Tell me some about some of the dark times that you’ve been through and how you managed to get through those.

I lost every single thing I owned within a matter of weeks.

I had lost my partner. I had lost my home. I had lost my job.

These were all of the pillars of my identity. Everything that defined me is gone.

So what’s left?

Who do I want to be, and how do I want to show up in the world?

No Bullsh*t Talks is a podcast for Entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs.

There’s too much bullsh*t out there, especially when it comes to business.

This podcast aims to highlight what’s true and what’s not in the world of entrepreneurship, bringing you honest and raw conversations about the rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship.

Each week, my guest will be a high-performing entrepreneur, sharing the ups and downs of their journey and helping you prepare for the road ahead while providing you with actionable insights and absolute gems of knowledge.

Stay tuned as I introduce this week’s guest.

She’s a former barrister, but now She’s a full-on entrepreneur.

She sits on boards, scouts cool startups for VC firms, is a delegate for UN Women UK, and now runs her own retreat company.

She’s a phenomenal person and someone that I’m proud to call a good friend.

I bring you the incredible Natalie Connor.

[Music]

Welcome, Natalie Connor, to No Bullsh*t Talks.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

I’m so excited to introduce you because you’ve had a very interesting kind of career.

You’re like a barrister turned VC, turned wellness expert.

You’ve been all over the place, right?

So I love to ask people to just really start off with their journey and how did you get to this moment in time where you’re at today?

Yeah, I mean, it’s been a bit of a weird journey for sure.

Yeah, I spent just over eight years practicing as a barrister, wearing a wig all day and fighting for a living.

But I realized that fundamentally, I just didn’t want to do that.

It was kind of making me into a more abrasive version of myself that I was taking home, and I didn’t like it.

It was causing me the wrong kinds of stress.

So I packed it all in and went into disruptive tech, basically because I’ve been self-employed my whole career.

I thought, who’s going to employ me without really imposing loads of rules on me?

And I thought tech, you know, they won’t know what they’re doing. They’ll be so happy to have me, which was true.

So I went in as a GC, as a General Counsel at first, and did that for a couple of years.

I bounced around a few different very cool businesses that were backed by some big VCs and led them through the scale-up phase and then through COVID, dealing with furlough and lots of redundancies and things like that.

Then I wound up at a small fintech called Sampa, which I ended up stepping up to be a director of after one of the original co-founders left sort of straight out of the gate.

I had the best time with a couple of French co-founders, Massas and Bazar, and our small team.

Last year, we sold it to Crowdcube, which is the big UK and European leader in crowdfunding, which has been awesome.

So now I do kind of a hybrid legal strategy job for them. That’s kind of the day job.

And then for the last couple of years, I’ve also been focusing on my

wellness business, which is called Elevate and that is kind of grounded in longevity science, but also informed by my own personal health journey through burnout, through postural issues, niggles, injuries, and loads of marginalized female health issues that I’ve suffered with that probably we all suffer with but don’t talk about.

Looking at holistic ways to deal with that and to set people up to live better for longer.

So that’s my true passion.

I spend a lot of time organizing retreats and events.

That’s a crazy journey that you’ve gone through to get there.

Like, all over the place.

But I want to rewind a little bit because I want to speak about the lawyer side.

I think this podcast is for entrepreneurs. Most people watching it are probably entrepreneurial.

Not everyone’s going to come from a corporate background necessarily, and definitely not necessarily a lawyer with the wig.

Actually, barrister style.

I want to know, I guess, how similar is what you went through to what you see on TV?

There are not that many UK legal dramas, but maybe Anatomy of a Scandal. I don’t know if you saw that. It was on Netflix.

I did see that.

A few others are coming up now. Silk, if you’ve seen that.

I don’t really watch them because it’s like watching a show about work.

Is it cringe?

Yeah, a bit.

Aspects of it are true.

It’s just people aren’t really, like, shagging in the toilets and chambers.

It’s just not that dramatic, sadly.

But all the other boring stuff is true.

Yeah, it’s dramatic.

There’s like tension in the court.

Yeah, and it also kind of depends on the area of law.

I mean, criminal law is pretty sexy.

It can be, in a sort of depressing way sexy, you know?

My field, I mean, I did quite a lot of…

I did some sexy cases actually by the end.

You know, I did the FA inquiry into historic child sex abuse in football.

I did a lot of work in the wake of Me Too.

I represented Zelda Perkins in front of the Women and Equalities Commission on NDAs, the stuff that she’d been forced to sign.

She was Harvey Weinstein’s former assistant.

I did a massive equal pay case for thousands and thousands of female cashiers in Tesco, claiming that they were doing work of equal value to the male shelf stackers.

At the time that I left the bar, that case was worth like £5 billion.

So, I mean, I did some cool stuff, you know, and I learned a lot.

Yeah, it was sexy, and then at times it was really dry, which I think is probably true of anyone’s professional life.

Even entrepreneurship can have its dry moments.

