On the morning of her 39th birthday, Sharmadean Reid woke up and felt at peace. Across her 20 year career, she’s founded and propelled forward multiple successful businesses: there’s the iconic, cult beauty salon WAH Nails, and Beautystack, the app that garnered her the title of the first Black woman in the UK to raise £1 million in venture capital funding, and the vibrant Stack World community for “mission-driven women” to network, collaborate, and learn together.
It’s been a kaleidoscopic, outwardly dazzling journey for Reid (MBE), but it’s been far from smooth sailing. A founder, writer, consultant and entrepreneur, she’s navigated her fair share of mistakes and missteps, inner turmoil and systemic challenges, and picked up and put down just about every wellness practice and personal development book going.
At 39, Reid decided she was ready to share 49 reflective and rousing essays that offer challenging perspectives on life, career, friendship, parenting, and selfhood. That’s what makes New Methods for Women: A Manifesto for Independence. She never wanted to write a straight business or self-help book – rather, Reid was determined to synthesise the working world with all of the real-life feelings, intimate ways of thinking, inner work and outer barriers that must be considered, while building the life you want to live.
This is a book that distils the triumphs and pressure points of Reid’s expansive career into an urgent manifesto for modern women, whatever their age and life stage. Reid lays out a path for young women through a world where long-embedded societal structures stack up against them. Her reflections on cultivating adult friendships are a particular highlight, and her approach to topics from financial wellness to self-reinvention, inner child work and media diets achieve the same tenacity and clarity.
Many self-help books will instruct women how to navigate the system as is, but Reid rallies for the ways to break it all down and start anew (with multiple routes to doing so – you do you!). Buy it for all your girlfriends, and read our chat below.
What was the impetus for the book?
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Sharmadean Reid: The structure was the thing that came first. I’ve always been a person who has loved philosophy, and interrogating rules and principles. And I’m a structure driven person. I had read a lot of business books by men when I first started my company, and I thought, what would that physically look like for me?
Two key influences for me were Ray Dalio’s Principles: Life and Work and Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. They’re both straightforward: here’s how you get ahead. These books are brilliant, and they’ve really helped me learn about the human condition, but are they considering what the experience might be like for a woman?
A history of power is really difficult to think about as a woman, when so many of women’s rights were only available in the last century. When reading Principles, I kept thinking that business books written by men can often forget that their success is built upon the unpaid labour of the women in their lives, whether it’s their mother or their partner.
I wanted to write a book that was a philosophical guide to life, and rather than just a ‘woman’s point of view’, be an empathetic understanding that takes into account systemic and societal issues that may stop women getting ahead, and how do we address them, before we start telling women to lean in and go get it. My book is designed to get women on a level playing field mentally, emotionally, financially.
I think that’s what makes the book so special. It is really fearless and frank in unpacking challenges that are uniquely levied on women. Interpolated into that is your own personal perspective, and themes of healing and spirituality. What’s suggested is that what is personal and intimate cannot be so easily cleaved from your experience of the workplace. Was that ethos always so clear to you?
Sharmadean Reid: Some of the best feedback [I’ve received for the book] has been people saying they’re grateful that trauma and healing is addressed as well as negotiation or navigating a workplace. Everything is connected, but I didn’t always understand that. I figured it out in real time – say, that my inability to hire someone I can rely on is because I’ve built up a belief that I can only rely on myself. The book is designed to be read chronologically; each piece of knowledge builds upon the next piece of knowledge as I found it.
Was it ever challenging to go back and unpack your experiences? Or were there moments that you looked back on and found surprising new meaning?
Sharmadean Reid: I wrote the book while I was going through it, so when I was reading the audiobook aloud in a three-day run, I was thinking, ‘oh, there’s a couple of instances here where I’ve definitely been way too selfish, I could have given a bit more grace to the other people that I’m talking about in these scenarios’. I reread parts and feel sorry for the girl I was, that something was such an issue for me, and [that] I found the methods to survive it after the fact. That comes with age. In the book, I explore that gap between younger and older women. Younger women feel they have to reinvent the wheel over and over again, when we need more intergenerational conversations.
Reinvention is a major theme of the book. Can you talk about that?
Sharmadean Reid: I think it’s essential. There is a real power in looking at your life and saying, ‘this isn’t what I want. I thought I wanted it, but I don’t, therefore I will try to do something else’. That’s critical at any juncture. It took me so long to learn that this is what I need to do over, over and over again.
Was there a particular woman you had in mind while writing?
Sharmadean Reid: I was first and foremost writing for any woman who wants to make a change in the world. We say that The Stack World is for mission-driven women, women who want to have an impact. When I was writing, I was thinking about everyone from students and entrepreneurs to stay-at-home mothers. I’m always thinking of the full spectrum of womanhood. I’m writing for a state of mind, and that state of mind is for control and self-ownership.
‘Reparenting’ is a really interesting concept you explore too.
Sharmadean Reid: My auntie gave me a book on reparenting by a psychotherapist – Heal Your Aloneness by Dr Margaret Paul – that I kept in the boot of my car for two years. Then one day, it was my birthday, and I just wanted to lay in Hyde Park and read. I drove there and found the book – divine timing! I found exactly what I needed: how to heal your aloneness, inner child bonding. I also read a tweet by an influencer called Grace Victory that simply said: ‘what would baby Grace want right now?’. You pick up your child self as your adult self, and care for them in a way that you might not necessarily have been cared for.
Have your approaches to wellness and spirituality evolved?
Sharmadean Reid: I’ve always had this balance of science and spirituality for my whole life. I come from a very churchy family – while I know there are things higher than myself I will not succumb to the structures of religion. It is different from my faith. You find what works for you and what you need – choose your own healer. I’m very intentional about saying in the book, don’t succumb to the gurus! And it’s important to keep a strong sense of self when there’s a new way of life – be it a religion or otherwise – being spouted.
I like to think of faith as a tool, a power you can harness, rather than something to constrict you. It should expand your world. Are there any affirmations that you’re prioritising right now?
Sharmadean Reid: To not lose my creative spirit. A big part of my own discovery of the process of writing the book is that I had worked my ass off to achieve a life that I thought I wanted. I went with societal pressure: start a business, get the fancy office, employees, the travel stuff. When actually, what I really love doing is making things, and I don’t think I’ll ever want to stop making things. What I’m trying to do now is figure out how I can marry the two things. How can I marry commercially growing and my creative elements blossoming? I’m thinking a lot about how creativity and deal making can help women achieve, gaining independence and self actualisation, without hustling and killing themselves.
You’ve done so well to cultivate community and connection. In this current social, political, and cultural climate how do you keep building?
Sharmadean Reid: Community became commoditised in the last decade. Businesses and brands have been built on them. I’ve come to understand the difference between community and audience. I want to keep empowering my community to start their own networks and build their own communities, which is what I’ve always done with The Stack World. I’ve always been a starter of stuff, creative playgrounds for people to enjoy themselves, and I’ll always keep doing it. It really is vital today and always.
New Methods for Women: A Manifesto for Independence by Sharmadean Reid is out via Penguin Life now
Anna Cafolla is Cosmopolitan UK’s acting site director – managing the day-to-day running of the website, as well as overseeing video, e-commerce and social for the brand. Anna has a background in culture, fashion, and social affairs journalism – profiling Saffron Hocking, Robyn, Shygirl, and Naomi Osaka; investigating fashion archives, the Irish abortion rights movement, Generation Alpha's developing tastes, women's shelter closures and social media conspiracies in turn. Find Anna on Instagram.
