Skin in the Game: Everything You Need is Already Inside You

introduction

this is a book about an immigrant who came to the US when unemployment was 10.4 percent, with no college degree, no money, and no contacts. She grew up in Scotland, the youngest of four girls. They were raised by their mother who was trained as a nurse and had been suddenly widowed at age thirty-eight. Their mum taught her and her three sisters, "Learn how to do something, so you will always be able to provide for yourself. If you ever have to do it alone, as I did, you must be able to put food on the table, a roof over your head, and provide for your family."

Determined that she would never be left as vulnerable, as she saw her mother had been, she looked beyond the confines of the small English town her family had moved to when she was nine, beyond the small hair salon where she worked weekends as a Saturday girl at thirteen, and way beyond the narrowness of the council housing and free lunch vouchers that she had grown up with. The pull of the American dream was a powerful one. When the opportunity to immigrate to the US and get a work visa presented itself, it was like opening a Willy Wonka bar and finding the golden ticket. So, she ran as fast as she could to the chocolate factory in California.

But this book isn’t strictly a memoir.

It’s the story of seeing an opportunity as an immigrant that everyone else had missed, and that would go on to be covered by the Harvard Business Review as a flash of brilliance. It’s about daring big with no resources and focusing on a final outcome of becoming the leader in the global market. It’s about self-funding a business with $14,000 on credit cards and growing that startup into Dermalogica, the number one brand in an industry that didn’t then exist: the professional skin care industry. It’s about starting and building the brand that then completely disrupted that industry—with twenty-seven formulas all developed in nine months with no mineral oil, no lanolin, no SD alcohol, no formaldehyde, no artificial colors, and no fragrance, when no one was talking about what ingredients they left out; everyone was bragging about the secret miracle ingredient they put in. Against the odds, having no connections or degree, she took on the giants at twenty-four years old with only a beauty school diploma to her credit. And some years later, the Sunday Times of London ran a double-page article titled The Woman Who Started a Cult because of the huge clamor for Dermalogica in over a hundred markets.

But this isn’t really a business book.

It’s about building an incredible community of 100,000 local entrepreneurs in 106 countries who built that global industry and changed their own lives through owning their skills. They named themselves experts in an industry that lacked credibility, respect, and success. It’s about never shrinking yourself and or allowing others to shrink you. Ever.

It’s my story. And theirs. And it can be yours.

we’ve all got stuff we deal with

You can’t go back

and make a new start,

but you can start right now

and make a brand new ending.

—James Sherman

Perhaps we look at other people’s lives and think they are perfect. Maybe not the people themselves, but their lives seem pretty wonderful. Social media relentlessly shows us how perfect everyone is—their perfect bodies, homes, jobs, travel, lovers, children, food, cars, and Facetuned images can stir envy and self-doubt among the millions of followers they may have.

They have everything. Or at least they didn’t get as bad a deal as maybe we did.

Think again.

Everyone has crappy, awful stuff in their lives. We either bury it, or we somehow manage to own it and it informs the way we live our life. Some of us have a small beach bag of stuff we psychologically carry around and will never unpack. Many have a huge U-Haul of stuff—a pack up the kids, we’re moving to Texas!–sized truck. Trust me, we all have baggage and plenty of it.

Will the stuff that’s piling up become the locked door that stops you from going into the next stage of your life? Or will it become the key that unlocks every door ahead of you? You have a choice. Either we work out our stuff before we can move forward, or if it’s manageable, we can carry it with us and unpack it along the way. Either way, we find that the lessons learned as a result were the point of having the stuff in the first place. That very same baggage was tailor-made to serve as our teacher. Own it.

my own stuff left me vulnerable—and strong

We’ve all got a story. Sometimes a really tough one. Like mine.

My mum was aptly named Heather. Like the hardy and resilient Scottish flower, she would need every bit of strength her name described. My father died when I was aged two and three quarters. Those quarters count a lot when you are small. Heather was just thirty-eight years old, with four children to raise on her own.

