How My Feminist Coaching Journey Began

How It All Began

Back in 2010, I came across a book that changed everything for me — Women Don’t Ask by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever.

At the time, I was working in corporate America, watching talented, hardworking women get underpaid and overlooked (including myself).

Reading that book felt like someone had finally put words to what I’d been witnessing: the gap wasn’t about capability — it was about conditioning.

Growing up in South Korea, I saw women like my mom and aunts haggle and bargain in the street markets every day. Negotiation was just part of life.

But in America, I noticed that most professional women (again, my younger self included) weren’t nearly as comfortable negotiating for ourselves.

That realization lit a fire in me. The contrast between my cultural inheritance — the ease of bargaining — and my lived experience — staying silent at work — revealed a deeper truth: many professional women are hungry to practice what we were never taught to do openly, across cultures and contexts, which is to advocate for ourselves with confidence while navigating power dynamics you seldom see in the street markets of Seoul.

From Local Meetups to Leadership Coaching

So, I started small. I created a Meetup for women professionals — people in tech, media, and marketing — who wanted to practice asking for raises and promotions.

We did role-plays. We practiced scripts. We celebrated each other’s wins.

I started to organize events, a local meetup. I said, ‘Hey women professionals, let’s get together and practice asking for the raises and promotions we want.’ It had such wonderful feedback. 

There was real hunger for this kind of thing.

This was before Lean In. Before Instagram feminism. Before everyone started talking openly about pay equity.

At that time, women told me, “No one has ever asked me to say out loud what I want.”

And that’s when I realized — what starts as negotiation training often becomes a deeper form of empowerment.

Negotiation as Self-advocacy

Yes, negotiation is about the numbers. But it’s also about identity — the ability to say, “My contributions matter.”

I quickly learned that women who struggled with negotiation were also struggling with internalized doubt, fear of backlash, or the belief that asking made them “ungrateful.”

And so, what began as salary practice evolved into a much larger mission:
Helping women build self-trust, self-advocacy, and self-compassion so they can show up in any room as the author of their own value.

That’s how my work slowly shifted into feminist executive coaching — coaching that honors both the systemic context and personal agency for women leaders in the workplace.

The Turning Point

I’d been doing negotiation and self-advocacy training since 2011, but it wasn’t until 2016 that I started calling myself a coach. Something clicked when I saw how transformative this work could be.

The women I worked with weren’t just getting raises — they were becoming more visible, respected, and self-assured.

They were renegotiating how they were seen and how they saw themselves.

Why I Still Teach This Today

Nearly fifteen years since my first negotiation workshop, I still believe that asking for what you want is one of the most feminist acts a person can take.

When a woman says, “This is the value I create,” she’s doing more than negotiating pay — she’s reprogramming generations of conditioning that taught her to play small, stay quiet, or wait to be noticed.

Every time I coach a woman to name her contribution, I think back to that first meetup in New York — a room full of smart, nervous, brilliant women who realized, maybe for the first time, that they had permission to take up space and claim the value they bring.

That’s the heart of my work. It always has been.

Because here’s the thing about negotiation. It isn’t confrontation — it’s grounded self-advocacy, an act of service. It’s taking a stand for the value you bring and making requests that enable you to bring more value to the table.

✨ Wanna dive deeper 1:1, with me, a feminist executive coach? 

If you’re a woman leader who’s ready to equip yourself with feminist coaching tools to unlearn gender socialization that’s holding you back from confidently advocating for yourself, so you can lead and thrive in your career, you’re invited to  book a free consultation →