis. I think I primarily focus on helping women get what they want.
So that simplifies everything, because if we even do a role play of how she asks for what she wants, and we watch and observe her self-reporting of what she did and everyone else’s view of what happened, wildly different, wildly different. A really easy, simple example is to create a catharsis moment for a woman, having a male volunteer come into the room. She completed a relationship but never got closure, so I have her go and say, “Give it to him. This guy’s a volunteer, he’s here, he’s willing to listen.” There’s 200 women in the room, or 20 women. Or in this particular case, there’s 200 women in the room, she’s on stage. And she was like, “All right, I’ll do it.” I’m like, “This is just for you now. So give it, no holding back.” And she did, she said the things that she didn’t say.
And then I asked the whole audience at the same time, “On the count of three, I’d like you to raise your hands and tell me on a scale of one to 10, how angry was she?” I asked her first, she said, “Eight. I don’t think I got to the 10 that I wanted, but I got to an eight.” On the count of three, all 200 people raised two fingers in the air. So she was like, “I gave it to him.” And it didn’t land. And this is what I’m talking about, this is human behavior, micro behaviors. And so I’ve been picking this apart for a while, and it’s my favorite thing in the world. It’s my favorite thing in the world, because the fixes are sometimes so simple and they don’t take 25 years of therapy. I mean, therapy is good for things, but this particular thing, these are universal patterns that women have to deal with.
Tori Dunlap:
An episode’s good if I pull out a pen and paper and start taking notes while you’re talking. These are the notes I already have, and we’re one question in. Okay, so I have to go back. So one of the things you talked about, because you talked about a lot, and I want to make sure we touch on each thing. It sounds like when you were, the very first thing you said, where you were like, “I wanted to become a superhero. Or I was just like, ‘You know what, I’m just going to do all of these things.'” And you were talking how softness was not really a thing or creating peace was not really a thing at that time. I mean, we would call that what masculine versus feminine energy, and we’ve talked about that a bit on the show. Can you talk to me about what that feeling was where you were just, probably maybe trauma driven, just like, “Fuck all of this. I’m going to get money, I’m going to get power, I’m going to do these things.” And that feels more masculine energy, yeah?
Kasia Urbaniak:
I think I know what you’re getting at. I think that especially if you’re talking about somebody in the late ’90s, if you’re looking for anything related to power or being safe, you’re looking for the masculine, whether you’re looking for masculine protector or to become a masculine protector of yourself.
Tori Dunlap:
And I want to stop us really quick, because we talked about it on the show before, we do not mean men or women when we talk about masculine, feminine. We’re not talking gender binaries here, we’re talking about the actual energy of these two. So I just want to clarify that before we move,
Kasia Urbaniak:
I would even take it one step deeper, I don’t talk about masculine and feminine in my school because I find it to be a little bit confusing.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, what do you talk about instead?
Kasia Urbaniak:
Dominant submissive or yin and yang, but when I started talking about yin and yang, the women in the room looked at me like a bunch of zebras. So I’m like, “All right, think about it this way, the penetrating and the receptive, the germinant and the submissive. And everyone not only has both modes, they’re needed for balance.” But in this case, I think I had a profound sadness in me and fear that magic isn’t real. I needed to know that magic was real. Now masculine or feminine, masculine in the sense of superhero not wanting to be wounded, but I have found that women benefit profoundly from allowing their nervous system to access healthy aggression, assertiveness, and that we mistake that for this armored defensive. You can’t even call it fully masculine or dominant, it’s hardened. Luckily I found a lot of work and a lot of teaching to have a lot of feminine in it, even domination, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Well, and you mentioned that moment in the dungeon, it almost sounds like transcendental or what people experience sometimes taking mushrooms, it sounds like an out-of-body experience. Can you tell me a bit more about what that felt like, maybe what caused it, if we can go there, but also what conclusions you drew from it?
Kasia Urbaniak:
You ask good questions, because this requires such a subtle and nuanced explanation. One of the things you want to look for as a dominatrix in a dungeon is somebody else’s resistance. So if you’re a dominatrix and you’re doing a session, it’s an hour long, and you go, “Kneel,” and they kneel, “Look up,” and they look up. And you go, “Okay, look down and wash the floor, kiss my boots,” and they do everything, it’s boring. It’s really boring, I don’t like it, they don’t like it. What is that? Okay, so it’s like a machine, I give the order, they follow the order. The thing that makes it interesting is locating any friction or resistance, like they’re a little slow to raise their head. And maybe it’s genuine, maybe it’s not genuine, maybe they just took a second too long to hear you, they raise their head, but you make a big deal out of it. You’re like, “Are you trying to disobey me? Do you have doubts? You’re listening to me, aren’t you? Did you doze off for a second? Are you that kind of person, you sleep through half your life?” Look for the resistance, find the thing so that you can make something out of it.
And context, I’m in my early 20s, late teens, I’m a people pleaser, I’m a girl who wants to be liked, I have these dimples, and I’m flashing them left and right. And all of this early education is totally counterintuitive to me. I know that a lot of the listeners might think for themselves, “Oh my goodness, if I was in that situation, how would I not bust out laughing?” I mean, now I’m serious about the BDSM experience having spiritual and psychological richness, but back then I was memorizing scripts to say. In finding that resistance and in pointing attention to it, there’s even more opportunities for nuance, because I can make something up, but I can also catch onto something that’s real.
And I had one session where the client’s chest seemed so heavy, and I had come back from a week-long retreat studying body energetics, and I called attention to it. And at that moment, a dam burst. I learned later that that man had just lost his mother, but it completely changed the tone of the session. I just followed what was most alive and followed what was most present. And I had all of my attention on him. And I noticed that it didn’t matter that I switched to nurturing mode, I was still in the dominant position. I’d went from cruel to nurturing, and I didn’t lose my power. In that moment, I understood a couple of things. I understood that the essential part was my attention on him. If he had had his attention on me, it wouldn’t really have worked as well, he had to be in his experience, I had to hold his experience, and that I could be a soft dom or a hard dom, it didn’t matter.
And when I had noticed that little subtle thing about heaviness in the chest and I had been picking up the resistance, I suddenly realized that everything he’d been saying from the moment he walked into the room before the session started, once the session started was totally opposite of what was actually happening, and that I could see what was happening, and I could put attention on it and I could move the energy along. And then after that I was like, “Holy fuck, could I do that with a waiter? Could I do that with my friends? Could I see what was happening underneath the conversation and not be distracted by the words?” So then I started becoming really good at asking questions, looking at somebody, feeling what was going on with them.
