Making Design Circular Podcast – Season 4 – In Conversation with Tamu Thomas, Part 2

Welcome to season four of Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden, in which we’re exploring what it takes to cultivate a creative practice in which you, your business and the planet ALL get to thrive. We’ll be diving deep into the nuances, complexities and mindset shifts that we need to embrace to bring about a just transition to a more circular economy.

In this episode, Katie continues last week’s conversation with Tamu Thomas a renowned transformational life coach, dedicated to guiding women toward achieving work-life harmony by embracing holistic well-being practices that align with their nervous system.

Katie & Tamu explore:

• The term ‘high-functioning freeze’
• Defiant hope & rage
• Activism v Martyrdom
• And of course, the final quick-fire round of season 4!

You can connect with Tamu here:

Website: https://www.livethreesixty.com/ and https://www.womenwhoworktoomuch.co/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tamu.thomas/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/livethreesixty/

Learn more about Tamu’s membership here: https://live-three-sixty.mykajabi.com/membership

 

Here are some highlights:

I learned that it was unsafe for me to express rage

“Rage is part of the human experience, rage, emotion, energy in motion, rage is energy in motion that says you’ve got to make a change, whether it’s externally or internally, but instead, we hold on to it, and have a lot of like, bitterness and resentment inside. And we get sidetracked with that. So we avoid the real issue. And we make it all about the anger or the rage.”

Empowerment to build momentum

My life is min,e square with a life of service means that your life has to be of service to you too. Because if your life is not a service to you too, if you are giving away all of your lifeforce energy, you’re not actually doing activism, you’re doing martyrdom. Our planet doesn’t need any more martyrs. Social justice causes for human beings, animals around the world doesn’t need any more martyrs what they need, or what these things we believe in need, is for us to be and this word, sometimes it gets on my nerves, but it is for us to be empowered. Because when we are empowered, rather than doing things in fits and spurts, we can actually build momentum and have a compounding effect. And I say this to my clients. And I say to myself all the time. Social justice is not just if it’s not just for you too, we don’t need any more martyrs.

Broken: Mending and repair in a throwaway world: Katie’s sixth book celebrates 25 artists, curators, menders and re-makers who have rejected the allure of the fast, disposable and easy in favour of the patina of use, the stories of age and the longevity of care and repair. Accompanying these profiles, six in-depth essays explore the societal, cultural and environmental roles of mending in a throwaway world.

Cultivating Hope, 3 part mini course: Are you ready to cultivate hope in the face of the climate crisis? Sign up to Katie’s three-part free mini course that will help you move through feelings of helplessness, reconnect with nature and take aligned action.

The Seed, Self-paced 4 part course: Sign up to Katie’s self-paced course to help you find your unique contribution to environmentalism – have fun, play to your strengths, work in alignment with your values and make a big impact in the process.

Spread the Word:

Please share Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden with wild abandon — with your friends, family, and fellow designer-makers or wherever interesting conversations about creativity happen in your world!

If you love what you’re listening to, show us some love by following Circular with Katie Treggiden in this app and leaving a review. All that good stuff tells the ‘algorithm Gods’ to show the podcast to more people, and that can only be a good thing, right?

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And find me on the Interwebs:  @katietreggiden (Twitter, TikTok), & @katietreggiden3908 (YouTube) & @katietreggiden.1 (Instagram) – and if you’re a designer, maker, artist or craftsperson, join me on IG @making_design_circular_

About Katie:
Katie Treggiden is the founder and director of Making Design Circular – an international membership community and online learning platform for environmentally conscious designers, makers artists and craftspeople. She is also an author, journalist and podcaster championing a hopeful approach to environmentalism. With more than 20 years’ experience in the creative industries, she regularly contributes to publications such as The Guardian, The Observer, Crafts Magazine and Dezeen. She is currently exploring the question ‘Can craft save the world?’ through her sixth book, Broken: Mending & Repair in a Throwaway World (Ludion, 2023), this very podcast.

