When Business Class Becomes a Living Room: How Sacred Leadership Is Reshaping Entrepreneurship Education
The classroom fell quiet as Debra Trappen settled into her chair on screen, not with the polished authority of a keynote speaker (although she is that), but with the warmth of someone joining a circle of friends. "I love to call it sacred leadership, especially when I'm talking with women," she began, and with those words, something shifted in the virtual space between a seasoned entrepreneur and a room full of students at Meredith College.
This wasn't going to be another guest lecture about market penetration strategies or competitive advantage. This was something different entirely.
Molly McKinley (Left) and Debra Trappen enjoy a laugh together.
The Friction That Births Innovation
Debra's story doesn't follow the traditional entrepreneurial arc. Nearly 24 years in real estate taught her something that no business textbook addresses directly: entire industries can be fundamentally misaligned with the humans who power them.
"Real estate is male-designed, but female-dominated," she explained to the BUS306 students. "We are the dominant sales force. And this created friction—even in training, how the training was so male energy: drive, force, push, go, plan, execute. And it missed the things that most of us need."
That friction became her compass. Every time she encountered a barrier, every moment she felt the disconnect between who she was expected to be and who she actually was, she took notes. Those notes eventually became the blueprint for Red Threads Collective, a community she now leads that brings women entrepreneurs together in ways that honor the fullness of their lives.
The lesson for emerging entrepreneurs: friction isn't failure. It's data. It's the raw material from which innovation is born.
The Three-Cup Principle in Practice
During the conversation, Debra referenced what she called "three cups of tea,” the principle that the first cup is shared as strangers, the second as friends, and the third as family. You don't start discussing business until you know someone's children's names.
This isn't just philosophical wisdom. It's a fundamental restructuring of how value is created and exchanged in business.
Traditional business education teaches transaction first, relationship second. Debra's model, and increasingly, the model that's succeeding in what some call the "trust economy," reverses that entirely. Build a genuine connection first. The business opportunities emerge organically from that foundation of trust.
Inside Red Threads Collective, this plays out in what Debra calls the "exchange circle,”an economy of care where women offer their wisdom freely before any money changes hands. One woman might share her expertise in reading a P&L statement. Another might teach meal planning. The point isn't the specific skill; it's the web of reciprocity being woven.
Business Models Built on Wholeness
Perhaps the most radical aspect of Debra's work is the refusal to compartmentalize. In Red Threads, you don't choose a hat such as founder, mother, daughter, wife, or seeker. You bring all of it.
"Some places invite the leader in us. Some of the spaces invite the woman in us. Some of them invite the wife or the partner or whatever it might be, one of the hats," Debra explained. "And inside the collective, you bring it all. You bring your joy. You bring your rage. You bring your business. You bring your partner. You bring whatever is going on in your life to the table."
This isn't just about comfort or community (though it provides both). It's about acknowledging a truth that traditional business structures have long denied: humans are not modular. The creativity that solves business problems is connected to the same creative force that navigates relationships, raises children, and seeks meaning. Trying to wall these off from each other doesn't create focus; it creates fragmentation.
For students building their first ventures, this suggests a different set of founding questions:
What kind of life do I want this business to enable?
Who do I need to be in order to build this well?
What communities will hold me accountable and inspired?
The Iterative Nature of Purpose-Driven Work
Debra launched Red Threads in May 2024. By October 2025, it had already pivoted three times. This might sound like instability, but it's actually the opposite—it's responsiveness.
"We can listen and move and change and pivot," she told the students. "We don't have to wait for someone. That is one of the beautiful parts of being an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, being a founder, is that you don't have to wait for a whole bunch of other people to do what it is that you want to do."
Traditional corporate structures require extensive approval processes before making changes. Entrepreneurs working in alignment with their communities can move at the speed of relationship, adjusting based on what members actually need rather than what was assumed they would want.
The lesson embedded here connects directly to the "act, learn, build" framework taught in entrepreneurship courses: you don't need perfect clarity before you start. In fact, waiting for perfect clarity often means never starting at all.
"Clarity was a lightning bolt, and that for me, everything would come all together, one big, beautiful, yummy yes at a time. And I was like, that is just not how it is," Debra shared. "Sometimes I'm running towards a yes to something that I've always wanted. And sometimes I'm running away from what I didn't—and neither one is a good or a bad. It just is."
The Trust Economy and Why It Matters Now
The conversation touched on something essential that's reshaping all of commerce: we've moved from the experience economy into the trust economy. In a world where artificial intelligence can generate convincing content, where deepfakes blur reality, and where information overload is constant, trust becomes the scarcest and most valuable currency.
This means the path to monetization looks different from what it did even five years ago. You can't just create a great product or delightful experience and expect customers to find you. You must first create spaces where trust can develop—spaces where your actual humanity is visible and consistent.
Debra's Thursday morning gatherings serve this function. They're not sales pitches. They're genuine containers where women show up, share what's real, and witness each other's journeys. The business opportunities—the consulting work, the retreat offerings, the member-exclusive services—all flow from that foundation of established trust.
