I have spent most of my career thinking about influence. What builds it, what earns it, and how a single voice can shift the way people see a brand, a cause, or an opportunity. I did not expect to learn one of the biggest lessons of my career on a sailboat crossing the North Atlantic, but that is exactly what happened.
This summer, I joined Her Planet Earth on their all-female North Atlantic Sailing Expedition, crossing from Iceland to the Faroe Islands aboard the SV Sea Dragon. The crew was made up of women from completely different backgrounds and countries, bound together by nothing but resilience, curiosity, and a shared willingness to be uncomfortable for something that mattered. We took shifts through the night. We navigated open water with no land in sight for days. We depended on each other in a way that stripped away every title, every LinkedIn headline, every polished version of ourselves that we bring to a boardroom.
I have built my career around the idea that community and opportunity grow stronger when women invest in each other. I did not think I needed another reminder of that. The ocean gave me one anyway.
Every mile of that crossing was more than a personal challenge. It was directly tied to a partnership with Conservation International, supporting the women of Namuaimada Village in Ra Province, Fiji. For generations, the women in this community have carried deep knowledge of seaweed harvesting, passed down through mothers and grandmothers long before anyone called it sustainable aquaculture. What they have never had is the infrastructure, funding, or market access to turn that knowledge into something that could support their families in the long term.
This expedition helped fund that. Not a one-time donation, but the beginning of real economic independence, built on skills these women already have and have practiced for years. It is the kind of investment that does not ask a community to change who they are or what they know. It asks the rest of us to finally pay attention to the value that was already there.
I think about that a lot in my work. So much of influencer marketing and PR is about finding a voice that already has credibility and giving it room to be heard by a wider audience. That is precisely what this partnership does for the women of Ra Province. Conservation International is not teaching them a new skill. It is helping the world recognize the one they already have.
I will be honest. I did not go into this expedition thinking about brand strategy or thought leadership. I went because the mission moved me, and because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something physically and mentally demanding that had nothing to do with quarterly goals.
But somewhere around day three, exhausted, salt-crusted, and further from land than I had ever been, it hit me that this is what influencing for good actually looks like when you strip away the campaigns and the content calendars. It is showing up. It is putting your own comfort second to a cause bigger than yourself. It is trusting that the impact you cannot see yet is still real.
I think about the women in Namuaimada Village, most of whom I will likely never meet in person, and I feel a strange and powerful kind of connection to them. We are separated by an ocean, by language, by completely different daily lives. But we are connected by the same belief that women supporting women changes outcomes. Not in an abstract, feel-good way, but in a measurable, generational way. Their daughters will have options their grandmothers did not. That is not a marketing outcome. That is a legacy.
I run a company built on the idea that influence, used well, can move people to care about things they might otherwise scroll past. This trip reminded me why that work matters beyond the metrics. Influence is not just about reach or engagement. At its best, it is a bridge between people who would otherwise never know each other exists, built to lift someone up.
Leadership does not always look like a boardroom or a keynote stage. Sometimes it looks like a night watch on an open sea, trusting the person next to you with your safety, in service of women you have never met but whose future you now have a stake in.
If this story moved you even a fraction of how it moved me, I would ask you to consider supporting the journey through our Team Fundraising Page. Every donation continues funding the work in Fiji long after our crossing is behind us, and it is work worth funding.