Creating Community with Female Entrepreneurs

Society teaches women to make themselves small. For one evening, I took up space alongside a group of amazing, strong female entrepreneurs. Suddenly, I didn't feel so alone.

I am part of a cohort sponsored by my county small business incubator. Every other week, I meet with other entrepreneurs to learn about a new business topic from someone in the field.

Stabbing at paper plates piled high with chicken and rice, we started last night’s meeting as we always do – a speaker introduced herself to the room with a PowerPoint and her credentials.

The difference in this meeting: we were in a room much smaller than the large conference room we normally met in. A modest projector replaced the usual wall-sized presenter screen. Normally confined to seated rows, we gathered around a long table, facing each other.

And by coincidence, the group of entrepreneurs still attending the free class were all women. The presenter was also a woman.

She reached the slide about interviewing. It’s important to sell yourself, she said. Murmurs of agreement rose through the room.

Have you ever heard of imposter syndrome? The presenter asked. That question released the floodgates; my fellow female entrepreneurs piped up with their feelings of failure and diminishment. We felt like we weren’t good enough. We felt like we didn’t deserve the success we had.

I realized we all felt the same thing – we were afraid to talk about our success. To speak our ambitions out loud felt taboo; society has told us not to take up too much space, to not be too loud, to not be too boastful.

But then we started talking. One woman built her trophy store from the ground up, using only referrals and word-of-mouth to sustain a business of 18 years. Another woman spoke of the time another business owner called her extraordinary. Another woman immigrated from another country, learning English and adapting to a new culture as she built her career. Another woman passed around signed copies of her recently published book.

As the meeting went on, our voices became louder. We spoke up, a cacophony that crescendoed with our collective ambition. We held communion. We created community. We were a collective of women finding their voices in a society that silenced us for centuries.

And our voices deserve to be heard. By leaping into entrepreneurship, we were taking a risk that many are too scared to take. We made mistakes along the way, but as women so often do, we let our mistakes overshadow our accomplishments and asterisked our accomplishments with reasons for why our success was only an accident.

But for one evening, we boasted without abandon. We took pride in ourselves. We dropped the asterisks.

And for one evening, I didn’t feel so alone. These women provided the comfort that can only come from a community of like-minded people. Because while I am grateful for the emotional and financial support from my family and loved ones, I’m operating outside the 9-5 script that I grew up with and am still surrounded by. And that can feel lonely. And terrifying. And like I’m doing something wrong.

But this community of women reminded me that it’s ok to be human. It’s ok to make mistakes. I can also take pride in my accomplishments without guilt. Shining my own light won’t dim others’; the world doesn’t have to be a lonely place. I just have to find the right people to step into the sunlight with me.