From Bad Influence To Bold Pivot

Ever been told you’re a “bad influence” for asking fair questions? That spark is where our journey starts—a child who stood up to bullies, grew into an adult who refuses pay ceilings, quiet poverty, and routines that drain time without building a life. We talk frankly about the cost of playing by rules that weren’t designed for us: stagnant wages in essential roles, pensions that don’t add up, and credit habits that feel like comfort but act like chains. Then we go further—toward the pivots that buy back hours, dignity, and choice.

I share the moves that changed my trajectory: leaving roles that capped growth, relocating to make housing work, and embracing remote work not as a perk but as financial leverage. We unpack the unseen costs of commuting and life admin, and why employers rarely account for the real price we pay to show up. From there, the conversation turns practical: retraining for portable skills

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Chapters

• 0:00 Foundations And A New Focus
• 1:50 Naming The Bad Influence Label
• 5:10 Standing Up To Bullying
• 7:25 Friendship, Misunderstandings, Belonging
• 9:15 Fairness From Playground To Paycheque
• 12:30 Quiet Poverty In Essential Work
• 15:35 Credit Traps And Financial Conditioning
• 19:20 Pivoting Careers And Pay Ceilings
• 23:10 Moving Homes And Working From Home
• 26:40 Time Costs, Commuting, And Value
• 29:20 Retraining And Local Entrepreneurship
• 32:10 Four-Day Weeks And Self-Reliance
• 35:00 Systems Not Built For Us
• 38:00 Defining Freedom And Daily Joy
• 41:00 Building A Business And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and good afternoon. This is Lita here, goddess of growth. I am here to just say hi and share a few reflections. I have spent the last few weeks building the foundation to buy Create a Network and business is ready. I am ready to go. And as the days go on, I am still podcasting more in my head than on this platform. However, things are ready to be changed, and I am shifting my work focus as the foundation building comes through an end. I don't know if it really ends, to be honest. Websites always need updating, blogs are done more frequently, the sharing becomes a bit more personal. Today I'd like to review again a few articles that have come across my radar. But interestingly, articles often come in such a way where I'll be thinking about a subject matter and then the headlines will show up. I suppose that's why I go in and just read the information. You are with Lita, Goddess of Growth, and this is a space for us to come together and identify our stories. Those very stories that help us to transform, to be the creators that we are here to be. Today I'm reflecting on again the pivot. Starting life as the bad influence. According to my mother's update this year, a teacher once told her I was a bad influence. It's not new news. I was 12 years old. I hated the school I was in, but that's another story. The label bad influence has stayed with me in some quarters of my life. I think now it wasn't so much about being badly behaved, it was about having a mind of my own, about questioning things that didn't seem fair. And often I came upon the challenge of meeting people that felt I felt that you know I was I felt too much of myself, so to speak. Again, the nuances are there. I've often come across people that have insecurities, and it's almost like a projection because I come across often as being quiet, or used to, because I'm podcasting and live streaming now, so this is a whole different um life experience. But I started life as quite a shy insular child. Unless, of course, you knew me. And when I was with my cousins and closest people, I was able to converse on a lot of topics actually, often spending time with my seniors talking about geopolitics, family dynamics, relationships. If you didn't know me, I suppose I was a bit distant, sometimes aloof. I took a long time to get to know people, trust people. Regardless of which, my core theme for life has always been an interest in fairness and justice. It's been something that's integral to my life as long as I can remember. As the oldest child, I was tasked with sharing, but I also cherished my own space. There was a balance between giving, sharing, making sure everyone else had, and also learning about my own boundaries and understanding that it was okay and is okay for me to have something for myself too. I could not stand unfairness. Even for those I didn't particularly like. I was the one who would step in if someone was being bullied. In fact, my very first secondary school had many horrors. It reminded me often of scenes in Grange Hill. For those of us of my age, you all know the program. And the children, to me, especially in the fifth form and sixth form in those days, they'd looked like adults smoking in the toilet. They had lives that one wouldn't believe existed in reality, but there you go. And the fights, the fights in the school, outside of the school. Yeah. I remember a young girl, she was in her fifth year, I believe. Jasmine, I do remember her name. She had a boyfriend in another school, and a couple of