Recap

Last week, we explored what it means to choose differently, and why making an unconventional choice can feel harder when you’re the only person around you doing it.

Hannah reflected on the many alternative career choices she’s made throughout her life, but realised it was her personal choices, particularly around relationships and being single while friends married and started families, that made her question herself most.

But she recognised something important: loneliness isn’t proof that you’ve chosen incorrectly. Sometimes the discomfort simply comes from not having anyone around you making the same choice.

Bethany shared her own history of unconventional decisions: moving to London, changing university, travelling instead of attending graduation, starting a business and creating her own community. Not every choice worked out perfectly, but the risks and mistakes ultimately led to many of the things she values most.

We then explored how, despite “pivoting” becoming increasingly normal, choosing a different path can still feel bold and uncomfortable. We’re often influenced by the definitions of success we grew up with and the examples we see around us.

So we asked:

What would you choose if you didn’t need it to make sense to anyone else?

Sometimes choosing differently starts with believing another route is possible before you can see where it leads.

Deep Dive

There’s a strange moment that happens when you realise you don’t quite fit the programme everyone else seems to be following.

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Editors Notes

From Hannah to you

I feel like the Queen of choosing differently. I’ve made quite a few choices in my life that made considerably more sense to me than they did to my friends or family. I chose college instead of staying on at my school for Sixth Form. I stepped away from my University course 10 months before completion. After experiencing stress-related illness I left the standard 9-5 to join my Mum in business. I chose to leave corporate roles with no clear plan and more recently I chose to return to my hospitality roots so I could step away from the noise of the online space and spend some time IRL.

All of these alternative career routes were playing out alongside rocky relationships and a two year stint during my late 20s, as the only single guest at many hen do’s and weddings.

Upon reflection, as I write this, I realised that not once did I question my career choices. On the other hand, the personal ones hit different.

I’d dated a couple of guys that I could easily have married and started a family with, alongside most of my friends who were already well and truly on the path.

I was repeatedly told I was too fussy and even told once that I was ‘getting on a bit’ which led me to consider what that really meant. While my choices felt right privately, I questioned them every time I had to explain them publicly.

Maybe I am being too fussy?

Maybe I’m the problem?

What if I don’t find what they have?

That kind of loneliness, the type that has you driving to the wedding, smiling through hours of celebrations, dealing with the uncomfortable mannerisms that people try to hide when you say “I’m here on my own” and then driving yourself home; it isn’t dramatic. It holds a quiet certainty that what you’re holding out for makes complete sense to you.

It can feel right somehow but leave you explaining your choices more than you’d like to or wishing that someone would mirror back “that makes complete sense, obviously that’s the right move!”.

Not every differently chosen route will be better or wiser simply because it’s different but loneliness itself is not proof that you should make a U-turn. More often than not, the discomfort is less about loneliness and more about not having anyone close by that would make the same choice.

We become what we see and if it isn’t in sight, that’s a much harder path to follow.

From Bethany to you

I’ve always felt like I think a bit outside the box. From a young age, I couldn’t help but question everything from why you ‘can’t’ do something, to what success actually is (albeit internally, as I was often too shy to ask these things out loud). The people I admire most in life are always the ones that have had the confidence to be themselves openly and follow a path that might be deemed unconventional, or even irresponsible, by others. I probably looked up to them even more as I struggled with having the confidence to do that myself until recent years.

Choosing differently has worked out well for me as a whole, but it hasn’t always gone to plan. However, without taking the risk of following my own path I know that I wouldn’t have had all the good things that happened to me. They just had to come with a few mistakes.

I moved from a small town in Yorkshire to London just a month after turning 18. I changed universities after studying my first degree for a year. I used the last of my student loan to travel Thailand instead of attending my graduation. I got my first dog at 23 when I was living in a house share. I then moved into my first flat before I could really afford it (luckily I ended up getting a promotion shortly afterwards). I took out a business loan to launch my first business. I got back together with my ex-boyfriend about 4 times in 9 years (see what I mean about it not always going to plan?). I wasn’t meeting many people I felt aligned with in my 20s, so I started my own community.

Anyway, there are a lot more examples but you get the idea. Choosing differently can be both a good and bad thing, but I often find in the long run the universe rewards you for boldly pursuing what you truly desire.

