Most of us think this way. We sort our lives into two drawers. One holds work, the CV, the roles, the qualifications, the things we are paid for and by which we are introduced. The other holds everything else, the garden, the season tickets, the cookery, the cars, the choir. The first drawer is labelled expertise. The second is labelled hobbies, and we rarely open it in professional company, in case something undignified falls out.

The sorting is tidy and plays to the not mixing work with play rhetoric we’ve been brought up with, but it’s not necessarily or always right.

Consider what twenty years of genuine attention actually builds. It builds pattern recognition, the ability to see what is really happening beneath what appears to be happening. It builds an insider’s ear for how a world talks about itself, what it worries about, where its money and its politics move. It builds a kind of judgement that an eighteen-month industry hire simply doesn’t possess, it’s not just a pastime, but a whole body of expertise that has simply never been indexed differently.

Put the two drawers together and something interesting can happen. A finance director who understands motorsport is layer far more intriguing than a finance director with a hobby, she is one of a very small number of people who can walk into a motorsport business carrying both commercial discipline and native fluency in that world. The same is true of the strategist who has gardened seriously for decades and the horticulture brand trying to scale, or the operations leader who has spent a lifetime around sport and the sports charity wrestling with growth. Sector boundaries are mostly filing conventions, but actual judgement travels.

It works in the other direction too. A friend of mine is a brilliant journalist and copywriter whose professional home is interiors and furnishings. When I was making a film about heart health, I asked her to help me find the words, from a non medical view point, and on paper she was entirely the wrong contractor. In practice she brought a warmth and a register the sector could never have found for itself, because she wrote like a person rather than an experienced health narrative provider. There is a common denominator underneath that - whatever an organisation makes or provides, we are all its patients, its clients, its beneficiaries in the end. Someone arriving from outside the sector never forgets this. Someone who has spent twenty years inside it frequently does.

Take me as evidence. I am Welsh, which means rugby was never really optional, it is less a national sport than a national condition, I have loved the game my entire life (apart from when Wales play England). I grew up in and around various elite sports, in my own youth and through my family, and set that alongside a career’s worth of business acumen and a question appears that, until recently, I had never once thought to ask, until I started shaping what a strategic sprint could look like - could I go and help the Welsh Rugby Union with their strategy, direction, operations? (Lord knows they need the help at the moment) A sprint is short. I would be lending my judgement to one question for a few days or weeks, not moving into the stadium. Why not? In fact, now that I have written it down, it seems completely logical.. hold the phone!

Accomplished women are particularly prone to keeping that second drawer shut. Many of us spent careers being advised to stay in our lane, and we learned it so well that we apply it even to the things that bring us joy. We call decades of knowledge “a little interest of mine, in my spare time”. Take my Mum, if asked she would say “I was a teacher” way before “I was an opera singer”.

These are ideas I have been mulling over, and I notice they land differently with different women. For some, the thought of connecting their loved world on professional terms is electrifyingly exciting. Like a friend who in semi retirement trained to be a ski instructor so she can live out her passion in the winter season. For others, a passion is a refuge from work, deliberately kept separate, and it should stay exactly where it is. Both responses are right, and only you will know which is yours. The invitation is simply to open the second drawer and have a look at how long you have nurtured these interests, how much you understand that a newcomer would not, and how rarely you have counted any of it as fiscally useful knowledge.

What excites me is that this can become more than a thought experiment. A network that knows what its members love, as well as what they have done, can approach those worlds directly: the motorsport business, the horticulture brand, the winter sport retailer, the sports charity, and yes, perhaps even the WRU. Each would be offered judgement it could not otherwise reach. When an organisation goes to an agency, it only commissions one lens. Conversely, a room of women whose experience crosses sectors and whose passions cross even more of them, offers something an agency simply cannot. You do not have to stay in your lane, and you do not have to leap out of it either.

Surely your experience was never meant to narrow your world. Some of the most interesting next chapters may not begin in a new industry chosen from a list, but in a world you have quietly loved for years, finally met on professional terms. At The Athenae we will ask every member about these worlds when she joins, so we can build the connections that let her judgement travel into them - but only ever as far as she wants it to go. On your own terms.

In good company,

Lynn

Founder, The Athenae

I don’t think it’s the women holding back. I think it is the structure of the rooms.

Think about the last professional event you went to. Someone stood at the front, possibly behind a lecturn. There were slides, probably too many. Possibly a panel, where four people agreed with one another in slightly different words for forty minutes. Then a glass of wine standing near a pillar wondering whether to approach anybody, and then the train home.

You may well have learned something, sure. But I wouldn’t put money on somebody having asked you anything.

Accomplished women get invited to lots of events, and in most of them they are audience. Occasionally they are asked to speak, which can mean ten minutes and a job title, but a prepared talk is not the same as being asked what you think.

So all that knowledge inside stays where it is. Not hidden exactly, just never requested. I mean the judgement you built while solving something difficult, which doesn’t have a tidy name or fit into a neat box on a bio. And I also mean the other things you know, the ones that arrived through love rather than employment and that you have never once thought to count as knowledge at all. Those are the subject of next Monday’s letter, so I will leave them there for now.

I am not above any of this, incidentally. I have sat in plenty of those rooms and contributed nothing, and told myself afterwards that I had nothing to add. I might have had something to add, actually, I just hadn’t been asked, and I wasn’t going to volunteer it to a room full of people over a glass of warm wine.

Which is roughly how I ended up designing an evening around the question rather than the answer.

