Reinvention: The Secret To Finding Yourself. Every Woman Needs to Know This About Midlife! With Eleanor Mills.

0:00You are all about rebirth. finding a solution to what many people find in midlife which is a complete cut off with your old life and you've got to start a new one, what do you do, where do you go? When you hit 50 probably everything will change massively and probably the thing that's been most at the centre of your life will fall away. But in the space that that death brings something amazing new can grow. So many women I think are in something where they feel like I'm not really living my truth. It's so frightening... Yeah, to shift out of it. ..to shift out of it. What should they do? And I felt like I'd been recharged by the universe with this really strong sense of the possibility of renewal and reinvention.

0:50And I came out of it with a sense that that was what I wanted to do. You're very exciting to talk to. You're like, you're fizzing. I can feel it. But what I see is a lot of women, and they know that something needs to change, and they don't really know kind of how to do that. The first thing I say is you can really kind of manifest a new and joyous life for yourself and that that's really not impossible and I've seen so many women do it or in the process of doing it. I think women will get so much from you. Just want to say hi. Hi. Thanks for coming. I mean, Eleanor, I love your journey and I love the fact that you are all about rebirth, you know, finding a solution to what many people find in midlife, which is a complete cut off with your old life and you've got to start a new one.

1:47What do you do? Where do you go? But also the deep dive into what it is to be a woman. Yes. And where we're going, but how far we've come. There's so much to get at. What is your main aim, goal, wish in life? Well, my real sense of purpose now, my real driving purpose is to try and tell a different, more optimistic and positive story about women's lives from kind of 45 plus. Because I think that the story that we're told in the culture is manifestly not fit for purpose. and when I look around me at all the amazing women, I call them queen ages at this point, doing incredible things, the story, the broader story is really, really not, just really not cutting it.

2:35And I really saw that because I was a top editor in the media for 25 years. I was chair of women in journalism, editorial director at the Sunday Times Magazine, all that stuff. So I really have had a kind of inside view, inside the belly of the beast at quite how gendered ageist the media is. So that's where ageism meets sexism. How hard it was to get pictures of older women, say, on the front of the magazine. How basically we were seen, women were seen as, I remember an old picture editor saying to me, oh, we love brightening up the page, which meant, you know, putting a picture of a pretty girl.

3:06And that really our value was to be kind of, you know, young and decorative and kind of fecund and fertile and fanciable. A bit like in the old days, in the 70s, when they had, you know, used to sell cars with kind of pretty young girls straight across along the bonnet, you know. It's not that long ago. And that's really the mentality underneath. So therefore, women at 50 plus who don't fit that anymore, we basically see this completely redundant or invisible. And the research that we did showed that over half of women over 50 felt completely unrepresented in the culture. And about 40 percent felt completely invisible.

3:43Can you define what a queen-ager is? Well, I like to see it as a woman in midlife who is a queen and coming into her prime. And I came up with the whole phrase because I have been writing headlines for a long time. And one of the women in one of our focus groups said, I feel like a teenager, but in my own house with post sheets and nice tea. So that stuck in my head. And then I go to Jamaica a lot and we listen to a song there all the time, which goes, she's a queen. and also Jamaican, older Jamaican women are seen as queens. They have, and they're really respected. They're kind of called auntie in the community.

4:21We were playing pickleball one day and there were a whole load of boys playing football next to us. And one of the women just turned around, one of the queen ages turned around and said, will you go and play at the other end of the thing? And they just immediately did it. About 20 boys, just like total respect. So I think that those two things, the queen and then the saying she felt like a teenager came together in my head and I got kind of queen age, which I also think is a great rebranding. And it has that sense of us coming into our power and into our prime at this point in our lives. And I really want all women to look forward to being Queen Ages.

4:53And I think it sounds joyful. I kind of want to go back to the beginning and you getting into journalism. What was exciting about that time? Because you were 25 years, like you said, in the papers and something of a record breaker because, I mean, you at 26, weren't you the youngest editor? Yeah, the youngest ever features editor on the Daily Telegraph. That's amazing. Yeah, and then I went to the Sunday Times and I started doing the paper's main interview every week. So I was interviewing everyone from the Dalai Lama to Sheryl Sandberg to Prime Ministers. I did Charlton Heston, you know, it's a really long time ago, every week.

