SPEAKER_04: 0:57

Imagine climbing the ladder at one of the fastest growing tech companies in the world, only to be told you're not good enough and watching your career collapse in front of you. That's exactly what happened to Alice Turha. At Deliveroo, she went from European marketing lead to demoted overnight. But instead of hiding it, Alice turned that failure into the foundation of her business, Badass Unicorn, helping high-growth teams build confidence, resilience, and what she calls badass array. Welcome to Erasing Marketing Mistakes, the podcast that helps you grow your brand faster by learning the mistakes of the world's top marketers and leaders. I'm Chris Norton and my mission is to help you, the senior marketer, to avoid the traps others have fallen into so you can build a thriving brand. Today, Alice Tahar joins us to talk about what happens when your dream job disappears, how to reframe shame into strength, and why imposter syndrome is something we all need to learn to dance with. Alice will share her journey from Deliveroo to founding Badass Unicorn and the mistakes, emotions and redundancies that shaped her approach to leadership and resilience. Alice will break down how to build resilient teams into high-growth environments, how to turn career setbacks into personal brands, and how to uncover your own badassery. So, as always, sit back, relax, and let's hear how you can learn from the mistakes that can make us all stronger. Enjoy. Thanks for having me. So, Alice, I have looked through well before we spoke, I looked through your um your job history and you've had a very, very interesting career before you started Badass Unicorn. Um, because you you did you've got you've got a degree in geography, you can tell me if I'm wrong here. And then you've gone into you've gone into marketing. You've worked for Whitbread, you've worked for Deliveroo, you've had quite a range of uh roles in marketing. So do you just want to talk about how you've come to to be where you are today? Because I think it'd be quite interesting to hear your backstory.

SPEAKER_02: 3:07

Absolutely. Do you want the long version or the short version?

SPEAKER_04: 3:11

Hmm, the medium version, how's that?

SPEAKER_02: 3:13

The medium version, I like it. So you are right. I did a degree in geography, which was completely unrelated really to anything that I do now. I often think, should I have done business or marketing or something? Because it perhaps would have been a bit more useful. But I had a had a hell of a good time doing geography anyway. And um, yeah, I started off my career working for quite a famous photographer and was there as like the head of FedEx, you know, and like getting the coffees and all that, and basically just kind of grew with the role and started doing more interesting stuff, made a logo out of his signature, started picking up the phones, and then I was going off to run exhibitions around the world. So that was really a lesson in when at first you might arrive somewhere and you're doing maybe dog's body work, if you just lean in and show willing and enthusiasm and add value, then you can grow your remit to something much better than header FedEx. Um, and then yeah, I went over to a partnerships marketing agency. I then moved over to Whitbread. I was marketing Beef Eater, not the gin. Um, I used to sometimes not correct people when they said, Oh wow, you work for Beef Eater. I'd be like, Yeah, not the restaurants on the side of the motorway next to a Premier Inn. And uh and and then yeah, went over to Deliveroo. I kind of I wasn't there suited for corporate. So I like to wear Air Max trainers and I F and Blind and things like that. So actually, when I started getting into personal development, I realised that I wasn't really in the right spot working in a corporate for my kind of the way in which I thrive. And then I got hit up in my DMs, as you often do, by a recruiter being like, Do you want to come and interview for international marketing manager at Deliveroo? And I had just started seeing the bikes going around London and the kind of flashes of teal as you were going around the streets because Deliveroo was 2016, it was still quite early days. I'm not gonna take the glory of all the proper OGs who did the really hard work, but it still wasn't the kind of brand household name that we know today. And I absolutely loved it. I really found my three sweet spot in such a kind of thriving, fast-paced environment, working with our teams around the world and trying to standardize marketing and growing global campaigns and being that really like the hub in the hub and spoke sort of marketing structure. And it was all going quite well until one day it wasn't. So uh I um in businesses like delivery, they grow very, very fast, and your role grows with it. And I'd been sort of promoted to the European marketing lead. So I was looking after marketing for continental Europe, and it was a pretty big job, and delivery was becoming quite a big player at the time. And I think they got in some management consultants who said, I'm not sure that you've got the right people in the right roles at the right levels. And sadly, I was one of the victims because unbeknownst to me, I sort of wasn't performing at the marketing director level that was now kind of expected, and I wasn't really good at some of the things that you needed to be good at in a tech marketing company, like cohort analysis. And um, yeah, I wasn't very good at Excel, and it was a very numeric company. And so unfortunately, I got demoted. So I got taken to one side in a one-to-one and told that they were bringing in somebody above me to kind of take over my job, and it was the biggest slice of humble pie. But actually, as we'll kind of discuss a little bit more, I think in a minute, it became a real zeitgeist moment that I kind of had to pick myself up off the floor and figure out what I did next. And what came next was a journey towards badass unicorn, a training company for high performance teams.

SPEAKER_04: 6:51

I'll shut up now. I mean, well, I mean, you you covered you covered getting demoted. Wow. I mean, demotion is a is a tough thing to to take. So for somebody to do that um and to take that, so what how how how did that come about and what did you how did you take it? Obviously, not initially, I would imagine not the not the best, but obviously you've you've grown from it because that's the whole point, right?

