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you know people who say how do you balance your life and your work i know that they hate one of those two parts in
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their own life there is no work-life balance 1983 we started the international dermal institute which is
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still the number one training program in the industry and we launched dermalogica in january of 1986. and that business
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generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year we knew that the big opportunity was going to be a product
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lots of people have great ideas every day the difference most people can't execute because the details are really
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important and most people miss them will start to think they're petty a brand triggers emotional responses i'm
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not a diva but i am strong and i know what makes a business successful we can't be afraid that some people won't
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like what we say we have to say it we both know that we could just spend all of our time just doing business what's the cost of that i would
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self-sabotage relationships we were just working so hard and lucy came downstairs
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and she said mum i just and i said lucy for gonna say what is wrong and she said i wanted to give you a hug
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you look so cross i was just stood there with my child in
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front of me looking scared of me [Music] that was the tipping point for me i had
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to ask for help so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the
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direva ceo usa edition i hope nobody's listening but if you are
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then please keep this yourself [Music]
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as i delve deep into your story into your book it became so apparently clear to me that
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your early years your childhood were very very formative can you tell me
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about those early years and how they shaped and molded you into the person you were to become today i think at the
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time obviously i didn't realize exactly how formative my childhood was going to
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be i think most of us look back at our childhood feel better or worse and realize that's
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actually where so much of whatever i am as an adult came from so i was born in edinburgh scotland um
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the youngest of four girls my mum and dad um had been they met in the second world war in
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india dad was a little older than my mum my mum was 38 my dad was 50
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when he died of heart attack suddenly not expected did not know he was ill
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my mother at 38 with four children had not worked since she married and the
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reason was she was a trained nurse but at that time in the uk and it
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carried on until i think the early 70s and it did here too if you were a married woman you gave up your job to a
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single woman because it was assumed that you didn't need the work that was true in nursing and in teaching so she hadn't
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worked since 1945. she also didn't know how to drive a car
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and she had no financial literacy but this woman my mother
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she pulled herself together she got work as a nurse she had a friend
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who was then working at the western general hospital in edinburgh she called her up she said pat i need a job
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she said what can you give me and she said i can give you a night shift seven to seven because
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i was two so i wasn't going to school my mom had to take care of me during the day and then go to work
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and so everything was kind of determined right there my mother drummed into every one of us
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learn how to do something because if you don't know how to do something literally a skill set in your
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hands that you can turn on a penny and go into work right away
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i don't she didn't know what she would have done without her training and so that became
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absolutely concrete in my head i have to be able to support myself i have to be able to earn
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my own money and i can't ever put my future in the hands of of someone else's
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um income or success and so yes that was highly formative it then led me to the life i i know i've led and
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also what things i care about what i think is important and you the loss of your father at two
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and three quarters years old what impact in hindsight did that have on
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you directly i think it was huge one thing the the emotion i remember
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feeling at the time was not grief exactly because i wasn't quite sure what had happened to him they
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didn't say to me right away he's dead that i was told he'd gone away
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and then my sister judy who's next one up from me she's six years older than me
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told me directly he's not coming back he's dead and i at that stage i was about five four and
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a half five i was going to school and the next emotion i felt was was shame
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that i didn't have a father i didn't know anyone else that didn't have a father i didn't know you could grow up in a family without father
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so i hid it and as far as relationship and role modelling i didn't realize then
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but i do now here i am i grew up in a household of very strong capable women that's how i
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saw them they were all older than me bigger than me they helped me get dressed helped me they did everything
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i then went to an all-girls school and i was i had all women teachers i was
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a brownie and a girl guide and so i'd never had that relationship
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role played for me i'd never really thought about there being not that i of course i knew there was a difference but
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i hadn't really thought about the power dynamic i hadn't seen that actually and then i i went to a friend's house
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when i was 11 her dad came home we were home about 4 30 and her dad came home at about six i think and sat down right
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away and her mum gave him a cup of tea and he put on the tv and
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i i thought he was sick i said is your dad not well and she said no he's fine and i said oh
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well oh because the only time i'd ever been given a cup of tea sitting in a chair was when i was sick and my mom
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would say well get up and you know get dressed put on your dressing gown and now in later life
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i realize it's impacted me a great deal it it as i've been married now to raymond
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for well over 30 years we got married in 1990. so what's that no
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longer right how long have i been married forever and i think that a lot in my
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relationship with raymond um i thought i was always being very independent and doing the right thing by doing
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everything i could but i also realized that was exclusionary i i can be very exclusionary of the other person hard to
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ask for help not because i consciously don't want to but because emotionally i don't feel i
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need to that's not great so there's a lot to unpack and work through that formative like really pivotal advice
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that your mum gave you which was learn how to do something it seemed so simple but it was so clearly really profound
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for you and has been throughout your life at that age what is it that you wanted to learn how to do what is it you
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wanted to be when you grew up when you're you know 11 11 years old so
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actually i remember looking in the bournemouth evening echo newspaper and saying to my mum look this hair salon is
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hiring 15 year old apprentices and i think i was about 11 and i said i'm going to cut it out and keep it because
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when i'm 16 and i leave school i will apply
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and and my mom said well i think you'll stay at school longer and i think you'll go to university
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which no one in my family had and i thought well maybe but that was in my head i i
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i wanted to to i got my first saturday job at 13 working in a salon
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and i saw first-hand proof that if you know how to do that you know how to earn money
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and then when that salon hired a skin therapist then called a beauty therapist but i don't like the word beauty when
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applied to people's appearance um i realized that that's actually what i want to do i want to be a skin therapist
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so it's pretty pretty early you don't end up going to university at that stage you went to university
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primarily if you were going to follow a profession legal the law or be a doctor or an
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academic or a pharmacist or i couldn't quite grasp
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the immediacy of how that was going to equip me to be self-determined
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quickly you see my biggest fear growing up
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after my father had passed away was that my mum would i used to make these elaborate plans of what would happen if my mum died and
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then how old was i would i be taken into foster care or would i would my older sister be able to be my guardian and at
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that stage my older sister was 15 when my dad died but when my older sister
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turned 21 and i was eight i was so relieved because i knew
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now she's an adult and married she would be able to i go and live with her so i'd
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make all these plans of what would happen and i wanted to be self-determined
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quickly and and so when i was looking at a long haul of three years education
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maybe i just couldn't attach myself to it i wanted to be able to do a training that i could travel with i could work
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with it would be literally in my hands and now i realize in my head and in my
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heart and it could take me anywhere i wanted to that sounds like a consequence of the
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the advice your mother had instilled in you that learned how to do something and she really had tried to make you sort of
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autonomous and self-determined for many reasons yeah so 19 years old you
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yeah you look at the newspaper yeah i look at the newspaper and it's a sunday and it's freezing cold
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uh in england it's it's winter in 1977.
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and um freezing and i had a gas meter so you had to put coins in to get the heating
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on and i never hadn't you know i was working as a as a disqualified so i was but i was still working as a junior in a
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salon so i never had enough money and um i had a boyfriend who said with me who
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said jesus bloody freezing and what's the hottest place on earth today i just
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want to know where it is so i looked at the weather in the sunday paper and i said it's johannesburg and it was
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then it was before we went into you know celsius um i said it's 106.