Yeah, and actually you’ve just exactly pointed that out because I think the purpose of this podcast, and everything that I do, is to highlight the bullsh*t in entrepreneurship.

Most of the time, it isn’t as interesting as people say, or as successful and glamorous as people say.

And just like how we see on TV, it’s all drama in the courtroom.

And like I said, people shagging in toilets.

That just doesn’t happen.

It’s mostly research and discovery.

That is the sad truth.

But yeah, that’s a nice mix.

Got to keep us on our toes.

But VC world, that’s a massive change of…Pace, right?

So obviously, it’s still corporate and still that sort of thing, but it’s definitely massively startup-based, right?

So it’s very, very different.

How?

What made you go into that for a start?

What made you transition, and how did you find it?

I mean, to be honest, I had a bit of a crisis.

I made it to the bar, and I made it to one of the best barristers’ chambers in the country.

I’m from pretty humble beginnings.

I don’t have family in the law.

I didn’t have any help.

I’m not privately educated, and I’m not Oxbridge educated.

So I was very much in the minority of people who made it to that level in my field.

And I’m a woman.

I mean, that in itself is a problem when my chambers wheeled me out as the poster girl for diversity.

Me as, like, I’m a woman and I’m state-school educated, but that’s really all I have to say for myself.

That’s how not diverse the bar still is in places.

I ended up transitioning to a different set before I left, and they were far better.

But yeah, it’s pretty problematic.

How did I decide?

Basically, a lot of my identity was tied up in being a barrister and in the fact that I’d kind of made it.

So I wasn’t really ready to leave the law behind, even though I kind of felt like maybe I wanted to.

I thought a stepping stone for me would be, okay, I want to do a legal role, but I want it to be sexy and fun and really dynamic and fast-paced, and in an area that’s really mission-driven that I can give a sh*t about.

Because a lot of the time you’re doing cases in court and you really don’t care whether your client wins or loses, to be honest, particularly in big commercial cases.

So I was like, I want to get behind a brand that I can really back.

Tech was really the place for that.

Back when I was first getting into it in 2019, it was the heyday.

It was the height of the bull market.

There was VC money everywhere.

Everyone was in hyper-growth mode.

So it was a really exciting time to get into it.

So yeah, I think that answers your question.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like it’s such a big change.

I think there are probably a lot of people watching who are either thinking about being an entrepreneur, and that’s already a shift in itself.

I think that must have been a really difficult decision.

But now you’re literally running your own thing with Elevate, and you’ve transitioned again.

You’re still doing everything, aren’t you?

But what again made you do that transition into entrepreneurship?

So I mean, I guess there was an element of entrepreneurship already in the sense that I joined a range of startups.

The most recent one was seed stage.

It was small.

We built it from the ground up.

When you’re a GC as well, you learn the nuts and bolts of how to actually build a business and how to make it work.

So I kind of had that knowledge and could take that with me.

Elevate, as I say, was born out of the fact that I worked out through a lot of coaching and NLP work that one of my biggest values is ownership.

In fact, my three biggest values are health, ownership, and hospitality.

I always knew that I wanted to start something of my own, but I didn’t really want to start a tech company.

I didn’t want to get on that hamster wheel of VC funding and constantly having to justify myself to external shareholders.

So it happened quite organically as a result of all of these issues that I’d had and the fact that I’m really evangelical about my own health journey and the amazing practices, modalities, and practitioners that I’ve discovered along the way.

They’ve genuinely set me up now in a place where I think I’m so well.

I’m such a well person, and I think I have all of that to thank despite the fact that my life is crazy.

Combining those three values made me realize that what I really want to do is share the knowledge that I’ve learned over so many years in a really piecemeal way.

Share that with other people.

Help them access those tools in a really easy way.

And frankly, keep women, in particular, busy women in high-powered jobs, and give them the tools they need to thrive rather than just barely keep their head above water and maybe end up packing it all in because it’s just too much in the end.

So it’s not about encouraging everyone to sack their jobs off and become yoga teachers.

It’s about saying, no, stay in that crazy corporate world, but here are the tools you need to make sure that you’re going to be okay.

Because that’s what you’ve done, right?

You’re still in that corporate world, really.

So you haven’t, like I said, sacked everything off and become, not quite a yoga teacher, but you know, you’re running retreats and all that sort of stuff.

You haven’t, I guess, fully taken the plunge.

Is that because you’re not prepared to yet?

Is that because the finances aren’t there?

Is that because you still love what you do?

What is that balance like?

Or do you see yourself transitioning fully to become a full entrepreneur?

I think it might happen at some point.

I think for the first time in a long time, I’m not putting pressure on myself to reach the next arbitrary goal.

Doing what I’m doing with Elevate gives me so much pure, unadulterated joy and passion.

I don’t make a huge amount of money from it, frankly.

You don’t go into the wellness event space expecting to make a load of money straight out of the gate.

That wasn’t my motivation for it.

