Ladies, the problem isn't your confidence; it's that confidence in women isn't rewarded | From tall poppy to OBE with Lauren Currie, UPFRONT

0:00Welcome to Strategy and Tragedy, the UK's top 20 business show. If this is your first time here, then welcome. You are in the right place, either as a first time founder or a budding entrepreneur. And if you are tuning back in, then a very warm welcome. I'm so happy to have you here. And I'm so happy to interview my next guest, Lauren Curry, who is the six time serial entrepreneur, founder of Upfront on a mission to upskill 10 million women when it comes to their confidence. previously chairperson of Pregnant and Screwed, now newly published children's book author, Lauren, I have to check my notes because the list just goes on and on.

0:37She was awarded an OBE for her services in design and diversity. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Design Week and Creative Review. The accolades just go on and on and on. Lauren, an absolute pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for coming on Strategy and Tragedy. I'm so happy to be here, Steph. Thank you for inviting me. And I'm so happy that we are so well coordinated. We need to dive in properly to your story because there's so many things I want to talk to you about. So my more loyal listeners will know that I usually end my conversations with my traditional closing question.

1:08I'm going to bring it up front and centre. front and centre which is the name of our conference and centre oh is there some psychological manipulation there bringing it up front and centre for this interview lauren what is one tragedy that's taught you an unforgettable lesson so there is a tragedy that almost i feel like it follows me around every day that motivates me to do the work that i do and when i think about the world that i want to live in the world that i I want my son and his children to live in. I think we're all on the same page. There's a lot of change that needs to happen, particularly in terms of equity and equality.

1:50And the tragedy that breaks my heart every day is I believe that part of how we create that world is through art and business and creativity. It's through people having an idea and putting that idea into the world, whether that is a business idea, a product line a fashion brand an invention a piece of technology a song a novel and the tragedy is that the women who are having those ideas are so consumed with the belief that their ideas are not good enough that those ideas never see the light of day and so all of the creativity and the economic power that we need to create the change that we need to see in the world doesn't happen because women are so convinced their ideas aren't good enough and to me that is a tragedy that breaks my heart and why I'm motivated to do work and keep showing up in the world every day to build products and services that show women and teach women that their ideas are good enough exactly as they are and these are the steps you need to take to execute upon those ideas yeah what's that saying to have the confidence of mediocre white man right so lovely segue into up front but before we talk about your current business business number six I want to stick with this for a second does this tragedy have its roots in something more personal to you like why this in particular did something happen that's broken your heart around this why this one in particular well I think when I look back on the businesses that I've built and the work that I've done all of my work has always been in and around social change and trying to make the world a better play right you know I've worked my first business with was a service design consultancy we were one of the very first in the UK to be offering service design consultancy focused on the public sector so how do we make the NHS be more human-centered how do you make education services be more human-centered i built a product to make it easier for local communities to talk to their local police force before we had social media i've worked in the health space maternity rights space and the red thread that goes through it all is women's lack of confidence hindering their growth their community's growth and ultimately growth that benefits everybody because confidence is a catalyst for change it's a catalyst for leadership it's a catalyst for difficult conversations it's a catalyst for business building it's the spark that creates all of these things that have consequences of monumental impact and so that is why I decided to focus on confidence because it is the red thread that I see that runs through all those spaces.

4:51So it's more of a macro observation across all of these different points in the pattern as opposed to like one specific. Yes, and it's also a pattern that I see in my own life and in my mum's life, my girlfriend's lives, you know, the women that I'm close to, my peers. You know, I am still very much on a confidence journey. I always will be. You know, I always have to caveat things when I deliver keynotes and give lectures to say, please don't put me on a pedestal as I've solved the confidence conundrum because it can't be solved. You know, you can't graduate confidence. It's not a thing that you're ever finished with.

5:31And that can be frustrating and I think a bit exhausting to think about. But I think it's also quite liberating to understand that it's a lifelong journey. And as you grow, your confidence challenges just change shape. It's like you don't ever get to a place where there aren't any, but you do get to a place where you are really well equipped with tools and strategies and mindset principles that make it you can keep going and keep growing. Hey, gang, super quick interruption, but I promise it's worth it. I want to tell you really quickly about One Day. It's an 18 month MBA program, but get this, you literally start and scale your business for real alongside it.

6:11I am a mentor on the program. If you've been following this show for a while, then you may have picked up on the fact that I work there as well. That's one of my other jobs. And I absolutely love it. I've been with the business now for two years, probably a little bit more by the time you're listening to this. And that's why I can say with utmost conviction, being on the inside track, how good this program is. So you've got the curriculum, the content, the learnings, the resources, the frameworks that add the structure to the chaos and the mess and give you that much needed direction. on how you can move the needle week on week on week and get closer to your entrepreneurial goals.

6:42Beyond the actual content and curriculum, you've got one-to-one mentorship. So with myself, for example, and then best of all, I would argue the community. You get access to other entrepreneurs that are on the same journey that you are because entrepreneurship is tough. And so being surrounded by other people that are on the same journey, who can pick you up when you're down, it can also be helpful in terms of sharing other learnings, resources. Honestly, I cannot talk any more highly about this program. I'm going to drop the link in the show notes. Check it out if you're a first time founder, if you're considering making that leap into entrepreneurship, or maybe if you tried something before and it didn't quite work out, you realize actually this whole entrepreneurship game is a lot harder than you expected.

