She went from being a lawyer to a coach, created a community when she realised she wanted to meet like-minded women, and today helps other female entrepreneurs grow. She also knows what it feels like to doubt your own decisions, fear uncertainty and wonder whether it might be easier to return to something you already know how to do. Romana Prokopová’s story shows that sometimes we don’t need to have the whole plan figured out. We just need to take the next step.

At 45, Romana is a coach, mentor, lecturer, Bach flower practitioner, entrepreneur, wife and mother of two. Originally from Moravia, she has lived in Tábor for the past twenty years. Looking back at her professional journey today, she sees a law degree, a doctorate, the Czech bar exams and ten years of legal practice. But she also sees a period when she rediscovered her interest in working with people, coaching and personal development, founded a community for female entrepreneurs with a friend, and gradually created a career that now feels far more meaningful to her.

As a teenager, she had already considered studying psychology and philosophy. In the end, she chose law. “I don’t even know why. Probably because there’s no maths, chemistry or physics, which I was really bad at,” Romana laughs. She graduated from law school, earned her doctorate, passed the bar exams and spent ten years working in the field. During her studies, she even tried to get into psychology, but wasn’t accepted.

In the end, life led her there by a different route.

When One Small Step Changes Your Direction

For a long time, everything can look exactly as it should. You graduate, gain qualifications, build a career and have a job that gives you security. But even a well-chosen path doesn’t necessarily have to be the one we want to stay on for the rest of our lives.

For Romana, the change began with having children and continued during the pandemic. Suddenly, online education gave her access to courses and fields she had always been interested in. She began exploring Bach flower remedies, coaching, nutritional counselling and other areas of further education. She completed an accredited coaching programme, joined the European Mentoring and Coaching Council and gradually began building her own practice.

“When I think back to how much I struggled studying for my bar exams, compared with how I devour every course now, I realise how much I need this freedom, sense of meaning, variety and the feeling that there’s something beyond myself,” Romana recalls.

What is particularly interesting about her career change is that it didn’t come from one major decision made on a particular day. Instead, it gradually became clear what gave her energy and what she wanted to spend her time doing.

“So today, I’m basically doing what I dreamed of, but life led me there.”

She also admits that without an external push, she might have stayed where she was. “I’m not going to play the hero. If it hadn’t been for Covid, I’d probably still be representing divorce clients, drafting contracts and going to court.”

You Don’t Have to Be Ready to Begin

When you start something new, uncertainty rarely disappears just because you’ve made the decision. Quite the opposite. When Romana opened her own office and initially had only a few clients, she began to question whether leaving the legal profession had been the right choice.

“There were so many times when I swore I was going to give up and go back to law, where I could comfortably invoice thousands, never have to worry about finding clients and be financially secure.”

During that period, her husband’s support was crucial. He supported her financially while also reminding her that law was no longer her path. Today, she speaks openly about this because, in her view, entrepreneurship isn’t just a story about freedom and fulfilled dreams. There is also a very practical side to it, one that social media often shows far less of.

If you believe that all you need is a good idea and you’ll soon be making millions, reality can be a harsh wake-up call. Building a business takes time, investment, energy and the ability to get through periods when the results simply aren’t visible yet. That’s why she believes it’s important not only to dream, but also to work out whether you can realistically afford to start and how long it might take before the business can stand on its own.

Uncertainty isn’t something she has somehow left behind, either. “Even when I’m excited about something, I always approach new projects with respect.”

The difference is that she now knows respect doesn’t have to be a reason not to do something.

Don’t Wait Until You’re Ready

Perhaps her own experience with doubt has also shaped the way she works with female entrepreneurs. Today, she focuses primarily on coaching and mentoring women who run businesses or work in demanding professions. Among other things, she helps them manage stress, prevent burnout and find ways to structure their businesses so that they make sense not only financially, but personally as well.

She describes herself as “very action-oriented and a little hypercreative.” She has plenty of ideas and sometimes has to consciously slow herself down so there aren’t too many of them. When she comes up with something together with Míša Pěknicová, one of them will often have an idea and the other will simply say, “Okay, let’s do it.” And then something starts happening.

