Chloe Hooper, founder and CEO of Barefeet Consultancy discusses the importance of redefining business purpose and values, the journey of self-belief, and the significance of authenticity in both personal and professional realms.
Chloe shares her transition from the agency landscape to consultancy, emphasizing the need for organizations to truly embody their values and the challenges of self-doubt that many face, particularly women in leadership roles.
The conversation highlights the interconnectedness of personal growth and professional success, advocating for a culture of accountability and radical candor in the workplace.
Chloe shares insights from her podcast, ‘Limitless Equation,’ which aims to inspire women by showcasing their superpowers and encouraging self-advocacy and touches on leadership, the significance of assertiveness in professional settings, and the need for diversity and understanding within teams.
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Well, we get to see under the hood of multiple different businesses, so and as well, I feel like sometimes companies lie to themselves when it comes to business purpose and values.
Transcription:
Ellie:
My name is Ellie Angell and welcome to Managing Marketing, a podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. And remember, if you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review or share this episode to help spread the words of wisdom from our guests each week.
And today, I am thrilled because I’m joined by Chloe Hooper, who is the founder and CEO of Bare Feat Consultancy, specializing in redefining business purpose and values. And you’ve got to tell me if I’ve got that wrong Chloe, but that’s how I sort of interpret it and crucially bringing that purpose to life and those values to life in meaningful ways.
And Chloe also devised and host a Limitless Equation Podcast focused on the professional empowerment of women through the unlocking of self-belief and having, I mean, I’ve listened to almost all of them, and I think there are life lessons in there for everyone, by the way, not just women.
Welcome Chloe, thanks so much for being here.
Chloe:
Thank you and you’re totally right in terms of when I actually launched the podcast, I had more men reach out saying to me, “I need help with this.” We’re jumping straight into this fast quickly, but I had more men reach out saying, “I need help with this.” And I said, it wasn’t about only making it for women, it’s actually about making it for everyone.
I’m just asking women to come on because we don’t get to the podcast because we don’t get access to enough really strong female leadership in our day to day because we’re still seeing the gender gap and the pay gap and everything that’s happening.
So, I will caveat with it is open to everyone. I do have many male, female, everyone listening, so yes, I agree with you a hundred percent. And thank you so much for having me on Ellie, I’m really excited to have a-
Ellie:
No, look, I’m excited too and I’m a bit nervous actually. I’m not normally nervous on a podcast, I had to sit with myself for five minutes before we joined each other just to work out why I’m a bit nervous and I’m a bit nervous for a couple of reasons. I’m a bit nervous because I am a bit fan girly about your podcast and so now, I’m interviewing you on a podcast so I feel a little bit, “Oh God, I hope it comes up to scratch.”
And then secondly, I think one of the reasons that I love that podcast so much is your vulnerability and your openness and your honesty, which is something that I kind of talk to as in terms of the way I communicate, there’s some similarities there, I think. So, I’m kind of nervous with the two of us together, where this conversation could end up going.
Chloe:
We’re going deep babe. We’re going deep.
Ellie:
Going deep, that’s great. So, look, I love a career pivot, we’ll come to the podcast in a bit, but I’d love to talk a little bit about Bare Feat. It’s a fascinating pivot because you were in the NZ landscape, you were in media agencies, most recently in new business development and then you’ve really pivoted to something very, very different. Tell me the Bare Feat story.
Chloe:
Yeah, so I was at Omnicom for about 10 years, obviously you can hear by the Essex accent. Working at Omnicom in London and then joined PHD in Australia and had the time of my life. I loved my job. I ended up heading up new business and marketing for APAC. And so, I was working with a lot of the CEOs who didn’t have support locally on ground when it came to marketing new business and also people.
So Manon Pietra, who’s head of Belonging at Canva now, her and I kind of tag teamed that from Australia and supported the local markets. And I think that was when internally my job really started to change.
We were going through COVID, and I was becoming very supportive to the tools of the CEOs there in terms of like business consultancy and how they could grow. And then going off and running workshops around how they could bring their vision and their values to life and actually really kind of make that happen.
And then when I quit my job, I knew it was time. I loved my time at PHD but it I was ready to go. There was something calling me from the inside going, “It’s your time to make the leap and do something different.”
And when I left, I was really fortunate because I handed my notice in, I had a three-month notice period and everyone said to me, “We’ll see you at X competitor.” And I was like, “Yeah, probably.” But Sydney went into lockdown when I was in Tasmania and I was like, “There is no way that I’m going to work at my notice period on my kitchen bench when I could potentially be traveling around in a camper van.”
So, I was traveling around in a camper van, working out what I wanted to do, no shoes on, at the same time, I’d been running a lot of mental health first aid courses for the industry which was real passion project for me. But it meant that my network had just broadened quite deeply beyond kind of like the confines of Omnicom.
So, all of a sudden, I’m like, “Oh, I’m enjoying seeing under the hood of what different people are doing and I want to do something different.” And I decided to kind of like back … there wasn’t really anything else I wanted to do other than back myself.
When I left the UK originally this was 10 years ago now, but me and the girls all wrote down where we’ll all be in five years’ time and it’s really funny because what I wrote about myself was very brief. It just said, “I’ll either be an entrepreneur or a hippie.” I didn’t know which camp I was going to go in and I’ve kind of now become both because I’ve got my own camper van and everything now.
So, yeah, to answer your question, it wasn’t necessarily a deliberate move, I was very lucky that I had the head space and the clarity to go, “Hold on, pause, what do I want?” And I don’t think a lot of people take that between going for the next job.
I think even when it comes to promotions, people always want to climb the ladder and get promoted, but then actually do you want the job that’s above you or do you just want the job title and the salary that go with it? It’s a very different question to be asking. Like, “Do I want that person’s work? Do I want to be doing their craft? Do I want to achieve that?”
So, I think taking a step out, getting out into nature and just being like, “What do I want?” Really helped me to identify it’s time to go out on my own. And then when I went out on my own, originally everyone was jumping on me saying to me, “Can you do our new business and marketing plan?” And I’d be like, “Yeah, absolutely. What’s your overall vision? What are the values? And I’ll feed your marketing plan up into that.”
