Adrienne: Welcome to Sugarcoated.
Adrienne: I'm your host, Adrienne Garland, the CEO and founder of She Leads Media.
Adrienne: For far too long, women have been conditioned to sugarcoat their words, their actions, and the way they show up in the world and to conform to certain cultural norms and ideals.
Adrienne: This is inherently designed to keep those who are outside of the norm from gaining power, prestige, wealth, and influence, preventing more women from being recognized and respected as the powerful leaders that we truly are.
Adrienne: Join me each week as we dive into raw conversations with remarkable, uncompromising and inspirational women that will encourage you to strip away your sugar coating and move boldly in the direction of your magnificent dreams.
Adrienne: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Sugarcoated.
Adrienne: I'm your host, Adrienne Garland.
Adrienne: And I am so excited today in this season of allergies to welcome my guest, Joyce Dales, to the podcast. She is a CEO and entrepreneur and founder of a company called Buzzagogo, and she helps people to eradicate or eliminate allergies colds flu. And she's an inventor, which is so exciting to me. So we are going to have, as we always do, an open, honest, raw conversation with what it's like to be a woman entrepreneur. Welcome to the show, Adrienne.
Joyce: Well, thank you for having me.
Joyce: I'm really excited to be here.
Adrienne: I am so excited that you're here today, especially because my allergies are acting up a little bit.
Adrienne: And I happen to have your product in my house because we are including your product in our gift bags for a retreat that we're doing in May.
Adrienne: That's called unbreakable.
Adrienne: And so all of the women that are going to be on the retreat with us are going to have the benefit of using your product.
Adrienne: So we are so excited and so grateful that you contributed this to our unbreakable retreat into our gift bags.
Joyce: Well, I'm happy to be able to do it.
Joyce: I was excited for the opportunity because anytime I can reach other female entrepreneurs, I think that's a fantastic thing because women really understand the motivation behind my company, and they are most often the ones that help hold my company up and support me.
Adrienne: I love that.
Adrienne: I mean, I think it's so important for women to support other women and sort of make those choices with our pocketbook and how we spend.
Adrienne: And I wish that there was a way, even if it was on Amazon or whatever, that every single product or even service that was founded by a woman, started by a woman cofounded that there was some little button so that we could more easily make the choice.
Adrienne: Because I think if given the choice, more women would purchase things from other women.
Joyce: Absolutely.
Joyce: I mean, we do have the women owned logo.
Joyce: But you know what's funny is during COVID, you have to become certified as woman owned, which is an arduous and lengthy and often costly process which chaps my b***.
Joyce: Just a little bit, but you can self certify that you are a woman owned company.
Joyce: So that's what I did, because during COVID, a lot of the processes are even slower than normal.
Joyce: And I didn't want to wait six months to a year to get my certification done.
Joyce: I am in process, but it's going to take a while.
Joyce: So I went ahead and said, you know what?
Joyce: I'm going to go ahead and self certify.
Joyce: I am a woman owned company, and I put the little logo on my product.
Adrienne: I love that so much.
Adrienne: And I didn't recognize that you could self certify like that because I, too, have tried to go through the process of certifying as a woman owned small business.
Adrienne: And I got up to a certain point, and then I think I had to get some documents signed and validated, and life just kind of gets in the way.
Adrienne: And I didn't do it.
Adrienne: So my application expired and I have to go through everything again.
Adrienne: They really shouldn't make it as hard as they do.
Adrienne: I mean, there's not much to being able to prove that you're a woman owned business.
Joyce: Yeah.
Joyce: I don't understand why we have to go through this.
Joyce: I think that's insane.
Joyce: And I found myself in the exact same position with during covet.
Joyce: Certain parts of the process shut down completely, and I'd have to jump through even more Hoops, which I am doing.
Joyce: I don't find it to be very fair or palatable or necessary.
Joyce: I think it's almost like its own little racket, and I don't care for that.
Joyce: As a woman owned company, I don't need more Hoops to jump through.
Adrienne: I know with everything that we have to go through as entrepreneurs, as women, whether it's not receiving the same type of financing, not having the right credit scores in order to get loans, I mean, there's just so many hurdles.
