Andrea McLean exclusive: I completely embarrassed myself

When former Loose Women presenter Andrea McLean opened up on this week’s Second Act podcast about feeling shame after losing her business, she touched on a sensitive point that hits many women in midlife.

Starting again in life – whether after a divorce, redundancy or career break to look after children or elderly parents – can be a humbling and confusing experience.

Our work and home life can become such a big part of who we are that when it is taken away, we can find ourselves feeling completely lost and questioning what our purpose is.  It can make us feel worthless and less than the person we were before the change in our circumstances took hold. 

How many times have you met people for the first time and the one icebreaker they usually ask is ‘what do you do?’ Without that anchor to hold on to, you can find yourself swimming in a puddle of shame and failure that can crush your confidence, if you don’t get a handle on it.

“The shame of loss of status, loss of identity, loss of who am I if I am not that thing? And that doesn’t have to mean just someone who worked on the TV. It can be any job that you had that maybe people thought was an elevated position,” she tells Ateh Jewel on this week’s Second Act podcast. “Then maybe you’ve been made redundant. Maybe you left to have children and suddenly you can’t get back in the workplace again. There is zero shame in doing a job that maybe isn’t as shiny as the one you previously had.”

For Andrea she decided to face the shame she initially felt after walking away from Loose Women to set up a business that ultimately collapsed after she fell dangerously ill with pneumonia, sepsis and long Covid. “The shame fired something up inside me,” she says. After trying and failing to land a job at Starbucks to make ends meet, she took a pause and considered all the skills she was good at to help her start again. 

Writing her latest book Shameless, a guide that helps to disempower that negative feeling and get on with living your life for you, became a cathartic experience and helped her to process what she had been through. And gives hope to others who are struggling that there is another way.

“I’ve literally done the most embarrassing thing that a human being can do, which is to tell the whole world that they’re going to leap out and see if they can fly.

“And I didn’t fly. I landed flat on my face and I completely embarrassed myself. And my business didn’t work and we lost everything. So if I can literally hold my head up and go, okay,that was appalling, and in the process I nearly died. If I can turn around and do that with everything that’s happened to me, I think my dear you can pick yourself up and start all over again.”

She says the mistake some people make when starting again is thinking they should have everything already figured out – but that only blocks us from fulfilling our potential. 

“You never know what the right thing to do is. You look at the options that are in front of you, and you make the best choice you can in the moment that you are in with the knowledge that you have,” the 53-year-old says.

“And it’s a mixture of what your gut is telling you, what your common sense is telling you, and then you make that decision. I think we get paralysed into inaction because we want to make sure we’re making the correct decision. And that’s what holds so many of us back. You never know whether you’re making the correct decision or not.

“Hindsight and time will tell you that. 

“A rocket that is on its way to the moon is off course 98% of the time. They are constantly adjusting, constantly reevaluating and moving.

“So you may make a decision that works for a tiny percentage of time. Then you readjust, course correct and carry on.”

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