Show Notes
"The day I finally stopped pretending was the day I realized I wasn't performing anymore. I was just surviving. And that wasn't something I was willing to keep calling success." - Brooke Leone Shipman, Founder of CEO Woman
Brooke was the first in her family to graduate college, raised without much structure but with a lot of drive.
As a sophomore in high school, after being screamed at on the drive to school, she looked in the mirror and decided she got to choose who she was, not her environment.
That decision carried her from straight A's to a scholarship to a climb from executive assistant to chief of staff at one of the largest fintech companies in the world.
For eight years, she was trusted with everything behind the scenes and invisible in front of it.
"So lonely, and also incredibly formative," she calls it.
Underneath the climb, she was performing a persona at work that clashed with who she actually was, telling herself she was fine for longer than she'd like to admit, because stopping meant admitting something wasn't working.
A close friend saw something in her before she saw it herself, and kept following up: what are your next steps, what do you need.
That's what cracked open a door she couldn't close.
She left her senior role with no outside capital and built CEO Woman, a personal growth platform for ambitious women, deliberately positioned as a luxury brand, not for the price point, but for the standard of women in the room.
"Redefining success never means asking less of yourself. It means getting honest about which standards are actually yours, and which ones were handed to you by someone else's agenda."
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