Judymay Is Listening -Caroline Towning, Following Your True Passion, “It’s Never Too Late”

Welcome to Judy Mayer's Listening. This is the show where you tell me what's happening in your life and I listen and together we transform everything. So, ladies, are you up for some transforming everything today? Why not? Let's just, just do it. I have an amazing guest in studio with me today. You're going to be meeting her very shortly and we're going to be talking about things that often seem like light, soft subjects. Have you ever noticed that when a woman makes a meal, she's just providing for her family? It's overlooked, it's not praised, it's not seen as any big deal. And then as soon as a man goes on TV and he so much as chops an onion, it's talked about in the most delicious detail and it's given all this focus and it's given all this praise. And suddenly, as soon as it's a chef doing it and not mum doing it, somehow the thing of chopping an onion and putting together a stir fry is elevated. Just that gaze that looking at men doing things can kind of transform it. And so what we are doing as women and what we've been doing for the last few decades is we've been reclaiming that. We've been saying to ourselves, you know what, Just because women do something brilliantly or just because women are interested in it, doesn't make it less. There's one reason I really love Twitter. There are many reasons I love Twitter, many reasons I don't. But one of the reasons I love Twitter is the fact that things like kittens are now seen as a viable or a praiseworthy, a focus worthy thing. Whereas before, kittens were simply something that you gave to a young girl and forgot about. It was seen as unpowerful. The beauty of a little kitten was seen as somehow not important. And as we start to reclaim these things that are important to us, things like lipstick, clothes, horses, yoga, I think it's really, really important because that's part of us reclaiming ourselves. When we talk about things like self esteem or self discipline or radical self care, the bit that we've got to look at first is the self bit and us really owning what it is that we are naturally drawn toward and what it is that feels really good to us is the vital first step in this. Now, myself and Caroline have known each other for a little while, for ages, for years, I think we kept kind of meeting each other and sort of seeing each other at different art things and around the Groucho Club and different places around Soho and didn't really get to know each other until quite recently. And she is just an absolute delight. And for me, she really personifies this way of being in the world, being fully feminine and full, fully powerful. Caroline Towning is an artist first and foremost. I don't know if she would say it's first and foremost, but that's the thing that I associate with her. And also a lover of horses. She does yoga brilliantly. She's a photographer. She has some incredible global projects coming up over the next couple of years. And so the reason I brought her in was I really wanted for us to have a chat about what does it mean to love stuff and to do the stuff you actually love, rather than the stuff that maybe other people think it's important to do. So what is it that you love, Caroline, and why do you love it? Hi. So from as young as I can remember, I have always been obsessed with horses. I mean, I was sitting on a horse before I could even talk. I grew up in Yorkshire, My mum is a dressage rider, so by default I was going to love horses whether I liked it or not. And for me, I just. I can't think of a time when horses haven't been in my life. And from a very, very young age, I was just obsessed with drawing and I used to draw women and I used to draw horses. And, you know, I'm now 36. I've never grown out of it. Was there ever a time where you sort of thought, oh, I'll put that to one side and I'll focus on something else? So I had a really tough time at school. I wasn't academic, I was really dyslexic. I was actually really blind, like I'm minus 6.6 in HR, but they never really discovered this until later. So I was sent to a really academic school when I was 4 and I just had a really tough time. They didn't spot any of this. I was just falling behind. I felt really stupid. All I wanted to do was basically paint and draw. And up north at that time in the 80s with my parents, that was just not seen as a viable career. So, you know, I grew up in quite traditional Jewish family and it was be a dentist or a doctor or something, you know, or marry really, really rich. Marry really, really rich. And, you know, I just wasn't interested in any of those things. All I wanted to do was draw horses. So it was kind of beaten out of me a little bit and I ended up just bouncing around different schools and I had a really, really miserable time and how did they beat it out of you? Was it just sort of. Was it more subtle, people just not praising it, not acknowledging it, or was it. Was it more definite? Was it like, caroline, you cannot keep doing this. It was. It was kind of like, oh, you still doing your art? Oh, you know, it's very. Kind of quite patronizing with it. And it was very much. I wasn't. I was terrible at math. I'm still terrible at maths. I never really. Still can't add, but it wasn't encouraged. And, you know, I still did art. I still, you know, I didn't have many friends when I was a kid. I was quite lonely. But what I had was I was very, very lucky that I had a pony and then a horse. And you got to tell us the pony's name. So my first one was called Domino. And he was basically, when we went to go and try him out, must have been about 6 or 7. And he actually bolted with me across the other side of the field. And my mum, who's. My mum's Scottish and she's very, very tough, and she was like, oh, brilliant. He'll be a tough ride for her. So we bought him and he was. I don't know if you know about ponies, but ponies are really difficult. They're not easy animals. Sometimes they're more difficult than horses. They're quite stubborn ponies. You do see a lot of little girls