When I launched Monday Hustle, I’d bought into the idea that if a young woman quits her job to forge her own path, it's inherently feminist. The responses I received to this decision, and my subsequent branding and marketing, definitely followed the same vein: break the glass ceiling, blaze your own trail, they said - so, before I'd learnt about systemic workplace issues; before I understood why the idea of hustling at all costs wasn't necessarily that positive; before I'd figured out how I might bring other women with me; I started working towards my own individual success. You see why my idea of feminism might have been a little misguided..? 

Of course, regardless of gender, there are a tonne of cultural forces and influences at play, and no individual can expect to understand every invisible force that shapes the decisions we make or the way we present - all we can do is do our best with the information we have. Even with the best of intentions, while our businesses, visions, marketing and branding might seem feminist in appearance - sometimes, they could be anti-feminist in practice.

The person whose work kickstarted my journey to start unpacking this stuff was writer and feminist marketer, Kelly Diels - who happens to be today’s guest! As part of her work, Kelly writes about some of the damaging marketing strategies that women in particular are taught to use when we’re building businesses and why they’re not always serving us - nor the communities we hope to help. In this conversation, Kelly generously chats to us about a phrase she coined called the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand, or FLEB. She explains to us reasons why we should think twice before buying a course by Tony Robbins... She helps us understand why marketing tactics that many female-lead online businesses and brands use aren't always serving women - and, she also explains how we can step into our power and create the type of culture we want to be a part of.

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To keep exploring this topic visit Kelly's website for a library of articles and resources. There, you'll also find information about her feminist marketing coaching, courses and workshops. Don't forget to sign up to her newsletter and follow her on Instagram. 

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Transcription

Kelly Diels: We’re always culture making, every single moment, right? If we’re in a conversation and we don’t check someone when they say something sexist or racist or homophobic, we were culture makers. We allowed an unjust culture to flow. So that means we have enormous personal power at every single moment in our life to decide what kind of culture we want to make. I want to make a culture of justice. 

Lucy O’Connor (intro): You’re listening to Selfie Reflective, the podcast that scratches beneath the surface of social media. Each week you’ll hear from a new guest who presents us with a different perspective on the status update quo based on their background and experience. I’m your host, writer and creative, Lucy O’Connor. For three years I ran a personal brand, which ended because of a conflicting love/hate relationship with social media. 

After learning that I was not alone in that feeling, I launched Selfie Reflective, a space where we can explore, unpack and critically reflect on the technical and cultural issues that our social media landscape presents together. Selfie Reflective is brought to you with support from InternetNZ. 

It’s been quite confronting to look back on my time running Monday Hustle and realise that my work wasn’t really doing much for women’s progress. I’d bought into the idea that being a young woman who had quit her job to forge my own path was inherently feminist. And the responses I received to my work and decisions definitely followed that vein. 

Break the glass ceiling, blaze your own trail, fake it til you make it, they said. So without really considering the systemic issues around the workplace, issues with promoting the idea that to relentlessly hustle is to succeed, or really thinking about how I planned to bring other women with me, I got to hustling for my own individual success. 

Now, I can’t be too hard on myself because I know part of this was due to a lack of literacy, a lack of understanding, a lack of education around feminism. None of us can be expected to know everything about the way the world works, nor how many of our decisions are influenced by the status quo or cultural climate. None of us can blame ourselves for being motivated to chase a misguided sense of empowerment. We can just keep learning, keep pivoting and keep doing our best with the information we have. 

As we’re about to start unpacking, even when we have the best of intentions to run businesses that lift and inspire other women, while our branding, vision and associated marketing might appear feminist on the surface, it could actually be anti-feminist in practice. The person who kickstarted my journey in learning about this stuff was writer and feminist marketer, Kelly Diels, who happens to be today’s guest. 

As part of her work, Kelly writes about some of the damaging marketing strategies that women, in particular, are taught to use when we’re building businesses and why they’re not always serving us, nor the communities we hope to help. In this conversation Kelly generously chats to us about a phrase she coined called, ‘The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand.’

She discusses her idea of culture making and culture remaking. She explains to us reasons why you should think twice before buying a course by Tony Robbins and of course, she helps us understand why the marketing tactics that many female led online businesses and brands are using, aren’t always serving women. 

If you’re brand new to this stuff, I’d recommend grabbing a paper and pen, if you can, because this episode might change, not just your marketing strategy, but your life. Enjoy the show. 

Lucy: Kelly Diels, welcome to the podcast, thank you for joining me today. 

Kelly: Lucy, thanks for inviting me to be here. 

Lucy: Of course! Let’s dive right in. What do you mean when you say ‘the marketing tactics that aren’t necessarily serving women?’

Kelly: A lot of people I work with identify as healers and professionals who are trying to create change and are coaches and a lot of what they’re trying to do is facilitate really deliberate decision making on the parts of their clients. And for people to make really powerful sovereign decisions about their lives rather than reacting to social conditioning or limits that other people have placed on them. 

