Get Shucked with The Oyster Sisters

Need a good ol’ belly-laugh and some pearly wisdom to lift your spirits while counting down the remaining days of 2024 and aligning yourself for 2025?  You can count on The Oyster Sisters.   In this episode of Get Shucked, Gem, Mia and Taz warmly welcome in the new year by sharing 24 lessons they've learned from 2024. Including how they’ve found more freedom. Gemma extols the virtues of aluminium-free deodorant, Mia kicks the rules and goes knicker-free, and Taz talks about the value of being phone-free. They explore how they’ve learned to pause, lead and let-go. To deal with pain, grieve and forgive. To look for signs of life, laugh at themselves and realize that, sometimes, “going through hell” can actually be rather helpful!   The moral of this episode is that life doesn’t always go to plan and years don’t always turn out as envisioned.  That’s why, before they get their vision boards out, The Oyster Sisters are taking a moment to review the soulful-wisdom and hard-earned lessons they’ll be taking with them into the new year, the handy hints they’ve picked up along the way, and the excellent tools they’ve got in their toolkit. So that, no matter what gritty-shit life throws at them in the year ahead, they’ll be able to remind themselves, and each other that “they’ve got this!”  Perhaps listening might inspire you to "clock" your very own "24 from 24"? Just in the knicker of time for 2025!

It is was 7pm (ish) on the 25th of January, 2023. Gemma was on her porch eating chicken. Mia was on her couch drinking espresso martini’s. Taryn was in Canberra being announced as Australian of the Year.  What followed was an epic year for Taz and her team at The Embrace Collective including 90 odd flights, hundreds of keynotes and appearances, tens of thousands of fist bumps, 1 million children reached, and many millions more parents, teachers, coaches and leaders now better equipped to address the epidemic of body image distress in young people.    In this episode, we dive deep into Taryn’s reflections on her experience as 2023 Australian of the Year. You’ll hear behind the scenes stories of how Taz dealt with intense public scrutiny, grappled with targeted critique, and struggled not to swear all year.  As her chicken-eating, espresso-martini-drinking mates serve up some tasty questions, Taz dishes out the facts and her feelings about the year, dares to share some of her “head lines” (her inner monologue) behind the newspaper headlines, and declares her enduring commitment to ”fierce kindness”. She also reveals some juicy and hilarious stories that you’re not going to want to miss. (Pssst…something to do with singing with the B52’s and stealing from the White House!)  Listen as we explore Taryn’s pearls of wisdom about leadership, how “pottering” became her word of 2024, and how she edits Michelle Obama’s famous quote about highs and lows to get real about the “mess in the middle“.   We do need to warn you: Taz had to hold her swear words in for a whole year. In this episode, she does, therefore, let a few rip. You’ll be pleased to know, on the matter of letting rip, that she did NOT, and we repeat, she DID NOT fart in the White House. That said, you may wish to take care with sharing this episode out loud if you’ve got little ears around.

One bright, sunny day in January, we three were enjoying brunch together following a delightful morning of boogie boarding. We left the cafe in our separate cars then, moments later, the planet seemed to stop rotating on its axis. Taryn spotted a nasty car crash, realised the crumpled car belonged to Mia, and jumped out of her moving car to be with her friend. Gemma received a call from Taz’s husband Tim, slammed on her brakes and raced to the scene. Police cars, fire engines and ambulances were called. Mia had sustained a serious spinal injury, and was taken by ambulance to hospital.  In this episode, we dive into what happened that morning, how it has impacted all of us, and share some of the pearls of wisdom that have emerged from the experience. Although the concept of post-traumatic stress is familiar to us, research by psychologists over the past 25 years has shown that negative experiences can result in *positive* changes, including recognising personal strengths, discovering new possibilities, improving relationships and appreciating life more fully. Post-traumatic growth is possible, and Mia’s experience is a wonderful case study.   At the time of recording this episode, Mia was in the early stages of recovering from her spinal fracture and deep in the messy middle of meaning-making. Despite that, you’ll hear us bring a healthy dose of healing humour to this episode, without any pretense about the fact that it has been a painful and disruptive time. Listen as we explore some of the golden highlights, including how Mia is learning to receive the support of friends and family, to see herself and value her life energy more fully, and to reframe her relationship with her body. Plus, if you’re wondering how to be an expert companion for others in the aftermath of adversity, you’ll definitely want to tune in to see how Gemma and Taryn encourage curiosity, listen actively, and offer compassionate feedback. Some gentle advice: this episode contains discussion of a traumatic event, including depictions of a car accident and resultant injuries, so you may wish to take care in choosing the most appropriate moment for you to listen. 

