Chloe Davies: It Takes a Village – Transcript

0:00:12 – Host 

Welcome to Genuine Humans, exploring the stories behind the great marketing leaders of our time and hearing how their journeys have influenced the brands they’ve built. Brought to you by The Social Element, here are our hosts Tamara Littleton, CEO and founder, and Wendy Christie, Chief People Officer.  

0:00:46 – Tamara Littleton 

Welcome back to the Genuine Humans podcast. I’m here with my co-host, Wendy Christie. Wendy, how are you doing? 

0:00:51 – Wendy Christie 

Hello Tamara. Yeah, I’m doing really well, thank you, how are you?

0:00:54 – Tamara Littleton 

Good. I did a lot of singing at the weekend, so I’m feeling particularly good, particularly good. And another reason to feel good is that we are joined today by Chloe Davies, founder of It Takes a Village and co-founder of Join Our Table. Chloe was named one of Campaign Magazine UK’s 2023 Trail Blazers of the Year, and she is an award-winning founder, creative social impact consultant, a chef, which I want to talk more about, and an entrepreneur who has dedicated much of her career campaigning for inclusion and equality in all spaces, and that’s in-house and at agency level.  

Welcome to the podcast, Chloe.  

0:01:31 – Chloe Davies 

Good morning, how’s everybody?  

0:01:34 – Tamara Littleton 

Very, very good. I’m so happy to have you on the podcast, and I mean, I want to know all about It Takes a Village. I want to know about Join Our Table, but I’d love to know how you got to where you are now and maybe just give us a flavour of your early career.  

0:01:49 – Chloe Davies 

Sure, my God, this is such a big question! 

I’m having a conversation with myself in my head only because I’ve been talking about, I guess, my like X-Men origin story much more than I had been in the past, and I guess my story started way back when, I would say, roughly about seven or eight. 

So, I am the eldest daughter of two African parents. My mum is from Nigeria. She came to the UK when she was five. My dad was born in the UK. He was born in Northampton. We won’t talk about that, but and they’re both incredibly wonderful black parents, very proud. 

I come from a very proud African-American family, so I kind of had that my whole life, eldest daughter, African daughter too. So you have the weight and the expectations of you on yourself.

And I’d always been super inquisitive. You know, my dad always calls me the “why child” because I would always ask why, and I was just really interested in life and I had an amazing grandfather his name is Arthur Davies, who was an accountant but secretly wanted to be a headmaster. And so myself and my cousins, I think I remember from the age of five going to Colchester where they live and having lessons in the Summer holidays and half terms because we got shipped off by our parents and education was very key, and so I guess I’ve been doing that from five, and maybe about seven or eight my educational drive really, really kicked in.  

I would be what’s classed as a gifted child. So really smart, got moved up in primary school. Instead of doing year four, I did year five. Instead of year five, I did year six. I was all ready to go to secondary school and then this little old thing called government policy got in the way. I’m born on the 1st of September and the school year runs from the 1st of September to the 31st of August, and what? We’re going back 25, almost 30 years now, and they didn’t make an exception. They wouldn’t make an exception, and so I had to repeat a year of school. Now we make exceptions for gifted children. You know, you’ve got kids that go to university at seven or eight, but they refused to do that for me, and so I spent a year doing nothing, trying to reintroduce myself to a group of friends that I hadn’t been in part of their friend circle for three years. I’m a geek, I love being super smart, and so you know that’s never really going to mess well with kids and you know the kind of playground school banter. But I also had a teacher who would repeatedly say you know, we know that you know the answer. Let somebody else have a chance. And so, in essence, I think the very first experience of me being silenced at a very young age had such a detrimental impact and kind of as I’ve been doing a lot of personal work recently, I realised that that’s kind of my start.  

So if we fast forward a little bit to 14, six years later, I had gone to a very affluent school. You could go to school in the borough that your parents worked, and despite us living in Walthamstow, which at the time – I’m sticking to this line – was the back end of civilization, now it’s gentrified and very, very lovely.

0:05:23 – Tamara Littleton

It’s very bougie now. 

