Thinking Errors

I'd already handed my notice in. All right. So tell us a story. You were obviously not loving your job. What were you doing and what made you decide to make the change? So I studied psychology and I came from a background where my family had run out of money when I was 10 and that had like a massive impact on me. And so I had this kind of anxiety about money when I was growing up and not having it and the impact of what happens when you don't.
So I ended up whilst I did psychology, which I loved, I ended up going into a corporate life, which wasn't a good fit for me. So I ended up as a management consultant for an enormous global firm. And I was working in financial services, which I'm quite a sort of practical, physical person, I like to do things and make things. And not only was the product a kind of something that's just in the ether, you can't see it, you can't touch it.
But the world of financial services was a bit cutthroat. And there wasn't an enormous amount of meaning or purpose in it. And I was just helping organizations to become more effective and make more money. And I kind of lost sense of who I was and what I was doing. So for years, and I actually remember going back and reading a book, it was called How To Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson. And it was all about how to get off the, you know, out of the rat race and to make your way in the world doing something a bit more purposeful.
And I looked it up the other day and actually I bought that book 11 years before I quit my job. And clearly I had been unhappy for quite some time. There was, there was a lack of fit. There were lovely people and you know, they were doing good work, but it just wasn't really for me. I really wanted to leave, but. The challenge was that I was the breadwinner of the family.
So my husband makes peanuts and he works in the arts and doesn't make anything. So it was all down to me to bring in the cash. And having come from a background where money was important and status was important and a big job was important and having stability was important, the idea of leaving was like a death. It was the idea of kind of jumping into the abyss, into the unknown. And I was deeply, deeply terrified.
So I didn't for quite some time. But the thing that really

kicked me up the butt was my husband. My husband and I were together for many years. We weren't married. And it was on the 21st of March, 2016. He was diagnosed with something called multiple myeloma. He'd basically fallen over. He'd gone to see some friends in Edinburgh, in Scotland, and was feeling very, very unwell, very sick and got tested for all sorts of things. They didn't know what it was. And eventually he got an MRI, a scan of his head.
And in March of 2016 they said we're not sure whether it's a brain tumour or whether it's something else but we need to go and get you tested and I'd known somebody who'd had a brain tumour and I'd known how quickly they'd gone downhill so this was terrifying and eventually he got diagnosed in that March and they said it was something called multiple myeloma which is quite a rare form of cancer. which is basically in the white blood cells.
So it's not something you can zap, it's not something you can cut out. And the survival rate at that point was pretty poor. And they said, look, you've probably got five years. And the challenge I had was that because I was working for this big organization, they were paying for the medical. It cost me five pounds a month and he ended up getting treated on private medical. So I'm in the UK and obviously we have the National Health Service, which means that a lot of things aren't paid.
You don't have to pay for them. They're free. But we were having to pay for it because the NHS doesn't cover those kinds of drugs and they're like 7,000 pounds a month. So it's this very new type of chemotherapy from the States that isn't covered. So, you know, he was being treated and we were both miserable. It was incredibly scary. The idea that he was going to die before he got to 50, you know, like mid to late forties stopped me from leaving because I had all of this background, this kind of financial background of being scared around making my own way in the world, not having that structure.
But in addition, this kind of massive, and I'm sure many, many people have this, which is this massive looming presence in your life that if you've got ill health, what can you do? Because it's so expensive to pay for it. And I had a lot of soul searching, lots of dark nights and lots of tears and panics about, you know, if I quit, because I was so unhappy, if I quit, we couldn't pay for the drugs. know we've been talking to friends about getting them bussed in from India you know because they're much cheaper you know could we get them through you know customs and how much would it cost and how could we guarantee that the quality of the drugs would be good and it was like really awful sort of

