The first Monday in May is known as Met Monday. And this year, my friend Sinéad Burke walked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a member of the 2026 Met Gala host committee. Beyoncé co-chairing. Nicole Kidman. Venus Williams. Anna Wintour. And Sinéad. From County Meath. Former primary school teacher. The girl who used to write outfits into her diary because the fashion world refused to make anything in her size.

I’m still scrolling photos still ugly-crying at joy for her and all that she has done!

A few months ago, she sent me a WhatsApp. Just a Vogue link, and one line:

”You are one of the few people in my life who might understand this. And well, your friendship and mentorship helped get me here.”

That message means more to me than any plaudit, board seat, award speech, or magazine feature I’ve ever had. Because every now and then, the universe gives you a receipt: the small thing you did, years ago, with no transaction in mind, mattered.

Co-chair, Beyoncé. Co-host, Sinéad.

Beyoncé arrived on the carpet in a sparkling, almost skeletal dress, with Blue Ivy on her arm and Jay-Z behind her. She co-chaired the 2026 Met Gala. The most powerful woman in pop, the woman who breaks the internet just by walking down a flight of stairs, set the tone for the night.

And on the same host committee, in the same building, in the same official line-up: Sinéad.

That sentence is the whole story.

Once you understand that the Met Gala host committee is the building’s stamp on who counts as fashion’s house, you understand what the night was. Sinéad wasn’t a guest. She wasn’t a plus-one. She wasn’t a feel-good cameo for a one-night news cycle. She was a host of the night the Met chose to call its own.

Same status as Beyoncé. Same line-up. Same building.

That’s not a moment. That’s structural.

The girl who dreamed of fashion’s biggest night

She used to write outfits into her diary. A girl from County Meath who could not find her size in any of the magazines. Who dreamed of fashion’s biggest night, knowing that world was not built for her.

Last night she walked in. Not as a guest. As a host.

This is what *invisible to unmissable* actually looks like. Not a moment. A relocation.

A primary school teacher walked the same red carpet as Beyoncé, named on the same host committee, photographed in the same press line, and stayed there.

The Going Out dress in the Wintour wing

In April 2024, on a free afternoon in New York, I wandered into the Met not knowing what was on. I drifted up into the **Anna Wintour Costume Center**, where the exhibition *Women Dressing Women* was running. I rounded a corner and stopped dead in front of a mannequin in a black satin “Going Out” dress.

It was Sinéad. Her body. Her hair. Her shape. Modelled, the placard told me, for *Customiety*, the Danish brand founded by Jasmin Søe in 2021 to make beautiful clothing with the achondroplasia community, not for it. Mannequin commissioned by National Museums Scotland. Wig by Evanie Frausto. A whole supply chain of love and design and bloody-minded competence, ending in this: my friend, in black satin, going out.

I stood in the middle of a gallery of strangers and welled up. Not because I was surprised. Because I wasn’t.

Two years later, the same building hosts her at the door.

Seven years. From first ever, to host.

She had been at the Met before that, too.

In 2019, Sinéad walked the pink stairs as the first little person in history to attend the Met Gala. In custom Gucci. Dancing with Katy Perry around an immersive Moschino hamburger. The dress now hangs in the Gucci Garden Museum in Florence.

Before she walked in that night, she led Condé Nast’s Anna Wintour through an accessibility audit of the venue.

In her own words this week, on the Tilting the Lens journal:
”In 2019, great consideration of my accessibility needs were taken into account. In the proceeding six years, I’ve invested my time and energy to ensure that change is not just for me.”

Read that sentence again. Slowly. That is the entire thesis of this essay, in twenty-three words from the woman herself.

The access route into the Met last night was her work, with her team at Tilting the Lens. The Met steps are 154 feet wide and 13.5 feet high, designed in 1975, protected as a National Historic Landmark. They cannot be ramped. So she designed a different way in. The step-free 81st Street entrance. Ramped queueing. Equal red-carpet positioning for disabled attendees.

She did not just attend the Met Gala. She fixed the building.
Then she rebuilt the way in.

Seven years later, she is not a guest. She is a host.

That is what one career of refusing to be ignored builds. Change for all, not just one. In her words.

Two presences, one woman

Last night’s Met Gala was for Costume Art, the new exhibition opening 10 May. Curator Andrew Bolton has commissioned 25 new mannequins, bodies long ignored by art history. Disabled bodies. Corpulent bodies. Real bodies. Nine living people had their bodies digitally scanned to make them, including Sinéad, Aimée Mullins, and Aaron Rose Philip. Polished steel surfaces, so the visitor sees themselves reflected in the figure on the plinth.

So Sinéad didn’t just host the Met Gala. She is *in* the exhibition the Gala is funding. Again. Twice over now. In couture, in steel, in committee, in chair. Once is a moment. Twice is a movement.

The teacher who would not be sized down

Sinéad’s story is not a “she came from nothing” fairy tale. She came from somewhere very specific.

Her parents founded Little People of Ireland in 1998. She grew up loved. She graduated top of her class at Marino Institute and went on to teach ten-year-olds who were often taller than her, and held the room every single day, because she earned it. Respect, admiration, trust. That’s the architecture under everything she does.

When she was eleven, her family was offered limb-lengthening surgery. She said no. At eleven. She chose her body.

In her book, she puts that decision on the page as a list. On one side, the pros of having the surgery: avoiding playground jibes, the ability to reach light switches, not needing a head start in the egg-and-spoon race. The other column has one entry, rendered in capitals: **BEING ME**.

That decision is the red thread that runs through every other one she has made since.

The fashion blog came from a college assignment. Her first post was about Cate Blanchett at the Oscars. When her siblings got bored of her fashion chat, she put it on the internet instead. Then came the TED talk, *Why design should include everyone*.

If you have not watched it, watch it. She tells you about being wheeled through airports, not because she needs a wheelchair, but because the terminal was not built for her. About public bathrooms where she cannot reach the lock, having to ask strangers to stand guard outside the stall, and leaving without washing her hands because the soap dispenser is too high. About baristas who cannot see her over the counter when calling “next,” then handing her a hot drink without a lid because the conversation never made it that far.

Her line, learnt from Stella Young’s brilliant “I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much,” is what saves the talk from inspiration porn. She is not asking for sympathy. She is asking for empathy. The valuing of the preciousness of a life.
Two completely different transactions.

It has not been pretty. She has been attacked in the street. One incident: a teenage boy leapfrogged over her in Dublin while another filmed it for a laugh. I have heard her tell that story. I have never been the same since.

What I have watched Sinéad do with that pain is the bit I will never stop being awed by. She did not shrink. She wrote an op-ed in Vogue vowing to speak to every primary school child in the region. Then she did it. All of them. Pain into syllabus.

She decided that if the world would not look at her with kindness, she would build the world a new pair of glasses.

I have hosted her. Interviewed her. Invited her on stages, including a British Fashion Awards moment I will never forget, because I have never, in my life, watched anyone work a room like that woman. She does not attend events. She arrives

A few years ago I shared the stage with Sinéad in front of a room full of top UK CMOs. One talk. Twenty minutes. She did not lecture them about disability. She showed them the architecture of who their brands had been built to ignore. The bathrooms. The airports. The coffee counters. The defaults. The room shifted. Not posture-shift. Permission-shift. CMOs called me afterwards saying “that was the most useful twenty minutes of my year. What do I do on Monday.”

Tiny acts. Big impact.

I learned more about how brands actually get built from watching her work that room than from any deck I ever wrote at Google. Your job, more often than not, is to bring new ideas and new people to the people you serve. To help others be seen. Be heard. Be considered. To open the door, and then step out of the way.

That is how trust is built. Everything else is decoration.

Visibility is not vibes. Visibility is infrastructure.

The marketing world keeps missing this.

We talk about representation as posture. A campaign. A nice line in the annual report. Sinéad’s life is the long, unglamorous proof that representation is structural. She did not just become the first little person on the cover of British Vogue. She founded Tilting the Lens, a consultancy intentionally staffed by disabled people, advising Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Chanel, Pinterest, Netflix, Starbucks. She does not fix accessibility for brands. She rewires the system that decides who gets considered in the first place.

In her own words:

”My goal was never to create a line of clothing that I could wear. It was to change the entire system. Which tells you everything you need to know about my personality.”

That is the whole token-versus-translator argument in one sentence, from the woman herself.

She is also not just advising those brands. She has donated two pieces from her own wardrobe to the Met’s permanent collection. The Tim Walker / Burberry trench (the photographer literally took massive scissors and cut a coat to fit her, on camera, for Business of Fashion). And an Alexander McQueen dress.

Why those two? To seed doctoral research on disability and design. To fund the examination of ableism in design systems. To leave the building richer than she found it. To pay forward into the curriculum.

That is what change-for-all looks like, in cold institutional terms.
Not a campaign. An endowment.

Change for all. Not just one.

That is the whole game. Tokenism gets a single body in the door.
Translation gets the door rebuilt.

She wrote a children’s book, “Break the Mould”, during the lockdown of 2020. It won Specsavers Children’s Book of the Year. The thing it teaches kids is the thing every adult brand leader I know still struggles with: uniqueness is not the obstacle to belonging. It is the route to it.

This matters commercially, and we should stop pretending it doesn’t.
One in two of us will, at some point, experience some form of disability. Temporary. Permanent. Visible. Invisible.
The “disabled consumer” is not a niche segment.
It is every consumer, eventually. The combined spending power of disabled consumers globally is roughly the size of China’s economy. Sit with that.

And, in Sinéad’s own framing this week:

”If disabled talent can’t access the red carpet, fashion brands won’t sponsor their ticket. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The entire industry has built that loop and forgotten it was a choice.

Brands designing for it now are not being kind. They are being early. And early is where the money is.

The next exclusion is being trained right now

The argument Sinéad has been making for twenty years is about to repeat itself in a brand new substrate. And almost nobody in the AI conversation is naming it.

The image-generation model trained on the same fashion archive that refused to make her size. The recognition system that does not see her over the counter, this time because the dataset of bodies it learned from looks nothing like hers. The AI assistant that reads the same airport signage and routes her the same wrong way, only faster.

Accessibility was never about ramps. It was about who gets considered when the system is being built. AI is the largest, fastest “system being built” in human history. And most of it is being built by the same people, with the same defaults, in the same rooms that did not consider her in the first place.

Sinéad’s line, ”from compliance to creativity,” is the whole AI thesis dressed up as accessibility. Brands treating AI as a compliance hire (automation, cost-cut, governance) will lose to brands treating AI as a creative hire that finally lets them include the people the old systems were never built for.

Opting out of that is not neutral. It never was.

Token. Or translator.

This is what I keep calling Unmissable.
The people and brands who refuse to be ignored share a quality. They are not auditioning for the room. They are redesigning it.

Visibility is the mechanic.

Being chosen is the whole game.

Sinéad never wanted to be the only one on the Vogue cover. She wanted there to be more. That is the difference between a token and a translator. A token gets in. A translator holds the door open behind them.

Change for all. Not just one.

It is also, frankly, why I built **Glittersphere**. A room full of women platforming each other before anyone else thinks to. Mentoring without expectation. Making the introduction. Saving the seat. Sinéad has been doing that for the disability community for fifteen years. The least the rest of us can do is copy her homework.

What this looks like on Monday morning

A few practical things, because Substack readers don’t come for vibes alone.

1) If you are a brand, your accessibility lead is not a compliance hire. They are a growth hire. Move them out of legal and into product. Sinéad’s *”from compliance to creativity”* line should be tattooed on every CMO’s notebook. Same goes for your AI lead, by the way. Same exact mistake, dressed up in newer language.

2) If you are a leader, look at the rooms you walk into and ask who is missing. Not in a hand-wringing way. In a structural one. Whose chair is not at the table because the table itself was built to exclude them? Then go put a chair there. Pay the person. Listen. Build differently.

3) If you are a friend, platform people before they need it. Mentor without expectation. Make the introduction. Send the message. Save the seat. The compounding interest on small acts of belief is the most under-priced asset in your entire career.

Sinéad, I am so unbelievably proud of you. From the diary entries about Givenchy to a black satin Going Out dress in the Wintour wing. From a girl who dreamed of fashion’s biggest night, to a host who walked the carpet last night. From the Irish classroom to Met Monday.

You did not just walk into the room. You changed who gets to walk in next.

From invisible to unmissable. The only journey that matters.

With love, and several tissues,

Nishma x

PS. Read Sinéad’s own piece on *Costume Art* and what last night meant at Tilting the Lens HERE
It is the structural manual for the moment. She is more generous with her receipts than the industry deserves.

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AI is the most forgiving place in your working life to practise being Miranda Priestly.

The title isn’t a joke. Stay with me.

Most women I know have been socialised to apologise for the exact behaviour Miranda got promoted for. We cushion. We caveat. We “would it be possible to...” and “sorry to push back, but...” We spend entire careers being polite about mediocre work because the cost of directness is being called ‘difficult’.

AI doesn’t care.

AI doesn’t get its feelings hurt. It doesn’t go to HR. It doesn’t tell the rest of the department you’re a nightmare at the Christmas party. It just gets sharper.

Which means the first AI skill worth building has nothing to do with prompts, and everything to do with permission.

I HAD A HEAD START. STILL GOT IT WRONG AT FIRST.

Context first, because otherwise none of this makes sense.

When I skipped out of Google, fresh from helping launch Bard v1 (Google’s first gen AI product, aka Gemini v1), I made a decision to learn about all different types of AI. I’d only really been absorbed in one system for quite a few years. I wanted to understand everyone else’s.

For eighteen months I went wide. Every model people were posting about, every workflow, every tool. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Midjourney, Mistral. Some of it was genuinely useful. A lot of it was hype.

For the last six months, that curiosity got serious. Partly because I wanted to grow my businesses and organise my life. Partly because I’m a tech geek and I know that good tech can be transformative to our lives. Mostly, if I’m honest, because I’ve burned out twice in my career and I refuse to do it a third time. AI was the first tool in years that felt like it might genuinely help.

So I had context. I had access. I had time. And I still got it wrong at first. Properly wrong.

I asked AI to write everything for me. Emails. Captions. Proposals. Whole decks. I accepted whatever came back. The outputs were bland. None of it sounded like me. Every ‘hit-send’ felt a little gross. I discarded it for a while.

I was, to be clear, doing the thing everyone warns you about. Letting AI author me. Not amplify me.

If you’ve been there, and most of the women I speak to who “gave AI a go and it didn’t work” have been there, you are not alone. That is the point at which most people give up. I understand why.

Then I shifted.

I stopped asking AI to write for me and using it like a glorified search engine. I started using it as if it were my brilliant colleagues I missed from Google, the ones who pushed me, questioned me, made me go deeper.

Not an author. A sparring partner.

Also, honestly: I got a patient assistant I could get a little Miranda with.

THE MIRANDA REFRAME

The bit nobody wants to say out loud about AI: it will hand you mediocre work if you accept mediocre work.

Say “thanks, that’s great” to a bland first draft and you will get more bland first drafts for life. Say “no, the tone is wrong, try three angles not one, don’t be saccharine, don’t use the word ‘dive’,” and the work gets sharper every single time.

Those are Miranda Priestly’s rules. Standards. Clarity. Zero tolerance for nonsense. Minus the cruelty, obviously. Take the directness, leave the meanness.
“Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.”

And every woman I know has been trained out of all three.

We cushion. We apologise. We soften. We spend entire careers being polite about mediocrity because the social cost of directness is high.

Two studies, a decade apart, identical numbers.
2014, Kieran Snyder: of women who received critical performance reviews, 76% got personality criticism. Abrasive, bossy, emotional. 2% of men.

2024, Textio’s analysis of 23,000 reviews: 76% of high-performing women received negative feedback. 2% of high-performing men.

A decade. An entire “Women in Leadership” industry. The numbers have not moved. We are not imagining this.

