Lesson 4.3: Your personal story [transcript]

So here we are on Rebrand Yourself™, sing the best song of yourself. And today we’re going to be talking about the personal bits. Now for all of us, by the time we hit 50, there will be some stuff which has been really painful for all of us. And if it makes you feel any better, I know from our research for NOON that by the time we get to 50, over half of us have been through at least 5 of divorce, bereavement, redundancy, the death of elderly parents, our own health challenges, some kind of domestic, financial or other abuse, you know, so just to put this in context, we all know that by this time we’ve been through a lot of stuff.

And if you’re thinking, “Crikey! My life’s been a bit of a car crash”, well, join the club. So don’t feel bad about that. It’s one of the really interesting things about what we see at NOON is that everybody’s in that boat. So what we’re trying to do here is not kind of ring the withers of our, of our reader. We’re not trying to kind of make them get out the tissues. What we’re trying to do is to think about our personal life as a kind of prism for the qualities that we bring to where we are now. 

So for me, a massive bit of my life, even though I’m 54, is that my parents divorced when I was 6 and I came from this very high-profile family. You know, I’m not showing off, but just so you understand that my, you know, my aunt was the first-ever female director of prosecutions. My stepmother, Dame Tessa Jowell, was the woman who brought us the Olympics. You know, my mum was a university lecturer and was a bit, was a high flyer so my, my dad was in and out of the newspapers – that’s another story. But basically the only, the only currency which counted in my childhood was achievement. It was about being, I was being driven to be as successful and as high profile as possible.

And I lived in this kind of age of achievement state for much of my first five decades. And that is really important because I think it’s really, it’s really important in understanding the shift that I’ve been through in midlife. And what I care about now is only really understandable in the context of where I came from. So that’s a kind of, it’s like a kind of nod to, to where we came from, what the context is. And as you’ll see I don’t necessarily use that in my, in my cv, but it’s certainly a reason for why I’ve had this midlife pivot and why I about it so much. 

One of the other real fundamentals of my life was that I married my husband. I met my. My husband ‘Dezza’, Derek, when I was 26. I was backpacking around India. I came back saying I’ve fallen in love with the juggler. Everybody thought I was mad. I was the feature editor of The Telegraph. But I also think that he was a real rock for me. And that was a really important moment in me becoming the person that I am now was that I always feel that kind of my awakened self, the bit of me that was more kind of mature or some deep core of me recognised that my husband was the right person for me, although he really looked unlikely at the time. And we’ve been together for nearly 30 years.

And he’s always been the rock. So I was the breadwinner, but he looked after the house, he looked after the kids. And I think I realised quite early on in my life that I, probably because of all the achievement stuff in the paragraph above, the way I felt safe really was to have somebody who looked after me, but to be in charge of earning the money. And also I had a lot of energy and a lot of things I wanted to do in the world. So it suited us much better for me to be the breadwinner and for him to be at home. 

But I think it’s important for me in terms of my purpose and also my, it’s important in terms of not being afraid to buck the trend is would be what I would say about that. It’s not just that I went off to India and there I was working at The Telegraph and I’d married this juggler. The point was that I never needed to conform and I was prepared to make my own decisions and to do things that other people thought was a bit weird. And that’s been a through line for me all the way through my life. And that thing of when, you know, you know, follow that instinct, that for me has been absolutely crucial both in my work as a journalist, which is often very instinctual about what stories we’re going to connect with people, and also a real, deeply known truth that the things that we really care about will connect with other people.

And that that passion, that authenticity of kind of purpose is a superpower, is a kind of real kind of point of connection. So I put that personal bit for me is really important. So that I was, I lived in this age of achievement. I always felt that achievement was the only thing that got me love, but I also had a kind of instinct that I could follow my own path and that I needed what I needed, and I didn’t really care what other people thought.

And then also a big kind of personal bit for me is this massive personal disaster was how I felt when I was made redundant from The Sunday Times, the achievement matrix came down. I was humbled, humiliated, and it pushed me into a new phase. I reconnected with nature. I swam in the cold water every day. I discovered a spiritual side to myself. I became an expert in change and transition, which I wrote about.

