The Foundation of Self

Someone once told me, "Coralee, I wish I had your confidence."

I remember not quite knowing what to say. Because the truth is, it never came from how I saw myself, it came from how many times I pushed myself, quietly, when nobody was watching. Speaking up as a little girl when it felt safer to stay quiet. Making the hard call in a business meeting. Saying what I believed at tables where I wasn't sure my voice belonged there at all. Getting uncomfortable, because I'd learned, over and over, that discomfort passes. Saying "I don't know, but I'll figure it out," and meaning it. That is how confidence is built.

None of it came from feeling ready. It came from moving anyway.

For twenty-five years I built things, really beautiful things; businesses, brands, teams, cultures inside other people's companies. I loved it. I was good at it. And somewhere in all those years of building for everyone else, I started to understand something I couldn't unlearn: how a leader shows up in a room is the thing that actually decides the outcome. Not the plan or the polish. Definitely not the strategy. It was the behavior underneath it, the relationships and the confidence of leaders that defined the outcome. It wasn’t about performative job titles or the story we told ourselves. It was about people...always people.

Then came the time in my life that quietly took me apart. A time where resiliency was the strength I was given but didn't really want. My brother passed away. Devastating. Sibling loss is often overlooked. My business partner and business bestie-someone I'd built a company beside, and dreamed beside, moved on to build her own thing and I respect that. But I was alone with my grief, with an insane workload and a business I never pictured as a solo venture. Then my marriage ended, a long drawn out separation that would weave itself into everything in the coming years...All of it stacked, one on top of the other, over and over. A year and a half I still don't fully have words for...and through it I just wondered who I was and was it enough?

At the time I didn't call it anything. I just felt a whisper underneath everything. What next. What now. Was this the unraveling so many women refer to? I kept going the way I always had, one foot in front of the other. And the strange grace of it was that the people around me held me the exact way I had spent my whole career teaching other people to do. I heard my own words come back to me, encouraging me to give myself the same grace. "I got you. You can do this. I'll meet you where you're at. Let yourself off the hook. You can say no." And then the one that resonated "Now you get to be whatever you want to be!" And with that the story started to shift. I didn't need permission, somehow I was quietly waiting for it.

I didn't feel strong, but my confidence was a pattern. I just decided, most days, what version of myself I wanted to show up. As a leader that will always be my secret sauce "Show up anyway, unapologetically, imperfect at times, and always the most honest version of me."

Then, an exit I didn't choose on my own terms, just when I thought I had a plan. I had 30 days to close the doors on my co working studio, a space I'd built with my whole heart. Before I let it go, I booked a portrait session, a strange, quiet impulse to document myself inside those walls. Imagine years of photographing women in that studio and not once was it for myself. That space had held so many dreams that weren't mine. Workshops. Late nights. Other people's businesses becoming real in that room. I had built a community there. I had given my belief, my time, my whole self to other people's next chapters.

I had built everything so beautifully around me. Except me.

When the doors of the studio closed, I sat in a stillness I hadn't let myself feel in years. And underneath that stillness was a question I couldn't outrun anymore: what would it look like to give myself the same thing I had spent twenty-five years giving everyone else? Two weeks later, almost as if the timing had been waiting for me, an intake form landed in my inbox from UPenn. I read through the outline once and just knew. Not because it was another leadership course, but because it went underneath the surface, into the actual science of why people lead the way they do. In my early twenties I'd done culture and people work. Here I was again, further along, being handed a way to go deeper into the thing I'd always sensed was missing.

I've come to believe success looks different once your purpose gets loud enough to hear it. I had real success building the agency, and the studio... success that is often other peoples goals. I was leading teams and building community. I felt selfish for wanting more. It wasn't until I lived through every one of these pieces myself; the loss, the letting go, the slow return to myself and my own dreams that I had an unshakable belief in something bigger. Bigger than the version of ourselves that keeps us small.

The agency work continues, and I'm proud of it. It is now the place I get to empower others in their work and careers and I don't have to carry all of it. I get to step away and build something new, my own community, my own space, my own real potential without the fear of being too much or not enough. Whatever this becomes, isn't about founding something new. It's about becoming someone I'd quietly put on hold for a long time.

"Do more you" I tell the people I work with. I'm only just now learning to mean it for myself, no need for permission.

This is less of a founders story... it is more the story of potential that was always living on the sidelines. A founders evolution and courage to change what success, resilience and confidence looks like and to share those gifts and instill that veracity in the women around me.