7:20One day is the place for you. The frameworks, the guidance, the support, both practically, emotionally is just second to none. So check it out. Let me know what you think. Now let's get back into the episode. It's interesting you mentioned about being put on a pedestal because even for me, without even fully realising it. I'm like, Lauren is queen of confidence. Even on the way here, I wasn't even listening to the song. But knowing I was on my way to come and interview you, Lauren, the song that I just had going round in my head, do you want to guess? Yeah. Demi Lovato. What's wrong? And it's still going round in my head, right?

7:53What's wrong with being confident? Yeah.

7:59I wasn't even listening to it, but just with you in my mind. and so with that expectation that pressure that putting you on the pedestal it's like okay queen of confidence lauren curry of course you're still human there must have been so many times your confidence has been knocked are there any that you want to share and specifically how you picked yourself back up again i mean there's constant constant moments where my confidence is knocked and i think how i how i always frame it in my mind is that my expertise and my superpower is entrepreneurship and building community and it just so happens that I've focused on confidence as the theme for this business and these communities that I'm building the moments where my confidence is knocked sometimes come fast and heavy and I am in a place now where I have such a depth of understanding of how confidence works where it comes from how you cultivate it in yourself and other people that those moments don't affect me the way that they used to.

9:07For example, being on stage and you're tech not working. And I'll tell you a story that happened last Wednesday. I was delivering a live class. 1 ,032 people had signed up to come along. There was 642 women in the room. And we're on Zoom in an online learning space, which I'm sure lots of you will be familiar with and I was about 10 minutes in I was still in the introduction and a woman's microphone was off whether this was intentional or not and she shouted so clearly every single person heard her I'm not listening to this anymore and I just said okay, bye and then kept going and didn't really think about it but afterwards my team were like and they were like You did not even miss a beat.

9:58And later, one of the participants wrote about it on LinkedIn to say, that moment taught me everything I need to know about Upfront, about Lauren's teaching style, about what I'm going to learn in this bond. Confidence in action. And I felt proud of myself because it wasn't, that's not something that I could have rehearsed or engineer or practice. But my reaction in that moment was kind of, this is hilarious that that's just happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Move on. Exactly. Whereas now I can take a moment and think about it. I can see that for others that could have been a, oh my, you know, I need to defend myself.

10:34I need to over-explain. I need to ask her to send me feedback. So that was a very kind of tangible moment that happened recently. I think the bigger picture challenge that I'm working through at the moment is what academics call the likeability penalty, which is this notion that the more successful a woman becomes, the more likely she is to be criticised particularly by other women. Did you hear of the unlikable women's summit? Yes, exactly. And that's something that I have experienced, continue to experience and I often talk about this notion of tall poppy syndrome which is how academics have studied and coined this phrase of when women stand tall above the parapet as a tall poppy they are much more likely to be you know the other people are going to try and cut them down so much so that I have a tall poppy tattooed on me which I got this time last year because the work that I've been doing with myself is rather than showing up from a place of what are they going to say and what are they going to think it's showing up from a place of I am a tall poppy that is I have always been that I've always been a tall poppy since I was four years old and I always will be it's part of how I see the world it's part of my ambition and my creativity and so I want to really own that and be proud of that rather than trying to live a life where I'm trying to strategize and come up with plans on how I'm going to respond to these people who are trying to cut me down because they will and they will continue to do that and that's that's okay because my focus is on myself and the communities that I'm here to serve and the impact that I want to have in the world yeah so a lot of these are very relatable and sound a little bit easier said than done of course if somebody says something that you know nobody quite like or you know I feel like everyone's a bit of a people pleaser we've all got at least some sort of people pleaser within us so I'd love to dive into some of those strategies because even listening to that hilarious remark on that zoom call that you did there's something that jumps out at me is just this kind of water off a duck's back just this like move on next move on next but linking it back to this people pleaser is we are inherent we are all social creatures right like anthropologically we've evolved from with tribes so that's where obviously if somebody doesn't like us it can feel like death it can feel existential so I guess first of all is like how do we overcome that people pleaser within us i think part of it is understanding where those feelings come from and you've articulated part of where that comes from really well as you know my partner studied evolution so we have lots of interesting conversations about this and that women are rewarded and encouraged to be nurturing and more aware of is everyone in the group okay right and we are more likely to prioritize being liked rather than respected but what i think is really exciting is we have the consciousness and the intellect to be able to have this conversation and to choose differently and one of our strap lines up front which we have on badges and on tote bags is may our confidence upset them and it's interesting because people have been through the bond and people are in the upfront community are like yes like they they see that that is part of this work and they see that people not liking your new confidence is inevitable like that is what will happen but people who are new to up front might come and say oh I don't want to upset anybody who's them who am I who am I upsetting and so how I always encourage people to think about it is it is not your job to make other people feel comfortable and there are ways that you can make other people feel comfortable without putting yourself down so i think people see it as two choices like everybody's going to be really upset or i have to kind of downplay myself to make everybody feel comfortable and that's just not it's not the case because when i talk to women one-on-one about this they'll say but i don't want other people in the room to feel intimidated and i want everybody in the room to feel comfortable and i want everybody in the room to feel safe to speak up and it's like yes you can do all of that whilst maintaining your own respect and your own boundaries and your own dignity without making fun of yourself without saying sorry all the time without slipping in comments that you're unprepared or you're not very smart or you're late or you're not wearing the right shoes or whatever this these stories look like so i think it's something about understanding this is a systemic societal problem it's not about you as an individual and the more we have these conversations about tall poppy syndrome about the likeability penalty you know it's like I'm not here to be liked I'm here to create impact I'm here to be respected I'm here to be kind I definitely want to get into the systemic thing in just a sec but riffing off what you just said there personally in my experience I've actually found like flipping it completely on its head that by being more confident maybe as a woman in particular I make other people around me feel even more comfortable I think especially as a leader because you've got somebody that's clear direction that's reliable so it's that kind of what about if being your most confident best self made everyone else around you feel even more comfortable if that's what you're worried about and that is what the data tells us that's what happens right so for every person who might feel jealous or intimidated or insecure there will be 10 people who feel wow i could be that exactly what would it look like if i emulated that person and we know that when people feel more comfortable and secure they're more likely to do good work they're more likely to be happy a really great example of what you've just shared is stand-up comedians so if you imagine going to a stand-up comedy gig and the comedians you know mumbling sweating i mean you just want to die you're like i need to get me out of you because you're so embarrassed feel it for the person where if the person stands up grabs the mic right instantly they're telling you i'm fine yeah i'm fine you're fine we're gonna have a good time and you're like yeah it's fine because you're setting the tone exactly people feel it people feel that energy and it's the same at work it's the same at home it's the same in parenting and it's not about being a perfect person who's always i've got this you know it was like what happened in the webinar last week what happened the week before when my tech failed on the stage like things go wrong but you're okay nobody's dying everything's fine yeah and you can just hold that moment and let everybody know that you're okay and if you're okay they'll be okay do you encourage your i know you call them bonders And again, we keep talking about it.

