The Role Model You Needed (And How You Become One)

On Why Breaking Barriers Exists — and What It’s Actually Built From

As Breaking Barriers moves into its next evolution, I’ve been doing something I don’t always make time for: looking back.

Not with nostalgia. With honesty.

Because the truth is — and this is something I’ve come to understand more clearly as the year has gone on — not everything I built here came from a pure place. Some of it came from empathy and compassion. From seeing a group of people who needed somewhere to feel valued, challenged, and free to grow into something more than they’d been told they were capable of.

And some of it came from anger. From resentment. From ego. From a deeply held need to prove something.

Both are true. And I think it’s worth saying that out loud.

Why I Started This

We’ve spent this year talking about patterns — the ones buried in the nervous system, the ones we run on autopilot, the ones that once kept us safe and now just keep us stuck. We’ve talked about awareness, accountability, capacity, and choice. And this month, I want to bring all of that to bear on the thing I’ve built — because Breaking Barriers is, in many ways, a physical expression of everything we’ve been exploring.

I came up through combat sport. Mixed environments, always. I loved it. I loved pitting myself against the men in the room — it made me feel strong to keep up, to hold my own, to take the occasional hit in a controlled sparring sense and still be standing. At the time I called it strength. Hindsight has shown me a more complicated picture.

Because alongside the genuine love of training, there was something else running. A need to prove myself. A refusal to acknowledge the hard stuff. A habit of brushing off comments, behaviours, and attitudes that were designed — consciously or not — to keep me in my place as a woman in those spaces. Even when I was the one coaching the room. The disrespect was there. Not always. But enough to make me strive harder. Enough to become part of what drove me.

It wasn’t until about a year ago, training with a new coach, that I started to see it clearly. I was sharing some of what I’d experienced — casually, the way you do when you’ve normalised something — and the look on his face stopped me. Shock. Not at me, but at what I was describing so matter-of-factly. That reaction was the mirror I needed. Those environments weren’t healthy. And I had accepted them, absorbed them, and in some ways replicated them — all in the name of being the woman who could handle anything.

What I Built Instead — and Why

So when it came to creating my own space, I made a deliberate choice: mixed. Not by default. By design.

I want to be clear — I have enormous respect for women-only spaces. For many women, they are genuinely necessary. A refuge from experiences — with men specifically, and in the world generally — that have made mixed environments feel unsafe or simply exhausting.

That is real and it is valid and I would never dismiss it, and because to some extent that was my experience too, however, I believed — still believe — that there is something uniquely powerful about learning to train alongside each other rather than separately from each other.

Here’s what I’ve watched happen in a well-run mixed training environment.

The men begin to understand, in a visceral way, what it is to move through the world as a woman. Not from a lecture. From a conversation in the middle of a session — are the footsteps behind me getting closer? What’s the energy in the room I’m walking into? Should I drink tonight? Things that don’t register as considerations for most men become suddenly, uncomfortably real. That understanding makes them better. It makes them more aware of the space they take up, the tone they set, and the example they model for the younger men in their lives.

And for those men — the ones who never quite fit the traditional alpha mould, who felt awkward in typical male fitness spaces, who are a little unsure of themselves — they get to be strong and accepted exactly as they are. No performance required. Just show up, work hard, be decent.

For the women, training with men who are held to a clear standard of respect changes something too. The guarded posture softens — not because the world outside has changed, but because this space is different. And that experience of safety in a mixed environment, practised repeatedly, builds something. Evidence, again — that not every room is the same. That the standard can be set differently.

Different Ages, Same Standard

Then there are the teens.

I made another deliberate choice: not to create a separate, sanitised junior environment. Not to lower the standard of behaviour or expectation because someone is younger. My teens train alongside adults — and they are held to the same standard of conduct, focus, and respect.

That is not harsh. That is, I’d argue, one of the most valuable things I offer them.

Because we do them a disservice when we pander to the expectation that young people can’t or won’t meet a high standard. Most of them rise to it immediately. They sit up straighter. They listen more carefully. They take the work more seriously — because the room takes them seriously first.

And the adults in the room benefit too. There is something clarifying about watching a seventeen-year-old push through something hard without complaint. Something that quietly recalibrates your own excuses.

We have to coexist in this world — across genders, across ages, across the full, complicated spectrum of human experience. Creating separate bubbles for each group doesn’t prepare anyone for that reality. It just delays it.

What if instead, we learned together? Held each other to a higher standard? Worked, side by side, to be better humans?

That’s the room I’m trying to build.

The Evolution

I said at the start that some of what I built here came from anger and ego. I want to sit with that for a moment rather than rush past it.

The need to prove myself — to the coaches who put me through the wringer to earn my gradings, whilst my male counterparts coasted through, to the rooms that tolerated me rather than welcomed me — that energy went into this business. And it produced real things. Drive, standards, a refusal to make the space mediocre.

But anger is not a sustainable foundation. And ego, as we’ve explored across this whole year of writing, is just fear wearing a more confident outfit.

As Breaking Barriers evolves, I want the foundation to be something steadier. The empathy that sees a person walk in the door carrying more than their gym bag and meets them where they are. The compassion that understands capacity — that knows the difference between someone making excuses and someone running on empty. The genuine belief that every person in that room is capable of more than they currently believe.

That belief — not the anger, not the ego, not the need to prove anything — is what I want to build from here.

What This Has to Do With You

Every theme we’ve explored this year has been pointing at the same thing. Awareness. Structure. Balance. Capacity. Accountability. Choice.

They all lead back to this: who are you becoming, and is it by design or by default?

The role model most of us needed was someone who didn’t have it all figured out but kept showing up anyway. Who was honest about the hard stuff rather than performing a version of strength that cost them everything behind the scenes. Who created something — a business, a family, a life — not from what they were told they should want, but from what they actually believed mattered.

That person doesn’t arrive fully formed. They’re built — slowly, honestly, through exactly the kind of work we do every week on these mats.

You’re already doing it. Keep going.