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Patsy quit her job. Susannah quit the city. Now they’re on a quest to find the path through the wobbly middle of their careers. This podcast is for every woman who’s asking “What now?”.
Hosted by Susannah de Jager and Patsy Day, The Wobbly Middle features interviews with famed city superwomen, dazzling entrepreneurs and revolutionary midwives and doctors who reveal what they’ve learnt through their own wobbly middle experiences.
[00:00:05] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Season two of the Wobbly Middle, a podcast about women reinventing their careers in midlife.
Hi Pats.
[00:00:12] Patsy Day: Hi Susannah.
[00:00:14] Susannah de Jager: How's your wobbly middle?
[00:00:15] Patsy Day: It's okay, I'm a little emotional this week. My son is writing exams, and I suppose when there's that kind of pressure on your children, we so want to protect them and it's just something he has to go through and he'll be fine. But I'm finding it's something I have to go through too, and then there's also the vast amount of drugs I'm taking to keep the hay fever at bay.
How's your wobbly middle?
[00:00:42] Susannah de Jager: So it's very interesting. We've actually just finished this amazing conversation with Joy, and what came through was so much honesty, but one thing she talks about so movingly is her sense of identity, and it really made me think of something I've done as a practice, which is looking at your female archetypes, and this is a Jungian mode of thinking. But for anyone at home who's trying to see what pulls them towards their true core and center, I highly advise looking into it and just to give you a taster of what the four primary female archetypes are they are the mother, the Amazon or the Warrior, the lover, and the mystic, and those core beliefs that are formed by our experience are very important as we move through later stages of life.
[00:01:40] Patsy Day: I don't know anything about those, so I'll be looking them up afterwards.
[00:01:44] Susannah de Jager: I love a good online quiz there, so I'm a sucker for these things.
[00:01:48] Patsy Day: So a little bit about Joy Foster. She really is incredible. What really struck me in our conversation with Joy was her resilience, her adaptability, her gift to find the gap and to solve the problem. But what also comes through is a really deep sense of service when it comes to empowering women to find their footing again in the workplace.
[00:02:10] Susannah de Jager: And that's very much formed from her own experience as you're about to hear. But taking a step back to give those, listening a bit of context on Joy. She studied economics, went into stock trading, had a job that her father in particular thought very highly of, but she didn't necessarily love that much.
She was, in theory completely set up and could have stayed on that path, but instead, and as you'll hear this is typical of Joy, she chucked it in to go and pursue her dream of going to the Olympics. Then in another twist, she became a journalist, met her husband in a whirlwind romance, and became, in her own words, a trailing spouse.
It's really this phase of her life that informed where she now finds herself. Her experience in her adopted country of Switzerland was not wholly positive when she became a married woman and she realized that perhaps her corporate life was behind her.
Through this experience and realizing that others would be in the same situation, Joy became an accidental entrepreneur, founding Tech Pixies, which upskills women in modern tech to help them return to the world of work, change careers, or start a business. Here's Joy.
[00:03:24] Patsy Day: Hi Joy, thank you so much for coming on our show.
[00:03:27] Joy Foster: I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
[00:03:28] Patsy Day: We share a common mission to encourage women to seek out fulfilling work and at Tech Pixies you say something pretty powerful about the link between confidence and our choices over our futures, and I wonder if you could tell us a little about that.
[00:03:48] Joy Foster: Well, I believe that confidence is something that we lose if we're not actively making choices to keep it right. So, unintentionally as we get older and we focus on other people on mainly our children or our elderly parents, we lose a bit of ourselves. And I think it's really important that if we want to gain confidence, we first make the decision that's important to us and then start to take action steps towards it.
So I really think in that sense, confidence is a choice, and that we can lean into a life that is full of a vision for what we would love to achieve, and we can take little bite-sized action steps, I call them five minute power moves, every day towards that. You know, before you know it, things start to happen in a way that you never could have imagined, and that's quite special. So, if I were to really sum it up, it is that confidence is a choice. There's certain steps we need to take in order to bring it back into our lives.
[00:04:44] Susannah de Jager: Could you illuminate on some of the steps? I want to hear what the five minute power moves are. They sound great.
[00:04:51] Joy Foster: Yeah, well the first step is actually to craft a vision. I think you need to have a vision for your life. It's really easy when you have young children or you're newly married. The vision becomes about everybody else. That's a common thread that we see with women who are in midlife, is that it might have been 10 or 20 years since they last thought about themselves and their dreams.