Adrienne: And at the same time, with the whole great resignation and women leaving the corporate world, I do believe that entrepreneurship is the antidote to a corporate career.
Adrienne: And I think that if we paved the way and made it a little bit easier for women to start and scale businesses that many, many more women would do.
Adrienne: So it's just disheartening to see women who have so much capability, and yet they are made to become teachers just take over all the household duties.
Adrienne: It's just simply not fair.
Joyce: I agree.
Joyce: When I was a kid, I was told I was raised in a family in Maine where everyone was a teacher.
Joyce: So that made sense that as a female, I would become a teacher.
Joyce: And that was my career until I became this person, the Queen of boogers.
Adrienne: So it changed my mind.
Adrienne: Well, you know what, Jose?
Adrienne: I think that is such a perfect segue, our little preamble here.
Adrienne: Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you came to be the Queen of Bookers?
Joyce: Yeah.
Joyce: I think most women don't have a problem with that.
Joyce: It's funny.
Joyce: Every time I go through any kind of business process or investment process, I find a lot of the men are deeply uncomfortable with that, but the women who are moms are like, Yep, we get it.
Joyce: That was a problem that needed to be solved anyway.
Joyce: So I started my company gosh, sort of unofficially, almost 14 years ago, Maybe almost 15, when we brought our first daughter was adopted from Vietnam, and we were bringing her home, and she had just had emergency open heart surgery Due to the legacy genetic issues that agent Orange has caused for generations of children over there, Because there's still farming in the soil, and you would have to scrape 2ft of soil off a huge swath of Vietnam In order to remediate that.
Joyce: So it is changing the genetics of generations of kids.
Joyce: And my kid was one of those, and she had emergency open heart surgery in Vietnam, and her correction was perfect.
Joyce: Her heart was essentially backwards in some ways.
Joyce: So they fixed her teeny, tiny little heart, and off she came home to be with us.
Joyce: And when she got home, she was deemed immunocompromised.
Joyce: And I had that sort of feeling that we've all had for the last two years, Where every cough, every sniffle just struck fear into my heart.
Joyce: I couldn't go to the store.
Joyce: If someone cough near me, I was running in the other direction.
Joyce: It was the second time someone I loved had been deemed immunocompromised Because my father, who had passed away from cancer, Was also during his chemotherapy immunocompromised.
Joyce: So I had a vague understanding of it.
Joyce: But with a new baby, the fear level was, like, off the charts.
Joyce: Yeah.
Joyce: So here I've been handed this beautiful, fragile one year old baby.
Joyce: I brought her home, and now I am losing my mind, Trying to find a way to be safe.
Joyce: So I've always been an APA therapist all my life.
Joyce: I love all things be related.
Joyce: I know, like, a socially unacceptable level of information about honey.
Joyce: I'll talk to strangers about honey.
Joyce: It's weird.
Joyce: So I've always been into that.
Joyce: And at that time, I believe Zycam was the only nasal swab product that had ever come on the market, and it had been pulled from the market for hurting people's sense of smell.
Joyce: And I decided, A, why the nose?
Joyce: And B, why did that go wrong?
Joyce: And what is this all about?
Joyce: So I started to dive into how we get sick and how to not get sick.
Joyce: And I learned everything I could about the nose, and I learned that it was its own biome.
Joyce: It needs to have the right biodiversity that our gut is designed to trap and prevent, Designed to restore and maintain our immune system.
Joyce: But our nose is designed to trap and prevent.
Joyce: So I learned what we've all learned in the last two years, that the nose is the hub of viral infection.
Joyce: And that's the starting point of how my product began.
Joyce: I began to, like, mix things up in my kitchen and insist that all my friends and family shove this up their nose.
Joyce: And that's how it started.
Adrienne: I love a product where the MDBP is that you shove something up your nose.
Joyce: Yeah, it was a hard sell at first, because now everybody will do it.
Joyce: It's like I don't have that learning curve anymore.
Joyce: But at that time, that was a hard sell.
Adrienne: Wow.
Adrienne: I mean, just going back, first of all, it's just so incredible adoption stories and giving people a chance at a really wonderful life.
Adrienne: So I just want to congratulate you on doing that because it is such a beautiful thing.
