Taking charge of your confidence and approaching work with intention, with Lauren Currie
Taking charge of your confidence and approaching work with intention, with Lauren Currie
💸 How do we build a world we want to live in while still making our profit? What’s the best approach when it comes to changing our attitude to confidence? How can we approach our work with more intention?
Lauren Currie is a designer and entrepreneur and has built businesses for the last 15 years. As the Founder and CEO of UPFRONT, she’s on a mission to help 1 million women boost their confidence by 2023. She was awarded an OBE for her services to design and diversity.
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“We seemingly cannot win in this patriarchal society. That’s why so many of us get obsessed with the idea of avoiding being arrogant.”
WHAT IS CONFIDENCE, WHY IT MATTERS, AND HOW DOES IT DIFFER FROM ARROGANCE?
Confidence has got so many negative connotations around it because so much of our society, when you think about confidence in women together, it shows up in this very often harmful, often kind of toxic narrative of - if women were just more confident, then everything would be better.
It's not that women and girls don't have confidence, it's that we live in a society and a culture that doesn't reward confidence in women and girls. I believe that all girls are born with confidence and then someone or something takes it away.
It gets complicated and it's even more complex when you apply it to work because the external barriers that exist have such an impact on women and often mean that they have very low confidence. L:eadership and team culture really affect your confidence. Confidence is a word that we so often use, but we don't really know what it means.
It often becomes an excuse to perpetuate sexism and prejudice.
We often hear things like you need to be louder in meetings, but why? That's asking that person to change themselves. If you’re the loudest person, you get the most airtime and gets rewarded the most. That shouldn't be the case.
Confidence in your team is about praise and trust and feedback and openness.
We seemingly cannot win in this patriarchal society. That’s why so many of us get obsessed with the idea of avoiding being arrogant.
The first step when it comes to thinking about the relationship between confidence and arrogance is to recognize all the different ways that we've been tricked. One of the most transformative moments a woman can go through is to realise that it’s the system that’s broken.
working with more intention
When you are extremely passionate about one thing, then there's always trade offs. So it’s about being intentional about what those trade offs are.
Recognise that finding a way to work with intention on something you love might take time. There are no shortcuts.
If you're stuck in a job that you absolutely hate and you're desperately scrambling for — what's next? What's your thing? What's your purpose? Where can you go? You’re not going to find the answer to that whilst you are depleted.
What you need to do is take a small step to get yourself out of there. Maybe it's a job that you're overqualified for that will pay you a little less, but it will give you the space and the mental capacity to recover and to heal. And then you can start asking these big juicy questions.
Figuring things out is not something that happens quickly. It's not something that feels comfortable, and it's definitely not something I think that happens when you are depleted.
There's a lot of grace and peace that can come with just accepting you are where you are and leaning into that. It's always about starting small — tiny, tiny steps.
Most people are waiting for the perfect conditions to start the business, to leave the job, and there's no such thing. Perfect conditions don't exist. You just have to get going.
A lot of people want to create something in the world, whether it's a business or a community or this new thing. The main reason you hear for why people don't do that is money. When you dig really deep into that, it's never really about money, it's about fear. Because when you do the maths, most of the time, not always, but most of the time, the money would actually be fine.
making money as an impact business
Lauren Currie made £1million in revenue - and her business is an impact business. She wants to normalize women talking about money and making money, and women starting businesses. She also wants to show the world that it's possible to build a business that is as impact led and generates wealth at the same time.
One of the challenges of running an impact business is that your identity becomes so wrapped up with your work.
When you’re working on a passion project, it can be easy to fall into a pattern of overworking.
It’s also important to acknowledge that a lot of impact businesses we see are run by people who have inherent privilege - whether it’s a wealthy co-founder or wealthy parents.
A lot about entrepreneurship is related to taking risk. It's about leaping into the unknown and living in constant uncertainty. If you have a financial safety net, then that becomes a hundred million times easier. If you have a family that you can return to, or a partner that can financially support you, that's an intense privilege that we don’t talk about enough.
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Resources and ways to connect with Lauren:
We would also like to offer you a discount code to the UPFRONT and CENTRE festival with the code VESTPOD
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