And I realized not only did that give me an immense amount of power and influence in a conversation, it also gave me a lot of information about what somebody was protecting or afraid of. It’s a love skill. I mean, the best love skills and the best power skills are the same skills. And then I started seeing that extra dimension that clicked in, I started seeing that what people oftentimes call power isn’t powerful at all. Like a dictator, a tyrant, somebody who’s being tyrannical, a lot of people have power aversion. The best people have power aversion, just like money aversion. And also, I’m so excited about the work you do because you help women be less power averse and less money averse. So it just became really obvious to me that power and energy are the same, they’re related. And then when somebody’s being a tyrant, what they’re doing is closing themselves off to receive the deeper gifts of the other human being.
Coercion is the most wasteful, therefore power-draining thing ever. And if you see the bigger metaphor of a dictator that’s running a country, all of the resources that are required to enforce a police state, constant repression, and you don’t get innovation, you don’t get beautiful art, you don’t get any of those things. So too with a two-person dynamic, you deprive yourself of their greatest gifts. If you have the courage to be curious about the resistance and go a little bit behind and earn trust to find out, when somebody says, “Oh hell no,” to you, and you have the courage to respectfully show them that you care what they’re trying to protect with that no, the floodgates open, kinds of collaboration and kinds of contribution are available to you that you wouldn’t have been able to think of before because you don’t know what treasures exist in the basement of their heart.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m just going to take a second. Okay. Wow, everybody go back about five minutes and listen to all of that again. Okay, so I had questions from the first answer you gave me, and then I have more questions from this, and then I have so many. Okay, so one of the things that I think is really important, what you said, and I have background as an actor, I don’t know if you know that. I have a theater major, this is my first and probably forever love, is theater. And one of the things you were talking about in being a dominatrix is that the whole thing is not reality, and you called it telling lies, but whether it is purely scripted or it is a fantasy, it’s not you. But you mentioned the power of that, in the telling of the lies, understanding something new about yourself or about this other person. So what happens when we don’t have to be ourselves?
Kasia Urbaniak:
Everything becomes possible. If you wanted to imprison somebody, if you wanted to totally repress and control somebody, the hard way would to be create laws and punishments and prison bars. The easy way would be to limit their imagination, because you can’t choose something you can’t imagine. So that is the number one obstacle to free will. And the problem with having a fixed identity or having an idea of what being a woman is supposed to look like is that it takes those obstacles off the table so you can be bound in good-girl conditioning, and think that you’re choosing, when you’re really choosing between version A of something shitty or version B of something shitty. And you’re like, “Sweet, I got the slightly less lame job, I got the slightly less lame relationship.” And the power of being able to leave your identity for a moment.
In my case, I was the people pleaser who pretended to be a dominatrix, but it didn’t stop there. I couldn’t stop playing with roles and personas after that, it’s a pivotal part of my work, is that if you don’t have to be yourself and you can try on different things, you discover that you are much more multifaceted and that you have a lot more options than you thought. One of the number one things my students say in classes to me, especially after a roleplay about asking something is, “I didn’t even know that was possible or allowed. I didn’t even think of saying, ‘Hey hubby, I want to try one-way monogamy for a while where I’m polyamorous and you are not,’ or like, ‘Ex who’s not paying alimony, I just want you to buy me a house.'” And every relationship’s unique and it has a specific energetic need, and what meets that need is not always what you think it is, especially if you’re thinking in the box, if you’re thinking with your fixed patterning.
Tori Dunlap:
One of the things that I’ve discovered in my own life, and in my own version, I think it’s very similar to what you’re talking about, is that we all know if you don’t ask, you don’t receive, but also I think that when we talk about negotiation in my work, success is not, “I got what I wanted,” because you don’t have control over that all the time. Your boss can tell you no, they can say, “Oh, there’s budget cuts.” Or when you ask for an upgrade at the hotel, the front desk could be like, “No, there’s no rooms available.” Or I ask somebody out on the date, I don’t care if they say yes. Success for me is I had the audacity to do it, and the audacity to be brave and be vulnerable. And the practice of asking for me is like, “Yes, if I get the thing I want, cool.” That’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it to build the muscle of bravery and of also hearing no and being okay with that, and getting right back on the horse to do it again.
And I think that’s what you’re talking about as well, and I see it with so many women, is they’re afraid of taking space, they’re afraid of hearing no, because maybe it means they failed or maybe it means they’re not good enough. And it’s like, “No, I’m doing this thing, and I don’t care if the man says, ‘Yes, I think you’re hot too.’ I don’t care. I care that I’ve done the thing and that I’ve been brave enough to do it.”
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. That makes me want to talk about two different things, money and asking. And money and asking, can be a money ask, can be a non-money ask, I think it’s really easy to forget that women have only been allowed to have money for a few decades, literally. It was in the ’80s a woman in America could start a business without-
Tori Dunlap:
’76 you could get a loan without your husband’s approval… Or no, ’76, credit card, and I believe ’82 was loan without husband’s approval.
Kasia Urbaniak:
I was alive, I was on this planet as a living being. One of the things that I’m obsessed with is these behaviors that are socially contagious, the small ones. And we are social beings, we learn socially. So you can tell someone, “It’s really important that you regularly check your bank account.” But if they’re not doing it, they’re not going to do it, because behavior is socially learned. So we learn a lot of things from this incredible conditioning that’s born of love, it’s born of protection. It just needs an update, it’s not appropriate anymore. And I think that when it comes to money, one of them more difficult things is for a really long time, the way to be successful as a woman was to marry well.
Tori Dunlap:
That was your only option, really.
Kasia Urbaniak:
That was your only option.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kasia Urbaniak:
And so a lot of our conditioning is dependent upon broadcasting being an appropriate mate. And one of the most desirable things you could broadcast to most men is, “I am not expensive. I won’t cost you much, and I’ll make a lot out of nothing.”
Tori Dunlap:
Or even beyond money and expensive, like, “I am not too much.”
Kasia Urbaniak:
“I’m not a burden. I’m low maintenance. I’ll be happy with little.”
Tori Dunlap:
Cool girl. Cue cool girl monologue from Gone Girl right now. And we’re talking about a heteronormative relationship here, you’re exactly right, in order to survive, women had to become the most palatable version to men.
