Most of us don’t believe that we can change the world… because we are bombarded by bad news every day – radio, TV, social media feeds and billboards. We feel ‘the hopeless and helpless’… that it’s impossible for one of us to change the world. So we don’t even try. But what if we could? I chat to Sara Price – a 25 year veteran of the PR industry founder of Actually, an organisation that supports people who believe they can change the world.
Show Notes
- How Sara learnt she could change the world… in Ghana with UNICEF and working for a back bencher in the UK Parliament
- Why, despite loving working for UNICEF, she left and entered the corporate world, eventually setting up one of London’s top award winning PR agencies, Pagefield 9 years ago
- Key learnings from setting up her own business – in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis!
- Why she set up ACTUALLY in early 2019
- How YOU can find what you should be doing to change the world: hint…work from your strength and experience
- How she’s focussing on leveraging her 25 years in PR to support other change makers to Actually change the world
- The primary difference between people who change the world, and people who don’t.
- Lessons from the youth: AnikeaGeorge and Greta Thunberg – and why Greta has received more PR coverage than any other change maker
- Using the 5 keys to communication to get your change out there
- Why you need a community to support you in changing the world… and her commitment to keep holding the vision of those who want to change the world when their energy and motivation dips
- Learnings from her trip to Richard Branson’s Necker Island that changed with whom she was spending time, and deep insights on Imposter Syndrome
- The saddest two words in the English language …“What if…” because they’re usually muttered at a time when we are at the end of our life or have regrets.
Learn more about Sara Price
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Transcript
Lisa Linfield: 00:09 Yay, I am so excited to let you know that this is episode 100. Oh my goodness gracious me, can you imagine that such a big milestone has happened? I want to thank you all for listening, for being there to support me, for the encouraging messages that you send and for coming on this journey to teach a million women about money. So in celebration of this fantastic milestone, I am joined today in this episode by the most special human being. In fact, I think all my guests are special human beings, but this human, Sara Price, is on a mission to support every one of us to change the world. So listen closely, because this truly is a special interview to celebrate 100 episodes.
Hello everybody, and welcome to today’s episode of Working Women’s Wealth. I am joined by Sara Price, who has spent 25 years in the PR industry. She’s co-founded one of London’s biggest PR agencies called Pagefield, and most recently has founded a business called actually.world whose mission is to support people, charities, and organizations to change the world. Thank you for joining us on the show.
Sara Price: 01:45 You’re so welcome. It’s lovely to be here.
Lisa Linfield: 01:48 When did you personally start to believe that you could change the world?
Sara Price: 01:55 Well that’s an interesting question, because the reality is I believe that everybody can change the world. I envisage a world where everyone without question, knows that they have the capacity to make a difference and to create change, where every young person knows that their voice matters, that their vote matters, that they have the capability to change things. It really first came home to me probably 20 years ago. I took a job with UNICEF, and I spent some time in West Africa with them. I met a woman in one of the biggest slums in Accra in Ghana, who was pretty much single handedly running a mother and baby clinic there that was funded by UNICEF. I saw the extraordinary difference that she made to the women and the children that came through that clinic, and it brought home to me that one person with drive and commitment and vision can indeed change the world of the people that they come into contact with, if not the wider world.
Lisa Linfield: 03:06 That’s amazing. It truly resonates, because I do strongly believe that each one of us can change the world. We just sometimes I think through life as we grow, become almost
[inaudible 00:03:19]
ties to our ability to be able to do that.
Sara Price: 03:23 Yeah, I think there’s a lot going on in the world right now, and I’ve worked with the media for a very long time, so I don’t want to dismiss the media or be derogatory about them, but bad news sells. It’s easy in today’s world to be cynical and to be negative, and to be pessimistic and to feel what I call the hopeless and helpless mindset to lapse into believing that we can’t make a difference. That everything is bigger than we are and that as an individual, it’s impossible to impact. That it’s like an enormous tanker and it’s impossible to turn it around, but anyone who’s spent any time at a harbor will know that actually it’s the little tug boats that maneuver the big ships into harbor. So it’s entirely possible for one individual or a small group to have a real difference.
There’s that incredibly famous Margaret Mead quote that says never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. Whenever I’m feeling hopeless and helpless, which luckily isn’t very often, I remember that.
