Welcome to my new series, “Interviews with inspiring women“. You can find my first interview, with my mum, here. The second interview was with my coach, Jocelyne Clémençon. And now for its third edition, an interview with my “little” sister Lauren! I write “little” because she is in fact taller than me and wise beyond her years. I particularly liked her answer to “What’s the one change you think would improve the world?”. Read on for her insights, life lessons and a cute picture of us as little girls!
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Can you please give us a quick intro to who you are and what you do?
I’m a pretty average 25 year old, privileged with being born from exceptional parents.
I’m British by blood and was born and raised in France.
I went through Business School at Toulouse Business School, and studied abroad for a bit a W.P. Carey School of Business in Arizona. I’m currently a financial auditor in a Big Four auditing firm.
Where are you currently based?
Paris.
What are you passionate about?
Alleviating suffering in the world.
What inspired you to start what you do?
After business school, financial auditing seemed challenging and fast-paced which would allow me to learn a lot. I think I need that type of stimulation and growth-opportunities in my work environment or I would get bored or frustrated.
What is your favourite thing about what you do?
The opportunities to be challenged, meet a wide variety of people (clients, managers, partners, team members), take on responsibility and therefore improve both technically as well as from team-management and work methodology perspectives.
What has been your biggest “pinch me” moment in your life so far?
This one is bittersweet: as of today, it would be either when my late husband Josiah proposed to me, or our wedding day itself.
There will be more to come.
Which achievement are you most proud of?
When I was 17, I was top of my intake into the French Air Force. (The first female for that Air Base!)
What food or fitness choices help you to be healthy?
I don’t put much effort into it really… But I love yoga, walking/hiking, running and I am vegan.
Which habits or personality traits do you think have helped with your success so far?
I would say mainly that I’m a hard-worker: I don’t decide I can’t do it until I’ve tried, and I keep trying and working hard and with intention until I can. I’ve also improved in my ability to be attentive to feedback and utilise it to improve and widen my skillset.
Words to live by?
“Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.” – Richard Bach
What’s the number one book that you would recommend to others?
Only one is difficult. But I’d probably stick to the best-seller Sapiens, A Brief History Of Humanity by Professor Yuval Noah Harari.
What are you currently reading?
Behave: The Biology Of Humans At Our Best And Worst by Professor Robert Sapolsky.
I needed to briefly crash-course myself in the very basic fundamentals of neurobiology, and it’s a big book but it is fascinating and easy to read so far.
What is your favourite book?
I could not possibly name just one.
Sophie’s World and The Orange Girl by Jostein Gaarder are younger-year favourites, as well as (of course) the Harry Potter series.
This year, Wild by Cheryl Strayed has been a friend to my heart. Thank you Cheryl for writing it, and you Jessica for the gift. (No gift is more touching than a book that touches your heart).
On a less personal level, I also much enjoy anthropologic, social and economic literature. I thought Making Globalisation Work by Nobel-Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was very good.
But all those categories are quite distinct so I couldn’t truly pick one favourite over another. Should I HAVE to, it would probably be Wild (right now).
(I love Wild too, glad you liked it!) What app or website could you not live without?
So long as I can text (be it through WhatsApp, Messenger, regular texts or – my preference – Snapchat), then I’m okay!
What is your favourite social media platform?
Instagram because it reminds me that however hard life can be, it can at least be very pretty.
Do you have a favourite podcast to listen to, or YouTube channel to watch?
The French podcast Nouvelle Ecole is very good: it is based around interviews of people (sometimes famous, sometimes less so) getting to grips with how they found their calling.
I follow some yoga YouTube channels for my home practice.
But mainly, I enjoy watching TedTalks.
Who is one thought leader that you follow?
I don’t really follow anyone in particular. When I like the perspective of the author of a scientific book/article (or TedTalk), I look at what else he or she has published and if it could be of any interest to me.
What’s the one change you think would improve the world?
