The Cost of Becoming Strong, with Gersende Bonin | A Ripple Talk

Welcome, I'm Sabine Hutchison founder of the Ripple Network. Before you hear this talk, I want to take a moment to tell you what it took to get here. The Ripple Network is a dedicated practice space which was created for women professionals who wanted to speak with more confidence, more clarity, and more of themselves. And speaking is never just speaking, it's how you show up in every room, in every conversation, at every moment.

When what you say and how you say it lands to those around you, a place to come into your own, to create your natural communication style, and to build confidence through doing it week after week, with women who are actually doing the same thing. So over 12 weeks, the women of this first cohort moved through three phases of work. The first month was about understanding how they naturally show up, recording regularly, receiving feedback.

And noticing their own patterns and presence. The second month moved into storytelling, longer form speaking, narrative clarity, and beginning to shape the core idea of their Ripple Talk. The third month was about delivery, assembling, refining, practicing, and finally standing in front of their cohort and all five program partners to deliver the talk that they've been building. So speaking practice asks something real of you, and these women gave it.

They showed up every single week for each other and for themselves. And that is where the growth happened. What you're about to hear is the result of that work. One ripple can change the tide, and today's conversation is exactly that. Welcome.

Hello, my name is Gersende Bonin. When I was first invited to prepare this talk, I kept thinking I do not know where to start. And maybe that was the first honest thing. Because sometimes the hardest stories to tell are the ones we have been living for so long we no longer see them as stories. We see them as character.

as success, as simply who we are. I grew up believing that if I wanted to be taken seriously, I had to become harder, sharper, more competitive, more self-contained. And for a long time that worked. It helped me achieve. It helped me survive. It helped me belong in places where softness

did not seem welcome. But over time I started to wonder something.

What if the very qualities that help many women of my generation succeed are also the ones that left some of us with regrets? What if, in learning how to function in an environment shaped by masculine codes, we also learn to silence parts of ourselves we would one day desperately miss?

That is what I want to explore with you today. Not whether ambition is wrong, not whether strength is wrong, but whether adaptation has a cost, and whether some of us only discover that cost much later.

The first place I learned this was at home. I grew up in a family of four girls, and for a long time I did not think my relationship with my father was especially different from the one he had with my sisters.

Not in any way I could have named then. But there were moments where he expected more from me. Moments when he would say almost casually, it's different for your sisters. And even if I could not have explained it all at the time, I think I understood that something in me was being called forward differently.

Maybe because I was the eldest. Maybe because I was the scientific one. Maybe because as a child I was a tomboy. I loved risk. I loved climbing trees. I loved challenge. My father was a brilliant man. He had done impressive studies, built a remarkable career, and had a very scientific mind.

Among my sisters, I was the one most naturally shared that part of him. So we found each other there, in the intellect, in rigor, in challenge, in strength. At the time that felt special. It felt like being trusted, like being seen, like being invited into a world of seriousness, intelligence, and

and possibility.

It is only in retrospect that I have come to see something more complicated in that dynamic. That perhaps in his eyes and in mine, I was not only his daughter, but also stepping into a place shaped by expectations more often reserved for boys.

And hidden inside that was a lesson I did not yet know I was learning. That if I wanted closeness, recognition, legitimacy to meet him there, I had to be strong, I had to be impressive, I had to be capable, I had to lean away from what the world expected a girl to be.

No one said those words to me.

That is not usually how these things happen. They become an atmosphere before they become a sentence. So I absorbed it. Not as pain, as identity. And identities like that can be very efficient. They help you function, they help you achieve, they help you belong in worlds.

That already know how they measure value. That identity followed me into my career. I became a diving instructor in France at a time when, for the state-level qualification, there was no separate female scale. There was one standard based on men's performance. And I was proud of that. Proud

Proud that I could level up, proud that I could meet the same criteria, proud that being a woman, would not stop me from achieving at the same level.

That pride was real. I do not want to rewrite that part of my life dishonestly. It mattered to me, it shaped me. But looking back, I can see that I was learning more than discipline or resilience.

I was learning to measure my worth against a standard I had not created. I was learning that recognition came through endurance, toughness and comparison.