at riding schools kind of, you know, getting pushed around by the pony or pony galloping off and quite traditional. You know, old riding school instructors would be like, it's never the pony's fault, it's always the little child's fault. I love that kind of traditional kind of pony club, you know. But again, that's sort of interesting that you've got what's already quite a big animal. It's bigger than you and you're a child and you have to, you know, communicate with the animal, learn the animal, convince things, like all really quite important skills to have in life. So why do you think it is that girls and ponies are seen as sort of a soft option, not really viable, not something that, you know, isn't going to lead to you having the most amazing life, I think. Well, I mean, I think girls and ponies, I mean, there's this amazing connection here when a girl. Little girls have always been obsessed with horses, and I think it's to do with sense of empowerment. And when you get on that animal, I mean, a horse has a strength of five to seven men I mean, when you get on that animal and it's completely connected with you and doing what you say, I feel there's nothing more empowering or. It is the most amazing feeling in the world. Galloping across a field on a horse. I mean, I can't think of any, anything better I'd rather do. But I think, you know, for girls to have that connection with a horse and to learn how to look out after it, I mean, they are essentially, you build a friendship with the horse. I mean, you are putting your life in that horse's hands or hooves every time you get on it. And I think that is the most amazing thing. And little girls are just always attracted to that. I mean, I think career wise, you know, you can have amazing careers with horses. I mean, I actually, I was an amateur show jumper up until about 19 and I absolutely loved it. And actually that was one of the options of what I really wanted to do. I really, really. Actually from the first half of my life, I just wanted to be a show jumper. And I still want to be a show jumper. I think I might go back to it at some point. Um, but yeah, I mean that was, that was my, you know, obviously I had the art as well, but it was horses or art. I mean, they were the two big passions. And when I actually did go to university, I ended up studying animation because I, you know, I was obviously I was never had the brains to be a doctor. So let me just do a slight tweak there. You never had that particular brain, that particular kind of rain. Yeah. So doing animation, I knew I could go out at the end of an animation degree and get a job, which I did. I got a job in soho, hence meeting you in the Groucho Club. But yeah, so I did that. But the passion for horses and art never really went away. In fact, my end of year film at university, my animation was about a woman and a horse. Why is it, do you think that as women we often stop listening to that voice? So there's something that is attracting us, something that we want to do, something that we want to go for, whether that is earning loads of money through real estate, whether that is becoming a best selling author or just a really great author. Why is it that you think, why do you think that we just close that down? I think. Well, for me it was insecurity. I was lost for a great period of time. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was kind of looking for guidance and the guidance that I got was telling me that I Couldn't do something that I really wanted. Hence me kind of looking for thinking maybe I can do animation, maybe I can, you know, do still something creative but get a 9 till 5 job. So, you know, for me it was insecurity and not really listening to me. It's taken a lot of confidence actually to turn around and go, you know what, I'm an artist and I paint this and I love painting horses and this is what I do. And actually it's been easier doing that than all the other careers that I thought would have been better. You know, I love the way that Julia Cameron refers to that as the careers that are just not quite the right thing. She calls them shadow careers. And she'll. Yeah, she talks about how, you know, when someone really wants to be a recording artist and they instead become like a producer or something close. Something close, but just not really it. And if you think about it in terms of relationships, you know, would you end up marrying the person who's like the best friend of the person you really want to be married to? I mean, you know, we can see that's a whole other radio show. Indeed. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think we're going to be talking about after the break is, you know, how can we do that? How can we sort of sit in it and how can we really claim and own our reality without allowing society or the people who love us, who are around us from closing that down? But I've got to ask you, what happened to Domino in the end? Oh, it was really sweet actually. So he, when we bought him, a girl had grown out of him and she'd had him for so many years and he actually ended up going to riding school. But then the riding school closed down and the old man who kept it kept him as a companion. So he actually lived in his garden. Oh, I love it. All right, we can find out more right after these. Welcome to women's radio station. I'm Sarah Louise Ryan and welcome to Love Lessons live on women's radio station. 