The Therapy Edit - One Thing with Rosie Nixon on how reinvention is always possible

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

In this inspiring guest episode of The Therapy Edit, Anna speaks to Rosie Nixon, former Editor-in-Chief of HELLO! magazine about her One Thing; how reinvention is always an option.Following her own recent professional reinvention, Rosie's honest words will be a huge boost to everyone out there feeling like their current work just isn't working for them anymore.Rosie lives in Surrey and, after a thrilling time as Editor in Chief and Editor of HELLO! magazine, she decided it was time to super-charge her career and set up her own Consultancy. HELLO! is now one of her clients and she enjoys flexing her creative muscles for other brands too. Rosie is the author of three novels, The Stylist, Amber Green Takes Manhattan and Just Between Friends, plus the Be Kind book (Harper Collins) and has two more books in the works. She enjoys the variety of a portfolio career which includes coaching clients and recording her podcast, plus mothering her two lively sons!You can learn more about Rosie and take a look at her books and work on her website here.You can also follow Rosie on Instagram here.

Hello and welcome to The Therapy Edit with me, psychotherapist, mum of three and author Anna Martha. Every Friday, I invite one guest to tell me the one thing they would most like to share with mums everywhere. So join with me as we hear this dose of wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's guest episode of The Therapy Edit. I have with me, the wonderful Rosie Nixon. Now, Rosie was the editor-in-chief, an editor of Hello magazine,

and Latterly Hello's Creative Brand Ambassador for 15 years. She has also held senior positions at other titles that we know and love, such as Gratzier, Glamour and Red. And in 2017, Rosie won the British Society of Editors. Now, this is such a coveted editor of the Year award. So that is amazing. and what I love when I read Rosa's bio was that she started out as the editor of Barbie magazine

which is obviously having a massive moment right now and I'm yet to get my husband to watch that I can't wait to watch it again I don't often watch things twice so what a great kind of foray into editing now she recently and I can't wait here I've just been grilling her now on this and I had to click record so I didn't get all the gold out

before we hit record but she has recently a month ago decided that it was time to supercharge her career and she's set up her own consultancy. And now hello is one of her clients, which is, I mean, such a testament to the relationship that she built with him over those years. Now she mixes many of her work passions

and utilizes her skills as a media expert, author, coach and broadcaster. So all of that experience, Rosie, what a massive shift you've been going through. So welcome. Thank you, Anna. Yeah, great to be here chatting to you. So how are you today?

I am good, yeah. I'm still sort of in the early days of setting up my new working routine. So I'm having to be really focused, actually, which is quite testing for somebody like me who gets very excited about things easily and then can end up spreading themselves thinly. So I'm having to keep the focus on what I really want to do at this stage of my career. I relate to that. I relate to that a lot.

And I guess when you're working at Hello so long, You probably were just, you know, in a routine and, you know, probably had a diary full of meetings and places to be. And were you in the office a lot or? Yeah, we were hybrid working. So we were in and out, obviously, yeah, previously, you know, before pre-pandemic, we were in every day in a busy newsroom. And even during the pandemic, it was very busy in my bedroom still putting a magazine to press every week. So I am missing that sense of being part of a big team, really missing having a PA as well. Yeah.

Also, having to get my head around accounts and all the stuff that I suddenly have to do for myself has been quite a big thing. But it's so it's been a real learning curve, actually, the last few weeks. But I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying having a greater understanding of all of those bits. I've been drinking this special mushroom tea as well that's meant to help with focus. Don't keep it a secret. I'd love to hear more about that.

I know. It's very good. Kelly Hoppen told me all about it, actually. So I'm hoping that that's going to help with my focus today. I'm going to look that up. I'm going to look that up because it's kind of, I think sometimes when you have a diary that you're in charge of more, it's, yeah, it's that accountability yourself, isn't it?

And that kind of discipline of, I need to get these things down at this time because no one's going to be on my back necessarily about it in the same way. No, that's it. And actually, I am finding my diary is a very useful tool actually, putting in those things that I need to do as if they're a meeting to say, Yes, time blocking has changed my life. Exactly. And it really does work.