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Below is a transcript of our conversation. Find the full episode available to listen on Spotify here.

This transcript is generated in Otter.ai – please excuse any spelling and grammatical errors. 

INTRO

Welcome to season four of Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden, in which we’re exploring what it takes to cultivate a creative practice in which you, your business and the planet ALL get to thrive. We’ll be diving deep into the nuances, complexities and mindset shifts that we need to embrace to bring about a just transition to a more circular economy.

PODCAST SNIPPET

Rage is part of the human experience, rage, emotion, energy in motion, rage is energy in motion that says you’ve got to make a change, whether it’s externally or internally, but instead, we hold on to it, and have a lot of like, bitterness and resentment inside. And we get sidetracked with that, so we avoid the real issue and we make it all about the anger or the rage.

EPISODE INTRO

Hello and welcome to the final episode of season 4 and if that makes you a bit sad, fear not because it’s a 2-parter. I had such a juicy conversation with Tamu Thomas, the author of upcoming book ‘Women who work too much’ that it was too much to just fit into one episode so we split it into two. Tamu is an absolute power-house. She is a woman I respect an enormous amount and somebody I’ve learnt vast amounts from and the nurture part of the Making Design Circular Framework is very much inspired by, among other people, Tamu’s work. So I was delighted to get the opportunity to talk to her about her new book and here it is.

Katie Treggiden 

Now Tamu, I’ve got a confession to make. There was a, I don’t think it was even a chapter heading, it was like a section heading in the book that I just felt so called out by I couldn’t even read the rest of it. Because the term high functioning freeze. I just went. Tell me what it is and tell me how I, or our listeners, or me, well, you can start to move out of high functioning freeze. I’m not even sure I want to know, but go.