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And our guest in studio today is Caroline Towning who has been telling us about her childhood with horses, her love of horses and art and how for quite a while she was sort of sidestepping the. The very core of what it was that she was really into. I just want to introduce a couple of. Well, one statement and one question that you guys have sent in around this idea of sort of following your passion and doing what it is that you want to do in this world. And the question comes from Alison. She says, I feel scared that I've left it too long without making my dreams come true and that now it's too late. I freeze when it comes to making the calls I need to make. Alison, there are so many people who are just like, yes, that's me. That's me, too. And you know what? Even those of us like myself and Caroline, who've reached a certain level of making our dreams come true and, you know, getting the life that we love, we also feel like, oh, is it too late for this part, or is it too late to be this person as well? So it's a thing that you might think some people don't have, that you might think that you're in the beginner place. But trust me, Alison, there's a lot about your life that is someone else's dream come true. Even if, like, without knowing much about you, you know, the fact that you have access to a computer and the fact that you can write me this note. There are so many women who would love to be able to write, would love to be able to send a note. And I don't mean that in a sort of a sycophantic kind of a way. It really is that, you know, when we can say, you know what? I'm this far, and that's okay, and start to get excited about the next part and to realize that you haven't left it too late. I remember when I was 30. Caroline, you'll love this story because it's. It's actually a bit of a Groucho story. Although it didn't happen in Groucho. One time. I was 30 years old, I was hanging out with Westlife. They were at the absolute peak of their initial flash of fame, and they're very funny guys, really, really good to hang out with. And I was saying to myself, I was saying to them at the age of 30, I said, oh, I've left it too late. I don't know. There's all these things I want to do at 30. And every time I hear a Westlife song or someone mentions Westlife, I think about that conversation, and I think about them at the age of, like, they were sort of 23, 24. No, no, it's fine. Age is just a number. And the fact that they go age is just a number really means that, yeah, they thought that at 30 I was kind of, you know, technically past it too, but I could still rake something back. But then you listen to people who are in their 60s and they look at you sort of being in your 30s, 40s, 50s, and they're sort of like, no, you've got loads of time. So in fact we do have loads of time. Did you ever have that feeling of, oh no, I've messed it all up, I should have gone for what I really wanted to go for or I should have, you know, found a way to do this. Did you ever have moments in your life every day? I mean, I think I had that feeling when I was 19 and missed the first year of applying for university. I thought, oh, I've messed up my whole career, I've messed it up, it's over. Yeah, I mean there's also so much pressure on women as well. And you know, every time there's this whole thing in the press is every time they mention a female name, they always put her age next to it. And they don't necessarily do that with guys or there's this assumption that, you know, guys can be in their 60s and they can be a first time filmmaker or first time dad or first time anything and it's absolutely fine. Well, I think it goes back to when they put Bond girls, you know, 20 year old bond girls with 45 year old bond. It's kind of, you know, they kind of see men in their peak in their 40s and women in their peak at their 20s and I, that's why I loved it. Was it the Last Bond with the older actress? Can we find out what the name of that actress is? The French actress Benjamin. Oh, just, just incredible. Veronica Bellucci is it? Yes. Oh my goodness, she's amazing. She's so, so beautiful. And also we have obviously the whole fertility window as well, which I think, you know, really, really creeps in on women. You know, it's, it's hovering over us the whole time and men just don't have that. So I'm so thrilled that one of my clients, Bettina Gordon, has her book published with a really great publisher in the USA and it's called the Joys of Later Motherhood. That's Gordon. The Joys of Later Motherhood. And she's talking about how you don't need to panic once you hit 40. She was about 41, I think, when she became pregnant, 42 when she had her son, Hunter. And she didn't have to do sort of IVF and all these things that you think, oh, no, now we've got to roll out the panic plan. Yeah. I mean, I actually went to an IVF clinic last year because we were struggling and we. I mean, I sat down, I was. I was 35. Just turned 35. And the doctor told me that basically it was, in the next four months, all my. All my eggs are gonna dry up. And, you know, it was terrifying. Absolutely. Scaremonger at its worst, isn't it? If you go. And also if you go into the kind of waiting rooms, they have all these charts on the wall of the kind of age brackets of women. And then, you know, they have the kind of graph going down and then the 35 one, it just drops, you know, and it's really. Is this a private clinic? No, actually, do the nhs. But I couldn't go through with it because for me, it was just so invasive. And I had. We did one appointment and the doctor was really pushy with me. And, yeah, this is a whole other story, but I was so mortified and I just couldn't do it. But. And really, it's the same story. It's about us listening to ourselves, listening to, you know what? I'm not going to live according to the world's dictates. I get to live according to what feels right to me. And what feels right. But again, thinking has, I think, you know, is one of the French philosophers who realized this, that, or actually every woman had realized it. A French male philosopher said it first that we tend to see thinking as being superior to feeling, and feeling is a thing that women are better at, but somehow we can be navigating according to our feelings, and that's brushed aside when the more masculine thinking comes online. And that really does us a huge, huge disservice. So I think in these little ways that we can kind of pull it back by saying, no, I'm the expert on me. This is how I feel, and this is what I'm going to. It just didn't feel right. And actually my husband was amazing about it. You know, we just decided if we can't do it naturally, then actually, you know, in a few years