It was my PMS week, which I knew in advance. So I planned a week with no goals in it. Nothing to chase, nothing to launch, nothing to prove. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to..!

This week was about organising, cleaning up and finishing up work I had left open. Which fits the end of the luteal phase almost too well. It’s when you want to nest, and I wanted to nest my whole business.

The other reason I was nesting

Mathilde is coming back next week.

She was my most amazing sidekick for a year before she went on maternity leave, and I have been counting the days for her to come back (yes, I’m the happiest for her to be a mom of two now, but I miss her in the team!) Having her next to me is going to take this business to a completely different level.

I know that because it already happened. The year I hired her, my revenue doubled.

Last time she was focused on one part of the business. This time she comes back as my operational partner. And over the next year, I want us to work toward her actually buying into the business, however we end up structuring it. I’ve told her that, we had amazing conversations around it. But really, that’s how much I believe in her, and how clearly I can see that together we are far better at this business than I am alone!!

Everyone deserves a Mathilde next to them in business!!

What I actually did this week

I had three sales calls and sent two offers out for 1:1 coaching, which is wonderful and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Beyond my coaching sessions, I kept the calendar almost empty on purpose.

Though I must say, the start of the week was chaotic to say the least.. lol!! I forgot literally EVERYTHING. And in some ways, life got in the way with some genuinely shitty things.

At one point I called my mum and told her I was done with all of it; I was leaving Amsterdam, I was moving to another country. She said: what’s going on, and which cycle phase are you in?

And there it was. My head was everywhere except here.

It’s okay to be in the trenches for a bit. That had nothing to do with the experiment. That was me living my luteal phase, which is always a little rougher around the edges. I can also still feel the effect of the move two months ago. I was under enormous stress and the body takes time to clear that, even with all the nervous system work I’m doing.

Then on Thursday afternoon, and for the whole of Friday, I took a period leave. No plans at all. It rained all day and I watched a series from my bed while eating cookies. BEST THING THERE WAS. I just needed exactly that and no one to bother me.

Was it productive?

Actually, yes. Just not the way that word usually gets used.

Productive at a level that worked with my energy instead. Gentle and kind, and still a week where a lot got done.

Three things you can use this week

1. Plan your hardest week before it arrives.
   I knew PMS was coming, so I built a week that suited it. The goal wasn’t to push through, it was to ease in. You already know roughly when yours lands if you track your cycle, so go ahead and plan ahead! If you have no clue, I’d advise you to start track your cycle with day 1 being the first day of your period.

2. Match the work to the energy you actually have.
   Luteal energy is nesting energy. Doing admin, cleaning up, finishing to-dos, organising. There is always work that fits the phase you’re in, and doing that work is not falling behind in any way or form.

3. Hire before you feel ready to.
   This is the one I’d underline. The year I hired Mathilde, my revenue doubled. Not because she took over the parts I was bad at, though she did, but because handing them over gave me back the hours and the head space to do the work only I can do. If you’re holding onto everything because you believe you can do it all, that belief has a price, and it’s almost always higher than the salary you’re avoiding. Look at what you did this week and ask which of it genuinely required you.

100 days progress

Day 35 of 100

This week’s question: what does productive look like when your energy is low?

Stages researched 8 of 20

Conference and TEDx pitches sent 2 of 20

Dream podcasts shortlisted 3 of 7

Podcast pitches sent 1 of 7

Outreach messages drafted 3

Outreach conversations started 20 of 100

New Intensive and Immersion clients 0 of 10

Corporate partnerships 0 of 3

LinkedIn community 33.818 of 50,000

Sunday letters published on Stubstack 5 of 15


I write these updates about my experiment every Sunday. The honest version of the hundred days, including the rejections when they arrive.

And if you read the second layer bit and recognised yourself, that gap between believing you are capable and having no idea how, that is most of what I do with women one to one. The Feminine CEO Intensive and the Immersion are both open. Reply to this and tell me where you are stuck, and I will send you a DM with a thought, a question or tip for how to move forward with building/scaling your business.

With love, Roos

Honestly, seventy is a good number. But it isn’t 100, which is what I said out loud, in public, to all of you.

So I gave myself until Sunday.

Maybe that’s super stubborn. But I can’t walk away from a goal I’ve named when the last thirty percent is still there for the taking. And honestly, Wednesday or Sunday, who gives a shit? It’s still well within the time.