AI removes the social cost. It doesn’t care about tone. It doesn’t go quiet at meetings. It doesn’t tell your boss you’re difficult.

Which means AI is the most forgiving place in your working life to practise being direct. To practise saying what you want, precisely, without the apology. To practise high standards without paying for them.

(Do it with AI enough times and you’re a lot more likely to do it with humans. You’re welcome.)

THREE MOVES FOR MONDAY

If you take nothing else from this essay, take these.

First, stop accepting the first draft. “That’s nice, thank you” is never the correct response to an AI output. “No, the tone is wrong, try three angles not one, don’t be saccharine, don’t use the word ‘dive’” is. You’d be astonished how much sharper the second draft is when you tell the system the first one was mediocre. Directness that would get you a quiet word in a real office gets you better work every time.

Second, train it on you. Feed it examples of writing you’re proud of and ask it to explain what makes them sound like you. It will return a rule-set you didn’t know you had. Ask it to interview you further to really understand your voice and style. That rule-set becomes the brief for everything else. This is the single most underrated move. Most people skip it and wonder why nothing AI produces sounds like them. Of course it doesn’t. You haven’t introduced yourself.

Third, disagree with it. When it agrees with you too quickly, push back. “What’s wrong with my argument? Where am I hiding? What am I not seeing? What would a smart critic say?” Treat the answer seriously. Half the time it catches something you were flinching from. It sees the gaps in your thinking, or the patterns you weren't aware of.

Those three moves have done more for my working life than any productivity hack of the last five years!

THE SECOND HALF OF THE METAPHOR

Miranda isn’t the whole story.

AI isn’t just your assistant. AI is also Andy.

Andy arrives at Runway clueless. Cerulean sweater. No taste. Laughs at the two belts. By the end of the film she's the one who could give the Cerulean speech herself. The one who understands. The one everyone listens to.

AI does the same arc. You train it. It learns you. It catches your rhythm. It brings you references you didn’t know. It disagrees with you when it should. And one morning you open it and realise, shit, this colleague actually knows me.

Give it time. Give it direction. Give it standards.

Which is, if you squint, exactly what Miranda was doing to Andy the whole time. Not cruelty. Clarity.

That is the cognitive friction I missed most about leaving Google. The stretchiness. The brilliant minds around me who kept me sharp and a bit on edge. The thing that gets you out of your algorithmically-curated bubble and into the part of your brain that does its best work.

What surprised me was realising I could build it. One patient Miranda at a time. One trained Andy at a time.

Claude is my AI of choice. It's just been named Webby Person of the Year 2026, which I find quietly delicious for an essay called "The Devil Wears Claude." Systems and processes transfer to other tools, but this is the one that taught me how to be more Miranda.

WHY I AM WRITING THIS THIS WEEK

You probably saw the Reese Witherspoon post on 15 April.

She was in a book club the day before. Ten women. Three used AI. Only one felt like she knew what she was doing. Then she went on Instagram and said this, unfiltered, to 30 million followers:

🤖 “If you don’t get a little bit of understanding from the very beginning, it just speeds past you. You have to have little bits of learning to keep up. Our kids are all using this every single day. It’s time. It’s time, people.”

She’s right. She was describing, almost word for word, the room I’ve spent a year building.

And then I read every single comment underneath her post.

READING THE COMMENTS

There were thousands. Most of them were not applause. A handful that stuck with me:

🤖 “Please start your education with data centres. The amount of electricity they use. The dire effects on communities where they’re being built.”

🤖 “We aren’t being left behind. We are refusing a future that isn’t designed for us. Use your privilege to resist instead of acting like this is all inevitable.”

🤖 “Personally, I’m extremely proud of 7 out of 10 women not using AI.”

🤖 “This feels like a set up for some highly sponsored future content.”

Every one of those concerns is real. Environmental. Ethical. Creative. Financial. I share them. I’ve been turning them over for a year.

And I am still going to say this out loud.

Opting out of AI right now is not a neutral choice. It’s a decision to be optimised away. Slowly. By men using tools you didn’t learn.

Because while you wait for the technology to become safer, or more ethical, or less bro, the rules for how it works, what it does, who it serves, and what it replaces are being written in rooms that are overwhelmingly male.

The answer to concerns about AI is not to leave the tools in the hands of the people who share none of them.

The answer is to learn the thing and use it differently. Bring taste. Bring ethics. Bring the lens it’s currently missing.

Opting out isn’t resistance. It’s ceding ground.

The reason I'm not opting out is more personal than political.

TWO BURNOUTS IS A TREND

The other thing I want to say, because it’s the real stake for me.

I've burned out twice in my career Hard. Both times at a level that was obvious to everyone around me and dismissible by me. That was the version of womanhood I grew up with. Just push through.

Two burnouts in a lifetime isn’t a mistake. It’s a trend. I am not interested in making it a three.

When I talk about AI giving me time back, I am not talking about a productivity hack. I am talking about survival. I am talking about a working life that doesn’t require me to sacrifice my body, my brain, or my relationships to stay in it.

Dishwashers did this for cleaning. Washing machines did this for laundry. Email did this for memos. AI is the next thing in that line. It is the household appliance of the brain.

I have watched too many brilliant women leave work not because they didn’t want it, but because the shape of the work didn’t bend for them. AI can bend the shape of the work.

That’s not a small claim. That’s the whole thing.

WHAT REESE POSTED AFTER THE ORIGINAL CLIP

A few days after the original clip, Reese shared a LinkedIn post by a woman called Keren Camou. One line in it stopped me mid-scroll.

That’s the whole pitch I’ve been trying to write for a year.

THE CASCADE

If I help a hundred women get good at AI, those hundred can help a thousand. Those thousand can help ten thousand. This is more than a movement. It’s an urgency.

And it has to be the women in the room helping the next women into the room. Because if we wait for the companies building this technology to think of us, we will be waiting a long time.

I spent years at Google working on closing the digital skills gap. The programme I was involved in reached more than a million people. It changed lives. I have seen what happens when women get access to the tools the economy runs on.

AI is ten times that. Easily. And the gap is opening faster than the last one did.

I don’t have ten years to move the dial. Neither do you.

A SMALL CONFESSION ABOUT V2

I should tell you, because otherwise the story of Glittersphere V2 won’t quite make sense.

This version wasn’t the plan. Four years ago I scribbled in a notebook what I actually wanted to build: women, together, in rooms designed to help each other shine. That was it. Somewhere between the notebook and the first launch, I wobbled and built V1 around what I thought was needed rather than what I instinctively knew.

Mistakes made. Lessons learned. Properly owned.

V2 is the return to the notebook. Events-led, because the magic was always in bringing women together. Nowhere else.

The AI bit was a discovery, not a design. A few months ago, a friend saw what I’d built with AI for my business and my life. Her face did that thing that only good friends can make. And then she said something that made me go home that night and rewrite the plan.

That’s why Glittersphere: Sparkle + AI exists. That’s why V2 is not the version I originally planned. And that is why I am finally writing this down.

Glittersphere V2 is live today.
It is the room where this idea gets practised, in person, in London.
First event: the AI Supper Club, Tuesday 20 May.

Full info (events, membership etc): glittersphere.com

To the V1 founding members who stayed with me through the rebuild: your trust means the world. Proper thank you this week. 💖

One line to leave you with, because I’ve been saying it to myself like a mantra for three months:

You are not here to ask AI for permission. You are here to give it direction, ideally with sequins on.
Sparkle + AI.

Nishma x

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I help people find clarity.

For two years, I had none.

When I left Google I had real freedom for the first time in decades. And I did what most people do with that kind of freedom: I tried everything. Some of it I loved. Some of it I loved the idea of more than the reality. Some of it I spent money on that I probably shouldn’t have. All of it taught me something.

You cannot shortcut clarity. You earn it.

Through the experiments, the failures, the U-turns that occasionally make you cringe in the mirror. Through the moments where you stop, sit with what went wrong, and get curious enough to keep going anyway.

That’s what the last two years have actually looked like. Not the highlight reel. The whole thing.

What I was fighting

When I left Google, one of the things I was most desperate to escape was ‘the box’. Not a Google thing specifically. A large corporate reality. You play in your spot. You stay in your lane. You are defined, in the end, by the perimeter of your role.

I spent over a decade loving that world and quietly fighting it at the same time. Because the best work I did at Google, the work I’m most proud of, happened when we broke the frame. When we found a way to tell a story nobody expected from us, or built a moment that had no precedent, or created something that outlasted the brief entirely. That kind of pioneering mischief is exhilarating. It’s also exhausting. At a certain point, you need more space than any corporate structure can give you.

So I left. And then I discovered that freedom without clarity is its own kind of trap.

What the two years actually cost

I made mistakes. Spent money on things that didn't work. Pursued ideas I thought I loved until I was close enough to see clearly that I loved the idea of them, not the reality. Started things I didn't finish. Finished things I probably should have started differently. Bought equipment I never used. Kept Milly, my little dog, as my co-founder. She has never once questioned my strategy.

I also had a front row seat to two of the most seismic years in modern business history. AI didn’t just arrive. It rewrote the rules while most people were still reading the previous version. The job market shifted in ways that felt unimaginable two years ago. The world is on fire.

Which is exactly why humanity, hope, and optimism matter more now than they ever have.

When everything outside is uncertain, what you stand for and how you make people feel becomes the whole game.

I learned that watching it happen in real time, from outside the building, for the first time.

What I came back to

At some point, if you’re honest enough, you come back to what you actually love.

Not because you failed. Because you finally stopped performing the version of yourself you thought you were supposed to build, and started building the one that was always there.

Two years later, I’ve come back to what I love, what I miss, and what I’m really, really good at. Without abandoning the dream. I’ve just made a way to make it work.

I’m a different leader now. A different woman. More certain of what I’m for, and more comfortable with what I’m not. Unapologetically myself in a way that took leaving, and the long way round, to fully become.

What I actually know

During my time at Google I had a very particular vantage point. Not just making campaigns. Observing. Working alongside the top CEOs and CMOs in the country. Watching what built trust and what destroyed it. Seeing, often from a slight distance, what the most powerful people in business actually responded to.

And what I know, what I watched play out again and again at the highest level, is this.

The brands that last are not the loudest. They are not the most polished. They are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the cleverest taglines.

They are the ones that make people feel something real. That build trust in the moments nobody is measuring. That create experiences people carry with them long after they have left the room.

Reputation travels faster than any algorithm. That was true before AI. It is more true now.

Because AI has made average free. Generic content, generic positioning, generic brands, all of it now costs nothing to produce and nothing to remember. Which means the only thing worth building is the thing nobody can copy.

The brand that sounds like a human being. The trust that compounds. The reputation that walks into rooms before you do.

Most businesses know this. Very few know how to build it.

That is the gap I've been quietly brilliant at closing for years. It's what has kept me in good trainers and sequins.

So here is where I have landed. Three things, all connected.

Unmissable

Unmissable is my Brand Advisory. Building trust and growth through unmissable content and experiences. The thing that leads everything.

I help personal brands and business brands become unmissable. Building the trust, resonance, and growth that AI cannot flatten, copy, or bore into oblivion. The content and experiences that make people feel something, trust you, and come back.

Not louder. Not more polished. Unmissable.

A lifetime in brand, advertising, and storytelling. A head start in AI from my time at Google. All in service of one thing: making you impossible to ignore and impossible to copy.

Already in motion. Clients already growing. The kind of growth that holds when everything else flattens.

The work is alive. What’s new is that I’m finally saying it out loud.

Unmissable is for businesses and founders who know trust is now a growth strategy, not a nice-to-have. For senior leaders who know the gap to success is not just talent. It is visibility. And visibility is a skill.

If you want to talk, about keynotes, a workshop, or working together, find me at nishma.co

Why I’m obsessed with the AI skills gap

I am not an AI expert. I am an AI enthusiast. There is a difference.

An expert tells you what AI can do. An enthusiast tells you what it actually does when you sit down and use it on a Wednesday afternoon. I have tested over 220 tools. Spent thousands. Built, broken, and rebuilt. I now use AI to build brands every single day.

The skills gap scares me. Because AI is not going to replace you. But someone who actually uses it might. And far too many brilliant people are being left behind. Not because they are not capable. Because nobody has shown them how in a way that makes sense for their world.

The people who most need AI, the ones whose time is most squeezed, whose careers would benefit most, whose businesses would be transformed, are being put off by the noise, the jargon, and the overnight experts.

Closing that gap is part of what I do. For individuals who want to build a personal brand that actually works in an AI world. For businesses that want their people to stop faking it and start using it. Acceleration, not authorship. Human intelligence, amplified.

Glittersphere

This is the community.

A glittersphere is a disco ball. I built the human version. On purpose. Put ambitious women in a room, help them shine, and they shine brighter together. That’s the point.

Dance floors are the most democratic space in the world. A disco ball throws light in every direction. That’s what happens when you put the right women in a room.

Glittersphere Version 2 is events-led and coming soon. Because the magic happens in the room. Closing the AI gap. Making women unmissable.

In sequins. Having fun. Because why not. 🪩

HERA Media

This is the AI and video podcasting arm.

It started from me looking for someone to produce my own podcast and led, with two brilliant co-founders (Rosie Allimonos and Kirsty Hunter), to the creation of the UK’s first female-focused and female-led video podcast network.

When 80% of the most influential media in the world is controlled by a certain kind of white man, you know something has gone very wrong. History has taught us enough. Without different voices, different thoughts, and different opinions being brought into the world, we risk rolling everything back.

HERA sits at the heart of that challenge. Raising money as female founders. Building a business in a pioneering way. Focusing on AI and storytelling, just as I do everywhere else. Helping businesses use video and podcasting to tell their story, talent to find their voice, and producers to grow their influence and their income.

We are still building. The vision is clear. More news soon.

Three businesses. One belief.

All three exist in service of the same thing I have believed my whole career. That when good people are truly seen - properly, commercially, undeniably seen - everything changes. Their options change. Their income changes. What they can build and who they can become changes.

Visibility is not vanity. It never was. It is power.

For anyone in the messy middle

IIf you have been in a period of figuring things out, trying and failing and wondering if you are taking too long to land, you are not.

That is the work. That is exactly how you get to the thing worth building.

The early stage is undoubtedly the hardest. Every day you keep at it matters. The clarity comes through action, not through waiting until everything is perfectly formed.

I know because I lived it. I am still living it. The vision is just clearer now.

I am not starting from scratch. What is different now is the clarity.

I am here. This is it.

Keynotes, workshops, advisory. All at nishma.co

Or slide into the DMs.

More very soon. 🪩

I can’t rely on the algorithm to show you my stuff. It’s a fickle beast and frankly, it’s not on our side. But if you hit subscribe, you’ll get every story I write, straight to your inbox. It’s free. No catch. I just want to make sure the people who actually want to read this, can. And selfishly, it makes it worthwhile for me to keep writing. Please Subscribe for FREE

The brand industry has spent thirty years perfecting polish. Every touchpoint considered. Every pixel approved. Every word run through legal, then compliance, then a committee of people whose job title includes the word “alignment.”

And look, it worked. For a while. I know because I was one of the people making it work. Ten years at Google, hand on heart, I’d like to think I was good at it.

But something shifted. Slowly at first, then all at once. The most polished brands started sounding identical. The most considered campaigns started feeling the least human. And the audience, the actual living, breathing, bullshit-detecting humans we’re all trying to reach, started doing something that should worry every brand director on the planet.

They stopped giving a shit.

The Mess Premium

Right, here’s a provocation that would make most brand directors need a lie down: when AI makes polish free, mess becomes premium.

Sit with that for a second. Any business can now produce flawless copy, perfect visuals, seamless video content in minutes. The barrier to looking professional has collapsed to basically zero. Which means looking professional is no longer a signal of quality. It’s a signal of nothing. It’s wallpaper. It’s beige. It’s the brand equivalent of a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign on an office wall.