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which was really hot and he said god i wish i was in janisberg and i said me too where's that he said south africa
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geography wasn't super strong for me turned over the page and as i turned the page there was a
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quarter page ad taken by the south african government
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for assisted passage if you would emigrate to south africa and i think australia
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and canada used to do the same thing as well in the uk then the government of south africa
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would pay your passage they would assist it it would cost you 40 pounds
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to go which was really it was a lot of money but it wasn't that much money that we couldn't have
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scraped it together and just on a whim it was a sunday the next day salons were closed it was a
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monday that's pretty typical still in salons we called the number in london and
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got the papers because there was no internet you couldn't google anything or look anything up filled them out and
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emigrated to south africa with what intention getting a job
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i was pretty good at what i did and i knew i could get a job i'll just get a job in a salon and i'll start working
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and for assisted passage you had to fulfill one of the requirements one of
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the jobs that they needed to hire for and there were ten listed and the number
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one was patissera well i wasn't a participant a pastry maker number two was a butcher
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definitely i wasn't a butcher number three was a hairdresser bingo for my boyfriend and number four
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was then as the name was beauty therapist and that was me wow and how did that phase of your life
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go so from between 19 and 22 roughly yeah when you're in south africa how when you reflect on that how was that
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experience well it was hugely formative first of all um we got the boyfriend and
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i tony and i got married it was easier to apply for assisted passage if you
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were a couple and you would get housing now i was also crazy about him and and
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he was about me and off we went 19 years old he got married yes wow
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not a not a successful marriage we didn't know each other very well great boyfriend wrong husband
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and so that lasted about a year when i was in south africa
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and yet there i am now on the other side of the planet with no family no cell phones no
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computer no face time there was nothing like that in order to call her home i had to go to the post office in cape
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town and book an international call and it was expensive so i literally called
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home once a year but i can work which is great because i
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can support myself my marriage is broken up and i've got to wait to get a divorce because there's no
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such thing as a sudden divorce in south africa it's then operating under dutch reform church law
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so i had to be separated for two years and then they give you a decree and eyesight and then i could apply for one
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more year i had to be separated never go not going back together again and only then do you get
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your decree absolutely so it was three years before i could get divorced i read that you walked out one day
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essentially from the marriage and he'd emptied your personal bank account and yeah you were pretty much stood on your
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track suit on the street on your own yeah was in the street my clothing had been thrown out of an
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upstairs window of our rented terraced house along with some garbage bags trash bags
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rubbish bags and i picked up the stuff that wasn't cut up because he cut up a lot of my
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stuff as he threw it out stuffed it in the trash bag got in my car and i drove to a friend's
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house and as i drove away i can i feel it now i can feel myself sitting in the car it was a mazda and i was driving
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away and i looked in the rearview mirror and i could hardly see because i was crying i was really scared and
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emotionally very devastated and i was shaking and i looked in the rearview mirror and
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i just promised myself this will never happen again i will
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never allow myself to be this vulnerable i will never allow myself to ever be in
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a situation that i run away with my clothes in trash bags
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i'm going to pull my act together in a big way
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that was a lot that happened in that four years that was probably the most formative time of my life
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what seemed like the greatest calamity because remember now my mother had been widowed but i'd now just walked
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out of a marriage and at that age i guess i thought it was that was my
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marriage not like oh i'll have more i've just walked out of my marriage
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i am now alone the very thing that happened to my mother i didn't have kids but
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i think all of that was wrapped up and you know i probably should have had a lot of therapy a lot sooner but i didn't
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so all of that was wrapped up i felt incredibly vulnerable physically vulnerable
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so i hit the ground running and i'd now got a job working for a company for a
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skincare company selling to salons it was redken which now owned by l'oreal but then they were privately owned by an
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entrepreneur paula kent meehan in los angeles and she started redking with her
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hairdresser jerry reading that's where the name red ken came from jerry reading and paula kent
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and so i had a company car i worked really hard i was determined to do well
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get promoted which i did and within a year i had been made the brand manager for the skincare division
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and transferred to johannesburg and johannesburg was where i met
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raymond and so how does that then lead you from johannesburg to los angeles that was raymond werwind we worked together for
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the next year he was my boss's boss so i didn't report directly to him but i would be in
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meetings with him because i was the brand manager for the skincare division and he was brilliant he is brilliant and
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i love and respect and admire that we would have conversations at the at
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the table at work and everyone would be positing some idea or another
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and he would see right through everything to the conclusion he's very
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pragmatic okay i've heard everything this is this is what i'm thinking this is what we should do and he was right
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and i saw that and i loved that and i felt very inspired by that and he saw in me my creativity because i
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would usually be the one at that table that was saying i know we're out of stock of that color of foundation
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because we haven't had a shipment from los angeles but i think that was in our gift sets last christmas can we see how
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many we've got left over in the warehouse break open the palettes because it's now march
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and just take out the foundation and sell that and that actually was true story that's what we did so he loved my
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creativity and my ideas and thinking and we would brainstorm as a group of
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several different companies new product ideas etc i loved his brilliance and i guess over that we fell in love and uh
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started secretly dating secretly dated not so secret but yeah secretly dating
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there was no um there was no sort of hr department that would legally have stopped that then i suppose they would
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now i don't think it could happen i'm not sure but um yeah and he was he had been in process for a green card for two years
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and his green card came through while we were dating and he said i've got 90 days to go to