And they’d be like, “Oh, we don’t have that or, oh, we’ve got something global, but it doesn’t really make any sense here.” And I was like, “Okay, well if we are going to actually make you famous for something, we need to make it real internally first. So, we need a clear vision, we need clear values, we need to make sure that people turn up internally like that.”
So, I then went like, “Okay, well we need to start there.” And that was how Bare Feat was basically born just out of getting briefs from people that I was like, “Oh, there’s a bit missing.” And then I realized, “Oh, everyone’s got this bit missing.” If you think about it, values live on the wall in organizations, so it’s like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got it on our website.” Most companies don’t know what they are, what do they mean?
So, if you’ve got a value, like one of my clients is purposeful transparency. Unless you actually educate teams on what the fuck does that mean, how do we turn up purposefully transparent? Then we can’t really ask that and expect them of us and we can’t really have that culture change at scale that we want to see.
Henry Innis is actually one of my clients at Mutinex and that’s how we describes it’s like culture change at scale, how do we get everyone involved in that process? So, that’s kind of where it’s landed and I now have my purpose playbook and yeah, I’ve been rolling that out across a few organizations over the last five years.
And I love that I get to build connections with teams and get to know them deeply, get to know the business challenges deeply and how we can then apply that thinking and what we want to see from everyone and get everyone speaking the same language because things are messy out there at the moment, so-
Ellie:
Yes, things are definitely messy. And look, I did raise a smile when you were talking about what the fuck does the value actually mean? Because I see that in pitches all the time and agencies because I educate clients on how to manage agencies in pitches as well and vice versa and they’ll put it up on the screen and you can sort of tell intuitively if the people are really connected or not.
And you can also tell in the work as the rhetoric changes to substance in a pitch, you can tell if they are living and breeding those and you can tell by how they interact with each other and how empowered they are and all sorts of things and you can really tell when it’s meaningless. And you’re right, I don’t know, I mean, I guess it’s not just an agency thing, it is generally a corporate thing. The values living on the wall and not in people’s brains or in their hearts-
Chloe:
And yeah, because no one thinks to upskill people on it, you need to actually — if you can’t just go, okay, you know, I talk about it around taking everything from the board, like taking it out of the boardroom is just such an important part.
Like all that stuff kind of happens in the boardroom. The leadership team get together, they get all excited about it and then they do one meeting and say, “Everyone, these are our values now.” And, and the journey kind of stops there.
So, for me it’s about taking the leadership pool on that journey and then saying, “Okay, how are we going to make you famous? How are we going to make sure people belong to this internally? But then how are we going to make sure you’re then famous for it externally?” So, that every touch point is constantly showing up like that internally and externally, so I’m very lucky because I love my job.
Ellie:
Do you find naivety in the boardroom? I mean you, it’s interesting, I think it’s so easy to sort of drink that Kool-Aid if you’re in a sort of, “Oh yeah, these are our values, let’s just go out and communicate them.” Is there a kind of sense of no guys, just think about this from in real life, what would happen if you just did went out and did this?
Chloe:
Yeah, absolutely. So, it’s that accountability piece as well. So, making sure can we hold you all accountable to this? Are you going to behave in this way too? And also making sure they understand the cases and the examples where this would show up. Like how does this show up with clients? If this is our value and we’re always about being transparent, if something goes wrong, are we always going to share it?
And if the answer is yes, then that can be our value. If the answer is no, then you’re never living and breathing it, you’re going to be confusing your team, you’re going to be confusing your clients. So yeah, I think that anyone that does values properly is flying and they know how it has such a big impact on how everyone rallies behind something but yeah, there’s definitely naivety.
But one of my things that I love doing is challenging people. I had a call with someone earlier and they’ve just been made redundant, and they started their story with me and I said, “Look, I’m going to be real honest with you.” I’m very blunt. I was like, “This is what you’re doing wrong. This is how you can help yourself and this is your plan forward.”
And she was like, “Chloe, thank you so much, because I’ve been having feedback and people have been telling me I’m doing a good job, but that’s not what I need to hear. I need to know what’s going to get me solutions.”
And I think I’m the same in that room. I kick my shoes off when I jump into a meeting and I’m like, we get really grounded and we get like, “Okay, what’s ahead of us and how are we all going to rally together on that?”
So, yes, I think there is naivety, but I think the pleasure of being an external facilitator is you can kind of call out the bullshit and you can also read when the politics are coming at play and you can make sure all voices are heard and that’s how you get to a really good collaborative outcome in the end.
Ellie:
And look, even before you told that story about your call there, the thought in my head was radical candor and it’s something, I mean, because I’m an external consultant too and I’m at my best in those moments where I do just, I mean, it’s a fine line.
But sometimes you do just need to get out of your echo chamber, think about this differently because that isn’t who you are right now or you’re doing that completely in the wrong way. And I think that’s where the value as a consultant, if you’re not adding that, you’re not adding any value at all.
Chloe:
Well, we get to see under the hood of multiple different businesses, so and as well, you can … I feel like sometimes companies lie to themselves when it comes to business purpose and values. Because they’re like, it comes from your DNA and where the business kind of originated from and where it wants to go to.
And sometimes it’s about what are we going to leave behind and what are we going to take forward? There’s that conversation that needs to happen, I think especially when it’s founder led businesses, sometimes you can find that they’ve gone so far and they want to hold onto some business, helping them when they’re brought in new people let go of some of that stuff.
Or if you’re working in a big organization, it’s like, I always do like a bit of an audit in terms of speaking to before I go in, I’ll speak to some of their clients, I’ll speak to some of their, particularly if we’re talking about agencies, I’ll speak to new business pitches they didn’t win. I’ll speak to the trade press.
I’ll sometimes actually call Darren and find out from Trinity what’s their view and I’ll give them a picture because I’ll go into them and say, “Okay, how do you think people think of you?” And they’ll go, “Oh this.” And then I’ll go, “Okay, well this is the reality of it.”
So, when it comes to identifying our purpose and our values and how we want to show up, we need that audit. We need to understand what people already think of us. Because you never really want to be going to a massive switch, you need to because it doesn’t feel authentic. So, yeah, agree with you, I love doing the external stuff, it’s great.