SPEAKER_02: 7:21

Yeah, so luckily for me, I'd discovered the magic of personal development a few years before and had really started getting to know myself and what I wanted, and it gave me permission to start showing up on LinkedIn and do podcasts, and I started being invited to speak and so forth whilst doing my marketing role. And I thought nobody realized that actually what I wanted to do was pivot to go into the world of training and public speaking and become the UK's version of Mel Robbins, and still working on that. But I obviously was kind of showing that I wasn't quite in the space that I needed to be at that marketing director level. And so when they kind of recognized that I wasn't the right fit to take the company into its next period of growth, I became one of the kind of victims. And I think you're right to say it was the toughest, one of the toughest things I've ever experienced. My toughest thing has to be becoming a mum, but um, definitely the second toughest because it was a real fall from grace, right? I had to exit the marketing lead Slack group, I had to sit somewhere different, I had to hand over all my responsibility. And of course, I could have gone away in a shroud of secrecy and kind of gone and got another job, and no one would have ever known any better. But I realized that delivery was a really good place to be. And of course, I was moonlighting doing my side hustle and personal development by this point. So I put my big girl personal development pants on, and after all of the personal personal development that I had done, I realized that I needed to find a way that this could define me in a positive way. And don't you sometimes find that when you shed light or when you put light onto shame, it kind of takes the shame away. So instead of pretending it didn't happen, I leant into it. I spoke about it on podcasts. I remember speaking about it on stage at a marketing week event, and one of the reporters, completely unbeknownst to me, wrote an article about it and someone sent it to me about delivery marketing leads, reframes, career crisis. And I was like, what? I didn't mean for that to happen. But I think people were quite surprised and found the honesty of my experience and me sharing it like that quite refreshing. And actually, now it's become such a key cornerstone of my personal brand. And I only wish that more people would talk about their marketing mistakes, um, which you give people a platform to do and their screw-ups, because then we would all feel like we're not some weirdo for not getting it right every single time. We're just part of a really good crew.

SPEAKER_04: 9:55

I mean, you are exactly the reason why we started this podcast. That's exact that sort of story is exactly exactly the reason. The honesty, the authenticity, and sharing something that's happened that's tough. And then like building from it and the fact that you lent into it is is brilliant. Go on, Will, what's your question?

SPEAKER_03: 10:12

Yeah, so talk to us about um what you now do at badass unicorn. And can you also define what badassery is? Because I quite like that term, and I've got to steal that, I think.

SPEAKER_02: 10:22

I I can, I can, I can. So essentially, what I learned on this personal development journey were the things that lit me up, the things that I would pay to do were public speaking, and one of those freak shows that actually like standing in front of a group of strangers and sharing my thoughts. And I loved building workshops. And the bits of marketing that I was best at was when we had off sites and we brought in team members from around the world, and I had a real knack of being able to create really inclusive, inspiring, energizing spaces. And so taking that learning and picking myself up off the floor after I'd drunk two bottles of rose with my mum and sobbed into her bosom, like, oh my god, why does this happen to me? Um, I realized that that was where I wanted to sort of rebuild. So I pivoted to an L and D role at Deliveroo, which I might still be in if another professional punch hadn't come around and slapped me around the face, which was redundancy. So I was put at risk of redundancy just at the beginning of COVID. And I kind of took it as a sign that it was my opportunity to take a little buffer of a redundancy payout and see if I could get the business to pay my salary and and pay the mortgage. So started off small, charging relatively small amounts to do workshops. And someone would say to me, Do you do a resilience workshop? And I go, Yes, builds resilience workshop, you know, and really built the parachute as I was flying face first into the ground. But slowly but surely I started to get some traction. I got Gusto as a client. And as soon as you start to get like a big brand on your books, people start to take you more seriously. And now I get to boast that I work with Google McDonald's and delivery is now a client. And uh, yeah, it's all about turbocharging ROI, return on individual for high performance teams. So we cover things like strength and confidence and line management and then creating an attitude or fortitude, which is all the mindset stuff. And you asked about what badassery is. So badassery are the attributes, behaviors, and characteristics that each one of us has that make us formidably impressive. Because even if your listener today woke up feeling like, today's not really a good day, I kind of got out on the wrong side of the bed. I'm here to remind you that you are a literal badass miracle. That if you think about the chances of you being on this earth, there's a one in 15 quadrillion chance, that's 15 zeros, that that sperm met that egg and gazintheid, you came into the world. And I believe that everybody has a unique set of gifts to give the world. We just sometimes need somebody to help us realize what those things are and how to lean into them.

SPEAKER_04: 13:37

I could listen to you all day long. This is great. Oh wow. Amazing.

SPEAKER_03: 13:43

So you work with high high growth companies currently, don't you? I was looking looking at some of those um those amazing brands that you work with at the moment. So are there um what are the typical challenges, I suppose, when it comes to those high growth companies? I mean, I notice you talk about resilience, building in and training resilience is a kind of a key factor. Um, what else are they struggling with? And and and coming back to resilience, you know, how do you make teams more resilient? What would you recommend?

SPEAKER_02: 14:12

Yeah, it's a great question. When you work in a high-growth company, it can sometimes feel like you're on a rocket ship. And sometimes that rocket ship's going up and you're going with it, and it's about withstanding the G force, so resilience and time management and how to work more effectively and things like that. But sometimes when the rocket ship goes off course or you're kind of struggling with trying to keep up, it is about that resilience, that growth mindset piece to be able to kind of ride with the changes. Um, so yeah, I would say the kind of key challenges that businesses would come to me with are often around how to equip the teams with the mindset to be able to face whatever challenges might come their way in work and in you know, general life. And also a lot of the challenges might be around how do you boost morale, how do you get people really thriving at work with that fire in their professional bellies, taking initiative, taking agency of their own career journeys, taking the reins of that path and kind of creating something that feels really exciting to them, whilst also finding ways to kind of meet the business's priorities, because these businesses aren't charities. So you've got to bring those things together in something that I call the value creation zone.

