Maria Hatzistefanis - How to Live Your Best Life: Transform your mindset and manifest real success

London-based beauty entrepreneur, Maria Hatzistefanis started her career as a beauty writer before moving to New York where she received an MBA from Columbia Business School. She founded her ground-breaking skincare group, Rodial, in 1999 by identifying a niche for treatments targeted to specific skin concerns, with evocative tongue-in-cheek names such as Snake Serum and Dragons Blood.

Maria now runs two brands Rodial and Nip + Fab with products selling through 20,000 doors across 35 countries worldwide. Today, the cutting-edge products are available in the most prestigious stores around the world, with support and praise from high profile names in the fashion and beauty industries.

2 December 2019. I am heading to the 2019 Fashion Awards. It is one of the fashion events of the year. It is way up there in the see and be seen stakes, kind of like the Met Ball crossed with the Oscars but with actual royals (as opposed to people who just play them in movies) sitting in the front row. For years I watched from afar, following the winner announcements on Twitter, searching for the red-carpet looks in the press the next day and wishing Id been there not only to breathe the same air as the greatest design names in the universe, but also to witness the drama that only a room full of wildly off-centre fashion geniuses can create: the heartbreakingly beautiful McQueen inmemoriam tribute by Nick Knight and Bjrk, or when Vivienne Westwood apparently did an endearingly loopy hour-long acceptance speech, or when model Karen Elson fell headfirst off the six-foot-high stage, taking half the set with her. Id even have been happy to be there in one of the few years where seemingly nothing crazy happened. I just wanted to be part of the scene I loved.

As a teen back in the day, sticking magazine tears on my mood board of dreams, getting an invite to this sort of event was a top-five item on my list of when I make it stuff. Now, here I am in 2019, and I am not only going to the event, but for the fourth year running I am hosting my own table! It is the dream come true bonus deluxe edition of my fantasies teenage me would be choking on her Diet Coke. This year I truly feel I have made it. I have some amazing guests with me: designers, VIPs and top models. I arrive on the red carpet after an intense afternoon of glamming. I have had my hair and makeup done to perfection and I am wearing a stunning cream-coloured David Koma jumpsuit with feathers. I look like a million dollars and the popping flashbulbs, as I make my way past the ranks of photographers, are a validation Maria, over here One more, Maria Maria, Maria, Maria. They are still shouting my name as I make my way into the baroque splendour of the Royal Albert Hall to greet my guests and take a seat at my table.

If the red carpet is exciting then, once inside the Albert Hall, the glamour is off the scale. The huge circular floor and tiered boxes throng with the impossibly beautiful and charismatic inhabitants of Planet Fashion. As the lights dim and the show begins, a jaw-dropping roll call of celebrities and design superstars takes to the stage. Yet among all this glamour and excitement, my mind is elsewhere.

I spend the whole evening in my head going through something that has been bothering me at work: a work-related deal that I have been working on for six months has fallen through. I just found out this morning. I am upset, angry and disappointed with myself. My team has put their heart and soul into the project, and we have all been working non-stop to make this happen and keep it on track through the ups and downs, which have been many to say the least. Every deal has its tricky moments but this one has been a roller coaster, one day thinking it would go ahead, then the next convinced it was dead in the water. Everybody worked incredibly hard on it but, as ever, being the boss always involves an extra layer of pressure. After all, the buck stops with me. I had been keeping it all together for my team, keeping them motivated and working on the deal while I was absorbing all the punches from this and the other daily dramas of running my own business.

So, I turn up to the awards with all of that front and centre in my mind, which is understandable it is still very raw. It is particularly devastating to lose the deal but, as I sit at my table on one of the biggest nights of the year, so incredibly lucky, should I really be rehashing every moment instead of enjoying the night? As the champagne flows I am busy quizzing myself. Has it been a total waste of time? Should we have stopped the process when I saw some red flags? Has my Make It Happen attitude actually worked against me this time? Did I push it way past the point when I should have cut our losses and bailed? I fake another smile as I wonder how I will tell my staff we have all just wasted our time.

Although there is nothing I can do to change it, I sit there distracted, not enjoying myself in the slightest, stewing on the bad news. I cant wait to go back home, get to bed, and slot back into my regular routine so I can deal with my work issues. The awards end; everyone is off to after-shows, bars and penthouse parties but I just go back home, relieved I dont have to pretend I am having fun any more. As the car door closes, I sink back in to my seat and breathe a sigh of relief. Its as though the entire evening has been an annoyance and only now can I be fully in my head with no one to interrupt me and my doom-laden thoughts.

Happiness is an inside job. If you had seen me that night you would have thought from external appearances that I must be the luckiest, happiest, most content person in the world. But in my head, I was living a different story. I felt deflated, disappointed, demotivated and like a failure. It didnt matter how I looked or where I was or who I had around me. I was living the story that was in my mind: a story of worry, anxiety and fear. I wasnt living in the moment.

Now, you may think that was a perfectly understandable state of mind. It was a huge potential deal; we worked hard and it was a smack in the face when it all fell through. It would be playing on anyones mind if that happened to them but let us not forget the other side of this. I was at the biggest fashion event of the year. I should have been there and not stuck in my head. I should have been networking, being the best of hosts to my guests, making new friendships and making connections that could lead to bigger and better deals in the future. Instead, I was in a pity party in my head. Everything I went through in my mind that night could have waited I wasted my time, my energy and my chances by pouring fuel on the fire of my own disappointment.

I am a very goal-oriented person. Nothing makes me happier than working towards a goal and achieving it, and I have always had goals in my life: goals for the type of job I wanted to do, the type of partner I wanted to have, the type of life I wanted to live. I built this imaginary mood board in my head with the expectation that when I somehow achieved all of these goals, I would arrive at my final destination a destination called Happy Town. Population: me. Amazingly, one day, I got there. The journey, although exciting, wasnt the one I had expected or predicted, there were ups and downs, there were good times and bad, but somehow, along the way, I ticked off every single one of those mood board must-haves and finally reached the magical borders of Happy Town. And you know what? I was happy. I had proved them all wrong, I had only gone and done it! Yes! Go me!