There are too many struggles and causes of suffering for me to be able to single out one thing. That would sound to me like making a scale of who deserves relief the most, when really I think there is no such thing as a scale of suffering and we all need and deserve a helping hand sometimes.
But like our mother said in her interview, I think borders are a ridiculous construct. Of course, residency and citizenship currently comes with benefits in some countries, which would perhaps be too costly to offer to anyone passing on the territory. But there is no way in my mind that it can possibly be acceptable to be sending refugees back to war-torn countries where they are at risk for their lives. In my eyes, it is a crime against humanity to strip them from their right to pursue happiness in that way.
I also think that trade rules and the hierarchy of power which govern the world are extremely unfair on developing countries, who in fact, in many cases, have more natural resources than developed countries. The powers at be simply legislate in order to “legally” exploit these countries, leaving populations living in poverty, without access to equal education opportunities or even basic healthcare therefore dying of easily preventable diseases, and in many cases actually living in hunger/malnutrition or starving to death. This is a widely accepted fact, it makes me angry that policies are changing at such an unacceptably slow pace with regards to this.
I wish there were more I could do about these two types of issues mentioned above, and I often feel quite beaten down by the state of the world in those regards. If anyone out there has ideas/projects to fight against such injustices, I would be very keen to hear about them.
On the other hand, one type of issue close to my heart is stigma and discrimination. And the good news is, we can all quite easily get involved in this and truly shape what the society we wish to be a part of should look like. Through conscientious study (this can literally be just reading articles which pop up on Facebook with an open heart), we can all learn more about discrimination and stigma which a wide variety of people are faced with: women, people of colour, people with different abilities (some are visible, some are not), people suffering from addictions or mental illnesses, the LGBTQ community, people at the “bottom of the social ladder” (what a stupid expression).
We are all human, we all have the same desire to belong and to be happy and no type of religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability or lack thereof has ever made anyone less deserving of those things. Yet in many very real ways we are pushing people away from that, by – sometimes involuntarily or unknowingly – making them feel that who they are is inadequate in this world. I wish more people could be confronted with that reality, and the severity of its consequences (alarmingly often: death), with a more open heart.
I hate the common opinion that our generation are “snowflakes” and becoming “weak”. We’re not. Discriminated and stigmatised people are increasingly rising up to call out injustice. What is braver than that? And it seems, more people are actually listening and taking notice and action. What could possibly be wrong with that? I think Francis de Sales words “Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as true strength” ring very true here.
I’m tired of hearing otherwise intelligent and educated people who are not faced with the discrimination in question exclaim “oh my, we really can’t joke about/say anything nowadays” when a scandal erupts over a racist or sexist slur for instance. If you’re a man, you don’t decide what is or is not offensive to women, they do. If you’re white, you do not decide what is or is not offensive to people of colour, they do. And so forth. That’s just common sense.
We can all easily get informed, check our privileges, check our inclusiveness and relentlessly call out people (as softly as possible – for that is the most efficient way in my mind) when we witness discrimination.
Finally, I wish people would open their eyes to the horrific atrocities which the 70 billion farmed animals go through as standard practice in the dairy, egg and meat industry every single day just to satisfy our taste. I used to love Mcdonald’s, cheese, pizza, saucisson (etc, etc, ETC…) as much as the next person but once you open your eyes to what, deep down, your brain already knows and realise that you are financing torture and murder over a taste that will last on your tongue for about 20 minutes; and that it is absolutely possible not only to survive but to thrive on a vegan diet, there is no going back.
It hurts me that people make fun of vegans and close their ears, eyes and hearts to the subject altogether. If we all made, at least, an effort in the direction of considerably reducing our consumption of animal products, the world would be a better place. The reduction of animal product consumption also has huge positive impacts on health, the environment and world hunger.
There is literally no reason in my mind to keep consuming animal products. Vegan food tastes really good; it’s better for your health (say experts backed by a wide range of studies, as well as vegans with regards to their subjective feeling of wellbeing); in my experience, it is cheaper and no less convenient. I eat out very often for business and have never encountered a restaurant unable to serve me something vegan. So when it comes down to it, meat eaters have to accept that they value a fleeting taste more than the lives of living beings.
