How can you find growth when the world has already dictated what you should become? For many women, this is a common dilemma. There is an on-going struggle to fit within the so-called standards of the world that we bury what it is that makes us happy. Debrah Mowlem, the founder of Business Ladies Forum, inspires women to forget being normal and just embrace their weird. In this episode, she joins Melanie Parish to share what is behind that philosophy and what she is currently working on to help support women enjoy life, be happy, and live their purpose.

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Listen to the podcast here

Forget Normal, Embrace Your Weird With Debrah Mowlem

I’ve been thinking about leadership and I’ve been thinking about how conflict aversion gets in the way of honest dialogue. Honest and open dialogue creates these amazing feedback loops where organizations learn and thrive. There may be friction, but that friction helps hone a well-crafted product, idea or process. When leaders are conflict-averse and they bury that conflict, the organization misses out on that opportunity to have constructive, exciting honing happen of everything that everyone is working for. These conflict-averse leaders need to understand that conflict aversion can serve them, but they want to put it aside when it isn’t in the best interest of the organization. Someone who’s conflict-averse probably isn’t going to create lots of problems and things exploding in the organization. When there is something that needs to be talked about, they need to figure out how to exercise the skill of stepping into the fire of being a calming force in the fire to help people share their stories, ideas, disagreements more fluidly because the organization becomes better for that discourse that happens.

I’m here with Debrah Mowlem. She had the most amazing childhood growing up in a small village in Zimbabwe, Africa. She always knew she was a writer and she was a very curious child who questioned the unfairness of culture and religion on women in the village. She stopped school after high school and worked hard to start a business, selling agricultural products in a market, growing a business to employ over twenty people. She moved to the United Kingdom in the ‘90s and thrived as she learned about business and started one. She published her first book in 2007, and now has a total of seven books, including two business books. She was a number one international best-selling author, two times over from those two business books. Business coaching and public speaking became part of what she gives back to the women she left in the village. She founded the Business Ladies Forum, a platform for women to support, network and learn business together. She discovered a way to overcome her own limitations, and now she helps women in the same situation and helps them realize their dreams and their purpose in life.

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Debrah, I’m super excited to have you on my show. It is so nice to see you. How are you?

I’m fine, thank you. Thanks for inviting me. I’m really glad to be talking to you.

I want to dive in and ask you how you’re experimenting in your own life and your own work?

With all this locked down, I’ve realized I can’t ignore online anymore. I’ve yet to be serious about working from home, and all that software that helps people to work from home and still be productive and still be able to be monitoring what they’re doing and how many hours they’re putting in. To communicate with them, the world has been a bonus because all of a sudden, all these networks have opened up and I’m talking to people like you, people across the world, otherwise I would be too busy in my own world.

Can you tell me some of the upcoming projects that you have? You do so many things.

I’ve got a workshop that starts on the 1st of February 2021. It’s called Evolve and Resolve. It’s for people to evolve their businesses and to resolve all the business problems they had in 2020. I’ve got a new book coming up. It’s a funny title called F Normal, Embrace Your Weird, like forget being normal, F normal, embrace your weird.

What does that mean, ‘embrace your weird?’

It means I’m different and I know I’m different. In order to succeed in my life, I’ve been blessed that I’m weird like that. I’ve seen many people who try so hard to be normal, but they’re abandoning their own true selves, and trying to fit in with what the world thinks is normal. What is normal anyway? My weird is my normal, and F that.

I’ve heard people say that privilege is being able to define normal.

You might be right there.

I think there’s something cool about what you’re talking about because if you embrace your own normal, your own weird, then you’re elevating who you are. It transcends that privilege and marginalization as well.

Working with the women, I’ve realized many women struggle to be normal, to be what the world, the community, the culture, the religion deems to be normal. Some of us are just born outside that box. In order to be good at what you do to enjoy life, to be happy, you have to accept the fact that you’re not like everybody else. You are you. That’s what makes you unique and that’s what makes you exciting. That’s what makes you produce and live your purpose.

Forget Normal: It’s hard to stand out because people fear to be unaccepted people, fear to be unliked. We like to be loved too much, so we tend to do accepted things.

