Transcription of Lael Couper Jepson for the show Reclaiming Personal Power #248
Dr. Belisle: Sometime recently, I came back in the office, and on my desk, there was a book called Unscripted: A Woman’s Living Prayer, by Lael Couper Jepson, with a lovely little note on it. I said, “I have no idea who this person is,” but on the book, there’s just wonderful photography of Lael Couper Jepson, so I said, “This is intriguing. I think I’ll start reading it.” I did, and today we have in the studio with us Lael Couper Jepson because I did actually really enjoy your book.
Lael: Thank you.
Dr. Belisle: It’s quite wonderful. She is the owner of She Changes, a Portland-based business that supports women in more fully unleashing their power to be architects of change for their lives, for their business, or as leaders within their organizations and communities.
As a certified professional coach with an extensive background in consulting and organizational change, Lael has worked with women nationally over the past ten years in her business making a name for herself and her She Changes community. Lael is passionate about storytelling as a means for women to not feel so alone, and has held countless local events such as She Speaks, Homecoming, and Mustang Sally’s to inspire women to share their stories and ignite courageous action.
Most recently, Lael wrote about her own story in her book, which I have in my hand, Unscripted: A Woman’s Living Prayer. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Lael: Yeah, thanks for having me, Lisa.
Dr. Belisle: The reason that this book is a little dog-eared is because I actually brought it with me on vacation, which is when I do a lot of my reading, as most of us do. It had access to pool water and beach water.
Lael: Yeah. It’s well-loved.
Dr. Belisle: It’s well-loved, and it’s also evidence that it kept … It was very thought-provoking and it kept me reading through.
Lael: I’m so glad.
Dr. Belisle: I didn’t put it down.
Lael: Yeah, I hear that a lot. It’s a big book, and I hear it doesn’t read like a big book.
Dr. Belisle: That’s right. Yeah. That’s true.
Lael: That’s awesome. That’s great. Great to hear.
Dr. Belisle: Now, one of the things … In this book, you talk about your own journey, essentially from being in the corporate world for many years in a field that really was more male-dominated, to finding your own voice and becoming aware that within yourself and within all of us, really, we have male and female energies.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: I find that really fascinating because I practice Chinese medicine, and we talk about yin and yang.
Lael: Right, there you go. Yep.
Dr. Belisle: That’s inherent in-
Lael: Yeah, it’s not a new concept, what I’m touching on. Right.
Dr. Belisle: Yes. But, what you’ve described is something that I think we still struggle with as a culture.
Lael: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.
Dr. Belisle: This dichotomy that we all, I guess, feel impacted by, that women and men need to be a certain way in their lives.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: It really impacts us, perhaps in a way that we don’t quite fully understand.
Lael: Physically, emotionally, spiritually, yeah. I’m pretty convinced it’s at the root of just about everything. Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: Yeah. Back us up a little bit and tell me, how did this all start for you?
Lael: I love how you describe it, just because it accelerated about 20 years of my life in a nice, neat, red bow, but it didn’t happen that way at all. In classic me fashion, it was quite messy and there was a fair amount of thrashing and artmaking involved in that. It really began in … This sounds so … I wrote about this, but it sounds so embarrassing, still, to say, is that I didn’t really fully realize I was a woman until I was 34 and I was pregnant. It has nothing to do with gender confusion or anything like that, it’s just it’s very telling to the degree I had disassociated myself from being a woman, because it hadn’t felt relevant. There certainly wasn’t space in my corporate world to talk about being a woman. It wasn’t acknowledged, and, in fact, in my own lexicon, I used stuff like “one of the guys,” and I fit in.
Until I got pregnant, and it was like I was outed, first to myself. You know, this was no mystery to everybody around me. It was really this internal conversation I had where I literally walked into this leadership retreat that I had done many times before, and for the first time, I just saw this. It was the top 150 leaders of the company, and I just saw this sea of white men in their 50s and 60s, primarily, and a few women, but all I could see was the predominantly white men. At the same time, I looked down, and I was ten months pregnant. I probably should not have even been at this retreat, but I loved it. I was very ripe with child, so much so I couldn’t even see my toes from underneath my belly. It just struck me in that moment, that visual of, “I’m a woman.” It sounds so simple and basic to say that now, but it clicked for me in that moment.
That was the moment that began everything, that changed everything, because I started to see myself as different and I started to get curious. The first part of my journey was to get curious of how that happened, and how was I culpable. How did I allow that to happen at the age of 34? How did I get to this place? There was the unraveling of that, and there was rage and anger that came up behind that in processing through that. It began with curiosity, it moved into anger. It had me start to look outward into the world and say, “Where are the women? Where am I out there? What’s happening?”
