Episode 35: Connection Over Competition and Championing Women with Kate Okello Tarrant

Hello and welcome to the Mum Means Business podcast, where we shine a light on inspiring women who have one thing in common. When they’re not managing tantrums, homework, P.E. kits and play dates, they are busting their gut to create something from nothing, to turn their passion into a thriving business and build a better life for themselves and their families. We dig into what motivates devoted mothers to pursue entrepreneurship and how they integrate their work and family life.

I’m Victoria Phipps, your host, and if you’re an ambitious mum in need of some solidarity whilst navigating the messy middle of making your big dream a reality, then stick around. This is for you.

NOTE: This is the transcript from the original recording, rather than the edited episode so timings may vary.

Kate OT (00:00)
He

Victoria (00:02)
My guest today is an actor, voice artist and founder. A millennial mum of three boys, she’s appeared on countless stages across the UK, on screen and in your ears. Regularly working with household names such as the BBC and Audible. ⁓ With the performance industry on pause, she began blog documenting her experience of motherhood in lockdown. Within weeks, Kate Akello-Tarrant, aka Mrs. O.T., had reached tens of thousands of women.

sparking conversations that led her to train as a breastfeeding consultant, become a pre and postnatal advocate, and create the Mum Retreat, a series of nurturing events centered on maternal mental health and wellbeing. From intimate, candela evenings and meaningful discussions to workshops with leading experts, Kate now runs retreats, campaigns, and gatherings across London and beyond.

and was recently recognized with the award for Best Maternal Mental Health and Wellbeing Events UK at GHP Women’s Health Awards. When she’s not behind the mic or on set or planning the next retreat, you’ll probably find Kate on Instagram writing about the things that people don’t talk about, hoping her message lands with someone at the moment is needed most. She insists there is joy to be found in failing publicly and this readiness to be open and vulnerable is her superpower.

For Kate, advocating for connection over competition is important. She says, we need to dismantle the societal conditioning that other women are a threat. The message we receive as girls is that there is only so much success to go round and this scarcity mindset leads to social performance and gatekeeping, which keeps us all disconnected and playing small at a time when we need each other more than ever.

Kate, you are speaking my language and I feel like this is exactly the conversation we need to be having this week with International Women’s Day coming up in a few days time. So welcome to the MUMmeets Business podcast.

Kate OT (02:01)
you for having me my goodness the longest intro my goodness I can’t believe

just a little story I am when I filled in the form for the podcast I sent Victoria poor Victoria the shortest little description that I typed out forgetting to mention anything that I actually do so how it’s gone from one extreme to the other I don’t know but honestly I feel I’m so privileged and thank you so much for having me it’s a real

Victoria (02:20)
Hahaha!

Kate OT (02:30)
treat to come and spend time with you.

Victoria (02:32)
I’m

looking forward to it. I think we’re going to have plenty to talk about. I… Come on.

Kate OT (02:36)
we always do, sorry.

The first time that I met you I just knew that we were going to be bosom buddies and I’m just so excited that we can continue that conversation. We’ve got a whole hour, when do we ever get that joy and motherhood to have a conversation with someone we adore for an hour? I mean what a treat.

Victoria (02:45)
I know.

I do suspect that this is why I started the podcast. To like carve out time for a full hour of conversation with another mum. Like it’s a dream for me because no one’s interrupting me. I can call it work and do it in between the school runs. There’s no one coming to ask me a question or request a snack. It’s bliss. I love it. And it really fills my cup.

Kate OT (03:00)
Yes.

Yes!

Well thank goodness you did. I’m so grateful that you started the podcast.

I have to admit, I said to you earlier that I’ve been listening to the ones that obviously when you…

mums in general that are start up businesses is actually quite a small circle especially in the capital we’ll often find that at different networking events or events or whatever we cross paths with each other so I have been listening to some of your conversations with people that I know but I’ve been really binging in the past few days and can I just say to give you a little bit of an ego boost and a massage

It’s so refreshing to hear a business podcast that feels relatable. think that there’s so many that exist that are… I mean, we all have goals and aspirations, right? But they’re all so… Sometimes they feel like they’re so far away from the current place that we’re sitting at or the starting point or the founders point or the idea. And so it’s wonderful to listen to these huge, big household name entrepreneurs. ⁓

Victoria (04:07)
Mmm.

Kate OT (04:18)
at the kind of peak of their career and working backwards but just for those of us that are just finding our feet and living it in the beginning stages or the kind of even the middle stages or even in the established stages but it just feels so much more grounded than anything that I’ve listened to so thank you for creating a space for that because it’s been yeah I feel like I know everyone that I’ve listened to so far because I’m like I get it we would all have a great lunch together

Victoria (04:42)
Yeah.

my gosh, yeah, exactly. But that is what you do. So you appreciate this. It is all about kind of just that point of connection, even if it’s just through your ears as you’re coming back from the school run or whatever. And I just love these kind of messy middle conversations. even, I have been fortunate to speak to people who feel like they’re kind of arriving maybe, like finally it’s making sense for them.

Kate OT (04:50)
Yeah, true.

Victoria (05:14)
But actually everyone has those stories to tell of those awkward beginnings and those things where they really try something, they thought it was gonna be it and it wasn’t it. And then they had to pick themselves up and do something different or pivot or just try again or try in a different way. And I think that struggle to grow a business or to achieve those goals and those dreams.

is really hard and people sit in it for a long time and then they come out the other end and they have this what everyone will perceive to be overnight success and it’s actually bollocks. know overnight successes take decades sometimes and so even those people who feel like they’re getting there and it makes sense to them and they feel aligned and they feel like they’ve got momentum and it’s working and they’re making money actually they’ve all got those stories too so even if I get these people on I’m like tell me about

when it wasn’t working. Because I think we all need that.

Kate OT (06:10)
We

do, the overnight success, that’s an external perspective. The overnight success is what everybody else sees and I think it’s what we’re conditioned to show people so we are, we can often be quite private in what we share with the world in case we fail or in case it doesn’t go right or in case we’re embarrassed and often the people that first see the things that we’re starting to set up are the likes of our close friends and family and I find there’s a huge irony in the fact that the people that should make us feel the most safe and the people that should be the

that are there to nurture us are often the ones that we’re most embarrassed to say actually I really want to pivot or I really want to start something that doesn’t exist. So no, can totally get how… ⁓

the overnight success thing seems. mean obviously I look at it from a business perspective now but obviously my profession really is an actor and a voice artist and that’s the world of overnight successes and you go actually if you really want to go and have a look at some of the early day stuff that these people were doing. didn’t they might have just happened to appear on your cinema screen or your TV screen now but

Victoria (07:05)
Mm-hmm.

Kate OT (07:15)
they’ve been doing some pretty dodgy off-western stuff for years wondering if it’s ever gonna happen even this huge thing, heated rivalry that everyone’s talking about at the moment the lead actor was like weeks before he appeared on screen and is now you know feels like a household name he was serving people at a bar or a restaurant and you just think this is not…

Victoria (07:18)
Yeah.

Mm.

Kate OT (07:39)
Yeah, the graft happens. I think it’s really important that we talk about that graft too and not be so, not gatekeep it and not be so shy. Just the vulnerability I think is where the real strength lies because we can all celebrate the success but really appreciating the moments where you can hit rock bottom or you can wonder whether it’s even something that’s for you in the first place. That’s where your true growth happens. It really truly is.

Victoria (08:04)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Kate OT (08:09)
couldn’t advocate for that more.

Victoria (08:09)
And it’s

a hard thing to hear that because it doesn’t feel like you’re growing. It feels like you’re stalling and you’re frustrated. And it can actually just be quite painful that you have this sense that there is something for you and you just can’t find it. But it’s interesting. This is why the kind of blend of motherhood and business with this podcast is so endlessly fascinating for me because I think it’s the same. We don’t show.

our failings in motherhood as much as we present our immaculate children, you know, dressed in matching outfits at someone’s wedding. You know, it’s, we’re not showing like the total shit show that was going on in the back of the car 10 minutes ago when you were trying to put a bow in her hair and everyone was melting down. That doesn’t make it to Instagram. So I think the two things kind of go hand in hand. And then what you’re doing.

Kate OT (08:47)
Yep.

⁓ gosh. Yep.

Victoria (09:05)
is just inviting people behind the scenes in both, which is why it is attracting attention and it’s helping you to find your people because we need it. There isn’t enough of it. So let’s go back in your story. You were an actor and a voiceover artist and then the pandemic happened. So tell me about what made you decide

Kate OT (09:18)
yeah.

Yeah.

Hmm

Yeah.