time, when we're ready, we'll adopt because, you know, there's so many children out there. And actually adoption has fallen because IVF has been so successful that not as many people are adopting. So we just thought, you know, what? Well, we're gonna leave it up to, you know, the power of the universe. And, yeah, just also realizing that, you know, this is really useful for Alison and for all of us, that just knowing that we don't have to do everything right now, as soon as we acknowledge that something isn't working for us, it doesn't mean that suddenly we have to be all about that. Suddenly that challenge or that thing we would like to transform doesn't have to rule everything. I think it was going back to the question. I think it was that, you know, I'm not really a massively maternal person. I've always actually quite preferred animals to people. So I was always quite happy to have a horse instead of a baby. But for me, hitting the 35 was the real kind of real moments in my life. And I was like, oh, wow, I'm 35. And actually there's loads of women my age that have kids that are 10 years old or teenagers or, you know, a lot of them had their first babies. And I did feel the pressure of, is it now or never? And actually, the more people I speak to and, you know, my best friend's just had a baby at 41, and it's perfectly healthy. And, you know, she's now trying for her second. So I just think you have to just do what you need to do. And actually, yeah, there is a ticking clock, but it's not, as, you know, it's not 35, and then that's it, it's over. You do have a little bit of a bigger window if you keep yourself healthy and, you know, keep your. Do your yoga. And I love it whenever I see stories about women who have been much older, sort of in their 80s and 90s, having babies. No. Making their dreams come true. Other dreams, other kind of babies. So, for example, Grandma Moses started painting when she was well into her 80s or even 90s. That's amazing. And then by the time she was in her 90s, she was the most famous artist in America. And you have stories about. You know, I love it when you've got stories with women who are in their 80s and 90s and they're having their first art exhibitions or, you know, starting to weightlift. And they really are so valuable to us because they're the ones that remind us that, you know, what, if you're here today, it's not too late. And they. They're also, I guess they were 50s children or actually 40s or 30s children, where women just didn't have careers. You know, you basically were a housewife, you know, and for them to kind of break out of that at later life is so amazing, you know, when we're a lot luckier because, you know, our generation, we are having careers and. And we can so take it for granted, can't we? And I know in Ireland, where I'm from, if you were in the civil service, so if you're working for the government, if you got married, you then had to give up your job. I mean, that's what it was like right up until the 70s. I think, the early 70s. I was kind of blessed that my mother and my grandmother, her mom were doctors, and my grandmother, in the 50s, was out living in Nigeria and, you know, going out into the bush and sort of going upriver for two weeks and living in a hut and curing people. So I sort of had those role models, and I guess now we get to be the role models for a lot of girls who don't know it to be any other way. Yeah, I get a lot of girls emailing me, little girls that just want to draw horses or, you know, or just want a horse ride or. And it's enough. Yeah, it's enough. So, you know, if you've got the more stereotypical idea of a young boy sort of tinkering with engines and then making tinkering with engines his career, like, however he scales that in whatever way he does it, you know, if that's okay, then our passion needs to be made okay as well. Is there any. Is there anything else that you think that we do as women that maybe is kind of looked down on as well as, you know, things like art and horses and cooking and soft skills, as they'd be called? Yeah, I think. I think everything that men seem to do seems to be taken a lot more seriously. I mean, look at the women's football. I mean, it makes me. Actually part of it makes me quite angry that they. Good anger, right? Yeah, good anger. That, you know, it's all men's sport and you see how male footballers behave as well, and yet the girls have gone out or the women have gone out, and it's got so much kind of interest and support, and people are loving it more than the men. I saw something really good on Twitter today where someone said, from now on, it's called soccer and men's soccer. I thought that was absolutely beautiful. Coming up after the break, we're going to be talking more about how is it that we can really hold our ground, first of all, identifying what it is we're passionate about, acknowledging that that passion is really, really valid and then bringing that out and finding ways to monetize that, ways to make a living from that, and also being that beacon for other women who are thinking that like Alison was thinking, hopefully she's not anymore. Alison was thinking that it's too late. Just knowing that we can support each other in that, moving forward, knowing that what we love counts, it really counts. Welcome to the Women's Radio station. Supporting women's well being Women's Radio Station is all about diversity from opinions, career, ethnicity, education and most importantly, women's well being. We aim to celebrate the individuality of every woman everywhere, providing opportunities and the platform for your voice. Visit our website, womensradiostation.com for more information. 