17:39So we will dive in in a set gang. But do you encourage, do you talk about the, what is it, like the zones of comfort and getting into that stretch zone? Yes. Is there any more on that you can like pushing, keep on pushing those boundaries and keep kind of coming out of your comfort zone to increase your confidence? Absolutely. Confidence is a practice. So we talk about confidence as a practice of building new muscle the same way you would build new muscle at the gym through a fitness regime. and that muscle only starts to stretch when you are outside your comfort zone it's like you can't build confidence sitting at a desk behind the screen doing the things that you've that you've always done and it's not about putting yourself in positions that feel so scary you know you're throwing up the night before in sweating buckets it's like what is a what's a healthy a healthy stretch so maybe you're someone who goes to meetings and doesn't say very much so you decide okay in the next week I'm going to say something in every single meeting I'm in and that something might be not super significant but you're practicing the muscle of saying something of letting your voice take up space in those rooms then the next week it might be I don't even have a photograph on my LinkedIn profile because what if Andy that I had a crush on in nursery school comes to find me on LinkedIn which he might he probably won't but also he doesn't care so let's get your photo on LinkedIn so it's these we call them micro reps it's like what are these micro moments of confidence that can really start to build build a practice love that love the micro reps as a so I'm a mentor to MBA students in entrepreneurship and they are first-time founders it's the first time that they are like taking that leap so it's very much kind of that stretch uh not quite a micro rep but a little bit more and the amount of my students who I see hold themselves back men and women but from fear of don't even know what right because we haven't even given ourselves the time the opportunity to even think about it and talk about it but when you do start to open it up a little bit it is mind-blowing how much we stop ourselves from doing things because of other people so your kind of funny example there of kind of like someone I had a crush on if they see or whatever can you expand a bit more can you share any more kind of practical tips on overcoming other people's judgment their perception what will they think who are they anyway i'd love to hear you talk a bit more about that so there's an amazing quote that i love from dita von tees and she said yeah i know what you're gonna say you i can be the ripest juiciest most delicious peach in the world and there will still be people who don't like peaches I think that's the clean version.

20:21I think that is a great mantra because you can do the best work in the world in the way that is full of kindness and integrity. And there will still be people who don't like you, who don't like your work, who don't like what you stand for. That is just part of being a change maker in the world. The way that I think about it is this. there are lots of people who will have opinions on you what you do what you don't do what you say and how you say it you get to decide whose opinion matters to you so for me the opinion that matters most to me is my own what do I think of how I showed up in this podcast today so when I go to bed at night and when I do my weekly review next Friday of all the things I've done this week I'll think to myself how do I feel about how I showed up about our conversation we had about how I rehearsed prepared delivered if I feel good about those things that's the most important thing then I might think okay who else matters so my partner's opinion matters my son's opinion matters and there's maybe a friend and then a couple of professional advisors that if they called me up and said that really was not a good move you shouldn't have said that or I don't think this has landed well I would say tell me more take it on board what do you think help me learn help me improve all of the other stuff is noise so on your own opinion mattering the most out of everyone which is fantastic advice and completely agree with what's coming up for me is honestly both personally as well as some of these other incredible entrepreneurs that I mentor how do reconcile then another blocker to taking action and being more confident being perfectionism because like I'm never happy and I don't want to be okay because I don't want maybe I need to join a bond or get some help but I fear complacency so much I'd rather it's so difficult I can see you're smiling and something's coming out there but it's such a tightrope that I feel that I will I'm turning this into my therapy session now, but it's a tightrope between almost in my mind, not even perfectionism, but like, you know, striving and wanting to do better.

