Episode 198: From Convent to Corporate
The Broad Experience
The Broad Experience
5.0 • 592 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2022
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ellen Snee decided to become a nun in the early ‘70s, which seemed an inopportune time. Society was changing rapidly, there were riots on her college campus, and as a friend told her, nuns and priests were abandoning convents and the priesthood, not joining. But Ellen felt a sense of mission and purpose that didn’t go away. She spent 18 mostly happy years with an international order of nuns, the Religious of the Sacred Heart.
In a stereotype-busting conversation, Ellen describes how life in a convent gave her a freedom her married girlfriends lacked, how she hoped to change the Catholic Church from the inside, and how taking a vow of chastity didn’t mean the end of her relationships with men. Since leaving the convent in the early 1990s Ellen has used her wisdom and insights within corporations, to help professional women “learn how to know what they know, how to recognize their desire, and how to pursue it.”
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| 0:44.7 | Welcome to the broad experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. |
| 0:46.0 | I'm Ashley Milneight. |
| 0:54.0 | This time, how an early career in the Catholic Church paved the way for everything that came after. |
| 1:03.1 | The truth is that as a nun, I had the freedom to do a lot of things within a certain context. |
| 1:09.8 | You know, we were not as oppressed and cloistered as you would think. From the convent to the corporation, coming up on the broad |
| 1:14.4 | experience. For the past 30 years, Ellen Snee has been working in the realm of women's leadership. |
| 1:29.4 | She's run her own consulting firm, working with senior women at big corporations. |
| 1:34.1 | She herself has been an executive at a technology company, and she's also worked as a coach to individual women. |
| 1:41.8 | But before all this, she spent almost two decades as a nun. Ellen grew up in a big |
| 1:48.2 | Irish Catholic family just outside New York City. She was the eldest of five kids. |
| 1:54.3 | And both my mother and my father had siblings who were nuns and priests. So our household was filled with nuns and priests, |
| 2:08.4 | relatives, friends, and from the parish. Still, Ellen didn't aspire to be a nun growing up. |
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