At the time, I had an advanced degree and I knew the statistics of the disconnect between women who are getting advanced degrees and actually accelerating into the C-suites, and it wasn’t really in the boardrooms, wasn’t really working. I surprised myself and realized that I wanted to dedicate my work in the world to working with women, which took me by surprise because I did not see that coming. That was not a dream I had growing up. I didn’t identify as being a feminist. I didn’t [inaudible 00:38:32] identify as being a woman, so here I am dedicating my professional life to this and forming She Changes, which I went on to do. It was a journey. I worked with a lot of men who I love and still love who were like, “You’re cutting off half your market share by just working with women. You really should think that through,” and I did. I was thinking, “Oh my God, what am I doing?”
Something wise within me has governed all of my work with She Changes, this book, and I’ve invested in that. I’ve often joked that that’s the key stakeholder in my business, that wise voice in me, and it’s served me well. The book that you hold in your hands is really the culmination of my journey of the past ten years, that has taken me to this point. It began as a conversation about being a woman, and then it, as I teased it out further, it became about the range of who I am as a woman and making space for the masculine energy in myself, which I had shamed a lot, and so asking myself where I participated in that shame. Then, the feminine energy, what did that even mean? It was quite an inside-out, thrashing around … I call it a street fight on the cover, and an aria, because it was totally inspired.
It’s such an honor to have gotten that. I’m so glad it’s out. Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: It’s interesting that you would talk about feminism, because looking back through the book in preparation for today, I really was struck by anger and, the quote that you gave by Gloria Steinem, “Anger is energizing. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.”
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: Then you ask the question, “Why is it that when a woman gets angry, she is shamed? Nothing shuts me up faster than being accused of being angry, and I do mean accused, because it feels just like that, a charge of misbehavior, caught redhanded for excessive expression of passion, overstepping a boundary.”
Lael: Yep.
Dr. Belisle: It’s an enormous topic.
Lael: It is.
Dr. Belisle: For me, there’s the feminist aspect of it, but then I think actually the suppression of anger in our culture these days, just in general.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: I mean, you can be a male or you can be a female. I think that it gets squashed.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: Tell me about that for you.
Lael: It gets squashed, and then it comes out sideways. I’m an athlete and a competitor. I love competition. Having done athletics most of my life, I find a really great home for that in a lane on a track or in a triathlon, and that’s acceptable, and that’s okay. Interestingly enough, except in women-only events, which I have encountered. It hasn’t … You know, it’s still fresh for me, too. Taking in what people are saying about me … It started with my family. I have been called “vicious” by my own family, and I wrote about it, so they know I’m saying this. This is not a secret. I have been known as a straight shooter, I’m direct, I will tell you how I feel. Often when I do that, I’m called vicious, I’m called malic- … I mean, really mean-spirited names that I have swallowed whole for most of my life. I’m the vicious one. Wow.
My mom and I, I don’t think she’d mind me sharing, got in a fight once. I was telling her how I felt, and she said, “I feel like I’ve been riddled with bullets.” I was like, “Wow. Sorry.” I mean, what do you say to that, right? When I unpack that, I had to separate my … There’s the intention versus the impact. I’ve done diversity work, so I know she gets to feel the way she feels. I need to own my impact. I sat with my intention around this, and what I found, when I peeled back all the layers, was my heart. I have a very, very big heart, and I’ve had people tell me that time and time again, but I haven’t really owned that side of myself because I’ve been told I can be mean, I can be vicious, I can be the b-word that other women have called me that. I don’t know if I can say that here, but you know what I’m talking about.
It’s taken me a while to own my heart, and to marry my heart, I think I talk about it in the book, to snug up my heart against that side of myself that tells the truth. That’s what Clarissa Pinkwell at Estes writes in her book about the wild women archetype and the type of the feminine that is fierce and will carry her young around in her teeth and will thunder after injustice. When truth is said in that spirit, from that heart, imagine the world we’d live in. Imagine the world we’d live in if more women harnessed that — more people, but starting with women — harnessed that side of themselves.
That’s what I’ve been actively doing, really over the last year, even since writing this book. I’m now living that prayer. I’m constantly taking stock of where I’m participating in my own shame, and it’s really a deep pool. It’s not a quick conversation. I’m constantly catching myself there.
Dr. Belisle: Well, I think you’re right, it’s not a quick conversation. It’s not one that we could even cover, just you personally, in this short amount of time that we have for the radio show.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: Yet, I think it really is so insidious, I think. It’s not … What I often wonder is how did we get to the place where passive resistance or the nonviolence that someone like Martin Luther King espoused, or Gandhi … How do we get to the place where nonviolence became sublimation of all feelings that might make other people uncomfortable?
Lael: Right.
Dr. Belisle: I don’t think that we ever were saying, during the peace movements of the ’60s and ’70s, I don’t think we were ever saying, “People, stop feeling. People, stop being angry. Stop being joyful.” Yet, I think that what I see oftentimes is that everything needs to get tamped down, whether it’s anger, whether it’s extreme joy, whether it’s viewpoints that don’t match up with other people’s.