Quite a lot of the work was busy work so when we're working with clients sometimes we'd be brought in to do something that they couldn't do on their own or from a leadership perspective or cultural perspective had to be seen to be done by somebody else but it wasn't necessarily the right work in my opinion. So there were examples of Projects that I worked on, or I led work streams of activity where we would bill the client for a lot of money.
And at the end of it, we could list an enormous number of things that we'd done. But the difference they'd made was questionable because we were dealing with really intractable, difficult, enormous problems that organizations were facing. And I would sort of put my hand up and go, I'm not sure we're actually doing the right thing here. And it was always a bit. or could you please be quiet because, you know, we've agreed to this.
This is what we said we'd do. Client's very happy for whatever reason. So from an integrity values perspective, I felt that we really needed to rethink what we were doing and it wasn't always right. So it didn't feel that I was at adding any value. I didn't feel I was working for organizations that I were adding something to the world and everyone was so stressed all the time. It often wasn't that pleasant to be in that culture because Everyone was doing their very best.
I don't want to give the impression that people weren't nice or kind or thoughtful. They were, but under stress. I and everyone else was under stress and they always are because the timescales are really tight and the work is really difficult. You know, a lot of the work I was doing was around change management and you're trying to encourage people in organizations to shift. They're trying to use logic and actually they're all feeling kind of, ultimately we're all at one level fearful.
You know, if someone comes up to you and says, right, your job's going to change, the systems you're going to get going to use are going to change, the way we're going to work isn't going to change. Half of your colleagues are going to leave. It automatically accesses certain parts of our brain, like the amygdala and parts of our brain that put us into fight or flight. So we quite quickly go into scared mode and it's very difficult.
Then you're working with lots of people who are fearful and who aren't encouraged to share that with you. So they come out with rationale for why something won't work, but actually underneath it all, there's an emotional aspect to it, which is fear. And we don't spend enough time working with that fear and kind of helping people to get their heads around the change. so we push things through too quickly. I mean I'm sure there's lots of great work going on but I sat towards the end of my career thinking there's got to be a better way to do this, I've got to have more impact, I mean I don't have kids so what's going to be on my gravestone?
You know that helps an organisation be a bit more efficient or leave a mark in some way and help people in some way and I just didn't feel I was doing that.

There are many people in those organisations who are very happy. Don't get me wrong. Some of it's about fit, but it wasn't right for me. I didn't feel that I was making a positive mark on the world. And therefore what's the point of me? It's quite existential. There's this sort of like, what am I here for? If I'm not going to make some sort of a mark in some way. What made you finally get to that point?
So you were, you had to do this job because it paid for the medical care for your husband. So when you quit, was that not paid for anymore? Like, what about the big house? What about the medical bills? Like, how did you deal with that? So the big house, we sold it. It was really upsetting, we sold it. And the point was that I'd spent years doing it up, but I was never there.
So of the kind of nine years we were in this house, I was probably there three years equivalent, if you added all the time up, because I was away all the time. I was away Sunday night to Friday night, which suited my husband sometimes because he's an introvert and I'm a raving extrovert. And it was like, thank God for that, a bit of peace and quiet. So we sold the house. we moved into a rental house.
And because when I left, this was the funny thing, because when we left the house and moved into rental, the estate agents, the realtors said, we don't trust you because you don't have a job. So you need to pay upfront for the whole year. Luckily, we'd sold a house and we had some money in the bank. But all these people who don't and don't have that kind of chunk of money, that means it's amazing.
But we spent a lot of money renting. But what it enabled me to do was we're able to pay for the medical. It paid me a few hundred pounds a month to live on. So I took money out of that sale of that house. I sold lots of things. I sold a lot of my clothes on eBay. I started doing online research, you know, like where there's universities that want you to do research, like questionnaires and surveys and stuff like that, or market research companies.
I filled in hundreds and hundreds of surveys. I did all sorts of things to just get my costs right down. And actually COVID in a weird way, whilst it's been dreadful and awful for so many people, was a bit of a godsend in some respects. I mean, it meant I couldn't earn an income, but I wasn't spending anything. I was just at home, you know, doing very little. I mean, I was trying to build a business, but doing very little in terms of