Ellie:
And look, yeah, so I think this isn’t an original observation, but I do think, I mean, agencies in particular, they’re experts in developing other people’s brands. We’re not always at their own brand. And if a brand is a set of intangible values in the mind of whoever your consumer is for want of a better term, that it talks to what you’re saying, and you just can’t just make a massive shift.
Those memories are already in place, it’s about evolution and trying to get to something that is actually livable and breathable and it’s amazing how many agencies don’t do that actually in pitching again, I’m thinking about my angle of it, but yeah.
Chloe:
Yeah. Oh, because I’m X new business, so I’ve been in those.
Ellie:
Yeah, me too, I mean.
Chloe:
Yeah. I’ve been in those pitching, I understand it. But I think one of the things that people forget in our industry is how incestual it is and how … it’s like a beehive in my head in terms of how our industry works and an example I always use is MFAX.
So, I’m one of the curators for MFAX in terms of what makes it on stage. And I find it quite surprising sometimes that people don’t always put their best foot forward to that because you want to make sure with a program like MFAX or where you’re turning up and you’re talking to the whole industry about something that you are showing exactly who you are, you’re exciting everyone in that room because it’s core foundation of other people need to know you’re really good because then you’re going to attract the best talent.
Once you’ve then thinking about that, it’s then like, well actually creative agencies, like are you partnering with creative agencies? Are you going out and sharing your pitch deck with them? And how you are unique and how you are special? I mean, you know this better than I do, but when clients are picking an agency, they’re asking around.
They’re asking other clients, they’re asking creative agencies they trust, they’re asking people who work in the industry. And if you can create that buzz and that hype around your business through having really clear purpose, through having really clear values, through having engaged staff, it makes such a big difference.
So, standing on stage at MFAX and presenting something that’s really memorable and exciting, it’s like some of the best advertising you can do for the whole year. But then I find it quite interesting when we see some of the entries and they’re not … you can tell someone’s done it just quickly on the side rather than it being like this is really important for this reason.
Ellie:
What was the exact moment you sort of decided to take the plunge on Bare Feat? Was there an identifiable memory that you have of right, “I’m going to do it?” Or did it just evolve organically?
Chloe:
No, I’d say it was that trip. It was that three-month trip of just being away and over that period of just going, “I can do this.”
Ellie:
But even more precisely than that, was there, like were you sitting on a mountain somewhere or was there like a moment in time?
Chloe:
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, sorry. So, I was in Kakadu.
Ellie:
Oh, there you go. You were on a mountain.
Chloe:
Yeah, great question. It’s almost like we planned that, but we didn’t. I was in Kakadu and my feet were filthy. I was walking barefoot upper mountain and I was like, “I want to help organizations climb mountains.” That was my kind of elevator pitch in the beginning of like, “I love a challenge.”
My coach identified me as a change catalyst years ago when I was at PHD and I’ve always liked that around that concept of change and how I can come in and not be the face of it all, not be the one that’s necessarily the smartest person in the room, but if I can be there and I can help everyone else change, that’s where I can add value.
And I think that kind of change catalyst element has always been there for me. And as I was walking up this mountain, I was thinking about what am I good at and what can I play into? And yeah, that was where Bare Feat was born in Kakadu.
Ellie:
Very personal journey to get to a professional point. And you’ve got to tell me if I’m wrong here, but it feels like you invest a lot of yourself and your personal experiences as well as your professional expertise into what it is that you do. Is that a fair comment?
Chloe:
Yeah, it’s not something I’ve ever thought about, but there’s something that’s 100% true in what you’ve just said. For me now where I’m at in my career, there are no lines. It’s not even as if I’ve got blurred lines, there’s no lines in terms of who I am and what my business is and how I show up and what’s important to me. I feel like I’ve genuinely found my purpose in life and what I’m meant to be doing because it’s who I am, not necessarily like what I’m doing, if that makes sense.
Ellie:
Yeah, no it does and as you’re talking there, I’m just thinking about the self-belief that it takes to do that and to build a business from nothing. And to take to particularly in this field, it’s a business that you’re trying to instill confidence and clarity and a move from talking to walking in other businesses and that does require self-belief.
But on the personal side, you’re probably subject to as much self-doubt as any other person on the planet. I mean, how much do you have to work to resolve that conflict? I mean, you’re advocating a lot of confidence and yet on the personal side, you might not feel it. I haven’t articulated that very well, but it’s like how do those two things mesh for you?
Chloe:
So, full transparency, I think I went from my whole career with no self-belief up until a year ago which is really interesting because I’m someone who set up a business, made it to head of APAC before I was 30, would get up and speak on stage and it was shocking for me when I realized I had no self-belief.
So, I presented at Cannes in Cairns last year and I always talk about the fact that I jumped off stage and people say to me, “Well done. That’s amazing.” And I was like, “Oh, couldn’t have done it without my partner. If it wasn’t for him, I’d never be able to do this.” Even though he wasn’t there, had nothing to do with the presentation.
But just as a woman, we are told that if we’ve done well at anything, it’s because we are lucky, because we’ve worked hard, because someone else gave us the opportunity rather than being like, “No, this is who I am, these are my core skills.”
And the next day when that relationship then ended, and I then spoke about this in my podcast, but I kind of wrote myself a little bit of a to-do list of like, alright, find somewhere to live, find a new house, sort my shit out basically and on the bottom of it, I wrote believe in myself and I had no idea what that meant.
And then it was only when I wrapped here, I was like, “Wow, this kind of lack of self-belief has been showing up in every area of my life.” So, despite that being someone who practices self-leadership, like if I want something, I’ll go and get it but I wasn’t connecting with any of those achievements and seeing them as mine and then in that way, life always feels scarier.
So, for the last year, I’ve been very intentional and obsessive, if I’m honest around how do I be someone who fully understands and appreciates themself and believes in themselves to make sure that when things go right for me, it’s because of me and when things don’t go right for me, it’s because of me. I can take more accountability for who I am.
So, yeah, I think if someone had met me two years ago, they’d be like, “Oh, she believes in herself.” No and I’m not saying I fully do now but going to Cannes this year and jumping up on stage and being like, “I promised myself I would be the strongest version of myself that ever existed, and the person who believes in themselves.” And I woke up every day for the last year working on that. And I’m so much lighter, I’m so much happier and I’m able to now say, “Yeah, I’m good at that.”