Kasia Urbaniak:
It also meant that desire was in the way, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kasia Urbaniak:
So a woman who wants things. She’s horny, if she has a big appetite in food and sex or money, those things are marriage-market things, they’re not even what people like, enjoy, admire. So when we’re talking about asking, when you’re saying, “Having the audacity to ask,” one of the beautiful things about an audacious ask is it changes all your asks afterwards, you have a reference point, like, “I didn’t die, I got a yes I didn’t expect, or I got a no and I made it.” There’s two things with asking that I think are really important. One is taking the time to prepare. You know how there are three parts of speech? There’s I, there’s you, and there’s it or them. So most negotiation, especially money-related things, they really focus on the it, they focus on like, “The standard salary for this is…” That’s an it thing.
I deeply encourage people in preparing for an ask to go deep into the I, deep into the you. And even blow it out of proportion, like, “This is what this would do for me. This is what I would be able to do as a result. This is how me doing this or having this would impact my psychology, my emotions, the people in my life, my family.” Make a really good case why it’s good for you, then make a really good case for why it’s good for them, what it does, the role they get to take in your life, even if it’s outlandish. This is the preparation phase, you don’t need to use this in your request, it’s first the submissive experience, really feel it in your body.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s the emotional prep.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yeah. And then feel it for them, because we make assumptions how put on people feel when we ask them something.
Tori Dunlap:
People want to help though, that’s the thing I wanted… People want to help.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yeah. And if they don’t have a chance to contribute to you in a way that’s meaningful, they become worms in your life, they become nobodies. You give them a beautiful role, however, a lot of women do this thing where they’re not asking for you to do a thing, they’re asking you also for permission to ask. If I ask you, Tori, for something, and I’m also going to be crestfallen and crushed, because I’m going to make it mean when you say no, that not only is it a no, it’s not okay that I asked. You’re are going to feel that and you’re going to resent me whether you say yes or no. If you feel free to say no, it’s way easier. And the way you get free to say no, the victory, is the audacious ask itself. But when you prepare well, it becomes something else, the ask becomes an exposure of an exciting desire, a thing that you want to have happen. And if I’m able to legitimately in my body be excited about this thing in a way that is really genuine, then the act of sharing it with you becomes the victory.
Tori Dunlap:
So when we’re talking about, you mentioned a lot of people, a lot of women make asks, and it’s really just permission, what is happening in that moment? Because I think there is a difference between an ask that is genuine, that is thought out for women, and maybe feels audacious and scary, that’s one issue, but then there’s the issue of asking for permission to do something.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Mm-hmm. Well, there’s a couple of things I could say here. One is, the cleanest, easiest thing to do is, after you make your ask, that you allow your attention to rest on the other person enough that you’re fully in their world, so that you’re looking at their responses and you’re getting curious about them. If you manage to stay curious, their no or their resistance won’t shut you down. You’ll be interested in what beautiful thing they’re trying to protect, what jewel or what thing they think is threatened. And if you can get to that, you can maintain a connection through whatever resistance and keep the relationship and the engagement going. The other thing is the more you trust your body, the more trustworthy your body becomes. I’m not against women asking tons of advice of many, many, many people. I think though that the most important thing is to pay attention to how you feel when you hear them say it.
It’s really good to sample the feeling. The other thing, and this is more money related than anything else, the first money class I ever taught was really shocking, because I didn’t intend to teach anything about money. I’m like, “What do I know about money?” Especially seven years ago, I’d been teaching for a few years. I noticed a couple things. First thing I noticed was that that is where power aversion hides most often, so often. First money class I taught was live and in person, it was a beta test with students that were more advanced, that I had a good rapport with. So I felt really comfortable calling out when I’m 20 minutes in, all of a sudden these brilliant women I knew, it was like everybody’s IQ dropped 20 points, and they were not even able to string their thoughts together.
And at that moment, we all talked about it in real time, and I was like, “I’m starting to lose my train of thought as a teacher. We’re all losing our train of thought. What’s going on?” It felt like the room got hot. It was summer in New York, and it felt like everything got foggy. And then I asked them to do a test. We discussed this, we created a social media thread, a small WhatsApp thread. And the assignment was, “Whenever this fog comes in, just text the word fog.” And all of a sudden it became so clear. One of the students sitting in the third row, she’s an engineer, she’s like, “I am brilliant with numbers. And when I look at my own financial statements, I go limp.” And when we started naming the fog, when it showed up, it didn’t just show up in situations where money was numbers, prices, it was also when there was a tense ask to make that might be implied as financially related. And it was like all of these opportunities to make money, all these opportunities to create wealth were invisible.
So women weren’t asking questions about their finances that were really important, of course. Women weren’t aware of all the things that their money’s doing, of course. But also, the world is full of wealth. And if you fog out the moment there’s an opportunity, you’re never going to step through and say, “Hi, I’m here. I’d like this.” And there was this moment where also I realized that wealth is a form of alchemy. Here’s a really simple example, you have lemons, you have water, you have sugar, you have a pitcher, you have a hot day, you have thirsty neighbors, you have a table. None of those things have value, but like an alchemist, you bring those together when you see the need and you see the opportunity, you have a freaking lemonade stand. The profit margin on every cup of lemonade is huge, but what it takes is being aware and connected to your surroundings and not fogging out. So in all of the money training, this is the first thing we do, we just train to notice the fog. This is far more common in women. Men don’t check out to money the way that women do. And it creates this misleading idea that women aren’t as good with money, when you look in the world, actually phenomenal.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, men are socially conditioned to talk about money, think about money, want money, and they’re encouraged and worshiped for the pursuit of money in a way that women aren’t.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Absolutely.
Tori Dunlap:
And that’s my entire book, and this podcast and all of the work. We have had so many examples. We have in our stock market school, an anesthesiologist, incredible woman who’s an anesthesiologist. And I still remember her reaching out to me a year ago, and she was like, “I am so smart, and yet money makes me feel so stupid.” And I thought it was about numbers and I thought it was about math, and none of that is true. And it’s not, it’s not about numbers, it’s not about math. I have a fucking theater degree, it’s not about numbers, it’s not about math, it’s about managing your emotions and all of the things you’re talking about.
Kasia Urbaniak:
I’ve been a listener of your podcast since before you reached out, and I was so excited to see you because I’m like-
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, yay.