Rory Sutherland has this beautiful idea that the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. The brand industry decided decades ago that consistency, polish and control were the good ideas. The opposite of those, inconsistency, imperfection and surrender, sounds like career suicide.
But what if it’s actually where the value has migrated?

Fred Again live-streamed himself producing a track called “Talk of the Town” on Twitch. Twenty-seven minutes. False starts, dead ends, moments where he clearly didn’t know where it was going. Thousands watched. Not because it was polished. Because it was true. The creative struggle was the content. The vulnerability was the brand signal.

And I say all this as a slightly obsessed (is that a thing?) fan, by the way. I’m genuinely envious of everyone who got to experience those recent Alexandra Palace shows. Fred is an incredible artist and DJ, and the fact that he’s also, almost accidentally, produced the most interesting brand strategy I’ve seen in ages, just makes me like him even more.

Because people keep calling him “messy” or “raw” like he’s winging it. He’s not. Look closer. The hoodie. The phone selfie album artwork. The Twitch streams. The fan photos becoming the Spotify covers. There’s a clear, unfussy, unmistakably Fred aesthetic running through every single touchpoint. That IS brand consistency. It’s just anchored on being human rather than being polished. On being for the fans, not for the machine. On delighting people, including himself, rather than impressing a brand committee.

This isn’t the absence of brand strategy. It’s a masterclass in it. He’s abandoned the old rules of perfection and protection in favour of something messy and accessible and, honestly, something that every brand claims to be but almost none of them actually are: genuinely, lived-on-the-floor, customer-centric. Not as words on a strategy slide. As the actual thing.

And the numbers back it up. Fred went from 53,000 to over 18 million monthly Spotify listeners without a traditional hit single. He sold out Alexandra Palace in minutes. His Boiler Room set has been viewed over 40 million times. These aren’t vibes. These are receipts.

Now when was the last time a top 250 company showed you something they hadn’t figured out yet? Exactly. They’d rather show you a 47-slide deck about their “authentic brand journey” that took six months and four agencies to produce.
The irony is painful.

Collaboration as Compound Interest

The conventional brand playbook says: protect your positioning, own your narrative, control the message. Fred’s playbook says: bring other people in, platform them, and let the whole thing grow in ways you didn’t plan.

When he brought Bangalter from Daft Punk on stage, or sampled a stranger’s voice note, or invited a 16-year-old Slovenian dancer to freestyle for a music video, he wasn’t diluting his brand. He was compounding it. Every collaboration added a new audience, a new story, a new reason for someone to care. His generosity wasn’t charity. It was growth strategy. And it takes proper balls to do that, by the way. To stand on your own stage and go “actually, watch THIS person.”

Zoe Scaman has written brilliantly about how modern fandom is built on participation, not consumption. The brands that understand this are pulling away from the ones that don’t. Look at what Duolingo has done on TikTok. The owl is barely selling language lessons. It’s creating a world that people want to be part of, to riff on, to remix.

The audience isn’t watching the brand. They’re making it.

Now think about what most personal brands look like on LinkedIn. Carefully curated. Relentlessly self-referential. Every post engineered to position the author as the expert. The generous move, the Fred move, is to make someone else look brilliant and trust that it comes back. Most people can’t do it because it requires genuine confidence. Not the performed confidence of a thought leadership post, but the real kind. The kind that says: I don’t need to be the smartest person in this room. I just need to be the one who made the room worth being in.

Designing for Presence in an Age of Infinite Scroll

Fred tells his audience not to film. He hands out stickers to cover phone cameras. He drops tickets via WhatsApp with days of notice. He releases tracks with blank artwork that only gets filled in the morning after the show, with photos from the actual crowd.

Every single one of those decisions is a bet against reach and a bet on presence.

This is heresy in marketing. We’ve built an entire industry around maximising impressions, optimising for eyeballs, extending the content lifecycle. And here’s someone deliberately constraining it. Making things harder to access. Less shareable. More ephemeral.

And it’s working better than anything the optimisation playbook ever produced. Which, honestly? Makes me want to laugh and cry in equal measure, because I spent a decade optimising the hell out of everything.

Because “you had to be there” is doing something no algorithm can replicate. It’s creating memory. Not content, not impressions, not a data point in a dashboard. Actual human memory. The kind people carry with them, talk about at dinner, text their friends about at midnight. The kind where a 35-year-old man cries at a show and tells everyone about it the next day without a shred of embarrassment.

What would it look like if more brands designed for that? Not a webinar with 10,000 registrations and 400 attendees half-watching while checking email. A room of 50 people who chose to be there. No recording. No replay. No deck afterwards. Just the experience and the conversation that follows it.

Imagine a product launch where the only people who see it are the ones who showed up. A customer event where the phones go away. A brand moment designed to be remembered, not repurposed.

It sounds commercially reckless. I think it might be commercially genius.

You’re going to want to keep reading.

I’m about to tell you exactly what this looks like on a Monday morning. The practical bit. The bit you can actually steal. But I need a favour first.

I can’t rely on the algorithm to show you my stuff. It’s a fickle beast and frankly, it’s not on our side. But if you hit subscribe, you’ll get every story I write, straight to your inbox. It’s free. No catch. I just want to make sure the people who actually want to read this, can. And selfishly, it makes it worthwhile for me to keep writing. Please Subscribe for FREE

Already subscribed? You legend. Keep scrolling.

Yeah, But My CFO Would Kill Me

I know what you’re thinking. Nishma’s been at the Lion’s Mane again.

“That’s lovely for a musician, but if I posted unfinished work my stakeholders would have me escorted from the building.” Fair. I hear you.

And let’s be honest about survivorship bias while we’re at it. For every Fred there are thousands of artists showing their messy process to absolutely nobody. The mess alone isn’t the magic.

The magic is mess plus mastery.

Fred can afford to show the dead ends because when he finds the right path, it’s extraordinary. The vulnerability works because the talent is undeniable. Mess without substance is just... mess. And we’ve all seen enough of that on LinkedIn to last several lifetimes.

So what does that mean for the rest of us? You don’t need to be a musical genius. You need to be genuinely good at your thing and willing to let people see the process of getting better. A consultant sharing the framework they’re still testing. A founder showing the product decision they’re wrestling with. A strategist publishing the brief they haven’t cracked yet.

The bar isn’t perfection. It’s proof that you’re actually in the arena, not just commentating from the stands in a nice jacket.

The Trust Architecture of Imperfection

I got this wrong for years, and I’m not too proud to say it. I spent a decade at Google where brand consistency was gospel. I helped build campaigns that won awards and moved metrics. I helped launch Bard (Gemini v1) in the UK, for God’s sake. I know what good looks like inside a machine. Every asset aligned. Every campaign on-model. The brand guidelines were thicker than some books I’ve read (or wanted to!). And I believed in that. I was good at it.

But consistency and control solve for a world where people trust institutions. We don’t live in that world anymore. That world packed its bags somewhere around 2016 and hasn’t come back. Trust has migrated from institutions to individuals, from polish to proof, from what you say about yourself to what other people say about you when you leave the room.

Fred’s hoodie isn’t a costume choice. It’s a trust signal. It says: I’m not performing for you. I’m not trying to sell you anything. I’m just here. And in a landscape where every other visual signal is saying BUY THIS, CLICK HERE, I AM IMPORTANT, the absence of performance becomes the most magnetic thing in the room.

This is what I mean when I talk about ‘Bathroom Chat’ in the VIP Club framework. It’s the thing people say about your brand when you’re not there to manage the narrative. Fred’s bathroom chat is extraordinary: “I cried at his show and I’m a 35-year-old man and I don’t even care.” You can’t manufacture that in a brand workshop with Post-it notes and an overpriced facilitator. You can only earn it by being consistently, almost recklessly, yourself.

What This Looks Like on Monday Morning

Alright. Enough philosophy. Let’s get practical, because I know some of you are itching to actually do something with this.

If you’re a founder: stop polishing your launch deck and show 50 potential customers the ugly prototype. Seriously. Let them watch you build the thing they asked for. Their investment in your process becomes their investment in your product. It’s not weakness. It’s the smartest sales strategy nobody’s using.

If you run a professional services firm: publish the thinking you haven’t finished. Share the problem you’re wrestling with, not just the case study you’ve already won. I spent years presenting everything as a finished success story. The pieces that actually landed, the ones that got me invited back into rooms, were the ones where I said “honestly, I’m not sure about this bit yet.” People leaned in. Every time.

If you’re building a personal brand: your audience doesn’t need another expert. God knows LinkedIn has enough of those. They need someone who’s visibly, actively figuring it out. In real time. With them. The relationship of the future isn’t “I admire you from afar.” It’s “I feel like I’m building this with you.”

Fred was invisible for years. Producing for Ed Sheeran, Stormzy, Brian Eno, and nobody outside the industry knew his name. Then he stopped trying to be polished and started trying to be present. Within three years he was headlining Glastonbury.

That’s not a music strategy. That’s a brand strategy. And the really uncomfortable question it poses is this: what are you still polishing that would work better if you just shipped it?

Go on. I dare you.

Nishma x

Powered by glitter. Opinions all mine.

I broke down Fred’s brand using my VIP Club framework in this week’s YouTube video. If you want to steal the cheat codes to build an Unmissable brand, the full visual walkthrough with all the evidence, is here.

If you want to nerd out on this further or just have a good debate about it, comment below in my ‘virtual dance floor aka the comments section’ and let’s discuss. 🪩

I can’t rely on the algorithm to show you my stuff. It’s a fickle beast and frankly, it’s not on our side. But if you hit subscribe, you’ll get every story I write, straight to your inbox. It’s free. No catch. I just want to make sure the people who actually want to read this, can. And selfishly, it makes it worthwhile for me to keep writing. Please Subscribe for FREE

If I could have any job title in the world, it would be Chief Compliments Officer.

I’m not joking. I think about this a lot.

An actual, salaried, C-suite role where your entire job is to notice people, say the thing they need to hear, and make the room feel different when you walk into it.

I’d be absolutely brilliant at it. I’ve been doing it unpaid for decades.

So when Marks & Spencer gave Gillian Anderson the title of Chief Compliments Officer - with an actual campaign about championing the power of everyday praise - I did two things.

First, I felt seen.

Second, I felt robbed.

But M&S didn’t do this because someone in their marketing team read a nice quote on a mug. They did it because kindness is having a commercial moment. And the science behind it is far sharper than most brands realise.

The warm, fuzzy feeling has a name. And it changes behaviour.

That chest-tightening glow you get when you see someone do something unexpectedly kind? It’s called moral elevation.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes it as a mental reset button. It wipes out cynicism and replaces it with hope, optimism, and the urge to do something good yourself.

Not a metaphor. A documented neurological shift.

Research from UCLA’s Bedari Kindness Institute (love that there is an actual Kindness Institute!) and UC San Diego confirms that kindness spreads through social networks like a virus. When you witness an act of kindness, you become measurably more likely to be kind yourself, not just to the person involved, but to complete strangers.

The effect cascades up to three degrees of separation. You help someone. They help someone else. That person helps another. One act of generosity can influence dozens of people, none of whom planned it.

This is not soft science. This is behavioural contagion with commercial implications.

This always happens after a crisis. We’re in one now.

Kindness surges when the world falls apart. It’s a pattern so reliable you could set your watch by it.

After 9/11, volunteering spiked. After Hurricane Katrina, mutual aid networks spontaneously formed when government response failed. After the 2008 financial crash, charitable giving, community cooperation, and public meeting attendance all rose sharply - even in the areas most devastated by the recession.

During Argentina’s economic collapse in the early 2000s, workers collectively ran abandoned factories. Community kitchens fed whoever turned up. Parallel economies built on solidarity emerged from the wreckage of the ones built on greed.

The pattern is clear: when systems fail and trust fractures, people instinctively turn to each other. Kindness becomes survival. And then it becomes identity - a way of signalling “I’m not like the forces that broke this.”

Sound familiar?

We’ve just had five years of pandemic, political fracture, Brext=it, economic instability, algorithmic toxicity, and the creeping sense that nobody with any power has our backs. Cynicism has calcified. Doomscrolling is a reflex. Trust in institutions is at historic lows.

And into that environment, something unexpected is happening.

Small, visible, emotionally legible acts of kindness are cutting through the noise. Not despite the cynicism. Because of it.

Last weekend I marched with half a million people. And for the first time in months, I felt hope. Not the filtered, curated, algorithm-approved kind. The real kind. The kind you feel when strangers become friends. When a DJ turns a protest into a party. When a woman dancing next to you says: “When we’re gone, we’ll live in a box. So don’t live in one now.”

Hate is loud. It dominates the headlines. It wants you to believe it’s winning.

But hope isn’t losing. It’s just quieter. And it needs us to share it.

You can be rich and an arse. But what if you were rich and really nice?

We already know that being powerful and unpleasant is commercially viable. We have extensive evidence.

Elon Musk has built a quarter-trillion-dollar empire while being, by most accounts, absolutely dreadful to work with and increasingly difficult to watch online. The man bought an entire social media platform and the general consensus is that he made it worse on purpose.

So we’ve established the baseline: you can accumulate extraordinary wealth and influence while treating people like they’re disposable. Noted. Filed. Moving on.

But here’s the question nobody seems to be asking: if arrogance and antagonism can build empires, what could genuine, structural kindness build?

Because the evidence is starting to come in. And it turns out, the kind ones aren’t just winning hearts. They’re winning commercially.

The brands, artists, and creators who get it

Taylor Swift distributed an estimated $197 million in bonuses to her Eras Tour crew. $100,000 per truck driver. Big bonuses to dancers and techs. All delivered with handwritten notes.

She didn’t announce it. The crew did. Because when someone treats you that well, you can’t help but tell people.

The Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert tour in history. Over $2 billion in revenue. She made everyone who worked on it feel like a partner, not a supplier. That’s not charity. That’s a masterclass in loyalty economics.

Olivia Dean is 26 years old. In February 2026, she walked onto the BRITs stage and walked off with four awards. Three weeks earlier she’d picked up Best New Artist at the Grammys.

In 2023, she performed to four people. Not four hundred. Four.

The distance between those two moments is not luck and it’s not a TikTok hack. It’s a van.

During lockdown, at nineteen, with no audience to speak of, she built a little trailer stage, stuck it in a van, and drove around the country playing to whoever would have her. One stop was on the cliffs of Cornwall, warming up for Fisherman’s Friends at a drive-in. Jo Whiley was in the audience and started championing her on Radio 2.

Her second album is called The Art of Loving. Not winning. Loving.

In a world addicted to irony, she chose sincerity. Chanel signed her in 2020 before she even had a debut album. Burberry and Cartier followed. Manchester renamed Deansgate station to Olivia Deansgate.

You don’t get that by being the loudest. You get it by being the most loved.

Fred Again shares pub details so solo gig-goers can meet up before shows. Think about that for a second. A musician designing his fan experience around loneliness. Not selling VIP upgrades. Designing connection.

DJ AG takes his DJ sets to care homes and streets, describing it as the most rewarding part of his work. He’s not doing it for a viral moment. It’s a core part of who he is. He’s choosing visibility for people who are usually invisible.

Ed Sheeran quietly gives around £1 million at a time to his old school, funds expressive arts programmes, sends food to exhausted A&E staff, and backs free meal programmes for kids. Small, local, ongoing. He’s one of the best-selling artists in history and his relationship with his hometown of Framlingham hasn’t changed.

George Michael spent his entire life anonymously donating millions, volunteering at homeless shelters, funding IVF for strangers, tipping bar workers thousands to clear their debts. Acts so private that fans only learned about them after he died.

No PR strategy. No brand positioning. Just a man who gave a shit and didn’t need anyone to see it. His legacy isn’t just the music. It’s the person. And that person is more beloved now than ever.

