At first, we tend to ask practical ones.

What should I do next? Should I leave? Should I stay? How do I make this work? What am I supposed to become now?

But underneath those questions, there are often much bigger ones waiting.

What if I’m not actually the problem?

What if the way I have been taught to work, create, lead and even rest no longer makes sense to me?

What if I stopped trying to fix myself long enough to question the structures I have been adapting to?

That is where our new autumn season of The Lady’s Lab begins.

We are calling it Questions for the In-Between.

Five conversations between September and November, designed as a journey — beginning with the systems around us and slowly moving closer and closer towards ourselves.

1. Question the system

10 September — What happens when women stop adapting to broken systems? with Maja Grakalić, design strategist & futurist

Women are constantly being offered solutions for surviving dysfunctional workplaces.

Be more resilient. Communicate better. Manage your energy. Set stronger boundaries.

But what if the people aren’t the problem?

Together with Maja, we’ll look beneath the symptoms of workplace dysfunction and ask what becomes possible when we stop endlessly fixing the people inside a system and start redesigning the work itself.

2. Question what we make

30 September — What is still worth creating? with Isabelle Ette

We are entering a world where images, words, ideas and entire pieces of work can be generated in seconds.

Which leaves a much more interesting question than what can AI make?

What is still worth making ourselves?

A conversation about originality, comparison, creativity and what makes something feel unmistakably human.

3. Return to your own voice

8 October — Write yourself back to yourself with Tatjana Harttung, thinking partner & facilitator

Somewhere underneath our professional voice, our useful voice, our sensible voice, our agreeable voice, there is often another one.

Ours.

This Lab is an invitation to use writing and journaling not as another self-improvement exercise, but as a way of listening more honestly.

Enough quiet to hear the woman underneath the performance.

4. Name your desire

22 October — What do you actually want? with Kinga Jakabffy, writer, artist & communications strategist

Such a simple question.

And, strangely, one many women find incredibly difficult to answer.

Not what makes sense. Not what everyone else needs. Not what looks impressive. Not what you should want.

What do you want now?

A conversation about desire, self-trust and the next small step we might take if we stopped outsourcing the answer.

5. Redesign the rhythm

5 November — What if rest was part of the work? with Moulsari Jain, social innovation artist & systems designer

We end the season by questioning perhaps one of the most deeply embedded rules of modern work: that productivity should be constant.

Moulsari will introduce Rest to Harvest, a proposal for designing work around the natural cycles of life rather than continuously overriding them.

And the question underneath it:

What would become possible if I stopped overriding my own needs?

When we put these five conversations next to each other, something became very clear.

This isn’t really a series about becoming better at work.

It is about questioning what we have inherited.

The systems we automatically adapt to. The things we make because we think we should. The voices we perform. The desires we suppress. The rhythms we override.

And then asking what we want to carry forward — and what we might finally be ready to leave behind.

Maybe that is what the in-between is for.

Not rushing to become the next finished version of yourself.

But creating enough space to notice what is trying to emerge.

Five conversations. Five spaces to think out loud.

No need to have an answer before you arrive.

In fact, we rather prefer that you don’t.

The Lady’s Lab — Questions for the In-Between September–November 2026 Online

Come for one conversation, or follow the whole journey with us.

REGISTER FOR THE AUTUMN SERIES]

Real conversations. No masks. No gatekeeping. 🩷

With love,

Dina & Fransje

Yesterday evening we gathered three of our brilliant writers who wrote an essay, letter or article in our very first The Lady’s Realm Journal with the topic of “Women in Transition” and invited our community.

The Check-In Question, how we start every conversation.

We started as we start every Lady’s Realm Meeting, with a check in question. This time it is: “In one word: where are you in your own transition right now?”.

The words came back one after another. Rosi said release. Jelena said surrender, Dina said softening. Maja said embrace: embraced by the community, and in turn embracing herself in all of her multitudes. Marta was leaving early motherhood behind and finding her way back to herself, and called it integration and expansion. Sonja said it had started as a shock and had become accepting, embracing. Raffaella hunted for the word and landed on deepening. Mirela typed speaking out into the chat. Marie said surrender too — not the word, she said, but the real practice of it. And one woman, joining from the other side of the world, said guided: I’ve realised I’m not in control. I’m being guided. That’s why I’m here.

How the Journal was written

This spring we invited ten women to Motovun in the spring for an Editorial Collective. The original plan was to come up with an editorial spine for a Lady’s Realm Book. But the group went somewhere different. They asked: what is a book? And came up with the idea of a monthly newsletter that was delivered in the mail with stickers and other goodies filled with letters, articles and essays from women. This is our goal, but we wanted to build an artifact now and the Mobile Lady’s Realm Journal is what we build.

Here are the three articles the Lady’s wrote and why they did so.

1. The Question I never learned to answer.

Maja — designer, futurist, systems thinker, and as of this year a very fresh PhD — wrote The question I never learned to answer. The question is what do you do? Industrial design, then motion, then websites, then product, then strategy, and a doctorate nobody cares about but she does. For years she experienced her own range as a personal failure to be summarised.

What the piece arrives at is that the demand was never reasonable. Everything she has touched came from the same place: curiosity, and the pull towards wherever new ideas are emerging. It might not be a me problem, she said on the call. It might be an industry problem that wants to reduce everybody to a tagline. She quoted a line she’d read somewhere — specialisation is for insects — and then said the thing she’d tell her younger self: you’re fantastic, and you don’t have to fit in.

It landed in the room because everyone recognised it. Dina and I tried this question on a group of women a few weeks ago — so, what do you do? — and something like eight in ten visibly froze. That isn’t a confidence problem. It’s an externally imposed framework, and it fits almost nobody.

Read The Lady’s Realm Journal →

2. On the record - Three letters from within Motherhood

Jelena is broadcast journalist, TEDx speaker, children’s author and she wrote about gender equity in AI, and the accounts that were never written down. She has a project called Pónekad where she asked twenty-five experienced mothers to each write one letter to a future mother. Not advice: the thing they had never felt safe saying out loud. A thousand boxes went out, and five hundred women wrote letters back and gave permission to keep them.

Her argument is that women’s stories are almost always recorded after the transition, once it’s tidy and tellable. After six years, she said, I can tell the story of early motherhood well — and I would leave out precisely the things I needed someone to say to me in year one. That gap is now an AI training problem. My daughter is seven, she said. She will ask these systems what is happening to her, and what comes back will be built from what we did or didn’t write down. The gap isn’t the number of articles by women. It’s the genre.

Which is what On the Record, the platform she’s building, is for. Three of her collected letters are also in the issue.

3. The Letter I Owe her

Rosi Bremec is the writer behind The Letter I Owe Her, published in the journal under the name Annie. It is a deeply personal letter to the young woman she once was, exploring motherhood, survival, shame and what it means to reclaim the authorship of a story the world may have interpreted differently. Rosi chose to change names and identifying details to protect the other people within the story, but last night she joined us under her own name to stand beside the work.

A friend she sent it to has already passed it on to someone going through the same thing.If it helps one woman, Rosi said on the call. Just one.

Jelena refused to let that stand as modesty. It already helped you, she said — and that’s the most important thing. The moment was bigger than the story: think how many women are carrying something they have never said, being unkind to themselves about it, who have simply never experienced what it’s like to put it down in a room that doesn’t judge them.

Pass it on to one Lady in your life

Someone is going to read one of these three pieces and think: I feel seen. I feel heard. That’s the only reason why we do this.

Issue One is out now, and free to read. Subscribing to Substack is what keeps it going, and means you won’t miss the next one.

And if a story in here belongs to a woman you love, send it to her.

Read The Lady’s Realm Journal →

The raison d’être of The Lady’s Realm is that everyone has a story of a time they were marginalised, bullied or discriminated against at work, simply because of who they are.