Victoria (09:35)
to do something different and bet on yourself? And how did that all intertwine with your motherhood, in inverted commas, journey?

Kate OT (09:46)
Right. Now I just have to preempt this with the fact that I do have a tendency to tangent, so apologies in advance. Because all of these things they do, they’re all interwoven with each other and so it’s so hard not to want to bring everything in at once. But I’ve been incredibly lucky in the fact that…

Victoria (09:53)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Kate OT (10:10)
everything that I’ve done seems to have grown somewhat organically. You know, I mean I think every little girl’s got a dream of maybe I always used to like want to be a fashion designer. I don’t know if you ever went through that phase of wanting to be a fashion designer. Yeah, ⁓

Victoria (10:21)
I did. I used to draw the most hideous dresses and think that I would be good

at that.

Kate OT (10:26)
Yeah, same. So I think we all have

that rite of passage first and I wasn’t particularly a girly girl but I was like fashion designer, that’s for me. But I think that from day one the one thing that I always knew about myself is that I was never going to be able to work for somebody else. So any dream that I did have and it wasn’t always that of an actor, that maybe came a little bit later on in life but I just knew that working for somebody else was never going to be aligned with me and as a kid it wasn’t maybe as clear as that.

Victoria (10:33)
You

Kate OT (10:56)
It was more just that all of my visions that I had were things that I was creating, things that I was starting up, the fashion designing company, the stalls selling X, Y and Z and as I got older and I struggled massively with identity as a child, like massively, I mean not just because I was a mixed-race girl growing up in Newcastle and I had a very diverse upbringing which I’m so grateful for. I’ve been brought up with no bias, no prejudice, nothing because all of

these kind of social taboos all existed within the echo chamber of my home and so that’s always been a kind of norm for me. But I never felt quite comfortable in my own skin and I found a huge outlet in acting and in writing and I adored it and organically that grew and…

luckily became my career. went to a wonderful drama school, I trained with brilliant people, I came out of drama school and I acquired an agent and that was what life looked like. And on the flip side of that, and I think actually I saw something on your stories the other day, I’ve also, I’ve never really been a proud person in that I also know that in order to do things like that and in order to work for yourself,

it doesn’t always, obviously, happen overnight, it’s not always an overnight success and so I’ve always had lots of fingers in lots of different pies in in-between jobs as I should say, all the things that keep things ticking over and I think it’s through those jobs on the side or the jobs that pay the bills that you discover other things that also make you happy I don’t think that we’re all fulfilled from one single thing and

So yeah, then I, see I told you I had a tangent. So I had an established acting career, but I also was doing a million different things and then to keep the cogs turning until a few years down the line, I was able to fully sustain myself just from performance. And just as that trajectory was positive, the pandemic hit and the whole performance world stopped. However, I had also fallen pregnant during this time.

and so I’d been mentally preparing myself for a pause so I was a little bit smug when everyone was like we can’t act anymore and I was like great because I, such a shame that it’s paused at the exact time that I’ve had a baby so I don’t have to go through that grief that I really thought I was going to have to go through but when it did pause I didn’t realise how much of an outlet it was for me and so

Victoria (13:29)
You

It’s such a shame.

Kate OT (13:55)
I needed the creativity. I heard you speak recently and you were saying that you didn’t ever think of yourself as a creative person, which is crazy because everything that you’ve done so far has been creative. But I do think that inherently if you are a creative person, you need an outlet, whatever that looks like. And so I started writing. That was where I started. I thought, my goodness, you know, how many people have…

Like people have never had babies during a pandemic before. We don’t know what this is like. Surely there must be millions of women sitting there going, what on earth is going on? I’ve been told that I’ve got to stay inside the house. I’ve been told that I’ve got to do X, Y and Z. I don’t, all this stuff about meeting my new best friends in NCT classes became like this online thing. And all of these things that we were told was going to be, you know, our motherhood journey was suddenly taken away from us.

Victoria (14:38)
I know, yeah.

Kate OT (14:47)
and so I thought look my own career is paused I was somewhat prepared for it but I didn’t I wasn’t prepared for the impact it would have on me on my mental health on my purpose I suppose and so I thought if I can’t do anything else then I’ll write so I just started writing hoping that maybe I might meet like one online friend that would be like yeah say I’m struggling too and it ended up

reaching, I mean, thousands, tens of thousands of women that were logging on from all over the world really, I mean, mainly the UK, but you know, I had messages of people being like, that what your experience is in the UK? We’re here, we’re not even allowed to have partners and we’re not allowed to do this. And so I just spoke to so many different people. And then I ended up, I don’t know if you’re like this, if you’re a kind of empathetic person,

you end up being a kind of free therapist for a lot of people. Like, with no qualification, yeah.

Victoria (15:41)
With no qualification. ⁓

Kate OT (15:47)
and I was like,

oh, I’m now, like my husband was like, you know, I waking up in the middle of the night, still very heavily pregnant, and I was like, oh, this Sandra from Belfast or whoever, I’m like, you know, she’s about to go into labour and I don’t want her to feel like she’s on her own, so he was like, you’re what, you’re messaging a woman in labour, and I’m like, yeah, I just, you know, I really want, we’ve really made this connection, I really want to support her, and he was going, are you, you alright? And I was like, it’s just my community, I need my community, and then somebody messaged me after the given birth to their baby, and I’d essentially been there.

Victoria (15:55)
Hahaha!

Kate OT (16:17)
and they said, you know you’re like a free doula and I thought first of all what’s a doula? I thought they meant dealer and I was like not a dealer at all, I’m a very nice person and I thought I’m like a free what? And so it sparked this…

Victoria (16:22)
You

Kate OT (16:34)
I don’t know, it had a snowball effect on me where I thought, if I am doing something and it’s already got a title, what is this? And so subsequently I then ended up training as a breastfeeding consultant, I did end up training as a pre and postnatal advocate, it’s called a doula, I don’t call it a doula, I’ll address that at another stage in another conversation as to why I don’t use that word personally, but…

Victoria (16:53)
Okay, all right.

Kate OT (17:00)
I just started having these conversations with women and I ended up falling into a role that I never prepared and this blog that was originally called Mrs. OT the Wimbles mum, because I’m from Wimbledon, became Mrs. OT the breastfeeding consultant, Mrs. OT the birth advocate, Mrs. OT the kind of mental wellbeing aficionado and I didn’t, yeah, I never set out for it to be that case but I found something that fuelled me and it brought together all of this.

stuff that I’d craved from acting, the community, the kind of projects, the conversation, the storytelling, and also the publicly failing I suppose, or not publicly failing but the public confessions of finding things hard, of being open about being in unknown territory, of just needing

to hear someone else’s story for validation and I got just as much from those women as they maybe got from myself or I hope they got from me. It was never a one-way street so although I was the one staying up in the middle of the night that wasn’t just because I wanted to help, of course I did, but I loved the fact that I was seeing elements of my own life reflected back at me and I just thought this is this is missing from so much of motherhood.

Victoria (18:03)
Yeah.

Kate OT (18:25)
because all the stuff that I’ve seen online makes it seem like this kind of dream-like state and that’s just not true. So then I had my baby and I’ve had three babies now since and because I was self-employed I didn’t really have a maternity leave so I just was, you know, I kind of felt like I was caught up in everyone else’s maternity leave around me but then as their nine months came to an end

I realised that was like at the events that I was going to it was the next batch of mums that were starting their nine months of maternity leave and I was going hang on a second my need for support and community doesn’t just stop at that nine month point where are the events and where are the community gatherings for women that have got children that are maybe starting school and we feel like we need support or what if they’re going to university and we feel like they need support? Motherhood

Victoria (19:06)
doesn’t end.

Kate OT (19:25)
There’s so much catered for mums in the kind of lead up to having a baby and the short phase afterwards. But it’s a journey for life. You never get off the motherhood train. You will never have moments where you think, my god, what am I doing? Am I getting this wrong? Am I letting them down? And there’s so much hype around the midnight breastfeeding conversations and my god, we need that. This is in conjunction with not fighting against. We need that, but…

Victoria (19:50)
Mm-hmm.

Kate OT (19:52)
I need just as much support for my mental health and wellbeing now six years into this journey and I know I will continue to need it, know, 60 years down the line. And so I started looking for it and I thought there was some kind of retreats to far off destinations and I was like, can’t quite just up sticks and leave, how does that work, right? And there were things where you know were still bringing your babies along.

Victoria (20:12)
How does that work when you’re a mum? Yeah.