For me, I fell in love with my husband, who I've been married to for 16 years, and when we got engaged, he was living in Switzerland. I was living in America. I had a completely different plan for my life,I gave it all up to get on a plane and move to Europe, and I've been here almost 18 years. I was, what we call, a trailing spouse. That's not an uncommon story, okay? Maybe the moving across the world is uncommon, but that idea of, well now my family's more important than I am, is not uncommon.
So I had to refind myself in that and one of the beautiful things that I've learned about myself is that I will bloom wherever I'm planted. That's sort of a personal mantra of mine. So whether I was an exchange student to France at 15, or I was a year abroad student in my junior year of University in London, or whether I was living in Switzerland or living here. I just take the idea that I will bloom wherever I'm planted and I will build a community around me, and I'll thrive within that community. That's been a real gift for me.
But I think it starts with a vision. So really getting clarity on what you would love for your life, and I like to look at three years from now, because often when people try and create a vision for their lives, they are thinking about in the next month or in the next year. That can be, you know, if you're trying to generate a million pounds in a single year and you've never generated a hundred thousand pounds in a single year. It might be better to have it out asa three year vision, because then your brain can't really shut you down.
That's sort of what we work with is crafting a three-year vision, and then once you've got that vision, we really want to create what we call snapshots. Dream achieved moments like how am I going to know when I've accomplished this? Right? So, someone who might be writing a book and they, so their vision is to get a book published. Well, one of their dream achieve snapshot moments is going to bethe book cover being created. It might be having the physical book in their hands. It might be a book launch party, right? Making that vision come to life in bite-size pieces where you're actually talking about what you're wearing, who you're with, what it smells like. If your vision is a house by the beach, you can smell the sea water, you can feel the sand. So really bringing it to life. So having the vision, bringing it to life, and then making a decision for it. This goes back to choice. Saying, that is what I would love for my life, and really deciding for it. Signing your name to it.
There's a famous story of Jim Carrey, who wanted to make $10 million in acting and he wrote himself a check for $10 million for services rendered to acting, and he had that check in his pocket for a long time. It was, actually the movie Dumb and Dumber, that he got his first 10 million. He was the first actor to be paid 10 million for a movie, and it was for Dumb and Dumber, which I find fascinating. Making the decision and putting it down in writing. Signing your name to it. Putting the date on it. Really committing to yourself.
Then the third step really is those five minute power moves. What step can I take every single day in the direction of this dream? Those five minute power moves are magical. When I was starting Tech Pixies, I had no money whatsoever, gotta remember I'd given up everything, moved across the country, had these two babies. My children are 15 months apart. I was full on mom mode andall the savings we had, we spent on my husband's education to get an executive MBA at Oxford.
So I had absolutely nothing to start my business with. My five minute power move was to call someone called a network navigator at the Oxford LEP, which is the Local Enterprise Partnership, and to tell them I had an idea and what the idea was and could he help me? And it turns out that particular morning that I called him, his name was Tony Hart,a grant had come across his desk and he said, you should apply for it.
And literally we applied for it. We got 16,000 pounds and it was a grant. I didn't have to pay it back, and that's what launched Tech Pixies, and that was a decade ago. So those five minute power moves are really magical.
[00:09:00] Patsy Day: Joy there are so many delicious morsels in what you've just said, including what sounds like a whirlwind romance. But you've done so many different interesting things starting back.
Your first job was a trading assistant. But then you chucked it all in to pursue your dreams of going to the Olympics.
What made you brave?
[00:09:19] Joy Foster: That's a great question.
[00:09:21] Susannah de Jager: By the way. For those that can't see at home. Joy is wearing a jumper that says, be brave. I feel like that's quite important to call out the visual prompting that Patsy and I are looking at right now.
[00:09:32] Joy Foster: I know that's a great question and I think now that I'm getting older and I have more time to reflect on the last 20 years, let's say.I recognized two things. One, I didn't realize I had ADHD, so I was undiagnosed ADHD. Anyone who's listening to this can relate to that, that explains a lot of your life once you figure that out.
So,my ability to get engaged after 10 days and move countries in five days and start my whole life all over again. That's very ADHD. So part of my bravery comes from ADHD for sure. The other part of my bravery, I think came from the fact that I was very young when my dad died. I was 21 years old.
I mean, not young in child terms, but still 21 is quite young to lose your father, and he was a very central figure in my life. I thought, wow, you know, life is really too short. I've gotta do what I love, not do what somebody else would love, and my dad really loved my job and fair enough, he paid for my education and he was really proud of the work that I was doing. But there was a part of me that it didn't fit who I was. So I think, you know, losing my dad and realizing like life was too short, and then the ADHD those were two really big factors.
