Should you come out as bisexual? Why coming out to yourself is a business power move
Today I'm asking you a big question:
Should you come out?
Should you reveal that your sexuality differs from the heterosexual norm?
More specifically, should you do it to increase your business success?
I'm Lauren White. I'm a qualified sexologist and bisexual woman, and this is something that I've seen over and over again in myself, in my clients and in women in business from afar.
It's about how coming out – even privately –can completely blow up your business…
…not because your audience or your offers change but because you change – you get real about who you are and that completely radicalises your business.
I'm not talking about a rainbow emoji or posts on Instagram or about the public declarations or the announcements.
I'm talking about the quiet, intimate decision to stop hiding from yourself.
That's what this is really about.
We are scaling it right back to the most important foundational piece:
How you feel about yourself, what your relationship is to yourself, whether you're in self reverence or not, and how can connected you are to your sexual erotic self.
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This is about admitting who you really are sexually, emotionally, energetically, and allowing the truth to settle in your body.
That's when everything shifts, because up until now you've been toying with this decision. You've been in your head. You know who you are. But you've decided to relegate everything until later.
Until this happens. When this happens…you've completely deprioritised this part of yourself. You've had to play pretend.
You’re in a committed relationship, you've got a family, you've got a public identity, and you're questioning:
“What the fuck do I do with this? What can I do with this? I have no power over this, so I'm going to shut it down and not even think about it…I’m not even let myself go there because it doesn't feel safe.”
Here's what you need to know:
Coming out does not mean publicly.
Coming out to yourself is the part that's necessary, and especially for astute women in business, you already know that you're attracted to women, so let's take a moment to bask in that truth.
You are more dynamic than you ever gave yourself credit for. Your eroticism and attraction is way more dynamic than you ever gave it credit for.
Maybe only being with men felt like the safe option.
Maybe only outwardly showing your attraction to men felt like the safe option, and now you are older, you are wiser and you're established.
If you’re in a privileged position, you get to be radically honest with yourself.
You get to say: “I'm attracted to women. Women turn me on. I want more than I've let myself have. I'm not 100% straight. I like both men and women, and in my mind, I can have both, even if I don't outwardly act on it.”
Even these self-admissions alone can be so challenging.
I get it.
You've worked so hard to build what you've got and now you're questioning if just even admitting this to yourself is going to tear down everything that you've worked so fucking hard for.
It doesn't have to. This first step is just about the private admission to yourself.
Because what this is really about is how you've got the power to stop gaslighting yourself.
When you come home to your erotic truth, you simply feel lighter. You move differently through the world, and that includes your business.
When we're harbouring a secret, we’re bogged down, we're burdened, and the science has shown it.
When my podcast was called The Secrets Women Keep, I delved into the research about secrets and how secrets literally held us back from living in our authenticity and how preoccupied people felt by their secret – how much it influenced every single decision they made, just so they could preserve the secret.
And the biggest problem about secrets is they trickle down so deeply into our psyche that it causes shame. And anytime shame is present in your energetic system, it’s swaying your decision making in ways that you don't want, in ways that aren't going to multiply what it is that you want to receive.
In fact, shame is going to keep you held back from the success that you are so deeply worthy of.
Admitting to yourself and coming out to yourself is going to change everything for you on a personal note first, and that is going to seep into your business because your business is a reflection of your body and your values, your truth, and how comfortable you are with visibility.
When you’re hiding something this fundamental to your existence – to your essence – it leaks into your messaging, your leadership, and your ability to be fully seen.
One of my clients said she knew that she was dimming her own light. She knew that she was holding herself back, and that her erotic power was the missing piece.
She'd done everything else. She didn't need another strategy.
What she needed was that power behind closed doors to feel it, to experience it, to access it, to speak to it, to embody it, so that she could move through the world unburdened because she knew how infinitely potent she was when she accessed this.
She knew that being radically honest with herself about her fantasies, about her desires, about how she wanted more impact play was going to be the thing that had her feeling her own light.
Not just that but feeling lit up from within.
