MEET MRS WINDERLEY

Mrs Winderley’s motto is “I admitted feeling defeated, I didn’t admit defeat.”

An award-winning writer, motivational speaker and proud ‘failure’, Mrs Winderley didn’t always have a voice, let alone know how to use it. But she does now. And she’s using it to BUILD, not

break, sharing the things that were and are tonic for her soul in the hopes that what she shares may be tonic for someone else’s soul, too.

As a child, she grew up with a confidence-crushing stutter and, as a young adult, grew into a chronic people pleaser. Long story short, she gave her inner critic way too much airtime and drowned out her inner cheerleader with the insecure opinions of others for way too long. In a plot twist that even Mr Winderley didn’t see coming, she found herself stepping down as a full-time Creative Director in Ad Land to enter a national beauty pageant for married women (with two kids) at the age of 36.

After 13 months in Pageant Land, during a global pandemic, she emerged not with a title or a crown but with a PTSD diagnosis and a hefty therapy bill. Cue a whole lot of sifting through post-smear campaign debris, gut-wrenching healing, and hard-earned learning, and what’s come out the other side is a woman as well-versed in narcissists as she is in skincare, as comfortable talking about cyberbullying as she is about collecting coffee mugs, and as likely to help you navigate your trauma as she is to help you kick self-sabotage to the curb.

Words she lives by? Like Brene Brown once said, “Deny the story and it owns you, own the story and you get to write the ending.”