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With a wide range of sponsorship opportunities, including individual programmes, we can tailor your experience for you. For more information on how you can sponsor a Show, go to womensradiostation.com Women's radio stations supporting women's well being. Welcome to Judy Mayer's Listening. This is the show where you tell me what's happening in your life and I listen and together we transform everything. Welcome back. This is Judy Mae Murphy and I'm here in studio with Caroline Towning today and we're talking all about your passion and making it valid and putting it central in your life. And even when that is, especially when that is against sort of dictates of society or internal conditioning or ideas, that somehow something like talking to people on the radio or painting a horse isn't as important as something else that, you know, like being a doctor or. And you know what's really interesting about that? When you sort of said that, you know, that was like one of your options. Caroline was being a doctor when you were up in Yorkshire. My mum was a doctor and she really wanted to be an artist, really. She loved painting so much and when she was a teenager she used to paint all the time. When she'd go out and visit her mum in Nigeria, she would paint, she would, you know, she was always sketching and her pictures were pretty good. But that's not even the point because you can always get good. We all get good just by doing it more and more. I think it's 5% talent and 95% work. Absolutely, absolutely. And it's just so sad to me. One time she had a friend who was having either a big birthday or an anniversary or something and she painted a special painting for this friend and she would talk about it all the time and she'd have people coming in and looking at it and she would just. She was just so alive. And I just said to her, you know, you need to do this more. And she didn't. And she passed away 12 years ago and she never painted another painting. That's heartbreaking. They talk about, don't die with your music still in you. It could be music, it could be art. And I often think about, what are the paintings that my mum never painted? What are the paintings that are now not hanging on the walls for my niece and nephew to see or for us to enjoy and remember her By. And so I think that it really, really does matter, because one day, we're not going to be here to be completely stoic about it. We're just. We're not going to be here. And was there a moment when you were doing the animation? And so it was a kind of a shadow career. You were close to what it was that you wanted. And did you then start to do art again, just in a hobby way, or did you start to realize, you know what, I need to make this my career, so I need to kind of step up and make. It was actually quite interesting when I was animating. I mean, when I first started, I actually loved it. You know, I studied 3D animation and special effects, and I used to do a lot of 3D sculpting. So there's a tool called Zbrush, which is basically like clay within the computer. Yeah, it's really amazing. If you Google zbrush, you see the most amazing sculptures come up. And I was really. I used to love just sculpting assets for, you know, 3D animation, whatever that was. What's an asset in this term? Oh, sorry. An asset is just. So when you do 3D animation, it's essentially a 3D world. So everything within that world you build. So that could be. If you're animating this room, we'd build the tables, the chairs and the microphones, and all of those are assets. Okay, nice. But I quite liked doing more organic things, so I would sculpt faces or horses or a plant or trees. I had an obsession with trees, actually, for a long time. I'd always sculpt really beautiful trees and put, you know, butterflies in them. So I loved seeing the animation. But when I was working. One thing they don't teach you is that when you study animation, you learn how to be a great animator, but you don't learn how to deal with clients and deadlines and money and all these things that you need to survive. And I was. After 10 years of just working in a dark room on a computer, it became very, very sterile for me. And I was constantly making client changes, and I was just burning out. And actually, a lot of animators do burn out because it is quite an insular career, and you're just one cog on a big pipeline of work, depending on what kind of studio you were working for. I actually worked for smaller studios and did freelance, so it wasn't as bad, but I just burnt out. So actually, weirdly, I ended up buying a club in soho. Hello. You remember this? Do you remember Black's club right opposite the Groucho. This is in 2014. Oh, my goodness. I remember. I remember Blacks. It was a lovely little house. Yeah. Like, Georgian townhouse. Absolutely gorgeous place that doesn't exist anymore. No, it's still there. It's still there. It came up for sale, and I had a friend who wanted to invest money into it, and he was like, you run it, and I'll put the money in. And I had no idea about hospitality or Westminster Council or anything. I've never waitressed or anything. I think, actually I did one stint waitressing, and I got fired on the first night because I was terrible. Meet your sister. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, this is really, really. When would this ever come up? So we took it over, and I ran it for about 18 months, and it was the best and worst 18 months of my life. Like, this club had not been touched for 25 years. In fact, when we pulled back one of the counters, you could actually see layers of where the cigarettes had fallen from over the years. Oh, my goodness. Hadn't been pulled back. You know, obviously, no one had smoked in the building for, you know, however many years since the smoking ban. And when we were doing that, I was trying to make the club really, really arty. I wanted to make it more of an arty club. I'm a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, which I love. So I wanted to make it more like that kind of vibe and do members exhibitions. And we brought in a gallery called Cobb Gallery, and we worked with those girls. And we're doing. We're doing a lot of kind of shows. And when I was just seeing the big paintings going up, I was just getting that burning feeling inside of, like, oh, this is what I want to be doing. I want to be making art again. So. So I. So when. When the club imploded, which it did, it's a whole other