We are collecting these stories to learn from them, and we want to banish these stories to the history books where they belong.

So the magazine is a dream come true, collecting stories from our community of women — which in the future will be a record, an artifact of women’s lives in 2026 — and hopefully times will have changed and our stories will be archaic.

Free Full Journal here

Free Full Journal here

A Community for Women in Transition

We started The Lady’s Realm two years ago as a community for women and a boutique consultancy making work better for women. Our name comes from a monthly magazine published between 1896 and 1914.

So editing The Lady’s Realm Journal in 2026, 130 years later, and starting it up again, is just a joy. Standing on these ladies’ giant shoulders is a huge privilege.

In the intro of the 1972 book made of those magazines, it says: “The ladies’ magazines together illustrate how much has changed in the last sixty-eight years — and maybe how much has stayed the same.” That’s exactly why we do what we do: there is still so much to do to make work and life better for women. In a time where women’s rights are turned back, there is more need to come together as women and support each other, make each other feel seen, and tell your story to an audience that will listen without judgement.

Thank you

We’re so happy to share our first magazine with you, and maybe in sixty-eight years someone will write the same comment — but we hope, of course, that the opposite is true.

Thank you to all our Lady’s — our community Lady’s, our founding Lady’s, our editorial Lady’s, our Lady partners — for making The Lady’s Realm what it is: a safe space to be a woman, and an initiative that makes work better for women.

You rock.

Dina & Fransje Founders & editors-in-chief, The Lady’s Realm

Become a Free or Paid Subscriber to read the full journal - once you do you are free to share it with as many women as you love, you won’t miss the next publications and are now part of our community of amazing women.

Read the Full Journal

The story of the revival started not in an office but on a hill in Istria. Last spring, ten women arrived in Motovun carrying notebooks, unfinished ideas and questions they couldn’t quite answer alone. Over four days they became our first Editorial Collective — writing essays, taking photographs in the cobbled streets, and building a safe space where women told stories some had never told anyone before.

Almost everything in this first journal was made there, together and all at once. Standing on the shoulders of the women who published it a century ago is a genuine privilege — and a reminder of how much has changed, and how much still hasn’t.

Women in Transition is the theme of this first issue — and, if we’re honest, it’s exactly where we are too. This whole year has been one long in-between: changing shape, getting clearer, getting confused again, moving forward before everything feels settled. We’re slowly learning that the work isn’t to escape uncertainty before you move. It’s to move with it. So we’re not writing to women in transition from the other side. We’re in it with you.

Free Full Journal here

Free Full Journal here

This issue isn’t a conclusion. It’s the beginning of a conversation we want to keep building — and in October, we’ll gather again in Motovun for the next residency to see what wants to emerge. Come closer. Read with us. Write with us.

The Lady’s Realm is still becoming. So are we. And perhaps you are too.

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In this issue
01 · The Check-In 02 · Annie’s Letter 03 · The Lady’s Editorial Residency 04 · The Epiphany Exit — why women are suddenly getting up and walking out 05 · Transmogrification 06 · On the Record — on gender equity in AI 07 · Stay and Dance 08 · My Body Remembers 09 · The Question I Never Learned to Answer 10 · The Lady’s Lab, Autumn 2026 11 · Thank You from The Lady’s Realm 12 · The Check-Out

Share it with one women who will also enjoy this slow read and perhaps even feels seen in one of the letters and stories.

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It took almost a century to redesign it around the woman using it — her body, her movement, her privacy, her dignity, her daily life.

That history feels almost too perfect as a metaphor.

How often do we design something for women without designing from the reality of their bodies, time, mental load, privacy or lives? And how long do women live with the result before anyone thinks to ask whether it was designed for them at all?

I first met Jeannette Weber at one of our Amsterdam Salons.

She had spent years working inside Design for Personal Health at Philips, including on solutions for breastfeeding and early motherhood. What stayed with me was not only what she had designed, but the honesty with which she spoke about who she was while designing it: a white, child-free feminist woman creating products for first-time mothers, aware that care, expertise and good intentions do not remove bias.

Jeannette is also in her own in-between — reconsidering what she wants the next chapter of her life and work to stand for. That made her the right person for this Lab. She did not arrive with a perfected methodology from the other side. She was asking, alongside us, what responsibility looks like in a moment that asks more of designers, leaders and anyone making decisions that shape other people’s lives.

By the end of the session, the room was so energised we could easily have continued for another hour. So we did, in a way — we sent Jeannette three questions that were still sitting with us after the room closed.

Her answers are below.

What does “design is never neutral” mean to you in practice?

Jeannette Weber:

Design is never neutral, because the world is not neutral. And neither are we.

We all carry our own perspectives, biases, traumas, wishes and lived experiences. They shape our worldview, our actions and our designs.

I am, among many things, a white, child-free feminist woman. Designing products for first-time mothers — all of that comes with bias. I need to acknowledge the blind spots that come with my personal lived experience, as well as my preference for certain solutions.

I was also raised in a male-dominated world, where “male” was treated as the unquestioned universal norm. That means I still look at the world through a male gaze. It shapes my default judgment and decision-making.

Neutrality does not exist. Not in photography, where the photographer frames her version of reality. Not in design, where the designer’s choices reflect the world that shaped her.

We have to keep asking what we are carrying into the design with us.

Left unquestioned, design reproduces the world’s stereotypes and inequalities. Examined closely, it has the power to reinvent that world instead.

What are the three questions you wanted to leave us with?

Jeannette Weber:

“I’d blush if I could.”

Siri’s infamous submissive response to harassment is one example of how harmful design patterns enter products. These things do not happen by accident. They are rooted in systemic inequality and they slip into products through a lack of care — whether intentional or not.

Our work culture often rewards speed over scrutiny. We are pushed to move quickly, optimise, launch and scale. This leaves too little room to examine the logic we are reproducing.

The three questions I wanted to leave the room with:

— Would I defend this decision or solution publicly?
— Are we designing for systems that no longer fit?
— What future am I building for the women I serve?

These questions ask us to look beyond whether something technically works. Who does it work for? Who has to adapt? What kind of behaviour does it normalise? What version of the future does it quietly make more likely?

A decision can appear small and still contain an entire worldview. A line written for a voice assistant, a default setting in an app, a supposedly efficient step in a service — all of these communicate who is expected to accommodate, who is protected and whose discomfort is treated as insignificant.

The responsibility of the designer is not only to solve the problem placed in front of her. It is also to question how that problem was defined, whose reality shaped it and whether solving it in the expected way will reinforce the system that created it.

What would a small shift towards Femtopia look like?

A note before Jeannette’s answer: Femtopia — the word for a future designed around women’s actual lives, bodies and realities, rather than around the systems that have historically excluded them.

Jeannette Weber:

Women represented just 13.9% of European inventors named on patent applications filed at the European Patent Office in 2022. There is still a great deal of systemic work to do.

The good news is that we can choose otherwise. Where alternatives do not exist yet, we can build them.

There is real power in a room full of women doing exactly that: imagining Femtopias.

I believe a first step is to build a fertile environment for Femtopia to flourish within our organisations. The current system does not serve us. We need to redesign how decisions get made, how teams operate and how success is defined and measured.

What if we measured a successful team by the number of rest days taken? By mentoring sessions? By psychological safety? By happiness?

A second shift is to imagine the future through more diverse stories. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin suggests that perhaps humanity’s first great invention was not a weapon, but a woven bag used to gather and carry food.

The dominant story celebrates the spear: conquest, force, competition, the individual hero. The carrier bag tells another story — one of gathering, carrying, sharing and sustaining life.

What changes when we design from that story instead?

Femtopia is not one perfect future that can be designed for everyone. It is the possibility of many worlds existing alongside one another, shaped by different bodies, experiences, needs and ways of living.