I still don’t know if I’ll make it today. If I’m really honest, I didn’t put much effort into it these last few days, because a lot of other things happened. And that’s okay too. At least I’m doing it, and I’m proud of myself for that.

The thing this week actually taught me

I set quite a lot of goals for these 100 days. I want to speak on big stages, be a guest speaker on podcasts, reach out top 100 people I thought were out of my league, acquire 10 new clients, corporate partnerships and 50,000 followers on LinkedIn.

This week I found out I can’t chase them scattered..

I can only do one thing at a time if I want to be really good at it.

It reminded me of when I started Accelerate, my quarterly mastermind to help women to create aligned, consistent, successful businesses on their terms. If I wanted that to work (and to be really good at delivering it), I had to stop everything else. Or at least, my gut was telling me this. So I stopped focusing on 1:1 coaching and I doubled down on this program completely. That’s the reason it became what it is today, 8 cohorts in.

Yes, I’m pretty damn proud of what I’ve built for female entrepreneurs!!

And now it’s the same thing here. Am I going to make every single goal in 100 days? I’m not sure anymore and that’s okay. Because if you set goals this big, you also need to make the time for them, the energy for them, the space for them. Things need to breathe.

Last week until upcoming week, I’ll focus solely on the survey. And then it will be something else.

Something else I figured out, and I want to give it to you

Because once you take one step forward, the next step shows up. It ALWAYS does (I can see my clients nodding while reading it). I think most people say “I’m not ready” when what they actually mean is “I don’t have the how yet.” Those are not the same thing. You’re not waiting for readiness; you’re waiting for a map, and the map only appears once you’re walking.

It’s honestly as simple as making the decision.

And then there was the week itself

Some crazy shit happened - excuse my words.

Because I moved back to the Netherlands, I’m migrating a few of my business processes and my website. Something went wrong in the migration and my domain was shut off for the entire week. My email stopped working; I couldn’t receive anything, I couldn’t send anything, and I was waiting on some genuinely important things.

It got solved this weekend, thank God. But it drained me and I was worried sick all week. What if my domain would never recover again.. I know, it felt like the end of the world to me.. lol!

And here’s the part I want to be honest about, because it’s not the flattering version. When something occupies my brain like that, I stop nourishing myself. I look at my laptop more and I tend to scroll more. It’s a behaviour I recognise in myself and I did it all week.

Then on Thursday my sister came over and I decided to keep my laptop shut all day. We catched up, we went to a breathwork session together and I found my way back to me. Today I’m going to a nervous system reset class, also can’t wait for that one!

Because managing my energy is not optional for me, and this week showed me exactly what happens when I let it slide. And we can’t support others if we don’t put the oxygen mask on ourselves first.

Three things you can use this week

1. Pick one thing.
   And I don’t mean by that pick oneone thing forever. I mean choose one thing at a time. If you have five goals, the fastest route through all five is still one at a time, done properly (trust me!)

2. Stop waiting for the how.
   Make the decision first. If you want to launch a group cohort, expand your business, or simply even start a business, don’t figure out the how. Make the decision to simply do it. The next step will show up once you’ve taken this one. It always does. (And if you’re unsure about the how, connect with me on DM and we can explore together where your next opportunities are hiding)

3. Watch what you do when something is occupying your brain.
   When I’m stressed, anxious or worried, I start to scroll and refresh my inbox every ten minutes. Whatever yours is, it’s usually the first sign that you’ve stopped taking care of yourself, and it shows up long before you notice you’re depleted.

Twenty-eight days in

I’m at 70-something responses with a few hours to go, a domain that finally works again, and a much clearer sense of how I actually operate. Woohooo!!! I can breathe again and feel so proud of this achievement already!

100 Days Progress

Day 28 of 100

This week’s question: what is my one thing right now?

Stages researched 5 of 20

Conference and TEDx pitches sent 0 of 20

Dream podcasts shortlisted 3 of 7

Podcast pitches sent 0 of 7

Outreach messages drafted 3

Outreach conversations started 15 of 100

New Intensive and Immersion clients 0 of 10

Corporate partnerships 0 of 3

LinkedIn community 33.818 of 50,000

Sunday letters published on Stubstack 2 of 15


I write these updates about my experiment every Sunday. The honest version of the hundred days, including the rejections when they arrive.

