Lilian Ong

Lilian Ong’s work is rooted in a personal understanding of the barriers that can hold women back. After experiencing childhood trauma, postnatal depression, anxiety around public speaking and years of self-doubt, she began a journey of confronting the fears and limiting beliefs that had shaped her life. That experience eventually became the foundation for her work helping other women do the same.

As founder of Women of Courage Asia, Ong has built a community focused on helping women develop confidence, authentic leadership and the ability to take purposeful action. Through coaching, mentoring, leadership programmes, speaking engagements and retreats, the organisation works with women across Asia, while her work also extends to women in Singapore’s correctional facilities and prisons through volunteer engagement.

Her approach is grounded in lived experience. Ong describes courage not as the absence of fear, but as the willingness to act despite it. Her own transformation—from someone who once found public speaking paralysing to someone who now regularly speaks to and coaches women—has become part of the message she shares with others.

Alongside Women of Courage Asia, Ong founded Class Living, extending her work into personal development, leadership and entrepreneurship. Through these platforms, as well as the HER Courage Biz Network, she says she has reached tens of thousands of women across Asia and beyond. For Ong, the measure of that impact is not simply the number of women she reaches, but what happens afterwards: women finding their voices, starting businesses and taking on leadership roles.

Her work has also taken a regional focus. The 2025 HER Courage Leaders Summit brought together women around the theme of expanding female leadership across ASEAN, reflecting Ong’s ambition to build an Asia-wide ecosystem centred on mentorship, leadership development, entrepreneurship and community.

For Ong, the next stage is about creating a multiplier effect: women who develop the courage to lead themselves becoming women who help others do the same. It is this work—helping women move from self-doubt towards purposeful action and leadership—that earned her the Tatler Front & Female Education & Development Award.