Kate OT (20:20)
but I just thought I’m really craving something just for me, like really just for me. Something where I’m giving myself permission to take that couple of hours out of my schedule. And I think for mums we do often have to schedule things. I mean you just said that this is a great way of having conversations with people and scheduling that hour. ⁓

I needed it to be something that was scheduled that people could put in their diaries because do you know what? The first thing that goes is time to self as a mum. If you’ve got it just lightly written in pencil in your calendar, promise you you won’t see it through. If the kid starts crying, if they’re saying, Mummy, please stay, please do this, you’ll go, ⁓ do you know what, I’ll go for that swim, I’ll go for that run, I’ll go for that coffee another time. We rain check it. Whereas if we’ve got something that we’ve booked and we’ve got a ticket for and it’s in pen in our calendar,

the show up rate for ourselves and for the event is so much greater so in AppTeam we’ve got a phrase where we say if you can’t find it, create it and so I thought surely this must apply to everything so I couldn’t find it and I created it and it was scary and again I just went in with this kind of nonchalant I’m gonna see how it goes in the same way that I’ll see if I write something maybe it’ll land with one person and

Victoria (21:27)
Everything, yeah.

Kate OT (21:42)
Yeah, it went. It wasn’t just me that was feeling that way, you know? It wasn’t just me. So there we go, that is the most long-winded story of how this all came about.

Victoria (21:53)
No,

it’s a great story. So what was that first event? What was the first thing that you did?

Kate OT (22:03)
my goodness what was my first event? So I had… what was it? my goodness that is really terrible. So my first event…

Victoria (22:16)
This is supposed to be a really cool memory for you.

Kate OT (22:19)
I know.

I can’t even think what the first event was. mean there’s been so many, mean there’s been hundreds. Now my first kind of more intimate event, they used to have different names, the Urban Retreat was one where I wanted to people together in a small close-knit community. That was… I can’t even remember. We’re gonna have to cut this out.

Victoria (22:44)
No, it’s all right, don’t worry. No, but I think…

Kate OT (22:46)
So

my first big public event was with Anna Martha, who I met when I went to see one of her in-person talks. And I immediately just fell in love with her. And I have to say, we were both very similar souls, and I just found it so refreshing hearing her talk about…

she said something that resonated with me forever and it was we are all just imperfect humans raising imperfect children and it was at a point of motherhood where I really needed to hear that. I’ve always had trouble with my own emotional regulation and again I was surrounded by this narrative online that we were, I mean we’ve gone through this whole like gentle parenting era and this was all being bombarded at me from left right and centre and so afterwards I stayed behind to chat to her and we had a few mutual connections.

and we just had a chin-wag and I just said, just know that you and I…

are aligned in so many ways and we’ve been friends ever since and so when I first thought I would take my events public and do like bigger in-person gatherings and like audience like big ticket events I knew that she had to be the first person that I had that conversation with and I’m so glad that we did and she’s wonderful and she she agreed in a heartbeat blesser which she didn’t have to do for little old Zedliss to me but she was it was so refreshing having that conversation with her.

But think a lot of my growth had to come from realising that I could also have those conversations myself. So I think for the first few events that I did that were these kind of higher profile events, I was the interviewer and I was almost too scared to trust my own voice. And it wasn’t until I was having these conversations and I was going, you know, in my writing and the things that I’m putting out there, I know that I can…

Victoria (24:28)
Mm.

Kate OT (24:41)
facilitate this off my own back. ⁓ Maybe I can be brave enough to actually trust that people will come to the events because I’m also hosting them and that I can create that same ambiance or setup or validation. So that was a huge like imposter syndrome moment.

Victoria (25:01)
Yeah, but think

so many women will relate to that. Even in this podcast, I’m the interviewer and talking about sharing the journey, this podcast is not monetized. This podcast costs me money and time and energy to make because I tried to do it without it cost me money and I stopped sleeping.

So now it costs me money and I sleep a bit more, but it’s, know, a sensible person has to think, where is this going? You know, first you’re establishing, can you even do it? So you do your first event, which obviously was very memorable. And then the event with your friend. No, do not worry.

Kate OT (25:46)
It’s not that I can’t remember my first event, it’s that I can’t remember the order of whether I did the smaller events before the

bigger events and I’m like which one came first, the chicken or the egg? I’m so sorry.

Victoria (25:55)
They were all great, it does not matter. But

yeah, you have to think about, first you establish, can you even do it? And there’s a lot of imposter syndrome, I’m sure, that you were feeling, even though you’re having all these conversations online, it’s very different asking somebody to leave their homes and invest money and time to come to an event that you arrange in the early days when you haven’t done that before. And that’s a leap of faith. You just feel like it might work and we have to follow those feelings.

But once you’ve established, okay, well, you can do that, but you’re in that sense, at that stage, you’re attracting your attendees with these brilliant women who are going to speak and you’re going to interview them. And you persuade yourself it works because you’re attracting them. And then at some point there is a transition and it’s similar with podcasting. You know, I think, okay, well, I’m interviewing all these amazing women, so inspired by them.

but people are listening because they want to hear those women. And that’s exactly, it’s the same journey. And it’s at some point I have to think, but okay, at what point do you step in? At what point do you become the speaker, the attracting force in the event that people actually just want to come because they want to hear you. And I think that’s the journey that there are so many parallels that people will relate to that because

Kate OT (27:05)
100 %

Victoria (27:22)
It’s an expansive thing, isn’t it? You you stretch your comfort zone and you’re kind of like, okay, well that seemed to work all right. But you’re still not at a point where you want to be at the heart of it because you think that then it will all fall apart because they’re not coming for you because of our own self-worth probably in complicated ways, you know, and our own confidence. And again, you know, confidence is a tricky thing because it’s about doing it.

Kate OT (27:36)
my gosh.

Victoria (27:50)
you’re not going to be confident until you’ve done it. And then it becomes about competence, but to actually just take that leap to become the center of your own event before you feel ready. When did you do that and what did that feel like?

Kate OT (28:07)
I realised, so you get stats and things on ticket sales and I realised that I was, despite having all of these incredible guests coming along and they were so kind and they were all sharing and whatever, I realised that the majority of the ticket sales were coming from my end, from my channels, from my click through links.

And then I started having people from that industry approach me and say, ⁓ I saw that you did this event with so-and-so, would you like to collaborate? Would you like to do an event together? Now, on the surface, that’s really flattering, right?

If there’s anyone listening to this that runs events for a living, you will know that it is no mean feat from A to Z getting that event off the ground. so whilst at first I thought, my goodness, so and so’s just slid into my DMs, they want to do this, my goodness, so and so says let’s do something together. What I realised was I was doing all the promo, I was doing all the ticket sales,

I was footing all the bills and mean, we were hiring huge auditoriums which were in the thousands so I had to trust that the ticket sales would come through which does help when you’ve got higher calibre guests but if they didn’t, that’s my bank account that those thousands of pounds are coming out of.

I was rallying all the stuff, was doing all the promo, was doing the filming, was doing the marketing, was doing the editing. My partner who does, he’s similar to me, we’re both multi hyphenates, he’s got a media company and so we were doing the in-house filming. And I just thought, this is so flattering, but actually…

Victoria (29:54)
Yeah

Kate OT (30:03)
what they’re getting is really a free service in that I’m putting everything together for them and all they have to do is turn up and I was paying them and I thought actually if I’m selling most of the tickets here let me just see what happens if I remove that pressure if I make these things more intimate if I make them more localized and it is just myself

and then I did it terrified and almost quit a million times, being like, no one’s gonna come, I’m gonna cancel, no one’s gonna come, no one’s gonna come. But people did, people showed up. And maybe I made a really rookie error not saying yes to all of those requests coming through. But I just thought, actually, what it tells me, the data from that tells me that what I’m doing is successful.

on its own and they want a slice of the cake where they get to show up and they get to benefit from that but actually the dream is for the opposite to be true for people to be wanting to do to invite me and to do that work and to

Victoria (30:57)
Mm. Mm.

Kate OT (31:14)
Does that make sense, what I’m trying to say?

Victoria (31:16)
Yeah,

yeah, no absolutely because and it’s…

Kate OT (31:20)
I just, I just, I don’t want to

just do all of the, I can’t be doing all of this work just so that they don’t have to do it for themselves and I just become a glorified interviewer. But, no disrespect.