In the same ways, I'm getting a lot better about being more compassionate towards myself as well and time blocking those non-negotiables around your own well-being. Brilliant. Yoga class I really want to go to and, you know, prioritising those things as much as the meetings. Yeah, because they can get edged out otherwise. And actually in reality, they fuel you to do the other stuff well. Yeah, especially with creativity. Yeah, I'm trying to have.

finish a novel at the moment as well. And that, I mean, that takes, you need to be feeling in the right head space to be able to sit down and feel creative. And I know without a doubt that if I've just been for a little run or got outside for a bit in the morning, I will sit down and all of those, that oxygen will be like a bubble bath in my brain. I'm going to be more creative. So it's doing those things, putting them in the diary because you know they will then set you up for success for the day ahead. Yeah. I think that's such a great way of thinking about it. I love the fact that, you know, in the Olden Diary, and I think in some other countries, Sunday is the first day of the week because we're meant to work and live from a place

of being topped up and slowing down. And actually, we are going to be far more productive if we put those things in for us, whereas actually often we make the mistake of putting them in at the end and then they never happen. Absolutely. Yeah. And then your time gets squeezed and they go to the bottom of the priorities list. Absolutely. So I would love to hear, Rosie, with all your experience.

experience along the way of just doing these incredible, having these incredible roles and now kind of, yeah, doing your own thing. What is the one thing that you would love to share with all of those listening? Well, this is a real hot topic for me at the moment. And actually, I've had so many interesting conversations recently as I've been on this journey. And it seems to be something that's on the mind of a lot of midlife women or, you know, people of all ages too, but especially midlife as I'm finding. And that is that reinvention is possible. I think really it took me, talking in a career sense, a couple of years at least to get to where I am now, having made the decision to shift my career. But it was about having that little voice in your head persistently highlighting to you how you had changed as an individual during the course of your working life.

And I think I, like many out there, have been working pretty much nonstop since I graduated from university a long time ago now. I have had, you know, a fantastic career in magazines that I've loved every minute of and I've lived and breathed my roles at hello for 15 and a half years. And I have no regrets at all. But I'm not the same woman that I was when I started off in that career. And it took me a time to get my head around that and actually to be okay with it to actually think, yes, I have changed. My values in life are perhaps a bit different now. I'm not getting as excited by the things that I once was about that career. Also, the media world has changed so much. So no one job really stands still anyway. We all evolve with it. But it was really useful to me to have a chance to

sort of take stock of all of that and to work through it and do some deeper thinking about who I was now and what is important to me in my life. And that didn't come easily. You know, a lot of that self-awareness was born out of a very difficult time when I was on the brink of burnout over a year ago. Absolutely exhausted, felt overwhelmed by all the aspects of life that I was keeping all these balls in the air constantly. And I'm sure lots of your listeners will relate to that feeling as well. And I was actually forced to pause to stop. You know, a doctor actually said to me,

you need to come away from work for a minimum of a couple of weeks. It ended up being three weeks of work, during which time I did a lot of walking around the Surrey Hills, a lot of thinking, a lot of journaling, listening to all the podcasts, yours included, and also the Mail Robbins podcast. Amazing. You know, buying all the books on burnout.

But I felt nothing was kind of picking up bits of information along the way. But I felt nothing exactly spoke to me as a woman at this stage of my life. And there's no precedent been set for a lot of us midlifers who were sold the, you can do it all dream. And we can hold down these big careers and we can mother and we can go from, you know, our workout gear to glamorous events. and we can do it all, which is very exciting, enticing concept and one that I was fully bought into. But then I reached this stage of life when the demands of my children are slightly different.

I'm not firing on all cylinders with my career in the way that I once was. It's not, you know, really fulfilling me in the way that it once was. And sort of what do I do now, you know? So I did a lot of deep thinking around the concept of success. what it means to me now as a 48-year-old woman, and it's very different to what it meant to me 20 years ago. And that's okay, you know, number one, being okay with that. And I did a lot of journaling around my values and what was really important to me at this stage of life. And I really recommend that actually as a practical exercise for listeners to actually sit and to write what

success means to you. And it took me ages actually to get it exactly right in just a few sentences. And once I had that sort of honed and I began to be really ruthless about what was still fulfilling me and feeding me in my life and what wasn't, I started to build up this clearer picture of who I am now and be more in touch with my authentic self. And then I could start to put that into what I wanted my future working life to look like. And I had to do all of this, like all of us within the realms of the reality that we live in, because we've got financial commitments and mortgages to pay and also lots of commitments around our family. But I felt that I wasn't achieving a balance and it was having an effect on my physical health. So it was

time to stop ignoring that little voice that had been there in my head for some time and actually take the action. And honestly, I can't tell you how much happier I am now. I feel like I know who I am, and I'm really happy with who I am, age 48. You know, I'm actually looking forward to my 50s as this whole new chapter is awaiting me. And I have had the guts to make what felt like a very scary move in lots of ways. Because I think a lot of us as women, we feel as though we should be grateful and and actually yes everything was kind of fine on paper and if you looked at my Instagram squares it looked as though I was sort of sailing gliding effortlessly through life but actually the reality was kind of very different and you can still be grateful for so much

