To the Girls Who Cheer for Other Girls

After almost 11 years in the corporate world, and now sitting about a year away from defending my dissertation in my doctoral program, I've spent a lot of time observing people, relationships, ambition, and what success looks like across different stages of life and career. One thing I've come to appreciate more and more is the women who genuinely cheer for other women.

I've worked with incredible women throughout my career. Women who made introductions, shared opportunities, offered advice, advocated for others in rooms they weren't in, and celebrated wins that had absolutely nothing to do with them. I've also learned that the women who do this best are usually the women who are the most secure in themselves.

They're focused on building their own careers, pursuing their own goals, and creating lives that feel meaningful to them. Because of that, someone else's success doesn't feel threatening.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that another woman's win doesn't take away yours. Her business success doesn't make yours less possible. Her confidence doesn't diminish yours; her accomplishments don't reduce your potential. There is room for all of us. But when we're operating from comparison, insecurity, or scarcity, that can be hard to see.

Sometimes I wonder how different things would look if we had learned this earlier. If young girls grew up understanding that someone else's beauty doesn't diminish their own, someone else's intelligence doesn't make them less intelligent, and someone else's success doesn't reduce their chances of succeeding, I think we'd spend a lot less time comparing and a lot more time supporting.

Because the habit of cheering for other women doesn't suddenly appear when we enter the workforce. It starts much earlier. It starts in classrooms, on sports teams, in friend groups, and in the small moments where we decide whether another girl's success feels inspiring or threatening.

The real test isn't whether we can celebrate people when life is going exactly the way we planned. It's whether we can celebrate them when we're still waiting for our own opportunity, our own breakthrough, or our own next chapter.

The more fulfilled you become in your own life, the easier it becomes to genuinely support other people. When you're proud of who you're becoming, you're less concerned with measuring yourself against someone else.

You stop keeping score, comparing timelines, and treating another woman's success as evidence that you're somehow behind. And you start realizing that her win has absolutely nothing to do with yours. In fact, I think one of the strongest indicators of confidence is the ability to celebrate another woman without making her success about yourself.

So to the girls who cheer for girls: never stop. The world needs those girls.

And it needs the women they become.

Dania Khalife