The motivation was that I really love this and I really believe in it.

I think eventually I can probably monetize that more, but I don’t want to start with that in mind.

I think the nature of what I’m trying to convey and deliver to people would lose some of its authenticity if I was coming at it from a place of, these are the margins I need to make.

It’s all about genuinely trying to help people.

So maybe eventually.

But in the meantime, I am really enjoying what I’m doing as part of my day job too, which I think I’m so lucky to be able to say.

Absolutely.

And that wasn’t the case several years ago.

I’ve kind of cultivated that life, if you like, over many years.

I think everything you just said there is so important.

Why would you give something up if you love doing it anyway?

That’s how I feel.

I hear these people going, “Oh, are you going to retire?”

But if you love what you do, why do you need to retire?

If you’re healthy and everything, just keep going.

And the same as what you just said about not being in it for the money at the moment.

Obviously, you want to monetize it, but if money becomes a requirement, it takes away a lot of that passion.

You’re doing it because you love it.

That’s why you’re so good at it.

That’s why it’s coming out that way.

Actually, having your day job, which you also love, is great.

It’s a valuable position to be in.

You know comfortably that you’re on a salary that you can live on.

You don’t necessarily need to make money from that, so you can just concentrate on making it amazing for everyone else.

It’s an ideal position.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I think it would be different if I hated my day job and I was looking for an out.

But at the moment, it’s a nice balance.

I’m able to make a comfortable living doing what I’m doing in the day job, and I can grow Elevate.

Maybe there’ll come a time where I can edge into it more.

Maybe I can do fewer days doing the day job.

There’s a way to kind of ease into it.

I mean, I’m all for people diving in headfirst in the right circumstances.

There could be a world in which I could have done that with Elevate, and it could have worked.

But I just think you have to do it in the way that’s right for you.

I think I can grow Elevate in that way.

It’s not like I’m trying to get first-mover advantage or anything like that.

Obviously, I think what we offer is unique, but it’s always going to be that way.

I think there’s always going to be space for plenty of people to play in this space.

So I’m not in a rush.

Good.

That makes sense.

You’re going to have better results that way.

But do you want to dive into the wellness industry a little bit more?

Because you mentioned already that there’s a lot going on in the wellness industry.

You don’t think that you can necessarily make loads of money straight out of the gate doing…

More because you mentioned already that there’s a lot going on in the wellness industry.

You don’t think that you can necessarily make loads of money straight out of the gate doing your wellness events and stuff.

So I do want to talk about it because I think that the wellness industry has pros and cons to it.

There’s definitely some bad rep and obviously some great rep.

I think that it seems like everyone is running a retreat now.

I must have met like 10 people this week who apparently have a retreat.

It’s like, what is going on?

Why is everyone running a retreat?

And then obviously the fitness craze and wellness craze on social media is such a big thing.

Everyone seems to be an expert.

Everyone’s launching a recipe book and all these techniques.

What is going on?

How on earth do you position yourself as a legitimate, science-backed company and actually get the respect that you deserve when there’s all this bullsh*t out there?

What do you do?

Yeah, it’s a good question.

I mean, there is a lot of bullsh*t.

I think broadly it’s good that wellness is on the agenda and people are talking about it.

I think we probably have Gen Z to thank for that, and that’s okay.

But there’s a lot of bullsh*t within that.

For me, what bullsh*t looks like in this industry is people, whoever they might be, influencers, fitfluencers, who will come at you and preach that their way is the only way.

That, to me, is the antithesis of true wellness.

For me, every single person’s body and mind is different.

That’s how I’m coming at it with Elevate.

It’s unique in the sense that there’s a lot of one-on-one support and a lot of tailoring to your particular needs and your particular body type through the fitness side and through the functional medicine side.

I have this conversation every time I run a retreat, with my chefs or with new venues.

I explain that I’m not interested in an all-vegan venue, and I’m not interested in hiring someone to facilitate who’s just going to have everyone do a load of burpees for an hour.

That’s just not helpful, and it’s not conducive to longevity.

There’s that approach, and then there’s the fact that…

How do you establish yourself as a credible business in this field?

The facilitators that I work with are truly the crème de la crème.

I feel like I can say that with conviction because I have been a client of all of them for years.

As you can probably tell, I’m very Type A, pretty skeptical, and hard to impress.

I’ve had a lot of trainers over the years.

I’ve done a lot of health stuff over the years.

The people who I’ve brought on this journey with me are the best in the business.

My trainer Scott is the Head of Movement for Chelsea FC Women’s Team.

He had a lot to do with the Lionesses’ win.

He’s incredible.

He’s honestly got me through so many niggles and injuries that every other practitioner under the sun couldn’t touch.

Within a month of lifting weights with him in the right way for my body, I was out of pain.

The same goes for Lara, my functional medicine practitioner.

I’ve had a myriad of health concerns.

To be frank, I’m talking IBS, recurrent UTIs, skin issues, hormonal issues.

