She came to me because she’d been watching me for over a year.
Watching my content. Reading my posts. Listening to my talks.
She told me later that she’d started a message to me at least three times and deleted it every time, because she wasn’t sure she deserved the help.
I want you to let that sit with you for a second.
A woman running teams, delivering results, carrying an entire department on her back, and she wasn’t sure she deserved to invest in herself.
That’s what the world does to women. It trains us to believe that everyone else’s needs come first. That investing in yourself is selfish. That asking for help is weakness. Worse of all, if you just work a bit harder, stay a bit later, say yes to one more thing, eventually someone will notice.
They don’t notice.
Because you’ve trained them not to.
When she finally booked that call with me, she was exhausted.
This was not the kind of tired that a holiday fixes, it’s the kind that lives in your bones ( I know you know what I am talking about).
She was a senior leader at a global organisation, one of the names you’d recognise. She was the one they gave the impossible projects to because they knew she’d deliver. The one who got the 10 pm emails with “I know it’s late, but can you just…” and replied within minutes because that’s who she was.
Reliable, indispensable and always on.
And she was miserable.
She wasn’t dramatic or overtly falling apart; it was just happening quietly. The way that looks fine from the outside. The way that involves holding it together in meetings and then sitting in her car in the car park afterwards, unable to move. The way that means pouring wine every evening, not because she wants it, but because it’s the only thing that slows her brain down and numbs the overwhelm. The way that means she hasn’t bought herself something nice in months because everyone else’s needs swallowed the budget.
I see this woman most weeks.
Different name, different company, same story.
Our first session was full of fear.
Fear of what she’d find if she looked too closely.
Fear that if she stopped being the responsible one, everything would fall apart. Fear that the version of herself she’d been performing for two decades was the only version available to her, even if it wasn’t the version she wanted.
I asked her a simple question. I said, “If you could design your life from scratch, right now, with no obligations and no guilt, what would it look like?”
She cried.
Not because the question was hard, but because nobody had ever asked her. In over twenty years of corporate leadership, performance reviews, development plans, 360-degree feedback, and coaching conversations, no one had ever asked her what she actually wanted.
They’d asked her what the business needed, what the team needed, what the clients needed, but never what she needed.
That’s the thing about being a woman in leadership. You become so good at serving others that you forget you’re allowed to want things too, that you are allowed to serve yourself.
The work we did together wasn’t complicated.
I didn’t give her a twelve-step framework, a fancy model, or a worksheet with boxes to tick.
That’s not how I work.
I held up a mirror, and I asked the questions she’d been avoiding. I challenged the stories she’d been telling herself, the ones about not being ready, not being qualified enough, not being the kind of woman who gets to have it all.
I helped her see that she’d spent years carrying luggage that wasn’t hers.
Expectations from family.
Conditioning from a system that rewards women for compliance and punishes them for ambition.
Guilt, inherited and absorbed, for daring to be successful.
The belief, buried so deep she didn’t even know it was there, that she didn’t deserve ease.
We unpacked all of it. Carefully, compassionately and of course, but unflinchingly.
And then we rebuilt.
Within three months, this woman had renegotiated her salary.
Not by a little bit.
By a significant amount.
She’d walked into a conversation she’d been avoiding for two years and laid out her value with a clarity that left the room in no doubt. She told me afterwards that her hands were shaking, but her voice wasn’t.
She set boundaries with her team – real ones. The kind that meant she stopped answering emails after 7 pm and the world, surprisingly, did not collapse. She delegated work she’d been hoarding because she didn’t trust anyone else to do it properly, and watched her team step up in ways that shocked her. She took her holidays, and the world didn’t fall apart.
She started planning the business she’d been dreaming about for five years. The one she’d told herself she’d get to “one day.” One day became this day.
She mapped it out and started building.
And she went shopping.
This might sound small, but it wasn’t. She had been denying herself the things she wanted, nice things, for herself, because somewhere deep down she didn’t believe she was worth the spend.
Yet another client, on my instruction, went and bought herself something beautiful. She stood in that changing room and looked at herself and saw, maybe for the first time in years, a woman who was allowed to have good things.
That’s what activation looks like.
I didn’t give her a magic formula (There isn’t one.) What I gave her was space to face herself, a mirror that showed her the truth rather than the story, and a safe-enough container in which she could fall apart and put herself back together in a way that actually worked.
That’s what I do.
I activate what’s been buried.
The power, the clarity, the self-belief, the ambition, it’s all in there. It’s always been in there. It just got covered up.
Layer by layer.
Year after year.
Conditioning from a world that tells women to be grateful for what they have instead of asking for what they deserve.
My job is to help you uncover it, and then to stand beside you while you step into it.
Here’s why I’m telling you this story now.
Because this month has been about enough is enough. About the state of women’s rights. About corporate cowardice and government cuts and a world that keeps telling women to wait. And all of that is true, and all of that matters, and we should be angry about it.
But anger without action is just noise.
The woman in this story didn’t wait for the system to change. She changed herself, and in doing so, she changed everything around her. Her team performs better. Her organisation benefits from her renewed clarity. Her family has a woman at the centre who is finally present, not just performing.
That’s the ripple effect when one woman chooses herself. Imagine what happens when hundreds do. Imagine what happens when thousands do.
Imagine what happens when we step into our power, stop competing and start collaborating.
That’s the world I’m building towards.
If you’re reading this and you recognise yourself in her story, I want you to know something.
You are not stuck.
You are not too far gone.
You have not left it too late.
Lady, you absolutely, categorically, do not need anyone’s permission to start.
If you’re ready for 1:1 support, my elite Activation Coaching is how I work most deeply with women at a turning point. It’s not therapy, it’s not generic coaching. It’s me, a mirror, the right questions, and a level of challenge and compassion that will change how you see yourself.
Book a discovery call, and let’s have the conversation you’ve been putting off.
If you want to start the work in your own time, the Magnificently You Programme is 27 modules of everything I know about stepping into your power. Self-paced, on your terms.
And if you’re a woman in senior leadership who knows she needs community, who knows the lone wolf approach has run its course, stay close, because something extraordinary is coming very soon.
I’ll tell you more in the coming weeks.
She waited a year before she messaged me.
A darn whole year of watching, wondering, deleting drafts.
Don’t be her. Don’t wait.
The only permission you need is your own.
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