Most will assume Donna Forte is a name, a person, not a description. It is the latter. The words are Italian, donna forte, and they mean a strong woman. It described me before I was willing to use it.

There is nothing immodest about naming your own strength. I have spent thirty years asking other people to do it, and it was fair to ask it of myself.

Some people are uneasy when a woman says it plainly. That has never been a good enough reason to stop.

The work has been the same whether I am sitting with a family and their children, with staff, or inside a whole organization. I make the space for a person to see what they are carrying, and we build the next part from it. The strength is already there, not supplied, but ignited.

We make a choice every day about which lens we see ourselves through, deficit based or strength based. The deficit lens keeps people from seeing what they are capable of, and I refuse it, in my own life and in anyone else’s.

My goal has always been self-sufficiency. It is how I know an engagement has worked and it is time for me to move on. And it rarely stops with the one person. When someone becomes self-sufficient it reaches the family they go home to and the staff they supervise and the community their organization sits in.

There is a caveat. I cannot work harder for you than you are willing to work for yourself. That has told me more about how an engagement will go than anything agreed to beforehand.

The Fibonacci sequence above builds forward from where it came. People work the same way. What brought you to this moment is what the next part gets built from, and none of it is wasted, least of all the hard parts, which is usually where the strength came from.