Non-Linear Careers for Mums || Deb Smallwood on Identity, Choice & SelfPowerment

Foreign.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Real Life Real Kitchen podcast.

This week I'm having a fantastic chat with Deb Smallwood, who is a trailblazing executive thought leader and advocate for women's empowerment.

Deb has got a career spanning about 46 years in various transformational leadership roles, and she is about to publish a book called Of Self Powerment.

This has come about with her working with women who are, should we say, high achievers, executive women.

And these women who have succeeded in terms of kind of material things and status, but still feel that something is missing.

And Deb has been helping them kind of find their way and find.

Find their purpose in life.

Would that be a fair kind of assessment, Deb, of where you are with helping these ladies?

Hi, Zoe.

And what a great job articulating that.

You're so spot on.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So I think I'm gonna have quite a few mums on here who are doing things like creating sourdough starters and are going, this sounds terribly corporate.

This sounds very corporate.

Why has Zoe got Deb onto this, onto podcast?

So I listened to a talk that Deb gave recently, and what I found very, very powerful about the conversation or the.

The.

The.

The talk that Deb gave was, I think a lot of women, we come into the world, or at least when we're 18, 19, after our time in education, we think there is a ladder that we have to follow.

Deb has had a career through various industries, and it's always been changing.

Going through.

It's almost like a wave, responding to different needs at different times, different opportunities.

And I don't think we have enough of these stories of women who have had such not quite a portfolio career, but definitely have changed depending on the season of life.

And so that's something I really thought was a very powerful message in Deb's work.

So, Deb, could you let me know a little bit about how you got into the corporate world?

How did it begin?

I loved what you talked about this season.

Right.

So I.

We're.

We're going back many, many years.

So we're in the 70s, right?

Yes.

And I had a really strong mother that said to me, you need to be in the computers, you need to work for a company.

You need to have, you know, in health benefits and retirement and financial security, and you need to get a business degree.

So I got into business and technology because that's where my mother pointed me.

And back in the 70s, I had no idea what business was all about.

And luckily, I got into the technology as a COBOL programmer and entered that way.

And I, I loved what you said.

Our lives are journeys and our paths are not linear, they're non linear.

And even corporate women, what I realize, it's very, very cycled.

There's highs and lows and there's pivots and life.

And I think the more you can be flexible and agile in life to the pivots and looking up and out into opportunities, the path may be a little more positive and maybe a little more fulfilling.

Yeah.

A bit more sort of enjoyable.

Enjoyable in some ways.

Yeah.

With ease.

Right?

Life is hard.

Yeah, life is.

Life is hard.

Life is.

Life is.

So your mother sounds quite savvy.

So she was already kind of looking forward and saying this, this sort of job security is important.

Where had that come from?

And so she just really believed in.

She was a really a frontier, she was a strong.

I was only children in school, let alone in our church in the Greek community.

So a divorced mother working, she was a hairdresser.

She was not educated.

And so she always talked about financial independence and I believe for all women.

And I, I said this to my daughters and I'm saying it to my granddaughters.

Financial independence is your key in life because when you have financial independence, you can make choices.

It's easier to make choices.

And so if, and it may be for the time you're not financially independent, right.

You may be staying at home, but always have a skill or a trait or some type of skill that you can go and work.

And I always felt that I could always waitress because I was a waitress during the summers and I knew that I could make money and be financially independent as a waitress.

Right.

And there's nothing wrong with being a waitress.

I made lots of money and it was a really fun job.

I think I remember hearing a really powerful story from a lady who's now, she's now an academic.

But when she left for university to train to be a graphic designer, her mother took her aside and said, darling, I can't.

You know, money isn't an option.

You're going to have to work your way.

But what I can teach you to do is basic haircutting.

So fringe little bit trips.

So you just charge the people in your halls of residence, you're the students before a Saturday night, charge them a five or a tenner for a quick trim.

And that's what helped pave her way for her rent, her food, all of this.

And that story has always stuck with me.

And I think you're right.

It's having that knowing that you have the skills, you do have this freedom, you always have a choice.

You always have a choice.

No, that's, that's a really powerful, powerful thing that we need to be telling our children as well actually.

That there's always, always options, always options.