SPEAKER_03: 15:31

Well well, let's cover that in a second. But I mean that you you said an awful lot there that was that was fascinating. It'd be good to kind of um dive into it. So morale then. So, you know, if if you're kind of um I know it's difficult to to offer definitive, you know, step-by-step advice, but what are the strategies and the and the tactics that you perhaps suggest to teams that that you know these high growth companies, they're perhaps lacking morale for whatever reason. How can you kind of build that in or or rediscover that?

SPEAKER_02: 16:02

Yeah, lovely question. So I'll try and keep this as practical as I can. The best I remember uh uh my first boss when I worked for Terry O'Neill, the photographer, he said that work should feel like a six-form common room. And I definitely didn't feel as excited as I should have done going to school every day because it was ruddy brilliant, wasn't it? Right. But how do we create our own kind of sixth-form common room vibe? And really for me, that's about understanding what our strengths are. Now, our strengths are not just what we're good at. For some reason, we've got this strange definition of strengths being what we're good at, when actually, if you look in the dictionary, the definition of strength is your source of advantage. And I believe, and lots in the personal development world believe, that your source of advantage are the things that energize and motivate you, the things that you jump to on your to-do list, the things that you're most engaged and most present doing. And so for anybody that might be feeling a little bit lackluster, or for anybody who's leading a team who might be feeling a little bit lackluster, I'd invite them to think about how can you reconnect yourselves or your team with the things that really light you up, the things that you can't wait to do, the things that you would pay to do if you would be able to. And a really nice exercise that I suggest people do for this is create your dream diary. So literally draw out a diary. I've got a template which I can share if you want to put it in the show notes, where you literally plot out your your diary and you put in, imagining your dream week, the different tasks that you'd be doing. This isn't about your job title, this isn't about the things that you put on your CV. This is about what would a dream week look like. And when you do that, you can start to see what are the things that I find most energizing. And with that information, it's about having conversations about these kind of business proposals that say, I see problem X, and I think you should let me solve it by doing why. And why is the things that energize and motivate you. So you are showing how you're adding value to the business and solving a real business need, but what you're doing there is having an opportunity to lean into the things that you want to lean more into.

SPEAKER_04: 18:15

So you talk a lot about imposter syndrome, and there's so many people out there, include me included, imposter syndrome, like starting a bloody podcast two and a half years ago. I didn't have a bloody clip, neither me or Will knew what we were doing, and I had massive imposter syndrome. Like, how the hell do you do this? What how does it work? You know, um what what is it you do to help people with imposter syndrome? Because like you've spoken at big conferences, you've you've done the keynotes and stuff, you've walked on stage, and I've done we we do quite a bit of that ourselves, but I think everybody, if they're honest, when they when they're about that literal 30 seconds before you're about to step out onto the lecturer, you're thinking, um, and so how how how do you help like beat that beat that scary moment?

SPEAKER_02: 19:02

Yeah, imposter syndrome is huge. One of my mentors, Mark Evans, he says, if you don't get imposter syndrome, you're either a psychopath or a complete narcissist. So I think the first thing to say is if you get in get imposter syndrome, it just means that you're humble enough to realize that you're not the finished article and that you've got we've all got things to improve. The next thing I'd say is if you're getting up on stage or if you're presenting to a senior stakeholder or what have you, it's pretty natural to get imposter syndrome because your body thinks that you are at risk because you're in a position where you could make a total tit of yourself, right? You could say the wrong thing. You could fall off the stage and you know break your nose.

SPEAKER_00: 19:47

You're not helping it.

SPEAKER_02: 19:49

Sorry. But this is but but but imposter syndrome, or when your body goes into fight or flight, the sweaty palms and the dry mouth and the heart beating and the fast breathing, this is all your body's way of saying, uh-oh, I feel scared. There's a metaphorical saber-toothed tiger that's about to jump on me, right? So when we recognize that A, it means we're humble, B, it's nature's way of keeping us safe, we can start to almost de-demonize it and realize that it was actually something that was created to kind of keep us alive and keep us being good people and humble people. And it has some good attributes too, right? You know, when you see somebody running a little bit faster than you round the circuit of the park, you think, okay, I'm gonna step up the bait, pace. So it it pushes you and it stops you maybe from letting the word vomit just fall out of your mouth. So there's some positive attributes. And I once heard somebody say, We're never gonna cure imposter syndrome, but we need to learn how to dance with our imposter.

SPEAKER_04: 20:53

Yeah, I mean, uh one thing I always try to do is I read, I can't remember where I read this, it might be a book or something. It said that when you're about to do public speaking or something like that, where you are like you like you said, you could fall over or whatever, is to treat the anxiety, is the very same um sort of emotions and and neurological signals as excitement. So you treat it as like you're excited to give a great performance or a great whatever. That's one of the things that that I've taken from. But what I did take from what you just said there is I'm not a psychopath or a narcissist, so I'm an I'm I'm winning today. That's good for me. There you go. There you go.

SPEAKER_02: 21:33

Yeah, apparently I don't know the exact science, but I think it is the same pathways are triggered with excitement and nervousness. So it's it's it's a similar thing, and I love that simple reframe of I'm I'm excited, I'm a bit apprehensive, and it's okay.