Victoria (31:28)
Yes, and also, no,

no, no, but this is the thing, you know, it becomes about your positioning. You know, are you the facilitator or are you the heart of it? You know, where are you? And I think, again, you can bring it back to this podcast. And I’ve got a good kind of business buddy over in the States who has done a podcast similar to this and she got to…

200 episodes and she stopped because actually the numbers were kind of dropping and we’ve had so many conversations. She’s poor, she’s going onto YouTube and she’s doing other things and she’s brilliant and it’s again, it’s like talking to moms in business at various levels of their career. And she’s had lots of struggles with this because how and at what point

do you become the center of your own story and what you’re building? And I think it’s challenging to know and you kind of have to trust your instinct with it. But I think it takes us and this is just a hunch. I feel like from the conversations I have with women, it takes us just such a long time to get there because there’s so much kind of conditioning around playing small.

and not being too big for your boots. And we ask ourselves, you know, who are you to do that 10,000 times, whereas a man might ask themselves once or twice and then just be like, well, I’m me, so that’s fine. And it’s not, no one’s fallen, it’s no shade on men, it’s just the messages that we hear that keep us small. And it’s through fear of judgment and often fear of judgment from other women.

Kate OT (32:57)
gosh.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep.

Victoria (33:24)
you know, what would they think? I, they’ll think, who does she think she is getting on this stage? You know, it was all very well. And you tell yourself these horrendous stories. It was all very well when, you know, I had that guest speaker and she’s an X, Y, Z and who am I? Even though you are having these super intimate, really heartfelt connections and conversations with women online where you’re literally guiding them through their labor and you’ve never met them before. Even though you have that.

capacity to make people feel comfortable and seen and that you’re ready to listen to them and you want to help them and you want them to feel okay and feel like they’re not alone. You know that you have those skills but that’s not like a qualification that you can put on your wall and you start to measure your skills based on the kind of academic metrics that were kind of injected into our brain at school.

And you know, the school system doesn’t necessarily give you a gold star for your humility or for your emotional maturity, for your ability to connect with other humans. That’s not what’s valued. But if you’ve got a degree in this and you’ve been published in that, then those things are traditionally what makes you feel credible. And I think

One of my greatest hopes for the 21st century is we can flip all of that on its head. I, well, I just think, I mean, if AI does anything good, it’s that. It’s the, actually AI can do all of that stuff. It can just, you know, you don’t need a degree in statistics because essentially you’re just going to plug all your data in and it’s going to spit it back out at you. And you can just analyze it in two seconds. Whereas before it would have taken weeks. So what is valuable and surely it is that.

Kate OT (34:56)
So yeah, baby.

Hmm.

Victoria (35:21)
It’s our humanity and our ability to connect. And obviously that’s a superpower that you have because it was so organic, but it takes you a while to accept those messages that the universe is sending you, that actually you’re enough to do all of that and to put yourself at the heart of it.

Kate OT (35:36)
⁓ my goodness,

massively. But not just as me, all of us, women in general, the women that I speak to, we’re all in the same boat so often where we just don’t think that what we’re putting out there is good enough.

The most powerful thing that can happen is when you learn how to switch that button off. And let me tell you, it will be faulty sometimes and you’ll think you’ve turned it off and then suddenly it will be there a bit like my mic this morning. But… ⁓

Victoria (36:06)
You

Kate OT (36:11)
Society has conditioned women to…

sometimes mute themselves, sometimes become wallflowers in rooms. I went to an all-girls school and I could normally sniff out anybody else that went to an all-girls school because we all seem to be healing from the same traumas, ⁓ but we all seem to be having to undo this way of life that we all kind of…

I don’t know why we did it but it was such a hierarchy. used to walk around and you people say what was it like and I say it really felt like that opening scene of Mean Girls where we were all in these kind of really apparent cliques and people would leave a room and they just said something nice to your face and then they’d leave the room and they’d say the opposite and girls were…

in my experience they could be so manipulating and so judgemental and so catty and competitive and that is the most toxic thing that we can be to each other not just as kids but it seems to have eeked into business and life you will never see a room full of men. Businessmen speak to each other

Victoria (37:16)
Mm.

Kate OT (37:26)
in the same way that women do when it comes to entrepreneurship. Even in school I used to so crave, like all of my mates have been guys from a young age. I mean I do have my core girl group but that’s because we’re very very aligned but I used to get on so much better with boys because I found it so refreshing the fact that there didn’t seem to be this gatekeeping, there didn’t seem to be this…

like tit for tat or I need to show you that I’m better at you, better than you and it’s just so much more simple and actually if we, there’s not very many times that I will say this but if we use men as a shining example, it’s, sorry, I jest, I jest, but it shows that there is space for all of us at the table and I think that if we can get that

Victoria (37:57)
Simpler.

hahahahah

Kate OT (38:17)
hardwired into us and undo all of those habits of needing to show that we’re doing the next best thing or that we’re always achieving or we’re always doing this, that and the other. It would be so freeing to so many of us. ⁓

and we wouldn’t have the identity crisis that we’re having or this whole feeling of we’re not good enough or we don’t deserve to take the seat front and centre because we’d feel like that there was a seat there for us. think that we look at other people and we feel like we…

we go, we can’t possibly be doing what they’re doing or there’s no way we can be good enough for that and it’s such a twisted narrative because of course we can. The only person that’s telling us that is ourselves and our conditioning that women need to be muted and that we need to kind of fight with each other in order to succeed and that happens so much, particularly in the mum world as well, so not just in the female business entrepreneur world or the self-employed world but in the

Victoria (39:15)
Mm-hmm.

Kate OT (39:18)
parenting world as well. You don’t see guys posting about parenthood in the same way that mothers do where we’re trying to show this like polished version of I am doing this and it’s all just because when people are craving that sense of worth of

Victoria (39:36)
Mm-hmm.

Kate OT (39:36)
approving to other women specifically they won’t be doing it because they want the dad down the road to think that they’re brilliant at the morning school run or getting their kids dressed or whatever it’s women competing with other women and yet if we actually supported other women the whole narrative would change our belief system would change hearing other people saying

Victoria (39:42)
No.

Kate OT (40:01)
that are in the same industry as us saying that we’re doing a wonderful job, it’s one of the biggest compliments in the world and yet it so often doesn’t happen because they think that by complimenting you and that can be as simple as… that doesn’t have to be sending a letter in the post with like love hearts on it it can be as simple as hitting like on something but people will be like I don’t want to hit like on their post because for some reason I think that that’s going to tarnish my own reputation so if we could learn to…

Victoria (40:18)
Yeah.

Kate OT (40:32)
unpick all of that, then I do believe it would create space for those of us that feel like maybe we shouldn’t be taking front and centre stage. It might just help us crush that narrative too because who says? Who says?

Victoria (40:34)
Mm.

Yeah,

yeah, and it’s so interesting that you kind of hark back to school, because I do think there is something in all girls schools. And I remember being told at the time, so I went to a mixed primary and an all girls secondary. And I remember as I was at that school, a lot of comments from other women be like, well, you’ll learn to navigate women. You it’s a good grounding in how…

women’s minds work. And it was all very negative, like it was armoring me for when I go out into the real world and I’ll be faced, but I’ll have like the inside knowledge of how women are in business, how women are in corporate. And I remember that happening several times where the expectation is women are awful to each other, manipulative, catty.

Kate OT (41:25)
Mmm.

Victoria (41:41)
competitive, all of those things that you just cited. And that it’s good that I was being immersed in that at an early age because it wouldn’t impact me so much when I go out into the big wide world and I meet the really scary women. And the whole thing is just reinforcing this idea that that is the status quo. That’s how it is. And it’s all around this sort of scarcity. know, there’s only so much space. So you have to fight each other for it. And the kind of the clicks

and the judgment and the teasing and the, you know, at times straight out bullying girl to girl. And I kind of, I think I rode a very central wave through that whole experience, but I did notice it. And actually now at the age of 40, well, at the age of 35, when I became a mum, I realized for the first time

Kate OT (42:19)
Yep. Yep. Yep.

Victoria (42:41)
Having come out of school with some really solid friends, but the rest kind of dropped by the wayside. And having memories of girls I definitely didn’t ever want to bump into in life. Still now, still now I’d be like, God, turn around.

Kate OT (42:44)
Mm.

yeah, we’ve all got those. Still, if I go home, I’m like, please don’t let me, please

don’t let me bump into them in the local supermarket. Please, I can’t do this today. Yeah, hide.

Victoria (43:01)
Yeah, literally just turn on your heels and walk in a different direction, even though you really need milk.

Yeah, definitely. But then, you know, having a sort of, like you said, a core of friends that you carry through your twenties and you keep in touch with. But then it wasn’t until motherhood that I realized how much I needed other women. And I started to find very positive relationships from the start. And I was lucky, we did the lockdown NCT as well. So my daughter’s a little bit younger than your eldest.

Kate OT (43:19)
Mm.

