‘And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom…
I share my bio at the bottom of this page. But I’d first like to share with you an element of my story in a desire to help you understand some of the history behind this initiative and the motivation for my work. The personal nature of my story is not important. What is more significant is the pattern it may represent for women in the collective field of our experience. What I have come to realise is that my challenges are not really personal to me and that because of our collective history, they are more impersonal in nature. So many of us share common patterns of difficulty in relation to life as well as common desires.
My own inspiration to support women to find their authentic power and bring it to life as an expression of their leadership, came from my own personal experience of not being able to access my own authentic power.
There was a particular ‘pain point’ in my life about 16 years ago when I came to the end of my first career. Having spent around 14 years thoroughly enjoying my career and the development it brought me, things gradually began to change.
Without going into the details of the story and exactly how it all occurred, I can perhaps just say that I somehow ended up having the experience of hitting against the glass ceiling of the prevailing culture of the business that I was in. It was as if there wasn’t room for me to express the creativity, gifts and leadership that felt natural to me. I felt I was being somehow constricted by my role and unable to influence my environment because of the pressure that I felt to have to show up a certain way and deliver on certain tasks that no longer inspired me. All this is pretty ironic as this was a business that I had co-founded and co-owned. It became very painful after a while and what I seemed to be experiencing was a lack of ability to express who I really was in the environment I was in. I couldn’t be ME and it felt as though my creativity, my values, my power, my principles and my perspectives weren’t being valued or respected.
So I began to wilt – I shut down my creativity, the joy drained out of me, my relationships with others became superficial and stifled and I was living in a kind of inner prison unable to show up in my authenticity and power.
Eventually the pain of staying in that dynamic and not knowing how to find my power, became greater than the fear that I held of stepping off the cliff of my comfort zone, into the unknown. And then, one day came when I had a kind of epiphany. A moment of stillness came over me and a very clear energy inside me told me I needed to leave. My head fought like crazy at the insanity of leaving my own successful business. But my heart was clear. And so my fear turned to courage and left the office by the end of the same day.
This was really the beginning of my journey. Because ultimately what I learned from that experience was that I wasn’t going to find my power by changing my environment. All along, I may have been hitting against the external glass ceiling and an environment that wasn’t conducive to my growth and evolution. But more importantly, I realised I was right up against the internal glass ceiling that I had created and that only I could be responsible for dismantling.
Embracing this truth is what gave me access to my power again. I was no longer a victim and I needed to take responsibility for this experience and see the power I had given away to my environment. And so my journey over the last 16 years has been one of finding and dismantling the inner structures that created the glass ceiling on my own life….. the natural bi-product of which has been and still is, the emergence of a more authentic, purposeful and empowered sense of myself.
And what really helped and still helps me on my own journey is having others around me that I know have faith in me, who care about me and my vision, who hold me accountable and who can often relate to my experience because they share it in some way themselves.
The gift from all of this personal experience was the passion and motivation that sustains me in my work now. I wanted to become the support that I needed but couldn’t find. I wanted to support other women on their journey of dismantling their own inner glass ceiling and finding the authentic power that lights up their leadership and passion to contribute their unique gifts to the world.
So I began to follow a long journey of my own personal, spiritual and professional development and 9 years ago I set up this initiative, Women at the Heart of Leadership, as a resource for our personal and collective evolution as women and to foster the emergence of a healthier paradigm of leadership that embraces feminine values and principles in balance with the masculine ones. And it’s been an amazing journey through which I’ve had the privilege of supporting and getting to know hundreds of women on their own personal journeys.
Over those years we’ve learned a huge amount about the themes that are present for women. And we’ve learned that it’s not all personal… so much of what we experience as women is collective and shared by many. Probably one of the most common things I hear in my work, is:
“I’m so comforted to know I’m not alone.”
And so this is our platform now as we begin to share our message with more womem, that:
Possibly the most important work we can do, as feminine leaders, is to dismantle our own inner glass ceiling, to restructure the way we see and relate to ourselves in order to access our authentic power…. so that we can realise the true potential we hold and make the contributions that life is calling us to make.
So if you’d like to join us on some part of this journey and explore more about what it might mean for you to become a Women at the Heart of Leadership on your own journey of transformation, please go ahead and join us FREE by putting your name in the sign up box on this page. We’ll make sure you don’t miss out on all the unique resources we are offering to support your journey.
Thank you… and I look forward to meeting you along the way!
Warm wishes,
Joey
Joey Walters’ Bio
Joey is a transformational leadership facilitator, teacher and coach dedicated to fostering the emergence of heart-centred, Evolutionary Leaders, grounded in the more ‘feminine’ attributes of intuitive wisdom, relatedness and care for life. She is a director of UK based leadership consultancy Dancehammer and in 2003 founded the Women at the Heart of Leadership initiative following her calling to provide a safe and supportive Learning Community in which women could realise their authentic power, purpose and potential as Feminine Leaders and agents of cultural evolution. Since then, Joey has coached and facilitated hundreds of women in all walks of life to restore their innate feminine strengths and engage the transformation that empowers them to become authentic, generative leaders and bring their unique contributions to life in personal as well as professional contexts.
Joey’s compassionate, intuitive and insightful approach weaves her practical business experience with many years of professional, personal and spiritual development including 10 years training with Earth Wisdom teachers from the Ehama Institute in New Mexico. She is an Interfaith Minister and Spiritual Counsellor, ordained in 2002 by the UK Interfaith Seminary and a practioner in Organisational and Family Systemic Constellations.
Joey is a proud mother of two young boys and lives in Scotland with her life partner.