“From one size fits all — to a world in which many worlds fit.”

A product can be technically successful and still belong to a badly designed world.

Women have become remarkably skilled at adapting to those worlds. We bring cardigans into freezing offices, schedule bodily needs between meetings and soften the sentence before saying the thing. We become so fluent in bending around the system that the system can continue calling itself neutral.

Women have become so skilled at adapting to badly designed worlds that those worlds can continue calling themselves neutral.

So the next time before approving a product, policy, service, campaign or system, ask yourself these 6 questions.

From one size fits all — to a world in which many worlds fit.

I am still thinking about the breast pump. About how women could live with something so poorly designed for almost a century before their comfort, movement and dignity became central to the question.

I am also thinking about Femtopia as more than a lovely future we imagined together. Perhaps it can become a practice — a way of gathering women’s lived experience and using it to ask what else could exist.

There is value in making existing systems less harmful. But we also need spaces where we are no longer limited by their original architecture. Where we can imagine different relationships with work, care, technology, money and the body.

We did not leave this Lab with one Femtopia. We left with many women carrying different pieces of it into the worlds they are already shaping.

I am still wondering what mine looks like.

What does yours look like?

Continue inside The Lady’s Realm

The Lady’s Realm is an editorial home for women in transition. We don’t just publish stories. We build the rooms where the next ones begin.

Twice a month, we open the room through our Lady’s Labs—live conversations where women think together about work, leadership, creativity and what comes next.

This summer, those conversations continue in The Lady’s Realm Journal.

If you’d like to help build it, we’d love to have you with us.

Join the next open #26 Lady’s Lab: Fix the Work, Not the People ✏️

Join the next Lab

No masks. No performance. No gatekeeping.

Dina Mehulić
Co-founder & Editor, The Lady’s Realm
dina@theladysrealm.com

You weren’t. None of us were.

We covered the doors with post-it notes to prove it.

Three days. Ten women. A hilltop town in Istria, Croatia. Everything sorted by feeling — by the thing underneath the thing. The question that kept returning in different words from different women in different rooms over two years of Labs and Salons and late-night messages that ended with exactly those words.

The yellow post-its stayed up for the whole residency. You could read them from the terrace. From the table where we ate breakfast. From the chairs where we sat and argued and laughed and occasionally went quiet because someone had just said something that needed a moment.

What emerged were fourteen clusters — the editorial spine of The Lady’s Realm Journal.

01 — Support System

It wasn’t the first thing women talked about. It was the very thing every other conversation eventually came back to.

Not advice. Not networking. Not even friendship exactly.

Something much simpler. The feeling of finally being understood, being seen and not having to explain yourself before you speak.

Feel seen. Feel heard. Feel not alone.

We keep underestimating how much energy women spend not having this. And how much becomes possible the moment they do.

02 — Transmognification

We needed a new word for it. Because the ones we have don’t quite fit.

Transformation implies you know what you’re becoming. Reinvention sounds too intentional. Transition too administrative.

Transmognification appeared on a post-it. And we couldn’t get it out of our heads. It took us a while to even pronounce it — but that mouthful is exactly how it feels. The word itself is in-between. Still becoming something.

The in-between phase where you are not who you were — but don’t yet know who you are yet. The chrysalis stage that has no name and no clear end. The time that asks you to keep going without knowing where you’re going.

How do you support yourself through a transition when you don’t know yet what you’re transitioning into?

That’s the question this cluster holds. And it was the one topic every woman in the room felt most compelled to write about — which is why it became the central theme of the upcoming first edition of The Lady’s Realm Journal.

03 — I’ve Had Enough. I’m Done.

The pivotal moment is not one moment.

It’s a hundred small ones. A pattern of experiences, a slow accumulation of evidence, until one unremarkable Tuesday morning the calculation quietly changes and you finally trust what you already knew.

You have the data.

You always had the data. You just needed permission to believe it.

This cluster is about that moment. The anti-manipulation. The self-knowing as power. The particular clarity that comes not from someone else telling you it’s okay to leave — but from realising you were the one who got to decide when it was done.

And our personal favourite line from the room: I hate your shoes — and other comebacks to annoying people.

04 — My Tribe

Girlboss era is over. Welcome to the era of female constellations.

Not competing for the same position at the top of a hierarchy. Not networking for what you can extract. Something slower and more nourishing — actually belonging, actually being known, building something together that none of you would have reached alone.

Someone wrote in our gratitude jar: I found my tribe. That feeling.

Just that. That feeling.

We knew exactly what she meant

05 — Surrendering to What Is

Every woman will have a burnout. All of us did.

That appeared on a post-it. Written matter-of-factly, as if it were simply weather. Something that happens. Something you survive and learn from and eventually — if you’re lucky — understand.

Also on a post-it: We all cry in Zara.

No explanation was offered. None was needed.

This cluster is about the freedom that lives on the other side of the performance. The unmasking. The self-acceptance that isn’t passive — that is, actually, one of the most radical things a woman can practice.

Crying is not a weakness. Emotional surrender is not the same as giving up.

06 — Experience as Power

Age is truth serum. What kind of drink do you make?

One line. Written on a post-it. Read aloud in a room in Motovun.

The whole room went quiet.

This cluster holds something the culture is slowly beginning to understand but hasn’t quite said clearly yet: experience is not a consolation prize for youth. It is its own form of intelligence. Of authority. Of power.

Growing older is great — the alternative is not better. Sometimes your biggest weakness is your biggest strength. Re-writing our stories, turning adversity into power.

The question isn’t how to stay young. It’s what kind of drink you make from what you know.

07 — Agency & Sovereignty

Pick a hero.

Then make an alter ego hero for yourself.

Not the person you’re supposed to become. Not the version that fits the expectation or the job description or the life plan someone else drew up. The person you would be if you stopped waiting for permission and started making the decisions you’ve been circling for years.

Encouragement to change their paths, minds and desires. I want them to feel the power of their own agency without needing to repeat pain or patterns.

This cluster is about the authorship of your own life. About choosing — actually choosing — rather than drifting into what seems expected or easiest or least disruptive.

08 — Own Your Narrative

There is a difference between being defined by your story and being the one who tells it.

This cluster holds that distinction carefully. Because the stories we inherit (from families, from cultures, from the versions of ourselves we performed for years) can feel like facts. Like the truth of who we are. When they are, actually, a starting point. Material to work with.

Where you come from is a map. Circumstances don’t define who you truly are. You can use every tool to be an architect.

Stories and wisdom that help women be happy about being a woman.

That last line is simple and enormous. We’re still sitting with it.

09 — Maternal Instincts Beyond Blood

Motherhood is a spectrum. And it shows up in so many ways.

The urge to protect. To nurture. To want someone else to flourish more than you want credit for it. To be the person who sees potential in someone before they see it themselves.

This conversation kept expanding — into mentorship, into legacy, into grandmothers, into the particular love that comes from wanting to leave something real behind.

It’s not a script. Maternal instinct is not just for family. Being someone else’s female vision.

Motherhood as a source of power. Not a limitation. A source.

10 — Personal Spiritual Awakening

Not religion.

The knowing that lives in the body. The instincts you were taught to override. The quiet intelligence that most professional settings ask you to leave at the door — and that accumulates, unspoken, until one day it becomes impossible to ignore.

Female spirituality as a vehicle of growing knowledge. Human superpowers.

And this, written by one of the women at the table and read aloud on the last morning:

I’m doing a free fall. I’m saying yes. I’m writing my spirituality.

11 — Stop Fixing. You Are Enough.

Two words on a post-it.

Hello you.

That’s it. That’s the whole cluster. Everything else is just the long way of finding your way back to those two words.