Victoria (43:30)
but then we were able to meet at four months and we just all completely clicked straight away and we’re still in touch. But that was when I realised for the first time that women can be a hugely positive.

essential part of your life and your female friendships can…

Kate OT (43:48)
Yeah.

Victoria (43:55)
be the thing that helps you survive in that time during early motherhood. If you can connect with other women in a way that doesn’t feel judgmental and you can share in all of those failings and just sort of have those late night WhatsApp chats. There’s a famous one, the first time we ever took our baby swimming. And look, we still had the NCT WhatsApp where the guys were in it as well, because they hadn’t yet vacated. And the babies were like four or five months old.

Kate OT (43:59)
Absolutely.

Hahaha

Victoria (44:21)
And this chat, there was like frantic panic, like two hours of this back and forth, like, what the hell do we need to take it like a four and a half month old swimming? And it’s like, what size swim nappy is anyone taking? What towels are you taking? Someone’s got like, ⁓ you know, a waterproof changing mat and then the other person’s panicking, they don’t. And all of this stuff, but we needed to have each other in that moment. Otherwise you’re doing it alone and you’re turning up and you’ve probably not got everything.

Kate OT (44:30)
So big.

Victoria (44:50)
and you’re looking at the other mums and your feeling is that they’ve got it sorted and you haven’t. And that’s how we’re kind of going out into the world in our businesses, in motherhood. The assumption is that somehow you are less than, but you’re not telling anybody you feel that way. And you’re not telling any, you’re not giving any indication of that. And that everyone else has just got their shit together in a way that you haven’t and they are winning and you are floundering around.

And actually, if we could just open these conversations up, which is what you are doing in all the work that you’re doing through the mum retreat and everything that you put out online, it’s just like, this is it, lay it out on the table. And that is the point at which we can start to break all of that stuff down and actually reach each other and…

Kate OT (45:38)
We are living in

it massively.

massively separated society at the moment. We’re not even from our generation, mean generations before were much more close knit but even from my own generation growing up I feel like I had grandparents close by, I feel like we had family friends that would step in and like babysitting was so much more casual and we had this kind of network and I know that the word village gets overused but it is, it’s a village. That’s what mums are supposed to be. If you take it really far back and this is where my training and stuff has come in, I mean

There’s so many societal things that we put on ourselves, like marriage and all of that. This is to be with one person for all of our life. This is not how humans are actually wired to be. Primarily, instinctively, when mammals and the female humans used to just sit together, communally raising their children together. Breastfeeding, as a breastfeeding consultant, we learn that although the actual act of the child suckling is something that’s natural, it’s not…

Victoria (46:21)
Mm.

I know.

Hmm.

Kate OT (46:41)
something that

is not a natural thing to know how to do it without having seen other women doing it. We learn through osmosis, we sit, we used to sit around in these circles, essentially naked, watching another woman feeding their child successfully and that would be how we took on board how to feed our own child when it came around. We don’t have this anymore, we’re all separate. I’ve got family at the northeast of England, Adam’s parents are in the south. We don’t have that community and if we don’t find that for ourselves it becomes very

lonely very very quickly and that parallels to everything in business if you are starting something on your own if you do not find those people that are going to be there to lift you and to support you and to nurture you on those days where you go I just can’t do this as a parent as a founder whatever

we will hit rock bottom really quickly because innately it’s not what we’re supposed to be doing. need that WhatsApp group where it’s chaos about the swimming. We need those mum friends that pick us up when we go, I don’t know if I can do this. Our relationships have so much strain on them as well because often if we are in a partnership, and kudos for people that are doing this on their own, but that person can then become our only f***.

form of support and that puts tremendous, that’s not how it’s meant to be. There’s so many people that I speak to and like myself, we’ve been through rocky patches myself where I’m going how can I possibly do this anymore but for me that’s not a cry for help for the relationship. It means that I’ve got to a point where I’ve isolated myself from all of the other people that should be stepping in and surrounding me that I’m thinking that there’s something wrong with my relationship but it’s actually it’s something wrong with the dynamic that we’re surrounding ourselves with. We absolutely

need each other but that also requires a vulnerability from us in asking for help when we need it and saying that the shit has hit the fan when the shit hits the fan because if we only portray ourselves to be successful and thriving and loving every second of our lives hey guess what people aren’t gonna assume that we need that knock on the door that we need that text that we need that check-in and that’s not to say that we have to just you know hang all our dirty laundry out online

Victoria (48:35)
Mm-hmm.

Kate OT (48:58)
and say, woe is me, or like, it doesn’t have to be like that, but there does have to be a certain element of going, I’m finding this really, really hard, anyone else? Or, I’m feeling really lonely this week, is anybody around? Because if we just keep this constant, you know, facade.

That’s all the people have got to work on. How can we possibly support each other and with our business too if we only ever just say, you know…

Victoria (49:23)
Yeah.

Kate OT (49:28)
I’ve won this award or I’ve been invited to do this and you know it’s so classic like guys I’m delighted to announce hello everyone I’m thrilled to say like that’s what social media has become but if like there’s been some events I’ve done that have sold out in four and half minutes there have been events that I’ve done where I’ve been able to take my family on a nice holiday there have been things that have been mentioned in articles and pubs and that’s brilliant like

Victoria (49:35)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Kate OT (49:54)
It’s great to celebrate those wins but there have been some that I’ve poured blood sweat and tears into and four people have shown up and it’s meant to have sold out. The tickets are there, I’ve done the prep, no one’s there. That’s hard, we need to talk about that. That impacts you. There’s been some events where I’ve planned them and I’ve had some weird imposter syndrome and this whole thing that I’ve been so ready to do…

I’ve come away from it and thought that was the worst thing that I’ve ever did and I feel awful that I’ve charged people money for that. They might not even recognise it, they might think it was the best thing they did, but those feelings are all still valid and if we don’t have that unit of people to go to decompress with, it just ends up being these tight knots that get held in different compartments of our body and our mind.

Victoria (50:23)
Mm.

Kate OT (50:43)
and we hit rock bottom really really quickly, the burnout creeps up on us and it’s so detrimental and we start losing faith in ourselves and I know that we shouldn’t rely on other people’s validation in order to you know pick ourselves up.

Victoria (50:57)
It’s not that though.

It’s not that though, is it? It’s darker, I think, than that because actually, because of the way these societal systems have been set up, I mean, you go back millennia, we are told that we should have infinite capacity. So we are taught, and we are capable, I mean, mothers.

Kate OT (51:03)
Mm.

Mmm.

Victoria (51:25)
Jesus, like I had no idea how capable I was until I became a mom. I don’t know what I was doing with my time before I became a mom, but we are capable and also we are expected to crack on. And this is the message that our mothers were told and often like the older generation, I mean, I’m not just citing my mom, like people, women in general, like, well, it was hard for us and we just get on with it. And it’s the stoicism of it.

Kate OT (51:25)
I I know.

We know no bounds.

Mmm.

Victoria (51:54)
And you know, they’re brought up by the wartime generation. And mums are dealing with all sorts of stuff and likely raising their kids when their husbands are off at war and they don’t know if they’ll ever see them again, you know. And these are the realities, you know, we’re dealing with generations of women who have internalized this stoicism and it has been helpful to society that they have provided so much free labor.

Kate OT (51:57)
I wanna.

Victoria (52:22)
that they have raised the children and not been compensated financially and often been in serious lack financially and still managed to drag their kids up and keep them fed. And we carry that into kind of modern society where actually even though there is support, even though we want to be there for each other and this is why women go and do Christmas wreath making together.

Kate OT (52:25)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Victoria (52:48)
You know,

we just, all want to sit around a table and chin wag and we want to make food and just put it all out and eat together and have the kids running around at our feet. We obviously crave that, but there is something in us where we’ve been taught that we should be able to manage it all by ourselves. And that comes into business building too. And I did not connect with anyone else who was starting a photography business or running a photography business for the, for over a decade. I just, I just figured it out.

myself. I didn’t ask for help. just thought, because I didn’t even have the kind of actual thought. I just assumed without any mindfulness that I was supposed to do that and figure that out by myself. I was supposed to be capable.

Kate OT (53:30)
also

that we have I think we’ve also been aware of the times that we have asked for help. People gatekeep, women gatekeep and it can be a really uncomfortable conversation not all women by the way and I do believe the tides are turning and that’s what I really want to advocate for but there’s this whole thing of you know you almost first of all don’t want to ask for help sometimes because that

Victoria (53:37)
Mm.