girls had come and apparently put liquid in her eyes because they liked the guy. It was a crazy place, horrible place for me anyway. Oh, yeah. Haven't remembered that one for a long time. Could not you know, could not accept fairness, unfairness, couldn't look at it, couldn't watch it, couldn't be part of it. And I definitely was the one that would step in if anyone was being bullied. In fact, teachers used to call on me to befriend others who were often alone. And some of those times being asked to step up led to different life experiences and opportunities for me personally. I remember being asked to show a new girl around school. She spoke mostly French, just a little English. I introduced her as tasked to people around the school, making sure that she was able to connect with others and make friends. I knew immediately she wouldn't be someone that would be my friend. She was very chic, she looked very, you know, wealthy, so shall we say, and knowing my background, I knew I couldn't keep up with all of that. So I did my best to introduce her to the people of her standing in and around the school. I was stunned the next day to find her waiting for me. I later learned that other children who shared her language didn't want to be friends with her, fearing her lack of English would reflect poorly on them. Our friendship was a strange pairing marked by a moment of a dance class where she urgently signalled for me not to enter the girls' changing room. She didn't have the words, but I later learned she thought I was a boy. I was that late to blossom. So on reflection, as always, she chose to be with me as a friend, not even knowing what sex I was. Months later, after a performance, a dance performance, our mothers met. And on reflection, I suppose, throughout our lives there's been a number of misunderstandings. But again, that'll be a topic for another day. So the instinct I have to look out for the underdog, the scapegoat, the black sheep, that person on the sideline often has come at my own expense, but it has never left me. And when I talk about expense, I am not talking necessarily about finance, but emotionally, mentally, physically. There's always been an investment to help those that I feel could do with a bit of assistance, whether it is in putting people together, connecting them with my network, helping them to move through a cycle. But I do believe, regardless of the person, there has to be something good in everyone. And often it takes me a long time to fully understand that it is up to the other person to tap into their inner glory. And I reflect again on today geopolitics again, unfair systems. At fifty, I reflect on that child that studied and enjoyed topics like sociology, psychology, economics. I look at the news when I reflect on the conflicts and how the players have switched from bullies to victims and victims to bullies. It's like family dynamics being played out on the world stage, really. And our families, they create a scenario in our upbringing that prepares us for later life. We just don't realise it until it's almost too late. But lately, my reflections on fairness have moved from the playground to the paycheck. You know. The NHS administrators as an example. The many in government roles serving their community only to find themselves in a life with zero prospects and without financial backing, facing a life of quiet poverty. It seems to me the global focus on wealth is for the top, while everyone else, there's a form of servitude that keeps people working without any real chance of investing. Some are lulled by the illusion of a pension, not realizing that on a low salary, that pension will be unfit for purpose. Especially if one is renting or paying a mortgage and hasn't completed the mortgage, for example, by retirement age. And I do believe there is a growing, let's say, minority at the moment that have come towards pension age and they've still got a chunk of a mortgage to pay. They may decide to use the equity and downgrade to something more manageable, something that they could pay off in full. And if they've ever had to juggle, like the cleaner has had to. Damned if we do, damned if we don't. When we depend on it, observers suggest that we should work harder, work longer for the same minimum wage next to living wage. And then when we don't and find ourselves relying on that very system we we've been encouraged to rely on, we're reprimanded. Oh, it comes to me, Alabama solution, which I watched about a couple of weeks ago, and my shock and horror to see slavery in plain sights, and its acceptance because the people enslaved are criminals sent to prison, we believe, for rehabilitation. I watched the judge in that documentary state that the prison service, and this is my words, the prison service is in place of killing people, the death penalty. So it's almost like subconsciously we have accepted it is okay to keep criminals living indefinitely in indefinite horrors based on the crimes that they've committed, with no understanding that those enforcing that rule of law are in our society, in our beds, in our households, around our children. I saw one of the prison officers or guards