Kasia Urbaniak:
… “She’s on that mission. She gets it.” But that’s the thing, when you realize that there’s a really very small but incredibly powerful obstacle to women having huge amounts of power in this world, you’re an evangelist, you’re on fire. And that’s the thing, the fog covers up all the mixed signals women get. And there’s a wealth gap, where 80% of the wealth is owned by men. It’s not even a pay gap.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep. Well, and to your point about the fog too, let’s talk more about that, because I think what happens is the fog becomes personal. I think the fog can just be if you’re in a healthy place with yourself, “How interesting.” And again, curiosity, “Interesting. Why is that happening? And what is going on with this that leads me to believe that I don’t have the tools to manage this?” But I think for most women, the fog happens and they go, “I’m a failure.” The fog happens and they go, “I’m stupid.” The fog happens and they go, “Why can’t I figure this out? I’m such a fucking idiot.” So talk to me about how we can better respond to not having the answers to questions or to that fog coming up.
Kasia Urbaniak:
The first part is the easiest, and it really just is about accepting it’s not you, it’s not personal, the fog isn’t you. Every single woman in my school has some kind of degree of fog or another. And noticing it in real time, just being like, “Oh, this is the fog. This is women only having money for a few decades, and being more valuable when they’re low maintenance, and mixed signals about, ‘If I make more than a partner, nobody will ever be able to express their love for me with providership,’ and I’m [inaudible 00:35:11].” It’s all of it. So the fog is not you. A practice of just calling it fog and not fighting against it is so powerful, because then you start noticing when you fog. You don’t even need to talk yourself out of it and say, “Wait, I’m good with money.” Just be like, “Oh, this neutral thing has come.” It’s in the collective energy body of women, “It’s hitting me now, it’s moving through the world now, it’s here. It’s not you, it’s not you, it’s not you, it’s not.” Then know that every time you notice it, you’re diminishing its power, and you’re also noticing now what you don’t notice. If you can notice the fog, you’re not in the fog, like, “You’re not the fog, it’s not your thing.”
The next thing is, in my money classes, I do this incredibly simple practice. I love the dumbass ones everyone can do. It’s called dumb money questions, and it’s just a running list of really dumb money questions. And it can be, “How much money do I have? What’s the password to my bank account login? What are stocks?” And there’s a really beautiful way in which just writing the questions without any intention of getting the answers, like, “No plan. This is not a to-do list. You just track the questions.” It does something to how it programs your mind to be seeking things on the less-than-conscious level. So really, I started realizing the word question starts with the word quest. So make sure that you ask questions that are in alignment with the quest you want to be on. So that alone is huge fog, dumb money questions, anybody can do it. Also, because I work in groups, the fog becomes even more easy to depersonalize because you see that all these different kinds of women have it.
Tori Dunlap:
Everybody else has it too. Yep, that’s why we do memberships. That’s why we are launching… It’ll be out by now, we have a program launching in January. And it’s more about the community. It’s, yes, learning all these things and content and blah, blah, blah, but it’s learning them together, becoming accountable to each other, feeling supportive of each other, and also giving yourself a safe space to ask questions that do feel “stupid,” or to say, “Yes, I saved $100,000, and I can’t tell anybody else in my life because they’re going to get weird and shitty about it.” I want to be able to champion you and give you a safe space to do that. Yeah, totally.
Okay, you said something about curiosity that I thought was really important, when we’re making an ask or in any sort of difficult scenario, leading with curiosity. And my favorite question to ask when I don’t understand something is like, “Tell me more about that.” I will ask that all the time, just like, “Tell me more. What do you mean by that? Tell me more.” And I think that there’s this belief in any sort of ask or negotiation, or even difficult conversation, we’re talking a lot about the power dynamics here. And there is so much power and curiosity, and you are the person who actually is controlling the conversation when you’re then curious. So can we talk about how curiosity is not just the right thing to do because it makes us better people, but also how it puts us back in the power seat and it helps us drive the conversation. What is curiosity doing for our sense of power?
Kasia Urbaniak:
Well, first thing, if you’re not curious, then you’re repeating the past. So it’s a dead situation. So if you’re interested in having a conversation, that you know exactly how it’s going to go and you know exactly what to do, you can lean on that, you don’t need to be curious, but also, it’s not a living thing. So being curious is incredibly important for anything that can be better than you expect, not just worse than you expect. Now you can be curious about yourself, curious in, “Oh, why am I reacting that way? Oh, what does this mean to me?” You can be curious about someone else. I don’t think it makes sense to ever really stop being curious. The cool thing about being curious about somebody else while you’re in a interaction or a negotiation with them, especially if it’s getting tense or you’re scared, is not only does it calm you down to focus on the other person with curiosity, it also puts so much of your energetic attention on them, then it becomes the same thing that I experienced in the dungeon.
Tori Dunlap:
They feel seen.
Kasia Urbaniak:
They feel seen. And even on a more animal-of-the-body level, when they feel the weight of that attention, their brain chemistry can shift into a more receptive, even submissive state. If they don’t feel like you can hold them, they will never be able to biochemically shift into a submissive state. That means if you are afraid of getting in their face with curiosity, it’s so counterintuitive.
Tori Dunlap:
I’ll let them do all the talking, I’ll let them-
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yeah, and curiosity, people are like, “What’s the difference between being in a dominant state of attention and holding space if I’m paying attention to them?” What we’re talking about is not paying attention. We’re talking about putting your attention on them and leading with your curiosity to feel what’s most alive, to like, “Ooh, there’s something hot there. There’s something interesting there. There’s something that feels meaningful there.” And asking about that, and asking about that, then you’re in control of the conversation.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, in speaking of control, you talk about how dominant and submissive isn’t really about that control, it’s about where your focus and your energy is. So can we talk about both sides of this? How does this play out in our day-to-day interactions with people, whether it’s men or otherwise, this dominant, submissive?
Kasia Urbaniak:
In around 2018, I guess it was around the Me Too time, there was a lot of talk about power dynamics in the workplace, and we started getting a lot of questions in the school about women in a meeting syndrome. So we started analyzing it, we started analyzing what happens to women in a meeting. And yes, all the things that have been memed and identified, like, “Keep heeding, dah, dah, dah.” I’m really interested not in who’s wrong or who’s doing the thing that doesn’t work, I’m interested in giving women the tools to get what they want before the patriarchy’s over, not waiting for the laws to change. So I was like, “Where can they do something differently?” And one of the things I noticed is that women in meeting situations, when a woman speaks, oftentimes her attention is just on herself. And then the man who goes and repeats what she said, and everybody thinks he’s the one who said it, has his attention on the whole room.