On Wednesday 16th September I am hosting the first Athenae Salon. Ninety minutes online, from 7.00 to 8.30pm UK time. There are no slides, no panel and no presentations, and I am not going to talk at anybody. We start together, then move into small rooms of four or five where everybody actually gets to speak, and come back together at the end. It is off the record and nothing is recorded, which makes it much easier for people to say what they really think.

The theme is the expertise that never made your CV.

There are only thirty-six places, deliberately. Past a certain size a conversation stops being one and becomes an audience again, and we have quite enough of those.

A few women have already registered through the early invitations. Their working lives are in completely different worlds, and I am intrigued about what might happen if they end up in the same small group. That is the entire point. A different world from yours is not a nice extra. It is what makes the conversation worth ninety minutes of a Wednesday evening.

Registration is at theathenae.com/salon and it is open from today.

And so nothing arrives as a surprise: The Athenae opens as a paid membership on 27th September to the first 25 founding circle. There will be no membership pitch during the Salon, and attending carries no expectation of joining, the evening stands on its own. I simply want the room to be full of t

he right people, and if you’ve read this far then I have a suspicion you might be one of them.

Lynn.

P.S. Before you close this. What is the thing you know that has never appeared on a CV? Hit reply and tell me. One line is plenty, and I read every reply.

On Connection, and the women who know you, challenge you, and come with you.

In my last letter, I wrote about presence, being fully in the room as yourself and helping to make the room better for the people who are in it with you.

That leads us to the fourth pillar, connection, because however accomplished or independent we become, very little of consequence happens entirely alone. There are always people somewhere in the story, the person who made the introduction, told us the truth, encouraged the slightly mad idea, opened a door, or just reminded us of who we were at exactly the moment we had forgotten and brought us back down to earth.

A room, after all, is made by the people in it.

So, this letter is about the company you keep.

· · ·

We were told, for years, to network, network, network.

Build the network. Work the room. Collect the contacts. Keep in touch. Grow your following and make sure the right people know your name. I had a desk full of cards for weeks before having a clear out and no doubt the same happened to mine!

There is value in a wide network, of course and I don’t mean to be flippant. I have benefited enormously from mine, and many of the things I have built began with a conversation or an introduction from someone I knew.

But the older I get, the more I value something somewhat different - the smaller circle of people who truly know me.

The women you can call without constructing the conversation first. The ones who know the history and the context and can tell from the tone of your first sentence whether you need advice, encouragement, honesty, or simply someone to listen. They have seen several different versions of you over the years and don’t get confused when you change again. And when something goes well, they celebrate you properly, just as they will tell you the truth, kindly, when they think you are about to walk into a mistake.

That kind of connection is a wonderful thing.

It is also worth nurturing.

· · ·

I have my own people, and they know exactly who they are.

Some of them are literally grouped that way in my phone: “My Framily” and “The A Team.”

My circle has probably become smaller over the years, but it has also become stronger through considered curation. These are the people I trust enough to call when I need to think something through properly, when I have rushed so far ahead that nobody else can quite see how I got there, or when I have lost perspective and need someone tohand it back to me.

They know my patterns. They know which ideas have real substance, and which ones are me becoming overexcited about something new. They mostly know when to encourage me, when to challenge me and, occasionally, when to tell me firmly to stop, sleep on it, and look again in the morning.

There is laughter in these relationships too. A lot of it.

I think that truly matters.

Good company should not feel like another development or self help programme. The best conversations can move between a serious decision, a ridiculous story, a difficult truth and what we are having for dinner without anybody having to change tack.

These women know the whole of me, rather than only the competent version that turns up for work.

And I bring my people with me.

That has always been how I work. When I see an opportunity, I think about who else should be part of it. When I meet someone interesting, I immediately start thinking about who they should know. When I begin building something, my instinct is to gather the people who will make it richer, stronger or more interesting.

Some of the things I am proudest of have grown in exactly that way, one conversation leading to another, an introduction opening a door, somebody recognising potential in another person and bringing her into the room.

I suppose somebody could call that networking.

I don’t really think of it that way.

For me, it is about paying attention. You notice people, remember what matters to them and understand enough about what they are trying to do that, when an opportunity or a person crosses your path, you make the connection.

There is generosity in that.

There is also power in it.

· · ·

Our circles change as our lives do.

For much of our working lives, the structures around us supplied a great deal of connection. Work gave us colleagues, projects gave us teams, and organisations put interesting people in our paths almost every day.

Some of those relationships lasted for a season and others became part of our lives.

As careers change, that scaffolding changes too. Teams disperse, roles move on, organisations are left behind, and more of us work independently, build portfolio careers as they are now called, or some if us move across several different worlds at once.

At that point, the company we keep becomes more deliberate.

I think that can be one of the great pleasures of this stage of life.

Our circles don’t have to be defined by an organisational chart any more, seniority or who happens to sit in the same office space. We can choose people because they are interesting, generous, challenging, because they see the world differently or make us laugh, because after an hour in their company an idea that felt impossible suddenly feels entirely plausible.

The person who becomes important in your next chapter may be someone you met last year, twenty years younger or older than you, working in a world completely unlike your own, or someone you have admired from a distance and finally decide to contact.

One of the advantages of experience is surely that we can become more discerning about the company we keep, while remaining endlessly curious about where good company might be found.

· · ·

This is at the heart of how I have designed The Athenae.