Tamu Thomas 

Wriggling in the chair. I’m saying high functioning freeze is my favourite, but I know it’s so well. So high functioning Freeze. Freeze is a survival state, and is often referred to as a blended state. So it’s a blend of fight and it’s a blend of fight, flight and shutdown. But in the last year, I studied polyvagal informed practice, which is, of course by Deb Dana. And she led a few of the workshops in there. And she said that she believes it’s more accurate to describe freeze as a blended state of running, like she didn’t say running, but other, very quickly bouncing between freeze and shutdown. So you’re just looking backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards. So just think about that, you’re running up to the top of the mountain, and you’re crashing back down, up to the top, and you’re doing that really, really quickly. That requires a lot of energy. So freeze is when you’ve got a lot of activity going on inside. So you’ve got a lot of anxious feeling, you’ve got that and I need to do this, and I need to do that and I’m feeling overwhelmed, I’m not going to be able to do it all, I’m running out of time. You wake up, as soon as you’ve woken up out of bed, you’ve already run out of time, you haven’t even started your day, you feel like you’ve run out of time. There’s something due on the 15th of February, you think you’re out of time on the 15th of January, that kind of vibe. And it kind of feels like you’re inhaling, but you’re just inhaling, so just and you’re holding all of that, because you’re so scared that what’s inside is going to explode. So quite often, we feel like we’re suppressing a volcano, a lot of activity. But on the outside, we might look shut down and not with it at all or we may look calm, we may look like we can engage we can, you know, I’m on my Zoom call, I’m talking to my clients, we’re having a great old time. But inside I’m like, Oh my gosh, and I’ve got to do this and I haven’t done that and I’m supposed to do this, I’ve got to buy so and so’s present, all of that stuff is going on, on the inside. And quite often that stuff is taking place on top of stuff that we froze when we were two years old, four years old, six years old, 16 years old, right? All of these things that have told us, it’s not safe for us to state our needs, for us to seek help for us to express whether it’s anger, disappointment, or whatever so we keep it all bottled up inside. And we worry that if we dare open and breathe, we’re going to be like dragons. So it’s about that bringing in the context, connection, and choice piece. giving ourselves the context. That context could be getting a sheet of paper and writing down everything that’s going on inside. And the key is not to shame yourself for it. Lots of us don’t want to admit what we’ve got going on, on the inside, because we’ve been taught to be ashamed of it. If we were to accept thats part of that human experience, we could get it onto paper, or we can start to consider what is important, what is it that we are doing because we believe we’re supposed to because that’s what good girls do, that’s what we do to be nice. What are we agreeing to because we have been taught it’s better for us to feel bad than it is for us to look bad. Having a look at all of that stuff and starting to prioritise it. So my journey with high functioning freeze. That feel bad, as opposed to look bad, was something that was very, very strong.  So I would say yes to a whole load of things and be filled with resentment, feel ashamed that I was filled of resentment. The loud voice in my head about being lazy, would be telling me that I’m lazy for not wanting to do that. And I would just freeze that down so I could get on with what I was getting on with. And I was suffering. I was experiencing anxiety. I was experiencing panic attacks. My head always felt so heavy, and I was triggered to smithereens by people I perceived to be needy, and they weren’t needy, they were just people that were stating their needs. So part of that four is looking at all of these things you’re carrying on the inside and asking yourself, are these things genuinely important? When we look at these things is very important for us to forgive ourselves. Because we often shame ourselves for not being strong enough, or not being resourced, all of these things. And when we realise actually, these are conditions, and to a lesser or greater degree, usually greater, we have drunk from our own poisoned chalice, we are now oppressing ourselves the way we’ve been oppressed. So we need to forgive ourselves for that. And we also need to forgive the people, places and structures for doing that, because otherwise, we’re carrying, they’ve trundled on, they’re living their lives, they’re doing what they’re doing. 10 Downing Street is doing whatever it’s doing. So it’s about forgiving them because they are also subject to the system we live within. And that forgiveness, makes space for compassion, so you can start to view yourself with compassion. And then you look at that list. If I’m being compassionate with myself, what are the things on that list that are important? And how do those things on that list, support the way I want to live, and you start making those powerful choices. And it is hard, you know what it’s not just hard, it’s bloody terrifying, because then you start to realise, oh my goodness, I’ve got to start to say no, or not yet to people. And from somebody who survived by saying yes to people, that limbic system I spoke about earlier, starts to kick up a fuss. You’re gonna get kicked out, they’re gonna think you’re bad, they don’t think you don’t like them, or they’re gonna think you’re better than them, all of these things come up. But with that compassionate lens, it just cracks open the door wide enough for you to see that anybody that wants you to be burnt out, resentful, frustrated, so that you can say yes to them, they’re not actually in a relationship with you. They’re in a relationship with what you can do for them. And this also has parallels to our business because we can do this with our business and our employment as well. Yeah, and with our activism work, right. And with our activism work. Now, when we’re able to identify that, we can then start to recognise, if I continue to operate as a version of what people project onto me, I’m never going to get to know the real me, which means I’m never going to get to know what I really want and need, which means I’m never going to have the opportunity to have the relationships I want to have.

Katie Treggiden 

And make the contribution that you want to have right?

Tamu Thomas 

Living a half life. So when we come to activism, there is an outrageously high number of activists who are impacted by mental ill health, who feel isolated and lonely. Because they’re doing this, sometimes I look at activism and I’m like, gosh, Audrey Lord taught to us, the Masters tools will never dismantle the Masters House, but we start to use these oppressive supremacist ways of being and we start to use that for our activism work. There’s only one way you can be an activist, you’ve got to show up all the time. If you dare drink from single use plastic, you’re part of the problem. That’s not how it is. When you think about something like a matriarchy, people think matriarchy is the opposite of patriarchy. Matriarchy is different. Matriarchy, is collaboration. Matriarchy, is working in unison. Matriarchy, is, this is how it should be, but also, if we look at reality, and we’re reasonable, let’s work with it how it is. When we’re able to operate in that way we’re able to give ourselves grace because guess what, as humans we have to consume. We can’t survive if we don’t consume. Even this beautiful tree outside my window, thankfully for us, it consumes carbon dioxide, but it still consumes. Look at agriculture, if you don’t tend to the soil, and you’re just every year planting, doing what you need to do to harvest, that soil is going to become depleted and it’s going to become barren. So it’s about operating in a way where we can replenish and be replenished.