and you're renting and you're much happier do you ever get thoughts of oh my god or like what do you look at your bank account and freak out or do you you know that sort of sense of status do people think that you were mad completely i've had to actually wean myself off talking so much to the people i used to work with because i feel like a bit of an alien now because there's a sort of look of what what what why would you do that you know and people can't quite make sense of it because i was on a good i had a good job it was a good salary i'm embarrassed sometimes i think covid has actually been helpful to me because i put on a lot of weight i let my hair go gray i went very gray in the last five years since my husband was ill and I just stopped dyeing it and thought okay that's it I'm going to be a bit more authentic and and and it is this great streak so I felt like I said to somebody the other day because I had it all cut off really short which doesn't suit me your hair looks beautiful short my hair does not look good short and I said to someone the other day I look like a badger because I had these white stripes I hate looking like a badger.
I think it's very cool. I looked in the mirror and I would cry. I cried for the first couple of months after having it cut off because I thought it was just easier to cut it all off. I didn't want to see anybody. I was so fat. I didn't have anything to talk about. I had no social skills because I was like, what do I talk about? I've got nothing to say to all these people.
So actually the fact that we had lockdown and I could keep the interaction of like an hour or so on Zoom and I go, hi, how are you? And we'd have a nice chat, but I didn't have to see from here down. It was like balloon woman. Being stuck at home and being in COVID and just having my husband who loves me for who I am and not what I look like and going for long walks and doing all that kind of stuff and just trying to make sense of it all.
I had massive highs and lows. I really did. I would freak when I looked at the bank account and think, what have I done? and occasionally I'd look on job boards to see if I could find a job that I could apply for and then I'd feel sick the idea of applying for it and generally I was fine but there were moments of I'd wake up in the night sweating thinking what have I done you know there's only so long you can live on the money that you've got from selling your house because that's a one-way ticket you know at some point you're going to have nothing left and you can't now buy a house to live in.
So yeah, it's been, it's been probably the hardest time in my life. I'd say the last couple of years. I mean, I think it's so brilliant that you made this decision and the, and to do it during the time when you didn't know COVID was coming. And I know that you said that there's many been many benefits of that for you. I mean, we all put on 20 pounds during COVID and that's for those of us that were, you know, life stayed relatively the same.
And then there was this addition. I looked at myself in the mirror this morning and went, okay, you look more like you because it's starting to come off again. But for the last year, it's been hard even to look in the mirror sometimes. So to have that and to have to deal with all the anxiety of that and all the shame and all the guilt that comes with that and to have your bank account and to have your husband dealing with all these having to deal with and having to deal with, I can't even imagine the amount of people that must've said, what were you thinking?

What's your advice to women who are closet creatives working in management consultancy? In financial services. Another layer in financial services. Often I was doing work in IT system implementation. So it was management consultancy, financial services and IT. You know, it was like, how far could I have got? It's like, if you drew a line and you put Charlotte, natural skills and capabilities and orientation. And then you put what could be further from what she's good at and fits in with.
Oh, I know financial services, it implementations within management consultancy. So that's my first point is values, which is know yourself. If you don't know who you are or what you like and what makes you tick what makes you happy, how can you possibly make a pathway or have a direction that's going to make you happy. So for me it's a lot of this time out has been soul searching about who am I?
Who am I anymore? You know I go back to when I was 10 or 12 or 13 or 15 and I think I went so far from that person who was very creative, who was really good at writing, that was you know funny and curious and interested in the world and I became this other person that did spreadsheets, you know, and project plans. So I think the first thing is the people I've spoken to who have made that leap, that have got back to something that's more of themselves, have understood themselves.
So I think there's be clear about your purpose, you know, be really clear about your values, be really clear about your skills and then seek things out. And it doesn't have to be just a job, it could be things that you do in your life. that just make you happy because life is short and you know from my husband's perspective that was a real wake up call with which is you know life is short so why are we all pretending to be somebody we're not to fit in with social expectations and norms it's a bit of advice but it's also i think what i've experienced with all the people i've spoken to those people make it more easily because they have done some soul searching they've understood themselves and accepted themselves.
I think that's the other part, which is there'll be bits of ourselves that society will think are a bit less valid or worthwhile, but we have to say, well, that's who I am, good and bad. So I say that's the first thing, that's my first kind of bit of advice, and that's what's helped for me. I mean, the second thing is I would say that as women, we are our own worst enemy.
We need to get out of the way of ourselves because of all the people I've spoken to,