The Vision Boardroom

We’re living in a time when ‘pivot’ has become so much more than that infamous Ross Geller line.

Practising lawyers becoming florists. Established financial advisors writing and publishing fiction. GPs qualifying as yoga teachers.

Pivoting has never been easier. Or so they say.

At IM., we recently began to notice that a common thread in the frustration and doubt felt by many of the ambitious women we met came back to one consistent and repeated message: choosing differently is an easy option now.

But pivoting, or starting out as a newbie in a completely unconventional direction, can still be a bold and uncomfortable choice. Think about it. What did ‘doing well’ look like and sound like when you were growing up or when you walked into adult working life?

What ambitions felt easy to speak out loud, and which did you keep quiet or find yourself over-explaining?

We’ve been there. In those moments where you question yourself and ask, “Why does this feel hard for me when everyone is telling me it should be so easy?”. The answer may be simpler than we think: Maybe you just haven’t found your route yet. Maybe you’ve been trying to follow someone else’s version of ‘different’.

The phrases we grew up with. The lack of real examples outside of social media that we can use as evidence. The societal norms that we soak up from the first day we walk into school.

We’re shown ‘what it takes’ to get to where we want to go, but often in limited ways. This Memo series is your invitation to consider that there could be alternative ways of getting to where you want to go. Routes that you haven’t allowed yourself to see yet.

What would you choose if you didn’t need it to make sense to others?

What would change if you chose a different route without any upfront peer approval?

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The Shift

We completely get it. Choosing differently is scary. It also links beautifully to last month’s topic of having the courage to be visible, making it the perfect segue into this next part of your becoming. Over the next four Memos, our goal is to normalise this feeling and help you realise that more people have stood in our shoes than we previously thought.

Whether it is taking the leap to pursue your dream career, making a change in your relationships, having a shift in lifestyle or doing something that makes someone think ‘that’s not like her’, by the end of this series, you will have more authority over yourself and your decisions than ever before. More importantly, you’ll know it’s more than OK to choose differently.

The Experiment

For the experiment this series, we encourage you to start building evidence that choosing differently is more common than we may think. Instead of looking for someone who has made your exact choice, find one person who has chosen differently in a way that makes you think:

Oh. People actually do that.

It could be someone in your industry, someone online, someone in your family or even a historical figure.

Then ask:

What did they have to believe before there was evidence that their choice would work?

What Caught Our Attention This Week

The Parts We Don’t See

Vivien Wong is co-founder of Little Moons, alongside her brother. Before helping to bring mochi to the UK market at scale, Vivien had qualified as a chartered accountant and forged a career in finance, later making the leap into the family business in a completely different field. Little Moons now generates in excess of £50 million in annual revenue and operates from a large UK-based manufacturing site.

Vivien has stated that she always knew she wanted to start her own business and viewed her qualification as something to fall back on if needed. The real push came after her father’s cancer diagnosis, which prompted her to question how long she was willing to wait before taking the leap.

What caught our attention this week was a powerful reminder from Vivien that the parts we usually witness are only the outcome of years of resilience alongside tough, informed decisions and the difficulty of choosing a different path, before there’s any evidence of success.

“For anyone watching founders seemingly blow up on social media overnight, it’s important to remember that the viral moment is often the part of the story everyone sees rather than the beginning.”

Why We Stay When We’re Free to Leave

An Instagram post by Yousuf Aslam really caught our eye this week, questioning why Odysseus lost 7 years to an island with no monster and no chains. If you haven’t seen the new movie or know about the story, in summary, Odysseus spends 2 decades trying to get back home to his family after the Trojan War but faces several obstacles on the way.

The main talking point was why we stay somewhere too long, even when we are free to leave. Odysseus battled monsters, a whirlpool, sirens and the Cyclops but when it came to living on an island with a goddess called Calypso, this was the place that kept him the longest. The irony was that he wasn’t trapped by something horrible or scary, he stayed because it was ‘almost right’.

We all have our own versions of islands. A relationship that is fine, a city you promised you would leave 3 years ago, a job that gets you by or even the fact that we can often stay in one version of ourselves for longer than we expected.

