Owning Your Why - The Only Constant in a World of Change

Speaker Introduction and Context

The session opens with host Stephanie introducing Raquel as the creator and founder of PressConf, a conference for web agencies that had recently launched and generated significant social media attention. Stephanie notes a shared history with Raquel through 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

Elegant Themes and the Divi Chat podcast community, where they had crossed paths previously.

Raquel opens by acknowledging that she is much more comfortable on a physical stage than in virtual settings, and asks the audience to bear with her. She is also known as a fast talker, and deliberately slows herself down throughout the session, even pausing to take a collective deep breath with the audience before beginning in earnest.

She goes by the single name Raquel - no last name - as a deliberate personal choice that reflects her value of personal connection and closeness with the people she meets.

The Distinction: Finding vs. Knowing vs. Owning Your Why

Raquel opens the substantive content by making an explicit distinction that she considered carefully before settling on the session title. "Finding your why" is a well-established concept, most closely associated with Simon Sinek's work. Raquel is a proponent of this idea, but she argues that the journey does not stop at finding.

She describes a clear progression: Not yet knowing - many people are in this stage without realizing it; they have a why, but it is buried or unrecognized.

Finding - the discovery process, working out what matters and why.

Knowing - you have identified it, but this alone is insufficient.

Owning - fully claiming it, living from it, using it as an active filter for decisions and commitments.

She admits she deliberated over whether the title "owning your why" was the right framing, but ultimately felt it was the most honest and necessary articulation of what she wanted to convey.

Self-Knowledge as the Foundation

The first core principle Raquel establishes is stark: you cannot know your why if you do not know who you are. She argues that in the world of business, there is enormous pressure to focus on strategy, purpose statements, mission, brand, and numbers - and that in chasing those outputs, people skip entirely past the prerequisite of genuine self-knowledge.

She frames this not as self-indulgence but as foundational business intelligence. You cannot build a genuine why on top of a person you have not yet met. For Raquel, this means that the work of clarifying your purpose begins not with brand frameworks or strategy workshops, but with the more uncomfortable and personal work of understanding who you actually are.

Her vision for PressConf is explicitly built on this principle: yes, PressConf is about business, but before it is about business, it is about who its participants are as people.

You cannot build a genuine why on top of a person you have not yet met.

The Problem: Inherited Definitions of Self

The second major point Raquel addresses is what she calls being "buried under someone else's why." She lists the culprits: inherited definitions of success, ambition, value, belonging, and "enoughness" - a word she chooses deliberately to capture the invisible standard by which many people measure themselves without ever having chosen that standard.

The problem with absorbing other people's whys is not necessarily that they are wrong or bad in themselves. The issue is that they are not yours. They can serve as a starting point or a source of resonance, but if you stop there, you end up performing life rather than living it. She describes this state as waking up and no longer being sure who you are, because your sense of self is built on performance and external expectation rather than internal truth.

She makes a specific observation about the tendency to look at others' mission statements and think "I like that, I resonate with that" - and how this can become a shortcut that skips the more difficult personal excavation.

Tracing the Why Back to Childhood

Raquel introduces what she acknowledges sounds like a cliche - that so much of who we are as adults traces back to our childhoods - but she makes the case for it anyway, because she believes it is genuinely true. Therapy, growth work, and self-development all tend to circle back to early formative experiences. The inherent self we were as children does not disappear; we morph and change, but the core does not vanish.

As a personal illustration, she shares her long-standing love for the character of Alice from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Alice was a girl defined by curiosity who refused to let that curiosity stop her. For Raquel, this was a deep resonance that she nonetheless stifled for approximately two decades because of external expectations, others' demands, and various forms of constraint.

She connects this directly to her company name: Wonderland Curious is an explicit callback to the Alice archetype and to the curiosity she spent years suppressing before reclaiming it.

Raquel's Personal Story: From Wife and Mother to Founder

The most personally revealing section of the talk involves Raquel sharing the arc of her own identity journey. She uses a photograph from 2014 - twelve years before the summit - as an anchor point, describing the person in the image as someone who was on the brink of

discovering who she was, in her early thirties, having spent her twenties without a clear individual identity.

Her twenties were spent almost entirely as a stay-at-home wife and mother. She married young, had children immediately, and describes spending the decade either pregnant, nursing, or raising small children. Her identity was defined entirely through her relationships - she was wife and mother, not Raquel. She had brief windows of expressing herself through coaching colorguard and dancing (she describes herself as a dancer for most of her life), but these were cut short by external circumstances.

