#160 The Heroine’s Journey to Her True Voice

Today, I interview Joan Perry, who once built a life filled with achievement, only to realize she was climbing the wrong ladder in the wrong building. Outwardly, everything looked perfect—career success, recognition, and status—but inwardly, she felt disconnected from herself. Joan shares how, for years, she followed the path that culture and family laid out for her, without ever stopping to ask if it was truly her own.

Growing up in a high-achieving family in the Midwest, Joan learned early on that visibility and accomplishment were rewarded. Her voice, however, was often silenced. In a household where airtime was earned and expression was measured, she became an achiever—excelling in sports, academics, and later, in a groundbreaking career on Wall Street. Yet behind all the success was a deep longing for something more real, something that felt alive inside her.

The breakthrough came when everything she had built began to fall apart. A divorce she never saw coming stripped away the vision she had constructed. It forced her to pause for the first time and listen inward. Joan realized she had shaped her entire life around survival, not authenticity. Stability had come at the cost of her true voice. This disruption marked the true beginning of her Heroine’s Journey—the journey back to herself.

Today, Joan Perry is the founder of The Heroine’s Journey and a bestselling author, helping women everywhere reclaim their voice, self-worth, and authentic path. Through her writing, coaching, and her podcast The Heroine’s Journey, she teaches that real success starts when we stop performing and start listening within. Her story is a powerful reminder that it is never too late to rewrite the story and become the Heroine of your own life.

__________________

Joan Perry is a cultural luminary and advocate for women becoming the heroines of their own lives. Her credits include bestselling author, business owner, securities trader, high-performance coach, pioneering high-net-worth investor, philanthropist, and publisher.

Her deepest joy comes from sharing her epic work, The Heroine’s Journey to True Wealth, with other women who are also trying to rewrite their heroine's story.

She is an international bestselling author, host of The Heroine's Journey Podcast, and founder of The Heroine's Journey. She is also the author of The Heroine's Journey: The Art of Becoming the Heroine of Your Own Life.

__________________

Find Joan here:
https://www.facebook.com/TheJoanPerry

linkedin.com/in/the-joan-perry

www.WalkTheJourney.com

Transcript

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode # 160 Joan Perry

“The Heroine’s Journey to Her True Voice”

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing, and I'm here today on the podcast Find Your Voice and Change Your Life. My guest is Joan Perry, and I cannot wait for you to learn more about the Heroine’s Journey. It's something that came into my awareness not too long ago when she and I found each other—the idea that we, as women, are on a journey.

And it is different from the quest idea that someone like Joseph Campbell described. We get to define our own journey, and there are steps. I know that today Joan will be talking about what she did in her journey, her Heroine’s Journey. Let me first read the bio that I have for you.

Joan Perry is a cultural luminary and advocate for women becoming the heroines of their own lives. Her credits include bestselling author, business owner, securities trader, high-performance coach, pioneering high-net-worth investor, philanthropist, and publisher. Her deepest joys come from sharing her epic work, The Heroine's Journey to True Wealth, with other women who are also trying to rewrite their Heroine’s Journey.

This is wonderful to be able to give you a platform today. I know that we had a conversation already about my journey.

(01:42) Joan Perry: Yes, yes.

(01:43) Doreen Downing: How it definitely fits right in with what you have discovered about women—and making the journey to find themselves, to have a voice, to be empowered.

(01:57) Joan Perry: To become the heroes of their own lives.

(02:00) Doreen Downing: Yes. We are. Let's start with—I always like to dial back to where you were born, how you arrived, what kind of family it was. Because today is about—yes, it is about your journey—but it's also about how we find our voice. And how we sometimes find that we do not have a voice.

Usually, those of us on this deeper journey discover that we did not have a voice for some reason, and our journey is to find it. So, let us start there, Joan.

(02:40) Joan Perry: So, if we jump all the way from A to Z, the whole purpose of the Heroine's Journey is to claim your self-worth and your voice. Yes, so you are right on target.

