Why Do Accomplished Women Doubt Their Value? – An Interview with Nathalie Cabart
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
After a 30-year international career in Consumer Insights and Marketing, Nathalie Cabart founded Flowernflow, where she helps women reconnect with their self-esteem, confidence, and authentic selves through coaching, visualization, meditation, and energy healing.
Drawing on both her corporate leadership experience and her work accompanying women across cultures, Nathalie has developed a unique approach that bridges analytical understanding and deeper inner transformation. In this interview, she shares what she has learned about human behavior, self-worth, intuition, and why so many accomplished women still struggle to fully step into their light.
Nathalie Cabart, Life Coach & Energy Healer
After 30 years of helping brands understand people, what inspired you to start helping women better understand themselves?
Throughout my career, I spent thousands of hours listening to consumers around the world, trying to understand what drives their choices, behaviors, aspirations, and emotions. What fascinated me most was not the products or brands themselves. It was people.
Over time, I realized that many of the questions consumers were asking themselves were not so different from the questions I was asking myself, and later the questions my coaching clients would bring to me.
Questions like: Am I worth it? What do I truly want? Why do I keep repeating the same patterns? What is stopping me from becoming who I want to be?
My own personal development journey led me to coaching, energy healing, meditation and visualization. Eventually, it became clear that I wanted to dedicate more of my life to helping women explore those questions and reconnect with themselves.
Today, I still do what I have always done: I listen deeply. The difference is that instead of helping brands understand people, I help women understand themselves.
What did your years in Consumer Insights teach you about human behavior that still shapes your coaching work today?
Perhaps the most important lesson is that people rarely behave according to what they consciously believe.
There is often a gap between what we say, what we think, and what actually drives our choices. In Consumer Insights, understanding that gap was essential. In coaching, it is exactly the same.
Many women intellectually understand their patterns. They know where their fears come from. They know they should trust themselves more, set boundaries, or stop seeking validation.
Yet they continue to repeat the same behaviors. Because lasting change rarely happens at the level of information. It happens when we access deeper beliefs, emotions, memories, and unconscious narratives that have shaped us over many years.
Why do so many accomplished women still struggle to fully recognize their own value?
Because achievement and self-worth are not the same thing. Many women in business have learned to measure their value through performance, responsibility, usefulness, or external validation.
They become highly competent, successful and admired, yet internally they continue to feel like they have something to prove.
One of the recurring themes in my work is what I call the "Ugly Duckling Complex." Women's lives evolve, their impact grows, but the way they see themselves often remains anchored in an older story.
They continue to look at themselves through the eyes of past experiences rather than present reality. Helping women update that internal narrative is often one of the most transformative parts of the journey.
Across the different countries and cultures you have worked in, what challenges do women seem to have in common?
What continually amazes me is how universal certain themes are. I coach women in France, the UK, Switzerland, Italy, Brazil, China and elsewhere, and although the cultural contexts differ, many underlying questions remain strikingly similar.
Women wonder whether they are enough. They struggle to receive recognition. They put themselves last. They underestimate their strengths. They adapt to expectations rather than listening to themselves.
Through my podcast, Her True Story, I share anonymized stories through a fictive character, Claire, inspired by real women I have worked with. The feedback I receive from listeners across the world is often the same: "I know Claire." Or even more powerfully: "I am Claire."
That reminds me that beneath our cultural differences, we often share the same human stories.
Why do you believe self-awareness alone is often not enough to create lasting change?
Because understanding is not the same as transformation. Many women I work with are incredibly self-aware. In fact, they are often painfully aware. They have analyzed, reflected, read, learned and understood. Yet something still hasn't shifted. The reason is that awareness is only the first step.
Transformation requires emotional experience. It requires feeling, trusting, experimenting, and embodying. We cannot think our way out of every challenge. Some things need to be experienced in order to be integrated.
How do coaching, visualization, meditation, and energy work help women move from understanding themselves to truly trusting themselves?
I see these approaches as complementary rather than separate. Coaching helps create awareness and clarity.
Visualization allows us to access possibilities that the rational mind sometimes struggles to imagine.
Meditation creates the inner space necessary to hear ourselves more clearly.
Energy work helps reconnect with sensations, emotions, and parts of us that may have been ignored or suppressed.
Together, they create a bridge between intellectual understanding and embodied knowing. In my experience, trust grows when women stop relying exclusively on external answers and start listening to their own inner wisdom.
What is one practice that helps women reconnect with their intuition when they have spent years relying mainly on logic and achievement?
I often invite women to pause before asking, "What should I do?" Instead, I ask: "What do you truly want?" Then I encourage them to notice what happens in their body before they answer.
Most women have spent years strengthening their analytical abilities, which can be wonderful strengths. But intuition often speaks more quietly.
It appears as a sensation, an emotion, a sense of expansion or contraction. Learning to listen to those subtle signals is often the first step toward reconnecting with intuition.
What role does emotional safety play in helping someone embrace who they really are?
I believe emotional safety is the foundation of all meaningful transformation. Many people think change happens because of techniques, frameworks or advice.
In reality, change often begins when someone feels safe enough to stop defending themselves. Safe enough to be honest.
Safe enough to feel. Safe enough to explore parts of themselves they may have hidden for years. But safety doesn't come from techniques alone. It comes from trust, and trust often begins when people feel deeply understood.
Many of the women I work with are accomplished professionals, leaders, entrepreneurs or experts in their own fields. One reason they often tell me they feel safe with me is that I understand their reality from the inside.
I have spent more than 30 years navigating the corporate world, leading teams, managing businesses, making difficult decisions, balancing ambition, responsibility and personal life.
In many ways, I have lived the same challenges they face. I sometimes say that I speak two languages.
The language of strategy, leadership, performance and business. The language of emotions, intuition, the body and inner transformation.
My clients often arrive having mastered the first language. Together, we create a space where they can reconnect with the second.
One of my clients recently wrote to me: "Sincerity is the mother of trust." Those words stayed with me. Because trust creates safety. Safety creates openness. Openness creates the conditions for transformation.
If readers could rewrite one story they have been telling themselves, what would you encourage them to remember?
I would encourage them to question the idea that it is too late. Too late to change. Too late to dream. Too late to reinvent themselves. Too late to choose themselves.
One of the most common limiting beliefs I encounter is the feeling that our most meaningful opportunities are behind us. I do not believe that.
I created Flowernflow in my fifties, after a long international corporate career. In many ways, I am still writing this new chapter myself.
Every woman has the ability to rewrite her story. Not by becoming someone else. But by becoming more fully herself.
Perhaps that is the most important thing I have learned: The light we are searching for is already within us. We simply need to give ourselves permission to step into it.
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