And if you read the second layer bit and recognised yourself, that gap between believing you are capable and having no idea how, that is most of what I do with women one to one. The Feminine CEO Intensive and the Immersion are both open. Reply to this and tell me where you are stuck, and I will send you a DM with a thought, a question or tip for how to move forward with building/scaling your business.

With love, Roos

This week was a lot calmer, which is interesting, since I’m entering my ovulation phase. The reason for it is that I’ve focused on one thing only; setting up & sharing a research reflection survey for Feminine CEOs.

At first, my plan was to get 25 responses. Honestly, I’d be super happy with that result. Then somewhere in the middle of creating it, I thought: fuck it, let’s go for a hundred responses!!

I had no plan for how I was going to reach a hundred answers. I simply couldn’t come up with one good reason not to want it, which was slightly annoying because I had been perfectly comfortable with twenty-five.

And I’ve started noticing something about myself: “I have no idea how yet” and “I should want what feels easy” are two completely different sentences. Somehow, I’ve spent years treating them as if they were the same.

So I changed how I talked about it. Instead of adding a link to my LinkedIn posts and hoping people would fill it in, I said out loud exactly what I was going for.

I currently have fifty-five responses (woohooo!!!0

Say what you want out loud.

The moment I named the “hundred” number, my community started helping me to reach it. Women reposted it, people I had never met shared it with their own audiences, and messages started coming in: “send me the link, I’d love to help!” (I mean, how cool is that!)

None of that would have happened when I hadn’t expressed this crazy-ass number as my target to my community and beyond.

And there it is, the whole mechanism, sitting in plain sight where it probably has been all along.

And this is showing up across the other goals of my experiment too.

I’m three weeks in, and almost everything that has arrived has come through that same door. Two more speaking opportunities landed this week, one requiring a speaker kit by the end of the month, which was a fun thing to discover given that I do not own one. And a conversation started about a magazine feature.

I pitched for none of it.

I just kept saying what I was doing where people could see me doing it.

Choosing to not know.

I’ve spent two years working with ambitious businesswomen. Eight cohorts of Accelerate, one-to-one clients, and several hundred women through workshops and masterclasses.

You’d think that would make me want to stop asking questions. It’s actually why I’m asking more.

The market is shifting and we are all shifting. What women needed from me two years ago isn’t automatically what they need now. The fastest way to become irrelevant is to keep confidently answering a question that changed while you were busy being the expert.

In week one I wrote about landing back in the beginner’s seat and finding it deeply uncomfortable. This week I chose to sit there. Turns out those are two very different experiences, and I suspect the second one is what expertise looks like once you have had it for a while.

So this is me asking rather than assuming. What are you actually building, what is getting in the way, and what would you do in your business right now if you fully trusted yourself?

Take The Feminine CEO Research here.

Two women who complete it receive a place in one of my programmes. One Feminine CEO Intensive, worth €4,400, and one Accelerate, worth €3,300.

The one thing I have been getting wrong for years

It took one sick cat, then one sick dog and three weeks of doing this in public for me to notice something that, in hindsight, feels painfully obvious.

I coach intuitively. I give a lot in every session. I stay open and receptive to my clients and to everything happening around me. That isn’t a mode I switch into, it is simply how I work.

Which means a lot of my work runs through my nervous system. And somehow, I have been treating mine like it maintains itself lately. Luckily, I found a studio here in Amsterdam focused on nervous system resetting. They offer all kinds of sessions, think; breathwork, EFT tapping, yoga nidra, somatic and reiki. I started going on Sundays first because I like walking into a new week feeling balanced. This week, I went twice.

And I’m telling you, the difference is not subtle.

The more attention I give my nervous system, the less frightening my own goals feel. Same goals, same list, completely different sensation in my body when I look at them.

Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe my body just hadn’t learned that it was safe to hold something that big yet! And so one of the things I'm learning is that taking care of myself isn't something I get to do once the work is done. It's part of what allows me to do the work in the first place.

Four things you can use this week

1. Say your number out loud.
   Whatever you are secretly hoping for, say it where people can hear it. Nobody can help you reach a target they don’t know exists. And it turns out, most people actually want to help! This has been the highest-leverage thing I’ve done in three weeks, and all it cost me was the discomfort of being specific.

2. Check whether you’re shrinking the goal or just missing the route.
   When the bigger number feels wrong, ask yourself which one is actually happening. Not having a plan yet is a completely normal part of wanting something you’ve never done before. It is not evidence that you should want less.