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And there’s a couple of things you mentioned. One is feeling bad versus looking bad. And one is this sense of it not being safe to express anger. And I think particularly for women of our age, there is this sense of rage. And you know, with what’s going on in the world, and if you choose to engage in making the world a better place, you’ve also got to engage with what’s horribly wrong with the world. And I spend a lot of time talking about defiant hope. The sort of strapline for my public speaking and journalism work is defiant hope, sparks meaningful change, because I believe that we can’t make a difference unless we believe that we can make a difference. But it can be so hard to stay hopeful at the moment, and there was a sentence in your book that had it been a hardcopy would have been highlighted and underlined and circled, which was knowing my rage did not obliterate my hope. Can you tell me more about that sentence? I feel like we could probably do a whole podcast on it.

Tamu Thomas 

Yeah, absolutely. So not only had I been raised to fear rage because I’m a woman. I grew up with parents, particularly a mum that wanted me to do well. So when my mum came to England, they started off as a working class family and my mum worked really hard for the better life lots of immigrant people come to move to other countries for. And it was very clear to me that as a black girl, I could not play around with rage, because I would then be labelled with the aggressive stereotype that is often associated with black people. So there are many ways I learned that it was unsafe for me to express rage. So when I felt my rage, it sneaked up. It was at the first day of my somatic coach training. And out of nowhere, I felt so hot, I felt like I was going to combust. This is the only word I can use to describe. I felt cheesed off, cheesed off and robbed. Because I was like, Oh my goodness, part of the reason I have felt so broken that led to depression that I ignored because I was being strong, that led to anxiety because I was ignoring the depression, that led to panic attacks because I was ignoring the anxiety. If I was able to look at my rage for what it was, I don’t think I would have made a lot of the choices I made. Because rage tells us something unjust happened. And when we allow our rage to express through us, for the most of us, it’s a catalyst for change. When we don’t express our rage, we hold onto it and we have periodic explosions, that feel really scary for us and the people around us and then we live up to the stereotype of rage that we were taught, it was all about. And I just thought to myself rage is part of the human experience, rage, emotion, energy in motion. Rage is energy in motion that says you’ve got to make that you’ve got to make a change, whether it’s externally or internally, but instead, we hold on to it, and have a lot of like, bitterness and resentment inside. And we get sidetracked with that. So we avoid the real issue and we make it all about the anger or the rage. An example will be, if I point out somebody’s unconscious bias, or I say actually that’s racist. If I say in a tone that is assertive and powerful, that’s aggressive. And then the whole thing gets sidelined and the focus is on the aggression, rather than the root, the core issue that happened. Somebody else this happens to all the time is Greta Thunberg. Whether they’re saying that she’s hysterical, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, anger doesn’t solve anything. If we think about the injustices we have seen in this world, whether with our own eyes or in history books. Kumbaya My Lord is not what has made the changes that need to be changed. I remember learning about the suffragettes in school, they weren’t sitting around making daisy chain saying please, sir, can I have some more. The civil rights movement in America. Colonised countries becoming independent, all sorts of stuff, all sorts of stuff. I remember as a child, my parents going out on marches to end apartheid in South Africa. It’s my mum’s rage, that meant that I knew we weren’t allowed to buy Cape apples, there were all sorts of things we weren’t allowed to buy. I knew that. And it was my mom’s rage that enabled her to take that action. Rage is a potent force for what we want in the world, especially, and I’m going to make a blanket statement, especially people like us, we’re not going to take our rage and project it onto individual people. We’re going to take our rage, and use it as a light to shine on what is corrupt, morally bankrupt, and all of that kind of stuff. So we can say to people look at this, see it, look at it with your eyes. This is what is broken, not us. This is what is weird. This is what needs to be on an improvement plan, not us. Let’s come together, because our rage is an expression of the purest, rawest, divine love. That love has been squished and squeezed and any other squeaky word for so long, it is saying no more. It’s compelling us to risk our comfort, our security, for the opportunity to create change, that creates true comfort, that creates true security, not just for us, but for other people too. We are the type of people who are doing the work of planting seeds that may not bear fruit in our lifetime. And rage enables us to say, I don’t care if I never get an apple from this tree. Whether it is one of my descendants, or somebody who is able to live on this world, because of the way I have shown up in this world benefits, that’s good, because that’s part of the human experience as well.