Now, if you’re watching the energetics and you’re watching really carefully, this is what you’re going to see. She says a thing, and again, this isn’t to blame her, she says a thing, and she respectfully maintains her voice, her attention essentially in her own orb on herself. That’s submissive, “This is how I feel.” Submissive can be very powerful, “This is what I think, this is what I have to say.” The moment she does that, there’s a restlessness in the room that you can feel, and that’s fidgetiness doesn’t end until somebody else lands, the message scores the goal by saying the same thing, but with their attention on the whole room, so everybody can shift into a submissive state, receive the message, it can land, they can feel it, they can obey. And then that penetration, that stroke is attributed to the man, not the woman. So they connect that message to the man.
Tori Dunlap:
Can I pause this? Can you give me an example? Let’s say it is this idea that a woman has of like, “Okay, we need to partner with this particular person in order to hit our Q1 goals next year.” She might be saying that in a submissive way, and then what is the man doing or saying that is getting everybody to pay attention?
Kasia Urbaniak:
Mm-hmm. So in real-life examples, especially one-on-one, what’s going to tend to happen, because nobody has to conform to business speak, is the woman would say I, and the man would say we or you, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Because there is a business speak, they might say the same phrase, exactly the same phrase. Tori, you have a very dominant presence, you know how to command a room, and I feel seen. No, but we can both switch, we can play a game, we’re on this call, we both switch, we both get subby. This is one of the reasons I was really surprised that people read my book and liked it, because I’m like, “I have to show you in person.” Because you can almost measure, you can use the agreement of a bunch of people watching to agree where the energy of the message ends. And as an actor you might understand that
Tori Dunlap:
Totally, yeah.
Kasia Urbaniak:
So whether it’s cues that are body-language related, or it’s the sound of the voice, or it’s not doing up-speak. I’m not interested in the minutiae, because when you understand what you’re doing, “I am taking control of this entire room. This room is mine. This entire room is the body of my submissive and I’m the dominatrix.” You’re saying the same thing, you’re not acting crazy. You’re just saying, “We got to partner with this person in order to hit out blah, blah, blah.” Versus a more submissive take on that is just that the energy ends somewhere around here. It sounds and feels like she’s talking about her opinion, not the mandate for all. We’re doing much easier to demo and do an example with two people because there’s no conformity around business speak. So be like, “I really feel like,” versus, “You’re going to love this, this is what you’re going to do. Check this out, try this on, do this. Just check it out.”
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, I have to ask a question though, that’s on everybody’s minds, if I do this in a meeting, am I then labeled a bitch? Am I then labeled difficult? Am I then told that I don’t get promotions because I don’t let everybody else’s ideas come to the table? This is where I always hit against the systemic barriers, is that there’s only so much we can control versus getting the response that we need to be docile and we need to just be grateful.
Kasia Urbaniak:
So experientially, I have an answer, experientially from my teaching, there’s always going to be that prejudice, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, always.
Kasia Urbaniak:
But unfortunately, this is where we get screwed. Our discomfort with that and our awareness of that possibility will amplify that happening, because our voices won’t be congruent, we’ll be pushing too hard, we’ll get shrill. Now with every single situation, whether it’s a speech, whether it’s an ask, whether it’s a presentation, I have women do it in an exaggerated submissive way and an exaggerated dominant way.
Tori Dunlap:
This is exactly what you do in theater class. You do too much so that you can do just enough. Yeah.
Kasia Urbaniak:
It’s like your entire being starts knowing what the aligned middle point is or what the right point is. So I have them overexaggerate, “We are going to hit a Q4…” You know?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kasia Urbaniak:
And I have them go inward. And the direction isn’t volume, it isn’t body language, it’s the moment you put your attention either in your experience, or in the experience of others, this sounds like a people-pleasing thing, but it’s incredibly powerful, you’re curious about the collective reception of the thing, you will speak to their bodies, you will speak to them in a way that they can feel, that will allow them to shift into a more submissive space and receive. The most powerful thing about the practice of asking in a deeply submissive way, “I really want dah, dah, dah,” and a deeply dominant way, “You will,” is women who practice asking in this way oftentimes don’t even need to make the request, it happens by itself. Why? Because a lot of the things that we want, we are signaling a not readiness to receive it.
A really simple example is when you’re super stressed and could use a hug is when you’re repelling everyone. So when you go inward, which is super vulnerable for a woman, she doesn’t want to seem weaker or whiner or a victim, and when you go outward, she doesn’t want to seem like an or too overbearing. When she has that physical therapy of increasing her range, when she releases and relaxes, the neutral version ends up being the right version, when she hits that moment, her entire body starts believing that this request is legitimate and she’s ready to receive it. So how many times have I seen a woman going up a subway stair carrying a stroller, somebody goes, “Can I help you with that?” And she goes, “No.” How many times have I in my past experienced somebody offering me something I can need and want, and saying no so quickly? I’m like, “Wait, why was that no pre-programmed?” That was the next bullet in my gun.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. I haven’t even sat with, “Maybe I do want it.” Yeah. Oh God, I could talk to you for hours. You talk about The Good Girl Double Bind, we’ve talked a little bit about that on the show with a previous guest about The Seven Deadly Sins. Do you know her work?
Kasia Urbaniak:
You know what? It was funny, because I saw that book come out and I was like, “Oh no,” because that was a book I wanted to write.
Tori Dunlap:
As soon as she was saying it, I was like, “Oh, I wish I wrote this book.” It was Elise Loehnen. Yeah, her book’s incredible. And the seven deadly sins are really what we’re talking about with desire, it’s just gluttony, lust, all of these things.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Okay. So with total respect to Elise, the book I haven’t read yet, I just want to say one thing about The Seven Deadly Sins, and I have no idea-
Tori Dunlap:
Sure.
Kasia Urbaniak:
… if this is something she’s discovered or not. The reason I was so excited about The Seven Deadly Sins is I realized they are only sins if you’re not in your body. If you’re embodied, they self-regulate. If a woman is deeply embodied and not rejecting any of the feelings that are coming up, greed, for example, is only a problem when you can’t feel if you’re not embodied enough to feel satiety. So sloth is only a problem if you are trying to rest while torturing yourself about how you shouldn’t be resting because you’re not actually resting. You get enough rest, they’re self-regulating. Gluttony, even rage, if you’re not rejecting anger, there’s a moment where you crack, your heart breaks open and you realize what it is that you’re fighting for.
