SHE TALKS
Easy Homemade
Cinnamon Rolls:
The Perfect
Holiday
Breakfast
Easy Homemade
Cinnamon Rolls:
The Perfect
Holiday
Breakfast
OCTOBER 2026
OCTOBER 2026
VOL 3 | ISSUE 10
VOL 3 | ISSUE 10
MAGAZINE
DR. DAWN ELLA:
FROM NEAR-DEATH
EXPERIENCE TO
THE VISIONARY’S
LIGHT
Featuring
The
Permission
You Are
Already
Waiting For
The
Permission
You Are
Already
Waiting For
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FROM THE EDITOR
Founder, Lead and Empower Her She Talks
Hello She Talkers
There is something about October that feels like a fresh invitation to
enjoy the season we are in. The crispness in the air, the changing colors,
the excitement of Halloween, and the transition into the final months of
the year create a natural rhythm of celebration, reflection, and
anticipation.
October is also a wonderful reminder that life does not have to be so
serious all the time. There is something joyful about dressing up,
embracing a little creativity, gathering with others, and simply making
space for fun. In a world that can move incredibly fast, these moments of
connection and celebration matter.
As we enter the final stretch of the year, I also find myself reflecting on
just how much our SHE Talks community has grown. New voices continue
to join us, new stories continue to emerge, and women around the world
continue to remind us of the power that comes from sharing our
experiences and lifting one another up.
There is still so much ahead for SHE Talks, and I could not be more
excited about where this movement is going. From our upcoming
gatherings and celebrations to the incredible women and stories we will
continue to feature, these final months of the year are filled with
possibility.
So, as you turn the pages of this October issue, I hope you give yourself
permission to enjoy the season, embrace a little fun, celebrate how far
you have come, and look forward to everything still waiting for you.
Thank you for continuing to read, share, and be part of SHE Talks.
With warm regards and excitement for the road ahead,
CONTRIBUTORS
Editor-in-Chief
DR. JULIE DUCHARME
Cover Layout and
Magazine Design
DR. JOSHUA DUCHARME
Contributing Writers
DR. JULIE DUCHARME
ELLE NAGY
TIFFANY ENGLISH
JENNIE EDWARDS
DELANEY TAYLOR
Table of Contents
@leadandempowerhert
SheTalksMag.com
Dr. Dawn Ella: From Near-Death Experience to
The Visionary’s Light
Easy Homemade Cinnamon
Rolls: The Perfect Holiday
Breakfast
The Magic of Halloween:
Costumes, Community, and
the Traditions We Keep
The Heat Was High. The Connections Were Higher.
Hire for Who They Are. Teach the Rest.
19
13
36
30
The Permission You Are Waiting For Is Already Yours
Feature
24
Vanity or vital Business tool -
Why we need women’s
Awards
42
SCALE UP
SCALE UP
BUSINESS INTENSIVE
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experience designed to unlock your business's true potential. Spend a full day uncovering the
core reasons your business isn’t scaling as expected, identifying the unseen obstacles
holding your business back.
Many small businesses face unseen challenges—problems they don’t even realize exist.
When time and cash flow are tight, it’s clear that something needs to shift.
With Dr. Ducharme's proven method EMPOWER she and her team will take you step by step
through her revolutionizing process she has used on hundreds of companies to bring them
back to life and find their authentic path in the world of business.
Sign up
@DrJulieDucharme.com
The best interview
reveals who shows up
when the script
disappears.
Hire for
Who They Are.
Skills date. Software changes.
Character travels with a person
for a whole career.
Tiffany English
Every résumé I have ever read told me what a
person could do. None told me who they were.
That gap drives more hires than any qualification
because skills date quickly, software evolves, and
processes keep getting rewritten, but attitude
and values travel with a person throughout their
career.
Hire for who they are. Teach the rest.
I have spent six years building teams across
Australia and the Philippines, and the lesson
holds on both sides of the water.