SPEAKER_00: 21:52

You're listening to the Embracing Marketing Mistakes podcast.

SPEAKER_03: 21:57

So, how do we learn to dance with our imposter then? Um, is it just a case of becoming comfortable with it and and understanding what it is we're we're experiencing?

SPEAKER_02: 22:07

Great question. So, one of the first things I think we can do, and probably the most important thing that we need to do is recognize when it starts to show its ugly face, right? And there are some symptoms of imposter syndrome that we all know, intellectual fraud or self-doubt. Those are pretty commonplace. But actually, there are other aspects of imposter syndrome manifesting that we might not be as aware of. Like if somebody is finds it difficult to um accept prave, praise, pray, praise. So, for example, are you somebody who, if somebody pays you a compliment, you go, oh, they were just being nice, they didn't really mean it. Or if someone says, Oh, you did a great job in the presentation, you go, Oh, no, no, no, it was all so and so. This is our imposter coming in. And so it's it can be useful to sort of recognize when those types of behaviors are coming into play. Uh, I talk about different archetypes of your imposter coming to life. So there's the perfectionist. Again, this is a coping mechanism to protect yourself from imposter syndrome. It's the idea that if I just get everything right, if I just dot every T and cross every I, then nobody's gonna realize that I'm actually a fraud and I don't deserve to be here. Being a workaholic is another classic imposter archetype. It's the idea that if I just get through everything on to-do list and on the to-do list, if I just juggle all the plates and I don't let anything fall, then nobody's gonna realize that I'm actually really rubbish and I'm not gonna get found out. So when we can start to see some of those things coming to life, we can start to catch ourselves in that moment and say, oh, hey, imposter, how are you? Thank you for keeping me safe, thank you for making me humble, thank you for driving me and all of the lovely stuff that you're doing. But even though I hear and see you, I'm going to do something a little bit different. And that's when we start the reframe of the excitement versus um nervousness. That's when we start putting things into perspective. That's when we, for example, start manically practicing the keynote that we've got to give in three days' time that we haven't given enough airtime to, right? So I think it's it's the key thing is about recognizing when your impostor is coming to life and then looking at not necessarily listening to it, but holding its hand and feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

SPEAKER_04: 24:33

And you've got when Will mentioned dancing with your dancing um with your imposter, what about your ego? You've got to get those two to dance together, right? So that so that you don't come across as either too egotistical or too too, you know, um, what's the what's the opposite of egotistical? Unegotistical for us humble? Humble, yeah, yeah, there you go. That's better.

SPEAKER_02: 24:56

Oh yeah, and but I think I think so many people we're so afraid of shining as bright as we can, right? Because we fear that people are going to judge us, that they'll think we're arrogant, that we think that we think we're up ourselves, that you know, especially for women, dare I say, like, you know, we have this idea that we need to be deferential and we need to be assertive, but not too assertive. And it's just such a hard balance to strike. And I think the more that we can sort of let go of some of that expectation and just say, Do you know what? I'm gonna show up as who I am. If you like me, great. If you don't, that's okay too. And try and let go of the worrying about what people think because it's such a burden that we all carry. And actually, another tip that I found really useful for overcoming imposter syndrome is drawing your imposter. So my imposter is a cheerleader, she's like the head cheerleader at Mean Girls High School, right? And I started to write down the things that she would say, like, oh, you're not good enough, you don't have a million followers, you don't have this, you don't have a best-selling book, you're useless, you're rubbish, you're this, you're that. So when I gave her a face and a name, she's called Alysia, by the way, um, suddenly I started to realize that actually Alyssia was just my inner child who got bullied as a teenager and who just wants everybody to like her and just wants like the recognition so that she feels like she's good enough. And then I just wanted to give Alicia a bit of a hug rather than vilify her as this monster that's holding me back.

SPEAKER_04: 26:35

I mean, I could I've actually got a picture of Alyssia, this the the cheerleader in my head now, telling you, you know, picking picking holes in you. You're right though, if you if you if you give them a face and a name, I suppose that that sort of humanizes it and removes that little character on your shoulder going, you can't do this. This isn't for you. You need to walk out, put down the keynote notes and run away.

SPEAKER_02: 26:57

I mean, literally, I've given I give sessions on imposter syndrome every month. And at the beginning, I asked people, how often do you experience imposter syndrome? And it is so rare that you get people saying never or rarely. 98% of people are experiencing imposter syndrome at least on a weekly basis, and probably about 25% are experiencing imposter syndrome multiple times a day. And we sit there and we think that everybody else is like totally confident in a meeting, but actually they're sitting there going, Oh god, I just stumbled on my words, I sound like a right idiot, or sitting there thinking, Oh, I knew I should have asked that question because somebody else asked it, and everyone goes, Mmm, yeah, so insightful. Yeah. So, you know, if we could see the speech bubbles of people's thoughts beside them, we'd realise that everybody else has got the same toxic monologue. I call my uh imposter syndrome the shitty committee, going through their heads, and then we just be like, Oh, we're just part of the majority, right?

SPEAKER_04: 27:58

Yeah. Wow. What what do you do?

SPEAKER_03: 28:01

What do you do in terms of oh sorry, go, Will Well, um well, was yours? It was yours a follow-up question to that.