I was learning that success meant adapting myself to what was already valued rather than asking whether that standard itself was too narrow. And the world rewards that adaptation. You become the woman who can handle it, the woman who is not too emotional. The woman who does not need.

special consideration. The woman who can keep up. Everyone calls that strength. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it is also a quiet kind of self-erasure. And it did not stop at work. It entered my my relationship too. I remember once driving with my partner to meet his brother

And sister-in-law for the first time. And I said to him almost casually, but not really joking, please do not leave me alone with your sister-in-law. I will have nothing to talk about with her. I would rather stay with you and your brother so that we can have interesting conversations.

At the time I believed that. I genuinely felt more comfortable with men. I found it easier to enter their conversations, their rhythms, their subjects. With women I often felt awkward, impatient, disconnected.

And now, when I look back on that moment, I hear something much sadder underneath it. I hear a woman who had learned that value lived in the spaces men occupied. A woman who had learned to distance herself from other women in order to feel distinct. A woman who had unconsciously absorbed the idea that what was

Coded feminine was somehow smaller, less serious, less interesting.

Not because she disliked women, but because she had spent years learning how to succeed by leaning away from anything the world dismissed in women.

And that is one of the quietest costs of adaptation.

Sometimes what helps you rise also separates you from other women, from tenderness, from parts of yourself. And then life does what life always does. It strips away performance. It strips away control. It strips away all the roles we have learned so well. My father became very ill.

I remember walking past his bedroom one evening. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, connected to oxygen very frail, with a book resting on his lap. And I said Dad, what are you doing? And he replied I'm reading. I can't hold the book anymore. It's too heavy. I don't have enough strength to

So this is the only way I can read.

And in that moment something shifted. I was no longer looking at the strong, brilliant, towering man of my childhood.

I was looking at someone vulnerable, someone diminished, someone deeply human. And what I saw strangely was almost a little boy. And in that moment I felt a huge wave rise in me. Not admiration, not discipline, not the need to say the right thing, just the simple

human desire to hug him, to cross the room, put my arms around him, to let love speak in the most ordinary way. And I did not. I held back because that was how I had learned to be with him. That was not the language of our relationship. Strength was, admiration was, restraint was

But tenderness had never really been rehearsed.

And a short time later he was gone. So when I think now about what this way of being gave me confidence, drive, resilience, the ability to walk into difficult spaces and hold my own, I also think about what it may have taken from me. I think about the cost of becoming so well adapted to a certain idea of strength.

I think about how many women of my generation learned to survive, to compete, to be respected by adopting the codes rewarded by the world around us. And I think about how complicated it feels now, in a time when those codes are more openly questioned. When the gender gap

Is criticized more clearly when we are asked to imagine other ways of being. Because some of us built ourselves according to rules that are now being challenged. And while that is progress, it can also leave us with a strange private grief. Grief for the tenderness we learned to suppress.

Grief for the connection we sometimes sacrifice. Grief for the moments we did not know how to inhabit because we had become so practiced at being strong. So I'm not here today to reject strength. I am here to ask what kind of strength we want to carry forward. A strength

that helps us compete, yes, but also a strength that lets us connect. A strength that earns respect, yes, but also a strength that does not silence tenderness. A strength that does not leave us armored in the moments that most require love.

Because success can open many doors, but it cannot take you back into one room one evening besides one bed and help you do the one thing your heart knew to do.

I so wish I had hugged him.

Gersende, thank you. Thank you for showing that tenderness. Thank you for

Thank you.

sharing that part of yourself.

Wow, what a journey that's this has been for you.

It has, yes. It it it it has been a a long way in the making, let's say.

I'm happy that we could offer a place for you. Obviously, this is this is something that you've lived. This is part of your life. And I'm so pleased that we could give this platform for you to be able to share that story because it's a beautiful story. And I think so many others have had similar experiences where they wanted to show that tenderness or they grew up in a in a space where

You're right. You had to show that that toughness or what whatever we define right as toughness. What we what what was that definition back then? So thank you for sharing that.

Absolutely, yeah. I think it's it's important to to let it out there because like you said, it it I'm not the only one.

Mm-hmm. No, you're absolutely right. And to have permission to talk about this because it is important. And and and and the more we bring up these types of conversations, the more our eyes open and and maybe someone else will walk in and and and hug that person and you will you will have potentially helped them to do that.