The people who thrive share three qualities:
curiosity, ownership and the willingness to say 'I
don’t know'. You can see all three in ten minutes.
You cannot install any of them.
Teach the Rest.
SHE TALKS | 8
Curiosity leaves
evidence long
before a résumé
does.
How to
interview
Change the questions. Ask about a mistake.
What happened, what changed afterwards,
and who did they tell? Someone who owns a
mistake in an interview will own one in a
crisis. Someone who blames a former
manager has told you exactly what they will
say about you.
Listen for the pronouns too. ‘We’ fixed it, or ‘I’
did. Ask what they taught themselves last
year without being asked. Cursory leaves a
trail.
Ask what they would do in the first week if the
brief made no sense. The answer you want
involves a question, asked early. The answer
you fear involves silence and a best guess.
Then run the skills test last, and weight it
least. Skills are the cheapest thing to add to a
person who already has the other three.
for attitude
Most interviews test memory. The candidate
recites achievements, the panel nods, and
everyone learns nothing about how that
person behaves under pressure.
ATTITUDE FIRST
APTITUDE SECOND
SOFTWARE LAST
SHE TALKS | 9
PHILIPPINES
94
Local or global is
the wrong question
Business owners still ask me whether to hire locally or offshore.
Ask a better question. Who is the right person for this role, and
where does she happen to live? Geography tells you about time
zones and wage bands. It tells you nothing about attitude.
Curiosity is distributed evenly across the planet. Opportunity is
the thing that clusters. Once you stop sorting people by postage,
you can create one standard. One org chart. One onboarding. One
definition of a good week's work. The word 'offshore' describes a
location. It should never describe a class of employee.
A postcode
can set a
clock. it
cannot set a
person’s
potential.
Culture is learned, so teach it on purpose
Most companies leave culture to osmosis. People absorb it from the room. That works until half
your team has never been in the room. Cultural difference is real and measurable. On Hofstede’s
power distance index, which scores comfort with hierarchy, the Philippines rates 94 and Australia
36. A professional raised to protect the harmony of a room will rarely challenge an unclear brief. An
Australian manager reads that silence as agreement. Neither person has done anything wrong.
AUSTRALIA
36
POWER DISTANCE INDEX
“
”
Nobody named the difference, so it quietly reads as underperformance.
Name it. In our business, we map six places where the two working cultures
differ: how people want clarity, how they deliver feedback, how they treat
authority, how they build trust, how they handle risk, and what tempo they
work at. Every new starter learns the map. So does every Australian
manager. Training runs both ways, or it fails. Then check whether it landed.
Ask the manager and team member the same questions, separately and in
writing. Read the gap between the two answers, never the average. A wide
gap means the instruction didn't land, and the fix is a rewritten brief or a
conversation that week. Nobody has to complain to be heard.
Invest as if they sat
beside you — attitude
is a two-way street
Here is the test of a unified standard. Would you do this for
someone in your head office? Then do it for the person twelve
hours' flight away. Pay above the local market, because loyalty
follows respect. Start healthcare on day one. Ship proper
equipment before day one. Write the career plan down, and fund
it at the same rate per head in both countries. If a course is worth
paying for in Australia, it is worth paying for in Cebu. Put every
person on the org chart by name and photo, wherever they sit,
and introduce them to customers the same way. Customers
notice who you hide.
The return arrives as tenure. In a sector where 30 to 45% of staff
leave every year, people stay with businesses that treat a remote
role as a real career.
Several of the leaders I work with today had never been asked to
lead anything before they joined us. They were hired for attitude.
They learned the rest. Now they teach it.
Investment is
the proof that
‘colleague’ is
more than a word.
None of this needs a platform. It needs a decision that the
person across the ocean is a colleague, with everything that
word carries. Skills are a moving target. Character is what
you hire. Build a workforce where the woman in Manila is as
invested in, and as invested as, the woman down the hall.
Geography then stops being a strategy. It becomes a detail.