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the states and claim my green card if i don't go in 90 days i'd forfeit it and i said it's
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like the golden ticket in willy wonka's chocolate bar you can't you can't say no you don't say no to the green card
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get on a plane and go and he said well you know we were really you know serious
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about each other and i said doesn't matter if we're meant to be together we will go and he said okay
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all right and we sort of broke up because he got on a plane and flew to new york
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and i had no idea i was gonna come here i didn't i wasn't going to get a green card
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so off he went and that was in may of 82
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and in the august of that year redken who were based in los angeles wanted me
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to come and do a training program here because i was running the brand and so i came on a two-week trip to la
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and at that stage raymond had moved from new york to chicago from chicago to la
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so of course we'd kept in contact writing letters and mail letters
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and i knew he was in la and we arranged to meet and then we knew this was it and i made a decision when i was on the flight
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home back to south africa i'm going to be there it was um september when i flew
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back i'm going to be there by christmas i'm going to make a plan and i did what was the plan
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i don't know if it's completely legal but i'll tell you so what happened was while i was here
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we wanted to explore how i would get immigration how to get work permit
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and so we went to see an immigration attorney here in los angeles and the easiest way was
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to marry raymond who had a green card i wasn't going to do that because i just i i literally didn't get my divorce until
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a few weeks after that so in south africa so that wasn't going to happen and i wasn't coming imminently i was
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thinking you know in a year or two and i just wanted to understand what it would take how i could go about it
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and so um i wasn't going to get married for for the the security of being able to
00:21:00
emigrate and i wasn't sure i wanted to marry him anyway because we you know we've been dating but i wasn't going to make that mistake again and it was 10
00:21:07
years before we married in fact but what happened was we went through every single option of how you could get
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a work permit i didn't fit any of them i said well what if i had you know i'm a trained skin therapist and he said it's
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you know the training doesn't exist the training exists here and i supply i'm a trained teacher in skin therapy
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which didn't exist here and actually only 70 of the 50 states even had a license to do skin care
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but california was one of them so what we what we put together was
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we started a company raymond started a company but we both together started it we registered it in sacramento and it
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cost 300 to start that company on the understanding that i would
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go back to south africa i would be made a job offer by that company in a management position
00:22:00
and i would transfer to the states the caveat was i had to i went to south
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africa had to set up a company in south africa because you had to have a company
00:22:12
in both places and that company had to offer someone in management in that other country a job
00:22:19
transfer and and it was not illegal it was a slight loophole
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which i have to say has been closed because now i think you have to have 10 staff that already work for you in the
00:22:31
states and you have to have tax returns for the last several years but that wasn't the case then
00:22:36
and i transferred myself in on an inter-company transfer visa and you and raymond um end up starting a
00:22:43
company together yeah national dermal international dermal institute because i was on this visa and i needed i would have to work
00:22:50
for myself so to begin with i thought i'd work as an independent contractor and get a job in a salon so i went i did
00:22:57
the rounds in beverly hills uh of the then that was the only place there were skincare salons i could find in the
00:23:04
yellow pages which was the telephone directory remember still no internet no computers no google
00:23:10
and uh what i realized when i went on interviews was that everyone they were hiring had an accent from somewhere in
00:23:16
europe and when i asked the people who were interviewing me who were generally the owners why are you why do you hire
00:23:24
people who were trained in europe why they know americans they said the training here is a few months and we're
00:23:29
used to several years the training's not not good enough
00:23:34
for my clients for these clients so yes i could have got a job in fact i was offered jobs at each of the salons i
00:23:41
interviewed as an independent contractor which is very common in our industry so i'd be working for myself but in fact
00:23:48
working in their salon and but what raymond and i were discussing was the big opportunity oh my goodness what are
00:23:54
we talking about there is no there are no skin therapist here and we're in los angeles we're in california where i
00:24:01
thought everyone was going to be getting a skin treatment every three minutes because that was sort of the myth of the states especially l.a
00:24:08
was not true at all it was makeup and hair it wasn't skincare it wasn't spot there was no such thing as a day spa
00:24:15
there was no such thing as a skin treatment there was no such thing as micro needling or any of the rest of it
00:24:21
that we think of now that was an industry that had to be established and so we started
00:24:27
a company called the international dermal institute and the purpose of our trade was a training program
00:24:33
i got my teaching qualification in south africa as a skin care therapy teacher
00:24:40
and i done you know several years experience in the industry wrote the curriculum and our goal was to bridge
00:24:46
the gap in a training between what was the california state board license which
00:24:51
was 600 hours about four months of training and the two or three year
00:24:56
full-time training that was common in europe and so in doing that
00:25:02
that would that would upskill the professional skin therapist to be able to start an industry
00:25:08
that we then would continue to train so it was almost like training your own
00:25:14
industry and that's exactly how it started and you know we knew this would be a huge opportunity
00:25:20
despite many people telling us we were crazy because if it was such a good idea why wasn't it already here yeah that's a
00:25:28
common thing to entrepreneurs if it's such a good idea how come no one thought of it before now and how did that go so
00:25:34
you launched that that sort of sort of trade 83 the year i got here and how did it go
00:25:41
year one year one so really well and i'll tell you why it went well because in that year okay so i got here in
00:25:46
january 83 we're now in december 1983 when we incorporated the international
00:25:52
dermal institute and we took that year to write the curriculum do research do our homework
00:25:58
where we're going to draw these people from and raymond got a job selling equipment for
00:26:04
a skincare company that sold to salons so now we were in contact with salons
00:26:10
and raymond wasn't selling any of this equipment because it was too sophisticated for the training that
00:26:15
existed here so i started doing training for this equipment
00:26:21
and so i spent that whole year training salons how to use this equipment that raymond was selling on a commission only
00:26:26
basis he wasn't getting a salary so in order to eat and pay the rent on our one bedroom apartment we needed him to start
00:26:33
selling some equipment and i needed to be making money teaching and that's how we put together our plan and that's how
00:26:38
we put together the idea of the international domain institute so i'd had a year of seeding students
00:26:45
and saying i'm going to be opening a training center so rather than me just demonstrating this machine to you i will
00:26:51
be able to teach you all the techniques that i know and that's going to be aromatherapy
00:26:56
manual lymph drainage it's going to be waxing it's going to be reflexology things that had never even been
00:27:03
introduced at that stage as well as of course great skincare techniques
00:27:08
so we started the international dermal institute classes were were filled pretty much straight away
00:27:14
um we were charging then 75 dollars a day pretty quickly it went
00:27:20
up to a hundred dollars a day people were driving to our one classroom in marina del rey which was
00:27:26
walking distance from our apartment because we only had one car and ray was driving it and um that's how we put it together and
00:27:34
then we built and we built a very successful training program which is still the number one advanced training
00:27:41
program in the industry we train over a hundred thousand skin therapists every year still
00:27:46
so we train around the world but what i realized in the following
00:27:52
two years there was no american-made professional salon product
00:27:57
and that was something that you didn't train and get a certificate and leave
00:28:02
you would be purchasing on a repeat basis so we knew because that was our background was product as well
00:28:09
we knew that the big opportunity was going to be a product when you think about why the
00:28:15
training was so successful and why you as an individual and your
00:28:20
husband succeeded in that what are the like factors we think you know what that's the thing that made us different
00:28:26
whether it's character or execution or whatever it is yeah i know exactly what it was
00:28:31