My mum, now alone, with four daughters.

Left to right; Judi, me, Sally and Diana. All just trying to be brave.

My three sisters are older than me, and I was left alone a lot of the time. We never had any spare money: I wore hand-me-down clothes and fourth-hand school uniforms. The fronts of my plastic sandals were cut open to last my growing feet another season. I never went to college and I have never studied business. I also failed chemistry at school.

When I began my career, making less than minimum wage as an apprentice, I was always broke. I would shake down the cushions of my couch for loose change. If I ever found any, I had to decide if I was buying milk or cigarettes. Cigarettes always won. I headed into a disastrous first marriage just out of my teens, which took me far away from my family—all the way to Africa—with an abusive, substance-addicted partner. I immigrated to the US with one suitcase, no money, and a beauty school diploma. No family, no connections, no network, and certainly no job offers.

I now have an incredible life partner in both marriage and business. Raymond is not only my soul mate; he is the smartest person I have ever met. He has held my heart and attention for over forty years. None of this would have happened in the same way for either of us without us having found ourselves and each other.

We have two amazing children who have faced their own struggles and will tell their own stories. They ultimately came through stronger for what they experienced. I am proud of them both—they are two of the bravest people I know.

I have lost homes, people, family, friends, pets, and possessions but I have never quite lost my way. I’ve been on the wrong train stopping at the wrong stations on a bad track, but I’ve always managed to find my way back to the map and get on the road ahead. Just like a connect-the-dots puzzle, it was unclear what everything would eventually add up to, but the picture became focused when I started joining up my seemingly random messy dots—my experiences. It all added up to the treasure hunt of my life.

I hope it will help you navigate yours.

becoming FOUND

It probably seems as if Dermalogica is successful because we create and make great skin care products. That’s not true. Yes, our products are the best in the world (you would expect me to say that as the founder), but that’s not the true success story behind Dermalogica. Our true engine is that we built our business by making salon skin therapists successful in their business.

We train them to be entrepreneurs of their business and their lives.

We focus on the key strengths that make entrepreneurs successful. We develop presentations that inspire, connect, and uplift each one of our hundreds of thousands of skin therapists to reach their own success. We promise, We will drag you kicking, screaming, and biting if necessary, to your optimum level of success. It established our industry and propelled our success at Dermalogica.

Because they have everything they need inside themselves, we succeed.

As I said earlier, most people think that entrepreneurs make it up as we go along. Which is mostly true. And that’s how it is in life too—we all figure it out as we go along. Sometimes that figuring out is damn scary—it might mean we have to take a fork in the road we never expected to. For me, a temperature of 104 degrees from food poisoning in 1979 showed me that fork in the road.

I was in a relationship that was making me hide my potential to allow my deeply insecure partner to feel more important. Then I ate that tainted BBQ chicken. It proved to be visionary. I was sick with salmonella poisoning and he was missing in action—he had gone out partying and left me in a house with no phone line. Cell phones hadn’t yet been invented. I didn’t have a car and couldn’t even drive. I was working in a dead-end job with no chance of advancement. While running a high temperature, I started to become delirious.

For the first and only time in my life, I clearly felt the presence of my father. Not just his presence; I actually felt his hand on my right shoulder, and although it wasn’t in his voice, a clear message, You have to know that you have everything you need inside you—leave. What? Where was I going to go? And how? A strange sense of calm and determination then replaced the rising panic. I felt absolutely clear on my way forward. I had nothing to lose.

When I recovered after five days of being really sick, I planned for my path ahead. It was as if I was planning a real trip: I started a packing list and looked for a destination. I even made a plan for bad weather. I saved for driving lessons and started looking for new work opportunities. I resolved to apply for a job that got me out of working behind the chair (as we call professional practical work in the salon industry) and put me in a related sales job with a company car. I was determined to make it happen—I had to. If I didn’t change things, I knew that I wouldn’t survive, let alone thrive. No matter how long it took, I was committed to the escape plan with no plan B.