Absolutely. Well that's one of my hopes by sharing this this this story is is absolutely if it can change and and and shift for someone when it's not too late for for that hug, then definitely it will be worth

Yeah.

it.

Yeah. So you've been on this 12-week journey in the Ripple Network in this first cohort, and I'm curious to hear what, if anything, what has shifted for you and around how you speak, but also in how you think about the story, because the story is something that happened later. When we originally started the program, we started with how we introduce ourselves. And so that's quite a shift from this beautiful story that you shared. So

Could you share a little bit what shifted for you?

Well I think a lot shifted, but maybe permission, permission to to bring into important conversation stories that relate directly to me so that I can make a point or draw the audience towards where where where I want to go more easily than just talking about theoretical

matters. That makes sense.

Yeah,

it does. So to think about how to bring aspects of yourself. Obviously, the story is not going to weave into every conversation that you have in work, but the idea behind it about how to tell stories and to pull pieces out that

So

are relevant or interesting in a conversation that you have.

Mm, absolutely, yes.

And and through the journey, is there anything that as you as specifically as you started to put the story together and discovered, okay, because I remember our conversations too around like we're like, what am I going to write about? What am I going to write about? And the brainstorming piece behind that, and how you and and that is such an important piece, I think, in everything that we do is to have to have someone that you can brainstorm a around when you're looking for an idea that can maybe help you piece pieces together. So

That that I saw was an an incredible step for you when when we were talking about this. And then it all started to fall into place, obviously through

Absolutely.

through, through some work. And was there anything that surprised you about yourself in this process?

well if you had told me you know, at the beginning, without all the process through which we went, that I would come up with a a a real personal story and and and make it into a talk that I could share with others, I would have told you there's no way that's happening because one I am so bad at just

scripting anything without any help and that's why the the the kind of brainstorming sessions we had were definitely helpful for me because even though I was I thought I was throwing out the out there ideas that were irrelevant or had no link with each other. I remember this one time where you say that's your talk. That's what you have to talk about.

And and I, really? I I really had this kind of moment where I thought, maybe she's right. Maybe it is something that I want to get out of my of me because I've been thinking and and and and and pondering things. You know, I had the feeling that I was a bit unadapted to today's word, that the criteria I had built my identity around.

like you know endurance and toughness and control, they they no longer seem to carry the same value. And and for me it was destabilizing. So I think being able to share it and also to find out that I'm not the only one and that

Mm.

it's it's okay to to you know embrace tenderness. And you know, don't get me wrong, I think the the lesson with my dad when he passed away

made me immediately decide that all the persons I love, I would tell them that I love them and I would hug them whenever I felt the need of it. So it

Mm-hmm.

was a l something that immediately impacted it. But I think in the in the professional area it was still something where I kept that, you know, like I said, I had easier

relationships and conversations with men than with women. And look at me now, I work for a all women company. So for me

Yeah, absolutely.

that's a big step.

Yeah, fantastic. Well, in this talk, you mentioned it briefly earlier, but what is for someone who's going to listen to this, what do you hope that they take away and what ripple do you want to start with this talk?

So I think what I want what I wish they would take away listening to my story is you know, if they can ask themselves what kind of strength they've learned and whether or not they think that they need to to to shift from that strength, you know, learned years ago. And and maybe if if adaptation doesn't i in today's world doesn't come with

A little bit of you know, adding a bit of softness into the way women of my generation have learned to to rise up to the challenge, I guess. And then the

Yeah, absolutely.

ripple, like I said earlier, I think is is really if if listening to my talk makes someone realize that.

they might be in in in a similar situation and and and gives them the the the strength or the you know allows them to decide to to take the call to to to hug the person that they are holding up from I think that would be amazing.

Well, that's an incredible ripple to share with the world. And I'm I'm sure there's gonna be big impact on that. And it's interesting because you may not see it all, but maybe some people will come back and tell you stories about that. That'll be very interesting to see.

That would be absolutely sharing and and discussing it with others. that's how we make progress, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Gersende thank you so much. Thanks for giving everything that you did throughout the the twelve weeks. Thanks for sharing your talk and thanks for your your tenderness today.

Well, it was my pleasure and thank you for this amazing training. Really helped me a lot. Thank you, Sabine.

Thanks.