i'd love to tell you it was because i wrote the most brilliant curriculum and i am the best teacher neither of which
00:28:37
is true i wrote a good enough curriculum and i'm a good enough teacher but what we did
00:28:43
somewhat inadvertently is sort of accidentally on purpose if you know what i mean community
00:28:50
we knew because i had been that skin therapists are isolated we
00:28:56
work in rooms on our own and the busier you become the more full your book is with appointments you're in the
00:29:02
treatment room which is about an eight by ten room with your client it's not and was not then performed out
00:29:10
in the public like hairdressing newer hairdresser you can look across salon and see five other people doing your job
00:29:17
as you do and you learn from them and you're inspired by them and you have a feeling of community in a salon and i
00:29:22
knew that because i'd been part of full-service salons where they're cutting hair and giving skin care treatments and doing nails
00:29:29
and so we knew that what was missing was this sense of community all of our students that were
00:29:35
coming to the classes none of them really knew each other they'd never met other skin therapists there were only 2
00:29:41
000 in the whole state so it wasn't surprising so we doubled down
00:29:46
our whole mantra was make every excuse think of every idea to bring
00:29:52
our people together guest speaker evenings power breakfasts working
00:29:58
lunches summer picnics holiday party we were doing everything any idea we saw
00:30:05
from what we saw in a coffee shop to what we saw in a shoe repair shop we were doing whatever we thought would
00:30:11
help us pull people together for the ostensible reason of training in skin care but in fact
00:30:18
was making them into a community so much so that after about 18 months
00:30:25
two years my students said to me you know what we're like family and i
00:30:32
said yes although we don't have the same accents and they laughed and they said no we're not family we're a tribe
00:30:39
it is human nature that was the core of our success
00:30:44
and what i see now in the last two years of of coved we've never needed it more than now more than ever we need human
00:30:51
connection we are sick of our netflix and our streaming and our everything we want human connection we want to see
00:30:58
each other i want to see your smile i want to see your face i want to hug you i want to touch you
00:31:04
and guess what the industry that i have spent my life in has never been more relevant than now
00:31:09
because we're the cavalry that's what we do as our work we
00:31:15
literally touch people not because they're to look pretty pampering luxury or indulgence because human connection
00:31:23
is the deepest form of unconditional love it's such a profound but seemingly
00:31:30
obvious piece of advice for how to build an engaged customer base how to
00:31:36
build great company culture how to build an audience if you're a social media influencer but that yeah but you're
00:31:41
right it's it's right at the heart of our sort of maslovian innate human needs is to belong to a tribe yeah and what a
00:31:48
lot of people do as they become successful they start to distance themselves from it they start to think
00:31:54
that was i'm bigger than that or i'm better than that what there's nothing better than being
00:32:00
connected to other people in a loving kind empathetic way i talk a lot you know in my book that you know
00:32:08
about empathy and the power of kindness and i continue to learn that all the
00:32:13
time and and be accessible i would always be accessible to my students when we built our premises our
00:32:20
lunchroom was for students and staff i would eat lunch in the lunchroom with everyone else we all did because we
00:32:25
wanted i want to be with everybody else i don't want to be on my own i want to be with everyone else and i want
00:32:31
everyone else to know that they can be with all of us we're all in this together whether it's somebody when you
00:32:36
own a business and you think you're all that well guess what the people that are in your janitorial staff your
00:32:42
housekeepers they're making you look good every day because that's the image that people have when they come in when i go to a
00:32:47
restaurant first thing i notice is how clean is it how well cared for is it is it loved
00:32:53
is this space loved and can i see that it's loved are people taking pride in
00:32:58
this space because all of that is non-communication that's non-verbal communication and it all
00:33:05
matters and we forget it because we start to think it's us we're the things we're the
00:33:10
ones with the one it's nonsense complete and utter nonsense and the minute you start to feel that way you will fall
00:33:18
how would your team members that have worked for you say for 10 years describe you as a leader in terms of that that
00:33:24
balance you describe of empathy and kindness and then also strength and decisiveness well there's a lot of
00:33:29
people that have worked had have and had worked for me for more than 10 years i'm thinking now of laurie mcgregor who's
00:33:35
our director of khan senior director of communications she's in the studio right now and i could ask
00:33:41
her because she certainly worked with me closely for many years i hope they would
00:33:46
describe me as fair i hope they would describe me as kind i hope they would describe me as
00:33:52
accessible i hope they'd also say i was collaborative because that's what i like
00:33:57
to think i am i believe i am what about the weaknesses lots
00:34:03
more than i could probably name my strengths i'm impatient i want things to be done now rather than
00:34:10
tomorrow it can make me careless i
00:34:15
see the flaws i see the good but i also see the flaws if i walk into a salon and
00:34:20
somebody missed a piece of hair that wasn't swept up i'm going to see it first i just am i can't help it i have
00:34:28
that kind of vision yes the product looks amazing yes the lighting is great yes i love your
00:34:34
uniform and i love the storefront and the great job you did with the windows
00:34:40
but why the hell is that hair in the corner not swept up
00:34:45
i can't take my eyes off it but i'm also not above going in the back finding the
00:34:51
dustpan and brush and brushing it up myself because i will will you say it like that yes yeah i'll
00:34:58
say it just like that you know when you say it like that yeah about the hair being on the floor yeah
00:35:04
that it will make people feel a certain way i'm the same yeah so why do you say
00:35:09
it like that well i would i probably the likelihood
00:35:14
would be i would start that conversation by saying to the person i'm sorry
00:35:19
do you have a dustband and brush in the kitchen in the staff room and they'll say uh yeah why i say just
00:35:26
just show me what it is you have to do it and i would come out with a dustband brush and i would sweep it up and then i'd say because the only thing i could
00:35:33
look at when i came in here was that hair in the corner now let's talk about
00:35:39
all the great things you do but let's never forget but that's important it might be some
00:35:45
version of that but i certainly wouldn't say i wouldn't walk in and go i'm sorry excuse me before we do anything i can't
00:35:52
see a thing that hair in the corner someone sweep it up i wouldn't do that i'm not a diva but i am strong and i
00:35:59
know what makes a business successful and i can't allow a business to not
00:36:04
hear what my thought is if i think it will make them more successful and i know it will it's not a matter of taste
00:36:10
or style that's a matter of hygiene so then i'm fierce
00:36:15
and that attention to detail tell me how important it is in your view now you've been in business for so long
00:36:21
how important is because some people say oh that's petty okay it's huge it's everything
00:36:27
the devil and god are in the details here's the deal
00:36:33
there is no shortage of a good idea lots of people have great ideas every day the difference most people can't
00:36:40
execute and if they can execute they don't execute well and if they execute well
00:36:46
they can't maintain it how do you stay relevant and growing in an industry like
00:36:53
my industry cosmetics makeup skin care hair fashion how do you stay relevant
00:36:59
for almost 40 years and stay the leader if you're not paying attention to detail
00:37:04
you'll peak and you'll drop in a quick minute you're going to be a party that happened overnight you're not going to
00:37:10
be a relationship that lasts a lifetime two different things both can be fun but
00:37:15
one is a long game that you're playing and one is a short-term fix that you
00:37:20
want and that's very different it's like dating and a marriage or dating in a long relationship
00:37:27
you're playing a long game and for me business was always about playing the long game we didn't build dermalogica to
00:37:34
flip it and sell it we could have done that after three or four years and if it wasn't going well we probably would have
00:37:39
done but we were self-funded on fourteen thousand dollars highly profitable
00:37:44
and took it all the way through to acquisition in 2015 by unilever and i'm still involved with dermalogica
00:37:51
i still function my title is chief visionary and when things are going wrong or i think you're
00:37:56
making the wrong turn i'm gonna tell you you don't have to listen to me you don't have to agree with me but i'm going to i
00:38:03
have to know that i said it because the details are really important and most people miss
00:38:09
them or start to think they're petty the other thing you mentioned which i found fascinating is you added to your
00:38:15
list of weaknesses in patients yeah but you are well aware of the strengths of
00:38:21
impatience of course that's the thing whatever is your weakness flip it it's like a coin the other side
00:38:28
is your strength now i know that sounds like complete opposite right but i'm
00:38:34
impatient so as a weakness especially when i'm tired i'm not making tiredness an excuse but especially when i'm tired
00:38:42
it can make you angry it can make you short-tempered
00:38:47
it can make you um rude amen and so you have to take a moment
00:38:54
and get yourself in check because impatience can also lead to a fast pace
00:39:00
to a quick idea to a rapid execution to a sense of urgency to a sense of excitement to a sense of enthusiasm to a
00:39:08
definite sense of leadership in in the team so that very quality is your
00:39:14
strength and is your weakness and you have to be able to
00:39:19
i always i say in the book you have to have a truth teller now hopefully your truth teller is yourself so that you can
00:39:25
say that wasn't my best self or that was not that was my strength at its weakest moment
00:39:33
and if you don't if you're not good at being truthful or honest with yourself you better have somebody around you that is
00:39:39