None of the seven deadly sins are sins if you are embodied. And the seven deadly sins come from a tradition that tells you that your body’s evil, you have to overcome your animal nature. And this does a huge disservice to women who get all their power from being embodied. So women owning their bodies, women being in their bodies, women being embodied, and not being the traded, commerce, breathing machines of the patriarchy. The more we trust our bodies, the more trustworthy our bodies become. And good-girl conditioning is such a clusterfuck because it really triggers a lot of mistrust and distrust of our behavior, of our inner signals.
Tori Dunlap:
Talk to me about The Good Girl Double Bind. How do we see this showing up for a woman, and what is the Bad Girl Protocol?
Kasia Urbaniak:
One of the things I noticed pretty quickly when I started teaching was when I was doing the exercises of having a woman exaggerate dominance and exaggerate submission. And mind you, in those in-person classes, we always had male volunteers, so we had a point of reference. We had men’s bodies, and it was important, because women were responding differently in these roleplays to women’s bodies than they were to men’s bodies. It didn’t matter who it was, that was enough. So what I started noticing really quickly is that there’s this thing that was, I called it at the time the female leveling habit. So when they were above, and it was the moment they’d been waiting for, they wanted to be in control and tell someone off, that’s the moment where all of a sudden their gaze would get inner and they’d start getting lower, because they would be positionally higher, they’d be standing over someone in a chair, and they’d be trying to get small.
We going inward, “You are going to blah, blah, blah, blah.” Then I’d have them get on their knees, and the moment they looked up, their gaze shot outward. It was equilibrium. And then I didn’t know at the time about the female social nervous system, and I didn’t understand, but I saw it, I saw what was happening, discomfort with being above and discomfort with being below, discomfort with both. And one of the reasons this is super problematic is that when you’re leading, everyone you’re leading needs to know you’re above them, because that means you can see further, you’re looking longer, you’re taking everyone into account. And that when you attention’s on yourself and you figure out, “How am I following? Am I learning?” It’s easier for them to teach you or lead you correctly. So getting that range is really important.
I started wondering what the origins of this might be, and the theory that I came up with is I started trying to remember in my own life and lives of my students, what’s the first moment I was worried about being too big or too small? And it was the same moment, and it was the moment that boys and girls start being interested in sex, get crushes. And from that moment, the boy gets a, “Oh look, the little boy, the boy is growing up to be a man. He’s interested in girls.” If he’s interested in girls, that he’s getting that message, that nudge, nudge, wink, wink. And the girl is getting a shocking death threat, fear, she’s getting a really weird mixed signal that nobody’s saying out loud.
And from that moment, it’s really easy for girls to be entrained into this space where their boobs are too big, until they’re too small, they’re too loud, or they’re too quiet, they’re too much, they’re not enough. And then in between those two polarities of too much and too little, that tightrope gets smaller and smaller. There’s actually no room to breathe, there’s no space there. There’s no space there. So a lot of breaking the good-girl conditioning, I use this tool so often of overdoing and underdoing as a way to start creating more space and range and getting more comfort in being in the body, because that compressed state where the signals don’t match, that’s good-girl conditioning. It’s where the girl’s smiling, but she looks like she could fucking kill you, or it’s the space in which nice feels shitty or inauthentic, or a lot of people struggle doing, being at the effect of something. When somebody’s victimy, they’re just in a smush around their suffering. They’re angry, they want revenge, they want to accuse.
This whole thing right now of victim privilege, everybody throwing around how they’ve been harmed, it’s incongruence, it’s ultimate good-girl conditioning. It’s using the pain that’s supposed to bring you inward so you can feel your tenderness, you can take stock of where you’ve been hurt, you can start knowing what there is to heal. That’s an inward state, when you’re sad, when you’re hurt, inward, submissive, surrender, that’s really important. Victimhood is a really important phase to do that inventory, but when you go out to get justice, you can’t be carrying that inward state. It’s going to feel shitty, going to leave people with no moves. That’s when you put that aside and then you go, “This is the behavior that you’ve been doing and this is the impact that it has.” That’s you, that’s power, that’s having the influence. And unpacking those and unsticking those is where a woman’s power blossoms. Good-girl conditioning is where it goes to die. It’s a not favor for anyone, it stinks, it feels weird, and we do it out of love, we think this is what being a good person looks like, and it’s not
Tori Dunlap:
At the beginning you talked about one of the women in your classes, who you told this woman, “Give everything to this-
Kasia Urbaniak:
Give them hell.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, give them hell. And she thought she was at an eight, and everybody’s like, “She was at a two.” What did a two look like that she thought was an eight, and what does an eight actually look like?
Kasia Urbaniak:
So in this context, it’s important to note that she wasn’t preparing for a real conversation.
Tori Dunlap:
Sure. It was the processing, it was probably the getting it all out there.
Kasia Urbaniak:
So in her case, what I could see was, she was carrying her pain, she was carrying her wounding, and it was driving her inwards. So her energy was yoked. She was trying to do two things at the same time, carry her pain and give him help.
Tori Dunlap:
So what is the difference there? I really want to dial in on that, because sometimes my pain is, “You fucking wrecked my life.” Sometimes that pain is the way I get to the anger, maybe. So when you say those things, why can those not be congruent to each other?
Kasia Urbaniak:
When you are speaking to me and you said, “You wrecked my life,” even though we’re on Zoom, I feel like it’s landing in my body. So I’m getting anger.
Tori Dunlap:
I was a theater degree.
Kasia Urbaniak:
But I’m getting anger, I’m not getting that you’re hurt. I intellectually get that that might be the cause, but you’re all the way over here.
Tori Dunlap:
Is it because I’m not saying I feel terrible, even if I’m angry, “I feel terrible,” as opposed to, “You wrecked my life?” Is that the difference?
Kasia Urbaniak:
This is the part where it gets tricky. If I say you, I will tend to give you energy.
If I say I, I will tend to keep my energy.
Tori Dunlap:
Right, this is the dominant and submissive, which is fine, because-
Kasia Urbaniak:
Wait, wait, wait, but language is not the law. You can bypass the fact that you’re saying, “I.” I can say, “Tori, I was so wounded, I was so wrecked. It really, really, really hurt.” I can go inward and say that. And I can go, and this is going to feel shitty, “Tori, I was wounded, I was wrecked.” The reason anger is easier is the anger goes outward and sadness goes inward, every emotion has a different way in which it moves.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I guess the question I’m really asking is how do we stop suppressing the emotion? If his woman was at a two and thought she was at an eight-
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yes. As we proceeded, she got to go into her wound, her sadness, where the energy goes inward, “Ow, that really hurt.” And this is the part that was hard for her because she was stuck in the middle, she had to go to a place where she was begging for his approval, which is secretly what she wanted. So she goes inward, she was like, “I really want this. I really want this. I really want this.” And that’s really hard. So when it got too hard, we would switch back out to her being like, “You’re a stupid motherfucker, and you did this shit, and you are ruining your life and you, you, you.” Attention out, then again, attention in. And then she had regained her voice. So you could overanalyze. If you saw it, what you would see was somebody who was speaking loudly because they were trying to be angry, but their vocal tone was muffled. You would see somebody who was looking down on the ground and trying to change their posture, but it really felt like what she was doing was, “Look how you hurt me. I’m hurt, I’m hurt, I’m hurt, I’m hurt.”