Adrienne: And I think that it obviously not only benefits the child, but it also benefits the family who's adopting the child.
Adrienne: And I love that so much.
Adrienne: So I just want to acknowledge and recognize what a beautiful thing that is for you.
Joyce: Yeah.
Joyce: It feels like we've won the lottery.
Joyce: It feels like with our two daughters as a second daughter came home from China.
Joyce: It's like there's some sort of magic and adoption where you get these little people who are destined to be with you.
Joyce: There's this Chinese proverb about the red thread that it stretches and tangles and knots, but it always connects you to who you're supposed to be with.
Joyce: That's how I look at it.
Adrienne: I love that.
Adrienne: And I guess maybe it extends into and that's what you're supposed to do, too, because look, a challenge and something that was very scary actually turned into an incredible opportunity and a business and a way to sort of earn a living on your own terms.
Joyce: Yes, I had been a high school teacher before my daughter came home.
Joyce: And there's nothing more motivating.
Joyce: You and I were talking earlier about moms and women changing the shifting dynamics of the workplace and the great resignation.
Joyce: How many women have a remedy or a product or a recipe or something from their family or some knowledge they have to share with other families?
Joyce: The best products come from motivated women.
Adrienne: Oh, my God.
Adrienne: You know what?
Adrienne: I feel like that really hit me.
Adrienne: The best products come from motivated women.
Adrienne: That needs to be emblazoned on a Tshirt somewhere.
Joyce: I'm going to make a pillow.
Joyce: I'm going to embroider.
Adrienne: Embroider.
Adrienne: I think all of this is so exciting, and I often think that what we need to do.
Adrienne: And one of the missions of even this Sugarcoated podcast is to really shine a light on women that are doing incredible things that maybe the media might not think of as incredible, because sometimes not sometimes.
Adrienne: Oftentimes the media portrays entrepreneurship as these tech startups with all this VC money behind it and sort of that's the only way to be an entrepreneur.
Adrienne: And I want to just get rid of that perception, because truly entrepreneurship and the thing that this country was built upon was smaller businesses and finding solutions to problems for families, for communities.
Adrienne: So I really commend you for what you're doing and also giving the inspiration to other women to sort of look at what you have, where you are, because there probably is some opportunity there.
Joyce: Yeah.
Joyce: When you think of all the baby products that have come out just since my girls were infants, I look at those and I think that is a parent who had a problem to solve, and I wish I'd had that.
Joyce: I think we're going to see more and more of that with a great resignation.
Joyce: There's sort of this can do attitude where people are having to shift their mindset away from corporate America and away from big tech and all of that and get back into inventing and creating and becoming makers.
Adrienne: Yes.
Adrienne: I love the idea of becoming a maker and using your hands and your God given skill set in order to create something of value.
Adrienne: I think the issue or the challenge becomes, how do you I don't know if it's even so much scale because you want it to sort of maintain that home grown appeal.
Adrienne: But, you know, how do businesses get created around things that are made by makers, and how do those businesses grow to profitability and remain profitable with so much competition and technology and everything that's out there?
Adrienne: Right.
Joyce: That's the big Riddle.
Joyce: Every day I'm trying to solve that problem.
Joyce: I think if you're just starting out with a new product or an idea or concept and you've created something, no one told me the rules back in the day.
Joyce: And my father, before he passed away, my dad was an amazing salesman.
Joyce: We ran a country store in Maine with the pickle jar on the counter, and salesman would come in and sell local goods.
Joyce: And so I had a very old fashioned mindset.
Joyce: And I feel like now postcoded we should go right back to that, that maybe that mindset that I utilized just inadvertently because it's all I knew is what we should all be using now, which is local start local, walk into that store, flop your thing down and say, I would like to do business with you.
Joyce: And that's how I grew.
Joyce: I went to the local country stores that were just like the one I grew up in.
Joyce: And I asked them, would you put this on your counter?
Joyce: Now, of course, I realize now that as an FDA compliant OTC pharmaceutical, that's not exactly how things are supposed to happen.
Adrienne: But ignorance was believed that we learned and it worked.
Joyce: It worked initially.