SPEAKER_04: 28:08

I was gonna ask, yeah, I was gonna say, like, what do you do in terms of like so one of the things we've discussed on this podcast is obviously Will and I are leaders leaders, so we want to get some free advice on leadership because we've read several books, but every only so many things you you can take from it. Like leadership, I've I talk about this quite a bit, leadership is quite a lonely experience because you're always trying to do the right thing, do the um and you can't always do the right thing. You or you try and do the right thing, but you're always it's it's you you know, sometimes you're seen as us and them and all those sorts of things. I suppose what I'm trying to say is what what how do you help leaders with leadership and the the lonely nature of being a leader? Is there any hot tips you've got on that?

SPEAKER_02: 28:49

Yeah, it's tough, you know, and honestly, I can give you one answer, but I'm gonna give you the answer that first came to mind, which is I think one of the things you have to do is look at your organization and understand what their version of good leadership looks like. Because I'll be honest, part of the reason I think, although no one would ever say this to me, that I got demoted at Deliveroo is because I came out espousing everything that I'd heard in books, all the motivational keynotes that said, bring your full self to work, share your warts and all story, be vulnerable, share all your mistakes. And I think at the time at Deliveroo, it just wasn't a culture that was open to that. And so I think they that the leadership probably looked at me and was like, oh, what's this girl doing? And I think all of the people that were working um at more junior levels looked at me and went, wow, that's so great that she's like sharing in this company-wide email that she made a mistake or sharing this blog card blog post that she wrote about being confidently alone. Um and I think the leaders were like, not not too sure about this. So I would say, like, have a look at what leadership looks like in your organization and then flex accordingly. And if you're in an organization that perhaps doesn't align with the type of leadership style that you want to have, it might be a question of, well, how could I perhaps promote the type of leadership that I think is important without getting myself demoted? Or am I working in the right spot? Um, so yeah, that's my like really honest take on it. In terms of leaders feeling lonely, another thing that I talk a lot about is psychological safety. So, psychological safety is the shared belief that we can be ourselves and speak up in meetings, share our ideas, constructively challenge without fear of retribution, right? And it's a shared belief because it rarely exists that one person feels psychologically safe and everybody else is, you know, poo in their pants. And um the most important thing that leaders can do for their teams and high performance is create psychological safety because it means uh there's lots and lots of research that shows that it makes for better and more effective decision making, it leads to like higher um effectiveness for teams. Like Google found that it was the number one ingredient for a high performing team, not who was on the team, not what they were doing, but the environment, the culture of kind of safety that that was exhibited. So I always espouse the importance of. Of psychological safety. And as for leaders feeling lonely, I'm finally kind of seguing back to your initial question. I think the more that we can, at least on a peer level, to the extent that we feel comfortable, be honest about how we're feeling, be open up about our mistakes, the things that aren't going well, and really kind of break down those barriers and create this psychological safety between a peer group. And if you don't feel like you can do that at work, maybe create psychological safety with people who are outside of your kind of workplace, the more or the less alone we feel, I should say.

SPEAKER_03: 32:07

Some of these are quite progressive concepts, aren't they? And I mean, there's I'm I'm absolutely on board with what you're talking about. But do you feel, you know, do you ever get kind of pushback from companies that are just really cynical and they see this as a kind of you know woke wokery in the workplace or whatever? You know, do you do you do you ever get that?

SPEAKER_02: 32:26

Yes. I mean, they don't tend to be the companies that work with me, to be fair. I'm called badass unicorns, so it kind of separates the the the old school from the progressive, I'd say. But yeah, you do hear that. Um it's a load of woke nonsense, we don't have time for this, you know, it's work, not therapy, etc. etc. To them, I would urge them to look at the research and look at the research behind psychological safety and how it drives high performance. And, you know, for example, we've got marketers listening right now. Like, imagine that you're in a brainstorm, right? And you're thinking about amazing ideas for next year for your brand. And imagine that there's an intern in that room and they have a can-winning industry-defining idea. Without psychological safety, that intern might keep their lips sealed, right? And so think about the graveyard of incredible ideas that never see the light of day because somebody was too scared to speak up. In fact, I've heard arguments that the financial crisis was a result of there being too little psychological safety because, and I'm not going to get into the ins and outs of the financial system, or I'll get myself totally in knots, right? But essentially, nobody was challenging all of these ridiculous things that they were doing. And because there was so much group think, this whole concept kind of rolled and rolled on and flywheeled, and then suddenly the whole deck of cards collapsed. So perhaps if somebody had had the psychological agency to say, are we sure about that? Um, perhaps we, you know, might have avoided, we we might have avoided some mistakes. And obviously, you can think about that at a sort of micro level in terms of companies or team decision making, not just macro world biopolitical challenges. Biopolitical? What the heck is that?

SPEAKER_03: 34:22

Some good words coming out today. Um I was going to ask you about resilience again. I think that's quite an interesting topic. And anecdotally, speaking with other business owners, other sort of CEOs and things, that there's the feeling that there's I think the immediate aftermath after COVID, um, anecdotally, I've heard that people entering the workforce lacked resilience. I think that's that's changed actually. And I think there's probably all sorts of reasons for that. The fact that a lot of young people are starting their careers having never experienced the workplace, they start their careers working remotely, very strange circumstances. Anyway, um, resilience then. So, how do we bake in more resilience into teams? And obviously, for those fast growth companies, it's a massive issue, isn't it? You know, it can be an absolute roller coaster. You know, in a single week, you can be at the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. And really, to you need that resilience to get through that and to carry on, don't you? So, what would you say to people that want more resilient teams?