For students entering a marketplace that will only become more saturated with AI-generated options, this matters profoundly. Your competitive advantage is more than who you know or what you can produce. It's who you authentically are and the quality of relationships you can build.
Reclaiming "Business for Good"
The term "business for good" often gets attached to specific models: B-Corps, social enterprises, nonprofits structured as for-profits. But Debra's work suggests something broader: any business can be a sacred act of contribution when it's built with intention around how it serves life.
"Business has been framed so often around extracting things—extracting labor from people, extracting their time, their energy, even in some cases, which we've experienced, our identity," she reflected. "But I truly do believe that business can be a sacred act of contribution."
This is more than adding corporate social responsibility initiatives on top of an extractive model, but about fundamentally rethinking what business is for. Moving from "how much can I extract from this system," to the question "what wants to emerge through me in service of something larger?"
What Educators Can Learn
Traditional business education prepares students to enter existing structures. It teaches them how to navigate corporate hierarchies, pitch to venture capitalists who expect hockey-stick growth, and measure success primarily through financial metrics.
But our conversation with Debra suggests a different approach is possible, one that doesn't reject business fundamentals but recontextualizes them within a more holistic understanding of human life and purpose.
When a student asked how to grow the collective from its current state, Debra's answer wasn't about scaling strategies or growth hacking. It was about deepening the offerings for existing members, creating more spaces for genuine exchange, and allowing her own consulting practice to emerge naturally from the relationships she'd cultivated.
"I haven't been in a headspace where I've had to think so specifically about profit. I've really been able to focus on the people," she explained. "And that has been such a game changer, not thinking and worrying about where the next check is coming, but having created enough of a nest egg to launch a business where I can focus on the people, on their needs, on the practice, and listening to what it is that they're seeking so that I can then provide it."
This suggests business education might serve students better by addressing:
How to build financial resilience before launching so you're not making desperate decisions
How to design customer research that prioritizes listening over validation
How to recognize and honor the skills being developed in "side paths" that seem unrelated to career goals
How to create offerings that serve the community you're building rather than chasing broader market opportunities
The Permission to Change
One of the most powerful moments in the conversation came when Debra addressed the students directly: "Sisters, we are allowed to change as often as we want, as dramatically and drastically as we want. There is no need to be tender if you don't want to be. You can make it messy. Change doesn't have to be perfect."
In a culture that often treats career changes as failures or pivots as instability, this framing offers something different. What if the ability to change in response to new information and soul whispers isn't a weakness but a core entrepreneurial competency?
Traditional career paths provided stability at the cost of adaptability. The emerging landscape requires the opposite: constant adaptation within a stable sense of purpose. Debra's journey through real estate brokerage, association leadership, consulting, and community-building wasn't random wandering but rather purposeful evolution, each stage building skills and insights that serve and have prepared her for the current work.
"Skills can be sneaky," she told the students. "The things that I thought were side paths for me, like volunteering at a variety of organizations or helping a friend launch a podcast or organizing a retreat for my friends, turned out to be very important threads that wove my future, but I wasn't doing them for business."
Starting Where the Soul Is Loudest
As the session concluded, Debra offered final wisdom: "Listen to the soul whisper, but start where it's loudest. That'll lead you down the right path."
For students facing a job market being transformed by automation, this guidance carries particular weight. The entry-level positions that once provided skill-building and professional development are disappearing. The path forward requires being "self-directed, self-aware, self-motivated." The container matters. The community matters. The willingness to begin before everything is perfectly clear matters.
Debra's story suggests entrepreneurship education at its best doesn't just teach business models and financial projections. It helps students recognize their own patterns, trust their intuition, and build the relationships that will sustain them through the inevitable uncertainty of building something new.
It creates space for questions like:
What whisper keeps returning to you?
What friction are you experiencing that might contain the seeds of innovation?
What kind of community would you need around you to sustain this work?
How can your business be a blessing to you, not just a set of tasks to complete?
The Revolution Hiding in Plain Sight
Perhaps the most subversive aspect of this conversation is how natural it all sounded. Debra wasn't proposing some wild theoretical framework. She was simply describing what works—what's working right now for her and the numerous women who gather in Red Threads Collective each week.
That ordinariness is the point. This shift in how we think about business, leadership, and community isn't waiting for permission from business schools or venture capitalists. It's already happening in living rooms and Zoom calls, in text threads between friends and Thursday morning gatherings.
The students in BUS306 were witnessing what becomes possible when someone decides to build a business that actually loves them back, that serves the fullness of life rather than demanding everything be sacrificed to it.
As traditional structures continue to shift and crack under the weight of their own contradictions, this approach offers something both ancient and innovative: business as an extension of who we are, as a contribution to the communities we love, as a practice of becoming more fully ourselves.
The future of business education might look a lot like sitting in a circle, sharing stories, asking real questions, and trusting that the path reveals itself as we walk it—together.
Debra Trappen is the founder of Red Threads Collective and author focused on sacred leadership and community-building. This conversation took place as part of BUS306: Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Social Impact at Meredith College