Episode Details

Here at CWG, we’ve had a busy old few weeks. With visits to the Game Fair and Defender Burghley Horse Trials and the launch of our Countrywoman paid membership, it doesn’t feel like our feet have touched the ground really.

The Game Fair is one of our favourite events and it certainly didn’t disappoint. Clear Scribbles, Charlotte Hurst and I went up on the day for Friday and it totally lived up to its reputation as a proper country day out. We’ve got a post coming up covering it in more detail very soon and have secured podcast dates to share some great brands we discovered.

Burghley Horse Trials is one of the premier events of the Equestrian Eventing calendar, with its elite 5* eventing competition and an extensive shopping village. Charlotte and I went up to Stamford for a few days to see all the action. It’s always a treat to be there with our Hiho Silver stand, and getting to see all the horses and competitors up close when Hiho judges at the Fairfax & Favor Best dressed at the First trot-up.

On August 5th, we launched our Countrywoman paid membership. It’s something we’ve talked about for some time, and hitting 50 podcasts recently really spurred us on.

Our intent for the meeting was to invite you to pull up a chair at our virtual kitchen table, (it’s very much come as you are), and start creating a Community of like-minded business women, Women juggling a lot, getting it wrong sometimes, getting it right sometimes and often feeling that they’re never quite in the right place - guilt trips about being at work and missing out on family life, then going home and having a guilt trip about not being at work!

We’re going to be meeting up once a month for an hour online and are hatching plans to meet up in real life at Countrywoman events.

It’s all about creating a group of women who look out for, support and cheer for each other. Women who want to run a business that fits their life, that they can be ambitious about, but then still have the time to enjoy their lives and their families.

For the record, it doesn’t matter how experienced you are, it’s always daunting starting something new. Over the years I’ve learnt to go into groups I’m facilitating with a topic and knowledge that I want to share, but then to be brave enough to let the room take over, and the ladies who joined the Community didn’t let me down.

I was there to go through my ADD Time Method, it’s a system that helps you free up some time in your busy days, and then look at how we can use that time usefully to add value or joy into our days.

But once we were all on the same page for the possibilities of creating more time for ourselves, the conversation in the room opened up so much wisdom and gradually, through their own supportive comments and ideas, the ladies in the room helped each other come to realise that often they were the blocks to their own liberation.

We talked about why “nobody will do it as well as me” keeps so many of us doing things we shouldn’t still be doing.

About the difference between something being done our way and being done perfectly well by somebody else.

About how doing something quicker because we came up with a better system often leads us to think we should charge less for it, rather than realising we can add more value for our client if we’re not spending hours doing tasks that don’t really add value.

Above everything else, the power of the women in the room meant that we all left that call feeling a little bit less lonely and a lot more suppor