0:05:24 – Chloe Davies

It’s very bougie! But when I was growing up, friends didn’t want to come to zone three, you know, you or on the border, zone four, and it just it wasn’t that it was bad, it just wasn’t where everybody else lived. And so I kind of had that bit. 

And my mum was the first Black department manager at Peter Jones and the first in John Lewis Partnership history. It took her 16 years to get the title. But she’d been doing the job for a very long time, and so you could go to school in the borough that your parents worked in, mum was at Peter Jones dad was at HMSO in Vauxhall. So my brother and I got to go to school in Kensington and Chelsea, and so I went to Holy Trinity primary school and then secondary school I had two choices Greycoats, which I desperately wanted to go to, or Lady Margaret School for Girls, which is at the other end of the Kings Road by Parsons Green, and my granddad swung in again. My dad and I got summoned to Colchester for me to go and sit in a study and talk about my prospects and where did I want to go. And I came from a great family. I love my family. I wanted to do them proud. I didn’t want to let them down. You know, my granddad was like, if you want to go to Lady Margaret’s, I’ll pay for your school uniform, and I didn’t really know how to say, no, I don’t want to go. I remember coming home on the train with my dad, and my dad said to me you know “where do you want to go”? And I said, “well, you know, I like Lady Margaret’s, but I really like Greycoats”, and you know, he said, “oh, granddad, and you know where do you want to go”? And I remember at that moment just thinking, let’s just say, Lady Margaret’s, I don’t actually want to go, but I want to make them happy.  

And it was a great school 66 girls in my year; 60 girls were white, and six girls were girls of color and that had been very, very different to how I had grown up in my primary school. My primary school, I think, was about 60% black and then all other races, and I never felt like I was alone or ostracised. I’m so at LMS. It was very, very different, very academic, very based on status, I think, and hierarchy. It used to be a private school, and I could really tell the undertones, and I had gone from this period, remember, of kind of dumbing myself down and silencing my smarts and just preferring to try and fit in than to actually just be myself. So it was a really bad cycle. I trained my brain, I’m one of those really awful people that if I look at it the night before the exam, I would ace the exam. So I got into kind of a very lazy period of, oh, I don’t care. I’ll be alright on the night, don’t worry about it, which I don’t think also went down too well.  

And when I was 14, the by-play of my family life really impacted my everyday life. And so, just putting a gentle trigger warning, I, my cousin who was my best friend, and even now, I talk to him regularly in my head. His name was Wesley, he’s four years older than me, and life was not as kind to him, I guess, as it had been on my side of the family, the dynamics were not there in many different ways. They called us Pinky and Perky, and he was like my older twin brother, really, and the first person that actually made me make sense. And when I was 14, and he was 18, he completed suicide.  

0:08:55 – Wendy Christie 

I’m so sorry. 

0:08:55 – Chloe Davies 

It fundamentally changed my family dynamic in many, many ways that adults stopped adulting. I think I stopped being a child and became an adult at 14. My family asked me what I thought, and I told my truth, as I’d been encouraged to do my whole life, and it wasn’t easy for people to hear, and so they categorically told me to be quiet, and so you kind of have to think from a very young age, being told that in school, where you just want to exist, and then being told that by the people that are supposed to keep you the most safe. And so I did.  

I internalised everything I remember when I went back to school, and I think this is just for context; you know, when I went back to school, grief has so many different layers, it never really goes away. I think it very much defines my personality and my character, and being an empath doesn’t really help because I’m full of emotions. And so I’d gone back to class, and you know it, just the wave just comes and it just came over me. I think I was about, yeah, 14 and a half, and my science teacher said you know, we know that a bad thing has happened to you. Do you think you could get yourself together? 

0:10:23 – Tamara Littleton 

So that’s what they said. “Can you get yourself together?! 

0:10:24 – Wendy Christie

Oh God. Wow.

0:10:18 – Chloe Davies 

And so I categorically and unequivocally internalised everything for the next ten years. I stopped talking about joy, pain. I acted out, any way to not have to say, because people weren’t listening, and the one person that I wanted to be able to hear me was no longer here anymore and managed to navigate through life and coast and do relatively okay until I got to 24. I was still working for John Lewis, although I’d kind of gone through the kind of uni route and stuff, and my body basically said you are not paying any attention whatsoever, so I’m going to make you.