Lisa Linfield: 04:33 That’s fantastic. I really like that quote. So you worked for UNICEF, but then you went into, I guess what one would call the corporate world. Why did you do that?
Sara Price: 04:43 One of my personal bugbears I think, and I was talking to somebody about this the other day, is that people who are working hard to change the world or make the world a better place for everybody else are quite often the people that are the least valued, both within our society if you look at things like nurses and teachers who are raising the next generation or taking care of the sick and the elderly, or if you look at the third sector and the nonprofit sector where people are working extraordinarily hard to make a difference in the world. The pay was just insufficient to pay my rent and pay my travel card and buy my food. After a couple of years of getting deeper and deeper into debt every single month, back in the days where you met with your bank manager in person, I had to come to Jesus conversation with my bank manager who said, “You simply can’t afford to keep doing this. You’ve only got two choices. You either need to get another job that pays you more money, or you’re going to have to leave London.”
In the end London won at that point, and I had to leave UNICEF. It was a really devastating decision for me, because UNICEF was one of those jobs that still to this day is the kind of benchmark of a job that I absolutely loved, because even on the days when the job was boring and everybody has those days, I was bolstered by the fact that I was part of something that was making a difference to some of the most marginalized children within our world, but I had to leave. I couldn’t afford to pay the rent.
Lisa Linfield: 06:22 I always say that everyone can be good. If you really love what you’re doing, you can be great, but you only hum. You get that sense of energy, it is almost like a perpetual energy that comes from helping another human being, because it always seems to be that just when you’re about to throw in the towel and you’re about to say this is absolute junk, someone that you’ve helped at some stage or something that you’ve done, comes back and boosts you with progress or compliment or something that just gives you that energy to keep going. That doesn’t happen when you’re not helping another human being. It just seems to be that God knows that you need this extra boost, and that circle turns and comes back for you and boosts you, and that is when you’re helping other human beings.
Sara Price: 07:06 Yeah, I completely agree and I had that in my first two jobs. My first job, I worked in parliament, I worked for a backbench MP. One of the things that I did for him was I helped him with his constituency casework, and his constituency was one of the poorest in London. It was in East London, had a very, very large immigrant population. Had some very serious social housing issues, and it was an amazing job. I enjoyed working in parliament and working in politics, but the thing that kept me going again on the days when the job was boring or when something didn’t go right or when I couldn’t pay my rent was the letters I would get from people within the constituency, from individuals that our work had helped. Families who have previously been living six or seven people sleeping in one bedroom, with damp coming down the walls and literally mushrooms growing out of the carpet, and we had helped them to be re-homed on. It’s that sort of thing that keeps you going when it’s difficult.
Lisa Linfield: 08:12 So you started this, what is now an amazing PR agency called Pagefield. How was that journey for you, and what did you learn?
Sara Price: 08:21 Wow, excellent question. It was an extraordinary journey. We started Pagefield interestingly, almost nine years ago exactly. It was nine years on Friday. I think probably there are several things that I’ve learned over that journey. I think I would’ve learned a lot in nine years anyway, but particularly nine years in business. When we first started that business, it was the middle of the global economic meltdown, and everybody said we were completely crazy. Both of us, Mark my business partner and I had left very stable, secure jobs in order to do this, and everybody thought we were completely mad. Then everybody also thought we were mad for going into business with one another. We were very, very close friends. We’ve known one another for a very long time, I think up when we’ve known one another for about 15 years. They said, “Never worked with your friends and never leave a stable job in the middle of a recession.”
So my first two lessons were that that’s complete nonsense. Actually, one of the best times to start a new business is in the middle of a recession, because if you can make a business work when the economy is in the toilet, then imagine how much better it will work when the economy recovers, which is exactly what we discovered. Secondly, working with someone that you have known for a long time means working with someone whose faults and foibles you know and understand, whose strengths and weaknesses you know and understand, and you have a platform of trust that means you can get through pretty much anything that starting a business will throw at you. So those were my first two lessons, and then probably the biggest other lesson is understand your own strengths and weaknesses, and recruit to compliment them. Mark and I have a very complimentary relationship, and that we have different strengths and weaknesses. I think that’s probably the essence of the strength in our partnership.
