Coaching Communities to Overcome Cancer
Getting back on your feet after a debilitating illness is the hardest job there is, and no one knows this better than Spanish entrepreneur Teresa Ferreiro, Founder and CEO of Soul Reconnect, an online platform for breast cancer patients and survivors.
Ferreiro’s journey began twelve years ago when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. An executive coach from the Spanish city of A Coruña, her experience surviving cancer and then re-entering the workforce was overwhelming.
“If you don’t know how to go back to work, talk to others, or face your fears, then things can get very difficult,” Ferriero says. “Breast cancer in this case can be the entry point to something deeper,” which in her case was the idea to one day start a business.
Ferreiro’s return to work post-cancer involved becoming a certified Executive Professional Coach and pursuing a Ph.D in Communications to help cancer patients advocate for themselves. Her studies and professional life fed into her idea of creating an online support community for breast cancer patients and survivors – an idea she thought about for years but was not sure how to get off the ground.
Her participation in the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE) helped Ferreiro make her business idea a reality. Her experience taught her how to integrate her coaching and academic
background into a business plan for an online community for cancer survivors and launch her platform during a time when the world was struggling with COVID.
It was a crucial moment. When COVID hit in 2020, Ferreiro knew the pandemic would make an already isolating experience like cancer even worse under the strict lockdowns that kept Spaniards – and most of the world – in their homes for months at a time.
“I realized I had so much to offer, and then COVID came. I had all of the research from the PhD and the work that we had done with patients that we had to interrupt,” says Ferreiro. “There were so many women who, due to COVID, were isolated and were not feeling accompanied or supported.”
She knew she had to act.
In 2020, the attorney helping her with the legal aspects of launching her business forwarded her information about AWE from the U.S. Consulate in Barcelona. She immediately applied and was accepted.
Ferreiro (bottom, fifth from left) and her 2021 AWE graduating class.
Although she already had business experience, the 13-week entrepreneurship program gave her the knowledge on how to best launch her platform. She found she was not alone. She was part of a strong online community of like-minded women entrepreneurs who were all struggling to launch a business during COVID. AWE changed her mind-set and gave her new inspiration.
“The program helped me to be brave, and think ‘Ok, there’s nothing to lose, this is my idea, and it is going to work!’” she said.
The program also helped her to adapt to a brave new economic world.
“What I didn’t know was that, for example, I would be constantly pivoting – starting and stopping three times due to COVID. So, it was more like being part of a community where we all are in the same place; otherwise, you feel very alone.”
While the business idea came from personal experience, the platform itself is grounded in science, stemming from her PhD thesis. Every tool provided on the Soul Reconnect platform is fully backed by five years of scientific study and patient feedback and is designed to help women with breast cancer navigate what can be an isolating and frightening journey.
Ferreiro sharing coaching techniques at a Safety Week conference.
That sense of community Ferreiro found through AWE was replicated in the business plan she developed. Her work led to a robust platform that offers a variety of healthcare coaching, as well as online courses and videos that address topics like doctor visits, nutrition and exercise, and returning to the workforce. Patients can also join webinars, individual coaching sessions, and retreats, all of which are carefully designed using the latest science to help patients focus on their personal growth.
For Ferreiro, the platform is about empowering patients to take back control of their lives, inside and out.
“We are changing the way cancer patients are being looked at and perceived,” she said. “The patient is no longer just a passive person who waits for a treatment, or others, to make decisions. Now, the patient is in the center, and she is the one who runs her life.”
Ferrero also coaches business executives on leadership at the IMD Business School in Switzerland. Her experience as a coach inspired her to lead a workshop for her AWE classmates to explore the emotional side of entrepreneurship. In it, they addressed their fears about their businesses and got more in touch with the emotional intelligence skills that are important for all entrepreneurs, and particularly women.
“The fact that some of us want to be mothers is a challenge. We are juggling many things, and when you are your own boss, it is not about sex equality but about our own decisions,” she said. “What we want to come first, and how to handle the outside pressure.”
Ferreiro (center) and fellow AWE participants after her leadership workshop.
Currently, Soul Connect is designed for solely for breast cancer patients and survivors. Down the road, Ferreiro plans to expand the business to add more content, address other chronic conditions, and translate the platform to other languages to branch beyond Spain.
“We want to create the space for patients who can lead their lives, patients who are leaders,” she said.
Ferreiro says that it is hard to know where the platform would be without the AWE program. AWE helped her realize that it was possible for Soul Reconnect to target not just patients as the individual end-user, but also companies that want to offer wellness to their employees. For example, by expanding services to include Human Resources information, Ferreiro hopes to partner with employers to empower cancer survivors so that they don’t suffer self-doubt during the transition back to the workplace.
“At the end of the day it is about us deciding how we want to build our lives," she said. “And that’s a lot of learning, it requires courage.”
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, AWE empowers female entrepreneurs to begin and scale their businesses. Operating in Spain since 2019, AWE has provided more than 16,000 women around the world with the knowledge, networks, and access they need to start and scale their businesses.