ABOUT LEAH VAN KING
I’ve always questioned the rules women are expected to follow.
Be confident, but not intimidating.
Have opinions, but don’t be difficult.
Be independent, but make sure he feels needed.
Speak up, but maybe soften the delivery.
At some point I started wondering:
How much of ourselves are women editing just to make everybody else comfortable?
I’m Leah Van King. I’m a writer, creator, musician, speaker, wife and mother, and I’ve built an audience of hundreds of thousands of people by questioning the things we’re told are
“just the way things are.”
RELATIONSHIPS
GENDER ROLES
MOTHERHOOD
SEX
CONFIDENCE
The invisible expectations we absorb without even realizing we’ve absorbed them.
And underneath a lot of those conversations, I kept finding the same thing:
WOMEN SHRINKING.
Shrinking doesn’t always look like silence.
Not necessarily women who are timid or submissive.
Sometimes the woman shrinking is loud, successful, funny, opinionated and perfectly capable of standing up for herself.
I know, because I’ve been her.
Second guessing yourself
After you've already made a decision.
"What ever you want"
When you absolutely have a preference.
Taking responsibility
For everyone else's feelings.
Letting resentment build
Because asking fro what you need somehow feels more uncomfortable than not getting it.
Calling self-abandonment “compromise.”
WE WATCH. WE LEARN. WE ADJUST.
Nobody has to explicitly tell girls to make themselves smaller.
I’m the youngest of four kids and the only girl after three boys.
Through sheer trickle-down effect, I inherited some of the world we give boys: the hand-me-downs, the toys, even bedsheets covered in robots and dinosaurs. Things that were big. Powerful. Fearless.
I think I absorbed some of that permission.
But by middle school, I was already learning to edit myself.
I wanted to fit in. I worried about seeming too smart. I didn’t want to be the nerd or the weird girl. I wanted to be cool.
Little me
You can take up enormous space in the world and still make yourself smaller in your relationships.
The funny thing is, I eventually became a woman who does very public things.
I’m the lead singer of Mystical Joyride. I’ve performed in front of thousands of people, and I’ve built my online platform largely by saying exactly what I think.
And I still discovered that confidence doesn’t make you immune to shrinking.
THEN I BECAME A MOTHER
Having my daughter made all of this feel more urgent.
I started thinking about what I wanted her to learn from watching me. I want her to know that women are allowed to be ambitious, creative, powerful, weird, brilliant, whatever they actually are.
I have to show her.
But I realized I can’t just tell her that.
I want my daughter to see her mother pursuing what lights her up so she grows up believing she can pursue whatever lights her up. For me, that’s creating, performing, speaking, making people laugh, questioning old rules and helping other people see themselves differently.
Inspiring people lights me up.
Motherhood didn’t make me less ambitious. It made me more determined to help create a world where women and girls feel free to become fully themselves. And it made me look differently at where my own ideas about womanhood began.
MALE SUCCESS. FEMALE ERASURE.
I grew up between male success and female erasure.
My dad is a founding member of the Commodores. I grew up watching a man be enormously successful, celebrated and visible, someone whose talent literally put him on stages around the world. And then there was my mom. My mom is brilliant, creative and talented in her own right. She wrote lyrics. She contributed ideas. But I also watched her repeatedly step into the background. Sometimes she didn’t take credit for her own contributions. Sometimes she allowed my dad to receive it instead. As a kid, I didn’t have language for what I was seeing. As an adult, I do.
I was watching how easily a woman can become supporting cast in somebody else’s life.
WHY STOP SHRINKING EXISTS
This work is about coming back into the room.
That’s part of why Stop Shrinking exists.
Stop Shrinking is where I bring all of these conversations together.
Through my writing, videos, workshops and programs, I help women notice the places they’ve learned to override themselves, question the rules they’ve been following without realizing it, and rebuild trust in their own reactions, needs and voice. Not so they can become harder, louder or less willing to compromise. So they can stop disappearing from their own lives and relationships in the name of keeping everything comfortable.
I don’t want women to become selfish. I don’t want relationships where nobody compromises and everybody walks around “protecting their peace” from the person they married. I believe deeply in partnership. But partnership requires two full people.
I want women to hear themselves again. To trust their reactions. To recognize resentment before it becomes rage. To say what they actually mean. To participate in the adult decisions of their lives instead of automatically handing over, or taking on, whole categories of responsibility because somebody decided that’s what men or women do.
Because so-called women’s work and so-called men’s work is really just everybody’s work.
And healthy relationships absolutely require compromise.
They should not require your disappearance.
THE WOMAN BEHIND STOP SHRINKING
Writer. Creator. Musician. Speaker.
I’m a writer, creator and social commentator whose work explores the invisible rules shaping women’s relationships, identities and ideas about who we’re supposed to be.
I’m also the lead singer of Mystical Joyride, and I’ve built an online community of hundreds of thousands of people through my commentary on relationships, gender roles, motherhood, confidence and the cultural expectations hiding in plain sight.
507k +
Social media followers
12M +
Views across content
LEAD SINGER
Mystical Joyride
KEYNOTE
SPEAKER
