Without the inner journey, without inner work, both masculine and feminine energy remain in the contracted form that fear requires to keep itself in check. The unfinished Hero’s Journey is not hard to recognise — it sits at the centre of the economy, not at the margins. The hero who is ruled by his shadow converts every victory immediately into a new conquest. There is no moment of stillness, no realisation that he has become a catastrophe for his tribe. The gift he gathered along the way is not returned to the community but deployed for his own immortality project.

We recognise him in the impact investor who makes a premature exit from a project the moment it struggles — because sitting with difficulty and admitting uncertainty would damage his self-image as a visionary. Or in the philanthropist who needs his name on every initiative. The gift is there, the willingness to release it is not.

The half-heroine is less visible but no less influential. She has completed the Hero’s Journey in full, overcome every obstacle, won her place at the table — and in doing so gave up precisely the feminine energy that could have distinguished her. She is untouchable, strong and not to be trifled with. But her real voice — the sense that something is fundamentally wrong, that nature and society are being hurt — she keeps inside.

We recognise her in the one who has known for years that a portfolio company is causing harm, but considers the relationship with her co-investing family members too valuable to enter the conflict. And in her most invisible form: the woman with wealth who has ‘wisely’ outsourced her money to an assett manager — while her intuition about what is right and wrong is more refined than any model.