Kate OT (53:52)
can be portrayed as failure or you know being novice or amateur and not knowing what you’re doing and so you kind of just have a much longer journey to the path of success because you’re being stubborn and you just want to make sure that it’s only you that sees the bits that don’t work out but also the times that I found that I’ve sometimes asked for help earlier on

it’s done in such a, you the response is so roundabout and I’m not really sure if I’ve actually got the information that I needed. It feels like they’re going, hang on, you want to do something in my industry and that’s something that I’m successful at. So, you know, have you ever thought about doing this instead? Or maybe you, I’ve read that you could, and it’s like they’re kind of trying to navigate you along. There is space for everything. And I do find now that people are…

maybe this is a bit controversial to say. Do you know the people that are most likely to help are the people that are actually the people that you least likely think are going to help. So the people that are maybe that seem unapproachable or very established you think gosh they’ll never apply to my DM. Nine out of ten times they do. It’s often people that are on your same level that are fighting for the same thing or have the same kind of end goal in mind or similar that are gatekeeping but…

There’s this image of a table that has limited seats and it’s so damaging because that’s just not the case at all. I just wonder why we do that to each other.

Victoria (55:33)
I think it goes back a very long way. I don’t think that’s something that we could pinpoint. I think that’s embedded, deeply ingrained in the roots of society. And it’s not like you could sort of hang your hat on a moment where someone said something to you when you asked for help and say, that was it, that was what I learned, because it will have come in a thousand tiny messages and responses or lack of response.

Kate OT (55:50)
Mmm.

Absolutely.

Victoria (56:02)
from you reaching out and asking for help. And in that sense, it’s a lot to unpack. I do agree with you. I do feel like the tides are turning, but it’s interesting what you said earlier about where it’s turning. So I feel like these conversations I’m having with you and with other people that I might have met through like online networks, communities who are doing this stuff, there is a sort of…

⁓ I use the word lightly, but there is a sort of higher level of proximity to enlightenment with this, where we are all quite aligned, very open, happy to share the challenges and the struggles, and really, really happy to help each other to the point where we’ll go out of our way. It’s not like we’re waiting to be asked if we have an idea for somebody.

Kate OT (56:38)
Mmm.

Victoria (56:59)
we’re very proactive as well. Like you’ll literally slide into someone’s DMs and say, look, I met this person. I think you should talk to them because of XYZ. And this is a fairly new experience for me because I feel like I’ve only been in this space for about like nine, 10 months. And before that, everything’s in my real life. And as you say,

Kate OT (57:01)
Yes.

Yeah.

Victoria (57:24)
like in the real world, you have such close friends that you could trace back decades. You’ve got shared memories from when you were kids, you know, opening your exam results or whatever it might be. Or even in, you know, in play groups, can, you’ve known people your whole life, but they perhaps just aren’t in this space yet. And I feel like it’s happening online, but there are certain kind of just mindset. It’s about mindset, isn’t it? There’s like this growth mindset.

Kate OT (57:31)
yeah.

Victoria (57:54)
when you’re having these conversations with women that are finding each other through the internet, essentially. And then actually when you go back into your real life, you realize that that’s not the prevailing mindset.

Kate OT (58:06)
No, but I think that again can go back to school. always ⁓ think about my younger self who never really felt like she fitted in and I think that we’re really lucky in a way to have social media because it opens up that echo chamber hugely. At school you will often find that your friends… ⁓

And I say that again lightly because I have got four core friends and we’re all in London and we still see each other all the time and I’m so grateful that I found those amidst all of this. But when you look at your kind of friendship group, they’re all kind of cobbled together with the closest thing to what you would like to find in a friend. And it’s why when you leave, often those friendships where you say, ⁓ we’ll keep in touch and know, best of luck, whether that’s from university or from school.

Victoria (58:52)
You

Kate OT (58:55)
you’ve got such a small catchment of people and there’s no way that they will all understand you or get you or… and so we have them labelled as our friends and in a sense they are but they’re… they’re not aligned with us in the way that…

social media can find people or the internet or events or community-based things can draw people towards us. So I do think that there’s this thing of, you know, my post as much as I can, this year I’m trying to really stop trying to second guess what other people are going to think about my post because I’m a recovering people pleaser, I always say, not quite there yet and…

Victoria (59:18)
Yeah.

Kate OT (59:38)
I get nervous sometimes before I post vulnerable things. I mean, I know that it’s what the premise of what I do is, but sometimes I’m talking about very deep things from my business to my relationship to my failures to my children to my mental health. And I know that it’s going to land with some people and that’s primarily why I do it to create that safe space. ⁓

But there are people that I know look at everything that I do that have known me all their life and yet can’t bring themselves to interact. And I do just think that…

by expanding.

that perimeter if you are looking for clients or for even just companionship or for like a community. Social media can be used in a really powerful way because it…

people will only come to your page and follow you because it’s something that they’re genuinely interested in but that doesn’t mean it’s not hurtful sometimes or hard to get your head around the fact that people that you’ve believed have loved you and supported you your whole life are very happy to skip on by your posts or your… you know, not interact with things and I…

Victoria (1:00:54)
Mm.

Kate OT (1:01:01)
Do you think it kind of comes with part and parcel? And I think there’s sometimes I’ve experienced that there’s been

It’s unearthed some resentment in friends. There will be people that wish that they could take the more creative path or wish that they could break out of ⁓ a box or a system and maybe haven’t taken that leap and I think it can sometimes be hard to watch people do that. That sounds like incredibly egotistical, it’s not intended to be, but I do think that sometimes people can look on and think, you know, Kate’s gone off and done all those things that she actually said she was going to do and I’m still here doing X, Y and Z and I think that can be hard for people to watch.

and we have to accept that there will be a form of green eye that will creep into these things and there will also be people that just haven’t quite undone that conditioning and they just go that’s a threat to me even though it couldn’t be we’re in completely different lines of work so

What I would say though is that that’s okay. Like it’s okay if you can forgive them, great. If you realise that actually it’s been too many years of silence and know, friendships can also be seasonal. They might have been very prominent in a certain season of your life but they might not be necessarily the people that you need in that girl gang or boy gang or support gang going forward.

I love the online community that I found and meeting the likes of yourself and all of these people, when you find people that do lift you up, brilliant, let’s just hold on to that and…

spend our energy and time on that because I think that we can often, I mean it’s human to focus on the negative and the bad and oh you know I’ve got seven million likes on this post but that one person from school that was my school best friend has read it and they’ve not even hit it even though it wouldn’t hurt them to do so. It’s easy to catastrophise on that but actually yeah that is the joy of growing your own organic community because you’ve got the other 99 % of people that…

that do and that’s incredible, we should really be advocating for that and trying to be that person for other people. There’s so many of us that are going, but they don’t do that for us and they don’t do that for us, but how many of us are actually doing that ourselves? How many times are we scrolling past things? Can we be the ones that break that narrative? we be the ones that go, that girl’s really asked, she’s just started this new salon and she needs us to re-share that. We just skip by because we go, it’s not really, can we just do them a favour?

Victoria (1:03:12)
Yeah.

But again, yeah,

absolutely. And again, you’re so right about picking up on that thing about brave action, because not everybody is in a position to take the brave action. Not everybody has the right mindset to do it. Not everybody is going to be courageous enough to step outside of the path that they’re on and pursue something different, even if they might dream about it. And part of…

this podcast is to show ordinary mums that these things are within their reach if they choose them. And there’s nothing special about any of us. We’re just doing scary things that do mean that we have to confront those little micro moments whereby we can see that somebody who went to school with is looked at something and they’ve not said anything and we’re like,

Kate OT (1:04:11)
Yeah.

Victoria (1:04:29)
God, they must think that I’m just so full of myself. They must think that, but that is pure conditioning. And the fact that they didn’t interact is pure conditioning. And I think there’s something about being in the arena because we know what it takes to build something from nothing, what it costs to do that, whether it’s time, energy, sleep, know, moments away from your kids when actually you’re doing it.

Kate OT (1:04:40)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Victoria (1:04:58)
partly for your kids. It’s so costly and there are times when it can feel so hard and if you’re launching something new, every single like, even if you’ve got seven million or if you’ve got two, means everything. And it just propels you forward and it gives you energy to carry on. And I think if you’ve been in that arena, you understand it, you get it, and you may not have a lot of time. You may not be like,

Kate OT (1:05:19)
Exactly.

Victoria (1:05:26)
they’re commenting on everything that they do, but you just click, just click like, and then when you’ve got a moment, just send a little voice note and be like, this is really cool, I hope it goes well. God, how much that means to the person on the receiving end.

Kate OT (1:05:30)
Yeah.

Yeah.

