Show notes
ZERO: ARE WE HAPPY?
—Felicity says writing her book was a “bit of a mission” and she did it all in three months, writing between 8pm and midnight and juggling her three kids: “I’m very proud of it.”
—Sharon was “really intrigued” by the imposter syndrome covered in the book. “You covered things around imposter syndrome, feminism, having it all and perfectionism. And when we put them all on the table and all the choice points we have as women, and then social media, how do we not ever doubt ourselves, how can we not ever question how are not getting it right and why we don’t have it all when these are massive gravitational pulls on how we ‘should’ be thinking?”
—Felicity thinks it’s human nature to doubt yourself and in her experience sometimes it’s good: “It makes me strive more and strive higher. For me, there’s a tipping point. If you are constantly doubting yourself with imposter syndrome or not feeling you live up to expectations, perfectionism, it can be a bit of a slippery slope to your emotional undoing. My book talks about feminism and what feminism promises us as women was having it all really and how we’ve come to realise as women we can’t have it all, not at the same time and still function and juggle everything and look happy.”
—Sharon interjects: “Or be happy.”
—Felicity agrees. “Are we happy? We might try and look it but are we happy? I suppose I just really felt I needed to call these things out. What I put in here has been called out before, women have dealt with these things for many decades. I suppose what I am questioning is what we are adding now is another layer with the wellness industry, with social media and from my experiences of taking to women … I’ve worked with women for two decades in my career and we, I just feel we are at a point now where women are feeling like they have no time to themselves any more. We’re struggling to sleep, we’re cranky.
—When Felicity references “horrifying” statistics from a Jean Hailes Foundation study which surveyed over 15,000 Australian women, Sharon reads them out: 67 per cent of women feel nervous, anxious or on edge, with 53 per cent not able to control their worry. 78 per cent of women report difficulty sleeping or falling asleep. 34 per cent have no time for themselves and 68 per cent feel foggy.
—Felicity is not talking about mental health issues, but “I’m on about all those other women, our wellbeing and our feeling of wellness and facing life. We know it has dips and goes up and down, but a lot of the time we’re not getting help there like we used to and that’s what I wanted to call out and reassure women that a lot of us are feeling like this and with all the things crashing at us, social media, ‘you must drink green juice’, we must get to yoga, must do this, must do that It was tough pre-pandemic and now it’s even worse. There’s an extra layer of worry. Women are like, ‘I’m done, how are we going to cope?’”
—Sharon asks how come men don’t feel the same: “I believe feminism is a great equaliser. Things changed in the ‘70s but this structure of it didn’t change. Feminism is a beautiful ideal but the reality hasn’t really unfolded that way.”
—Felicity agrees. “I think we all agree the tenets to feminism, what feminism means, are amazing and men are on board with that too … but it’s very messy about how do we live a feminist lifestyle. My husband is a great feminist ally but from his perspective he is still trying to work that out as well. He’s juggling a full time job with trying to be a good dad and I’m the same so we’re really in this messy place of we all agree and want to be equal but … we’re still working it out.”
—After Felicity references 1950s housewives, Sharon admits “I am so not built for the 1950s. I am the worst wife. I’m appalling at the 9 to 5 and about what’s expected of me. No wonder Prozac went through the roof … you had to be home and look pretty and wear kitten heels and cook a roast every night.”
—Felicity: “And they were also expected to have an orgasm on the clean kitchen floor!”
9.14: THE PANDEMIC EFFECT
—Sharon asks how COVID will redefine women’s roles again. “Can I rant? Now women are at home taking care of the kids and expected to work and a lot of the time the studies are showing the husbands are locking themselves in different rooms to work and the women are home schooling, managing, doing their jobs, and to me we didn’t make any ground during this period.”
—Felicity references a University of Melbourne study that showed during the pandemic women have taken on more housework, financial worries, cooking, and men haven’t shifted at all. “In many ways the social experiment of working from home has been wonderful, it’s opened up men’s eyes to what women really do at home, the extremes of things they do particularly if they have kids On the flip side I feel they’ve swung completely the other way because there are no delineations between work and life. This morning, my husband was on the computer at 7.30 which is fine, but I’m thinking, ‘It’s 7.30, you don’t’ start work at 7.30.’ Life is rolled into work and work into life. Before we were complaining we couldn’t find enough time. Now it’s just one big mess.”