Joyce: And being an OTC pharmaceutical is really rare.
Joyce: I doubt anyone else listening out there has created something that has to go through those Hoops.
Joyce: But that's what I did at the beginning.
Joyce: And I just walked into every baby store, every mom and pop general store, and they were the early adopters and the proof of concept for my product.
Adrienne: Yeah.
Adrienne: And what I love about that so much is that then the people who live in the area, they go in, they use the product, and they get great results, and then they spread that through word of mouth.
Adrienne: And that's the way that's fundamentally what marketing is.
Adrienne: Right.
Adrienne: It's like telling someone else about the results that you have gotten from the use of this product.
Adrienne: I love that so much.
Joyce: I agree.
Joyce: And I think we have a trust issue.
Joyce: Oh, I'm sorry.
Joyce: I didn't mean to correct you.
Adrienne: No, go ahead.
Joyce: I think we have a trust issue in corporate America right now.
Joyce: And so right now is, I think, a new golden age for creators and inventors and small products to go, like you said, go in and build trust locally and go viral in an old fashioned way on a local level and let those people be the evangelist for your product and spread the word.
Joyce: Because there's a trust issue with corporate America right now, and people are looking for small local curated stuff.
Adrienne: You know, I love that so much.
Adrienne: It's like the concept of influencers is not a bad one.
Adrienne: Right.
Joyce: Right.
Adrienne: And this local this trust that is, I think what influencers, quote unquote, are supposed to be all about.
Adrienne: However it's gone awry, people are paid to be influencers.
Adrienne: They make up things in order to just get more followers, and it's gone out of control.
Adrienne: And so I think that's where there's the lack of trust.
Adrienne: And it's like technology is great in that it enables maybe some of these local makers to get into other local areas that they might not otherwise reach.
Adrienne: Except what happens is they don't have the marketing money and muscle in order to compete with these larger organizations.
Adrienne: And so the ability of technology to spread things that are worth spreading gets dampened by bigger companies that have these generic mass products that are oftentimes not even good for you.
Joyce: That's right.
Joyce: I mean, how do you compete with that?
Joyce: Because the big companies just go right to the huge influencers, and they're 100% relying upon the might of their dollar in pushing things through technology.
Joyce: So the only thing we can do as smaller entrepreneurs, as makers is to do both.
Joyce: We're going to take the time to go to the local you know, go to the smaller influencers, go to the general store offer like I come to you and I say, here's my product.
Joyce: Would you share it with your entrepreneur and women who will understand where I'm going with this and maybe support it this expensive, it's costly, it takes some time, but it's so worth it to be authentic and reach out to people on a human level because the corporations it may feel like this Goliath situation, but I think if we just keep working the streets that we women entrepreneurs will succeed and reach the audience that we need to reach.
Adrienne: I love that so much.
Adrienne: And I love your enthusiasm and attitude around that, too, because I agree with you.
Adrienne: And it's one of the things that I even have struggled with in the course of launching my own business is that I very much don't rely on technology, although I do use social media and all the things.
Adrienne: But more fundamental is that I like to build relationships with people and build that trust and let them know that I either have something going on or I have a service to sell but not pressuring them into anything at all.
Adrienne: And it's been a struggle because as much as people like to connect and build relationships, they are very much influenced by these shiny objects.
Adrienne: Here's the ten steps for wild success.
Adrienne: Make ten grand a month and they pour all their money into those things.
Adrienne: And then when those things aren't successful, they do develop this lack of trust of anybody else, because why should they then trust me?
Adrienne: That doesn't have the ten point system.
Adrienne: Right.
Adrienne: But that's not the stuff that works.
Adrienne: The stuff that works is what you're talking about.
Adrienne: It's the going out, talking to people, seeing what people need modifying based on feedback that you're getting from actual customers.
Adrienne: And I think that that has sort of been lost in the whole startup ecosystem.
Joyce: I agree.
Joyce: You're 100% million percent correct.
Joyce: That's been lost.
Joyce: It's this awful Riddle that I'm sure we all feel behind the eight ball every single week about how do I move the dial, how do I bring people to my service, how do I prove my value and worth of my product or my service?