who apparently was promoted a couple of times after killing a few prisoners, and I think one he did so was a prisoner called Stephen. And I think about his wife, his children, his family knowing that it's his job to torment prisoners on a daily basis. And as a child, I remember having a debate in class about the death penalty, and those people in the old days responsible for hanging. And I couldn't fathom how a person, usually a man, would leave home his wife and family, and his job was to go and let loose the axe or go in with an injection and then return home as the family man and be respected in society as well because they've helped eliminate someone that has committed crimes against humanity, community, society. It's a strange so the jailers of our modern age have come to mind. What keeps us in this system? I believe one of our biggest downfalls is not learning economics, and I know I've said this before. Poor parents raise children who believe they're succeeding because they earn more than what their parents earned. Our measures on life are based on past experience because we have no idea what's coming in the future. The young will boast until a few paydays in they realize the dream of a home, a stable life is impossible on their income. And then there's credit. I was raised in a household where credit was our master. Unbeknownst to me, I didn't think too much of getting a catalogue and being asked to choose what I wanted, clothes, toys, the rest of it. Christmas time being asked to write the list and flicking through catalogues, putting the page number and so. Nothing at all. It meant we had a lifestyle of always living beyond our means without even realizing it. Easy come, easy go. And in those days I imagine the terms for credit were not as good as now. We're talking about times where even in those days I'm a 70s child. I've come I will I've come into this world at a time when women initially needed to have a father or a male figure to sign their agreement that they could rent or lease a home, buy a home, have a bank account. So in those days, 70s, 80s, credit was hard to come by, especially for someone as a woman. Catalogues were very popular, Kays and can't remember the others, Argos, and so the Qualgus didn't do credit in those days, so I'm not quite sure. There's other catalogues, big ones that we used to go through. Freeman's, that's right, other catalogues. But it taught us that all we needed to do was just visualize, put it out there, and the items will come. No idea or concept of how many hours it took to work to get that item. So we were living beyond our means without even realizing it. And being in social housing, not having the high rents that people in the private sector was paying, we were also cushioned and absorbed from real financial realities. As a young woman, I learned to get by on credit, ongoing overdraft, high interest uh cards, which I did before I purchased my first apartment and learned that was not the way to go. But credit on its own, forget the desire or the requirement to have a roof over our heads, but credit on its own can keep us continually looking for some kind of work so that we're in a position to pay off the credit that we owe. If you think this behaviour, this lifestyle of credit is any different to a prison service, I would say you are wrong. The life we live is better than any enforced prison, any built prison. However, if you're one that has a fixed pattern for work, we clock in, we clock out, we pay tax on what we earn, and then again on what we spend. The system frowns on us working for more money, whether it be overtime, getting another job, or branching out and being creative and going into self-employment. Self-employment, there are companies that will tolerate that a bit more, because it's seen as actually encouraging creativity, plus it should eventually support and help the economy, right? But in the cleaner's case, because she relied on stable income from two employers, there seems to be an issue. Conflict of interest, maybe. True freedom is not the ability to just wake up, travel to work, and travel back. That's a routine, isn't it? It's not liberation. So we're thinking about pivoting and how we can pivot to ultimately freedom. Why do we do the things we do in this life? Yes, we go to a job to pay for our cars, our mortgages, our rent, you know, the basics. We need funds for that, right? Even though I know countries are thinking about presenting some kind of a minimum income to make sure that people are living on a minimum let standard of have a minimum standard of living, that might be something to look into. So what's the way out? I'm 50 years old, almost 51. My pay hasn't actually risen in a meaningful way since what, 2009? Literally. My journey has been really about focusing on housing, stability, being a woman. I didn't really focus on salary. In fact, there was a really good job I had. I always tell people this around 2009, probably just before. Actually, it would have been way before 2009, because that's when I got my first home. I had this really lovely job, I cannot remember the year, and I really wanted my salary to increase because I wanted