Female Founders: Tanya York of MicroArt On the Five Things You Need to Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadice
It’s ok to start over, change careers and reinvent yourself — you can have more than one passion and start multiple successful businesses. Having a mentor is more valuable than you can ever imagine.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tanya York.
Entrepreneur Tanya York started her career as a special effects makeup artist in the Hollywood movie industry over 20 years ago. She is the founder and sole owner of MicroArt Inc. She has over 30 years of experience as a CEO. She has been a successful Hollywood Producering veteran, was named one of Hollywood’s most influential women by The Hollywood Reporter. In her 30’s she graced the cover of Entrepreneur magazine in the Young Millionaires issue. She has completed numerous executive management programs including MIT’s Sloan Business School’s “Birthing of Giants” and Young Presidents Organization affiliated executive management program at Stanford University. She founded and developed MicroArt in 2009 to be the leading semi-permanent makeup studio. Located in Beverly Hills, she worked with highly trained lab techs to design a semi-permanent technique and inks that would always look natural.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Born in the Caribbean and living in Europe for 8 years, I moved to Los Angeles at age 17. By 19 I discovered her love for the film industry and produced my first feature film. By age 21, I had raised money and started her first movie production company which produced 7 movies in the first 2 years. I have produced and financed over 30 movies- all of which I am proud to say have been profitable. After the blockbuster success I had achieved in the Home Entertainment/DVD boom, the industry had changed and I wanted to reinvent myself and to start a business that was different and very special. The idea for MicroArt started with me having issues with my eyebrow makeup smudging all the time, and my early experience in special-effects makeup. I invested a sum of money to create the technology, working with electronic engineers and cosmetic chemists all over the world to develop a signature technique for MicroArt Semi-Permanent Makeup that previously didn’t exist.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
Each day is an interesting story. Our clients are celebrities, athletes, homemakers, retired seniors, cancer survivors, professionals with busy and active lifestyles. Today there was a male politician that we performed MicroArt on. He is a returning client, but he is getting ready for the upcoming elections.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
As MicroArt is my second major business, I was able to apply my experience from over 33 years as an entrepreneur to this new business and fortunately, I was apple to apply the lessons I had learned.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
At 19 years old, one of my first business mentors was someone who was also an investor in my first company who ran a major film studio. His films had won Oscars and he was in the Guinness book of records for multiple accomplishments he had. He mentored me for the first 3 years from startup most of my operations. He forced me to become a better version of myself and paved the way for me to build a company that had over 300 employees by the time I was in my mid 20’s.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience, what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
I feel that sometimes what holds women back is themselves, their lack of belief in themselves, and their ability to be able to step up to the plate to accomplish their goals.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder, but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
I think any woman can be a successful entrepreneur and become a founder of their own brand. They need to believe they have what it takes to do it and are willing to put in the work needed without allowing being a woman to stand in their way.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
The traits needed can be a long list, but it starts with having the will, commitment, and perseverance to create a business and work hard at it. In my opinion, sadly, a large percentage of the current population is not even cut out to keep a job much less have a career.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
It’s ok to start over, change careers and reinvent yourself — you can have more than one passion and start multiple successful businesses. Having a mentor is more valuable than you can ever imagine.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
My company changes lives by fixing problems for clients that are life-changing for them. In addition, I value that small business owners are a major part of the economy.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Having entrepreneurial education for young adults, especially women will help build the foundation for future founders. Programs that make finding business mentorship easy to access for both the mentor to volunteer their time and a place where young women can find them.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
People like Richard Branson and others that are bold and have no limits to what they can achieve.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this!
Female Founders: Fauzia Khanani of Studio For On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadice
I believe in every industry and especially architecture, women have the potential to approach projects and processes in a different way than male counterparts. The end result may or may not end up being similar but the way in which the goal was reached is likely achieved with more care and consideration from where I stand. In some ways, the process is often more people-focused versus product-focused.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Fauzia Khanani.
Fauzia is the founder of Studio For, an architecture and interior design firm based in New York City. The firm’s work includes a range of custom residential, commercial office, and public spaces spanning from New York to Hong Kong. Fauzia received her Master of Architecture degree from the University of California Berkeley. Her previous career in social science research and public health continue to have a strong influence on the practice and has shaped how we approach design. She has been regularly published not only for the firm’s projects and innovative process but also for her passion in the promotion of diversity for minorities and women within the field of architecture and design.
Outside of practice, Fauzia is a founding member of the AIANY Social Science and Architecture Committee and was nominated to Co-Chair in early 2020. She is also a founding Board.
Member of Design Advocates, a non-profit organization established in March of this year for architects and designers to share resources and collaborate on efforts to serve the public good through pro bono projects, research, and advocacy.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Because my parents are immigrants to the US, we traveled a lot when I was young to see our extended family which also led to us visiting monumental places if the locations coincided with our family trips. I was exposed to pretty amazing architecture on those trips and by my mid-teens, I wanted to be an architect. After high school, I ended up attending a university that didn’t have an architecture program but I found myself engaged in sociological and public health studies and went that route for my degree and ultimately my career until my late 20’s. A few years into my public health career when I knew that food and health care should be basic rights for people, I also came to the conclusion that shelter is also a basic need. This translated to a career shift to architecture as it seemed like the next step in an evolution where design, namely architecture, can be a tool to improve quality of life for all.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
There have been so many along the way but the freshest one just happened a few days ago when I was meeting some potential new clients. We spent about 3 hours together and by chance at the end it somehow came up that the wife in the couple and I lived in the same very small town in New Hampshire when we were children. We went on to chat about it and actually went to the same nursery school and elementary school before my family moved to North Carolina. This story is interesting to me not because of our shared history but mostly because being a business owner has given me the opportunity to meet people from all walks of life and from all over the world and I’ve always found that in the end, we always seem to have some connection to each other and that our paths were meant to cross for some reason or another.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I started my first project in upstate NY, I was still living outside of New York State and would fly in for preliminary site visits and meetings with consultants. One of my first trips out was in the middle of winter and having lived in California for 8 years, I was definitely not prepared for the elements and I had never made a site visit to a non-urban environment. So I showed up in a big puffy coat (which I had bought to attend the Obama Inauguration) which was great but my shoe situation wasn’t as tight. Within about 15 minutes of being on this snow covered, wet and freezing property, my measly desert boots were soaked all the way through and my feet were frozen. After a full day of meetings, I made my way back to Albany airport without sensation in my feet. On the plane ride back, I got on wifi and immediately bought a pair of REAL winter boots for rugged sites. While quite hilarious, I learned a huge lesson on that trip: always be prepared for any kind of weather at site visits. I now keep a stash of all kinds of gear in the back of my car including a raincoat, rain pants, waterproof boots, extra gloves, hats for various weather conditions because I also learned that site visits always go on (like a show!) no matter the weather.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
When I think about how my career has progressed and the ability to start my own studio, I can’t talk about it without mentioning my very first clients, Susan and Rico Viray, who are very close friends. I saw them for the first time in over 10 years at their niece’s wedding when I was still living in California and at the rehearsal dinner, Susan mentioned they were property shopping to build a weekend house in upstate NY. Rico then asked “Aren’t you an architect?” I confirmed and he said, “Great, you’re going to design the house for us.” 11 years later with 3 projects under our belt together, I feel I owe so much to them for having faith in me to do something I never even considered. Susan and Rico founded their own company and Susan has also been an invaluable female mentor, resource, and sounding board for me as I have built the studio over the years.
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
I think one of the major obstacles for women founders is establishing support for a start up- whether it’s financial or mentorship. As you say, only 20 percent of funded companies are founded by women so the number of female mentors one can turn to for advice and experience is exponentially smaller for women than for men right off the bat. In the world of architecture, women-owned firms/studios are an even smaller percentage compared to the norm. Professional organizations should provide mentoring programs specific to women starting offices. While the government at various levels provides MBE certifications, these institutions should provide seed money for women entrepreneurs to start their own shops and specifically for women of color.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
I believe in every industry and especially architecture, women have the potential to approach projects and processes in a different way than male counterparts. The end result may or may not end up being similar but the way in which the goal was reached is likely achieved with more care and consideration from where I stand. In some ways, the process is often more people-focused versus product-focused.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
One thing I always hear from people is “It’s your company so you should be doing whatever you want and come and go as you please.” I usually just chuckle under my breath when I hear something along the lines of those statements. If anything, it more often than not, feels the exact opposite. Having a company to me is akin to putting a piece of yourself out there or giving birth to something from inside of you (not quite a child but akin) so in fact, it often feels like the exact opposite of what people think or say about the freedom of owning a business. You are so committed to the success of your venture and the team you have brought together that it takes priority over most things in your life. I’ve been trying to find a happy medium and at times there are regressions but overall I’m moving towards a place where there is more of a balance. Having a supportive and capable team is fundamental to making this shift.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
That is a hefty statement and very subjective! I don’t know that I’ve “made the world a better place” but I’ve certainly tried to leverage my professional path as a means to improve the quality of life for others. Within Studio For, I’ve tried to create an environment where everyone, especially designers of color, feel included and can receive mentorship in a safe environment. We also try to make as many decisions as possible collectively in our office which also supports this idea of equity and inclusion. This is also supported outside of the studio by the work I’ve been doing as a member of the Design As Protest Collective, which strives to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as tools of oppression.
On another note, I co-founded a non-profit during the early months of the pandemic called Design Advocates. The organization is a place where architects and designers can share resources and collaborate on efforts to serve the greater public through pro bono design, research and advocacy work with a focus on serving people, organizations, institutions and businesses within marginalized communities. Our initial focus was on helping them to adapt to COVID-19 but it’s grown beyond that focus with projects spanning from NYC to across the country. I’m excited to see where this endeavor goes especially as we get further involved in local planning and policy related to the creation of the built environment.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
My response to this goes back to the reason why I rerouted my career path to architecture- housing should be a human right. Every single person on this planet should be provided with shelter and if I could inspire a global movement towards that end, I would be elated.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this!
Female Founders: Shaina Kerrigan of Molly J On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadice
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. I started Molly J. in 2019 by simply hosting parties at my house to share what I was learning about cannabis. I had no idea that 3 years later we’d have a full operation of chefs and thousands of customers. Every day includes its own element of heavy lifting or meaningful decisions, and our revenue helps pay the bills for everyone on our team. In those early days, if I had realized what this business could become, I may have conserved energy, realizing that some of those early decisions I fretted over wouldn’t matter in the long run.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shaina Kerrigan.
Shaina Kerrigan is a mother of two and the founder of Molly J., a CBD-infused, small batch confection company based in Marin, California. Ensuring quality and authenticity by creating small-batch, handcrafted CBD gumdrops, Molly J. offers a cutting-edge wellness experience that is equally delicious as it is beautifully packaged. With Molly J., Shaina hopes to “spread the chill” while educating the public about the benefits of CBD edibles.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I worked in the tech industry at Yelp for about 9 years, and climbed the ladder to eventually run my own global organization within the company. It was thrilling, exciting, and engaging…until it wasn’t. In my last few years there, I got married and started a family — two very big competing priorities that slowly chiseled away at the energy I had for my career in a large-scale company. Suddenly, I was finding myself stressed out and overwhelmed with no end in sight. I burned out spectacularly, calling my boss at 2am to quit the day I was supposed to come back from maternity leave. However, I then spent the next few months building myself back up, laser focused on all things health and wellness. I realized the main culprit for my imbalance was the fact that I wasn’t sleeping well, which led me on a mission to find help; including visiting my local dispensary. There, I found an industry that mostly spoke to men or folks who were already very familiar with the cannabis plant, and yet, I found the cannabis plant to be such a huge help for so many of the ailments that affect women and moms. After this experience, I could see a gap in the market and set out to spread the news by organizing secret Tupperware-style parties with fellow moms to give them the lowdown on what, when, and how to use cannabis in their lives. It was from these parties that I learned what moms, and women in general, were looking for — high quality, effective CBD gumdrops that felt just as luxurious as opening a bottle of wine at the end of a long day.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
In those early days, cannabis was still stigmatized (some argue it still is!) so women, especially moms, kept their curiosity close to the vest. I hosted the first party at my house with 10 of my closest mom friends, and four of them reached out the next day asking if I’d come to their house to do the same for their friends. This kept happening after each party and I quickly built up a wait list of 40+ moms anxious to get into our next event. Soon, moms started affectionately calling it a “Book Club,” and one morning while getting coffee at the local coffee shop, a woman slowed down next to me to whisper in my ear “Are you Shaina from the Book Club?” That was the moment I knew we were onto something.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Way back in the beginning, when I didn’t know if I had a sustainable business yet, but needed a space to fulfill orders and store packing materials, I found a surprisingly inexpensive office space on the Sausalito waterfront that would allow me to rent month to month; while I kept my options open in case the business didn’t thrive how I wanted it to. There were a few red flags — the landlord wanted to “stay off the record” and be paid in all cash, the space was freezing cold because it sat right over the water, the wifi was spotty, and the walls were paper thin so we could hear our neighbor welding jewelry all day long. The funniest part of that space was that the bathroom facilities and dock were shared with the folks that lived on the houseboats right in front of us. They were a cast of characters that we got to know — the guy who’d sit in front of our office to smoke a joint everyday at 12pm on the dot, the woman who’d get off her boat with 3 large huskies in tow, and even the older gentleman who’d pass in the afternoon in full pirate gear. We lasted in the freezing cold for about 3 months before we found our new, beautiful Molly J. branded cottage in the industrial, warmer part of Sausalito. I look back at those three months and smile — you do what you have to do to save a buck for your business in those early days!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I’d never started a business before Molly J., so to say I went in blindly is an understatement. I doubted myself every step of the way and have a very distinct memory of setting up plans to throw in the towel early on, planning instead to go work for another small business I admired. I happened to have a happy hour set up that day with my friend (and hair stylist) Brooke and vented my plans to her, saying I was sad to let it all go but excited for my next chapter ahead. She politely interrupted and dug in further, ultimately reminding me that I have what it takes, I’m onto something worthwhile, and I can succeed. Turns out that was just what I needed — it inspired enough curiosity within me to come back to my work at Molly J. the very next day, and I haven’t missed a day ever since.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
A key factor that holds women back from founding companies is the limited access to resources — specifically, time, connections, and money. More often than not, women (especially moms) take on more of the household duties, and when they struggle to balance that with founding a business, the latter takes a back seat. Already struggling for time, female founders often don’t have the capacity or foundation to seek out and cultivate a strong network of connections — advisors, fellow entrepreneurs, investors — which is paramount to a business’ success, especially in the early days. All this feeds into the final resource: money. It takes money to start a business, and the combination of competing time plus a smaller network of connections makes it very difficult for female founders to get off the ground. This crisis ballooned over the COVID-19 pandemic, and Bloomberg recently reported female founders secured only 2% of venture capital in the US in 2021.