So as well, it applies to little boys, right?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I've been having conversations with my son.

We have the dustmen who go out, who go past.

And I said, the thing is you can start off as a dustman, but then you work your way up and you're learning the skills, you know, and waste management.

Everybody needs their rubbish cleared away.

Where there's exactly, exactly.

Really true.

Now one of the elements of your book that's coming out you, over the course of your career, or I suppose more recently, you've had interviews with about 50 odd women who have been at that C suite level.

So just for those who don't know C suite people in a corporate organization who'd be chief executive officer, chief financial officer, they have a C chief in front the chiefs.

So you've had a chat with 50 odd of these women to talk about their experiences of leadership and what were some of the kind of the patterns you spotted in these conversations that you had?

Well, I went into those conversations to really understand their experiences.

I, I only knew my story and my career from my book and they were open ended questions.

And what I, what I realized was they may be putting on a facade of confidence and that everything was amazing.

But when I looked behind their store or in their stories, so much suffering and pain for everyone.

Let it be in their childhood, growing up, school, working and women, the, the suffering just really just blew me away.

It took the away from me.

And I realized that all women have some level of self doubt and it varies.

And those that can manage the noise in their head and their self doubt tend to be able to pivot and move forward and accelerate forward.

Though that could even the self doubt can be imposter syndrome or it could be an imposter syndrome is someone that looks at an opportunity and says I'm not qualified.

Here are the things that they're looking for.

And I can't do all 12.

When in reality no one can do all 12.

You should, if you feel that you can do the role, you should jump into it.

Right?

Raise your hand so I found that, that it was the suffering and the self doubt just, I was just surprised.

And that a lot of women and I, and I talk to men.

They, they tend, and I talked to 10 men but they, they tend not to hang onto the past like women do.

And we carry a lot of heaviness with us forward and they become limiting beliefs in their abilities.

Not like one woman, her mother used to say, you know, you're not pretty, you're not smart.

And she grew up thinking she wasn't enough.

Yeah.

Than enough.

And through self powerment she's realizing she's beautiful, she's capable, she's high and in a very highly successful.

This is a woman that's managing 5,000 people right level sweet.

And doesn't think she's enough.

So I found stories like that.

Right.

And it's applicable to all women.

Yeah, yeah.

I want to come back to the men part of it because I do find that very interesting.

But golly, I mean it's amazing, isn't it the stories we tell ourselves.

Even though on you'd have anybody from the outside saying love, you're in charge of 5,000 people in this, you know, successful company.

You're more than enough, you're fantastic.

But inside we still have these stories of yeah.

That we're not.

How is it that you, how are you actually helping?

So a lady like that again, look, look at what you're achieving and you know, you're employing all these people, it means you're supporting families.

It's got this kind of huge ripple effect.

How do you, how do you change that story in their head?

It's with awareness.

Right.

First thing is that you even aware that you've got this noise in your head.

I, I go back to acknowledging your strengths, your superpowers.

We all are gifted.

We're all these beautiful humans that whatever your religion is or whatever you believe in.

Right.

But we're this human being that is so gifted and we all have our own unique DNA and we have strengths and superpowers and we all have disabilities, we all have gaps.

I'm dyslexic, right.

I a little ADHD that you weren't diagnosed with dyslexia 50, you know, 50, 60 years ago.

And but they create your gaps, create superpowers and strengths.

Right.

So you have to go back to who you are, what you're really good at, what your passions, what you love to do.

And knowing we.

I mentioned this on the call that we were on.

You know, Aristotle said, the great philosopher said knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

And I'll just adapt that to knowing yourself, accepting yourself and loving yourself.

Right.

And, and being an advocate for yourself in your wellness, your mental, your physical, your emotional wellness.

So that to me is the first step.

So for this particular woman, I was doing one on one mentoring and she joined a masterclass that we had and it was a six month masterclass.

And so getting her grounded into some of the limiting beliefs and the stories that were in a heads whole awareness.

And then the second thing is catching, learning to catch the thoughts.

We're never going to stop the thoughts.

I, I have thoughts all the time.

I had thoughts before I came on today.

Right.

Like you have to take a deep breath and go, I've got this, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And so touch that.

And when we can quiet the noise even for 30 seconds, we can hear that inner wisdom inside us.