It is deliberately small and curated because I want the women in it to become genuinely known to one another; conversations with continuity, where somebody remembers what you said three months ago and ask, “hey, what happened next?”, where women understand one another’s work well enough to make intelligent introductions and notice opportunities. Most of all, I want the Founding Circle to grow organically together.

There is something so special about being there at the beginning of anything. The culture has not yet hardened, the traditions have not yet been decided, and the people in the room help determine what the room becomes.

That is how I see the founding women of The Athenae.

They will shape it with me.

Their experience will influence the conversations we have, the rooms – the salons - we create, the organisations we work with and the connections that develop between us. Over time, I hope each woman will be able to look around and think, you know what, these are women I would never have met in one room otherwise, and my world is larger and richer because I know them.

That is the promise of good company.

It expands rather than drains you.

· · ·

This is also why you will not find my face all over Instagram telling women what they should do.

My own experience is just one experience among many.

I have learned things and I will share them honestly, just as I hope every woman in The Athenae will bring what she has learned. The whole premise is that an extraordinary amount of knowledge already exists between us.

The Athenae is built around that collective depth.

It is a company of women who have built things, led things, changed things, navigated difficult things, started again, and still have more they want to do. Every woman brings a different set of experiences, relationships, interests and instincts into the room.

That is what makes the room interesting.

The value does not come from one woman standing at the front teaching everybody else how to live.

It comes from what happens between women who each bring something of their own.

A conversation sparks an idea. An introduction creates an opportunity. One woman’s experience helps another avoid a mistake. Somebody sees a connection that was invisible from inside one career or one sector.

And then, occasionally, something entirely new begins.

· · ·

When I first imagined The Athenae, this is what I saw.

A beautiful room, in every sense of the word, filled with women you would genuinely want to sit beside.

A conversation that can get to the interesting part quickly because nobody is there to prove her credentials.

Someone saying, “I know exactly who you should speak to,” and reaching for her phone.

Another woman hearing an idea you have been thinking about quietly and saying, “You should do that. And I think I know how to help.”

A room where ambition is interesting and encouraged rather than being embarrassing or decried. Experience is shared rather than guarded, and success is celebrated properly. A room where you can bring an unfinished thought, knowing people will remember it, and that becomes more valuable as the women inside it come to know one another.

That is what I mean by connection.

Being known, certainly, but also knowing others well enough to recognise what might be possible for them.

· · ·

There is one final thing about good company.

The people who truly know you usually know much more than your CV.

They know what you love.

They remember the subjects that make you lean forward, the worlds you have followed for years, the things you know an extraordinary amount about despite never having been paid to know them.

And they are often the ones who make connections we cannot see for ourselves.

They say, “You should be doing more of that.”

Or, “Why have you never thought about working with them?”

Or perhaps, “You do realise that you know more about this than almost anyone I know?”

The next chapter is not always waiting neatly inside the industry where you have already spent twenty-five plus years.

Sometimes it sits in the overlap between what you know, who you know and what you have quietly loved for years.

That is where we go next.

For now, think about your own circle.

Who are your people?

Who would be in your A Team?

And which brilliant woman do you know who should be brought into a room she has not yet discovered?

In good company,

Lynn.

Founder, The Athenae

In my last letter, I wrote about positioning, closing the gap between who you have become and who other people still remember you as.

The replies were more emotional than I expected. Women told me that stopping for a moment, to take stock of what the depth and breadth of what they had achieved over the years, and subsequently, realising how many parts people didn’t know about them now, because we don’t tend to shout about it. Work, relationships, knowledge, resilience, judgement. Things accumulated over years that had become so familiar they had almost stopped seeing them.

A lot of positioning happens at a distance, through conversations, introductions, choices and sometimes, quietly updating the record.

Presence is what happens when you are actually there.

It is the third pillar of The Athenae Approach, and I think, one of the most misunderstood, because so much of the advice around “executive presence” is usually attributed to a narrow set of rules, such as:

Speak up more. Command the room. Project confidence. Be more assertive.

Some women are naturally big personalities. They are funny, energetic and warm, and they light up a room the moment they enter it, we all have those people in our lives and they’re a pleasure to be around.

Others are naturally quieter and just as good company, but in a different way. They listen, take in what is happening and speak only when they have something worth adding.

The difficulty begins when one particular style is confused with authority, and volume becomes the main currency in the room.

We have all met the person who has an opinion on everything, starts answering before somebody else has finished the question, or repeats your point ten minutes later and somehow receives the credit…

They may take up a great deal of air, but that is not the same as having presence.

Presence, to me, is the ability to be naturally and fully in the room as yourself, without effort. It means bringing in the depth of your experience to the table without making yourself smaller, and importantly, without needing to make anyone else smaller either.

· · ·

Many women of our generation learned complicated lessons about what leadership was supposed to look like.

We built our careers in organisations largely designed by men, often with very few female examples ahead of us. Some of the women who had reached the top were extraordinary leaders, role models. Others had survived by becoming harder, sometimes more than the culture around them and, consciously or otherwise, expected the women behind them to do the same.

It’s important that we recognise these truths.

We can recognise how difficult it was for women to succeed in those systems while also questioning the behaviours that success sometimes required of them.

But getting through the door is not the same as changing the room. Surviving a difficult system is not the same as improving it, and becoming powerful is not the same as using power well.

I think our generation carries a responsibility here.

Our legacy cannot simply be that we succeeded in organisations that were difficult for women. It must also be that we left those organisations better than we found them, brought people with us and passed on what we had learned.

