As the founder of ‘Her Big Leap’, she helps executive women leave the corporate world to start a business — without risking everything they’ve already built.
Most high-achieving women didn’t stumble into corporate life. They were pointed there — deliberately, by parents, teachers – and a society – who believed it was the safest path to independence and security. Get good grades. Get a good job. Climb the ladder. That was the promise: do all the right things, and success will follow. You’ll be set for life.
For Sarah Janzen, that message came early and clearly. Her own mother had given up a significant career to raise a family, and what Sarah absorbed — directly and indirectly — was a simple directive: be financially independent, work hard, and always aim for the top. “If you’re going to go into medicine, don’t be a nurse, be a doctor.” Strive. Achieve. The bigger the ambition, the better the life waiting on the other side.
And she did it. She climbed. She achieved. She checked every box she’d been handed. And then, on the way to the top, her life was quietly falling apart. Her health was failing. Her relationships were strained. And beneath the credentials and the accomplishments was a question she couldn’t shake: Is this all there is?
It’s a question Sarah now hears constantly from the women she works with — high performers who followed the same roadmap and arrived at the same unsettling destination. “The problem,” she says, “isn’t that women aren’t working hard enough. It’s that we’re still measuring ourselves against a definition of success that was written for our parents’ generation — and it no longer fits.”
Forty years ago, the model made sense. Corporate life offered genuine stability, reasonable boundaries between work and home, and a clear social contract: loyalty in exchange for security. A woman could do her job well and actually come home and be present. That world is gone. Today’s corporate environment demands constant availability — phones, laptops, Slack notifications at all hours. Women are burning out at staggering rates, trying to meet expectations that were never designed with their lives in mind. More and more, Sarah says, she sees high-achieving, ambitious and capable women walking away from environments that are simply too costly to sustain.
What followed Sarah’s own breaking point wasn’t a clean leap — it was a stumble. She left corporate and launched a business that failed before it ever got off the ground, costing her both time and hard-earned savings. “I was chasing an external opportunity instead of building something rooted in who I actually am,” she reflects. The real lesson wasn’t about business strategy. It was about values — specifically, learning to stop looking outside herself for the answer and getting still enough to hear her own voice. When she finally did, the direction became clear. What she cared about most wasn’t the market opportunity she’d been chasing. It was women. Helping them succeed, on their own terms.
That clarity and hard-earned lessons became the foundation of Her Big Leap — a coaching program built to help executive women make the transition from corporate to entrepreneurship without starting from scratch or sacrificing financial security. At its core is a belief that entrepreneurship is the most powerful vehicle available to women today: financial autonomy, meaningful work, flexibility, and the freedom to re-define what success looks like.
Her approach to leadership reflects the same philosophy. “Authentic leadership means getting clear on what success looks like for you,” she says — not performing someone else’s version of it, and not mistaking achievement for fulfilment. It means showing up as your real self, imperfections included, and trusting that who you are is enough.
The message she most wants women to hear is both simple and quietly radical: Stop. And ask yourself what success actually means to you. What does it look like financially, professionally, personally? How present do you want to be — and for whom? What kind of work makes you feel like yourself? “You can’t create the life you want,” she says, “until you actually know what you want it to look like.”
The rulebook that pointed so many women toward corporate success was written with good intentions. Sarah Janzen’s work is about helping women re-write it on their own terms.