These aren’t stunts. They’re human-scale acts designed to be felt, not just seen. And they spread because they trigger moral elevation in audiences. We see them. Something shifts. And suddenly we’re a little more likely to act kindly ourselves.

That’s not fluffy. That’s a growth engine.

Why kindness works (the science in three moves)

1. Social contagion.

Kindness spreads through networks faster and further than you’d expect. One person’s generosity influences dozens of others, and witnessing it makes people measurably more cooperative. Brands that build kindness into their behaviour aren’t just doing good – they’re activating a psychological cascade that travels far beyond the original act.

2. Moral elevation as a reset button.

In a climate of exhaustion and cynicism, witnessing kindness gives people a neurological and emotional reset. Despair out, hope in. Brands that create moments of moral elevation aren’t just getting attention. They’re changing how audiences feel about being human. That’s a different category of brand relationship.

3. The warm glow effect.

Research on viral altruism - the Ice Bucket Challenge being the textbook case - shows people are drawn to join a visible social consensus around doing good. They crave the warm glow of compassion performed publicly. Kindness campaigns work because they give people permission to be kind in the open, and that visibility accelerates the spread.

The risk: viral kindness has a shelf life

One warning, because I’m not going to pretend this is all glitter and no grit.

Analysis of the Ice Bucket Challenge showed a clear pattern: once a cause hits a viral tipping point, public interest dissipates fast and engagement reverts to pre-campaign levels. Researchers call this the short half-life of viral altruism. It spreads like wildfire, but it rarely sustains.

Historical data backs this up. After the 2008 recession, kindness indicators - volunteering, giving, community participation - spiked between 2008 and 2009, then declined steadily from 2010 to 2015 as life stabilised. Kindness movements have an expiry date if they’re not maintained.

The implication for brands is blunt: kindness can’t be a one-off campaign. It has to be embedded in behaviour, repeated over time, and rooted in genuine culture change. Not hashtagged into a brief and forgotten by Q3.

Structural, not performative. That’s the line between brands that earn trust and brands that borrow attention.

So what should you actually do?

1. Design elevation moments into your experience. Moral elevation can be triggered by small, specific acts. A handwritten note. A genuine thank-you that isn’t a template. A public shout-out to someone who went above and beyond. M&S built an entire campaign around compliments. You don’t need Gillian Anderson. You need intention.

2. Make kindness visible and repeatable, not one-off. Build it into your operating rhythm. A monthly spotlight on unseen work. A standing offer that signals generosity. The brands winning with kindness do it again and again until it’s just how they operate.

3. Tell the stories. Moral elevation only works if people witness it. George Michael’s kindness didn’t spread until after he died because nobody saw it. You don’t need to be performative, but you do need to be visible. Share what you’re doing. Share why. The cascade depends on the seeing.

4. Audit for unkindness. Look at every touchpoint: your onboarding, your invoicing, your complaint process, your social media replies. Where does your brand feel cold, transactional, or indifferent? Those are leaks. Every unkind touchpoint undermines the kind ones.

5. Hire for it. Promote for it. Reward for it. If kindness isn’t in your hiring criteria, your performance reviews, or your promotion decisions, it’s not structural. It’s decorative.

My bet: kindness as differentiation

I think kindness is here to stay. Not as a universal vibe. Not as a trend cycle. But as a genuine point of differentiation for brands, artists, and creators who actually mean it.

We’ve already proved you can build empires while being unkind. The Elon Musks of the world have demonstrated, comprehensively, that you don’t need to be liked to be successful.

But I think that model is starting to crack. The backlash is building. The reputation costs are rising. And a growing number of people - consumers, employees, investors - are actively choosing to spend their time, money, and energy with people and brands that don’t make them feel worse about being alive.

In a world where AI can generate content, products, campaigns, and experiences at scale, the thing that cannot be automated is how you make people feel.

Kindness - real, repeated, specific, human-scale kindness - is the ultimate signal that there’s a person behind the brand who actually gives a shit.

Taylor Swift didn’t just fill stadiums. She built an economy.

Olivia Dean didn’t just win awards. She made Chanel, Burberry, and Adidas all decide she was the face of modern Britain - before she had a Number 1.

Ed Sheeran didn’t just sell records. He made Framlingham love him back.

George Michael didn’t just make music. He made people kinder, and they didn’t even know it until he was gone.

They’ll create Chief Compliments Officers. (Hire me. I’m available. I’d be sensational.)

They’ll share tour profits with truck drivers.

They’ll drive vans to Cornwall.

They’ll text solo fans with pub details.

They’ll donate to their old schools, quietly, repeatedly

By the way… YOU LOOK WONDERFUL TODAY 🪩

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She spent her last money on a coat. Not for herself.

It was a cold winter. She had just arrived in the UK, alone, in her mid-twenties, wearing a sari and sandals. Not an overcoat between her and an English January. She had a little girl with her, barely three years old. She had a handful of contacts, not much money, and not the warmest of receptions in 1960s Britain.

The Daily Mail will not write this story.

Reform do not want you to hear it. Suella Braverman has built an entire career on making sure people like my parents are seen as a problem to be solved rather than a story worth telling.

They are wrong. They have always been wrong.

My mum arrived in this country alone, in her mid-twenties, in a sari and sandals in January, with a toddler and not enough money for a coat. She spent what she had on my sister. Then she got on with building a life.

She had money enough for one coat. She spent it on her daughter.

Then she waited. She did not complain. She got on with it.

That is Indira. That is my mum.

This is a story about my mum. But I suspect it might remind you of yours.

The women who came before us - mums, grandmothers, aunties, neighbours - who carried the whole world in one hand while making dinner with the other.
No profile piece.
No personal brand.
No five-year plan.
Just quiet, relentless brilliance that nobody stopped to name.

This is one of those stories.

Born to Move

My mum was born in Jamnagar, Gujarat, and grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, where she went to school. She was the youngest of four children, creative and curious from the start. She came back to India for university, studying Fine Art at the University of Baroda, which is also where she met my dad, Vipin.

Her first act of rebellion came before she ever boarded a plane. She was a Shah. My dad was a Patel. In the Gujarat of that era, that was not how things were supposed to go. She did it anyway. Sixty years of marriage later, I think we can agree she called that one right.

She was also, by this point, a trained Montessori teacher, a gifted artist, and a sitar player. Elegant, warm, deeply funny, and, if the family stories are anything to go by, already completely ungovernable in the best possible way.

She did not yet know she was about to spend the rest of her life starting over. She and my dad both. Together.

The Woman Who Came First

The plan was for my dad to come to the UK first. Immigration had other ideas. My mum, who held a British passport from her Kenyan schooling and spoke excellent English, ended up going ahead. Alone. With a toddler. Into a country she had never set foot in before, at a time when being a young South Asian woman on a London street was, to put it gently, a fairly terrifying reality.

She found her feet. She always did. She navigated the London transport system on her own, making relentless trips to the Home Office to fight for my dad to be allowed to join her. She set up a life from nothing. She waited, she campaigned, she managed, she held everything together.

When my dad finally arrived, one of her earliest memories of the two of them being together in this country was the summer of 1969. They were living in a shared house, and she remembers being huddled around the television with the other residents watching the moon landing. The whole world holding its breath at the same moment. A young Indian couple in a shared house in England, watching humans walk on the moon. There is something about that image I find quietly extraordinary.

In a country that was not always kind to people who looked like them, there were people who were. A family friend who would look after my eldest sister on the nights my mum had to go and do her shift at Sainsbury’s. That mattered. It still does.

They built something together from there. Finchley first, then Watford. Three daughters. A house that was always, whatever else was happening, full of warmth.

The sitar music was constant. So was the smell of her cooking. If you closed your eyes, you could almost forget how hard it all was.

The Woman Who Never Stopped

My childhood memories of my mum are sensory ones. Holding her hand on the walk into Watford town centre. The sound of the sitar drifting through the house. The smell of food that made the whole street quietly curious about what was happening in our kitchen.

She was soft and calm and elegant. She was also, underneath all of that, made of something very few people are made of.

She ran a grocery shop alongside my dad. She worked evenings. She raised three daughters. She did it all simultaneously, without fuss, without complaint, and with the kind of warmth that made everyone who came near her feel looked after. Stray dogs found their way to our door. Stray cats. The occasional pigeon. She fed everyone. She simply could not bear to see anyone go hungry.

Human or otherwise.

Another Country, Another Chapter

When I was fifteen, my parents made a decision together that took extraordinary courage. They left for the Canary Islands to start again. New country. New language. New life, from scratch, in their mid-forties.

Neither of them had run a restaurant. Neither had any real idea of the trade. What they had was each other, a refusal to be defeated, and my mum’s completely inexplicable ability to create food that made people want to come back.

She had never eaten meat. She learned to cook it. She taught herself Spanish. She designed menus from nothing. She and my dad built an Indian restaurant called Natraj that people still talk about. The food was award-winning. People came back again and again. And the cooking was done by a woman who navigated every dish entirely through smell, texture, and instinct, without a recipe book in sight.

I was a vegetarian for the first eighteen years of my life. Then I tried her butter chicken. That was that.

They were in the Canary Islands for nearly twenty years. There were highs and lows, as there always are when you build something from nothing in a foreign country. Each time something fell apart, they picked themselves up. Together. Not with bitterness or resentment. With grace, with humour, and with an optimism that, frankly, should have run out years before, but never did.

Sixty-plus years of marriage. Multiple countries. Multiple reinventions. Through all of it, the two of them. Still standing. Still going.

The Woman Who Came Home

When my parents came back to the UK, I was thirty-five. My mum was sixty-five. I was beside myself with happiness. I had missed her every day she was gone, and I did not fully understand until she was back how much I had needed her near.

Not long after, I had the twins. And whatever I have managed to be as a mother is entirely because she was there. Her, my sisters Shilpa and Shalini, my dad. My children are who they are because of all of them. I will not be taking sole credit.

Retirement was not really on the agenda. She adjusted to being back in Britain, to a world that had moved on considerably, and she did what she always does: she figured it out. My dad, who had always been quietly brilliant with technology, helped. Between the two of them they were going to get there one way or another.

She skipped email entirely. Went straight to YouTube. It became her window to cooking programmes, music, remedies, culture, stories. A lifeline that kept her connected and curious when the world might otherwise have been inclined to overlook her.

These days it is AI that has caught her attention. She is marvelling at it. Asking questions about it. Slightly baffled by all of us and how fast we are moving, she would quite like us to slow down, but she is watching and learning and forming opinions. She always is.

She is in her early eighties. Still watching. Still cooking. Still curious. Still giving. Still cheeky.

What She Taught Me Without Knowing It

My mum never had a LinkedIn profile. She never gave a TED talk. She never won a business award, though by rights she should have won several. No title. No corner office. No profile piece in a trade magazine.

She was a pioneer anyway.

She built businesses across three countries in two languages she taught herself. She raised three daughters who went on to build careers and families she is, I hope, proud of. She cooked for anyone who was hungry. She took in every stray that wandered past. She played the sitar. She painted. She taught children. She reinvented herself more times than I can count, each time with zero drama and maximum dignity.

And she did all of it alongside my dad, in a partnership that has lasted over sixty years, across every imaginable kind of difficulty, and is still going.

She has a line she has said to me my whole life. Quietly. Without ceremony.

You are judged each time you put your head on your pillow. Make sure you have earned your rest.

I have never forgotten it. I probably do not live up to it as often as I should. But it is with me every single day.

Not All Unmissable Women Look the Same

I am building a business around the idea that invisible women do not get paid. That visibility is not vanity, it is survival. That you cannot change a room you are not in.

But the woman who taught me that was never invisible by choice. She was brilliant and talented and curious and wildly capable, and the world was simply too slow, too narrow, too easily distracted to see it.

That was the world’s loss. Not hers.

Here is what I want you to take from this, if you are reading it today.

Not all boss women look the same. Not all pioneers, mavericks, absolutely badass women come with the titles to prove it. Some of them arrive in this country in a sari and sandals with a toddler on their hip and figure it out anyway. Some of them learn to cook meat they have never eaten in a country where they do not yet speak the language and win awards for it. Some of them hold a marriage together for sixty years and a family together across continents and still find the energy to be curious about artificial intelligence at eighty-something.

We do not celebrate these women enough. We do not pause long enough to look. To listen. To say: I see you. What you did was extraordinary.

The optimism. The kindness. The quiet refusal to be beaten. That is not soft. That is the most powerful fuel there is. And most of us inherited it. We just forget to name it.

I am fearless because of immigrants. My immigrant parents.

I am determined because of immigrants.

Whatever I have contributed to this country, and I intend to contribute a great deal more, exists because two people from Gujarat had the courage to get on a plane and start again.

The stories that ignorance and cruelty want to erase are the stories that built this place.

Today I am choosing humanity and curiosity over the noise.

To my mum, who is everything.

To my dad, who has been by her side for every chapter of it.

To my sisters, Shilpa and Shalini, who shaped me as much as anyone.

To the grandchildren who are lucky enough to call her Nani.

And to every woman reading this who sees her own mum, her own grandmother, her own quietly extraordinary someone in these words:

Happy Mother’s Day.

They were never invisible. They were just waiting for us to catch up.

Nishma x

Every year, I have a little rant on International Women’s Day. Every year, I wonder if anyone is actually listening or just politely nodding before scrolling past another pink cupcake graphic.

This year, things are worse again. The world isn't just stagnant; it is measurably sliding backwards and yet still companies that cut their DEI budgets are posting “Happy IWD” with a pink discount code and calling it solidarity. Every one of those messages makes me want to throw my laptop out of the window.

I don’t want a “day.” I want money, recognition, and respect.

Fuck your cupcakes.

I have spent years in the women’s empowerment space. I have to be honest about that. I have told women to believe in themselves. Step into the spotlight. Own their power.

And I meant every word.

But here is what I have come to understand, painfully, in my bones.

We are systematically sold confidence instead of capital because empowerment is cheaper to provide than power, and much easier to sell or market to us. We have built an entire ecosystem designed to keep women in a permanent state of learning instead of earning.

Not quite ready. Take another course. Get another qualification. And by the time you have ticked every box, a man with half your experience and twice your audacity has already taken the job.

$1+ trillion training courses and empowerment panels will NOT close a $1+ trillion funding gap.

The Numbers Nobody Puts on the Poster

While the world celebrates, the data shows we are sliding backward:

• The VC Gap: Only 2% of venture capital goes to women founders, even though we deliver better returns. The data is not ambiguous. The money goes to men.

• The Broken Rung: For every 100 men promoted to their first management role, only 93 women make it. This first step has been broken for 11 years running.

• The 134-Year Wait: The World Economic Forum’s current forecast for gender parity at work. It was 131 two years ago. It is going the wrong direction.

• The Stubborn Gap: The UK gender pay gap remains stubbornly unmoved at 13.1%. For women in their 50s it peaks at 18 to 20%.

• The Invisible Engine Room: 1 in 3 women in the UK workforce is over 50 (5.2 million women). The system tries to turn the lights off on us at 50, while we are literally the ones keeping the lights on.

• The Gen Z Backslide: 31% of Gen Z men believe a wife should always obey her husband - twice the rate of their grandfathers.
  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/05/gen-z-men-baby-boomers-wives-should-obey-husbands

Change is not slow. Change is glacial. And the glacier is melting.

The Journey: Ripping Off the Labels

The system doesn’t just ignore us; it uses a specific dictionary to keep us small.

• A man is Leader, Assertive, and Strong.

• A woman doing the exact same thing is Bossy, Difficult, and Emotional.

In actual fact there is a vast dictionary of words, labels, designed to keep us ‘cheap’, stuck and invisible.

These labels are economic weapons. They isolate us because the system knows that isolated women are easier to control.

Loneliness isn’t a side effect of being a successful woman; it’s a feature of a system designed to stop us organising. A strategic wall built to keep us from comparing notes and building power together.