When I left PHD, I was writing down what I could do next. This was when I was still … before I’d handed my notes in, my first thing I wrote at the top was, I have no skills. Like how did we get to that point where even on my own, I’m going, “You’re so shitty, you’ve got nothing. You’ve got no value to add.”
To now being at this point in my life where I go, “I’m really proud of you, Chloe, for who you are. Well done for being brave, that moment in time was hard for you.” And just showing myself self-compassion but then extending that to celebrating myself and being like, “You wanted something and you did it and connecting with it.”
And I’ll just add a little tip for you because my therapist gave me this. She said to me to go back through my life and write down all my achievements, which is really common, loads of people do that but then actually score them on a scale of 1 to 10 on, was this me, did I do it? How do I feel about it?
And it’s quite a confronting exercise to go, “Oh, I think I gave everyone else credit for everything I’ve ever done in my life.” And now having to rewire my brain to go, “No, that was you and it’s okay to do that as well.” Does that make sense?
Ellie:
It does make sense. And I mean, you’ve just talked much more effectively than I did to what I was sort of trying to get at with that question, which is the sort of the mesh of the professional journey you’ve been on meshing with the personal journey you’ve been on the two things really helping each other.
I think you seem to bring so much of yourself to what it is that you do and that no doubt makes you stronger when you kick your shoes off and go into the ballroom and do your thing. So, I mean, that’s amazing.
And look, I can really relate to some of what you’re saying there, this podcast’s about you, not me, but I’ve had a journey too, a long journey to become more authentic in myself and to believe in myself and to credit and to be kinder to myself frankly, and to take ownership. Like you said, if it goes right, it’s something I’ve done well, and if it doesn’t go right, it’s also about me, that’s a long journey that I’ve been on.
And also, I can really relate when you say I feel so much lighter, there’s a sort of becoming your authentic self, which I’ve done in different ways, perhaps to you, but no, you know it’s the same kind of principle and I feel both better at my job and a better person. I’ve written about this, as a better person generally, and people say to me, “You’re a better — I mean, and people say, “God, you’re so much more likable now.”
I’m like, well, it’s just because I was so closed and sort of in a mindset of you’re a piece of shit that once I sort of unwrapped that and done some similar things to the tip that you just gave me and sort of say, “Hang, hang on, no, I have done things I can be proud.” And it has been hard to get to the place where I can be authentic in myself.
Chloe:
Are you proud of yourself now?
Ellie:
I’m prouder of myself, I’m kinder to myself, I feel people’s warmth more, but that is because I’ve allowed that feeling as opposed to, I mean, I’ve allowed people into who I actually am and therefore they’re warmer towards me.
But I find that that extends across work and across, it doesn’t have to be talking about personal stuff. It just, it is the way I’m expressing myself as a human being professionally and personally is getting me to a different place than I thought I could ever get to.
Chloe:
I think being proud of yourself is like an onion. So, it’s like you learn it on the surface level and then you need to just keep digging deeper into that. So, if you don’t mind me saying like, your body language, when I said, “Are you proud of yourself?” You’re looking down, there was a little bit of hesitancy there, but you were able to go, “Yes, I’m proud of myself.”
I think that … and this is the thing I see in women all the time, so I’m just calling this out. It’s like, actually when you can get to a point where you can really own it and really connect with it and I’m not there either, my onion’s still being unwrapped, and I’ve still got to get to that core of that. But I have met some women through during the podcast that have connected with that even stronger than I have.
And then I’m like, “I want to get to that level of the onion. I really want to strip into it.” And it’s like, how can we really own it? And I think it’s something, it’s about unlearning a lot of the things that we’ve learned previously about ourselves. Like we are so unkind to ourselves and I love that you just spoke about self-compassion then in terms of being kinder to selves.
You were so brave, I was swimming before I love your journey, and I just think that you’re going to be so inspirational to so many people. There will be a day where you really, and it might even come with tears, it will really unlock that moment of like, “I did it. I’m proud of myself, I love who I am, go me,” and you’ll feel it from inside you.
And I think that’s what we’re all working towards. We’re working down into that onion layer of finding that real belief.
Ellie:
See, I knew I was right to be nervous about where we’re coming down to this.
Chloe:
I’m saying the same.
Ellie:
No, look, I love what you’re saying, I do. I love what you’re saying and along I’ve had a couple of those moments and I don’t think I’ve got to the center of the onion for sure.
But I mean, it’s the analogy of a mountain and you’re climbing a mountain one step at a time and I think when you get to the top of that mountain, and again, I’m talking personally and professionally, when you feel you’ve got to a plateau or to a top of a mountain, that’s also tricky because the only way then is, “Well, where do I go from here?”
And I think that’s also about unlocking, “Okay, no, hang on, I can do more. I can go further, I can do this, I can do that.” Whereas you’re absolutely right and it prevents people from all walks of life of doing stuff and women particularly, I think, I mean, the default setting is, “Oh no, no, I couldn’t possibly-
Chloe:
What you’ve just … oh, sorry.
Ellie:
Go on. No, go on.
Chloe:
I was just going to say, what you’ve just touched on there though is like the feeling of getting to the top of the mountain. And one of the things that I’ve learned this year is, especially when it comes to self-belief, I was really naive at the beginning of this journey to go, “At the end of this year, I’m going to have a hundred percent self-belief, and this is how I’m going to be.”
And then realizing that there’s no top of the mountain, like, to your point, there’s those mini moments where you celebrate yourself and you go, “I did that. I’m proud of myself. I intentionally set myself a goal, I executed on it and I’m celebrating myself and I’m proud of myself.” That’s the loop that you are talking about.
And it is a loop but one of the things I think you’ve just kind of caught on there is like people are so changing the goalposts constantly to what success looks like. Constantly when I’m coaching people, they’re like, “I haven’t come very far, I wanted to be able to do X,” and it’s like, “No, no, no.” In January this year, I’m thinking of someone I was coaching in terms of talking about their fitness with me.
