Rachel Hollis
speaker
279 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 6 Jun
Rachel Hollis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I am obsessed with athletes. I'm not obsessed with sports. I don't really know a lot about sports, but I'm so curious about the athletes, the Olympians. How do they make themselves do the same thing over and over at the highest level and get the best results again and again? Because essentially as an entrepreneur, that's what we're asking of ourselves. So I'm obsessed with this question.
And one of the themes that I've seen over and over is that athletes at the high levels fall in love with the grind. They're in love with the process. They're in love with how do I make this better by the tiniest millisecond? So for me, I really think a big part of this success was I wasn't trying to be successful. I just really liked writing books. I liked writing and I was trying to get better.
And that was my only goal was I thought, well, if you read my first book and you read my third book, As a reader, would you think I had improved as a writer? That's all I was trying to do. And Girl, Wash Your Face was honestly, I think, a fluke in a lot of ways. I actually think my ability to write fiction is why I have success in the personal development space.
because my audience are not people who self-identify as personal development nerds. It's not like Tony Robbins' entire audience goes over to me. I was speaking to women who maybe had never considered personal development before. They might not even have ever gone to therapy. They really had not considered these things at all.
So I think my ability to storytell and explain how I went through it and how it was helpful, that really was a massive unlock that wasn't in the space. Because I didn't really know how to be a personal development writer, I think that I brought something to it that maybe didn't exist before. But gosh, I cannot stress that enough to any of your listeners.
It really is an overnight success after working at it for a decade. It's like what we do in the dark that gets celebrated in the light. Nobody's going to cheer for you. Nobody's going to be there like rooting you on, especially at the hardest moments.
the process enough to keep going because you know, you don't know when, but you know at some point you're going to get the results that you're striving for.
That's great.
Yeah. And I think going back to that idea of the audience, if you figured out your customer base, if you figured out your audience, and even as you were changing the format of your show, you were learning how to do a show. You were learning how to be better. You were learning how to tell jokes or do an interview. So nothing is wasted. Nothing is lost.
It's so easy to look at social media and see everybody else crossing the finish line and feel like you are not far enough along in your race. But like it's all stacking on top of each other to lead you where you're supposed to go. So just stick with it.
Yeah. So we didn't have that word influencer. It's so common now, but you didn't call it that. I knew a lot of women like me who had websites where they created content. You were a mommy blogger. I remember that term. Yeah, like we just... created this content based on whatever we were interested in. Like Joy Cho with Oh Joy did something very different than I did on my site.
And it changed based on whatever your interests were. But then brands wanted our audience. And you have to remember, social media did not exist back then like it does today. We had Facebook, but even then we didn't really know what we were doing with Facebook. So many of these brands wanted access to people who were devout followers.
I mean, they would check in every day to see what you wrote about. They'd share it with their friends. And so- we didn't know what to charge. We didn't know what that was worth. And I think probably we all charged way too little for the amount of access we were giving away or what they were able to get out of it. But we really were, it felt like the Wild West of doing branded content for people.
But it was fun and we were figuring it out. And if I could go back in time, I'm sure I would approach it so differently. But I'm sure there are versions of this today of being in an industry that's either coming up for the first time or maybe shifting so quickly that you feel like you're building the airplane while you're flying it through the air.
There's a certain kind of magic and energy that happens inside of that. And it definitely was that for us. But yeah, we just kept like, okay, let's try this thing. And now let's do this. And even building a team inside of a business that didn't exist before, like you couldn't call someone or look online and go, well, how do you build a lifestyle website? How do you hire editors?
How do you hire a photographer? We were making it up as we went along for sure.
Yeah, for sure. Again, these things are common now. Back then it wasn't a thing, but I had just run the LA Marathon and to celebrate, I went with my then husband to Mexico. We were on a beach in Mexico and I was wearing a bathing suit that I thought was really cute. And I had a following on Facebook, but maybe 10,000 people. It wasn't huge at all.
And I was like, oh, they'll like this bathing suit because the bathing suit was monogrammed. And I was like, oh, I'm going to show them. And it was a bikini. And I asked my husband at the time, I was like, oh, can you take a picture of me in this bikini? And he took a few pictures. And then I went to the pool and I was looking through the photos.
And in all the photos, you could see my stretch marks pretty predominantly. And I was like, oh, I don't know. Maybe I'm not going to post this. And I was like, oh, who cares? Everyone who follows me is a mom like me. They probably have stretch marks too. They're still going to love this bathing suit. I'm just going to write about how I didn't want to post it because of these stretch marks.
And I will never forget this, that I posted it. I was on crappy Wi-Fi. So I went, I did like a refresh to make sure that it had posted. And when I refreshed it, it had a hundred likes. Now that doesn't seem like a big deal, but I am telling you, I'd never gotten more than eight likes on something in my entire life. And I was like, holy crap, a hundred likes, this is nuts.
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