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
To give women (especially moms) more time to devote to their businesses, I’d encourage our government to make childcare more accessible, safe, and reliable. As a society, we can normalize men taking over more of the household duties and sharing the load (if not more!). When it comes to building out a network, I’d love to see successful businesses, especially those run by men, offer mentorship connections to female-founded companies in their respective fields. Ideally the teams would advise and strategize, sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to steer clear of. They’d also make connections to build out their network of potential investors for capital down the road. Finally, pushing venture capitalists and investors to prioritize funding in female-founded businesses would be a huge and impactful step in the right direction.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
Research has shown that women tend to make better investors, CEOs, and founders because they make calm, level decisions and are less likely to take riskier bets. I’d go even further to say women tend to have higher EQs (Emotional Intelligence), which allows them to read people better (great for negotiations), connect with consumers, and lead enthusiastic, engaged teams.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
Starting your own business isn’t glamorous, it’s gritty. In the beginning, you don’t make much money (if at all) and you’re carrying the whole business on your shoulders — if you’re not working on it, no one else is. Forward momentum solely depends on you, and the stress of revenue, logistics, customer service, etc., can be heavy. You become invested mentally and financially, and yet, for most businesses, you won’t know if you have a viable, scalable company until you have enough time under your belt. More often than not, the success of a company takes a long, grueling period of years, as opposed to the myth that you can hit it big quick.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
Obviously, a founder must have a dedicated, motivated work ethic but the key differentiator is that they need to be able to apply that work ethic every single day, enduring extreme stress (with only occasional wins), for years without any guarantee of true success. They’re intrinsically and authentically bought into their mission and blindly optimistic (bordering on too hopeful!) that they will succeed.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. I started Molly J. in 2019 by simply hosting parties at my house to share what I was learning about cannabis. I had no idea that 3 years later we’d have a full operation of chefs and thousands of customers. Every day includes its own element of heavy lifting or meaningful decisions, and our revenue helps pay the bills for everyone on our team. In those early days, if I had realized what this business could become, I may have conserved energy, realizing that some of those early decisions I fretted over wouldn’t matter in the long run.
Ask for help. Early on, I met with a fellow female founder to pick her brain, and ended up asking for connections and opportunities to get Molly J. off the ground. I hate asking for help so it was an uncomfortable place to be, and I was so surprised when she readily agreed. Fast forward 3 years, and we’re still close female founder friends, helping each other wherever we can to see each other succeed.
Raise capital. I built Molly J. with a little bit of my own money and a whole lot of my own blood, sweat, and tears. I did it the hard, time-consuming way, but now I realize that I could have covered more ground faster if I had the courage to find investors at start.
Start with logistics that aren’t scalable. Molly J. makes high-end, handcrafted CBD confections for common ailments like stress and sleep, and we knew from the start that building a loyal community of supporters was integral to our success. Without recognizing it, we started out doing things that weren’t scalable but would help build that community, like including a handwritten note in every order and slipping extra gifts into the shipments of our club members. Some of those extra touches have been retired for the sake of efficiency, but that loyal community remains (and continues to grow) because we keep what really matters: quality, customer service, and authenticity.
Hire the right people. Recruiting feels like its own job, and often founders simply don’t have the time. So we’ll resort to the easy option — using a freelancer from the internet, hiring the first person who comes along, or offering up a temporary job that should actually be a long term role. It’s a quick win, but a long term headache because when that temporary situation falls through, you’re left with another round of hiring and training, losing everything you invested in the first person. Put the effort in on the front end by hiring the best person for the job who can stick with you for the long haul.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
That’s what we aim to do everyday! The regular and consistent feedback we hear from consumers about how our gumdrops finally helped them get a good night of sleep or tamed their stress, is what keeps us going. Also, we see an opportunity to help right the wrongs of how the War on Drugs disproportionately affects people of color, and dedicate a portion of proceeds to two organizations that help legalize the cannabis plant (NORML) and free those previously incarcerated because of it (Last Prisoner Project).
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I’d try to spread the benefits of Intuitive Sleeping (i.e. the ability to wake up when your body decides, not the alarm clock). I’m a big believer in letting your body and mind recharge, and if our businesses, schools, and general public sentiment allowed us to get our day started when our bodies decided (as opposed to arbitrarily set timeframes), I believe we’d be more effective, present, and even creative, in every facet of our lives.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
As a founder trying to grow and scale an authentic, meaningful business that genuinely helps the world, there’s no one better to get one-on-one time with than the queen of entrepreneurship, Oprah. She’s innovative, curious, and isn’t afraid to go against the grain to do it her way; which is what I believe we need more of from founders of all genders.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this!
Women In Wellness: Julie Elledge of Mentor Agility On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadice
Invest in yourself — One of the best ways to manage risk is to invest in a coach. As experts in the change process, coaches know the adventure ahead and how to tap into your creativity. Working in partnership, you will seek out guiding resources and activities that prepare you in advance for the coming challenges.
As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Julie Elledge.
Founder and CEO of Mentor Agility and creator of the Hero’s Journey® Change Model, Dr. Elledge is a highly experienced coach and renowned educator specializing in the use of storytelling in coaching. She is a licensed family therapist and professional coach in national practice with numerous credentials including the prestigious International Coaching Federation (ICF), the National Board Certification for Health and Wellness Coaching (NBC-HWC), and Board Certified Coach (BCC). Dr. Elledge is recognized as an expert in creativity and organizational dynamics and has created education and training programs for Apple Education, Twentieth Century Fox, NOAA, BP and INEEL. Using her gift for storytelling she has pioneered the areas of creativity, financial well-being, and nature in coaching.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
I learned a very important lesson about health through my meditation training. “Trust the diagnosis, not the prognosis.”
I became a Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC) because of an incident that changed my life. I did not ask my doctor enough questions when she recommended surgery. I later found out there were less invasive ways to treat my diagnosis and the outcome of the surgery would have taken a heavy toll on my quality of life. The trade off was not worth it.
Through that experience, I learned how important it is to advocate for myself with my own research and asking the right questions. As a consequence I vowed to myself that I would become a Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC). NBC-HWCs are not medical experts; however, we do guide clients through a transformational change with guiding resources and expertise that best fit their individual needs. What I love about my work is that I empower my clients to advocate for and trust themselves as problem solvers. By doing so, they improve the quality of their lives. That’s enormously rewarding.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
When I look back at my career, I recognize an interesting storytelling thread. Many of the therapy and coaching approaches I am trained in and practice help clients to express their story — narrative therapy/coaching, art therapy, guided imagery, and nature therapy. Clients often benefit from a combination of these methods to help them process their experiences. I took this expertise into education and coaching.
Creating transmedia storytelling curriculums distributed by Apple Education, we learned the art of matching the storytelling method to the communication platform. As the central operating system, the mind consumes story in different ways. For example, movies, books, and oral storytelling are completely different ways to tell a story but they all have the potential to evoke a “storytelling trance” or completely absorb our attention. The Marvel universe, for example, is told through comic books, feature films, and television series. Each of these platforms takes advantage of matching the storytelling platform with a different aspect of the story.
I apply these lessons learned to our coach training. We train coaches to tap into clients’ natural curiosity and creativity through a variety of storytelling methods such as oral storytelling, myth, cinema coaching, creative expression, and personal narrative depending on the setting and clients’ preferences. Just as transmedia storytelling takes advantage of the best practices based upon the media platform, our coaches apply storytelling to the coaching environment whether that is in-person individual or group meetings, online video platforms like zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet, or working outdoors in urban or natural environments.
Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Before my coaching career, working for corporate headquarters for Caesars World, I thought I was living the American Dream! As a road warrior, I barely noticed the toll my lifestyle was taking on me. I managed my sleep deprivation with diet caffeinated drinks, sat in planes and cars all day, and ate fast food to save time. Even though my enthusiasm for my career never waned, my energy drained along with my sense of joy. I had not yet made the connection between the dulling impact of stress and neglecting a healthy lifestyle.
I left the job I loved to pursue a career as a therapist. Busy therapists sit all day unless they move with their clients. A sedentary job does nothing for health, stress, or creativity. The full impact of my physical symptoms related to stress and sitting would not show up until later in my life.
A healthy lifestyle improves physical, emotional, and cognitive performance. I learned that passion and purpose cannot replace the basic needs of the body and mind. The mind needs as much exercise and healthy nutrition as the body. Getting outside and moving with clients not only improves their ability to disrupt their stress and adopt a healthier lifestyle, I benefit as well.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
Transformational change begins with a call to action that we often ignore. A worldwide pandemic, global economic shutdown, social unrest, and war are prompting our values to shuffle and reprioritize physical and mental health, financial well-being, and our relationship to ourselves, each other, and the planet. I firmly believe that coaches are going to lead us out of our current slew of crises. It is time to answer the call to action with a new story. A fresh story begins with an adventure — a Hero’s Journey!
I know the heart of transformational change rests in the hands of storytellers. Seeking out the best storytellers and coaches, we brought them together to form a dynamic training practice at Mentor Agility. Our students tell us that the subject matter, and the way that it is taught, is transforming the way they coach. That is enormously rewarding.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
Eat a plant for a snack
You are biologically wired to enjoy plants! A habit of snacking on plants is an easy way to satisfy your hunger and restore your energy. When you add more plants to your diet, your hunger is satiated.
Processed foods and sugar have a dulling effect on your taste buds. The more you eat, the less you can taste the vibrancy in natural food. To slide the balance towards plants, consume your snack mindfully paying attention to the vibrant flavors and textures inherent in nature’s bounty. Watch your tastebuds wake up to the pleasure inherent in natural foods. Finding pleasure in food sourced close to nature is your birthright.
2. Take a nature walk everyday
Sometimes we lose sight of the simple things. Getting outdoors and walking has well-documented benefits for your physical, mental, social well-being. A nature walk can happen anywhere, even in an urban environment. The key is how you use your attention. Focus on the birds, clouds, or the trees.
Walking is a low task activity that has the potential to suppress stress and the analytic part of your brain. In the absence of perceived threat and fact finding, the brain follows its curiosities. All manner of positive emotions can sneak in under these conditions such as gratitude, serenity, awe, joy, and hope. The positive emotions evoked, opens up the subconscious mind to work on your challenges and find more innovative solutions.
3. Feast on a daily dose of wonder
With unending access to news, social media and entertainment, becoming a passive consumer is easy. All these distractions cause our senses to dull and shut down, to protect ourselves from chronic stress, anxiety, and despair.
The secret weapon against stress, anxiety, and despair are neurologically wired inside of us. We’re naturally curious creatures searching out and digesting information like hungry carnivores. The meal we seek is a sense of wonder. Charles Dickens describes it this way, “All of us have wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.” Our most powerful stimulation is nature itself. We’re biologically attracted to feast on nature’s beauty.
To release your sense of wonder, take the time for a bit of mystery and the space for silence to process a single nature experience. In the process of perceiving beauty, a desire to know more awakens motivation inside of us that spills into other parts of our lives.
4. “Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.”
A productive life is not the same thing as a meaningful life. A fast paced society lives and breathes on its citizens living a productive life; however, Joseph Campbell suggests that you can’t find your path if you are living out what others tell you to do. “We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”
Dulling taste buds, emotions, and motivation are indicators stress is slowly and incrementally muting every aspect of your life.
Joseph Campbell suggests, “Life is not a problem to resolve but a mystery to be lived.” By shifting your internal energy into being present with yourself, you unlock your center of motivation living with intent, creativity, and meaning.
To follow your bliss, do something every day that is meaningful to you. Check your path. If the road is already paved then ask yourself if you are following the crowd or are you listening to your own inner value. The mystery you seek to unravel is the mystery of who you are. How do your actions line up with your inner values?
5. Creatively express yourself
Creativity is the quintessential quality that companies seek. They pay good money for a creative star and yet, we are all capable and genetically wired to be creative. Creativity is how you use your imagination to solve problems. Too often our creative impulse is stifled because we are stopped by the fact there is a problem.
The art of problem solving is to trust yourself. Believe in your experience, your voice, and your skill. Seek out your own everyday agency. Seek creative ways to describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and encounters with beauty. Let your imagination soar and dream. You will find your art form in the crosshairs of your strengths, skill, and pleasure.
To creatively express yourself, use your skill as your voice into the world. If you’re a mountain climber, climb. If you’re a writer, write. If you are a strategist, strategize. When you use your ability in the service of others, you effect change in the world. Your internal energy shifts from threat management towards meaning and purpose.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I would empower a fresh perspective in the human story with language that unites mind-body-spirit-environment. While it is useful to describe and study them separately, the division does not adequately explain the power of their unity. This error in thinking causes energy waves of misjudgment. An unhealthy lifestyle not only breaks down just physical health, it suppresses creativity, motivation, and mental health. Too often we would rather take recreational or prescription drugs to feel better than take a walk, eat healthier, reduce our stress, or genuinely connect with others. I have experienced this error of judgment myself and learned hard won lessons. The human body, mind, and emotions are made to take a hit. Just as the human body heals an abrasion, our lifestyle heals and nurtures the human body-mind-spirit-enviornment, if given a chance.