We also now have an incredible chief executive, who actually joined us as a founding partner not that long after we started the business. So he’s grown up with the business, and he became chief executive about three years ago now. He has skills that neither Mark nor I have. He is very, very organized and naturally organized. I’m very organized, but I have to really focus on it. He is just naturally organized. That’s just the way he is, and he is an absolutely extraordinary CEO. Then the final lesson is once you’ve appointed a chief executive, get out of their way. Allow them to do their job without having the founders looking over their shoulder saying, “Well, I’m not sure I would’ve done it like that. You might want to think about doing it in a different way.” So those would be the first lessons that come to mind.
Lisa Linfield: 11:22 That’s amazing, and good lessons. I always liken it to exercise when we also say you need to build knowledge and skills. Actually you don’t, most of us know exactly what to do. The challenge is not the knowing, the challenge is the stuff that is what people call the soft stuff. When it comes to your business, one can always know what one needs to do in their business, but it’s the soft stuff and as you say, putting the right people with the right skills in place and allowing them to flourish and getting out of their way.
Sara Price: 11:49 Yeah, and I think people underestimate the importance of the soft stuff and the importance of culture. One of the things that I think I’m most proud of with Pagefield, I mean we’ve won lots of industry awards. We’ve done incredible work for some amazing global clients. We’ve worked for everybody from Airbnb to Kellogg’s, to the British airways. We do great work, but I think the thing that I am probably proudest of is the culture we’ve created, and the team that we have put together and the fact that we have always said that internally, our driving philosophy is people before profits. So we always prioritize our people. We spend a lot of time developing them, focusing on them, understanding them. Our recruitment process is very rigorous, because we insist on recruiting the right people for our organization.
Other than do they have the skills, do they have the experience, do they have the potential, the overriding consideration is would I spend a long train journey with this person? If the answer to that question is no, then even if they’ve got skills and the experience and the potential, we don’t recruit them because one person that just doesn’t quite fit, can have a devastating impact on a business of our size. That’s not to say that everybody has the same personality type. We have a really diverse team with very diverse political views, with very diverse opinions and different approaches to things that they are all bright, fascinating, curious, interested in the world around them and able to hold their own.
Lisa Linfield: 13:28 That’s fantastic. So you’ve now built this amazing business with amazing human beings, and you have decided this year to build something just as amazing and even more impactful called Actually. Why did you do that and what is Actually?
Sara Price: 13:50 You remember I was talking about UNICEF, and how devastating a decision it was to leave. When I left, I walked out of my office on the last day and I promised myself that one day when I could afford to, I would find my way back to doing that kind of work again. The kind of work where you feel that you’re making a genuine difference, and you’re contributing to changing the world in some way. That was 20 years ago. So 20 years after I made that promise, I thought, “You know what? I can afford to do this now.” I sat down with a huge sheet of paper and I wrote a list of all the organizations, the courses, the campaigns that I was interested in and wanted to contribute to in some way. So all the ways that I thought I might be able to help change the world. It was a very, very, very long list. I think there were over 100 things on that list.
I was somewhat overwhelmed by the idea that I had to try and choose, because how do you choose between helping tackle plastics in the ocean, or helping to solve the issues around child labor or child trafficking, or gender equality or health inequalities. I had this moment of complete overwhelm, realizing that I only have one life and in that lifetime, there wasn’t enough time to change all the things that I wanted to change. I actually took a sabbatical. I took a few months off and went away, and had a long think. I realized that actually I didn’t have to choose. I have 25 years of experience in communications, and I remembered all the social enterprises, all the charities, all the campaign groups that I have seen over the past 25 years, who have huge vision and great passion, but very little often in the way of communications expertise.
Or amazing social enterprise businesses and charities that just didn’t have sufficient funds to work with a PR agency like Pagefield, and so were struggling to get their voices heard, struggling to get the kind of cut through that would really help them to attract support to make people have enough to really have an impact and change the world. I realized that I could help them. I could help them to build their capacity in communications and campaigning. I could advise them, I could support them, I could lift the veil, so to speak. I could demystify communications for them, and I could help others to change the world. In doing that, I would take the things off my list of 100 gradually by helping others to do what I don’t have the time to do in my lifetime, and I could fulfill the promise I made when I left UNICEF 20 years ago.