I don’t think people can compute

what people… every time a ticket sale comes through, promise you someone that’s in a small business is doing a happy dance. Every time somebody books a photography session or wants the prints from the gallery afterwards, it makes people do happy dances. I wish people could see all the happy dances that it makes people do because that’s what validation looks like when you’re on your own. You haven’t got your boss telling you, ⁓ you know great job, this is a really good… you know submitted this…

Victoria (1:05:44)
Mmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Kate OT (1:06:07)
presentation or whatever, you’ve got nothing, the only stuff that you’ve got is…

by the interactions that you have, the bookings you have, the ticket sales that you have, all from kind people taking time out of their day to say, I’ve just read that and although, I’ve got friends that aren’t mums that will contact me and say, I know that I’m not a mum but there was elements of what you wrote that really resonated with me and that can bring me to tears if it lands at the right moment because I go, thank God that this is…

Victoria (1:06:33)
Mmm.

Kate OT (1:06:39)
this is exactly what I wanted to get from that but if people just sit back in silence and often you you go on the school run or you go and meet friends and they go I saw you were doing this and I’ve seen you doing that and you go ⁓ so you’re watching everything and you’re like and you’re not just even scrolling by it you know enough about it to be reciting my own life back to me but you don’t like that

Victoria (1:06:51)
Yeah, you’re watching everything. You never like, you never comment.

Hmm. Yeah.

Kate OT (1:07:04)
That is the op- that has the opposite effect because you just think, goodness, like, is it that difficult?

Victoria (1:07:09)
But again,

no, it’s not difficult, it’s literally a tap. But again, acknowledging that that is their fear, that someone might see that they’ve interacted with a thing and make some sort of bizarre judgment on them. And I don’t even know what that judgment is, but I understand that that is what makes people social media lurkers, as opposed to social media interactors.

Kate OT (1:07:19)
Yes, absolutely.

million percent and

if we’re honest with ourselves and everybody is in the same way that people deny peeing in the shower I’m not gonna have it we’ve all been that person right we’ve all been that person at one point there are still things that

I will go past and there’ll be something that red flags in me and goes, that’s a threat. And it does take unconditioning ourselves to go, that is not a threat, I think they’ve written that bloody beautifully, I think they’ve conveyed that message really well. Maybe I wish that I’d written it myself that well, or maybe I wish that I was doing an event like that. That’s a me thing.

I am capable of sitting and letting that person know that that’s great. And I still don’t know what the red flags are, but I do know that we’d be lying to ourselves if we said that we don’t also have…

those deep rooted responses to things inadvertently because we’re not all going, like I’m not sitting here preaching to be like an archangel that just like literally spends all of my days sitting commenting on everybody’s posts and liking everything. I try as best I can, I’m trying to come off social media ironically, but I try and engage with as much as I humanly can but there will still be moments where that fails us and…

Victoria (1:08:32)
Completely, yeah.

Kate OT (1:08:57)
that we just have to recognise it and recognising it is the most important thing because we can’t change it otherwise.

Victoria (1:09:03)
Yeah, and actually I’d go a stage further. I’d say, recognize it, just pause and analyze it. And I definitely have those feelings because this is a baby podcast. know, I can go and look at Zoe Blaski’s mother kind Instagram and I’m like, Jesus Christ, you know. But she’s put in years, years and years and years and years. And she totally, and she’s just one of, could pick out so many people at various stages ahead of the game than I am.

Kate OT (1:09:14)
Mm.

Yeah, absolutely.

Victoria (1:09:32)
And actually what I have found really lovely is just having that instinctive reaction, thinking, God, they’re clever and I’m rubbish, because that’s basically what’s happening. And I’ll never be as insightful, as successful, as eloquent, as articulate, whatever it might be that they’ve just done that’s landed with me in some awkward way. And just being like, right, this is a muscle now. And I comment.

Kate OT (1:10:00)
Mm-hmm.

Victoria (1:10:02)
some elaborate praise every single fucking time because it makes me then it just dissipates the whole thing dissipates and I feel like that’s an act of kindness because as you say it doesn’t really matter what stage you are in the game like of course you just become more accustomed to the validation but it still counts and it makes me feel so great to do that and I highly recommend doing it.

Kate OT (1:10:06)
Yeah.

Victoria (1:10:30)
because yeah, fine, someone might see it and be like, God, they really went to town on, they’re like kissing that ass, whatever it might be. But it’s genuinely, but it’s genuine. Like I did have that reaction, but it takes the kind of the pang of envy and just translates it or transforms it into something really positive. And then it just becomes all about energy. you’ve just caught it and you’ve thrown it back into the universe and now it’s a positive ripple.

Kate OT (1:10:38)
That peachy bottom.

yeah

you’ve twisted it, you’ve gone I’m looking at what you’re doing I could feel threatened by that I could let this be like this big downward spiral where my self belief is affected but actually I’m gonna do for you what I would love somebody to do for me I’m gonna acknowledge what you’re doing right and actually I’m gonna feed off what you’re doing to remind myself why I’m inspired to do the thing that I want to do in the first place. Such a lovely

Victoria (1:11:06)
But I admire it.

Kate OT (1:11:28)
full circle moment but you have to catch yourself, you absolutely do. And reminding ourselves, coming full circle, that…

that success is not something that’s happened overnight. They will have also had their podcast or business or whatever in its infancy stages. We all have to start from somewhere and it’s so fascinating when you do meet these people and like, know, my industry is talking and communicating with people that are in this funny manfluencer world that we’ve created online and…

They’ve all, we’re all just walking the same path, just different, we’re just on different stages of it. We have all failed, we will all fail, we will all get things wrong. If we could share that a little bit more, so that people aren’t just assuming that it’s all, you know, roses and sunshine, yeah, rainbows and unicorns, then great.

Victoria (1:12:28)
Rainbows and unicorns, yeah.

Kate OT (1:12:33)
Like how powerful would that be? Lifting other people up, showing the space at the table, showing that we’re all getting it wrong behind the scenes in order to get it right, in order to work out what makes us tick, in order to work out what actually makes us progress. All in the while…

Victoria (1:12:35)
And yeah.

Kate OT (1:12:50)
building a community around us of people that get it. mean, what’s not to love about that? And yet, if as women we do the opposite and we keep our doors and guards up and we gatekeep information and we scroll past and we don’t interact for fear of competition or because it makes us feel a little bit good that they’ve not got…

you know, they’ve not got our support in that massive number that intimidates us, that’s an us thing.

Victoria (1:13:20)
Hmm.

Kate OT (1:13:22)
We’re stuck, we’re stumped, we’re cutting each other out, we’re actually inhibiting ourselves rather than creating space for true growth and connection and we can’t, the amount of people that I meet, know, go women supporting women and it’s all over their thing, I mean they’ve cut the hashtags down now but it would be hashtag women supporting women, hashtag women in business, hashtag mums supporting mums and I’m going, you’d meet them and you go, you’re not like that at all. But if we are, and if we can, catch ourselves.

It’s great, same as in the acting world, I’m still so lucky that I still do performance and voice work and all of that and I’m so, I don’t take that for granted for a second that I’ve been able to keep that ball rolling during motherhood but it’s the same in every industry like there’s people that will walk into a room and…

assert their authority and, ⁓ gosh darling I haven’t seen you since so and so and all of this because they just want to go just so you know I’m the big fish in this room but actually it’s no such thing really we’re all just at different stages in our little ponds yeah little fishes

Victoria (1:14:17)
You

We’re all just fish. We’re all just fish, aren’t we? mean, and

the repercussion is that we make these spaces where the success lives and the fulfillment and the reward, feeling that accessible. And I think if we can open it up and normalize failure, as you said, then more women.

Kate OT (1:14:41)
Hmm.

Victoria (1:14:48)
will feel able to take that brave action and take that leap and do the thing that means when they get to the end of their life, they can say they tried and they can say they failed and they can say at times they succeeded and it was fun. No.

Kate OT (1:15:02)
If you don’t fail, you do not grow. You cannot,

there is not any narrative whereby you decide that you’re going to do something and then you do it and it works. This just, it just doesn’t exist. And also failure is such a horrible word because it makes you feel like…

failure but actually it’s just information it’s just putting yeah you’re putting data in you’re seeing if it works and you’re getting a data response and if it doesn’t you go thank God I’ve got that data because I don’t want to pummel however many years into something that is going to fall flat on its face every single time it’s just data and when it hits it’s worth it but if we just go I failed I want to stop

Victoria (1:15:24)
Yeah, it’s data. Yeah.