And I had a full physical, mental and emotional breakdown didn’t leave my bed for three days. Gratefully, John Lewis, came knocking at my door and said you know “are you okay?” And I went to hospital. They tried me on antidepressants. They don’t work for me, and it’s not saying that they don’t work for other people, but I think just my makeup, it just made me go even worse. What did work was that John Lewis said, you know, they had such a great care, duty of care for their staff, and they had occupational health, and so they basically said you can have six to 12 sessions of counselling. I had 13. I got 13 tattooed on my wrist. You make your own luck. And Diane, my first counsellor, was incredible because she really just, I’m going to swear, she basically just stopped me from bullshitting myself and to actually like talk to myself for the very first time.  

0:12:04

And so, whilst I’ve gone on and had so many other episodes since, much worse than that original one, I now had a vocabulary and an understanding, and so I guess the reason why I started my story there is because when you know what it’s like to not belong in the place that you’re supposed to feel the most safe that’s what I recognise has now been the undertone of my career, throughout my career is how do I keep creating places of belonging, places where people truly feel represented, honest and true to themselves, and how can I keep doing that for myself wherever I’ve gone?  

But if I’m secure, how can I keep doing that for other people when you know my strategic brain says, look, there’s a gap, or actually, this person has been missed so much of why I’ve done what I’ve done in all the different places that I’ve been able to is because I’ve been searching for that, I guess, to replace what I lost, but also so that nobody else ever has to feel like that again. I think I feel like I’ve got, you know, my little guardian angel with the devil on the other side because that’s just him but guiding into these different places of you know, how do we, how do we make this a bit more safe for somebody else the next time and how do we give someone else a bit more voice, because you know what it’s like to not have that.  

0:13:28 – Tamara Littleton 

And that’s incredible that you were just naturally doing that. And then, as you said, you’ve sort of now sort of realised that that was the thread, and that was the reason, and it’s kind of good to be able to look back and see, oh yeah, okay, that’s why I am doing what I do and, incredibly, giving to turn that pain into something that’s actually so inclusive for other people.  

0:13:55 – Chloe Davies 

I’ll be honest, like I don’t, my cheeks probably go up into my face. I don’t really know how to, not, it’s not a like… I think you know anyone who’s been through great pain and great loss; there is really nowhere else to go. You know you can, you can fixate on what you’ve lost, and it can turn you into someone that maybe you don’t necessarily like. And I think I’m grateful that I had a little brother to look after. I had the babies, I had the kids who I kind of had to just keep going for because the adults were still trying to get themselves together, and you know, someone had to cook and make sure that we were fed and all that other kind of stuff. And it’s not to say that I was the only one, but I’m definitely the ‘Susie Housemaker’ of my family. So I was like, let’s just, let’s just do that. And yeah, I just, I think you just have to keep moving in whichever way that you can because otherwise, what was it all for? And I think that’s a question that I always ask myself. I would never go through with the act of suicide, having been a family member left behind. But has my brain pushed me to the limits of contemplation? Absolutely, like that’s just me being completely honest.  

I think anybody who navigates with mental health issues calls, whatever the language is, for you. I think that that’s the part. What I try to do is to recognise that for what it is and turn it into something positive because otherwise, yeah, do you know what? I could join him, and that would be great, but there was more that we had to do, and so I’m literally like, if I’m here, I’m going to make it count. I’m going to make it count for the both of us, and maybe that might seem like, at times, like I’m doing the most, but I’m doing it for two people. And he was pretty amazing If you think I’m cool, like he was really fucking awesome. So, yeah, I’m just, it’s just that. Really, it’s just me versus me.  

0:16:08 – Tamara Littleton 

Thank you for sharing that. I think that’s so important that you’re talking about that, because not everyone does share, and I think also the power of therapy as well it’s so good.  

0:16:20 – Chloe Davies 

Hallelujah.  

0:16:22 – Tamara Littleton 

I feel like we should all just have therapy.  