There are 13 steps in the Heroine's Journey, and as we go down that journey—which, by the way, is the plot line of a woman's life—what is so interesting is you have heard all kinds of women tell you stories about their lives and what they have gone through, the ups, the downs, and whatever. But it is only with this work that I think the discovery has been made: we actually have the same plot line. It is just that our stories are different.

You are asking me, “How does my story relate to the Heroine’s Journey? Where did I start? What messages did I interpret? How did I get formed as I am taking these steps forward?” That is good. It all started in Chicago, Illinois. I grew up in the Midwest, so I am one of those. I like to say that I am corn-fed.

(03:53) Doreen Downing: I love it. Thank you.

(03:55) Joan Perry: I come from a wholesome stock with good values, as the Midwest turns out, I think, lovely people. I am very fond of Midwestern people. Obviously, I grew up there, so that makes a difference.

My family, interestingly enough, my parents were two really, really type A parents. They were on a mission, and you better get on a mission. Education was important, and how you showed up doing what you were doing was very important.

That put me in a really high-achieving family and catapulted my journey through education and, later, to go work on Wall Street as an investment banker and start my own firm, which was the first female investment banking firm in the country that underwrote municipal bonds. All that seemed grand.

(05:04) Doreen Downing: It does seem grand. Even when you said catapulted, that image of you with all of that energy from your parents pushing you...

(05:17) Joan Perry: Did you feel like I was sort of like a cannonball?

(05:19) Doreen Downing: Yes. Yes, that is exactly what I felt.

(05:23) Joan Perry: That is pretty much the way it was. I will have a side note here to say that I had a sister who rejected it all. So, you know, we do make our choices as we see what is in front of us, and we decide, "I like that. I do not like that. That is going to be my journey or not."

Early on, I was an achiever. I was Illinois State Diving Champion. I liked sports. All of that is to kind of say that I looked around and I said, "What is success?" Well, success must be—as I looked around in the business world—

(06:02) Doreen Downing: And you are looking up. I noticed you went that way. There must be a ladder or something that you need to climb.

(06:11) Joan Perry: Yes, exactly. I said, "Success must be the way men do it."

They go out into the world, they fight the lions, tigers, and bears, and they bring home the bacon. That was my approach. And only now, looking back on it, can I say that was the classic Hero’s Journey.

(06:37) Doreen Downing: Classic.

(06:39) Joan Perry: Classic. Now, here is the problem. It all looked good on the outside. I got to the top of the ladder.

(06:48) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(06:49) Joan Perry: But the ladder was in the wrong building.

(06:52) Doreen Downing: Oh, that just gave me a little shiver. That is pretty profound, is it not?

(06:59) Joan Perry: Yes. Because I constructed it all to look really good, to seem really good, but I never checked in with myself to say, "Does this feel good? Is this the journey I want to take?"

And if I circle back for a minute to voice, which is obviously your prime topic, as I grew up in that type A family, airtime was very much measured. If my father was bored with what you were saying, he would just cut you off. So, I learned to be very self-conscious about my introduction into airtime—to the point that there was even a time, I remember it really distinctly, where I said to myself, "You need to speak in a soft voice. You need to not say too much. You need to really try to tone down your presence."

(08:16) Doreen Downing: Well, to have that at the same time as having the drive—the powerful drive within to, I am putting quotes around "succeed"—but succeed in the way that men succeed. At the same time, you are hearing voices that say you need to be quiet. It is like, “Wow, what a...” There is ambivalence or something in there. "Who am I?" 

(08:48) Joan Perry: Exactly. There were two messages that I could not equalize.

(08:53) Doreen Downing: Yes. Mm-hmm.

(08:55) Joan Perry: On the one hand, I was blessed because I did grow up in that era where women could do things. My mother was a very successful businesswoman, so I had that model. She started her own businesses—several of them—and did very well. But she also did not talk to me.