Kate OT (1:15:47)
useless and if someone if we can borrow other people’s data and the same way the AI of like you said earlier is is fine-tuning that and speeding up that process if we can see someone else’s data Where it hasn’t worked out? That’s gold dust, but that doesn’t even mean we’re gonna use it to not using it for world domination or to take down their business

There’ll be other things that they might be able to learn from us and we won’t gatekeep it because in turn they didn’t gatekeep it from us. Wow, look at that. We’re all working together in harmony.

Victoria (1:16:18)
Yeah, exactly. It’s a beautiful picture that you paint if we can just…

slowly but surely unpick all of those messages that feed into the stories we tell ourselves about other women and about what we are capable of and what we can do in this world because actually we can do all sorts of fantastic things if we allow ourselves to and if we ask for help and if we give help and we all rise up together.

Kate OT (1:16:46)
yeah. yeah.

Victoria (1:16:54)
It’s gorgeous. I’m mindful of time, Kate, but I have one last question for you. ⁓ God, no, I loved it. I have one last question. So you’ve listened to the podcast. What would you say now to eight-year-old Kate?

Kate OT (1:16:56)
I know, I’m a chatter. Yes.

I would say first of all Kate your hair will grow do not worry about it. My parents used to… Mum if you’re listening to this I’m still harbouring resentment from the fact that my mum used to cut my hair like essentially like a black Annie where it was just like this halo of curls around my head I’ve got really inherently curly hair which you wouldn’t know but I always used to wonder will my hair ever grow long enough to weigh the curls down so I don’t look like I’ve been electrified. Anyway I would say

Victoria (1:17:13)
Okay. I feel like there’s a story there.

you

Hahahaha

Kate OT (1:17:38)
Kate, you are not too much. I have spent my whole life thinking that I am too much, that I am an overwhelming person. I’ve had friends, you know, tell me, you know, can’t expect everyone to do things the same way that you do them. I’ve always had a huge eye for detail and I suppose like borderline perfectionist.

But I used to just always think that I was too much. I once asked my parents if they paid my friends to be friends with me because I just couldn’t possibly ever understand why someone would want to hang out with me because I was just this big undiagnosed ADHD ball of energy that couldn’t finish a sentence and was terribly time blind and chaotic and there was lots of stuff going on in life and family and I would put on this whole act in order to never let people see me.

I spent my whole life just thinking that I’d never find my place and I’d never fit in and I just wish I could tell myself like you’re not too much darling like one day you will find your people and it might be in this great big vast space that we call social media that you don’t even know about now and

It might be that it’s friends that you don’t meet till much later on in life when you’re both following dreams that are aligned. But it doesn’t mean you’re not too much, it just means that you haven’t found your people yet and when you find them, honestly, you will be the happiest that you’ve ever been. You’ve just got to go through a little bit of an identity crisis first. ⁓ yeah, just you’re not too much. Stop telling yourself. I think that’s all I told myself, that I was too much and I wish that I could have.

taken that little narrative out of my childhood and my young adult years because it would have saved me a heck of a lot of heartache and anxiety.

Victoria (1:19:37)
I get it though. I do get it. I think I don’t think I necessarily told myself I was too much. I think everyone else told me. She’s very full on, isn’t she? Like, oh, right, okay, I’m full on.

Kate OT (1:19:45)
yeah, yeah, it… Yeah, she’s a lot. Just calm down,

just calm down Kate, okay, this is a bit tiresome now Kate, can we just sit down, can you put your feet down at the table please Kate, can you please just sit nicely, can you just wait until you… Okay, we’ve heard this, this is very long story, can we shorten this story a little bit? yes. And not just by family, but just…

Victoria (1:20:06)
In

the world, yeah, the world at large. Or what you ever hear.

Kate OT (1:20:06)
You believe what you’re told, right? And as a kid, it’s so hard to say,

⁓ what you overhear, what school says. In school, I was blacklisted. I was never allowed to be in the performances because I never did my homework. had another ADHD thing. And I just thought, you know, you’ve got it all wrong. If you said you can be in the show if you do your homework, it would have been done early. Yeah, exactly. But I just always, yeah.

Victoria (1:20:12)
Mm.

What a punishment!

Yeah, let’s go for the carrot over the stick in that situation. Yeah.

Kate OT (1:20:33)
always thought that I was too much. I used to believe I was unlovable for that reason. had exes tell me that no one will put up with me. But you do. You find your people. So here’s to everybody finding their people, to raising their people up, to not being embarrassed because that’s all in our own heads. And not being afraid to get things wrong because it’s human. We’re all humans.

not too much.

Victoria (1:21:04)
Exactly.

No. Okay, well in the spirit of finding your people, where can people find you?

Kate OT (1:21:11)
Eee well, I am on Instagram primarily. My website is mrsot.com so any events that I’ve got coming up will be on there. Otherwise I’m at underscore mrs.ot on Instagram. I try and do deeper meaningfuls, deep and meaningfuls on the grid and then a little bit of giggles and fun in the stories and on reels just for a little bit of light relief from the the dark tales and woeful moments.

Victoria (1:21:38)
It’s.

It’s a gorgeous place to be, your Instagram feed. I like hanging out there. And this is it. There are days when it’s fun and you’ve got lots of anecdotes to tell, probably your kids doing something crazy. And there are days when actually you just, you’re out and you’ve got a story to tell about how it wasn’t one of your best days. And that’s it, the colour.

Kate OT (1:21:45)
Thank you.

I would honestly say for anybody

that’s having just a day or just needs something, not to be too self-promotional but I promise you there’ll be a post for that so if you do just ever need validation or you’re sitting at 3 in the morning and you’re angry at your husband or you’re frustrated with family or you’re annoyed at yourself or you’re questioning yourself, grab a cup of tea, have a little scroll.

and hopefully a couple of words that I’ve written in a very similar time or in a very similar looking pair of shoes.

might just give you the cuddle that you need. That’s why I do it and if you ever do need to have a chat my DMs as everybody knows that knows me are always open. So please don’t be a stranger if something resonates and you need to delve into it more. I write about it because it’s life and I’ve lived it and therefore I’m more than happy to talk about it so please do come and find me Mrs. OT and we can have a little chin wag. Be friends, expand that community.

Victoria (1:23:07)
Exactly, because it’s a community that needs expanding and the self promotion is entirely justified. I absolutely insist. No, we all do. You know, that’s why we’re… we’re still warming up. I’m almost not awake. No, I absolutely insist that anyone listening goes immediately to Kate’s Instagram and follows her and has a little scroll because it’s, like I said, it’s a great place to be.

Kate OT (1:23:14)
I still find it very uncomfortable to do but it’s the 2026 thing, still January, we’re still doing the resolutions.

Victoria (1:23:36)
what you’re building is. I hate this word so much, but it’s really special and we need more of it in the world. So thank you so much, Kate, for coming to talk to me. I feel like this is such a cathartic conversation where we have put the world to rights and I really hope that people take something away from this because we’ve dug into some really, really deep stuff on why we feel and behave the way we do and we all do it, but actually we can change it.

Kate OT (1:23:41)
well thank you.

Victoria (1:24:06)
We can all just flip the script and start raising each other up and actually then the world’s our oyster.

Kate OT (1:24:15)
It all starts with ourselves, it all starts with noticing our own red flags and going, why do I feel like this and how would I like to feel and if we can just start with that.

Victoria (1:24:17)
Yeah.

Kate OT (1:24:26)
the whole narrative flips. yeah, I’m much better at writing by the way than speaking so I do apologise to whoever’s having to edit this. I’m much better at putting pen to paper. So if you’re thinking, I really understand what she’s trying to say, I wish she could say it more concisely. That’s where my, that’s where the substack and the writing on Insta comes into play. I don’t waffle as much on there. I do waffle but not quite as much as this. But thank you as well. Thank you darling. I love the podcast too. Honestly I meant when I

Victoria (1:24:52)
I love a waffle. no.

Kate OT (1:24:56)
at the beginning I think we need these conversations we really absolutely do but in a way that feels tangible and not and I love listening to big like huge celebrity guests that are doing that have got these massive empires but there are many empires too and being a mum and starting a business is no mean feat so thank you for facilitating these conversations and I can’t wait to listen to more

Victoria (1:25:22)
Good.

Lots more to come. I’m amazed that I’ve kept it going so long, but now I absolutely am not about to let it go. So many amazing people to talk to and these stories just fill me up. And I feel like I’m making a new friend every week, whether they like it or not. Amazing. Well, thank you again. It’s been just exactly what I needed.

Kate OT (1:25:30)
No you’re not, don’t do it girl.

You are! Well I’ve got you back. I’ll be clicking and sharing and liking so I’ve got you back my girl. Don’t you worry.

seat up.

Victoria (1:25:53)
Thank