We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Asia Bowman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Asia thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

The origin is both personal and professional for me. Throughout my life, I watched men I loved, men who were close to me, sit in silence with things that were clearly eating them alive. Stress, fear, worry, even joy. They just held it. Some of them would say things out loud like “no one cares about me” or “how I feel doesn’t matter,” and then just…keep going and accepted as part of life.

And I watched what that cost them. I’m talking about hair falling out from stress, significant weight gain and loss, what I’d describe as crashing out or spiraling after years of pushing everything down. Some of them were getting mistreated by partners, by employers, by family members, and they couldn’t even recognize it, or if they could, they didn’t feel entitled to say something about it. That made me sad in a really deep way. Honestly, I just felt an immense amount of grief for them as humans.

So when I started thinking about what I wanted to do next, men’s emotional health kept coming to mind. As I dug into the research I found the number of men seeking mental health support has doubled in the last eight years, but they’re also dropping out very fast, like after one session. It indicated to me that the infrastructures around them aren’t matching their needs. The organizations that touch their lives every day, healthcare systems, school, workplaces, don’t have the tools or the frameworks to actually meet men where they were.

I decided that’s the gap I wanted to work in, so I created EQ Ascent.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

My background is in systems-level policy and program development. For years I did research and then worked alongside government agencies, community organizations, and people with lived experience to build policy and program solutions that actually improved quality of life for underserved populations. That work taught me how to look at a problem from multiple angles at once, how to listen to the people most affected and let their voices lead, and how to design something that fits a community rather than something that just gets dropped on top of one. Those skills and that way of seeing the world are exactly what I brought into the work I do now around men’s mental health.

The through line for me has always been person-first work, and that’s what I’m most proud of. Most of what I’ve done over the course of my career has been heavily directed by the people I was trying to serve, their direct input, their leadership, their experience. Creating opportunities and solutions alongside the people impacted is what has meant the most to me across all of it.

What I do now sits at the intersection of qualitative research and human-centered design. I work with organizations that touch men’s lives every day, healthcare systems, universities, workplaces, and I help them build solutions that actually resonnate with men. Not programs that look good on paper but don’t get used or initiatives built around assumptions about what men need. We’re building real solutions designed to reach the men they’re meant to serve.

What I want potential clients to know is that I’m not coming in with a prepackaged solution waiting to be sold. The research comes first. The people most affected shape the direction. And what gets built is specific to the context, not borrowed from somewhere else and rebranded.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The lesson I had to unlearn was waiting for other people to validate me. For a long time, across personal and professional environments, I was measuring the quality of my work by whether someone else approved of it. If the right person nodded, I felt good. If they didn’t, I questioned everything. That was a quiet but exhausting way to operate, and I didn’t fully realize how much I was doing it until I stepped out on my own.

When you work for yourself, there’s no built-in approval structure to lean on. But what started to happen was that I began noticing things I had been too distracted to see before. The signs were always there, I just wasn’t looking in the right direction. Hearing from a previous partner that the work we did together was being expanded or used as a blueprint for something new. Seeing the impact show up in the numbers. Watching something we built together take on a life of its own after I was long gone from the project. That’s a different kind of validation, and it’s a more honest one.

There will always be someone who doesn’t connect with my methods or doesn’t believe in what I’m doing, and I’ve made peace with that. But when I stopped orienting myself around those people, what came into focus was the actual evidence that the work was landing. The impact, the people who have shown up and rallied around this, the way this community of belief keeps me going when doubt creeps in. Learning to trust that over someone’s approval changed everything for me.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Honestly, pivoting is just part of my story at this point, so I have a few to choose from. The earliest and maybe most significant one was joining the armed forces in college. That was never part of any plan I had for myself, not even remotely. I’m a free spirited person by nature, someone who never really mapped things out too far in advance. But I was in a tough financial spot and the military was the rescue I needed. Almost overnight I went from operating however I wanted to managing a completely different set of obligations and priorities. I had to grow up fast and figure out how to balance being a civilian and fulfilling my military commitments at the same time. Looking back, that experience built something in me around adaptability and discipline that I didn’t know I needed and still draw on today.

Then there’s the business itself, which has gone through three real iterations to get where it is now. The first version was a brick and mortar concept, a physical space, and what killed it was a combination of funding obstacles and the reality that being anchored to one location just wasn’t going to work for my life. So I moved to a curriculum based model, which felt more flexible, but what I kept running into was that I was putting out small fires. Addressing symptoms rather than root causes, which is actually the opposite of how I’m wired to work. That friction is what pushed me toward qualitative research and human centered design consulting, work that goes deeper, gets at the structural issues, and builds something that lasts longer than a program cycle. Each version taught me something I needed to know to get to the next one, and I don’t think I could have landed here without going through all of it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://eqascent.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bowmanasia/

Image Credits

Soft Rebellion Club- Tara Hall
Wellness Failing Men – Mel, The Body Witch