I would say 90% of the women I've spoken to are perfectionists who are very high performing. Whatever walk of life, you know, it doesn't have to be a big job that they just work really hard. They try really hard. They put themselves out. They have multiple roles in their life as, you know, breadwinner, mother, daughter, wife, girlfriend, whatever. And they try to do all of them perfectly. and they're trying to work incredibly hard and actually we are our worst enemy because so many of the people i've spoken to the language they use with them so i've done some training in cognitive behavioral therapy and there's something which i'm sure you're aware of which is called thinking errors which is the way we think and the way we talk to ourselves and the language we use with ourselves and so many of them just use terrible language they go i'm rubbish i'm terrible i'm awful you know i can't believe how you know slow i am at this and just they talk to themselves in a way they would never talk to their friends.
Love that. Thinking errors. I really, really like that. And so when you have one of these thinking errors come up, what's the process? Like, how do you get through it? So the first step is to become aware of them. And there are a number of different types of thinking errors. So for example, there's something called globalization, which means that I say, I'm never, I'm never confident. I'm always late. I'm always slow, whatever it is.
And these, these words always never, it's not true. I'm sometimes lacking confidence or I'm sometimes late. So there's something about the first step is to become aware of how often we do it. I've got a little questionnaire that I give people. And when they go through the questionnaire, there's, you can see there's an intake of breath and like, Oh, I'm doing it all the time. You know, like, yeah, I'll catch people.
I'll go, do you see, you just did it then.

There's something else called mind reading and what that means is my neighbour didn't look at me when I left the house this morning and I know it's because she hates me. I know she hates me. Well, how do you know she hates you? Well, because she's done it. She does it always. There you go, there's a globalisation. She always avoids my eye contact, you know. So there's something about we make up little stories about people and what they're thinking and how they think about us.
Maybe that neighbour is really shy. and struggles with eye contact. Or maybe they've had a bad morning, they've been tearful and they don't want to look at you. So we're telling ourselves these stories about other people. So the first step is just to become aware of it, to engage those people around you, often like loved ones who can kind of go, oh, Sam, you've done it again. There's another one. Like, wow, look at how I talk about myself.
And then the next step is just to be more tender with ourselves, a bit kinder with ourselves, a bit more self-loving, to treat ourselves in a way that we treat our best friends that would say, Oh, come on, you did fine. You did the best you could in that situation with what you knew then. You know more now, that's fine. So I think there's something about just being our own best friend and kind of going, I think you did great.
So there's all sorts of stuff around affirmations about telling yourself that you did really well. I did something the other day where I didn't do my best, but I said to myself, given the skills that you've got and the experience you've got, and you're new to this, you did fine. So for example, this podcast that I've just started. It was the first one was good. It was all right. But I made lots of mistakes in it.
I talked too fast. I went like this into the microphone far too many times. Which you always do, right? Yes. Hello. You know, and I just, I could have beat myself up about it. I said, look, given what you have, the experience you've got, that was fine. It was a good start. So, I mean, I'm not saying I'm brilliant at this. I try, I'm not saying I'm world-class, but I'm giving it a go.
I love when you said, being tender with yourself. I was joking there when I say you always do that because I hadn't really thought about that, globalization. My husband always does that globalization thing. I love to tell him that. But using that word tender, I think is really important because we hear that be kind to yourself.