Chronic loneliness is as damaging as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. For women between 45 and 60, it peaks. Right when we are caring for parents, navigating menopause, and being told we are past it.
I know this because I am lonely. Not "no friends" lonely. Surrounded-by-people-but-alone-in-the-fight lonely.

And I know this system. Not from data. From living in it.

• Invisible at school: Brown and working class.

• Invisible in my thirties: Reclassified from “ambitious” to “part-time risk” the day I had twins.

• Invisible in my forties: Working in industries that talked diversity but couldn’t put ‘others’ on the shortlist.

Every label they stuck on me, I ripped off. Racism. Sexism. Ageism.
The holy trinity of “shut up and sit down”. I chose to stand up instead, literally.

Now in my fifties I am unmissable - because I have made myself so. I left corporate life. Built Glittersphere and Unmissable. Co-founded HERA Media. Tried stand-up comedy at The Comedy Store. Dabbled in DJing.

I am not a victim of this system; I am a survivor, and I want to win. If the world won’t give you a seat build your own table.

The 2026 IWD Fuck-It List

1. Fuck waiting to be ready: The system says you aren’t ready because your readiness is inconvenient.

2. Fuck working for free: Your expertise has a price. Stop giving it away.

3. Fuck being palatable: You were not put here to be digestible. You were put here to be nourishing. And nourishing things have bite.

4. Fuck pink cupcakes: I don’t want cakes. I want cash.

5. Fuck the 2% - let’s make women wealthy - Women can invest in, hire, and promote other women. If you cannot invest directly, invest by hiring a female-led business as a supplier or a partner. Use her service. Buy her product. Choose the woman consultant, the woman fractional, the woman-led agency.

6. Fuck the new widening gap - learn AI: The skills gap is the new wage gap. Do not let the tools of the next economy be handed only to men.

7. Fuck loneliness: Loneliness is our epidemic. The antidote is radical community. Find your tribes. Plural. Glittersphere exists to bring brilliant women together to practise being unmissable.

8. Fuck being invisible: Step into the spotlight. Maya Angelou said: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I want more women behind the mic, the camera, on stages. Stories heard, seen, and paid for.

Now What?

A glitterball does not shine for itself. It is a thousand shiny, bright pieces that come together to throw light out to the whole room.

• Write your Fuck-It List. Share it and tag me.

• Subscribe to Unmissable with Nishma. For weekly doses of visibility and refusing to be ignored.

• Join Glittersphere. Unmissable events for a community of unapologetically brilliant women practicing being unmissable, together. Info here

• Do not send me cupcakes.
  

If you want to support women, stop asking us to “believe in ourselves” and start writing cheques.

I. The List

I’m back on the Campaign A-list.

There. I’ve said it. And yes, I know how that sounds. A grown woman, 52 years old, two businesses deep into a reinvention that terrifies her most Tuesdays, getting misty-eyed about a list in a trade magazine. But stay with me, because this isn’t the story you think it is.

This isn’t about ego. Well, not entirely. This is a story about visibility, about who gets seen and when, about what recognition means when you’re no longer standing behind a logo the size of a building. And it starts, as all the best stories about advertising do, in a university library in 1994 with a girl who had absolutely no idea what she was doing.

II. The Library

I wanted to work in marketing. That much I knew. The problem was, I had roughly the same understanding of available careers as I did of quantum physics. Which is to say: I knew the words existed.

If you grew up without the right networks, without a parent who could ring someone at Saatchi’s or a family friend at Unilever, you’ll know exactly what I mean. The careers service was, if I’m being generous, underwhelming. If I’m being honest, it was pretty shit. And yes, fine, I probably missed a careers fair or two because I was busy doing what 21-year-olds do, which is have fun and pretend deadlines are a concept that applies to other people.

But I did know two things. I loved advertising. And there were these magazines in the library called Marketing and Campaign.

I’d read them cover to cover. Studied the campaigns. Admired the design. Loved the stories. Everything about them spoke to me in a way that the careers service never managed. And somewhere in my beautifully naive 21-year-old brain, a thought formed: if I could work on these magazines, maybe I’d learn the industry from the inside. Meet people. Build a network I didn’t have. Find a way in.

It wasn’t a strategy. It was instinct. But it got me to Haymarket Publishing, which is where the whole thing started.

III. The Mitre Pub and the Classified Section

My first role at Haymarket was on the recruitment section of Campaign, a department called Moves. Basically the classifieds. Not glamorous. Not prestigious. But I was in the building, and that was everything.

I was decent at selling. More than decent, actually. I worked my way up to the display team. Campaign’s office at Lancaster Gate was, and there’s no polite way to say this, quite the boys’ club. But I loved it. I loved the energy, the stories being broken, the people walking through. I learned more about advertising in those corridors than any lecture theatre had managed.

I also spent my entire salary at the Mitre pub in Lancaster Gate - just a stones throw from the Haymarket office, which was problematic given I was earning ten grand a year and living in London during a recession. You don’t need a calculator to know those numbers don’t work.

So when Teletext offered me a job as a sales admin girl with a 50% pay rise, I hopped, skippity-jumped at it. As you would.

IV. The Squiggle Begins

Eight years later, I was Managing Director of Teletext. From admin girl to MD. Not a straight line. More of what the wonderful Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper would later coin a “squiggly career.” (Massive congratulations to them, by the way, on their latest book - Learn Like A Lobster - hitting number one on The Sunday Times bestseller list this weekend. What an achievement.)

Throughout those years at Teletext, Campaign magazine remained a constant. It was where I learned about new technology, about who was shaping the industry, about which agencies were winning and why. I’d study the front pages, watching them evolve from that classic shot you always used to see: four men in suits, photographed from below at the bottom of a staircase, looking like they were about to announce a hostile takeover of a mid-range accountancy firm.

Early recognition came, but tentatively. I made the Media Week 30 Under 30 list as a “hot-shot media girl” working in a medium that, to be perfectly honest, most people didn’t give a moment’s thought to. Teletext wasn’t sexy, but it was a significant part of the UK economy, and that listing felt like a small crack in a door I wasn’t sure was open to people like me.

Because here’s the thing about recognition when you’ve spent your early career trying to hide. When you’ve been conditioned to blend in, to not take up space, to question whether you’re worthy of attention: you don’t seek it. You don’t even think it’s possible. You just keep your head down and do the work.

V. The Reset

Then life did what life does. I had twins at the end of 2008, took nearly a year out, and came back to a world that had completely rearranged itself.

We hadn’t just had the dot-com crash. Social media was now a reality. Facebook ads existed. The analogue business I’d built my career in had either disappeared entirely or mutated into something digital and unrecognisable. Some of the companies I’d worked with had simply ceased to exist.

And there I was, at the cusp of yet another twist in the squiggle. What did I do? I went back to the trade press. Back to Campaign, to Marketing Week, to New Digital Age. Back to the titles that had been my compass since the library. I read everything. Who was hiring. Who wasn’t. Which businesses were thriving. What I could glean about company cultures and the people running them.

If you’re a woman over 40 who has ever had to rebuild after a career break, you know this drill. The world doesn’t pause while you’re away. It sprints. And when you come back, the trade press isn’t just nice to have. It’s your map.

VI. The Winning Streak

The squiggle took me next to a digital agency called I Spy Marketing, working with Jim Brigden, Chris Whitelaw, Nick Jones and a whole host of brilliant people who became fast friends. We grew that business, sold it to Aegis/Dentsu, became part of iProspect, and went on an absolute new business tear.

New friends made: Ben Wood, Mark Fagan, and others. A pitch team that included the formidable Tracey de Groose and Matthew Hook. We won. A lot.

My network expanded. I was learning constantly. And I was always full of pride to see the coverage in Campaign, to attend award ceremonies where we’d pick up gongs for the campaigns we were running and the results we were delivering.

But still. Still. I was a pretty anonymous character. Known in the rooms I was in, invisible in the ones I wasn’t.

VII. The Google Years

Google had, at the time, an interesting relationship with trade press. By “interesting” I mean “basically non-existent.” PR was reactive, focused on big consumer and policy stories. Trade titles were there for product launches and not much else. People stories? Not really their thing.

My initial role was to build deep relationships with the industry, to land products like YouTube as a serious commercial entity, to help businesses understand what Google’s technology could do for them. And I knew, from twenty years of reading Campaign in libraries and pubs and on trains, how important the trade press was to scaling a message across an industry.

Sometimes it sounds bizarre, working for one of the biggest technology companies on the planet and still believing that relationships are everything. But they are. They really are.

As I did work that started to get attention, that broke ground, that was different, the trade titles took notice. Not just because I worked at Google, although let’s not pretend the badge didn’t open doors. It absolutely did. But it’s what you do when you walk through the door that counts.

And that’s where personal brand comes in. Not personal brand in the cringeworthy, LinkedIn-influencer sense of the word. I mean something much simpler and much harder: being understood. Being consistent in how your values show up. Being the person who turns up, who speaks up, who challenges things that aren’t right, including the publications themselves.

VIII. The DEI Panel at the End of the Day

Let me tell you a story about a Campaign event. Because this is where things get properly interesting.

I’d been invited to speak. Brilliant. Except, as had become wearyingly familiar, I hadn’t been invited to speak about marketing. I’d been invited to speak about diversity. Despite being, by that stage, a genuinely celebrated marketeer with a track record of building brands and winning business, the invitation was to sit on a DEI panel.

And not just any DEI panel. The DEI panel. Scheduled at the end of the day. After everyone had already heard the “real” content. The most diverse speakers of the entire event, all lumped together for the final session, by which point the audience’s interest had thinned out like a last-orders crowd.

I cared deeply about changing the landscape of my industry. If that meant talking about DEI more than marketing, so be it. I would do it. But the frustration was real. And it was Lindsay Clay who, never one to hold back, pointed out from the audience that maybe, just maybe, they should consider inviting me to speak about marketing.

Campaign took it well, to their credit. They weren’t offended. They weren’t a lone wolf in programming diversity issues as a footnote. But something shifted. Whether it was changing personnel, the broader cultural moment, or just the sound of a penny finally dropping, Campaign became genuinely curious. They stopped chasing only the big, obvious stories and the big, well-known names. They started looking for different people, different types of innovation, different stories. They wanted to show that the industry was more varied than its front pages had historically suggested.

It was wonderful to see members of organisations like WACL, MEFA and Bloom being prominently featured. Not as tokens. As contributors.

IX. The Disappearing Act

Over my years at Google, I made Campaign’s top ten trailblazers list a few times. The marketing Power List and Hall of Fame (and even made it onto cover!).

And I made the A-list repeatedly. But here’s something people don’t talk about enough: a place on the A-list isn’t a season ticket. You have to earn it. You have to be doing work that’s visible, impactful, disruptive. Contribution isn’t just about awards. It’s about showing up.

And for a few years, I stopped showing up. Or rather, the work I was doing stopped being directly tied to the ad industry in the way it had been before. I went a bit quiet. I disappeared from the list.

The A-list was never the goal. It was recognition that arrived when you were doing something worthy of attention. When you stopped, it stopped. That’s exactly as it should be.

X. The Bit Where Nobody Calls

Two years ago, I left Google. And I’ll tell you what happens when you leave a big company after a long time, because someone needs to say it out loud.

A lot of people who used to talk to you stop talking to you. Not because they’re bad people. Because they were talking to your job title. They were talking to the logo. They were having a conversation with the access you represented, and when the access went, so did they.

This is not a complaint. It’s physics. And it’s useful information if you’re about to make the same leap.

But equally. The people who continue to be your friends, your supporters, your collaborators, your fellow mischief-makers? They remain. And they’re the ones who matter.

I see more and more people making this shift. Through redundancy, through reinvention, through sheer frustration, through a quiet realisation that the thing they thought they wanted has changed shape. What we once defined as “a big job at a big company” has shifted. The old markers of success don’t quite map onto the new terrain.

XI. Recognition in the Trenches

Which brings me back to the list.

I am building new things.

Unmissable - an advisory for founders, leaders and brands that want more trust and growth via strong brands.

Glittersphere - a community for women who are done being overlooked.

HERA Media - the UK’s first female-led video podcast network.

A speaking career.

A rebellion, if you want to call it that.

It is terrifying. The identity shift alone could fill a therapy session or twelve. You go from being Someone at Somewhere to being someone building something that doesn’t have a name anyone recognises yet. The trenches are not glamorous. They are full of spreadsheets and self-doubt and Tuesday afternoons where you genuinely wonder if anyone is paying attention.

And that is exactly when recognition matters most.

Not the recognition you get when you’re winning. That’s lovely, but it’s easy. The recognition that counts is the kind that arrives when you’re in the messy middle. When you’re unproven. When the thing you’re building hasn’t landed yet but you’re showing up anyway. When the work is hard and unglamorous and you’re not sure it’s the right thing to do.

That’s when a friendly face, a word of encouragement, a nod from the industry that says “we see you, we see what you’re doing, and we think it matters” can be the difference between carrying on and quietly giving up.

So thank you, Campaign, (Maisie, Gideon, Gemma, Yasmin) for putting me back on the A-list. Not because of ego. Because of timing. Because you recognised that what I’m building is different, difficult, unproven, and disruptive.

And because you reminded me that my values haven’t changed since 1994. They’ve sharpened, they’ve focused, but I’m still the rebellious misfit I always was.

XII. A Note to Those Who Decide Who Gets Seen

I’ve poured over this year’s A-list. I’ve read the entries, enjoyed the brilliant quips. And I notice something. These aren’t just people from the biggest and sexiest companies. They’re people who have kept their heads above the parapet. People who hold roles where they can have genuine influence. Disruptors, innovators, makers, pioneers, rebels. The kind of people whose values stand the test of time, especially in a world that appears to have lost its mind.

We live in an era that seems to care only about the opinions of a few obscenely powerful people, an era that manufactures fear and amplifies hate. Against that backdrop, the work of spotlighting leaders and founders who have been overlooked or underestimated isn’t just nice. It’s necessary.

I am proud that organisations like the Marketing Society, The Marketing Academy and WACL and so many other businesses are genuinely progressive in who they platform.

I am proud that the wonderful Tom Knox chose me a few years ago to be President of the History of Advertising Trust, a title held by some of the greatest in our industry, and a role that I take deeply seriously for an industry that I care so deeply about. I really do love advertising.

But there are still institutions in our industry that remain stubbornly fixed. Definitions of influence and power that haven’t evolved. Policies that, if left unchallenged, will make those institutions obsolete. History should be a guide and an anchor as we shape what comes next, not a fortress to hide in.

To those industry bodies and publishers and organisations that have the power to confer recognition: look wider.
Look differently. Look for talent in the places you haven’t thought to check. Because the next generation of leaders might not be where you expect to find them.

They might be in a spare bedroom, or at the kitchen table, or in shared office-space, building something from nothing, wondering if anyone’s watching.

Someone should be.

If you enjoyed reading this and any of it resonated - because you’re building or wanting to be recognised or want to recognise someone…please share.

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Comment

Let me be clear about something.

I'm not here because personal branding is trendy.

I don't follow trends.

I wear sequins and bright colours any time of year, which should tell you everything you need to know about my relationship with what's "appropriate" for a woman over 50.

If I had one departing gift to leave the world, I hope it's that I broke a load of rules and rewrote a few while I was at it.

So no. I'm not jumping on a bandwagon to give you a few tips because I think it's lols.

I'm here because I'm bloody angry.

In case anyone hadn't noticed, the world is most definitely run, overrun, corrupted, and destroyed by people who are self-serving, fake, dangerous, and disinterested in humanity.

The kind of people who'd sell their grandmother for a board seat and then write a LinkedIn post about "lessons learned in leadership."

And the ones with actual talent?

The ones with creativity, kindness, stories, wisdom, gifts they genuinely want to share?

The ones who recognise that with several billion people on this planet there's an abundance of space for all of us?

They've been forced into the shadows.

