Unleash the Girls

Between our gender, my business plan, some family financing, and a small local bank, a loan to manufacture and sell a bra was granted to two women with little to no business experience. Miracles do happen!

Except it was no miracle. It took vision, hard work, courage, and perseverance.

It is my experience that one cannot successfully grow an idea into a reality that manifests as a real-world business without also growing as much or more personally. By its very nature growth is change. In order to both anticipate  and respond to my growing enterprise, I too had to grow and change. I had to confront, challenge, and work at my own stuff, my own baggage—an opportunity handed to me almost daily because my business partner and I had such differing values and operating styles.

These days, the issue of women and power is a sociopolitical hot topic. In my business partnership and the primarily-male industry in which the Jogbra business operated, I came to think quite a bit about the subject of power and my own perceptions of power or lack of it. What role did character play? Inner strength? Was being a strong person the same as being a powerful person?

Power doesn’t have a gender. Strength is an acquired trait that is honed by adversity and challenge. Living with and through our vulnerabilities is a vital part of the process if we are to successfully transform and grow.