Yousuf made the point “Pain is information. Comfort is silence.” This is why the worst places don’t hold us the longest. It’s the ones that are just OK enough that they quietly take your best years away.

So, what is the island that you need to get off?

We’re Not as Alone as We Tell Ourselves We Are

Last week, Bethany hosted a dinner for female entrepreneurs and creatives in Yorkshire as part of EGO The Community. A theme that kept occurring throughout the evening, and as part of the Q&A, was the feeling of comparison and the ability to put yourself out there unapologetically. It got us thinking that we all experience the same feelings when it comes to life and business, but we often fall into the trap of thinking that it’s only us experiencing it.

While everyone does have unique circumstances, it does help to know that feelings such as comparison or not feeling good enough crop up with everybody from time to time. When women get together in a room to share their experiences and journey so far, it becomes prominent that we need these reminders of not feeling isolated (especially if the people around us don’t really get it).

When was the last time you surrounded yourself with likeminded women IRL?

Inside Next Week’s Memo

The series over the next few weeks will explore why feeling different is actually a good thing, and how you can get to a place where you feel free to be different out loud. A big part of why The Internal Memo began was to help you (an ambitious, creative woman) not feel as alone in whatever journey you are on that might seem outside the box to a lot of people. This will be the perfect series to delve into this idea and come out the other end with more confidence and acceptance than ever.

See you next Monday, 8am.

Bethany & Hannah x

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Your Monthly Summary

Memo 004 is all about taking what we’ve learnt in the past three weeks and incorporating it into your ‘becoming’. You might be asking…

“How do I step into the woman I’m becoming?”

“Why does it still not feel easy?”

Our response to that is you are already stepping into her, and nobody promised it was going to be easy. But that’s all part of the fun really! The worst thing that we can do is put pressure on ourselves to become a ‘finished product’ or ‘perfect’, because in reality that just doesn’t happen. Who we are now will not be who we are in 10 years time. But what we can do is take pieces of inspiration with us, building a wonderful jigsaw that’s unique and special to us, until we piece together the kind of life we want for ourselves.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, the best part is the journey. Don’t rush.

In saying that, we know you’re here to have a helping hand in becoming who you want to be (and in a lot of cases, just showing more of who you already know you are) so we wanted to give you a little roundup of some of the best parts of the past three Memos that will help you do just that.

Memo 001

Memo 002

Memo 003

In this final Memo of our first series, we’re sharing our personal learnings too. The thing that struck us most when digging into The Courage to be Visible was not what we expected.

External Briefing

Welcome to your external briefing, in which we share real life examples relating to the topic of the month.

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Intro

This week, we step into Memo 003 and we’re opening with a deep dive into how to know when the uncomfortable feelings are redirecting us or holding us back, a perspective shift that helps you interpret and uncover the path of least resistance for you to finally step into your becoming.

Our Memo series follows a framework. Each four part series moves through Vision, Build, Rise and then closes with Become. Last week Memo 002 was Build, focusing on building the foundations of visibility.

If you find yourself spending hours scrolling to find the perfect new notebook so you can start to map out the future you’re dreaming of, in a beautifully presented scrap-book style (we’ve been there!), that would be one of the moments to check in with yourself.

The truth behind it all is that our thoughts create our feelings, and our feelings drive our actions. When we think doubtful thoughts, we create fear, and we often respond by keeping ourselves busy rather than taking meaningful action.

- Memo 002

Now, we Rise.

Deep Dive: You already know how, so trust yourself.

There are so many of us that have experienced the dread of being seen. Whether it shows up as procrastination, indecision or claiming a lack of confidence, it holds us back.

Those moments when you step into a new room - heart racing, short of breath, an inner monologue shouting at us to turn around, chest heavy and the fear telling us that flight is the only way out.

We could equally be in the same situation on a separate occasion and feel energised and excited about the endless opportunities that lay ahead.

At IM. we’re not here to give a simple three-step approach to overcome your fear of being visible. We’re here to help you understand and to know that those altering feelings and reactions are signals that you can begin to interpret so they work for you, not against you.

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Editor’s Note: What Can Visibility Look Like?

From Hannah to you

“Push through the discomfort.”
“Do it before you’re ready.”
“It’s going to feel scary.”

What happens if we repeatedly take action in a direction that was never right for us?