to buy a home, and I understood how many multiples I needed for a salary, and I just wasn't at it. And I remember a colleague sitting down and stating everybody wants 30,000 grand as a salary, but it's not a good thing because apparently when you get 30,000 pounds, you're taxed more and you have more responsibilities, and the equivalent of what you're earning isn't as much as when you're earning less than 30,000 pounds. I was really puzzled. I asked a question for him to actually clarify what he meant, and he made a comment about me being intelligent, I should understand. And to this day, I understood what he was saying, but evidently he came from a house where probably I'd say two parents had financial backing, and so my only interest was getting enough money to be able to buy a home. So those arguments about okay, if you get a higher salary, you pay more tax. That's that's irrelevant to someone that's actually wanting to do the work, to get the money, to pivot, to go and get a home. I'm 50 years old now, 51 soon. It has been a time, this life, of attempting to leave behind the survival story and step into the I am here and living story. Who knows if I'll ever achieve it, but I do have hope. I've not achieved it as yet. If you look at it from the outside, you'll be like, well, Nita, you've got your house, you've got your whatever. But to fully embrace wealth and live a wealthy life, that hasn't happened as yet. I did a lot and made a lot of sacrifices to leave that life of poverty behind. And my answer to leaving it behind has been to pivot on many things, pivot away from ancestral expectation. I learned this year I had a very frank conversation, wasn't even a conversation. I did the listening mostly. My mother was very clear. Her only ambition for us as children was that we could read. She's of the generation that believes as migrants we make the best if we do cleaning jobs and so don't aim too high. I have a degree in business. It was never her dream for me to have a degree. And in fact, I was raised as the stupid child. Jacquas was one of the names very much prevalent in my life. When I got my degree, it was a shock. I took myself through that. I was away. I had left home many years before, a few years before, I took myself on a degree. My first marriage was what inspired me to do my degree, actually. I have done a lot of pivoting. I've gone into jobs that have refused to promote me, or jobs where, like the NHS role, often they have one role and that's what you do for life. You might get little increments in pay, but there's like a cap on how much they will increase that pay too. I left the NHS on around£25,400, 2009, and I read the same role is now paying£26,000. I know I made the best decision to leave. One of the reasons I left was because at the time they had decided to do some kind of a pay freeze, and they said that there was no more room to move up. You'd basically increase your knowledge and experience by taking on more responsibilities. And a lot of jobs were doing that in the economic crisis then. There was a crash. I had moved to Royal Tempridge Wells and taken on a travel commitment of around 4,400 a year. My near£26,000 salary was not going to cover that travel expense for an indefinite period of time, not with my mortgage and other bills that I had to pay. So I had to pivot. I had to move forward. I had to find another way of attempting to live well enough and still maintain my financial commitments. Conscious moves. Sometimes I've moved and not even realized why I'm moving, but just understood there was a requirement. To move. So that included leaving London to buy my first home in Royal Tunbit Wells. And again, at the start of the pandemic, it meant selling my one-bedroom apartment for a small three-bedroom cottage in a village near Glastonbury, where I am now. On each move, it was a calculated risk. In fact, this move was the most calculated because all the things I thought I was working towards didn't didn't actually happen. It was a calculated risk. I've said before, Thursday before the pandemic hit us, as in we had our first lockdown, I received an offer on my apartment that was already up for sale. It was up for sale the year before, it didn't sell. I took it off, I changed agents. The Thursday before, and they came with an offer, quite you know, about 10 grand less than I wanted. And I told the agent, actually, you need to come up at least an offer five grand. And I was told I'd need to accept the offer if they said yes, because there's a lot of people pulling out of their purchases and sales because of what's happening with the pandemic. The interested buyer agreed and we moved forward. I started working from home full-time from the Monday, and yeah, it's been working from home ever since, even with the move. Strategic move meant the idea of working from home full-time was something that I took into consideration when I chose to move. Let's say I thought uh it was actually no 2019. I took on the role, a new role, new new job, and the job had or I I was told the job was looking into working from home a couple of days a week. And it was quite an exciting development because the post