The room you sit in will always shape the size of the dream you allow yourself to carry.

In today’s solo episode of She Wears the Pants, Ashley Deland takes you inside her recent experience at South by Southwest in Austin — and more importantly, into the internal shift that followed. This is a conversation about proximity, energy, and the unseen ways environments expand or contract your vision as a founder. Before scale becomes reality, there is a shift in what you believe is possible — and that shift is often shaped by the rooms you choose to enter.

If you’re a woman navigating growth, stepping into bigger spaces, or feeling the pull toward your next level, this episode will help you recalibrate your environment, your energy, and the way you approach expansion — so you can hold more without shrinking your vision.

In this episode, Ashley shares how to:

• Understand how environment shapes vision, standards, and the scale you allow yourself to pursue

• Recognize when you’ve outgrown the rooms, conversations, and thinking you’ve been operating inside

• Identify the difference between transactional networking and aligned, long-term relationship building

• Apply a more expansive lens to your ideas by surrounding yourself with audacity-led thinking

• Strengthen your capacity to hold both ambition and joy as you build and scale

• Anchor into a leadership identity that expands possibility instead of unconsciously limiting it

By the end, you’ll walk away with a deeper awareness of how proximity, energy, and environment influence your leadership — and a renewed sense of what is available to you when you place yourself in rooms that expand your thinking. If you’ve been feeling the edges of your next level, let this be your reminder: sometimes the shift you’re searching for is found in the spaces you choose to step into.

Continue the Work with Ashley

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→ https://ashleydeland.com/inquire

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She Wears the Pants is where high-growth women come to build companies that match their calling. If this episode resonated, follow, rate, and review so more women can find these conversations.

Welcome back to She Wears the Pants — the place where high-growth women come to build companies that match their calling.

I’m your host, Ashley Deland.

Last month I attended my first South by Southwest experience in Austin, Texas, and today I want to hold space for a conversation around that experience… and really what has been sitting with me since I got home.

Because sometimes you step into certain rooms, certain cities or certain experiences - and you leave carrying something more than just new contacts, collaborations or new ideas.

You leave with a shift in perspective.

And that’s exactly what this trip - and many of my previous trips have done for me.

As a Canadian girl who has spent the last decade building businesses, advising founders, mentoring women and scaling companies — I’ve spent a lot of time in local rooms.

I’ve built and exited local companies.

My very first corporate role was working alongside Moses Znaimer, a media pioneer here in Canada, as his Director of Marketing & Events.

I’ve produced multiple of my own events, built local brands and mentored hundreds of Canadian founders.

So this conversation isn’t coming from someone observing from the sidelines.

It’s coming from someone who has spent a long time studying how rooms shape vision.

And one thing I’ve noticed very clearly is that there is a different energy in certain spaces.

That’s why for the past 3 years, I’ve been very intentional about placing myself in rooms with different energy, different mindsets, and very often… different countries.

And more recently that has meant more and more in American rooms.

And I get asked about that a lot.

People will ask me,

“What’s the difference?”

“Why do you keep going back to those American rooms?”

“What is it that you’re finding there?”

So I thought today would be the perfect opportunity to try and describe something that is actually quite difficult to explain.

Because the difference isn’t necessarily in the titles in the room, or the success of the people attending.

The difference is energy.

And if you’ve ever been inside a room where the energy shifts something inside you, then you’ll know exactly what I mean in today’s conversation.

And when I say energy, I’m talking about something deeper than just enthusiasm, excitement or even experience…

It’s a mindset.

It’s a way of approaching possibility.

And one of the clearest differences I’ve felt in many of the American rooms I’ve stepped into is what I can only describe as audacity.

There’s an audacity to the way people think.

An audacity to the questions being asked.

An audacity to the scale of the visions being shared.

The conversation isn’t just about what’s realistic or what’s practical.

It’s about what’s possible.

You’ll hear someone speak about an idea, and instead of the person receiving that information or even the room quietly analyzing the risks or the limitations, the response is often something closer to:

“Okay… so what would it look like if this went ten times bigger?”

“What’s the next level of this?”

“Who do we need to bring into this to make it happen?”

There’s this underlying belief in the air that the dream doesn’t have to shrink in order to fit the environment.

Instead , the environment expands to hold the dream.

And that mindset does something powerful to you when you’re sitting inside it.

Because, we all know that vision is contagious.

You’ll hear someone explain what they’re building - you know more typically - a platform, a movement, a company, an app — and within minutes the conversation turns into collaboration.

Someone says, “I know someone you should meet.”

Another person adds, “You should connect with my friend who’s working on something similar.”

And then before you know it, there’s this collaborative energy of, “How can we support her with this?”