That’s when I started Actually, and we’re in soft launch phase at the moment. We started in March, but the idea behind the business is we focus on mindset skills and support, and we offer in person and virtual training in communication strategy and communications planning. We do consulting and advisory support. So I consult with businesses and charities on their communications activity, and we’re also building a really thriving community of change-makers who can support and inspire one another. So that’s what we’re up to with Actually at the moment, six months in.
Lisa Linfield: 17:40 It always, when people say to me, “I want to do something but I have no idea what I can do.” It amazes me how often we look, and I include myself, to something completely dislocated from where we spent our last life. It amazes me how often I watch people, including myself, come back to something that leverages those last 25 years in your case, of experience. I looked at myself and I thought, “Well, I’m going to do this and that.” I’d been in banking and finance my whole life, and I ended up helping humans with their money as opposed to helping corporates with their money. I interviewed a woman called Nina and she was looking at all these other things, and has worked on leveraging her training for corporates to training individual humans. It’s so often when we think, “Okay, I want to change the world, maybe I must leave everything and throw it away,” when actually part of it is that the skill set that you’ve been developing is part of the path to [inaudible 00:18:42].
Sara Price: 18:41 Yeah, yeah I totally agree. I was very, very lucky to have an advisor, a mentor who when I was going through my crippling overwhelm over what to do next, and I was looking at this list of 100 things and trying to work out how I was going to choose one, how I was going to make my difference and did I need to start a new charity or did I need to retrain as a teacher and go and work in West Africa as a teacher. All of those things that go through your mind, and I had an excellent mentor who said, “Use what you know, but use it in a different way.” It was a light bulb moment for me. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that what I had amassed over 25 years in terms of my experience in communications, was a resource that I could divert and use in a different way to achieve a different result. It just hadn’t occurred to me. It surprises me now that it didn’t occur to me.
Lisa Linfield: 19:44 No, and the great thing about looking backwards is it always seem so obvious, but at the time, it seems like it just doesn’t appear.
Sara Price: 19:51 Exactly. It does seem incredibly obvious now, but at the time, I did spend several days going backwards and forward over this list trying to work out what on earth I was going to do. Now I think everything was leading to this point.
Lisa Linfield: 20:07 Your purpose is to support people to change the world. If one of our listeners out there is wanting to do that, what would you say to them?
Sara Price: 20:18 I would say that the biggest difference between people who change the world and people who don’t is that the people who change the world genuinely believe that they can, and that is it. That is the primary difference. I think it’s what I referred to earlier as the hopeless and helpless mindset. It is prevalent in our society, and we have a dominant culture that is quite cynical and quite, I don’t want to say negative, but quite pessimistic. That’s understandable and people live the way they live and that’s fine, but it does inculcate this kind of inbuilt helplessness, which I rail against because I simply don’t buy it. I just don’t buy that people can’t make a difference. I believe the complete opposite of that.
When I look at some of the most incredible change makers at the moment, you look at people like Greta Thunberg, or someone who’s perhaps a little less famous but no less impactful, was a 17 year old girl called Amika George, who woke up one morning and read an article that said that young girls in the UK were missing at least a few days from school every month, because they couldn’t afford to buy proper sanitary protection. This girl, who at the time was about 16, decided that that was just unacceptable and she began a campaign to get the government to provide free sanitary protection for girls in schools, so that no girl would have to miss out on an education. It just didn’t occur to her that she couldn’t do it, that she couldn’t change the world. Talking to her afterwards, there was an interview with her in which she said that whenever anybody tells you that you can’t do something, you should take that as a spur to keep on going, because you absolutely can.
She never allowed anyone to tell her that she couldn’t make a difference. I think, “Well if a 16, 17 year old girl isn’t going to let anyone tell them that she can’t make a difference, then neither will I.”
Lisa Linfield: 22:29 That’s fantastic. One of my previous interviews with a woman called Gloria Mitchell, and she has the concept of the difference between possible and probable. Most of us focus on the story we tell ourselves, it’s improbable that I can make a difference, when in actual fact we should focus on is it possible? Of course, it’s possible. A 17 year old girl has made a massive difference to the lives of other children everywhere. It’s absolutely possible to do it. So then if someone some way with less resources, less anything has changed the world, then so can you.
