DISCOVER HER POWER WITH NADJA SCHWARTZ, FOUNDER OF AIROBICS STUDIO

The most interesting businesses right now are not being built by people who fit the system.

They are being built by people who refuse to be discouraged by it. A GOALGIRLS* column about women building businesses differently.

What if movement was not about fixing your body? Not thinner. Stronger. Better. More disciplined. Just more yours.

For this edition of DISCOVER HER POWER, we meet Nadja Schwarz, founder of Hamburg-based pole, aerial and dance studio AIRobics. Nadja has danced since childhood, competed successfully in rhythmic gymnastics, became German Vice Champion in Pole Dance — and then did something slightly less predictable:

She left her career in management consulting to turn the thing that made her feel most free into her business. Today, AIRobics is built around pole, aerial silk, hoop, hammock and dance. But really, it is about something bigger: What happens when we stop treating our bodies like projects — and start experiencing them instead?

I’D RATHER BUILD NEW STRUCTURES

Kaddie: Where does your power come from?

Nadja: “My power lies in refusing to make myself smaller in order to be easier to understand. I can be emotional and strategic. Soft and strong. Unconventional and focused. For a long time, I thought strength meant adapting well. Today, I think my real strength is knowing when not to adapt at all. I don’t want to fit into structures that were never built for all of us. I’d rather build new ones.”

ENOUGH WITH NEVER BEING ENOUGH
Kaddie: If your business was a movement — what would it destroy?

Nadja: “The idea that our value depends on how much we achieve, how productive we are or how well we fit into someone else’s definition of success. I want people to stop outsourcing every decision about their body, life and worth to systems that profit from making them feel unfinished.”

Who loses power?

Nadja: “Anyone making money from our self-doubt.”

STOP GENDERING POWER

Kaddie: Which assumption about women in business should be deleted?

Nadja: “That women have to step into their masculine energy to succeed. The moment we assign strategy, ambition and decisiveness to the masculine and softness, intuition and emotion to the feminine, we’re rebuilding the same old boxes with new language. We need to stop gendering power.”

WHEN POWER GETS MORE HUMAN

Kaddie: What would be different if more women led companies?

Nadja: “Empathy isn’t the opposite of performance. It’s often what makes sustainable performance possible. More women in power wouldn’t make leadership softer. It would make it more human and, in many cases, more effective.”

Maybe leadership never needed less emotion. Maybe it needed more emotional intelligence.

Nadja: “We spend far too much of our lives trying to be acceptable. Say no earlier. Leave sooner. Change your mind. Start again. Be too much for the wrong people. Disappoint people if the alternative is constantly disappointing yourself. I would rather be misunderstood for living my own life than celebrated for living somebody else’s.”

That is the real AIRobics lesson. Take the career change. Take the pole. Take the space. Your life is allowed to feel like yours.

GOALGIRLS* is an international FLINTA* creative collective and agency. Follow us on: @heygoalgirls
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