5:32And that was such a kind of massive kind of thing to be doing. So I was a bit of a journalistic wunderkinder and I had this amazing kind of ride in journalism from when I was in my early 20s to just before 50. And then I kind of got spat off the wave. And that's really when the kind of midlife reinvention and kind of rebirth begins. But I must say about journalism that I felt like I'd had a fantastic front row seat on history. And I always say it beats working for a living because you're kind of doing, you're getting paid to do what other people would do if they could. So, I mean, obviously you're very grateful for it.

6:07I can hear that. Yeah, it was amazing. And the experience that you had and the opportunities that you were given. Yeah. But when you've been in that industry for so long and very suddenly, like out of nowhere, because you were doing a great job. Yes. Came a redundancy. What happened? Well, it was a huge shock to me was that it came kind of out of a blue sky. And I'd always thought that journalism was a kind of really meritocratic profession. and that if you were really good at your job, which I was, and you kind of hit your targets, whatever, you would be all right and you would be protected. And then suddenly that wasn't enough anymore.

6:43And you do get to the very top of organisations and then it often comes down to, you know, are you a fit? Is there personal chemistry with the person who comes in and they want their own team? And I was out and that was a massive, huge shock because I think Queen Ages are the kind of first generation of women who really, for me, I really identified myself by my job, by my work. I'd worn this big kind of Game of Thrones cloak of editorial power for a really long time. I was editorial director. So that was so much my life that when it was suddenly taken away from me, kind of with no warning and I hadn't really had a chance to kind of even think about what else I might do.

7:24It was like a death. It was like a bereavement or, you know, and I've heard women since talk about you know when somebody dies or um if they get divorced or when the children leave home it's that kind of thing where suddenly whatever had been before is gone you know you can't go back and so the only thing you can do is is move forward eventually and reinvent but what i say in the book and what i really believe is that you have to pause and you have to grieve what you've what you've lost and that there's no quick route through that I remember going to a chigong class I'm you know really pretty bad at chigong but I don't have much else to do and I was sitting there and at the end of the thing the instructor came around the class and they're going how was it for you and one woman was going oh I could feel rainbows between my hands and you know and I was just sitting there weeping I didn't have a tissue so I was really kind of snotty and he was like you're right and I was just like oh I've had a big transition and he looked at me with great compassion and he just said change is difficult and it was such a magic moment for me because I'm sure you know what it's like if you've been in a bad way everyone goes oh you'll be fine you know you know it'll be the making of you and when they say that you just want to punch them that's not where you are and to actually be told that it was allowed to be given permission to be in a bad way and to be finding it tough and to be really sad was really liberating it was kind of a moment where I thought okay for the first time I had a little bit of self-compassion and I was kind of going okay maybe this is difficult and I'm allowed to be in this place and find it tough and be sad and that was really liberating.

9:02I think for so many people change is one of those things that literally your back is up against the wall and but often a change is very very painful and it's like I don't want to do it I don't want to do it but you get to make the choice but you didn't get to do that. No no and so when it's forced upon you I was actually experiencing quote isn't it you know some achieve greatness some have greatness thrust upon them so it's one thing to kind of pursue a change and it's quite another to have a massive change thrust upon you and that's why it's like a death because when somebody dies there's nothing you can do you can't go back and it was like the death of the person that I'd been um and and I and I mourned it um it was the pandemic so I was at I was at home I also got really sick with COVID and I was just really, really kind of anxious and in a low place.