And it turns into this beautiful co-creation.

And that’s truthfully what I found in Austin - and in many of the American events I’ve attended.

There was far less competition in the air and far more collaboration.

There was also a noticeable absence of transactional energy.

People were looking for ways to build together.

They were speaking through long-term lenses - not just the next quarter, the next round or the next launch - they’re thinking decade - movement - platform and building this audaciously beautiful ecosystem that will completely change industries.

And you know what - that’s my love language right there.

Because when you sit inside that type of thinking for even a few hours, something inside of you starts to expand.

You begin to realize that the ceiling you may have been quietly operating under… might not actually exist.

And I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve been intentionally placing myself in these rooms over the past couple of years.

And to be clear it’s not because Canada lacks talent — far from it.

We have extraordinary founders here.

But there's sometimes about stepping outside your familiar environment, outside the same circles, friends and conversations that allows you to stretch your imagination.

And that’s something every founder needs from time to time.

Because the rooms you sit in will always influence the size of the dream you allow yourself to carry.

Alright, now let’s move on to another layer to this past experience - one that I only realized after coming home and reflecting - which kind of surprised me.

And it wasn’t about business strategy or scaling companies.

It was about something much simpler.

Joy.

As I moved through the different gatherings, dinners, conversations, panels and events, I started noticing something …

People were actually enjoying themselves.

There was laughter.

There were genuine friendships forming.

There were conversations happening late into the evening that had nothing to do with closing deals, raising investment or pitching ideas.

And it reminded me of something that I think many founders quietly forget as they build their companies.

We were never meant to sacrifice our entire lives on the altar of ambition.

Yes, building a company requires discipline, it requires focus, resilience and long seasons of work - my friend.

But it was never meant to feel like a permanent state of pressure.

And I think the culture of hustle has pushed many founders so far into survival mode that we’ve almost forgotten that we’re building these businesses in order to live a meaningful life.

Not the other way around.

And this is my gentle reminder to you today (because I know I needed it too) that entrepreneurship doesn’t have to feel heavy all the time.

You can build serious things in the world… while still laughing with the people around you.

And - You can hold big visions…while still creating space for joy.

Now, let’s move into the final takeaway I carried home from Austin with me.

And this one is for the founders who are constantly hearing phrases like,

“Your network is your net worth.”

Or,

“You just need to get into the right rooms.”

Because while there is truth in that, many people misunderstand what proximity actually means.

The power of proximity is not just about who you know.

It’s about the moment you realize that the dream you’ve been carrying inside your mind is actually touchable.

You can see it.

You can hear someone explain how they built it.

You can sit across from someone who once had the exact same idea — and now it exists in the world.

And that’s when you know - that you’re in the right experience for you, surrounded by the right people and you allow the internal shift to happen.

Because now the thought, vision or dream stops feeling abstract, heavy or even unachievable.

It becomes tangible.

And then you start to think in terms of:

“Oh… this is actually possible and I’m going to be the one to build it.”

But here’s where I see many people get it wrong.

They think “okay, I will pay what I need to, to just get into the room”

But - getting into the room is not the goal.

Just being physically present does not automatically unlock opportunity or potential.

The real value of those spaces comes from how you show up inside them.

If you walk into those environments with transactional energy - aka - handing out business cards, pitching your services, trying to sell something — people feel that immediately.

And it stands out - not in the way you want.

The most powerful people in those rooms aren’t looking for quick transactions.

They’re looking for relationships.

They’re looking for alignment.

They’re looking for the kind of people they want to build with over time.

And that means you have to enter those spaces differently.

With curiosity, generosity and especially with the intention to connect with people as humans first — not as opportunities.

You’ve all heard me say many times before that you are just one thought, introduction or conversation away from something life-changing.

And most of the time, the most valuable thing you’ll receive from a room isn’t a deal.

It’s a conversation.

An introduction.

A single sentence that unlocks a new way of thinking.

That’s the real magic of those environments.

Not access, not being part of that clique or getting your picture taken with whoever just spoke on stage for Insta…

It’s Alignment.

And when you walk into rooms with that mindset — when you bring the right energy, the right openness, the right intention — something powerful begins to happen.

The right people begin to find you.

The right conversations begin to unfold.

And the right opportunities begin to appear.

So if there’s one thing I want you to take from this episode today, it’s this:

The rooms you choose matter.

The energy you bring into those rooms matters.

And the vision you allow yourself to carry inside them matters.

Because when you surround yourself with people who believe deeply in possibility… eventually you start believing in it more deeply yourself.

And that belief changes how you lead.

How you build.

How you dream.

And ultimately, how you live.

And until next time — keep rising into the woman your calling requires.