3. Ask your people what they need instead of assuming you already know.
   Experience and current information are not the same thing. Whatever you feel most certain about when it comes to your clients might be exactly the thing worth checking.

4. Treat your nervous system as infrastructure.
   If your work runs on your energy, and for most of us it does, then looking after it isn’t a nice extra sitting outside the business. It’s a crucial part of the business. Put it in your calendar with the same seriousness you would give a client.

The real check-in, 21 days in.

I feel calm.

Which is not the word I expected to be writing in week three of an experiment about chasing enormous things.

There was no chasing this week. I had one priority, worked on it properly alongside my clients, and it felt considerably better than all the frantic motion of week one..! I’m sleeping well, I’m heading into ovulation and feel grounded, calm and satisfied, which feels like its own small miracle.

My cat is recovering really well from her eye surgery, and then my dog got sick (she’s doing better again luckily!). At this point I’m fairly convinced something is going on in this house. Both are being handled, both will be fine, and I’ve become extremely well acquainted with my vet.

So yes, forty-five responses to go. Three days to get them. I have no idea whether I’ll make it. What I do notice is that I’ve stopped needing to know before I’m willing to want it.

Day 21 of 100

This week’s question: what changes when you say the number out loud?

Stages researched 5 of 20

Conference and TEDx pitches sent 2 of 20

Dream podcasts shortlisted 3 of 7

Podcast pitches sent 1 of 7

Outreach messages drafted 2

Outreach conversations started 20 of 100

New Intensive and Immersion clients 0 of 10

Corporate partnerships 0 of 3

LinkedIn community 33.497 of 50,000

Sunday letters published on Stubstack 3 of 15

I write these updates about my experiment every Sunday. The honest version of the hundred days, including the rejections when they arrive.

And if you read the second layer bit and recognised yourself, that gap between believing you are capable and having no idea how, that is most of what I do with women one to one. The Feminine CEO Intensive and the Immersion are both open. Reply to this and tell me where you are stuck, and I will send you a DM with a thought, a question or tip for how to move forward with building/scaling your business.

With love, Roos

I read it a few times and sat with the feeling of being a woman who gets invited to speak on a stage in Dubai, and I’m not going to pretend that isn’t an amazing feeling.

But I missed some details with this invite… Like with all speaker invites, you don’t only want to understand the topics that they focus on; you also want to know who’s speaking there as well ánd understand the budget. The budget for travel and stay, because if you get invited, well, I expect they’ll pay for my travel.

I did my due diligence and figured out that there isn’t a budget, and in fact, if I want to speak on that stage, I had to pay a fee. She also mentioned very warmly and without hesitation that eighty-three speakers had already confirmed.

So I said no. There was no fear in it and no story about me not being good enough. Because I simply refuse to buy a speaker opportunity. Honestly, it felt like the first plot twist that arrived since starting this experiment.

The part I didn’t see coming

I expected week 2 to test whether I could ask for things. Whether I could send the pitch, make the call, put myself in front of people who might say no. But what it actually tested was whether I could tell the difference between a stage and a product that is shaped by one. 83 speakers is not a line-up. To me, it’s a customer base.

This decision made me so proud of myself, I actually raised a glass to it. The whole point of asking what I would do if I fully trusted myself is that sometimes the honest answer is that I would not be flattered into paying for this. So I said thank you, showed my gratitude, and if a budget appears, I would be open to speaking again.

This wasn’t the only opportunity that came my way..

Since I started saying this out loud, things have started to arrive.

• I had my first conversation with a large financial company about bringing feminine performance to the workplace.

• I confirmed my first podcast, with a woman who interviews female founders and I’m genuinely excited to sit down and chat with her!

• Three more speaking gigs opened up, and I’m in conversation to explore more about the events, the speakers who’re coming- and you’ve guessed it, if there’s budget for travel (it’s all outside of the Netherlands).

• I also had calls with amazing female business owners and made two offers.

How much you plan, life can still be in the way.

Even though I would have loved to spend more time working on my goals, I decided that my furry child (my cat of almost 17) was my prio #1. She had a tumor in her eye that needed to be removed, so I’ve spent most of my energy and time taking care of her (and navigating my own stress levels).

What you can actually get tested on is whether you can choose your priority deliberately rather than drift into it and then resent yourself, the week, and all things included.