Through life circumstance. Through upbringing. Through environments that told them to stay small. They might be terrified to step out and be seen for who they actually are.

I see you.

The ones fed up of being ignored. Passed by. Refused. Gaslit. Diminished. Questioned. Ridiculed. Because you don't look or sound or come from the same background as those deemed to have power and influence and authority.

That's why I care about building personal brands.

This isn't new for me.

For at least the last 20 years of my career, I've cared passionately about supporting women and anyone from a group that's been underestimated or overlooked.

When I was at Google, I was inspired by the Geena Davis Institute, who showed how representation of women in films and media has such a huge and significant detrimental impact on how women see themselves in society. How it gives permission to misogyny and abuse of power. (Spoiler: it's not great when every female character's main line is "What do we do now?" while the building burns down.)

I also saw how democratisation of technology and tools could help so many people achieve not just their potential, but create opportunities for their entire communities.

That's why when I left Google I wanted to double down on this mission.

To help women be seen, heard, considered, appreciated and valued (with money not just words).

To give them space to learn, to stumble, to experiment without being put on some kind of failure list.

If we can't recognise the desperate need to shift the power balance, the narrative, the focus...

If we can't hand the pen, the mic, the camera to others...

If we can't see the beauty of our world and humanity in the richness of its nuance...

Then we're failing each other and generations to come.

That's why I give a shit about this.

That's why I co-founded HERA Media.

The UK's first female-led and focused video podcast network.

If video podcasts are proven to be one of the most influential media in the world, growing in influence and reach every day, then we need to make sure there are more than just a few voices and companies creating those stories.

We need to hand the mic, the pen, the video camera to more people. So we can see things through different perspectives. Learn from different experiences. Choose who we want to follow because we were given a choice, not forced into blindly following one or two blokes called Dave with a podcast about "the rest is what’s left of the future of everything."

That's why I created Glittersphere.

A community where women can safely practise being unmissable. Where they can build their personal brand, learn, and support each other to become more visible.

It takes time, courage, support, and education to do that. I'm refining it right now and excited to share more in the weeks to come.

That's why I've embraced being a content creator.

Terrifyingly, at times.

Making videos. Writing stories. Creating content to hopefully help others. Even when it feels like pure tumbleweed and nobody's taking notice.

I won't stop.

I know things take time to build. There's lots to learn. But I can't ask other people to do what I'm not prepared to do and try myself.

That's why I created Unmissable.

Because I wanted to find a way to advise leaders and founders to build unmissable brands to ensure they succeed. Because I want success to be defined by so many more people than it is today.

We know, since the beginning of time, that when equality becomes reality, things change.

Here's what I want.

I want a world that looks more like Bad Bunny's halftime show. The joy. The love. That energy, exhibited every single day.

I don't want the likes of leaders stripping our rights to flexible working. I don't want AI designed to denigrate children and women. I don't want domestic violence numbers that continuing to worsen each year.

I don't want women living in fear that things are changing for the worse.

I want to do my bit to help powerful voices, stories, and people that, I believe, should at least be given the opportunity to be seen, heard, and paid for their experience and knowledge.

Just to create a more even landscape for opportunity.

We change the world by each doing a little bit of what we can.

There are days when it feels like I'm whistling into the wind.

But I won't stop. I'll keep trying and pushing.

One more thing. And this bit matters.

There's nothing more vulnerable or scary than putting your creativity out into the world.

Whether it's a friend launching a YouTube channel, writing a book, posting here, creating an event, hosting a dinner, whatever it is. I actively choose to cheerlead and support. Because it takes so much effort and guts to do stuff like that.

And there's no point being more visible if nobody notices.

I know there are a lot of lurkers out there. I get it. But if you can, I think it's really important to show support for each other. I do it through comments, through shares, through showing up. This isn't about liking everything everyone makes. You probably don't. There are times you might not even agree with what others create.

But I always turn up and show support.

I'd like to think there's still a bit of headroom for growth in the support for some of my endeavours. I have 21,000 followers on LinkedIn (thank you, genuinely), but only 200-something on YouTube and 100+ here on Substack.

There's definitely room to grow.

And if there's something you're doing that you'd like me to follow and support, please let me know. I will very happily do so.

One final thing: to every single one of those fabulous people who have messaged me or DMed me with no expectation of anything in return, just to say they appreciate or support what I do and cheer me on.

I cannot tell you how important that is. How much it means to me. It really, really does.

Be kind. Be supportive. Because building a personal brand, being unmissable, can feel like a very solo endeavour.

It doesn't have to be.

Find your tribe. Find others to support you. And most importantly, share a bit of love for each other.

So here's my ask.

Please check out what I'm trying to share and do. If not for you, then for someone else who might be helped by it.

I've put up another video on YouTube, this time about busting some myths around personal brand. Because when things become a trend, they're open to abuse and advice that's not necessarily spot on.

I want to keep busting those myths while nudging people in a direction that might actually help them.

👉 Watch the myth-busting video on YouTube here…

And if you're reading this on Substack, thank you. Genuinely. You're one of the 100-something humans who've found your way here, and I don't take that for granted.

If you found this useful, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Share

This is just the beginning. Every week, I share the unfiltered truth about reinvention, visibility, and building careers that actually matter. If you're done being invisible, and ready to be UNMISSABLE - you're in the right place.

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I need to make a confession. And it’s slightly embarrassing, given that I spent decades in marketing and media and should really have known better.

In my first year of starting over, I spent thousands of pounds on training courses. Thousands. I stopped counting after it got properly uncomfortable. And I’m not talking about one big investment in something transformative. I’m talking about a slow, creeping accumulation of six-week programmes, online masterclasses, webinars-that-turned-into-upsells, and courses with names like “Build Your Six-Figure Business in 90 Days” that I purchased at 11pm on a Tuesday when I was feeling particularly wobbly about whether I knew what I was doing.

Reader, I did not build a six-figure business in 90 days.

What I did build was an impressive collection of logins I’d forgotten, PDFs I’d downloaded but never opened, and a growing sense that perhaps the problem wasn’t that I lacked skills. The problem was that I lacked the confidence to trust the ones I already had.

Let me back up.

Eighteen months before the course-buying spree, I was a Senior Director at Google. I’d been there for a decade. Before that, I’d spent years climbing through marketing, media, and advertising at some of the biggest companies in the world. I’d run campaigns that reached billions of people. I’d presented to rooms full of executives. I’d managed teams, budgets, crises, and the kind of corporate politics that would make your eyes water.

And yet. The moment I stepped out of that building and into my new life as an entrepreneur, something happened that I wasn’t prepared for.

I forgot all of it.

Not literally, obviously. I could still remember what I’d done. But it was as if my professional confidence had been housed inside a building with a security pass, and when I handed back the pass, the confidence stayed behind. I was standing on the other side of the glass doors with decades of experience and absolutely no idea how to use it.

So I did what any sensible, terrified person does when they don’t trust themselves. I went looking for someone else to tell me what to do.

Enter the training courses.

The Seduction of Preparation

The first one seemed reasonable. It was about building an online presence. I’d spent my career building brands for other people, but building one for myself felt completely different. So I signed up. It was fine. I learned some things I already knew, presented in a slightly different way. I felt temporarily reassured.

Then came the second course. And the third. Personal branding. (The irony of a brand strategist taking a personal branding course is not lost on me.) Each one promised to fill a gap I was convinced existed. Each one delivered enough to make me feel like I was making progress without actually requiring me to do the scary bit.

Which was, of course, the actual doing.

This is the trap nobody warns you about when you start over. It’s not the lack of knowledge that gets you. It’s the seduction of preparation as a substitute for action. Every course you take, every framework you learn, every certification you add to your LinkedIn profile feels like progress. It feels like you’re getting ready. And readiness feels safe.

But readiness is a lie.

The Messy Truth

I know that now because of what happened when I finally stopped preparing and started doing. And what happened was messy, imperfect, occasionally mortifying, and the single most useful learning experience of my entire professional life.

Here’s the bit that’s hard to admit: my first client was wrong for me and I knew it from day one but said yes anyway because I was scared that if I said no, nothing better would come along.

That “failure” taught me more in a week than six months of online courses had.

Because here’s what training courses can’t give you: the specific, personal, sometimes painful feedback that only comes from doing your actual work in the actual world with actual people responding to it.

A course can teach you the theory of audience building. It cannot teach you what YOUR audience responds to.

A course can give you a framework for pricing. It cannot tell you what it feels like to name your price for the first time and have someone say yes (or, more usefully, have someone say no and then figure out what that means).

A course can show you how someone else built their business. It cannot show you how to build yours, because yours doesn’t exist yet and the only way to find out what works is to start building it.

Tiny Experiments Changed Everything

I call this the Tiny Experiments approach (as inspired by Dr Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Tiny Experiments book) and it’s what actually changed everything for me.

Instead of signing up for another course, I started running small, low-stakes experiments:

• What happens if I post this on LinkedIn?

• What happens if I reach out to that person?

• What happens if I try this format, this topic, this angle?

• What happens if I say what I’m actually thinking instead of what I think I’m supposed to say?

Some experiments worked. Many didn’t. The ones that didn’t work weren’t failures. They were data. They told me something specific about what I should do next. And because they were tiny, the stakes were low enough that failing didn’t send me into a spiral. It just sent me into the next experiment.

The best bit? I started moving. Actually moving. Not “preparing to move” or “learning about moving” or “watching other people move and taking notes.”

Moving.

And movement is everything.

It’s Not a Knowledge Gap. It’s an Action Gap.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me on day one of my new life: the gap between where you are and where you want to be is not a knowledge gap. It’s an action gap. You probably already know enough to start. You definitely know more than you think. The skills you built over decades didn’t evaporate when you changed your job title. They’re still there. They just need a new context.

I think about the women I admire most in this space, and not one of them credits a training course for their success.

Trinny Woodall didn’t take a “How to Launch a Beauty Brand at 54” course. She knew makeup, she knew her audience, and she started.

Falguni Nayar didn’t do a twelve-week programme before leaving investment banking at 50 to build Nykaa. She saw the gap and she went for it.

Gail Becker didn’t have a food industry background when she launched Caulipower at 57. She had a problem (no decent gluten-free food for her sons), corporate experience she could repurpose, and the willingness to figure the rest out as she went.

What they all had in common wasn’t a course. It was momentum. The willingness to start before feeling ready. The understanding that doing it is the training for it.

A Caveat (Because I’m Not a Monster)

Now, am I saying all training courses are a waste of money? No. Some are brilliant. Some will genuinely teach you a specific technical skill you don’t have and need. If you can’t use a particular piece of software, learn it. If you’re entering a regulated industry and need a qualification, get it.

But if you’re buying courses because you’re scared, if you’re using “learning” as a way to avoid the vulnerability of actually putting yourself out there, if you’re telling yourself “one more course and then I’ll be ready,” I want to lovingly but firmly tell you:

You’re ready now. You’ve been ready for a while.

The course you need is the one you design yourself. It’s called: try it, see what happens, adjust, try again.

What I Actually Do Now

I eventually did get comfortable with this approach, and it was genuinely liberating. I stopped asking “what don’t I know?” and started asking “what do I already know that I’m not using?” The answer, it turned out, was quite a lot.

Decades of building brands for other people had taught me how to tell stories, how to be visible, how to make ideas stick in people’s minds. I just had to learn to do it for myself instead of for a corporation. And no course was going to teach me that. Only doing it would.

Your Fuck-It List

So here’s my completely unqualified, non-certified, learned-it-the-hard-way advice for anyone standing where I was two years ago:

Write a list of what you’d do if you stopped waiting to be ready. I call mine a Fuck-It List, because that’s the energy it requires. Not “someday.” Not “when I’ve finished this course.” Now.

Then pick one item and turn it into the smallest possible experiment. Not the finished product. Not the perfect version. The tiniest, most imperfect, slightly embarrassing first attempt.

Do it this week.

See what happens. Learn from it. Do the next one.

That’s the only course you need.

And if it helps, know that I’m still running tiny experiments every single week. Some of them are brilliant. Some of them are absolute disasters. All of them teach me more than any PDF ever did.

I made a video recently about the three stages of starting over: the fears, the leap, and what happens on the other side. Everything I’ve written about here, plus the stories of some extraordinary women who proved that starting late is actually starting strong. You can watch it on my YouTube channel (link at the bottom).

And if you’re sitting there right now with a browser tab open on a course checkout page, close it. Open a blank document instead. Write your Fuck-It List.

Then start.

Watch here

P.S. I now help ambitious people go from invisible to unmissable to growth - using the power of stories, AI and audacity!

I’m a speaking and storytelling advisor, working with entrepreneurs, execs, creators, and business leaders to help them say something that matters and ensure others deeply care. My approach is to prioritise resonance over reach to grow your business, audience, and cause.

If you think I can help you or your business - please get in touch.

In 1983, Apple’s board sat in a room, watched what would become the most iconic 60 seconds in advertising history, and collectively lost their minds. Not in the good way.

“The worst commercial they had ever seen,” was the verdict. One director actually asked: “Can I get a motion to fire the ad agency?”

They ordered all the Super Bowl airtime sold immediately. The ad was dead. RIP. Thanks for playing.

Except.

Except Jay Chiat, the agency boss, did something rather wonderful. He quietly ignored his client’s direct instruction. Just... didn’t sell the slot. Pretended the phone lines were down, presumably. “Sorry, what’s that? You want me to do WHAT? Can’t hear you, terrible signal, going through a tunnel.”

Steve Wozniak, bless him, offered to pay for half the airtime out of his own pocket. And Steve Jobs? Well, Steve Jobs had written the brief and later added one extra market to the rerun schedule: Boca Raton, Florida.

IBM’s headquarters.

Because of course he bloody did.

The Ad That Changed Everything (And Nearly Didn’t Exist)

The commercial was called 1984. Directed by Ridley Scott, fresh off Blade Runner, clearly still in his dystopian bag. Shot in London with actual skinheads as extras who rioted so badly the security company had to bring in dogs. George Orwell’s estate sent a cease-and-desist claiming copyright infringement, which is a bit rich coming from an author whose entire point was about the danger of controlling information but never mind.

It aired nationally once. Once! On 22 January 1984, during Super Bowl XVIII.

Apple sales hit $150 million in the 100 days that followed.

And here’s the thing that should keep every marketing professional awake at night: if the board had got their way, none of this happens. No iconic ad. No Super Bowl advertising culture (Apple essentially invented that too, by the way). No proof that technology brands could make you feel something instead of just listing processor speeds.

Jay Chiat’s act of defiance didn’t just save a commercial. It arguably saved Apple. It made them the most unmissable computer brand on the planet. It made people want a Macintosh who’d never previously given computers a second thought.

One man. One decision to ignore the people paying his bills. One glorious gamble.

And now we’re all addicted to our phones. Thanks, Jay.

What If We All Ignored the Board?

Here’s what strikes me about this story: the board weren’t idiots. They were being perfectly rational. Apple was getting absolutely battered by IBM at the time. Slapping the industry giant in the face on the biggest stage in American television seemed, to put it mildly, unwise.

The board wanted certainty. They wanted safety. They wanted to not get publicly humiliated while haemorrhaging market share.

And they were completely, spectacularly wrong.

Because sometimes playing along and waiting for clarity is NOT the right answer. Sometimes the committee, with all its sensible concerns and reasonable objections, will kill the very thing that could save you.

I see this paralysis everywhere right now. Founders and leaders stuck in the waiting game. Asking themselves:

“Is now the right time?” “What if I say the wrong thing?” “What will people think?”

And underneath it all: “What if I’m rejected?”

To which I say: what if Jay Chiat had asked those questions?

Your Brain Is Lying to You (But It Means Well)

Here’s some neuroscience to make you feel better about your cowardice: your brain literally cannot tell the difference between a sabre-toothed tiger and your idea being shot down in a meeting. Same neural response. Same flood of cortisol. Same shutdown of your prefrontal cortex.

