Ep 112 – Learning To Listen To Your Intuition
Ep 112 - Learning To Listen To Your Intuition
Everything was fine until it wasn’t. Like most millennials, Merissa Forsyth was living a comfortable life; thriving in her marketing career and climbing up the corporate ladder. Everything was good and hopeful until a feeling hit. It came swifty and it stuck. It made her stop. Something felt off and yet everything was fine. The niggling gut-tingling sensation turned itself into one clear thought: what if women didn’t wear makeup for a day to challenge them and champion change for a greater cause? Makeup Free Me launched in 2012 and has since evolved into Pretty Foundation: a charity focused on early education and prevention of body-image issues for young girls. In this episode, Merissa bares it all again to remind us that before we start, we must stop.
Merissa Forsyth
38% of 4 year old girls in Australia are dissatisfied with their bodies. 10 years ago, most four year olds would have been preoccupied with Christmas lists and movie-star crushes. Now they’re busy juggling the warped negativity in their heads. It’s a harrowing thought: children toying with their worth rather than understanding it.
It’s a statistic Merissa Forsyth has stared at but not stopped for – other than being engulfed by everything that 38% means, she decided to change its meaning by changing the number all together.
Enter The Pretty Foundation, an organisation built to empower girls with the perspective, skills and support to develop and nurture a positive body image for themselves and others. From workshops to books, awards to charitable partnerships, the pretty foundation was established to talk to pretty much everything else a girl stands for, rather than what we’ve come to know ‘pretty’ to mean.
Unlike most entrepreneurs, the road to pretty didn’t come from a gap in the market or an inconvenient task but a rather ugly truth that presented itself on an ordinary day.
In this episode, Merissa discusses how she went from a thriving corporate to CEO by following a feeling and having the perseverance to bear it all.
Street Cred:
Merissa Forsyth is the founder and CEO of The Pretty Foundation, an organisation working to empower girls with the perspective, skills and support to develop and nurture a positive body image for themselves and others. What began as a ‘Makeup Free Me’ campaign in 2012 encouraging women to go bare, has since evolved to an established charity focusing on early education and prevention of body-image issues for young girls.
Learn More:
Learn more about Pretty Foundation
Connect with Merissa on LinkedIn
