Leading Our Way

CONCLUSION: IT STARTS WITH EMPATHY

WRITING THIS BOOK HAS been an unforgettable journey.

I got to meet, debate, learn from, and learn with trailblazing women. Women who confided in me their stories, their failures, their fears, their hopes, their vision for a different and better world.

And putting it into words, bringing it all together, trying to do it justice was no easy task.

To get started, it required optimism: believing that such a project should and could become reality, believing that impressive women would take time to speak to me, not to shine, but to question and explore their journeys and redefine leadership models while doing so. Once in it, it required curiosity, meaning the capacity to listen, uncover, discover others, and then create something innovative with all I had collected through hours of chats between Paris, London, Brussels, New York, Denver and Istanbul. Listening not to judge, not to respond, but to understand, to learn—which I once again realised is not as easy as it seems, in an era where we often talk to share our story rather than to learn from others, where we debate to be right, to prevail, rather than to understand different perspectives. And it required more consistency than I thought it would: putting my energy and bringing my ambition to the table at every step of the way, in each email, in each interview, in each follow‐up comment, after each “no”, each obstacle, each challenge. Making sure that despite the setbacks, I would continue moving ...