Validation on a feeling she’s experiencing but feels it’s shameful and not safe to share. Encouragement to appreciate themselves. Feeling worthy and deserving of — and remembering you always have been.

How are you not?

12 — Origin Story

Where you come from is a map.

It is not a sentence.

This cluster holds the difference between inheritance and identity. The patterns handed down — the expectations, the limitations, the stories told about who you were before you could disagree — are information. Not destiny. The material you were given, not the building you have to live in.

That whatever your story, wherever you are in your journey — you are enough.

Self-trust. That’s what this one is really about.

13 — Career, Vocation, Purpose

No workplace is a place to give you validation.

Your job is not your identity.

Work is work — until it’s not.

This cluster felt the most urgent in the room. The quiet unravelling of the belief that a career is the same thing as a self. The moment when the title stops being enough and the question underneath finally becomes audible:

What kind of life actually feels like mine?

Don’t look for validation at work. External validation. Work is work until its not.

14 — Financial Independence

The last cluster. The practical one.

Which is also, underneath, about freedom.

About the difference between surviving and designing. About what becomes possible when money stops being a source of fear and starts being a tool. About the particular kind of agency that comes from knowing — really knowing — that you are going to be fine.

How to diversify income. Financial independence. Give me practical advice. Money talks.

You’re going to be fine.

These are the fourteen things we found in Motovun.

Not a table of contents. Not a curriculum. Something more like a map drawn by women who have been living these questions without quite having the language for them yet.

That’s what we’re building now.

If you’d asked me six months ago what The Lady’s Realm was building, I would probably have said a community.

Today I’d answer differently.

We're building a language. A language for experiences women keep having before they have words for them.

Because once something has a name, you realise you were never the only one living it.

And maybe that’s where every movement begins.

Not with certainty.

With recognition.

If this is your kind of movement — come be part of it.

The Lady’s Labs happen twice a month. Online. Free.

No masks. No performance. No gatekeeping.

Just honest conversation, in good company.

👉 Join a Lab: luma.com/TheLadysRealm
👉 Subscribe to the Journal so you don’t miss what’s coming next
👉 The waitlist for our October Editorial Residency in Motovun is open!

Most women find us through another woman.

If one came to mind while reading,

pass this along to her. 💜

Dina Mehulić
Co-founder & Editor, The Lady’s Realm
dina@theladysrealm.com

Not because women are suddenly changing.

Because more and more of us are finally giving ourselves permission to live differently.

Over the last few years, we’ve had the privilege of sitting with hundreds of women through our Leadership Labs, Salons, workshops, and now our very first Editorial Residency in Motovun.

Different countries.
Different generations.
Different careers.
Different lives.

And yet, somehow, the same questions keep finding their way into the room.

Women who are discovering that the next chapter isn’t about becoming someone new, but about remembering who they were before they spent years adapting to everyone else’s expectations.

Women who are no longer interested in endlessly fixing themselves, but are learning that self-acceptance might be a far more radical act than self-improvement.

Women who are building lives that include space for self-renewal, recognising that transition isn’t something to rush through or solve, but a place where entirely new versions of ourselves quietly begin to emerge.

Women who are becoming harder to manipulate because they know themselves better. They trust their instincts more, set clearer boundaries, and are slowly learning that they already have the data they need.

Women who are realising that the era of trying to do everything alone—or proving they can—is giving way to something much more interesting: building villages, finding their people, and understanding that belonging isn’t a luxury; it’s part of how we grow.

Women who are redefining success, recognising that careers, titles and external validation can no longer carry the weight of identity, and beginning to ask a quieter question instead: What kind of life actually feels like mine?

Women who are thinking differently about money—not as status, but as agency. About experience—not as age, but as power. About vulnerability—not as weakness, but as the place where trust begins.

The stories are completely different.

The patterns aren’t.

Somewhere along the way, and I realised that perhaps our role isn’t to have the answers. Our role is to notice the questions before the rest of the world has words for them.

That was really the beginning of the Lady’s Editorial Residency in Motovun.

Not because we wanted to run another retreat (which we badly needed) or because we wanted to write another book (which we also really wanted).

But because we wanted real women in room, real lived experinces and to create the conditions for conversations that normally don’t have anywhere to go.

The kind that happen late at night around a dinner table.

Walking home through quiet streets.

Over coffee the next morning.

Or in that tiny moment when somebody says something out loud for the very first time, and suddenly everyone else in the room quietly nods because they’ve been carrying something similar.

People ask us how we chose the women who came to Motovun.

The honest answer is that we didn’t curate the room by CVs or job titles.

Of course, they’re extraordinary women. Women leading global teams, building businesses, teaching AI, writing books, designing systems, researching the future, creating communities and challenging industries.

But that wasn’t why we invited them.

We invited women who were deeply curious. Women who were generous with one another. Women who were willing to arrive without needing to have everything figured out. Women who could hold complexity, ask better questions than answers, and trust a process that was still taking shape as we were building it.

Looking back now, I think that mattered far more than any title ever could.

Because once we were sitting around that table, nobody introduced themselves with their LinkedIn headline.

The first question wasn’t, “So, what do you do?”

It was simply,

“Where are we finding you right now?”

Everything that followed grew from there.

Over the next three days we didn’t just write.

We cooked together.

Pulled tarot cards.

Walked through Motovun.

Danced a little longer than we probably should have.

And somewhere in between all of that, a manifesto began to emerge.

Fourteen signals.

Questions that none of us could have written alone.

That’s really what this Journal is.

Not a collection of polished answers.

But a living record of the questions women are asking at this moment in history.

A testimony of our time.

More than a hundred years ago, there was a publication called The Lady’s Realm. It documented women’s lives, ambitions, work, travel and ideas until it stopped publishing in 1914.

We’ve decided to pick up the conversation where it left off.

Not by writing about women.

By writing with women.

And if you’ve ever caught yourself thinking, “I’ve been feeling this too, but I thought I was the only one,” then you’re exactly why this Journal exists.

This isn’t a publication to consume.

It’s an invitation to notice, reflect, contribute and help us document the questions we’re all living through—together.

Our new Manifesto is already evolving. The Founding Voices of our first Editorial Collective are gathering again this week to refine it, challenge it and shape the first edition of the Journal together. We’ll be sharing what emerges and the signals we’re beginning to notice over the coming weeks.

If you’d like to be part of the conversation, join us.

Come to one of our bi-weekly Lady’s Lab. Join us for a Salon. Read along. Share your reflections. And if you feel called to help write future editions, we’d love to welcome you to a future Editorial Residency in Motovun, Croatia.

We only host two Editorial Residencies each year because we believe conversations like these need time, care and the right mix of voices, not bigger rooms. The waitlist for our October residency is now open.

Because this publication isn’t something Fransje and I are writing.

It’s something we’re building together.

Dina ♡

If this letter resonated with you, I’d love for you to stay with us.

Every few weeks we’ll publish a new editorial letter, share the signals we’re noticing, and continue documenting the questions women are living through together.

If you’d like to take the conversation further, you’re warmly invited to:

• Join one of our upcoming Lady’s Labs

• Apply for a future Lady’s Editorial Residency

And if you’d simply like to read along…

Join us ♡

Dina Mehulić ♡
Co-founder & Editor, The Lady’s Realm.

If this letter sparked something in you, I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on LinkedIn or simply reply to this letter, I’d genuinely love to hear your story.

We had two days, a lot of questions, wildflowers on the table and a bottle of wine that didn’t last very long. What we made in those two days — through conversation and argument and laughter and the particular honesty that only comes when women stop performing for each other — became the Motovun Manifesto for the Future of Female Leadership. Then an exhibition at Galerija Kaptol in Zagreb. Then a series of conversations that travelled much further than any of us expected.

That’s the thing about these rooms.

You never quite know what you’re making when you’re making it. You only realise later.