9:49And I wrote about that, which a lot of people found surprising at the time and I was quite honest about how awful that felt. But actually that was one of the best things that I've ever done because it made me realise that I was really not alone and that there were so many other people at this point in midlife having to reinvent, you know, for whatever reason. I really hope you are enjoying this episode. We would love a follow, please. Thanks. um what's interesting about what you're talking about is firstly I think how many women but not just women men everyone go through this redundancy thing at 50 yes it is a it is an absolute but then we are expected nowadays to work until we're 68 68 yeah so it is that what the hell am I gonna do midlife crisis which kind of um often comes out in different ways with men and women but it's an incredibly difficult and painful place that that identifying yourself with your job which i absolutely 100 percent have done my entire career and i'm now trying to replace some kind of spirituality of understanding of the world yes me too it's very difficult so you you started by writing yeah so i started by writing i'd been a columnist for a very long time on the sunday times in the news review and so what I knew from that is that often if I was going through something even if it wasn't something that was really being talked about that if I was going through it then other people probably were too so I think that that gave me the confidence to share it because I've kind of you know done that before uh and then I also think that I realized that there was a massive gap it was a huge hole you know and when I looked around and I could see that there were so many people needing to reinvent at this point but who and there was nowhere to go I mean I remember googling midlife redundancy and I got the HMRC website let me tell you if you are looking for inspiration the HMRC website is not where you're going to find it no it was so depressing and there was just nothing so I thought okay this is an opportunity um so I set up my organization noon.org.uk and I called it noon because in the hundred year life 50 is only halfway through and I really wanted that rebrand of thinking actually it's only lunchtime you know I loved like the afternoon tea cocktails you know it's like the whole of the good day was to come and I thought that was optimistic lunchtime of your life lunchtime of my life so it's like well you can't give up you can't feel like you're on the scrap heap that you're all done if it's only lunchtime you know so that I found kind of um inspiring could I ask you something quickly because you know whenever I see somebody and they go so I saw a hole in the market and I started a business and you think no no no it's not that easy but how did you do it yeah it was that quite daunting for you did you do it in lockdown were you on your own no I did it in lockdown so I'd been um just before I was made redundant from the Sunday Times I had been on a retreat uh in Jamaica where I'd taken some magic mushrooms and during it was it was a kind of um therapeutic retreat it wasn't just like taking them for lots it was medicine it was medicine it was seen as a medicine where you It was a properly spiritual journey where you were going into taking the magic mushrooms, asking it some questions and you do three heroic doses in a week.

13:13And they call them heroic doses because they want you to reach that point of kind of singularity where your ego dissolves. Does that mean the amount? So it's quite a lot. A heroic dose is really going to be. So I took eight grams of psilocybin and, you know, then I know and everyone was doing that, too. So it was a lot. And what it did was it kind of on the last day, they said, you know, take away, throw away everything you no longer need in your life and all kind of blow it up. And I had the sense of completely melting. When I took the mushrooms, I had the sense of completely kind of melting into a golden.

13:54It was like being at the time I described as being like in a big bowl of golden cream. and I felt like I'd been recharged by the universe with this kind of golden light. And what I came out of the trip with was just this really strong sense of the possibility of renewal and reinvention at this point. And I came out of it with a sense that that was what I wanted to do, that I wanted to help people to catalyse that change. Would you mind if I asked you a bit more about that retreat? Because I think there might be lots of people watching who have no idea about what magic mushrooms do, what a retreat would be like.

14:32Had you ever had experience of that before? Well, I'd taken loads of ecstasy and stuff back in the 80s. Yeah, you know, back in the day. Yeah, back in day. Back in day. We did it. We all did our, like, jumping around. I did a lot of jumping around in fields. We were doing it together. Yeah, exactly. We were the rave generation. So, yeah, back in the 90s, I did my hands in the air. But not since then, at work and everything, not really. And I'd always been scared of taking acid. So we took EE and that kind of thing. But not hallucinogen. No, hallucinogen seemed a bit scary. We were really brought up with, you know, we had Zamo just say no, didn't we, on stuff?

15:02Yes, totally. And then we had on acid. Everyone said if you took acid, you'd try and jump out of a window. You'd jump out of a window and think you could fly. So I was like, I don't think I want to do that. But you went from nothing to Hero Dose in Jamaica. Yeah, I went with a friend who'd had really bad PTSD. And she wanted to go because she'd read the Michael Pollan book, How to Change Your Mind, which is all about the kind of... And there's an amazing documentary, isn't there? Incredible documentary. people should watch on Netflix which is basically the book kind of in film version but he talks about the what what actually the neuroscience of what the psilocybin which is the active bit of magic mushrooms does in your brain and I've talked to a lot of neuroscientists about it as a good journalist and what they say about it is it's a bit like if you're going skiing and there were really deep ruts in the snow because it's all been carved up and hadn't been stayed for a while what what the taking the psilocybin does is it kind of like a fresh fall of snow and it allows you to create new paths in your brain that's a brilliant which i think is a really clever way of describing it it really stuck with me and and so it's very good for people if you're in ptsd you're kind of stuck in grooves or it's good for people who are anorexic or obsessive compulsive or depressed where their brain has got into deep grooves and this just allows you and when you see it under um under brain scanners you can see new connections being made because it takes off learn something the default mode network which is the front bit of your brain which basically tries to control everything all the time and it allows your brain to make new connections um so i think it's a really worthwhile thing for people to do at this point and it is quite scary but i think if you go and do it in a therapeutic way and what they have is they have um what they call trip sitters or psychedelic ninjas who are with you all the time who are there to kind of be as your guardian angels and you do it so they talk about set and setting so you do it in a very careful place where you can't jump off a balcony and somebody kind of looks after you but I think what it allows you to do is to really kind of reset your sense of yourself and for me it opened me up to a whole kind of spiritual aspect of the world which I think I'd been very resistant to so because what i find interesting is that you're not somebody who would naturally go out and seek no narcotics no but this was something completely different and i think it is worth knowing for people obviously it's not legal here but in jamaica it is a drug but in jamaica it is they never got around to making it illegal and so you can you know you can do it there but if you're going to go and do it i really recommend doing it under controlled conditions because it can be quite frightening um and you want to be in a situation where you can completely surrender to what you're being shown um and that capacity to kind of open up i mean i've done it a few times since and every time i've been shown something which is then maybe i didn't even understand in the moment which has gone on to be um what coleridge or wordsworth would describe as a vivifying virtue which is i it um kind of stokes your capacity for kind of joy or aliveness in your life afterwards.

