How do women and girls build confidence? Confidence is built through experiences, not compliments. Confidence building requires a safe environment with supportive people and activities that stretch your expertise.
Dr. Lisa Hinkelman, founder and CEO of Ruling Our eXperiences (ROX), took the stage at the 2025 Women in Retail Leadership Summit to examine the challenges women face in leadership and connect the struggles girls face to the barriers women encounter in professional development. She offered actionable strategies to build confidence, resilience and leadership at every stage of the journey.
In this clip from her inspiring keynote, Hinkelman details how confidence can be built in girls, the throughline to women’s leadership, and how leaders today can create a ripple effect that strengthens the female leadership pipeline, from middle school to the boardroom.
“The next generation is paying attention to us,” Hinkelman told the audience. “We have to rewrite these confidence patterns … we’ve got to find ways to recognize our failures, to be able to talk to the girls in our lives about those, and to create a generation who knows that speaking up and speaking out, and trying and failing, is part of the process.”
Women in Retail Leadership Circle members can watch Hinkelman’s full keynote presentation here as well as all sessions from the 2025 Women in Retail Leadership Summit here.