She was the first person to explain to me that all of those are linked.

When you go to your GP with that kind of thing, they’re just trying to put you in a box.

Here’s a cream for that.

Here’s some antibiotics for that.

She was the first person who introduced me to this concept of functional medicine and genuinely healed me of things that I’d had since childhood and thought I would never recover from.

The proof is in the pudding, so to speak.

The same goes for Leo and Lisa.

Lisa was my life coach.

The NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming work that I did with her, which I alluded to earlier, is literally why I think I’m here now.

She helped me uncover what my values were and what my limiting beliefs were.

She does a lot of that work with us on retreat.

Then Leo does multidisciplinary mindfulness work, breathwork, cold water therapy, and all that stuff.

Because of him, I’m in my ice bath every morning on my terrace, and it has changed the game for me.

The same goes for when people come on my retreats.

It’s taking on a bit of a life of its own now because people come away saying, “This has been transformational.”

The connections people make, the decisions they make in their own lives, and then they come back to me a year later and say, “Because of you, I was able to quit the job I hate. I was able to make these changes in my life.”

I think the proof is in the pudding there, in the testimonials.

I think it’s amazing.

You’ve just listed a bunch of people who you obviously really, really believe in, and you can tell by the way you’re talking about them.

I think that’s the key for everything.

If you genuinely have good people, then anything’s possible.

You’re going to be doing so much better.

It’s the same thing in every industry.

If you just have the right people around you…

I joke about the wellness industry and all the bullsh*t out there, but saying there’s only one way to do things is exactly what it is.

I see that on Instagram all the time.

It’s the same in business.

I get so fed up when people go, “This is what you do. This is how you have a morning routine. This is how you achieve XYZ.”

No.

There are so many other ways of doing this.

That is definitely bullsh*t.

I think it’s so exciting to hear about all these people and how you feel like you’re a new person.

I’m coming on your retreat, and I hope that same thing happens to me.

Although I’m terrified of getting in this ice bath, actually.

You’re going, “Oh, it’s going to change your life.”

Honestly, if I end up having an ice bath, I’ll be shocked.

But let’s see what happens.

Absolutely.

Do you want to touch on some of those health things that you mentioned too?

Because that’s a lot of stuff.

I know that a lot of people listening are aware of things that they’ve had.

You mentioned the GP, and the GP is even worse than that now.

You can only talk about one thing.

I’ve been there so many times and said, “Well, I’ve also got this.”

“Oh no, one thing only.”

I’m like, “But they could be linked.”

Actually, if you know about the other things, it helps get to your diagnosis quicker.

They don’t do it.

It’s actually ridiculous.

I feel like lots of people out there have health concerns or health problems and are either ignoring them or aren’t aware of them.

Talk me through some of those health issues that you’ve had and how they’ve impacted you.

Because you’re obviously super grateful for where you are now, but you weren’t always in this place.

You weren’t always as healthy and as great as you are now.

Tell me some about some of the dark times that you’ve been through and how you managed to get through those.

Yeah, I mean, from a physical health perspective, some of the stuff I described I’ve honestly had since I was a young child.

I had digestive issues from childhood.

My mom suffered with them, and I think there’s an element of genetics in there.

As you age, that ties in a lot with hormonal stuff, skin issues, and everything else.

It’s been pretty debilitating at times, honestly.

I’ve tried a lot of different medications, which probably actually exacerbated things, to be honest.

That’s been super hard.

Then on the mental health front, which is what brought me to the mindfulness aspect of what we now deliver through Elevate and all the other stuff I’ve done, I’m a big believer in the notion that nobody comes to mindfulness without having gone through some pretty dark bullsh*t.

If you haven’t really experienced anything difficult, you kind of have no reason to turn to those tools.

My rock-bottom moment was coming up to three years ago now.

Friends tell me I should write a book about this because it’s just so nuts.

Everything went wrong for me in my life all at once.

My partner left me.

We were in a difficult situation in terms of me and my physical state.

I won’t go into the details of that, but I was in a very vulnerable position physically when he left me with no warning.

Two weeks later, my house flooded and I lost every single thing I owned.

This was a house I’d hustled to buy a few years prior, again with no help.

I lost every single thing I owned kind of overnight.

I called on my recent ex to come and help me.

He was the only person I knew in London at the time.

He had a big car, and he just ignored the call.

My neighbors and I were evacuated from our homes on boats by the fire brigade.

Then within another week of that, I ended up essentially in a whistleblowing situation at work in a relatively new role.

I was being asked to do some dodgy stuff and refused to do it.

I was forced out of that job.

So within a matter of weeks, I had lost my partner.

I had lost my home.

I had lost my job.

These were all of the pillars of my identity.

Especially work.

My home was my safe space.

I was a really home-oriented person.

I was sitting in this flat that my insurers were paying for in Fulham, with none of my own stuff, looking at the smoking embers of my life and thinking, “What is the point?”

Not in a suicidal sense, but just like everything that defined me is gone.

