Dr. Sharon Billins spent years building a conventional professional life before a series of setbacks forced her to reconsider what she was actually meant to do. Today, she is building a global platform around purpose, faith and helping others recognize their own potential.
By Helen Davis, Presales Specialist, Humans of Fuzia
interviews founders and leaders about the real patterns behind entrepreneurship, leadership, and business growth.
August 10, 2026
Sometimes entrepreneurship begins with a business idea. Sometimes it begins when the life you built stops making sense.
For Dr. Sharon Billins, the second path changed everything.
Billins began her career as a chemical engineer after graduating from Florida State University. She spent roughly a decade in the profession before feeling what she describes as a strong call toward ministry and service.
That transition eventually took her far beyond a conventional career.
Today, Billins describes herself as a minister, teacher, counselor, motivational speaker and advisor who works with people across industries and around the world. She has consulted with CEOs and boards, supported people in corporate environments, traveled internationally and even worked with film productions, where she has prayed with actors and crews.
At the center of everything she does is one conviction: every person has a purpose that makes them unique.
But discovering and living that purpose came with a price.
Billins became the youngest manager at United Technologies Aerospace and recalls facing questions about her age and credentials. Later, when she stepped into ministry, she encountered resistance from both men and women who questioned whether she belonged in that role.
Then life became considerably harder.
She went through a divorce while raising two young children. After losing her corporate job following the loss of a defense contract, she found herself without the financial security she had once known. At one point, she had to rely on government assistance to provide food for her children.
For someone who had once advised other women, the experience was deeply humbling.
“These are women that I used to counsel to tell them how to be better, and here I was in the same room with them.”
That experience changed her understanding of compassion.
Billins also faced serious health challenges, including seven surgeries related to an eye condition that left her fearing she might lose her sight. Through those experiences, she says, prayer, family and the people around her became essential sources of strength.
Rather than allowing those chapters to define her limitations, she began using them to understand the challenges other people face.
Her next ambition reflects that evolution.
Billins wants to create a large annual symposium bringing together women CEOs and entrepreneurs across industries to network, learn, encourage one another and explore purpose and faith. She also wants to create a mentorship initiative for girls between 11 and 18, helping them understand their talents and potential earlier in life.
But even with a clear vision, she recognizes a familiar entrepreneurial obstacle: execution.
Her first book, Speak God on Listening, has already been completed, yet years of editing and publishing complications have delayed its release. She is now working through another round of editing while developing a second book.
Her response is not to pretend obstacles don’t exist.
It is to make them part of the plan.
She believes entrepreneurs need to examine their goals, identify what is slowing them down, calculate the resources required and determine which people can help move the idea forward.
Execution Tip
Choose one idea you have been postponing. Write down three things: what is blocking it, what resources it requires, and who can help you execute it. Turn the obstacle into an action plan.
Billins’ story is ultimately about more than resilience.
It is about what happens when a person stops measuring her life only by career stability, financial security or conventional definitions of success.
She has experienced professional achievement, loss, uncertainty, motherhood, health challenges and reinvention.
Now she wants to turn those experiences into something bigger than herself: a space where other people—especially women and young girls—can recognize their own purpose before circumstances force them to search for it.
Sometimes purpose does not arrive as a clear answer.
Sometimes it is revealed by everything you survive on the way to it.
Sharon Billins | LinkedIn