because you'll have a lot of you know ass kisses around you especially when you're successful not when you start
00:39:47
but especially when you're successful and you have to know it's not not necessarily because they're insincere
00:39:53
but they're not going to be your truth tellers so that's lovely to have and it's lovely maybe for your ego or
00:39:59
whatever it is for inviting to parties but you have to have some truth tellers
00:40:04
have you got truth tellers around you yes that will tell you when you're you're out of line or that you've been rude
00:40:11
my number one truth teller is raymond yeah he will tell me he has no filter he has no ability to edit
00:40:17
he's about the kindest and most generous person i've ever known he's certainly the smartest person but he has absolutely no edit button and i will say
00:40:23
to him sometimes roman i cannot believe he just said that he said but it's true it's true
00:40:29
and he's right okay so that's raymond and then i have people in my tight team
00:40:36
natalie byrne who works with me on strategy for our non-profit she will call me and has many times sometimes
00:40:42
late at night and say jane i can't stop thinking about this i think what you said today was off base or off the mark
00:40:49
or whatever it is and we talk about it and she's almost 100 right and that's i tell her natalie
00:40:55
i love you because you tell me the truth don't ever i don't want to hurt your feelings i said natalie please you will
00:41:00
not hurt my feelings i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast my girlfriend
00:41:05
came upstairs yesterday when i was having a shower and she said to me that she tried the heel protein shake which lives on my fridge over there and she
00:41:11
said it's amazing low calories you get your 20 odd grams of protein you get your 26 vitamins and minerals and it's
00:41:17
nutritionally complete in the protein space there's lots of things but it's hard to find something that is nice
00:41:22
especially when consumed just with water and that is nutritionally complete if you haven't tried the heel protein
00:41:29
product do give it a try the salted caramel one if you put some ice cubes in it and you put it in a blender and you
00:41:36
try it is as good as pretty much any milkshake on the market just mixed with water it's been a game changer for me
00:41:42
because i'm trying to drop my calorie intake and i'm trying to be a little bit more healthy with my diet so this is
00:41:47
where heel fits in my life thank you hill for making a product that i actually like on the point of impatience one of the
00:41:53
things i read that i really resonated with a lot and it's in fact something that barack obama had said when i spoke
00:41:59
at conference with him in brazil is this idea of making decisions yes before you're at 100
00:42:05
and people really struggle with this but some people it's the most liberating thing they can hear and i've had a guest
00:42:10
come on this podcast that said when you said that that changed my life i read you you said the exact same thing you
00:42:15
said you know get to 70 yeah that's my number i don't even know if that's the real number but it just feels right yeah
00:42:20
70 sounds right if you've got 70 of the information that you will need to make a decision
00:42:27
make it don't you will not get 100 because by the time you even think you're at 100
00:42:34
the situation's changed it needs a decision now leadership requires decisiveness
00:42:41
and you need to make a decision immediately whether it's in a war-torn country
00:42:48
or whether it is in a strife-driven life i mean you need to make the decision
00:42:53
so i would say to people who i would hire let me give you the lowdown of how this
00:42:59
works because most people want to know how do i become successful in this company let's say or words to that
00:43:04
effect and my answer is always you will get 10 points for making the right decision
00:43:11
you will get no points for making the wrong decision but you will get minus 10 points
00:43:17
if you don't make a decision you can't be in a meeting and not speak
00:43:22
up because then you're an audience we want an audience you can get a chair and sit over there and listen if you want to but
00:43:29
you must have an opinion and you must state it that's what you're here for that's why
00:43:35
we want you decisiveness is critical because in order to make that decision i have to
00:43:40
hear all the opinions doesn't mean i'm going to it's going to persuade me differently although it might
00:43:45
but ultimately the buck stops with the person who's going to have to make that ultimate decision and you must make it
00:43:52
one of the other quotes which i found really interesting and inspiring was that your aim when you started dermalogica was to
00:43:59
piss off the 80 and to please the 20 that's that's a quote taken from your book skin in the game yeah raymond
00:44:05
that's raymond's phrase in fact what happened was we were i won't use the word beauty and and so
00:44:12
i was bemoaning the fact that you know people didn't agree with that you know i used to get people saying this you know
00:44:18
you're running down our industry your disgrace to our industry because i wouldn't say i was a beauty therapist
00:44:24
and or a beautician and i mean this these are all great names i'm happy for you to call yourself anything you want
00:44:29
to just doesn't apply to me i don't apply that to my work so i was having this sort of like rant with raymond and
00:44:35
he said but we can't be afraid that some people won't like what we say we have to say it we actually ran out an add-on
00:44:42
based on that conversation which was mel who worked front desk for us holding a sign
00:44:48
saying um we're not pretty and at the bottom we just put the company logo
00:44:55
and because and ray said we understand something this was a team of us marketing we have
00:45:01
to be prepared to piss off 80 or will never turn on 20
00:45:08
will be middle of the road mediocre average palatable but not definable
00:45:15
that's a product that's not a brand a brand has a voice a brand has a personality a brand triggers emotional
00:45:23
responses and so that became our kind of watch word in marketing we need to piss off 80
00:45:31
and turn on 20 we don't need everyone to like us and if we're not being
00:45:36
decisive and if we're not being truthful and if we're not being um slightly
00:45:41
disruptive um we're not being true to ourselves and if we're not doing any of that then
00:45:48
everyone's going to like us but not a lot no one's going to hate us but not a lot and we can't walk that middle ground
00:45:55
so it was a couple of years into your training company that you launched dermalogica yeah so
00:46:01
1983 we started the international dermal institute and we launched dermalogica in
00:46:07
january of 1986. and the resistance you faced talk to me
00:46:13
about the resistance and the challenges you faced in trying to launch that company because i know there were plenty
00:46:20
well at that time everything was sort of the industry was segmented into cosmetics
00:46:30
that included skin care hair care makeup whatever you can think of artifice
00:46:36
decoration that's why i don't ever put skin care in the cosmetic industry which
00:46:41
is an amazing industry and i love it uh but it's not my industry my industry is skincare it's very specific and it's
00:46:47
different and it's closely related to nutrition healthcare and um
00:46:53
and and self self-care so and human connection
00:46:58
so therefore when we started we wanted to form this hybrid between a cosmetic
00:47:05
and a pharmaceutical there was nothing in the middle of those two things then 1986 but remember this
00:47:12
is conversations happening in 85 because we launched in 86. so we wanted to put together this thing
00:47:18
between the two so what did that mean it had to look like a pharmaceutical but perform like
00:47:23
a cosmetic had to be cosmetically elegant but it couldn't look luxury couldn't be a pink jar with a
00:47:30
gold lid so all of that idea of branding influenced what our voice was going to
00:47:35
be the name derma means skin logica means sensible sense
00:47:41
simple serious and unique that was kind of our mantra
00:47:46
so we we took a lot of pushback for that we were told our packaging is ugly
00:47:52
why don't you use jars jars are you know the industry standard and they're disgusting and you because they
00:47:58
contaminate with bacteria not just from your hands but also because we tend to use our products in bathrooms now not at
00:48:05
dressing tables in your dressing room and in a bathroom e coli bacteria is
00:48:11
airborne there's more bacteria in your bathroom than anywhere else so you really don't want that in a jar of cream
00:48:17
it's like people have a bar of soap in their shower and they take that bar and somebody uses the bar and washes their
00:48:23
bits and pieces and the next person gets in and washes their face it's disgusting so
00:48:28
we were talking about all of this and we were getting pushed back and we just we just weathered it and uh
00:48:35
i spoke at a big conference for the industry in glasgow a world conference
00:48:40
in 1987 and i was speaking about this kind of thing and after i had 25 minutes
00:48:47
assigned to me for my presentation and after i think it was about nine minutes the organizers came up and
00:48:54
switched the mic off and asked me to leave the stage because they said what i was talking
00:49:00
about was counterpoint to kind of anarchy in the industry and what
00:49:06
i was talking about was that salons should not be gender specific
00:49:13
that we shouldn't have male salons and female sons in fact there is no gender binary
00:49:19
and we should sell product in our salons because clients need to have product to take home and maintain the results they
00:49:26
just paid us for in the treatment room and apparently me suggesting that there is no binary in a target
00:49:33
market for our work skin care and skin care is
00:49:39
not a luxury it should be a necessity for everyone and we should retell products
00:49:45
was deemed to be an anarchy in the industry now it pissed off probably 80 of the
00:49:51
people i guess in that room i don't know but the 20
00:49:57
of skin therapists who heard that message crowded
00:50:03
our stand there at the trade show that was part of that conference and applauded when i got back to our
00:50:09
booth there were a crowd of skin therapists applauding because they were waiting
00:50:16
to have a business a profession an industry to be proud of and it was not a
00:50:21
hobby or something i did for pin money or something i did on the side was something that you know it's my little
00:50:27
thing i love skin i don't make any money at it they said we need a career we need
00:50:33
a profession we need an industry and a voice that will speak for us because we love this work and we want it to be
00:50:39
profitable otherwise how do we pay the rent and so that was my rallying call the 20