22:49And that wasn't quite being nitpicky about certain things versus that complacency. And just like, I don't want to get too comfortable because I know myself, I know I could get too comfortable and it scares me. So I'd rather veer on this side of the tightrope. so how do you reconcile that your opinion is one that matters the most but when you're a bloody perfectionist that's never happy so have you ever been in a place where you've been complacent and comfortable and lost opportunities um it's so rare that i give myself the opportunity to do that that there isn't a lot of statistic the short answer the right answer is no what she means is no you are I'm so scared so far away so far away from that place like people who worry about that what you've just described that fear it's like the question I always get asked is I'm so so scared of being arrogant terrified of somebody that doesn't worry me actually I feel like I could be the most arrogant woman and I'd be nowhere near a mediocre man people who are ruminating and obsessing over never being called arrogant yeah yeah so far right because they're so worried about don't ever think about it it never crosses their mind people who are being complacent who are not challenging themselves don't have these thoughts are not having this conversation right so there's work for you to do around your identity it's like you need to own and accept the lived reality of the type of person that you are you are a person who does things you are a doer you are a creator you push yourself outside your comfort zone i don't know you super well but i'm going to guess you always have been that type of person that is not going to change and then the fit we're gonna put the spotlight back on you in a sec but then this is where it's problematic i hear you it makes a lot of sense yeah and this isn't the first time someone's tried to tell me this yeah i apologize but my problem is is because i've i'm so scared to allow that to happen that i'm like well the only reason i have been that type of person is because of those fears you know so it's integrated within that you see what i mean so you think that's the reason you've had the success that you've had partially yeah it's not because i don't know right so i've always been too scared we do know okay you know that we we do know that you are you are driven if you were to do a really deep dive into what you're driven by in your values why you do your work what motivates you to do your work that is not driven by what if one day i become lazy you know you're driven by impact you're driven by creativity relationships financial success impact all these things yeah and it's a bit like it reminds me of conversations i have with artists in the bond who'll say they think that their success is because they've struggled so much like that's right i've had the success or you meet corporates corporate women in the bond who are like the reason they've had their success is because they've burnt out so many times and so you're attaching that's the price to pay yes like i wouldn't have got this good stuff without that bad stuff and so the the thing we need to unlearn which is all of the work we do in the bond is about unlearning much more than it is learning new things we have to unlearn this idea that to create something really powerful and useful in the world there needs to be some sort of pain and negativity attached to that and you know what that ties into is deservedness is to feel like you deserve it i've had these but like i have this promotion this gig and then that ties into the confidence because you you don't you're lacking the confidence to own and be okay with that role with that creative success whatever it is so it's almost like the pain the burnout the struggling the suffering is the price to pay to help you collect enough evidence that you deserve of it it's like this internal narrative right and the other way you can think about it is okay let's let's say your theory's real so let's say in six months you're going to be oh i've not been gone to work for two weeks there's no money in my bank account i'm not getting any inbound emails i've just took my foot off the ball completely it's like worst case scenario like what would happen then you'd figure it out it's so unknown to me you would literally figure it out you figured out everything else it's like i people say to me are you not scared because my partner works for my business and we have a young son we live in sweden we don't have any support system we both come from very working class backgrounds there's no inheritance waiting in the wings and all our eggs are in this business he's basket you know it's like this is our this is our son's future this is our how we make our livelihood and folk will say that's just terrifying like what if it doesn't work what if it all goes horribly wrong and i've gotten to a place now with my in my entrepreneurship journey where i think if that happens i was build something else yeah and i know that it would work and it would be a success of some shape and kind because i've done it so many times and because i trust myself i trust my skills and my abilities and you're the same it's like what what would the worst case scenario be and when you really deeply believe that you would be okay in that worst case scenario then it because it's not a fear anymore that it's not a worry anymore because why would it be you would figure it out it's like another quote that comes to mind i hope i don't butcher it but there's that quote about the bird on the branch does this ring any fast i was hoping you'd save me on that one it's something about how like the bird doesn't fear the branch breaking from underneath it sounds good though so it's like the bird doesn't fear the branch from breaking beneath its feet because it trusts its wings to fly beautiful that's what i mean that's what it is i'll have to look it up and borrow that for next interesting i love how this is like semi conversation around confidence versus you know therapy or kind of mixed in here i'm sure your bond sessions they must be so therapeutic must be so emotional i can really imagine um so thank you for giving me a bit of a taste of that i've always got so many other questions i want to ask you one of the other things i wanted to ask we mentioned about sort of the systemic issue especially bringing it back to like confidence in women in particular i loved your quote i'm checking my notes here so i do get this one right the problem is not that women aren't confident it's that confidence in women is not rewarded they have a rational valid reaction to a system that is penalizing their confidence so I would love for you to expand on that yes and it's a very intentional strapline that I use a lot in my in my keynotes and in my lectures because especially now bear in mind I've been doing this upfront work for 10 years 10 years ago we were not talking about confidence the way we are now we definitely weren't talking about it from a systemic intersectional perspective and that is one of the reasons that I built Upfront and saw a huge gap to create something like Upfront 10 years ago because all of the conversation around confidence the products and the webinars and the training most of them were built by men and they were preaching this kind of fake it till you make it power pose business suits model of confidence and then on the other side you had kind of body breath vibrations crystals which i think both of them are not fit for purpose we need something rooted in science and rooted in reality and the reality is that we live in a world where 90 of people have a negativity bias towards women and that is a statistic from the united nations most recent gender report is that just general like even outside of the workplace like all people what yeah it's a very scary statistic and it's one that underpins how we've designed the bonds because you can't talk about confidence and isolation from that it's like you can't confidence your way out of oppression you can't confidence you're right out of that bias so when we look at confidence in that context yes it's about you as an individual your agency your power the control and influence that you do have but it's also about your role in the system that you're part of the teams that you lead the family that you look after the friendship groups you're part of community groups political groups whatever that looks like how are you using your confidence to build the collective confidence of the women and girls around you so that future generations are not having conversations about confidence anymore so obviously the workplace is one of the most relatable and extreme examples of this so what we see at work is women being punished for having confidence in a way that white men who are often incompetent and mediocre get praised for showing confidence women of color are often penalized and punished for having too much confidence and white women are continually told that we're doing confidence wrong so you're either too confident or not confident enough and usually when I'm in theatres I'll say raise your hands if you've ever been told you're either too confident or not confident enough every hand goes up then I say raise your hand if you've been told you're both and most hands go up and that's a really good example of what academics call the double bind so we are told to be more confident and then when we display those confident behaviors we're told to tone it down we're told not that much to go back in your box so up front is changing hopefully changing the conversation that's why we talk about starting a confidence revolution to help women understand this it's not you it's not your confidence this is a systemic issue and one of the reasons it happens is we have such a narrow fixed idea of what confidence is and we are fed that story from when we're little confidence is usually masculine it's usually very loud and extroverted it's often american and you know i say this as your favorite scottish extrovert friend we live in a world that rewards extroversion and it is not good for any of us so if you don't fit that really narrow box you get feedback really early in your life that you're doing it wrong and that confidence is not something that's going to get you anywhere so my version of that story you know i was a very confident little girl as most of us all were like i always say we are all born with all of the confidence and the creativity that we need in the world and then someone or something takes it away and for me that was learning that knowing the answers putting my hand up did not make me popular other girls did not like that and i remember my teachers saying to my parents at parents night she's pretending she doesn't know the answer wow and a question i would love to your listeners to think about it's like when what age were you when you started to hide your cleverness because every woman has an answer to that question and I think I was probably seven wow so young shrinking ourselves literally making ourselves less visible so a couple of things one is I love the plot twist that I guess like the bonders what's revealed to them when they join which is this whole mission and impact all around confidence comments when you're like welcome to the club this isn't actually about making you more confident this is a systemic global issue isn't your fault so I love that immediate it's almost like you bought the book or you've seen the you bought the ticket to see the film and you're like wait what and you're like immediately like wait what's what's all this about the other thing that comes up for me is I must be part of the 10 % that crazy statistic you shared the UN with the negative bias and I would guess one of the biggest reasons for that is because I grew up in a matriarchal household which makes me wonder what kind of household did you grow up in what were your parents like so I grew up in quite a traditional male female partnership uh my mum and dad are both closet artists they're both very very creative my mum is also very entrepreneurial and I had a brother uh I think the context for me was more my school and where I where I grew up and a place called Ayrshire in in Scotland which is you know one of the most impoverished parts of the UK.