I think I also had patterns of bravery in my life. I was a Rotary exchange student at the age of 15 to France. I'd gone to Russia. It was the first time outside of the country when I was 13.
So I'd done a lot of things that other kids my age weren't doing. When I was a teenager I went to boarding school for my senior year. I went to three different high schools over four yearsand I also grew up in a house where my biological mom had skied into a tree when I was four. Was brain damage her whole life, and so I had a complicated family makeup where I had my bonus mom and my dad and my biological mom who was in and out of the hospital. If you look at anyone who has gone on to do really great things, a lot of times they have had a tremendous amount of turmoil or conflict or challenge in their life.
I certainly had my fair share of that, and I think that very much affected the way my brain functioned, and when I got my ADHD diagnosis and I got a brain scan, they talked about how emotional trauma can be just aseffective in making your brain functioned differently as physical trauma, right?
That's a lot of things to happen in a short period of time to someone. I think we all have the capacity to be brave. When we face adversity, going through it is one of the best ways that we can build up that bravery muscle and certainly was the case for me.
[00:11:57] Susannah de Jager: Thank you, Joy. Gosh, for those of you, again, at home who can't see us, I have been putting up my hand in acknowledgement at so many of the things that Joy just shared with us. So making decisions fast moving country. I've just moved country, getting engaged fast, going to multiple high schools, and a late diagnosis of ADHD, which I also had recently.
So I recognize so many of those things you are talking about Joy. Thank you. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how you bloomed when you moved to Switzerland, because I think that's a really beautiful part of your story as well.
[00:12:37] Joy Foster: Yeah, I mean, Switzerland's really interesting. First of all, as an American, no Americans know where Switzerland is. So as soon as I said I was going to Switzerland, They were like, oh, you're going Sweden? No, I'm going to Switzerland.
The other thing that was sort of funny about Switzerland was, I'd gone to France and I spoke French, relatively fluently. I've lost a lot of that fluency now, but I can still speak French.And so I thought, well, this is great, you know, Switzerland, they speak French, I can speak French, and turns out we were in the heart of the German speaking part of Switzerland. So not only did I go to a country where I couldn't speak the language, but I had to learn the language that I really struggled with.
So I was very lucky. At the Olympics in 2008, I managed to, secure a job at Deloitte, in the marketing department in Zurich. So I sort of, was able to go to Switzerland with a working visa for six months, which was actually really fantastic. But what happens often in Switzerland is when you get married, they just assume that you're going to stay home with the kids and, kids in Switzerland, don't eat lunch at school. They come home during the day and you have to feed them and it's very much structured to keep a woman at home in Switzerland, and women didn't get the vote until the 1970s.
Long story short, my contract ended the week I got married, and I think that was very much deliberate in the sense that they just assumed that, because I was getting married, I no longer needed a job.
So I started going through recruiters andI went into a recruiter's office. I was getting primed up for a bank job in Zurich using my previous degree in economics and my previous skills as a trader and about halfway through the interview, they were said, okay, we think you're ready to go. Do you have any final questions? And I said, well, actually, one thing that no one's told me about is how does maternity leave in Switzerland work? I was newly married. We'd been married for just a couple weeks. My husband was a decade older than me. You know, it was something I was thinking about is how do I plan my career around my family, or how do I plan my family around my career?
And that all ended in a very abrupt finish because he stood me up, walked me to the back of the office, not even out at the front of the office, he walked me to the fire escape and he basically left me at the top of the fire escape and said, I can't help you. I had to walk down those metal stairs, clank, clank, clank. Feeling my heart sink into my stomach and recognizing that my corporate career probably was over. There weren't a lot of options anyway for someone who didn't speak German fluently. So I remember sitting on the train and just thinking, I cannot be the only person that this is happening to.
[00:14:57] Patsy Day: It's so hard to think that this was happening in the last decade, the last 15 years. It seems like something from the fifties.
[00:15:03] Susannah de Jager: No, there's data on women in the workplace that Switzerland is one of the worst places still in the developed world.
[00:15:09] Joy Foster: Yeah, and that's how I became an accidental entrepreneur because I then set up a website to help other people like me with a friend from church. That was my first entrepreneurial venture.
[00:15:20] Patsy Day: You, seem to have developed enormous amounts of resilience from your home life growing up, and also as a sportswoman, you need tons of resilience.