Four things you can use this week

1. Ask what an opportunity costs you, not only what it gives you.
   Visibility, money, energy and time are all currencies. An offer that makes money and energy and gives you the visibility alongside 83 other people is a transaction, and it’s fine to want it as long as you know that is what you are buying.

2. Notice when something arrives in the shape of your own ambition.
   That is the moment your judgement is the least reliable, because saying no might feel like you betray the goal. Take some time and sleep on those decisions. I take proper time for each decision that feels important, and it has never -once- cost me an opportunity that was genuinely mine to take.

3. Don’t just set goals, spread the word!!
   Everything that arrived this week came from a public announcement. You really don’t need the perfect pitch to start being available for opportunities

4. Choose your priorities deliberately when life happens.
   Something will come up, left way or right way. The difference between a lost week and a chosen one is whether you decided on the purpose, and you can only make that decision if you say out loud what is coming first and why that is important for you.

One thing I would love from you this week.

I have changed a LOT over the past year, and my work definitely played a part in that. What I’m least willing to guess about is whether the women I work with have changed too.

So I’m running a Feminine CEO research survey (something I’ve worked on this week deliberately!). It’s a short reflection on how you feel, where your business actually is what right now, what you are navigating, and what would make the real difference in the next few months as we’re heading towards 2027.

As a BIG THANK YOU, two women who complete it will receive either 1:1 coaching or a seat in Accelerate. Both names are drawn once the survey closes on Wednesday 19.08 at 23.59 CEST.

100 Days Progress

Day 14 of 100

This week’s question: does saying no count as progress?

Stages researched 5 of 20

Conference and TEDx pitches sent 0 of 20

Dream podcasts shortlisted 3 of 7

Podcast pitches sent 0 of 7

Outreach messages drafted 2

Outreach conversations started 10 of 100

New Intensive and Immersion clients 0 of 10

Corporate partnerships 0 of 3

LinkedIn community 33.250 of 50,000

Sunday letters published on Stubstack 2 of 15


I write these updates about my experiment every Sunday. The honest version of the hundred days, including the rejections when they arrive.

And if you read the second layer bit and recognised yourself, that gap between believing you are capable and having no idea how, that is most of what I do with women one to one. The Feminine CEO Intensive and the Immersion are both open. Reply to this and tell me where you are stuck, and I will send you a DM with a thought, a question or tip for how to move forward with building/scaling your business.

With love, Roos

I was so amazed by the response I received for announcing this delulu idea. Almost 100+ reactions on LinkedIn, personal DMs from women whom I’ve never met, and a few even telling me that they were so inspired that they’ll start something like this themselves (how cool!).

I’ll tell you in honesty. For three hours I felt unstoppable after I posted that announcement, but after the notifications slowed down I found myself staring at my laptop thinking: have I just promised the internet something I have absolutely no idea how to do?

“Okay, now what?!”, I heard myself saying.. Because I had announced a list of enormous things without a plan attached to a single one of them.

The most interesting learning of the week

I definitely needed to sit with that unsure feeling, and it became the most helpful thing I can give to you this week ↓

• The first layer is whether you believe you are capable of the thing. Whether you are worthy of the stage, the client, the number. I know I feel this one in every cell of my body. I did not doubt for a second that I belong on those stages.

• The second layer is whether you know how you will get there.

I did not have that at all. And because the two feelings live in the same part of your body, the panic arrives looking identical. It feels like doubt in yourself. It presents as the old familiar story that “you are not ready”.

But you know what. This is not that story, it’s simply missing directions for its route.

Why is this distinction so important? Because both ask for a different way to solve it:

If you don’t feel you’re capable of achieving it > you need evidence.
If you missing the “how”, no affirmation will help you to get there, and you’ll tire yourself trying to feel your way into something that actually requires a plan.

The masculine and feminine energy always go hand in hand, and in this case as well.

How I solved my challenge

I was SUPER frustrated for a full hour, and I would love to tell you it was productive frustration…!

Unfortunately, it was the opposite: I opened my email five times in twenty minutes, convinced something enormous had landed while I was not looking. I scrolled LinkedIn studying women further along than me, telling myself I was collecting inspiration when what I really wanted was for one of them to hand me the instructions. I opened my own website and closed it again, multiple times.

None of it was helping, though every minute of it looked like working. And then it landed: I already own the recipe for this.

In Accelerate, the mastermind I’ve built and hosted for 8 cohorts already, where women build consistent businesses and step into leading them as Feminine CEOs, we work through five pillars.