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah. And I guess you kind of said that rage says not this and hope says this. Right. And that’s the connection, moving from not this to this.

Tamu Thomas 

And that hope, that defiant hope, defiant hope like I literally feel like the flame heart emoji. That defiant hope when I think about this, I don’t know what his name is. There’s a black guy, I’m sure he’s somewhere like Manchester, and he does physiotherapy for people who have got all sorts of things impacting them. And there’s a girl who had a tumour, and the tumour has done lots of nerve damage. So she’s learning how to walk again, all sorts. When I see that young woman, that is defiant hope, because everything about her presentation looks like hopelessness. But rather than leaning into learned helplessness, that defiant hope is helping her lean into learn optimism, and I’m telling you, we’re going to see that woman running a marathon at some point in time, because that defiant hope is just gently fanning that ember, so that it becomes a flame so that she can be who she wants to be. That defiant Hope is what made Martin Luther King be able to do what he did. That gives Greta Thunberg I hope I’m saying her name correctly, the capacity to do what she does. It enables you to do what you do. That defiant hope, which I am literally loving, that defiant hope is what made me look at the coaching industry and say, Okay, I’m not going to say I’m not a coach, because I’m ashamed of the coaching industry, because clearly I am but, that defiant hope gave me faith to operate the way I believe is ethical and is supportive and sustainable and regenerative for people. Katie, I’m in love with that. I mean I just want to take it and run with it. Because defiant hope, can you imagine the world we could live in if our leaders could be defiantly hopeful instead of defiantly woeful?

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Hello and welcome to the final episode of season 4 and if that makes you a bit sad, fear not because it’s a 2-parter. I had such a juicy conversation with Tamu Thomas, the author of upcoming book ‘Women who work too much’ that it was too much to just fit into one episode so we split it into two. Tamu is an absolute power-house. She is a woman I respect an enormous amount and somebody I’ve learnt vast amounts from and the nurture part of the Making Design Circular Framework is very much inspired by, among other people, Tamu’s work. So I was delighted to get the opportunity to talk to her about her new book and here it is.

AD BREAK

I want to use this opportunity of a little sort of mini ad break of sorts to tell you about three things that I think you might be interested in. The first is my latest book Broken: Mending and repair in a throwaway world, which came out in May 2023, with Ludion the publisher of my last four books, and I’m so excited about it. Jay blades was kind enough to write the foreword, and it explores the role of mending and repair in a world where we don’t really need to mend anymore. So I’m looking at the social and cultural roles that mending is playing. And those include mending as restoration of function, which you might sort of immediately think of when you think of repair, but also repair a storytelling repair as activism, repair as healing, and even the regeneration of natural systems as a form of repair. It profiles 28, amazing menders, fixers, hackers, remakers, curators and artists. And it is the book I’m the most proud of so far. And I know I always say that, but I really am, it came out of my research at Oxford and I think it makes an important and new contribution to the field of writing on repair. So if you want to get your hands on a copy, the link is in the show notes.