It was very much an environment where you should be seen but not heard. So, the way I spoke loudly into that was to be an achiever—not necessarily to use my voice—but to show up as the diving champion, or as the cheerleader, or as the straight-A student. Show up in some form that could be accountable to achievement. But that, again, did not have anything to do with my authentic self—of me speaking into the world—my feelings, thoughts, emotions, experiences.

(10:00) Doreen Downing: Oh. What I am seeing right now—and I do know this about expression—is that it does not come just from the sound of our own voice or our own words. Expression is what you are saying. Your voice was the one that did the, you know, like moving to excel, but it was energetic. I get it. But that was a voice, actually.

(10:28) Joan Perry: Yes. Except, kind of—

(10:31) Doreen Downing: It was an expression.

(10:33) Joan Perry: Yes. Fast forwarding a little bit though, by my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college, I had five collapsed lungs.

(10:44) Doreen Downing: Ooh.

(10:45) Joan Perry: Yes. Which, you know, is the direct—

(10:49) Doreen Downing: Ah.

(10:50) Joan Perry: I forget who wrote the book, but how illness really relates to something in your personality.

(10:56) Doreen Downing: Louise Hay.

(10:57) Joan Perry: Yes. So, five collapsed lungs for me was definitely a strong statement about my feelings and ability to use my voice.

(11:09) Doreen Downing: Yes. There is no breath, no life, no way to, you know, there is—

(11:17) Joan Perry: Remote.

(11:18) Doreen Downing: Yes. Oh my. But how does somebody—what is a collapsed lung? What is that? Actually, I am not—

(11:29) Joan Perry: Well, you feel like you swallowed an ice cube whole and somebody grabbed you around the middle.

(11:35) Doreen Downing: Oh, okay.

(11:37) Joan Perry: It is a great prescription. You can live on one lung. But usually, if you have one collapsed lung, you have a second one because your organs displace so badly inside. Your heart moves around, your stomach moves around. It is not a good thing. So, the reason I had that many is it went from one side to another, back and forth, over those years.

(12:06) Doreen Downing: Yet it sounds like still you did not move yourself into a new— I mean, you were already, it feels like, on your journey to be this executive, this CEO, this business owner, whatever you were defining early on as success.

(12:30) Joan Perry: Yes. I think from all that, what I got is that you could engineer and control your life. And you could control it in ways that other people saw what you wanted them to see. So that you could become the success, you could become the whatever.

It is completely in line with culture that tells us to be the skinniest, to be…You have to do this to…

I do not think I was unusual in the sense that I picked up on and responded to the norms of what culture was telling me to do.

The important part of this is to see how much we try to shape-shift our lives and mold ourselves into being, which, by the way, is only a precursor to the Heroine’s Journey.

(13:28) Doreen Downing: Hmm. Well, before we go into some of the steps and hear more about it—because it sounds like we are already on your Heroine’s Journey.

(13:39) Joan Perry: No, not yet.

(13:41) Doreen Downing: I mean, it feels like you are saying that is the precursor. You know, life—we step into life as little girls—and to me, it feels like as soon as we are born, that is the beginning of our journey. But when it becomes conscious, then that is a different story, I think you are saying.

(14:02) Joan Perry: Yes. The way I define it as the Heroine’s Journey, I think for the first 50 years of our life, we try to do what will make us safe and secure.

(14:11) Doreen Downing: Yes. 

(14:13) Joan Perry: And the Heroine’s Journey is actually the journey of blossoming the authentic self.

(14:21) Doreen Downing: Oh, beautiful. Okay, good. So, before we get to the blossoming—or even waking up to the fact that you have some kind of seed with good roots inside that could possibly blossom—I know you have mentioned some other stories to me about your own suffering, and your own feeling trapped. Anything more you could share about the precursor?

(14:49) Joan Perry: Well, what I would say is, because we try to shape-shift our lives into safety and security, sometimes that might lead us to feel like we are in a trash compactor. And what I mean by that is—you know, I can honestly say that I married somebody because you were supposed to get married. That was just part of the journey.

