Background - The Unseen Strain Beneath Women’s Capability
Across leadership, professional life, and intimate relationships, many women appear capable and steady while carrying a form of strain that is rarely named. They navigate environments where being misread, judged, or dismissed carries consequences, and over time, they learn, often without conscious awareness, how to organise themselves around what feels acceptable and safe.
This careful self-management is not superficial. It shapes expression, tone, timing, and emotional range. What begins as a subtle adjustment stabilises into identity. Carefulness becomes maturity. Self-restraint becomes responsibility. Adaptability becomes “just how I am.” What is lost is not strength or capability, but contact with her own signals, her particular way of sensing, seeing, and responding to life.
This pattern is significant because it does not sit at the level of confidence or behaviour. It sits at the level where meaning is formed, and where identity quietly organises itself in relation to belonging, credibility, and perceived risk. Without language for what is happening, women absorb the cost alone, assuming the issue is something lacking in them rather than a distortion in the conditions shaping their sense-making.
Introduction - Understanding the Pattern Before Transformation Begins
This article names what is occurring beneath that surface and why it matters. Drawing on her work with women in leadership contexts, Jeanette Mundy introduces Identity Vulnerability™ and contextualises Ashkan Tashvir’s sense-making framework to show how meaning quietly takes shape long before deliberate choice enters the picture.
Rather than offering behavioural advice, this work looks beneath action to the structures that organise it. It examines how initial impressions, cognitive maps, stories, mental models, perspectives, domains, and paradigms form a self-reinforcing pattern that distances a woman from her instinct and narrows what feels permissible in expression and presence.
What follows is not a behavioural explanation, but a sense-making one. It clarifies how identity becomes organised around protection rather than presence, and what becomes possible when these patterns are finally seen with accuracy.
Where Meaning Begins - and How Identity Takes Shape
Drawing on Ashkan Tashvir’s work on sense-making, meaning does not begin with reasoning or intention, but in the quiet, often unexamined moments where experience is first registered and oriented. What follows shows how those moments stack up over time and begin to shape identity.
Stage One - Initial Insight
This is the first moment of sense-making.
An initial insight is a pre-verbal impression. It arrives as a felt sense, an emotional registration, or an immediate conclusion before reasoning occurs. It often comes without words.
It feels obvious.
It feels true.
Because it arrives so quickly and with such certainty, it is rarely questioned.
At this stage, nothing has been explained. No evidence has been weighed. And yet, something already feels known.
What tends to go wrong here is subtle but consequential.
This first impression is often mistaken for the whole truth. A feeling is taken as a fact. A reaction is treated as a reliable signal about reality.
What is actually happening is much simpler and more precarious.
This is the beginning of sense-making, not the conclusion of it.
Examples of initial insights sound like:
“I need to get myself together here.”
“This isn’t the moment to say that.”
“I’m showing too much.”
“I should look more composed.”
“I don’t quite fit here.”
“I need to manage this better.”
These impressions do not arrive as full sentences at first.
They often register as a tightening, a hesitation, a pull to self-correct, and only later acquire words.
What matters is not whether they are true, but that they feel true in the moment.
What tends to go wrong
The first felt impression is mistaken for the whole truth, so a momentary sensation or reaction is treated as a reliable signal about reality.
Because they are experienced as obvious, they become the unquestioned starting point for further sense-making, shaping how a woman thinks, adjusts, and presents herself before she ever consciously decides to do so.
What has been described so far is not accidental. It follows a recognisable pattern, one that operates beneath awareness, shaping meaning before a woman ever decides what to do.
This is the opening movement of sense-making, the moment meaning first takes shape, before it has structure, story, or rule.
Stage Two - Cognitive Map
How meaning is categorised, what things are for them.
Almost immediately, what is felt is organised into meaning. What was registered in the body is classified as acceptable or unacceptable, put-together or sloppy, attractive or invisible, ageing well or failing, composed or exposed. These categories are not created in any one moment. They already exist, formed through past experience, cultural conditioning, media imagery, and relational feedback. Because this classification happens quickly and familiarly, it feels accurate. It feels like reality, even when it is incomplete, inherited, or distorted.
What tends to go wrong
The categories being used are assumed to be reality itself, so inherited or distorted classifications go unseen and unquestioned.
Examples of beauty-lens mapping:
A natural face is categorised as tired rather than neutral.
Ageing skin is read as decline rather than change.