18:14So how long did the effects of that trip stay with you? Did they expand and grow? I think they're still with me. And actually quite a lot of research which they've done in America shows that for a lot of people there they put this experience of having done psilocybin up there with like giving birth or getting married that it can be completely transformational in terms of how you see yourself and your place in the world. And for me it gave me a great sense of connectedness to everything the sense of a life force chugging through me but also through the insects and the trees and the waves and the sunshine and just feeling linked to it all what I discovered was having been glimpse have been given a glimpse of that sense of connectedness and goldenness I could find it again it without the mushrooms you could recall it I could recall it so it really I started meditating and I would think about the golden light and these the light that I'd seen through the waves or that sense of connectedness.

19:11And I could find my way back to that place through meditation and I did silent retreats and I've done kind of, I've done all sorts of silent retreats, consternations. I decided I quite like my silent self because you stop telling yourself stories. You stop having to tell a story about yourself all the time and everything becomes quite still. I quite like silent Eleanor. She was quite chill. Is this like a completely new Eleanor you're getting to know? Totally. I mean, because I think it's important to put in context. So I was like, I was a really like hard charging, tough hack. You know, I'd worked in newsrooms where I was often the only woman, you know, I ran the coverage, you know, after 9-11 or of like Damalona Taylor's death or American elections.

19:55All consuming. We're talking day and night. Yeah. You'd be expected to stay, you know, until it was done. Always. And I had two small kids as well. I had kids while I was doing it. And I'm slightly ashamed to say now that I think I often put my work ahead of my kids. Um, and, but I think that, so in some ways the redundancy, although it felt like a death at the time, I really now see as a kind of renaissance, a kind of rebirth, a second chance to be a different, to become a different version of myself. I talk in the book about, um, 50 being the point where we become the woman we always wanted to be, that you can kind of become a different version of yourself.

20:33I think I'm a, I certainly am having more fun and I feel much more essentially me and much more free and I also feel that I can really speak my truth in a way that I couldn't before and I think that's partly to do with you know menopause and kind of getting to a point where you really don't give a stuff about stuff and but I just it was very it was a hard crucible I mean um Chip Conley talks about midlife not as a crisis but as a chrysalis which I really like and I and I'd actually got to that same idea in this book that this this moment of shedding of I've talked about it more as like a pruning it's like you you know in 25 to 50 you grow all these kind of tendrils and actually need a good like chopping back to your kind of central essence and I wear my bright green nails as a kind of as a kind of reminder that I'm now this new, very bright green shoot.

21:30I love that. Yeah, so there's like a kind of, I feel like I've gone back to kind of core green, kind of ring, and that other people can too. God, you're very exciting to talk to you. Like, you are joy. I mean it. No, but you are joy. I can literally, you're fizzing. I can feel it. It's lovely. I like being near you. It's very infectious. Oh, good, that's nice. And because one of the big things I say in the book is about saying yes to joy. and so one of the things I did but I wasn't having to slug into like the Sunday Times all the time is I started swimming every day in the Hampstead Ladies Pond all the way through the winter and just doing lots of things that made me feel good and through that and what I say to and I now run lots of circles for my Queen Ages.