0:16:24 – Chloe Davies 

Everybody needs… I… honestly, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me. Everybody needs someone to talk to. That’s basically what a therapist is. It’s your own person to go and talk to, that doesn’t judge you but also keeps it real and honest with you, because I think we live in a world that will force everyone to lie to themselves without actually seeing themselves. So I think that’s…. I’m with you, Tamara. I’m an advocate for therapy the whole way through. Affordable therapy would be great, but yeah, definitely.  

0:16:56 – Wendy Christie 

And how about what you’re doing now, Chloe, can you talk about what you’re doing, what you’re up to now?  

0:17:01 – Chloe Davies 

Gosh, sure! It Takes a Village is, like, seven-ish years in the making. So you could imagine, you know, the whole host of different things that I’ve done. You know, retail, PR, music, food. I’ve been cooking since I was three. Dad and grandma, yeah, like because mom was the breadwinner, dad did shift work so dad was the one that cooked. And so I had this idea seven-odd years ago to bring people together over food and great conversations. It was going to be called Breaking Bread because typically, within Black culture, Black community, we break bread over food. And it was going to be John Bishop meets Saturday Kitchen meets Oprah. That was basically how I had it in my head, sketched it all out, had episodes and everything.  

I was volunteering for Pride London at the time. So the very first person I ever told was my director of comms at the time, who’s James Holt. He’s now the ED for Archwell Foundation and a very good friend, and I was like, I want to do this, and so we kind of talked about it, but the timing wasn’t right, and there were certain things that were going on that just meant it kind of got pushed to one side. 

And then life, lifed, but it’s always been in the back of my head, and so you know, when you’ve worked as many different industries as I have in lots of different ways, and I guess this idea of like bringing people together and representation and conversation landed me in adland in-house in abundance, which made sense. If I hadn’t done all the other things, I wouldn’t have been ready for the fast pace that is adland, but it was something so magical and so beautiful and alongside kind of this really great drive to do incredible work, and I’m really lucky to have done some incredible work alongside some amazing people I kept holding the mirror to myself and not seeing myself reflected in abundance. And when I did hold the mirror up, I just saw a lot of pain that I had been used to in the past. A lot of you know discrimination and, I guess, not fairness and that “why child” kicked in and was like, “But why”? And so It Takes a Village came.

I had been lucky enough to go to Sydney on behalf of UK Black Pride in support of Lady Phyll and the amazing work she was doing there. But I also got to do some adland stuff and got to go to TWA Australia, and I was working with Pablo and some stuff, and I had two weeks child-free, which counts, in a completely different time zone. To sleep, and the sleep woke my brain up. I had not, you know. The fog disappeared, and my brain went, “OK, you ready? You listening?” 

0:20:00

Now here it is, and the framework for It Takes a Villiage came – this idea of having a global collective for Black women – and global was important because my role at the time as Head of Social Impact at Lucky Generals was for London and for New York. So, even though I was based in London, the Black woman that I was in New York, I was having a very different conversation, and so it was really about how do Black women show up in our industry and in our collective creative industries because it isn’t just advertising, marketing, media or comms. We cross and intersect and overlap with each other on a regular basis, but also how do we connect with each other, how do we celebrate with each other and, ultimately, what does championship and agency really look like? So, yeah, started last year, came back hungry. “Oh my God, we’re going to do this. It’s going to be amazing!” Very lucky that I had a really wonderful jump-off point and so much great enthusiasm and so much great support and people that are really, really invested. I have to give an incredible shout-out to Collette Philip at Brand by Me. She was the first person that said, “Oh my God, this is amazing, incredible, take my money!” I was like, “Oh my God, wow!” 

0:21:24

And sometimes, when Black women create things, often from a frustration, often because we want more and then structures that we’re in don’t work and that doesn’t always go the way that we planned, and so I can absolutely say that I’m the queen of pivots. 