What small steps do you do, that contribute to making the world a better place?
I try to keep myself informed. I sign petitions, and occasionally participate in demonstrations.
I try to treat all living beings well, whilst striving to educate and diminish my biases.
I try to be vocal, in a respectful way, about those above-mentioned issues which are close to my heart, in the hopes of raising awareness. The flip side to that coin, is that I try to listen to people speaking about the causes close to their hearts (even when my opinion differs from theirs) with an open heart. I think we need to do away with the simplistic narrative that people with racist/sexist/homophobic/etc views are mean and/or stupid, mainly because it isn’t an effective way of dealing with these issues. I think reality is more complex than that. Very few people are mean at heart and I am not talking here about the abject few which carry out or support hate crimes, simply about those who adhere to non-inclusive views. Many of these issues stem from misinformation or ignorance.
Ignorance is demonised today and I agree we are ultimately responsible for our actions and the harm we may cause others through them but our level of openness to difference itself is most often highly conditioned by our environment. Had I not been born where I was, to the family I was born to and been able to benefit from a high quality education, I may not hold the views I do today. I would love to think that I would have came to the same conclusions on my own. But would I have? I don’t know.
Above all, I wish to do more to contribute to making the world a better place.
If you had to eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be?
This is embarrassing… tomato beans on toast (with Sriracha on it) – which is by far the main staple of my diet.
But, being a Brit, I love Indian food and my time in Arizona (and married to an Arizonan) has left me very partial to Mexican food.
Basically, I like food.
If you could only watch one film or series for the rest of your life, what would it be?
I’m not that into films or series really.
I have enjoyed some series (most especially Homeland) but with my current schedule I feel like getting into a series would literally suck up all my spare time!
For films: I admit I know literally every single line of Love Actually but it still warms my heart whenever I watch it. Concerning recent films, I have really enjoyed Moonlight.
If you had to listen to one song for the rest of your life, what would it be?
That is quite hard because I love music and listen to a wide variety of genres.
But I would be either I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself by the White Stripes or Nina Simone’s interpretation of Feeling Good.
What’s your favourite place you’ve travelled to?
I haven’t travelled enough!
My favourite time travelling was probably being immersed into the Cévennes mountains and forest for a week long trek on horseback. I know: pretty lame that it isn’t some exotic far-away destination, but I love being surrounded by nature, especially in isolation or in a small group/pair (like with a horse!).
Which places are on your travel bucket list?
In the same type of break, I would love to solo-hike the HRP (Haute Randonnée des Pyrénées) which is basically walking from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean across the French-Spanish border through the Pyrenees. Also… you and I have made a plan to hike the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) together one day.
Other than that, my travel bucket list is basically the whole world! I love discovering and trying to get to grips with new cultures.
What are you most excited for in summer?
Hopefully managing to get to an ocean sometime soon. I love the ocean, it makes me feel energised and happy.
What’s something people would be surprised to learn about you?
Probably many things! I would say that just like most people, I am comparable to an onion: although I strive to be genuine, many layers separate the outside appearance from the center.
Who would you recommend I interview for my next Interviews with Inspiring Women?
This is my favourite question!
I think this is a great idea your great mind has had and with this question, you could literally keep it going for ever and ever!
Considering you cannot interview yourself, I would recommend you interview Maria Kouts, Philippine Sans, Melissa As, Solène Roques, Zoë Hayes, Ranim Chaban, Cécile Bonnin, Lou Castex, Delphine Getten.
If people are interested in connecting with you, or following what you’re up to, where should they find you?
My Instagram: laugoodenough.
Boom, another great one in the Interview with inspiring women series, thank you so much Lauren! Please share what you would answer to the interview questions – especially the “What’s the one change you think would improve the world?” one – in the comments section. Also, guess which one of us is which in the photo below, ha!
xxx
Jessica
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