612 Sara Blakely Shares How To Be Kind To Yourself

"THERE’S A HIDDEN BLESSING IN EVERYTHING WE GO THROUGH IN LIFE.”Running your own business can be one of the hardest things on you mentally. It’s a very masculine dominated world, and there’s often times not enough love. I often notice I’m being hard on myself, especially when things go wrong. All of this got me thinking about the important words I received in the past from Sara Blakely. If you don’t know Sara, she is the CEO of Spanx. She is the YOUNGEST female self made billionaire in America. She didn’t do that by going to war with her competitors; she did it through love and encouragement. Along her route she also suffered from severe grief, having lost 11 people that were close to her in a very short period of time. Listen to how you can be kind to yourself, and be successful in business, on Episode 612. In This Episode You Will Learn:The one thing that will help you the most in your life (00:52)What people said to her when she started her business (1:50)How she was able to build a business differently (2:32)The grief she has had to encounter (2:50)Sara’s views on our mortality (3:21)Plus much, much more Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:10Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to a special edition of the School of Greatness Podcast. We are so pumped to have Sarah Blakely in the house. Now, for those that don't know who she is, she is the founder and CEO of the intimate apparel company, Spanx. And in 2012, she was named in Time Magazine's Top 100 Most Influential People in the World list. And as of 2014, she is listed as the 93rd Most Powerful Woman in the World by Forbes. She was also named the youngest self-made female billionaire in America.

• 0:54Sara Blakely?

  One thing that I feel like has helped me the most is to be kind to myself. So I realized that when I became a mom, I spent a lot of mental energy beating myself up, feeling so guilty. And when I was working, I was beating myself up that I wasn't with the kids and mentally and when I was with the kids, I was beating myself up with that. So I think a lot of mothers were our own worst enemy. And when I really stopped and said, I don't know how to juggle all this. Some days I feel like I'm doing it right. And some days I feel like I just want to cry. At least I made that change and it was a huge change for me. I just catch myself when I start doing that to myself and I just, I change it to kindness and forgiveness.

• 1:35Lewis Howes?

  As opposed to beating yourself up.

• 1:36Sara Blakely?

  Yeah, I'm just like, okay, it's all right. I'm most proud of the fact that I was able to achieve this in a really kind way, that I can look at myself in the mirror and just, I am where I am and I feel really good about it, really good about myself. Didn't feel like I had to compromise. You know, when I first started Spanx, I was at a cocktail party and three guys came up to me and they said, Sarah, we heard you just started your business and invented something. And I said, yes. And they go, you know, business is war.

• 2:06Sara Blakely?

  And I just looked at him and then one guy, you know, pat me on the back and he said, "Yeah, I hope you're up for it. I hope you're ready for war."

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:13Sara Blakely?

  And I went home that night in my apartment and I sat down on the floor and I literally started crying. And I remember thinking, "I don't want to go to war. Like, why does it have to be war? I want to go about this in a completely different way." And so the whole journey of Spanx, I really took a feminine approach to it. I mean, I didn't know business. I'd never taken a business class. I didn't have a business plan. I didn't go out and raise VC. So I trusted my gut. I stuck with intuition. I just did things what felt very...

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:42Sara Blakely?

  Yeah. I think traditional business has been very male energy. And so I wanted to see what would happen if I took a very feminine energy approach. So I've been dropped to my knees many times in life by grief. I mean, just, ugh, it's like unbearably painful. By the time I was 31, I'd lost 11 different people close to me from separate tragedies.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 3:07Sara Blakely?

  Yeah. But I will say that, you know, going through that, I always think there's a hidden blessing in everything that we go through in life. And one of the blessings was that facing my own mortality at a really young age had all these hidden gifts. I use mortality and sort of the insignificance of all of this in a positive way, just how temporary this all is, to fuel me and to say, "What? Why would I ever not do this?" What? Because I'm afraid that person, that person's not going to remember me five minutes after. I make a fool of myself anyway. Like, let's do this. We're all here for just a short period of time. So it freed me up in a way that I think most people in the natural course of life, you know, maybe starts to think about in their 40s when they might

• 3:51Sara Blakely?

  lose a parent or a grandparent or something. So, yeah, really...

• 3:56Speaker 02

  How do you get through a challenging loss like that? Like, what's your process?

• 4:00Sara Blakely?

  Oh, my gosh. I, one day at a time. I mean, it is just one day at a time. The more you experience in life, the more you'll have to offer others. So experience everything, anything and everything. Don't hold yourself back. Smile and be kind and...

• 4:18Sara Blakely?

  Don't take it all too seriously. Remember to laugh along the way.