It always comes back to the personal first. Your business can't fix a personal problem.
Coming out to yourself is going to liberate your energy. It's going to free up your head space so that life force energy is in full motion and becomes pure magnetism.
Until that moment, you're going to feel like a diluted version of yourself.
Your sense of jealousy and envy around people who are already out and living their fullest lives is going to have you feeling bitter and resentful.
Creating offers and working with clients from that place instead of the clear energy of I know who I am and I'm completely at ease with it…you're not in that undesirable form of tension anymore. You’re not in this feeling of: “Am I this or am I this, or am I this or am I this?”
You’re integrated.
When you’re integrated, your offers get sharper. Your voice gets hotter, your conviction becomes undeniable, and this is my favourite part:
No one can out you or anything about you because you've already been to your biggest shame. You've already been there, you've already felt it, and you've already conquered it
There's literally nothing that anyone can throw at you because you already know everything about yourself. You already know who the fuck you are, and no one can take that away from you.
When I came out in private to myself, my power stopped leaking. I stopped being so needy for what was outside of me to try and fill me up.
And this is particularly true in the case of pedestalling men. I pedestalled men trying to look for that sense of completeness that they could never really give me because none of this is really about who you have sex with, although that's an aspect of it.
A lot of it is about your connection to yourself and your ability to be self-sourcing in your power and in your eroticism. That act of mine was really a way of overcompensating where I didn't feel certain and sure of myself.
What else happened was my shame stopped driving the wheel of my business and my relationships and my life. When you face your shame head on, when you alchemise it into pure power and drive, and self-knowing and self-trust, it can never get you again.
It's not that you're not going to feel it, it's that you're going to know what to do with it.
When it comes up, you’re able to name it and you're able to deal with it efficiently and effectively because you've been to the bigger, deeper shame and nothing brings up shame like sexuality.
Another beautiful thing that happened is my voice got louder – not in terms of volume or from a place of performance, but that clarity within myself and who I was and how I identified, allowed me to speak from a place of uncensored truth.
I just kept speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking, and the more I spoke with that clarity and precision, the more dream clients could come into my life.
But it was more than that.
I started to access all the groups that were deeply interesting to me and made connections there as well. This is about expanding your network. Not just professionally, but personally as well. And to prepare you – expanding your personal network and really going all in on that is going to make you more magnetic to your professional network because they're going to feel that you're not looking to them to fill you up.
You’re already full of yourself.
You’re already getting all of your needs and wants met on your personal time, and they're just a nice extra, a nice little sweetener to your life.
I'm going to speak to the obvious now…this is fucking terrifying – I get that.
Again, the point of this transmission in this moment is to let you know this isn’t just about coming out to yourself. This is about you letting you self-pleasure to your fantasies and to read what you want to read and exploring who it is that you want be.
You don't even have to tell a soul just yet.
But coming out in this way, it's like pulling a thread on this beautifully woven identity that you've got, but this is going to make your identity even more free, even more liberated. It was so tight and constrained before, and now it becomes an object of beauty, a piece of art, and you get to keep weaving it in a way that allows you to breathe.
In a way that allows you to move to feel less imprisoned.
Best of all, you don't have to blow up your whole identity. You don't have to move out. You don't have to separate from your partner or divorce your husband. Nothing dramatic or drastic.
All you need to do is know that you are so fucking powerful that you can hold success and sexual complexity, and when you actually spin it around, you get to make your sexual complexity – the integration of it, the stroking of it, the playing with it – you get to use it to fuel your success because you're not looking outward anymore.
Each and every moment that you think something out there is going to fill you up, you come in here and you source it from within.
When you come out to yourself, you’re going to learn that you can still lead.
In fact, you're going to lead with way more power. Even if this all isn't reconciled within yourself, really trust that you can hold all of this and trust that the more that you go into yourself – the more everyone who looks to you feels certain of the words you say , how you say it and how you hold your body.
This is about a ripple effect that is way beyond you. Even though you’re not admitting anything outwardly to anyone at this stage, just know that this admission is going to shift something in you that's going to be felt tangibly.
