Be The Ripple Podcast

Jen Sato and Kathrin Schoenborn share a commitment to female founders that grew into the Global Entrepreneurial Leadership Program, a global network that gives women building healthcare and life sciences ventures access, expertise, and trusted peer support.In this episode, we explore what makes the program so distinctive: twenty founders across seven countries, meaningful connection across markets, and a design grounded in the realities women entrepreneurs face. Jen and Kathrin reflect on the importance of access, the loneliness of leadership, the courage it takes to speak honestly about failure, and why founders need relationships long before they need to call on them.The conversation also asks a bigger question. What happens when you build generosity into a network from the beginning? This is a story about two women creating what was missing, and a ripple that will continue through the founders who give, share and open doors for others.Find The Ripple Network at theripplenetwork.com.Key topics: female founders, trusted networks, peer circles, life sciences entrepreneurship, feedback without judgment, leadership as self-leadership, legacy as daily practice

How many of you know what it feels like to give your absolute best, to be the one people rely on, and still feel overlooked?

Carolyn Hantz opens with that question because she has lived the answer. She spent forty six years in federal service across eight presidential administrations, sixteen of them in the Senior Executive Service, a group that makes up 0.4% of the federal workforce. She started as an entry level secretary paying her own tuition, and she was selected into the SES less than a year after losing her husband to cancer, while raising two young children on her own.

In this talk she lays out what the rise actually requires: closing your experience gaps instead of waiting to be noticed, building strategic relationships rather than surface connections, being visible in the rooms that matter, and making the mindset shift that holds it all together.

After the talk, Carolyn joins Ripple Network founder Sabine Hutchison to talk about coming back to public speaking after retirement, what she learned from hearing her own story played back, and why sharing the hard parts makes room for other people to do the same.

Ripple Talks are built inside The Ripple Network, a twelve week speaking practice for women professionals who want to speak with more confidence, more clarity, and more of themselves. One ripple can change the tide.

Applications for the next cohort: www.theripplenetwork.com

"I wish I had seen the signs."

Ibiere Addey opens with the words of a colleague who had just lost his fourteen year old son, and then walks through five real cases, including her own child's, of young people slowly losing themselves in plain sight.

Her point is not that any single moment breaks a child. It is that nothing about it is sudden. Children are gradually taught to hide their pain until it becomes harm, and the adults around them are often too busy to notice the window closing.

More Than Ever Now is Ibiere's initiative and her call to action: be intentional about parenting, about mentoring, about knowing who and what is shaping the rising generation. Not the next generation. The one growing up right now.

After the talk, Ibiere joins Ripple Network founder Sabine Hutchison to talk about what changed for her over twelve weeks of practice, why a talk without real connection to your own life is so much harder to deliver, and the power she found in slowing down.

Ripple Talks are built inside The Ripple Network, a twelve week speaking practice for women professionals who want to speak with more confidence, more clarity, and more of themselves. One ripple can change the tide.

Applications for the next cohort: www.theripplenetwork.com

"What if the very qualities that helped many women of my generation succeed are also the ones that left some of us with regrets?"

Gersende Bonin grew up as the eldest of four girls, the scientific one, the daughter her father called forward differently. She learned early that closeness and legitimacy came through being capable, impressive and strong, and she carried that lesson into a career built on meeting standards she had not set, including a diving instructor qualification in France with one scale, based on men's performance.

That adaptation gave her drive, resilience and the ability to hold her own in difficult rooms. In this talk she looks honestly at what it also took: distance from other women, and tenderness she had trained out of herself. It ends beside her father's bed, in a moment she has never stopped thinking about.

After the talk, Gersende sits down with Ripple Network founder Sabine Hutchison to talk about finding the story she did not know she had, the permission that came with telling it, and what changed once she said it out loud.

Ripple Talks are built inside The Ripple Network, a twelve week speaking practice for women professionals who want to speak with more confidence, more clarity, and more of themselves. One ripple can change the tide.

Applications for the next cohort: www.theripplenetwork.com

"Are you a robot?"

That is how Marie-Louise Murville opens her Ripple Talk, and it is not a rhetorical trick. It is the whole argument. Robots follow code. Leaders follow values, and the ones worth following say those values out loud.

Marie-Louise graduated from MIT with two engineering degrees and spent the next thirty years as a president, COO, venture capitalist and consultant across health IT, B2B e-commerce and biotech. In this talk she shares the day one turnaround where her entire management team resigned, the framework she has used ever since, and the five lessons her mother, a Marine in World War II, left her with.

After the talk, Marie-Louise sits down with Ripple Network founder Sabine Hutchison to talk about what shifted over twelve weeks of practice, why coaching without repetition does not work, and what it took to bring thirty years of experience into ten minutes.

Ripple Talks are built inside The Ripple Network, a twelve week speaking practice for women professionals who want to speak with more confidence, more clarity, and more of themselves. One ripple can change the tide.

Applications for the next cohort: www.theripplenetwork.com

What happens when the person who teaches others how tonavigate change has no roadmap for her own? In 2025, Adrienne Gibson, a keynote speaker and organizational consultant with more than two decades of experience,faced a health crisis, a paused business, and a dismantled home simultaneously.This conversation is about what she found when the external scaffolding fell.