22:17I saw that but on with noon with noon so we go on Afternoon, you can actually find a circle. So you can find a circle near you. We started doing it just in Soho. I started sending out this Queen Age newsletter. And you know what it's like to begin with? You know, you have a few hundred, then you have a few thousand. And then it really kind of gathered pace. And I started just doing it in this flat in Soho that I borrowed. And it got too big for that. And now we've got chapters all over the place, which is really exciting. I love that. Chapters like Hell's Angels. Yeah, like Hell's Angels. Hell's Queen Ages.

22:46Hell's Queen Ages. You're going to have to get some leather jackets or something made up. We got some tote bags saying join the Queen Age of Revolution. And what you see, what's so amazing about the Noon Circle is just the sense of that we're all in this. And one of the things we say in the Noon Circle is the say yes to joy. And I think that actually following your joy, following doing the things that you love, it are the stepping stones. You were saying, how did you set up this business? Well, I think following those pebbles of the things that really make you happy are the route to a kind of a successful life, a truly successful life, a resonant life, a life that matches on the outside how you feel on the inside.

23:26And I think for a lot of women, that's not the case. It's one of the things I talk about in the book. In fact, when I was, after I left the Sunday, after I was made redundant, I went to Jamaica with my friend Decker and I was lying and I was feeling really terrible. it was in the really early bit and we went and we swam out around this boat in the bay and a woman put popped her head over the top of the boat and was like you know oh who are you come aboard so we were sitting it was about 11 in the morning sitting there with a beer and Nancy told us her story and she was sailing around the Caribbean on kind of quite a funny grossy little boat which she'd bought with her friend they'd got it for 20 ,000 bucks from some marina in puerto rico and she talked about living a resonant life and how the life that she'd had as a kind of suburban woman in chicago had really not been her but this adventurous life living like a pirate kind of from day to day sailing around the caribbean she was in her late 50s she suddenly felt who she was really supposed to be and that really lit a spark in me i was like wow and that was the first time that I actually spoke aloud my kind of plan for noon and this kind of how we could create a community that would help other women to live a resonant life with their truthiest kind of truth on show.

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25:34So you know that you are in the absolute best hands. Join me and head to Zoe.com and use code DAVINA10 for 10 % off your membership. So as a Zoe member, what you'll get is an at-home test kit. It's not scary at all. And personalised nutrition programme to help you make smarter food choices for your body. So that's Zoe.com with code DAVINA10. I mean, in a way, like you've already said, it was a kind of a blessing, in fact, this cutoff point that you had. Because so many women, I think, are in something where they feel like I'm not really living my truth. Yes, so much. But it's so frightening. Yeah, to shift out of it.

26:19To shift out of it. What should they do? It's really interesting. I see someone said to me in the noon circle the other day, she said, I'm living this life. I'm in this house. I've got these kids. She said to me, Eleanor, I don't feel like I chose any of it. I feel like I'm sleepwalking through my own life. And I thought that felt to me really sad. And I think that for me, it was kind of thrust upon me, this change. I had to do something else. But what I see is a lot of women come and they know that something needs to change. They feel really stuck. They feel really numb. They know it's not resonant and they don't really know kind of how to do that.

26:55So what we say at noon is the first thing I say is start doing something that you love. And a lot of them have even forgotten what that might be. And I go, right, go back. What did you really love doing when you were a kid? So for me, I loved reading books and I liked swimming, which is weirdly like actually exactly where I bent it up. So that's quite a good one. It's like, what did you really love as a child? Use those as some building blocks. and then I think the other thing that's really important is to give yourself a bit of space and we run retreats at noon and we also do these amazing trips I took um 15 queen ages to Morocco and we went high into the Atlas Mountain and walked for miles beyond the end of the road with this Berber woman and ex-nomad who's another queen ager um and we slept on like floors on little mats and shared showers and so it was something about really stripping back it's a bit like the traveling we used to do when we were you know you know I did a lot of traveling in my early 20s so it was like really kind of stripping back all the extraneous stuff and suddenly the women all began to talk and they began to share their truthiest truths or what they'd always really wanted to do and hadn't been able to and there was so much tragedy and kind of difficulties that they'd faced but there was also this incredible strength and what we see in our noon research is actually in this midlife collision so over half of women by the time they hit 50 have been through at least five massive life events divorce bereavement redundancy death of elderly parents you know looking after teenagers you know we've got an epidemic of anxiety and gen z empty nest you know their own health issues maybe a bit of menopause some abuse so over half of women had at least five of those and they tend to come all at once in what we call the midlife collision um but what we saw was that people the women who'd been through the most ended up the happiest yes so there was such a kind of optimistic narrative to that because when I started looking at the reception I was thinking oh the gloom and doom this is a nightmare and actually there was such we talk about queen ages being forged in fire and actually when you come out the other end you're this kind of like invincible shiny kind of great version of yourself because you sloughed off all the things that you aren't I totally see that in women I know yes the ones that have been through the most yes are boss bitches like oh my god they're boss bitches and And they shine, you know, and then they take no prisoners.