The woman behind us shouldn’t have to repeat every battle we fought simply because we had to fight it. They should see something different modelled - authority without cruelty, high standards without fear, ambition without humiliation, and strength without the need to dominate everyone else in the room.

Presence is partly about how you feel when you enter a room. It is also about what becomes possible for other people because you are there.

· · ·

There is another part of this that many women will recognise immediately.

It is the habit of softening what we say.

“This might be a silly question…”

“I might be wrong, but…”

“Sorry, can I just…”

I still catch myself doing it. It’s hard to get out of the habit!

I have sat in meetings knowing that I was right about something and still heard myself offer it tentatively, or apologetically, as though saying it clearly might be rude.

That habit did not come from nowhere.

Those habits did not come from nowhere. They were often intelligent adaptations to rooms that we felt were hostile or at least not particularly comfortable or receptive.

A man was decisive; a woman was difficult. A man was direct; a woman was abrasive. A man had presence; a woman was perhaps just a bit much.

So I think we have learned to soften sentences, add caveats and smile and nod while underneath, disagreeing. We made difficult points sound as harmless as possible. And probably made a smaller impact.

Some of those habits helped us navigate our way through, but an adaptation that was useful in one situation or earlier in our career can become limiting later on.

There comes a point when you have enough experience to say the thing plainly. You can be clear without being rude and certain without being theatrical.

One of the more interesting things experience gives us, is instinct: judgement developed through pattern recognition, decisions, mistakes and lived experience, our own and learned from those close to us. It does not make us infallible, but it does give us something valuable to bring into the room.

Sometimes you see the problem before you can explain every part of it. You instinctively recognise a pattern because you have encountered some version of it before, professionally or personally. You sense where something is heading because experience has taught you what usually happens next.

That instinct deserves examination, but it does not need to be disguised as a tentative hunch simply to make it more acceptable.

Sometimes the sentence can simply be:

I see this differently.

I am concerned about where this leads.

My experience suggests we should look again.

· · ·

The women whose presence I admire most are certainly not all one type.

Some are quiet, while others are naturally charismatic and can hold a whole room without effort, as we’ve explored. But what they have in common is that they remain recognisably themselves.

Their authority sits securely enough that they can listen. They can disagree without turning disagreement into confrontation, change their minds without feeling diminished by it, and make room for somebody else without giving up their own place.

They don’t need to win every point or try to prove that they are the cleverest person in the room.

Their contribution does not become smaller when another person shines. They are comfortable enough to support and let others shine.

That, to me, is the real thing.

Presence is less about becoming louder or quieter and more about becoming less distorted by the room.

· · ·

There is a practical side to this too. And I’m well aware this is easier said than done.

Presence can be the pause before you speak, rather than rushing in because silence feels uncomfortable. It can be removing the apology from the beginning of a sentence or saying, “I disagree,” and then calmly explaining why.

It can mean asking a question because you genuinely want the answer, rather than wrapping a statement inside a question because you are reluctant to make it directly.

It can also mean noticing that somebody else has been interrupted and saying, “I would like to hear her finish.”

Sometimes it means saying less because the point has already been made. At other times, it means saying more because nobody else in the room is going to say what needs saying.

These acts can look small from the outside, but they change the quality of a conversation. Each one says something about what you are bringing into the room and how deliberately you are prepared to use it.

There is no one style, but I’m becoming increasingly aware of the impact these small acts. I am sure you will now as well!

The common thread is intention.

Presence is knowing what you are bringing into the room and being deliberate about how you use it.

· · ·

And this is where I think the room matters too.

In the wrong room, you can spend enormous amounts of energy translating yourself for others. Explaining your value, softening your challenge, proving your credibility and making your ambition more acceptable.

In the right room, much less of that is necessary as you are understood more quickly and your judgement is trusted. It isn’t necessarily comfortable or agreeable, but that’s ok - because your challenge isn’t seen as a threat. Challenge sharpens the thinking rather than becoming a judgement on somebody’s personality. Different perspectives are taken seriously, and experience is shared rather than guarded.

This is where Presence becomes more than an individual quality.

Bringing together a group of accomplished women doesn’t automatically create collective intelligence simply by being in the same place, sure. But I do think it can emerge when women can bring their knowledge, questions, developed instinct and disagreement into the conversation. When women from different sectors and backgrounds can look at the same problem from several directions, test one another’s assumptions and intuitions and build something we wouldn’t have necessarily reached on our own.

That is the kind of platform I want The Athenae to create, a place where challenge is useful, disagreement is productive and experience becomes available to others. This helps us keep growing and learning from each other.

A room where women don’t have to become harder to be taken seriously, and where the woman coming behind us does not have to fight exactly the same battle simply because we did. Lets leave a more positive and constructive legacy.

And it leads on to the discussion next week: Connection.

Connection is about who is genuinely in the room with you. Who sees you, tells you the truth, opens a door and brings your name into the conversation even when you are not there. It’s also about whose name you say, who you bring into the room in return.

For now, two questions to reflect on:

When do you still soften or hold back what you really think?

And how could your presence make the room better for someone else?

In good company,

Lynn.

The Athenae

In my last letter, I wrote about recognition, the work of seeing the pattern in what you have done, understanding what you are good at, maybe unusually good at, and finding the language to name it.

Once you can say out loud what you do, you can begin to position it. Because how can you position something you have not yet fully recognised in yourself?

Someone I trust once told me that positioning is what people say about you when you are not in the room. The thought is slightly cringy, I know, but I keep returning to it often because, of course, we all do it.

Someone’s name comes up in conversation and, almost instantly, a half-sentence forms.