36:16So at school, there was a lot of, I think particularly on the West Coast of Scotland, and I'd be so curious to hear from your Scottish listeners, but there's a really intense culture of who does she think she is? Yeah. And it's the tall poppy thing to an extreme. Yeah. So it's like everybody has to know their place and stay in their box. And I'm just not that type of person, whether it was my red duffel that I wore when I was a teenager. I enjoyed performing. I wanted to be on stage. You know, that just did not go down well. And I was both subtly and very explicitly given a message of, you know, this is not welcome here, to the point where I once had a family, a friend of my parents suggest that I tone down the red if I ever wanted to get a boyfriend.

37:10Wow. these idiots apologies to your relative but you know it kind of links back a little bit to my question before and you know other overcoming other people's perceptions and it's like if you do stop and really think about it and you're like the classic like they them you're like who are they anyway you stop you think you're like to your point on like whose opinion matters but also like what are they doing you know it's like are they lurking on the sidelines are they a spectator of the sport like I'm a player on the field move on I think what you touched on there as well was also anthropological and so powerful is the groups in which we belong as well right and so your story of growing up in Ayrshire how can you give any advice for anyone who might feel like they're surrounded by friends family loved ones who they love they don't want to cut them off but there's maybe that they hate to admit it to themselves but there's maybe that sense of like I'm outgrowing this group and again it's that sort of fear of leaving the group it's like death I'm leaving the tribe but sometimes you do have to put yourself in that situation what advice can you give to that I think it's so important because we don't talk enough about the grief that comes with that right and for me you know entrepreneurship leadership building businesses publishing books like I don't have hundreds of friends who are doing those things yeah because there are not hundreds of women in the world doing those things period yeah never mind women who I have access to who I've built friendships and relationships with and I don't it's something that I'm it's a very kind of present thing that I'm working through and something that came to me last night so I had the launch of my children's book in London as you know congratulations and it was such a huge day and I was full of adrenaline my partner and my son were in the hotel room asleep and I was like wandering around London with my notepad and my headphones in thinking gosh this is like how do you even start to process it and there was a bit of me that could feel myself slipping into sadness of being like I'm by myself I would have loved to have friends around me at this moment you know nobody's organized a dinner for you know you kind of go into this like oh nobody and then I realized I kind of sat with it and it's like it's not that it's sad it's just singular nobody else in the world even some of my closest friends who love me with all their heart do not know the three-year journey that it's taken me to get that book to the stage where we launched it in London in front and full of a room of 70 people they just can't know yeah they weren't on that journey I'm the only person who can sit with that the aftermath of what that feels like and so it's yeah the grief thing so I think it's about recognizing when you grow when you invest in yourself when you make decisions that are not always comfortable and familiar there will be people who will be and it comes back to what we talked about earlier there will be people who are upset by that and that is a very inevitable part of it so the first thing you have to do is really trust yourself that that'll be okay and that you'll be able to deal with that and that it's not about cutting everybody off and you know never speaking to your family and friends again but you'll figure it out and you'll find a way maybe not with all of them but for the ones that really matter you'll find a way the second thing i want your listeners to think about is there are so many people in the world who will be your biggest cheerleaders and champions they will be leaving you voice notes at midnight they will be pre-ordering your book in bulk they will be bringing homemade lasagna to your door for your kids because you've been up all night pitching those people are just waiting to meet you there's so many of them and I I get a bit emotional when I think about this I'm like I've not met so many of these people yet and we're going to have so much fun in the future and they're going to support me so much and I don't even know they exist and that is a kind of vision that I connect with when I feel because it is isolating entrepreneurship is lonely being a leader is lonely and we need that's why support groups communities like the bond are so so important but I always think imagine those future cheerleaders who haven't even met you yet that's going to be amazing that's such a nice thought I've never heard that before like the people you haven't met yet how exciting that's and I can feel I can feel your energy even as you're saying it.