Everybody was happy when I got married, but I never stopped to ask myself, "Does this feel good?"

(15:29) Doreen Downing: You keep saying that. You keep saying, did I ever stop to listen to myself? Did myself even have a voice that I could hear?

(15:42) Joan Perry: Yes.

(15:43) Doreen Downing: Was I even willing to develop a way to listen? I think first we need to know how to listen before we can say, "Hello in there. What do you want in there?"

(15:54) Joan Perry: What do you want? What do you want? Because maybe what I wanted at that time was acceptance.

(16:01) Doreen Downing: Good point.

(16:03) Joan Perry: Maybe I just wanted to be visible, in a very competitive family.

(16:11) Doreen Downing: Right. "Hey, look at me."

(16:15) Joan Perry: Maybe I wanted to be noticed for my gifts.

There were all kinds of things I was striving for and completely forgetting. And I will tell this story because I did marry the man who was, you know, the college Mr. Superman. And I was not married for 10 minutes before I thought, "What have I done?"

The realization I got out of that was I married him for all the reasons on this hand, and I forgot to ask all the reasons on this hand. I married him because he was from a really good family, a wealthy family, he had a good education, he had a good job, and he looked like a Kennedy. Sounds like the perfect formula, right?

I forgot to ask, "Does he love me? Does he say nice things about me? Does he care about me? Does he sleep with me? Does he like sex with me? Is he my friend?"

(17:32) Doreen Downing: Oh, wow. That is so touching—to be in that predicament, but also lovely to be in this moment with you, looking back and knowing what you chose and why you chose it, and then what you ignored.

I mean, not that you ignored it—you did not even ask. You did not even listen.

(17:56) Joan Perry: I think voice is a two-part thing. I think it is your voice into the world, and I think it is your voice speaking to yourself.

And honestly, I did not have either one at that point.

(18:12) Doreen Downing: But it sounds like you thought you had the external one, right?

(18:18) Joan Perry: Yes, because I was 30 and fabulous.

(18:22) Doreen Downing: You keep coming up with some great phrases, Joan. It is like, you know, the writer in you or the poet in you—just—

(18:33) Joan Perry: I can tell you, he gave me this three-carat diamond ring, and I went to the restroom and cried.

(18:44) Joan Perry: Because, like I said, I got to the top of the ladder, but the ladder was in the wrong building.

(18:51) Doreen Downing: Yes. That is a great phrase. And then, how did you realize that though? Take me to the point where you went, "Oh, wrong ladder. Wrong..." I mean, "Wrong ladder."

(19:06) Joan Perry: I did not get the message then, because I honestly think when you are in your thirties, it is a little too young to get it.

You are so busy trying to have safety and security and be how you want to form yourself into the future, that I do not really think that this authentic self finds its voice and starts to emerge until around midlife.

And in midlife, you sort of get this sense of, "Oh my gosh, this is not going to go on forever. Do I like this?"

(19:44) Doreen Downing: Mm-hmm. A little, I do not know if you want to call them whispers, but I get the sense that there is a niggling.

(19:56) Joan Perry: Yes. Well, if we look at how we are formed, we came roaring down the birth canal, arriving in life—not with some babies stamped approved and some babies stamped disapproved. No.

We all arrived here perfectly formed.

(20:16) Doreen Downing: Yes. Beautiful.

(20:18) Joan Perry: Yes, I believe that. One hundred percent of us are just perfect the way we popped out.

But the thing of it is, we start to put these things on ourselves that contain our voice, contain our sense of aliveness, contain our sense of being.

You know, I went to work on Wall Street. Oh my gosh. Wall Street for women back then—that was like walking straight into hell. High testosterone. Very competitive. People did not make good connections because it was the elite of the competitive world.

(21:09) Doreen Downing: So, there were little moments, I guess, that started to pop. It sounds like for you—not like there was a moment, a turning point moment?

(21:22) Joan Perry: Oh, there was a turning point moment.

(21:24) Doreen Downing: Oh.