Joyce: And it's this Riddle, it's this goalpost that keeps moving.
Joyce: And so I always try to go back to keeping it simple and what's worked the longest.
Joyce: And that's just like you said, human interaction.
Adrienne: Well, you are in what, 12,000 retailers nationwide?
Joyce: Yes.
Adrienne: So that's a lot of foot traffic and mileage and connections and relationship building.
Adrienne: How did you go from starting in, I assume, your home, your kitchen to that whole process of the FTC?
Adrienne: I'm sorry, FTC.
Adrienne: Listen to me.
Adrienne: The FDA and then into 12,000 retailers.
Joyce: Well, I think if somebody had told me 15 years ago that what an FDA compliant OTC Pharmaceutical means, I would have bailed and run away screaming out of fear because it was intense, like we were at the Tuckaway Lake in Little Nottingham, New Hampshire, and I got a phone call from the FDA that they were coming and sending agents to the house for three days to go through our compliance.
Joyce: Lucky for me, I am, in fact, married to an attorney, a recovering attorney.
Joyce: He's a software developer now, and all our duckies were beautifully in a row because he understood all that processes.
Joyce: But I can't imagine if that had happened to me on my own as a small entrepreneur.
Joyce: The FDA agent told me they had to have special meetings about me because usually smaller companies like mine are doing like a salsa or it's a beverage company or some sort of food product or a bomb or a Sav.
Joyce: But I was making claims and it's a medical product.
Joyce: So they had to have special meetings with how to deal with me.
Joyce: And thank goodness those agents were kind and walked us through everything.
Joyce: And it was a fantastic experience in the end.
Joyce: But I think if I'd known how hard this process was going to be, I would have run away in terror.
Joyce: But I'm glad I didn't know because I started out with my father's work ethic of just ask.
Joyce: It can't hurt to ask.
Joyce: And I would walk into every health food store everywhere.
Joyce: I could just say, hey, would you be willing to try this?
Joyce: And nine out of ten times they said, yes, because it made sense to them.
Joyce: It was a new and innovative concept to not just fight pathogens where they colonized, but enhance your nasal immune function and give your nose the biodiversity it needs to be function at the best level to trap and prevent.
Joyce: So it all made sense.
Joyce: And people were picking up the product here and there and then listening to my father's voice in my head.
Joyce: One spring, the Red Sox.
Joyce: It was on the news that the Red Sox had a cold the whole time.
Joyce: So I was like, wow, that's interesting.
Joyce: I have a solution.
Joyce: It's the same attitude I had at beginning my products like, don't tell me there's no cure for the common cold.
Joyce: I do not accept that information.
Joyce: So I hear the Red Sox have a cold.
Joyce: I'm like, I am going to send this to Fenway.
Joyce: So I went down the roster and I found this one man's name.
Joyce: He was a massage therapist, this older Samoan gentleman that had come to the team through Kurt Schilling back in 2003, and he was into alternative medicine.
Joyce: So I sent the product to Fenway in his name.
Joyce: Never hear anything about it.
Joyce: Six weeks later, I get this email at 01:00 A.m.
Joyce: Saying, hey, can you please bring a bunch of this to Fenway?
Joyce: All the families are sick.
Joyce: We're traveling tomorrow.
Joyce: Can you bring it tomorrow?
Joyce: So it was father's Day.
Joyce: I loaded my husband up and said, this is your father's day.
Joyce: Yes, you can go to Fenway and deliver this to this gentleman.
Joyce: And he had the time of his life.
Joyce: Well, that started a relationship with the Red Sox, where I would just donate product every three months, all through spring training, through the regular season.
Joyce: Well, apparently a CVS executive who are the top corporate sponsors of Fenway and JetBlue park.
Joyce: Somebody gave them some.
Joyce: I got a phone call from a local broker or a local executive saying, hey, we want to do a honeybee end cap.
Joyce: Would you be the focal point of that?
Joyce: As a local New England test.
Joyce: I was like, yes, Sir, I will.
Adrienne: Thank you so much about that.
Joyce: So I did it, and I had no idea what I was doing.
Joyce: We had to go through the New Hampshire SBDC because when you're in the weeds as a small entrepreneur, I ran straight to my SBDC.