29:14But they also have a great humanity and empathy and, you know, they're the person you need in a crisis. And I suppose also what they're showing us is that, you know, this is what you can be when you go through trouble. Yes. Do not be afraid of going through the trouble. You can't avoid it. You can't go round it, under, over. No, I see that. It can't go over it, can't go under it, got to go through it, like the bear hunt in the book. It'll get better. I love what you said about speaking your truth as well, because I think you've earned it, you know. Yes. Like, actually, do you know what? I've earned my right to say whatever I want.

29:46Yes. You can argue with me now. Look at Miriam. And you too. Yeah. Miriam Margolis. We all have to bow down to the altar of Miriam Margolis. But she, exactly, she shows the way. And what I'm hoping that this book does and my story does for other women is to point a map of what this point can look like. And it's both a kind of warning and an encouragement, I hope. It's saying when you hit 50, probably everything will change massively. And probably the thing that's been most at the centre of your life will fall away. But in the space that that death brings, something amazing new can grow if you let it.

30:21And it's giving people the kind of courage to walk through those pinch points, those dark times, and knowing that something will come better afterwards. And weirdly enough, that's the older... I'm an obsessive storyteller, it's what I've always done. But that story of kind of going into the darkness, then coming out to light is actually the oldest story in humanity. There's a Syrian goddess called Ayanna, a queen who goes down into the darkness and she's hung on a hook like a slab of meat in the dark. And then she's rescued by some people who come down to find her. But when she's in the dark, she thinks she's dead, but actually she's not.