So what’s left?

Weirdly, that’s kind of what led me to where I am now.

Very gradually building the pieces of, okay, who do I want to be?

How do I want to show up in the world?

It led me to a lot of these practices.

It led me to life coaching and NLP.

It led me to meditation and breathwork.

It led me to functional movement.

Honestly, without it, I wouldn’t have discovered some of these techniques.

I probably wouldn’t have healed from all of the physical health stuff.

I wouldn’t have started Elevate.

Honestly, I just wouldn’t have.

So I’ve got to be thankful for it, weirdly.

That was a big story.

That’s a lot of stuff to have happened.

We won’t go into man-bashing or anything.

I feel like that’s a conversation over a glass of wine we can have.

But it’s not even that.

It’s just when people let you down, it’s so disappointing and so isolating.

You’re going through the hardest time.

Like you said, you literally lost everything.

Your home.

People weren’t there for you.

You said, “Oh, you know you’re so down not in a suicidal way but even if you were that wouldn’t even be so farfetched considering that

Situation you were in, and then health-wise, it’s just like when you have these major life things and you have to deal with them all at once, it’s so overwhelming.

Your emotions and your brain just can’t deal with that.

There are many other people, I’m sure, who would have reacted way worse than you.

I feel like I am totally with you on the whole idea that if you’ve had that sense of adversity, you’re so much better at dealing with things, and it brings you to

where you are.

And I look back at all the worst moments in my life, and I feel like if they didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

So you do have to be a bit grateful.

But, oh my God, that’s not easy, especially at the time.

So I want to go back to those moments, if you’re okay to kind of recall your feelings and how you got to where you are now.

Because everyone’s going to be watching this thinking, “Oh my God, this woman is so strong.”

You’re this powerhouse of a woman.

You’re a barrister, VC, you work in a VC firm, and you’re doing your own business.

You said you’re super healthy, super fit, with a great mindset.

You seem like you’re in an amazing space.

And you went through all that.

But you obviously weren’t always that put together.

And it’s only just three years ago.

Talk me through that journey.

Obviously, you mentioned all those people who helped along the way, but I want to know that journey a little bit, from that point nearly three years ago to now.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, I mean, when it all happened, I actually remember making a very conscious choice to try and handle it in the best way I could.

A couple of years prior to that, my sort of big long-term relationship had come to an end.

The way I dealt with it then was, you know, I was in my late 20s and I just got really drunk and dated everyone and just kind of lived my best life.

I didn’t process my feelings until like 18 months later.

I had a moment standing in this rental flat where I was like, “I’m going to make a different choice this time.”

So I gave up alcohol for a year.

I mean, I wasn’t a big drinker, but actually lawyers do a lot of, let’s call it, kind of gray-area drinking.

I wouldn’t say I had a problem, but…

High-functioning alcoholics?

Yeah, maybe not that much in my case, but I was definitely drinking a couple of times a week at least.

It would be quite a lot of wine in one go.

I made a conscious choice.

I was like, “Alcohol’s not going to be my friend right now. It’s really not.”

And then, I mean, this sounds a bit tragic, but I basically spent six months just lying in the bath every night, crying and just kind of feeling my feelings, which I hadn’t really done before.

Then I frog-marched myself into therapy straight out of the gate as well because I basically felt like a lot of it stemmed from the ex and from feeling like, how can somebody lack humanity to that extent?

Regardless of the fact that you clearly feel differently about me and our relationship is over, how can you leave me in essentially a life-or-death situation?

That was hard.

It was hard for me to come to terms with the fact that I had misjudged somebody’s character to such a degree.

I didn’t really know how to make my peace with that.

I thought, I’ve got to get some therapy because otherwise this is going to take root in me.

I don’t want to become somebody who hates men or who distrusts everyone.

I just don’t want that to happen to me.

So I did a lot of talking therapy.

I did a lot more crying.

I’m not a crier, I should say.

I did more crying that year than I think I’ve done in my whole life prior to that.

But then, feeling your feelings helps you process things.

I was talking it through with people.

I was not drinking.

I was working out.

I’d already met Scott at that point, so we were training together every week through the pandemic outdoors.

I reckon that had a huge impact on my mindset and my vitamin D intake, if nothing else.

And gradually, basically, the decision I kind of made was I’ve lost control of everything in my life.

I was a bit of a control freak before that.

I sort of said to myself, “Okay, what can you control? What is actually within your control?”

Very little, right?

We can’t control other people.

We can’t control the elements.

We can’t control our own health to a certain degree.

So I started with, “I can control how I show up for other people.”

I actually kind of started with RAKs, like random acts of kindness, and making sure that I could show up for the people that needed me.

And yeah, that coupled with the NLP I was doing and the values work just kind of helped me find my way, not even back to myself, but to the person that I should have been all along, I guess.

That sounds a bit poetic.

I love that.

I just think that so many of us are in a place where we’re not even sure who we really are.

