Unbound: A Woman's Guide to Power

asking a question reverses the flow of attention. And control over the flow of attention is power.

The primary superpower of the submissive is her ability to connect to a deep inner signal and to communicate the truth of that signal to others.

But they are requests made using submissive language—“I” language, emotional language with an exclusive focus on the speaker and her experience.

That is the submissive state I want you to envision, one in which you are completely and safely held by someone else’s attention, and can therefore relax and concentrate only on what you feel. Your role as a submissive is to turn your attention inward, and to feel what you want so completely that every cell in your being is saturated with it.

Congruence is what occurs when your attention—your body’s language—is aligned with your intentions and words. It’s hard to define but impossible to deny when felt or witnessed. You may have heard it called “embodiment,” “alignment,” “integrity,” “resonance,” or “the law of attraction”; I believe it to be a human being’s natural state. Practically s

Influence is the opposite of control. If you are able to powerfully influence someone, then you gain access to all of their inner resources: their smarts, their creativity, their passion. This kind of cooperation often creates a third possibility, a solution even better than either person involved could possibly have imagined by themselves. So the

Much of the time, the other person will agree to join you in the world you’ve created—the world where you have what you want—because a connected, submissive Ask has a fundamental integrity, a very powerful place from which to make a request or an invitation.

The most radical thing a woman can do is want.

The whole world is built on agreements, born from the conversations that happen inside relationships. All the seemingly fixed phenomena that surround us—from love to laws, from families to corporations to governments—are the direct result of an agreement.