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
And then I like refreshed it again and it had like a thousand likes. And I was like, what is going on? And over the course of that day, I just remember sitting by a pool, refreshing and just watching it go and get bigger and bigger. And I probably had 10,000 followers on Facebook. And by the end of the day, I had like a hundred thousand.
I'll tell you what too, Hala, if you're going to have something go viral, That's not the thing you want to go viral. It's not yourself in a bikini, like not feeling like the best version of you. But that taught me so much because of the response from women to that post. I was like, oh, women really want to talk about things that are real.
Because this was the era of the Pinterest birthday party and everything had to be perfect and our kids needed to look amazing. And I was like, oh, women really want to talk about real things. So that honestly, I think, planted the seed of what Girl, Wash Your Face would become, which was, can we have a real conversation about what this really feels like? Yes, sometimes it's beautiful.
And yes, sometimes it's not. And our lives are all of it. So can we hold space for all of that?
Yeah, I just, I got so much attention for that post. I didn't really know what to do with it, to be honest with you. But it was, in retrospect, just a really great jumping off point of what my career and my writing style would become.
Yeah. I feel like a grandma when I'm saying this to you, but when all of these new websites came around, so let's say Pinterest is a great example. We learned very quickly as content creators that there was an aesthetic that would get you more noticed, that people really, they wanted the blowout. They wanted full hair and makeup.
The audience wanted perfect, perfect, perfect, because they never really had a website to see that before. And now you could look up anything on Pinterest and find the most aesthetically pleasing version of that. And we all started to chase that visual ideal, not just in the work we created, but in our lives.
So I think it was just right for this opportunity for some women to kind of raise their hand and go like, yeah, but that's not always what it looks like. Some days I feel like I look that pretty, but other days that's just not reality. And so if we can show up as our real selves, how would that be?
I think there's such a better balance of it today because you have creators who are creating on both sides of that spectrum. You have stunningly beautiful doing makeup tutorials. And then you have people who are like, oh, I... I haven't taken a shower in four days and I'm struggling with mental health and this is where I am. And it allows people to see themselves.
I had the opportunity to meet an author I really loved and admired in Jen Hatmaker. And she was so many of us, like, oh, we all just like were obsessed with her. And I got to meet her and I was fangirling so hard. And she asked me a question that truly changed the course of my life. She was like, oh, what's the next book you're writing? And I was like, oh, oh my gosh.
Okay, well, because I was writing fiction and I was telling her all about this fiction that I was writing. And she said, no, God, no, not that. What's the story of your heart? What's the thing you would say to women if you could say anything? And I truly did not know that I had an answer to that question. I just started word vomiting all over her.
I was like, oh, I just, I wish that women knew how powerful they were. And I wish they knew they could stand up and go again. And I wish they knew they could take ownership of their life. And it's like, girl, like, please get it together. Stop crying, girl. And so I just kept saying like, girl, and she was like, oh, right, girl, wash your face. Yeah. And I was like, oh my, that, that.
And I left that conversation with her that we were on a trip together. I left that conversation and wrote the first chapter of what would become Girl, Wash Your Face in the aftermath of our chat. And so the idea that someone could ask you a question that completely shifts the way you see yourself or your work, oh my gosh, it's so incredibly powerful.
Honestly, it feels like a really beautiful bookend to Girl, Wash Your Face, to be honest. When you have the kind of success that I had with that book, everyone wants you to just keep writing that book. They're like, do it again, do it again, do it again. And I've just gotten to the place in my life and my career where I don't want to tell anybody else how to live.
When I wrote Girl, Wash Your Face, I was like, I have all of your answers. I know exactly what you should do. And the older I get, the more I understand that everyone's on their own journey. And without context into someone else's lived experience, you can't really offer great advice.
But I have had those moments and I have had those prompts and those questions where someone gave me a bit of wisdom that utterly changed the way I saw myself. So I thought, well, could I share some of the framework that I've used to figure out my own path and my own answers?
So instead of a book of my answers, it's a book of my questions so that you can form your own answers to wherever you are or whatever's going on for you.
I think this audience will really identify with the fact that at the beginning of 2020, I had a staff of 60 people. I had a massive business that was based on live events. I threw conferences for women to work on personal development and we were crushing it. We're absolutely crushing it. And when into 2020... So freaking pumped, so excited.
We did an event in January of 2020 in Florida that was like 6,000 people for three days. We were like, here we go, let's do it. March, very first week of March, 2020, we did an event in Toronto. It was our first international conference, absolutely crushed it.
And I remember at that conference, we started to hear about this thing that was happening in China and people were getting sick and we were like, wow, this is wild. By the time I got back to Austin, which is where I lived at the time, the world was shutting down. And like most people, we were like, okay, I guess we'll work from home for a couple weeks and then we'll be back.
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