Taking up space is equated with too much rather than present.
Comfort in the body is mapped as letting go rather than ease.
Once the map is in place, everything that follows will make sense inside it.
Stage Three - Stories
How meaning becomes narrative
From this map, meaning becomes story.
Events are linked into explanations that feel coherent and personal:
“I need to try harder to look put-together.”
“I can’t let myself go like that.”
“This is why I have to stay polished.”
“I’m starting to look past my best.”
These stories are attempts to remain acceptable, ways of explaining experience in a world where appearance has been the organising structure.
What tends to go wrong
Interpretive narratives harden through repetition and begin to feel inevitable, even when they are incomplete or rarely interrupted by alternative reference points.
The story does not announce itself as a story.
It arrives as how things are.
Stage Four - Mental Models
The rules that govern behaviour, how things work for them.
As stories stabilise, internal rules for how to stay acceptable begin to operate automatically.
These are not conscious choices.
They are assumed truths about how the world works and how a woman must operate within it.
Beauty-lens mental models often sound like:
A woman should always look like she’s coping.
Looking tired means I’m failing to manage myself.
My body is something that must be controlled to remain credible.
Aging well requires effort; aging naturally signals decline.
If I stop trying, I will lose value.
Being presentable is a form of responsibility.
Letting myself go would say something about who I am.
These rules often become operationalised through health and body management:
There is a correct way to eat, and deviation means loss of discipline or control.
My body should move toward a particular shape or weight for me to remain acceptable.
Staying within the “right” routines is evidence that I am managing myself properly.
What tends to go wrong here
Protective rules formed in earlier conditions continue to govern behaviour long after they have stopped serving the present. They make sense and the rules women live by avoid scrutiny, even in changing environments.
They don’t feel like assumptions; they feel like how things are.
Stage Five - Perspective
The lens-shaping interpretation: from which angle the subject is being looked at.
Perspective refers to the position from which a situation is being interpreted.
It is where a woman is looking from when she assesses herself, others, and what is happening around her.
Every perspective is partial.
No single perspective shows the whole picture; it highlights some things while obscuring others.
One of the most powerful perspectives shaping women’s sense-making is the beauty lens.
From early childhood, girls are immersed in signals about what is welcome and valued.
Appearance is praised.
Agreeableness is rewarded.
Being pleasing, composed, and emotionally manageable is reinforced long before there is language for choice, comparison, or critique.
These signals do not remain external.
They become a lens, a habitual position from which self-assessment occurs.
Over time, this perspective extends well beyond appearance.
It begins to shape how behaviour is judged, how emotion is expressed, how voice is moderated, and how much space feels permissible to take.
What is being shaped here is not vanity, but perception.
What tends to go wrong here
A single, culturally reinforced lens is treated as sufficient, limiting what can be seen, questioned, or reinterpreted and it shows up in a variety of contexts.
From within the beauty lens:
A body is assessed against narrow, Western ideals (think Barbie Doll) rather than cultural or biological diversity
Visibility is interpreted as exposure rather than presence
Ageing is seen as decline rather than transition or authority
Emotional expression is filtered through attractiveness or palatability rather than truth
From another perspective, those same realities could be interpreted entirely differently.
For example:
In some cultures, a fuller body signifies health, prosperity, or wisdom
In other contexts, age signals status and authority rather than loss
Emotional expressiveness may be read as strength, not instability
Both perspectives are partial and neither captures the whole truth.
The problem arises when one perspective is assumed to be sufficient, and everything else is judged against it.
Stage Six - Domain
What kind of “problem” this is assumed to be
A domain refers to the context within which sense-making is taking place.
It answers a simple but decisive question: what kind of matter is this?
Different domains operate according to different logics.
A relational issue requires relational understanding
A developmental issue involves time, change, and maturation
A scientific issue requires evidence and appropriate standards
A commercial issue operates according to persuasion, marketing, and profit
When a situation is interpreted through the wrong domain, the sense-making that follows becomes distorted, even if it feels logical at the time.
Much of what women later consume under the banners of health, wellbeing, and self-improvement operates primarily within a commercial domain, not a relational, developmental, or contextual one.
Within this domain:
Ageing is framed as decline
Appearance becomes currency
Improvement is positioned as obligation
These messages are not presented as marketing.
They are framed as guidance, care, or expertise.