AUTHOR BIO
Tiffany English is the Founder and Managing Director of Access Offshoring,
a Brisbane business building integrated teams of more than 400
professionals across Australia and the Philippines. Creator of APOS, the
operating system for Australian and Filipino teams, she won seven Stevie
Awards in 2026 and champions human-centric global workforces.
https://accessoffshoring.com.au/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessoffshoring/
Five moves
for the month
Rewrite the job ad. Lead with
three values, then list the
skills. Watch who applies.
Move the skills test to the end
of the process. Attitude first,
aptitude second, software last.
Write down your culture. Six
sentences on how you give
feedback, make decisions
and handle bad news. Teach
it in both directions.
Ask both sides the same three
questions. Separately, in
writing. Act on the gap.
Run the head-office test on
every policy. If you would not
withhold it from a local
colleague, stop withholding it
from a remote one.
SHE TALKS | 11
leadandempowerher.com/
she-talks-new-york
ON REMPOWERMENT
The
Permission
You Are
Waiting For
Is Already
Yours
On Rempowerment — and what
changes when we stop treating
capable women as though they are
powerless until someone intervenes.
Elle Nagy
Power is not
a gift waiting
in someone
else's hands.
There's a word at the centre of an entire culture that I want to examine
honestly. Empowerment. It's everywhere. On conference stages, in
coaching programmes, in leadership frameworks, in the language of
every well-intentioned mentor who has ever sat across from a capable
woman and told her she was about to be empowered. I don't doubt the
sincerity behind it. I do not question the genuine desire to help.
But I want to look carefully at what the word actually implies. Because
buried inside it is an assumption that I believe costs women more than
we have yet been willing to name.
Empowerment, as it is commonly used, suggests that power travels from
one person to another. That the coach gives it. That the programme
unlocks it. That the leader, the community, the retreat, the certificate
bestows it upon the woman who arrives ready to receive it.
This model, however beautifully packaged, quietly positions the woman
as fundamentally without power until someone else intervenes. And that
positioning is a lie. Not a malicious lie. A habitual one. One so embedded
in the language of personal development and leadership that we have
stopped noticing what it asks women to believe about themselves.
In leadership, it changes how you develop the people
around you: from carrying them toward outcomes to
holding such unwavering belief in their capacity that
they rise to meet it themselves.
In coaching, it redefines the role entirely. The coach
does not give the client anything she did not already
possess. She witnesses. She reflects. She holds the
vision of this client’s greatness while the client is still in
the middle of doubting it.
In parenting, it reshapes what love looks like in practice:
the difference between protecting a child from every
difficulty and trusting them with the contrast that will
make them strong.
In your relationship with yourself, it changes everything.
Because the most consequential person you will ever
Rempower is you.
The
strongest
support
leaves
the
steering
wheel
with you.
What
Rempowerment
Actually Means
I want to offer a different word. One that wake me at two in the
morning after sitting with this question for longer than I am prepared
to admit.
Rempowerment. Not empowerment. Rempowerment. The distinction
is not semantic. It is structural.
Rempowerment is not about bestowing power on another person. It is
about recognising the power they already hold, and creating the
conditions in which they are willing to claim it fully, even through
every part of them wants someone to come and carry them the last
kilometre.
The difference matters in every arena where human beings show up
to help each other grow.
RECOGNISE
REFLECT
RELEASE
SHE TALKS | 14
The
Disservice
of Rescue
Respect
sometimes looks
like raising the
standard.
SHE SHOWED UP. SO DID HER POWER.
Early in my career, before I had language for any of this, I
was asked to cover an aqua aerobics class at a gym in
South Africa. I walked in expected to facilitate the usual
approach: gentle movement, easy pace, the kind of
session that asks very little of anyone.
Instead I looked at fifteen women, most of them in their
seventies, who had gotten up early, driven to the gym, put
on their swimming costumes, and gotten into the pool. I
did not see elderly women in need of gentle management.
I saw women who had shown up. Who had made a choice.
Who deserved to be treated as the powerful, capable
beings they were.