SPEAKER_02: 35:26

I'm gonna say something that's potentially a little bit controversial. No, me never. Um I feel like resilience became a bit of a buzzword and it got a bit of a bad name because leaders would be saying to teams, you just need to be more resilient. You just need to be more resilient. And suddenly the onus is on the team member, on the individual, to just be more resilient. When what was actually happening was team members were being overworked, underpaid, weren't necessarily getting the support that they needed, and no wonder they were struggling, right? So I think we need to look at ourselves as leaders and ask whether or not what we're expecting of team members is really fair, or if perhaps their lack of resilience is actually that our expectations of them and the work that they do is too high. In a lot of the organizations that I work with, and in the teaching that I do around psychological safety, we talk about accountability and motivation being intrinsic to psychological safety. Now, in most of the organizations I work with, accountability and motivation are high, i.e., people are working extremely long hours, there's a real sense of presenteism, they are being expected to do things on the hoof, they're being expected to sort of work late, cancel holiday, all of these types of things. And so they're very much in an anxiety zone. So I think it's it's it's really important to look at are we setting, are we creating an environment in which people feel safe and secure to do their best work, or is their lack of resilience really just a cry for help or a demonstration that we're not really being fair to them? So that would be sort of my punchy answer. In terms of how we can build resilience, one of the key things I think is sort of individually looking at the body, because you know, you can have all the right software, but if the hardware isn't really working, then you're a bit screwed. So asking, you know, am I getting enough sleep? We know that sleep deprivation is a torture technique. And so just looking at, you know, if if I last night I was feeling really down and I was like, gosh, I feel really depressed. God, I hope I'm not getting depressed. I went to sleep and I woke up and I felt so much better. I was exhausted, you know. So are we getting enough sleep? Are we drinking enough water? Are we doing enough exercise? Are we taking time out for ourselves? You know, just really having that opportunity to reflect on how we're treating the body within. And then I teach something called uh I teach a sort of um method for reviewing your resilience called brave. So the B stands for body, the R stands for relationship, the A stands for acknowledge. So really acknowledging the situation. For example, have I just got too many things on my plate? Um, am I just expecting too much of myself? The V is for venture. So the venture is really important because venture is all about taking action. Because I can often find that when I'm feeling kind of low and a kind of less resilient, it's because I'm maybe sitting in the quagmire limbo of, oh gosh, I don't know what to do, and I've got analysis, paralysis, and oh. And actually, when I just start taking small actions, when I start to control the controllables, if you know Stephen Covey's circle of control, circle of concern, we can't affect a lot of the things that are in our circle of concern. That might be um, for example, like restructures, it might be changes in leadership, it might be um changes in business's priorities, all of those things are outside of our control. What can we control? What can we change? Well, we can change uh or define what are our boundaries, we can define uh things like you know who we're having lunch with, who we're spending our time with, we can define what projects we're working on. So just starting to look at how we can control the controllables and what small actions we can take, I always find helps me personally to think about how I can sort of move out of a challenging environment. And the last letter is E. And the E is for easy on yourself. Because I don't know about you, but I can be my own worst critic. And I wouldn't be friends with the person in my head. You know, there's two voices in my head the angel, the devil, the fixed mindset, the growth mindset, system one, system two, chimp, human, whatever version of this that you want to talk about. Essentially, there's two voices, right? And a lot of the time we we we just need to give the give give give the inner child, Alyssia, a hug and say, I know things are tough. Um, and I love you, and it's all gonna be okay, and um, it's okay to feel a bit down in the dumps right now.

SPEAKER_04: 40:35

Some days, yeah. You because you don't have to depression's obviously a lot more longer term thing, isn't it? I I love the fact, I mean, the Stephen Covey thing is is great, and the fact well, you can't don't worry about what you can't control. I mean, as soon as you would talk about that, then I'm like, Rachel, Reeves, that's what I can't control. I cannot control the budget in NI that they keep increasing, and the tax keeps increasing, they keep increasing taxes, taxes, taxes. Oh, businesses are suddenly struggling. I wonder why. Um, and that there's nothing we can do about that. That we've got to try and control the things that we can within our own business environment. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 41:11

Exactly. Like, for example, yeah, you can't change NI, but you might be like, okay, rather than hiring people, I'm gonna work more on a project basis with freelancers. Um perhaps I'm going to add a bit more of a buffer into my budget for this year because I don't know what might be coming down the pipes from the Treasury and things. So it can actually help us to perhaps mitigate some of the challenges that we might have coming down the way for us.

SPEAKER_00: 41:41

You're listening to the Embracing Marketing Mistakes podcast.

SPEAKER_04: 41:45

So, what what is your day-to-day, Alice? What do you do day to day? Like what your because you said you gave some resilience workshop example earlier. What sort of stuff do you do on a daily basis? Because you've covered so much, and I'm like, a lot of it is really interesting. So what's your day to day? What do you normally get stuck into?

SPEAKER_02: 42:03

Well, I'm up about quarter to six with my children.

SPEAKER_04: 42:06

Lovely.

SPEAKER_02: 42:07

Um, yeah, that's delightful. And then the morning is a mad scramble, mission impossible, trying to get them both out the door on time without completely blowing my top. And then I get home and get to have a little bit of peace by myself. So a typical day might see me running a session for a client, maybe online or in person. I have been organizing something called an unconference, which is the opposite to the boring stay-off conference format where someone pays to speak on the stage and tells you what to think. This is penned as the best coffee break ever. So I might be organizing my next unconference event. I might be doing some proposals, having some curiosity coffees, having a few new business meetings, trying to write a post that's going to get some traction on LinkedIn, squeezing in some lunch, maybe a bit of a walk, sending a few voice notes. And watching a bit of telly on the sofa in the evening, because I don't know about you, but I am so wiped by the end of the day. An hour I can just about manage.

