Women in Expansion
A live conversation
Wednesday, May 13 · 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern · Free
It usually starts with a jolt.
A role ends. A structure gives way. The ground moves beneath you. And what that jolt reveals is that the ground you'd stood on was never really that firm. That the evolution was already underway, building quietly, for longer than you knew.
What comes after the jolt is a journey. Neither a straight line nor a quick recovery. A real passage through uncertainty and experimentation, where something truer begins to organize and reveal itself.
On May 13, three women who have walked away talk honestly about what it takes to step through the unknown: what it costs, what it asks, what you learn to trust when nothing else is reliable, and what becomes possible on the other side. They haven’t just made their own way. They are leaving footprints for others to follow.
If you are restless, if you know that the familiar no longer fits, if the jolt is your reality — this conversation is for you.
There will be space to bring your own questions into the room.
Panelists
Theresa Bailey, Founder & CEO | Starfish Synergies
Theresa Bailey is the founder of Starfish Synergies and an award-winning facilitator working across North America. She began her career as a Research Officer in education before feeling a growing misalignment she could no longer ignore. She walked away not only from a secure role, but from a version of life and family structure she believed she was supposed to have, despite the cost. That decision led her into uncertainty and growth. Today, she helps leaders and teams build connection and resilience, and is the exclusive North American licensee of PLAY-DOH POWER SOLUTIONS with Hasbro.
Moderated by
Sejal Desai, Executive Director | Akanksha Education Fund
Tomide Awe, Founder & Creator | On Your Terms
Tomide Awe is the founder of On Your Terms, a platform for high achieving women rethinking work, identity, and what they want their lives to feel like. After more than a decade in consulting and tech — Accenture, Twitter, and Meta — she began questioning whether the life she was building was expansive, or simply impressive. That question became her work. Today she writes, speaks, and creates resources for women at identity-level inflection points, helping them move from achievement on someone else’s terms to expansion on their own.
Sunaina Mehta, Founder | Design Your Next
Convention was never easy for Sunaina to live by. The boundaries that contained and destined her life were ones she could not abide — and choosing herself, as she puts it, became the most graceful act of rebellion. She knows how hard and how brave that is. She founded Design Your Next as a studio for women's expansion — bringing together strategic direction, original research, cohorts, and a growing body of work built around one question: what becomes possible when a woman stops performing and starts authoring?
This conversation is part of ongoing research Sunaina is developing through Beautiful Power, a framework exploring how women's power becomes coherent and expressed when the structures overriding it finally give way. Design Your Next works with women in this passage every day. This panel is a chance to bring that conversation into the open.
Women in Expansion is an ongoing conversation series hosted by Design Your Next.