00:50:46
were always my tribe i think that's it's so unbelievably important especially as it relates to marketing and branding to
00:50:52
to have a perspective to stand for something or else you fall into this category of like indifference and people trying to please
00:50:59
everyone and pleasing no one as you say yeah i you know the business did phenomenally well as well so dermalogica
00:51:04
you made a million dollars roughly in your first year yeah eventually that business gets acquired by unilever your
00:51:10
other company still to this day is going incredibly strong as you say it's the the number one in the world in
00:51:16
its category i think i read that you had 1 400 employees yeah or something like that yeah staggering yeah
00:51:22
and that business generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year how hard did you have to work
00:51:28
how many hours were you working in those early dermalogica days oh it's a blur
00:51:34
24 24 wow so no seriously um
00:51:40
the minute we woke up seven o'clock earlier if it was something you know we were fretting about or a trade show that we had to
00:51:46
pack up and go uh all the way through till we fell asleep i i don't there is no work-life balance
00:51:54
it's all your big messy life you know people who say how do you balance your life and your work i know
00:52:01
that they hate one of those two parts in their own life i've never wanted to my it's not that my
00:52:08
life is my work or my work is my life it's all part of my life and i want all of it so i try and make
00:52:15
it happen i can't do it all at the same time i waited till i was 36 to have my first child i really thank god that i
00:52:22
was able to have two children and kind of snuck in what i feel under the under the rope and
00:52:28
a lot of people that that doesn't happen for them i feel really grateful for that
00:52:34
but the reason one of the reasons we put off having children was we were just working so hard and traveling
00:52:40
it was word of mouth where there was no social media there were no influences the influences were our skin therapists
00:52:46
and if word of mouth meant you had to find someone and tell them so we were working every trade show i was flying to
00:52:53
new york where all the magazines were being published and with my box of products when i was literally sitting in
00:52:59
the lobby of conde nast hoping that any one of the editors from any one of their magazines you know please god it might
00:53:06
be vogue will come downstairs and i can grab them in the lobby before they get out the door or see them as they get in
00:53:12
the elevator that was before they had secure elevators so you could get into the elevator with someone and give them
00:53:18
up literally an elevator pitch before they got to the 14th floor where their magazine was
00:53:24
and i and i was lonely and i was scared and i would go to vogue and and you know all
00:53:31
the magazines or hearst publishing and and just sit there with my little box of products saying what am i doing i was
00:53:37
just like pull it together because you've got to keep watching those doors when those elevator doors open if it's someone you've got to go over and say
00:53:43
one minute and press that sample of skin prep scrub into their hands and
00:53:48
and it worked what's the cost of that though that working
00:53:54
you know seven days a week tremendous hours what is the cost i think the greatest cost is friendships
00:54:00
i had friends who really were annoyed that we were just never available me as a person and i was a couple because we
00:54:06
came as a couple really so um we were never available for sunday brunch we couldn't go out on a saturday
00:54:13
night because i was teaching on a sunday i taught every sunday we were running errands on a saturday we
00:54:18
were doing laundry every night after the class and we lost a lot of friends that i look back and i'm sorry that we lost
00:54:23
them because i liked them and i thought that our friendship might have a shot at withstanding it
00:54:29
but the friends who are still our friends understood it and they talk about it now
00:54:35
say oh my god just remember when and we say yes you know i would i would invite everyone for dinner but we were
00:54:41
having indian takeout because i i couldn't cook i mean no i can cook but i
00:54:46
didn't have time to have enough time to do the shopping there was no instacart we kept our closest friends and our dearest
00:54:53
friends are still with us but i think friendship is the thing the thing you lose did you have to because i'm
00:54:58
thinking once upon a time i i am i was in a relationship with someone i worked with did you have to
00:55:04
make time like you know romance time date night date night all that stuff did you
00:55:09
have you ever done anything never i've never had a date night really no i don't know how does that work so you say we're
00:55:14
going on a date on thursday yeah so then we go on a date so we're going out to dinner maybe whatever you're doing
00:55:20
you're walking on the beach you're having alone time with that person and do you not talk about anything other
00:55:26
than your relationship i don't know you talk about the food on the menu and i don't know
00:55:32
the music or you know and then there's sort of pressure that you're going to have sex or whatever is that
00:55:38
i'm just wondering i've never done a date night because i can't even i know what raymond would
00:55:43
say because we've talked about it i've said tim do you want to go on like if you ever heard about this date night this is like years ago and you go what's
00:55:48
that and i said you know when you get together with your partner and you talk about things that you just talk about yourselves i guess or like your
00:55:54
relationship the things that are important important um what do you think about that
00:56:00
i just looked at me he said don't we do that every night and the answer is yes i mean for our relationship i'm not
00:56:06
for one second saying you shouldn't have a date night we know that barack obama and michelle obama used to famously have
00:56:12
their date nights i'm just not sure that ray and i would be able to keep a straight face on it we talk about
00:56:17
everything all the time if we're upset with each other we say i'm really upset with what you said to me yesterday i
00:56:22
just felt like you weren't listening to me or um we went to a dinner party and i kept
00:56:28
trying to catch you right at the dinner table because i was sat next to this ridiculous crazy person who was like
00:56:34
saying the biggest conspiracy theories in the world to me and you wouldn't look at me you've got to remember we've got
00:56:40
look at each other so i can catch your eye for us it's just one big messy relationship and um
00:56:46
we never took our personal arguments to work uh we did used to bring work
00:56:52
conversations home we called them fierce conversations but ray and i are the kind of couple
00:56:58
that we will we call it you know you put the mattresses against the wall you you stay in the room mattresses against the wall
00:57:04
until you have figured it out and you are not leaving this room until we do
00:57:11
and we will reach we will reach a point of agreement and we will
00:57:17
so you don't let that resentment sort of foster no try not to sometimes it's inevitable it still bugs me some things
00:57:23
that raymond does i know that i annoy the hell out of him sometimes but nothing that's important enough to
00:57:29
not be playing a long game for life with this person quick one we bring in eight people a
00:57:35
month to watch these conversations live here in the studio when we're here in the uk and when we're in la if you want
00:57:42
to be one of those people all you've got to do is hit subscribe you made a comment earlier on about therapy
00:57:47
and i thought it was i wasn't sure if it was flippant or serious but uh have you ever been to therapy and what what for
00:57:54
i had not seen a therapist although i now realize i really should have i'm quite positive about that until um
00:58:01
about five years ago and what happened five years ago it was pretty soon after we'd sold the
00:58:08
company which was momentous but i felt like i was dealing with it fine
00:58:13
raymond lost his father passed away we
00:58:19
had a house in santa barbara that we were that was our forever house we we
00:58:26
went up to santa barbara we raised our kids every summer up there it's a beach community about
00:58:32
80 miles north of los angeles that's our go-to place where we feel safe we feel
00:58:37
protected if we ever had a a staff event that we wanted to have a small group and discuss stuff we would
00:58:43
do it in santa barbara we had meetings there we it was just like our
00:58:48
place and we had this great house like a farmhouse and and i loved the garden and
00:58:55
i plot replanted the garden and i i loved the house and in january of 2018
00:59:04
santa barbara had massive fire the thomas fire and soon after there was flash flooding
00:59:10
and giant mudslide from the mountains above and our house was destroyed
00:59:18
and if we had been in it which we were not and the only reason we were not is this mudslide happened the
00:59:24
late hours of january 8th early morning january 9th and lucy our youngest child's birthday
00:59:32
is january 8th and we came back to la to celebrate it with her friends here if
00:59:37
we'd been in our house in santa barbara we wouldn't have made it out a huge massive boulder came straight through
00:59:43
the master bedroom which was on the ground floor and we would have we would have been killed
00:59:50
that was the tipping point for me and to begin with i felt like i just wasn't coming to terms with the fact
00:59:55
that we'd lost the house and raymond was becoming really worried about me and he kept saying jane
01:00:01
i cannot believe you're attaching this much to a to a place to a house to a possession to
01:00:08
our stuff it's stuff like we're safe
01:00:13
and for some reason i just couldn't put it down i couldn't get through it i was carrying it with me like a
01:00:20
weight and i wasn't sleeping and i started not sleeping and i went for 41 nights with
01:00:26
less than 44 hours sleep a night i clocked it
01:00:32
and i went to see my doctor who said i i think you need to we need to book you into the
01:00:37
sleep clinic at ucla the university of california los angeles and there was a three-month wait list
01:00:43
so i decided i was going to go talk to my doctor about sleeping tablets and i went and he recommended ambien
01:00:52
and i'd never take an ambien and i and i really didn't know if i wanted to start taking that
01:00:58
and he casually said well maybe you know psychologically there's a reason you're not sleeping so
01:01:04
i decided i'd go see a psychiatrist who i knew our youngest child had an eating
01:01:09
disorder and had seen this person this doctor and i went to her and i said i'm not sleeping and she said let me do some