Taking risks, trusting our guts, thinking big, stumbling and falling—chasing our biggest dreams. The skills I needed to be a successful human being were the same skills I later used to be a successful entrepreneur. I used them all to build my biggest life around living what I love with purpose.

I have often thought about what would have happened if I hadn’t been triggered by the food poisoning delirium. If I hadn’t got my act together and mustered up the courage to move into the next room of my life. What journey would I have had instead? What important treasures would I have missed along the way?

If I had stayed in my hometown and opened a one-room skin care salon, I would still celebrate my success. If I had never had a career at all and had met someone as a life companion (or brief companion), I would have been perfectly fine. If I had raised my children alone and had been a single parent, it would have been okay, and I would be proud of the achievement. I would have been happy. So will most of us. You see, it has nothing to with what our choices actually are. It has to do with whether we got to personally make them. That is the ultimate success: driving your own destiny just the way you want to. And having the bloody courage to do it.

we are already built for the life journey ahead of us

Most of us doubt that we have what it takes to live a successful life, pursue our dream, and build whatever crazy idea it is we are thinking about. Or we think we can’t do it because we don’t have a degree or business training. Or because we have no money. Sound familiar? It was all told to me too. I did it anyway.

You can too.

I was probably the least likely to find success in the skin care industry. My mum’s idea of a beauty routine was Yardley’s scented soap, a jar of Pond’s cold cream, and Max Factor’s Bewitching Coral lipstick. She taught my sisters and me not to touch our faces, not to pick at spots, and never to tweeze our eyebrows, so my love of professional skin care certainly didn’t come from her.

Despite that meager example of skin care expertise from my mum, I have lived, dreamed, eaten, breathed, and loved the skin care industry since I was seven years old and was given a tube of Avon Pretty Peach hand cream as a birthday gift from my Auntie Ann—now there was a woman who saw the future potential of her goddaughter.

At age eleven, I personally spent every penny of my small weekly allowance on Yeast-Pac clay face masks from the corner pharmacy. The small foil sachet cost around fifteen pence (about a quarter in the United States). I would carefully squeeze out the first third of the small packet and diligently apply it to my washed skin, leave it to set dry for twenty minutes, and then remove every scrap with a warm washcloth. I would fold the metal sachet carefully back and secure it with a paper clip to prevent the remaining contents from drying out. I repeated this twice more each week until the sachet was used up and I would head back to the local pharmacy on Saturday morning while my mum did grocery shopping.

What my mum role-modeled for me was resilience, fortitude, and self-reliance. She urged me to learn how to do something to support myself financially, as well as to travel and be independent. To be kind and have empathy for other people’s situations. And to love Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller, and the enormous value of side lighting in a room. And the simplicity of a tin of baked beans on toast for dinner. This was the beginning of my treasure hunt—the basement room of my mental dream house and the foundational experiences that built it.

a loosely defined plan for finding everything you need

I like to start a journey with a loosely defined plan—even if it’s a hand-drawn pirate’s treasure map that I stain with tea bags and burn the edges of to look really old. (I actually used to leave maps like this for my children to find with enormous excitement.) I now find my way using GPS programs that aren’t nearly as much fun.

the dots may seem random, but they will all join up

Remember those connect-the-dot puzzles we did when we were children? We stared at the paper and it looked like a bunch of dots. Then we carefully joined them up in numerical order. With a pencil that could be erased if we miscounted. And only when we joined the last few dots and held out the paper did we see—it’s a zebra! Who knew?