But I was in a situation last year, kind of three and a half weeks ready to go, where something really bad happened and forced me to have to postpone to 2024 to now, and I’m saying that guardedly, not because I don’t want to talk about it or that I don’t want to share it, I think I’m a firm believer in, like I said at the beginning, you know, when you talk about your origin story when you’re building something for Black women, I want you to focus on what I’m building. I am used to pain and, whilst it’s not nice and it’s not fair, there is a time and a place for everything to talk and to speak about that, and so that time will come. But it really was a life-changing situation. It meant that this high height that we were going from, we were supposed to be doing, you know, launching at the Carlton Intercontinental, which, if anybody knows anything about Cannes Lions, is an incredible space, and so I kind of had to decide OK, well, we could go ahead and we could still do it, but will it be the best that I want it to be? And the answer was no.  

So postponed to 2024, was a rough six months. I think what I learned about myself is all the things that I said at the beginning. It gave me the time to stop. It’s what my head and my body needed to actually reassess where I am. But what it gave me, more than anything else, was such clarity for what this business is and what we’re building. We are three very strong pillars to be seen and heard, to be celebrated and championed and to have agency because we are striving for all Black women to have agency. We launch our first pillar, first product, at the end…so you’re getting this hot before anybody else…the second of April, then we will launch our inaugural global insight study.  

It’s called We Can’t All Be Lying, because we can’t all be lying, and it will look at the experiences of Black women globally across our creative sector.  

0:23:27 

There is no data that exists in abundance. There have been studies that have been done, possibly region by region or as a Black community, but not dialled down specifically through the lens of Black women, and it will be, I believe, the first time that this has ever been done truly through an intersectional lens, through the ethnicity and the gender pay gap. So for the very first time in any industry, we will be able to say this is the benchmark and landscape for Black women in our industry, and this is how we can collaboratively work together. 

I think it’s very important for me to use myself as the bridge and the example. In the two years that I’ve been in-house, I’ve been able to do some incredible things based on my skills and not the colour of my skin. So I would really like to work together with this industry to create positive change for the skill set, the abundance and the value that comes from getting behind incredible Black women in enhancing their skills in listening, you know, navigating and working collaboratively together with their skills. Yeah, I’m excited, I am.  

0:25:20 – Tamara Littleton 

It’s incredible, and I mean it’s a big 2024 you’ve got coming up. Are you able to share some of the plans for what you’ll be doing in Cannes, or is that a little…you’re kind of keeping that a bit private? 

0:25:32 – Chloe Davies 

Oh my gosh, we’re coming back! 

We’re definitely coming back bigger and better. I have to say. I am incredibly grateful to the partners that I have so far, that they really have championed me, championed this collective. At the moment, I think you’re possibly going to see us three times throughout the week. You know, there are some amazing people that have been supportive of this. I’m in trouble because I’m already breaking the press release, but there have been some amazing people. But no, we are. Yeah, we’re definitely going to have a big event, but you’ll see us a couple of times throughout the week and also just amplifying other women that have been part of this.  

0:26:25

You know our second pillar is to be celebrated and championed. I know I’ve been championed by some incredible people. You know, Wendy, we’ve just met, but Tamara is one of those incredible people in my life. It’s the same how we celebrate each other. This is an introspective for Black women, but, as we often say, none of us got anywhere on our own, and so if you are people who really understand the depths that it takes to champion Black women and have been doing it, or are really focused and wanting to collectively do the work to do it, then that’s what we’re here to do and to work together with. And I think Join Our Table is that celebration of, you know, black British women. It was that celebration of we were all in Cannes last year. We all didn’t see ourselves reflected in the way that we wanted, and that’s not to say that we weren’t reflected, but the conversations were more focused through an entirely Black community, or it was Black American women or Black British men, and so we can celebrate and champion that. 

But you do want to see yourself, you do want to be able to go and have those nuanced conversations, and so, if it doesn’t exist, we just decided to why be one when you can be 8 and create it together? And so, you know, from a British perspective, where we know the conversation is so, so nuanced, being able to have done what we’ve done so far as this group, as this platform, being able to really spotlight, I think we’re now 124 black British women across advertising, media and marketing is incredible, and you know we’re just getting started.  

I think it’s that it’s. If it doesn’t exist, let’s not, let’s not cry about it, in the sense that I think I’m just built for action and change. I know that that’s not everybody, but if it’s not there, then my answer is, why? And then, ok, well, let’s go and try and create it.  