Joyce: And if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't have survived that growth process.
Joyce: So we wound up.
Joyce: I guess the short of that story is we wound up in CVS, and then it just grew and grew and grew.
Adrienne: That's amazing.
Joyce: Yeah, that's it.
Joyce: That's how it happened.
Joyce: So there was a certain degree of just dumb luck into my story.
Joyce: But it also comes from can't hurt to F.
Joyce: Yeah.
Adrienne: No, I love that.
Adrienne: There's so much there too, like lessons, right.
Adrienne: Listening to yourself, not being afraid and doing it anyway, maybe not knowing and learning as you go and as you grow and then really taking a risk and not focusing on the outcome.
Adrienne: You sent your product to somebody who you thought might be able to benefit from it.
Adrienne: But you didn't say, I'm going to send it to him because he's going to get me into CVS.
Adrienne: Ultimately, you had no idea that that was even going to transpire.
Joyce: Exactly.
Joyce: I have that attitude of because you lose faith all the time in your product.
Joyce: That's just the honest truth.
Joyce: It's like any relationship or marriage where you're just like, you have a week where you're like, what have I done?
Joyce: You have it with children.
Joyce: You have a moment, let's be honest.
Joyce: Okay.
Joyce: What advice?
Joyce: But I had to stick with that attitude of someone said to me once, when it comes to, like, fishing, if your bait is worth biting, the fish will find you.
Joyce: So just have faith.
Adrienne: Gosh yes.
Adrienne: I think that's one of the most difficult things.
Adrienne: It's sort of like the fear in entrepreneurship is something that is very, very difficult to overcome or to work through.
Adrienne: And then just the uncertainty around what's next.
Adrienne: Gosh, It's some of these things that when you look back and you say, why did I ever become an entrepreneur in the first place?
Adrienne: But I don't know.
Adrienne: There's also so much gratification.
Adrienne: And the fact is that you are helping people.
Adrienne: Right.
Adrienne: And there's nothing wrong with selling something beautiful.
Adrienne: I love beautiful things.
Adrienne: It brings joy to my life.
Adrienne: But you are literally helping people.
Adrienne: And I just think that that is an incredibly wonderful thing to wrap up into entrepreneurship.
Joyce: Thank you.
Joyce: I like to think so, too, because I know how scared I was.
Joyce: I can't claim to have cured anything.
Joyce: But what if I help moms and women and anyone who's afraid feel like a little more protective, a little more in control of what's going on?
Joyce: It gives them one more tool in their weapon, in their Arsenal of wellness to make them feel a little less afraid, because the world right now is the way that things are going we are being bombarded with fear constantly.
Joyce: And that's how I felt with a new baby who had just had open heart surgery.
Joyce: I was in that space in the COVID Mindset space 15 years ago.
Joyce: So I hope it helps people feel empowered.
Joyce: And you know what you just said about the fear of entrepreneur, about the failure and the fear of whether or not you're making right choices.
Joyce: As an entrepreneur, I think women in particular.
Joyce: How many nights did I put the baby to bed and then work my b*** off because I was scared that I was taking away time during the day when I should be paying attention to those babies.
Joyce: So I adjust my day accordingly?
Joyce: Or how many times did we go to do a run and I had to get a loan for my first big run and I thought, am I taking funds out of my children's College education?
Joyce: Like, is my idea worth this risk?
Joyce: And I don't believe I shouldn't say this.
Joyce: I don't know if it's true because I'm not a man and I'm not in their head.
Joyce: But as a female entrepreneur, I can assert that I had a lot of conflicting feelings and guilt about that topic.
Adrienne: Yeah, gosh.
Adrienne: One of the things that I love so much about doing this podcast and hopefully even just the name of it sugarcoated and that we are talking about things and not sugarcoating them, is that these type of insights come through.
Adrienne: And I think that these conversations need to happen much more often because like I said, you see in the media all of these shiny people and products and services and they might talk about a little bit of how their journey was difficult, but it doesn't get into the real fundamental human emotions and roller coaster that we are constantly on.
Adrienne: And this pressure, my goodness, you have newborn or whatever new to you patients that are compromised with their health that you need to put 100% of your attention on.