Sara Price: 23:01 Exactly, and as I say you only have to look at Greta Thunberg, who was I think 15 when she first started her climate strike in Sweden. As she has talked about publicly, she has a form of Asperger’s. This is a young girl who has completely changed the nature of the debate about the climate crisis, who garners enormous amounts of media now wherever she goes, who has political leaders around the world listening to her, opting on her recommendations and she is a teenager. A teenager operating in an environment that is dominated by the English language, where English is her second language. Someone making a real and genuine difference. So if she can do it, then so can we.
Lisa Linfield: 23:53 If one of the cornerstones of being able to change the world is to get the right people to mobilize and help support, and get your message around and get you the resources that you need, and that cornerstone is fundamentally communication in its essence, how does one communicate well?
Sara Price: 24:19 That is a very big question. I always say to people that the very first rule of good communications, people say that it is know your audience. I actually think that the first rule of great communications is show, don’t tell. In a personal context, don’t tell people you’re funny. Make them laugh. In a wider communications contacts, don’t tell people about your values. Don’t tell them about what’s important to you, show them. Don’t simply assert things, demonstrate them. So show, don’t tell is for me the first rule of communications, and then knowing your audience is absolutely critical. I was talking to somebody only a couple of days ago about how important it is to really understand the people that you’re trying to communicate with.
If you don’t understand that, then you could easily be wasting the majority of your time and effort on wonderful creative communication ideas and tactics and stories that simply aren’t reaching the people that you most want to talk to. So know your audience, show don’t tell, and then I think one of the most important things about good communications is the importance of total clarity and simplicity and consistency. So be clear, be simple, be consistent, and don’t simply tell somebody something once, show them it, tell them it and then repeat it. People retain information in different ways, and in a world where we are bombarded constantly with tens if not hundreds of thousands of pieces of information every day, if you want your piece of information to remain clear in people’s minds, then it [inaudible 00:26:11] repeating.
Then there’s a few other bits and pieces. Somebody has undoubtedly written a book of the 101 rules of good communications, but we don’t have time to go through all of that. It’s important to live your values. People can sniff authenticity, and they can definitely smell inauthenticity. So it’s important to live your values, it’s important to be who you are in communications times. I think one of the reasons why Greta Thunberg is so affecting as a communicator is that she is genuinely who she is. She shows up as Greta Thunberg and not as the mask that she feels people will find acceptable, or she doesn’t dawn a façade. She doesn’t change who she is in order to garner the kind of coverage that she wants, and yet she’s probably had more coverage and more impact than any other single person in the last decade. So be who you are, live your values.
Then I think the final thing about communications, particularly in the change making space is be courageous. There will be lots of people who tell you you can’t. There will be people who try and pull you down. There will be the people who say, “Who do you think you are to try and change the world.” Ignore the haters and be courageous, and know that you can make a difference. The only thing that will stop you from making a difference is if you stop.
Lisa Linfield: 27:47 That is truly phenomenal. I think I’ll listen to it a number of times, because of my mission to teach a million women about money. It really is hard. There are people who think that you’re nuts. There are times when you think, “Goodness, I’m putting in so much effort and it feels like there’s nothing coming back,” and when you want to give up. It is hugely important that we all join communities of people who support us, and who do believe that you can change the world. In one’s daily life, your friends or family might be people who think, “Why would you just live comfortable, live happy and that should be fine.” When if you’re a person who does believe and I think everybody should believe that they can change the world, it is great to have that wisdom that you’ve just shared with us, and that community to spur us on to not give in to the haters or the people who tell us we can’t do it.
Sara Price: 28:45 Absolutely. I recently published something called the Actually manifesto, and created a Facebook group, which is a community of change-makers. One of the things I recognized was it can be really lonely. As I’ve said a couple of times in this interview, we live in interesting times and our dominant culture is quite cynical and quite negative. When the world is an uncertain place and it’s easy to give up, pessimism is an understandable response when the world appears to be going to hell in a hand basket. I’m not immune to that. Nobody is immune to that. So we need to not only be courageous, but we need to surround ourselves with people and with community who can shore us up on those days when change feels hard, and when you’re exhausted and when you’ve just had one too many person tell you that can’t do it.