A healthy lifestyle as a solution to personal and professional success would use the same energetic waves for positive change in our professional, emotional, and social wellness. The transformation begins in the heart with storytelling.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
Challenge yourself — Expect problems to arise. Embrace the struggle as building your knowledge, skill, and confidence. Let your challenges evolve who you are.
Invest in yourself — One of the best ways to manage risk is to invest in a coach. As experts in the change process, coaches know the adventure ahead and how to tap into your creativity. Working in partnership, you will seek out guiding resources and activities that prepare you in advance for the coming challenges.
Believe in yourself — Too often we treat self-doubt as truth. Move your attention away from thoughts that you are not enough and into trusting in your ability to solve problems. Treat self-doubt as a stimulus to pause and engage in self-inquiry. This shift in mindset will propel yourself forward into positive action.
Value yourself — Comparison is the death of your creativity. Resist the temptation to measure yourself against others. This will lead you back to self-doubt. No one will ever approach a solution just like you. Hold in esteem what you contribute to the world.
Seek the mystery of knowing yourself — According to Joseph Campbell, the Hero’s Journey® combines two distant ideas: 1. the ancient spiritual quest and 2. the modern search for identity. In the pursuit to actualize your own potentiality, you bring into the world a new force of change. In having the courage to challenge yourself, you will learn about who you are. This is the heart of changing the world, challenge yourself and the world will respond.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
Personally, I chose for myself to eat a primarily vegetarian diet; however, I understand that eating is a very personal choice. What nourishes one body may not be the same for another. As an NBC-HWC, I advocate for my clients’ agency to make informed healthy diet choices.
In terms of sustainability, mental health, and environmental changes, they are all dear to my heart because they lead to the same destination. The standard of the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink determines the quality and longevity of our lives. Sustainability and environmental changes are a question of self-preservation. The human story unfolds within the setting of the natural world. We let the environment deteriorate at our own peril. Our physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual well-being is but a mirror of the natural world.
Thank you for these excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent. We wish you continued success.
Female Disruptors: Dorothy Siminovitch of Gestalt Coaching Works On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Candice Georgiadice
“Many roads lead to Rome.” Whatever we do, whatever choice we make, whether in the moment or for the long term, we should do so with aware intention and appreciation for the possibilities. We don’t know if any encounter with another person might be life-changing. But I’ve discovered that when we meet others with our best intentions, and with appreciation for the moment, we could be opening doors to untold richness. Appreciation for the complexity and possibilities of life is the nourishment we need to grow and change.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dorothy Siminovitch.
Dorothy Siminovitch is a world-renowned ICF Master Credential Coach who specializes in personal, executive, and team coaching. Her focus is on cultivating the power of presence and supporting people by using oneself as an instrument. With a PhD in organizational behavior, Dorothy is able to translate complex theories into working wisdom where she creates a safe environment for clients to consider new options or retire outdated habits. In her workshops and coaching sessions, clients find greater self-awareness and are able to dig deeper into issues which can be transformed. Dorothy uses the environment of psychological safety to promote more creativity enabling her clients to feel like “instruments of possibility”. Her clients report being able to harness more creativity and appreciation for themselves and others. Techniques for mindfulness, resilience, and adaptability are used so that clients can learn to view disruption as an opportunity towards positive change.
Dorothy partners with clients in a collaborative manner and her message is simply this, “You know more than you think you know, and you can do more than you think that you can,” which ignites mobilization through innovation and intervention. As a pioneer of Gestalt coaching, Dorothy authored A Gestalt Coaching Primer: The Path Toward Awareness IQ, a book used in many coaching schools and business schools looking to teach the process for greater self-mastery and transformative human development. As an expert in the coaching field for over twenty-five years, Dorothy has been featured on numerous radio shows and asked to speak at conferences including ICF conferences, The Coaching Conclave, The OD Network, and The Embodiment Conference. She is the founder of the ICF accredited Gestalt Coaching Program in Toronto, Canada and Istanbul, Turkey. She is passionate about facilitating conversation, creativity, and authenticity that results in pushing the boundaries of perspective and possibility. She is a fitness devotee and uses mindful practices for well-being, joy, and innovation. She loves cultural differences, communication excellence and creative story-telling and sees all leadership as an evolutionary response of possibility.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Frederick Buechner, a wonderful theologian, defined vocation, or what I call, “a calling” as the place where “your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
I’ve always had a sense of “a calling” by my interest in understanding individuals and supporting a sense of moving forward to new possibilities. In fact, I began my academic career with a degree in psychology, always looking to cultivate the deep skills for understanding people and inspiring desired development. The fascination in studying people started in early life where I grew up in the beautiful multi-cultural city of Montreal, which was also a troubled city. The cultural differences between the French-speaking and English-speaking inhabitants led to various everyday tensions that had to be considered and managed. I was both fascinated with and personally inspired to understand the management of differences between people. I chose to get my PhD in Organizational Behavior in the U.S. and became an organizational consultant. But I came to feel that organizational development work couldn’t allow for the kinds of conversations and meaningful change I was most drawn to. I eventually realized and recognized that the relatively new field of executive and team coaching was where I felt most energized and most useful. Coaching encounters are powerful because they invite profound conversations that can be transformational. They can bring clients to a new awareness, often obscured or suppressed about themselves, others, or their situation that enables them to take confident action leading to satisfaction. There’s an intimacy to coaching work that allows clients to voice their values and challenges safely to the coach as a trusted confidant. For the coach, that’s both a deep ethical responsibility and an extraordinary privilege. Taking both dimensions seriously, we have the opportunity to facilitate and witness remarkable outcomes. I think of coaching as a transformative intervention designed to support people in their dreams and untold possibilities.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Becoming aware of something important that we’ve overlooked, suppressed, or denied is disruptive to our sense of what we can and cannot do or say. I think of myself as “an awareness agent” — that is, my work is to help clients see habitual patterns of behavior or lost awareness that block or limit their ability to satisfy their needs or wants. These patterns become visible to me through their body language and/or word and their expression or evasion of either. Bringing these patterns to their attention is often surprising, and also often results in anxiety and a feeling of vulnerability. This is actually the optimal zone of learning, what my dear colleague, Marcia Reynolds, has called “the discomfort zone.” Clients may need to learn new ways to express themselves, to interact with others, to take action. New learning is always awkward. We have to start at the beginning, with small steps, and practice in order to gain confidence and fluidity. It takes commitment (even courage) to let go of what hasn’t been working and try different ways of something new. Even though it’s clear that what a client has been doing hasn’t worked, the worry of failure always looms. As coach, my role is to offer rationale, support, encouragement, and validation as clients take these learning steps toward meeting their wants and needs and their desired goals. I like to suggest that what I offer is intentional disruption in service of what learning offers — more satisfaction.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
A coach has to be skilled regarding the timing of feedback, and just how much can be tolerated by the client. But the coach also needs to be adept at turning a moment of perceived disaster into a learning experience, for both themself and others. I was giving a training program on group leadership, and our participants were practicing their skills with a volunteer client in-group of university students. I was part of the senior faculty, and the participants respectfully called me “Dr. Siminovitch.” I would watch the leaders facilitate their assigned group for 20 minutes then sound a bell to interrupt the learning session and give my feedback. After three rounds, as I stood to offer my observations, one member of the in-group interrupted with offensive statements devaluing the observations and teaching points I had been offering. These statements were so strongly-worded and disrespectful that my participants were taken aback, and feared the entire program was in jeopardy of being canceled. I, too, was shocked at being confronted in such a negative and combative manner. Yet, from somewhere within myself, a strange thought emerged: “Appreciate what he’s saying. Join him where he is.” That is, don’t fight against what he’s saying — try to make sense of it and use it. As I desperately considered this, I remember standing straight and tall. I then smiled at the participant who had spoken so rudely about me, and addressed the group: “Isn’t it great that this young man has questioned leadership? It’s healthy. It’s true that as senior faculty, I keep interrupting and no work seems to get done because of that. Isn’t this like what’s going on in this country? As leadership keeps changing, it’s hard to trust them and move forward. We need to make room to hear this kind of resistance. There is a message that we all need, so let’s thank him.” Then I called for a 10-minute break. For me, that was a turning point. I had met a personal challenge with creativity and self-assurance. That story always reminds me to have faith in myself in the moment, and then to allow for a “breather” to assess and try again. I’m grateful to that young man, whose anger and scorn gave me the opportunity to show my adaptive strength, my creativity, and my sense of humor. And, for me, it illustrated how a challenge is the opportunity to find one’s strength.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
We never forget the people who have brought us to a new place, opened a new door, or helped us resolve a difficult challenge. I was lucky enough to have met fascinating people throughout my journey of becoming, who offered knowledge, experiences, and guidance that I’ve used to influence others. Perhaps, my most powerful personal mentoring came from my mother, whose wisdom I came to value more deeply over time. My mother, an immigrant to Canada after a devastating life experience of loss, was a pioneer for all working women. Though her English skills were poor, she pushed herself to learn to be a real estate agent and was a trusted residential broker for almost fifty years. From my mother, I learned what endurance and the capacity to earn people’s trust “looked like.” Yet much of my “mentoring” comes from thinkers, poets, and philosophers whose excellence inspires me to learn from their brilliance and courage. I’ve always admired Albert Einstein, and I find that taking his theory of relativity as a metaphor for human relations is valuable. What is that person seeing or hearing from where she stands? Poets like Mary Oliver or William Stafford often offer depths of emotional intelligence more visceral and useful than any theoretical explanation. When clients are feeling shy or defensive, I like to quote famed psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: “It is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found.” I find they are willing to share more after pondering that masterful phrase. We can learn from anyone if we are paying attention even if it’s what not to do as well. I have also learned what not to do from those whose behavior was lacking in ethics. Earning people’s trust and delivering on that trust are critical lessons of personal integrity that I work to make part of my brand. Ask yourself, “What am I learning? What do I want to learn? What do I need to learn?” Then find your resources in whatever form it takes. Find the people who have the knowledge, experiences, and wisdom you seek to learn.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Disruptive innovation has been an organizational buzzword since Clayton Christensen introduced it in 1997. Essentially, it takes the form of a smaller start-up company beating out its bigger, well-established competition by offering a cheaper, more efficient product or service targeting those customers that the larger company is ignoring. Eventually, that product/service moves its way up-market, attracting more and more of the bigger company’s mainstream customers and finally luring them away. One example of this kind of successful disruptive innovation is Uber, which challenged the mainstream model of taxi service. The Uber model proved adaptive globally, and it suited drivers working in an expanding gig economy. Being disruptive can invite new thinking and new practices that answer emerging needs or wants. But not all disruptive innovation is either necessary or useful. I’d suggest that health care, for example, is one field where such endeavors might prove damaging, and simply exacerbate the ongoing challenge of delivering a quality of care that meets rigorous standards.
In 1996, when I first proposed that Gestalt thinking and practices were compatible with and complementary to the emergent field of professional coaching, many colleagues were skeptical. “Gestalt Coaching” was disruptive to traditional Gestalt fields of practice, but it occurred during the early days of the coaching boom and had the space and support it needed to prove its value to executives and organizational teams around the world. When there was a challenge to our program delivery, I decided to disrupt our delivery model by bringing the program to Istanbul and creating a new partnership and a new center. Our program is now in its thirteenth year of delivery, and we are known as a global coaching program. We are part of the professional coaching billion-dollar industry that is still growing. I also never saw myself as an author, but I wrote what became an instant classic, A Gestalt Coaching Primer: The Path towards Awareness Intelligence which was published in 2017 and will be re-issued as a second edition in the second quarter of 2022. To see myself become a trusted author, speaker, coach, and noted lecturer has been the realization of a dream that many say is inspirational. For all of that, I am deeply grateful.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
“You know more than you think you know.” That comes from Michael Polyani, who championed “tacit” forms of knowing (intuition, informed guesses, hunches). Whenever I find myself in an ambiguous situation, and I see that others are also unsure of what to do, I look for something from inside myself — a feeling, a memory, a phrase — that I can use to move us forward. The story I told earlier of the young man who challenged my authority is, again, an applicable example. I chose to turn the situation inside out, as it were, and to “join and appreciate him” rather than take offense or turn away. This ability is a demonstration of so-called “soft skills” or competencies that are often the key to re-framing and re-directing difficult situations. Under stress, people tend to be less inviting or validating of others. They “contract” in the very moments when they need to be more expansive and innovative. These are the moments I remind myself that I know more than I think I do and to trust my soft skills to help me connect with others and bring a new awareness into play.
“Wisdom begins in wonder.” — Socrates. We can trust that creative possibilities are hiding in the obvious. When I or others seem to be stuck, I take a moment to practice recentering, which involves breathing slowly and consciously until I feel a state of relaxed awareness. In this state, curiosity can emerge, leading to more creative thinking. Creativity is a form of playfulness. It’s allowing yourself to experiment with new ideas and to tolerate the chance of small failures in service of learning. When I feel I’ve reached an impasse and can’t go further, I sometimes find that by considering the situation without judgment, just being curious about it and appreciating all its dimensions, then a new awareness or possibility will occur to me.
