The Soul Instinct by Beatrice Dixon

I picked up The Soul Instinct because I love a good business story, particularly when the person behind the business has built something from the ground up. What I wasn’t expecting was just how extraordinary Beatrice Dixon’s story was before we even got anywhere near the business.

Beatrice was born prematurely without a nose or forehead and underwent reconstructive surgery as a baby. She also writes about the extraordinary circumstances surrounding her mother’s pregnancy and the complications that came before her birth. Honestly, I had to stop and take that part in for a moment.

It is fascinating.

And that’s before you get to the story of how she went on to build The Honey Pot Company, a women’s health and personal wellness business that started with an idea quite literally delivered to her in a dream.

From a dream to a major women’s wellness company

If you haven’t heard of The Honey Pot Company before, its beginnings are brilliant.

Beatrice was struggling with recurrent bacterial vaginosis when she says her late grandmother appeared to her in a dream and gave her a list of ingredients. She woke up, went into her kitchen and began experimenting. That eventually became the beginning of The Honey Pot Company.

What started with homemade products grew into a major personal wellness brand focused on vaginal and feminine care, with Beatrice becoming its co-founder, CEO and chief innovation officer. She has since been recognised by Forbes, Goldman Sachs, Inc. and Ebony for her work as an entrepreneur. For me, this is where the book becomes particularly interesting.

I run businesses myself, so I am always fascinated by the bit between having an idea and everybody suddenly calling you a successful entrepreneur. That’s usually where the best stories are, because businesses don’t magically appear fully formed with a team, investment and products sitting on shelves.

Beatrice talks about figuring things out when she didn’t necessarily know how, pitching a vaginal wellness company to rooms full of male investors, raising investment and building a business in an area of women’s health that historically hasn’t always received the attention, investment or even comfortable conversation it deserves.

She became one of relatively few Black female founders to raise significant venture and private equity investment, but the book doesn’t present the journey as one long series of wins. There are mistakes, difficult periods, uncertainty and plenty of moments where she simply had to keep going. I liked that.

The idea of a ‘soul instinct’

This isn’t purely a business memoir. In fact, I probably wouldn’t describe it primarily as one. The central idea is Beatrice’s belief in what she calls her “soul instinct”, that internal voice or intuition that tells you something before you necessarily have all the evidence to explain why.

Now, depending on your personality, that may sound wonderfully spiritual or slightly too woo-woo for you. Stay with it.

Because underneath the language, there is actually something very relatable about what she’s saying. How many times have you known that a job wasn’t right, a relationship wasn’t right, a business decision felt wrong or an opportunity felt right before you could logically explain it? The book is about learning to listen to that voice rather than constantly looking outside yourself for permission or reassurance.

There are chapters about shame, getting lost before finding your way, choosing yourself, doing things before you know exactly how to do them, building community and maintaining standards. One chapter is simply built around the idea that excellence should be your baseline, which probably tells you quite a lot about Beatrice Dixon.

As someone who spends a large part of my life making decisions, I found a lot of this really interesting. Business teaches you very quickly that there isn’t always somebody available to tell you what the correct answer is. Sometimes you have the figures, sometimes you have experience and sometimes you simply have that feeling in your stomach telling you which way to go.

And then there’s Gwyneth Paltrow

I also have to mention the foreword. It’s written by Gwyneth Paltrow. Paltrow obviously has her own considerable connection with the wellness industry through Goop, so having her introduce Beatrice’s story feels particularly fitting. She also joins Beatrice on the audiobook, which is worth knowing if, like me, you sometimes prefer listening to a book when life is busy.

But Gwyneth isn’t the reason to read it. Beatrice is.

Her life story would be remarkable even without The Honey Pot Company. Add in the fact that she then went on to build a major women’s wellness business from an idea that began in her own kitchen and you can understand why there was more than enough here to keep me interested.

Why I’m recommending it to the Daily Round community

There are obvious reasons why The Soul Instinct belongs in The Daily Round’s Care Library. It touches women’s health, wellbeing, entrepreneurship and leadership, but I think the bigger reason I’m recommending it is because it’s about what happens when life doesn’t follow anything resembling a sensible plan. Beatrice’s certainly didn’t.

She began life facing circumstances most of us can barely imagine, went through difficult periods growing up, struggled with her own intimate health, started experimenting with products in her kitchen and eventually found herself building and leading a major wellness company.

There is something reassuring in reading about successful people whose path was messy. We often see people once the company exists, the investment has arrived and their name is appearing on lists of successful founders. We don’t see nearly as much of the uncertainty that came before it.

This book gives you some of that.

My verdict

★★★★★ 5 out of 5 stars.

I found Beatrice Dixon absolutely fascinating. I picked this up expecting to enjoy the story of a woman building a successful health and wellbeing company. I got that, but her personal story surprised me even more.

Being born without a nose or forehead, undergoing reconstruction as a baby, navigating everything that followed and eventually becoming the woman who built The Honey Pot Company is quite a life story. But what stayed with me most was the idea behind the title.

Sometimes you can research something to death. You can ask ten people what they think. You can make your sensible list of pros and cons and still find that somewhere underneath all of it, you already know the answer. Beatrice Dixon calls that her soul instinct.

Whatever you choose to call it, I think there’s something in that.

Recommended by Jill Newey, Editor-in-Chief, The Daily Round