And yet the mainstream marketing and selling tactics that we are taught to use are all about some conscious triggers. And so we are usually in business to facilitate sovereign, conscious, deliberate decision making and yet we’re taught marketing strategies that leverage unconscious triggers. So our marketing ends up being exactly the opposite of the intent of the work that we’re doing. 

And as a result, a lot of the people in my world end up feeling really uncomfortable about marketing because there’s a friction between the systems that they’re trained to use, which are just the mainstream default systems that everyone is trying to use, and how they feel about the world, how they feel about their principles, how they feel about their clients. So, there ends up being a tension between their principles and the marketing strategies. 

Lucy: Wow, I discovered you, Kelly, because of something that you’ve coined ‘The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand,’ or FLEB. 

Kelly: Right. 

Lucy: Would you mind breaking that down a little bit for us? 

Kelly: Sure, it’s totally related to what we’re talking about here. So The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand, for me it’s really patriarchy. It is the good girl that we are all trained to be and trained that if we perform it appropriately, then we can get the things that we want in life, right down to basic respect and rights and love. What The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand is in a marketing sense, is the way that we’re trained to leverage lifestyle online in order to show that we’re leaders. 

So what I mean by that, is when we’re looking on stage at a women’s empowerment conference, who is on stage, it’s usually a tall, thin, professionally pretty person with professionally waved hair, presenting in a very sort of conventional way. Basically like Ivanka Trump or career Barbie. And that is part of the way that we’re taught to market. Like we’re supposed to show up pretty positive, showing pictures of our beautiful children and our beautiful lives and that’s how we establish ourselves as leaders. 

And I just think that’s like old patriarchy in a new model and that’s not really a system for success that’s leading women anywhere new. 

Lucy: So how has this come to be a thing, or has it just always been a thing and has social media kind of hijacked this image that we all ascribe to? 

Kelly: I would say it’s always been a thing and what social media has done has turned ordinary women into editors and media makers. So what I mean by it’s always been a thing, there’s always been this narrative about the angel and the house in Victorian times and the 50s housewife. There’s always been an image of what the perfect woman is and how that’s a system for success in our world. 

If only you are thin enough, pretty enough, white enough, smiley enough, positive enough, you’ll get everything you want in the world. So it’s always been a thing that the limits placed on women and the script that were supposed to perform has always been a thing. What social media has done, has turned us each into editors and creators and media makers and so now we are putting those images out there and trying to be those images in order to build our businesses. 

Lucy: Oh, it’s scary! Kelly, can you give us some examples of what we might see showing up on our feeds that represent this female lifestyle empowerment brand or some of the messaging that we might see? 

Kelly: So one of the messaging that we might all be familiar with is the ‘keeping it high vibe’ messaging, which is really another version of the man telling you on the street to smile. Right, women are always supposed to be positive. Only the ‘keep it high vibe’ message comes from other women and usually in sort of spiritual circles. So the relentless pressure for women to always be positive is part of that messaging about what it is to be an appropriate women, who is allowed to take up space in the world. 

Some of the images that might show up, you’re gonna see different things in different worlds, but basically that, let’s say, I think it’s 68% of women in North America are a size 14 or larger, but that’s not what we see in our social media feeds. We’re going to see even women who are a size 14 or larger posting images of very thin women on their social media, right? And we’re going to see lots of skinny, bendy, white ladies in extreme yoga poses. 

And we’re going to see people doing things on the beach in a midriff bearing top. So we’re not going to see sort of representations of body diversity and women of different sizes on social media. And then we’re going to start, those of us who don’t fit into that mould are going to start feeling like there’s something wrong with us and we’re not allowed to take up space. 

And I hear that all the time from women entrepreneurs is that they’re hesitant to get photos of themselves and put professional photos of themselves out on their social media because they don’t look like what you’re supposed to look like as a woman entrepreneur or a woman in the public eye. And so they sort of hide themselves and don’t market their businesses because they don’t fit into that formula.  

Lucy: Why does this model of success or model of image, how does that hurt people who kind of fall outside of it or don’t ascribe to it? 

Kelly: Well, if you fall outside of it, how do you perform that formula? Right? So Audre Lorde said there’s this thing called the mythical norm, which is a white, straight, heterosexual, middleclass or wealthy man. And everyone who is not that thing is not the norm. And so everyone who is not that thing then has to perform a role to earn their space. Like we’re sort of inherently considered defective and that’s the message we get in social media and the message we get in mainstream media and that’s the message we get from our politicians. 

Like we’re all special interests, we’re all marginalised identities, we’re not the mainstream, we’re not the norm. And so we then have to earn our space by being the model minority or the perfect woman. We have to earn our space because we’re already not right in that sort of mainstream messaging. I think you could also look at what we already know to be true. So black people will tell you that they have had to be twice as good in their careers to get half as far and women will tell you the same thing, that they’ve had to be better and more talented and more qualified than a man at the same level. 

And so we’re always having to overcompensate in order to get access to things we’ve been deliberated excluded from. So that’s where that performativity comes in. We know that there’s bias against us and so we have to show up flawless and therefore we have to perform, what is the ideal of our identity?