“Many roads lead to Rome.” Whatever we do, whatever choice we make, whether in the moment or for the long term, we should do so with aware intention and appreciation for the possibilities. We don’t know if any encounter with another person might be life-changing. But I’ve discovered that when we meet others with our best intentions, and with appreciation for the moment, we could be opening doors to untold richness. Appreciation for the complexity and possibilities of life is the nourishment we need to grow and change.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
“To thine own self be true,” is an age-old mantra that few of us really understand. Brené Brown, a powerful thinker on leadership and self-discovery, speaks about the importance of being vulnerable enough to say one’s truth without shame. The act of self-ownership leads, in turn, to self-empowerment. I love her work. I’ve been working on these issues in my coaching and in my life, and I recognize how deeply challenging it is to be truthful not just to others, but to oneself. Self-discovery isn’t easy. But while we need to do our own exploring and find our way to self-ownership, we need to be in good company to succeed. We need to learn to invite feedback to know how others perceive us. If I’ve learned anything from this pandemic, it’s that the isolation from others is perhaps as devastating an illness to overcome. We’re “wired” to be in some form of relationship with others, for our physical and mental well-being, and for the more transcendent joys of life. We need to remember that. If we intend to “shake things up,” we also need a trusted group whom we can turn to for advice, guidance, and support. Anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” We may have many wonderful individual strengths that bring us influence and success, but we do well to remember to nurture relationships with others as a way of moving our agenda and our lives forward.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
Men have their own invisible cultural rules that limit them in some ways, e.g., in friendship, colleagueship, and emotional expressiveness. But they’re taught from an early age how to “play the game,” how to gain and manipulate dominance and power. Today, though, masculinity is undergoing shifts even as women’s traditional roles have also been changing particularly in America. It’s just a short 100 years since women got the legal right to vote, and we still see more men in leadership positions, continuing pay disparities, and even a resurgent debate over women’s right to control their own bodies. Women’s fight for self-ownership and self-authorship is ongoing and not always clear. No matter which ideological arguments we consider, what women will always need is more cultural and economic support for the right to choose for themselves, to counter the ego-annihilating dictates of what they should do or what they can and cannot do. We need greater institutional support to allow women to dream big and to choose with greater freedom, to define themselves for themselves under challenge. During the pandemic, it was the women who felt they needed to leave their careers and return to child care, elder care, or home care. We need to welcome women’s voices into senior decision-making processes in corporate, not-for-profit, and governmental organizations. We need women’s voices and wisdom to be heard in thinking about all humanitarian crises, whether the climate or the outbreak of war. Women constantly must prove themselves. How do we make space for their voices and experiences? How do we invite them into more critical decision-making? Let the proof come commensurate with the power and influence they are afforded.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
There are so many that this question almost feels unfair! I’ll just say that I’m currently reading The Happiness Advantage: How a Positive Brain Fuels Success in Work and Life by Shawn Achor. I’m enjoying his wit and clarity in articulating principles for increasing our positivity and optimism, which in turn influences well-being, creativity, resilience, and success.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I would love to inspire a movement of appreciation as an act of interpersonal creativity. A finding from the Gottman Institute, which studies marriage/couples relationships, intrigues me: “The difference between happy and unhappy couples is the balance between positive and negative interactions during conflict. There is a very specific ratio that makes love last. That ‘magic ratio’ is 5 to 1. This means that for every negative interaction during conflict, a stable and happy marriage has five (or more) positive interactions.” I’m often surprised by how uncomfortable being appreciative makes some people feel, as though they’re somehow being inauthentic or that “being nice” somehow makes them vulnerable. There’s a related saying, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” But I think we can all find something positive to say, however small, and that we can find ways to say it in a manner that feels congruent with one’s self. Expressed appreciation invites a sense of security and joy, which opens possibilities for new ideas and for new learning.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My life lesson learned over time and through long practice is: Trust Yourself. If you can’t trust yourself, it’s unlikely anyone else will trust you. We are our own oldest and best allies. I recommend taking time for reflective observation, particularly in stressful or charged situations, to check in with ourselves on what we are feeling and what we are thinking. What truths are waiting for you within? Often, a very small or brief idea has great value that emerges only when I stop and listen to myself. So listen to yourself. Trust that you know more than you think you know.
Communication: The greatest gift as a human is the ability to communicate on a profound cerebral level verbally and non-verbally. It is what separates us as a species from the rest of the Animal Kingdom. Communication with my wife is one of my most cherished connections to her. One of the loveliest sounds in the world is the sound of my wife’s voice. So, it is always a pleasure to hear her verbally communicate with me. She also communicates with her hands and arms, a super endearing quality.
As a part of our series about lessons from Thriving Power Couples, I had the pleasure of interviewing Drs. David and Alexis May Kimble.
Renowned board certified urogynecologists and surgeons, Drs. David and Alexis May Kimble, offer the women of Southern California expert care from the inside out, helping them look and feel their best. As co-founders of The Kimble Center for Intimate Cosmetic Surgery in Los Angeles, CA, and co-hosts of the Vagina Talk podcast, doctors Kimble have decades of experience and recognition in the field of vulvovaginal health. They’ve dedicated their careers and lives to treating women, improving their quality of life, and destigmatizing conversations around pelvic wellness.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you two to your respective career paths?
DAVID: Single handedly, it was one of my mentors during my residency who is regarded as a true grandfather of Urogynecology. He told me I “must” continue my career as a Urogynecologist since in his eyes I was one of the best surgeons he has encountered. Women are the most incredible of the genders always seeking health and wellness, rightfully, they are the gatekeepers of healthcare for their families. I have the utmost respect and admiration for women and have dedicated my life’s career to the care of all women.
ALEXIS: My path to medicine was very unexpected and untraditional. I grew up in a seemingly traditional household, being the third of four children to immigrant parents. Culturally, this meant that my birth order relegated me to a position in my own family that was minimizing, invisible really. Being born of female gender was also minimizing in the world I was surrounded by. My maternal grandmother, a matriarch, repeatedly declared that “1,000 girls aren’t worth one boy.” I never truly grasped her meaning, but it left me wondering, questioning and ultimately silent for most of my childhood. Being often the only family of color in my neighborhood surely did not help. I spent most of my time working to be more invisible. The most natural way to do so was to be of service. When I was old enough to choose, I spent most of my breaks and time after school working for charities like the local battered women’s shelters and crisis centers for survivors of domestic violence and assault. However, it was one summer in college where I spent time in Tijuana as a potential contemplative for the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa’s order that led me to pursue a vocation in medicine. There, I helped the sisters feed and nurse the wounds of those who lacked, were without and housed in the charity’s quarters. I quickly learned the disparity among genders, race, class, and borders was expansive, but that health seemed a dignity all deserve. I set my mind to be a woman who advocates for other women to improve another’s life even if only at a most fundamental level. It has always been my belief that these women in these shelters who transiently were a part of my life helped inform who I have become by bolstering me with the courage I needed to believe in myself despite my own fears. Urogynecology, a subspecialty of women’s general health, attracted me because it focuses on optimizing life, health and wellness by improvement of pelvic floor conditions that can have a profound and diminishing impact on an individual’s quality of life. It’s about thriving, not mere surviving.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you two got married?
DAVID: I married a surgeon traditionally trained in Ob/Gyn. One week before the COVID pandemic shelter-in-place order, my daughter, Olympia, was born by an urgent Cesarean section due to potential antepartum concerns. I was in the operating room from the moment my wife entered, present for the spinal anesthetic. I was witness to one of the most courageous acts I have witnessed…an Ob/Gyn surgeon surrendering her body to the hands of some essential stranger to safely deliver our daughter. My wife was my hero, and I was humbled by her bravery and stealth in an emotionally taxing moment.
ALEXIS: When we were first together, I often recalled an old French saying that described relationships such that love in the beginning involves looking at each other. With time, love begins to take the form of looking out in the same direction. David and I have looked at endless sunsets together especially as it pertains to our work as co-surgeons, co-founders, and even sharing in the subspecialty of Urogynecology.
Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
DAVID: I never expressed my true feelings for her in the beginning. Alexis had a powerful spirit about her that I was drawn to, but my mind overpowered my heart and it took far too many months before I told her my true feelings. The lesson to learn is “Carpe Diem” — seize the day, seize the moment and never let time pass, be honest and true to your feelings.
ALEXIS: If I had a nickel for every mistake I’ve made, I would be sitting on a silver mountain overlooking great heights. I spent a lot of time away from my husband and children in pursuit of higher education, specialized surgical skills in rigorous and competitive surgical residency and fellowship post graduate medical educational programs. In my 20s and even in my 30s, my concept of time, ambition and mortality was unending. Today, I recognize that I can’t take back the time separated from my loved ones. So, I hold onto every moment now and work hard to create moments to be with them undivided.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
DAVID: Most medical doctors only practice what they have been taught and stop their education and training once residency is completed. I continued my education adopting very new and innovative technology to provide the very best care for our patients.
The early phase of robotic surgery began in 1999 with a robot termed AESOP. This required hours of my time in “teaching” the robot voice commands and truncated terms so it can respond appropriately in the Operating Room. This proved not to enhance patient care. Fast forward to 2007 when daVinci robot came to the market, I was the earliest adopter and it has revolutionized my surgical care for my patients. However, several of my medical school classmates and colleagues have no interest in adopting new technology. Further, I have continued the pursuit of comprehensive care of women and we are embarking on a Beverly Hills office, opening this Spring, solely to provide intimate cosmetic surgery for individuals that identify as female. The specialized training and knowledge makes our company/practice stand out among all the others.
ALEXIS: Our center stands out because we understand and am grounded in very traditional understanding and approaches to treating a wide breadth of pelvic floor and vulvovaginal conditions. However, our specialty, Urogynecology, affords me to consider new therapies and technologies to provide more efficacious and technologically advanced solutions to age-old problems. I am proud to be a recognized leader in my field to consider new and innovative technologies that can help women improve conditions that prevent her from living her best life.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
DAVID: Always is the answer. We are developing a new product line for intimate skin care. We tirelessly research sourcing the most natural ingredients to formulate the next amazing product that will prove invaluable for the intimate skin care for women, called Sonnet 79 (79 is the position on the Periodic Table for Gold). Clinical research is always on our radar to publish data to prove the efficacy of the aesthetic treatments in which we firmly believe.
ALEXIS: Echoing David’s sentiments, we are always working on new projects beyond managing the daily care of patients seen at our primary practice and center. We are expanding to a second location in Beverly Hills, in addition to our East side address in Pasadena. We are working to curate the best of what we believe will create beautiful, luxurious, and artistic space for our patients. I am very excited about our upcoming intimate skincare line, Sonnet 79, formulated to support, nourish and protect delicate vulvovaginal tissues and poised to launch this Spring. I am also in the process of writing a book aimed at girls, adolescents and teens as a resource for all things related to health, wellness, and beauty as they weather these various stages of becoming.
What advice would you give to other leaders or founders to help their employees to thrive?
DAVID: Know your employees, honestly study their habits and assess strengths and weaknesses/areas of improvement. Give them the tools to succeed both physically and psychologically. Respect is vital. Throughout most of my career, I have been known as the “Harmony Maker,” having the ability to transform most emotionally charged, adversarial situations into calmness and harmony. It is important to always create harmony in the work environment permitting open expression of ideas and feelings. This will invariably be the catalyst to promote your employees to excel and thrive.
ALEXIS: Aim to meet employees at their level. I can’t emphasize this enough. When I first started to be a boss, I believed that if I taught someone how to do something or showed them how to do something, it would get done. I quickly learned that not everyone hears and sees everything presented. Learners need to be ready to learn. It is important to understand every employee at their level and in their context before they can thrive and be supported in the ways they need in the organization’s work culture.
How do you define “Leadership”?
DAVID: By strict definition this means the ability to lead/command. However, leadership is quite broad in definition to encompass someone who guides by being an example, someone who sets the pace or tone, and someone who inspires diligence or good in others. Leadership is not an innate quality, but a learned skill requiring self confidence, self awareness, and the ability to critique oneself. No finite set of characteristics define leadership. A walk through history will prove leadership comes in many styles, shapes, and forms.
ALEXIS: Leadership is the unique ability to draw out the strengths in others and inspire them so that they can act and work to their strengths.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
DAVID: It is most challenging to single out one person only. Certain events happen in life that guide your journey in a defined direction, perhaps a course not yet plotted. In today’s world those who were previously called mentors are now called influencers. The most powerful influencer in my personal journey was my mother. It may sound contrite, however, she lead her life with resolve and the strength of an army. She marched with Martin Luther King and burned her bra in downtown Atlanta just to protest for women’s rights. Yes, she alone was my northern star guiding me, sometimes with a powerful nudge, to persevere against all odds and stay true to my course.
ALEXIS: I’ve had the privilege to be mentored by among the most talented surgeons and minds during my training years to whom I will always be grateful and hold in high esteem. Among one is my fellowship director and mentor, who believed in me when many did not, even against the grain of many others. She saw qualities in me that often were not traditional qualities in most candidates for surgical specialties.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
DAVID: My success and recognition as a leader and pioneer in medicine has allowed me to care for tens of thousands of women in my career. The goodness is readily evident in the successful outcomes for these women both surgically and emotionally. In my possession are hundreds of cards, gifts, and awards attesting to the goodness I have given the world. Beyond surgical skills, my bedside manner is my best known attribute touted countless times in reviews and awards. To me, it is a simple honor and privilege to be the surgeon capable of dramatically improving the lives of women.
ALEXIS: I am privileged to spend my day applying all I’ve learned and acquired through 16 years of rigorous discipline and sacrifice to alleviate or correct a condition for a patient who presents to me with a problem. I’ve devoted my career to understanding and solving. I am working to expand the breadth of knowledge and skills by constantly seeking new and improved ways to address old problems. My approach to many of these conditions is to seek new avenues to prevent them. For example, I recognize that many things in women’s health have not changed since the 1940s. I am at the forefront of considering new technologies or new methods to improve how we treat common conditions like prolapse, vaginal laxity, vulvar disorders, and sexual dysfunction. In many respects, my life has emboldened me with the courage to blaze a path where there has not been one. I also find that helping to educate and inspire the next generation of females and girls as it relates to women’s wellness is so incredibly vital to everything I do everyday.
What are the “5 Things You Need To Thrive As A Couple”? Please share a story or example for each.
DAVID:
Mutual respect: My wife is a fellowship trained urogynecological surgeon. Even from the beginning of our relationship, I was the Chief of Urogynecology who hired her directly out of fellowship, I admired her talent and skill that much. We perform all our surgeries together and to this day I remain in awe of her amazing skills.