That doesn’t mean she never has doubts herself. Rather, she has learned how to work with them. She admits that she can be chaotic, tends to throw herself headfirst into things and once even wondered whether ADHD might explain it. In the end, though, finding a label wasn’t what mattered to her. What mattered was understanding how she works and learning how to work with it.

“I know that’s how I am, so I simply have to be mindful of it and deliberately do things in a way that doesn’t end up wearing me down.”

The same qualities that can sometimes make organisation difficult are also sources of her creativity, intuition, empathy and energy. She doesn’t want to turn herself into someone else. She wants to make good use of who she is.

When There’s No Community, Create One

Three years ago, her instinct to get things moving brought her together with another entrepreneur, Míša Pěknicová. They felt Tábor was missing a vibrant community for women in business, so they created the Facebook group Podnikatelky z Tábora a okolí.

What started as a simple idea grew into something much bigger. The group now brings together more than 740 women. They have organised a conference, workshops and eleven networking events, along with informal gatherings, two dragon boat crews and even the Sbor podnikavých žen, a women’s choir that performs at social and cultural events. More than 200 women have taken part in various activities, and many have found new business collaborations or friendships through the community.

For Romana, though, it isn’t just about entrepreneurship. It’s also about the atmosphere they want to create around it.

“No hate, just support, collaboration and kindness.”

When she moved from Moravia to Tábor twenty years ago, she didn’t know anyone there. Today, she regularly runs into women from her community in the street. “That feels like a real miracle to me.”

Her community work has also led to a new project, Tvé podnikání, tvá cesta, which she and Míša are building around their own experience and which connects female entrepreneurs through Instagram and Herohero. Their motto is simple: Stop preparing to grow. Start growing.

Success Isn’t Just What People Can See

When she was younger, Romana had a fairly specific idea of what success looked like. “One day I’ll walk into an office wearing a Hugo Boss suit.”

Today, she would describe success differently. Her business needs to work financially and she needs enough clients, but it is equally important that she enjoys her work, finds meaning in it and has room for the other parts of her life.

“Overall harmony and balance are important.”

Her own pace of work can sometimes be almost too fast. She coaches, teaches, lectures, trains, works on the community, sings, learns and launches new projects. “I enjoy my work so much that it’s very easy for me to overdo it,” she admits.

That’s why she is also learning to protect the time when she does nothing. Alongside sleep and silence, she finds energy in nature, reading, creating, singing and simply being still. She enjoys moments when she can be alone, as well as the small things that, at first glance, have nothing to do with success at all. Good food, a tidy home, fresh air, a made bed, a phone call with her parents or walking into her bright workspace, surrounded by houseplants.

Perhaps that is where her idea of success has changed the most. It’s no longer about how she appears from the outside. It’s about how she feels in her life.

There Are No Mistakes, Only Experiences

When something goes wrong, she doesn’t have a perfect technique for staying positive at all costs. Her first reaction is much more human. “I swear about it for a while.” 😀

Then she calls her husband or a friend, talks the situation through with a coaching colleague and starts looking for what she can change. She doesn’t particularly like using the word mistake. She prefers to talk about experiences.

“Everything I’ve been through has made me who I am today.”

If she could go back to her younger self, she wouldn’t erase any of it. She would simply give her a hug and tell her that life wouldn’t always be easy, that she wouldn’t have to face everything alone and that it was okay to ask for help. And that some of the things she was afraid of then would one day look completely different.

Her story is about how change sometimes arrives when we aren’t planning for it at all, how uncertainty doesn’t necessarily mean we’re on the wrong path, and how accepting support from others isn’t a sign of weakness. It is also about how things that look like mistakes at one point in our lives can later take on an entirely different meaning.

“I feel immense gratitude for every day, for being able to live my dream and for being able to help others live theirs, too.”

Romana Prokopová
Coach, mentor and lecturer specialising in stress management and burnout prevention
Bach flower remedies, individual consultations and lectures
www.romanaprokopova.cz