Consensus isn't safety.
Shifting your power from outsourced to self-sourced.
Years ago, the CEO of the agency—where I worked for more than decade—shared a story he called “Ask the Captain.”
The lesson was simple:
If you want something to happen, go directly to the person with the authority to make the decision.
Don’t waste time circling around people who can’t actually move the ship.
That idea stayed with me for years.
And eventually, I put it into practice.
As I entered year 11, I believed deeply in an initiative we had created internally—and wanted to turn it into a true offering.
The captains disagreed.
They didn’t see the value.
They didn’t believe it was revenue-driving.
They didn’t understand the vision.
So I broke rank.
And I took the idea to the CEO of the holding company that owned us—the captain of my captain.
Ironically, this did not go over well.
I mean, it did for me.
I secured a $3M investment to take this initiative and turn it into a full-fledged company—the first equity investment in a majority women-owned business ever, in global holding company IPG’s 93-year history.
But my CEO did not like that he was no longer my captain.
Power and control is funny like that.
And it revealed something important:
Many people only believe in empowerment for as long as they are the ones holding the power.
Here’s the even more complicated truth.
“Ask the captain” feels empowering until you realize that the person you admire and revere—the one you’ve been asking for direction from—may no longer know the way to where you’re headed.
Sometimes it’s because it’s to a place they’ve never been.
Sometimes it’s because it’s to a place they don’t want you to go.
Even after that experience, I still spent years outsourcing my power.
I kept seeking—and thinking I needed—new captains.
New authority figures.
New institutions.
New gatekeepers.
New people whose approval felt necessary before I trusted myself enough to move.
And I think so many women are conditioned to do exactly this.
We are taught to seek:
approval
validation
permission
authority
consensus
We become consensus-builders.
We gather feedback.
We soften our instincts.
We over-explain our knowing.
We wait for everyone to agree before we allow ourselves to act.
Because somewhere along the way, many of us learned to mistake consensus for safety.
But complete consensus is not where new ideas are born.
The most aligned decisions of my life were not made once everyone agreed with me.
They were made when something inside of me became impossible to ignore.
A captain listens to feedback.
A captain gathers information.
A captain values the crew.
But eventually, a captain must be the one to decide how to chart the course.
Your life will change the moment you stop searching for another captain—and finally become your own.
That shift changed everything for me.
Not because I suddenly had all the answers.
But because I stopped waiting for someone else to authorize my knowing.
This is what sovereignty looks like.
Not in theory.
In practice.
And embodying sovereignty means you make intentional choices every day that honor your shift.
This is what we’ll be stepping into together inside the first Hype Women Dinner next Wednesday at Hype Women HQ in Chicagoland.
Doors close this Friday, May 15.
If you feel the pull, you already know.
xoxo,
Erin