01:01:16
cognitive testing which she did and then she said okay you are did you drive here
01:01:21
and i said yeah and she said you shouldn't drive home you cognitively
01:01:26
should not you should not be driving we've got to get you sleeping and through trial and error she tried
01:01:33
every sleeping tablet on the market and i nothing helped me 10 milligrams of milligram didn't help
01:01:38
i'd wake up after three hours and ultimately she said jane you don't have an insomnia problem
01:01:44
you have an anxiety problem and i had to dig in and deal with it and of course
01:01:51
as i dug into losing the house it wasn't about the house the house was representative of every loss i've ever
01:01:56
had in my life going all the way back to when i was two and three quarters
01:02:02
years old and lost my father had to go all the way back and dig in
01:02:07
and unpack it and realize why not who i am but why i am who i am
01:02:15
had that not happened had i not been able to unpack all of that and then realize how much i had in that
01:02:22
suitcase and which pieces it was okay to put in a cupboard and
01:02:28
close it know it's there but not have to wear it every day and which were the bits i needed to wear every day because
01:02:34
it was so much part of who i am i i know i couldn't have written the book and i don't know that i would be in the place
01:02:40
i am today is it the awareness of what's going on
01:02:45
in the suitcase that that is the liberating thing or is there also like tools and techniques and strategies of
01:02:51
dealing with triggers or moments that i think it's both but for me what has been
01:02:56
successful is having the right questions asked
01:03:02
and you're excellent at this so you know this how did that make you feel or what were
01:03:07
you thinking then or what did you do immediately after that and not having that person tell me
01:03:15
therefore what happened but allowing me to think
01:03:20
oh that's that's interesting i um i had a bath
01:03:25
or whatever it might be you know and then slowly over the next sometimes it's a few days sometimes it's a few
01:03:32
months sometimes a couple of years you start to realize i'm seeing a pattern here there's a pattern here that i'm
01:03:39
recognizing in myself and then for me um
01:03:45
the tools i get given tools to try encouraged to try try thinking about it this way
01:03:50
one thing when i would talk about my childhood for example and i was ashamed that i didn't have a father and i and i
01:03:58
felt ashamed when my mother started to develop alzheimer's and and was still
01:04:04
socially active but clearly not herself i've reframed that as how proud i am of
01:04:11
my parents and i am and i'm proud of my mum's fortitude and i'm proud of
01:04:17
her determination and i can talk with pride about my mother and father and not
01:04:23
feel anything else not feel any other emotion other than of course love
01:04:28
and i'm really grateful for that and uh i think that a lot of people
01:04:34
not laugh at therapy but knock it and i think it's because it's probably the single most terrifying thing you
01:04:41
ever do is really look deep at your choices and actions and behaviors
01:04:49
and it's much kinder to oneself to just keep it packed
01:04:54
up we can keep that locked away we don't need to discuss it don't look at that stop talking about that you don't need
01:04:59
to go about that that's over that's in the past why do you keep talking about that don't you don't need to you're okay
01:05:05
now oh best not to bother best not to leave well alone i've heard all that my
01:05:11
whole life i mean that i grew up under that not just from my family but from people
01:05:16
and i realized now no i think that's the only way you really find who you are
01:05:23
and maybe you can do it with best friends helping you maybe you can do it as a client of a skincare therapist who
01:05:28
listens to everything you tell them and if you do that's great but however it works for you find the way that helps
01:05:35
you examine because a life unexamined is a life not lived
01:05:42
so it's so interesting you know i sit here with lots of guests on this podcast and many of them have taken the
01:05:48
taken the leap or made the decision at some point to go to therapy and to start kind of unpacking things that have happened to them in their life and yet i
01:05:55
still and they speak to the profound impact positive impact it's had on their life
01:06:00
and yet i still as i sit here today definitely feel a stigma myself about
01:06:06
going yeah it's okay you're twenty-eight i'm twenty-nine yeah twenty-nine okay so definitely people told me many people i
01:06:12
was in relationships told me in my twenties that you know you should see someone or you know and i it would to me
01:06:19
there was a stigma there was nothing wrong with me and i had good friends that i could talk to and i had sisters i could tell
01:06:25
but none of them are completely as objective as we think they might be and of course it's not
01:06:30
completely confidential and i'm now 63 i'm going to be 64 next
01:06:36
saturday and i think there's a point where we start to
01:06:42
be ready and if not not and you'll know when it is
01:06:48
because your body will tell you it won't be your mind it won't be the stigma it'll be something i thought i had
01:06:54
insomnia i could have just probably started swallowing ambien and thinking oh well
01:07:00
this doesn't work either i guess i'm just getting older and i don't sleep but you see i wasn't able to function
01:07:07
without sleeping so my body literally took me to a place where i had to ask
01:07:16
for help and it took all those years and so
01:07:22
it's okay that there's a stigma it's okay you don't want to do it then don't do it it's not maybe it's not right for you now probably not very much to unpack
01:07:28
even though you feel like there's a lot and maybe you haven't seen the pattern repeat itself enough for you to think
01:07:34
oh it's not that person or that person this is actually my pattern
01:07:41
and so you know i just think all of us should find our way however we can the symptoms the symptoms culminated um
01:07:49
well your the unpacked suitcase culminated in this insomnia later in your life yeah but now
01:07:55
in hindsight now that you've been and you've spoken about it and you've unpacked these things and understood them better
01:08:00
can you identify other symptoms that were present at other phases in your life or was it just at that point when
01:08:06
you got insomnia that you thought well i need to was there
01:08:12
i used to pride myself that i left a relationship before anyone left me
01:08:20
right and i think because of that fear of being
01:08:26
the one left alone i would self-sabotage relationships whether they be
01:08:32
friendships or whether they be personal intimate relationships and that might work very
01:08:39
well until you have children
01:08:44
and that changes everything for me well because you are
01:08:50
forced to i tell a story in in my book about my youngest child lucy
01:08:56
before cell phones we had established a routine of we all had breakfast together ray and i always ate breakfast together
01:09:02
even if it was a banana and a cup of tea stood in the kitchen and then as we had children we would
01:09:07
literally take 10 minutes to just sit around the table and have a piece of toast a bowl of cereal whatever
01:09:13
and just say you know have a great day and you know you didn't have to have any kind of profound conversation just be
01:09:18
present and um with cell phones i started to get
01:09:24
you know emails and texts coming in from our markets in europe that were already
01:09:29
four o'clock in the afternoon at eight o'clock in the morning you know that you're nodding now obviously because you
01:09:34
do so we had a 24-hour business and so i started to get into the habit of just checking just quickly just
01:09:40
checking my emails and texts before i sat down to breakfast and then i would walk lucy to the bus
01:09:46
stop for school and then it got to where i would check them before i sat down for breakfast so that i knew what was on my
01:09:52
plate and then i'd walk at a school and then it got to i would check them and then maybe i couldn't sit down for
01:09:58
breakfast because i had to just quickly answer this text you know how that goes it's a slippery slope but i'm so busy and i'm successful and i'm working i'm
01:10:04
not fooling around i'm not like you know reading the the comics or anything at the back of the paper i'm working i mean
01:10:11
i'm answering as a crisis there's a crisis in new zealand so i was on my phone and and earlier i
01:10:18
come down at like 6 30 and i was busy scrolling and i had to quickly answer there was a catastrophe it was a bit of
01:10:24
a disaster happening in the uk and i had to answer them they needed an answer now because it was the end of the day there
01:10:30
and lucy came downstairs and she said morning mom and i said and i didn't say i just kind of like nodded and
01:10:37
said waved at her like hi hi she sat down and i was busy texting texting
01:10:44
looking at something and she said and then from the chair she got up from the table and she said mom and i said lucy
01:10:50
just one minute hang on mom and i said lucy just one minute
01:10:55
please and carry on and she said mum i just and i said lucy please can you not see i'm
01:11:02
busy i've got a whole thing happening in the uk and i have to get back to them
01:11:08
and i suddenly saw her eyes well up and i said lucy for goodness sake what is wrong
01:11:15
and she said i wanted to give you a hug you look so cross
01:11:24
and it was i was just stood there with this stupid bloody phone in my hand and my child in
01:11:31
front of me looking scared of me and i just put down the phone i got on
01:11:38
my knees i gave her a big hug and said lucy i'm so sorry and she started crying then i started
01:11:43
crying i said lucy i'm so sorry there is nothing more important than you and
01:11:48
being here right now i got distracted by business it's not
01:11:53
acceptable i promise you it will never happen again and i made a rule it never did
01:12:00
it doesn't make me any more perfect a parent my mum was very busy she worked a lot
01:12:06
it's not about that it's about knowing when the moment it's
01:12:12
not a long a moment is important to pay attention
01:12:17
and that day at least for that person my child when someone says mum i'm
01:12:22
listening how do you make sure that despite the
01:12:27
crisis that might emerge at any given moment in any day and also just the
01:12:32
general gravitational pull that business has because of the allure allure that you can be more successful or make more
01:12:38
money how do you make sure that you are allocating your time against your true priorities like
01:12:44
spending time with your children or like friendships or like your husband because we both know that we could just spend
01:12:50