Adrienne: No guilt allowed.
Adrienne: And yet what has society done to us that we are even feeling guilty for?
Adrienne: 1 NS.
Adrienne: It's ridiculous.
Adrienne: And in a way, it speaks to how driven you are that you said, well, let me continue to do this, but at the same time, I think that there's just way too much pressure on women to do everything we can.
Joyce: Oh yeah, the kin keeping alone.
Joyce: That's 90% of my day.
Joyce: When I learned the phrase kin keeping, I learned two phrases that revolutionized my attitude about marriage.
Joyce: And I have a very supportive partner.
Joyce: But kind keeping is a burden that your inlaws and your extended family may put upon you.
Joyce: And also weaponizing confidence.
Joyce: The more capable you become, the less capable the people around you become.
Adrienne: Oh my gosh, I've never even heard of that.
Adrienne: Say that again, weaponized you.
Adrienne: It's going to liberate you, right?
Joyce: Okay, weaponized incompetence.
Joyce: It's whether you're the head honcho in your office, whether you're the classroom mom helper and your kids do this to you, everyone will do this to you.
Joyce: As a woman, the more confident you become, the less competent the people around you will behave.
Joyce: And it will become a very unhealthy dynamic where they weaponize their incompetence because, Mummy, I'll take care of it.
Adrienne: Well, guess what?
Adrienne: I'm living that reality right here, right now.
Joyce: Yes.
Adrienne: It's insanity to older children.
Adrienne: They're 21 and 18 and they're fully healthy, capable men, basically.
Joyce: Yeah.
Adrienne: And the level of things and my husband included.
Adrienne: I'm right there with you.
Adrienne: He is so supportive of me and my best friend and just thinks the world of me.
Adrienne: So it's all good there's, like the love and the support and the friendship, it's all there.
Adrienne: But the incompetence, those two things run, I think, parallel the love and the incompetence.
Adrienne: Yeah.
Joyce: It's almost like, okay, I'm off at a blood drive helping a women's group.
Joyce: Early on in my marriage, I'm married to a man who has a doctorate.
Joyce: He's a lawyer, he's a software developer.
Joyce: He can build Rockets now that he's a genius.
Joyce: Right.
Adrienne: Okay.
Joyce: We've been married many years, honey.
Joyce: Where's the peanut butter?
Adrienne: Yeah.
Adrienne: When it's staring at his drive right there.
Adrienne: It's on the shelf in front of his face in direct eyeline site.
Joyce: That's exactly right.
Joyce: And I think that as women, we become such caretakers in area.
Joyce: And I found this in business as well.
Joyce: I better be careful what I say.
Joyce: Okay.
Joyce: I have men that I work with on my team that I have hired, and they are noticing shuttling more things.
Joyce: Right back at you.
Joyce: Right back at you.
Joyce: No.
Adrienne: At the same time, the level of frustration is maddening.
Adrienne: At the same time, it is so interesting.
Adrienne: It is an incredible skill that they have, and it's almost like a superpower.
Joyce: It is.
Joyce: Well, do you know how I learned about this?
Joyce: Million young millennial moms have made TikToks about this and it became a trend.
Joyce: Well, not a trend.
Joyce: It's a very small trend.
Joyce: But I found this corner of TikTok where they're talking about weaponizing confidence.
Joyce: I don't know who I should have bookmarked that mom, whoever she was about, she just had a baby.
Joyce: And her whole TikTok is about creating a foundation in her marriage with this newborn where there's so much equality when it comes to the raising of the child and the household chores.
Joyce: And that weaponized and confidence is something that is inflicted upon new moms tremendously.
Joyce: It's where the patterns get set.
Joyce: And so I watched her TikTok in awe.
Joyce: And the moment she came up with that phrase, I'm like, you are a genius.
Adrienne: Genius.
Adrienne: Yeah.
Adrienne: And it's funny, too, because it's the way you do it better than I do.
Adrienne: And that probably is true.
Adrienne: That's the problem, too, right?
Adrienne: It's like, yeah, we probably do do all of those things better, but it doesn't mean that because we do it better that we have to do it all.
Joyce: Yeah.