What do you think the impact is on people when they embrace their own weird?

They become happier. People become more productive and people are happy. When somebody accepts that they want to dye their hair purple and fuck anyone, they become happy. They don’t care what people say about their purple hair. They woke up out and check their purple head and be happy with whatever you decide to do. Never mind that somebody thinks, “That’s not normal. We don’t do things like that.” Who’s we? I’m talking about me, just me, not everybody else.

I love that authenticity of people just being who they are. It seems so simple and it’s powerful at the same time.

It’s something that we take for granted, especially the women I work with. I talk about women because they’re my main audience. It’s hard to stand out because people fear to be unaccepted people, fear to be unliked. We like to be loved too much, so we tend to do accepted things.

I’m curious, you have a relationship with women across the globe. Do you see cultural differences? Is it more in one place than another, or is this across all countries that you see this effect?

It’s more in third-world countries. Culture is still very much in place and it’s the culture that sometimes you look at and think, “That’s not very nice on this gender. That’s not very nice on this tribe. That’s not very nice on this race,” but most third-world countries still have that culture in place. Not as much as first-world countries where people have decided, “I’m going to live my life, I’ll forget about you.”

How are you experimenting in the work that you do? One thing we talked about before, and I want to bring it up because I think it’s super cool. One thing I heard that you were experimenting with was doing shorter podcasts because many of the women that listen to your podcast don’t have great signals or don’t have unlimited data, don’t have a Wi-Fi signal. Can you say more about that and how you’re providing resources?

I was talking about I’ve met them even shorter because I’m doing 60 days of one-minute videos. In that minute, I’m trying to give as much content as possible on one subject. It’s one subject, one-minute video each. The people I work with, most of them don’t have enough data to download an hour-long video, an-hour long audio. These videos are bite-size, tidbits, I call them.

When we talked about that, it gave me insight into your audience and how different they are from other people’s audiences. It made me think about how we all have audiences with constraints in business. There’s some constraint, and how do we think about those constraints? I love what you’re up to. How can people find you Debrah?

I’ve got links on Facebook. I’ve got a few groups going on Facebook and I’ve got my website, Ask-DM.com and DebrahMowlem.com.

It has been such a joy to have you here. I can’t wait to see your F Normal project. I’m fascinated by that. It’s great to have you.

Thank you so much for having me. I did have a nice time talking to you.

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I loved having Debrah on my show. I think that real curiosity about the needs of our clients is something that we can learn from her. It’s the ultimate feedback loop or pre-feedback loop to think about what our clients need before they know they need it. I love how she shortened her podcast episodes to be 60 seconds, because when you’re dealing with an audience that doesn’t have the data to download hour-long episodes, you start to deliver value in small chunks, so that they can afford to get that value from you. What else should we be thinking about with our clients? How should we think about their constraints and what they can get from us if we do bite-sized pieces? Go experiment.

Important Links:

• Business Ladies Forum
• Facebook – Debrah Mowlem
• Ask-DM.com
• DebrahMowlem.com

About Debrah Mowlem

Debrah Mowlem Had the most amazing exciting childhood growing up in a small village in Zimbabwe, Africa. She always knew she was a writer and a very curious child who questioned the unfairness of culture and religion on women in the village. Stopped school after high school and worked hard to start a business selling agriculture products at a market, growing that business to employ over 20 people.

She moved to the UK in the 90s and thrived to learn about business and start one. She published her first book in 2007 and now has a total of 7 books published, including 2 business books and was a number one International Bestselling Author two times over. From those 2 business books, business coaching and public speaking was born out of the need to give back to the women she ‘left in the village’. She founded Business Ladies Forum, a platform for women to support, network, and learn business together. Www.businessladiesforum

Never one to sit down Debrah runs a few businesses as well as business coaching women in a bid to try and help as many women as possible. Www.ask-dm.com and on a few social media platforms.

She is a podcaster: https://soundcloud.com/businessladiesforum and two others for different topics. She discovered a way to overcome her own limitations and now she helps other women in the same situation and helps them realize their dreams and their purpose in life.

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