was quite a distance from home. However, I started in the April and by the September they decided that the work from home opportunity wouldn't work. And then that was 2019. But by the March, work from home was something that not only could work, but what we did as a full-time option whilst we went through the pandemic. And that brings us back to employers, right? Employers pay for our time at work, but not for the travel, not for the travel costs. The life admin, that's all of us that we get ready, the clothes we take to work, the food we bring in, all of those things. The salary does not really cover it. For those of us that work from home, have you really looked at what it is you were spending to what you're spending now? My own budget cannot be compared to my previous because I moved, I got a bigger home, a bigger mortgage, bigger commitment. However, if I was to compare like for like, there is more benefit financially in working from home if you've got if you've had the same job as you did around the pandemic time. And the beauty of this life change, we have more time to fulfill all the admin that's required in our lives, the appointments. Just think more clearly about how we can prepare our finances and resources for older life. It's a strange thing where we have governments wanting to take any income that we have that they believe that we have saved from working from home and tax that, apparently, so I hear, when they will be the same government that complains in 10, 20 or so years' time when we are in need because we do not have money for ourselves, right? The digital age has cracked open. It's offering all of us who are interested, who are steered and geared towards it, offering us a chance to reclaim some of those resources, some of those hours, because actually when we're talking about income and growth, it's not just about money, it's about time. There's nothing that can replace those hours commuting to work, whether it's 15 minutes to an hour, some people travel too. I remember when I first took trains back home from London to rural Tumbridge Wells, and I thought to myself, oh, I don't know if I've made a mistake. You see, one of the criteria for choosing a home was finding somewhere where the train station was only five, six minutes walk. I think it was ten minutes was the marker, but my walk to the train station was five, six minutes. So that was perfect for me, one train into London. But there were some evenings because of lightning on the rails, train delays which happened on occasion, and sometimes they would remove a train from the service. Unlike the tube where there's continuous trains, the overground train have a whole different rules and regulation. So there were times I'd be stuck trying to get home, sometimes up to four hours. And I remember asking this businessman, like, how does he do it? He said he was doing it for years, very well stressed. I think he was a financial uh banker. And he'd been doing it for years, loved the journey because it allowed him to sleep, to read, to work, all of that kind of thing, to do that daily. That wasn't for me. We have the digital age now where we can, if we're inclined to, reclaim our time, also tap into our creativity. We need to think about what it is that we have that we can develop. We need to think about what opportunities are there outside of the job so that we can live good and better lives. Not all of us will have a great start, but we can all consider relocating, retraining, rethinking. And when I talk about retraining, there's a difference between retraining in the job that you are in versus opening up your mind to other skills that you can learn so that no matter what happens, you're able to pivot, to travel, whether it be from your village to another, from your town to another abroad. I was reading an article about the honest boxes. We have them in this village where people come and they will get eggs, load cool produce. Someone might have it outside their house or even in a check, and you have to have cash. You pick up your groceries and you put cash. There's no one there to serve you. There was this whole hoo-ha about Amazon opening stores where people could just go and pick up their goods and pay. I've never experienced Amazon, but I have experienced village life where I have my cash and I'm ready to pay. And the conversation led on to the fact that less of us are using cash now, which might mean that some of those honest boxes disappear. However, there's a woman that's creating cookies,£3.50 apiece, dare I say, that had the genius idea to create a QR code. So those of us that no longer carry cash could still benefit from using the honest boxes. They talked about her box being outside the pub, so you've got added security there, where the pub owner could almost look out and to see, you know, how many people are going in the box, make sure it was okay. There is still a slot that you can put money if you'd like to, if you're not someone that has technology, and there is something that is needed, I suppose, as we transition from cash to cashless. There are still a lot of us, young and old, believe it or not, that cannot or do not want to