She is brilliant strategically.

She always gets things done.

She is great with difficult people.

Or, from someone else:

Very clever, but perhaps not quite commercial enough.

Wonderful operator. Not sure I see her as the number one.

I remember being told, years ago, that a senior male colleague had called me “a diamond in the rough” in a leadership meeting while promotions were being discussed. Obviously I did not get one. But charming. To this day, I am still not entirely sure what he meant but it made me feel small, and patronised.

Sometimes we say the sentence aloud but more often we don’t, but it is there, in our minds, the mental shorthand we use to place or pigeonhole people, recommend them, rule them in or out.

The shorthand also varies from person to person. The same quality can be admired by one and criticised by another. Direct becomes difficult, decisive becomes inflexible, calm becomes distant and ambitious becomes intimidating. Women are particularly familiar with this double reading.

We cannot control what everybody thinks of us, but we can help to keep the picture current. Positioning is the quiet work of updating the record so that other people are making decisions about the woman you have become, rather than a version you have already outgrown.

And, if we are honest, most of us have very little idea what our own half-sentence is. Do you know? I’d probably say all the negative things about myself.

We know what we hope people say and what we would like them to say. The impression that survives when we are not there to explain ourselves, the sentence someone reaches for when our name comes up, is largely invisible to us.

For accomplished women, that can become a real problem, because the half-sentence can often be a whole generation behind the freaking work.

The way you are positioned in other people’s minds may have been set at a point in your career you have long outgrown. Literally bloody years ago. When you were the deputy, not the head. When you were the reliable pair of hands, not the person setting the direction. When you were known for delivering rather than deciding. When the work that now defines your judgement had not yet happened.

Usually, people are simply carrying an old version of you in their heads, and almost no one thinks to update it unless you give them a reason to.

I know this gap because I have lived it. I have evolved substantially over the past two years, with the creation of The Athenae being the clearest expression of that evolution. The woman building this is even further removed from the corporate version of me that some people may still remember from ten years ago.

Positioning is the work of closing that gap between who you have become and who other people still remember you as.

· · ·

This matters because those half-sentences add up.

They become the call you do not get. The board seat that goes to someone else. The opportunity that finds someone else because, in someone’s mind, they were more obvious. They probably may have been no more capable, simply more clearly positioned.

This is the part of the work I think many women resist most.

Recognition feels reasonable enough: fine, I will try to see myself more accurately.

Positioning sounds uncomfortably close to personal branding, and most of the women I know have an almost allergic response to that phrase.

I totally understand why. We have spent a decade being told to build a brand, curate a presence, become more visible, post more often and now, we seemingly have to turn ourselves into something legible to an algorithm. Many of us have refused, and I think we were right to do so. I uphold our right to refuse!

Being clear about what you bring does not require you to turn yourself into a product.

It is making sure that the way you are understood has kept pace with the person you have become. Let’s lean into that…

· · ·

I have started to think of positioning as a series of small, honest acts that update the record. Imagine:

A note to the colleague you have not spoken to for a year, simply telling them what you are working on now and why it matters to you.

Accepting the talk you might once have dismissed as too small, because the people in that room still think of you as you were five years ago.

Having coffee with the younger woman whose work may shape your next five years, rather than assuming that experience and opportunity only flow in one direction.

Saying yes to the interview you might once have declined because you were too busy doing the work to talk about it.

These are all quiet, considered ways for a woman to make sure that what she has done, and what she is doing now, is held accurately in the world. And, disclaimer, I’m actually terrible at this, the point of being here is that we work this out together..

The women who do this well know what they want to be known for now, and they allow that clarity to shape which rooms they enter, which invitations they accept, which sentences they allow to stand and which they quietly correct. That, I think, is the craft of it: allowing the work, judgement and contribution to speak through what we choose to do and where we choose to be.

· · ·

There is another, harder part of positioning. It asks us to look at what other people think of us and at what we have trained them to expect, often without realising it.

Many women of our generation became very good at being indispensable.

We worked late, answered the email and fixed the problem. We rewrote the document because it was quicker to do it ourselves than explain what was wrong with it, and noticed what had been forgotten before anyone else realised it had been dropped.

Then we went home and often did some version of the same thing there.

We came from a generation that treated exhaustion as validation of seriousness. Long hours meant commitment. Being needed meant being valuable. Coping meant succeeding.

And the strange thing is that nobody necessarily thanks you for being the person who always catches what falls. After a while, they simply expect you to catch it.

At work, competence creates more work, while at home capability creates more dependence. Because you have made all of it look manageable, the people around you may have no idea what it costs. Sometimes, neither do you.

There is a particular trap here for accomplished women. The traits that helped us build our careers, including reliability, endurance, responsiveness and the ability to see what needs doing and simply do it, can become the very traits that prevent us from moving into the next version of ourselves. While you are still proving that you can carry everything, nobody is being asked to notice what else you could do.

This must be part of positioning too. It includes the words people use to describe you and what you continue to make available. It may mean letting the late call wait, leaving a problem with its rightful owner, or stepping out of a meeting where your presence is useful to everyone except you.

The sentence:

I am not the right person to do that anymore.

Or perhaps:

I can help you think about it, but I am not going to take it on.

For some of us, those may be the most radical positioning statements we ever make.

Actually, no.

The question becomes twofold: How do other people see me, and what have I taught them to expect from me?

I write this from right in the middle of it. I have been sitting at this desk for hours, still trying to work out what to carry, what to release and how to build The Athenae without recreating the very habits I am writing about. That is precisely why I am looking for women with whom to work it out.