So as well as the specifics of things like training courses, and consulting and advisory work that I do through Actually, one of the most important things to me about that business is that we’re providing and creating a community, a space for those who want to make a difference to feel inspired and supported. I have made a commitment to everybody in that community that I will keep holding that vision when they’re too tired. That I will keep believing in them even when for whatever reason they can’t, and I will keep seeing the difference that they can make and the changes that they can create in the world, because I know that change is possible. I know that you, me, any individual can create change. Above all, I know in my bones that optimism wins.
So when they’ve had a break and they have recouped their courage and they are ready to get into the fray again, I will still be there and still seeing the amazing difference they can make and the change that they can create in the world, and still believing in them and still working towards my vision, which is a world where everybody knows without question that they can make a difference. That their voice counts, that they can create change. That’s the world that I’m creating, that I’m working towards. When I published the manifesto, which was probably about 10 days ago now, I had an email from somebody within minutes of it going live on Facebook to say, “Thank God, knowing that there is someone out there who believes in me and believes in what I’m doing, and knows that I can make a difference, has meant more to me than anything else.”
I got this email from this woman saying, “Thank God you’re there and thank God there’s somebody who believes in me. I really needed to hear that right now,” because it is tough. It can be a difficult road, but with community and with people behind you, that makes it easier.
Lisa Linfield: 31:57 So you returned, the beginning of this year you went and spent five days at the Virgin Unite Leadership Gathering on Richard Branson’s Necker Island with amazing human beings.
Sara Price: 32:11 Yeah.
Lisa Linfield: 32:12 What were the lessons that you learnt personally through that journey?
Sara Price: 32:18 Wow. I think one of the key lessons for me was this point around optimism wins. There’s a very famous quote by, I think his name’s Jim Rohn, that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. One of the other reasons I created this community of change makers was because I want the five people that I am the average of to be positive, optimistic, people who believe in change. People who understand that change is possible, who don’t deny that there are difficulties and problems in the world. They’re not Pollyannas, they’re not wandering around with their head in the clouds ignoring some of the really significant issues that we face as a planet, but they simply believe that change can be achieved and they are determined to do it. Those were the people that I met on Necker Island.
As I say, I came away from that with my own belief and optimism reaffirmed, and with a commitment that the five people I spend the most time with were going to be those kinds of people, optimistic change-maker people. So that was my first big realization. I think the next one was that option begets hope and courage. That in the face of cynicism, in the face of negativity, in the face of pessimism, it’s easy to feel paralyzed. It’s easy to be afraid, and it’s easy to feel hopeless. Take one step in the direction you want to go. Take one action that leads in the direction you are aiming for. As you take that action, so your own courage becomes resurgence so you will find your hope. Sitting around talking about it and worrying about it won’t change anything, but taking action will give you a sense of the momentum. It will give you a sense of hope, it will embolden you to keep going.
One of the other things I learned on a very personal level was that vulnerability is the key to connection, and it is connection that will help us to make a difference in the world. Not only because we will need community, and as human beings we are hardwired I think for connection, but also because I genuinely believe that a big part of the reason why we face so many issues in our world at the moment is because people feel disconnected. Disconnected from one another and disconnected from the planet that we call home. What I realized on Necker Island was the desire of the connection is insufficient if you are not prepared to be vulnerable, if you’re not prepared to show up as who you are, if you’re not prepared to be truly yourself and to lower the walls around you sufficiently that someone can genuinely connect with you, and see you for who you are.
If you are not prepared to be that vulnerable, then your connection is superficial. What we need to really make a difference in the world now is a much deeper level of connection. Those are probably the core lessons that I learned. One of the funny ones was that everybody suffers from imposter syndrome. There I was, I’d been invited to Necker Island. I was surrounded by the Branson family and these extraordinary successful entrepreneurs and business leaders, and people like Martin Luther King III, who was one of the speakers, and the Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Santos of Colombia. He was there as well, and then there was me. For the few weeks in the run up to Necker Island, I was racing around the shops buying new clothes and buying new bags, and trying to dress the part with this massive case of imposter syndrome, who the hell am I to be invited to this gathering?
