By Yolanda Beattie, Future IM/Pact Founder
If you’re a young woman in our Future IM/Pact community, I have no doubt your external game is already strong. Top marks, impressive internships – you’re building a résumé that gets you noticed and it’s working.
But here’s the thing I wish more women learned earlier: the external work gets you through the door, but a meaningful career is built from the inside out.
After years of coaching women in finance, I’ve seen the most fulfilled careers grow from three foundations: knowing yourself, choosing environments that align with that, and staying open to evolving as you go.
The women who have genuine presence aren’t necessarily the loudest or the most polished. They’re the ones who’ve done the work to understand themselves – their personality, values, and the work that lights them up.
The Enneagram is the most powerful tool I’ve found for this. Unlike most personality frameworks, it doesn’t just describe your traits, it helps you understand the deeper motivations behind your behaviour, the patterns that emerge under pressure, and the blind spots your strengths can create. You can find free enneagram tests online – approach the results with curiosity and use what resonates as a starting point for the deeper work.
Pair that with honest values work – getting specific about what you actually stand for and letting that inform where and how you work. Brené Brown’s work is a good place to start. Once you’re clear on this, you stop performing presence and start embodying it.
Knowing yourself is only half of the work. The other half is finding environments where that self can thrive.
For high achievers, the temptation is to chase the most impressive role. But impressive and aligned aren’t the same thing. When evaluating fit, pay attention to culture as much as credentials – how decisions get made, what behaviours get rewarded, whether the people ahead of you are ones you’d want to emulate. These things matter more than the name on the door.
The thing I wish more women learned earlier in their career is the external work gets you through the door, but a meaningful career is built from the inside out.
Purpose doesn’t require you to be saving the world or working in the not-for-profit sector. It can be found in any work you love that adds value to others. Take investment advice – purpose lives in the decades-long relationships you build with clients as they navigate life’s biggest financial decisions. That is meaningful work – it just doesn’t always come with the label.
What purpose does require is knowing what matters to you and returning to that, even when things get hard. I experienced this firsthand when Future IM/Pact was on the brink of shutting down as post-COVID learning budgets evaporated. It would have been easy to walk away, but staying anchored to my purpose of helping people build great careers gave me the courage to make hard decisions and reinvent the business. That ultimately led to Career Connect, our flash mentoring platform that has now connected hundreds of students with investment professionals and made our program even more impactful.
None of this is a one-time exercise. Who you are at 22 isn’t who you’ll be at 32, and that’s a good thing. The self-knowledge work you do now doesn’t lock you in – it gives you a foundation to build from and a compass to return to as you grow, change roles, and figure out what really matters to you.
** This article was written for the 2026 Capital W Careers Guide. Future IM/Pact is a proud sponsor of Capital W, UNSW Women in Business Society.
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The women who have genuine presence aren’t necessarily the loudest or the most polished. They’re the ones who’ve done the work to understand themselves – their personality, values, and the work that lights them up.