What lights you up? Gives you the tingles of pleasure and juicy feelings of joy?  With so much gritty-shit going down in the world, we wondered if it'd be inappropriate to talk about this topic. As if it were forbidden. Self-indulgent. Tone-deaf. So we delayed releasing it! Then, we realized; this is exactly the kind of guilt and shame-game that so many of us grew up playing with pleasure. All the more reason, amidst the heaviness, to shed some light on lightening our loads by investing in more play, and prioritizing pleasure.       In this enlightening episode, Mia opens up about how a message from a primary school teacher had her deferring delight until a re-education in her 40's. Taryn passionately proposes taking pleasure into our own hands by creating an everyday “sparkle list”, instead of deferring our heart's-desires onto a "bucket list" that often gets left until we’re too old to realize it. And, although red-rooms don’t rate a mention, Gemma confesses to once owning a red-book in which she noted daily sources of pleasure-tingles. Speaking of which, Gemma goes all the way by declaring that it’s time for women to reframe their relationship with self-pleasure, suggesting that we rename it, in order to reclaim it.   Yes...yes....yes! Is what you’ll be saying alot more after listening to this episode. But most of all, we hope you’ll be inspired to listen alot more to YOU. And to pursue what feels good and fills you with the joy and delight that you’re so deeply worthy of.

How many new year's past have you prescribed a set-in-stone plan for personal perfection that just ended up creating more pressure in your life?  If you’re anything like us, you’ll have had one too many of these, and really don’t relish the idea of another new year hangover! In this episode, we’re aiming to intercept you on the well-worn pathway to wearing yourself down and out as the new year rolls around, by inviting you to join us “freeballing” into 2024.   Although we fail to actually define "freeballing" (make of that what you will), we pose some powerful invitations to quit guilt-tripping yourself on the post-Christmas down-hill run, dispense with all-too-hard-and-fast goal setting, and instead experiment with getting curious and letting go, as far more loving practices for welcoming in a new year. 

What does eyebrow and ear-hair plucking, pimple popping and Covid lock-downs have to do with Christmas?  Nothing really. But somehow our conversation wound its way there in this episode. If you want to know how we got there, you’ll just have to listen. It’ll be like receiving an unexpected surprise on Christmas morning!    In this episode, we get real about our compulsive tendencies for overdoing in the lead up to and at Christmas. We unwrap our grit about being so damn exhausted by the time the day rolls around that we’re unable to give our loved ones the gift of our presence on Christmas Day. Or, we end up tangled in our tinsel with one another because we’re done like a turkey dinner. We also explore how each of us feel about the pressure to toe the commercial and societal line, and then tie the episode in a bow with some pearls of wisdom about how we could all do with doing less at Christmas.

Why do we drive ourselves beyond exhaustion and then wear it like a badge of honour? Ignore early-warning signs of depletion as if our bodies are machines? In this episode, we wade into a conversation about burning out. Mia and Gem talk about the times they’ve been there, done way too much of that. Taz grapples with whether she has, and how she feels about labeling busy-ness. Although one of us (i.e. Gemma) seems to have made a bit more progress on this front than the other two, we each reveal our wobbly bits about flipping the switch from hustle to flow in a world that rewards productivity over pausing and share some pearls of wisdom that have kept us afloat when we've found ourselves in the deep-end.

How many of us grew-up believing that our self-worth was tied up with pleasing others? Exhausting ourselves by being nice, toeing the line, and contorting ourselves so we never, ever hurt anyone else’s feelings. And to what end? We become depleted, disappointed and resentful.  In Episode 2 of The Oyster Sisters, we explore our wobbly bits around our experiences of FODO (the Fear Of Disappointing Others) and share some potent pearls of wisdom for dropping the pleasing and lifting our power for a more balanced and fulfilling life. 

Our very first episode, in which we reveal how we became The Oyster Sisters, why we’re called the Oyster Sisters (despite Taryn’s hatred of the slithery, salty wetness of our namesake), and what this podcast is all about. Plus a call to action that may surprise.