International Women’s Day didn’t begin with brunch and flowers.
It was born in 1911, in the aftermath of women marching for the right to vote, to work without being exploited, and to be seen as something other than an afterthought in the running of the world. Over a million women took to the streets across Europe that first year. They weren’t celebrating. They were demanding.
More than a century later, the date still lands on the 8th of March. The demands have evolved. Here’s a story that puts it into sharp relief.
The Day Iceland Stood Still
On the 24th of October 1975, 90% of women in Iceland went on strike.
Not just from their paid jobs. From all of it. The cooking. The childcare. The school runs. The invisible, unacknowledged labour that held the entire fabric of daily life together — the work that rarely appears on a CV and almost never appears in a salary.
For one day, they stopped.
Iceland effectively ground to a halt. Men arrived at offices with small children in tow, having no idea what to do with them. Herring factories couldn’t operate. Schools and nurseries closed. Phone companies were overwhelmed. The chaos was immediate, visible, and — for anyone paying attention — deeply instructive.
Women’s contribution wasn’t just significant. It was structural. Remove it for a single day and the whole building shook.
I showed the trailer for this footage last Saturday — the 7th of March, the day before International Women’s Day — to a room full of women in South London. I’d been introduced to it just days earlier at a meeting with Amanda Toumanguelov, President of the Women’s Federation for World Peace Ireland, who had seen it shown at an event and knew immediately it needed a wider audience.
Watching it together, you could feel it move through the room — smiles, grins, a warmth that felt almost like triumph. And underneath, something quieter still. A shared recognition. A genuine surprise that a story this powerful had been so invisible for so long.
(It’s called ‘The Day Iceland Stood Still’. Worth every minute.)
Why I Was in That Room
I’d been invited by the South London chapter of the Women’s Federation for World Peace to facilitate a workshop on health and wellbeing for International Women’s Day.
The theme was chosen deliberately. Because women — as most women in that room knew from lived experience — tend to put their own health and wellbeing last. After the work. After the family. After the fifteen other things that needed doing before they could, perhaps, finally, get to themselves.
Sound familiar?
Before I did anything else, I wanted to know why they’d come. So I asked.
What came back was honest and a little tender. Most were there for themselves — aware, at some level, that something needed to shift. But a handful came because of someone else. Three women made the journey specifically because a fourth woman they loved was going to be there. They didn’t come for a workshop. They came for her. For the connection. For the rare pleasure of being in a room with someone who mattered to them.
That told me everything I needed to know about the day ahead.
The Question That Changed the Room
Here’s what I did not do: stand at the front and tell these women what the research says they should be doing for their health.
I was fairly certain they had heard all of that before.
Instead, I used what I know. Systemic Modelling and a facilitation approach grounded in the collective intelligence of the group itself — something I’ve been deepening through a course with Xchange. Their work is built on Appreciative Inquiry: the understanding that every group already holds the wisdom it needs. The facilitator’s job isn’t to deliver answers. It’s to ask the question that lets the room find its own.
“Think of a time when you were healthy, at your very best. When you had optimum wellbeing. You were like what?”
The groups of five that formed around that question were something to watch. There was exquisite listening, animated conversation. Laughter. Pauses where someone searched carefully for the right word. And when each group brought their discoveries back to the room and we wove them together, what emerged was a set of principles — not mine, not from a textbook, but drawn entirely from the collective wisdom already sitting in that room.
Women who had raised children, run businesses, navigated careers, held families and teams and whole organisations together. They already knew. They just needed the conditions to remember.
And Then There Were the Men
This I want to mention, because it moved me.
Four men came to this event. Not as participants — as supporters. They organised and laid out the food. They managed the audio visuals. They cleared everything away at the end. Quietly, willingly, without any fuss or need for recognition.
It was a small thing. It was also not a small thing at all.
Because the story of women’s labour — seen and unseen — is precisely what International Women’s Day exists to illuminate. On this day, the dynamic gently reversed. Men creating the conditions for women to be present and to thrive. Both working together to make something meaningful possible.
Movement, Breath, and the Wisdom Already in the Room
The principles those women co-created weren’t just talked about. We lived them.
We moved together — gentle stretches, half sun salutations, chair yoga. We did breathwork. We laughed properly and with our whole bodies, because laughter has genuine research behind it and also because it simply feels wonderful. And a co-facilitator guided the group through hand massage — each woman massaging her own hands. A small, tender act of self-care that landed, for some, more deeply than expected.
By the end, each woman had one or two wellbeing changes they wanted to make. Not an overwhelming list. Not homework to feel guilty about. Just one or two things she was genuinely going to try.
Some chose breathwork. Some looked honestly at how they structure their days and career. Some simply decided — perhaps for the first time in a while — to take their own needs a little more seriously.
Which brings me to the principles themselves. What struck me was how precisely they mapped onto what decades of research on health and longevity consistently confirms. These women, drawing purely from their own experience, arrived at the same conclusions as the science.
The six principles they co-created:
- Movement — Not as punishment or performance. Simply moving the body, regularly, in ways that feel genuinely good.
- Managing stress — Noticing when the system is overwhelmed and making deliberate choices about what to do with that. Breathwork. Real rest. The radical act of saying no.
- Meaning and achievement — Having something that matters to you. Purpose isn’t a luxury. Research consistently links a sense of meaning to better health outcomes, greater resilience, and longer life.
- Sleep — Non-negotiable, and yet so often the first thing quietly sacrificed. The science on what sleep deprivation does to the body and mind is unambiguous.
- Nutrition — You are, quite literally, what you eat. Real food. Not perfection, but attention.
- Connection — And this one the women felt most viscerally. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, running for over 80 years, identifies close relationships as the single greatest predictor of health and happiness. Not diet. Not exercise. Connection.
Three women came to that workshop specifically to spend the day with someone they loved. Others came for sisterhood and reconnecting with dear friends. They knew, instinctively, what the research confirms. We are wired for each other. And that need doesn’t become less important as life gets busier. It becomes more.