From: Mie-Yun

What a herniated disc looks like Not mine. 3mm to the left and my doc said I wouldn’t have even been able to tell. Lucky me.

I’m a doer and an idea person.

For the last two weeks, I’ve had to put a lot of the doing on hold as I herniated a disc in my back. Sadly, it wasn’t due to bungee jumping — I just  stood up after a phone call at work. Not quite sure how I’m going to avoid that activity in the future.

So I’ve spent the last 14 days at home, working by email and phone but not seeing anyone except my family. As I’ve gotten better and emerged from the excruciating pain that had been dulled by a haze of Percocets and muscle relaxants, I finally started to really use Facebook to make up for the lack of people interactions for the first time ever. And I enjoyed it, especially when I realized social media is more of a conversation where you can add your voice to a stream rather than a medium where you need to prepare perfectly worded declarations.

And when I could manage my pain without dulling my brain, I took to watching TED videos to occupy my non-working hours. TED offers an amazing digital library of ideas, explained by incredibly articulate people in 18-minute nuggets on a huge range of topics.

In particular, I was moved by talks from Sheryl Sandberg, Amy Cuddy, Jane Goodall, Chris Anderson and Candy Chang, Each person had a different message: women should seek success at the workplace, fake it until you become it, sophisticated language distinguishes us as a species, crowd-accelerated learning is an amazing outcome of the Internet, and think about what you want to do before you die. And they helped think about a question I’ve long asked myself, which is — why are there not more women in business speaking up?

As one of those silent women business leaders, and inspired by those voices, I’ve decided to finally ignore the reasons why not, assume the Wonder Woman power pose, and start to share my thoughts to help start conversations about business and who knows what else. Let the experiment begin.

Conversation starters: Why do you think women in business don’t speak up more? Why did you start blogging? What’s preventing you from starting a blog?