Before Daphne Jones became a board director, a bestselling author, and an executive coach, she was a teenager who believed the one person who told her she wouldn’t make it.
By Priyanka Mishra, Chief of Global Growth, Fuzia covers entrepreneurship and leadership through in-depth founder interviews for Humans of Fuzia.
September 1, 2026
A high school counselor once told Daphne Jones that, as a Black woman, she’d never make it in college. She believed him — and became a secretary instead.
That sentence, and the years it cost her, sits at the center of how Jones teaches leaders to think — and it’s the story she brought to Humans of Fuzia, the global platform where founders and coaches trade ideas on leadership and business growth.
Jones eventually unlearned the counselor’s verdict, went to college, and built a 40-year career culminating in an executive post at GE. But disbelief, she says, never fully disappears — it has to be actively discarded. “You have to take disbelief and ball it up… and throw it away,” she explained, describing a habit, not a one-time decision. That reframing became the spine of her book, Win When They Say You Won’t.
Since retiring, Jones has organized her life around what she calls the “return phase” — earning traded for giving back, lived through four roles: author, board director, business owner, grandmother. As CEO of The Board Curators, she coaches senior executives — often women and people of color — overlooked for board seats, a quiet intervention in an industry where board diversity is widely discussed and rarely engineered.
Her clients’ real obstacle, Jones says, is rarely a skills gap — it’s an inability to self-diagnose. Executives stall in roles that no longer fit, without knowing why, having never audited their own strengths. Her answer pairs the 360-degree review with what she calls the EDIT process, starting with “envision”: naming what winning looks like before designing a plan toward it.
For prioritization, she uses a grid she calls BOW-MO-NO — sorting every goal into Bodacious, Moderate, or No, then cutting anything outside the top few. She uses it on herself, admitting her biggest challenge is wanting to do everything at once. The lesson transfers to founders: the problem usually isn’t ambition, it’s the refusal to triage it.
She’s equally direct about who belongs in a leader’s life, distinguishing a “circle” — people merely in proximity — from a “corner,” the few who’ve won before and are invested in your winning too. “There are people in your life that might be weeds and may not be flowers,” she said, warning that unhelpful influence often disguises itself as support.
Laid side by side, her tools stop reading as separate anecdotes and start reading as a sequence — one where skipping a step collapses the next. Jones never named it, but the pattern is real enough that Humans of Fuzia are tempted to: the Layer.
- Layer 1 — Belief: discard the disbelief someone else handed you before you can see yourself clearly.
- Layer 2 — Clarity: audit your own strengths (the 360, the EDIT process) before deciding what to prioritize.
- Layer 3 — Priority: sort what you learned through BOW-MO-NO before committing anyone else’s time to it.
- Layer 4 — Support: only once the first three hold does it matter who’s in your corner, not your circle.
It’s fittingly how Jones describes her own life too — not finished, but on “version 5.0.”
Execution Tip: Tonight, write down every goal competing for your attention, then sort each one into Bodacious, Moderate, or No. Act only on your Bodacious list this week.
The industry-wide struggle Jones points to isn’t a lack of coaching frameworks — there are thousands of coaches — but a lack of introspection before people seek one out.
Belief isn’t a soft prerequisite for leadership. It’s Layer 1 — and Humans of Fuzia exists to keep surfacing the people rebuilding theirs, one dismantled doubt at a time.
Connect with Daphne Jones
Daphne Jones can be found on LinkedIn, where she shares updates on her coaching work, board service, and The Winner’s Circle, her YouTube channel. Her book, Win When They Say You Won’t, is available through her website and major booksellers.