—Sharon says she knows a few couples where none of the boundaries have shifted and during the pandemic women are still responsible for the emotional burden: “I call it the emotional log. Two people need to pick it up. I’m hearing that’s not happening. Women are still trying to manage the emotional burden for the family which I think a lot of this comes back to.”
—Felicity calls it the mental load, “and absolutely in some cases it has to be the case. Even in my situation, it has to be that way. Tom earns far more money than I do, I worked on a website called WHIMN which sadly was a COVID casualty, I’m still working at News Corp which is okay, but because women make up the majority of part time work, casual work, they are lower down the ranks so they are the first to get cut. More women have lost jobs or had hours cut in COVID than men, particularly younger women or millennial women. I do wonder in five years time where are the gains we’ve made in quality over the last five years, is it going to get worse? There’s a 14 per cent pay gap already between men and women—what will be it be like in five years because a lot of women have lost their jobs.”
—Sharon tends to be a defensive pessimist: “The biggest gap I see is women back at home only able to get part time work and being more normalised so again we will entrench this pattern of women doing all of that and holding the emotional burden even more. Not the cheeriest message but that’s the way I see it.”
—Felicity is seeing it in her neighbourhood, with her friends, through her own experience “because we are all desperately trying to hold onto our jobs. We’re in a recession which is probably going to get worse once Job Keeper ends. For me I just come back to what can I do in my home to still be a feminist role model for my sons and daughter: mum is doing work and dad will unpack the dishwasher. I’m now about raising the next generation of feminist men and women.”
14.32 THIS RIDICULOUS PERFECTION
—Sharon starts on the social media topic and how it skews reality: “We’re comparing ourselves to this ridiculous perfection when we’re surrounded by laundry.”
—Felicity: “What do we do about that? I include a study in my book which shows even if you have a healthy self esteem and you look at someone on Instagram you will subconsciously compare yourself to them even if you are happy with what you look like or you’re happy with what your life is. It’s really tricky to self regulate.”
—Sharon tells Felicity she “didn’t go hard enough” in her book. “I used to be a Facebook addict. Now my team has to give me the code when I am allowed to go in. I go in, I do the post I need to do, I’m not allowed to scroll, I say I’m out and they change the code. I can’t trust me with social media so I banned myself and I’ve outsourced them letting me know when I’m needed to go in … I’m pushing the stop button on it. I’m not seeing it doing anything that’s good for us.”
—Felicity has a “love hate relationship” with social because she works in media “I need to be on social. I get stories out of that. I get some income out of it now. I have to play in that world, but I also need to check myself constantly that this is not real, I got really diligent about unfollowing people if they in a second make me feel not good enough, something about mothering or not exercising or not drinking some whiz bang juice or wearing lipstick this way. Unfollow, unfollow.
—Sharon says she and husband JP have really successful businesses on social “but in terms of my personal mental health, me being on that as a form of connection is not the way to do it.”
—Felicity worked in magazines for 15 years including Cosmopolitan and Cleo and they often got flak for photoshopping covers, even when they were sent direct from a celebrity agency so they had no power over that. “So when I launched Women’s Health and was editor of Women’s Health I was very particular about not photoshopping. We didn’t change waist sizes, thighs, nothing, which is what I loved about that publication. On Cleo and Cosmo we were told we were making young women feel bad about themselves and setting them up for body image issues, but I look at social media and it’s magazines on steroids. There are only a few women you could go, ‘No photoshopping on that.’ There are Kardashian types with their trillions of followers running these through filtered apps and I do think this is really worrying and I do hope by the time my kids who are 7, 5 and 2 are older it’s not around anymore.”
21.18: LET WOMEN BE WOMEN HOW WE DEFINE IT
—Sharon asks where the world took the turn where it’s okay for men to be silver foxes and women are defined by a whole bunch of other standards, “where women put pressure on themselves and other women to be this ideal?” She is constantly amazed by how women seem to define other women and criticise them: “Stop. Don’t do that. Let women be women the way we define it. The moment other women are clawing to pull that woman into their vision we are done, we are not making progress. I find that so galvanising. Let me define me the way I want to define me and you do you.”
—Felicity says previous generations got their fill of human interaction over the back fence and only had a small circle of influence, “our neighbour, our mother-in-law, and that’s who we learned from, shared ideas with. And now we have so much many more infuences coming into our lives. I think it’s become part of our society and part of our nature as women, we second guess ourselves. We have all this outside influence coming in telling us we should do this and that: social media, people in the workplace, regular media, friends, TV, and we can’t help but question our decisions and what we are doing with our lives. We can’t help but benchmark against what other people are doing.”