This June we’re opening the doors again.

Eight women. Eight disciplines — AI and systems thinking, creative leadership and organisational transformation, design and coaching and storytelling and cultural production. Three days in a hilltop town in Istria, cooking and walking and arguing and writing and staring at the hills and sitting with the question that has been following us all year:

Are we tweaking the system? Or rewriting the code?

Because everywhere we look, women seem to be navigating the same tensions. AI is changing work. Motherhood is changing identity. Leadership is changing shape. Entire industries are being reorganised around technologies and assumptions that were never designed with us in mind.

And somewhere inside all of that sits a question we keep returning to:

What do we wish someone had told us before we walked into the industry?

Not as a rhetorical exercise, but as the foundation of something real.

Because here is what we are actually building.

We are not disappearing for two years to write a book. We are writing it publicly, while living it collectively — in Labs and Salons and editorial residencies and Thursday lunchtimes with women thinking out loud from six countries at once.

The Lady’s Handbook for Young Women Entering the Creative Industry.

Not written by experts. Not written after the fact. Written in real time, by the women living it — in rooms like the one in Motovun this June, and in every conversation that has happened in The Lady’s Realm this year.

The London salon where nine women wrote letters to their younger selves and pinned them to the wall. The Amsterdam power wheel where women named what they’d do with their power. The Labs where Carla Moss helped us read the signals and Verena Paar helped us build companies on our own terms and Amy Hancock reminded us that horses don’t lie about your presence.

All of it is going in.

But here is what we are missing.

Your voice

.

The handbook will only be as honest, as useful and as real as the women who contribute to it. And the most important question we keep coming back to — the one that started with a room in Motovun two years ago and has been growing ever since — is the simplest one:

What do you wish someone had told you before you walked into the industry?

Not the polished version. Not the version you put in a LinkedIn post. The real one. The thing that cost you something to learn. The advice nobody gave you that would have changed everything. The sentence you needed to hear at 22, or 32, or last Tuesday.

It could be about money. About power. About how the system actually works versus how you were told it works. About your body, your ambition, your relationships, your sense of self. About the moment everything shifted. About the thing you’re still carrying.

We want it all.

Here is how to contribute:

Leave a comment below or reply directly to this email.

One sentence or one page. Anonymous or named. Raw or refined.

We’ll be taking your stories, lessons and hard-earned wisdom with us to Motovun this June and weaving them into the archive we’re building for The Lady’s Handbook.

Because the handbook doesn’t get written by one woman.

It gets written by many. And we’d love your voice in it. 💜

What do you wish someone had told you?

Tell us. 💜

Leave a comment

The Lady’s Realm Editorial Residency · Motovun · June 18—21, 2026

Follow along on Substack as the handbook takes shape — and subscribe so you don’t miss what comes out of the room.

*Lady’s: a woman who has outgrown the way things work

Dina Mehulić Co-founder & Community Architect, The Lady’s Realm dina@theladysrealm.com

Yesterday we sat with a different question: what if resilience isn’t personal at all? What if it’s something we make together?

A different kind of Lady’s Lab

The Lady’s Lab usually has a familiar shape: we pick a topic, we talk, we share.

Yesterday was different.

Martina Gobec and Naomi Thellier de Poncheville — who between them bring 35+ years of work with leaders and teams in systemic change — took us inward first, through a guided meditation, before we said a word.

Starting quiet before going collective.

The session was called Finding Resilience Together: Inner grounding & collective support. Instead of “how do I become more resilient?” we looked at where resilience actually lives in the body. How we move through uncertainty without holding everything alone. What the collective makes possible when processing, deciding, and acting stop being solo acts.

The poem

The meditation opened something. Then we wrote a poem together, line by line, voice by voice. It’s called A Collective Poem of Collective Resilience, and a few lines have stayed with me:

One of the Lady’s comment has stayed with me especially:

“I find that every time we create — or participate in creating — art, it is an act of rebellion and therefore resilience.”

What I’m taking with me

Resilience framed as a private burden is exhausting, and possibly wrong.

I also learned that you can feel supported and not alone without having to talk, with just being together.

Something shifts when you stop treating your capacity to keep going as a solo project.

A grounded room of women can produce in 60 minutes something none of them would have made alone and that is the point.

If you want to be in the next one: luma.com/TheLadysRealm.

With thanks to Sandra, Amy, Madeleine, Farah, Pernille, Susanne and all the other Lady’s from our community who wrote this with us.
And to Martina and Naomi for holding the space so beautifully.

Find out more about our facilitators of the week on LinkedIn:
​Martina Gobec & Naomi Thellier de Poncheville

Martina shares her personal essays here: https://thoughtwardrobe.kit.com/

Not burnout, not a crisis, but something much quieter. A meeting where someone says “quick update” and suddenly your entire life feels strange. The spreadsheet pretending to be important. The version of success you worked so hard to earn. The seat you’ve occupied for years.

And something in you simply goes:

I can’t do this anymore.

We’ve started calling it the epiphany exit. And honestly, once you see it, you see it everywhere.

What’s striking is that this often isn’t happening to women who “couldn’t make it.” Quite the opposite. More and more, we’re noticing it among women who did everything right. Women who climbed. Women in leadership. Women who became successful inside the system and, in doing so, gained a clearer view of how the system actually works.

And maybe that’s part of the shift.

The higher you go, the more visible the contradictions become. The performative leadership language masking cultures people can barely survive inside. The endless optimisation of humans into productivity systems. The emotional labour hidden underneath “high performance.” The growing sense that many institutions are asking people to betray increasingly fundamental parts of themselves in exchange for stability, status or belonging.

At some point, the emotional contract breaks.

Not because women suddenly become weak, emotional or incapable of leadership. But because the system itself starts losing legitimacy in their eyes. They can suddenly see the machine too clearly to keep pretending it makes sense.

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What’s emerging from this is not a clean career pivot narrative. It’s something far messier and more culturally significant. Women leaving before certainty exists. Before the replacement identity has formed. Before there is another job, business model or five-year plan waiting neatly on the other side.

That’s what makes this moment feel so psychologically disorienting.

The old world no longer feels inhabitable, but the new one does not fully exist yet either.

And still, many are jumping.

Not recklessly. Not impulsively. More like following a gut feeling that has become impossible to silence. A growing awareness that continuing to override themselves carries its own kind of risk.

What we’re also noticing inside The Lady’s Realm is that many women seek community during this transition rather than after it. Not once they’ve “figured it out,” but precisely in the terrifying middle. Mid-exit. Mid-reinvention. Mid-becoming.

That feels important.

Because maybe resilience in this era will not come from having a perfect plan. Maybe it comes from finding constellations of people willing to navigate uncertainty together while entirely new models of work, leadership, ambition and belonging are being prototyped in real time.

This is perhaps the signal beneath all signals right now:

We are not moving toward one clear new model. We are living through a phase where many parallel models are being tested at once by women who are no longer waiting for permission, certainty or a blueprint before beginning to build differently.

The map does not exist yet.

Women are drawing it as they walk.

At The Lady’s Realm, we’ve been noticing more and more women navigating this strange in-between space together. Mid-exit. Mid-reinvention. Mid-becoming.

Through our Labs, salons and conversations, we’re exploring the cultural signals emerging around women, leadership, identity, work, power and what comes next.

If this piece resonates, you’re very welcome to join us.

Subscribe for future essays, signals and gatherings — or come sit with us in one of the rooms where these conversations are unfolding in real time.

With love,

Dina & Fransje

The Lady's Realm is a boutique initiative dedicated to making work radically better for everyone. We work with progressive organisations to build stronger, more inclusive cultures through facilitation, leadership development and community.

If that sounds like your world — find us at dina@theladysrealm.com 💜

We are not moving toward one new model.

