It started with posting this on April Fools Day…
I had some chats with people after where they were saying things like, “Gahhh I thought you’d finally drank the Kool Aid!”, and I realised that there are people in my community now who don’t remember a time when I was into…
- choosing your thoughts
- choosing happiness
- manifesting
- probs loads more cringey stuff I can’t specifically remember
So when I critique any of this stuff, it’s always from a place of, “wow, I used to believe this before I understood xyz”, rather than EVERYONE WHO BELIEVES THIS IS XYZ.
It’s not that dissimilar to how I feel about renouncing my Catholic upbringing which I was really devoted to as a child. Both Christianity and WooGoddessBossBabe culture contain some ideas that are helpful to some people at some stages in their lives. And both contain plenty of ideas, and frameworks, and power structures that are harmful to plenty of people at plenty of stages in their lives.
So a quick recap for anyone who isn’t sure who I am and how I ended up emailing them about biz stuff.
- Was in Senior Management for M&S pre kids, lots of extra ‘people’ responsibilities like graduate assessment and mentoring, because I was good at coaching, and I loved it
- Started my hypnobirthing biz which would become Do It Like A Mother in 2013
- Started mentoring other birth workers in 2017, then running courses and stuff for other mothers in biz soon after
And on I went from there. My coaching approaches were based on my corporate trainings and experiences, and what I’d learned from running my own biz and my own investments in receiving coaching.
Babes, it was feminist lite, and it was heavy (ish) on the woo. In a way that it didn’t seem to be at the time, because everything I saw was woo infused too.
I wanna be clear- I am still very committed to the idea that we DO NOT AND WILL NEVER know everything about world around us, how things work, and what unseen forces are at play. I may or may not believe in, for example, an afterlife, or many reincarnations, or souls at all, from one day to the next. I am not swearing off the spiritual, mystical, etc. I actually think it can be unfeminist to write off the ideas that have seen women burnt as witches, or those that indigenous communities live by.
What I am saying is that I’ve become increasingly concerned about the harm that unregulated industries like coaching and the kinda holistic/ spiritual therapeutic space can cause when such frameworks are applied to people’s trauma, or even simply ‘difficult’ experiences.
I also feel concerned about the ways in which these applications undermine ACTUAL SYSTEM CHANGE in our society, by leading us to believe that our experiences of oppression may merely be projections of our own unhealed wounds, and/ or that the goal is for us as individuals to out manouvere such obstacles, rather than for us to tear them down together.
This is a freshly recorded version of the workshop content I shared when I ran this live in April. The discussion was so full and vulnerable that I became uncomfortable with sharing the recording with people who were not signed up at the time.
What's also true is that the discussion was a really fruitful part of the experience, and so I'm inviting you to drop me an email if you watch the workshop, and feel like you'd like to attend a (FREE) live chat with others who have experienced it at a date and time tbc.
In this session I am laying out
- what is unfeminist about mainstream mindset stuff
- what we could do instead
The price is £39 (for transparency, it was £49 when sold as a live session- this is a different level of demand for my energy, time and prep).
Now, as then, you can PAY WHAT YOU CAN AFFORD if the price makes the session inaccessible to you.