SPEAKER_04: 43:09

Just to chill out and not just stare at something instead of learning and benefiting myself, which I do all day, every day. No, I don't know. I just made it up. Oh yeah. He's much posher and clever.

SPEAKER_01: 43:28

Christian, is that what we're calling your imposter? I like it. I like it.

SPEAKER_03: 43:33

We'll draw, we're we'll draw our imposters after this session, Chris. You should. But then you then your imposter would say that's because you can't do it yourself. There we go.

SPEAKER_02: 43:49

Yes, that's true. Although, you know, Chat GPT is one of those control the controllables, right? I mean, I'm sure that lots of your listeners are worried about what's going to happen to my jobs, or you know, how how is that all going to work? And I think the only thing that we can really control when it comes to AI is really making sure that we're upskilling ourselves, that we're using it, and that we're equipping ourselves. And that's why, without shoehorning in why development training is so important. If AI are coming, we need to learn not to fight the robots, but how do we work with them and how do we unlock our human capital value, i.e., all of the things that the robots kind of can't do.

SPEAKER_04: 44:28

And a lot of that is sort of in the real life touchy feely, you can't do what we've done type stuff. Bringing things to life in the real world, all that you know, tactile real thing.

SPEAKER_03: 44:40

Completely agree with you mentioned, I think, I think that'd be great. I think people I think people find this really interesting.

SPEAKER_04: 44:56

What are the what are the different workshops you cover, Alice? So you've you've got one on resilience, I assume.

SPEAKER_02: 45:01

Yeah, I've got lots of different workshops. So I've got resilience, growth mindset, psychological safety, confidence, career catalysts, which is around what your strengths are and how do you lean into them, year of the badass, which is all around understanding what you need to thrive at work and what your North Star vision is and how to get their nine to thrive, which is all around what are your performance drivers and how can you optimize for productivity. So a whole suite of different topics.

SPEAKER_03: 45:34

They've got some great names, those courses.

SPEAKER_02: 45:37

Well, this is the benefit. This is the benefit to being a marketer and running your own business, right? There's lots of things that I'm not very good at, but coming to this with a bit of an eye for copy and being, you know, fairly proficient communicator, that has really helped me in building my business. And I've definitely leaned into that. And actually, I got some business advice about two and a half years ago now. I don't know about you, you can tell me, like it feels a little bit like LinkedIn is just littered with every Tom Dick and Harriet who has found themselves and now is teaching you how to do it too. And we all use the same verbiage of unleashing potential and da-da-da-da-da. And I suddenly I listened to somebody who uh was talking about finding your edge. And I realized that if I was going to stand out in the crowd, I needed to find my edge and lean into what made me unique, my badass factor. So that was when I turbocharged badassery and my the unicorns on my slides. And you might not work with me if you are from a certain type of business, but actually I think being a bit more edgy, a bit more different. I've heard that my creds aren't the normal, like boring creds that most people see. They've got unicorns all over them, obviously. Um, it means that hopefully I'm speaking to the types of businesses that would resonate with me and whose team members would resonate with me as well.

SPEAKER_03: 47:04

Yeah, and there's there's something really in that, isn't there, in terms of being clear who your people are, who you're who you who you want to work with, because you know, you don't want to appeal to everybody, do you? You know, you've you've you've got a real value with and you know, you I mean you you you only have to look at your client list, and it's immediately obvious those type of ambitious, fast growth, challenger brand companies, you know, you you talk about kind of Google, Deliveroot, there's McDonald's, all of those kind of brands, you know, that they're they're of the same kind of ilk, can't they? So I love that, you know. Be and I, you know, ideally you you want people looking at your creds thinking, nah, you know, she's not for me. And that's great because it means you don't work with people that aren't aren't appropriate for you.

SPEAKER_04: 47:43

Alice, Alice, if you had um one bit of advice for younger Alice that you bumped into who was now in marketing, what is the one piece of advice you'd give them now that if you if you saw yourself, you know, more of an Elysian now? Uh, you know, uh further on in your career, what would you what would you tell yourself just starting out in marketing?

SPEAKER_02: 48:06

Wow. I mean, it's a long time. I mean, I can't quite believe it. I'm 38 now. I never imagined what my life would look like past 40, you know. Like whenever I did my visions, I had like young children running around, and of course they were just like easy and didn't give me any lip. Um, and I never really thought about what my life looked like after 40. What advice would I give to my younger self? I think I would give different advice at different stages, but if I was just entering the workplace, I think there's nothing more valuable than enthusiasm and positivity in a workplace and taking initiative and offering your perspective and finding new ways to add value and maybe blagging it a bit, it it gets you, it gets you a long way. So I I would say, you know, throw yourself in with posity and enthusiasm, and you can't go far wrong. And if I was to speak to myself a little bit further along the journey, it would be don't lose sight of your strength. Because I spent a number of years listening to my ego, listening to Alicia, like, oh, the next job title, the next promotion, a bigger salary. But there's this thing called a rival fallacy, which is when you get the promotion, the job title, the whatever you're striving for, you get that little hit of dopamine and things feel kind of good for a while. But if the foundations of your house aren't built on the right things, at some point, it's going to fall down. And mine fell down spectacularly with my demo. And so I would just encourage your listeners to think about what are my strengths, the things that energize and motivate me, and how can I bring that to life as much as I possibly can.