And I was like, in January this year, you couldn’t bend down because you’d had surgery on your knee, you are now squatting 65 kg and you are now telling me that that’s not good enough. At the beginning of the year, there’s a version of you that’s so proud of you becoming this far.
But as people, we just constantly moving the goalposts and we’re never actually stopping and going, “I did that, well done me connect with that at a deep onion level,” and then — I don’t know where these onions come from.
Ellie:
I love the onion.
Chloe:
But connecting with that properly, believing in yourself in that moment and then using the strength of that belief to take you on to the next thing that you want to do in the next chapter of your journey but people don’t. They just like, “Oh, I want to do this. I want to get this promotion. Oh, okay, I got that. And now there’s something else in my life that’s not good enough.” And we’re constantly trying.
Our brain is there to protect us, so our brain is constantly looking for fear, it’s constantly looking for challenges, it’s constantly trying to support us and actually, the more we can understand that that’s the job of our brain, but it’s the job of our higher selves to go, “Thank you for that feedback brain, I appreciate what you’re saying to me, but I’m going to take a moment to stop and celebrate myself, and I’m going to help you connect with that,” that’s when you start to build that belief.
Like for you, there’ll be multiple moments in your journey over the last few years of going, “Oh, I wanted to be brave and do that, and I did it, go me.” And then that fuels you on for the next bit. But if you don’t stop and celebrate that initial win, you’re constantly chasing something that you’re never going to hit.
Ellie:
No, you’re exactly right. Yeah, that’s what I was trying to get at with the mountain and you think you’re like the natural — I mean, God in my …we’re getting way off topic here, but in my journey, there were very much, it was to certain things would’ve did represent in my head the top of a mountain but the closer I got to it, I had to recondition myself because it’s not, you set yourself up for failure like that because there’s no sort of — I’ve done a lot of things to change myself and my life.
It’s not like I’ve had moments of massive euphoria where it’s just been, “Right, yes, I’ve done it.” It’s like, “No, no, no, no.” You’ve just done something and that’s amazing and that’s amazing. And there’ve been moments of real emotion in that for me but then I’ve got to be very careful of either trying to overreach or thinking I’ve done it all, it’s neither of those two things applies. It’s just, okay, well let’s go round the circle again. Let’s peel off another layer of the onion.
Chloe:
It’s a loop. It’s a self-belief loop. Set your intention, execute on it, celebrate yourself back, and it’s following it like more like that. We’ve got all these analogies of climbing a mountain. It’s like you get the top of the mountain and then people are really disappointed when they get there and then they just create another mountain that they want to climb.
It’s like, if you see it as a loop and you as a holistic person that is going through these experiences and learning from them, and every single one of them is about building your self-belief and bringing you closer to who you are, I think your perspective on external achievement changes.
Like when I jumped off the stage at Cannes, I was really underwhelmed. So, I did it, had a great showing, got really good feedback and I got home and I cried. I’m really good at crying these days. Because I was trying to connect with my emotions. I was like, “What’s this all about?” And I then realized that I was underwhelmed by the experience because in my head I’d built it up to this huge thing that I was doing.
Because it was like my line in the sand moment of I’d promised myself I’d get to this point, but then I found so much joy in it because I realized that it wasn’t about the things I was doing externally anymore that were making me necessarily happy, it was about learning things about myself.
So, I’ve got more of a thrill out of learning something about myself in therapy and I’m wrapping one of those onion layers than I was from speaking on stage or from doing these things.
And I think that’s such a great experience to learn that about yourself. That sometimes you can seek all the external validation in the world, but the biggest moments of gratitude can come from those moments of like I’ve just learned this about myself and I can change this pattern of behavior, or I can do this, that’s the sexy bit for me.
Ellie:
See, there’s real power in that because that can then flow back out into everything else that you’re doing and you can take that power with you. And I certainly, again, can relate to some of what you’ve just said there. And I like the loop. I was more of a mountain girl, but I do like the loop. I think it’s a more effective way of thinking that it was mountains and plateaus for me.
And then I was like, “Okay, so where am I going to go next?” But you’re absolutely right and I think we could all do is celebrating ourselves more professionally for sure. So, that is … and I’m trying to bring it back to professional.
Chloe:
Yeah, yeah, go for it. Let’s do it.
Ellie:
No, just do it, just do it. Let’s talk about your podcast. Let’s talk about Limitless Equation. What, why, how did you think about that? We’ve talked about it a little bit up in the intro there, but what’s been your experience recording these? You’ve done about, what, 10 of them now? 11 of them?
Chloe:
Yeah. I’ve actually recorded more, but we’ve got a bit of a backlog of them. It has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life. When I originally stepped out to do this, it was a, for me, it was literally, I started a self-belief course for Chloe Hooper by Chloe Hooper. I literally started a PowerPoint, like I do learning development, so I’m a big believer, you can educate your way up any situation.
So, I was like, “Okay, I need to learn how to believe in myself, let’s go.” Started speaking to all these incredible women in my network, realizing they didn’t have any self-belief either, then looked into the research, 80% of women suffer with little to no self-belief and I was like, “this is massive, I need to do something about it.”
And when I get a B in my bonnet like that, I’m like, “Right, we’re going for this.” So then, yeah, I wanted to work out what self-belief was because it’s not actually great kind of research into it. It’s very fluffy, all the stuff that’s out there.
So, for me it was about, okay, well I know self-leadership is really important, which is what we spoke about at the beginning. Like going off, knowing what you want, intentionally going after it and getting it, I know that’s a big part of it.
From all my work in the mental health space, I was like, “Okay, this is about self-care.” So, making sure that if you don’t look after yourself on the journey, you’re not going to enjoy the journey, you’re not going to believe in yourself, you’re not — so I was like, “Okay, that’s a really psychological self-care.” Like mental welfare is such an important part of it.
So, I kind of had this equation of self-leadership times by self-care and I was like, “Okay, I know how to do those two.” But then the missing layer is sharing your superpower. So, sharing what makes you amazing and being proud of what makes you amazing. So, the limitless equation is self-leadership times wise, self-care, share your superpower equals self-belief.
And this feeds into the loop that I was talking about earlier in terms of, if we show up in those ways, we just live much more lives that are much more connected to ourselves, much happier. And then to bring this into the work context, like, so I now do self-leadership or self-belief programs, sorry, with sales teams.
