Female Potential launched back in 2018 – a brief explanation about what happened next.
Back in 2017 the decision was made to close the Women’s Development Forum after 8 successful years in Guernsey and Jersey, because the world of gender was changing, with employers and sponsors wanting to move towards a greater focus on broader diversity topics.
Plus after running a Not-for-Profit which offered 120 large groups meetings over the period, all on different topics, I was ready for a change.
At the time my heart was still in supporting women both inside work and in their lives in general, so Female Potential was set up to be a mixed offering of more corporate focused development plus community initiatives, such as the podcast.
Female Potential launched with a flourish in April 2018, the website was great, the concept was a bit out there, but engaging.
In our first year we held a number of networking events, recorded a monthly podcast, hosted a number of development Pods and offered coaching, but by 2019 we ran into 2 main issues.
Firstly, it proved near impossible for clients to get sign off from their employers to purchase from the Female Potential brand.
By that time we were living in a post #MeToo world and gender initiatives were being played down.
Therefore in order to sell into the corporate world I needed to revert to using our long established Johansen brand.
Secondly, I turned 60!
Sure I might have been able to blag it out that I was still in my 50’s for a while longer but in truth passing this milestone had a big effect on me.
I saw that the brand really needed to be run by someone 20 years younger AND also if it was, that a younger person would have set it up differently.
(I was still doing a lot for free which didn’t create a commercial proposition to sell Female Potential.)
Not quite knowing where to head next, I went quiet and just carried on with my coaching and training work while I was figuring this out.
Then 2020 happened!
And is still happening, talking about Covid-19 is bigger than the subject of this blog.
But one unexpected side effect of this year has been to make things much simpler for me.
In April I decided to take down the Female Potential website, carried on with the groups and clients I was working with by Zoom, and apart from that, went outdoors into nature.
By June it was obvious where to go next with my business, a simple website setting out the work I love to do most, but I decided to leave actually doing this until the cooler days of autumn.
Instead we spent the summer working on the redesign of our garden into a vegetable plot with a wild flower meadow; a pollinator friendly project.
What getting older, as well as Covid have been teaching me, is that if I don’t do what I want to do now then when will I get to do it?
With 40 years of work, life and learning experience, I have knowledge and skills to pass on to others through my coaching and workshops.
I am equally aware that the rate of change continues unabated so I am continuing to study and learn so that what I have to offer is relevant in today’s world.
In particular after studying the wisdom of the Enneagram Personality Typology for the last 20 years, and Systemic Constellation over the past 10 years, I wish to bring these immensely powerful personal transformation tools to a wider audience.
Back in the summer, I was prevaricating about dropping Leadership Development altogether from the website.
On the day I finally decided to drop it, a client arrived in my coaching room asking for me to be a Leadership Coach /Mentor for her!
So I took this as a message from the universe and have added this as another service on the website.
I hope this has given you an adequate explanation for why Female Potential faded from view as an offer, and i hope that if you have read this far you might be interested in some of the services on offer through michellejohansen.com