· · ·

There is, inevitably, some grief in changing those expectations.

The earlier version of you did important work. She was willing, available and very good at getting things done. She may have remembered the birthdays, booked the holiday, organised Christmas, noticed who needed help and quietly absorbed the emotional weather of the room.

She helped get you here, and she does not have to keep doing all of it forever.

The woman you are now may have something different to offer: judgement, selectivity, perspective and pattern recognition. She can see what matters, where her contribution genuinely changes something and where she is simply making life easier for everybody else at her own expense.

That shift can be uncomfortable because, for many women, usefulness has become deeply entangled with identity.

We may find ourselves asking: Who am I if I am not the one who sorts it? Who is going to do it if I don’t? What happens if I stop, and will people still value me if I am no longer endlessly available to them?

These are serious questions, and there are others worth asking.

Why should the measure of a good life be how effectively we pleased everybody else?

Why should the reward for decades of competence be nonstop over-functioning?

And why, having earned judgement, experience and choice, would we continue behaving as though our greatest value is that we can still clear everybody else’s inbox?

Becoming more deliberate about where we put ourselves may be one of the quietest forms of rebellion available to us. It keeps us engaged where our judgement can genuinely contribute.

· · ·

Perhaps positioning works best in company.

We are not always the best witnesses to our own evolution. Good company does more than encourage us: it reflects back what has changed, challenges the old shorthand and says our name accurately in rooms we have not yet entered.

That is part of what I want The Athenae to make possible: women recognising, sharpening and putting one another’s judgement to work. I want us to demonstrate our worth through the ideas we sharpen, the problems we solve and the opportunities we create together. The work itself becomes the evidence, which feels much more useful than banging the drum or campaigning for recognition.

If I were to name the work of positioning in one line, it would be this:

Make sure the company you keep knows the woman you have become, as well as the woman who got you here.

Let them see the woman you are now: the years behind you, the judgement you have earned and the work that is in motion today.

Recognition was the room before the room.

Positioning is the doorway between the two: the moment when what you have recognised in yourself begins to be held accurately by other people.

Presence, which comes next, is what happens when you step fully into that clearer position.

We will come to that, and then to connection and influence, in the letters that follow.

For now, perhaps the question is simpler.

What are people still expecting from you because you have always done it? And is it still the thing you want to be known for?

· · ·

If this letter has made you think of a woman whose reputation has not yet caught up with her real range, send it to her with a simple note.

Better still, the next time her name comes up in a room she is not in, update the record.

Part of being in good company is helping the company see itself clearly.

Thank you for listening.

In good company,
Lynn
Founder, The Athenae

Even when something has gone well, my instinct is rarely to sit back and admire it. “Best-practice” is a pet hate of mine, a term overly used by organisations. I am usually already asking what could have been done better, what we missed, and what we might do differently next time.

That same restlessness is part of what led me to recognition, and to why I think it matters so much.

There are many women, rightly, challenging the status quo loudly and publicly. I follow many of them, agree with much of what they say, and am grateful that those voices exist. The Athenae is interested in another form of challenge too - what happens when women who have spent decades building experience, judgement and influence begin to see themselves differently? What happens when they become clearer about what they carry, articulate it more confidently, and enter rooms already knowing the value they bring?

That is where Recognition begins.

A few years ago, after decades of executive work and a consulting career I had shaped carefully on my own terms, I began looking at senior employed roles again.

I wanted something demanding, something with significant responsibility, something with scale.

I assumed, perhaps naively, that the front door would have become easier to navigate by then.

It had not.

I was experienced and capable. I had run organisations through significant change, navigated grief and reinvention, and gathered the kind of judgement that arrives only after enough things have gone wrong and you have learned what to do next. Yet the system in front of me, the platforms, the algorithms, the recruiters, the language of the job descriptions, did not seem to know what to do with a woman whose experience would not collapse neatly into one label. That surprised and shocked me.

Not because I thought anything should be handed to me, but because I had assumed that, by this stage, depth would weigh more, not less. Then I began hearing versions of the same story from other women.

Senior executives who had spent years leading through complexity, only to find the next move unexpectedly harder. Lawyers who had built formidable careers in the city but no longer felt the culture around them fitted who they had become. Communications leaders and media executives who could see, often very clearly, how quickly experience was being traded for youth, visibility and the appearance of being new.

Founders who had sold the company and were ready to build something else. Women returning after caring for someone they loved. Senior leaders whose organisations had quietly stopped knowing how to grow them, even though they still had more to give.

The pattern became too consistent to dismiss as personal. Women can lose visibility, confidence and opportunity at precisely the point when they have gained wisdom, experience and knowledge.

That sentence, in the end, is what wrote The Athenae.

The first pillar of this work, and the one everything else rests on, is recognition.

We don’t want visibility for its own sake or to become a brighter, louder or more polished version of ourselves. Recognition is the deliberate practice of seeing yourself as accurately as you see the women you admire. For a long time, I thought that mainly meant women becoming more willing to name what they had done. I am not sure that is the whole story.

When I was developing The Athenae, my friend, my confident, my partner in crime, Janine, who I’d worked with, played with, cried with and laughed with for years, asked me a very simple question.

“What are you good at?”

I couldn’t answer her. Not really.

I could name jobs I had done, organisations I had worked with and things that had gone well. I could tell you where I had been useful and what had been delivered. But when she asked the next question, “What is your superpower?”, I was completely foxed. I stumbled around for an answer and came up with nothing convincing. I’m pretty good at partying, dancing, entertaining, bringing everyone together and staying up late putting the world to rights, does that count?

