Grace Williams grew up in Buckinghamshire, the eldest of three, watching her father build a career in banking through long hours - an early blueprint that welded success to hard work. She followed a version of that blueprint into law, training as an arbitration lawyer and measuring her days by billable hours and how late she stayed at her desk. At 21, on the eve of her first legal internship, she woke up numb down one side of her body and was diagnosed with MS.

She kept working. In 2019 her mother, Amanda, was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour, and six months later her father was diagnosed with cancer too. For three years Grace worked full-time as a lawyer AND cared for her mother, refusing to let anything visibly slip - an armour, she says now, that let her avoid ever asking how she actually felt until in 2021, an MS attack coincided with full burnout. Her mother passed away in the summer of 2022 and a year later, still working the same hours, a blunt conversation with her aunt on a Friday night ended with Grace handing in her notice the following Monday.

Now re-trained as a Health Coach and Nutritionist, Grace specialises in high-performance wellbeing, working with corporate women to help them reconnect with the bodies they've learned to override.

In this episode we cover:

• Early definition of success built on hard work and long hours

• Being diagnosed with MS at 21

• Why answering "I'm exhausted" is armour

• Her mother's terminal brain tumour diagnosis, and caring for both parents through COVID

• Why work became the easiest place to hide from grief

• The Friday night conversation with her aunt that moved her into action

• Building her new coaching business and relearning her own boundaries

• Redefining success as peace, and what legacy means to her

Mentions:

The Way (2010), dir. Emilio Estevez, starring Martin Sheen

Links:

https://www.instagram.com/g_documented/

This season of The Slow Down is sponsored by female-founded, Greek swim and resortwear brand Kiohne. The Slow Down listeners can use code theslowdown for 20% off their first shop on kiohne.com. Enter their world, explore their collection and buy beautiful pieces designed to be enjoyed while slowing down this summer.

Adot Gak is a Sudanese-American supermodel, writer and former contributing editor at The Standard, named BFA Model of the Year, who has walked for Rick Owens, Vetements, Richard Quinn and Tony Ward, and fronted campaigns for SKIMS and Alexander Wang. Born in Sudan, Adot's family fled to Egypt when she was four; at nine, she witnessed a violent police attack on a group of Sudanese refugees in a Cairo park that killed her older sister, then just 13, and changed the course of her family's life forever. At ten, she relocated to Iowa with her mother, growing up as the child of immigrants before being scouted in a shopping mall and moving to New York to build one of the industry's most recognisable careers.

Since then, Adot has become known as much for her voice as her face — outspoken on the modelling industry's relationship with race, unafraid to set boundaries and say no, and using humour as a way of carrying what she's survived. In this episode, we talk about what "booked and busy" actually looks like behind the scenes, when she stopped waiting for permission to belong in fashion, and what she wants to build next.

In this episode we cover:

• Early memories of Sudan and her family's move to Egypt

• The police attack in Cairo that killed her sister, and how she holds that now

• Getting scouted in a shopping mall in Iowa and moving to New York

• Deciding to stop waiting for permission to belong in the industry

• Race and diversity in fashion: what's real progress and what's performance

• Being told she "looks like AI"

• Modelling as an "extreme sport" — burnout, boundaries and saying no

Mentions:

‘Becoming’ - Michelle Obama

Links: https://www.instagram.com/adotthegreatt/

This season of The Slow Down is sponsored by female-founded, Greek swim and resortwear brand Kiohne. The Slow Down listeners can use code theslowdown for 20% off their first shop on kiohne.com. Enter their world, explore their collection and buy beautiful pieces designed to be enjoyed while slowing down this summer.

Laurence Stoffel grew up in the Swiss mountains. A shy, dreamy child who liked to observe the actions of adults, she went on to study industrial design at ECAL, one of Switzerland's most competitive art schools, talking her way back in after being rejected on her first attempt. Her early career took her from a Munich furniture studio to Freitag, the Swiss bag brand and eventually to a design research grant that sent her and her partner to Ghana and Burkina Faso, where six weeks spent weaving baskets with local designers under a mango tree unravelled everything she thought she knew about "correct" design.

Laurence then joined On, the Swiss running brand, when it was a handful of people selling shoes out of Zurich, and spent the next decade building its Creative Studio from scratch, scaling the team from 1 to over 100 people and helping steer the company to an IPO now valued at $11.8 billion. Along the way she became a mother of two, weathered a burnout serious enough to stop her mid-marathon, and rebuilt her relationship to work around one rule: choose it, don't owe it. Now, having recently left On and turned down several seven-figure job offers, Laurence is deciding what comes next.

In this episode we cover:

• Growing up in the Swiss mountains and the ideas of success inherited from her parents

• Studying industrial design and talking her way back in after rejection

• Early career: a Munich furniture studio and Freitag

• A design research grant that took her to Ghana and Burkina Faso

• The unconventional path into On, and why she doesn't believe in job applications

• Scaling On's Creative Studio from 1 to 100+ people

• Becoming a mother of two, choosing not to marry, and letting go of milestones

• What burnout actually looked like for her

• Why she is turning down seven-figure job offers right now

• Ultra-running as a mindset

Mentions:

On

ECAL

Stefan Diez - Munich furniture/industrial designer Sibylle Stoeckli - Lausanne-based female industrial designer

Freitag (Swiss bag brand) and its co-founder Daniel Freitag Pierrot le Fou (1965), dir. Jean-Luc Godard

Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurence-stoffel/

This season of The Slow Down is sponsored by female-founded, Greek swim and resortwear brand Kiohne. The Slow Down listeners can use code theslowdown for 20% off their first shop on kiohne.com. Enter their world, explore their collection and buy beautiful pieces designed to be enjoyed while slowing down this summer.