So I exchanged the gentle playlist for some Linkin Park,
got in the pool, and gave them the most demanding aqua
session of their lives. I showed them how to use the
resistance of the water, how to contract with intention,
how to breathe for maximum output.
An hour later, fifteen rather subdued women walked out
on trembling legs. On my way out, I found them huddled
around the manager and assumed I had pushed them too
hard. I braced for complaints.
What I discovered was that for the first time since joining
the gym, someone had treated them as the power-women
they already were. They loved it. They came back. They
brought friends.
What changed was not their capacity. Their capacity had
always been there. What changed was that someone
finally refused to underestimate it.
That is Rempowerment in its simplest form.
Resistance
can be
the
architecture
of
becoming.
The Mountain
and the Marshals
Let me tell you about the moment I understood Rempowerment from the inside.
I’d entered the SkyRun over the Drakensberg in South Africa — a race capped at
150 athletes, including some of the world’s elite ultra-endurance trail runners. My
sole qualifier was completing an Ironman, which felt sufficient until kilometre 57,
sitting alone in a muddy marshland at pitch darkness, last person in the field, a
strapped knee and a sprained ankle competing for my attention, tears streaming
silently down my face.
The opposite of it is rescue. And rescue —
however kind it feels in the moment — has a
cost that rarely gets named.
There’s a story about a boy who found a
butterfly struggling to emerge from its
cocoon. Out of love, he snipped the cocoon
open. The butterfly emerged easily, and
spent the rest of its life crawling, wings
shrivelled, body swollen, never able to fly.
The resistance its wings encountered was
not the enemy.
The resistance was the mechanism. The
butterfly’s effort to push through the tiny
opening was what forced fluid from its body
into its wings. Without the resistance, there
was no flight.
When we rescue people from their difficulty
whether in leadership, in relationships, in
coaching, in every context where one
person holds more certainty than another,
we believe we are being kind. We are often,
in truth,
satisfying our own discomfort at witnessing
their struggle.
We do not want to feel the tension of
watching someone work hard for
something. So we carry them. And in
carrying them, we make them incrementally
weaker.
SHE TALKS | 16
I'd crawled across Dragon's Ridge on
hands and knees. I had shuffled down a
sheet drop on my bruised backside
because it was the only way I could cross
it. I had screamed into the dark and had a
rather direct conversation with the
Universe that I will not reproduce here.
And then I saw two tiny lights ahead.
Marshals. Sent to find me. The flashlight
barely touched my face before they
turned around and walked back toward
camp. Without a word, Without a hand,
Without acknowledging what they could
surely see — that I was broken, filthy, in
pain, and moving at an excruciating pace.
I was, in that moment, furious.
They left me in silence. In my personal
hell. Fighting demons they could not see
but knew, with absolute certainty, I had to
conquer myself.
When we finally turned the corner into
camp, both marshals looked at me,
tipped their caps, and left.
That small nod was everything.
What those two marshals understood,
what the entire culture of ultra-
endurance sport understands
instinctively, is that you do not take a
single step of victory from another
person. Not only.
Because it is not just about reaching the
destination. It is about every footprint you
were strong enough to leave behind you.
The moment they carried me, they would
have robbed me of exactly what I went up
that mountain to find.
Support can stand beside
the struggle without stealing the summit.
SHE TALKS | 17
The
Permission
Is Already
Yours
The women I work with are not powerless. They have
never been powerless. They are women who have, at
various points, outsourced their authority; to the opinions
of others, to the validation of people who were never
going to be fully satisfied, to the next achievement, the
next title, the next external confirmation that they are
finally enough.
What they do not need is more power delivered from the
outside. What they need is to stop waiting for permission
they already have the authority to give themselves.
This is the territory inside Mastering Self-Leadership —
not a formula for self-improvement, but a return to self-
authority. The recognition that the most consequential
leadership any woman will ever exercise is the leadership
of her own life, from the inside out.