Lael: Yes, I agree. Yes.
Dr. Belisle: But it does. It kind of slides around under the surface, and then we don’t really have any way to actually engage with people anymore, because there’s nothing left.
Lael: Right, right.
Dr. Belisle: How do we get to a place of really genuine goodness? We want to move forward as a culture to a place where we’re really kind of squishing everybody, male and female.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: I don’t know. That’s a big question.
Lael: It really is. It’s a point of curiosity for me. When I first began my business, I had come from the corporate world, and I’d seen, and, frankly, participated in what has been called “women’s inhumanity to women,” right? The backstabbing, the ruthless … That’s another word that’s come my way, “ruthless.” Just triggered for me. The passive-aggressive nature, the pitting against each other. I was fascinated by that, so much so, in my classic nature, I’m like, “Let’s go in and really crack that open. Let’s double-click that icon.”
I did some women’s groups and I did some forums, and I was invited in, and it was so divisive. It was so repulsive. It was extremely validating to women who had experienced it and who knew it and who were ready to engage it. It was really repulsive to women who couldn’t even go near that topic. What happened was it became even more divisive. It created … That’s not what I wanted, and it wasn’t fun. It was really hard, sort of sweaty conversation. I thought, “I don’t want to do more of that. That didn’t work.” It wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t generative. It wasn’t life-giving. It was shaming and it was divisive. That’s not working.
I began my women’s retreat, Homecoming, which I did three times over the course of six years up in a lake in Raymond. I had 45 women each time, and I thought, “I’m going to have a different experience of women. I’m going to just trust all my instincts, and I’m going to create an experience that I want to have that’s going to feel different and women are going to taste it and feel it, and they can never again say they don’t know, because they’ve felt it. They have muscle memory of an experience where women have this really cool community, and they’re going to go and replicate it.” It was a grand experiment, and it actually happened.
I remember after my first Homecoming retreat, I know one of your guests was Jean Handie. She’s a very good friend of mine, and she was one of my retreat leaders. All three of my retreats, she came, and she said, after the first retreat, she said, “That experience with women,” she said, “If women were left to their own devices and they didn’t have the media and they didn’t have all this culturization we have, this is how they would have treated each other.” This is it. This is how we treat each other. It’s not needing to fix or rescue, but this large capacity to be with another woman as she shows up fully. I’m just getting excited talking about it. I did more of those, and I continue to do more of those. My book is the latest endeavor to do that, to send out a different ripple into the world.
I think in answer to your large question, we’re not taught … Anger isn’t named with women. There’s a book, Imagine a Woman, I think it’s called, by Patricia Riley, where she talks about, imagine if you felt, when you were younger, you felt this rage and you felt this anger, and some woman held you in her lap and said, “Oh yes, this is anger, this is what this is. You’re entitled to feel this way. This is not bad or something to be feared. This is something to be listened to, this is something to be with.” What a different relationship we would have to anger, right? We wouldn’t fear it. Anger is different than violence. Anger’s an emotion. We just don’t have a lot of space online in public forums to express anger and have it seen as with pride versus shame or fear.
Dr. Belisle: It’s also something that men can’t talk a lot about, which bothers me because, like you, I have … I think you have-
Lael: Two sons.
Dr. Belisle: Two sons.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: And, you have a lovely husband from New Sweden.
Lael: I do.
Dr. Belisle: I have my one son, two daughters, five brothers, a wonderful significant other, he is great. My first significant, my husband, he was also great. Grandfathers. I mean-
Lael: Yeah, a lot of men in your life.
Dr. Belisle: A lot of men. I mean, I equal to the number-
Lael: Yeah. I’m a big fan of men.
Dr. Belisle: Yeah. I’m a big fan, as I know you are, of humans, and what I see is, that bothers me now for the men, is that moving more towards giving women a voice, it has really, I think, impacted the men who weren’t the ones who took the voice away from women in the first place.
Lael: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: That’s what I really feel bothered by, is that my son would enter into a world where people are still angry at the white man.
Lael: Yes, yes.
Dr. Belisle: Specifically the white man, who seems to have had all the power all these years. But he didn’t take away the power of those of us women who are living now, nor did my, I think, my ex-husband or my significant other now or my grandfathers.
Lael: Yeah. Right, right.
Dr. Belisle: I don’t know. I guess this is just, like-
Lael: Not wanting to pump more shame into the system, you know?
Dr. Belisle: Yeah. Yeah.
Lael: It’s a delicate balance between understanding privilege and not wanting to shame additionally.
Dr. Belisle: Exactly.
Lael: Because that legacy, that is passed down. It’s been very interesting hearing from and watching the men that I know read, former clients of mine, people who have followed me for years, my husband. I’ll read aloud excerpts to my sons, and watching their experience of this book has been fascinating because it’s opening things.
