“You really want to have a reason why you make art,” declares Sally Mann, who was speaking at the University of Chicago’s Ida Noyes Hall, built in 1916 as the women’s clubhouse and gymnasium.

This physical storied past was surrounding hundreds in the audience at the Chicago Humanities Festival, eager to hear from Mann, named America’s Best Photographer by Time magazine in 2001, a Guggenheim fellow, and author of the new book, Art Work: On The Creative Life.

“I am not who you think I am. I am so much more,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, Indigenous scientist, botanist and best-selling author of Braiding Sweetgrass and the more recent, The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance.

Speaking at the Chicago Humanities Fall Festival recently on National Indigenous Peoples Day at the Morton Arboretum in suburban Chicago, Kimmerer, a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, offered lessons of gratitude, reciprocity and community in leadership and life.

It has been a week of global and national record-breaking milestones for female leadership across generations in business, politics, faith communities, music, media and more. At a time of intense cultural pushback, scrutiny and divisiveness toward leaders identifying as women, what lessons can we learn so these breakthroughs are not just one and done?

A look at the momentous achievements on the recent calendar represent different points of view and approaches. It is up to individuals to learn what each leader supports and why.

“Fear is my friend,” says Shirin Behzadi, author and C-suite entrepreneur who left her native Iran alone as a teenager and worked to become CEO of a billion-dollar home improvement franchise company. She also raised a family and survived a brain tumor.

In her new memoir, “The Unexpected CEO: My Journey from Gas Station Cashier to Billion-Dollar CEO,” Behzadi shares her inspiring story of how she refuses to be erased and uses her power for good.

With YouTube’s recent announcement offering a banquet of creative tools for creators, it is impossible to deny the AI revolution is deepening influence for leaders, users, institutions and cultures around the world across generations, identities and genders.

Everyone needs to pay attention.

It’s not easy being a woman leading at a high profile, legacy media outlet. But it never has been, even as the numbers of women journalists running top outlets globally is still recent and pretty rare.

Speaking at the 40th anniversary of the Journalism & Women Symposium annual CAMP in Washington, D.C., recently, JAWS President Angela Greiling Keane, Bloomberg Government News Director, said the theme of the conference, “Persevere and Persist,” is especially relevant today in a harrowing time for journalists covering politics.