Reader,
When I was little, I read The Ugly Duckling.
There’s something quiet devastating about that story. The duckling isn’t actually ugly. She isn’t broken. She isn’t less capable.
She’s just in the wrong pond.
But when you’re in the wrong pond long enough, you can start to believe the story the world is telling about you. That you're too much, or too intense, or too ambitious. That you feel too much, you're too emotional, too awkward, too quiet, or too loud (at the same time).
The world is full of stories about what women "should" be and how they "should" behave. And over time, this starts to erode our ability to hear ourselves and fully see ourselves.
For years, I moved through work spaces feeling slightly off.
Happy hours felt awkward and uncomfortable. Networking felt silly. Leadership questions felt like they were dancing around political questions folks were too afraid to say out loud.
On the outside, everything was fine. I wasn't failing. I wasn't floundering. In many respects, I was highly successful.
But I wasn't fully myself.
Success doesn't feel like success when you're always adjusting, adapting, or editing yourself so you're more palatable.
Softening certain edges. Sharpening others. Compressing parts of myself to make the room more comfortable.
Then, when I became a mother while working at a tech-backed startup (and then became a founder within a year) that misfit feeling intensified. My ambition didn’t go away. My hunger to build didn’t shrink. My creativity didn't die on the vine.
But I was left alone as a mother, with little guidance that made sense to me.
And suddenly I was faced with all sorts of assumptions about who I was going to become.
Because people have strong opinions about what you're supposed to be as a woman—and what roles you're supposed to play.
What was missing?
There was no room for me to explore my own identity shift. To blossom into the next version of myself. To shed past layers and reveal the new me. To become more of who I am.
Instead, I felt force-fit into cultural tropes about what “mothers” were “supposed” to do.
I didn’t need to be fixed. I needed a different flock.
Showing back up to work as a new mother—vulnerable, raw, sleep-deprived, but still me—I found I had no more tolerance for rooms that required me to fragment myself.
I turned to women’s groups, looking to belong. Would I fit in here?
I searched for mastermind groups, leadership groups, but I just couldn’t find a place that really saw me. This pain of not belonging felt—at first— like burning inwards with shame.
Most masterminds I encountered were narrowly focused on productivity, profit, or scale — without connecting to the depth and heart of the mission. Without acknowledging feminism, family systems, aging, grief, identity shifts. Without understanding that leadership is not just about output — it’s about expanding beyond past versions of yourself; about facing challenges; about darkness and grief; about brilliance and light; about the full arc of becoming.
For me (and this is obviously a much longer story), motherhood woke up a fury and a hunger that had always been simmering, but was just out of reach.
Things that I had tolerated before? No longer. People who had bullsh*t garbage to try to sell me? Blocked.
I was hungry to write, to express myself, to harness my fury and my rage, to evolve.
Few spaces made room for the whole swan.
Even fewer spaces made room for swans to find each other and be together.
So I built what I couldn’t find.
That’s where the Wise Women’s Council began, ten years ago.
A room for women who had outgrown the pond they were handed.
A place where thoughtful leaders could gather, think out loud, challenge each other, and grow.
The Wise Women’s Council is my answer to that hunger.
The Wise Women’s Council is a place for me to bring women together to show up as we are, to tell the truth, to honor our becoming, and to allow ourselves space for transformation.
Inside WWC, we hold space to honor your intellect and your intuition. We value your ambition and your right to deep rest. We talk about building wealth and building wisdom. We understand that loneliness is symptom of a broken culture of community, and we refuse to let you carry it alone.
The ugly duckling story was never about transformation.
It was about belonging.
So hold on, dear one. Hold on, because you will find spaces where you belong.
If you are hungry, tired, angry, confused, overwhelmed, sad, eager, optimistic, nervous, excited, or any-to-all-of-it... keep looking to find your place.
“The duckling of the story is symbolic of the wild nature, which, when pressed into circumstances of little nurture, instinctively strives to continue no matter what. The wild nature instinctively holds on and holds out, sometimes with style, other times with little grace, but holds on nevertheless,” writes Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run With The Wolves. “And thank goodness for that. For the wildish woman, duration is one of her greatest strengths.”
Leadership isn’t about learning more tactics.
It’s about allowing yourself the space to grow, to release, to emerge, and to become.
It’s about finally finding the water where you can stretch your wings.
Women have been suppressed and isolated for so long we’ve forgotten how essential it is to be in rooms together.
When you are with the right people—when you are around people who get it—you will light up in a way that you never have before.
As Estés writes, “When an individual's particular kind of soulfulness [...] is surrounded by psychic acknowledgement and acceptance, that person feels life and power as never before.”
“The other important aspect of the story is that when an individual's particular kind of soulfulness, which is about an instinctual and a spiritual identity, is surrounded by psychic acknowledgement and acceptance, that person feels life and power as never before.”
When we come together in rooms like this, we remember who we really are.
Every Spring and Fall, we open doors for women to join us in The Wise Women’s Council.
This week, we opened the doors again.
I hope you’ll take a look at what we’re about and consider joining us.
If this story resonates with you, there are a few ways to explore further:
Warmest,
SKP
PS: Also, whether or not you join WWC, please keep searching for the answers to your callings. Keep searching for the right groups and the places you belong. Trust yourself. You belong. You are meant to be in rooms with people who can see you fully. Keep searching, keep believing in yourself, and keep writing down what’s on your heart.
“When an individual's particular kind of soulfulness, which is about an instinctual and a spiritual identity, is surrounded by psychic acknowledgement and acceptance, that person feels life and power as never before.”
DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTES
|
