Why Women Are No Longer Willing to Play Small
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Rosanna Holmström is a breathwork facilitator, public speaker, and cybersecurity professional. She teaches leaders and high performers how to regulate their inner state and access clarity, resilience, and sustainable performance.
Something is shifting. Across boardrooms, businesses, communities, dance floors, retreats, and social movements, more women are speaking up, taking up space, expressing themselves more freely, and questioning the expectations they inherited. Not because women are becoming more powerful, but because many are remembering parts of themselves they were taught to suppress. The question is not why women are changing. The question is why so many of us learned to shrink ourselves in the first place.
The hidden cost of being a "good girl"
Many women grow up hearing that they should be kind, be helpful, and be agreeable. Don't be too loud. Don't be too emotional. Don't be too ambitious. Don't make people uncomfortable.
Most of these messages aren't spoken directly. They're absorbed through family systems, schools, culture, relationships, and workplaces.
Over time, many women learn that being liked feels safer than being authentic. That belonging feels safer than self-expression.
While this adaptation may help us fit in, it often comes at a cost, a cost many women don't recognize until much later in life. The cost of suppressing parts of who we really are.
The cost of being "too much"
I don't know how many times in my life I've been told that I'm too direct. Too intense. Too straightforward. I've heard it at work. I've heard it in relationships. I've heard it in situations where all I was doing was expressing how I felt or standing my ground.
What fascinates me is how many women immediately recognize this experience. A woman states a boundary. She speaks clearly. She says what she thinks.
Suddenly, she is labelled difficult, aggressive, intimidating, or rude. My favourite response these days is, "No, I'm not rude. I'm just being clear."
Because clarity is not aggression. Boundaries are not hostility. Taking up space is not a character flaw. The more women I meet, the more I realise how many of us have spent years softening our message in order to make other people comfortable.
Perhaps reclaiming our voice is not about becoming louder. Perhaps it is simply about no longer apologising for being honest.
When suppression becomes embodied
One of the most overlooked aspects of personal growth is that suppression does not live only in the mind. It lives in the body. Modern neuroscience shows that our nervous system continuously adapts to perceived threats and social environments.
If being fully expressed feels unsafe, the body responds accordingly. Breathing becomes shallow. Posture changes. Movement becomes restricted. Authenticity becomes negotiated.
Many women are not consciously choosing to play small. Their nervous system has simply learned that it is safer. This is one reason why cognitive approaches alone are not always enough. Understanding a pattern intellectually is very different from changing it somatically.
Nature never mistook femininity for weakness
One of the greatest misunderstandings about femininity is the idea that it should always appear soft, passive, agreeable, or quiet. Nature tells a very different story. Lionesses are the primary hunters within the pride.
Female elephants often lead entire herds through droughts, migrations, and threats. Their memory and leadership help ensure the survival of future generations.
Across countless species, females are nurturing and compassionate, but they are also fierce, protective, expressive, and powerful.
Nature has never confused femininity with weakness. Perhaps humans have. True feminine power is not the absence of strength. It is a strength expressed through embodiment, intuition, leadership, care, creativity, and courage.
The freedom women are still fighting for
When we talk about women reclaiming their voice, their boundaries, and their self-expression, we're not just talking about personal development. We're stepping into a much larger conversation, one that stretches across cultures, generations, and history itself.
History is complex. There has never been a single global experience of womanhood. Across different civilizations, cultures, and time periods, women have experienced vastly different levels of freedom, influence, education, leadership, and autonomy.
Yet despite these differences, certain patterns appear again and again throughout history. Women who challenged social norms often faced consequences.
Women who spoke too loudly, led too boldly, expressed their sexuality too freely, or refused to conform were frequently met with resistance, criticism, exclusion, or punishment.
In some societies, women were denied access to education. In others, they were excluded from political power, property ownership, or financial independence. In many places, their role was narrowly defined by what was considered acceptable for a woman to be.
While enormous progress has been made, the conversation is far from over. Even today, millions of women around the world continue to fight for freedoms that many others take for granted.
In Iran, women have risked imprisonment, violence, and even death for demanding greater freedom over their own bodies and lives. Following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, women took to the streets and sparked the global movement “Woman, Life, Freedom,” bringing international attention to the ongoing struggle for women’s rights and autonomy. As stated by UN Women in their statement on women's rights in Iran, the protests highlighted the ongoing fight for dignity, equality, and fundamental freedoms for women and girls.
Across parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, millions of girls still face barriers to education, child marriage, gender-based violence, and restrictions on opportunity. According to UNICEF's child marriage data and research, child marriage remains one of the most significant challenges affecting girls globally, limiting education, health outcomes, economic independence, and future possibilities.
Yet suppression doesn't always look the same. In many Western societies, women may have legal rights and opportunities previous generations could only dream of, yet still find themselves navigating a different set of pressures.
Be successful, but not intimidating. Be attractive, but not too sexual. Be ambitious, but not aggressive. Be confident, but not "too much."