all of our time just doing business yeah so how do you i really think about
01:12:56
is this a true emergency or is it a rush of adrenaline because
01:13:05
being able to solve this or do something about this is making me feel
01:13:12
relevant important special needed
01:13:18
bigger and if it's for any of those reasons it can wait
01:13:25
your ego can wait or is this moment not as much about me
01:13:31
but about the people i love or their need to show me love
01:13:36
it's it's not easy because we're impatient so we get caught up in that rush and that's the thing that made us
01:13:43
successful that's the thing that drives us that's the thing that without that we wouldn't be us and yet
01:13:51
take a breath and just say okay wait a minute does this have to be done
01:13:56
right now while i've got this other person my child my husband my partner my mother my wife fill in the blank
01:14:03
or could it wait four minutes could it wait an hour
01:14:09
could it wait till tonight could it wait till next week
01:14:15
does it actually have to be answered and trust me if it is a tick-tock
01:14:22
or a social media thing or anything like that i will tell you the answer now
01:14:27
you know it it does not have to be answered right away i don't care if you've got 2 million followers 22 million 120 it
01:14:34
doesn't have to be answered right away unless literally it is an emergency so
01:14:40
just take a beat take a minute and decide who needs this time the most and
01:14:46
sometimes it's not another person it's you sometimes you need that minute the most
01:14:52
i need this minute for me now so take a break and go and have that time for yourself
01:14:59
because you need that as well i heard one of the things you said as advice to entrepreneurs is to first and
01:15:06
foremost make sure you are one oh yeah make sure you are listen not everyone's an entrepreneur it sounds
01:15:11
like the cool thing to be right the sexy thing is to be an entrepreneur some people are not cut out to be entrepreneurs to be an entrepreneur it's
01:15:17
not just that you are a risk taker right i hate hearing it's just so tired cliche
01:15:23
to say you know entrepreneurs are great risk takers entrepreneurs are not frightened of being scared
01:15:29
let's say that it's not that we're not scared we are but we'll deal with it courage bravery is not the
01:15:36
absence of fear it's the presence of fear and still being able to function
01:15:41
so that you have to have you always have to be decisive you have to be able to make a decision you have to um
01:15:49
have 70 and make a call not everyone has that and then you don't have to you can also have a bit of that and be
01:15:55
an intrapreneur so you think entrepreneurially within someone else's company which is fine that's like
01:16:02
playing in vegas without using your own chips but it's not the rush of using your own
01:16:07
chips you know the entrepreneur we're using our own chips and it's once you get it's easy to risk a few
01:16:13
chips when you haven't got many on the table when the chips start stacking up and you want to put everything on red 22
01:16:20
well that's going to be a huge gamble so it's that kind of energy it's very different so you've got entrepreneurs
01:16:26
you have entrepreneurs you also have i think two kinds of entrepreneurs you've got entrepreneurs that are serial entrepreneurs they flip it then they
01:16:33
build it and flip it build it and flip it and they they're very good at starting things but they can't follow
01:16:39
they don't want to follow through and grow it and then you get a long long player like
01:16:44
like me and raymond where you build one company or two and you grow it
01:16:49
into an acquisition and that defines your entrepreneurship both are great either are fine
01:16:56
you have to find what your path is and you find that by finding what your purpose is and what's your fastest route
01:17:01
to get there and for us it was entrepreneurship but it's not for everybody and neither
01:17:07
should it be and that's the that's the magic find find your path
01:17:13
i know you weren't intent on selling dermalogica especially in the early years but you ultimately did yes
01:17:20
two questions yeah question one is the week after you sell dermalogica how did
01:17:25
you feel about it and the second thing is why why did you choose to sell the company
01:17:31
euphoric really yes and i'll tell you why because we knew exactly why we were selling um
01:17:38
i don't know it ever feels that way if you resell you sell regretfully or because of a some other reason but the
01:17:45
reason we sold was we felt strongly we had taken dermalogica
01:17:51
to as far as we could run it we were not that there were other people that were so much more clever than us out
01:17:57
there i did think that in the early days there must be someone who knows all these answers but then you realize pretty quickly people don't no one has
01:18:03
the answers no one knows your business better than you do so it wasn't that so much that if we thought of it as a relay
01:18:10
race raymond and i ran the first leg but you're running so fast and so hard
01:18:16
at your fullest capacity you can't possibly run the second third and fourth legs
01:18:22
so you have to pass that baton into a different kind of runner who the second leg is a different kind of runner as is
01:18:28
the third leg and guess what the fourth leg is the one that's going to take it home
01:18:33
so we felt very strongly about that we had rule we didn't need we didn't want to go
01:18:39
to an ipo because we don't play well in the sandbox with other people could we have promoted someone from within and like
01:18:45
stayed on as benevolent you know owners no i mean we were aging out we were
01:18:51
definitely you know we realized our relevancy was going to be was going to wane what
01:18:58
we knew and what we knew how to do life was changing the world was changing it was time we knew you've got to know
01:19:04
when to leave the party i don't know about you but i'm very good at knowing when to leave yeah and raymond is excellent at knowing
01:19:12
when i should leave the party too and so he said this is the time the time is we've got to pass the baton and it's
01:19:17
going to be an acquisition and then in the book skin in the game i tell the story of the acquisition because the
01:19:23
likely suspects of who would acquire us people in the cosmetic industry in
01:19:29
prestige sure they were at the table at the beginning but at the end of the day what
01:19:34
guided us was a shared value system and the shared value system was unilever and we're still with them and
01:19:41
we appointed our first ceo when we sold he's still our ceo he's terrific the team stayed on board ray
01:19:48
and i have stayed involved the company continues going strength to strength they're in double-digit growth
01:19:54
so we know we chose the right partner so we felt euphoric about it and now i feel gratified that we did the
01:20:02
right thing promise you i don't miss it a bit and i'm incredibly proud of what
01:20:08
we did i guess that's when you know it's the right time yeah you built wealth over many many years from two different
01:20:14
businesses so this even the acquisition of unilever i'm guessing wasn't a life changing in terms of the
01:20:19
fundamentals of your life moment no right so when you think about those two wonderful daughters you have and leaving
01:20:25
them that that money yeah you know what question i'm going to say ask me because you're you know much of
01:20:31
your tenacity and your hunger has come from not having it i remember hearing the stories of you like looking down the
01:20:36
back of the sofas for coins when you're younger all these things that you did are you scared that your kids won't have
01:20:42
that same tenacity and hunger if you leave them your your wealth yes absolutely and let me tell you
01:20:48
something they're 23 and 28 we better have done a good enough job by now because
01:20:54
you're not changing i don't know that you can change someone at 23 or 20. you couldn't change me at 23 or 28. we we um
01:21:01
we raised them in the house that we bought way before the acquisition we bought it 18 years before the
01:21:07
acquisition we live in a nice neighborhood we don't live in a gated community i don't live
01:21:12
in a mansion i'd never had living help or anything like that i didn't want it it's not who i am it's not my value
01:21:18
system it's not raymond's we raise them in as normal a childhood as anyone has i never i mean who had a normal childhood
01:21:25
i think they have a very strong value system they're aware that they are incredibly
01:21:31
uh fortunate they also know that a sense of purpose means how does
01:21:36
it benefit other people and that wealth is a burden if you don't figure out how it can benefit others and
01:21:43
give you some sense of gratitude at having it so
01:21:49
yes of course we've done estate planning and of course we don't want to see our children not taken care of and
01:21:56
they will also understand how they're going to take care of other people people they know
01:22:01
and also people that they don't know and will never meet because that's part of it if you are given this kind of
01:22:07
opportunity you have a responsibility or as i like to call it another equal
01:22:14
and opposite opportunity to do something with it and i think if you don't recognize that
01:22:20
pretty quickly it becomes a burden and can lead to incredible unhappiness
01:22:26
and uh i really hope that ray and i have done the right things to make sure that doesn't happen i feel pretty good so far
01:22:32
i have a high degree of confidence that you have by how you've delivered that because it seems to be very well thought through
01:22:37
we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the previous guest writes a question for the next guest and i don't get to see it until i open
01:22:43
this book so on a scale of one to ten of self-love how much do you accept
01:22:49
yourself have positive thoughts about yourself have healed your wounds and fully love who you are authentically
01:22:56
i one being you don't love yourself at all and ten being you love yourself
01:23:01
authentically i love myself authentically 10 and it's taken me
01:23:07
help and support and trust and faith to get there but i honestly do
01:23:13
with my flaws it's not that i think i'm perfect it's that i am always learning and i'm open
01:23:21
to being better yes it's a beautiful sense of sort of self-empathy to that yeah yeah i'm kind
01:23:28
to myself well thank you so much jane honestly the i learned so much just from researching
01:23:34
your life and your book the the sort of human vulnerable honest nature whilst also this constant undertone of real
01:23:42
actionable advice is what makes it so important i think that's the best use of
01:23:47
words thank you thanks as you might know my energy are a
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in the comments section below [Music]
01:24:53
you