The turning point came in approximately 2010, when her partner lost his job during the recession. The only viable path forward was to convert their side business of building websites into a full-scale operation. This was how she entered the WordPress world - not by design but by necessity, something she describes as an "accidental happening."

Through WordPress, she began discovering who she was. She describes a specific moment that crystallized the shift: she had initially been known at WordPress events as "so-and-so's wife." Over time, as she became more present and confident, the dynamic inverted - her partner started being introduced as "Raquel's husband." She marks this as a catalytic moment she did not fully recognize at the time, but now understands as the point where she started actively asking: who am I, and why am I?

Wherever My Feet Are: A Framework for Living Your Why

One of the most distinctive and specific ideas Raquel shares is a framework that emerged from an old time management book she read during her years of involvement with church community. The author was CJ Mahaney, and the book's central principle was deceptively simple: measure what you do, where you do it, and how you do it by where your feet are.

This idea stuck with her and became a practical expression of her why. It gave her a clear set of parameters for how to allocate her time and energy without overthinking. Wherever she physically was - whatever community she was embedded in - that was where she would serve, build, and contribute.

In practice this played out as:

• Deep involvement in her children's schools - serving on PTO and PTA boards, running booster groups for her children's high school dance team, marching band booster groups, and related activities.
• Involvement in her neighborhoods - serving on HOA boards, which she describes as more genuinely engaging than the loaded reputation of HOAs might suggest.
• Active participation in local government - she held an elected position as a city commissioner for the Parks and Recreation Commission in the Phoenix suburb where she lived at the time, a role that required being sworn in and that she held for eight years.
• Organizing WordCamps from 2014 onwards.

All of these, she notes, follow the same pattern: people, community, showing up, building something in the space where she happens to be. The pattern was present across every

context. This is her point - the pattern reveals the why long before you have a clean sentence to describe it.

The Clues Were There Before the Sentence Was

Raquel distills this into one of her central reframes: the clues were there before the sentence was. What you care about, what you protect, what you keep making space for, what you refuse to accept - these all appear as a pattern long before you can articulate them as a "why statement."

She describes her own realization: looking back, she was not building a why from scratch.

She was finally being honest about a why that had been showing up her whole life. She cites her love of people and talking as an example. Since first grade, she has loved connecting with others and sharing enthusiastically. A classmate's comment that she talked too much in first grade broke her heart and began a long process of self-stifling. Additional experiences compounded this: a boy mocking her for showing her teeth when she smiled, experiences of religious and other forms of abuse that demanded she conform to a quieter, smaller version of herself.

She describes social media through the lens of her childhood self: to her, it feels like show and tell. She is the child excitedly showing something she loves to anyone who will look. This is not a marketing tactic - it is an authentic expression of who she has always been, finally unrepressed.

She is careful to acknowledge that this excavation process is not always comfortable. It can be deep and painful because it requires surfacing experiences from childhood that include hurt, abuse, and trauma. She does not minimize this. She simply argues that the work is worth it, and that the why is there waiting regardless.

Your Why Is a Pattern, Not a Manufacture

Raquel's clearest articulation of her philosophy comes in a single statement she explicitly names as the most important thing she wants the audience to walk away with: "Your why is not a sentence you manufacture. It's a pattern you finally tell the truth about."

She follows this immediately with reassurance: you are not behind. You are not missing it.

You are not waiting for it to arrive. It is already inside you. Recognition is the work, not invention.

She illustrates the distinction between manufactured and discovered with a brief story about her son. As a child, he used to talk about wanting to take a boat and sail around Africa. He was young and had no fully formed understanding of what that meant, but the desire was vivid and consistent. Now at 21, college and life have pulled him in other directions, and maybe he will never literally sail around Africa. But the desire itself - adventurous,

expansive, untethered - is linked to something real about who he is. That is the kind of early signal Raquel is pointing to.

She also clarifies that going through a formal why-discovery process is not inherently about manufacturing something fake. If you do it with genuine honesty and rawness, you will not end up manufacturing - you will end up recognizing patterns that were always there.

Four Questions to Sit With

Raquel presents four reflective questions as a practical starting point for this work. She is explicit that she does not expect anyone to have immediate answers, and she actively discourages rushing through them. The value is in sitting with them - ideally over a week, minimally over an hour.