(21:25) Joan Perry: Yes. But what I am establishing here is that we are all roses, and we are tended to bloom like roses.

(21:33) Doreen Downing: Okay.

(21:33) Joan Perry: Do you think a rose can say, "Yes, stop. No. I am not going to unfold"? True for us too. While I thought I could engineer and control it, there comes a time in life when you realize you cannot.

There is a quote from Brené Brown that says, if you fell down, got your heart broken, a couple more things—even though you might not have wanted it—your Heroine’s Journey just started.

In other words, the Heroine’s Journey starts midlife when you are trying to interrupt that growth, and it says, "Oh no, hello, I am here." The Heroine’s Journey moment appears when something befalls you in life.

(22:38) Doreen Downing: Okay. I am going to pause here because I am going to take a quick break. This is a great place for us to say, hang on, we are going to hear more now, specifically what that moment is when you pop and you go, "Ah." Let me take a quick break. Be right back.

Hi, we are back on the Find Your Voice, Change Your Life podcast with my guest today, who is giving us insight into the Heroine’s Journey by talking about her own life.

Joan Perry is somebody who knows what this journey is and how unique it is to us as women—when it happens and how it happens—because she has been doing it and has been not only personally discovering it, but helping other women come to realize that we are on our own journeys.

So, what was that moment you were talking about?

(23:43) Joan Perry: Remember I said the plot line is the same?

(23:48) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(23:49) Joan Perry: The plot line for the Heroine’s Journey is 13 steps.
The steps group into: create your stability, awaken your authenticity, light up your expression, and make your contribution.

(24:10) Doreen Downing: Oh—

(24:11) Joan Perry: That is the full path of the Heroine’s Journey.

(24:14) Doreen Downing: Did you just see CALM? I mean, the three letters that you said came to calm. I just saw that instantly.

(24:25) Joan Perry: Interesting. You are right. I had not even seen that before. Gosh.

The Heroine’s Journey starts with something that comes out of the blue.

(24:36) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(24:37) Joan Perry: You are like, "Oh my gosh, where did that come from? How come I could not avoid it? I do not want this. Go away." It stops you in your tracks.

It might be a divorce or a relationship issue. It might be a financial issue. It might be a self-worth issue. Or it might be a physical issue.

(25:09) Doreen Downing: Right? It gets revealed, right? You cannot ignore it, is what I get.

(25:14) Joan Perry: You cannot ignore it. It gets bigger, and you are standing there screaming at it, "No, please do not." But it grows and grows.

Oftentimes, it is not just one area. It can be several. My Achilles heel of those four was relationships. It was a divorce I did not see coming. I thought, "Oh my gosh, he has a great life. Why would he ever do anything else?" But he intended to burn down the whole thing.

It automatically changes the narrative, strips you immediately.

The hard part is that you have this vision for your life, and you are like, "This is where my life is going. This is what I am doing. This is what I am creating." And all of a sudden, when this whatever lands smack on your head, it destroys that vision.

(26:16) Doreen Downing: Right? Now you are in a whole new life moment, and it is not the one you anticipated or thought you would be in.

It is usually something that—it sounds like what you are saying—disrupted. You have a big disruption of some sort.

What was next?

(26:37) Joan Perry: You are shaking your head like you know what I am talking about.

(26:39) Doreen Downing: Yes. I am relating. I mean, you asked me some of this on your podcast, and I am really seeing it. So, the A is—

(26:51) Doreen Downing: The next one begins with an A, as I remember.

(26:55) Joan Perry: The early steps of the Heroine's Journey are: create your stability. That is the first part of the journey.

There is a lot in that because, like we just said, your whole vision was messed up. Probably if you got a divorce, your finances are messed up, your relationships are messed up, your self-worth might have tanked, and you could have some physical issues.

I like to think of it like a beautiful— you know those flower carts that were painted wood? You have your gifts, skills, tools, and talents loaded in the bed of the truck, and you are wanting to take those to market so you can monetize them. And you look back and you are like, "One wheel just fell off. Oh my gosh. The other one fell off. My whole butt is dragging on the ground here."

