Sometimes you need to stand back and take a breather. Other times, you need to wield yourself.
I have been obsessed with the word ‘wielding’ and the phrase ‘wield yourself’ since I started on my scary yet rockin’ path of being healthy, as well as doing a whole lot of self-development. I love the words ‘rising, ‘uprising’ as well as ‘creating’, ‘building’, and my favorite word for what I am in the process of: ‘wielding’.
Wielding instead of creating- what’s the difference?
Wielding is the concept of creating/building based on deliberately using previously acquired concepts and skills that you already know brings you joy and happiness. Maybe I would even say that wielding happens from a place of fulfillment? It’s building stuff based on where you are already fulfilled, where you already know that you enjoy doing things like this. Well, what if you mash the things that you like to do, up?
I have thought a lot about why wielding feels like such a strong word for me.
Probably because it lets you see yourself as a tool. It’s in the word, that you will use everything you’ve already learned to create something new. It seems stronger for me and I believe that all rockers should be wielding, not creating. I have the same thing about ‘forging’ instead of creating. Forging is stronger to me- you melt things together.
A femtech entrepreneur; a case for wielding yourself.
I remember talking to one of my old friends at a conference in Copenhagen a while back. Her name is Ida Tin and she’s the founder of a femtech company called Clue, which is an ovulation tracker. Before that, Ida had a motorcycle travel agency together with her dad. And that’s actually where I got to know her – through a danish female entrepreneurship network called ‘morgendagens heltinder’. It was all the rage 15 years back. However, when I asked her how she came up with the idea for Clue she said that she had simply sat in her apartment and had a blank wall where she put post-it’s of all she liked to do in her life – all the things she was passionate about. Then she combined those things and started building because it was the perfect fit between feminism, technology, and reproductive rights.
What’s interesting here to me is that it simply wasn’t an act of creating everything from scratch. It was ‘deliberately’ using the things Ida knew made her feel fulfilled in order to create her next venture, her next dream.
I don’t see ‘wield yourself’ as an either/or from creating. It’s more like ‘upcycling’ (creating new things from old materials’ where creating is ‘DIY’ (creating new things from materials). It’s a layer above or below creativity depending on how you look at it.