The SheUp Community back in 2019 was one of my first exposures with the business world — and I quickly garnered that it’s one extraordinarily different from the high school environment I was used to. It was this humble yet powerful community group chat where I first learned to find my voice as someone who loves to share ideas and stories.

In 2020, I became a cofounder as leader of our first rebrand and new team infrastructure. I love being able to use this platform to inspire, encourage, and connect more leaders — particularly youth and students interested in the business and entrepreneurship world.

One of my favourite things about this community is that it feels as if we never stop moving. Even when the leadership team (myself very much included) is sometimes unmotivated or lethargic, there are always people in this community pushing us forwards. Whether it’s as simple as forwarding an interesting article in a group chat about productivity, or it’s collaborating with us to organize a workshop on creating visual moodboards.

Life is crazy, sh*t happens, frustration and lack of motivation is inevitable. But it’s comforting to know that we always have a consistent foundation to depend on with all the women of SheUp.

Seeing people fail. That sounds bad. What I mean is: witnessing vulnerability.

It can be really comforting to know that not everyone is a “picture perfect entrepreneur”: Waking up at 5am, going for a workout, making an energizing smoothie, working and in meetings for the rest of the day, finish off with another workout, and in bed by 10pm.

Especially in entrepreneurship, I find that the allowance of failure is extraordinarily important, and hearing from the women in our community that they are struggling with things like balancing motherhood and personal habits quite validating in its own way.

What we each struggle with is always different — but vulnerability looks the same.

Through common languages. Since small I have always been interested in learning different languages so I could communicate with more people — in English, Chinese, or French. Today I am still learning new languages, and I love finding people in the massive metropolitan of Shanghai who I can chat with in broken Dutch or Spanish.

But beyond that I have realized that, through SheUp, we are connected through a different language — the language of business. And by sharing our businesses or aspirations, we not only communicate but connect through our ideas and passions.

In short, I love connecting with people I find I can talk too easily about a common topic — and luckily that can look as expansive as “entrepreneurship” in the SheUp Community.