Impossible to Ignore Is Not About Volume: What Women in Cloud Reminded Me About Presence, Community, and Power

Last week, I was invited into a new conversation – one where powerful women are coming together with an audacious mission to inspire “the tech ecosystem to be an inclusive force for change and take collective action by providing a powerful platform to collaborate, build community engagement, and unlock $1B in new net economic access by 2030.”

If you haven’t heard of this transformative organization yet, do yourself a favor and check them out: https://womenincloud.com/

I was honored to be invited to participate in a series of different events, inluding an annual luncheon they host to celebrate their partners, a gala to award those who have had the greatest impact over the previous year, and a hands-on workshop that featued key note speakers, thoughtful breakout groups, and ample opportunity for networking.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I left each event a little more lit up than the last. By the third, something had genuinely shifted — not just in my mood, but in the scope of what I believe is possible for my own work. I want to tell you about all three because, together, they say something I could not have said from just one.

Room One: The Luncheon

The first room was a luncheon, and it was my real introduction to the Women in Cloud ecosystem. The numbers alone stopped me: over $600 million in economic access unlocked, a presence in more than 120 countries, and an unapologetic, undiluted dedication to women’s success that never once apologized for itself or softened its ambition to be more palatable.

But it was the conversations at the table that stayed with me longer than the statistics. We talked about the ethical use and design of AI — not AI as an abstract threat or an abstract promise, but as something that has to be built with intention if it is going to serve rather than flatten the people who use it. We talked about the importance of telling women’s stories through film and media, and how differently AI lands across generations — the same technology is met with entirely different hopes and fears depending on who is standing in front of it. And underneath all of it was a single thread: how much deeper the connection in the room became the moment people stopped performing polish and started showing up as who they actually were.

It was also where I met Chaitra for the first time. I felt an immediate resonance — with her vision, her leadership, her boldness. She is a woman I looked at and thought, without hesitation, I want to lead like that. Some people you meet once, and they recalibrate your sense of what is possible. She was that, instantly.

Room Two: The #empowHERaccess Award Gala

The second room could not have been more different in texture, and that contrast mattered. It was swanky. It was genuinely fun. The MCs built something rare—an evening that was inclusive, lighthearted, and full of real joy, not the stiff, performative kind of celebration these evenings can so easily become.

The keynote, Jane Boulware, spoke about something I have been circling in my own work for years: the importance of opening doors for others, of supporting one another instead of competing for scarcity, and of being willing to fail, get curious, and try new things without needing to already be excellent at them. It is a simple message. It is also one that high-achieving women rarely give themselves permission to actually live by.

And then there were the honorees. Women who are doing extraordinary work building systems, organizations, and technology that improve the world — not only for women, but for everyone standing downstream of better-built systems. Sitting in that room, watching that caliber of work get named and celebrated out loud, was its own kind of education.

Room Three: The Workshop

The third room was smaller and more hands-on — a workshop where we moved through a new leadership framework Chaitra and Women in Cloud have developed, working through it in small groups rather than just hearing it presented.

This is the part I want to underline: we did not just talk about new methods of leadership. We practiced them together in real time, with other women willing to be imperfect and figure it out beside us. That distinction matters more than it might sound. Knowing a framework and embodying it are two different processes, and a room built for the second one is rare and valuable in a way a keynote alone can never be.

What These Three Rooms Confirmed

By the end of the third room, something in me was genuinely lit up — the specific kind of aliveness that comes from being surrounded by other intelligent, high-achieving, bold women who are leading, founding, and building at the edge of what is possible. I had real breakthroughs in my own vision for The Uprising Collective. The scope of what I believe this work can become expanded in ways I am still metabolizing.

But beyond my own experience, these three rooms confirmed something I want to name directly, because I think it matters for every woman reading this.

I sat with women who are on the leading edge of AI and technology — women actually building the systems shaping what comes next. And when I asked what they saw as essential to the future of leadership, the same words kept surfacing: Empathy. Resilience. The ability to rally people behind a vision larger than any single task. A growing insistence that humanity has to sit at the center of where we lead, not at the periphery.

Here is what struck me hardest: nearly every one of those qualities is native to what I would call the sacred feminine. Not soft. Not secondary. Not the thing you add after the real leadership skills are already in place. Foundational. The emerging paradigm of leadership — the one being built right now by the people actually building the future — runs on capacities women have always carried, often while being told those capacities were liabilities in the rooms that mattered.

The future of leadership is not waiting for women to become more like the old model. It is being built out of exactly what women were always told to leave at the door.

Why I’m Telling You This

This is the whole reason The Uprising Collective exists. Not to help women perform leadership more convincingly inside rooms built for someone else. To help women recognize that the qualities they have been minimizing — their intuition, their embodied knowing, their capacity to hold complexity and people at the same time — are not the soft edges of leadership. They are about to become its actual center.

Community spaces like these three rooms are not extracurricular to that work. They are essential infrastructure for it. The relationships built with other ambitious, bold women feed your own success in ways a solo strategy session never will. They are where inspiration actually gets cultivated, and where you get to practice, out loud and imperfectly, the things you already know but have not yet fully embodied.

If any part of this is resonating — if you, too, are sensing that the leadership qualities you have been taught to downplay are exactly the ones the future is asking for — I would love to talk with you!

Learn more about my work through The Uprising Collective and book a free call with me HERE

To every woman I sat with this month at Women in Cloud: thank you. You confirmed something in me that I needed to be confirmed in, and I am building this work to make sure more women feel exactly that.