We’ve heard them all before and we believe there is truth in each of them. Repetition allows us to get comfortable with the uncomfortable and taking action leads to greater confidence as we begin to create and see the evidence our nervous system needs in order to keep going.

But what happens if we try to follow a framework that doesn’t work for us?

And how do we differentiate between ‘keep going’ and ‘pay closer attention’?

We have likely all watched women build incredible online audiences and assumed that her willingness to share publicly and her natural confidence is the reason she’s succeeded. If we could only push through the fear of showing up online, all would be well? Right?

There’s no denying it works. But this isn’t the only way.

From 2008 to 2018 I was co-owner and co-director of a business selling primarily to wholesale customers, including exclusive five-star London hotels and Virgin Trains First Class carriages.

I was visible every day. In conversations with customers, negotiations with suppliers, through leadership relationships and product reputation. One thing we never clung to was the idea of being visible in general, only to those that matched our vision and could positively move our brand forward.

Fast forward to 2020 after a successful business exit in 2018, I entered the coaching industry during lockdown. I had an NLP Practitioner and Life Coach accreditation and the feeling that “this is it, this is the thing I was meant to do”.

And there it was. Visibility meant something very different in this new digital-first world. It meant being personal, public and continuously online. Show your face, share your story, post consistently and nail your niche.

I struggled big time.

I pushed through, kept going and did it anyway, despite it feeling so wrong. I began to question my confidence, my ability and experience relevancy as not being good enough (a decade of business ownership, not good enough).

I’d already proved I could risk rejection and judgement. I could cold-call a dream customer that everyone said was a "never going to happen" opportunity and land a major contract. I could lead, sell, take action and ask the important questions. But I’d done it all differently.

My favourite quote from those kitchen days was “work hard in silence and let your success be your noise”. I lived by those words. I didn’t stop for a second to see what was trending or pay attention to where ‘the market was going’. We did what felt scary but right. We set a vision and we went for it.

I could create a personal label for the Executive Head Chef at The Savoy hotel and post a physical jar of our infamous Strawberry Jam straight to their desk, without ever mentioning that action to another soul. I could send a case of free jam to the local care home in support of their fundraising coffee morning and never mention it online.

What action would put what you want to be known for in front of the people who need to see it?

Which route would make you feel nervous as hell but really excited VS nervous as hell and filled with dread and procrastination?

Whichever route you choose, something still has to become visible. Whether it’s your CV application for a dream role, your opinion on something that matters, your promotion request at work, your ambitions or your ability. You do not need to become a public personality or ‘wish you had more confidence’ to prove you want that life badly enough.

In Memo 002, Bethany and I are exploring how to identify what needs to become visible, where it needs to be seen (and where it doesn’t) and which actions can help you build your visibility foundations without forcing yourself into one trending method.

Because truthfully, there has never been only one way to become visible and it’s time we paid more attention to that.

Recap

Last week in Memo 001 we set the overall vision for the month: what is visibility and what does it mean to be seen? On the surface it is perceived that the fear of being seen is really just the fear of judgement, but what if it’s more than that?

We introduced Bethany’s experience with visibility throughout her journey up until this point, we explored the shift that we encourage you to make from the time you read Memo 001 to Memo 004 and we let you know 3 of the things that caught our attention that week (hello Barbie?!).

Looking back on last week’s memo, it was a great opportunity to set the scene of why we think visibility is important here at IM. and why we know this is an essential part of you being able to step boldly into the woman you're meant to become.

“We don’t believe that the courage to be visible is as simple as ‘be more confident’ or no longer caring what people think.

It is deciding that what’s on the other side is more important than staying in a fear of judgement. It is letting our work be judged, allowing our ambition to be heard, accepting that we may disappoint someone, showing up as the person you have so far only allowed you to stay humble.”

- Memo 001

Building Visibility: Where Do I Even Start?

Have you ever felt like you’re playing small? Like there’s a version of you deep down that is just waiting for your moment to come out and shine, but something always stops it?

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Editor’s Note

From Bethany to you.

If you’re anything like me, the fear of being ‘seen’ has held you back more than once. If we’re honest, probably more times than we can count. But if there’s one thing I’ve now learnt, it’s that the uncomfortable feeling we can experience from showing up as ourselves is normal. The people you admire on your screens, in magazines, in life, aren’t fearless - they have just learnt that this feeling doesn’t go away, we learn to live alongside it. We learn to make friends with it.