In order to go forward, we have to have the wheels on our cart: financial, self-worth, relationship, physical.

(28:00) Doreen Downing: Okay, so that is the stability you are talking about.

(28:03) Joan Perry: That is stability, yes.

(28:04) Doreen Downing: Oh, well, that could be a whole lifetime right there, could it not?

(28:08) Joan Perry: That is only one quarter. That is the first quarter of the journey.

(28:12) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(28:13) Joan Perry: What happened when that happened to me—it was such a total upset. My whole life went up in smoke. I did not think I could recover from it.

I mentioned to you that I did a podcast on suicide earlier today.

(28:54) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(28:54) Joan Perry: Because, you know, that is not an— I mean, you go through all the options. And you say, "What do I do here? How do I rebuild this?"

The challenge is, in those moments, you can easily say, "Oh, that was a disaster. Oh my gosh. My life will never recover."

The truth is, it was a gift.

(28:54) Doreen Downing: I would like the listeners to begin to take that on as a new frame. It is a gift. Whatever the breaking down is, or the disturbance, or the falling apart is—somewhere in that is a gift.

Because it opens you up to what you are saying, which is, "Okay, let’s reorganize. Let’s reestablish and get stable."

So, the second quarter is what?

(29:26) Joan Perry: Do not go too fast here.

(29:29) Doreen Downing: We are coming to the end. I just want to give people a sense of it, and they can look you up and be able to actually work with you to understand their own journey. That is why I am doing more of the highlights rather than going in depth.

(29:51) Joan Perry: The best place to get that is the Heroine's Journey book, which will tell you more about that. You have to do the things to put the wheels back on your cart so you can go from "create your stability" to the next step, which is to awaken your authenticity.

(30:11) Doreen Downing: There is the A.

(30:12) Joan Perry: Yes. That part was dying to come out of me. Authenticity was dying to come out of me. That is why it is a gift—because I was sitting there choking on my gifts and talents and skills and the person that I authentically am.

Let me tell you, until you get stable, you cannot get authentic.

(30:35) Joan Perry: The reason why is that if you are not stable—pardon me for this—you are in prostitution. You have to prostitute yourself to do things you do not really want to do to make up for your lack of stability.

Like you have to take a job you do not want to take. Or in my early case, I married a man I did not want to be married to.

I had to come to grips with getting myself stable first. Once you are stable, then you can become authentic because your true self can show up.

(31:08) Doreen Downing: There are pillars, is what it sounds like. There is a structure that you can then do the inner connecting with—you can build your life on.

(31:22) Joan Perry: Yes.

(31:23) Doreen Downing: But what is the life that you want to build once you have the stability? That is something that is a creative process.

The awakening feels like, "Oh, hello, hello in there. Hello." And those questions you were asking on the other hand are like, "Well, what do I want?"

(31:46) Joan Perry: Yes. That is the gift of something that falls on your head and stops you in your tracks. Now you can begin this process of becoming yourself and moving toward a life of joy, prosperity, and freedom.

You become authentic, and until you become authentic, you cannot awaken your gifts, your expression. Those come from your gifts and from your authentic expression.

And until you wake up your expression, you cannot make your contribution because your contribution comes from your heart, your gifts, and your authentic being.

Like it or not, as Brené Brown said, this is the journey we all take.

(32:35) Doreen Downing: Yes. I like—well, you keep saying that it is the same plot. It is just different—

(32:40) Joan Perry: Different stories.

(32:41) Doreen Downing: Yes, different stories.

(32:45) Joan Perry: Yes.

(32:47) Doreen Downing: Third?

(32:49) Joan Perry: The third is "light up your expression."

(32:52) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(32:54) Joan Perry: Meaning that from your authenticity—
Here is a classic example. I went to work on that testosterone-filled securities trading floor. My expression was as cramped there as it was with my father.