Joyce: And I think there's a passive aggressive element to it.
Joyce: She was talking about her husband, and she gave him the chore of breakfast he was going to do.
Joyce: And so he and the toddler would be an all out war for breakfast, food everywhere, just bickering.
Joyce: It was like a war.
Joyce: And she would tell him, okay, this is what I do.
Joyce: It doesn't happen when I give the baby breakfast.
Joyce: When I give the baby breakfast, everything goes smoothly.
Joyce: And these are my routines.
Joyce: And then baby understands that.
Joyce: Toddler understands the parameters and the routine is necessary in order for that to go well, he knows this.
Joyce: And she talked about how they're in a year and a half later, and he's still engaging in war.
Joyce: Even though he knows what works, he's choosing not to.
Joyce: And that's the weaponizing confidence.
Joyce: It's like leaving the suitcase on the landing to see who's going to unpack it.
Joyce: He's going to stick with that to break her.
Joyce: And that's his weaponizing confidence.
Adrienne: Wow.
Adrienne: And I do think that, you know, I don't think that it's intentionally there is a little bit of intention behind it, but I don't think it's intentionally used against I don't know, there's something else because I don't think that anyone who is in a loving relationship would want to hurt the other partner.
Joyce: No, that was rare.
Joyce: I think that was just an example of, like, in your face passive aggressive weaponizing combinations.
Joyce: But I think the stuff that when that happens, that dynamic is set up.
Joyce: I think a lot of times it's just I almost take ownership over it sometimes when I'm like, oh, just let me do it.
Adrienne: Yeah.
Adrienne: Oh, I do the same thing.
Adrienne: Yeah.
Adrienne: So it's like we're feeding the monster.
Adrienne: Exactly.
Adrienne: Oh, my gosh.
Adrienne: Listen, Adrienne, I have had just such a pleasure talking with you today, and I can't wait to continue to watch your company grow and you go farther all over the country, all over the world.
Adrienne: I think what you're doing is phenomenal.
Adrienne: And I know you have some other products.
Adrienne: Where can people go to purchase your products?
Joyce: Well, our adult cold begone and children's algae begone are carried at select CVS throughout the country.
Joyce: We're at Harmony, which is the Bath and beyond.
Joyce: A lot of people have Harmon.
Joyce: We're at Albertson's in the United Supermarkets in the Southwest.
Joyce: And just our website, that's the best way to get it is the website, because you will get it fast.
Joyce: You know, it's coming directly from me.
Joyce: And so I encourage people to always use my website.
Adrienne: I love it.
Adrienne: Well, I hope that everybody who's listening goes to your website and purchases all the different products because I think you have more than just the adult Cold Be Gone and the.
Joyce: Allergy right, we have adult and Kids Cold Be Gone and Adult and Kid Allergy Begone.
Joyce: And those are my four primary products and we have some other things in the works but with the supply chain breakdown so I'm sticking with what I already have.
Adrienne: I love it.
Joyce: Yeah, you can find it at www.coldbegone.com and it's B with two E's like a Bumblebee.
Adrienne: I love it and I can't wait to pass it out to all the women that are on the unbreakable retreat so that we can as we're doing the Spartan race that we can breathe easy and also it will cut back on the risk of somebody sharing a bug while you're there because nothing is a bummer when you've invested time and money and time away from your family to get sick.
Adrienne: I love that so much.
Adrienne: Yes, I'm going to pass that out on the first day that we arrive.
Adrienne: It's going to be their welcome gift and I'm going to have them put it up their nose.
Adrienne: Stick it up your nose.
Joyce: I want to thank you so much for having me on this because as a home mom entrepreneur I think we need to start our own Facebook because this felt like therapy.
Joyce: This felt so good to talk about these things with somebody who gets it.
Adrienne: Oh, I am so happy that you had such a good time and you'll have to come back on the show and we'll talk about all of the great results from all of your product and what you're doing next because I do see some T shirts and some bumper stickers in your future.
Joyce: Weaponize in confidence.
Adrienne: Yes, Adrienne, this has been so lovely and thank you again, so much.
Joyce: Thank you.
Joyce: You have a wonderful day.
Joyce: You too.