I think that’s what most people are like.

It sounds a bit crazy, doesn’t it?

But I think we’re all influenced by society and social media and all that sort of stuff, and our parents.

We are trying to aspire to be who we think our parents want us to be, or who someone else wants us to be, or we’re trying to impress a guy, or whatever.

People do this sort of stuff, right?

And like I said, you don’t want to be hating men, but it’s not just men.

It’s whoever lets you down and does that.

I think the way I used to try and get over things like that was by realizing that the person you fell in love with doesn’t exist.

Actually, that’s not the person you believed they were.

So if that person doesn’t exist anymore, then you can’t really…

It’s easier said than done because the feelings are there.

But people will always disappoint you.

Exactly like you said, we can’t control people.

We can’t control a lot of things.

Actually, that’s what’s really scary.

But we can control the way we respond to things, right?

We can control all of that.

That’s why everything has to come back down to us and working on ourselves, because we’re the only ones that we can control.

We’re the only things that…

It has to come from within.

Everything is about that.

It’s taken me God knows how long to realize that too.

And I think what you’re saying about adversity, that’s it.

I don’t think I discovered those things until I went through really difficult times.

Or even some of the stuff in my past that’s now been dredged up and has really made me rethink things and rethink how I processed that previously.

Or more to the point, how I didn’t process it.

I just kind of dismissed it and parked it somewhere.

Then I saw other people’s reactions to it and all of

that sort of stuff.

I think everyone has something in their past that they probably aren’t processing and actually is more impactful on them than they realize.

I think that saying the strongest people, the best people who kind of get things, are the ones who have been through bad stuff.

But I hear people say, “Nothing bad has ever really happened to me.”

I don’t know if that’s necessarily true.

Or do you think maybe some people are that lucky?

Some people are that lucky, I guess.

But there’s probably stuff that they’re just parking.

Yeah, I think up to a point some people are that lucky.

But the thing is, everyone’s going to face something at some point.

You and I had the misfortune, or the fortune depending on how you look at it, of going through some stuff earlier than a lot of people and having to navigate that.

But everyone at some point is going to have to deal with illness, death in the family, money issues.

Everyone’s going to face something.

No one has a perfect life.

It’s just that maybe in your 30s, a lot of people haven’t got there yet.

So in a way, I kind of think I’ve front-loaded my bad luck.

It means that when I have to face things like that later, hopefully I’ll be better equipped for it.

To come back to your point about the best people, I guess it’s not so much the best people.

For me, the people I connect with the most are invariably the people who have been through some serious bullsh*t because they’ve had a reason to look at the world differently and look at what they want from life in a way that you never otherwise would.

They’ve done the work on themselves.

When you’ve been through some bullsh*t, you do see the world in that way.

You really appreciate how beautiful life is in a different way.

You want to talk about the deep stuff.

You want to connect with someone on that level.

Those are always the people that I’m drawn to.

Yeah, me too.

Actually, that’s how I feel at the moment.

I only want to be around those sorts of people because they get it.

Like I said, the gratefulness of it.

I feel like I’m so grateful for those bad things because I’m actually happier as a result of them.

I’m happier with life.

I find myself consciously aware of how I react to things.

I just don’t care about some of the things I used to react to.

A situation will happen, and where I used to be upset for days, weeks, or months, or react really badly to something, now I’m just like, “Meh.”

I move on quite quickly and park it because there are so many other things that are more important and more beautiful to appreciate.

It just changes who you are.

I think it’s so much healthier, which is lovely.

Totally.

Life is literally too short.

Nobody really gets that until they’ve been confronted with whatever it is—abuse, horrible trauma, disappointment from another person, or just bad luck.

You don’t realize it until that happens.

Otherwise, you’re just coasting.

I was coasting, and I didn’t even realize it at the time.

I was in a job that I didn’t enjoy but that paid me really well and had all of this status attached to it.

I was so proud of having made it when nobody else like me had.

That was what was keeping me in it.

But it wasn’t for love of the job or love of the work.

Actually, it was taking a bit of a toll on me.

Had this not happened—because all the stuff that happened to me was so humbling—I don’t think my ego would have let me make this transition.

Again, I truly don’t regret anything in my life because I think it’s wasted energy.

I’m not sorry that this stuff happened to me.

I know that’s kind of mental to say, but I’m honestly in the best place I think I’ve ever been in now.

I wouldn’t be if that hadn’t happened.

I probably would still be at the bar.

I’d be absolutely smashing it, but I would be kind of low-level miserable and not really sure what to do about it.

Probably people are hearing this and thinking you’re absolutely crazy.

But I totally get it because I feel the same way.

It’s kind of nuts when you think about it.

I think it’s an interesting place to be in.

I feel very grateful that we are in this space.

Hopefully other people will get there too, but it’s not going to be easy at all.

I would like to get a piece of advice, then, for people who are going through something.

Whether it’s a career transition, starting on their own, feeling like they’ve hit rock bottom and need to bounce back to where they want to be.

