The Woman Who Found Her Voice

To look at Paulette J. Sterling today, a global leadership professional with twenty-five years of international experience spanning Jamaica, the UK, and Canada—is to see a portrait of absolute composure and strategic authority. She is the founder of Sterling Business Management, a visionary recognized for stabilizing organizations during high-stakes transitions and embedding resilience into the very fabric of corporate governance. Yet behind the “Sterling Edge” and the prestigious M.Sc. in Organizational Leadership lies a narrative of profound silence that once threatened to swallow her whole.

The story of Paulette Sterling begins on a crowded bus in Jamaica. As a young girl attending the prestigious St. Andrew High School, Paulette was a “late comer,” but not by choice or sloth. She had entered high school early, having passed her Common Entrance exams in the fifth grade and skipping her final year of primary school. In the corridors of that all-girls institution, she was a child among teenagers, gripped by a paralyzing shyness.

“I grew up actually being afraid of my voice,” she recalls, the vulnerability of that memory still palpable. “I just was afraid of speaking out loud… because in my mind, if I say ‘bus stop’ or ‘one stop,’ somebody would say, ‘Why does she sound like that?’ or ‘She didn’t say it correctly.’” Rather than utter the two words required to signal the driver, Paulette would sit in silent, sweating agony as her stop drifted past. She would wait for someone else to call the stop—often miles away from her school—and then walk back in the heat, arriving late only to have her name highlighted as a “late comer.” She accepted the shame of the “late” mark beside her name as a fair price for the safety of her silence.

“I grew up actually being afraid of my voice,”

This was the raw, unpolished beginning of a woman who would eventually lead the global RESPECT Campaign and manage multi-year transition mapping for major financial institutions. Her journey is a testament to the truth that leadership is cultivated courage.

By the age of twenty-one, the girl who could not hail a bus was suddenly thrust into leadership roles. The transition was jarring. “The minute I entered the work world, I entered in a leadership role,” she says. “How am I leading people? How am I going to lead people?” In those early years, she felt the crushing weight of needing to belong. Surrounded by colleagues discussing their teenagers and mortgages, the twenty-one-year-old Paulette felt like an imposter. She began a performance of a different kind: pretending to be older to gain credibility. She masked her youth, fearing that her true perspective as a twenty-one-year-old would be dismissed.

It was through this struggle that she discovered the foundational pillar of her current philosophy: authenticity. She realized that the mask of age was as restrictive as the silence on the bus. Her evolution as a leader was marked by a shift from trying to be a “better version” of her boss to becoming a “better version” of herself. She began to understand that leadership was a movement rooted in conviction.

Drawing inspiration from the likes of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, she began to examine the internal mechanics of influence. She admired Garvey’s belief in self-reliance and his ability to create a movement through sheer conviction, even when the world told him he was “less of a person” because of the colour of his skin. Like Garvey, Paulette realized that influence begins with convincing yourself first. You must believe so deeply that you can bring others past their own limitations.

Her resolute nature was further sharpened by the writings of Jack Welch, specifically his book Winning. From Welch, she adopted the metaphor of the leader as a gardener. “He saw people; his work as leader, as a gardener… where he was there to prune people to help them grow,” she explains. This perspective allowed her to see organizational development as the nourishment of human potential. It also gave her the resolve to handle the pruning; the difficult decisions required to maintain organizational health.

“If you want to be a leader, you have to have courage.”

Throughout her career, from her time as Territory Manager in the UK to her role as Chief Representative Officer at JN Bank Canada, Paulette has treated resilience as a muscle. “If you want to be a leader, you have to have courage, and resilience needs to be handled like a muscle,” she insists. “You want good abs, you need to exercise. Even when you’re not seeing the two-pack, the four-pack, the six-pack as quickly as you would have wanted, you still have to get at it.”

Today, Paulette’s mission has culminated in the launch of Sterling Business Management and her signature event, Transform to Lead: The Sterling Edge. Scheduled for January 27, 2026, this virtual experience is her way of offering the leadership development she wished she had as a young woman—development that is relatable, accessible, and rooted in lived realities. She is intentionally keeping the barrier to entry low, charging a mere $25 to ensure that emerging leaders in the Caribbean and the diaspora can access high-impact tools without being overwhelmed by the high costs or theoretical noise of traditional corporate training.

She wants people to stop waiting until retirement to think about legacy. “If your legacy is to transform ten leaders, then how you lead today would have to have a bearing on that,” she argues. Her own legacy is being written in real time, as she helps others find the voice she once feared to use.

Paulette J. Sterling’s life story is a narrative arc from the back of a bus to the front of a global movement. She has moved from being a girl who would walk miles to avoid being heard to a woman who advises senior executives on how to lead with purpose.

She remains a becoming, a daily commitment to growth, proving that the most powerful leaders are often those who had to fight the hardest just to speak their own names. Her journey reminds us that leadership is about the refusal to let fear drive the bus.