Every experience that sparks our heart is like a dot on the paper of our lives. It is the people we meet who are significant, the places we visit or live in, and the pains or joys that we feel. Along the way, we may see that we have manifested a journey that allowed us to be seen, and to impact other lives and communities. Keep making the dots and having those experiences—because the dots aren’t random at all. The lessons we need are within those experiences. They will all join up and reveal our purpose to us. Then we are FOUND.

start thinking of your life as a series of rooms

I often dream about houses I have lived in. I walk through the rooms of each house and recall every detail—the furniture, the windows, the small items on each table, even the rugs and pictures. I comfort myself by looking at everything and recalling the way the light fell at certain times of the day. Winter light is cool and blue—brittle. Summer light is different in different parts of the world—rich and golden in Africa, soft and silver in Scotland.

Turns out that I’m not alone: many of us dream about houses and homes. The rooms inside can represent our own lives and moving from one to the next with each experience learned. I have come to understand that these dreams make me feel safe, secure—and that no matter where I am, I can make a home in my mind that will protect me. Or make me feel that I am protected—at least for a moment.

Where do you dream about?

Or have nightmares about?

In her teachings, the renowned physician and women’s health expert Dr. Christiane Northrup asks us to think of our life journey as a series of rooms in a house. I use this analogy of rooms filled with challenges and gifts when I think of the various experiences in my life. We start out in the basement when we are born—the foundation of our house—and make our way through the rooms that continue upstairs and ahead.

In this book, each room represents experiences, people, places, and events that may seem random, but they all join up like a connect-the-dots puzzle on paper from that room.

The goal of our life journey is to find the hidden treasures that help us discover our true purpose for being here and to become FOUND. We must try to make our way to the next room, the next floor, the next hallway until we reach the attic of our house—the end of our journey—and we leave our physical body. Don’t leave any room unexplored or locked. What if that room contained a piano, a writing desk, a garden, or a recording studio? What if, under a pile of clothes and boxes in that room, there was a camera, just waiting for you to find it and carry it with you to create your next chapter and realize a love of photography? What if all your most important treasures were inside that room and were never found?

Eddie Van Halen learned to play the piano at age six and won first place in competitions. But when his dad gave the preteen a six-string Teisco guitar from Sears, he was on his path to becoming one of rock’s greatest guitar groundbreakers. If we don’t take the tools we need from one room and progress to the next one without them, at some point we get to a room that we simply can’t navigate. We missed something along the way and will have to go back to find it.

So, miss nothing along the way.

Don’t get so comfy in one room you forget to open the door and explore the rest. We don’t know how many more rooms lie ahead for us. Some of us may have a gem of a studio apartment to explore, while others have an overgrown garden and an attic. It could take us a while.

Some of the rooms of our life are brightly lit, cozy, and warm. Others are dark, feel chilly, and may be scary. Don’t run through the dark rooms: they can reveal the most important lessons that will teach us the powers of strength and courage. If you duck through a scary room, you are destined to repeat the room because the takeaway lesson you need to move forward remains undiscovered. Most rooms are connected by a hallway: a period of transition, where we are between rooms and may feel unsure, afraid, and without direction. Keep going. The hallway may be short or longer but will lead to the room ahead. Trust that, when you are feeling lost or unsafe. Keep going. The only way to the next room is to learn from the last room, gathering all your takeaway treasures—especially those that may seem far out of reach. Find something to stand on to try to retrieve them.

Each room may have people in it with you—often many, maybe a few, sometimes none. They are all looking for their own takeaway treasures in the same room. Become aware of who might keep you stuck in the room with them and beg you not to go into the unknown rooms ahead. They want you to stay with them, close by, be safe, and help them validate their own decision to stay stuck in one room, too scared to go ahead for fear that it’s dangerous or less rewarding. They never dare to live their biggest life. But you must, without fear of losing something.

I don’t believe life is purely linear, so I don’t indicate in what order the rooms are FOUND—just that as we enter each room, we live the experiences inside it, and leave with the lessons to take forward. Depending on your circumstances, you may find key takeaways in the first room while others wait to be discovered by you in rooms ahead. I have laid this book out in the order I found my own rooms—but