Over the course of the five days that we were on Necker Island, I had that conversation with pretty much everybody I met and realized that everybody there from [inaudible 00:36:27], who was the former prime minister of [inaudible 00:36:30] to Richard Branson, to me. Every single one of us suffered from imposter syndrome on some level, and that was deeply reassuring, but also a real wake up call to not allowing that imposter syndrome to ever stop you from doing what you believe is the right thing to do from doing the things that will really stretch you.
Lisa Linfield: 36:53 That’s phenomenal insight, because I last week was giving a speech where I had incredible imposter syndrome. It really is one of the things that amazes me on this journey is it doesn’t matter how many dragons you slay along the way. There is always a forum or a place where you feel, well who am I to be here and who am I to [inaudible 00:37:16] to these people and all of this? It was absolutely paralyzing. I was paralyzed with fear. I went and I did the speech, because I guess my fear of failure was greater than my fear of imposter syndrome, but my goodness gracious me, it is just one of those things that never goes away. As you say, it’s almost that vulnerability that creates the connection also to each other. Well goodness, I’m feeling such imposter syndrome that then actually breaks down that wall and that feeling, well if they’re also feeling it and I’m also feeling it, well then maybe I can say the speech, do whatever it is that I’m supposed to do.
Sara Price: 37:55 Exactly. Exactly, and I think one of the things I’ve said ever since I was a child actually my father said to me when I was very young, he said, “The saddest words in the English language are what if.” He says, “You want to do everything in your life so that when you get to the end of your life, you don’t say what if.” What if I had done that thing? What if I had gone on that journey? What if I had started that business? What if I had… What if? What if? What if? Just the saddest words, because they usually muttered at a time when it’s too late to do anything about it. I think imposter syndrome, the busy inner critic, the voices inside our heads are very often the things that hold us back from doing the things that really challenge us, that can really scare us, but are also where the true joy and real achievement lie.
If we allow that to happen, if we allow that inner voice, that imposter syndrome to hold us back, then we will get to the end of our lives and wonder what if, and we will have regrets. I have tried to live my life so that I would not have regrets. When I went to Necker Island, I’d had a really difficult period where I was starting to think maybe I should have gone in a different direction. Maybe there are things that I should have done differently. I was starting to allow some of those regrets to creep in, and starting to think about the big what if questions. I went to Necker Island and I spent five days there, and it was terrifying. I did it in spite of the crazy loud voice in my head that was saying, “Who do you think you are?” It was the most extraordinary five days probably of my whole life.
I realized as I left the Island that I could never ever regret anything in my life up until that point, because everything I had done in my life had led to that point. I would do it all again and go through all of it all over again, simply to be able to have those five days on that Island. It reaffirmed in me my commitment to never allow imposter syndrome to stop me, so that I would never have regrets in the future.
Lisa Linfield: 40:17 That’s phenomenal. It truly is an inspiration to all of us. So how do people get hold of you? How do they join your amazing community of change makers, and get to learn more about what changing the world can be?
Sara Price: 40:36 Well there are multiple ways, but probably the easiest and quickest, we have a website as most people do in this day and age, which is a very easy website because it is actually.world. So if you go to www.actually.world, you will find us there. Click the button that says join us and we will send you information about our Facebook group, where you can come along and join a growing community of inspiring change-makers and visionaries, and people with huge passion for making a difference. So I think that’s probably the easiest way is go to the website, click join us or you can click contact us on that website as well. Send me an email and I will get back to you, and we can have a chat.
Lisa Linfield: 41:26 Sara, thank you so much for joining us. It has been an inspiring and humbling interview, and I’m so grateful for your time.
Sara Price: 41:33 Not at all. It’s been wonderful to chat to you. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Lisa Linfield: 41:37 That was Sara Price, and I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed that interview. I hope you did too, because I think we need more people out there who really believe in us to make a change. So if you’re wanting to make a change in your life, I have a download on my website that you’ll find in the show notes of this episode on how to make change in your life that’ll stick. So go to the website and look out for this episode, and you will see that download because I am absolutely supportive of Sara’s view that each one of us can change our lives for the better, and the lives of those around. So whatever the changes that you need to make, please do go to the website and have that download, workingwomenswealth.com. Take care and have a great week.