They arrive repeatedly and ambiently, saturating everyday spaces and digital environments – often appearing precisely at moments of self-questioning, vulnerability, or transition.
What tends to go wrong here
Experiences are interpreted through the wrong domain, causing relational or developmental realities to be treated as technical or commercial problems.
Stage Seven - Paradigm
The kind of world that is assumed
A paradigm refers to the underlying way a person understands what kind of world they are living in.
It shapes what is treated as normal, natural, or inevitable, often without ever being named.
By the time sense-making reaches this layer, interpretation no longer feels situational.
It feels like how things are.
When value is repeatedly experienced as conditional, a particular kind of world is assumed.
In this world:
Belonging is contingent
Approval is revocable
Safety must be earned
Visibility carries risk
Being fully oneself has consequences
Identity quietly reorganises around preservation.
Not because something is “wrong”
But because this world appears to require it.
Within this paradigm:
Self-monitoring feels responsible
Shape-shifting feels prudent
Managing oneself feels like maturity
Carefulness is interpreted as wisdom.
Self-restraint is interpreted as strength.
Adaptation is interpreted as character.
What disappears is the possibility that the paradigm itself may be inaccurate or incomplete.
This is not pathology.
It is adaptation to a world understood as scarce, evaluative, and conditional.
Much like other paradigms:
A scarcity paradigm assumes there is never enough
A performance paradigm assumes worth must be demonstrated
A productivity paradigm assumes rest is a liability
A beauty-based paradigm assumes value is visible, fragile, and constantly assessed
Once a paradigm is in place, it quietly governs what feels sensible, safe, and unavoidable.
What tends to go wrong
The assumed nature of the world goes unnoticed, so adaptation is mistaken for necessity rather than a response to a particular interpretation of reality.
Behaviour follows naturally.
What matters here is not whether the paradigm was learned intelligently – it was – but whether it still reflects the reality a woman is living in now. As long as this kind of world is assumed, self-leadership will remain organised around protection rather than presence. And strength, however capable, will continue to function as armour.
Reinforcing Patterns
Across these seven layers, a pattern becomes reliable, repeatable, and self-reinforcing.
Identity begins to organise itself around minimising relational risk rather than responding freely to what is present. Strength becomes composure. Capability becomes self-containment. Responsibility becomes over-functioning.
This is Identity Vulnerability™, not a flaw or deficit, but an intelligent identity logic shaped by lived experience. It determines how a woman shows up long before she decides what to do. And while it preserves credibility and belonging, it does so at a cost: distance from instinct, erosion of uniqueness, and the quiet exhaustion of constant self-management.
This is the unseen strain many women are living inside, and the ground from which self-leadership must now be re-understood.
Bringing It Together
Across all of this runs a single, often unseen thread.
Women do not begin by armouring themselves. They respond to distorted reference points, standards that quietly teach them how to be acceptable, credible, and safe. Over time, those reference points shape perception, narrow expression, and recalibrate what feels permissible. What looks like self-discipline becomes self-monitoring. What looks like maturity becomes restraint. What looks like strength becomes protection.
Masks are not chosen for performance. They are adopted for survival. Armour is not built out of fear, but out of intelligence, an accumulated knowledge about what costs too much to show, say, or risk.
The cost of these distortions is not just exhaustion or self-doubt. It is distance from instinct. Distance from uniqueness. Distance from the self that would otherwise respond freely to what is actually present.
This is the terrain of Identity Vulnerability™.
Identity Vulnerability™ does not describe fragility or lack. It names a pattern that becomes reliable, repeatable, and self-reinforcing: identity organised around minimising relational risk rather than expressing what is true. It explains why confidence training falls short, why boundary scripts feel artificial, and why resilience often becomes another form of endurance.
Self-leadership begins when this pattern is seen, not corrected, not overridden, but understood.
When distorted reference points loosen, armour no longer has to do the work of protection. Strength is freed for expression. Vulnerability regains its original meaning, not exposure for approval, but openness to reality. Leadership, in any domain, stops being something a woman performs and becomes something she inhabits.
This is not about becoming different.
It is about becoming more accurately oneself, once the conditions that made self-protection necessary are finally visible.
This work sits at the heart of RelateAble Global, where we work with women, leaders, and organisations through the lens of Identity Vulnerability™ to make visible the identity-level patterns shaping leadership, self-expression, performance, and sustainable impact. You can find us here at Relatable Global.