“Conversations from my Duvet”

This one is more lengthy than the others. This is because we are taking a little break before we head into an evolved version of Conversations. Season 2, if you will, is on it’s way. I spend for first few minutes explaining what’s happening. The content of this episode though, is one which you will have experience of 100%. I recount my experience of my period, which I call bleed these days, my first sexual encounter and pouring my diluted blood onto our plants in the garden as ceremony. I welcome your thoughts, as always and look forward to welcoming you into the next part of the journey as it comes. Please leave me a review or tap on the stars if you are on Apple Podcasts. This really helps other people find the podcast and is the most wonderful way you can endorse it. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. Thank you to Sophie Hargraves, @the_rebel_mother whose Made in Womb documentary and exhibition is of invaluable value. We bleed. Together. We live. We grow. We thrive.

The final one for June. Skirting around the concept of who we are, amongst other things. You’ll ask yourself who you are and who you are doing stuff for several times in your life, and that’s totally ok. We change, so I think it’s natural to have these moments of reassessing how we play out our lives. This is particularly prevalent when you have your own business (new or otherwise) and you see yourself as the brand, the unique quality people ‘choose’ YOU for. I share how inspired I am by the women who share their inner truth, their art, and how it is so rare for people to do this, to show who they really are to the world. I see this inner truth work as THE way to finding your authentic, unique path and that’s the way I want to operate. I want to speak from my heart and I want to feel. Within all these considerations, there is mention of my mind struggles in terms of whether I will return to the police or not - what it means financially, professionally, emotionally? These are honest deliberations around a vocation I chose to go into in 2003 and how I can’t go back if I don’t feel 100% committed because otherwise, I’m doing the public a massive disservice. At the time of journaling these 2018 conversations, Mark and I found ourselves speaking and opening up about money more that we ever had. As a subject, money is huge and all of us have a story around what it is to have or not have it. Any of you had to make big career leaving decisions that impacted your life hugely on lots of levels? I’d love to hear from you.

This one is for you if you are running your own gig and having doubts as to how to market yourself, how to set goals.  You may not get the exact answer you are searching for, but you get a real, authentic, true account of a talented woman (just like you are), who has got the option of taking the ‘easy’ road of going back in to the police for a regular wage and paid holidays, who instead has chosen to see what it can be like to go your own way.  It’s not easy.  For every person you follow with their own business, for every thought that they are doing SO much better than you, I ask, how do you know?  This is me, back in 2018, being honest, scared and ashamed about the lack of clients and the lack of money. When you look ahead and have a vision board, or goals – do you actually think about each one and going into WHY that specific goal is important to YOU?  Is it something you feel so deeply that you feel lighter at the prospect and it sounds true to you, or is it a goal that you hear thousands of other ‘entrepreneurs’ spout and therefore you think that you ‘should’ also have… Yes, that’s what this episode is about.  Getting real and authentic in your business, with goals which are as unique as you are.  I share my personal ones with you from a couple of years ago (not a lot of people do this, and this is where I believe the power of this podcast to be.  Truth, that we tend to conceal behind the perfect social media photo #lovinglife)  What is remarkable though, is that lots of these have now come to fruition.  Evidence based truth.    Get in touch with comments and as ever, please leave me a review, and/or rating on apple podcasts so that this podcast can reach more women like you.  You are amazing.

There are days you feel like a complete imposter. Time to own up. Time also to look at why you are involved in what you are involved in. Where does it come from? What’s the real block? For me, it’s going back to the old story of “all looks no substance”, believing I’m a bit thick behind it all. This journal entry flips the script. From feeling unqualified to teach pregnancy yoga to laying down on paper and relaying exactly why my own experiences of pregnancy have brought me to this precise moment. Thank you for tuning in. Please leave me a review or a rating if you enjoyed this. This is me with my cap in my hand. Lots of love, Sophie x

At its heart, this episode boils down to exploring our willingness to deep dive into ourselves to explore our uniqueness. The episode covers themes around personal accountability, and how we are much, much more than our ‘qualifications’. We have become complacent and reliant solely on the piece of paper in order to determine someone’s worthiness or indeed, as a way to generalise someone’s skills. (PS: not saying I’d go to a surgeon who has only an NVQ in papier mâché...) I’m talking about digging back in to our creative reserves to dust off the gold that makes US unique and individually special. This topic invariably leads onto the competition we feel with other women. Where does this come from? Who has taught us this? Are there times you feel more or less confident around other women? Have you questioned why? We are all so capable and full of all the skills to blow ourselves away with our awesomeness. That’s the world I want to live in.