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“It’s never enough.”
That’s the phrase that Anne Hathaway—the winner of IBJ’s inaugural Mentorship Award—whispered to me at the 2025 Women of Influence event on Oct. 21 right before we sat down for an on-stage chat for the crowd of nearly 600 people.
At the time, IBJ President Mitch Frazier was telling the audience about her career, which included stints working for Treasury Secretary James Baker, George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign, Vice President Dan and Marilyn Quayle, and the Republican National Committee. Anne launched her own public affairs firm and has served 16 years as executive director of the Richard G. Lugar Excellence in Public Service Series.
I quietly said to her something like, “This is overwhelming. How did you do all of this?”
Her answer: “It’s never enough.”
So as we sat down for our chat, I told the audience about the exchange. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“There’s so much more that I want to do, so many people that I want to engage with and help,” she said. “I want to make our state better, our city better. I want to help the women in the Lugar series. Much to my team’s chagrin. If you ask me for coffee, I go and try to be a listener to hear and to help people find what I call their seat on the bus in order to make sure that they’re living out their dreams.
“And it’s just never enough. There’s not enough time. There’s not enough opportunity.”
That’s why Anne Hathaway is our first-ever winner of our Women of Influence Mentorship Award.
But we didn’t just talk on stage about mentorship. Anne also addressed something that I think is helpful for so many of us—especially women who are constantly told we need to have more confidence, to know we belong in a room or to recognize we are qualified for a job. But for many of us, that confidence isn’t innate.
Anne explained to the crowd that a high school guidance counselor had told her politics wasn’t a career. She’d gone to school to be an interior designer. And so I asked her, in this career working for important people and taking on huge, public issues, whether she ever looked in the mirror and thought: “I don’t know if I can do it.”
The answer was “yes!”
“I would venture to say that every Woman of Influence—from the past through the current class—will tell you that there’s been a moment of weakness, that they’ve cried their selves to sleep, that there is a time when it was frustrating and it didn’t work,” she said. “And I know I still go through that.”
But, I asked her later, you had the confidence to walk through so many doors and take on so many challenges.
“Oh, it’s not confidence,” she told me. “It’s the fear of failure.”
Of course, neither Anne nor I advocate going through life afraid! But I loved hearing from someone as accomplished as Anne that sometimes it has been fear that pushed her into the next challenge—because that’s certainly been the case for me and for so many of us.
My takeaway? Fear and confidence can work together to move you forward. Embrace both.•
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Weidenbener is editor and assistant publisher of IBJ and assistant publisher of The Indiana Lawyer. Email her at [email protected].
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