So, why is this conversation important now?

Let’s rewind a little.

For as long as I can remember, I didn’t just shy away mentally. I tried to shrink myself physically. I’m 5ft 10 and I was always the tallest out of all the other girls (I often still am to this day) so I would end up slouching, leaning, sometimes even bending at the knees to try and fit in. Bending at the knees. Is there a clearer way to repeatedly tell yourself ‘you’re not good enough as you are’?

(I do believe there is a deep rooted expectation as a woman to not take up too much space, although that is a topic for another time).

I’ve spent the past decade slowly acclimatising to showing up authentically and being seen, but I still believed in the fallacy that one day I would wake up, roll out of bed and just. be. ready. That all my hesitations and fears would disappear and I’d suddenly feel comfortable with being myself out loud, with judgement, failure and rejection no longer being an obstacle to building the life I desire.

Oh, how wrong I was.

We’re ready when we choose to be ready. Even if we have to fake it for a little while.

A question for you. What have you been putting off until you feel ‘ready’?

The truth is, feeling connected to other human beings is an innate need. Not a want, a need. So often times in life we sacrifice our authenticity to maintain our connection with others, as the sound of potential rejection rings too loud in our ears. Showing up is scary, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I now practice being visible daily in one way or another and even with growth, comes new discomforts. But is it worth it?

Yes.

The fear of being seen held me back from sticking with my first business, making aligned friendships, choosing a relationship that I deserved, pursuing my childhood dream of being a singer and it stopped me from saying yes to lots of amazing opportunities, amongst many, many other things.

This visibility thing is important stuff.

Now that I’ve learnt to have the courage to show up as me, accepting that I’m not for everyone and that’s ok, I’ve met the most aligned people, I’ve started a community to find other likeminded women, I’ve learnt how to maintain boundaries for myself and my life and I’ve made the most progress in 1 year than I did throughout my whole 20s put together.

I’m not saying it’s easy now, and this is still the beginning, but think of what you can do if you learn how to make friends with the discomfort.

So, why do we have a fear of showing up authentically? When it comes down to it, is it actually the fear of judgement in disguise?

Let’s discuss.

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The Vision Boardroom: There’s More to This Than the Fear of Judgement

There is absolutely a fear of judgement preventing many of us from becoming our most authentic and visible selves.

However, when we begin to dig further into that and question its desire to diminish parts of us, we uncover something deeper. That staying hidden and neutral keeps us from experiencing any dramatic change in our lives.

A couple of the questions we have previously considered in our own respective journeys were: Will the relationships around me survive a new version of me? Will I make the people around me uncomfortable by showing my truest self?

And low and behold when researching for this topic we came across a recent clip from Hannah Waddingham’s interview with Women’s Health.

“I wouldn’t expect any friend, male or female, to be told by somebody else that they need to diminish their light in any way, for them”.

It stopped us in our tracks.

Hannah is an incredibly talented, 5”11 woman that has been taught from a young age to fully show up as herself, with zero fear of judgement or rocking the relationship equilibrium.

However, what we know to be true is that many of us had an alternative experience and were taught to fear judgement in order stay emotionally connected to those around us.

If we stay pleasant, humble, helpful, undemanding and easy-going, we stay safe. We learn from experience to adapt our behaviour to keep us in a state of warmth, not discomfort. Some of these learnt behaviours even become a part of our personality.

Are you humble or has it felt too uncomfortable to be seen as boldly ambitious?

Are you naturally easy-going or have you learnt that stating preferences creates tension?

It may not be an absence of ambition or a surface level fear of judgement (as we’ve personally experienced), but an adaptation that has kept our place in the world around us, safe. We began to question what parts of ourselves we were allowing to be visible and why?

We’d picked up the habit of checking what everyone else wanted from us first.

As Bethany touched upon in her Note, “I’ve made the most progress in 1 year than I did throughout my whole 20s put together.” That is why we believe paying attention to how we’re showing up and how we’re not, is one of the biggest steps towards the lives we’re dreaming of.