self-love, but I haven't heard that, be tender with yourself. And I think it's such a beautiful word and how you describe it is really, really good. So thinking errors, so Charlotte, talk to us about this passion of yours. So you had, you talked about when you were a teenager and you had a love of life and a love of writing and then it sort of waned away you didn't go into a career with that and I think a lot of people then decide maybe that either that thing goes on the shelf or that then becomes a hobby. in the spare time or something like that but it can't could it ever really be something and I talk to my clients about this a lot could it be ever be something that is the main job that they're also paid for which I think is the holy grail for so many people so many women we want to be doing something we love we recently released the results of our aspire confidence and courage survey and one of the number one things that came out as important for personal confidence is doing work that you love and you believe is important in the world.
And you're really talking to that today. So is it possible, and I know that you've interviewed so many people in your Spoon by Spoon project, is it possible to do something you love and get paid for it? Or is that just for, you know, a minority of people in the world? I think to be paid a large amount of money for something you adore is rare so you know you're thinking about sports people and actors and singers who just say I just I'm so fortunate I love my job and I get paid a lot of money I think there are people out there normal people who manage that but I think there are other ways to get that which is to start small so to carry on doing something you don't love so much but to do less of that and to start little projects little shift projects where you try something out in the spare time part-time evenings weekends so you're I was talking to somebody the other day and she has trained to be a coach and she was trying to write and her making money was predicated on her writing to get more clients.
And funnily enough, she sat there with a pen going, I can't write. I can't write, I can't write. And the reason she can't write is because there's no joy in the writing because the writing is at the heart of her making money and she's fearful. So she's coming to the writing with a fearful state of mind of this is going to be amazing. It's going to help me find lots and lots of clients.
So therefore it becomes a chore. If you can find a way to go part-time, to do stuff in the weekends, to take some time out, if you can take a few weeks out or a month out.

take some unpaid leave to go and play in the sandpit, go and try stuff out. You can re-engage with that joy of life and those things that you love to do. And then you can do what I've done, which is to slowly build that up really incrementally. So I'm now starting to make money out of some of the things I love. I've been, I was paid not so long ago to write, which was like bloody hell.
Someone wants to pay me to write. That's great. Um, and I've written a report for somebody. about the future and about uncertainty in the world of work. And they paid me and it was like, brilliant. This is, this is, this is a good start. I'm starting to get paid for my coaching. Um, I'm starting to get paid for some other work that I did. I did some consulting. I went back and did a bit of consulting, but it was for a client that was just wonderful, really purpose-led amazing company.
And I was doing work that I really believed in. And it was just a short piece of work. So I did dipping my toe back in the water and saying, do I still hate it? Do I like it? And actually I really enjoyed it. So that really helped. So that, that has given me a bit of an impetus in terms of, and a bit of injection of money. I've just been asked to guest write on a fantastic website called The Room Sigh, a woman called Samantha Newport, who's amazing young woman in her twenties, who set up this website, which is all about mental health. and about understanding ourselves and feeling more comfortable with ourselves.
So I'm a guest writer on that. And that's where I'm doing my podcasting as well. This is all just growing kind of quite organically. If you don't do what I did, which is quit completely and have nothing, because that wasn't the plan. The plan was to carry on doing this contracting work and then do stuff alongside, but I just couldn't carry on. If you can find a way to little nooks and crannies in your life, build those out.
Things that you, when you're in flow, when the hours go by and you're like, wow, it's two hours gone by, then you know you're doing something you love. If you can expand that a bit and reduce the things that you don't like a bit, go part time, do four days a week, do four and a half days a week, carve out some time in your life to do things you love, and then try and build from there.
Then you're not jumping off a cliff like I did. You're, the risk is lower. because you've still got something you've got something behind you it takes the pressure off it means you're not so scared because you're not saying right now I'm going to make you know all this money from writing and you're like looking at a blank sheet of paper and thinking this blank sheet of paper has to bring in the income so that would be my take on how to do it in a way that's safe and that is less scary.
And you know society has trained us hasn't it and I think particularly as women