—Sharon responds: “I think we can help it, and you write about this. The first half of your book pointed out we are not making good decisions and the second half is very much talking about the solutions. We need to know our values and what drives us and we do have an antidote for it, self-awareness. And you talk about it beautifully. Before we get to that let’s talk about how come rather than that someone would bag someone on social media publicly, a woman knocking a woman.”
—Felicity says that is more about the person doing the knocking: “That’s what it comes down to, how do you feel about yourself? So much of what we judge someone else for is a reflection of our own self. If I feel I am looking at someone and judging them and I self regulate and think okay what does that say about me. But I think that takes time. Now I’m in my forties it’s easier to self-regulate than when I was 22.”
27.31 TAKING THE HIT
—Sharon says she doesn’t read “hit pieces. I never look at someone being arrested. I don’t look at ambulances. As soon as I see there is trouble or someone is living their own version of tragedy … they are right now experiencing trauma and to gaze on that, it’s like looking through the curtains of their home so I look away. And that to me is a choice we can all make. Look away or help, but never be an observer to someone else’s pain. That’s how I’m choosing to live.”
—Felicity admires that “fantastic” bit of advice and says she does her bit in writing positive stories. Asked if positive stories sell, she says “the feel good stories do sell but not as much as the [more negative.] You can have a positive uplifting story but it’s that headline that gets you in.”
—Sharon says she believes womanhood isn’t doing us a favour every time we click on a ‘hit’ piece: “We must champion each other. It is so natural for men to pull together, to have clubs and quietly support each other. My husband and his friends, he’s had them for 55 years, they’re amazing, and I don’t always see the same thing with women. We don’t have to worry about having it all if we stop comparing ourselves or worrying about others judging us. The minute we stop that pattern we can choose having it all based on our own terms.
—Felicity talks about the hashtag womensupportingwomen. “Generally we are coming together and supporting each other a lot more than we used to, I feel that’s how we’re going to shift. We need to tell our own stories, tell each other stories, and that’s been probably the most wonderful reassuring feedback I’ve got about the book. I just want it to be a big hug and I have lots of messages for women saying ‘I feel the same, I thought I was the only one struggling, trying to keep my wellbeing afloat.’ In the book I have interviews with Tanya Plibersek, Megan Gale, who talk about their struggle as well. Megan for example says, ‘I look like I have the perfect life and I second guess every photo I put up.”
—Sharon: “She says she hides the truth sometimes at the risk of being misunderstood.”
—Felicity says Megan “doesn’t want people to throw stones and say how can you complain, you look like you’ve had the perfect life, great career, gorgeous husband, two kids, of course you have the perfect life. She says, yes, my life has been good, things have worked out but that’s not to say I don’t also struggle with parenting and self-esteem. One thing I probably learned out of the book is it’s good to acknowledge how we’re feeling. Even though it looks like what we are on the outside might be perfect, everyone is struggling, especially with this pandemic.
33.53 THE HARSHEST THING EVER SAID TO ME
—Sharon says nobody has it made and nobody has it together. ‘One of the harshest things ever said to me—I can’t have kids, I never have been able to have kids—and I was telling a woman once, ‘I don’t know if I feel sad about not being able to have kids but I’m thinking about it’, and she was like, ‘What are you worried about, you’ve got everything’ and I was like ‘Wow, that form of coming at me. That’s every woman’s experience. Mine just happens to be around kids. Every woman has something going on that hurts them, that’s traumatic, that they pine for that didn’t happen. And to judge someone because you think they have it made means they are not allowed to have the problem. That is too much pressure.”
—Felicity often struggles with complaining about anything when she thinks of women in Syria or India struggling with the pandemic: “This is crazy, I have a privileged existence, stop, but you need to feel what you’re feeling before you can help other people. That kind of gave me permission, ‘Okay, it’s okay to feel like this.’ Then you can go support a charity and help your community,”
—Sharon questions the mental health pathway we’re on if we keep being made to feel guilty or for trying to wrestle with the cards we’re dealt. “We can’t just suddenly act like we don’t have those problems because other people aren’t as well off as us. Otherwise we’re just in a race to the bottom. That makes no sense to say anyone who looks like they’re doing well isn’t allowed to be heard. That’s really unhealthy.”