That was the line that stayed with us longest after our Lady’s Lab with cultural strategist Carla Moss. Not because it was the most surprising thing said, but because it was the most honest.

Most conversations about women and work are still organised around the search for an answer. The replacement model. The new way of doing things that will make the old way obsolete. We want the girlboss to be replaced by something. We want the constellation to arrive fully formed. We want the map to exist before we start walking.

But what we heard in the room was something more complicated and more true than that. Women are not converging on a single new model. They are prototyping — simultaneously, in parallel, without coordination, without a shared blueprint — building different versions of what work, community, power and identity could look like.

We are in a transition phase. Not a stable new state.

What follows are eight signals from the room. Not predictions. Not a trend report. A live reading of what women are actually doing, saying and feeling right now — gathered in one hour on a Thursday lunchtime with Carla and a group of women from Amsterdam, Vienna, London, Lisbon and beyond.

This is the first edition of Lady’s Signals — a living read on where women actually are, drawn from real conversations in our Labs and Salons. We will keep adding to it.

01 — Independence is being redefined

Women don’t want to do everything alone anymore.

But they also don’t want to rely on systems, workplaces or relationships that only support them conditionally.

What many are looking for now is something in-between: autonomy without isolation. Support without control. The freedom to move — with people around them who actually show up.

02 — Girlboss is over. Constellation is next.

Something about hyper-individual success no longer feels convincing.

Women are seeking each other out more deliberately. Sharing contacts. Sharing information. Building quieter ecosystems of support behind the scenes. Less hierarchy. Less performance. More “how do we actually help each other move forward?”

Not a movement exactly. More like a shift in instinct.

03 — The body is back in the room

Women are talking about hormones, cycles, burnout, nervous systems, matrescence and mental load in the same breath as leadership and ambition.

Not because they want to be reduced to biology — but because pretending the body doesn’t exist has become impossible to sustain.

A lot of women are trying to build lives that include their humanity instead of constantly overriding it.

04 — Language is changing what women can see

Sometimes the biggest shift is simply finding the words.

You hear a term like mental load or matrescence for the first time and suddenly years of experience reorganize themselves in your mind.

Once something has language, it becomes visible. Once it becomes visible, it becomes harder to dismiss — both personally and collectively.

05 — Women are changing their relationship with money

There’s a noticeable shift from “keeping money safe” toward wanting to actually understand and direct it.

Investing. Building wealth. Taking calculated risks. Asking bigger questions about ownership, freedom and long-term security.

Not because women suddenly became obsessed with finance — but because financial fluency increasingly feels connected to agency.

06 — The dirty laundry is out

Women are speaking more openly about what work, relationships and leadership actually feel like behind the polished version.

The burnout. The resentment. The invisible labour. The impossible expectations.

Things that used to stay private are becoming collective conversations — and once that happens, it becomes much harder for institutions to pretend the problem is individual.

07 — Leadership is becoming more human

Many women are no longer trying to perform leadership in the old way. Less posturing. Less pretending. Less wearing the metaphorical suit.

Instead, more women are experimenting with leadership that feels relational, intuitive, emotionally intelligent and actually sustainable — even if there still isn’t a clear model for what that fully looks like yet.

08 — The epiphany exit is real

A surprising number of women are leaving systems that no longer fit them — often before they have a perfectly mapped-out next step.

Not because they’re reckless. Because staying has become more painful than uncertainty.

Many are in this strange in-between space right now: mid-exit, mid-reinvention, mid-becoming. Looking for community while they figure it out.

The signal beneath all signals.

We are not moving toward one new model. We are in a phase where many parallel models are being prototyped at once — by women who are done waiting for the blueprint and have decided to build without one.

Lady’s Signals will be our ongoing read on this — a living document gathered from real conversations in our Labs, Salons and gatherings. We will keep adding to it as the picture develops.

Because the map doesn’t exist yet. And we would rather draw it together. 💜

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Thank you to Carla Moss for bringing such a precise and generous cultural lens to this conversation — and to every woman in the room who showed up and went there.

The Lady’s Realm hosts Lady’s Labs twice a month — real conversations for women navigating leadership, creativity and the messy middle of building meaningful work.

👉 Subscribe to our events calendar and follow what’s coming next.

*Lady's: a woman who has outgrown the way things work

Dina Mehulić Co-founder & Community Architect, The Lady’s Realm dina@theladysrealm.com

On the third floor of Miro’s Amsterdam office. Eight segments radiating out from the centre, each one a different source of power. Not power as something abstract or aspirational — power as something already present, already carried, already operating in every woman who walked into that room.

Thirteen women. Senior managing directors and tech programmers from Bangladesh and Dutch creatives freelancers and a student of creative business who had never done anything quite like this before. All from different agencies, different backgrounds, different points on the map of a career.

We used Julie Diamond’s Sources of Power framework, adapted by Louise Pitre and brought to life by Naomi Thellier de Poncheville — one of the most embodied, practical tools for understanding power we have encountered. The premise is simple and the implications are not:

All of us have access to multiple power sources, just in varying degrees. When we can name them — when we can actually stand in them, physically, in a room, with other women watching — we can begin to use them more wisely. More consciously. With more intention about the impact we want to create and the harm we want to avoid.

Two questions opened the evening.

Where do you feel at home? And where do you resist?

Round One — Where do you naturally stand?

The first round asked women to move to the segment they most naturally lean into. The power source that feels like home. The one they draw from without thinking.

The room clustered around three: informal power, personal power and formative power.

Informal power — the networks, the connections, the access to resources that women have quietly built over years of showing up for people.

Personal power — the innate and developed qualities that shape how someone moves through a room before they’ve said a single word.

Formative power — the life experiences, the challenges and the gifts that have shaped a sense of worthiness. The hard things that turned into something.

What struck us watching: these are all forms of power that work relationally. Through others. In connection. Women, it seems, default to the kinds of power that connect rather than the kinds that command.

That is not a weakness. But it is worth noticing.

Round Two — Where don’t you go?

The second round was harder.

Which power source feels most uncomfortable? Most underdeveloped? Most charged?

The room shifted. Women moved to social power, positional power, expert power and physical power. The ones tied to identity, to title, to visibility, to the body taking up space in a room.

Naomi paused here and said something we haven’t stopped thinking about since:

“Social power is often the power that is left out. And yet it may be one of the most loaded for women. On one hand, we often feel powerless through our gender — and yet forget how much power we simultaneously hold in relation to other women, through race, age, class, education, seniority. Because these power sources overlap and intersect, we can easily lose sight of the social power we do carry. The risk is that we shy away from it rather than claiming it consciously — and in doing so, miss one of the most potent opportunities we have to grow positive influence and be better allies to others, particularly to the women who hold less social power than we do.”

The room was quiet for a moment.

Then someone said: I never thought that I could be both the one with less power and the one with more — at the same time, in the same room, depending on who else is in it.

That is the complexity of allyship that most conversations never reach.

Round Three — Where do you want to go?

By the third round, shoes had come off. People had sat down. The energy had settled into something quieter and more personal — the particular stillness that comes when a room has gone somewhere real together.

The question this time: which power source do you most want to lean into? Not the one you have. The one you want to claim more consciously. The one you’ve been circling without standing in.

The wheel bloomed. Women scattered across almost every segment.

Almost every segment except social power.

Which brought Naomi’s earlier observation back into sharp relief. The power source most loaded with complexity — the one that asks us to hold our privilege and our disadvantage simultaneously — was still the one women were least ready to stand in.

Not because they don’t have it. Because claiming it asks something difficult. It asks you to see yourself clearly — not just where you have been overlooked, but where you might be doing the overlooking.

And then we asked what they would do with it.

This is the part that made the evening something more than a workshop.

We gave each woman three post-it notes and one final question:

When you lean more into that power source — what becomes possible? Not just for you. For others?

