School is back in session and so, God help me, is the school run.

Let me tell you about the one rule in my car. It was handed down to me by my own parents, non-negotiable and eternal: whoever is driving the car controls the music.

If I am going to spend a third of my waking life ferrying children to school and theatre on Mondays and basketball on Thursdays, then we are listening to MY music.

And my music, obviously, comes from the peak of human civilization.

The 90s.

I consider it my sacred maternal duty to give my sons a proper cultural education in that car.

And what a syllabus it is....

This was the decade that gave the world "Baby Got Back," "How Bizarre," "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" and "MMMBop" (a LOT of mmm-ing went on in the 90s… historians will confirm). "Gangsta's Paradise." "Smells Like Teen Spirit." "No Scrubs." "Wannabe." "Killing Me Softly."

I did not care what genre it was. I loved ALL. OF. IT.

Which was the whole point of being an MTV kid....

You did not get to CHOOSE a genre. You put on MTV, whatever was on was on, and you took it. Grunge into bubblegum into gangsta rap into some emo lad being sad about a breakfast at Tiffany's... back to back, no skipping.

Not like now, when people file themselves into a Sirius XM channel called "Japanese Ambient Post-Punk For Rainy Tuesdays" and never hear a single note that's out of that narrow range.

Anyway.... I have a 90s playlist. It is long, it is magnificent, and every morning I hit shuffle to see which four bangers I can inflict on my children before drop-off.

This week, a song came on that I had not heard in YEARS. I "woohooed" and cranked it to full volume. And when it got to the chorus my eldest gave me a look he has perfected with a serious raised eyebrow and said, "Mum. This one's inappropriate."

Reader, I begged to differ.

"Bitch" by Meredith Brooks is not inappropriate.

It is one of the truest things a woman will ever learn about herself, and I knew it in my bones the first time I heard it, aged twelve, in the back of someone else's mum's car.

If you don't know it, go and play it RIGHT NOW. It is three minutes give or take of a woman cheerfully reeling off every contradictory thing she is allowed to be at the same time.... tender and terrifying, holy and filthy, nurturing and savage...the whole lot, and flatly refusing to apologise for a single one of them. It's the kind of cosmic truth that drops into your soul at twelve and just… stays.

Meredith Brooks, one hit and a guitar, handed the women of the world a gift with that song: permission to contain multitudes.

She was speaking my language, whether she knew it or not. She was speaking ARCHETYPE.

And nobody, I mean NOBODY, knows a woman's multitudes like I do.

I have weeks where I peel off the latex, pull on a jumper and jeans, and go and sit through a PTA meeting about lunch box snacks. I have days where I bin a pair of lube-covered gloves, scrub up to the elbow, and head off to a challah bake at my synagogue. I have lost count of the multitudes I contain, and I would not give a single one of them back.

In my work, I lean on my six favourite dominant feminine archetypes: the Mother, the Teacher, the Authoritarian, the Seductress, the Goddess and the Queen. Each one lets me meet a person differently, reach a different part of them and thus open a different door.

We all respond differently to different energies.

Some people bring out our very best. Some drag out our absolute worst.

And most of us desperately want to bring out the best in the people we're with, the client, the partner, the teenager, the maddening boss. The trick is knowing which version of yourself to summon, and when.

Nobody is born knowing how to do that. It is a skill, like driving, or reading a room, and once it clicks... well, well... you'll be a dangerous Meredith Brooks Bitch of a woman.... In the best way.

Which brings me, at long last, to the point.

Last year I ran the first pilot of my course, Domme Your Clients. It was still half-built at the time I soft launched it... more sellotape than structure, but I took a couple of cohorts through it, learned a mountain from them, and it is finally ready for a proper launch.

It teaches you exactly how to find, build and deploy your own archetypes so you can lead and connect authentically from your multitudes.

It's going properly public in a couple of weeks. But you lot get first dibs and the better price, because you've been here, reading my long, occasionally random Sunday emails, and that makes me love you sooooooo much.

There's a free quiz that shows you which archetype you're most drawn to. It's a good place to start.

After that, there's a short unit called The Mother Tax that shows you what it's costing you to stay stuck in just one (probably non dominant) archetype....and for a lot of women that bill turns out to be genuinely eye-watering.

Then there's the full course. When it opens to the public it'll be $997. For you it's $697. It'll be the same course, just at a far better price. Purely for being one of mine.

Now... it's Sunday.... go play Bitch by Meredith Brooks....and sing along...loud enough to alarm someone.

Talk soon,

Sylvie "you were never built to be one thing" Barak

P.S. Obligatory pic of me from the 90s, around the time "Bitch" came out... I already contained multitudes, it just took me a few decades to hone them!