you know but also feel that really you're not in touch with the authentic you who you are now and that takes a lot of work to figure out yeah yeah definitely and it's amazing I mean, it sounds like you were really pushed into that place where you just, it wasn't sustainable. And it took a doctor to say, Rosie, this isn't okay. Well, it did. Exactly. The doctor had to kind of say that thing, because I could barely get a word out. I mean, I basically didn't stop crying for two weeks. And I think that it's a mixture of everything when you're in midlife. And it is very easy to sort of lump it all on your job. But actually, it was a number of things. It was also perimenopause symptoms. There's a lot greater awareness around that now and they can affect women in a whole

multitude of ways and everybody's different. But for me, anxiety and brain fog was a real issue. Anxiety like I've never really felt before around my work and just how I was going to get through the week. The changing demands as a parent with my kids growing slightly older now at 10 and 8, the demands are different. In some ways, I feel like parenting's only just starting because their needs are less physical in the day to day, but they need you there emotionally for the chats just to be around home a bit more. So it's like a melting pot of things that all come to light perhaps at one time. But my mission now really is to help normalize these conversations, to discuss things that have worked, to hear from experts on what

they recommend as well, and to help midlife women feel that there is very much a possibility to reinvent. And that doesn't have to be people from, you know, relating to my story and that having been in a career for a very long time, feeling very defined by it. And almost like, I didn't know who I would be if I wasn't editor of hello. you know, who, what is my parents? What can I do? And I should be so grateful that I've got this. And, you know, but feeling, look, it's not gelling with who I authentically am now.

But for other women, it might be being very defined as a mother. And, you know, I've taken that time to be there for their children. And then again, in midlife, when the children are getting older and they're leaving home, thinking, well, who am I now? How do I reinvent this part? So reinvention, yeah. applies to so many of us in different ways. It's so helpful. I think it's so permission giving as well, just to honour that bit of you inside that starts to notice that actually you're just something's not quite right or you're just a bit burnt out or this isn't

bringing you the same sense of, yeah, joy as to what it did. And sometimes, yeah, I think you're so right. We can just kind of, we just paper over that and think, you know what, I should just be grateful. I mean, the stuff we put up with in life, the emotional, roller coasters we just kind of sweep under the carpet or even the physical the physical needs medical needs that go overlooked because a we're just too busy to listen to ourselves and b we just think you know what i should other people have it harder or i should just be grateful or i should just focus on the positives and actually we need to being authentic is is the choice to listen to and give space to all of these different parts of ourselves and i yeah i just think it's really permission giving to say to people

this doesn't have to be it. It doesn't have to be it. It doesn't have to be it for the rest of your life. You might not know what it looks like, but this took two years for you to go from that one thought. It wasn't a fast process. It was lots of stepping stones along the way. And thankfully, you know, my employer was very supportive

because it can be very nerve-wracking beginning any kind of conversation around this with your employer. And so going about that again was about stepping stones because I was still figuring it out for myself as well. And there were so many things I absolutely love about my role at Hello. And thankfully, you know, I'm still editor at large. So I do still work for Hello and I still host my In a Good Place podcast for Hello, which is about well-being and gets, you know, means that I can have these kinds of conversations for people in the public eye, which I absolutely love. There was so much that I loved.

But other parts, I mean, I described it. to my boss actually and we sort of chuckled about it a bit. We called it our conscious uncoupling in a career sense, which was that phrase that Gwyneth Paltrow used when she split with Chris Martin. And it's such a good phrase because that to me exactly says it. It was consciously saying, look, this has been a really great chapter for, and you know, it's had its ups and downs and but overall it's been fantastic. But I'm just ready. I've evolved as a person. So has the business as well and it's time to sort of go our separate ways and that's okay because quitting is sometimes a thing you have to do to grow and move ahead into your next

chapter. Yeah. And I think just even knowing that there are, that there is a possibility and I often encourage clients and working with it just to feel really, really stuck in their job just to write their letter of resignation and just put it in a drawer, not even hand it over, but just to spark off that, wait a minute, I'm not stuck. no one's holding me here there are other routes they might not find them yet it might not be right now

but what would you say to someone who's listening to this thinking oh Rosie you know what you just sparked thought and me I'm actually not happy with how things are and it might be a habit it might be a relationship

it might be a job it could be you know anything really but what would you what would you say to them to kind of slowly start fanning that little flame of yeah well first of all I'd say don't

panic and don't do anything knee-jerk or immediate. Helpful. Really think stepping stones because the worst thing that we could do is just when we start to feel like that, you know. And one day to the next we might feel differently as well is to kind of call up your boss or actually write the resignation letter and hand it in and then think, what the hell have I done two days later? Because you want to wake up on the day when you do do that.