So, going in and if you are trying to make sales and you’re in a position where you’re not hitting your numbers, you’re not getting there, what do we do? Like you said earlier, we beat ourselves up, we isolate, we do all the opposite things of what we need to do.
This is about helping teams when shit’s going wrong and how do we then believe in ourselves that it’s okay, I’m going to get myself out of this because the last thing businesses want is a team of people that don’t believe in themselves.
You want to be in a position where if a client sends a bad brief over, you want a team member that goes, “I believe in myself. I understand that this isn’t my fault, that I can’t read this brief. I’m going to believe in myself to have the brave conversation and say to them, okay, this brief isn’t really working for us, our side, can we connect so we can find out some more information?”
Instead, what I’m seeing in my other work is people will kind of go, “Oh, well, we’ll just try and answer the brief.” New business is a great example of it. We get new business briefs in, and sometimes you’re like, “There’s no budget, we haven’t got access to all of this.” And then we do hours and hours of work instead of just kind of going back and going, “Sorry, can you just clarify what you mean by this?”
But people are scared. They’re kind of like, “Oh, I’ve got it. We’ve got to look like we know what we’re doing.” It’s like, no, if your whole company believe in themselves and back themselves, people ask the challenging questions, people will hustle again when it comes to hitting those sales numbers and find a different way because they’re open-minded to, “I know I’m going to do this, I know I’ve got this.”
So, to answer your question, the podcast was then about bringing incredibly inspirational women on to share their superpowers, to act as a bit of a mentoring podcast to the industry so that basically, limitless learning with Lisa Harrison from Suncorp or the beautiful Tammy who I met with last week MD of ANZ, her kind of sharing her story around, I won’t give hers away, but her superpower.
We can learn so much from these women and we don’t all have access to them, we don’t all have access to the leadership that we want to be and that we want to see. So, it’s such an important part, I think, and I think that’s why we’re getting such good traction on it.
When I kind of started it, I was like, “Well, we’ll see how this goes,” but it’s kind of taken off, which has been really, I’m not going to say I was lucky because that would be against my values but it’s been really humbling and a beautiful experience to be part of.
Ellie:
I was literally about to say that the caliber of guests that you’ve been able to attract to this is a credit to your own standing. I mean, it’s amazing some of the people you’ve managed to get on and talk so fluently and with such authenticity about themselves and their journey and their style. And I think, when you talk about self-belief and bring it back, I’ll try and bring it back to the work stuff again.
But on the new business side, again, you can see so clearly where an agency in a pitch room, like having answered that brief, that they’ve tried to answer it without asking the questions. They lack belief or they lack self-belief in themselves as a team but in the professional world, I think there’s a lot of leadership.
People need to be empowered to self-belief as well, professionally speaking and that’s where leadership and God, you can see that in — and funnily enough, I was coaching an ANC yesterday and asking them about their experience of running a pitch and that sort of having the feedback.
Well, our CEO sort of sat down the day before the pitch and made us write scripts and then changed specific words in the scripts and we weren’t allowed to ask questions and like, God, you can so see that come through, just lack of belief as a result of that.
So, I think the leadership side of it is obviously massively important. And so, to have these women on and sharing their secrets is brilliant.
Chloe:
Yeah. It’s sharing their secrets. And on the new business thing, I think that it comes back to not feeling the need to a chemistry meeting, for example. I feel like the amount of chemistries that you go to and you see, and it’s like they’re just talking about themselves and it’s like back yourself enough to know that what you need to do is actually speak about them.
Everything for me, when I looked at all the work I’ve done in new business, all the work I’ve done in mental health space, all the work that I’ve done at Bare Feat with vision and values at the core of everything was like, if you can build a team that believe in themselves, they’re going to do the right thing because they’re going to feel brave.
When it comes to a chemistry session, they’re going to be brave enough to go, “We can lose the cred stack that we roll out every time. We’re going to be brave enough to have a conversation with the client about their business, and we’re going to upskill ourselves enough to know that we’re going into that room armed with the knowledge that we need to know, we are going to believe in the person opposite us ask that they’re going to ask the right questions.”
And to your point that you just made really clearly then around leaders actually going into those meetings and hyping everyone up before the big presentation instead of worrying about different words or how that’s going to land, it’s like actually your job in that space is to make everyone really excited.
I used to love working on new business and just being the one that would coach people through like, “Alright, what’s your section? How are we going to make this exciting? How are we going to make sure you enjoy it? How are we going to make sure this is authentic to you?” You get a group of people like that, the energy in a pitch just changes.
But people sign up to too many pitches. So, they’re jumping from one thing to another without actually being able to kind of hone in on like, “Why do we want this client? We believe we’re going to win this client and we’re going to do everything we can,” instead, they’re like, that lack of self-belief means potentially sometimes you’re pitching for 10 things in the space of three months, and therefore you don’t believe you are going to win any of them.
So, you go into all of them kind of with that hesitancy and that was not how you build out a growth plan in my opinion. I’m sure there’ll be people listening to this going, “I don’t like what she’s saying,” but that’s how I personally feel about it. If you are pitching, be in it to win it, go all in.
Ellie:
I think we need a part two of this podcast because that that seem of comfort. I mean, we could talk for a long time about this, but just picking up on, I’ll select one of the things, the many things you said there. When I coach agents, I have a term relating to pitching and agency’s pitching. I talk to agencies about finding their assertiveness line, you need to be on the assertiveness line.
In other words, walk in that room knowing that you have the right to be there, be assertive about who you are, be conscious of the fact that if who you are isn’t who this client is, okay, that’s fine. We can walk away but know that you have the capability and the right to be in that room and to be yourselves.
And so many pitches that I see they fall foul one way or the other. They’re either too passive, please, please give us the business. Just like when you’re down, you mentioned dating before, do you want someone on a first date sort of, “You don’t even love me,” that doesn’t work.
And of course, the other side is the chest beating CEO who rides in on a white horse saying that, “Oh yeah, yeah, you are rubbish, but we’re going to fix you.” The arrogance is also too far the other side, but the agency that manages to tread that line, that is all about empowerment and self-belief and it resonates through the team.