Because the very behaviour we’ve adopted to avoid judgement can prevent genuine connection and purpose. We may be widely accepted but not deeply known, it’s why many of us experience loneliness despite being surrounded by people. Perhaps the real fear is discovering which relationships and identities depended on us being less of ourselves.

A truth we can’t ignore in this conversation is that what is suppressed rarely vanishes. We’ve experienced frustration from unspoken ambition, resentment from unexpressed creativity and feeling invisible in spaces from softening our opinions. We’ve suffered internally to stay safe externally.

The courage to be visible is not just about gaining attention (as a society, we’ve lost our way with this). Courage is about preventing a growing divide between our internal truth and our external lives.

At its core, visibility is allowing what is true internally to be witnessed and have consequences externally.

A hard example is knowing what you think and saying it without removing the sharp edges. (Even writing that feels uncomfortable to think about!)

What’s immensely difficult about this is getting comfortable with stepping into ourselves, learning to grieve past versions that kept us safe and the parts and people of our lives that begin to dissipate over time. Not only this but the fear may never disappear entirely because every new stage demands another truth to be exposed; a new idea, a bigger ambition, a change of mind. Each stage of growth asks us to risk becoming unfamiliar again.

We don’t believe that the courage to be visible is as simple as ‘be more confident’ or no longer caring what people think.

It is deciding that what’s on the other side is more important than staying in a fear of judgement. It is letting our work be judged, allowing our ambition to be heard, accepting that we may disappoint someone, showing up as the person you have so far only allowed yourself to stay humble.

We begin to show a new part of ourselves every day and empower you to ask, who might you become if you truly have the courage to be visible?

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.”

― Ambrose Redmoon

The Shift

We know the feeling all too well. When it feels as though you’re just not the type of person that can show up and be fully visible in order to build the life you really want.

We see those that are doing so as more confident, more certain, and they definitely don’t appear to worry about what others think. Meanwhile you’re waiting for the morning when you jump out of bed and say, ‘I’m ready, today is the day I show up as myself’.

But we know that’s not the reality.

Over the next four Memos we are not teaching or asking you to become fearless, loud or more publicly exposed. We’re exploring what it means to stop hiding the deeper parts of yourself that truly matter - the ambitions, the opinions, your work and the woman you want to become.

We will look into why being visible is so emotionally driven, how our desire for belonging holds us back and decides the things we reveal and how we can begin to move our attention towards the things that help us bring our true selves to the world around us. Our hope is that visibility will feel less like something you have to push through and conquer and more like something you can begin to implement in a way that feels contagiously empowering.

The Experiment

Confidence and self-belief can be taught. The more you practice, the better you get at it. Kind of annoying, but it’s true.

That’s why as an IM. reader, we want to invite you to translate these new ways of thinking into your real life.

This week, be really honest with yourself. Reflect and write down 3 areas where you might not be showing up authentically or honestly and really examine if this is something that is holding you back from making progress.

Is it a fear of being seen? Do you not believe in yourself and your capabilities? Because we certainly believe in you. Feel free to let us know what you come up with - we’d love to hear!

What Caught Our Attention Last Week

Helping Barbie® to Find Her Dream House

Mattel Inc. recently announced that Barbie® has partnered with the UK’s largest property platform, Rightmove, to find her new DreamHouse™. Alongside this genius marketing campaign that caught our eye, the brands revealed that their research showed 75% of Gen Z and Millennial women see homeownership as an important life goal and form of greater independence.

Not only this, but the findings suggest that women are now more open to alternative routes to get themselves onto the property ladder, such as ‘platonic co-buying’. Almost half of young women would consider buying with a friend, while 44% believe this is becoming a more common route onto the property ladder.  Over half also said that co-owning with a friend would boost their overall happiness, as well as offer better financial stability and lead to a better sense of community.

This is an interesting talking point for 2 reasons.

Number 1: The marketing campaign itself. Is Barbie® playing into a stereotype of women and the girly, pink world? Probably, but we kind of love the campaign. We also admire an unlikely partnership, especially one that is highlighting a greater shift in society - that we as women can make our own rules and achieve things on our own terms.

