I’ve spent nearly four decades in PR, which is a long time to spend working out how to say a true thing in a way somebody will actually hear.

Feel Fab Naturally is a proageing business, and that’s a phrase worth unpacking, because almost nobody uses it.

Proageing doesn’t mean pretending the years aren’t happening. It means refusing the story that they’re a problem with a solution attached. Somewhere around thirty we’re told the peak has been & gone and the rest is management, and an entire industry has been built on that idea, most of it sold to women, most of it politely.

I didn’t set out to argue with any of that. I set out to feel better, because at one point I didn’t, and I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anybody about what to do.

What I found was that the honest information exists and is mostly written for other people. Studies written for scientists. Advice written for twenty-five-year-olds and then aimed at us. Almost nothing written to a woman in her fifties or sixties as though she were the most experienced person in the room, which in most rooms she is.

So I started writing it. First for myself, then for a handful of friends, then properly.

The method underneath it is CHARM, which are the five things I kept coming back to in every conversation I had with a woman about her own mojo: Connection, Hydration, Activation, Relaxation and Movement. Not a programme. Five places to look when something has gone flat and you can’t name it. Together they build healthspan, which is not more years but more of the years that work, and healthspan is what buys you the bandwidth to do more of what you actually like.

I’m not a coach and I am firm about that. I am a woman who reads the research, tries things on herself, and reports back honestly, including when the answer is that something did nothing at all.
The rest of me: I’ve rowed, I dragon boat, I paddle an outrigger canoe, and I have done all three for long enough that some of the women I started with are still part of my life. I’m endlessly curious and reasonably difficult to convince, which turns out to be a useful combination in this particular field.

The thinking arrives every Monday in Maximise Your Mojo. If you want the argument rather than the biography, read the Fired Up manifesto.

And if you want to know how the business actually operates, including the commercial side, it’s all set out on one page.

Fired Up at 55. For women who refuse to disappear.