What advice would you give to those people who are in that situation?

Wow.

Yeah, I suppose if I take some examples from the things I think I got right…

Gather together the tools that you do have in your armory because you’ve always got something.

Even when you think you’ve lost everything, you’ve always got the ability to get outdoors.

You’ve always got the ability to go and do some exercise, raise your heart rate, and pump your body full of those endorphins, which scientifically will make you feel better.

You don’t have to drink.

You have so much agency left.

You can’t control external things, but you can always control yourself.

I don’t mean to say that in a flippant way because when people say, “You can just choose not to get angry. It’s your choice how you respond,” it’s too simple to say that.

Of course things are going to affect you.

But I guess the level to which you react, or the level to which you take that on and make it personal and about you, is within your control.

So yeah, start with the toolkit that you have.

Lean on good people.

Find some good people and share.

A problem shared is a problem halved.

I was lucky that I have amazing family and amazing friends.

That was the one pillar of my happiness that I still had.

So I leaned on them a lot.

That was probably weird for them because I was always the strong one.

Now I’m back to being that person.

I’m the person people lean on.

I think some of my good friends who historically had issues were not used to me being the vulnerable one.

But try not to be afraid to be vulnerable in that scenario because people will want to step up and help you.

I like that.

That’s exactly what I think it boils down to.

There is such a big front of everyone trying to be successful.

“How’s business?”

“Oh, it’s amazing. I’ve landed this client. We’re winning this thing.”

Actually, we’re struggling deep down inside.

But if you suddenly said, “Actually, I’m struggling a little bit. I need some help,” then people will be there for you.

Good people will be there for you.

That’s obviously what I’m trying to create in my community.

Have people around you who will be there for you no matter what and who will step up.

If you’re vulnerable and you’re honest about it, they’ll appreciate it.

They’ll be the same back.

Only good things can happen from that, I think.

Totally.

I mean,

entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey.

If you’re a sole founder, it can be very lonely. You know, I’ve found that my various founder networking groups, or people like you, or friends that I’ve made along the way who I can now talk to about my issues, even though they’re not in my space, there’s so much empathy and support in that.

Also, another point I wanted to make was that level of vulnerability and humility resonates so well at every level of business leadership and entrepreneurship.

The very best CEOs that I’ve ever encountered have been the ones who are able to say, “You know what? We’ve got this wrong.”

Or, “Do you know what? I’m not necessarily clear on the next steps, but this is what I’m going to do about it.”

Rather than people who are just painting this amazing, glamorous picture about how everything’s going, and then the next week they’re firing half the workforce.

It just leaves a bit of a bad taste in people’s mouths.

Yeah.

I would much rather be around someone where you know where you stand, and they’re honest about it.

Not everyone’s going to know every answer, and you wouldn’t expect them to.

But what you want them to do is tell you the truth and be upfront with you.

You want them to find the right answer and have that passion to do it.

That’s all people ask for.

So I think that’s…

I love that.

I’ve got the questions that I’m going to ask every guest this season.

It’s really just around entrepreneurship and trying to give the audience practical advice and prepare people for the reality of what it looks like.

So I want to know, from your predictions, whether it’s your industry or just in general, what do you think entrepreneurship is going to look like in the next 12 months?

What do you see changing?

What do you see getting bigger?

What do you see it looking like?

I mean, I could answer that in a really boring way and be like, “These are the trends I’m seeing in VC,” and blah, blah, blah.

Maybe it’s not that boring.

Things like AI and green tech are absolutely going to have their moment.

I mean, they’re already having a moment.

There are trends like that.

But I think maybe the more interesting observations are more to do with demographics.

I think more and more we’re going to see micro-businesses starting because we’re now living in this hybrid world where people aren’t doing full-time work in the same way.

People are starting side hustles more and more.

I’ve never known so many people who are starting things of their own.

So I think there’s just going to be more businesses.

I think there are more female-founded businesses than ever before, which is kind of amazing to see.

I hope we’re going to see more of that.

In terms of the fundraising landscape, things have been pretty damn hard for the last couple of years.

But from everything I’m seeing in VC and through Crowdcube and the various other irons I have in the fire, things are kind of starting to pick up.

I think for businesses who want to raise money from VCs and angels, the landscape is going to improve pretty soon.

It’s already kind of on the turn, which is great because it’s been difficult lately.

If you wanted to start a business in the last couple of years and raise external capital, it’s been bloody hard.

But I think things are turning around there.

I don’t think it’s going to be quite as frivolous as 2021, where literally anyone and their dog could raise half a million from VC.

It’s not like that anymore.

But I think we’re going to see more and more opportunities there.

I also think, hopefully, we’re going to see more and more opportunities for diverse founders to raise money.

I think that’s actually something that’s now genuinely part of the conversation and not just virtue signaling.

That’s kind of the impression I’m getting.

I genuinely think there’s going to be more of a push towards seeing more diverse businesses flourish.