Align. Activate. Accelerate. Embody. Nourish.

In another post I’ll dive deeper in to each of them, but they function like the wheel of life. Each part contributes to the whole and when one parts fails, it will affect the other pillars too.

In my case, I’m very strong on embodiment and nourishing myself. But I could not activate, and I certainly could not accelerate, because I had skipped straight past the first one. I had launched a hundred-day experiment starting at pillar two.

So I went back to the foundation and asked myself the following questions:

1. Who am I?

2. What am I setting out to do?

3. And most uncomfortably, is that clear to anyone who is not already in a conversation with me?

Because I can only reach out, network, and pitch myself onto stages when I can say what I do and how I do it in one breath. In my own head, it is obvious and in sales conversations it is too. I know when I speak to a woman whether I can support her or not, and what the transformation will look like. Yet, with these new goals, I really start from scratch to feel comfortable sharing my story and why I am worth being booked.

What this experiment actually is about

A lot of people have asked what the hundred days involve. It is not one goal so much as a collection of decisions that all come back to the same question: what would I do if I fully trusted myself?

And I started to ask myself this question after I moved to Amsterdam about 4 weeks ago. It felt like stepping out of my comfort zone and routines, and it automatically challenged me to ask: how do I want to life? What am I here to do? And what would I do IF I fully trusted myself?

Well… turns out. I completely rewrote the script of my own plans, even though I set out to mostly arrive and relax this summer and work with the great clients I’ve been working with right now. It was clearly needed, I’m ready for the level up!

But the commitment that matters more than any of them is this one. Every Sunday I tell you exactly what happened, including the pitches that went nowhere, the rejections, the conversations that surprised me, and the moments I wanted to back out.

Because the experiment was never really about achieving every goal on the list, it is about whether I keep choosing self-trust while the outcome is still uncertain.

Four things you can use this week

• Work out which layer you are actually missing. Next time you feel the question mark coming up, ask whether you doubt you could do it or whether you have no idea how it would happen. Do not treat a routing problem as a confidence problem. One needs evidence, the other needs a next step written down.

• Give foundation work a deadline or you’ll keep it as an excuse. This is the one I want you to take seriously. Fixing your positioning, your offer, your website, all of it feels productive, and it will happily eat six weeks of your life while you tell yourself you are preparing. I have given myself until day fourteen. That is what I would give a client, so that is what I am giving me.

• Test if others understand what you’re doing as much as you do. Share what you do to someone outside your industry, without any expectations. If it takes three sentences and a bit of context, it is not ready to be pitched yet. Clarity in your own mind is not the same as clarity on the page.

• Ease the step, do not drop it. This week I learned my cat needs to have her eye removed, my father had a fall, and my hormones are at its lowest because my period is around the corner. Life does not pause because you announced something on LinkedIn. Turtle steps make baby steps, baby steps make normal steps, and normal steps make the big steps. On the hard days you go smaller, and you still go.

Where I actually am, seven days in

Back in the beginner’s seat, which I did not expect at this point in my career, and definitely not three hours after telling everyone what I was doing…

I was hard on myself about that for longer than I needed to be. A woman with eighty clients behind her should know how to do this, is roughly how the thinking went.

It is strange how fast your brain forgets everything you have built the moment you are a beginner again. Experience does not protect you from feeling like an amateur, it only means you have survived the feeling before.

Next week is still focused on the pillar Align. Finishing the foundation, setting up the research I want to run because I need more clarity on the women I am building this for, and drafting the pitches so they are ready to send rather than sent badly. Day fourteen is the line. After that, Activate.

The results of any of it will probably show up much later than I would like, but I’m here to build for long-term success. Which leaves the part in between to manage, and I am starting to think the whole experiment lives there.

100 Days Progress

Day 7 of 100

This week’s question: is this doubt, or is it a missing route?

Stages researched 0 of 20

Conference and TEDx pitches sent 0 of 20

Dream podcasts shortlisted 3 of 7

Podcast pitches sent 0 of 7

Outreach messages drafted 0

Outreach conversations started 0 of 100

New Intensive and Immersion clients 0 of 10

Corporate partnerships 0 of 3

LinkedIn community 33.122 of 50,000

Sunday letters published on Stubstack 1 of 15

I write these updates about my experiment every Sunday. The honest version of the hundred days, including the rejections when they arrive.