The moment you come out of pretending to be straight, pretending that you love being hetero, but being bored to fucking tears of all your hetero friends, living their boring lives…
…pretending that you love it, pretending that you love the gender roles that were never really made for you – the more your nervous system relaxes…
the more you become selective about who you want to work with…
who you want to be friends with…
and how you want to sustain connections.
This one move is going to inform so much of your life.
And you're going to do it step by step by step by step because you're no longer pretending and you're no longer performing, there's no need for overwhelm.
Just know that this is going to be an incremental shift that happens in your life and makes how you spend your personal time so much more satisfying because you're not masking, you're not pretending that you love these people and all these things that they talk about, when really you've got this wild force inside of you that gets to be explored and played with in really select spaces.
I'll just plant that seed there…
As you let go of old relationships, you're going to have more space for new, more resonant relationships to come through because your voice and your presence holds codes, and people who resonate with your voice and your presence and the codes that they hold will start to be drawn in.
It will literally sometimes be you walking down the street. You make eye contact with a woman and you both just know, there's these really magical moments that lay ahead when you are completely honest with who you are.
These little moments of connection and they just start to grow and build and they start to form into really deep relationships – next level friendships – where truth is just the standard.
I also want to prepare you for your content to change when you start owning your erotic truth. It’s inevitable that the way that you speak and write starts to be infused with that.
You start to feel your own liberation, and naturally when you feel liberated, you want other people to get in on it for themselves.
Not to copy exactly what you've done, but they are drawn in when you're coming at it from the place of: this feels so fucking good, and this feels so expansive. I can see that you are caged by something within yourself, by something holding you back. I invite you to come unfurl. I invite you to come forward and to come experience your version of this.
It's no fun being liberated on your own. I mean, it can be, but there comes a point where you want to be playing in the frequency of other people that are either liberated or becoming liberated as well. It's inevitable.
And when you start writing and speaking with this undertone of liberation, you’re matching with the clients that are also done with hiding.
It doesn't have to be about eroticism – it's simply about being free, and they're going to be feeling free to feel their power and their desires and their fuller selves – no matter what the position of your offering.
They're going to know that you can hold them, that you can handle whatever they put forward. They're going to feel that sense of trust, and there's nothing that you need to say. They're just going to know.
And you've had an experience of this yourself as well, where you look at what someone's offering, you're checking them out, you're reading their words, and you just know: they can't hold me. They aren't beyond me. They're behind where I'm at in my own growth.
When you go to this level and this truth, you're going to attract more powerful players in the game and yes, you can hold them and you can hold whatever they bring forward because you have held yourself.
So…should you come out?
Yes, you should.
You should come out to yourself.
In fact, we can just eliminate the word should right now.
You want to come out to yourself.
You are ready to come out to yourself.
You are ripe to come out to yourself because you know that this is the peace that's going to give you the sense of liberation that you've not been able to find through all the strategy, through receiving all the money or from getting the accolades.
Remember, you don't have to announce it to the world – it's going to be felt.
Being radically honest is one of the most erotic and profitable gifts that you can give yourself because when you stop hiding from who you are, your power multiplies, your voice sharpens people start accessing the codes that your voice and your energy hold. They can finally hear it and it resonates with them.
And because of that, your business gets to be built on truth, not performance, convincing or a need for validation.
The edge you are teetering on right now is the one where you become the woman who is free in her body and bedroom, so she can be free in her business, in her leadership, in her relationships and in her voice. You don't need more strategy or more control or more self-regulation that leaves you feeling numb as fuck.
You need to feel on fire from the inside out.
You need to reclaim the part of you that wants carnally without apology.
The part that leads with desire and calls in money that mirrors your turn on…
That's the work we do inside Velvet Ledger, private sanctum – the four week high touch space for bi open and curious women in business who want to embody the erotically powerful woman they've always been.
Not just behind closed doors, but in every part of their leadership, life and legacy.
This is where you abandon the performance and finally become self-possessed. Velvet only opens to the bold.