Right?

This is, this is applicable to everyone on your podcast as well.

Yeah, yeah.

Because it's also.

I remember when, well when we were in a conversation, an email about this chat was I said in some ways I'm sort of, I'd love to serve two ends of the spectrum, the stay at home mum who's just saying, I'm just a mum, what am I doing?

I'm just a bum to the, you know, high achieving corporate bum who's going, but I've trained to be a doctor management consultant.

I've worked so hard for this.

I can only be this.

And yet feels the call needing to be at home more, working out a part time role, but feels they can't let go of the identity.

So yes, I think that's a really important, important piece of the puzzle.

What would you say?

I mean, yeah, we've got the two ends of the spectrum, we've got the stay at home mum, we've got our corporate mummy.

But they both have fear.

Is that too strong a word?

But it seems to be sort of a fear, a lack of trust in their own abilities.

What do you think?

I think in all cases there are moments in our lives, in those cycles, in those seasons we lose ourselves.

So mothers, right, either stay at home moms, full time to mothers that work.

And I was a mother that worked, right?

My mother worked, I worked.

My daughters are career women as well.

We have to realize for starters that being a mom is a role.

It's not your identity for starters.

Right.

And we can't adapt, we can't identify ourselves as a mom because when your children grow up and leave you or you end up like just crumble A lot of women can't or men can't handle the fact when their kids go away and you continue to want to be the mom and it.

And when they're off and married, it's.

You're not a mom anymore.

You're.

You're a different kind of mom.

Right.

And the same thing happens in the corporate world.

They think they're their title in your identity.

So if you get fired or you get asked to leave or you get demoted, you, you, you get off your kilter.

So what self parliament is, is uncoupling the who you are with what you do get you focused on who you are.

And when you're really strong with who you are as a human being, then you can.

When you go to do the tasks, let it be grocery shopping, cooking, changing a diaper, doing laundry, what, whatever it is taking your kids back and forth right to practices or being homeschooling like you do understand that that's a doing but it doesn't define you.

No, that's.

That's back to that woman that I am not a nut.

She was so interwoven with her role and then when she didn't get the promotion, she got rocked.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've.

I have come across this talking to.

To women I've met in the, in the corporate section.

This has been a really interesting.

It's just my observation and again having seen a couple who have been made redundant or didn't get the role they wanted, it's like a real personal slight.

I'm trying to think of the words to be sort of try to be tender with it because I know it's a wound, I'm on the outside and I'm going to.

But it's a business has no real connection to you and yet you have placed a lot of trust, love time into it in the way that you would do sort of your local community or a network, you know, more of a local network.

I don't know.

So that's just something I've seen or my observation.

And there are these wounds which I almost go again, I'm detached.

I haven't had this experience.

And so this is, you know, please, please correct me.

Rather than seeing the rejection as an opportunity or a.

Okay, that door is closed and this door is opening.

They see it as a personal slight.

Is that to do with the whole kind of identity and doing are connected?

Absolutely.

And I, and I want to go back to stay at home moms.

Right.

Your identity is not a mother or a wife or.

Those are Roles and titles that you have.

You have to start with who you are as a human being and know yourself.

Right.

And take care of yourself.

And when you can be that strong woman, then you're.

You're just.

You're a better mom.

Yeah.

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Not that you're better mom, but you're.

You're enjoying every moment with a different lens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Knowing.

Knowing who you are, knowing you are Zoe, knowing you are Deb and this is.

The things you are doing at the moment is part of the tapestry of your life.

It is.

And be acceptance of the role that you have.

Embrace it.

Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And going into that, I think one of the things as well that when you were speaking and sort of one of the elements of your book that is coming up is this idea of.

Yeah, I, I'm very much drawn to this idea of choice.

And I don't mean like chocolate cupcake, strawberry cupcake.

I mean whatever situation you're in is.

Is changing your mindset might be a very dark, very difficult situation.

And going, what am I learning from this?

This too shall pass.

Where, where is the, the joy?

Where is the positive in this?

That, that seems to be quite a powerful element of the support you're able.

To give these women when we.

All there is is the present moment, right?

The past is the past and the future hasn't happened yet.