And if you read the second layer bit and recognised yourself, that gap between believing you are capable and having no idea how, that is most of what I do with women one to one. The Feminine CEO Intensive and the Immersion are both open. Reply to this and tell me where you are stuck, and I will send you a DM with a thought, a question or tip for how to move forward with building/scaling your business.

With love, Roos

This is the first update. What moving to Amsterdam made impossible to keep ignoring, what happened when I published the post, and the hour of frustration it took before I remembered I skipped my own first pillar. On day one. In public.

Weekly recaps go out every Sunday in The Feminine CEO Journal on Substack.

And somehow I still ended up building a life that didn’t quite feel like mine.

At twenty-nine I had the career I had spent years building toward. HR leader at a fast-growing scale-up unicorn, leading a team of twelve, and I had a seat at the table I used to watch from the doorway. It was exactly the dream I had envisioned: become a great leader with a big team and a seat at the board table.

But when I finally reached the goal I had spent years working toward, I hit a wall I hadn’t calculated for. “What comes next?” I didn’t have an answer for that question, and not having one is what actually burned me out. I landed in a kind of black hole, with zero idea what to do next with my life.

It became a domino effect. It wasn’t only my mind responding to the situation; my body paid the price too. For sixteen of every twenty-six days I was bleeding, half of my hair fell out and I had acne on my face, chest and back. She was telling me something long before I had language for it.

But what surprised me wasn’t the burnout itself, it was actually what came after:

That’s when the question showed up, and it never really left.

Why do capable women stop trusting themselves?

Not “how do we build confidence.” Confidence was never the missing piece for me, or for most of the women I now work with. We knew how to perform. We knew how to be capable in every room except the one where we made decisions about our own lives without checking them against someone else first.

I spent the next years trying to answer that question from every angle I could find. I studied hormones and became a hormone therapist because coaching a woman without accounting for her body felt incomplete. I trained as an executive coach because I wanted to understand behaviour at the level where it actually changes. I moved deeper into business mentoring because I found something I hadn’t expected there.

In my search to understand and answer this question, I found something interesting in my work as a feminine performance & business coach:

The boundary you knew about and didn’t set, the client you took for the wrong reason (you’re intuition already signaled you a clear no), the price you undercharged because asking for more felt like you weren’t worthy of it. None of that gets invented by running a business. It was always there. Running a business just takes away the places where you used to look away from it, because now you're the one person responsible for every outcome.

Every one of those pivots I took looked like a change of direction from the outside. From leading HR functions to hormonal health coaching to executive coaching to business mentoring. I didn’t fully understand at the time that I was answering the same question from a different angle each time. Though I’m glad I understand it now.

Understanding that didn't come with an instruction manual for what to do with it. It didn't even come with the answer to the question that had started it all. I still didn't know why capable women stop trusting themselves, not in a way I could put into words yet.

Instead, what came next was one decision. It was smaller and harder than it sounds. It was choosing to build my work around the thing that had actually shifted things for me, and for the women I'd started mentoring, instead of around what looked most credible on paper.

This isn’t only my story. It’s the story of most ambitious women I know. The ones who made every smart choice and still feel like they’re managing their own life from an outside perspective. The ones who hit the number and wonder why it landed so flat. Playing small was never about a lack of ambition for any of us. We had plenty of that. It was about how much of every decision we outsourced before we trusted our own read on it.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us got very good at building businesses & careers and never got taught how to stay ourselves while we built them. That’s the actual work now, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s a different job than the one I started out doing. My coaching stopped being about helping ambitious women get more ambitious. It became about helping them find their way back to themselves while they build, instead of arriving at the end of it as someone they don’t quite recognise.

I’d love to know if you’ve felt it too in your own work. Write and tell me about it please!

For the next few months, I’m going to double down on my own self-trust, and I’ll be documenting it here weekly. The highs, the lows, and the in-between feelings too. I’d love for you to follow along.

Join me live for The Feminine CEO Method on Wednesday the 3rd of June from 1pm to 2pm CEST. Register here (replay will be available for those who sign up)

And I'll be sharing something very special that day. I promise you don't want to miss it.

With love, Roos

This is me, unfiltered, sharing all my flowers. For all the women who feel ready to step into their Feminine CEO identity, in business, in life, in all of it.

If that's you, book a chemistry intro here. I'd love to meet you and explore how I can support you.

With love, Roos