 

I would also love to tell you about a free resource I have created called cultivating hope in the face of the environmental crisis. And the reason I have made this freely available is because I think it’s so important. If we don’t believe that change is possible and if we don’t believe we have some agency in bringing about that change, we won’t act. So cultivating hope is a three part mini course that’s all delivered direct to your inbox. And it helps you to move through feelings of despair and hopelessness. It helps you to reconnect with nature and that sort of brilliant effect that we know natural spaces have on our wellbeing. And it helps you to start taking aligned action. So if the relentless news cycle has got you feeling, kind of feeling all the doom and gloom, then check that out. Again, the link is in the show notes.

 

And finally, I want to tell you about making design circular the membership. So if you are a designer, a maker, an artist or a crafts person, and you feel drawn to sustainability, regeneration, environmentalism, whatever you want to call it, this is for you. It is an online membership community of brilliant, gorgeous, imperfect souls who have come together to try to make progress in this area. And it’s all built around the idea that you can pour into yourself and take care of yourself and pour into your creative practice and your expression and exploration of creativity and pour into your business and turn all of this or keep all this as a profitable business and benefit the planet. And we want all of those things in alignment so that pouring into any one of them benefits the others and that’s what the membership is built around. The strapline is rewild your creative practice so that you your business and the planets can thrive. So if that sounds like something that you need in your life, again, the link is in the show notes. All right, well, I will hand you back over to this fabulous conversation. Thank you.

MAIN PODCAST

Tamu Thomas 

I want to add one more piece on the defiant hope. When we think about nature. I remember watching time lapse video from bushfires in California. And I saw the devastation and just the ash and charred tree stumps and earth. And then they fast forwarded it, and you can see all these green shoots of fire defiant hope.

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah, it’s incredible, isn’t it? There’s a there was a wildfire on the road that I come to and from my house on every day in the summer of 2020, which is bonkers because Cornwall is a place known for its mizzile, which is mist and drizzle combined. But yeah, it is incredible how green and lush that little strip of road is already. And you know, I always remember when I was a kid, my parents concreted over a flower bed to create a drive to park the car. And there had been tulips growing in that flower bed and the next spring, the tulips grew up through the tarmac. Absolutely bonkers, but yeah, nature is definitely defiantly hopeful. I like that. Right. I’ve got one more question for you before we dive into the quickfire round. In the conclusion, you quote Tracee Ellis Ross. And she says, My life is mine. My life is mine. And I would love to know what that means in the context of kind of activism and a life spent in service of trying to make the world a better place, fighting the environmental crisis, fighting for social justice, whatever it is, how does that kind of idea of my life is mine square with a life of service?

Tamu Thomas 

My life is mine square with a life of service means that your life has to be of service to you too. Because if your life is not of service to you, too, if you are giving away all of your lifeforce energy, you’re not actually doing activism, you’re doing martyrdom. Our planet doesn’t need any more martyrs. Social justice causes for human beings, animals around the world doesn’t need any more martyrs. What they need, or what these things we believe in need, is for us to be and this word, sometimes it gets on my nerves, but it is for us to be empowered. Because when we are empowered, rather than doing things in fits and spurts, we can actually build momentum and have a compounding effect. And I say this to my clients and I say to myself all the time. Social justice is not just if it’s not just for you too. We don’t need any more martyrs.

Katie Treggiden 

I’m so important. And so articulately phrased, thank you, Tammy. Right, quick, fire round, best book, and we will be linking to yours in the show notes. So the best book you read or listen to lately.

Tamu Thomas 

So I am feeling a little bit like oh my gosh, it’s a business book anyway. It’s a business book. Because the truth is, I would have loved to tell you some really beautiful mystical book, but it’s not that. I very recently listened to 10x is better than 2x, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy. And his premise is that it’s actually quote unquote, easier to 10x whatever it is you want in your life, your identity, your vision, your work, whatever, then it is to 2x. But the difficulty lies in when you are making a 10x improvement whatever expansion, you have to let go of 80% of your former identity, because what got you there won’t get you here. It’s a really interesting that, you know, there are some examples he’s used in the book, but I’m a bit like me, because he talks about like YouTubers, and whatever else. But that principle of, if you’re going out 2x, you can keep 80% of your identity and make 20% change. But if you really want that exponential growth, you need to let go of like 80%, of who you were being and how you were doing things.