use digital only. And the cut was the nice link between it was the fact that some of the customers going for the cookies would also go into the pub. So that added extra um opportunities for the pub to get clients as well. But it is in making ourselves aware, retraining, being aware of the opportunities out there makes our work more promising and present, helps us build our legacies for the future. It doesn't have to die out the honest box. Our skills may not be relevant for the jobs that's coming in the future, but we can still observe what's going on around us so that when change happens, we're ready. Right? But the only way, in my opinion, we can be ready is to be ready to pivot, to stop putting ourselves in that position where we're reliant on an employer telling us we have to be in the office or the factory or on the farm at this time and that time and that time and that time. Farming is seasonal. But if you look at it, all the jobs are seasonal. There are conversations about having a four-day week because they acknowledge on the fourth day, usually a Friday, that's often the quietest day of the week. Again, companies struggle to bring that into practice. But in the meantime, whilst employers and corporations decide what's best for them to do, it's for us to make sure that we're getting training in. We're thinking about the economy, we're thinking about how much it costs to house, clothe, and feed ourselves. There's no one coming to save us, actually. In my experience, prices have gone up, salaries have not kept up at all. And that's years in the making. So whether we're going to cross the country, go abroad, to make things better for ourselves, we need to think about how we're going to make a change and what we're going to bring with us when we make that change, because there's no point leaving and having nothing to present in that location that we're going to, so that we can experience life better financially and holistically. The systems we are in are not for us, they aren't designed for us to thrive. For some reason, when we're looking at business strategy, and I don't remember when I was doing my business degree actually, being asked a question how does this company structure benefit the employee? Yes, we talked about HR principles and legislation, rules for work, um, equality, and so, but there's an economic question that isn't asked. So a company decides based on the local area, this is what the local people earn, and so on that basis, this is what we will pay. Which company is taking a step back to say, well, actually, to buy a house, you need X amount. These are the hours I need people to come in, and this is the work that I'm doing, and this is the profit that I'm making. Maybe my two million pound salary or profit, I can actually go in and give my staff a bit more. You might have staff that decide to work for me for life. Well, I've actually looked after them, stick in a house, clothe, and feed themselves, and also look after the next generation. The same generation that society likes to complain about, that can't find work, that live on benefits. And on the flip side, complain that there's not enough children in the world or in the country. The system is not designed for us to thrive, it's unfortunate. So we need to step out and make our own system within the system. Right? What is it that you want? What makes you happy? There's a part in all of us that wants true freedom. The freedom that so many of us around the world might never experience actually, if we don't act. We look, we look at people on the beach, scuba diving, skydiving, going to concerts. That's what it's all about when we watch these things or try to participate by paying a ticket to be there in that moment, that sense of freedom, elation, being able to just be. But it's a small moment. It's not often a daily activity unless you're someone that's creative, you found your bliss, you found your career, and you're doing it and enjoying it on a daily or frequent basis. That's what we're aiming for, right? Imagine how free one would feel because self-employment is not for everyone. Imagine how free one would feel actually waking up to go to work because they actually enjoy the job. You actually enjoy what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. It adds something, doesn't it? Beyond remuneration, it's freedom, conscious, courageous freedom created by pivoting, right? Well, this is my journey. Perhaps it mirrors yours. We're in a process of pivoting. I'm still doing work for others in a container of sorts, but I'm spending many a night, sometimes till 12, 1 or so o'clock. It's no longer a badge of honour, to be honest, with my dark eyes at the moment, attempting to build my business so I can do more creating, more living, experience more freedom. Let me know how life is for you, and I hope you got something from this. If you're ready to pivot, do join me. Thank you for listening. You've been with Lita, goddess of growth, today. Do tap into the links at the bottom of the podcast. It's my way of asking for support to keep the podcast alive. There are changes coming, and I do appreciate you being here and listening. Thank you.