story. I went back into kind of illustration, because when I was animating, I was still illustrating and I was still doing storyboards. So it wasn't completely 100% away from what I was doing. And I started. I actually made. I started with a coloring book, and then I started just doing illustration, and I got an agent and. What do you mean you started with a coloring book? That sounds fascinating. Again, with this idea of, you know, simplicity and things that would be looked down on a coloring book to most successful people in the world, that would be something that they would sniff at. So I'm fascinated by this coloring book. Tell me about that. I just basically decided I didn't know how to start, and I hadn't picked up a paintbrush for such a long time, but I would still draw a lot and still do a lot of storyboards. So I thought, okay, I'll make a coloring book because it's a product and I can sell it at the end. And I just drew 45 drawings, and it was loads of horses in there, loads of unicorns, loads of mythology fairies. It was just really. I think it was really therapeutic making it, because so much stuff had happened after the club and animation and my childhood, and I was just kind of processing it all through this book. Sounds like getting back in touch with your sort of feminine magic. It was everything. And just getting back into drawing, and I didn't, because there was no rules. There was no. It was just. I was just. I called it Colorful Mind, and it was just a book on mythology and drawing and unicorns and mermaids, and it was just a fun fantasy book. So I didn't really know where the pictures were starting. I'd just start off with a mermaid, and that would go into flowers and, you know, kind of crazy line drawings. And then that. Starting with that. I then said more illustration. And then I was doing black and white illustrations for a while, and then I started getting pet commissions and portrait commissions. And then I was like, okay, you know what? I'm gonna go back into oil painting. I hadn't done any kind of oil painting since I was probably in my teens, and I just basically bought some paints and an easel and just started painting again. And it just felt right. And the pieces seemed to get bigger and bigger. And then, before I knew it, it was all horses again and all big oil. Really big. If you haven't seen Caroline's art, please check it out on Instagram. It's CarolinaTowningArt. Yes. And you'll see that it's just absolutely fantastic. And you'll have this idea, you know, of. Wow. Yes, of course. This woman was born to do this. And I love the fact that, again, you were navigating according to how it felt. Yeah, it felt good to be going back to oils that you didn't override that with the thinking of. But I haven't done it since my teens, and therefore, I can't do it again now. Too much time has passed. Because how often do we do that? Like Alison was thinking, as the person that wrote into us, that idea of too much time has passed. I've left it too late. I wonder why we reach so readily for that idea of. I Can't be expected to step up because time has passed. I think we're just so scared of failing as well, you know. And I think, you know, women, we try and put. We're told to be perfect and we try and perfect everything. Which if you are an artist or a writer, you know, that you have to, you know, you might write 10 poems, seven of them might be rubbish, one of them might be okay and the other one might be brilliant. You know, that's part of it. You have to constantly create and just experiment. And you know, with women, I think we just try and perfect everything and we beat ourselves up too much and we're, we're living in this world where women are kind of made to be these like idealized, perfect mothers and we are required to over earn our place at the table. We get paid less often for doing much more. And I love what you're saying about poetry there. If you look at, say someone brilliant like EE Cummings or someone else brilliant like, well, just any poet really, they will have a body of work where part of it is not good. And with men that's ignored. And then we look at the really good works. And with a woman, they won't look at the good works, they will look at the not so good works, the works that aren't amazing but are still valid, still important. And they'll take that as an example of this is where she's at. Almost as if the brilliance, the genius part of it is somehow a fluke. Whereas with the men it's like, well, the less good ones can be ignored because the genius is the point. And I was kind of smiling over the weekend because I was reading the Russian writer Turgenev and there was this thing he had called First Love, a kind of a short story or a little short novel. And it was the most saccharine, drippingly like overly romantic thing. And it reminded me of Goethe's Tales of Young Werther. And I was just like, wow. So when a man does that, when a man kind of goes into this complete fall apart, can't function really like overly lovesick state, somehow it's high art when a woman does that. It's somehow just failing. It's somehow just weak. 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You're here joining us on WRS women's radio station supporting women's well being and here supporting your well being and your dreams and transforming everything. We have Caroline Towning in studio and we've been talking about Caroline's blossoming as an artist. How when she started out as a kid she was all about horses and all about art and how that got her through some pretty tough times and then how, you know, the world didn't get in the way but sort of took her a little bit off track for a while and how she got herself back on track via a coloring book which I just adore. And that now she is just so well known. I mean she's just absolutely fated as this just great artist of horses. I mean Stubbs step aside and she has even more incredible things coming up this year which we are going to be talking about in one moment. But there's just one thing I wanted to address, a little statement that came in from one