Lucy: Wow! So I’m used to seeing words like ‘Superwoman, Boss Babe, [yaz?] Queen,’ whenever there are, you know, something, I don’t know, someone has made a massive achievement or a career pivot or looks incredible. But why are these kind of words problematic? 

Kelly: Well, I mean yes, ‘queen’ is problematic if you’re white because it’s an appropriation of black slang. So that’s problematic in that space. But things like Boss Babe, I have such mixed feelings about because I love the impulse, right, the celebration of another woman’s power and brilliance and talent and competency. Like I love that! I want us to be all about that. But what irritates me about things like Girl Boss, Boss Babe and things like that, is it’s a modifier. 

If you say Girl Boss, female CEO, things like that, it’s like the thing is still, a boss is still something other than a woman. You have to marry it to another term to make it describe the woman. And so I really hate the phrase ‘Girl Boss’ for example. I’m not a girl boss; I’m just a boss, right? You don’t need to modify it, I am that thing. But when we have to modify it, we’re still implicitly saying a boss is something other than a girl. 

Lucy: When I was running my personal brand, Monday Hustle, that’s what I was kind of trying to embody. I’d quit my job and I was charging ahead and blazing my own trail and doing all of these things that you know, I guess I wasn’t feeling seen in my 9:00 to 5:00. I wasn’t feeling like I was reaching my potential and all of those things. 

So I quit my job and started to signal the idea of what I thought I wanted and it was only until about three years in that I realise that the messaging that I was perpetuating, that hustle life and telling your story and faking it til you make it, was actually a problem because of the systems that were against me, not necessarily because there was something inherently forward with my character. 

Kelly: Oh, that’s the absolute truth! Like that’s the truth and that’s what I want to point out. There’s nothing inherently wrong with our mind-sets, with our talents, with our competencies. What’s wrong is that people are bias against us. That they aren’t taking our talents and skills seriously, that women are generally performing an extra shift of domestic and emotional labour. 

We are over taxed and overwhelmed, those are the things that are the problem. And I made this point to a group that I work with, this week, so until I read Lean In in 2013/2014, I didn’t know that you could negotiate an opening salary. Like when you had a job offered to you, that you could negotiate that salary. Now, I have actually been told that I had a money mindset problem about money. That I wasn’t willing to ask for enough and I had these limiting beliefs about money. 

But I didn’t actually have a mindset problem; I had an access to information problem. And the reason I had an access to information problem is because I grew up poor and working class and there was no one in my world who could ever have told me or taught me that you can negotiate an opening salary. Everyone I knew were labourers or domestic workers and you took the wage that was offered to you. It wasn’t negotiable, so how would I possibly have known that except that, except that I had read it Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. 

That was a major Aha! moment. And once I knew that, I actually was in the middle of negotiating, like a job search and I ended up negotiating a job salary and got $8,000 more. But I didn’t have a mindset problem, I didn’t have a money story, I had an access to information problem because of my class position. And so I guess that’s what I’m trying to point out. There was nothing defective about me; I grew up in a certain identity where I couldn’t possibly have had that information. 

And that’s what I want other folks to know, is we aren’t internally defective, we don’t have these psychological problems. There often isn’t anything inside of us limiting us. There are external circumstances limiting us and in a way that’s great news because it means we can get together and we can fix that because there’s not actually anything wrong with us. The system is broken, we aren’t broken. 

Lucy: I mean I guess it becomes really difficult when all of the marketing rhetoric that we hear about, is women, is that idea of success, that embodiment of aspiration, that is still very much the norm. So tell us about how marketing tactics kind of work against progress for women, collectively? 

Kelly: So let’s think about one of the ways that women have been discriminated against and limited in our lives and it with this imagery that says, if you’re not thin and small and young, that you are not worth anything. Right? That a woman’s primary worth is her physicality and her appearance and her beauty and her femininity. That’s been true of all of patriarchy and that is very limiting because it means as soon as you’re like older than 30, your worth in the world declines. 

It means that if you are an intelligent person and you don’t want to be subservient to a man, then your worth in the world is going to decline. It means if you are not heterosexual, your worth in the world is going to decline. It means if you’re fat, your worth is going to decline. If you’re black, if you’re queer, if you’re trans, your worth is going to decline. 

So, that is a problem, right? The objectification of women is a problem. It is a limit to our limits, it’s a source of pain and it’s a source of oppression. And so if then we in our businesses go and create images that objectify women and play into that narrative and even serve ourselves up for that objectification, then we’re actually reinforcing discrimination against ourselves, even as we’re trying to profit from it. 

Lucy: But Kelly, it feels so good when someone (laughs) like your post, an outfit you’re rocking or your makeup, I mean how do we discern between feeling really good because we’re actually feeling really good or feeling really good because we are so used to receiving that external feedback and validation, whether it’s on social media or in real life or because of the opportunities that come our way? 

The success metrics are very real and social media, if we look at a post of me with my back to the camera, with a blanket over my head recording this podcast versus an image of me looking amazing going to an event, we can very quickly see the different types of feedback that each post garners. So as an individual struggling with this (laughs) how do you kind of undo all of this? 

