Autorentext
Kasia Urbaniak is the founder and headmistress of The Academy, a secret school that teaches women to fully embody their confidence and power. Her teachings, based on insights from her experiences working as an expert dominatrix as well as her training to become a Taoist nun, have been profiled in The New York Times, The Cut, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Through her courses, corporate sessions, and more, she has trained thousands of women - artists and politicians, philanthropists and aid workers, lawyers and judges.

Klappentext

The ultimate guide to owning your power-and mastering how to use it.

How can so many women feel "good and mad" yet still reluctant to speak up in a meeting or difficult conversation? Why do women often feel like they're too much-and, at the same time, not enough? What causes us, at the most critical moments in our lives, to freeze?

Kasia Urbaniak teaches power to women-and her answers to these questions may surprise you. Based on insights from her experiences as a dominatrix, her training to become a Taoist nun, and the countless women she has taught to expand their influence, this book offers precise, practical instruction in how to stand in your power, find your voice, and use it well.

Learn how to:

• Embrace your desires as the pathway to your destiny.
• Ask for-and get-what you need in your life, work, and in the bedroom.
• Skillfully navigate hearing "no" and any resistance, even your own.
• Flip power dynamics when someone crosses your boundaries and puts you on the spot.
• Create new and expanded roles for the people in your life with precise, targeted asks.

Whether you're getting crystal clear on exactly what you want, or turning the tables on a man who has shut you up and shut you down, Urbaniak's methods teach women to stand for themselves in every interaction.

Part manual, part manifesto, part behind the scenes look, Unbound is a how-to guide to the impossible, the outrageous, the unimaginable-a field guide to living your wildest, best, and most satisfying life.

Zusammenfassung
The ultimate guide to owning your power--and mastering how to use it.

How can so many women feel "good and mad" yet still reluctant to speak up in a meeting or difficult conversation? Why do women often feel like they're too much--and, at the same time, not enough? What causes us, at the most critical moments in our lives, to freeze?

Kasia Urbaniak teaches power to women--and her answers to these questions may surprise you. Based on insights from her experiences as a dominatrix, her training to become a Taoist nun, and the countless women she has taught to expand their influence, this book offers precise, practical instruction in how to stand in your power, find your voice, and use it well.

Learn how to:

Embrace your desires as the pathway to your destiny.Ask for--and get--what you need in your life, work, and in the bedroom.Skillfully navigate hearing "no" and any resistance, even your own.Flip power dynamics when someone crosses your boundaries and puts you on the spot.Create new and expanded roles for the people in your life with precise, targeted asks.
Whether you're getting crystal clear on exactly what you want, or turning the tables on a man who has shut you up and shut you down, Urbaniak's methods teach women to stand for themselves in every interaction.

Part manual, part manifesto, part behind the scenes look, Unbound is a how-to guide to the impossible, the outrageous, the unimaginable--a field guide to living your wildest, best, and most satisfying life.

Leseprobe

Introduction

This book is a training manual for battle. It will prepare you for war when it's necessary, and skillful collaboration when you desire it. It is a field guide to the impossible, the outrageous, the unimaginable. It contains instructions for achieving unattainable goals, ones so far out of your reach you feel stupid or crazy thinking them, let alone saying them out loud.

It is an education in breaking the ingrained conditioning that keeps women silent and accommodating when we should be expressing ourselves and having influence. It will teach you to know what you want and how get it, which will change the world around you.

It is a guide to power.

My name is Kasia Urbaniak, and I spent seventeen years studying to become a Taoist nun while working as one of the most successful dominatrices in the world.

These seemingly contradictory tracks gave me unexpected and unprecedented insight into how power works. In studying Taoism around the globe, I learned to read the human body, so I'd know a person's intention to attack or retreat before they'd moved a muscle or uttered a word. It taught me to follow and trust what's most alive-what's humming with energy and possibility.

From my work in the dungeon, I learned all the ways that imagination can heal us, and help us to discover deep emotional truths. In playing games with power, I learned to differentiate between real authority and a performance of it.

From both, I learned about power dynamics: influence on others that exists beyond the level of language alone.

In 2012, I founded a school with Ruben Flores, an emergency field coordinator for the humanitarian organization MŽdecins Sans Frontires (Doctors Without Borders), to teach other women what I had learned. At the beginning, our school felt like an exclusive but growing secret society of powerful women whose headquarters just happened to be my Manhattan apartment. We were a modern-day, real-world Bene Gesserit, a coven of the righteous, planning world domination and achieving it.

But in 2018, many women began speaking out about their lived experiences of sexual harassment and assault, which gave rise to larger cultural conversations about feelings of powerlessness in family units, in romantic and sexual relationships, and in the workplace.

As the #metoo movement gathered speed, women at large started speaking a truth that my students already knew and had trained for: that most-if not all-of us had clutched in a high-stake, high-stress situation.

When it was most important for us

to know and speak our truth,

we were unable to.

The world is on fire, and the concepts I teach are ones that every woman should have access to. That is why I am writing this book.

This book will inoculate you against "no" and resistance of all kinds, including your own. It will help you to identify the life-force, the juice, the beautiful moving energy in every interaction, which is the key to understanding true desire. It will provide you with a constructive channel for all of the rage every woman has spent her adult life tamping down. And it will teach you to harness one of the most powerful weapons we have-your attention.

And while there will be erotic absurdity and transcendent insight, what I really want to share with you is what I discovered underneath every interaction. Because power isn't a mood, an outfit, a moment, or a pose. It is the ability to access your deepest desires, express them fully, and use them to influence other people and the world at large.

Ultimately, this book is about relationships-in the den, in the bedroom, in the workplace, in Congress, and at the bar. It is about the dynamics that define them and decide their fate. It is about strength and vulnerability, dominance and surrender, and how each affects the flow of love, power, and influence.

I use binary terms-man and woman-when I speak about gender, not because I see gender as binary, but because my work is so deeply rooted in the cultural conditioning that all of us received when we were assigned "male" or "female" at birth. Regardless of how you identify now, the expectations …