[00:15:30] Joy Foster: Yeah, I think, resilience is a byproduct of going through traumatic events and coming out the other side.I was very, very lucky. I had a bonus mom and still have a bonus mom who,was the epitome of resilience. she raised two girls that weren't her own, and she really instilled in me that idea that I could do whatever it is that I wanted to do. When I got the Rotary International Exchange opportunity, it was my bonus mom that had to talk my dad into letting me go, because she knew what an opportunity it was going to be for me.
And I remember when I told her that if I got in the top 25 at the National Championships, I would quit my job and train full-time for the Olympics. This ispre Athens Olympics in 2004. And,I got it. I placed exactly 25th.
I remember in my mind very vividly, finishing the tournament, finishing 25th, driving my car back to where I was living and calling my mom to tell her, that I was going to quit my job to train full-time for the Olympics, and she supported me 100%. My dad was gone, and she could have said, you know, that's not a very responsible thing to do or whatever, but she said, I support you fully 100% and she backed me financially. She was there at the Olympic trials and so I think it helps when you have a partner in believing and that's something that I definitely had with her, and still have with her. People that believe in you, it matters so much. And I think, you know, my husband is a huge partner in believing, my children are huge partners in believing.
So I think what I've learned over the years is that you need to build up those partners in believing people who believe in you because, that helps the resilience build up a lot easier.
[00:17:02] Patsy Day: Well, we send your mom lots and lots of love and she sounds wonderful. You had a wonderful woman who supported you and you have gone on to support so many other women.
Do you want to tell us a bit more about what you do with Tech Pixies?
[00:17:17] Joy Foster: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think I got the best of both worlds, right? So I had two wonderful moms, a bonus mom, a biological mom. I will say, having watched my biological mom struggle for so long, that also inspired me that when I built Tech Pixies, we made sure that we had opportunities for people who could pay their fees, and opportunities for women who couldn't pay their fees.
We have a percentage of women around 45% at Tech Pixies who are,on universal credit or come from ethnic minority backgrounds or are over the age of 65 or come from an LGBTQ plus background, and then there's another 55% that don't have some of those challenges and are able to fully fund themselves.
So I wanted to really close the confidence gap. That was the original goal. There's this huge confidence gap between men and women when it comes to work, and we also know from the research that we did, 45% of women who took a career break, they found that it damaged their career, right?
And the number one thing that they struggled with was technology and how fast technology was changing while they were out of workplace. So one of my goals was really to introduce technology to women, and the byproduct of that ended up being confidence. So we have three different programs. One is a social media program, one is a life coaching program, and one is a business coaching program.
The main program that we've run for the last decade is our Social Media Mastery program, where people can get a social media management certification and they learn how to use five of the major social media networks. They learn how to put together a plan to execute that plan, to report on that plan.
There's a huge amount of confidence that comes from doing it. We just had someone, such a crazy great story, this gal named Lauren and she came into the program and she decided she was going to raise money and run the London Marathon and raise money for charities that had helped her. She'd lost four babies. She got pregnant, several times, but she was never able to have a baby and when she turned 50, she finally have a living baby, I should say.She decided that she was going to let that part of her life go and embrace a new chapter in her life. The way she wanted to do that was to celebrate by doing this marathon. Well she put together a plan, execute that plan, and she ended up raising over 3000 pounds for these incredible charities that supported her while she was going through these bereavements and really was able to go confidently into the next chapter. And that's just an example of someone who really benefited from that.
We had another gal who was a math supply teacher and she lost her job in the pandemic and she came through our social media program and she decided to set herself up as a tutor and she created a guide for parents who had children with maths anxiety.
That guide was shared a couple hundred times, and off the back of that, she launched her tutoring business. A couple years later she had enough money to buy her own house. This was a woman who was on universal credit and now owns their own home. That social media course is not about social media. It's about really discovering who you are and taking off your invisibility cloak and becoming visible.
[00:20:12] Patsy Day: That is incredible work, Joy.
Can you tell us a little bit more about funding? Because you say you had some grants and it sounds like the first grant fell from the sky like manner. But you've applied for subsequent grants. How do people find out about grants and how do they become more skillful in applying for them?
[00:20:33] Joy Foster: That's a great question. I think one of the things is to tell people what you're doing. If you don't tell people what you're doing, people don't know and they can't help you. Especially when the idea is new, the more you talk about it, the more it solidifies, you know? And I think you have to be careful who you talk to, you want to make sure you're talking to your partners and believing.