And there was a day when I did that at hello. but I knew absolutely 200% it was the right thing to do. And often something can push us slightly over the edge and make you feel like doing it there and then, but try to remember that you may feel differently in the weeks and months of car. So one of the most helpful things that I did was actually journaling. And when I say that, I'm going to say that.

Obviously, so my go-to to process the world is always words. But I did it, I didn't buy a, you know, big journals. Sometimes you will think you need this big leatherbound notebook by your bed and you must do it every morning and evening because that can feel like a chore or maybe not natural. I just journaled on my mobile phone. So in the notes section, I started a note which I entitled My Future and I've still got that on my phone. And I just started to put down there in lists the things that I absolutely loved and kind of what makes me spring out of bed in the morning, when am I at my best, what are the things that get me really, really excited around my work? And actually, you know, things around

my personal life as well, because it is all one, and I do think we have to look at our lives holistically like that. And then the things that were not feeding me so much anymore. And you have to be really, really honest with yourself, because sometimes the things that are not feeling you might actually be the main purpose of your job. And to actually admit that to yourself is really hard. Yeah. But it can be so liberating once you do and just put it down. So that for me, yeah, it was really, really helpful. And I'm writing that what my concept of success was now, like what a really successful work-life balance would look like for me. It's actually starting to visualize. If I could think about what my ideal work situation would be, what would that look

like? You know, how many days a week would I work? And what would I do on those days? And how would I be boundary? Just really starting to visualize it as real. And I've still got those notes on my phone and I refer to them often if I need a little reminder because we do all have days where you think, oh God, you know, it's feeling overwhelmed for whatever reason. And I can go back to that and think, no, this is right. I'm on this path. This is what I really, really want. So starting to get it down, I think, helps some clarity of thought. And then slowly bit by bit, you can start to make those, take those stepping stones towards that visualization of the working life you really, really want. So encouraging, just that, that encouragement

that you can, there can be change ahead. It doesn't have to be the way. it's always been because that's the way it's always been. It might have served you so well. You might have thrived and loved it. But maybe it just feels like the jacket just doesn't fit as well anymore. It's a bit, there's some restriction or there's just some sense of dis-ease when it comes to maybe your priorities at this point in your life because those change and shift along the way.

So that real encouragement. Yeah. So thank you. And also for those really practical tips of, you know, it takes time. You don't just handle your notice and off you go. Because there are things that need to be put in place and maybe ideas that need to be grown and an identity perhaps that needs to have the space to be challenged and to feel like, oh gosh, if I'm not doing that, then who am I and what might that look like and what does success mean to me? So, Rosie, thank you so much for your wisdom. I mean, sometimes I just wish these podcasts were like triple the lengths so I could grow you even more.

Your Instagram page, you know, that's where I learned about this shift for you and I was really excited when I saw that. um your instagram page you share really openly and honestly on there and then i mean yeah i mean all the words that you put out i'm just excited to see um where where this journey takes you and as a little finisher i would love to hear work completely aside what is one thing that you do that makes feel good yoga aside as well because we know that one yes oh thanks for your nice words well aside from like eating a whole packet of after rates on my own because dark chocolate of mince is my favourite. I would say, I mean, we moved out of London a couple of years ago and that was a major reinvention or sort of reset moment for me too. And getting outside into nature went on a really

lovely long six-mile walk with my husband at the weekend while the kids were in the drama club. We were literally sprinting actually at the end to get back to pick them up in time. Yeah, so the beauty of the countryside. So getting outside, that has really, and, you know, I figure things out. If something's on my mind, I know that if I go out for a walk or a run, I'm just in a such a bit. Even if I haven't completely figured it out, I'm in a much better mindset. So that really, really works for me. Brilliant.

Yeah. So getting out and about and encourage everyone, maybe when they're listening to this podcast or to listen to it again, just to absorb it. Absolutely. But thank you. Thank you so much, Rosie, for your wisdom that you bring and just that encouragement that I know will just be unlocking people's just the thought of just like, oh, what might that look like? You know, if I was to change things. So thank you for that encouragement. And it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Therapy. And if you have enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and review for me. Also, if you need any resources at all, I have lots of videos and courses and everything from health anxiety to driving anxiety and people pleasing. They are all on my

website, anamatha.com. And also, don't forget my brand new book, Raising a Happier Mother is out now for you to enjoy and benefit from. It's all about how to find balance, feel good, and see your children flourish as a result. Speak to you soon. Thank you.