Time: Time is our most precious commodity, what we have the least of. Life did not allow me to meet my wife as early as I would wish. The moment I met her and the palpable spirit around her, it felt as if I had always known her. As the years click by and the sands of time forge rapidly forward, I forever wish I had the power to pause and enjoy my moments with her endlessly.
Common ground: Bonds are cemented with common ground, true in most all relationships. The bonds of our marriage are forever challenged by the demands of everyday life, be it the kids, busy OR schedule, or finances. We take time to enjoy our common interests such as enjoying the sunset, walking along the boardwalk, reading, enjoying music, etc. My wife has a beautiful command of the English language. I love reading her words anywhere…a published article, a book chapter, or as simple as an email or text. I love to write and read…a wonderful bonding common ground.
Love and Romance: This is the cornerstone of any marriage, be it heterosexual or otherwise. Without a desire to be with one another, without a passion for the other, and without loving romance, the relationship evolves into roommates which will never stand the test of time. Just remember the TV series The Odd Couple with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon…this is not the relationship a loving couple desires to emulate. My wife is my endless sky, the prettiest sunset, my everything. Virtually every time she catches my eye, my heart skips a beat. I harness this passion in my romantic moments with her to completely and undeniably express my love. I try never to let those moments pass without a wink, smile, or perhaps a kiss.
Communication: The greatest gift as a human is the ability to communicate on a profound cerebral level verbally and non-verbally. It is what separates us as a species from the rest of the Animal Kingdom. Communication with my wife is one of my most cherished connections to her. One of the loveliest sounds in the world is the sound of my wife’s voice. So, it is always a pleasure to hear her verbally communicate with me. She also communicates with her hands and arms, a super endearing quality.
In sum, it is the profound love between a couple that transcends every aspect of their relationship making it grand and stalwart against all the stresses of the world.
ALEXIS:
The ability to choose each other every day. I think it is important to be reminded that being with each other is an active choice. To be able to stand on one’s own allows us to be positioned to choose to be with the other every day. I also find this makes things new, fresh and I am reminded how honored I am to be married to David.
Mutual respect. The most challenging part of a personal relationship is deciding who does the most and who does things to a capacity the other cannot. I find it is so critical to find things in the other one admires and to celebrate it and honor this in all interactions.
Innate attraction. It is important for me to be attracted to my partner in an instinctive way. This goes far especially during disagreements. David has the unfair advantage that I find him breathtaking!
Good hygiene. I can’t emphasize this enough. I absolutely require and believe that good hygiene demonstrates care of oneself and regard for one’s partner.
Rose champagne most days. Need I say more?
If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
DAVID: The use of the term vagina has been normal language to me for decades. However, the word is still considered taboo to most of society. Our new podcast Vagina Talk is designed to demystify the word vagina and openly discuss all that surrounds the vagina and vulva (the face of the vagina). My life’s mission is to be a vocal advocate for women, to enhance women’s lives by improving the function and appearance of the vulva and vagina itself. All women need to feel confident and beautiful, respected and admired. Consider the term hysterectomy, which literally means the removal of hysteria which dates back to the 16th century. Hysterectomy terminology has persisted through time even though it is demeaning to women. Removal of any other organ in the female body is called by its medical term. Women need to be empowered to demand their right to equality and respect and the Vagina Talk is designed to provide that platform. Beyond just equality and respect, strength comes from within which requires confidence, self esteem, and the ability to love oneself. Vagina Talk is the catalyst for women’s rights, discussing topics translatable to all who identify as a female.
ALEXIS: I think as women, we need to be the women we needed and didn’t have as a young girl. If we did that, perhaps, we could provide the nurturing, support, strength and modeling for the younger generation of females behind us so that we can have a future of capable, competent, beautifully strong women who are fearless, realized, empowered, and loved.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
DAVID: “Never Accept a Wooden Nickel” was a quote my maternal grandfather told me at every visit to their home. As a child, I thought he was just old and the quote had no meaning. As youth ascended into adulthood, I finally understood. It meant do not accept something less than what it is or could be or should be. Accept only the best in life and yourself. It made me strive to always be that shiny nickel, not a dull wooden nickel. This applies to me as a surgeon, as a husband, and as a father. I will never accept myself as a wooden nickel.
ALEXIS: “Everything is energy and that is all there is. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. IT can be no other way. This is not philosophy, this is physics.” — Albert Einstein
I think that life is delicate and our thoughts and intention hold the power to transform. I spent my life believing in the power of thinking to effect change in myself, in the world around me. This stands true today.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
DAVID: Elon Musk, hands down. He is a visionary, an entrepreneur, a missionary, and a stand alone man. He created an emission free vehicle that has revolutionized the industry and will contribute tremendously to solving the climate crisis. He accomplished this in the face of constant adversity, disbelief, even outright defamation. Einstein was considered strange, eccentric, even weird. However, he contributed so many things that the world could not live without. This is the same trajectory for Elon Musk, the Einstein of the 21st century.
ALEXIS: Elie Weisel is someone who I have admired as a thinkinger, writer and activist. He was able to cultivate light when all he was given was a suffocating darkness. His story is something that inspired me throughout the years.
Downtime and an escape from work. We have often found that we focus so much on the business that we don’t get enough time to focus on ourselves and each other so we have to make conscious efforts to work on ourselves both as individuals and as spouses. It is very easy to get caught up in work because it’s such a huge part of our daily lives, but you cannot pour from an empty cup and our marriage and family comes first.
As a part of our series about lessons from Thriving Power Couples, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ryan and Kelly Unger.
Kelly and Ryan Unger are certified personal trainers and Co-founders of the franchise, Epic Health and Fitness. Epic Fitness Health and is a new (and improved) breed in the Gym, Health and Fitness Clubs industry. Their goal is to change people’s view on fitness, so that it becomes part of who they are and their lifestyle. Kelly and Ryan have worked as trainers for years and turned their passion into a business.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you two to your respective career paths?
We both have athletic backgrounds and played various sports growing up and into college. Ryan quickly moved up the ladder in the gym industry, starting out as a personal trainer and becoming district manager for another company. Kelly has a master’s degree in mental health and an interest in helping people feel their best overall. Kelly was always a Zumba instructor and into group fitness classes until Ryan educated her on the importance of weight training and how it can truly change the body. Ryan felt he lost his connection to helping people when working in a big box gym, so he decided to create his own gym business. We moved from Tampa to Spring Hill, FL and worked on opening our first location.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you two got married?
The most interesting thing that has happened to us since we got married is building our businesses. We were dating when we started the process, soon after engaged and about six months after opening our first location, we got married. The businesses have given us many common goals and has as allowed us to spend more time together than if we had separate full-time jobs. This was helpful for us during quarantine when most people were getting sick of each other because they were stuck in the house together and not used to it. We found ways to stay busy like continuing to work on our business plan, working out in our gyms, and preparing to get right back to work upon reopening.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The best thing about being a husband-and-wife team working together is the checks and balances that we have in place to prevent mistakes. We aren’t perfect by any means, but we have been fortunate enough to avoid any serious mistakes so far. One slightly entertaining mistake that we did run into was an order of shirts we made for our bodybuilding team. The company that puts our logos on our apparel ordered children’s sizes rather than adult sizes. Needless to say, the huge bodybuilders trying to make sense of their tiny shirts once we handed them out was quite laughable. The shirt company fixed their error in time for the show, and no one had to wear the tiny kids’ shirts to their show!
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
I think our company stands out because of our small business/family-oriented feel, the positive and encouraging environment in our gyms, extremely unique equipment, and the fact that we cater to a wide variety of people and goals. We don’t push high numbers of memberships because we prefer quality over quantity, and we attract dedicated and loyal customers by being dedicated and loyal business owners. We are highly involved in our members’ goals and invested in their success. We provide the right equipment, staff, and environment to really help people get results they want.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
We are franchising our gyms! I think if we keep the same mindset of wanting to help people, it will continue to have a great impact in every community that Epic is lucky enough to be a part of. We are also incorporating the InBody570 medical grade body composition analyzing scans at each location, which really helps members track their progress and results!
What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?
Be humble and kind to everyone.
Work hard.
Don’t expect handouts.
There WILL be obstacles, but stay calm and try to find another way.
Don’t focus on just the money, but have another motivating factor for your success and the money will come.
How do you define “Leadership”?
Being a leader involves doing what needs to be done, being right in the trenches with your employees and being an example in all situations. Leading by example encourages and inspires your employees to be there best for your customers/clients.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Kelly’s grandfather, Jack MacAllister, US West CEO, was a businessman and taught her valuable lessons about finances, business, and most importantly, being a kind and caring person no matter what your position is.
Ryan’s grandmother, Nancy Apter, an elementary school teacher instilled a value in continuing education and hard work in Ryan throughout his life and supported him throughout his business ventures and life changes, while encouraging him to follow his dreams.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Yes, we hope so! That was always something very important to us — to have a positive impact in our community. We set up boxes for donations three different times per year, including Toys for Tots, donations to local humane society and animal shelters, and donations to a local women’s shelter. We also work with the local Special Olympics Powerlifting team to help train the athletes and we sponsor and host events throughout the year for their competitions. Additionally, we just focus our business plan and our efforts on genuinely helping people! We truly want each member to actually reach their goals in our gyms — no matter what that goal may be!
What are the “5 Things You Need To Thrive As A Couple”? Please share a story or example for each.
1 — Communication is most important for any marriage, but even more so when you’re also business partners together too.
2 — Be on the same page about your expectations and define your roles to function effectively, both at home and at work. This clears up any confusion or miscommunications and makes things run smoothly in all areas of your lives.
3 — Don’t forget to continue to appreciate each other — you’re each other’s favorite people- at work and at home. Continue to be kind to each other and express gratitude for the little things you do for each other that often get overlooked. Over time, the initial spark can weaken, or you get used to each other, but put in the work to ensure that spark stays lit.
4 — Downtime and an escape from work. We have often found that we focus so much on the business that we don’t get enough time to focus on ourselves and each other so we have to make conscious efforts to work on ourselves both as individuals and as spouses. It is very easy to get caught up in work because it’s such a huge part of our daily lives, but you cannot pour from an empty cup and our marriage and family comes first.
5 — Enjoy yourself! Running a business that you have a passion for is crucial and learning to have fun throughout the process helps you to give your best effort daily. When you truly love what you do, it shows in your work and your clients can see and feel it in the atmosphere of your business.
You are people of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
We opened our gym to do exactly that! We wanted to be a way for our communities to live happier and healthier lives. We decided by offering a higher quality, hands on, progress-oriented approach, we could inspire and help the greatest number of people to reach their health and fitness goals. Once we neared the limit of our abilities at our first location, we opened a second. Once we maxed that out, we decided to start a franchising business so that we can help others like us open thriving gyms in their communities.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” This quote stands out to entrepreneurs specifically because most people are so afraid to take a leap of faith and start their own business or follow their dreams. The truth is that if you never try you can never truly know the success you may achieve, and we have been fortunate enough to take well calculated shots and the risks we’ve taken have paid off. Taking the shot doesn’t mean doing it all just to win but with patience, practice, and the right intention you can make more shots than you miss and really make a huge impact.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
Jim Carrey because he emphasizes having a positive mindset, doing good in the world, and success is not just found in money, but in genuinely being a good person. He also reminds us that even when times are tough or stressful, laughter can be the best medicine.
How can our readers follow your work online?
We have a website for our gym that shows our different locations, which will hopefully be growing soon! We also have social media (Instagram and Facebook), as well as LinkedIn. Ryan has also done a Podcast recently and we hope to be on more soon. www.epichealthandfitness.com,
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
Female Founders: Dianne Sykes and Sara Oblak Speicher of Elite Mystique Agency On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
I know a lot of women hold themselves back in fear and they never take the chance. But if they have this vision, and are willing to take the leap, then it’s also important to clearly define success. Like, what does success mean to you, not to anybody else around you? And then you use this to measure your progress with it. And then, just like in sports, there’s going to be grit. There’s going to be a hustle. You will have to show up, learn new skills. It will require agility, stamina, perseverance, and determination. And just a little bit crazy, haha.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dianne Sykes, MS NSCA and Sara Oblak Speicher, MBA.
Dianne Sykes, MS NSCA and Sara Oblak Speicher, MBA founded Elite Mystique Agency Inc. to help executive women simplify and actually enjoy the complexities of life. Dianne is a physiologist and Sara is a strategist, and they offer operational solutions for executives in their homes and organizations. Collectively, these former elite athletes draw on 45+ years of coaching experience, and have served over 2500 clients to reallocate their resources and establish more energy in their bodies and more time in life. www.elitemystiqueagency.com
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Sara: Thank you for having us! Well, as an elite athlete, I’ve always been supported by coaches, but it wasn’t until much later in life that I became one. After the end of my international basketball career, which has brought me from Slovenia to New York City, I had set my sights on climbing a corporate ladder although I always loved this sense of freedom, flexibility, and limitlessness that comes with owning your own business… But when I lost my job the same time my husband and I found out we were expecting our first baby, I started my own business. Serving female founders, business owners as a virtual assistant at first, I soon realized these women require and deserve greater support. So I tapped into my knowledge and experience of being a formally-trained consultant, and grew that business into a premier agency.
After the birth of my second baby, I craved an even deeper work, I wanted to help make an even greater difference in my client’s lives. Coaching has always come natural to me so I decided to invest my time, money, and energy in developing and mastering coaching skills. Plus, it was personal — I really got to experience the value and depth of quality coaching as it helped me heal from postpartum depression, immense homesickness, disconnect, and severe burnout that nearly killed me. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now, and it feels like a perfect time for what’s coming next.
Dianne: I think that for me, entrepreneurship found me. I didn’t, I didn’t find this path; it opened itself up because it, you know, it was always a part of who I was. Even as a kid, I just wanted to be either the president of the United States or the big gymnast. Then realizing that I never really wanted to follow a structured path, but certainly most of my formative years, I subscribed to following that path of structure wound up in medical school. And, I love human potential. I love studying human potential. And so I also love helping people with their performance and help them overcome any physical conditions that would stand in the way of them experiencing their full potential.