Kelly: Well, I think one of the things we need to do is look at other possibility models. Are there people out there building brands, having successful businesses on their own terms who are not doing that? I have lots of clients who have 100,000 followers on Instagram. I have lots of people in my world who I can look to and say, they’ve built a body of work across 40 years and now they’re cultural icons and they didn’t go around getting likes for a bikini post. 

And of course there’s always gonna be icons out there, like Kim Kardashian who are building brands and empires off of their looks. And even that’s complex because I actually see Kim Kardashian doing some really useful and important work in the world around [prism of 0.18.49] abolition work. But that’s not the only form of success available to us. 

There are many other people building brands, publishing books, getting famous and doing really great work in the world who are not doing that. So we kind of have to open our imaginations and look for those possibility models. 

Lucy: Hmm, absolutely. 

Kelly: And I guess I want to point out that deviating from those mainstream norms and those tactics doesn’t mean that you’re now going to starve. You can be really, really successful doing your own thing on your own terms and often that can be the source of the success. So I know, for example, for a very long time I was performing The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand. That is what we are trained to do. I didn’t even know any other way. But when I woke up and saw what was going on and I changed my marketing tactics, my list tripled in three months.

My income tripled in the 18 months and I had never had the kind of traction and success that I was having using, doing things on my own terms, using tactics that were different. So I just want to sort of, there is this idea that if we deviate or that if we don’t put up really attractive pictures of ourselves, if we don’t perform, you know, white femininity, that we’re now not going to be successful. That’s just not the case 

There are other ways to build things that are very successful and that actually align with what you want to do. And I actually think that’s the reason that it becomes easier to grow is because you’re not ashamed of your own marketing. When you love the way that you’re showing up, when you are in complete integrity with your marketing and your imagery, it’s really easy to share it fluidly and consistently and enthusiastically and never feel embarrassed about putting a post-up or afraid to press ‘go’ on an email that’s marketing because you’re proud of your marketing. 

Lucy: So where did this framework that we all operate within begin? Why is it so attractive for women to kind of live under this guise of empowerment and aspiration and success with or without out? And like why is that the norm that we’re so used to? 

Kelly: I asked a question a few years ago of people in my social media audience. I asked them to look at the people they were following on social media and I said, are all your leaders and thought leaders, are they white? Are they pretty? Are they thin? And if so, why is that? It’s the way that humans are built. So we respond to certain signals because it signals to us that someone is a leader. 

So if someone displays wealth, we implicitly, on a subconscious level understand that they have more power than us and so we pay attention to what they’re saying because we picked up that leadership signal. It really was just wealth, but subconsciously we translate that. It’s the same with female beauty. If we pick up the signs of female beauty, implicitly, subconsciously we interpret that as leadership and power. And so we are sort of naturally picking those signs up on a subconscious level. 

So what we’re picking up are the signs of oppression and privilege or status and lack of privilege. So we’re picking those things up and we naturally follow those things because we’re trained to look for who are the authorities. And it’s really not even just trained, it’s like that’s how human conditioning works. So we’re just like naturally looking for those signs and in our culture, which is this sexist, racist, capitalist culture, those are the signs. 

Lucy: Yeah, it’s really tough isn’t it because I guess going back to that feedback thing with social media as well, the people who are perpetuating this female lifestyle empowerment brand, they might not have ever heard that this is problematic or it could be damaging or they’re not serving their audience or their customers highest, most authentic level. Like they think they are. What are some action points we could take to undo this narrative without being judgemental? Putting aside all of our jealousy and envy and all of those things, how do we kind of start to undo this? 

Kelly: I think you’re absolutely right and I don’t think that a whole lot of our biggest, most famous women entrepreneurs who I would classify as Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brands, I don’t think they sat down and were like, hahahaha, let me be evil and exploit my audience and contribute to women’s oppression. I don’t think that’s the case and I certainly know before I figured out the damage of this narrative and these tactics, I didn’t think I was doing that either. 

And what I think is actually important is that we build our social analysis. So like the more we are aware of how patriarchy works, how white supremacy works, how different forms of oppression work, the more that we can pick those things up in our environment. So basically I’m saying we have to build our social analysis in order to be able to spot these things and then to see how our behaviour is playing into things that we might not actually support. 

Lucy: I liked something you said that a lot of people would feel really distressed to learn, that their ideas area actually undermining feminism because so many of those women on social media identify as empowered feminists who are supporting, lifting up other women. So it is really, it’s a tough landscape and I would love to hear your take on people like Marie Forleo or Tony Robbins, who are people that a lot of these women look up to, buy courses from, and men as well. But I mean, are those types of role models, those big business individuals, success, you know, purporters are they under this framework as well? 

Kelly: I would argue, and I have written essays about this, and I wrote this, I wrote essays about Tony Robbins in particular, before he was accused of all the sexual misconduct that he was accused of. 

Lucy: Oh! I have to catch up, oh my gosh. 