Katie Treggiden 

And referring back to what we were saying earlier, you can probably get to 2x, just by working harder, but you can’t get to 10x just by working harder.

Tamu Thomas 

Exactly. That needs smart work. And I met him at a mastermind I went to in New York, and the way he broke it down and what he was talking about really aligned with lots of his, he’s an organisational psychologist, lots of research into neuroscience. So if you’re somebody who feels like I’m stuck because I know that the change I need to make is a big change and I’m really terrified of it. That would be a good book to delve into.

Katie Treggiden 

Nice, thank you and one I’ve not even heard of which is amazing. Favourite podcast?

Tamu Thomas 

Favourite podcast. I’m really loving upstream podcast. I think they just have such wonderfully radical conversations and they say the things, they say the thing. I’m not really into this permission thing because I think it’s a ruse but for them they give me permission to say what I would normally say on the inside, outside.

Katie Treggiden 

Nice. Yeah. Finish this sentence circularity is?

Tamu Thomas 

Circularity is. circularity is the human way.

Katie Treggiden

Yes, it really is, or was? Yeah. One thing you wish sustainable designer, makers and crafts people knew?

Tamu Thomas 

Your work is precious work. You share a piece of your soul with what you do and our society may trick us into believing that it is not valuable, because it wasn’t made quickly, because you can’t make 100% profit on it, because it can’t compete with this or that. But your work stands the test of time and I would even go as far as to say, your work is an embodiment of nature. Precious.

Katie Treggiden 

Yeah, nice. And last one best or worst life or business advice you’ve ever been given?

Tamu Thomas 

Best or worst? The worst was like, Don’t let people get off the call without closing the sale. That’s the absolute worst. And the best comes from our, she’s been both of our coach mentor, Ray Dodd. And I can’t remember exactly how she said it. But she might as well as said, how can you do your business in the youist way you possibly can? And I was like, ha, I’m allowed to do that. So yeah, I’ve got to be the meist me, otherwise it just doesn’t work.

Katie Treggiden 

Yes, I love that. I love that. And that is that’s Ray’s whole shtick isn’t it is the more yourself you show up as the more successful you’re going to be. And it goes back a little bit to that thing we were talking about, about how can you have a business that has your back, right, it’s accepting all the parts of you, not just the shiny parts? Yeah, Tammy, that’s been absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Tamu Thomas 

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having those quotes. Thank you for reading my words back to me. Honestly, if I was somebody that was able to cry really quickly, I would have been in tears because there was lots of cry in my eyes because that was the first time and thank you for inviting me to be a guest on your wonderful podcast.

Katie Treggiden 

It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

OUTRO

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Making Design Circular with Katie Treggiden. It is so lovely to know that there are people out there tuning into these conversations. If you found that interesting, I would love to connect with you on Instagram, I am on @katietreggiden.1. And if you’re a designer, maker, artist or crafts person who’s interested in sustainability and environmentalism, then please also follow @making_design_circular_ and both of those are in the shownotes. You can also follow my email newsletter there. I would be super grateful if you’re listening to this on an iPhone or iPad or other Apple device if you could leave us a review on Apple podcasts. I think that’s the only podcast platform that takes reviews, but it’s incredibly helpful to help people find us and make sure that more and more people are finding this message. So if you could take a couple of moments just to leave a review there that would be amazing. And I would also like to say a quick thank you to the incredible Kirsty Spain, who produces and edits this podcast and keeps me on track so that these episodes actually make it into your ears. So thank you very much, Kirsty.