So you can see through this, that this personal bit is extremely core and is, in a way, you can see why we do it in this order as well. So you have the kind of professional stuff which is also underwritten by a kind of personal, these kind of personal shifts. Because it’s often the personal shifts which also then kind of push us into professional shifts.

And that’s true of, you know, I did Joy’s matrix with her. And it’s really true for you, isn’t it? That the personal shifts also created professional shifts. So you went to live in Switzerland because your husband is a rower and was coaching people out there, and that also then made you realise, so tell us quickly, the story about you going to Switzerland. 

Joy: Yeah, well, I think just to say, on the personal side, this is definitely where you and I had to have a conversation about what to keep in and what to take out, right. So I’d had sort of two personal tragedies as a child and a young adult with my parents. And we decided to keep one of them in because it was relatively more central to who I became and then leave one out, which didn’t really have the connection to the through line to what I’m building now, which is a business that helps women, very similar to Eleanor.

But for me, the Switzerland piece was really key to my story, because here I was a trailing spouse. I’d moved out to Switzerland. I was living in a country where I didn’t speak the language, and also in a country that didn’t value women working. So as soon as I got married, I had no job anymore, and I ended up looking for a job. And I got into a recruiter’s office, and I’m in the recruiter’s office, and I’m prepping for a big interview.

And they said, “Right, do you have any more questions?” And I said, “Well, I have one question.” And they said, “What’s that?” And I said, “What’s the maternity leave policy in Switzerland?” Because no one had talked to me about that. And the guy, the recruiter, stood me up, walked me out of the office to the back of the office where the fire escape was, not even to the front of the office, and he said, “I can’t help you.” and he left me there.

You know, and that was such a critical moment for my career, because at that point my whole career went up in flames similar to yours, you know, in that sense. I mean, similar in the sense that it felt like it was all going up in flames and my life was over in terms of, you know, my career. But that was also the catalyst for me saying, “Okay, there’s got to be other people like me and I can help them.” Right? So that’s story became really powerful and much more powerful than a personal event that happened to me when I was younger. 

Yeah, so this is what we’re doing, is we’re tracing the through line. So for Joy, that moment in Switzerland, and she was there because she’d followed her husband, and then she suddenly realised, “okay, there are lots of other women in Switzerland who are being prevented from working because it’s such a kind of patriarchal culture.” And the next thing that you did was you set up a whole community for kind of trailing spouses, didn’t you? And a whole kind of, you know, things for them to do in Switzerland. 

So I think often what we’re showing, what we’re trying to say is, with this personal stuff, is we’re not trying to say, okay, we want you to kind your heart on a sleeve, on your sleeve and kind of, you know, being snotty, tears all over your CV. It’s absolutely not that. But there are some crucial points in our lives which then send us off on a different trajectory. And the lessons that we learn through those very, very hard, you know, often things which are really hard and tough. I’m sure when you left that office in Switzerland, you were absolutely gutted. I mean, I can absolutely tell you that it felt like I’d been pushed off a roof at The Sunday Times and I hadn’t got my job that I’d had for 25 years, which had defined me, it felt absolutely awful. 

But I can see now that it was incredibly important in terms of the kind of drive and the insight, I think, is what both of us got from that. So the insight for me from having been made redundant, writing about it, having like 10,000 people get in touch going, “it happened to me too”, it’s like you suddenly think, “okay, there’s something in this,” because it’s something that the mainstream is not seeing, is something that I realise is important. And if I realise it’s important, it’s going to be important to other people. So what we’re also trying to capture in this whole Matrix and Singing the Song of Yourself process is, what are those absolutely critical fulcrum moments for you?

And when I was interviewing, you know, all these kind of grandees for years, that was always what I was looking for in the interview. It’s that, okay, what are the moments when you suddenly become you suddenly get the insight which makes you the person that you then become? Because that’s what the person at the dinner party or the person on your CV or the interviewer wants to know. It’s like, why are you turning up in this incarnation now? Where does that come from? What are its roots? And that’s a refrain that goes all the way through your life. And I think in order to get that, we need to do some quite deep excavating. That’s what we’ve been doing through this course, to really work out what those moments are, because they’re not always, they’re not always that obvious.