Kelly: Right, so check out BuzzFeed, there are several articles about him being accused of sexual misconduct. And I wrote essays about my concerns about his ideology before those came out because I could see the signs in what he was teaching. So he teaches this gender binary that says, women are essentially chaotic, impulsive, feeling, sensual, they love to dance, they love dark chocolate, that’s just innately who women are. 

And men are logical, ordered, linear, active, sensible, he literally, in a Date with Destiny he teaches this theory of femininity and masculinity, which is not that afar off from what we are all trained in on a daily basis. And he says that in order for women to be successful, they need to tap into that sensual, disordered, chaotic nature and just really sort of surrender to that nature and men need to be more masculine. 

And so that binary is patriarchy. Whether or not you spiritualise it, whether or not you put divine language around it, it is patriarchy and it’s literally the theory of everything that’s wrong in our world. And why women have eating disorders and why there is sexual violence against women and why there is discrimination and why 90% of CEOs are men, because of those ideas that men are naturally suited to a particular kind of thing and women are naturally suited to another kind of thing. 

So that language and those ideas, even if they come wrapped in this spiritual language and people try and say it’s empowering, it’s still again, just old patriarchy in new bottles and it’s not helpful. And it doesn’t even really acknowledge that there are genders other than male and female. That there are trans folks and there are gender non-conforming folks that completely erases them from view. 

So, I have written about his gender ideology and in fact one of his main influencers, Warren Farrell is the grandfather of the men’s rights movement. So the anti-feminist movement, Warren Farrell has been a huge influence on Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins has blurbed his books, has had Warren Farrell speak at his events and they have a long, decades long thought collaborative relationship and were friends. 

So I was warning about Tony Robbins philosophy and how damaging it was, even though so many women are trained as coaches in his tradition and go to his Date with Destiny and take his trainings and then translate them and deliver to other women. And do that under the umbrella of empowerment. That ideology is not empowering. It is anti-feminist and it’s not good for us. 

So I was warning about Tony Robbins in particular for a long time and then when he was accused of sexual misconduct, I was not surprised. I saw those signs a long time before those claims came out. So Marie Forleo, I think she is an incredibly substantial person. I think she delivers an excellent programme. A lot of people, I would even say most of the people who come to me have worked with her and then that’s where they learn how to do online business. 

And she really does teach the fundamentals of online business brilliantly. And also, she has at times, like in 2014, said some things that were, in my opinion, not terribly positive, not terribly empowerment and they were jokes and we can let them go and it was also six years ago. So everyone grows and evolves, so I can let that go. 

But I think is damaging, this isn’t necessarily Marie’s fault, but she is naturally a beautiful, thin, embodiment of feminine beauty. And then people who take her course try to show up physically like her. So instead of just paying attention to the business tactics, they think that they also have to show up in a sheath dress with long professionally blown out hair and perform this version of femininity. 

So the women who go through her course, and I have worked with a lot of people who have gone through B-School, who go through her course who can’t perform that thing. Don’t feel like they can actually execute, so then they get stuck. It’s like, well, if I need to show photos of me being professionally beautiful and I’m fat, how do I do that? And then they don’t do it, they don’t execute. 

So I guess the other thing that I have concerns about, about Marie Forleo’s B-School is the degree to which I think it’s been influenced by Jeff Walker’s sort of doctrine around mental triggers and social triggers and baking in some subconscious triggers. But if you extract that piece, I think it’s such a solid training. I have great respect for what she’s built. 

Lucy: Fantastic, thank you for that. I mean sticking with the idea of coaches, what horrifies me to no end is when I launched my blog in 2015, I was alongside these amazing young women who were forging their own path and doing all these things. But I’ve seen their work, or a few people’s work in the last couple of years shift from this very cool, you know, unique individual person to the idea of the divine feminine. And encouraging this idea of you know, inner peace and positivity at all costs. And I’d love to hear a bit about why that type of messaging can be problematic? 

Kelly: Well, if you’re leveraging the narrative of white femininity and beauty in order to build a brand, I think we can see why that’s problematic and how that’s harmful to women and to women’s rights as a whole. And I don’t think that anyone’s, again, sitting down and like let me be nefarious and set women’s rights back by performing objectification in my own brand. I don’t think that’s what’s going on. 

I think the other thing that’s troubling for me about that is it [reaffies 0.31.59] or it reinforces that gender binary that we really need to be taking apart. So those are the things that I am concerned about. The other thing I’m concerned about is like some of the marketing tactics are like a lot of bait and switch and a lot of unconscious exploitation. So for example, here’s something in particular that I have an itch about. 

Payment plans, when people are marking up payment plans 25-30%, that really is troubling because it means the people who can least afford to pay for the thing are actually being penalised, right? It’s like the same thing when we go to those money loan places, those pay day loan places and they just charge exorbitant rates to people who can’t access traditional forms of credit, that’s what’s going on when empowerment brands run by women are charging 25-30% to their clients to access payment plans. 