Rempowerment is not a gentle concept. It asks something
harder than rescue. It asks you to hold the fullness of your
own capacity even when you are sitting in the dark, in the
mud, with a sprained ankle and zero glamour, wondering
whether to keep going.
vIt asks you to keep going anyway. Not because someone
carried you. Because you remembered you were always
strong enough to carry yourself.
The marshals tip their caps and leave.
The summit is yours. It always was.
Elle Nagy is a Rich Life Advisor, author, and self-
leadership guide for accomplished women.
Rempowerment is explored in depth in her book
Mastering Self-Leadership. Find her at
ellenagy.com
The life you
lead is waiting
for your
signature.
“
”
THE SUMMIT IS YOURS
SHE TALKS | 18
HOLIDAY BREAKFAST
Easy Homemade
Cinnamon Rolls:
The Perfect
Holiday Breakfast
Soft, fluffy, buttery rolls with cream cheese frosting, ready in
roughly two hours.
There are some foods that just feel like the holidays—and
warm, homemade cinnamon rolls are definitely one of them.
Imagine waking up on a holiday morning to the smell of
buttery dough, cinnamon, and sugar filling the kitchen. The
coffee is brewing, everyone is still in pajamas, and a warm pan
of fluffy cinnamon rolls is coming out of the oven just as the
day's festivities begin. It's the kind of breakfast that can turn
an ordinary morning into a holiday tradition.
These homemade cinnamon rolls with cream cheese frosting are soft,
fluffy, buttery, and surprisingly approachable. Made with instant yeast,
the dough comes together without the fuss of traditional active-dry
yeast, and the rolls are ready in roughly two hours—including rising
time.
While cinnamon rolls are a popular choice for holiday mornings
and seasonal brunches, you certainly don’t need to save them
for a special occasion. They’re just as delicious for a weekend
breakfast, birthday brunch, or anytime you’re looking for
something a little extra special.
MAKES
12 ROLLS
BAKE
20–25 MIN
RISE
1½–2 HOURS
A holiday
breakfast
worth waking up for.
SHE TALKS | 19
Why You'll Love
These Cinnamon Rolls
Soft and fluffy: The yeast dough creates tender
rolls with a light, pillowy texture.
Simple ingredients: You probably already have
most of what you need in your kitchen.
Instant yeast: No complicated yeast process or
lengthy preparation is required.
Cream cheese frosting: The frosting melts into the
warm rolls, creating those irresistible sweet, creamy
pockets throughout.
Easy to customize: Stick with classic cinnamon
sugar or try a seasonal filling like apple pie spread
or pumpkin butter.
And perhaps most importantly, these are the kind
of cinnamon rolls that make your kitchen smell
incredible while they're baking. A holiday breakfast
doesn't have to be complicated to feel special. In
fact, some of the best holiday breakfasts are the
ones that can be prepared without spending the
entire morning in the kitchen.
Make-ahead breakfast dishes and baked goods
are especially popular when you're hosting,
because they allow more time for family, friends,
coffee, and relaxing together. These cinnamon
rolls are a great fit for that kind of morning. You
can even do some of the preparation ahead of
time. Assemble the rolls the evening before and
refrigerate them, then bring them out in the
morning to finish rising before baking. That way,
you can enjoy freshly baked cinnamon rolls
without starting from scratch while everyone else
is enjoying the morning.
The Secret Is
in the Dough
LET TEXTURE
BE YOUR GUIDE
The most important part of homemade cinnamon rolls is
getting the dough right. You want the dough to feel soft
and slightly tacky, but it shouldn't stick to your hands.
When you gently press your finger into the dough, it
should leave a small indentation that slowly springs back.
Don't worry if your dough reaches this consistency before
the full 5-8 minutes of kneading time. Every mixer and
batch of dough is a little different. Let the texture be your
guide.
If the dough feels too dry, add a teaspoon of milk at a
time. If it's too wet or sticky, add a teaspoon of flour at a
time. Small adjustments are all you need.
SHE TALKS | 20