of you because I am listening, I'm listening to what's going on with you. And what you were saying was you said everyone's talking about self care. I don't even know what it really means. And I just thought that's worth a couple of minutes of just looking at that because we do talk about self care and I think it's kind of like what Caroline was talking about. It's about just listening to is this working for me? Listening to does this work for me? Not necessarily forcing yourself to have a bubble bath every night or forcing yourself to get into your cuddly pajamas or sit out and play guitar on the veranda if that's not working for that day. Sometimes self care can be about paying the bills. Sometimes self care can be about setting a boundary, talking back to somebody. So Caroline, what are some of your favorite ways to look after you? Oh well, as you know I am a complete yoga addict, which I actually got into. Yoga was before anxiety really, you know, I get really bad anxiety and somebody got me. Actually my first class was in 2003. It was a Bikram yoga class. Oh, one of the hot ones. Yeah, it's actually in Brooklyn. I had no idea what it was and it was completely wacky and out there. I think when you first do a hot yoga class, it was before yoga was super, super trendy as it is now. And yes, now I do vinyasa but for me, my self Care is going to a 90 minute yoga class, sweating, getting everything out and then coming back and just having a really, really nice meal. Early night, eight hours sleep, early night. That's my self care. You blew me away within 90 minutes because I do yoga every now and then. It's kind of interesting to me that a lot of the things that you do, I do very, very sporadically. Like the. So that's kind of like what we're talking about here. It's what suits everybody. Like, I love horses, I love riding horses. I wouldn't be nearly as accomplished as you, but I'll do it as part of my travel. So I'll be sort of in the woods in Sweden or I'll be in the Sahara desert riding, or I'll be, you know, in Palm Springs, California, just going around the foothills and, and I always see it as part of my, as part of my travel. But there's just so much I think that we're not acknowledging is available to us just because we kind of see that life needs to be done in this way. We're looking at people and they're all kind of doing life in a certain way. And it takes a certain creativity and a certain connectedness to your feelings to be able to say, well, you know what, let's get creative about this and let's bring it in another direction entirely. I think people always seem to have something in them. Like I call it a bug, like the acting bug or the drawing bug, or the yoga bug, or music. And this always seems to come from childhood, something that you really, really loved at school and then for whatever reason it was beaten out of you, or maybe you laughed at or you had a horrible teacher. You know, so many times people have a bad art teacher and it completely traumatizes them and they won't pick up a pencil for 20 years. And I just feel there's always something and you know what it is and you've repressed it, but it always finds a way to come back out. You know, I'm quite big on Instagram and I talk to everybody who messages me on Instagram and I have so many people that speak to me that have said, oh, you know, I'm inspired now, but just by looking, not necessarily on mine, but on Instagram and seeing other artists and just saying this has inspired me to do watercolors again and, you know, do botanical illustrations. And so we do have that bug. We just have to let it out and listen to it. And that's Caroline Towning Art. If you're On Instagram, please. Like, you'll just be so inspired daily looking at Caroline's stuff. And equally, I know my art teacher was really about elevating people and really seeing who they were. And so for me, she kind of left me alone about the art style. But she used to give me. She gave me my first philosophy books. So there was a book, a Schumacher book, called A Guide for the Perplexed. And I think there was. I think she was the first one to give me Marcus Aurelius meditations. And so she really saw who all the girls were in her class. And I think that we can do that as women. We can really see each other and sort of say, yeah, go for it. You've got this. Yeah, you want to become a wine expert. You want to, you know, take a year out and travel in Asia. You want to, you know, leave it another five years before you think about having kids or whatever that we. That we can be good at, that sometimes we can forget. So it's. I think we have a sense of guilt that we carry as well, you know, about family. And men don't necessarily have that. Men seem to be able to roam. If they wanted to go traveling or they want to do something, they just seem to do it and not really care about anyone else. But I think women do carry that sense of guilt, like not wanting to leave. Whether their mums or their kids or, you know, their family, they take commitments, family commitments, a lot more seriously. They don't necessarily have the confidence just to go or the selfishness to go out and just do something for themselves. Oh, it's so true. I was always pretty good at overriding that, though, I must say. But I do remember when I was going off to live in Kathmandu for a year back in 96, and my mum came to the airport and for me, like, family coming to collect you or see you off at the airport just wasn't a thing. So it was a big deal that my mom met me at the airport and had tears in her eyes, and that sort of made it more difficult. And actually, now that I think about it, I had the chance, I got a visa to go to live and work in America and my grandfather had such a bad reaction that I didn't go. I just sort of said, I'll. I'll put it off. And, well, I've lived, you know, spent lots and lots of time, lived in Hollywood and D.C. and New York and all kinds of places now, but back then it would have been a really great next move. But as you're saying, I think it's that we're so. Even if they are not intentionally sending