Take up space, but not too much space. The forms of suppression may look different. But the underlying message can sometimes feel remarkably similar. Don't make people uncomfortable. Don't be too loud. Don't be too emotional. Don't be too powerful.
Of course, this article is not about ignoring the extraordinary progress that has been made. Women today have more rights, opportunities, representation, and freedom than many generations before us.
But cultural conditioning rarely disappears simply because laws change. Many of the beliefs we inherit are passed quietly from generation to generation through families, schools, media, and workplaces, through the subtle messages about who we are allowed to be.
Perhaps this is why so many women today feel called to reclaim their voice, their boundaries, their intuition, and their self-expression.
Not because they are becoming someone new, but because they are remembering parts of themselves that were never meant to be hidden in the first place.
The body remembers
One of the most fascinating discoveries in neuroscience is that human beings do not simply remember through conscious thought. We remember through physiology, emotion, pattern recognition, and the nervous system.
Many women describe a feeling of finally coming home to themselves when they begin exploring practices that reconnect them to their bodies.
Not because they are becoming someone new, but because they are uncovering parts of themselves that have been buried beneath years of adaptation. The goal is not transformation. The goal is remembrance.
Why somatic practices can feel so healing
This may explain why so many women are drawn toward practices such as breathwork, dance, embodiment work, yoga, meditation, and conscious relationship work.
These practices invite us out of constant thinking and back into direct experience. They help us feel, move, express, release, and listen.
As I explored in my article Why High Performers Need to Learn Self-Regulation, the nervous system plays a central role in how we experience ourselves and the world around us.
As discussed in Why Connection Is the Medicine We Are Missing, healing rarely happens entirely alone. Many women discover that when they breathe deeply, move freely, or allow themselves to be fully expressed, something unexpected happens.
The armour begins to soften. The performance begins to drop. The body relaxes. Beneath all the conditioning, a more authentic version of themselves emerges.
My own experience of remembering
Over the years, I have witnessed this shift countless times, in women attending retreats, in breathwork sessions, in coaching containers, and in myself. I have watched women arrive carrying years of pressure to be who they believed they should be.
The good daughter. The good partner. The good employee. The woman who keeps everyone else comfortable. The woman who doesn't take up too much space.
Then something shifts. Not overnight. Not dramatically. But gradually. They start speaking differently. Moving differently. Laughing differently. Taking up space differently.
They stop apologizing for who they are. One experience that deeply impacted me happened during a retreat in the mountains of Georgia. For a week, I was surrounded by people from all over the world, many of whom I had never met before.
We spent our days exploring practices centred around embodiment, connection, movement, breath, and authentic expression.
What struck me most wasn't what I learned about other people. It was what I learned about myself. I realised how many unconscious stories I had carried for years. Stories about who I should be, how I should behave, and what was acceptable to express.
I watched similar realizations unfold around me. Women who had spent years hiding parts of themselves began speaking with more honesty, dancing more freely, setting boundaries more clearly, laughing louder, and taking up more space.
Because they finally felt safe enough to stop hiding. This is what I have come to believe after years of working with breathwork, nervous system regulation, and personal growth.
Women do not need to become someone new. They need to remember who they were before they learned it wasn't safe to be fully themselves.
The world benefits when women are whole
I don't believe women are becoming more powerful. I believe many women are becoming more willing to express the power that has always been there.
Not power over others. Power within themselves. The power to speak. To lead. To create. To nurture. To protect. To say no. To say yes. To trust themselves. Perhaps most importantly, the power to stop abandoning themselves in order to belong.
It would also be incomplete to tell this story without acknowledging the men who have helped make this shift possible.
The fathers who encourage their daughters to be bold. The partners who celebrate a woman's ambition rather than feeling threatened by it. The leaders who create space for women's voices to be heard. The men who are willing to question outdated ideas about masculinity and femininity.
We see you. We are grateful for you. Because this is not a movement against men. It is a movement toward wholeness. For everyone.
Perhaps the future isn't about women becoming stronger. Perhaps it's about women becoming more fully themselves, and perhaps the world benefits when they do.
When women stop shrinking themselves, they don't only change their own lives. They change families, communities, workplaces, relationships, and future generations.
Not through force. Not through domination. But through authenticity. Because the world doesn't need women to be smaller. It needs women to be whole.
Continue the conversation
If this article resonated with you, take a moment to ask yourself: Where in your life are you still making yourself smaller than you need to be? Who might you become if you stopped?
If you're interested in exploring nervous system regulation, embodiment, breathwork, and sustainable personal growth, you can learn more about my work by visiting my website and following me on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Read more from Rosanna Holmström
Rosanna Holmström, Breathwork Expert and International Speaker
Rosanna Holmström is a breathwork facilitator, public speaker, and cybersecurity professional. She helps leaders, founders, and individuals recovering from burnout regulate their inner world and access clarity, resilience, and sustainable energy. Through her brand Breathe With Rosie, she integrates breathwork and nervous system awareness into leadership, culture, and personal transformation.