Well, that’s nice.

If that happens, that’d be a great thing.

I feel like everything you’re saying has already started to come true because I met someone even this morning.

She’s a Black woman, and she’s an architect who’s actually now opening her own salon that she wants to do on the side.

Again, you’re talking about side hustles, and there she was doing it.

So it totally echoes everything you’ve just said.

That’s interesting.

I would like to pick up on the point you just made.

You said that every person and their dog was raising half a million back in 2021.

What changed in two years?

What do you think actually changed that made it so difficult now?

I mean, the market crashed.

It kind of happens in waves generally.

When you look at the history of the economy, it comes in cycles.

The last financial crisis was in 2008.

Then we recovered, had a nice little 10-year run, and now we’ve crashed again.

Obviously, the macroeconomic climate, with everything that’s going on around the world and various conflicts, means cash is no longer cheap.

It’s even worse in the UK with the problems we have with inflation, the base rate, and everything else.

Money is just not as cheap as it was.

VCs really haven’t been investing.

There’s been a massive shift away from growth at any cost toward profitability and being able to show a route to profitability much sooner.

A lot of these growing scale-up startups that were trying to acquire customers at any cost but were absolutely nowhere near profitable have really struggled.

Or they’ve had to really downsize and pivot in order to play in this new market.

I don’t think that’s going to go away anytime soon.

There is going to be much more emphasis, if you’re going to take on external capital, on investors looking to see what your plan is to get to break-even and beyond.

They’re going to scrutinize that in a way that they weren’t previously.

But yeah, in a nutshell, the macroeconomic situation has changed.

Yeah, I think the economy has really screwed up a lot of things.

I think last year showed that.

It’ll be really interesting to see what happens this year as people start to understand the market a little bit more and things pick up.

The final question that I want to ask is, what would you consider your key tools for success and really getting to where you are now?

My key tools?

For me personally, and again, I have to stress this is me and my journey.

What works for me might not work for you.

For me, it is my morning routine.

I get up, I do my breathwork, I get in my ice bath, and nothing gives me clarity of mind like it.

I set myself up for success as much as I can when I start my day.

Likewise, throughout my day, I take mindful breaks.

I really put that front and center.

The second thing is community.

Whatever that looks like to you.

For me, starting Elevate has actually been such an amazing networking and connection experience because I’ve met so many genuinely like-minded people.

I’ve chosen not to traverse a really lonely path with it.

I’ve thrown myself into the community early on and made sure I found people that I can lean on and share ideas with.

I think that’s so important.

If you lock yourself away and get stuck in your own head, your problems are going to be so magnified.

And then just keeping it real, I guess.

Keeping it no bullsh*t.

Yeah.

Just remembering that a lot of things aren’t the end of the world.

They might seem like it.

Doing whatever you need to do to remind yourself of that, whether that’s talking to a coach, talking to other people, and not letting things become massive.

I mean, I love all that.

No bullsh*t.

Community especially.

That’s exactly what I’m trying to…

No bullsh*t.

I totally echo all that.

I don’t know how I feel about the morning routine, mind you.

Mine involves a lot of snoozing.

After the retreat, you’re right, that might be completely different.

Can I ask, what time do you wake up?

I usually wake up at like 6:30.

Okay, so not horrendous.

It’s not horrendous.

I’m not part of the 5:00 a.m. club.

I’m sorry.

That’s never going to be me, and that’s okay.

But yeah, about 6:30.

I also wake up at the same time every day on the weekends.

There’s a lot of science around that being very beneficial.

But I also go to bed quite early.

I’m a big believer in getting enough sleep.

So yeah, it works for me.

Yeah, and I mean, I’m actually not far off when I think about it.

I’m a 7:00 a.m. person.

When I hear 7:00 a.m., I’m like, “I could do 7:00 a.m.”

But if I hear anything with a 6 in front of it, I’m like, “Oh, that’s early.”

Like 6:45, that’s early.

It’s a psychological thing.

If you say 6-something, it feels much earlier.

I got up at 6:00 this morning, or yesterday morning, and I feel like it made a big difference to me.

So I guess it’s whatever works for you, but you’ve got to keep doing it.

I definitely don’t do the same thing on weekends, although I’m trying to make sure I don’t stay in bed ridiculously late.

I think it’s something I’ve not got used to, but I think I’ll try.

I know that everyone sort of says a morning routine is important.

Actually, that is a very common answer from most successful people.

So yeah, thank you so much for coming in.

I hope everyone else found it really valuable.

But yeah, I think your journey has been brilliant.

I think that you’ve got so much to add.

So I guess, where can people find you if they want to get in touch?

You can find me on LinkedIn.

You can find Elevate on LinkedIn.

And you can find Elevate on Instagram.

Mine is private.

I’m trying to keep some level of boundary in my life.

Yeah, find me there.

Well, thank you so much.

It’s been amazing.

Thank you so much for having me.

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Yeey

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