3 lessons in managing your money & your life from Dragon’s Den’s Deborah Meaden
Get confident with your dosh; dial into your instincts, & how to cope with a lazy husband - click the button below to listen to this week's podcast...
In this week’s episode of our Postcards From Midlife podcast, we asked our favourite Dragon and business woman extraordinaire, Deborah Meaden, for her best advice on money, getting over financial anxiety, business pitching and what makes her feel healthier and happier than ever. If only we could all be a little bit more Deborah we thought at the end of the show…
‘Make sure your money delivers for the life you want’
Whether we like it or not money is woven into so many aspects of our lives so it’s essential to form a healthy relationship with it. But money has no value whatsoever until it’s turned into value by doing something with it. Start thinking of money as an enabler and stop thinking about it as sums. Ask yourself what it is that you want your money to do for you, and then tell yourself, ‘It’s my job to turn that money into value, because otherwise it’s floundering and has no effect in the world’. You need to take ownership of your money, don’t be afraid of it.
‘Instinct is nothing more than a good filing system’
When I see something that works well, I file it away and think, Right, next time I see that I’ll use it. And when I see something I don’t like, I file it away and think: ‘I’ll never be like that or do that’. All instinct does is grabs all of that information really quickly, loads it into your gut. We’ve all got it - you can’t go through life without gaining judgement, the trouble is, people can lose confidence in it. Even when I’ve got things wrong, I just think that’s part of life and learn from it. That’s another thing to put in my ‘tool box’ for life. It doesn’t shake me as long as I’m getting more stuff right that I get wrong.
‘I won’t have people saying ‘women of a certain age’’
If someone calls me a woman of a certain age, I always say: ‘You can stop right there, I’m 65 years old, I don’t care about age, what matters to me is if I’m healthy, if I can do all the things I love’. I will always try to do something, but if I can’t, I can’t. I wont have people putting me into a box and them deciding what I can and can’t do. The problem is if someone tells you you can’t do something, there’s half a chance you won’t be able to do it because they’ve already got into your head. You can always try to find a different way of doing it.
Also on this week’s episode - the resources for our chats about…
Getting walking
- Sign up for the Their World ‘Your Walk’ challenge to raise funds for Ukranian school children
- Learn how to Walkactive with walking coach Joanna Hall
Guiding teens in romantic relationships
- Listen to: Radio 4’s excellent 5-part series About The Boys https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001ypz1
- Watch: BAFTA Award-winning film How to Have Sex on Amazon
What to do with a lazy husband
Read: Five Arguments All Couples (Need To) Have: And Why the Washing-Up Matters by Joanna Harrison
Get professional help: Relate.org.uk
Thank you for this fab episode! Lorraine I especially love your positive and uplifting reply to the question about “My 15 year old son has a girlfriend...” As a sex educator I hard-agree that kids want and need to learn about sex from their parents/carers - and this will become especially important soon with restrictive new rules around what schools are allowed to teach likely coming in.
If as a parent/carer the idea of being responsible for your kids’ education around sex, pleasure, consent, and sexual communication fills you with dread, I urge you to unpick why,
and to educate yourself thoroughly if part of your worry is “But I don’t even know about that myself..”. You might want to turn away from it, but, there is a safety issue here - schools won’t be able to teach about sexual assault until three years AFTER the average age of childhood assault, and won’t be able to teach about porn until well after the age most kids have seen it online.
So if necessary it’s time to work on your own fears, belief systems, shame/embarrassment, judgements and lack of education around sex, so you can adopt the empowering, pleasure-positive, responsible and shame-free tone Lorraine so beautifully demonstrates in this episode.
Lorraine thanks for always mentioning ‘... and carers’ too - as a stepmum that made me feel very included, when it’s a role which sometimes feels a bit invisible.