What we talked about
Joan Perry is an international bestselling author, keynote speaker, and host of The Heroine’s Journey podcast. In this powerful episode, Joan joins us to share her deeply personal and transformative framework: a 13-step roadmap designed to help women reclaim their voice, rebuild self-worth, and live with authenticity and purpose.
Show notes
Joan Perry started the first female investment banking firm in the country, climbed to the top of her field:and then realized, as she puts it, that the ladder was in the wrong building. Her book The Heroine’s Journey came out of a conviction that women are handed a map designed for men and then blamed for getting lost.
What we covered
- Perry draws a sharp contrast between the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey. The hero’s journey:the structural backbone of Star Wars and The Hobbit:is an external quest: go out, conquer, bring back the prize. The heroine’s journey, Perry argues, is internal: claim your self-worth and your voice, because without those, nothing external will hold.
- The catalyst for writing the book was a Joseph Campbell quote. When asked whether women have a journey analogous to the hero’s, Campbell responded on Oprah’s stage: “No, they stay home and cry.” Perry had already drafted much of the book when she found a second, later Campbell quote in which he admitted he genuinely did not understand a woman’s path and said a woman would have to be the one to describe it.
- Perry tells the story of a woman whose husband turned to her on a romantic anniversary trip in Mexico:rose petals in the room, champagne, sea crashing on the rocks below:and said he wanted a divorce. He had been having an affair. Perry uses this as the archetype of the heroine’s crisis moment: the woman can look down at the rocks, or she can put her wings on and fly. Low self-worth, Perry says, means you only see the rocks.
- The four wheels of the cart:Perry’s core stability framework:are financial, physical, relationships, and beliefs. All four have to be rolling for a woman to move her gifts to market. Perry describes a client who was an Army nurse: she thought her problem was money, but it was actually that she had become so much the warrior that she had driven her husband away. One of the first changes Perry made with her was redecorating her home to reflect her femininity, and her happiness increased substantially.
- Perry is specific about the sequence: create your stability first, then awaken your authenticity, then light up your expression, then make your contribution. She argues you cannot move to the next stage without grounding yourself in the prior one:trying to express your gifts while financially unstable, for example, is a form of inauthenticity that undermines the whole project.
- Perry pushes back on what she calls the “girl boss” misreading of women’s empowerment. Going out and fighting lions, tigers, and bears, she says, doesn’t get a woman off the cliff:it just creates a bigger, more painful argument. The strength that moves a woman forward is internal, not combative. She also notes that a woman with strong self-worth becomes more attractive, not less, to partners who want an equal.
About Joan Perry
Joan Perry is an international bestselling author, keynote speaker, and host of The Heroine’s Journey podcast. She is the author of The Heroine’s Journey and an earlier book, A Girl Needs Cash, and has worked for decades on helping women build financial and personal self-worth. Her book is available at heroinesbook.com.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-joan-perry
- Website: https://www.walkthejourney.com
Episode 28 of the PreVetted Podcast.