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, it was the performance of anger.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Exactly, without the attention. She wasn’t looking to see where it landed, she was just like, “Not even going to go there.”
Tori Dunlap:
Well, almost I think it’s the self-consciousness versus the vulnerability. And I think that this is an example of the ways that women suppress emotions, specifically anger, is while feeling angry, you feel badly about feeling angry.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but see, this all goes back to curiosity. If you’re self-conscious, you’re not curious about the other person, you’re not actually curious about what’s happening.
Tori Dunlap:
Maybe we’re getting too in the weeds here, because I’m trying to think about, because I know, and especially as an actor, I know sometimes you got to be in the room to see things. So us describing this is really hard, but if there’s someone out there, probably every woman listening, and I’ll put myself in this, sometimes I don’t feel anger, and I will name every other emotion when I’m actually feeling anger, instead of, “I feel angry.” And one of the things I’m really trying to do is name my anger now, I’m trying to just give them a resource and get to the point where they can express this in a healthy way, where it’s also they’re not suppressing what they actually feel.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yeah. So another way to do it is to get comfortable with the things you think are absolutely unacceptable.
Tori Dunlap:
Tell me more.
Kasia Urbaniak:
We have an exercise called the Bad Girl Protocol, and the idea is you’re literally writing out your dark side, your evil, if you let yourself-
Tori Dunlap:
Shadow.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yeah, if you let yourself just be the worst human being in the world, what would you do? And this is a little bit edgy and it sounds dangerous, and I’ve had lost many nights of sleeping, like, “Am I nuts, having women do this exercise where they try to find what’s hot about these horrible, horrible, horrible ideas?” The crazy thing is so much hides in the closet of what we think is bad. So a Bad Girl Protocol in a class will very often look like this, “If I were a bad girl, I would get eight hours of sleep a night no matter what.”
Tori Dunlap:
I’m laughing because my brain is going to murder and having complete total crazy sex without consequences.
Kasia Urbaniak:
So that’s there, that’s there.
Tori Dunlap:
And you went eight hours of sleep, and now I feel like a terrible person.
Kasia Urbaniak:
No, no, no, because like, “No, no, no, if I were a bad girl, I would have my staple his balls to the mattress and jump up and down until everything was bloody.” That’s there, that’s there, that’s there. But the thing is, if you’re doing this, if you’re consciously going into the closet and letting everything out, lots of things that you think are bad that are actually good ideas come out, and the really bad ones show you where your heart is, the really evil ones are the ones that show you where your love is. So this is part of teaching women that most human beings, I don’t just have to believe, I see, are good on the inside, good. So letting all of this out releases where imagination goes to hide. So a lot of times the woman who thinks she’s speaking at an eight but is speaking at a two, has a lot of things that she thinks are bad, that are unacceptable, that are there and they’re hidden in that closet. So a lot of this is to do with just getting more range. It’s really surprising, but sometimes the thing that you think is dangerous to say is the most important thing another person needs to hear. And you won’t be able to deliver it well unless you get comfortable with it, you come to know it.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I have so many other questions for you. We have to wrap at some point. Okay, one of the things that you teach in your book, and you’ve gone viral on TikTok for sharing, is a 10-second practice that immediately shifts dynamics. Can we talk a little bit about that?
Kasia Urbaniak:
A really easy way to start thinking a simple, more contained way to start thinking and practicing this idea of attention is power, of where the attention is, is in a situation where somebody asks you, especially a man, an inappropriate question. So when we’re talking about dominance and submission, we’re talking about attention out, attention in, men tend to have a default of their attention out. When there’s a moment of stress, when there’s a moment of crisis, when the tension rises, the tendency is men look out, women look in. So women will check themselves, men will check out what’s going on, check in, check out, check in, check out. And this is really important, because there is a decisive moment in a lot of very compromising, especially sexual harassment situations, man puts his attention out, asks an inappropriate question, “Do you charge for blowjobs?” Whatever, “Do you want to go up to my hotel room?” Whatever. Moment of tension and crisis for a woman, where does her attention go? In. His attention’s on her, her attention’s on herself, “What do I do? What did I do? Did I give the wrong signal? How do I get out of this? What am I doing? What do I say?” And in that moment, that double attention on her shuts her down.
The simple thing to do in that situation is put your attention out, but putting your attention out by being like, “You are,” is hard. It’s a lot easier and more powerful if you ask a question. Why? Because when you ask him a question, you’re not just putting your attention on there and queuing yourself to use the tremendous power of curiosity to see the answer, that’s a heavy attention, it’s a piercing, penetrating attention. Also, even if it’s just for a split second, in order for him to find the answer, he has to go inward, which is not his default state, just go, “What’s the answer?” Even if it’s a millisecond, and that’s enough to shift the dynamic. He’s on the spot now. He’s on the spot.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep, “What the fuck was that?”
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yeah, yeah. Or, “Where did you get that tie?” It doesn’t even matter if it’s a non sequitur. Yeah, so seems very simple, but I want to just bring you a little bit into the real world of how this requires a little bit of training. I’m in a room, 600 women, big event in London, and I’m teaching them Turning the Spotlight, the name of this tool. I’ve explained it to them, I’ve demonstrated it. And now I say to them, “I’m going to go through the audience. I’m going to ask you an inappropriate question. Your job is to ask me a question back. Extra credit if you actually use your attention to put your attention on me.” It’s a little bit of a higher-stakes situation because everyone’s watching. First one always tries to answer the question, it’s like she forgets, “Do you want to go out on a date with me?” “I don’t know.” It’s usually the third or the fourth that will ask me a question back. And that one will come out swinging, she’s just like, “Who the fuck do you think you are?” Completely uncalibrated, everyone goes, “Woo.” But I’m like, let’s keep going until we get something usable, right? Calibrated.
Tori Dunlap:
Right, because you can’t do that. Yeah.