Eventually she said, “Well, I know.”

She told me that I see opportunities other people miss or see them earlier. That I can take a complicated situation, make sense of it, describe the strategy clearly and then turn that strategy into a practical implementation plan.

She said the thread running through my career was transformation: transforming organisations, transforming teams, taking something that was not working and seeing what it could become. I would never have said that about myself and honestly, not because I was being modest. It genuinely had not occurred to me to think about it.

We are taught to think the recognition gap is about modesty. I was lucky. I just happened to be there. It was really the team. But that assumes you already know exactly what you did and are choosing to make it smaller. Often it is stranger than that. The thing you do best does not register as a skill at all, because it has never once felt like effort. It is simply how you see. And you cannot name, still less value, what has never looked like anything remarkable from the inside.

And, just to be clear, I know the flip side of that too.

I can move too quickly. I can see the route from A to Z and forget that everyone else has not travelled through B, C and D with me. Earlier in my career, I was not always good enough at slowing down, explaining the steps, or bringing people with me.

I have had to learn to be more methodical, more reflective and more deliberate about making the thinking visible, so that other people can understand how I reached the conclusion rather than simply being asked to trust that I had.

That matters because recognition is not about inventing a flattering story about yourself. It is about seeing the whole pattern accurately: what you do unusually well, where that strength can trip you up, and what you have learned to do differently because of it. That conversation with my friend stayed with me because I think this happens more often than we realise.

We know the jobs we have done. We remember the difficult years, the projects, the crises, the teams, the things we somehow got over the line. But we do not always step back far enough to see the pattern underneath them.

What was it that you kept bringing?

What did people come to you for, again and again?

What do you do almost instinctively that other people find difficult?

What changes when you are in the room?

Those questions are surprisingly difficult to answer from the inside.

And perhaps that is the deeper part of the recognition gap. It is not only that we make our achievements smaller. Sometimes we have never found the language for the thing underneath them at all. We carry a CV full of evidence and no clear sentence that explains the value running through it.

There is a phrase for part of this that I dislike, and I will say it just once: impostor syndrome. Too often, it places the problem inside the woman when much of the problem sits in the room around her.

The women I am talking about are not incapable or confused. They are often clear-eyed, experienced and highly competent. But many have spent decades being rewarded for being useful, reliable, collaborative and low maintenance, while being subtly discouraged from being too visible, too certain or too explicit about their own value.

After a while, you begin to undervalue your own normal, and I think normal is the trap. When you have been doing exceptional work for twenty-five or more years, exceptional becomes your baseline. It feels ordinary because, to you, it is ordinary. But the fact that it has become ordinary to you is precisely what makes it valuable.

Almost nobody else can do it ordinarily.

You know this already when you look at other women. You can recognise the woman across the table for what she has made almost on sight. You know what her work cost. You understand the years behind her judgement. You would not let her sell herself short if you heard her doing it.

The harder move is to extend that same accuracy to yourself. Recognition, then, is not about becoming more boastful. It is about becoming more accurate.

It is about being able to look across the years and say: this is what I do well; this is the value I bring; this is the pattern in the work I have done.

There is power in being able to say that clearly, not only to an employer, a client or a board, but to yourself. Because once you can say it, you can position it. And once you can position it, you can communicate it and other people can recognise it too.

That, to me, is quiet rebellion.

The first status quo we are challenging is the belief that experience should become quieter with age.

The cost of not challenging it is not only the call you do not get or the opportunity that goes to someone who spoke first, although those costs are real.

The larger cost is internal.

It is the work you stop doing because you have stopped seeing why it matters. The role you do not apply for. The contribution you decide is no longer needed. The version of yourself you quietly retire because the world has stopped reflecting her back to you.

If recognition is not in your own hands, the world’s drift will set the terms.

And we already know something about the direction of that drift: women becoming less visible at the point when they may have the most to contribute.

The Athenae exists because what women know should not disappear quietly. I simply can’t lie down and take that. And what you know, the judgement, instinct, pattern recognition, resilience and understanding gathered over years, may be exactly the thing with which the world has become strangely careless.

If we are honest, it may also be the thing many of us have become careless with ourselves.

· · ·

That is what my friend did for me across the table. She could see the shape of it when I could not, and she handed it back to me in a single sentence. I have made something to affect that same reflection when there is no friend sitting opposite you to ask. It is called the Mini Influence Audit.

It’s a seven minute diagnostic with fifteen statements and a clear reading at the end. It is designed to surface the influence and recognition you already hold but have not yet named, possibly not really identified. Answer as the person you are today, not the one you may plan to be. There are no right or wrong answers, and your first response is usually the most honest one. It is designed slightly like the questionnaires we used to do in ‘‘Just 17’, ‘Smash Hits’ or ‘Jackie’! #throwback

I think of it as the room before the room: a private place to stop, take stock, and look again at what is already there before you decide what comes next.

It is not there to tell you who you are. It is there to help you notice what may already be obvious to everyone except you.

There is no charge, and there is no hard sell at the other end. I made it because I believe the recognition gap costs women, and the people and organisations around them, more than it should.

When you have ambled through it, I would love to know what you noticed. A line in a reply is enough.

We will come to ‘positioning’ next.

For now, I would rather we begin here, because everything else in the framework rests on this.

See it.

Name it.

Then decide what you want to do with it.