42:09You mentioned the bond as well. Let's segue on to that because I keep sort of teasing it. So tell my audience, what is the bond? What is it all about? What does it look like? What is it exactly? So bond is the collective noun for a group of women. And so our flagship product is called The Bond and it is a six week online learning experience that transforms your relationship with your confidence and the confidence of the women around you. We have had over 15 ,000 women from 24 time zones graduate from a bond so far. The bond is scalable across time zones and geographies, which is why organizations love the bond and bring lots of their teams into the bonds.

42:49And for individuals, you're joining a bond to join the confidence revolution. You're joining a six week program that is made up of pre-recorded content. there's a course so the course is based on all of the leading academic research around self-efficacy and self-advocacy then every week we have a live call with an expert that's like a ted talks very high energy and educational and then there's the community piece where there's lots of peer-to-peer learning offline meetups or up front and center conference and then you have 12 months access to the bond course the curriculum and the community and so they happen four times a year and we also host bonds for different topics so obviously the confidence one is the one that's most well known and the one that kind of links to the theme we've talked about today we also have a leadership bond we have a taylor swift strategy bond nice what's that one about so that is a for building your empire entrepreneurs and creatives who want to learn from the business lessons from how taylor swift has built that's amazing brand that she's built that's so cool because i think there's lots of stories and information out there about her art but nobody is studying and distilling the business decisions that she's making wow and i think how she builds brands how she serves her customers how she builds community her personal brand building there is so much we can all learn from how she's doing that and i'm a huge swifty i really want to build this it's like instead of read the book oh what's it write the book you want to read i was like i'm going to make the course That's incredible.

44:26I want to be part of. I love it. And just goes to show, right, how the rest of the world views Taylor Swift. She's the song who writes. She's an entrepreneur. She's the singer who writes these songs about her breakups. Similar to Reese Witherspoon. Yes, exactly. A credible case study with how successful. She's commercially minded. Yeah, exactly. Amazing. We also have a boys bond, which is for mums and young boys. And we're building out bonds in lots of different verticals. But the confidence bond is our most famous one. and we have incredible data and stories like this morning I met Laura Pacey who's just joined Upfront's advisory council so she did bond nine so every year we have public bonds seven eight nine ten so bond 10 kicks off on the third of November so we'll probably be in week two when this comes out in the world bond 11 will be in 2026 now Laura did bond nine because she was made redundant confidence through the floor just did not wasn't in a good place found up front came across bond nine did the program she graduated from the bond and applied for a job and is now in her very first c-suite position and that is a very common story right through to donna patterson who joined the bond when she was on maternity leave at the time she was working for morrison's who she believed had discriminated against her because she was pregnant.

45:51And due to the support of the bond and lots of other brilliant communities in her life, she decided to take Morrisons to court single-handedly. She could not afford a lawyer, so she did it by herself, using a lot of the techniques that we teach in the bond around owning the room and speaking in a way that gets people to listen. And she won. She took Morrisons to court and won. right through to bonders who start businesses, leave relationships. The average salary increase is 49%. Wow. Okay, if that hasn't sold it to you already. So I'm not sure exactly when this is going out. If it does go up before 3rd of November, then there is time.

