Hello beautiful soul
I need the current you to take a back seat on this one baby, because I want to speak to the future you this week.
Because I want to talk about HERoism today.
Not the kind with a cape. Not the kind that requires you to be fearless or unbroken or any of the other things we have been sold as the price of being worth something.
The kind that lives in the word itself.
The word hero comes from the ancient Greek — meaning one of divine ancestry, one who protects, one who watches over. And right there in the middle of it, hiding in plain sight —
HER.
Except we were never meant to be the ones who needed saving.
We were always meant to be the ones who protect.
I did not always know I was living a heroic life. For a long time I just thought I was surviving one.
I have been married twice.
The first marriage happened to me, but was a 12 year abusive relationship. I was so young and so terrified and so far from knowing who I was that there was no way I could have fully understood what I was walking into or what I was walking away from. Looking back I see my leaving that situation for what it was — nothing short of a miracle. But I could not have named it that at the time. At the time I was just a woman trying to get out of something she did not have the language for yet.
The second marriage I chose with my whole heart. Madly, absolutely in love, desperate to make it work. That marriage brought me to America. And it did not work out.
But here is what I understand now that I could not have understood then.
My first marriage happened to me. My second marriage was my chance to understand the pattern completely.
And I am so grateful for it. Genuinely, deeply, not-performing-it grateful.
Because there is a woman who only gets to be born through an experience like that. A woman who has been to the bottom and found out what she is made of down there. A woman who has had to choose herself not once, not in a grand gesture, but in microscopic moments of sovereignty, over and over again, in the dark, when no one was watching and it would have been so much easier not to.
That woman has a straight spine. She knows who she is.
She is a HERo.
And I just know that this might be real for you too. The greatest challenges you have faced have really been to prepare you for the BIG life that is coming your way.
In the last five years I have developed an unshakeable faith in something greater than myself.
I do not always love the methods if I am honest — I have wrestled with that plenty. But I trust it. And I genuinely believe that second marriage was part of how that faith was forged for me. The fire was the whole point. The woman on the other side of it was always who I was supposed to become.
I was at an event recently where I heard one of my teachers, Jai Dev speak about what he calls the HERoic life. He talked about how we spend our early years flooded by our own sense of self — and then life slowly reveals that we are not quite who we thought we were. And that seeing that reflected in nature's own rhythms, in the cycles and the seasons and the constant movement of things, is a relief. It means you are not going crazy. It means look at the brilliance of what is actually happening.
That landed for me because it is exactly how I have come to see my own story and the story of many women I have had the privilege to work with.
Not as something that happened to me. As something that was happening for me. Slowly, cyclically, seasonally — the same way everything that is alive moves through its own transformation.
Jai Dev also talks about two wings.
- The first wing is the inner experience — the stillness, the depth, the coming home to yourself.
- The second wing — the one that makes the whole thing actually fly — is our sensitivity to others. Because just as we are trying to feel okay, every living thing around us is trying to feel okay too. And when the inner work is fused with a genuinely open heart — not as decoration but as the thing everything else only works because of — that is when it becomes whole.
That is the work I am trying to do. Both wings. Always.
The vision I hold for every woman I work with — and for myself — is this. That we are safe. Serene. Sacred. Sublime. And therefore surrendered.
Surrendered not to another person. Not to a system that was not built for us. Not to a story someone else wrote about who we are supposed to be.
Surrendered to ourselves. To something greater. To the version of us that was there before the world got its hands on us and decided it knew better.
That is the HERoic life.
Not the absence of pain. Not the avoidance of hard chapters. But the willingness to move through them — with as much grace as we can muster and more honesty than feels comfortable — and come out the other side still standing. Still open. Still reaching a hand back for the woman behind us who is still in the middle of her own chapter and cannot quite see the end of it yet.
The word hero has HER at its root because she always was.
The protector. The watcher. The one of divine ancestry who was never waiting to be saved — she was busy becoming the person other women would one day point to and say — she showed me it was possible.
That is you.
You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not the sum of the hardest things that have happened to you.
You are a HERo in the middle of a HERoic life.
And the woman you are becoming because of it?
She is extraordinary.
Women Who Lead exists for her. For the woman who can feel herself becoming something new and wants a room full of other women who understand what that actually costs and what it actually gives.
I just launched the BLOOM Career Freedom Assessment to get you started — a free 10-minute tool that tells you exactly which of the Five Career Freedoms is most blocked for you right now and what your clearest next move is. I would love your feedback on it. Try it here.
This is so much more than leadership development. This is the foundation for the rest of your life.
Rooting for you always
Ruth x
Ps. Ness and I are hosting one more "Find your boldest voice" roundtable this Friday (17th) and we'd love to have you with us.
Spaces are limited to just 12, but I love how the right people just seem to end up in the right room together.
It's a space for real talk with other women about how the year is actually going:
- What are you most proud of?
- What are some of the areas you wish were different?
- Where do you want to use your voice and presence more boldly?
Come and join us here: https://luma.com/8xlxzoap
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