What Is Your Armor Protecting?

Athena, Archetypes, and Women in Leadership

As increasing numbers of women enter the workforce and step into positions of greater responsibility, recognition, and influence, we face an interesting psychological challenge.

We are entering workplaces and leadership structures that have historically been shaped largely by male models of leadership. At the same time, many women continue to carry deeply rooted expectations about who we are supposed to be: caregivers, partners, mothers, peacemakers, nurturers, helpers, and the people who hold everything together.

The tension, then, is far more complicated than the familiar question of career versus family. The deeper question may be:

And perhaps an even more important question:

Archetypes as an inner resource…

This is one of the reasons I am fascinated by the application of goddess archetypes to women and leadership.

Archetypes provide a language for recognizing psychological patterns that might otherwise operate outside our awareness. They can help us recognize our natural strengths, but they can also illuminate our defenses, vulnerabilities, and habitual ways of responding when we feel threatened.

The goal is not to place women into another set of categories and defined boxes.

Quite the opposite.

Archetypal awareness can help us discover that we have access to a much broader range of psychological resources than we may currently be using.

Athena, for example, is associated with wisdom, strategy, discernment, civilization, and skill. She is also a warrior—and she wears protective armor.

When you stop and think about it, the armor she wears offers a particularly powerful metaphor for women in leadership.

When feedback feels like a threat…

Imagine a young woman who aspires to a leadership position sitting across from her supervisor during her annual performance review.

She receives positive feedback, but her supervisor also identifies several opportunities for growth.

The words may be perfectly reasonable.

But something stirred within her.

Those “perfectly reasonable” words awaken an old internal narrative:

Suddenly, she is no longer simply receiving information about her professional development. She is experiencing the feedback as evidence of something much more personal: inadequacy.

Shame or self-doubt begins to rise.

Almost instinctively, she reaches for her psychological armor.

The young woman may become defensive. She may explain away the feedback, point out the shortcomings of others, mentally dismiss her supervisor's observations, or quietly decide that the person evaluating her simply doesn't understand her.

The armor has done its job and nothing was able to penetrate it, yet unfortunately, neither did the information that could have helped her grow and accelerate in her career.

Stop for a moment and consider this — what if we used the armor differently?

Archetypal awareness offers another possibility.

Imagine that the same woman has begun developing the ability to observe what is happening inside herself.

She notices the discomfort.

She recognizes the familiar thought: I'm not good enough.

But this time, rather than automatically reacting to it, she becomes curious.

She recognizes that receiving feedback has activated something much older and deeper than this particular conversation.

Now she can choose to consciously access the qualities Athena represents—discernment, strategic thinking, composure, and wise protection. She might pause before responding, notice the story unfolding in her internal dialogue, separate her emotional reaction from the actual content of the feedback, and ask herself, “What information here can help me grow?”

In this way, Athena becomes a symbolic reminder of capacities she already possesses and can learn to use more intentionally.

By doing this, she asks Athena's armor to perform a very different function.

Instead of using the armor to protect herself from the feedback, she uses it to protect herself from the internal noise that prevents her from hearing the feedback clearly.

Grounded in greater awareness of her own internal resources, she can ask:

She no longer has to accept every criticism as truth. Nor does she have to reject criticism in order to protect herself.

She can evaluate it through the power of knowing herself and practicing discernment.

That is a very different use of power.

From unconscious reaction to conscious choice…

This is where I believe archetypal work becomes particularly powerful in leadership development.

Self-awareness does not mean eliminating our defenses, emotions, or instinctive reactions. Nor does it mean becoming so self-controlled that we cease to feel them.

It means becoming increasingly conscious of what is happening within us so that we have greater choice about what happens next.

Athena's armor is neither inherently healthy nor unhealthy. The question is whether we are wearing it consciously and practicing intention.

The same psychological resource that helps one woman establish a courageous boundary may help another avoid vulnerability.

The Caregiver who creates an extraordinarily supportive team may also rescue employees from consequences they need to experience.

The Warrior who courageously confronts injustice may also enter battles that never needed to be fought.

The Wise Woman who carefully reflects before acting may sometimes use reflection to avoid acting at all.

Our strengths and our shadows are often closer to one another than we realize.

Leadership development, therefore, is not simply about acquiring more skills. It is also about becoming familiar with the psychological tools we already possess—and learning to use them consciously and with intention.

Who is leading from within…?

This is the question at the heart of the work I am developing around women, archetypes, and leadership.

Deepening self awareness and recognizing, who is leading from within me right now?

The more conscious we become of these inner patterns, the less likely we are to be unconsciously governed by them.

We create space between what we feel and what we do. We become less reactive and more intentional. We move from protection toward discernment, from automatically enacting familiar patterns toward consciously choosing our response.

There is a profound difference between trying to look like a leader and owning our authority as one. Leadership becomes less about proving ourselves and more about bringing the fullness of who we are to the work before us—our experience, wisdom, intuition, discernment, courage, and voice.

Perhaps that is one of the most important transitions a woman can make in her development as a leader: she stops waiting for permission to occupy the seat at the table she has already earned.

Athena's armor was never the problem.

The question is not whether she wears the armor. The question is what she chooses to protect with it.

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