Chloe:
It’s a bit like everyone talks about, “Oh, we’re a partner, we’re an extension of the team.” But it’s like, you need to go into the pitch with that mentality. It’s like going into a job and acting like you’ve already got the job. If you want to be the next CFO, go in as the existing CFO and then have that interview, but behave like you’re already there.
And I think not with an element of arrogance, with an element of confidence of going, “Alright, we’re working together, we’re a partnership, we’re going to pitch like this is a partnership. We’re going to collaborate, we’re going to talk to you, and this is what’s going to feel like to work with us, and this is how excited we are to be part of this.” Then that’s where you don’t have that arrogance. I think sometimes businesses can slip into that arrogance when they don’t have that passion and that excitement for it.
But I think if you can go in to your point, the way you tread the line between the two is assertive confidence. We’ve got this, this isn’t a problem for us, knowing your own value, knowing what you are going to bring, but with so much energy and so much passion, and there’s so much excitement, that’s who people want to work with, that’s who you and I would want to work with, right?
Ellie:
Yes, of course. And it brings gravitas with it and it brings all sorts of other things that then are going to make people want to hire you but that really comes from leadership and it comes from within. And you can still see it when there is a team who has been empowered to think like that and forever counseling clients, they’re all sort of thinking about how’s the agency relating to us and how are we relating to agency? I’m like, “You got to look at also how the agency is relating to each other?”
How are they too reliant on the CEO? Are they scared of asking a question? Are they being constantly trodden on by one loud voice? All of that stuff. Look at how they’re functioning together. That gives you the self-belief of those individuals.
Chloe:
A hundred percent. And to your point, it’s the diversity, you have to have diversity, but you have to have that’s understood. So, the reason why I think we nailed it back in the day was because we all understood each other quite deeply, what we were good at, going back to that moment of superpowers which is what I train people on.
Like, what are you really good at? What are your weaknesses? What are the bits that you shy away from? How do you turn up in these situations?
And I think one of the things that we got really right during the growth period of when I was in Omnicom was we just all knew ourselves and knew each other so well. So, it was like, go back to talking about Manon because she was my work wife and I miss her deeply, but we had very different skill sets and could have clashed quite significantly.
Similar ages, very different thinking, very different ways of working, we could have been at absolute loggerheads with each other, but we just knew each other so well and took the time to bond and get to know each other and had self-awareness enough to go, “Oh, you’ll be better at this. Oh, you’ll be better at this. Okay, let’s help each other out.”
And you see that come to life in pitch rooms and I think when you lose that is when you lose the sex appeal for people, for other businesses to want to work with you.
Ellie:
Yeah, it’s so true. And I think, so many businesses can benefit from that kind of coaching. Because I do think people, I mean to the earlier point we were talking about, I mean my term for it is echo chambers, but agencies and businesses don’t see outside of their own space a lot of the time.
They don’t see the relativity, they don’t see how other people are approaching it and that’s where coaching of this kind … I mean we’re talking about pitching now specifically, but that’s where coaching this kind can be really, really helpful. But what you are talking about is obviously a lot broader application. What’s your superpower?
Chloe:
So, Rowena Kanna gave me mine, which is how we got here Rowena Kanna’s at Gumtree now she was at X Volkswagen and she told me mine is helping people believe in themselves, which is so funny. So, when my breakup happened and I’ve promised myself I won’t talk about it anymore. So, I’m annoyed that I’ve even mentioned it because it’s irrelevant these days.
But it was a point where it was incredibly painful and I go to this CMO networking thing, I’ve been going to it for years. And I got up in front of all the women that were there and said, “Help me, someone must have been through this before.” It was like four days after the breakup. Like, we all go around the room and we kind of say how we’ve been up, what we’ve been up to, and what we need help in.
And I got up and was like, “I’ve had my heart broken. Someone must have been through this, can you help me?” And I was sitting next to Rowena Kanna6, who’s a very good friend of mine. And she just said to me and I said, “I don’t believe in myself. Anyone got any advice on this?” Like, it was just like that.
And she said, “Oh Chloe, that’s really interesting because you are always the person that makes other people believe in themselves.” And I am like, “I literally, if you want to start a business, I’d be the friend you call, if you want to like …. whatever, if you want to get the promotion, I’ll be the person you call. If you want to quit your job, I’ll be the person you call.” I’m talking about friends here. But my friends would describe me as the person that helps push you off a cliff.
Like if you need to be pushed off a cliff, I’ll be the one to help you. My personal mantra in life is always do what scares you most. So, if someone needs to do something, like if we’d met early, I would love to have helped, I’d love to have helped anything anyone wants to do. I’m like, “Let’s get you there. Let’s do it.”
Ellie:
You would’ve been a big help to me.
Chloe:
But I think we need that external guidance but I think the reason I’m able to push people off a cliff is because I can help them see themselves. I can read people really easily. I can’t necessarily read, I’m the data experts and all these really genius people that I work with but I can read people and I can really read what they’re good at.
And every woman that I’ve sat down with and done their superpower and they’ve come on and gone, “Oh, Chloe, I don’t know, what mine is?” Give me half an hour with them and they’ll walk out with clarity; they’ll walk out with excitement. And also, the thing that I really love is there’s a gap between when I tell them where their superpower is and then it might be like they’re all very busy people.
So, sometimes I have to wait two, three months to just kind of lock them into come into the studio and they’ll say, “Oh my God, I’ve seen my superpower show up in these ways or because of what you told me about my superpower decided to take this approach.”
And that intentional, conscious knowing your superpower has then helped them to one, lean into it more but two actually praise themselves of going, “Oh, that’s me doing that again because I’m really good at this.” So, that transition period between one and the other has actually been really nice as well.
So yeah, I will very confidently look you in the eye and say, my superpower is helping other people believe in themselves because I don’t … I think you asked me this conversation a year ago or two years ago. I’d go, “Oh, I don’t know, I haven’t got a superpower. Not me”
That would’ve been … because you don’t want to come across as arrogant. You don’t want to seem a certain way. But I’m really big about telling people no, like this is what I’m good at, I know what I’m not good at as well, but I know what I’m good at. What’s your superpower?