So I think that a payment plan, I would never pay 25-30% on a credit card, that’s just ludicrous, in some places it’s illegal, but I think that if you’re going to offer payment plans, that the payment plan surcharge, if there is one, should actually correspond to the real numbers. What’s the real risk of a person defaulting? What are the actual cost to you to run that payment plan? 

I actually run those numbers in my own business and then just bake that into my bottom line and that’s the cost of doing business. And all of my rates reflect that. So you don’t have to pay extra to access a payment plan in my programme because I’ve factored those costs into all of my prices. 

Lucy: I think reading your work really highlighted this idea that there always has to be a story for something. There always has to be a justification. It always has to flow naturally and recently, when I was listening to a podcast that you featured in, I heard the idea for the first time that when that story ends, when that story no longer makes sense, when you have operated under a personal brand, some women feel like the only choice they have is to close the door and disappear. 

And that was really interesting to me because that’s exactly what I did. I literally woke up one day and went, I’m done, I can’t do it anymore, this makes no sense, I have to close the door and finish. I gave no explanation. I wrote a blog post saying social media wasn’t feeling good, which was a truth and why I decided to launch this podcast. But I literally closed the door and did not; I wasn’t on social media for 20 months, nearly two years. So I’m interested for you to unpack that feeling or that experience and being a bit self-indulgent here, but (laughs) I think it would be relevant to a lot of people. 

Kelly: I had the same experience!

Lucy: No way?

Kelly: Yes! I went offline 100% deactivated every social profile for 24 months. 

Lucy: That’s crazy! I’ve talked to another influencer, or ex-influencer who did the same thing, it literally took her two years to re-emerge back on social media. 

Kelly: Right, so it’s not that I wasn’t working, right? I got hired as a marketing manager for a company that had like $50 million in annual revenue and it was a business to business and I didn’t have to perform. I didn’t have to show up cute and tap dance and be positive. I didn’t have to do any of that. All I had to do was educate the end consumer about what the products did and reduce the risk of buying this multimillion dollar package. 

And that’s all I had to do and it was so easy and it was so refreshing and it was so, wasn’t about me performing prettiness and positivity all the time. And it was such a relief and then when I decided to come back to the online world and restart my online business, that’s when I grasped The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand. Suddenly I could see it so clearly. It’s like it hit me in the face. 

And so what I’m trying to get across with this. When we feel forced to perform a caricature of ourselves, a socially acceptable, prettier, thinner, more positive version of ourself, a performance takes a lot of energy. It is not inherently sustainable and eventually, when we can’t keep up the show, we retreat. So even prior to me going offline for 24 months, I would design myself a marketing programme and I’m a marketing consultant, I can design a great marketing campaign. 

I can design a very complex funnel, I can do all of that thing and I would do it for other people and they would run off and execute it and be wildly successful and then I would design the same plan for myself and I could only stick with my own content plan for like three months. So I would rock it out for three months and then I would be exhausted and go offline for a month. 

Then I would come back and I’ve had this narrative in my head about, I am self-sabotaging, I have a success problem, I have an upper limits problem because I cannot maintain my marketing campaigns. But the reason I couldn’t maintain them was because they required so much artifice and so much performance. So they were not sustainable. I was burning myself out. 

And this is what I’m saying, when I stopped doing that and started marketing on my own terms, and being authentic about who I was and showing up fully as who I was, and speaking about politics and things that were important to me, then my brand took off. Then my income triple because that was sustainable. I could show up every day and talk about things that were really important to me, but I couldn’t show up every day and be relentlessly positive and thin and beautiful and all of those things. 

Like I just couldn’t do it, it was too much of a performance. So this is what I’m trying to say, if you can find a way to market that is actually true to who you are, that does not conflict with your principles and does not require you to perform a happier, prettier, more socially acceptable version of yourself, you will have a lot more energy to market fluidly and then your business will do well. 

Because the number one thing that grows in business is consistency. So performativity takes too much energy to allow you to be consistent. 

Lucy: Oh yeah, you’re giving me hope here! (Laughter) I mean social media, there’s no doubt that it’s a platform that is highly manufactured, performed strategically under the guise of being in the moment, you know, it’s hard for me to think of a time where I hadn’t thought about how someone might receive the content I was putting out. And that’s why I think it’s kind of strategic. 

But it’s also highly individualistic. We all exist as one person on social media or a brand that’s operated by you behind the scenes. So how do we collectively progress through all of these challenges?

Kelly: So one of the things I do deliberately is signal boost. Meaning that I am constantly sharing posts from other people and drawing attention to some of the brilliant people in my world so that my social media feed isn’t actually only about me and my brand. It’s about all the things and people and businesses I care about. And so I’m using my personal power and my social media to also float the boats of other people. 

And so I think that’s one of the ways that we rise collectively and the other way I use my social media is I’m like unapologetic about telling the truth about what I see in the world. And I comment on those things. So I am 100% obsessed with women and power, right. I wanna know how we get out of pain and out of shame and out of limitation and into flourishing, right? That is my 100% obsession. And so it makes sense for me to speak about what’s limiting women, what’s shaming them. 

