Well, you bring up this idea of what feels comfortable
Tara McMullin: Yeah. And I think that was kind of where I wanted to go with a follow-up, which is, you have such a positive, vibrant life-giving persona and I think obviously genuine personality. I’m curious how you felt taking those initial steps to be more overt about speaking up for these things that you believe in that are hard conversations to talk about. And I wonder also, kind of in the same vein, how has that impacted or did it impact that brightness and vibrancy and positivity that is sort of part of your brand as well? Does that make sense?
Suz Chadwick: Yeah. I mean, I think that I did step back. Is like I was saying when I’m not confident with something I kind of step back and I listen, which I know that I’ve heard you talk about a lot as well so that I can confidently speak about things. So I didn’t really understand a lot of the issues around Aboriginal rights here in Australia, I didn’t understand a lot of the history. I’ve got an Aboriginal woman in one of my groups, and she’s like a massive advocate. She does training on it so I was like on some of her training.
And then I was trying to work out how I was going to bring this to life in my business
Whilst I knew about the history, I didn’t know a lot of the details about what’s happening right now. It’s kind of like all that happened when Australia was establishing itself and all the rest of it, but the issues that are happening now, I really didn’t know. So for me, it was really hard. I felt like I wanted to step back. And so I was in that learning phase with that. And then I was in the hard discussions with my family. And so I probably did take like a week or two out, where I was just processing and going, okay, I need to educate myself, I need to be okay with the fact that I may not agree with my parents on this. But then I also need to make a decision about what action I’m going to take in the public arena.
And I’m okay with that, too
And like I said, within my business, we’ve been supporting some of these things for years, just never talked about it. And so it was just like, it’s not just about talking about it going, look what I’ve done. It’s really about talking about it and saying, what does this mean? Like, what else could you do? How else can I help you to be an advocate if you want to be and if this is something that you that we want to talk about? And so I did sort of open up the conversation in one of my groups too, which was my course group. I think a lot of people were just unsure of how to have that conversation.
I’m like, you ask questions and say how you’re feeling. This is something you want to talk about more, is it not? And there’s no judgment if not, like that’s something you have to be passionate because you want it to be real and not just lip service as well. So I think that it definitely did take me, sort of I had to take a step back. And I do think that I am a very fun, excitable, out there person. But even in between all of that, I think that there are a lot of serious things that we need to talk about and I’m totally, totally okay with that.