When I first started my business nearly 18 years ago, I wasn’t focused exclusively on women. In fact, my very first client was a man, and I have coached many men over the years.
I was simply beginning.
After years in the oil and gas software industry, I was finding my way into a new way of being and a body of work grounded in both inner wisdom and practical business strategy. At the same time, I was finding my own voice. When I sat down to write about leadership, business, and what it meant to create a meaningful life, my natural inclination was to write from my own experiences and desires.
I wrote about what I was noticing. What I was questioning. What I was learning to trust.
For so many years, I had succeeded by listening to the voices around me. I knew how to lead, build strategy, manage complexity, and make things happen. Those years gave me tremendous wisdom, experience, and business acumen. Yet somewhere along the way, I had become disconnected from another kind of knowing. The quieter wisdom within me. My intuition. My spiritual awareness. The part of me that understood there could be another way to lead and build a business.
As I began reconnecting with that wisdom, it found its way into my words.
The language I chose for my brand came from that place. I didn’t sit down with a perfectly mapped-out plan for what it would become. I listened for the words that felt true. Sometimes they seemed to arrive through my own inner wisdom. Sometimes they felt divinely guided.
And women began to find me.
They recognized something in what I was saying because they were seeking it, too. They wanted to grow meaningful, prosperous businesses without disconnecting from themselves in the process. They wanted to trust their wisdom, use their voices, and lead in a way that felt true to who they were.
I couldn’t have seen then where those early words would lead. I didn’t know they would grow into Extraordinary Women Radio, Extraordinary Women Ignite, a community of women entrepreneurs, and a body of work devoted to raising women’s voices, visibility, and businesses.
Today, I can name the vision: to raise the voices, visibility, and businesses of one million women entrepreneurs around the world. I believe women’s wisdom is the medicine our earth needs, and every woman who brings more of that wisdom into her business and leadership expands what is possible for all of us.
I didn’t yet have the language of a movement.
I was following something I knew, even before I fully understood what I knew.
We tend to imagine that movements begin with a grand vision, a bold declaration, or a carefully constructed plan. Sometimes they do. More often, I believe they begin much more quietly.
They begin with something we can’t stop noticing.
Sometimes we keep noticing the same thing. We return to the same question, hear ourselves speaking about the same possibility, or wonder why more people aren’t talking about it. Eventually, we begin to recognize that it may be ours to do something with.
And sometimes a big idea drops in all at once. It feels clear and undeniable, even when we cannot imagine how it could possibly happen. We do not know where the resources, relationships, or path will come from. We only know the idea has arrived, and something within us is asking us to step toward it anyway.
No matter how these ideas come to us, whether as a quiet knowing that grows over time or a vision that arrives bigger than we feel ready to hold, our work is to pay attention. We may not yet understand everything the idea is asking of us. We may only know that it is ours to begin.
Our lives give us perspective. Experience gives us wisdom. Eventually, there are things we know because we have lived them.
Your story matters because of what you now know through living it.
You may know how to rebuild because you have done it yourself. You may have discovered a more humane way to lead or a more meaningful way to work. Perhaps you see a possibility for greater health, belonging, freedom, or prosperity that others have not yet seen.
Somewhere inside that knowing may be an idea worth carrying into the world.
That is often how a movement begins. Not with certainty about the destination, but with the courage to follow what feels true.
Looking back, I can see the red thread running through it all. The woman writing her first words from a newly reclaimed place of inner wisdom was already planting the seeds of the work I lead today. Each time I trusted that voice, the path became a little clearer. Each time another woman recognized herself in those words, the movement grew.
There may be a thread running through your life, too. Something you have known, seen, believed, or cared about long before you had a name for it. Something that keeps asking for your attention. Something your experiences have prepared you to carry.
What have your life, your work, and the people you serve taught you that you are now meant to carry forward?
What possibility do you see because of everything you have lived?
You do not need to have the full vision yet.
You may simply need to begin listening to what you can no longer keep to yourself.