And all we have, all we can really control is ourselves.

Now when, when you have children, you can control them to a degree.

To a degree.

But eating all of that, they.

They still have their own will, right?

They may not, they may not want to take a nap, they may want to go outside.

You want them to be.

But you can somewhat control the majority of it because you pick them up and just bring them in and they can cry.

Um, so when we realize that all we have is this moment and the only thing that we can control is ourselves, we need to become fully accountable to ourselves.

Meaning what?

I realized in my life, I was accountable to my husband, my children, my mother, my job, my boss, the company, my team, my customers.

And then, and then there I was at the bottom, right.

And I Was overweight, didn't take care of myself, didn't find time to myself, and I wasn't accountable to myself.

So when you realize that all you have is the present moment in this gift from the God or universe, whatever you believe in, and you take care of yourself, then when you see what's in front of you, bad or good, I say, I want to go to the beach and it's raining.

You have to accept.

Accept the fact that it's raining.

I go to a grocery store and there's a long line and I go to myself, why am I here on a Saturday morning?

You have to accept it.

Right.

Well, what did you expect?

Yes, it's that acceptance of.

Or my child is having a tantrum or my mother has gotten sick or bad things and sad things.

You almost have to accept it.

And then once you accept it, you take action.

You can either surrender to it and go, there's nothing I can do.

Or you can change your mind, or you can take action and change it.

Yeah, that's the power.

That's a big piece.

Is accepting what is.

And old choices.

Because at the end of the day, we have choice.

And I'm going to go back to.

And when you have financial independence, have more choice.

Yeah.

Or even freedom.

Freedom to make.

To make those choices.

I was just thinking about going to the beach on a rainy day and I thought, well, I'm here in England.

It's pretty standard.

Pretty standard.

But you could still enjoy it.

Just depends what kind of coat you're wearing.

So.

Yes.

Yes.

New England.

So sunny summer.

Yes, this is true.

This is true.

Not quite as warm as a Greek summer or a Greek beach, but yes, it's still.

So I'm going to go back to the 10 chaps that you interviewed for the book and you were saying, so it was quite, quite a contrast because they were the past is the past.

And then there was more of a kind of moving forward.

What's going on there?

What is the.

Yeah.

Why the contrast, do you think?

I think men and women are just different.

And I remember early in my career there was a book out that you've probably heard of, Men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

Right?

Yes.

And that has stuck with me all along.

And I just think we're typically.

These are general statements.

Right.

And not scientific, but observations and some readings.

And what I learned from the interviews, which is extremely different.

Women tend to.

You.

We have these hormones that you had talked about, right?

Yes.

We're just wired differently.

We tend to be a little More balanced between our right side of the brain and left side of the brain.

And I remember reading that book.

Book.

And it was like us, we have a super highway in between the right side and the left side.

We can process a lot of different things.

Right.

And sequential or creative.

Right.

And so we just think differently than men.

We tend to be a little more.

Because we leverage our right side.

We tend to be a little more empathetic.

So interview, same questions.

And knowing the majority of.

I knew a lot of the executives and then I went beyond.

So I even interviewed some men that I really didn't know.

None of the men cried.

And I.

Part of it was still carrying a lot of pain from their childhood.

Crying about their childhood or crying about something that happened in their life, in their career.

The men didn't.

And the men, some of them lost their mothers young.

Yeah.

Or I was going to say similar levels of suffering, I presume.

But suffering, they.

They tend to either buried it or let it go.

I don't know.

So there was that.

Just networking.

Women tend to want to prove that they can do it alone.

So even as a mom, we need to know that it's okay to ask for help in any role that we're in.

Because we can't do it alone.

We can't do anything alone.

Men don't necessarily ask for help, but they network people all around them that when they have a challenge, they pick up the phone and say, hey, I got this problem.

And it's businesslike.

Right.

But how do I solve this?

So different kinds of network structure.

We tend to get emotional support.

Men don't have a network of emotional support.

So those were some differences.

Yeah.

Just very, very different.

Yeah.

But also quite complementary.

Having those kind of.

And having that.

The empathetic.

But also the kind of the business that.

Not quite the brusqueness, but, you know, the directness, shall we say.

And having that.

Yeah.

Having those.

Yeah.

