16/08/2026
Coming Out with women in Business. She Rises Collective event !!
What does it mean when you look back on an event from three years ago, and you know that you were an established business woman and still attending events, now, you come across people you haven’t met before. How do we, as women, support our younger selves by making sure we don’t undersell ourselves?
When we meet new people, we’re not coming out in business. Our network isn’t shrinking, our merits and achievements aren’t reduced in size, yet I find so often in myself and in other women this constriction of setting intermediate boundaries within groups.
Holding your resume front and centre in your own mind as you mingle with networking crowds is obviously a tactic to anticipate confidence and the expectation of guidance towards possible new friends, and being attentive is a skill. But if being attentive requires a deletion of everything in the forefront of my frontal lobes, then that’s when I have to put my foot down. Saying “no” emotionally to the type of person that is so full of exuberance for their own experience while completely ignoring the witnessing that maybe is an aspect of their inflation of the moment.
Saying “no” to witnessing someone else’s complete undoing around public speaking and their moment on stage feels to me like nothing more than a swampy river that I need to cross without getting eaten by a crocodile.
Their undoing starts out as your opportunity to show empathy. You listen kindly and with warmth. You begin in the most thoughtful way to project that moment in the conversation when they will inject something that lets you off the hook. I mean, the investment in the meeting and chat can be anything, and usually works out wonderfully because you’re there to meet and chat and network with like-minded people.
But you start to realise there’s no interjection coming and that you’re standing there not as the important, stimulating, interesting person you came to be and to meet, but a prop. This person talking has only your witness, your imagination and possibly your heart. You look into their eyes, only lip service returns as their guide to help you along. You feel the sense of time, a clock and a wall. How you can see the texture of their clothes and the thickness of their guided transactional steps taking them to the event.
But they have no queue. They are the holders of valour when you need bravery.
They are stoking the flames of women’s rights and powers with their emotions so clearly not within the room you have met because they are formulating the way they have been promoted, not as promotion but as victory.
When you’re wanting strength and future momentum and it’s the truth to your life, just remember that in that moment when the person you’ve never met claims to be giving you an ear, no one is there to say well done to all your achievements. Give yourself a massive pat on the back because you could be much stronger, wiser and wealthier than the truth of your emotional guidance. Your closest contender could be suffering a pet death or someone recently diagnosed with cancer.
It’s so hard to tightly squeeze those Kegel-exercised muscles together and just bear through when no one has actually listened to your junket story of how your business rose to success out of the ashes of despair. But you will live again. You will have stepped through the paradigm of dignity so that the next opportunity shines.
There’s something interesting in the tension between being genuinely attentive to other women and disappearing yourself in the process.
Perhaps this is one of the quiet lessons of business that nobody puts on the networking agenda. We are told to connect, collaborate, support and listen. We are encouraged to make space for everyone else, and rightly so. But making space does not mean vacating the room.
You can listen without becoming invisible.
You can acknowledge another woman’s fear without adopting it.
You can celebrate someone else’s success without placing your own achievements beneath theirs.
And you can walk away from a conversation without deciding that you have somehow failed at networking.
Coming out in business, perhaps, is not about announcing yourself. It is not about walking into a room with a louder voice, a longer resume or a perfectly rehearsed story. It might simply be about remembering that you were already there.
You were already building.
You were already learning.
You were already surviving the moments that nobody in that room knows anything about.
The woman you were three years ago deserves some recognition too. She walked into rooms without knowing who she would meet. She made mistakes. She probably said yes when she wanted to say no. She listened when she wanted to speak. She gave away pieces of herself because she was still learning the difference between connection and obligation.
And maybe the woman standing in that room today doesn’t need to do that anymore.
You understand how things work and your presence has shined through without even serving the explorations of the past.
So, well done.
You don’t have to prove that you belong.
You don’t have to shrink your achievements to make someone else comfortable.
And you certainly don’t have to disappear from your own story just because someone else has started telling theirs.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do in business is simply remain present as yourself.
That is not coming out.
That is remembering you never went away.