—Felicity talks about women she interviewed for her book who have gone through adversity (Paralympian Kelly Cartwright, mindfulness expert Emma Murray) “and it just comes back to gratitude. Emma said something that really resonated with me: gratitude only works when you truly feel it inside you. So sometimes when I am having one of those ‘my world is caving in’ days, you just have to stop. I have this practice at the end of every day, I write the best thing that happened to me during the day. That could be walking one of my sons to school, getting a story done a day early, having a lovely conversation with my husband. Little miniscule things and it’s helped me get through my days and focus on the big stuff.”
—Sharon talks the rituals she and JP have every day where they share something they’re grateful for and the highlight of their day. Says one of her favourite things in the book was Felicity living a values driven life: “This is my passion. This is how I got to let go of a lot of stuff that used to tie me in knots The need to be the hero and look like I’ve got it all together. Never admit I am flawed or fallible.”
_Felicity lives a values-based life too, “but I would always say they have pretty much stayed the same throughout my life and each year I narrow them down. I used to think I need 20 values and now I need three, if I am a lot clearer and more specific it’s easier to set up boundaries and say no to things that don’t align with those. Every year or six months I think what are the three things that are most important to me this year, friendship, marriage, work, kids. They are kind of like a filter. This year it’s my kids. I have young kids, my career has had to go on hold a bit, I’m still working but not like it was. Often you get lost and think but I want to do that, I like to try everything and so now I am just like be clear, this is what is important.”
41.54 VALUING VALUES
—Sharon says to her the pathway through it is to have a theme for the year so you know where you’re heading: fitness, friendship, travel. “And then I have my values and from that whatever comes up that’s aligned with that I get to say yes to.” Also enjoyed Felicity’s book discussion of boundaries: “Women have very poor boundaries. I think this is key. If you have values but not clear boundaries you’ll trade your values for people pleasing every day of the week.”
—Felicity says as women we love to people please: “I’ll just bake that cake, she needs help with her party, then suddenly you have to do the five tier Frozen cake. I think at times we can say we have boundaries but we can be really flaky with them. I think we fear if we push back and say no that we perhaps are being a bitch, she won’t like me anymore, but I really think if you’re clear and say no you might hurt then when you initially say not but later I feel you gain more respect.” Another thing she learned from the book is the women she interviewed guard their time closely and the women who seem to have a bit of balance and are not overwhelmed have boundaries instead of saying yes to everything: ‘No I don’t want to meet up with the girls this Friday night ‘cos I want to be with my husband.’ That’s something I’ve become a lot clearer about.” Says if you constantly walk away from a friend feeling drained instead energised and uplifted, maybe it’s time to cut them off: “I know that sounds harsh.”
—Sharon says it doesn’t: “Connection for the sake of connection isn’t connection. It actually makes you feel more alone. I feel more lonely in those situations where I am compromising my values.”
—Asked what she loved about the book, Felicity says she learned the line, ‘Done is better than perfect.’ “It comes back to perfectionism and a lot of things we’ve spoken about. Now I’m a lot about getting things done or saying no. I always used to strive personally, I have to do the best work on this story, build the best Lego house, run the fastest. Now it’s 80 per cent. As long as I get my ass to that gym—it doesn’t have the to be the best workout session ever, but I got there.”
—She says ‘done is better than perfect’ can be applied to the minutiae of daily life: “If Tom puts the washing out it might not be how I like it but you know what, it’s done. Onto bigger things.”
—Sharon says the important thing is giving yourself a break: “Self care isn’t having the bath. It’s giving yourself a break. It’s not being measured by that standard of perfectionism. That’s what I’m hearing you say. It’s a much better way to live than I have to be everybody’s hero and it’s all on me.”
—Felicity says that’s where the book came from: “I had been talking to mums at the school gate, my barista, my friends, my work colleagues and this is what I am hearing, that they’re trying to be women that a) we never will be and b) it’s our undoing. If we don’t start talking about it and calling ourselves out and calling each other out … that’s the whole premise of it, we’re all overwhelmed, our wellbeing is suffering but there are things you can do today to help and that can be boundaries, setting values, reconnecting with friends, taking time out. As Yumi Stynes said it used to be a rich lady thing, but everyone can do it. Go to your local caravan park, stay at a friend’s house in their spare room, and if we all go inward for a little while that will help the outward.”
—Sharon signs off: “It’s a timely book that will make a difference. Let’s give up ladies on thinking we can have it all or that we should even strive for that. Let’s have our version of wonderful for ourselves.”