Michelle Morgan is Co-Founder of 6 businesses and a parent at Sydenham High School. She kicked off International Women’s Day this morning – in front of her daughter and peers – by telling us her story. Michelle navigated through school but failed most of her exams and didn’t go to university. She talked to us about overcoming shyness, anxiety & lack of self-belief to build a multi-million pound business, Livity,. It was founded in 2001, after Michelle spent time at an ad agency that she managed to talk her way into, and is a youth-led creative network bringing brands and young people together, for the better. Livity was an experiment – a business that placed equal importance on profit & purpose.
Michelle openly talked to us about her struggles with depression and anxiety at periods in her life and how she only recognised what it was after reading Ruby Wax’s book Frazzled, which allowed her to go to her GP for help and to begin recovering after a particularly violent, physical and mental burn out. After discovering the language to talk about how she was feeling she used the stimulus of days spent in her pyjamas to create a new business giving PJs purpose! Pjoys offers beautiful organic cotton pyjamas as a blank canvas for internationally acclaimed artists. It aims to capture lots of conversations, ideally in their pjs, to make into beautiful, useful films that will sit on pjoys.co.uk platform and be a resource and inspiration.
Our purpose is to make mental health an everyday conversation. We believe that talking about our feelings and our mental health is critical to addressing the mental health crisis the world is experiencing. We’re creating Pjoys as a way to have and share everyday conversations about mental health. 1 in 4 people are affected by mental illness at some point in their lives and there are 450 million people around the world currently suffering from a neurological condition. But if 1 in 4 people are affected then what about the 3 in 4? We all have mental health.
You can read more about Pjoys on their website: pjoys.co.uk.