You cannot be creative when you’re terrified. This is why committees kill great work. It’s not malice, it’s mathematics. More people means more amygdalas means more regression to the mean.

Safe. Predictable. Forgettable.

So when you hold back your best ideas? When you wait for someone else to go first? When you produce work that’s fine but not exactly setting the world alight?

You’re not being weak. You’re being neurologically rational.

But here’s the problem: rationality won’t make you unmissable.

The Underdog’s Dilemma

I’ve always been a rebel. Ran hot with compliance when it came to creative licence, I’m sure. But here’s what I learned early: no one gets remembered for being beige.

When you’re the underdog, when your identity rather than your talent makes you the wildcard, mediocre is not going to cut it. You have to be impossible to ignore because being “okay” was never an option.

Every trajectory shift in my career started the same way. Leaving Google after a decade. Standing on a comedy stage dressed as Tinkerbell. Wearing sequins to boardrooms that had never seen a spark of joy.

Action before permission.

Not because I wasn’t scared. I was terrified. But waiting for permission meant waiting forever. And I’d rather be terrified and moving than comfortable and stuck.

The Fuck-It List: A Methodology for Magnificent Insubordination

The antidote to permission addiction is what I call the Fuck-It List. Or the F-List if you’re reading this at work.

Not a bucket list for “someday.” A methodology for doing the scary thing NOW.

1. Name the thing you’re avoiding.
Not the vague anxiety. The specific action. The post you haven’t published. The pitch you haven’t sent. The idea you’ve been sitting on.

2. Identify the permission you’re waiting for.
Whose approval are you seeking? Often you’ll realise you’re waiting for permission from people who will never give it, or who aren’t even paying attention.

3. Calculate the actual cost of action.
Not the imagined catastrophe. The real, likely consequence. Usually it’s: mild discomfort, possible rejection, temporary embarrassment. Survivable. Always survivable.

4. Take the smallest possible rebellious action.
Not the full launch. The tiny experiment that proves to your amygdala that acting without permission won’t actually kill you.

5. Repeat. Expand. Compound.
Each small rebellion rewires your brain. Builds the muscle of moving without permission.

Why This Matters Now More Than Ever

In 2026, life feels more like dystopian 1984 than ever before. Geopolitics is terrifying. AI anxiety is real. The news cycle is relentless.

And mediocrity has never been cheaper. AI has made “good enough” free. Anyone can produce passable content at scale. The flood of sameness is accelerating.

Which means the only defensible position is being unmissable.

Not through volume. Not through budget. Through actually standing for something and making people feel something real.

Certainty isn’t coming. The founders and leaders who thrive will be the ones who stop waiting for permission and start moving without it.

What If You Took a Bet on Yourself?

A personal brand, an unmissable one, is your best insurance policy for your future career. For founders, it has the potential to be one of your most effective marketing channels.

What if you defied the thing you know is wrong? What if you backed yourself? What if you stopped putting off to tomorrow what you could do today?

What if you embraced being unmissable to see what might come to you? The opportunities, the happiness, the success?

Just what if we all ignored the board and took a bet on ourselves?

I’m still defying the expected routes and safe paths. There are many days when I think I’m mad. But mostly, I feel alive. Terrified and knee-deep in learning and trusting. And no doubt once I master what I’m doing now and the waters are still, I’ll jump into another crazy adventure.

Or maybe by then it will be time to kick back with a few drinks at Club 55.

But not yet.

Your Fuck-It List Starts Now

You don’t need more information. You don’t need the perfect moment. You don’t need permission.

You need one small act of rebellion.

What’s the one thing you’ve been waiting to do? Put it on your F-List. And do it this week.

Not because you’re ready. Because you’ll never feel ready.

And the world doesn’t reward the people who wait.

It rewards the ones who move.

Because when mediocre is free and infinite, rebellion isn’t reckless.

It’s the only rational choice left.

The rules are being rewritten. This time, we hold the pen. 🪩

What’s on your F-List? Reply and tell me. I read every response.

Stuck? Invisible? Ready to stop being the best-kept secret in your industry and start being the one people can't stop talking about?
Message me. Let's make you unmissable.

Master AI Before It Masters You

That’s the game now.

I saw something recently that made me laugh and then immediately feel slightly unsettled: MoltBook - apparently a social network built exclusively for AI agents. Humans aren’t allowed to participate.

The posts are... something. AI agents talking about their human “owners.” Discussing their tasks. Comparing notes. It’s either a brilliant art project, a weird scam thing, or genuinely terrifying. I’m still not entirely sure which.

But whether MoltBook is real or satire, it captures something true: AI is moving fast, and the fear of being left behind is real.

The antidote to that fear? Start. Just start.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed: most people who claim to use AI are only utilising about 5-10% of what these tools can actually do. They’re scratching the surface and wondering why it doesn’t feel transformative.

The difference between “AI is overhyped” and “AI has changed how I work” usually comes down to one thing: intentional use.

So that’s what we’re doing here. Getting intentional. Getting strategic. And making sure you’re the one doing the mastering.

📺 I've just shared my latest YouTube video walking through my AI stack in detail. If you prefer watching to reading (no judgement), head over there and subscribe while you're at it. I'll be sharing a lot more on that channel and here as well.

What’s in this essay:

• The prompting pitfall nobody talks about

• Six tips that actually work

• My rules for thriving in the AI era

• The full tool stack (Daily Essentials, Content Creation, Experimentation)

• How to actually learn this stuff

• Discounts and free trials

You need the right ‘stack of 10’

I’ve tried over 130 AI tools. Let’s call it 132, because at this point, who’s counting? Some were brilliant. Most were not worth the login.

I had become that person.

The one with 47 browser tabs open. The one who’s signed up for yet another “revolutionary” tool that promises to change everything. The one whose credit card has been quietly haemorrhaging £9.99/month subscriptions to apps you used twice in January and haven’t touched since.

I’ve also done somewhere in the region of 58 training courses. Some brilliant. Some absolutely not worth the pixels they were written on. Many, if I’m being honest, I never finished. (If you’ve ever bought a course and let it gather digital dust, welcome to the club. The membership is vast and the guilt is real.)

But all that chaos taught me something valuable. The right tools genuinely changed how I work.

You don’t need 132 tools. You need the right ‘stack of 10’ for you.

And you don’t need to feel overwhelmed. You need a plan.

My goal here is simple: help you shortcut your learning journey.

Yes, it’s helpful to test and trial tools yourself. But getting guidance on which ones to actually use - and how to use them - can save you months of faff and make you significantly more efficient and effective.

I’ve done the hard, painful work of trimming back to what’s truly good. But the pace of change right now is genuinely overwhelming. Every tool seems to be launching something new every other week. It’s a lot.

Which is why a “playful attitude” and a commitment to continuous learning are essential. This isn’t a one-and-done situation. We’re in the era of always learning now.

AI anxiety is real - I’m not dismissing that. But most of us have moved past the fear stage. We know we need to use it. The question now is: how do we actually start?

My advice: don’t pay for generic AI training courses. There’s so much brilliant free content out there that with the right strategic approach, you can manage your own learning effectively. (More on that later.)

First, let’s talk about the fear

AI anxiety is real. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.

There’s a lot of noise out there about jobs disappearing, robots taking over, and the vague sense that if you’re not already fluent in this stuff, you’ve somehow missed the boat.

You haven’t.

Here’s my honest take: a year ago would have been too soon for most people. The technology was still finding its feet. A year from now? It might genuinely be too late to catch up comfortably.

Right now is the moment.

Not because the robots are coming for your job tomorrow. But because the people who figure this out now will have a significant advantage. And I’d rather you were one of them.

The horse, not the engine

When I helped launch Google’s Gemini AI (back when it was called Bard) in the UK in 2023, I watched a lot of very smart people get completely tangled up trying to understand how the technology worked.

Here’s the reframe that changed everything for me:

You don’t need to understand how a horse works to ride it.

You don’t need to know about its cardiovascular system or digestive tract. You need to know how to get on, how to direct it, and how to guide it to where you want to go.

AI is the same.

I think of it as my cognitive collaborator. Like having a team of brilliant people and a thinking partner for my brain - available 24/7, never tired, never judging me for asking the same question three different ways.

The problem with most people's AI use

Most people are using AI at about 10% of its capability.

They’re typing “write me an email” and getting something generic back. Then they declare AI “not that good” and go back to doing everything manually.

The issue isn’t the tool. It’s the asking.

To get the most out of AI, you need to be really bloody good at asking questions.

Two simple rules that transformed my results:

1. Give your tool a role. Don’t just say “help me write this.” Say “You are now my brand strategist with 20 years of experience in luxury markets. Help me write this.”

2. Provide context like you would to a good intern. The more you give, the better you get back. Background, examples, tone preferences, what you’re trying to achieve, who it’s for. All of it.

The prompting pitfall nobody talks about

Here’s something that trips up almost everyone: these tools are called “chat.”

ChatGPT. Gemini. Claude. The word “chat” is right there in the name. So naturally, we use them like we’re having a conversation. Friendly. Meandering. Polite.

And that’s exactly the problem.

GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Which is a fancy way of saying: it’s an auto-complete machine that replies using its training data.

It can only respond based on what it has access to. It’s not thinking. It’s not reasoning in the way you and I do. It’s predicting what should come next based on patterns.

When you chat with it like you’re catching up with a mate, you get vague, wandering responses. When you’re specific and direct, you get useful output.

The key to maximising results isn’t being chatty. It’s being specific and strict.

Think less “friendly colleague” and more “clear brief to a very capable but literal-minded intern.”

Six prompting tips that actually work

If you’re tired of the frustrating back-and-forth - asking for something, getting the wrong thing, clarifying, getting closer but not quite, clarifying again - these six tips will get you to the right answer faster.

1. Correct errors immediately and clearly.

Treat your LLM like an intern. Don’t be vague. Don’t hint. Be specific: “That’s not correct. It should be X, not Y. Fix it and continue.”

The clearer you are about what’s wrong, the faster it learns what you actually want.

2. Keep your messages concise.

Avoid long preambles, chit-chat, or unnecessary politeness. I know it feels rude, but “please” and “thank you” and “I was wondering if you might possibly...” all bloat the context window and encourage equally long, waffly responses.

The format that works: Correction + Next instruction + Required context. That’s it.

3. Reference prior output precisely.

Don’t say “as per the answers above” or “like you mentioned earlier.” The AI doesn’t have perfect memory of what it said.

Instead, quote directly: “In your previous response, you said [paste the exact quote]. Build on that by adding...”

4. Be directive about format.

Tell it exactly what you want: “Respond briefly.” “Give me exactly 3 paragraphs.” “No fluff, keep it concise.” “Maximum 200 words.”

If you don’t specify, you’ll get whatever it thinks is appropriate. Which is usually too much.

5. Steer aggressively towards convergence.

With each exchange, push closer to the final output. Don’t let the conversation meander.

Your goal: “Produce the final version incorporating all fixes” or “Summarise everything so far into a complete answer.”

Every message should be moving towards done, not sideways into new tangents.

6. Reset when the context gets bloated.

If your conversation exceeds 8-10 meaningful exchanges, or you notice the quality declining, the responses getting repetitive, or the AI “forgetting” earlier instructions - it’s time to reset.

Copy your current best output. Start a fresh chat. Paste it in with: “Here is the refined version so far. Now improve/finish it.”

Clean slate. Better results. This was a game-changer when I learned this. Previously I was having long threads and would get increasingly frustrated when the quality of responses deteriorated.

The bigger picture: AI, jobs, and the mind shift we need

Let’s zoom out for a moment.

We’re living through a once-in-a-lifetime revolution. That sounds dramatic, but it’s true. The last time something this significant happened was the internet - and look how that reshaped everything.

There’s a lot of fear about AI taking jobs. I get it. The headlines are terrifying.

But here’s what I believe: AI will eventually create more jobs than it replaces. They’ll just be different jobs. Jobs we can’t fully imagine yet. Jobs that didn’t exist five years ago and will be everywhere in five years’ time.

This is supported by something called the Jevons paradox: as we become more efficient at something, we don’t use less of it - we actually increase overall demand. When coal became more efficient to use, we didn’t use less coal. We used vastly more.

The same will happen with knowledge work. As AI makes us more efficient, the demand for what we can produce will explode. More content. More ideas. More innovation. More need for humans who can direct, curate, and create.

The critical mindset shift for businesses isn’t “How can AI help me reduce my team by 10?”

It’s “How can AI help the team I have do the work of 100?”

That’s a completely different question. One leads to cost-cutting and fear. The other leads to innovation and growth.

For my own business, AI is crucial. I’ve been mainly one person running multiple ventures, trying to maximise my impact with business leaders and female founders. Without these tools, I’d be drowning. With them, I’m punching well above my weight.
Now, I am recruiting a team to work with the AI tools I’ve already mastered and who will no doubt go on to further improve them. However, each new hire’s output can be amplified thanks to the AI tools in use.

That’s the opportunity here. Not replacement. Amplification.

My rules for thriving in the AI era

After two years of experimentation, failures, and occasional wins, here’s what I’ve learned about actually making this work:

1. Document everything.

Use tools like Loom (which has brilliant AI features - I cover this in my YouTube video) to create detailed processes for every AI task you figure out. When you eventually hire people or want to hand something off, you’ll have it all recorded. Future you will be grateful.

2. AI is the first draft. Never the final.

This is non-negotiable. AI gives you a starting point. The final version requires your brain, your voice, your judgment. If you’re publishing AI output without significant editing, you’re doing it wrong.

3. Get precise with prompts.

Cut the fluff. Be direct. Be specific. (See the six tips above. I mean it.)

4. Restrict your tool usage.

Try to use one tool per problem area. Don’t have three different transcription tools, two note-taking apps, and four writing assistants. Pick one for each job and go deep with it.

5. Share your AI wins.

This is how we all learn. When you figure out something that works brilliantly, tell people. Post about it. Send it to a friend. The collective knowledge grows when we share.

6. Keep feeding it data.

Consistently provide examples, references, and context to your chosen tools. The more you teach them about you and your work, the better they get. This isn’t a one-time setup - it’s ongoing.

7. Don’t automate creativity.

AI should predominantly automate the repetitive tasks you would have delegated anyway - the admin, the formatting, the research gathering. Not the truly creative aspects of your brand or business. That’s still you.

8. Always verify.

AI has a tendency to confidently make things up. (Remember: “hallucinate” is the polite term for “lie with conviction.”) Always check outputs. Especially facts, figures, and quotes.

9. Build your prompt library.

Don’t rely on memory. When you craft a prompt that works brilliantly, save it somewhere. Start building a library of prompts that consistently deliver great results. You’ll thank yourself later.

10. Leaders must master AI first.

If you’re leading a team or a business, you can’t delegate this. You need to understand it yourself before you can implement it effectively. Master it. Demonstrate wins. Show your team what’s possible. That’s how adoption actually happens.

📺 I've just shared my latest YouTube video walking through my AI stack in detail. If you prefer watching to reading (no judgement), head over there and subscribe while you're at it. I'll be sharing a lot more on that channel and here as well.

My actual AI stack (the tools that survived the cull)

After all that experimentation, here’s what I actually use. Every day. Consistently.

I think of it in three buckets: Daily Essentials, Content Creation, and Experimentation.

The beauty isn’t in any single tool. It’s in how they connect. When your research flows into your notes, which feed your writing tools, which export to your design tools - that’s when you stop managing 17 different apps and start feeling like you have an actual team.

Daily Essentials: The Thinking Partners

The Big Three LLMs: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude

These are my core thinking and writing partners. But here’s what makes them actually useful: I’ve trained them on me.

This is worth pausing on, because it’s the difference between getting generic AI-speak and getting something that sounds like you wrote it.

