The Spectacle of a Woman: How Owning the Experiences You've Had Makes You the Leader You Want to Be
What does it mean to be a spectacle? Not the cringeworthy kind, but the real kind: a vision, a marvel, something worth watching unfold. The spectacle you've lived is the foundation every good leader stands on, whether they know it yet or not. This talk is about learning to know it.
I have spent a lot of time in my life being a little bit chaotic, an occasional space cadet. I gained these qualities the hard way.
Growing up as a joint-custody kid who moved every two weeks, while my parents moved houses eight times in six years, I learned early that expectations were a luxury I couldn't afford. So I became a "make-do" girl instead. Cheerful, adaptable, 41 jobs (never fired, just couldn’t stay still), 7 states, 25 moves, and one survival skill grown as strong and supple as a feather: float. Never land. Make do. You never quite get everything you want, but you learn to be happy with whatever you get.
For a long time, that looked like chaos. From the inside, it was a masterclass in resilience, reinvention, and reading a room. The make-do girl is resourceful beyond measure, unshakeable in uncertainty, able to walk into a room full of strangers and find the current. These are not small things. These are exactly the things that make a leader worth following.
The only thing that I could trust and depend upon was my writing. In 2023, I left academia to build a business devoted to coaching writers, and I discovered that leading others requires something harder than shapeshifting: it requires knowing which version of yourself to show up as, and why. I learned that steadiness is not the enemy of wonder. It is the condition for it.
I share my story to model something I believe every leader needs to practice, the act of turning your own experiences into your resources. The chaotic, floating, make-do years were not a detour from becoming a leader. They were an education. And I want to help you find yours.
This talk is my invitation to stop editing your biography for the highlight reel and start examining it for the lift buried in the detours, the survival strategies, and skills you learned while taking the long way around.
Takeaway: The experiences you've been quietly apologizing for, or leaving off your LinkedIn, are often the very ones that make you a leader worth following. Whether you are leading now or growing into it, you will leave with a fresh lens for reading your own story and a clearer sense of how owning all of it, not just the polished parts, is what makes you the leader you are, and the leader you are still becoming.
Frankie Rollins
Writing Coach
Frankie Rollins is a creative dynamo, building a world to welcome people into their own throughlines, blockages, and sense of self through workshops that access each person's fifth brain, the place where all of our expertise, experience, and values are stored. Frankie is the founder of the Fifth Brain Collective, and a writing coach offering 1-1 coaching, memberships, workshops and webinars. Frankie is the author of Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide to Artistic Confidence, The Grief Manuscript, and The Sin Eater & Other Stories. She has been a member of the eWomen Network Northern Colorado chapter for almost three years.
Facilitated By
Toni Caruso
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