0:28:32 – Tamara Littleton 

Fantastic. Looking forward to seeing where that goes. Something I really want to also ask you about if you’re OK to share. You’ve been so good at sharing. I know that we’ve talked about that. You’re exploring the possibility of an ADHD diagnosis, and I know that a lot of us will relate to that, and I just wondered if you could share a bit more about your personal story.  

0:28:52 – Chloe Davies 

I mean, I have two neurodivergent children, so I think the first time that I asked myself some really serious questions was, “Well, how did they get it?” I think as every parent does. You know, my eldest son is autistic and nonverbal, although his vocabulary is coming on day by day, and my second son is definitely on the ADHD spectrum, and so you do just try and kind of find out. My brother is dyslexic, and I guess because I’m the other way in terms of, like, my IQ and educational level, never really put two and two together. On their dad’s side, ADHD and autism kind of exist quite a lot, so, again made the assumption I worked. Okay, so that.  

0:29:50

And then I, without meaning to the people that I truly have around me now that are my core group of people 85% have ADHD, and so I didn’t actually do it on purpose, and they’re all very, very different, very different genders, very different identities. The ADHD, though, is very similar in that the vast majority of us are hyper-focused, and so I realised, like anything like attracted, like went he go, and so I have a really good friend. His name is Rich Miles; he runs the Diversity Standards Collective. I have  Colette Philip and Selma Nichols. I’ve got some incredible people around me who all exist somewhere in the ADHD spectrum, and the more that we talked, but also the more that we connected, and I think my very good friend Ada Paris is the best example. She is like my big sister, and as she’s going through her diagnosis, there was a lot that I was like. This sounds very familiar; oh, wait a minute.  

Wait a second. How did you know? I’ve never told anybody this, and so she would share quite a lot of this journey and we would talk about it and stuff. And then, you know, as she kind of got her final bit, I kind of just went, no, actually, I think maybe I need to go and really like understand this. I think, also because I’m going through it as a parent, I understand how slow the system is and how frustrating it could be.  

I think I’ll also be really honest to someone that lives with a lot of labels and, I guess, identity markers. This isn’t, I’m not trying to find another one. So I really was, I was like, is this really me or is this like projection or something else? And then no, I went and actually had like the first test and then, like the ones that they make you do, and I like sat for 45 minutes online and like did my tests. I was like, you know, I can’t think of anything. I kind of think that’s the case. 

0:31:36

I think what I am doing with this is navigating around a lot of incredible people who live with it, and I think, in a similar way that I say with my mental health, like I don’t live with it, it lives with me, so I think they do the same. I think I’m looking at incredible people who’ve done incredible things and continue to do incredible things, despite, you know, their ADHD diagnosis, and I think I’m just interrogating this in the pace that I want to. I’m not, I’m not in a rush to super explore everything because that’s my natural brain, wanting to know everything, and I know what it’s like when you open Pandora’s box, so I’m kind of trying to be gentle with myself and just really understand what it is, more than anything else, knowing that from one person to the next ADHD is completely different. It’s never the same in one person, but the positive ways that, like I, can collaboratively work together with people. So, yeah, so like myself, especially for myself, Selma, Colette and Ada, we have to have like very structured conversations now because the last time that Colette and I were on the phone together three and a half hours later and we hadn’t actually like done the thing that we said that we were gonna do, we got distracted by something else. You know, it’s the same we all. We can all kind of go off piste, but we can all trigger each other in our conversations too. So, yeah, it’s just education and understanding, I think, is key for everything.  

How it applies especially to Black women, it’s different because, yeah, because Rich, as a white man, Rich’s ADHD is very visible to me. But I was like, oh no, but I’m, I’m like the, I call him like the little brother that I never asked for, and I didn’t mean it like that because it’s all love like he’s my work hubby, but you know where. It’s like, okay, so I can help you make sense of you, and we have a nice counterbalance for each other that I never really realised. Oh no, you’re actually helping me make sense of me because you are where mine might be more diluted, and yours is more volume. Actually, in other ways, mine is more volume, and yours is more diluted. And how can we actually help each other get a little bit of balance in each other? So, yeah, it’s been, it’s been a nice way to navigate, I guess, the start of this year, and I think that’s the conversation that it was stemming on.  