I have a client of mine, said she got my book in the mail, and it came home. She has two sons and her husband, and her husband grabbed the book and said, “Oh, is this Lael,” and picked it up, because I’m all over the cover. He had heard about me, and so he started thumbing through the book and he started reading it, and then her sons picked up the book, and they’re like, “Who’s this woman?” They were looking through it. She’s like, “Can I … Can I have my book?”
I’m actually going to start gathering groups of men, and I have had lots of energy to do that around the years, to talk about this. It’s very interesting. My husband has a lot of feminine energy, and we often joke. I have an extraordinary amount of masculine energy, he has a lot of feminine energy, and I’m very much a woman and he’s very much a man. It’s been so cool in our family to uncouple the gender from the energy, which is so difficult. If you talk with a group of women about the feminine, they will immediately talk about being a woman, or they’ll come to the rescue, if you will, of men. Not the women in my community, so much, they don’t really have a lot of energy for that, but it’s amazing how synonymous that masculine is with male and feminine is with female. If nothing else, I want my book to open a different conversation, a broader conversation.
I was on my street the other day, and I approached a couple of my neighbors, two women who were talking, and she was talking about getting promoted and really negotiating her salary, and how exhausted she was. She said, “Yeah, there’s that masculine energy in me again,” because she referenced my book. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms until I started reading it. She just did it as a matter of course. It wasn’t loaded, it wasn’t charged, it lost its electric charge of shame or lily-dipping in it, qualifying it. It was so exciting to see because I want a new conversation. The old one’s not working around men and women. It’s just limiting, and it’s divisive. The cool news is, the spectrum is changing. There’s a broad spectrum of gender identification. It’s not that easy to have that conversation anymore anyway, so I’m delighted about that. Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: I’m also delighted, and I also think … I’ve also wondered over the years it has been that women were not allowed to have enough of a voice in some cases because we didn’t have enough education.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: You know, or we didn’t have our own economic means. Now I think we have many women who show up at the table, whether we’re educated or not educated, or have our own means or don’t have our own means, that’s become less of an issue.
Lael: Yeah, I love that.
Dr. Belisle: All the excuses that used to exist, I think we’ve slowly put to the side, and now I think we can all come to the table as equal human beings and have these conversations and just say, “You know what? That stuff, maybe it’s relevant, maybe it’s not, to your perspective, but it doesn’t mean that you have some sort of advantage in the hierarchy,” I guess.
Lael: Yeah. It’s how we measure worth in our society, I think. In the past, it’s education, it’s value, it’s how much you make, where you went to school, who you know, what you’ve read. It’s all this sort of stuff. I’d love to get to the place — and, it’s starting, it certainly is, I feel it, and it gives me great hope every day when I get out of bed — that someone could say in a boardroom or in a corporate setting, “Something doesn’t feel right,” and then just put a period after the end of that sentence. That would be so great, without referencing something they’ve read in particular. In the work that I do with women, it’s using a lot … I’m a very verbose person. No one has ever accused me of being concise, so this is kind of ironic. I do a lot of work with women around using short statements and shorter ones.
I had a grad school professor, this amazing woman named Lucia Edmonds down in DC, and she carried … I’m doing this with my fingers like I’m carrying a very small object like a period. She would carry a period in her pocket. Wise, wise woman. She was in her mid-’60s. She would say these things, and she said, “I’m just going to place a period right there.” As a woman in my 30s at the time, I was like, “Oh, yes. You do that.” It keeps the potency of what was said, versus watering down or sandwiching it with a preface and a disclaimer, or all those watery-down words that have you lose the essence of what was said. Potency. Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: I know that we could just keep talking forever and ever, and people will want to, I know, read your book Unscripted: A Woman’s Living Prayer. How can they learn more about you and the work that you do with She Changes?
Lael: Certainly my website, shechanges.com, and the book is available on Amazon and booksellers. I’m speaking a lot more. I’m doing a lot of interviews. I’m going up and talking at women’s colleges and women’s book clubs are inviting me in to speak. It seems, and I love this, that I’m not alone. I almost had that as the title of my book, “It seems I’m not alone,” because it’s the theme of my work. Women are hungry to talk about this, and I love that my book is giving them the forum to gather without me, and I love being invited in. Yeah. More of that to come.
Dr. Belisle: We’ve been speaking with Lael Couper Jepson, who is the owner of She Changes, a Portland-based business that supports women in more fully unleashing their power to be architects of change, and author of the book Unscripted: A Woman’s Living Prayer. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Lael: Thanks for having me, Lisa. It’s been fun.
Dr. Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show #248, “Reclaiming Personal Power.” Our guests have included Lael Couper Jepson and Angela Coulombe. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as DrLisa, and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as Bountiful1 on Instagram.
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