46:32If you want to check it out, we'll be propping the links and everything in the show notes. If not, sign up to the next one. You mentioned these incredible case studies. What wonderful success stories. I do want to our final sort of chunk of this interview I do want to kind of deep dive a bit more into the entrepreneurial side of things so you mentioned you have got entrepreneurs who go through the program we talked about you know forging your own path and how lonely that can be just want to read out another statistic here up to 250 billion pounds could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled their businesses at the same rate as men so obviously there's loads of problems when it comes to access to finance unconscious bias the list goes on and on but connecting again to the confidence piece what advice can you give to let's say if there is a budding female entrepreneur that's listening she probably isn't even calling herself an entrepreneur right like even that label is like oh that's no i did that right oh other people can call me that but i can't yeah yeah yeah exactly like i'm not an entrepreneur i'm not a founder and especially if you haven't had your first taste of it but you do have that itch and there's like oh i could do this and especially now social media and the internet can you give any more advice we haven't already touched on to help them take the leap because full circle back to what you said at the very beginning around the tragedy of all of these ideas and potential businesses and products and services that don't make it out there into the real world because of how confidence has blocked you so i think for the people who are listening who are in that position we need to stop thinking about i'm either in a job doing what i'm doing now or i'm a founder or i'm an entrepreneur like that those are not the two choices it's not as binary as that as you say especially because of the internet we can do a very slow merge of those two worlds we can take baby steps little pigeon steps we can find what those micro confidence reps are so that it feels manageable and doable i think the reason that your listeners are not doing it is because that gap's just too huge it's like what how would i even what no thank you so the one way that i always tell folks to think about starting that journey is to work in the open be visible show yourself and your work to the world what does that mean that means that you are showing up normally online not always there are ways to do this in person in your own communities of course but online is going to be the most effective impactful way to do that is to get used to saying what you think having ideas and opinions online so for example say you are an employment lawyer by day and you have got an idea for a tech startup that is going to streamline part of the legal process you can start to talk about that online through one linkedin post and the post might say i've been thinking about how we might solve the problem xyz what do you think do you know anybody else who solves that problem because that's the first thing i think you're also operating from a place of this idea you've got doesn't exist it probably does in a different shape or form so your first job is to find those people take them for coffee have conversations figure out what's working and what's not working about their business so i would start to see it as what is the what's the tiny step that you can take rather than making this huge big leap you are never ever going to wake up one day and say that's it i'm ready i'm ready to hand under my notice i'm ready to start a business most businesses start by accident most businesses start very very scrappy another question i would pose to you is what is the quickest cheapest way you can prove to yourself that it's a shit idea so you can move on with your life so you can move on to your next idea maybe you make a holding page maybe you do a poll on linkedin maybe the next time you're in a taxi and they say what do you do you tell them that you're the ceo of this new company and see what their reaction is i love that you don't even know them it's a stranger exactly it's really low risk yeah low stakes environments because i think that's also for me so much of this is about our relationship with our own identity and the stories we tell ourselves and i think we see this a lot with writing and creating art building businesses like i'm not a founder i'm not an entrepreneur i'm not a writer i just write on linkedin every day i'm not really a writer if you write you are a writer if you are building something you are founding something you are a creator the stories you tell yourself especially in those early days really really matter and it is a journey that I've been on as we said like I used to cringe at the idea of being called an entrepreneur would never have called myself an entrepreneur and I don't even know where that came from I think because my education my self-education was you know it was Richard Branson James Dyson Steve Jobs these were the books I was reading these were the role models that I had at the time right I mean obviously you know I don't relate to any of those men yeah um and I wonder you know how my journey would have changed if I'd had access to women building businesses and women with backgrounds like mine building businesses i think the other thing is you just need to get over yourself and i say that with all the love in my heart it's like nobody is really watching that closely right you don't really matter that much try the thing do the thing it might work it might not work but you will never know if you don't try and i'll be damned if you want to be one of those people on your deathbed who didn't try the thing yeah you Yeah, you miss 100 % of the shots you don't take.

52:46100%. I love it. The weight that we've just given other people. And the other thing that comes to mind there is like, good news. This is not a big deal. Like bad news. Bad news. This is not a big deal. Good news. It's not a big deal. Given that you are so much further along and not putting you on a pedestal, but this is your sixth business. You are a serial entrepreneur, Lauren. Any other tips that you can give? I guess like before we wrap, can you share sort of your top pearls of wisdom as it relates to, again, in keeping with the entrepreneurial theme on like finding product market fit growth?

53:20I read that you hit the one million milestone in 23 months. So congratulations. Share your simple eight steps. Yes, download my PDF. So I think the first thing and we've kind of touched on it is bias towards action. so anybody who knows me or has ever spent any time with me I am intensely driven by doing the thing this book is a really great example it took me three years it was supposed to take me one year but I am like a dog with a bone like I will I see it through to execution every single time and I think part of that is my education I went to art school and to study product design and when you study product design you are rewarded for how many shitty prototypes you can make and so I learned in my early 20s to make scrappy models scrappy sketches how can we let's go into show let's go show it somebody at the bus stop what do you think of this idea so that's how I approach everything how I design my company how we run meetings what our policies are how I show up online instagram posts linkedin posts and also how how i built our product you know i'm here now telling a very compelling story about the bond how it works where it came from why it's called a bond at the start it was a course there was a facebook group and 20 videos uploaded to a drive and 300 people paid for that and it wasn't called a bond then and that was four years ago and every single bond gets better and better because of the second point so number one bias towards action second is obsession with customer feedback i am constantly shook at how many suppliers i engage with who never ask yeah feedback yeah same is that nobody does it's insane yeah it's like anything i do with when someone pays me to deliver a service which would usually be a keynote of some sort i will always ask for same of course the products that my business sell where we have thousands of customers using these products we have a really robust feedback framework and we read every single point and we take action on the things that need to be better we reach out and ask for more information if we want or need it and we also double down on the things that people love and things that are really great and things that matter to people because people hear feedback and think it's like oh tell me about feedback's also about what is it you really love about this thing because that's the thing that i'm then going to put on the home page yeah exactly because i can't guess what and the speech i gave in edinburgh last week when people said oh it's so great and i kept saying what was your favorite bit exactly and it wasn't the part that i had guessed and i often go around at the end and look at people's notebooks what's the bit that they've written down or when they'll take out their phones exactly they take pictures because that's the bit that i'll lead with exactly exactly so i asked the exact same question with the show you're never anyone's like i listen to what was your favorite bit yeah so that's good that's validating for me so always asking for feedback and then i think the third thing is really engaging with money making money spending money investing in yourself investing in your team being comfortable with losing money again a journey I'm still on but I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are still oh I don't know if it's going to make any money don't pay myself if you don't pay yourself you don't have a business you just have an expensive hobby right it's that you need to figure out how to make it work and if you're not paying yourselves like what's the plan okay I can afford to not be paid for 10 months at the 10 month mark I know that I need to be paid x to pay my bills when are we going to check in on that what does that look like you know being really comfortable with saying how much your product is again often and I'm shopping around for services, photographers, social media support, can I find how much it is?