A lot of women had male bosses, male mentors, male sponsors.

So it wasn't just female helping, female men helping and women helping men.

That.

But I.

What I.

One of my conclusions.

Life is hard.

Yeah.

And we need to ask for help.

And I asked everyone, what would they do differently in their career?

What would they change?

And they all said they wouldn't change anything.

But the majority of them said, I wish I asked for help earlier.

Realized is my whole life I never asked for help.

I felt I was expected to do it all, um, through exhaustion and anxiety and panic, all of that.

Right.

Um, I think it's okay.

To be a little vulnerable and say, I need help.

Right.

I need space.

I. I need time for myself.

Yeah.

I mean, this is something that I. I encourage a lot of the moms.

I call it.

I call it the running away time.

You know, even just a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon or making sure you have an hour of Monday night is your sacred night, whatever.

But that out of the house, doing something for you.

Right.

You know, it could be just sitting in a cafe, staring into space.

It could be knitting, it could be walking, it could be the gym, whatever.

Meeting up with a friend, whatever you need.

But you fill that bottle and it's incredible the difference that you come.

When you come back, you just have so much more capacity for everything that comes because you.

Yeah, you've.

You've filled that.

And.

Yeah.

Deeply, deeply important to have that.

That you're not just giving, giving, giving, giving, giving all the time, and nothing is coming back in.

Really important.

Yeah.

It's going to go back to what I said about accountability.

That is being accountable to yourself and giving your tonic space.

Right.

I didn't do any of the things that you talked about, and it warmed them.

Right.

Until one day I woke up and said, oh, I'm not doing any of that.

So I get cranial sacrals once a week.

I do Pilates.

I go for walks.

And I loved what you said because I saw it on your website, which is just incredible and amazing, the different offerings that you have in support.

It was like a reset.

Was it a reset Sunday?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I say 30 seconds.

Just pause.

Get in the car, the kids are screaming.

Sometimes I got my grandchildren.

And I just pause and I just breathe.

Right.

Just pauses throughout the day.

If you.

If you can't find an hour or 15, you have 30 seconds throughout the day.

Yeah, yeah.

I've got.

I've got an aunt who's one of eight.

And she said, the thing is, being a mother, you don't have that time of.

So coming from a Catholic family, don't have that time of adoration and contemplative prayer or daily mass.

She's like, if you're on the loo and you've got a couple of minutes of silence without an audience, that's your gift.

Enjoy.

And that is just enough to.

And then you go on.

Yeah, it's.

It's.

And she's accepting.

She's in that moment.

Yeah.

Let it be just a couple of minutes.

Yeah.

Yep.

And.

And I think something as well.

And we're gonna go right back to the beginning where we were talking about seasons of life.

This too shall pass.

That's a phrase.

And it shall pass quickly if you're not careful.

But this too shall pass.

And that often gives just enough encouragement to say, okay, this is a hard thing at the moment.

It shall pass.

But also, what little changes could I make to make it easier?

So in the corporate setting, I presume there's going to be things like, where can I shift within the company if I need to go part time to be with my little ones or aged relative?

What can I do there?

Do I need to change careers completely as a mum?

What do I need to change in the house?

Do we need to be doing quite so many extracurricular activities?

We, we have a lot more power and control than we think we do.

Absolutely.

This too shall pass.

It's going back to accepting the moment.

Right.

Either pandering to it and taking, like you said, small actions which are choices.

It's all.

It runs the same.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And not going in all guns blazing because that's when it goes wrong.

Try and do a dramatic change in 24 hours.

That's when it all.

That's when disaster strikes.

Would that be a fair comment?

Yes, absolutely.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, Deb, thank you so much.

This has been just a, just a really, really lovely chat.

Again, I tell you, it's just such a privilege to have this podcast.

People are so generous with their time, their wisdom, and there's just so much, so much food for thought.

So I just want to say thank you for your time.

So you can find out more about that in the show notes where you can follow her, find out a little bit more about her.

And if you feel that this episode has really resonated with you or you know of someone where you thought, aha, this sounds like it might suit them.

Please, like, share, subscribe, leave comments, all the things and we'll get the word out there.

So, Deb, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

Love the podcast and want to help keep the kettle on.

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