It makes sense because it was not coming from my gifts.

Lighting up your expression—today, what am I doing? The Heroine’s Journey—it is my expression.

(33:33) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(33:34) Joan Perry: It is my passion. It is my mission. It is what I love. It is what I want to teach.

(33:39) Doreen Downing: Everybody, did you just hear the expression there? I feel like you just lit up the whole universe with your passion. That was lovely. And for people who are not watching, you can hear it. Those of us who are watching can see the joy.

(33:59) Joan Perry: It is where my joy lies. Beaming.

(34:01) Doreen Downing: Beaming joy.

(34:03) Joan Perry: Once you come to that joy, your prosperity lies there as well.

(34:07) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(34:08) Joan Perry: Because then your gifts are ones that people really want.

(34:12) Doreen Downing: Yes. You are lined up. You are really connected to yourself and to your power, and then your voice. That is where we bring our voice in.

(34:23) Joan Perry: It is never a job. It is never a job. Fourth is to make your contribution.

(34:32) Doreen Downing: That takes a full-bodied—kind of what you are talking about now, as well as the voice, because you have to be visible in some way. Even if it might be writing, it is still visible.

It does not necessarily have to be on a podcast or on a stage. What you heard me say the other day was that life is your stage.

(34:58) Joan Perry: Absolutely. With all these steps, you claim your self-worth and your voice.

(35:08) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(35:09) Joan Perry: Now you know the Heroine's Journey is my voice speaking loud and clear, and it is not something that is not truly authentic.

(35:25) Doreen Downing: Look at you. Yes.

(35:30) Joan Perry: It is my gift to the world. It is my gift to women. It is a big conversation I want us all to have. I invite you all to read the book. It has so much in it—stories, and it is easy to read.

It will light up your Heroine’s Journey.

(35:46) Doreen Downing: We will definitely have that in the show notes. We will have it on the webpage where you are going to be highlighted and links to the book.

In a way, it feels like I watched a movie. It was your life, but I felt the evolution of what is possible in humanity—in women—who can do the waking up and use whatever difficulty they have experienced in life as the beginning.

(36:28) Joan Perry: Right.

(36:29) Doreen Downing: Reestablishing themselves on this earth, in their new “Now” moment.

(36:40) Joan Perry: Imagine a world where women claim their self-worth, where they use their voice where their gifts and their expressions come out fully.

I imagine we will create whole new businesses, whole new points of view, because honestly, the voices of women have not been fully part of the culture—and now it is time.

(37:05) Doreen Downing: Thank you. Thank you. We know to find you on your website. That is probably the easiest way to look you up.

(37:15) Joan Perry: You can go to heroinesbook.com and find a free plus shipping copy of the book. We give it to you for free if you will pay just the shipping.

(37:25) Doreen Downing: Thank you. Thank you.

(37:26) Joan Perry: It is at heroinesbook.com.

(37:28) Doreen Downing: Thank you. Thank you. I am going to open up the space for you to come into calm, which is how I am going to remember the CALM of this process, and listen to what you want to leave us with today. You are so in love with this life that you know is possible for us.

What comes to you to say to close?

(38:04) Joan Perry: So many of us, when we try to conform, as I said earlier, find ourselves in trash compactors, and the directions are on the outside of the box.

What I want to invite all women to do is to get out of anything that is not leading to their joy, prosperity, and freedom. By taking the Heroine’s Journey, becoming their bigger, better selves, and living a life they love, we can light up the world that way.

You can also go to walkthejourney.com—that is our website—but if you are looking for the book, you will find it at heroinesbook.com.

(38:49) Doreen Downing: Thank you for having me today.

(38:51) Joan Perry: Absolutely. I feel like your presence lights the world up, and I think your voice—literally today—had a lot of lightness and inspiration.

Thank you so much, Joan.

(39:07) Joan Perry: Thank you. Till we meet again, journey onward.

(39:12) Doreen Downing: Oh, I like that. Journey onward.