“What you believe isn’t what you say you believe. What you believe is what you do. That to me is this perfect example of integrity.”
Mel Wiggins runs a business in Northern Ireland called Assembly, a community for women who are interested in personal development, fostering courage, and being more true to themselves. She writes, teaches, and hosts in-person and online events in that community. She’s also the co-founder of Freedom Acts, an anti human-trafficking non-profit that she and a friend started while still in their 20s; she’s a blogger; and she’s a mum to a little boy and a little girl. Mel and I had a wonderful conversation about how all of those roles formed, intersected and evolved… and the three pillars of ‘true influence’.
Things We Talk About In This Episode:
- Multi-layered, multi-hyphenated careers and what to call yourself if you’re asked at a party
- Being led by curiosity, the value of deep-dive research, and the joy of starting something new
- Mel’s early career in the not-for-profit charity sector, and the turning point she reached that led her to galvanise a group of volunteers and ultimately, to co-create Freedom Acts, a not-for-profit group aimed at ending modern slavery
- How pregnancy can be an impetus for both creativity and personal rebellion
- Doing something new, how to “be a learner at every stage,” and how to get things done despite feeling totally unqualified
- Pivoting careers, self-doubt and self-worth wobbles when it comes to moving from charitable work to for-profit work, the desire to “do good,” and the realisation that roles, and work, can be “both-and” rather than “either-or”
- Finding your ‘ideal community’ on Instagram, and building space to make that community part of your offline life
- Starting an “accidental business”
- Allowing your values to drive your business, or the work you do in the world
- The inner work that goes into making peace with charging for your services, skills and time
- That women need to have more stakes and autonomy in economics, finance and making money… and that we are to be trusted
- Navigating the world of online influence
- The concept of being influential as an improvement (what it means to be “improvingly influential”)
- Mel’s research into what people consistently find “influential” in both social and personal contexts (three core pillars of intuition, integrity, and impact)
- The value of finding and maintaining our own personal boundaries when sharing online
- The very human desire to “be seen” – and giving ourselves permission to admit this and pursue it
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Mel’s website
- Mel’s business, Assembly
- Mel on Instagram, @melwiggins
- Freedom Acts
- Sara’s podcast episode “Using Instagram for Charity Fundraising, with Creating for Good”
- Sara’s story in Stylist magazine: “How becoming the breadwinner changed my relationship with my husband”
- Tara Mohr (coach and author)