And so I knew that I had a passion for medicine, but not really knowing any other alternatives, I went into pre-med thinking I was going to be a heart surgeon and had a kind of that big aha moment… Recognizing that there’s gotta be another way for me to help somebody heal their heart other than cracking their chest open and spending 10 hours over there putting their heartbeats together.
And that led me into physiology and then into the wellness sector. And of course, growing up as an elite athlete, understanding the importance of always having a coach, helped me be the very best version of me as an athlete, as the scholar, as whatever I was doing.
So taking that and saying, well, how can I. Support and guide people to live out their full potential, physically, mentally, spiritually. And that’s what led me to do what I do today, which I’ve been doing for 25 years.
Sara: And that’s when we met — Dianne and I were both a part of the same mastermind. Athlete and Mom Codes brought us together, we developed a deep friendship and that ultimately evolved into this business partnership. We founded Elite Mystique Agency to support executive women. To help them simplify complexities of fitness, nutrition, lifestyle, time mastery, and mental brilliance. Best part is that everything we teach, we have done for ourselves.
Dianne: Yup, basically learning how to live again. I think it’s even beyond trying to redefine health, happiness, and fun. I think for many women, it’s what is their actual definition of enjoying their life? What is success? How to actually just live it in a moment?
I think that a lot of executive women live in this theoretical land of “Well, what would that be like? Let me intellectualize and let me define that cerebrally…” But we’re more interested in their experience of life, what it means to actually experience success.
Deep meaningful relationship. That’s the difference between it and the spectator and an athlete both know how to play basketball, but the athlete is actually the one experiencing it. We’re very interested in women having an actual experience of success and the actual experience of fulfillment in their lives.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
Dianne: It’s all been interesting! Even how we came together and established an agency has been outstanding, interesting. I think even when we’re in the weeds and then minutiae of running our business on a daily basis, it’s super interesting. It’s interesting to be an entrepreneur in the Aquarian age, running a female founded business, supporting other female leaders. There’s just nothing uninteresting. It’s an interesting question to ask because we wouldn’t be doing it if the work wasn’t interesting! Even in the monotony of opening off our business bank accounts, spending two hours on the phone with the bank — that’s interesting. Going back and forth with a marketing person, how to position a Facebook ad, that’s interesting. Having a woman on the phone bitching about her endless task list, that’s interesting…
Sara: Your answer actually inspired me. You know, as somebody who has been trained in this Piscean approach to leadership and to business operations, which is very hierarchical, very linear, I think what you and I are experiencing and redefining is a much more harmonious and flow.
And one of the most amazing experiences in that regard is just our relationship to time and productivity. How we just honor the fact that we can sit down and we can waste the whole day staring at a computer and nothing’s going to happen. Are we going to beat ourselves over? No, we’re going to close the computer. We’re going to do our own thing.
And then the next time we sit down and we do more in an hour than most people would in a week. When we get into the flow, that has been very interesting to observe and to experience from my perspective. Especially during our Camp Elite Mystique when we got together with the sole purpose of doing things in person, sitting side by side, which creates a very different energy than zooming from five states away.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Sara: I pretty much made every single mistake in the books and I’m not talking just about starting the Elite Mystique Agency, but also my own company 10 years ago. There’s this beginner’s naivete when you just pick up the phone and do the guerrilla approach to marketing, to sales, and you say yes, and then you figure it out.
But the lessons that I have learned have not necessarily been from making those mistakes, but from what transpired as the years went by. Being a part of this industry that has so many unwritten rules of what you’re not supposed to be doing, and how you’re not supposed to be presenting yourself, and how you’re not supposed to make yourself available, and how you’re not supposed to say certain things or offer certain things or price certain things… It really jaded me. I looked back and realized I no longer did the most basic business stuff, the ABCs of business!
So that was going on the lessons that got applied to launching our agency, going back to the basics and going back to this beginner’s naivete. Releasing a lot of those limitations — and I’m still working through many, to be honest. Because there have been a lot of things I was shying away from in fear of being judged or in the fear of failure or rejection.
Dianne: I think Sara just hit it right on the head in terms of how I actually now, as a recovering perfectionist, am seeing mistakes as the greatest blessing from the higher power. The greatest blessing that could come through from my soul to carry out my destiny. Because what is that mistake? It’s a miss-take. Take two. Take three. Take four. Take however many takes you need in order to get it to be in alignment with what your heart is really leading you to do. And so it’s all about what can I take from that? What lesson is there for me that is such a treasure because if it weren’t for that lesson, I would have the wisdom that I have now to move forward in a way that is in alignment with what the heart is leading toward.
When I look back to when I first started my career as an official brick and mortar business owner and trusting investor, that investor turned out to have been part of a Ponzi scheme and laundered our money. And not just it wasn’t just the money that we put into this, but it was the money that we made from the business.
So basically, in the first year of opening, my very first business, I lost a hundred thousand dollars of my and my husband at the time who was my business partner. Our hard earned money. And was this a mistake? Should I trust the wrong person? But recognizing that, that actually wasn’t my mistake.
My mistake was that I wore that in shame for years. The mistake in essence was that I didn’t take the lesson because I was so ashamed. That I trusted somebody that I shouldn’t have, and that I beat myself up every day in hiding and then shame, cover up and then not wanting to admit that out loud to anyone that I trusted. Because I hid in shame, I didn’t take the lesson.
The lesson was not “don’t trust anybody” because that’s exhausting and that’s not who I am. The lesson was, “don’t be ashamed of the decisions you make, because you’re doing the best you can with what you got good morning.”
And it took a lot more mistakes of me feeling ashamed of my decisions as an entrepreneur and a leader rather than just owning me, executing a decision based on what I knew at that time.
So looking back, I could have just said, I trusted her. We made a move. We were able to open our doors. We need a lot of money. We should, we helped a lot of people and she stole from us. Cool. Instead of wearing that in my adrenal glands and letting it blow me out.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Dianne: I’m just going to say that’s this is such a cliche question, it’s the truth. Because there’s no one woman. I mean every, day in every way, there are about 50 people that I see as being incredibly supportive. So to highlight one person is not fair. What I will say is I enjoy seeing the support, especially more recently, the support of people. Because a big turning point for me over the past six months or so I was seeing that not everybody is going to support me in the way that I define and require being supported. And first of all it took a very long time to even finally being okay asking for help.
The next step was, “Can I actually then receive that help?” It’s one thing to get right with asking for it, which is super hard for a lot of us women in the first place. Once we reconcile with being able to ask for help, can you actually receive it because help isn’t going to come in just the flavor you want, especially if you’re still clunky around communicating what it is that you want help with.
So was it really helpful to me to have people close to me, criticize me for my choice. Yeah, that was really, really fucking supportive. I could have chosen to see it as totally toxic, which I did for so long. But I was like, well, wait a minute. It’s just that this person cares about my wellbeing enough to have an opinion, which means that’s a lot of energy heading in my direction for my greatest good. So that I can carry out the service I was here for.
Thank you. Thank you for saying that feedback because it just puts me more on my path of knowing what I’m here to do. It didn’t come in the package, tied up in a bow of “Hey, you’re awesome, Diane, do a great jobs that you’re doing such a good job. I totally get it. I totally understand you.”
You know, maybe that wouldn’t have been the support I needed. Maybe that wouldn’t have motivated me to make some changes in my life that allowed me to open up my creativity and expand even more, even more alive. Yeah. So I would say now I see support in everybody, everybody, and going back to even the woman who pongy schemed our money away, the one for her, I wouldn’t be here now.
So is that supportive? I had to lose a hundred grand before I made my next movie and I could not have made a million dollars in my brick and mortar businesses. If I didn’t lose a hundred friends.
Sara: Indeed! You mentioned asking for help, and I think that is the sticky point for so many. Especially when we are conditioned to glorify this idea of “self-made” and “pulling up by the bootstraps.” We tend to not only forget that, like you said, there are 50 people supporting us every day — but even ask for help in the first place!
I was raised to be super independent, fierce, and then created these blinders and filtered vision that turned very toxic when I indeed required and received support. Weather from my husband, from our families, from friends. Instead of receiving it, it felt like a knife twisting in this core wound. So I offer to the reader that she re-evaluates her filters, ther perceptions, and conditioning around asking for and receiving support — in whatever shape and form that might be — without this feeling of guilt, shame, or incompetence.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
Dianne: Ourselves. We’ve got to take full responsibility for ourselves. There’s no one else or no other structure that we can continue to blame and think that that’s somehow going to move the ball forward for us. We gotta to take responsibility. How do we do that? My opinion and my personal experience starts with us first supporting ourselves.
We talk about other people supporting us. Well, are you your own cheerleader? Are you all inside your head, telling yourself you’re beautiful? Telling yourself you’ve got this? Telling yourself you’re intelligent? Telling yourself you’re sophisticated? Telling yourself you can?
Or are you inside your own head, all day long, shitting on yourself? Because that is so inverted. How is that going to get people to pay us? How is that going to get us in the doors? If we can’t even support our own talent, if we are not hedging bets on ourselves, then who else will?
And then the second piece is that if we first clean that up, then it puts us in a position to actually provide that for each other. Instead of, “I feel so shitty about myself and I see another woman who is making some strides. I am now going to take her out. I am going to first compare myself to her, and then compete and complain.”
The three deadly Cs that I believe have every woman not leading a company are too much complaining, too much comparing and too much competing. And that’s why only 20% of us are running companies because we’re so freaking busy just in the land of complaining, comparing, and competing. How about “Wow, I’m so inspired by what she’s doing, how can I support her and how can I create a similar experience for myself knowing that it’s possible?”
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
Sara: I love this question. As Dianne says, the first step is in taking full responsibility for ourselves — while also seeing a greater picture.
Let me preface what I am about to say with the fact that personally, I am as progressive as we get. I believe that capitalism has outlived itself, and that indeed, a complete systemic reset is necessary.
That said, I also think that complaining about the system… that’s easy. And unproductive. Yes, we all know it’s broken. Rigid. Not working for everyone. But what I would offer is that we also do something about it.
I am seeing it time and time again — and have in sports, in academia, in the corporate, even in entrepreneurship — that just things just are because they always have been. Or that because I had to face challenges, well then so should you.
What if instead we consciously focus on bettering ourselves, and doing anything we can to better others? Legwork required to do so will differ, too. Some of us will march the streets. Some of us will educate. Some of us legislate. Some raise funds, and some hold space and raise the vibration. We all have a part to play. Yes, we are tired. We are scared. And yes, things might get worse before they get better. But we gotta keep pushing. Persisting. And be audacious to utilize resources that already are available. Literally at our fingertips.
Dianne: Yeah. Something easy to start with is noticing what are you being vocal about? Because the moment you start changing your thoughts about yourself you will vibrate at an entirely different, higher, frequency that has a tremendous impact on the planet. Your good thoughts about yourself impact humanity in a multitude of ways.
That’s more powerful and more quantum than any of us can understand. But I would challenge any woman to just start right there with what you got right in front of you. You think bad thoughts, how does that affect your health? Your family? How does that affect your community? How does that affect your health?
Sara: I would expand on that a little bit though because it is a bit more nuanced. For example, simply thinking good thought still won’t fix the broken and rigid system that discriminates against certain communities. Plus, there is this thing called Toxic Positivity. To think good thoughts does not equate suppressing and dismissing complex emotions like anger, fear, resentment, sadness. It requires you to properly acknowledge and process and alchemize them.
Dianne: Yeah, that’s what we do and it’s just far more intertwined and complex than what this interview is providing. So what I can offer right here, right now, is a simple solution.
Just stop, just breathe in and go. I don’t need to think this through anymore. It’s done. And it can be that powerful.
See, women are powerful. Biologically we are quick, and the most coveted life force because we give life. We are the most powerful life force. And what does that mean?
That if we’re inverted, it’s powerful in the negative, it’s multitude times more power than the negative. Then our male counterparts. So I’m just simply saying, start with yourself. You can convert that into positive energy — not overlooking that of course there is fine tuning. But really at the end of the day, speaking as an athlete, it just comes down to diligence and discipline.
Can you be devoted to changing those thoughts or is that too much hard work? And you’d rather be busy doing other things and then running that negative tape in your head all day long and being addicted to it?
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
Dianne: Um, we are biologically wired for it. We are! We have the physiological structure and resources to operate at a very, very, very high level of performance. The complexity of a woman’s endocrine system is what allows us to hold another life for nine months and give birth to it. So running a company as fucking easy as hell. That’s a piece of what we have done in memoria, which is run a household, raise a family. And that comes so naturally to so many of us. It’s just simple, I guess, without the comparison and the complaining and the competing to knock out our energy before we even get out of bed. Then we soon start to see that our cup runneth over with energy, we get energy for days.
We got energy for eons pouring out of us when that oxytocin and serotonin are making a nice little blend because we are creating enough of it as we are tending and befriending each other, supporting each other. Then oxytocin and serotonin are absolutely just bathing ourselves in nutrient dense juiciness, vitality, timelessness. And the dopamine hits that we get when combined with the proper dose of adrenaline and cortisol, is like a shock to the brain.
To just execute decisions, delegate, be super clear, be absolutely decisive on a whim. About 50 different things at once we run. That capacity, you are supercomputing with our brains all day long. Again, this is what we are biologically designed for. That’s why we are still not extinct because of our ability to do these things with our ice flows.
And so running a company is in comparison to running a house. Pretty similar, pretty simple. And then furthermore, you take into consideration that if a woman starts to understand the richness of her lunar cycles, which could sound as esoteric, but it’s not, it’s just pure understanding of energy. Then we can use that energy to optimize our performance.
And we use that energy to our benefit every day and say “OK I can absolutely make quick decisions, but now I can also switch into having a vision for the future and seeing it crystal clear in my mind’s eye and actually.”