Kasia Urbaniak:
Number five or six it takes, it takes a little bit of time to learn this habit. You ask an inappropriate question to a man, he’s going to be like, “Why are you asking?” Almost immediately, default, attention out. Woman will freeze. So once you get that moment where you learn to recognize, just noticing the fog, once you get that moment, you get a habit of being like, “Oh, I’ve been asked something that feels uncomfortable. Maybe I should put the attention out.” Right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yep.
Kasia Urbaniak:
And you have a little bit of practice with it, that’s when the fun begins, because at that moment, you can start really calibrating to the person that you’re in front of. So you can be clever, you can be smart, you can be simple, you can be soulful. So somebody’s like, “What’s a single girl like you doing here?” And you’re like, “Are you taking a poll? Are you looking for love? Are you hoping to be a candidate? Are you the king of dumb questions?” There’s a lot of things you can do. And if it’s really offensive, you can be searing. There’s a lot of things you can do, but the place where this originated from was actually the dungeon, because there was a horrible kind of client, they’re their own breed, where they like to go to BDSM dungeons where no sex is offered, and try to manipulate the new girl.
So before I was even a teacher, I started teaching the new girls this trick. So you’re in a dungeon and a guy’s like, “This is great, but when are we going to have sex?” Or start alluding to that. Now she is a dominatrix, so she can’t say, “I don’t know. I don’t feel comfortable with that. That’s against the rules.” Because she loses the whole aura of power. But if she goes, “What kind of submissive are you asking for things you’re not supposed to have? Do you like breaking the rules? Are you trying to piss me off? Are you trying to control me into punishing you?” So I train them to do question after question after question. And the more they went, they could go funny, they could go hard, they could go soft, “Oh, look at you. Do you not know how to speak to a woman?” It doesn’t have to be snarky, because the thing is, if you say no, if you stand up for your rights, like you can in some other situations, there are situations where you don’t want to offend the person you’re working with, if you lose your power in the first three minutes of a 60-minute BDSM session, then it’s over, the next 56, 57 minutes are a nightmare, you lost your footing, you’re there and you’re like, “I don’t know.” it is a nightmare.
So this ends up being a really powerful thing to practice that’s relatively simple, and eventually when you master it, you can use authentic curiosity, and that really disarms people and really gets to their heart immediately, like, “Are you being clumsy right now or are you being super aggressive?” Because I feel like maybe that question, that could be offensive to a lot of women, is a cry for connection with a woman, “Is that the best that you can do? Do you need help?”
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I fucking love it.
Kasia Urbaniak:
And the best examples will come from being in the moment and being curious, because then you can be like, “Did you just lose a mother recently?” You know what I mean?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Kasia Urbaniak:
But you’ll see something to say, those are just examples. Looking at you, I don’t have any cues.
Tori Dunlap:
What are you trying to do with that question?
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yeah, or, “Do you think that question’s going to get you what you most deeply want?”
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. And I’ll say to anybody listening, that is when I feel most powerful, is when I am curious, even in a situation that isn’t with a dude being shitty. It’s just like, “Yeah, tell me more about that.” Or like, “What did you mean by that?” Or if it is the dude being shitty, the amount of times I’m just like, “What? What was that?” Like [inaudible 01:09:50], “What was that?”
Kasia Urbaniak:
With genuine curiosity, it becomes really easy to see that a lot of shitty dudes are actually just clumsy.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, and they also just panic then, they’re like, “Oh, I wasn’t trying to offend you.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but what was that?”
Kasia Urbaniak:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
“What was that?” Okay, I could talk to you for another six hours, but we both got to go. Get on your soapbox for me, our last question, what would you say to a woman listening, who wants to feel more in control of her life and more powerful in a way that feels good to her and good in her body?
Kasia Urbaniak:
The simplest way, the most direct way is to keep a daily desire list. Coming to what you really, really, really want is not a thing that most women have in their back pocket. They mostly don’t spend a lot of time really deeply feeling into the evolution of their desires. And why I say this is that’s the main thing that keeps them being the best supporting actress. If you don’t carry in your heart and in your body the thing that is going to light you up next, the thing that’s going to give you the light to grow next, if you’re not aware of it, everybody else’s agenda will take over and you’ll be playing defense, you won’t be an active creator of your life. And from there stems the asking practice, and from there stems the Bad Girl Protocol. From there, everything is built on that. But I cannot overemphasize that, because if you do take it on as a religious practice of daily tapping in, and even if you’re writing the same thing every day, allowing it to change or allowing it to get more specific, you’re teaching your body how to become a magnet for it, you’re getting your voice more comfortable, “Why do you want money? What do you want it for? What do you want your life to look like?” It’s basically unlocking the taboo around that appetite, around that horny, hungry, voracious, alive thing.
And the beauty of that is that the desire prohibition and the distrust of the body starts to go away, when you start making friends with your desires and really understanding that you have no say in what you want, it just comes up on its own, and power is acknowledging it. You get to decide what you do about it, but if you don’t take stock of it, you don’t know your destiny, you don’t know what your life’s about. And we have consumer culture, “I like this. I like this.” I’m talking about desires, I’m talking about deeply knowing what’s going to drive you forward. If you know what moves you, you will be moved and you will take action, and everything else organizes around that. And when a woman isn’t the center of her universe, she’s always playing catch-up.
Tori Dunlap:
One of my favorite episodes we’ve ever done, thank you so much. Please plug away, tell us about your book, tell us about your work. Plug away, my friend.
Kasia Urbaniak:
My book is called Unbound: A Woman’s Guide to Power. It’s at Amazon, all major booksellers. My website is weteachpower.com, in part because my name is so difficult to spell. Kasia Urbaniak is a complicated Polish name, so weteachpower.com and Unbound. Tori, thank you so much for the work that you do. It’s been a delight to speak to you.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you. Thank you so much. I think I’d be a great dominatrix, by the way. That’s my new career path.
Kasia Urbaniak:
100%.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you to Kasia for joining us. So you can get her book, Unbound: A Woman’s Guide to Power, wherever you get your books. And you can also check out her academy at kasiaurbaniak.com, that’s K-A-S-I-A-U-R-B-A-N-I-A-K, we also put it down below in the show notes. Thank you as always, for joining us financial feminists. Hell of an episode, we appreciate you being here, and we’ll talk to you very soon.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Researched by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video Engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram and Meghan Walker. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton. Photography by Sarah Wolfe. And theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.
A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirsthundredk.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