So white supremacy is a big freaking problem (laughs). Homophobia is a big problem, limiting the lives of women. Fat phobia is a big problem. I’m going to speak about all of those things and I’m going to speak about the way they show up in our marketing and our selling. And I am going to tell the truth about the world I see because if I’m about women’s power, I also have to tell about the truth about what is limiting us. 

And I again, just do not think women are a problem to be fixed. I think our culture that limits and excludes and discriminates against women and people of colour and black folks and indigenous folks and queer folks and trans folks, that is the problem, right? We’re not the problem. But together we can be the solution. So we can use our social media to shout out to each other, to give each other credit, to introduce each other to some of the people influencing us. 

And we can use our social media to tell the truth about the world we live in and those are the ways that it doesn’t become about empire building, but about collective flourishing. I’m all about personal flourishing, I want our businesses to do well, but I don’t want them to do well in the traditional mould where we’re like exploiting other people to do well. 

Lucy: Absolutely. I think that’s a nice segue. I love part of your work which talks about how being different or showing up in a way that is authentic to you, which might be different to mainstream is actually a source of power. I’d love for you to speak to that a little bit. 

Kelly: This is, I mean I’m so glad you raised this because this is my most favourite thing to talk about in the world. But I think that everything that has been used against us, and often even the stuff that we’ve beat ourselves up for internally, are actually sources of power. And so there’s an artist in my life, her name is Kari Kristensen out of Vancouver, she’s a print maker. 

She grew up in small town Ontario, she was the only gay person that she knew as a kid and she didn’t even know that being gay was a thing. This was like pre-internet and she’s navigating this world where she feels totally wrong and something is wrong with her. And as a result she actually developed OCD and she has a particular form of OCD called arithmomania, which means when she walks into a room, she calculates everything. 

She’s counting the number of the books on the wall, she’s reordering them in size to height, she’s counting the number of rings you’ve got on your finger, she’s counting everything and rearranging it, meticulously, in her head, while everything else is going on. So that’s what she does. So, she’s also a print maker and making prints, lino cut prints requires drawing a whole bunch of lines and dots on a piece of linoleum and cutting it out. 

And so for her to make one 8 x 12 print requires her to make 3,800 tiny little cuts on a piece of linoleum, so her OCD comes in massively handy, right? So someone who has that level of obsessive focus and loves that kind of attention to detail, it’s like the perfect art form for them. And she is a brilliant lino cut artist, like just brilliant! I have literally blown her stuff up on screen trying to figure out how she did what she did. Like it’s just amazing!

And she’s very successful and so the thing that was used against her, she was made to feel wrong because she was gay. As a result, she developed the coping tactic of arithmomania and OCD, which in turn helped her become an amazing print maker. It’s literally like the thing that everyone tried to cure her of, helped her become an incredible artist. So that’s what I mean, is like often the thing that we’re trying to cope with and the thing that we think is wrong with us and the thing that the world thinks is wrong with us helps us develop a source of power. 

So, in Kari’s case, it’s a source of her artistic technique. In my case, I’m a fat woman and I’m a woman and those two things help me see the world differently than other people. So I can see sexism where a man doesn’t see it. I can see fat phobia where a thin person doesn’t see it. And so that’s actually, in a way, a source of creativity. It’s like, imagine Wonder Woman and her invisible jet, imagine you could see the jet? 

I can see the jet because I’m fat and a I’m a woman. I can see all the invisible structures and all the invisible oppressions that other people can’t see. So I have more information about the world than other people do. And that’s a source of power because I then go write about that. I build a whole business on that, on talking about the things that other people don’t see. And so I would point then to Rebecca Solnit, the writer. 

She wrote a book called Men Explain Things to Me, that then became the reason we have the word ‘mansplaining,’ where she wrote a book, she was at a party, a guy asked her what the book was about, she started explaining to him and then he was like, well actually I read another book and this person says this, this and this, and she’s like, yeah, that’s my book. 

And so he was explaining over and over and over again to her, her book, as though he had more authority. And then when he finally realised, oh my goodness, it really is her book that I’m trying to explain to her, he was so embarrassed and he just turned and walked away. But that’s mansplaining. What I’m trying to say, Rebecca, because she’s a woman, was able to name this thing that affects all of us, mansplaining, where people don’t take us seriously because we’re women and try to explain to us things that we actually have more knowledge about. 

So her being a woman helped her see something that other people didn’t see. So that was a source of power. Sonya Renee Taylor in her book, The Body is Not an Apology talks about how oppressed people speak the language of justice fluently. So we’re all fluent in the language of injustice, our normal world, but people for whom that’s used against, they speak another language as well. 

So what I’m trying to say is, those of us who have marginalised identities or have been excluded or traumatised, we often see things that other people don’t see. We see the invisible jet, we can point it out and that helps other people see it too. So it’s a source of creative power. 

Lucy: In your work you always say that we are the culture makers. So just explain to us a bit about that and how we can feel like the work that we’re doing is an important fabric and redefining the cultural norms that we live in. 