What came back was not abstract. It was specific. It was the allyship piece — not as a concept but as a list of things women were actually going to do. In their teams. In their industries. In the rooms they already inhabit.

What can we actually do for other with the power we already have?

Expert Power — knowledge and skills

I can create an atmosphere of learning and sharing. I can connect you to others who can support your mission. I can cheer you on — loudly, specifically, in front of the right people.

Informal Power — networks and resources

Take the facilitating role to ensure everyone is heard. Connect more friends with each other — deliberately, not accidentally. Volunteer with younger people and help give them confidence.

Formative Power — life experiences and challenges

Listen to my body first — and explain that this is what I’m doing. Encourage people to develop their spider sense, especially kids. Enable women to trust their gut and lean into the illogical. Be an example for others who have had similar experiences.

Personal Power — unique essence and presence

Point out the uniqueness in others — name it, specifically. Make growth opportunities visible for others, not just yourself. Cheer for uniqueness and personal power in everyone around you.

Positional Power — formal role and title

Help people in unfair social situations who need support. Let other women know they can do what they’ve been told they can’t.

Physical Power — voice, presence, body

Use your voice to take up space in rooms where others can’t yet. Lead through presence — trust, connection, knowledge felt in the body.

Justice Power — inner compass and values

Amplify women’s stories — in our community, in our work. Speak up. Call out injustice. Train a thousand women and men on allyship and action.

Social Power — identity markers and privilege

See where you hold more power than others in the same room. Use that awareness to open doors, not guard them. Be the ally you needed when you had less social power than you do now.

This is what we keep learning from these salons:

Power is not something far away. It is already here, in every woman in every room, in eight different forms, waiting to be named. And once it is named — once it is seen clearly, not just where you have it but where you don’t, not just where you feel it but where you’ve been afraid to stand — something shifts.

You are only as powerful as you feel.

And feeling it, it turns out, is a practice.

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We bring this work into organisations through our Allyship in Action workshops — for teams who want to move from sentiment to practice. If you’d like to bring a session to your organisation, find us at dina@theladysrealm.com

Thank you to Miro Amsterdam for opening their beautiful space and making the room possible. To Naomi Thellier de Poncheville for holding the container with such precision and warmth. And to Julie Diamond and Louise Pitre for a framework that makes something as complex as power feel navigable.

Further reading: Julie Diamond’s Power: A User’s Guide · diamondleadership.com

These conversations are feeding into The Lady’s Handbook for Young Women Entering the Creative Industry.

*Lady’s: a woman who has outgrown the way things work

Dina Mehulić Co-founder & Community Architect, The Lady’s Realm dina@theladysrealm.com

❤️‍🔥 Subscribe for more from the Lady’s Realm…

…where we explore leadership, power, allyship, and the ways we can show up — for ourselves and for each other.

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The Ladies’ Realm exists because we want to banish certain stories to the history books. Stories of women being overlooked, undermined, used and underpaid in industries that couldn’t exist without them.

But before we could banish anyone else’s stories, we had to tell our own.

This is Dina’s.

She came into the creative industry the way most of us do — thinking it was going to be like joining a rock band. The energy, the creativity, the cool kids. What she didn’t expect was the pendulum. The very big highs. And then the very big lows.

“You get the role,” she said, “but you don’t get the pay check.”

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She talked about the moment she realised it wasn’t a language problem or a nationality problem — it was a seniority problem. The higher she rose, the fewer people like her were in the room. The boys club doesn’t reveal itself at the bottom. It reveals itself at the top, when you’re finally close enough to see it clearly.

She talked about the ally who wasn’t. The person who opened doors and lit fires and then used every vulnerability she’d ever shared to serve their own interests instead.

“An ill-tempered ally is worse than an enemy,” she said.

She found that line in an old book — The Lady’s Realm, a collection of women’s magazines published in London in the 19th century, found on the side of a street (long story).

That book is where our name comes from.

And that line — about the ill-tempered ally — is part of why we’re building this.

Because nobody told Dina.

Nobody warned her. Nobody left a note.

We’re trying to leave one. 💜

Dina & Fransje

Leaving notes for the next generation

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Not a conference table. Not a panel stage. Not a circle of chairs arranged by a facilitator trying to make a corporate room feel human.

A kitchen counter is where the real conversations happen. Always have been. You lean against it with a drink in your hand and something loosens — the performance, the politeness, the careful version of yourself you brought to the party.

This is where we gathered. Nine women in London on a Wednesday evening. Editors, journalists, designers, executives, founders and creatives from Croatia, Argentina, Ireland, Russia, the Netherlands and the UK. Different industries, different career stages, different versions of the same question they had each been carrying for years.

Nobody said it out loud yet. But it was already in the room.

What did this cost me? And was it supposed to?

We started with the worst advice we’d ever been given.

Not as an icebreaker. As an excavation.

One woman read hers from the post-it she’d written it on. Then another. Then the room went very quiet — not the uncomfortable kind of quiet, but the kind that means something true just landed.

“Be humble. You talk too much. You don’t give others space.”

“Look pretty and shut up.” — actual advice given before a client meeting. At an agency. Recently.

“Ignore your female traits — act like a man to succeed.”

“Keep your mouth shut. You’re too outspoken and opinionated. Do this and you won’t get backstabbed.” She paused. “But you do anyway.”

“You can have everything.” Someone said it and then added, quietly: you can’t.

The room exhaled. Not with shock — with recognition.

Because every woman in that kitchen had heard some version of this. Not from enemies. From managers who meant well. People who were passing on the survival instructions they’d been given — the ones that had kept them small enough to stay safe in rooms that weren’t built for them.

This is the part that’s hard to sit with.

The advice that held us back came wrapped in love.

Then we asked the harder question.

What is one thing you learned the hard way — that you wish someone had told you?

And this is where the evening changed.

Because what came back was not the polished version. Not the LinkedIn lesson with the tidy takeaway. It was the thing underneath — the truth that costs something to say out loud.

One woman talked about money. How she’d always treated it as a lifeline rather than a tool — spending her whole career in survival mode, taking less risk, asking for less, expecting less. We should be playful with money, she said. We should teach the next generation to be playful with it. Not reckless. Playful. Like it belongs to them. Because it does.

One woman talked about visibility. How she’d spent years believing that good work would speak for itself. It doesn’t, she said. It never did. Someone else will speak for it if you don’t. She’d watched it happen. Watched her ideas leave the room in someone else’s mouth. Watched someone else take the credit for the thing she’d built. Take up space, she said. Name what you did. Otherwise the story gets written without you.

One woman talked about the system. How she’d spent years trying to fix herself — her confidence, her communication, her presence — before she realised the rooms she was trying to fit into were the problem, not her. Men get promoted on potential, she said. Women get promoted on proof. She’d stopped trying to collect more proof. She’d started naming the design flaw instead.

One woman talked about allyship. Not as a concept but as a Monday morning practice. Find your allies, she said. Brag for other women. Share their posts. Say her name in the meeting. Get her in the room. It is often easier to advocate for someone else than for yourself, she said. So use that. Use it deliberately.

And one woman — the one who made everyone laugh the hardest — offered this:

If they ask you to make the coffee — burn it. They’ll never ask you again. 🔥

By the time we got to the best advice, something had shifted.

The women in the room were not the same women who had arrived an hour earlier. Something had been put down. Not solved — put down. There is a difference.

The best advice came faster. Looser. Like the room had given itself permission.

Show vulnerability and you will get it back 95% of the time. That’s where real connection happens.

It’s never too late. To start something. To learn something. To switch.

You can do things your way and still be successful.

Don’t sugarcoat things. The most useful thing you can offer someone ten years behind you is the truth — how you got through it, not just that you did.

I made it by being me. Not someone else.