Adrienne and Sabine explore the concept of skills as savings,the idea that every hard season deposits something you can draw on later. The discussion will explain why most organizational change programs fail to engage the humanelement, how Eastern and Western cultures approach transformation very differently, and why apparent speed in change programs is often not actual speed. And Adrienne shares, with unusual honesty, exactly what she did to keepmoving: walking, sound frequencies, box breathing, journaling, and allowing herself a pity party, and then getting back up.

 This episode is for anyone who is in the middle of somethinguncertain, and for any leader trying to understand why their change program is not landing the way they expected. Link in bio.

 Find Adrienne Gibson at https://www.adriennegibson.com/.  Find The Ripple Network at theripplenetwork.com.

Key topics: organizational change, human dynamics, resilience,personal transformation, change management, authentic leadership, skills as savings.

What does it take to stop leading from the front, not becauseyou are stepping away, but because you have realized that the most lasting impact comes from a different place? Rebecca Vermeulen, Vice President at Genentech and 2025 HBA Star Award recipient, spent over thirty years buildingher leadership identity around what she could accomplish and how well she could lead. And then she took a sabbatical that changed how she understood all of it.

In this episode, Rebecca and Sabine explore the successaddiction and what it takes to recognize it in yourself, the difference between leading from the front and sitting in the sea with your team, the inner voice that gets louder the longer you ignore it, and the ongoing weekly practice of catching reactive leadership and choosing the power of a pause instead. Rebecca also shares the book that shaped her thinking during the sabbatical and why she invested in an Enneagram coach to hold the shift in place.

For any leader who has wondered whether stepping back might actually be the most powerful thing they could do right now, this conversation is for you.  

Find Rebecca Vermeulen at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-vermeulen-a401113/.Find The Ripple Network at theripplenetwork.com.

Key topics: leadership development, sabbatical, successaddiction, ego in leadership, women in leadership, legacy, organizationalchange

What does burnout actually feel like when you are the person everyone else relies on? In this episode of Be the Ripple, Sabine speaks with Katie Delaney, a functional medicine certified health coach, author, and former pharmaceutical industry leader, about the slow accumulation of stress that ends in a reckoning and the quiet, sustainable process of rebuilding from the inside out.

Katie shares her story from a 2019 emergency room visit through the demands of managing global clinical trials during a pandemic, to the emotional breakdown that finally opened the door to change. She talks about what it means to set a boundary as protection rather than limitation, why sleep is a biological necessity rather than a luxury, and how a simple vision board became the beginning of a five-year transformation.

This episode is for the high-performing woman who is showing up completely while quietly running out of herself. It is for anyone who has ever worn exhaustion like a badge of honor and is ready to consider a different way.

Find Katie at WellnesscoachkatiedKatie Delaney

Find The Ripple Network at theripplenetwork.com

Key topics: burnout recovery, boundaries for high-performing women, functional medicine and health coaching, sleep and stress, building sustainable success

What does it mean to create impact when you may never see the outcome? In this episode of Be the Ripple, Sabine Hutchison speaks with Nicoletta della Valle, founder of Sempre Berna, a neighborhood café in Bern, Switzerland, that opened in October 2025 and pairs good espresso with free, walk-in support for anyone who needs it.

In six months, Sempre Berna has handled around 130 cases: individuals navigating government forms, residents applying for apartments, young people looking for work, and one man who came in wanting help writing a CV, not for a job application, but for his own funeral. Nicoletta and her team of volunteers rarely find out what happened next. That is the whole point.

This conversation explores what it means to build something whose ripple you may never witness, why removing data collection from care is a values-based decision, how collaboration with food trucks and local businesses keeps the whole thing alive, and why being missed might be the truest form of legacy. If you’ve ever felt the pull to respond to a gap you keep noticing, this episode is for you.

Find Sempre Berna at sempreberna.ch. Learn more about The Ripple Network at theripplenetwork.com.

Key topics: invisible impact, community support, volunteer leadership, values-based design, legacy as daily practice, social entrepreneurship, collaboration, Bern, Switzerland

What if success isn’t something you achieve, but something you feel? In this episode of Be The Ripple, Sabine Hutchison sits down with Susi Hutchison (Founder of Wild Redbird) for a conversation about redefining success as peace and contentment, without shrinking ambition or living by someone else’s scoreboard.

Susi shares what it looked like to leave a corporate leadership role without a plan, take time to soften, and rebuild from self-love. They explore the practice of returning to the moment, through breath, nature, and small rituals, and why legacy isn’t what we leave behind,but how we show up every day.

Key themes: redefining success • presence aspractice • breath and nervous system grounding • self-love and self-worth •“medicine” moments • the ripple of how we treat others. If you’ve been feelingpressure to prove, this episode is a gentle return. Listen, and ask yourself: whatwould success look like if it felt calm on the inside?

If you would like to contact Susi, here are herdetails:

https://www.wildredbird.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/susi-hutchison/