0:34:46 – Wendy Christie 

Thank you. Thank you, Chloe. So I think we’re going to move on now to the, the final section of the podcast, where I was gonna say we get a bit more personal, but actually I think we’ve probably already been pretty personal, so I’ll substitute that for we get a little bit more frivolous. So let’s start with what’s your idea of a perfect weekend?  

0:35:05 – Chloe Davies 

Oh, spa, gotta be a spa I don’t want to say it because then everybody will go there, but I have a particular spa that is, I’m gonna say it’s called Penny Hill Park. It is like my ultimate treat to myself. They really know how to take care of someone. And it’s just being off-grid. That’s my, that’s my frivolous. If I can’t get on the plane; it’s a spa.  

0:35:30 – Wendy Christie 

So what do you? What treatments do you particularly enjoy?  

0:35:33 – Chloe Davies 

It’s got to be a full-body massage. I’m not really a fan of the like hot tub (other people’s germs), but I Will full body massage. You know, the manicure, pedicure. I’m a facial and then just like chilling and having good food and no time limit, like I can just sit and have a good meal and have a nice bottle of wine and read a book and be on my own time, and the view is incredible sounds perfect.  

0:36:06 – Wendy Christie 

On a different note, what historical figure would you most in identify with? And it could be someone fictional or someone real. 

 0:36:21 – Chloe Davies 

Oh, wow, that’s a good one historical figure…for some reason…I’m not actually sure I’m gonna have to unpick why, but my brain is saying Cleopatra. For some reason, in my head, that’s what’s coming up.  

0:36:30 – Wendy Christie 

So I’m just it’s probably. I wonder if it’s because we’ve just been talking about a spa, and maybe you’re just bathing in asses milk.  

0:36:38 – Chloe Davies 

Do you know what? More than anything else? Phenomenal female leader, yeah, and she was sassy and sexy with it too. So you know why not.  

0:36:51 – Tamara Littleton 

Yeah, go for it. What’s the last thing you did that gave you childlike joy? 

0:37:07 – Chloe Davies 

It’s yesterday, outside with my kids. They’ve got a turny thing, so we were throwing water Into it, and my eldest, my youngest son, Theo, wasn’t paying attention. And my eldest son Miles threw the water and it splashed him as he went, and just the look on his face. That’s why I started laughing. Yeah, I get to relive my childhood with my kids.  

0:37:31 – Tamara Littleton 

That’s lovely. My favourite question how would you fare in a zombie apocalypse?  

0:37:36 – Chloe Davies 

Oh, I’m good. The thing with having a dad like mine he’s an IT engineer, and my brother, who is now also an IT engineer, is that we had shoot-them-ups, RPGs like role-playing games. So Doom, I’ve been playing in my house since I think I was much younger than was legally allowed to play, and so, yeah, I would be running, we would not be asking questions, and I would be, ‘shoot first, ask questions later’  

0:38:14 – Wendy Christie 

How would your friends describe you?  

0:38:16 – Chloe Davies 

Oh, oh, for the laughter, warm a feeder and big heart. But maybe quite emotional.  

0:38:32 – Tamara Littleton 

I think that’s wonderful, and I think that’s actually a good place to stop. I would just say that it’s been such an honour to have you on the podcast, and I want to give you one last chance. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you particularly want to talk about, or any closing thoughts from you. 

0:38:50 – Chloe Davies 

I don’t think there’s anything that we haven’t covered. I guess really it’s. I’m very much for 2024. In order for you to move forward, you have to remember where you came from, and I come from two incredibly wonderful parents who have done some really amazing things for me. Hmm, allow me to kind of do what I’m doing now. So I guess, more than anything else, I kind of just want to acknowledge them. They kind of give me the courage and the love to be able to still do what I do now, despite the knots. And yeah, I wouldn’t have got through 2023 without them. That’s it. Yeah, thanks, mum and dad.  

0:39:43 – Host 

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Transcribed by https://podium.page