By: Fair Consulting Group Media
Detroit, Michigan. Deb Davis still spends hours behind a camera lens photographing people at their most unguarded. But these days, she’s doing something else too: helping women discover what they saw in her images and then forgot about themselves. Somewhere along the way, she noticed a pattern that had nothing to do with technical photography. The women who looked the most put-together, the ones holding down careers, raising families, running households, and showing up for everyone around them, were often the ones who felt the most disconnected from who they actually are.
“A woman can be functioning, achieving, caring for everyone around her and still be disconnected from herself,” Davis says.
Davis runs two separate businesses. Detroit City Headshots is her professional photography practice, where she has spent years photographing accomplished women. The Transparency Table is her coaching and education platform, built around a simple but often uncomfortable idea: real change starts with telling yourself the truth before you tell anyone else. The two are distinct companies (neither was created as an arm of the other), but Davis is candid that the same themes surface in both. She’s an award-winning photographer, speaker, life and empowerment coach, breast cancer survivor, and author of The Faces of Transparency: What We Reveal.
“Transparency doesn’t mean telling everybody everything,” she explains. “It begins with being willing to tell yourself the truth.”
Davis recently took that message to the stage at the Leadership Experience Tour, where she shared the foundational philosophy behind her work: the idea that a woman can be functioning, achieving, and caring for everyone around her while still feeling disconnected from herself.
Through The Transparency Table, she teaches that philosophy in The Transparency Journey™, a six-week coaching program whose next cohort begins in November 2026. The program has already run with previous groups of women. Davis built it for women who are highly functional, dependable, and accomplished; the people others rely on, but who may be quietly carrying guilt, fear, or the pressure to constantly appear strong, even as they lose touch with their own voice, identity, and needs.
The full Transparency Journey™ framework moves participants through six stages: Reveal, Release, Restore, Rise, Integrate, and Activate. In the Reveal phase, women begin recognizing the patterns, beliefs, and experiences they have hidden, minimized, or ignored. Release focuses on letting go of outdated expectations, unhealthy patterns, and the pressure to keep performing. Restore is about reconnecting with identity, confidence, voice, and boundaries. Rise is where women take intentional, clear-eyed steps toward what comes next. Integrate is where the work becomes part of daily life, not a temporary shift. And Activate is where women move forward with what they’ve reclaimed.
“The Transparency Journey helps women move beyond identifying what needs to change and begin doing the work of reclaiming their voice, identity, confidence, and direction,” Davis says.
Over the course of the program, participants work through areas like boundaries, confidence, emotional patterns, and self-awareness. Davis is careful to note that this isn’t typical coaching. “It focuses on the internal work that often needs to happen before a woman can confidently move toward what is next,” she says.
That distinction reflects something Davis has observed from both sides of her working life. Her message about hiding in plain sight and being “the strong one” isn’t only a coaching theme. It’s a pattern she noticed years earlier through her camera lens. She wants the women she works with to stop performing “I’m fine” and start showing up from an honest place instead.
Her photography business runs on its own track. Through Detroit City Headshots, Davis offers a Confidence and Camera Ready workshop, a separate offering that helps women prepare to be photographed with more ease and self-assurance. It is not part of the coaching program, and women in The Transparency Journey™ are not required to do a photography session. Though some choose to work with her that way on their own.
Davis’s target audience is women who have spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over their own, women who may look successful from the outside while feeling uncertain about what they actually want. She says she understands that tension firsthand, and it’s part of what drives her to help others move from survival mode into more intentional, authentic living.
As interest in The Transparency Journey™ continues to grow ahead of the November 2026 cohort, Davis is developing additional groups and community-based learning opportunities. For Davis, the goal isn’t just a six-week program. It’s giving women a structured, supportive path back to themselves.
“My hope is that readers recognize the importance of using their voice, prioritizing their own development, and taking intentional steps toward greater confidence, clarity, and authenticity,” she says.
To learn more about Deb Davis, The Transparency Table, and The Transparency Journey™, visit thetransparencytable.com, the Transparency Table Facebook Group, and LinkedIn.
