What Happens When Women Find Each Other

A lot of self-care advice tells you to protect your energy, guard your time and just say no. And sometimes that's right. But I've been thinking about what Shonda Rhimes shares in her book The Year of Yes. She said yes to everything that scared her and everything she'd been quietly declining for years. Not recklessly, but intentionally, she said yes to the version of herself she hadn't fully met yet. I think about that a lot in the context of this profession.

For years I went to industry conferences and walked into rooms that looked the same every time. The same faces, the same conversations, the same unspoken understanding of who belonged at the front and who belonged at the edges. I was good at navigating those rooms. I'd learned how. But navigating isn't the same as belonging.

So a few years ago I said YES to something different.

I went to the Appraisal Institute convention and walked past the rooms I already knew and sat down somewhere new. I found women who were sole proprietors and corporate employees, residential and commercial appraisers, some in early career and some decades in all carrying the same stories I'd been carrying alone. The same moments of being talked past, second-guessed, vouched for by someone else. The same exhaustion of being the only one.

And I thought: this is what's been missing. Not a conference session or a committee seat. These women and this conversation.

I went home and told my daughter Marissa about a dream I'd carried for a long time — to talk shop on the beach with a group of women appraisers. Just like that she didn't hesitate: let's build it… so we did.

We started with ten women at a beach retreat. Ten women who had never been in a room together before, who discovered in about twenty minutes that they had everything in common. The relief was palpable. The laughter was the kind that happens when you finally stop performing and just exist among people who get it.

That is Ascend.

We built it because only 20% of this profession is women, and most of them are out there doing extraordinary work completely alone. Because this profession requires a specific kind of mind: one that is analytical and subjective all at once. When women with that mind finally find each other, something remarkable happens.

We didn't wait for the profession to change. We said yes to building something different.