The secretions from the pituitary gland and the pineal gland to we have much more colorful and creative and imaginative visions of the future that our male counterparts again, because we are biologically wired for that. So for us to close our eyes and visualize something in the future and pull that into reality.
And I can go on and on, because this really is about human performance. And there are so many things! We have masculine and feminine energy and there were so many things that we can do. The masculine and that there are so many things that men can do that we are so grateful for is women. But it’s high time that we understand how running a company is easier than changing.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
Sara: Perhaps this old pattern that we have to, as founders, behave and run our companies in a specific way that has been modeled by men. But when we tap into our own strengths, into our own gifts, into the laws of energy and the universe, we can create our own way that is way more powerful than what we allowed ourselves to experience before.
Dianne: Yeah, I think the myth is that it’s super complicated. Busting that myth is understanding that if we just simply use our intuition, then there is no complicated thing. It’s all just there as a puzzle and the puzzle wouldn’t present itself if there wasn’t a solution to it. And it’s just us getting into that intuitive space of “Hey, I trust my gut and I’m going to make this decision. It’s going to take me down this road.”
It’s what I said before about making a mistake. I trusted someone and she gave us some opportunities and it didn’t work. But I could have just taken the lesson and said, “I’m so glad I trusted my gut and did that anyway, because I took a risk. I had to bet I had to bet on myself and I, and it all worked out.”
But perhaps it would have worked out a lot quicker had I not carried that guilt and shame around for so long, and questioned my own intuition, questioned my own ability to make executive decisions quickly.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
Sara: This question in ite essence evokes comparison that Dianne mentioned earlier, trying to compartmentalize individuals. I think anybody who wants to be a founder could be a founder, but only the person themselves knows if that is for them.
I know a lot of women hold themselves back in fear and they never take the chance. But if they have this vision, and are willing to take the leap, then it’s also important to clearly define success. Like, what does success mean to you, not to anybody else around you? And then you use this to measure your progress with it. And then, just like in sports, there’s going to be grit. There’s going to be a hustle. You will have to show up, learn new skills. It will require agility, stamina, perseverance, and determination. And just a little bit crazy, haha.
Chances are, you will be called delusional. Hold onto this vision, into this knowing that you’re creating something that hasn’t been done before and no one else, but you can bring it to life.
But again, it’s on any one person to decide for themselves whether or not not this is something they want.
Dianne: I mean, again, it’s an interesting question because it comes back to what gives you energy? Does it give you energy to found a company? We just spoke about how every woman is completely capable of founding and running a company with her eyes closed. The question is, do you want it?
Because some women just don’t want it. It’s like just because you can have kids doesn’t mean you want to, and that’s every woman’s prerogative to make herself. But it’s really a bigger question of can you get right with deciding for yourself what you just said? What does success look like to you?
And then owning that without shame, without guilt, without comparison. You know, complaining without you should be. Like, “I should be doing this over here, but I’m not.”
It’s like, well, if your destiny is calling you forth to sweep the floors in Costco, then you get to do that to your heart’s content and be the best that anybody ever could possibly be on this planet. And you’re bringing beauty to this earth for the time that you’re here and it’s going to make your heart sing doing that then fucking awesome.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
Dianne: I feel like we answered it — nobody could tell me what I was ready to hear. Period.
Here’s the answer. I don’t wish that anybody would’ve told me anything. Because I don’t wish for it to have been any different than what it is. And what I am grateful for now is being more receptive and more responsive.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
Sara: This is exactly why we created our Elite Mystique Agency. For many years, Dianne and I have supported our respective clients in different ways. In the end of the day, our clients pretty much wanted the same things: to have more time. To have more energy. To be able to do more. To be able to live better. We just used different knowledge, specialized skillset, and practical experience to help them achieve that.
By the time the world pressed pause in 2020, Dianne and I also started talking on the phone daily. It was through those conversations that we realized just how compatible our services and modalities were; how passionate we are about the same issues, and how we strive to create similar experiences.
As we watched so many women around us struggle, we decided to pool our resources to help empower, inspire them, to really help them simplify complexities of their lives, businesses. They already carried so much on their shoulders… Some of them succumbed to the pressures of expectations. Others found themselves trapped in toxic environments when they needed nurturing the most. When time and energy is the one thing that they don’t have in excess, how can we help them feel better, navigate more with greater ease, do more to help make the change in their lives and in the world?
Dianne: I’ll just add that perhaps, keeping it on a pragmatic level, there is so much that we can talk about with regards to this, but it’s really how I see defining success. How we’re living successfully every day is because Sara and I have become masterful at energy and time conservation. It is what we do. It’s how we live and we know how to maximize time and circulate energy.
Every morning, it’s kicking the sheets off the bed knowing that there are thousands and millions of women out there who say the same thing over and over. “I wish I had more time and I wish I had more energy.”
And so we impact the planet by saying, “Hey there, we can support you in this.”
And it’s not about fixing you because some part of you is broken and it’s not about giving you one formula that we think is going to work for everybody. It’s not. It’s actually listening to why it is that women believe they don’t have time or energy and giving them the opportunity to feel supportive and then taking those reasons that she believes she doesn’t have time and energy and offering an array of different solutions and possibilities. And then she decides for herself what she feels is going to work.
And then our other gift and what we have been so successful at, is being accountable. Being devoted, diligent. What made us great athletes is that we were disciplined and we can offer that accountability to the people that we serve every day. We’re going to make that midnight call and say, what are you doing? You blow it out in the mirror, what’s going on? get right with your thoughts. What are you doing? Are you wasting time? Why?
You know, it’s that which has made us successful at what we do and allowed us to move mountains through the midst of COVID and raising children and marriage and divorce and, parenthood and single motherhood, all of it.
Well, because we know how to circulate energy in not just some nice times. How do we know? Maybe it’s just our gifts. Maybe it’s just the practice we’ve put into it. Or a mix of both, but that’s what we do. And we’ve become it too. If anybody knows us, they know we are two women who live life. They know we are not two women who are like, “I’m perfect and happy, and everything’s great…” but we are certainly two women who are like “Okay. Things are shitty and I’m okay with it, it’s all awesome because I’m so grateful to be alive.”
And that’s contagious. And it takes a lot of courage to stand up and say that and to offer that to other women. And that’s what we do.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Dianne: I think you just answered it right there.
You are not broken, but let’s figure out your own way and enjoy every step of the way, even when life gets shitty. Every single human being has a cocktail of strengths, a smorgasbord, if you will. And it’s just understanding what those strengths are and how to align your priorities and preferences of those strengths.
Are you actually doing the activities every day that are aligned? What are you doing that’s going to make you feel really energized and really good as a human? And I think that alone has the biggest impact on the most people, in the quickest amount of time.
And it’s really sobering , especially for sometimes when you’re like, “Holy shit, I’m really good at these things, but yet I spend my entire day doing activities and nothing to do with what I’m actually good at.” And it makes you feel bad about yourself.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Dianne: Well, I am very much looking forward to having breakfast with Megan Rapinoe because she’s just at the precipice of great change. She’s certainly been somebody who, just in the past few days of us providing these interview answers, was really pushing the needle forward to have that settlement for US Women’s soccer. And speaking as a mother of an 11 year old who aspires to be just like her, I do need to sit down with Megan, and have a chat about how she’s going to hold that responsibility and be the leader that my daughter’s generation needs. And I really know that she’s going to require our guidance and our support.
She has a lot of responsibility on the plate and she still wants to be able to. And she deserves what she desires. She deserves to enjoy all of it. And I’m concerned that perhaps she might not be, and that is not okay with me.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this!
Pay discrimination. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirm that men make more than equally qualified and educated women for the same work in nearly every industry. Men are hired at higher salaries upon entry in jobs and the gap grows as they advance in the company. Companies that don’t publish their salary ranges, guide salary decisions with objective criteria, conduct regular pay audits, and evaluate their managers on pay equity practices are making a choice to devalue women’s work.
As part of my series about “the five things we need to do to close the gender wage gap” I had the pleasure of interviewing Noreen Farrel.
Noreen Farrell is the Executive Director of Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), a national non-profit advancing the rights of women and girls through policy reform, litigation, community education, and movement building. Noreen is a nationally recognized leader and innovator on a variety of gender justice issues. She co-founded and chairs the national Equal Pay Today Campaign, working with 30+ organizations in dozens of states and at the federal level to close the gender wage gap for women of color and low-paid workers. She has represented thousands of women and girls in groundbreaking impact litigation to end sex discrimination in school and the workplace, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. Noreen also leads ERA’s various Women’s Agenda Initiatives, including state and national policy reform campaigns to improve the lives of women and girls and their families. She is a graduate of Yale University and University of California Hastings College of the Law, where she was Editor-In-Chief of the Women’s Law Journal.
Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us the “backstory” that brought you to this career path?
Those who know me would say that I was destined to become a gender justice lawyer. You don’t survive a family of seven without the ability to debate and a strong desire to win! Both coupled with an acute awareness at an early age that my parents struggled more than they should. When my mother was widowed at a young age, she cleaned houses, cared for people in their homes, and worked in a nursing home for very little pay as she carried the weight of her entire family. My career has been inspired by her and working women like her across the country who deserve workplace dignity, equal pay, and a fair chance to succeed. Whether before a jury or Congress, I am humbled to be able to fight for them as part of the Equal Rights Advocates team.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this career?
Oscar’s Night, 2015. I could not believe my eyes when Patricia Arquette accepted her Academy Award for her role in Boyhood and said,” “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all.” From my living room, I stood up and cheered with the rest of America not knowing that she would call me a few days later to partner on her call to action. When you see “Patricia Arquette” on your phone screen, you pick up. She told me that others had told her that Equal Rights Advocates was the place to call if she wanted to put her words to action. Later that month, Patricia joined ERA and Senator Hannah Beth Jackson to introduce what was then the strongest state equal pay law in the country. Since passage of the California Fair Pay Act of 2015, 42 states have introduced similar or stronger legislation. 55 million people follow our Equal Pay Day campaigns on social media. Tech industry leaders like Salesforce have joined us. From our living rooms to Congress to workplaces across the country, we are building a movement to be excited about. Thanks, Oscars 2015!
Can you share a story about the funniest or most interesting mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
There are more than I can count, but one of the most embarrassing ones was the court brief I filed that inadvertently included “pubic” instead of public. 16 times. Imagine reading pubic 16 times. Lessons learned? First, don’t trust spell check. Second, our work quality says something about ourselves to the world. Put the time in, own mistakes, ask for feedback, strive for excellence. The people we work on behalf of deserve our best efforts.
Ok let’s jump to the main focus of our interview. Even in 2020, women still earn about 81 cents for every dollar a man makes. Can you explain three of the main factors that are causing the wage gap?
An important point about average “pay gap” numbers is that they don’t tell the story of women workers of color averaging far less (like Black women at 63 cents and Latinas at just 57 cents). I also love to challenge the overuse of the term wage “gap” because it implies some inexplicable occurrence — like a gap in the sidewalk that just happens over time. But let’s be clear: the wage gap exists because of deliberate choices to devalue women’s work.
Three choices to devalue women’s work stand out:
First, pay discrimination. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirm that men make more than equally qualified and educated women for the same work in nearly every industry. Men are hired at higher salaries upon entry in jobs and the gap grows as they advance in the company. Companies that don’t publish their salary ranges, guide salary decisions with objective criteria, conduct regular pay audits, and evaluate their managers on pay equity practices are making a choice to devalue women’s work.
Second, gender bias fuels occupational segregation — trapping women in the lowest paid work and excluding them from the highest paid jobs. Women occupy two-thirds of the nation’s minimum wage jobs; they are also overrepresented in tipped industries paying a subminimum wage. Gender bias is the driver. No matter the industry, wages fall when the number of women rise; wages rise as male representation increases. If we are serious about closing the wage gap, we have to create pathways for women into higher wage jobs and shield them from sexual harassment once they get there. We also have to insist on one fair wage for women workers, by raising the minimum wage and abolishing the subminimum wage for tipped workers.
Third, the wage gap grows when women are forced from the workplace once they become pregnant or caregivers. As COVID-19 made clear, women are bearing the brunt of family care. Women leaving the workforce because of pregnancy/caregiver discrimination, lack of childcare or work flexibility, and/or because they are denied job protected and paid family leave or sick leave are taking a huge hit to their career earnings. Even if they return to the same job, they suffer a 7% reduction in pay for the same work. If we are to close the pay gap, we must provide all workers — men and women and people across genders — access to the support and policies they need to stay employed while caring for families.
Can you share with our readers what your work is doing to help close the gender wage gap?
Equal Rights Advocates co-created the Equal Pay Today campaign to ensure that women and men have the same opportunities and are paid fairly for their work. With our dedicated and diverse partners nationwide, we support working families by prioritizing the needs of Black, Latina, and Native women who have the most to gain from strong fair pay policies. We’ve been able to raise public awareness with our series of Equal Pay Days for Black, Latina, AANHPI, and Native women. With our media and events, we want to start a conversation in every workplace about equal pay. (Sorry, HR.)
Mark your calendars for March 15 for Women’s Equal Pay Day. We’re planning a March Madness-themed week of action to share information about pay gap myths. We’re thrilled to be featured on TBS during the entire month of March for their International Women’s Day campaign to talk about the pay gap.
We’ve also collaborated with organizations across the country to help pass strong equal pay laws like the laws we helped create in California. We’re supporting efforts in Mississippi right now to make sure the equal pay proposal in that state is a good one. We’re making sure the Biden Administration and Congress don’t forget about their promises to working women by fighting to close policy gaps in existing federal laws on equal pay and gender equality. Closer to home, we’re also pushing hard for wage transparency in California with a new bill we introduced last week. The Pay Transparency for Pay Equity Act will require employers to post salary ranges and promotional opportunities, and also publicly report pay data by sex, race, and ethnicy. We can’t fix what we can’t see, so greater transparency in pay data will make it easier for workers to see who has strong equal pay practices and who doesn’t. With this bill, we have a chance to address the fact that California women lost $46 billion in 2020 to this pay gap and people of color lost even more — a whopping $61 billion.