Number 2: The research. We love that there are so many alternative options to women getting on the property ladder (if that is something important to them). We all know the current state of the economy puts certain progress off the table for many individuals, so opening the conversation to solutions such as platonic co-buying is really amplifying the fact that we don’t need to follow a conventional route to get what we want. It is also very relevant for co-editor Bethany as she is currently looking to buy a home with her sister - so she said it’s wonderful to know they’re not the only ones!

Kelly Philp, Sr Director Dolls Marketing at Mattel EMEA said: “For over 65 years, Barbie has inspired generations of girls to imagine limitless possibilities for their future, and the DreamHouse has always been part of that story. Since the very first DreamHouse, Barbie has represented independence, creativity and the freedom to define success on your own terms. As today’s research shows young women continue to shape what homeownership looks like, and we’re proud to celebrate that journey alongside Rightmove.”

Interesting! What do you think about this marketing campaign?

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The Age of the Freebie is Over

If you didn’t see it doing the rounds on Instagram last week, founder of Yorkshire based Get Baked, Rich Myers, posted about an email he got sent from The Voice (TV show) asking for free cake for their talent. There indeed would be no payment, but instead he would get exposure to “highly influential coaches and presenters”. So we ask, is the age of the freebie over?

We think so, especially for independent businesses, and a lot of the general public seemed to agree with hundreds of comments from other smaller businesses showing their support and conveying their frustration.

From an IM. perspective, when Bethany had her first skincare business she thought it was amazing to be asked to provide freebies, but in reality the outcome didn’t often reap equal rewards in comparison with the effort, time and money that went into providing them in the first place. Of course this is all down to the individual and if the opportunity has mutual benefit. However when you are a multi-million pound company we think the bare minimum should be to pay for some cake, and Rich certainly didn’t let them eat his cake on this occasion.

Oprah Revealed ‘Life Starts at 44’

Last week, Bethany watched Oprah Winfrey on Keke Palmer’s podcast, “Baby, this is Keke Palmer” and some real nuggets of wisdom were dropped (not surprising, it’s Oprah after all).

Oprah spoke about everything from why she doesn’t experience imposter syndrome (love that), how her self-belief got her to where she is today and wait for it… why she wouldn’t go back to 30 if she had the option. Music to Bethany’s ears as she turns 30 today and had a very stereotypical crisis in the days leading up to it.

So why wouldn’t Oprah go back to being 30? She said for her, life really began when she was in her 40s. Oprah revealed to Keke “I think life starts at 44, because you come into yourself in a way that you’re no longer trying to please everybody else. You come into yourself. I think when you’re not free, not completely free, you can’t make decisions based upon what you want. It was 44 where I locked in. I wasn’t just doing things for other people. I really was in full drive, purposeful living for myself. 44 is when it locked in.”

We love that. Although we’d love to think we can learn from Oprah and come into ourselves even sooner by prioritising our goals and dreams at any age. After all, you can never please everybody so go live your best life is what we say!

At IM. we are huge believers in backing yourself and that’s exactly what Oprah revealed she did at the start of her career, long before people caught up with the vision she had for herself and her life.

In the conversation with Keke, she stated that when starting “The Oprah Winfrey Show“ in the 80s, she told one of the “suits” that her dream was to be a mogul. According to Oprah, he called her “arrogant.”

So what did Oprah do? She bet on herself, choosing to become a producer and give up a traditional salary, instead negotiating 50% of the show’s revenue.

“Owning that show was the transition to me owning myself in so many ways,” she said. “I believed in myself. And that is the reason that I am what I am.”

Don’t underestimate a woman with a clear vision.

Thanks for the inspiration, Oprah.

What’s Ahead in The Internal Memo?

If you’re new here, we choose a topic of the month and dive deeper into it across 4 memo’s: Vision, Build, Rise, Become. Each memo is intentionally designed to help you along your journey of stepping into the woman you are becoming.

This week we laid the foundations, next week we delve into the actionable steps we can all take to become more comfortable in the discomfort and really stop letting the fear of being seen hold us back.

This is exactly why IM. started. We are no longer willing to hold back. And even though we’re still in the process of becoming, if you too feel ready to become the woman that no longer hides, you need to stick around for the rest of this month’s series.

In the meantime, don’t forget to show up as yourself, because there’s truly nobody like you.

See you next Monday, 8am.

- Bethany & Hannah

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