Why facing and embracing the past is the only way to look ahead.
This month we found Emma Fox on stage at the CAHIP Women’s Leadership Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada. As part of an impressive lineup of speakers, Fox added a particularly personal challenge to the agenda.
In 2019, the Empowered Community and Mentoring program was created to support, advise, and guide minority leaders into their full potential. Fox has spent several years highlighting up and coming leaders in the insurance industry, and especially those who have faced a particularly different path to get themselves on the map. Representing leaders of color, leaders with disabilities, young leaders, and female leaders, the Empowered Community brought some of the most notable insurance thought-leaders to the surface to share their own stories of adversity.
Fox found that in opening up a forum of vulnerability, she was able to create a space for some of the biggest names in business, alongside incoming and aspiring leaders who look up to them, to share a very common ground; “It’s amazing how similar our journeys really are. We may have different types of struggles; different people, different locations, different timelines, but we find time and time again that even the most successful folks in our space didn’t get here very easily.” Fox said. “And although our challenges play out under different circumstances, the feelings they illicit are always the same, and that really brings us together. No matter our backgrounds.”
With this same tenor, Fox shared a poignantly personal accounting of her own journey to the stage at WLS, starting with where she’s really from and taking the audience through a history of childhood abuse, fear, uncertainty, and a lot of unwillingness to embrace her experiences for worry of being defined by it. But, Fox shared that retracing and reframing the events behind you can be a crucial part of being able to find fulfillment into the future. She said that learning how to accept the feelings of powerlessness when bad things happen to us is perhaps the most powerful thing we can do, especially as women.
Fox challenged the audience to reflect upon what she called the “lifeline” and in particular, start to deconstruct the things you’re most afraid of remembering or revisiting. Because once you allow yourself to accept what was, and realize that it you can choose how it helps define you (because it does, no matter what), you can finally and truly find a sense authenticity and peace.
Interested in mentorship opportunities or being mentored? Get in touch to learn more.