This episode kicks off The Freak Show’s first-ever Spotlight Series! In honor of International Women’s Day, we’re dedicating March to celebrating bold, inspiring women who have stepped into their brand with confidence and clarity. And who better to start with than Natalie McCandless, founder of Reconnect Sisterhood?
Natalie is a confidence coach, psychotherapist, and mindfulness teacher with nearly 20 years of experience helping women rediscover who they truly are, without guilt, without self-doubt, and without trying to fit into someone else’s version of confidence.
Natalie has been a therapist for 16 years, and her favorite part of the job has always been working with women on their self-esteem. Day after day, she'd sit with some of the most incredible people and watch them hold themselves back because of a lack of confidence, or because life's big transitions had knocked them sideways.
She wanted to bottle up everything she loved most — therapy, coaching, mindfulness — and create something that honored the power of women working together. Something that helped them reconnect to themselves, their values, their identity, and each other.
That something became Reconnect Sisterhood.
The women she works with most tend to be navigating huge life shifts like career changes, motherhood, fertility journeys, returning to work, or perimenopause. Transitions that shake us up in ways we don't always expect.
Having a brand that could hold all of that passion and purpose was a non-negotiable for her.
Reconnect Sisterhood didn't exist before we worked together, so this wasn't a rebrand. This was building something from scratch and making sure it came to life properly.
Natalie knew from the start she wanted to do it right. She didn't have the design skills (and that's completely fine, none of us have every skill) but more than that, she didn't have the time. She was a mum of 2, moving between cities, running a therapy practice, with an idea that felt like her life's mission. DIY-ing a brand wasn't going to do it justice.
So she started Googling and browsing Instagram, and then she came across a reel of me... buttering toast.
I genuinely don't remember what I was talking about in that reel. But Natalie says she was immediately hooked because she perceived me as real.
She clicked on my links, hopped on a call, and that was it.
What I love about this story is what it actually says about personal branding: the content you create when you're just being yourself (not performing or trying to go viral) is often what lands hardest.
Someone decided to invest in a full branding project because they felt a connection through a casual toast-buttering moment. That's the power of showing up as you.
There was a lot of laughing, a lot of overrunning our calls because we kept talking, the occasional kid making a cameo.
The part she hadn't expected was how collaborative the whole thing would be. She'd gone in bracing herself for the "hand it over and hope for the best" experience, but that's not how it went. There was constant checking in, explanations behind every decision, and real back-and-forth. She pushed back a few times; I showed her why, and she came around.
Working together for over a year on someone's brand has to be a collaboration. I don't know your vision unless you tell me. You don't trust me unless I show you how I think. And when it works, you end up with something that still feels completely like yours, just brought to life by someone else.
"It still feels like my baby, but you've given it the life."
Having a brand didn't just give Natalie a logo and a bold, energetic color palette. It gave her a way to show up consistently, even when life got messy.
This became more than theoretical when Natalie had to put Reconnect Sisterhood down entirely. Since Christmas, she's been dealing with serious health complications: repeated hospital stays, stress-related ulcers, and early perimenopause on top of it all.
The year before, she'd had a peritonsillar abscess so severe it nearly closed her windpipe. She was hallucinating from fever at her son's birthday party and ended up needing one-on-one nursing care overnight before emergency surgery. And she'd kept working through it.
So she made the call to step back, knowing that when she was ready to return, she wouldn’t be starting over. The brand is still there. When the energy is available, she can just walk back in.
A solid brand gives you the confidence to pause when you need to, knowing the business can hold itself while you take care of yourself. You can't pour from an empty cup, and you definitely can't show up properly for your brand if you haven't looked after yourself first.
As Natalie put it, your life is more important than your work. And as obvious as that sounds, it's a shockingly hard thing to actually act on when the work is something you love and believe in with your whole chest.
Natalie says there isn't a perfect time.
For her, it came down to a feeling: this business idea is important enough that I can't do it without help. She knew she couldn't translate what was in her head into a website, a visual identity, a brand because she didn’t have the skills.
You don't need to have everything figured out. You don't need it to be the "right time." You just need to care enough about what you're building to want it done properly, and to trust that the right person will help you find the words, the visuals, and the story you didn't quite know how to articulate yet.
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✦ THE EXTRAVAGANZA: Create your industry-leading first impression.
✦ THE COLOUR CIRCLE: Bring the Canva design you’ve been (over)fiddling with for hours
✦ Follow her Instagram
✦ Check out her Website
✦ Listen to the Reconnect Sisterhood podcast
✦ See Natalie's Case Study
✦ Say hey on Instagram
✦ Get my Uncaged emails
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This episode was co-produced with Adrienne Cruz.
Psychotherapist & Confidence Coach
Over the last 5 years as a Brand & Marketing Designer, I’ve helped freaks like us design their unconventional brands so they can step onto the main stage & own their weird. Because if you wanted to be, look or sound like everyone else, you wouldn’t be where you are today. Now it’s your turn.
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