that we're successful when we make a lot of money, when we're successful when we have the title. But do you think that definitions of success need to change? Totally. Completely agree. What is success? Success is a life well led, a life that feels purpose driven, that feels that you're making a difference. And that doesn't just have to be money driven. And I actually think, I feel like I'm so fortunate that I'm doing this at the time of COVID because it's now become a little bit more acceptable to have a different way of living.
We almost can't remember the world before where people were getting in suits and wearing makeup and high heels and spending two hours a day each way to commute into an office. Like people are looking at you now going, well why would I do that when I can do things by Teams or Zoom or online? So I think the kind of rules of engagement have changed and actually I think some organizations are going to struggle to get their employees back into the office because they're going to say well why would I when I get I get to finish at three o'clock and play with my kids or I get to go on my lunch break is going for walk in the hills or I get to make my family the my their favorite dish of pasta because I get to be home at a reasonable time.
There's much more kind of fluidity and flexibility in the way we're working and I think so some of the choices I've made are now a bit less mad than perhaps they might have been a year and a half, two years ago where people would be like why would you do that? So I think in a way it's luck. There's a timing to it I think where more people are asking themselves these existential questions of really look we could all be dead through Covid. why don't we just actually stop doing this and enjoy ourselves?
So I think everyone needs to stop and reflect, look in the mirror, the warts and all, and say which bits of my life are going well, do more of that, which bits are not going so well, change it. I know I make it sound easy, it's not. That's the first part, isn't it? To know what you would shift if you could. I love it. So next plans, what are you up to?

I really feel very grateful that if I were to say something back to my younger self, it's trust yourself, you will get there. My husband and I do this thing called five things where we just pick five things we're grateful for. We do it all the time because we just want to remind ourselves that we have so much. We have so much. What are your five things? Just to finish off, I've got to hit the five things.
What are the five things today? Well, the five things today, it's been lovely talking to you. I am so grateful for the friendships that I've got. I've got some wonderful friends. I've got a friend who wants to talk to me today and keep saying, why aren't you free? Why aren't you free? And I say, talking to Sam, talking to Sam. So I'm going to talk to her soon. I'm going to talk down off the phone and chat to her.
She's a wonderful friend. My husband's health. I'm so grateful for that. He's going to cook for me tonight. He cooks beautifully. So I'm really looking forward and they can be tiny things. I'm really grateful we got this mic working. Because that was, that was a problem at the beginning. Just, it doesn't have to be massive things. It can be that the sun is streaming through the window and it's hitting my face and it's making, I can feel it on my skin.
It just tiny, the smallest of things. That's all we have in the world is whatever we're in at the moment. It's the moment by moment by moment. That's all we have. We do it all the time. And it's a way of kind of, it circumnavigates the negative loops that you can have like, Oh my God, the money it's not coming in. I expect to be making more money than this. So yeah.
I am extremely, eternally grateful that of all the people that have helped me along the way, all the people who've supported me and I feel my life is 100% better. You are going to make such a difference with this podcast. I know that so many people are going to listen to it and it's going to ignite them on their own journeys. So well done. Thank you very, very much. I feel quite joyous.
I can see the sun streaming in and I'm feeling it and I'm all, you know. 7.45 in the morning on a Friday, but you have really inspired me and I'm deeply grateful and I'm inspired by your writing because I know that it's a natural talent for you. It's certainly not a natural talent for me, but you know, I try my best and I'm doing my thing. I'm correcting my thinking errors as I'm even speaking to you now.
So I love that phrase. I had not heard that phrase. I love it. So I think it actually might be a really great title for this podcast. Thank you, Charlotte, sending you love. Thank you so much.

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