30:56She's regenerating. It's that kind of fallowness. It's the turn of the year. it's like winter the leaves come off the trees and at the point where it looks darkest it's actually when all the buds are going to come out again that we need that kind of fallowing wallowing regenerating a bit of time in the dark that's the change is difficult bit so that we can come back like this new my new bright green sap i mean you've also talked about how this generation of women are real trailblazers really because we are completely different to previous generations so much so the ravers we were the yeah we were the ravers we shook it off and i think that we i also think we were sold a massive lie so i think when we came into the workforce we were told that we had equality we didn't we had the i think about it we were given the lanyard so we were allowed in we were given a kind of security pass but everything was still set up for men i mean i was lucky enough i went to altswood university but at my college there wasn't a single female tutor there wasn't a single woman on the on any wall it was like an entirely male world which we were allowed into and it was the same when I went into newspapers you know you were allowed in but the price of entry was not being what they used to call missish so you know not not minding when someone made terrible kind of sexist comments yeah you know people were really brutal you just had to put up with it that was the price of being in the room and I'm sure you know what I mean and it's so exciting to actually be allowed yeah in the room in the room that you didn't complain you just got on with it but I think that that was a massive gaslighting because although we were allowed in the room it wasn't set up for us um and things we've also been huge drivers of change in our generation my first daughter I was allowed five months maternity leave and then by the time I had my second Laura in 2005 I was allowed a year so that was like real like social change happening in real time and then of course when I was first allowed a bit of flexible working it was unheard of and I got it because my male boss suggested it because I resigned and he didn't want me to leave um but then you know everybody could have it so we have been the spear the kind of tip of the spear of this social change all the way through and that's why I think it's up to us to now change this conversation about women of 50 and what we're for I mean you did it brilliantly with all your stuff on menopause that was really the beginning i think but i think it's a bigger conversation you know menopause is the beginning yes we want doctors to know what they're talking about you know we we want to feel okay but also we don't want to be seen through just the menopausal lens because i think that there's so much that we can be at this point and the next bit is stopping companies making women redundant at like 50 which is what happens um well there's an economical value and it's beyond beyond like important for a company to keep women with all of that experience all of that knowledge all of those people you've met and yeah and the wealth of um or the depth of help that you can pass on to a new younger journalist when they're going to go and interview exactly and cheryl sandberg's research shows that lean in that um women senior women are 68 percent more likely to mentor the kind of diverse talent coming up the ranks than men do so so when you whack your queen ages you lose a huge amount of kind of culture culture and kind of nurturingness within the organization and all that wisdom and we're never going to get to equality at the top if we lose all the women at 50 i mean the average age of a female ceo is 56 average age of a female chair 61 if we leave the work if the workforce spits us out of 50 we're never going to get to that kind of equality and we're so far away from it even though we all but we began we're the first generation who kind of began often in equal numbers in the professions but if you look at law or medicine at the very top it's still only about 15 percent female i mean there's a massive way to go before we have any kind of equality at the top of our society how do we do that well part of the part of it is tackling the gendered ageist narrative which says women are useless and have no value once they hit 50 and is that up to us well i think no one else live it no one else is going to do it you know we live a life where people go oh yeah isn't she 50 yeah but she's 56 look she's no and i think you're totally manifesting that um and i think we need to keep challenging the gender and ageism in the culture so if you think about just the normal you know rubbish that we're told like men age like silver foxes you know all that kind of george clooney kind of you know they get better with age like fine wine women not so much more seen to age like peaches one wrinkle and we're you know we're in the pit and yeah and that you know so that needs to change because that goes to the heart of what we value women for in our culture and i'm afraid patriarchy values women for being you know fecund and you know fanciable so and i see that as a bit like if women are rainbows the patriarchy only sees us in black and white and actually there are all these other things that we are and we go on being and that we become even more powerful and amazing as we age which our culture doesn't see so that's the story that I'm trying to change is that and that's why it's the last bit of feminism because it's saying we need to value women for all that they are everything and kind of shake off the male lens which makes us only see ourselves valued valuable in the black and white of you know how hot we are or you know whether men think that we're going to be good mothers which is still the lens that too much of the media sees us through yeah and one of the great revelations I had when I was writing the book was I was thinking society tells me I'm only valuable if I kind of you know have a thigh gap and I'm kind of you know don't have cankles whatever and I was thinking you know actually I'm 53 I've had two children you know I've got I've got nice chubby thighs and a bit of stomach and actually that's completely fine it hasn't actually stopped me being having a very successful and happy life and actually I think that's quite an important thing to say oh my god it's so important and the other thing i think is that all women come out more women come out and speak yeah of that i mean i can't tell you how much i loved pamela anderson for her makeup i love i've always loved pamela anderson but i made it was incredible yeah but we've been apart what we what we as a society did to that woman yes exactly and particularly her and and what i've also seen i write about in the book is that the closer women are to us to an this kind of male ideal or this kind of patriarchal ideal which is pushed in the media the more lacking they feel that they are so it's always my most beautiful friends who were kind of closest to being kind of it whatever it was who felt the most sense of lack as they could see their imperfections I was always kind of a bit short and round and busty and so I never really looked like any of those women in the magazine so I kind of got kind of got on with it you know I never had any shortage of takers.

37:43And I was interviewing an amazing woman who worked in advertising for a long time in New York. And she said to me, of course, the truth is, Eleanor, that what's attractive in people is energy, confidence, you know, vitality, pizzazz. But you can't sell that in a bottle. That's what I was trying to say to you earlier. You're just immensely attractive. Like you just want to be near you because you are so confident and full of joy. I think it's a very, it's a really kind of magnetic power to have. And you being like that will enable other people to be like that. It's leading by example, really, isn't it?

38:18So Decker, my lovely friend Decker, who wrote this book about her husband dying in front of her. She had two small children and he drowned in front of her in Jamaica. And she wrote an amazing book called All at Sea. And when I was writing this, because my book's very honest, I said, gosh, I don't know if I can do this. there's you know I kind of you know can I share these things which I still feel a kind of residue of shame about you know I feel really fearful about it and she said the thing is else when you take off all your clothes and you walk down the street you allow everyone else to take their clothes off too yes and you know you feel it's shameful because people kind of haven't done it or they don't usually talk in this way but when you do it you suddenly give everyone else a magic permission pass to say oh yeah I also feel like that I love that and that I find really powerful as a way of explaining, you know, why I've been as honest in the book as I have.

39:08Because I think people were surprised because I'd had the big cloak and been the big executive that I was so raw about how I felt about being made redundant and, you know, everything that's happened since. But I just kind of thought, if you're going to write a book, you might as well share your truthiest truths or it's not worth it, right? I mean, how did it feel at the end? What was it like when you gave it to somebody else to read? Well, I tell you what I think helped is I write this newsletter every week called The Queen Ager. So I kind of road tested quite a lot of it in that. And what I do really feel about this book is that it is an absolute kind of testament to all the amazing women who've come to Noon over the last three years.

