The Lie That We Are In Competition

When I studied design in my 20s, one of my teachers said something to me that I never forgot and have tried to live by ever since.

She said, “A brilliant idea gets prevented by a good one.”

I think about this sentence so often, because I think this is one of the biggest shifts we can observe in women at the moment. We have been fed the lie that we have to compete with each other, keep things close to our chest, protect our ideas and not share too much because otherwise someone will steal it and we lose it.

And honestly, that is such a patriarchal way of looking at creativity, wisdom and leadership.

More and more women can see right through this now, because clearly it did not work so well for us. It kept us separate. It made us suspicious of each other. It made us believe that another woman’s brilliance somehow takes something away from our own, when really the opposite is true.

As women, we are collectively realising that we are not competing with each other. In fact, when we share our good idea, we give it the chance to become a brilliant one through the feedback, reflection and wisdom of others.

Ideas Become Brilliant When They Move

When I look back at my 30 years as a solopreneur, I can see that every idea I ever had was sparked by something that inspired me. A conversation, a sentence, a book, a client, something I saw, something I felt, something someone else had already put into the world.

So initially, yes, it was often someone else’s idea in some way. But that is not copying. That is how creativity works. It is building on top of a foundation that someone else has built, and then bringing your own lived experience, your own lens, your own timing and your own wisdom to it.

And I hope that the ideas I put out there become the foundation for another woman’s brilliance too.

That feels so much more alive to me than ownership. It feels like circulation. It feels like women remembering that wisdom was never meant to be hidden away or locked behind some invisible wall of “mine”.

We need to stop hiding our genius and share more freely, because I truly believe this is how we make the world a better place. Not by all sitting in our separate corners trying to come up with something no one has ever said before, but by allowing ideas, wisdom, stories and experience to move between us.

I can already see this happening in the online space. Women are working in a more circular way, where giving and receiving become a continuous flow. The feeling of completion gets eliminated, because it is not about “this is mine and now it is finished”. It is more like, this moved through me, I shared it, and now it might move through you in a completely different way.

Around 50, Your Calling Comes Online Differently

Of course, this takes clarity. It takes knowing your own gifts. It takes knowing your own zone of genius. Because when you do not really know what is yours, it is easy to feel threatened by what another woman is doing.

But when you are clear on your own gifts, your own path, your own voice and your own life’s work, there is so much more peace.

This is also what I have found around 50. Your calling starts to come online in a different way. Not as another clever business idea. Not as another strategy. Not as another thing to prove. But as something much deeper that has been gathering in you for years.

And when you align your life’s work with your soul’s path, there can never really be competition.

Nobody else has lived your life. Nobody else has your exact body of wisdom. Nobody else has your exact way of seeing, feeling, translating, creating or leading.

So the work is not to become more original by hiding more. The work is to trust yourself enough to share what is moving through you.

And maybe this is one of the great invitations of this season around 50. To stop waiting until the idea is perfect. To stop hiding the wisdom because it feels too simple. To stop assuming that what you know is not enough just because it comes naturally to you now.

Because the thing that feels obvious to you might be the exact thing another woman needs to hear.

This is why I created The 50 Threshold.

It is a free Human Design lesson for women around 50 who feel that their old life, work or business no longer fits in the same way, and who can feel that something deeper is starting to call them forward.

It is not about starting from scratch. It is about beginning to see the wisdom that has been gathering in you all along, and understanding the life’s work that wants to come through now.

Because your wisdom was never meant to stay hidden.

Much love, Sharonah x