When Joy and I were talking, we were going through her thing, it was suddenly, that was obviously for me talking to her, it’s a crucial moment when all these different things came together. And Joy had another massive thing in her personal life when her real mum had a massive ski accident and was sent into a coma when you were 2, 4, little, yeah, And we decided that that was really relevant because Joy had an experience of two different mothers. One who worked and kind of had a life in the world and had agency and could do things, and one who was very much disadvantaged because she couldn’t do that. And actually what we realised was that Joy’s whole purpose has been really driven by trying to give lots of other women the skills that her step-mum, her kind of second mum had, which her real mother didn’t.

And so she’d grown up with a pattern of that. So that, again, is very important when you’re beginning to try to explain to people who you are, what your drivers are, why it is you’ve done what you’ve done. And of course, by the time we get to, you know, our mid-50s,  or our 40s or wherever we are, there’s more water under the bridge. And also, it’s important if we’re going to come across as kind of evolved and thoughtful human beings and the kind of person that somebody might want to employ, that we’ve thought these things out. We understand where we come, we understand what the song of ourselves is. So also we can start to bring that out in others. 

Joy: Actually, as you’re speaking, I want to ask you a question. Do you think that some of the personal side, I think more so than even the professional side, has a relatability element to it? Because you’re almost trying to connect with someone on the other side. So when we were thinking through my stories, and then actually, as I’m thinking through your stories, there’s an element of, you know, like you said, 10,000 women got in touch and said, “I’ve been made redundant.” 

You know, and when I tell my story of being walked to the back of the office and, you know, to this fire escape and being left at the top of the stairs and told, “I can’t help you”, people say the same thing to me. Like, you know, “I got sidelined in an office” or “I got let go because I didn’t comply” or whatever it was. So I think there’s, I think now that we’re revisiting this and talking about it, I think there’s actually some sort of relatability on the personal side as well. You know, like when you’re talking about your parents getting divorced at 6 – a lot of people can relate to that. And they can relate to what an impact a childhood divorce had on them. 

I think that’s absolutely spot on. And what we’re trying to do here, and what I was always trying to do when I was writing up interviews, is you’re finding the emotional nuggets of connection, yeah. Because most people won’t remember necessarily what you said or the facts, but they’ll remember how you made them feel. And they’ll remember, you know, also people remember stories, so they probably would remember Joy’s story of being in Switzerland and being shown to the, you know, the tradesman’s entrance as it were, because everybody’s had a moment in their life where they feel a bit humiliated.

And I think part of showing that you’re a great communicator is being able to also demonstrate the wisdom that comes from having been in some tough spots and having to do some work on yourself, and also realising how you can use those moments to help other people or the insight that they’ve generated in you. Because that’s also what people warm to. And when we’re thinking about singing the song of ourselves, we’re also trying to dig into the key nuggets. That’s really what the Matrix is, it’s like the nine nuggets which sum up these kind of crucial bits of your life. And you’re trying to dig out those nuggets because they’re the bit that really make you who you are, you know, they’re the bit that make you tick. And they’re the bit that when you sit down at dinner and, you know, say you’re sitting next to someone or you’re at a networking event and you talk about that, they’ll remember you. That will connect because they’ve also been through a similar kind of emotional journey.

So what I’m trying to do when you’re Singing the Song of Yourself is it’s not just like “when I was seven, I learned to do this.” What we’re picking out are the most important kind of absolute, like, pivoting bits that go through you. If you think about yourself like a stick of rock – like the stick of rock at the beach, you know, if you go to Brighton beach and it says Brighton all the way down and it’s pink – what these crucial nuggets of your life do is show what those qualities are which make you essentially you. And that’s what we’re trying to dig out. So that’s why things which way you might look at it and think, “I’m never going to talk about that on my CV,” actually, some of those moments are the fulcrums, the moments where we’ve actually maybe been quite humiliated or things have been quite awful.

And that is what people can relate to because everybody’s got those. But most people are brave enough to talk about them and having that courage makes you stand out. And that’s the point of the Mills Matrix™.