Her suggested approach: journal the questions, write the first gut-reaction word or phrase that comes to mind without editing, then return and go deeper.

The four questions are: What has always mattered to me?

What do I keep making space for?

What do I refuse to accept?

What do people come to me for?

She notes that gut responses give a useful starting point, but the real value comes from sustained reflection. Simply answering quickly creates a beginning. The honest, deeper examination creates an owned why.

What Owning Your Why Gives You

Raquel moves from discovery to application by articulating what actually changes when you go from knowing your why to owning it. The tangible benefits she describes are: Clearer yeses - you can say yes quickly and confidently to things that align with who you are.

Cleaner nos - you can decline things that do not align without guilt or uncertainty.

Better decisions - the filter is built in; you do not have to deliberate from scratch every time.

Less performing - you stop saying yes to things you should not, stop contorting yourself to fit expectations that are not yours.

She is specific about the cost of not owning it: you say yes to things you should not, you become a performer in the pejorative sense, you lose your grip on what is actually real and aligned for you. She notes with some irony that she loves performing in the literal sense - 1.

she is a dancer, a stage speaker, someone who enjoys the craft of presentation. But she loves not performing in life even more. Owning her why is what makes the difference.

The Celery Test (Simon Sinek Reference)

To make the concept of owning your why concrete and practical, Raquel borrows Simon Sinek's "celery test" from his work on purpose and why. She credits Sinek explicitly and positions this as an accessible illustration of what owning a decision-framework looks and feels like.

The scenario: you have decided to be a clean eater. Your why around this is clear and fully owned. Someone offers you a choice between celery and an Oreo. You do not have to deliberate. You do not have to weigh pros and cons. You just know - because the filter is already in place. You choose the celery.

Raquel acknowledges that celery is perhaps not the most appetizing example, and jokes that red pepper or blueberries might be a more appealing illustration, but the point stands. When your why is owned rather than merely known, decisions that align with it become automatic.

The deliberation happens at the level of establishing the why, not at the level of each individual choice.

She uses this to reinforce the sequence she has built across the session: discover the pattern, tell the truth about it, own the resulting why, and then watch your decisions become cleaner and faster as a result.

Someone offers you a choice between celery and an Oreo.

Practical Starting Point

Raquel closes the content portion with a concrete call to action: take one quiet hour this week and sit with the four questions. Write them down. Write gut responses. See what emerges. Use that as the starting point for either discovering, knowing, or owning your why - wherever you currently are in the progression.

She acknowledges that for some in the audience the issue will be that they have not yet found their why at all, for others they will know it but have not fully stepped into owning it, and for some the session may be a confirmation that they are already living it. The questions work at every stage.

Q&A: AI, Web Agencies, and Owning the Technology

Following the main talk, host Stephanie asks Raquel where she thinks web agencies will be in two years, acknowledging somewhat apologetically that this does not feel entirely on-topic

for Raquel's session. Raquel handles the question directly and routes it back through her framework.

Her honest answer: she does not know. But she does think it is scary, and she believes agencies that want to remain relevant need to learn how to own AI. The technology is so prevalent and impactful that many agencies are already finding themselves in trouble. She positions this not as a contradiction of her "inner work first" message but as its application: first own your why, then own the technology in front of you.

The implication is that agencies without a grounded sense of who they are and what they are building toward will be especially vulnerable to the disruption that AI brings. Those who know their why will have a clearer basis for deciding how to integrate AI, what to use it for, and what to refuse.

About Raquel and Her Work

Raquel is the founder of two ventures: PressConf - A conference specifically aimed at web agencies, which had recently launched and was generating significant social media attention at the time of this summit. It is built on the philosophy that inner clarity is as important as business strategy.

Wonderland Curious - Her primary company, which operates in events and travel. The name is a deliberate callback to her deep personal identification with the Alice in Wonderland archetype and the quality of curiosity she spent years suppressing before reclaiming.

She has been involved in the WordPress community since approximately 2010 and has been organizing WordCamps since 2014. She previously served in a community management or social role at Elegant Themes. She has held an elected public office (Parks and Recreation Commissioner) and served on multiple civic boards and school organizations over the years.

About the speaker Raquel Wonderland Curious / PressConf

Raquel is founder of Wonderland Curious and PressConf, a conference built specifically for web agencies. She focuses on the intersection of personal clarity and business strategy for founders.