You want to be talking to people who are going to big you up rather than tear you down, I think it's really important. We call people who tear you down, we call them sacred friends. So they're trying to keep you safe, and if at one time I misspelled the word sacred and I wrote scared, and I was like, well that's exactly what it is. A sacred friend is a scared friend. They're scared for you, so they'll tell you not to do the thing you want to do because they're scared it won't work out for you, right? So, you really have to identify who am I safe to tell my dream to?
But I did talk about it a lot and this friend of ours, said, oh, have you heard of UnLtd? So there's an organization called UnLtd, U-N-L-T-D, and they have a series offunds. They have a get started fund, they have a Grow It fund,and we ended up getting the Start it fund and we ended up getting the Grow It fund, and they ended up giving us, several grants over the years. But then we ended up getting a social enterprise loan from them as well. So there's lots of different ways I think, also the Local Enterprise Partnership will know about what grants are available to you.
What's also interesting is I now do some work as a CMO for a software company and we're applying for awards and grants, and one of the tools that they use, and I didn't even know about it, and this is the benefit of going back and working in an office or being around other people, is you get to learn all sorts of cool technology that's there. There's something called NotebookLM and it's connected to Google and you can put in your website, and you can put in anything you've written about your business in the past or any previous awards you've applied for, you could put all these resources into NotebookLM, and then you can takethe criteria that the grant company has given you.
You can copy and paste it into NotebookLM, and you can say, using the resources that I've given you, please can you help me fill out this application for this award? And literally within like 30 seconds,and this is leveraging ai. You can get a very well crafted, well-written, well structured awards application or grant application. And obviously, you can go back over it and you can fine tune it and take out the parts that don't work and keep in the parts that do work. But AI tools have made things so much easier and faster, but I think at the end of the day, you probably won't get most of the grants you go for. I think the loan for Starbucks was applied for 235 times, before it was granted. You just have to be resilient and you just have to say, okay, I'm not going to let that one rejection bother me. I'm going to go to the next one and the next one and the next one, and eventually someone will say yes. I have a mentor that says no one can say no a hundred times, and I think that's a really good way of looking at it. Our business has been built on a mixture of grants, loans, investment, personal savings and personal sacrifice. You name it, I've done it all.
[00:23:15] Susannah de Jager: I think that's really so important for people to hear because coupling what you've spoken about a lot, which is that confidence, or lack of confidence, with the almost inevitable rejection rate on things like grants. It's very important that people realize, no, it's not a bad idea necessarily, and if you've got that feeling in your gut that it's a good idea and you've got your champions and cheerleaders who broadly agree with you. You do sometimes just need to keep plugging, and I think this can be a more female trait, but I'm not saying that it can't be male as well, we are prime to kind of come through our academic careers and you're used to being patted on the head and people sort of saying, yep, good job, and when you then try and do something on your own and outside of those formal structures, it can be very disconcerting. That experience is going to be very different and so I think that companionship in that moment for anyone listening is very important. So thank you for sharing.
[00:24:18] Joy Foster: I would add one thing, and that is with grants. If you don't get the grant, talk to them about why and reapply because very often if you reapply, you're more likely to get it. They're already familiar with you. They recognize that you've made changes. The 150,000 pound loan, we got maybe four years ago, I think that we got it because we didn't get it the first time. I think it's really important and same thing with the Grow It Award, which was 15,000 pounds. We didn't get the first time, but we got it the second time. If you're going for a grant, get to know the grant people and really talk to them and then don't be afraid to apply a second time or a third time. That's where the magic is.
[00:24:54] Patsy Day: Thank you. That's a very helpful insight.
You met Prime Minister Theresa May a couple of times to discuss women's needs when they return to work. What did you highlight then? How many years ago was it? And have you seen any changes in that period?
[00:25:12] Joy Foster: Yeah, that's an interesting question. We had space that we were borrowing from Grant Thornton, and while she was on the campaign trail in 2017, she came to see what we were doing. It was phenomenal to have a female prime minister, a living female prime minister, like, you have to remember, I come from a country where there's never been a female president. I would love for us to have a female president. She's not the first female prime minister and she certainly, won't be the last, we obviously had a little bit of a blip in there.
[00:25:40] Susannah de Jager: I wondered if you were to reference that. Oh God, the letters!
[00:25:44] Joy Foster: Well it was very interesting, you know, having met both of them. I was invited to do a small business commerce conversation with Liz Truss when she was involved in the Treasury, and they're completely different people in terms of how they interact with you and I really felt that Liz was very arrogant and didn't listen to what I had to say.