In good company,

Lynn.

Founder, The Athenae

The old phones with the long, curly leads you could just about drag into your bedroom if you shut the door carefully enough. The conversations with girlfriends you had already seen all day at school, but still needed to speak to again the moment you got home. The after-school debrief. Later, the after-work debrief. The “what did she mean by that?” debrief. The “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life” debrief.

We didn’t grow up narrating our lives in public. We grew up talking things through.

Which may be why Instagram has never quite felt like home to many of us: too fast, too shiny, too performed. Too much pressure to make a life look coherent before you have had the chance to understand it yourself.

I have missed the long conversation. The kind where you do not have to arrive polished, where one woman says something slightly unfinished and another says, “Yes. That. I know exactly what you mean.”

That is part of why I am writing these letters, and part of why I have founded The Athenae, because somewhere in the last few years, I began to feel something shift.

Not only in the world, although that is certainly part of it. Laws women fought for may feel like they are beginning to turn back, language softening around women’s freedoms, doors we thought had been opened beginning, in places, to narrow again.

Women’s rights, when you look at it honestly, are recent. Recently won, lightly held. We had perhaps allowed ourselves to believe that what was won would stay won.

It is not that simple, and in reality it never has been.

But also closer to home, I kept seeing women who had spent decades doing the work, building careers, raising families, leading teams, holding organisations together, opening doors for others. And then, slowly, beginning to feel the edges of the room move in.

Not because they were finished or had lost ambition. Absolutely not because they had less to offer. Often, it was the opposite.

They had more judgement, more perspective, more instinct, more depth. But the world had become strangely careless with the kind of experience they carried. And, if I am honest, many of them had become careless with it too.

That is where The Athenae begins.

The Athenae takes its name from an Athenaeum: a room for ideas, conversation and thought. But I wanted it to feel warmer than that. Less institution, more good company. Less performance, more recognition. A place where accomplished women could bring what they know, what they have carried, and what they are ready to do next.

I think of it as a quiet rebellion. The rebellions of my younger years were loud, and breaking rules was rather the point of them. What is different now is not the rebel but the register: this one is quiet, not because I have mellowed, but because experience has taught me something the noise never did, which is that worth is more powerfully demonstrated than announced, and that what a room of accomplished women can show together will always carry further than anything one of us might shout alone.

I have never quite lost that instinct. I have simply become more interested in where to direct it.

There are, rightly, many women speaking loudly about inequality, women’s rights, menopause, work, health and all the other places where change is still overdue. I follow many of them, agree with much of what they say, and am grateful that those voices exist.

The Athenae is doing something slightly different.

Its approach is quieter, more deliberate and, perhaps, more subversive for being so. It is about creating a refined space in which accomplished women do not have to argue endlessly for their worth, but can demonstrate it. A place where experience, judgement, depth and influence become visible not through noise, but through what women create, contribute and make possible together.

That, to me, is still rebellion, just in a different register: not withdrawing from the argument, but changing the terms of it.

It is not silent, mind. I hope there will be plenty said here. But it does not depend on noise. It depends on presence and on clarity, on the women who have done the most deciding, finally, to be seen for it.

That kind of rebellion is harder to argue with than the loud ones. It does not need to win an argument. It only needs to stop disappearing.

You have lifted enough banners. This is not another one.

This is the room where you put the banner down for a moment and are simply, accurately, seen.

The first thing this room asks of you is the unfashionable bit.

It asks you to be recognised.

Not louder. Not brighter. Not more performed.

Recognised. Named plainly for what you have done and made: careers, often; organisations, sometimes; bodies of work; teams that grew up around your judgement; children, in many cases; marriages; houses that became homes; lives that took shape because you kept turning up.

Recognised without the diminishing footnote. Without I was lucky or I just or I happened to. Without the small social shrug we have all perfected.

I notice it most in the women I admire. The ones who have done the most often recognise themselves the least. They have spent years recognising others; that is part of how they led. The recognising-themselves part got left, somehow, for another day.

These letters are the beginning of arguing that day is now.

Because there is a cost to not naming what we have made. A private one: the call you do not get, the opportunity that goes to someone who spoke first. And a larger one too.

If the women who have done the most also see themselves the least, what they know risks being absorbed back into the air without ever being properly named. Daughters lose access to it. Sons grow up without seeing it. Younger colleagues inherit a thinner picture of what was possible.

That is the part I find I cannot stop thinking about.

The Athenae exists because what women know should not disappear quietly.

In practical terms, The Athenae will be a membership, a platform, a series of salons, and an advisory space for organisations that understand the value of experienced women.

Underneath all of that is something simpler. A belief that what you have made, and what you are still making, should be held in good company. Named honestly and passed forward.

This is our legacy, our quiet rebellion.

The framework runs in five parts: Recognition, Positioning, Presence, Connection, Influence. We will travel through them here, in these letters, slowly. There is no test at the end, and you do not have to arrive anywhere by a particular date.

In Good Company is what I am calling these letters.

The name says most of what needs saying: you are in good company. So are the women who will be reading alongside you. And what we hold between us is in good company too.

I am glad you are here.

If this letter found you at the right moment, I would love to know, in a reply if you would like: what are you beginning to recognise about yourself now?

There is no wrong answer. Only the answer that is true today.

And if there is a woman in your life who has been quietly doing the work for decades, and who has not yet been told what you know about her, this letter is for her too.

Send it on. Tell her she is not finished. Tell her she is in good company.

In good company,

Lynn

Founder, The Athenae