Ellie:
I’d say probably authenticity.
Chloe:
Nice. Love that. I think I love that you’re saying that with a smile on your face.
Ellie:
Well, funny enough, I was going to ask with my heart in my mouth, I was going to ask you what your read is on me. I mean, you mentioned, you give me half an hour with someone I can get a read. We’ve been talking, obviously it’s a slightly different scenario. You’re not coaching me here, but we’ve spent an hour or so talking to each other, what’s your read? So, I can put you on the spot.
Chloe:
I can definitely do it-
Ellie:
Obviously be honest.
Chloe:
Yeah. Yeah. I’ll be honest. And if you want to cut it out, we can cut it out.
Ellie:
No, no.
Chloe:
I’m a very direct person. So, I think you are someone that has gone through a lot of pain in your life and gone through a lot of suffering and I think that the beauty in that has unlocked something really special in you and I think you had to be extremely brave, extremely courageous.
And my read on you is that you haven’t, and this is probably why I started banging on about the onion earlier, I don’t think from our conversation you fully connected with how magical and how amazing that was.
And I think that you do something similar to what I do in terms of you’re comfortable speaking about things externally because it’s how you process and how you want to help other people and you’ve got that gift in you.
But sometimes people like you and I, when we speak about things externally, we don’t need to necessarily fully let it in. It’s kind of like our way of dealing with it is talking about it. And I think there’s going to be a really magical moment in your life in the next kind of year where you’ll understand what I mean right now.
And you’ll go, “Oh, I finally really feel it. I finally can see how brave that was. I can finally see that.” So, in terms of your superpower, yes you are absolutely authentic, you’re absolutely showing up as your true self and that’s who you are.
But I think you haven’t fully connected with your courage and the deep level of empathy you have, the reason you’re doing this is so clear. You’ve got this empathetic communication style that I would tell you anything and not many people have that gift.
So, the reason you are really good at doing what you’re doing right now, even though you said you were nervous, is because I think that I’m going to call it the war, the war that you’ve been through in your own head to get yourself to where you are today has made you an extremely empathetic communicator.
And I think you’ve got one more loop to go in terms of really connecting with, “I’m really fucking good at that and I’m going to really lean into it even further.” So, I’m quite interested to see where you go next because I don’t think your journey’s completely over in terms of celebrating yourself if that’s my … sorry, you asked for it, you got it.
Ellie:
No, we might have to leave it there because you’re almost making me emotional.
Chloe:
Oh, I’m sorry.
Ellie:
I mean, I guess all I can say to that is anyone listening to this, you should hire this woman because she really is quite intuitive. I mean that’s a fairly profound take after just an hour of talking to me. So, thank you so much. I mean, I always learn something when I record a podcast, but you’ve really turned some light bulbs on.
Chloe:
Okay, let’s try again. Oh, the other way round though, this time. Yeah, I think, people need to hear your story.
Ellie:
This is going to be a black mark for me but as soon as you said that you know what my immediate reaction was, “I’m not worthy.” I mean, you’ve had Katie Rigg-Smith on, I mean you’ve had all these amazing people on, and that was my initial reaction was, “Oh no.”
Have other women, I’m guessing that even some of these women who are incredibly high powered, who have really, really serious professional roles, I’m guessing that some of them have probably had that same reaction when you’ve asked them off air about, “Well, do you want to come and do my podcast?” Am I right?
Chloe:
All bar one or two and the best thing about that is — and I’ll mention her because I don’t think she’ll mind, so Melissa Doyle, she’s a famous journalist. She’s the most … you meet this woman and you’re just like, “You’re exactly the same on the TV as you are in real life.” She’s just an absolute babe.
She doesn’t change from the camera to who she’s in … I’ve been to Zambia with her, we’ve spent a fair bit of time together, there was no mask. She didn’t have time for a mask, you know what I mean? I spent a big bit of time with her. I asked her to be on air. She’s like, “I’ll do it for you.” And I was like, “Okay, amazing.” I’m thinking she’d be one of my most confident people because she’s so self-accomplished, she’s on camera all the time.
She was very honest about the fact that she doesn’t want to talk about herself. So, she sees herself as a facilitator to external conversations and she actually talks on the podcast around the session with me was like the therapy she didn’t know she needed and even when it was going live, someone who’s like literally going in the press and everything all the time she messaged me, “Chloe, I’m so nervous.”
So, I always tell that story to other guests that are coming on in terms of like, talking about yourself, celebrating yourself is something so many of us are afraid of doing. It doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done with your life. But that’s exactly why I’m doing this because I’m at war with the fact that it’s not okay for us to go, “I’m really good at this.”
Because you’re scared of being judged for that or you don’t want to talk about yourself, you don’t want to seem self-centered. The book that I’m writing at the moment, it’s called Self-Doubt: The Invisible Pandemic and I believe that everyone is struggling with self-doubt, and it doesn’t matter what level you are at and that’s why I have this equation.
This is why I am deliberately making people consciously thinking about self-belief and bringing it into the spotlight so that it’s okay to do that because we’ve got to close that loop. We’ve got to do the intentional, we’ve got to execute and then we’ve got to celebrate to be able to build that self-belief.
If people are missing the celebrate bit every time and not going, “I’m really good at this.” We’re going to continue to see the pay gaps from a gender point of view. We’re going to continue to see, I think it’s 26% of women are CEOs in Australia, we’re going to see continue to see these gaps until we start advocating for ourselves, until we start celebrating ourselves, until we start putting our best foot forward. So yeah, that’s what it’s all about.
So, to answer your question, yes, everyone feels like this and you’ll be absolutely fine and I think you’ve got a really interesting story to tell and one that people would find a lot of courage in. And I think that it’s important that you do that for yourself as well as for other people, so yeah, we’re going to swap roles next time.
Ellie:
Okay. We’ll do some role reverse. I think let’s leave it there. This has been brilliant. This has been so brilliant. I love your work. Good luck with the book as well. I’ll be looking forward to seeing that come out at some point. And yeah, I’ll see you on our role reversal podcast at some point in the near future, I guess.
Chloe:
Amazing. Thank you so much.
Ellie:
Thanks Chloe.