us that message, even if they do want the best for us and they do want for us to do what we want to do, we're really good at picking up on what their needs are. And they need for me to stay here either because, you know, we don't want to outshine people or because we don't want people to be left without our company or our help or, you know, for whatever reason. Yeah, I think the outshining thing is a really interesting point as well, because I think we're told to do something but don't do it too well. You know, just kind of don't get above your station so much that women have to kind of be taken down a little peg or two. Where men, it's all about going out there and doing it and owning it. And that phrase about putting people in their place is usually used for women, isn't it? And that's why I love it on social media when we have things like the American soccer team, as we're calling it now, the American soccer team winning the World Cup. And, you know, it just enraging so many men who, you know, narcissistic men who just want to so called put women in their place. Whenever I hear someone use the phrase, oh, I put that person in their place, I'm just like, you've told me way more about yourself than you've told me about that other person or that situation. Because everyone's place is the planet. Everyone's right is to, you know, to grow in the way that they want to grow. As long as it's not hurting other people. You're putting people down, which is so wrong. You just need to elevate people. And I think women are good at that. You know, I think this whole new sisterhood generation that we're creating as well, so powerful. You know, we've never really had this before. We've never had so many women come together and support each other and champion each other. It's always been one woman would break into a workplace and that would be it. It would be the token woman. Yeah, so exactly. So Coco Chanel would be the example of a woman who made it in fashion, and Frida Kahlo would be the example of a woman who'd made it in art or Georgia o' Keeffe or whoever. So that, you know, and that's something that's, you know, quite recent. But these days, like women who I love to elevate are people like M raz E M R A Z Z on Twitter. Follow her. She's an absolute education. She's a laugh riot. Really, really sharp thinker. And I think that the more that we do that, the more that we say there's a woman over here doing something great, the more that we can then relax and not be so scared that we're going to be put down or told that somehow we don't belong here. So, Caroline, tell us what it is that you have coming up in the next year. Some really exciting plans. So this is what I was telling you last week. I have been wanting to do a project. I haven't quite known. I knew I wanted to paint women and I knew I wanted to paint horses. And I've been working on this idea for a while and it's taken me a long time just to kind of work out exactly what it is. So I started painting a girl last year who's called Molly Summerland and she is a rising star in the eventing industry. And as I was painting her, I realized that I just want to tell women's stories and their connection to their horses through paintings, photography, illustrations. And so my new project is called Women and Horses around the World. And I'm essentially flying around the world and finding interesting women. So I've got an old movie star in Hollywood, I've got a cowgirl in Texas, I've got a show jumper in Germany. So I've got all these really, really interesting women and I'm still looking for more. I've got about 10 confirmed, so I'm still looking. So if anyone's listening and they know anywhere in the world, someone, a woman who is doing amazing things, I'm looking for the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. I still need to get. I've got loads in America. So good for America. We're good for America. We're good for Europe actually. So more east, right? So maybe Japan. Japan, I need China. I need. And yeah, definitely, definitely. I'm lucky. I really want one of the girls in Dubai. And actually Saudi Arabia has quite a big question scene which I had no idea about, so I'd love to do that too. And basically I'm gonna have a big show in London in a couple of years time when it's all finished. And I'm also putting it together in a coffee table book. So it'll be an artist's travel journal and travel book and art book and it'll be telling all the stories. For me, it's about going back to why are women obsessed with horses and using all these women that I'm painting to tell their story and kind of explore and uncover the deep rooted fascination with horses. Oh, that's so wonderful. And as we're listening to Caroline Towney here today, remember that if you have a desire to do something in the same way Caroline does, just notice that she's now doing it. She's putting it in play. She's not sitting there questioning it. You were put here for a reason that counts. You're valid. See you next week. Welcome to the women's radio station supporting women's well being. Women's radio station is all about diversity from opinions, career, ethnicity, education and most importantly, women's well being. We aim to celebrate the individuality of every woman everywhere, providing opportunities and the platform for your voice. Visit our website, womensradiostation.com for more information. I'm Tamina Zaman, founder of Empower and Enrich. When it comes to money, do you clam up or get confused? Do you wish you could save more money or are you hoping you have enough for retirement? You are not alone. Many women want to be smarter with their cash, but just don't know where to start. At Empower and Enrich the you will find a host of options to help you take charge of your finances and learn how to put your money to work for you in an easy, affordable way. Get in touch with me@empowerandenrich.org and let's change your future together. Hello, my name is Natasha Ann Kelleher. Welcome to you lovely lady listeners of your very own women's radio station. 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