Equal pay makes good business sense by building a strong, stable and diverse workforce. It also makes good corporate responsibility sense. Consumers want their brands to do the right thing. Paying women, especially women of color, what they’ve earned is the right thing.
Can you recommend 5 things that need to be done on a broader societal level to close the gender wage gap. Please share a story or example for each.
On an individual level, the best thing to do is rip off the secrecy. Talk about pay. We worked with an amazing woman, Aileen Rizo, a math education professional, who discovered over lunch that her male colleague with less time on the job was being paid more than her. Because of her case, the Ninth Circuit has held that prior salary cannot be a justification for unequal pay.
As an employer, sunshine is the best policy when it comes to wage equality. Publicize your salary ranges, launch a pay audit so you can see if there are gaps and where they exist, don’t retaliate against workers who want to talk about their salaries. (They’re going to talk about it anyway and you really don’t want them to talk about it in an open letter on Medium.) And please get rid of the Mommy penalty. Working moms have it really tough right now because of the pandemic — don’t make it so hard for a working mom or any working parent to have a flexible schedule so they can respond to their family’s needs. It’s the 21st century — moms and dads need to work. Let’s have workplaces that work *with* them, not against.
On the policy front, let’s raise the minimum wage, abolish the subminimum wage for tipped workers, ensure paid leave and access to childcare for all, and fill gaps in existing fair pay laws. Let’s do it in the states and at the federal level, because our rights should not depend on our zip code!
Is that five things? I lost count.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Let’s join together to end pay disparities faced by women and others — and end poverty. Closing the gender wage gap would lower working women’s poverty rates, especially for single mothers, in every state and help women and families achieve greater economic security. Indeed, if working women received equal pay with comparable men — men who are of the same age, have the same level of education, work the same number of hours, and have the same urban/rural status — poverty for working women would be reduced by more than 40 percent! Equal pay for working women would increase our annual average earnings from $41,402 to $48,326, adding $541 billion in wage and salary income to the U.S. economy. To go further, we eliminate the subminimum wage (as low as $2.13 per hour) paid to tipped workers in many states. States that have eliminated the tipped minimum wage have less poverty among workers in key tipped industries.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have two quotes by inspiring women of color that I live by: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free” by civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” by poet activist June Jordan. We have to defy the myth of scarcity, that someone must lose in order for someone else to win. It is, in fact, the opposite. There is no gender justice without racial, LGBTQ+, immigrant justice. As much as forces try to pit communities against each other, we are not free until every person in this country has what they need to thrive and find joy. We need to embrace a sense of abundance, knowing that everyone wins when everyone wins. I love pairing it with June Jordan’s quote because reaching solutions to our country’s problems can feel daunting. But we make the most progress when we stop waiting for others and remember our own power — as workers, consumers, family breadwinners, and voters. Nothing can stop us if we own that.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
When I think about women who have owned their power, I am inspired by Melinda Gates and McKenzie Scott. Over some chocolate croissants, I would love to sit down with these visionary philanthropists and strategists for gender justice. Collectively, they have given billions of dollars to great causes. In so doing, they have fostered an abundance mindset allowing activists to think big to drive change. I always say, we have to lead with the vision of what we need and want and deserve, not what we “think we can get.” I would love to thank them for validating that with their investment in the movement.
This was really meaningful! Thank you so much for your time.
Female Founders: Saskia Ketz of Mojomox on the Five Things You Need to Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
You have to let go of perfectionism. As a designer, I love tinkering until something is exactly right, but that’s the wrong way to go about building a business. You want to launch quickly so you can learn from what you put out in the world rather than letting perfectionism hold you back from ever getting started. This ties back to the product I’m creating, too: I think it’s better for startups to create “good enough” brands on their own rather than wait until they can pay for an expensive designer before launching.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders,” I had the pleasure of interviewing Saskia Ketz, the founder of Mojomox, an online logo builder that allows startups and creators on tight budgets to create dynamic, professional looking brand identities. No stranger to starting companies, Saskia also runs MMarch NY, a branding agency that’s worked with world-class brands like Netflix, Ikea, and Timberland. She’s also the founder and editor-in-chief of A Women’s Thing, a publication reshaping what society’s views of “women’s things” are, and is passionate about helping women see new possibilities for themselves.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I’ve always been passionate about design — it taps into my love for strategy and creativity. After getting my MA in design and visual communications, I took a traditional job at an agency and quickly found that wasn’t the path for me. I wanted to work on my own things and control my own schedule. That’s what led me to become a founder.
At first, that meant starting my own agency. I loved choosing my clients and have worked on some amazing projects over the past eight years for everyone from big brands like Netflix to startups with really interesting missions. The work was inspiring, but I felt like something was missing.
For one, I felt drawn to the idea of building a product. I’ve always been analytical, and the thought of creating something technical from the ground up was appealing. I was also tiring of the high-touch nature of agency work and hoping to create something that would provide passive income in the long run.
At the same time, I started offering free “office hours” calls, and a lot of startups would use this opportunity to pick my brain. The work these founders were doing was inspiring, and I always felt pulled to help them, but I didn’t want to cut my agency prices to meet their startup budgets. Moreover, I didn’t think they should be spending a lot on design work. Good branding design is rooted in strategy, and early-stage companies still have a lot of experimenting and pivoting to do before they understand their strategy.
That’s when I saw the opportunity: to build a product that solved this problem for early-stage founders. I wanted to equip them with my design knowledge in an empowering way and give them tools to easily create design assets to get them off the ground until they have the strategy (and budgets) to hire someone.
And Mojomox was born. We currently offer DIY tools for creating logos, color palettes, font systems, and basic marketing assets — with more on the way!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
I’ve been so pleasantly surprised with how generous early users are with feedback. Founders have tight budgets and even tighter schedules, and I always assumed if they didn’t like something about my product, they would simply find an alternative.
But I’ve experienced the opposite: Early users see the potential in my product and want to help me better help them. The first time this happened, I opened my inbox to an entire essay from one of my users sharing their story, their needs, and what I could improve about the product. I was so shocked and grateful, and even more so when this continued happening with other users.
It’s helped me feel more open to asking users for feedback, which has become the most interesting part of the founder journey. When you step out of the room where you’re building something by yourself and see how other people react to the work, you learn about their actual problems — and when you solve their actual problems, they’re more likely to pay for your product and recommend it to others.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I started building Mojomox, I wanted to create something different than existing DIY logo apps, which often integrate icons for a brand’s industry that a professional designer would never use. Instead, I focused our tool on creating wordmarks: a simple logo made with a brand name in a clean typeface without any imagery.
Quickly, the feedback started rolling in: My users liked the wordmarks, but they also wanted some kind of logo to go alongside it. After fighting it and fighting it, I finally caved and decided to add a logo feature (though one that focuses on simple, graphic shapes rather than illustrative icons).
I had to laugh at how quickly I built what I said I wouldn’t, but I’m starting to understand that’s such a big part of the founder journey. You like to think you’re the expert and that you always have the right ideas, but really your users are the experts in what they need and want. It goes back to receiving that feedback openly and making real business decisions from it.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I would not be here without the support of my husband, Darshan Somashekar (and not for the reasons you might expect). He’s founded two companies — EasyBib, which he sold to Chegg, and now gaming company Solitaired — in addition to advising many more, so he’s very familiar with this world and has become a de facto business partner.
We have a daily routine where we sit outside with coffee and talk for an hour. While we’re chatting about personal stuff, too, he almost always gives me a new perspective on a challenge I’m facing in my business. All in all, he probably spends a few hours of his spare time every week helping me build my company, and I’m so grateful for it.
Whether it’s a formal business partner, a mentor, or just someone you’re close to who’s gone down this path before, I hope every founder can find someone this supportive to help on their journey.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience, what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
This is such a big question with a lot of complex answers, but two things really stand out to me. One, on an individual level, is just that women generally still struggle with confidence compared to men. So many women I talk to feel like they need more expertise and experience to start a company than men do. I’ve had to work on showing confidence in my ideas and decisions. A few things that have helped are finding other female founders to share experiences with and getting good people in my corner to support me.
On a societal level, the lack of equity in childcare and other caregiving is still a huge barrier. I see so many female founders who either have to step back from their company once they have kids or aren’t able to grow at the rate they’d like because of the time and energy spent tending to their families. Worse are the women who never even try starting companies because they can’t imagine having children without paid maternity leave, healthcare, and other benefits employers offer. This isn’t a new conversation, but there’s still a lot of work to be done in solving it.
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
It would be great if the government would step in with things like universal parental leave, healthcare, and affordable childcare to help women feel like they don’t have to choose between building a family and building a company.
Until then, it comes down to having tough conversations on an individual level, particularly if you’re having a child with a male partner. Before you have kids, sit down, address the amount of work it’s going to add and get tactical about how you’ll divvy that up: The baby wakes up X times a night — who’s going to get up? Each feeding takes an hour — who’s going to do that?
Most men don’t realize how much work raising a child takes because they don’t talk about it. It’s important to have this conversation from a place of valuing both of your time and work equally so that you don’t end up with the bulk of the responsibility. I could have done without having kids, but my husband wanted them, meaning we had to negotiate what that would look like so I wouldn’t have to sacrifice my career.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
People who start companies do it to solve the problems they see in the world, to make a dent in the universe. There are so many issues that will just never get tackled by men because they don’t have these same problems: women’s health, childcare, and other duties women bear the brunt of, like education and senior care. Even for problems that male founders are tackling, women will undoubtedly bring creative solutions to the table since they see the issues from a different perspective.
This doesn’t just relate to needing more female founders, but to needing more BIPOC founders, more LGBTQIA+ founders, and so on. If we want a diversity of solutions to the diversity of challenges in the world, we need a diversity of founders to do it.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
It’s not glamorous! So many female founders share their highlight reels online: going to snazzy events, speaking at major conferences, getting featured in big publications. What they don’t often show is working all hours of the day, muddling through dull operational things, and all the other really tough things about being a founder.
You do have more control over your time than when you’re working for a traditional employer, but you’re giving so much of your time to your business that it doesn’t always feel that way. Still, it’s worth it if you have a passion for your mission and are excited to build something from the ground up.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
The short answer to this is that anyone can be a founder if you really want to do it and are ready for the work it will entail.
The longer answer is that it depends on your work preferences. If you want to get really good at doing just one thing — for example, if I wanted to spend all my time creating brand identities — I think it’s better to work a traditional job. Obviously, your responsibilities will shift throughout your career, but generally you’ll be highly focused on one area of expertise.
As a founder, though, you have to do all the things, even if you don’t know how to do them or don’t like doing them. For instance, I’m more excited about the product side of things, but building a successful business is 80% marketing. While I’d rather be working on the product roadmap, I often have to spend a full day doing media outreach or SEO content creation. If you don’t think you can push through tasks you don’t want to do in order to achieve your vision, being a founder probably isn’t the path for you.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
You have to let go of perfectionism. As a designer, I love tinkering until something is exactly right, but that’s the wrong way to go about building a business. You want to launch quickly so you can learn from what you put out in the world rather than letting perfectionism hold you back from ever getting started. This ties back to the product I’m creating, too: I think it’s better for startups to create “good enough” brands on their own rather than wait until they can pay for an expensive designer before launching.
Everything will be different than what you think. You can never truly prepare to be a founder because everything will play out differently than you anticipated, from what your users actually want to how long it takes you to complete tasks (hint: always longer than you think). Don’t waste your time planning too much — instead, as we Germans like to say, you just have to jump into cold water and figure it out as you go.
You really can’t do it all. I hate to say it, but it’s true. This relates both to how you balance your business with your personal life, but also to how you balance other projects and ideas you have while growing your business. I love having my hand in multiple projects at once, but I’ve had to step back from my work at A Women’s Thing and start saying no to agency clients so I can put as much energy as possible into my business.
You have to be the face of your company. You don’t just get to build your vision — you have to share it with the world, too. Depending on your personality, you may love this, but it’s not my favorite thing and I have to push through it regularly to write about my work or do interviews like this. There’s no getting around having to put yourself out there to put your company out there.
There are so many business basics to learn. I wish someone could have just dumped the knowledge about accounting, financing, organizational strategy, and the like into my brain. There’s so much to learn, and it’s not the most fun part of building a business (at least for me), but until you can hire someone to help you with it, you will have to spend time figuring it out.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
Design and branding may seem frivolous to some, but it’s critical for business success — especially in today’s online world. Hiring a professional designer can be cost-prohibitive for early-stage companies, so Mojomox is all about making good branding more accessible. I hope the work I’m doing will help remove this as a barrier for other founders — particularly women. I love getting to use my design knowledge to help others succeed.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I would love for there to be more support for alternative ways of working and living. Wouldn’t it be cool if our education systems made it easy to travel at a young age so that we all could learn more about other people in the world? Wouldn’t it be great if our healthcare wasn’t tied to our employers, so people could choose to work how they like? Wouldn’t it be inspiring if societal norms didn’t push one way of starting a family, but modeled all kinds of ways to build community and live a fulfilling home life?
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Honestly, nobody comes to mind because I’ve always been very bold about just reaching out to people I want to meet. Even your heroes are more normal than you think — if you want to meet someone, just ask, and don’t be afraid to be a little persistent. It all goes back to having confidence.
A while ago, I really wanted to chat with Seth Godin, so I reached out to him a few times and even went so far as sending him a handwritten letter. He ended up inviting me to a private event he was hosting on the future of publishing, which was really cool.
At this point, the people who inspire me most are historical women who lived impactful lives despite the societal oppression they faced. For instance, it would be amazing to go back to Medieval times and talk to Hildegard of Bingen, who was a philosopher, writer, composer, and visionary of her time. I would love to find out what inspired her to do so many great things in one lifespan.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