57:43Put it there, front and centre. It's like if you want to join a bond, it's£749 or£125 for six months. That's how much it costs. If you want to buy my children's book, it's£10.99. I would love you to buy all of those things. Like get comfortable with owning how much your product costs, what the business model is and again it's linked back to all the things we've talked about women are culturally conditioned to feel uncomfortable around conversations about money just thinking exactly that, I was going to dive into that as well the status quo wants to keep us poor because when women have money we create economic power and when we have economic power we can build businesses, we can invest in each other we can hire each other, we can pay each other like that's what motivates me but we the you know the the powers that be of course don't want that to happen because the current state of things is what's serving them so again please don't feel embarrassed or ashamed or oh shit i've got so far to go because we live in a world that is nine that has a 90 percent negativity bias towards women there is a reason that these things are difficult the system is working exactly as it's designed to and that is not to reinforce negative stereotypes or you know to bring out my tiny violin i actually find it very liberating and motivating yeah because once you on once you have that knowledge then you can go about trying to fix it and make it better blame yourself exactly what we're doing yeah you don't you don't kind of blame yourself for it lauren incredible it's you make me think about you know everything that exists on the other side of fear right it's like all of the whether it's that fear of getting familiar with your money talking about sharing your prices taking that leap those micro reps I love it Lauren is there anything I haven't already asked you that you would like to talk about before we finish it can I talk about my new book yeah of course congratulations thank you so my children's book is called Taylor Meets the Trick and it is written for three to eight year olds and it is all about teaching young people about the patriarchy in a very fun easy gentle kind way the story is inspired by my little boy who's got long blonde curly hair people often think he's a girl and the trick has become such a incredible tool as language for our family to to talk about these moments that doesn't make anybody feel shame or embarrassed so I'll give you two examples that happened at the launch yesterday which just blew me away given that I've literally just written this book and I've been talking and working on the trick for five years one of our speakers Lee an incredible guy called Lee Chambers who is from the male ally institute turned up to the event to speak on the panel in running gear like joggies in a jumper and i met him at the door and i didn't even i thought kind of noticed but had no emotional response to that noticing it wasn't until he was on the stage that he shared with us that he'd left his suitcase on the train oh no and he had no clothes and so he had to turn up in very casual joggies and jumper and then he said and the fact that none of you have really noticed but yet had any of the women on this stage turned up like that you would have all noticed and that's the trick and I was like I was tricked so that was a funny moment double standard and not only that but all the connotations of like what a slob lazy doesn't care like all these other things that we would put on then at the end of the event so I had bought really beautiful uh bouquets of flowers to have around the venue and at the end of there was hardly anybody left everybody had gone home we're packing all the stuff up and I thought gosh these gorgeous flowers I don't want them they'll just go to waste in the venue and so I ran around the room saying would you like to take these lovely flowers home and I only asked women hmm i was tricked i was tricked so it's these moments where you know the trick is making you think there's rules for boys and rules for girls grown-ups call it the patriarchy children call it the trick in the book the teacher is tricked because the teacher thinks that taylor is a girl and the daddy has to educate the teacher and taylor there's this thing called the patriarchy in the story it's a little black squiggle that sits on your shoulder and it's really sneaky and jumps into your tummy and jumps into your heart and at the back of the book there's lots of resources for parents and families and really this is for grown-ups this is for mums and dads aunties and uncles grannies and granddads who want to build a better future for all of us so go to the trick.co you can also get it on amazon would really love you to get a copy if you have any little people in your life we'll put the links in the show notes lauren congratulations thank you so much i have to ask given i've recently discovered that you're a swifty the long long curly hair the taylor any connection of course wow you are a swifty of course she named your son good job she's got an androgynous name right so we did this we gave so obviously the way that the little boy looks my son's got long blonde curly hair he's called atlas he's not called taylor oh okay yeah but we wanted we chose taylor because taylor swift and because it's a gender neutral name but because taylor's so famous we're probably going to lean to think that's a girl yeah yeah makes sense which makes you tricked in the story and that's why we gave him a guitar mastermind that's what i would say that's very savvy lauren thank you so much for coming on strategy and tragedy an absolute pleasure and thank you so much for listening I really hope you've enjoyed this episode.

1:03:55And more importantly, I hope you're feeling a boost of confidence. I hope that you are leaving this episode feeling ready to take a micro rep, to take a small action to build your own self-confidence. Thank you so much. Episodes are weekly and I hope to see you next time.