Whereas I felt that Theresa May really listened, and she asked really great questions and Ifelt listened to and I felt that she heard what we were trying to do, and she certainly raised our profile, just by coming to visit us. Our website got more hits in one day than it had in a whole year because she name dropped us on national television. It's interesting, government has in some ways, huge capacity to do something, also have huge hand ties.
Trying to get government funding, like we've never been able, in a decade, we've never been able to get government funding to fund the people that we're getting off of universal credit. So we are saving the government money by helping people get off universal credit because we have a very good success rate in doing that.
But we can't get the government to give us money because we're too small of an organization. We don't have enough financial security for them to say, yeah, we're going to give you a big contract to roll that out. So we've applied several times for government contracts and not got them.
Which is disappointing because we're doing amazing work and can really change things. it's a mixed bag because I think we went backwards with Boris Johnson, women wise. I think most people know that. Venture capital now is less than two p on the pound. So there's been a huge backward step.
And obviously, a Trump administration does not help that at all.
What I can say is that even if we've gone backwards, that doesn't mean that we can't still fix things, and individually, women who are running organizations who are helping women can pair up with other organizations. Like I do a lot of, work now with an organization called Noon, which is run by Eleanor Mills. So we're building a course together to help women to find their voice and to share their stories called Rebrand Yourself.
I'm confident that things can turn around. You see amazing stories, I'm not a Kardashian fan per se, but you look at the work that Kim Kardashian is doing and other really powerful women like Reese Witherspoon. I look at the work that they're doing and I think this is not over yet. You know, Michelle Obama, Jamie Kern Lima, Sarah Blakely, they're doing huge amounts of work in the US but even in even homegrown. We've got Debbie Wasco, we've got Sherry Coutu, Sam Smith we got women who are doing really amazing things to build that infrastructure to help support women, even if the government's not willing to do it.
[00:28:11] Patsy Day: You've mentioned a wonderful list of women entrepreneurs there. Is there a specific female entrepreneur that you look to for inspiration?
[00:28:21] Joy Foster: Oh yeah. There is a woman that I look to for inspiration, that is, Dame Stephanie Shirley. If people don't know her story, she's now in her nineties, I believe. I had a private dinner with her when she was in her late eighties, and we shut down the House of Lords. We were the last people to leave the House of Lords. and I just got to bask in her presence for an evening. She was on the Kindertransport. She survived the Nazis and when she came to this country, she was separated from her family, and when she was reunited, she never really reconnected with her mom.
She sort of bonded with her family that had raised her here during the war. She had a son who had severe autism and she ended up building a business. It was a software business and she employed mostly women, and they were working from the kitchen tables in the 1960s. It then became a business that is now worth, 3 billion pounds.
They were the first people to program the black box that went into the Concord. She talks a lot about, when she was in business so starting out there was fear of being sexually assaulted or even raped if you were in a room with a man privately trying to do a business deal.
She said you couldn't have a bank account without your husband co-signing because it's the 1960s, and she said that, no one would take her seriously when she wrote the name Stephanie atthe end of a document. So she changed her name to Steve. People would get letters from Steve and then they would do business with Steve, not realizing that Steve was a woman.
I have a huge amount of respect for her and I've read her book,Let It Go, and she's a fascinating case study in entrepreneurship and she was doing it way before anybody else was. I really admire her and look up to her.
[00:29:52] Patsy Day: Last question that we ask all our guests. What advice would you give your younger self?
[00:29:58] Joy Foster: Oh, that's a great question. I would tell my younger self that it's all going to work out.
It may not work out the way that you thought it was going to work out, but you're going to go on an amazing adventure you know, and cherish your youth. That's the other thing I would tell myself because I think young girls spend so much time in the mirror not liking their bodies, and then, as they get older, they recognize how beautiful they were when they were younger. And so just, I think I would say to her, you know, you're beautiful, you're strong, you're powerful, you're resilient.
You've got a gorgeous life ahead of you, and you're going to love it. So get ready for the ride.
[00:30:29] Patsy Day: Thank you so much, Joy.
[00:30:30] Susannah de Jager: Thank you, Joy. I've really, really loved listening to your story.
[00:30:34] Joy Foster: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
[00:30:36] Patsy Day: Thank you for listening, for sharing your stories, and for being part of the conversation.
[00:30:41] Susannah de Jager: New episodes of The Wobbly Middle are released every other week. Please follow us and leave a review. It really helps others to find us.