SPEAKER_04: 49:57

It's yeah, it's so hard to do that in your job, isn't it? If you're in a corporate environment and like your head of market, even if you're like one of the marketing team of 25 or something, and the the the c the company cultures a certain way, um, you can have you can have an effect on like you've well we've talked about the areas of influence that you've got, but you can't I suppose you can't change the vision of the company. Like so it's back to your thing, maybe you need to review the company that you're working with if if that environment isn't but you're just striving. You strive when you're young, you're striving, you're resilient, you you're going for every promotion, you're going for the and then you get there and you're like, I'm here now. What is this it?

SPEAKER_02: 50:34

Well and then you and then and then you know, I've spoken to a lot of people who are perhaps a little bit later on in their in their careers and they've chased the promotions, the job titles, they've got used to a certain style of living, they've got a mortgage that demands that they need to earn a certain amount, and you suddenly go, but I'm not I'm not happy. Like, is this it? Is this what I always dreamed of when I was growing up? And it just I think gets harder and harder to unpick as you get older and older because you have more responsibilities. And it's that's not to say that you can't unpick it. I think the first step is recognizing that perhaps you're not exactly where you might want to be and taking incremental action. Like I didn't wake up one day and go, I'm gonna start a business and it's gonna be called badass unicorn and it's gonna be working with these types of clients. I woke up one day and went, oh wow, those dreams I want, I'm gonna go out and make them come true. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do it yet. But this small action I'm going today to do today is send that wince and send email to the client saying, I charge£500 for a talk, would you pay it? And my wince and send action today is I'm gonna write a LinkedIn post and put it out there, even though I'm terrified. And my wince and send action today is to reach out to that person for a curiosity coffee. So I need to find a better way of communicating this because death by a thousand cuts doesn't really feel that positive. But making your dreams come true is about the small, incremental, everyday actions that compound and compound and compound. And you surprise yourself then when you look back and say, Wow, I've come a long way. Like last week I went to speak at the Marketing Academy. Do you guys know the marketing academy? Yeah, Marketing Academy. So I was on the scholarship eight years ago, and I finally, after a lot of asking, by the way, was invited to come back and speak to the scholars, right? I got the graveyard shift just before dinner. They squeezed me in. And uh, but but nonetheless, I love it. My one of my other mentors who was also speaking that day, he was like, I got the closing keynote. And I was like, Well, that's a better way than the graveyard shift, isn't it? Um, so um, and and it really got me reflecting on wow, what would eight the me of eight years ago think? And I think overwhelmingly, she would be extremely proud of how far I've come, but it didn't happen by accident, and it was really a case of taking those small steps in the right direction. When I talk about your career path, a lot of people find the idea of a North Star overwhelming. So I like to tell them to imagine that your dream life is like a lake covered in lots and lots of lily pads. You're on one side of the lake, your dream future's on the other side. And all you have to do is follow the scent by leaping from lily pad to lily pad across this path in this squiggly kind of journey, remembering that there are no wrong turns, dead ends, or decisions that you can't move away from. And if you're following the center for things that energize and motivate you, it would be hard to go too far wrong. And the beautiful thing that I've found is that as I have got closer to what my North Star vision is, the closer that my North Star vision has sort of come in. So it's almost like as I become more and more fulfilled by what I'm doing, some of the grandiose things like having a million followers or a best-selling book or whatever those things might be become less important because I'm much more satisfied in the life that I'm living every day.

SPEAKER_03: 54:07

Wow. Amazing. This is a fascinating uh conversation for sure. Now, um, we always we always ask our guests this, and I'm sure you've you've met and consulted and trained and worked with so many interesting people. Um, is there anybody you've met in your journey that you think would be perfect for this podcast? And um who are they and and and what do you think that you know what why do you think you'd uh put them forward for us to speak to?

SPEAKER_02: 54:34

Great question. Do they have to be a marketer?

SPEAKER_03: 54:37

Not necessarily. No, we we have all sorts of people on this on this pod. We sometimes have business owners, entrepreneurs, um, you know, consultants.

SPEAKER_02: 54:46

Okay. Well, I am gonna put forward somebody that is in the sort of comms sphere, and she is probably the standout speaker from my experience on the marketing academy. I can still remember her talk. It was called Smashed It Babe, and that was the moment that I really started to think about what my North Star dreams come true were and decided that I was gonna go after them. And her name is Emma Harris.

SPEAKER_04: 55:14

Oh, okay, great. Emma Harris, love to try and find her.

SPEAKER_02: 55:17

She's pretty and you won't you won't have to look for long. She's absolutely epic. She has a a movement called Slow the Fuck Down. And uh yeah, she's she's doing some great stuff. So um check her out. Yeah, she's she's not dissimilar to me in sort of energy and vibe and making you feel like you've been, you know, sat round the face or given a can or two of Red Bull.

SPEAKER_04: 55:40

Yeah, cool. Um, and if people want to get hold of you, Alice, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_02: 55:45

I play on LinkedIn mainly for my kind of reflections, and then of course there's my website www.ww.badassunicorn.co.uk.

SPEAKER_04: 55:56

Okay, great. Um thanks for coming on the show, Alice. That was absolutely brilliant.

SPEAKER_03: 55:59

Yeah, that's great. I really enjoyed that.

SPEAKER_02: 56:02

Thank you for having me.