My parents were teachers, and so were my paternal grandparents. Learning wasn’t a hobby at home, it was the default setting.

My parents separated while my mum was pregnant with me, so childhood came with uncertainty, chaos, and relentless logistics. Love too, whatever “love” means.

I was raised between two very different weekend worlds, and both shaped me.

With my mum, Saturdays meant window shopping – always with the same line: “juste pour le plaisir de regarder.” We spent hours in those malls. Always left with something: small, cheap, and perfectly chosen. Side effect: a permanent dislike of shopping as leisure.

Sundays: Disney films, books, a quatre-quart in the oven, my sisters and I fighting for the bowl. Thirty years on, that smell still takes me somewhere specific.

With my father, alternate weekends meant the local café-bar: beers and cigarettes for him, chips and Coke (sometimes peach iced tea, if life was fancy) for my brother and me. I hated beer for years. The cigarette smell I never made peace with. Then, at 30, during a pétanque game in the desert somewhere in the Middle East, P. handed me an ice-cold Leffe Blonde and questioned my Belgian credentials. Plot twist: it was excellent.

Over time, I realised how many of our tastes, habits, and even disgusts are built in childhood, or built in opposition to it.

Early Grind, No Backup Plan

Long before boardrooms, I was already running on a “whatever it takes” setting.

I loved numbers early, almost obsessively. I could count to 100 at three. Mathematics was my favourite subject, and my grandfather H., a maths teacher, was my favourite adult.

Then teenage logic happened. At 16, I decided I “didn’t like” my maths teacher, failed maths for the first time, and dropped sciences entirely. H. was furious. That one decision quietly closed the door on medicine before I’d given it a fair chance.

I’d built my entire school path around it. From age five, that was the answer. From twelve, I overloaded my timetable with everything available – report cards were handwritten back then, and they literally added lines for mine. Mathematics, sciences, Latin, history, geography: all of it.

Money was always short. Restaurant shifts at weekends, homework between services. University came; medicine was gone. I started in Political Science, then fell for economics after one intro lecture. I did both degrees in parallel, kept working, and later added early-morning cleaning shifts before class.

I filled every available hour with learning or working. My unofficial motto was “whatever it takes.” Twenty years since high school. And since I started therapy. My psychiatrist D. suspected undiagnosed ADHD.

Maybe that explains the intensity. It doesn’t change the result: discipline became a language I speak fluently.

Career Rocket, Social Blind Spots

That work ethic carried me straight in. Fifteen years of corporate life – Luxembourg, Dubai, Riyadh, Madrid – and more hours on planes than I can count.

Career-wise: strong trajectory. “Sky is the limit, B.B.,” my boss G. used to tell me.

But socially, in certain rooms? Let’s say I occasionally looked confident while internally buffering.

Someone mentions a watch reference like it’s common knowledge.

A wine list arrives and suddenly your brain files for immediate leave.

A conversation jumps to markets, design, cars, or culture, and everyone is flowing while you’re smiling like a diplomat.

I had my moments too: wrong term, wrong reference, wrong confidence level.

Thinking: “Excellent. I’ve managed to lose credibility before the soup arrives.”

Curiosity as a Survival Strategy

So instead of pretending harder, I got curious.

I started learning the worlds that kept showing up in real rooms: finance and money, wine plus spirits and brews, gastronomy, style and dress codes, luxury codes, interiors and design, social etiquettes, tech, modern culture, books and podcast references, sport, mind games… The list kept growing.

Not to become a walking encyclopaedia.

To stop feeling like a tourist in conversations that matter.

And the more I learned, the more I felt like myself again.

Sharper.

More grounded.

More present.

Less “functioning woman checking tasks,” more actual human with range.

Nothing in my background had prepared me to decode those unspoken social and cultural codes at 23.

And the question that stayed with me was simple: when you don’t know something exists, how are you supposed to learn it?

Not a Competence Problem

The answer needed a home.

Because too many women are brilliant, capable, and carrying half the planet, yet were never given the cultural context that makes certain rooms feel easy.

It is rarely a competence problem.

It is usually an exposure problem.

And when context is missing, confidence gets expensive.

I built The GentleWomen Club to make the unspoken social currency practical, elegant, and accessible, so women can enter conversations with ease and stay there with quiet confidence.

That is the mission.

That is the point.

That is the “why.”

Yours,

B.B.

Founder, The GentleWomen Club