The right rooms don’t require you to dim your light. They brighten up.

And one that we keep coming back to, that one woman offered quietly near the end of the evening:

The things that make you difficult are the things that make you necessary. Don’t smooth them away.

At the end we wrote a Lady’s* Cheat Sheet we wish we had on day one.

To the women we were when we first walked into the industry — before we knew what it would ask of us, before we learned what we now know, before the hard way taught us what the easy way never could.

If you could hand your younger self a cheat sheet on the way into the industry — one page, no lectures, just the things that actually matter — what would be on it?

This is what nine women around a kitchen counter in London came up with.

The Lady’s* Cheat Sheet What we would have handed ourselves on day one

These cheat sheets — and the conversations that produced them — are becoming something larger than one evening in a London kitchen.

The Lady’s Handbook for Young Women Entering the Creative Industry.

Not a guide written by experts. A collection of hard-won truths from women who have already walked the road — and want to leave something real behind for the women who come next.

If you have something worth adding — the worst advice you were given, the best, or the truth you had to find the hard way — we want it.

Drop it in the comments. Or reply to this email. Anonymised or named — your choice.

The next generation is watching.

Let’s give them something true.

Dina Mehulić Co-founder & Community Architect, The Lady’s Realm

We host and facilitate sessions on allyship, community and the future of work — for organisations, teams and gatherings of women who want to think differently. If you’d like to collaborate or bring a session to your team, find me at dina@theladysrealm.com

I want to be honest about something.

When we invited Verena Paar to our Lady’s Lab to talk about building a company on feminist values, I wasn’t sure what we’d get. The phrase carries a lot of weight. It can mean everything and nothing. It can become a mood board. A set of aspirational values on a website that nobody reads after the rebrand.

What I didn’t expect was for the room to build something together.

Verena didn’t arrive with a framework. She arrived with seven years of having actually done it — the friction, the doubt, the moments where her values collided with what the market expected of her. She’s a marketing strategist, founder, and self-described proud mom on a mission to build businesses that actually mean something. As the force behind Propelled, she helps companies turn complex ideas into clear, compelling stories.

But before all of that, she started where many of us start. With a feeling. The feeling of sitting in a corporate job and knowing, somewhere below the rational mind: this cannot be my life.

She left. She built something. And she did it without a manifesto.

When we asked her what chapter she’s currently in, she said:

“I’m in the chapter where I’m trying to choose alignment over approval. Earlier in my life, I focused on meeting expectations and proving myself. Now I’m building from a place of clarity. Clarity about my values, my voice, and the kind of life I want to live.”

That sentence became the spine of everything that followed.

We asked three questions.

The first was the hardest: When you say building a company on feminist values, what does that actually mean in practice?

Not in theory. Not in the mission statement. In practice. On a Tuesday morning when a client pushes back, when a team member is struggling, when the numbers don’t look the way you need them to look.

The room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when a question lands somewhere real.

And then the answers came. Not from Verena alone — from everyone. Which is the thing about asking a real question in a real room. The intelligence is distributed. It doesn’t belong to the speaker. It belongs to whoever is present enough to catch it.

What came back was not a list of values. It was something closer to a set of refusals.

What follows is not a framework we designed. It is what the room built together — women from six countries, different industries, different career stages, all thinking out loud on a Thursday lunchtime. We wrote it down. They made it.

Here are the twelve principles the room built together:

1. Fix the work, not the people. Most organisations spend enormous energy trying to help people fit a broken system. The feminist alternative is to question the system itself — the structures, the processes, the unspoken rules that were designed for someone else and never updated.

2. Purpose and health first. Prioritise your company’s why — and the health of everyone in it — over traditional metrics like relentless growth.

3. Collaborate, don’t compete. Particularly with other women. The scarcity mindset (that there is only room for one of us) is one of the most effective tools the system has ever produced. Rising with each other is not naive. It is strategic.

4. Circles over hierarchy. Rigid hierarchies protect ego. Self-organised, circular structures are built on trust. Harder to build. More durable when they work.

5. Show up as your full self. As Verena said: “The right rooms don’t require you to dim your light — they brighten up.” If the room is asking you to shrink, it’s the wrong room.

6. Space for emotions. All of them. Including the inconvenient ones. A company that only allows the feelings that are comfortable is not a safe place — it’s a performance.

7. Salary transparency. Not as a political statement. As a practical act of trust — and a way to help people understand their own worth.

8. Psychological safety as foundation. The operating system everything else runs on. Where mistakes are learning opportunities. Where being wrong is not a threat to your place in the room.

9. Design roles around people. Most of us have spent years reshaping ourselves to fit a role someone else defined. The alternative requires a completely different relationship with control — and a willingness to start with the human before you build the container.

10. Growth is not always the answer. A conscious decision not to grow. Not because ambition isn’t there — but because more, every year, as the only metric of success is a design flaw dressed up as common sense.

11. Allyship as operating system. Not a workshop. Not a value on a wall. A daily practice of creating opportunities for other women, calling out what isn’t right, and leaving things better than you found them.

12. Leave it better than you found it. Not as a philosophy. As a calendar invitation.

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If you'd like to watch the full conversation with Verena, the recording is here: LINK

The second question was the reality check: Where does this approach get tested the most?

Here Verena was most useful. Because she didn’t pretend it was easy. Feminist values — in practice, not in theory — collide constantly with traditional business expectations. Clients who want speed over care. Markets that reward scale over depth. The pressure to perform certainty when what you actually feel is uncertainty.

“Shrinking yourself to be more palatable,” she said, “leads to living an inauthentic life. It never leads to real belonging. It leads to quiet resentment.”

The moments of collision are not failures. They are the practice.

The third question was the practical one: Where should someone start?

Start with yourself. Before seeking outside advice — which may not apply to your specific situation — understand your own desires. Not what the market wants from you. Not what your former employer modelled. What do you actually want?

Then find one client or customer early. Not to scale. To establish the value of what you do — and with it, the power to walk away from what doesn’t align.

And listen to your own inner voice. As Verena put it:

“Don’t accept the wisdom of others. Follow the beat of your own drum. Whether it’s career, motherhood, partnerships — it goes for everything. If what’s expected of you is not what you want for yourself, choose yourself.”

Finally — be forewarned. Use the stories, handbooks and hard-won wisdom of women who went before you. Because forewarned is forearmed. Which is, not coincidentally, exactly why we are building The Lady’s Handbook.

After the session I kept thinking about one thing.

The principles didn’t come from Verena. They didn’t come from us. They came from the room — from women on screens in six countries, thinking out loud together on a Thursday lunchtime.

That is what a Lady’s Lab is for. Not to deliver answers. To create the conditions where the answers that were already in the room can finally surface.

The Lady’s company isn’t built alone. Neither is the thinking behind it.

This conversation is part of a growing body of work we are collecting — stories, principles and hard-won wisdom from women building differently. It will become The Lady's Handbook for Young Women Entering the Creative Industry. If you have a story worth adding, we want to hear it.

What ripple effect does Verena hope her work creates?

“I hope my work gives women permission. Permission to take up space, to make ambitious decisions, and to build lives that feel deeply theirs. If even one woman makes a braver, bolder choice because she saw what’s possible, that ripple matters.”

We think it already has.

The Lady’s Realm hosts Lady’s Labs twice a month — real conversations for women navigating leadership, creativity and the messy middle of building meaningful work.

Subscribe to follow what’s coming next — including two gatherings in Motovun, Croatia, and The Lady’s Handbook for Young Women Entering the Creative Industry.

Dina Mehulić Co-founder & Community Architect, The Lady’s Realm

I host and facilitate sessions on allyship, community and the future of work — for organisations, teams and gatherings of women who want to think differently. If you’d like to collaborate or bring a session to your team, find me at dina@theladysrealm.com