“Don’t get angry, get even”, says author, TV presenter, fitness guru, and Prosecco lover, our Inspiring Woman, Shelly Palmer.
Shelly Palmer had everything – the looks, the smarts, the glamourous jobs, the celebrity friends, the secrets of business success, the keys to the city. Everything, that is, except a heathy relationship of mutual respect as a couple of loving equals. For many painful years she was involved in a relationship so toxic she lost her confidence, her identity and the very idea of herself as a woman in her on right with her own needs, ambitions and dreams. All of them were stunted and smothered by a controlling partner who told her how to dress, how to behave and how to tiptoe around his moods and whims. She lost confidence and had low self-esteem. She’d had no other relationship experience and had nothing to measure against.
She managed to escape that relationship eventually and found new love, but again she found herself attracted to the same kind of men over and over again. She hit rock bottom two years ago when she miscarried and finally addressed some deep-seated issues of her own around her adoption.
“It led me on a journey of self-discovery and self-development. It’s how I was able to write my book “Little Pocket Book of Red Flags” and help other women,” says Shelly. The book is a woman’s guide to dating in the age of social media and managing toxic relationships.
Shelly wrote the book with her best friend Louise Pullen who she locked down with. She was on her own in the city and everyone was locking down around her, and she didn’t want to be on her own. She got in her mini and drove to Portsmouth. Writing the book was something they’d always talked about. They shared their own dating disasters and friends shared theirs with them too.
They wanted to write a book that could be passed down from mother to sister to niece to friend. They asked: “What would we write for our younger selves?” That was the starting point.
The book tackles the dangers of dating online and social media and what to look out for. It’s been adopted by the Freedom Project which works with domestic violence victims across the UK and has been added to their reading list.
Despite the success of the book, Shelly is not your traditional agony aunt. Far from it. Her career trajectory is a blaze of energy and enterprise.
At 21 Shelly had the keys to the city, by 25 she’d burnt out.
She partied her way through university working with Red Bull, she had the car and the fridge to go with the job, the fridge was obviously full of Red Bull. She moved on from this role to work with celebrities when she became the Umbrella Girl for the Super Bikes meeting Robby Savage, and Liam Howlett from the Prodigy, Goldie was a regular in the Paddock. She met the Appletons and Baby Spice. Gordon Ramsey was a big bike fan. He had restaurants in London but wasn’t the big TV star he is today. Shelly admits she was naïve at the time and didn’t really know who all the famous faces were.
By her mid-twenties Shelly was working in advertising being run ragged not only by her own boss, but the team of 50 and five directors who she was working for. She likens herself to Cinderella, there were always spare tickets for big TV events, but Shelly was invisible to them and never got invited to the ball. In the end she had a Bridgette Jones moment and walked out.
This was a turning point in her life, and she decided to embark on an Exercise to Music course. Now she’s developed her Fabulicious Fitness Dance and Workout Classes in the local community. At its height she was teaching more than 100 people in one class.
Shelly has learnt some hard lessons along the way and had her fair share of trauma. She says: “You have to own your story and I’m a product of the things that happened to me.”
Another big step Shelly took during lockdown was to move her classes online and build a brand-new membership site for her new project – The Queen of Killer Curves
“In this role I want to motivate women to be the best that they can be in the skin that they are in. Level up in their lives and to start living like the Queen that has always been inside them. It’s only through vulnerability that we learn the lessons we need in life, but those lessons make us strong and powerful, and it’s our duty to pass them on to as many women as possible.” Shelly believes that to be your own Queen you need to work on mind, body and soul.
Shelly offers dance, barre, HIIT and coaching if you want to work with her one on one. This is the culmination of more than a decade’s work.
Shelly is also an ambassador for Tropic Skincare – a business that pays her mortgage and she’d dubbed herself the “side-hustle queen” working with a team of 180 people and empowering them to run their own enterprise too. Her background in health and wellness led her to Tropic which promotes plant-based products. She was struggling to find a deodorant which was paraben free and a friend of a friend recommended Tropic. She started using the products and eventually sold them to her clients because she loved using them. The fact they are toxin and chemical free is what really sold her.
You may also enjoy reading about abusive relationships with Russell-Cooke and the legal help you need.