Kelly: So I’ll point it out in two ways. One, we talked already about Audre Lorde and the mythical norm. The mythical norm is like the white, straight, middleclass man. And if you look at the world’s population, that mythical norm is not the norm at all. That is the exception. The vast majority of the world, well, first of all, the majority of the world is women (laughs), we’re like 51% of the population. The majority of the world is brown, right? 

The majority of the world is not that identity and yet we are the ones who get identified as minorities and marginalised and non-dominant. So the point I’m trying to make is, without women, without brown people, without queer people, if all of us disappeared tomorrow, there in fact would be no culture left. Culture depends on people and we are actually the majority (laughs). 

Everyone who has been termed a minority is actually the majority. We are actually the culture and the other way that I want to explain this. I want us to really realise that we are the culture. We have the power, if we disappeared tomorrow, everything would fall apart. And I think this is especially acute in the time of Corona. If women disappeared tomorrow, the entire world would fall apart. We are literally what’s keeping it together right now. 

Our caregiving, our domestic labour, our emotional labour right now is what’s keeping everyone afloat. So that’s the first thing. And then the second thing, culture flows through us without our consent. Like 90% of our behaviour is subconscious. We don’t even know why we’re doing what we’re doing. So you know when you were pointing out that people aren’t trying to be nefarious and they really would be heartbroken to think that they are doing things that are undermining women because their actual goal is to elevate women, that is the truth. 

Culture works through us without our consent. So my daughter came home crying one day because some kids had done something that really hurt her feelings and there’s no way that those children thought that they were doing a racist/sexist thing. My child is black. There’s no way that those children thought explicitly at the age of six that they were doing a racist/sexist thing, but they were. 

So the voice of culture was just flowing through them without their consent. When I do things as a white woman that are racist, that I didn’t know were racist, that’s culture flowing through me without my consent. And we can interrupt that. So if behaviour just flows through us, as culture flows through us, we’re always culture making, every single moment, right? If we’re in a conversation and we don’t check someone when they say something sexist or racist or homophobic, we were culture makers. 

We allow an unjust culture to flow. So that means we have enormous personal power at every single moment in our life to decide what kind of culture we want to make. I want to make a culture of justice. I want to make a culture of racial equity. I want to make a culture of gender equity. I want to make a culture where people of all genders can flourish. That’s the world that I’m dreaming of and so I can use my mouth, my life, my body, my business, my social media to create that culture. 

I don’t just have to let an unjust culture flow through me. I can interrupt it and make it what I want it to be. And again, if you think that we are actually the majority, we have enormous power. So I’m just wondering what do we want to do with it? What kind of culture do we actually want to live in and then take the tiny moment by moment actions, like this isn’t about Oprah and you get a car and you get a car and like giving away massive amounts of anything or doing huge dramatic things. 

But if each of us use the moment by moment conversations and posts available to us, we can start shaping the culture around us. 

Lucy: Amazing, Kelly Diels, thank you so much for your time today. I have to say something that’s kind of embarrassing, but you were the first person that I reached out to, to speak on this podcast and you saying ‘yes’ was like the biggest motivator for me to kind of get off the ground, so thank you so much for your amazing work. I have been in complete awe of it for the last two and a half years and it’s really helped me in shaping my world view and helping to feel confident, and presenting these messages that are not necessarily the status quo, so thank you so much. 

Kelly: Lucy, I am like so touched and moved, and thank you so much for sharing that with me because it’s so important to me that we shape our culture and here you are, creating a podcast, a cultural object, a cultural contribution and it just like, I’m feeling so moved that the collaboration between us, that’s what the result is. And thank you for telling me that, that my work had some tiny impact in you then becoming a culture maker and deciding to put work out into the world that will influence us. I’m so touched, thank you. 

Lucy (outro): To answer your immediate question, yes, I did have tears in my eyes by that point of our conversation. That was the incredible Kelly Diels, writer and feminist marketer. I’ve left links to her website where you can find a ton of articles, blog posts and resources about everything we’ve discussed on the show. Kelly also offers feminist marketing courses and coaching, so you can find all of that information on her website. 

I’d also highly recommend that you add yourself to Kelly’s mailing list, every Sunday she sends a love letter and never fails to teach me something new. Kelly also tells me that she might be in the process of writing a book, which is super exciting. You can keep up with all of her activity by following her on Instagram. All of those links are in the show notes. 

Did you find anything particularly enlightening, confronting, challenging about that episode? I remember when I first discovered Kelly’s work, I just felt like she had articulated all of these invisible things that I could feel but I couldn’t yet define. One of the things I love about Kelly’s work is her commitment to lifting other voices and to connecting amazing people. And I need to thank Kelly because she is the person who introduced me to Kaila Tova’s work and Kaila Tova, of course, appeared in the very first episode of Selfie Reflective. 

Feel free to send any thoughts or reflections to selfiereflective@gmail.com. Until next Tuesday, I’m Lucy O’Connor, thank you so much for listening. 

Selfie Reflective is written, hosted and produced by me, Lucy O, final episode audio and quality control is all thanks to Tom Frankish. 

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