39:49And it's because of their love and support and the kind of joy that they've taken in my story or the optimism that they've been able to take from someone like me going through this and being sad and kind of coming out the other side. that gave me the confidence to write the book because I kind of, I feel like I've got a kind of Praetorian guard of women who really get it and I'm kind of writing it for them. I kind of feel like it's kind of wrung everything out of me. Everything I ever knew that I thought was true is in that book. What do you want for your life for the next 10, 20 years? I really want the story to change.

40:26I really, really want to create a new map, a new set of signposts for women about what life can be from 50 onwards and that this is the age of becoming that they're not done yet they're not on the scrap heap that you're never too old it's never too late that you can really kind of manifest a new and joyous life for yourself and that that's really not impossible and I've seen so many women do it or on in the process of doing it and you can go back and follow your dreams and you know all of that stuff is possible and and find your tribe it's like you were saying you know going to try and find other people I remember when I turned 45 I discovered a Facebook group called um 50 AF oh yes that sounds good and I got on there it was the most inappropriate saucy naughty hilarious and I thought oh god these women are so funny it's not all like oh god I feel awful I did it it was rude and yeah like funny and people were talking about these outrageous clothes that they were buying and that's all oh life can be like that yeah yes and that's what we need to that's what we need to show I think we have to model a different way of being a woman you know between 50 and 75 you know and beyond that we can that that we are we have such an opportunity we're so lucky that we have this longevity this longevity dividend it's actually the biggest dividend of all the scientific revolutions we've doubled the length of time that people live in this century and we'd like the first generation of women to really reap the benefits of that and so it's really important to kind of my stepfather was used to say he was a psychologist he used to say we owe death a living and I really believe that then it's kind of that this can be a really amazing important rich part of life and rather than just thinking that we're you know we're tall and we've had it and no one cares about us anymore we should be really grabbing it by both hands and having a ball what what can businesses do to try and buck the trend well i think the first thing they can do is actually look hard because in business what gets measured gets done so most businesses are not even tracking how many women over 50 they've got in their businesses they don't value them and actually the research that we did shows that queen ages are behind over 90 90 percent of all household consumer spending decisions we know that we're buying stuff for ourselves for our kids for our husbands for our for our parents and yet we appear in less than 11 percent of advertising i definitely feel invisible in terms of advertising completely invisible and yet we're the ones with the money you know and i know i mean i will spend five times as much on a pair of jeans than my 21 year old does i mean they go to a thrift shop and they look fab i need all directed at the 20 it's all directed at the 21 year olds which is completely mad and that's partly because only um less than six percent of marketing and advertising uh professionals or people in it are less than six percent are over 50 so it's entirely kind of braced in the young and that's completely bonkers we're living in a society where we're lucky enough to age and yet the whole kind of message is that getting older is a disaster which is just mad since we're incredibly lucky to be to have the privilege of getting old the alternative to getting old is dying so you know i think we think that that's an important thing to kind of spell out and also that the queen age of pound you know we talked about things like the pink pound or the black pound the queen age of pound is massively valuable so i think it's really important that companies start thinking about us and they need queen agers in their companies if they're going to be able to sell to us i mean i think that the sheer economics of us should change that and also is i mean you'll know this but the number of women over 50 in the workforce yeah it's getting bigger and bigger it is getting bigger and bigger but they are hitting this really toxic cocktail of gendered ageism in the culture the midlife collision of all these things hitting together and what my friend Lucy Ryan who wrote in a brilliant book called revolting women talks about as the revolt which is just that thing of getting to this point and going oh my god I've lived by everyone else's rules for too long and I just can't be bothered anymore and wanting to shift into purpose or a sense of legacy or doing something that feels meaningful to them and I also think that this whole thing about you know the world's been set up for men and we were given the lanyard but not not really equality.

45:00If companies want to hang on to Queen Ages, they've got to really start thinking about what it is that we want. And again, our research shows that for Queen Ages, flexibility, work-life balance, 16 times more important than status or kudos. And yet at the top in those very hungry jobs, you get status. I was given a big fancy kind of corner office, but the flip side of that was I was meant to be on call 24-7. So I think that there's also a sense of us going, I think we've had enough of pleasing everybody else. What do I want to do for myself? Maybe I've got another 10, 25 good years. What does that look like for me?