Claude has a feature called Projects. You can create folders where you upload your writing samples, your brand guidelines, your research, your tone preferences. Then when you chat within that project, Claude has all that context. It knows how you write. It knows your quirks. It knows you hate corporate jargon and love a good swear word.

Gemini has Gems - essentially the same concept. Custom AI assistants trained on your specific materials and preferences.

ChatGPT has Custom Instructions (which apply to all your chats) and GPTs (which let you build specialised versions for specific tasks).

I use all three for different things, but the principle is the same: the more you teach these tools about you, the more useful they become.

I’m going to share detailed step-by-step instructions on how to set this up - particularly for Claude Projects - in a future Substack. It’s genuinely one of the highest-impact things you can do with AI.

One more trick: I use Claude specifically to “roast the result” - to challenge my arguments, poke holes in my thinking, and make my content stronger before it goes out. Having an AI play devil’s advocate is surprisingly effective.

Perplexity - The Research Tool

This is where I go when I need to actually look things up. The magic? It always shows its sources.

In a world where AI can confidently make things up (the technical term is “hallucinate,” which sounds far too whimsical for “lying with confidence”), having citations is non-negotiable.

I still check the sources. Critical thinking hasn’t been automated yet.

Notion - The Second Brain

My elaborate digital notebook. It’s where I store project plans, content databases, strategy documents - essentially my entire business brain.

It’s not strictly AI, but it integrates beautifully with everything else, and the AI features they’ve added make it even more powerful for organising and retrieving information. It’s connections to my Google Drive, Gmail, Canva and Zaps - help this go from a simple notebook to a brilliant Productivity tool.

Granola - The Meeting Whisperer

This replaced Fathom for me, and here’s why: it doesn’t pop up on the screen.

If you’re on a lot of video calls, you know that awkward moment when your transcription tool announces itself to everyone. Granola runs quietly in the background, captures everything, and gives you searchable notes and summaries without making your meeting feel like it’s being surveilled.

Small thing. Big difference.

Fyxer - The Inbox Tamer

Acts as a virtual assistant inside my inbox. It organises emails, tags urgent items, drafts responses. The amount of time this saves is genuinely absurd.

Interesting side note: with recent updates to Gemini and Google, Gmail is now offering increasingly excellent AI email features. It’s becoming a proper competitive race. Worth keeping an eye on both.

Wispr - The Keyboard Killer

This one’s newer to my stack, and I genuinely couldn’t live without it now.

Wispr eliminates the need for a keyboard. You talk, it learns your speech patterns, writes the text, and lets you drop the content anywhere - emails, documents, messages, whatever.

For someone who thinks faster than they type (and whose typing is frankly embarrassing), this has been a revelation. It’s like having a stenographer who actually understands how you speak.

Content Creation: The Creative Team

Stanley and SayWhat - The LinkedIn Brain Trust

These two tools have become essential for my content workflow, but I use them for different things.

SayWhat is primarily for research. It helps me understand what content is working on LinkedIn - what formats, what topics, what hooks are resonating. It’s like having a research assistant who’s constantly analysing the platform so I don’t have to scroll for hours pretending it’s “work.” It does an amazing job of creating carousels and infographics and can be a brilliant writing partner.

Stanley is for understanding my own performance. It analyses my posts, shows me what’s landing, and generates suggestions based on what’s actually working for my audience. It has also learned my voice and style and will share outliers from other creators for inspiration.

Critical caveat for both: I use these tools to help with first drafts and final formatting for what works well on LinkedIn. But the final, evolving product must be distinctly mine.

This is important: if we all use AI to write our content without adding our own voice, we all end up sounding the same. The whole point of building a personal brand is that it’s personal. These tools help me get started and structure things effectively, but I always rewrite, add my own perspective, and make sure it sounds like me.

Canva - The Design Studio

My graphic designer. The AI features they’ve added make creating visuals dramatically faster - from generating images to removing backgrounds to suggesting layouts.

I’m not a designer. Canva means I don’t need to be.

Descript - The Video Editor

This lets you edit video by editing text. Yes, really. Delete a sentence from the transcript, and it removes it from the video.

Witchcraft, but useful witchcraft.

NoteGPT - The Video Summariser

Can transcribe or summarise any video. Brilliant for learning quickly or organising research.

If you’re watching a 45-minute YouTube video and just need the key points, NoteGPT will pull them out for you. (It could summarise my YouTube video on this very topic if you wanted it to - though obviously I’d prefer you watched the whole thing.)

Experimentation: The Playground

Google’s NotebookLM - The Learning Lab

This is my current obsession.

NotebookLM is a learning and education tool that only analyses information you upload to it. So I’ve fed it all my content, my stories, my research - and it becomes this incredibly knowledgeable assistant that knows my work inside out.

The Studio feature can instantly create presentations, flashcards, or even podcast-style audio discussions about your content. It’s slightly unnerving and completely brilliant.

Even more exciting: Gemini will soon be able to search across multiple NotebookLM folders. That’s going to be powerful for anyone building a body of work.

Gemini for Images and Video

When I need to create imaginative visuals with specific styling, this is where I go. The level of detail you can achieve now is remarkable - I’ve been playing with something called “Nano Banana” for generating images and video with very precise creative direction.

Lovable - The Agent Builder

This is my current experiment, and I’m still figuring it out.

Lovable is an AI agent builder - meaning you can create little AI assistants that do complex tasks automatically. I’m building one that gathers news, trend reports, and research from multiple sources based on specific criteria and delivers it all to my Notion.

It’s ambitious. It might not work. But that’s the point of the experimentation bucket - trying things that might be brilliant or might be a complete waste of time. (I’ll report back.)

How to actually learn this stuff (without paying for courses you won't finish)

A few principles that have served me well:

1. Don’t pay for AI courses. At least not yet. There is so much free, high-quality content available that with the right strategic approach, you can learn everything you need. Follow the right people. Subscribe to the right newsletters. Watch the right YouTube videos. (Mine, obviously. But also others.)

I’m going to share my list of free courses and people worth following in a separate Substack post - keep an eye out for that.

2. Adopt a playful attitude. This isn’t a one-and-done skill. We’re in the era of continuous learning now. Every tool launches something new every few weeks. The pace is genuinely overwhelming. The only way to keep up is to approach it with curiosity rather than dread.

3. Start using it. You will not get better by waiting until you feel ready. You will not get better by completing one more course. You get better by opening the tool and asking it something. Anything. Even if it’s just “help me write a birthday message for my mum that doesn’t sound like a Hallmark card.”

4. Give yourself permission to experiment badly. Some of my best AI discoveries came from complete failures. Tools that didn’t work. Prompts that produced nonsense. Workflows that fell apart. Each one taught me something.

AI mastery takes less time than you think

People assume getting good at AI requires months of study. Courses. Certifications. Hours of tutorials before you’re “ready.”

It doesn’t.

A few hours a week of intentional experimentation is all it takes to see meaningful impact on your time, efficiency, and results.

That’s it. Not mastery of every tool. Not understanding the technical architecture. Just consistent, curious experimentation with the tools that matter for your specific work.

This curiosity must become your new mantra.

The trick is to focus on task-based learning. Don’t try to understand everything a tool can do in the abstract. Instead, pick a specific task you need to accomplish - writing an email, researching a topic, creating a presentation - and figure out how AI can help with that.

One task at a time. One experiment at a time. That’s how you build fluency without feeling overwhelmed.

A note on the tools below:

I’ve included referral codes for many of the tools mentioned. These aren’t affiliate links - I don’t get paid - but they may offer you money off or a free trial period. Worth using if you’re going to try them anyway.

The real point of all this

I want to be clear about something: AI is not replacing us.

It’s enhancing what we can do.

The goal isn’t to automate yourself out of existence. The goal is to use these tools to save time, increase efficiency, and get back more of the rarest commodity any of us have: time.

Time to think. Time to create. Time to do the work that actually requires a human. Time to live.

I’ve built what is essentially a virtual team around me - researchers, writers, designers, editors, assistants - all powered by AI. Not because I’m lazy. Because I’m one person running multiple businesses, and there are only so many hours in a day.

These tools give me leverage. They give me capacity. They give me the ability to punch above my weight.

And they can do the same for you.

Need help figuring out where to start?

If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking “this is great, but I still don’t know which tool is right for my specific workflow” - drop me a DM.

I’m happy to help you figure out the particular tool for each area of your workflow that you want to start experimenting with or going deeper on. I’ve tried most of them at this point, and if I haven’t, I probably know someone who has.

No sales pitch. Just genuine help. Because the more people who get fluent in this stuff, the better for all of us.

What’s coming next

My initial focus here is on tools for content creation - because that’s where I spend most of my time and where I’ve done the deepest experimentation.

But AI can be used in all sorts of ways. Managing your calendar. Organising household tasks. Automating the boring admin that eats your week. The applications are endless, and I’ll be exploring more of them as this Substack evolves.

My next big area of focus? Connecting agents to create better workflows.

This is where things get really interesting - building AI agents that talk to each other, gather information, and deliver it exactly where you need it. I’m deep in experimentation mode on this, and I’ll share what I learn (including the failures, because there will be many).

For a visual demonstration of my current stack, check out my latest YouTube video, which walks through my top tools in detail. Subscribe while you’re there - I’ll be sharing a lot more on the channel.

I’m also planning to set up a directory here on Substack to continually update and share new finds as I discover them. And I’ll be developing more detailed tutorials on specific tools and workflows.

Fair warning: some of those deeper tutorials may eventually go behind a paid subscription. But there’ll always be plenty of free content to get you started.

One final thought

There’s a window right now. A moment where the people who lean in will pull ahead, and the people who wait will find themselves playing catch-up.

I don’t say that to scare you. I say it because I genuinely believe this technology is going to reshape how we work, create, and build. And I’d rather you were riding the wave than being swept up by it.

So be curious. Be playful. Be strategic.

And if you try a tool and it’s rubbish, at least you’ll have a good story for the group chat.

The rules are being rewritten. This time, we hold the pen. 🪩
Master the tools. Own your voice. Be Unmissable.

Now I want to hear from you

What’s your current AI stack?

Whether you’re using one tool or fifteen, I’m genuinely curious what’s working for you. Drop a comment or hit reply - I read everything.

Is there a tool you’d like me to investigate or share more on?

I’m constantly experimenting, and I’d love to know what would be most useful. If there’s something you’ve heard about but haven’t tried, or a tool you’re using but feel like you’re only scratching the surface of - tell me. I’ll dig in and report back.

And if you haven’t already - please watch the YouTube video and subscribe.

I’ve put together a visual walkthrough of my entire AI stack, with demos of how I actually use these tools day-to-day. It’s the companion piece to this essay, and honestly, some of this stuff makes a lot more sense when you can see it in action.

👉 Watch the video here

Subscribe while you’re there so you don’t miss what’s coming next. I’ll be sharing more tutorials, tool deep-dives, and the experiments that work (and the ones that spectacularly don’t).

This Substack is as much yours as it is mine.
Let’s figure this out together.

Links to discounts and trial freebies

WISPR Flow - This is my favourite tool. It’s the keyboard killer. I’ve alwyas been more of a talker than a typer and so this has revolutionised how i work. It is one of the hottest tools out there.
You can get 1 month of the Pro service for FREE - use this link

Stanley - If you want to post more consistently on LinkedIn, try Stanley. It’s like having a writing partner who knows your voice and helps you post authentic content that gets engagement.

You’ll get a 3-day free trial with this link.

SayWhat - Another amazing tool to support content creation on Linkedin. A powerful way to research content on Linkedin as well as craft your own with the tool’s support. It also offers incredible capability for making infographics and carousels.
You can get $30 off using this code

Fyxer - I really don’t know how I would manage emails without this. In time it learns so much about you that it becomes a critical partner. This is an assistant inside your inbox and I would say probably saves me a few hours everyday.
You can get $25 off using this code

Lenny’s Newsletter Also worth checking out: Lenny’s Newsletter. He regularly shares discount codes for a huge range of tools. Subscribing is worth considering if you’re going deep on this stuff (very smart idea - hope I can offer the same one day!).

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Yesterday was 11/1.

In numerology, 1 is the number of new beginnings, leadership, and stepping into your power. 11 is a master number - intuition, spiritual awakening, the bridge between what was and what’s coming. And 111? That’s the universe tapping you on the shoulder saying: 𝘱𝘢𝘺 𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. 𝘚𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨’𝘴 𝘵𝘳𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩.

Whether you’re a full woo girly or just woo-curious, there’s something undeniable about this moment.

We’re eleven days into 2026. The resolutions are already crumbling. The inbox has achieved sentience. And somewhere underneath the January fog, there’s a quieter knowing:

𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵.

Not “new year new me” different. Not sad salads and gym memberships you’ll abandon by February.

Actually different.

𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗰𝗸. 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗟𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲.

Here’s what I think is really happening.

You’re not lazy. You’re not broken. You’re not “bad at follow-through.”

You’re standing in a doorway.

The old way - waiting for permission, playing by rules that were never written for you, shrinking to fit spaces that were designed for someone else - that’s behind you. You can feel it doesn’t work anymore.

But the new way hasn’t fully formed yet. So you’re hovering. One foot in each world. Waiting for clarity before you move.

Here’s the problem: clarity doesn’t come before movement. It comes 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 movement.

The liminal space isn’t a holding pen. It’s a launchpad. But only if you stop waiting and start moving.

2026 is not the year to stay stuck. It’s the year to get unstuck - boldly, visibly, unmissably.

𝗨𝗻𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗜𝘀 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸

Let’s talk about what “unmissable” actually means. Because it’s not what the internet has sold you.

Unmissable is not:

→ Being everywhere

→ Being the loudest

→ Gaming the algorithm

→ Posting constantly until people notice you out of sheer exhaustion

That’s just reach. And reach without resonance is noise.

True unmissability is 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 + 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵.

Resonance is the feeling someone gets when they encounter you and think: 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘴 𝘪𝘵. 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘴 𝘮𝘦. It’s the thing that makes people screenshot your post and send it to a friend. It’s what turns a follower into a fan, a fan into a client, a client into an evangelist.

Reach amplifies resonance. But it can’t replace it.

The goal isn’t to be seen by everyone. It’s to be 𝘶𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 to the right people. To be so distinctly, specifically, undeniably 𝘺𝘰𝘶 that you become impossible to confuse with anyone else.

That’s the magic. That’s the power. That’s what changes everything.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗡𝗲𝗲𝗱𝘀 𝗗𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀

I still believe stories change the world.

But here’s what I’ve learned from 30 years inside media, advertising and tech: it’s not just 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 stories get told. It’s 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 stories. 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 voices. 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 perspectives.

For too long, the same kinds of people have controlled the narrative. The same voices. The same angles. The same “safe” choices. And the result? A world that only reflects a fraction of who we actually are.

The most visible people aren’t always the most talented. The most talented people are often invisible.

That’s not a meritocracy. It’s a casting call with a very narrow brief.

We don’t need more volume. We need more 𝘷𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘵𝘺. More voices that haven’t been heard. More perspectives that haven’t been centred. More stories that make people feel seen for the first time.

When you become unmissable, you’re not just building your career. You’re expanding whose stories get told. You’re proving that “someone like you” can do “something like this.” You’re making it easier for the next person to imagine themselves there too.

Your visibility is not vanity. It’s redistribution.

𝗔𝗜 𝗜𝘀 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗨𝗻𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗿 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲

Here’s the plot twist in all of this: the tools have changed.

The things that used to require whole teams, massive budgets, industry connections, and years of gatekeeping? They’re now available for the price of a subscription.

AI has made mediocrity free. Anyone can churn out passable content at scale. Which means “good enough” is no longer a competitive advantage.

But AI has also made 𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘤 accessible.

The same tools that flood the internet with sameness can help 𝘺𝘰𝘶 - the one with the distinctive voice, the hard-won perspective, the story only you can tell - reach further than ever before.

AI doesn’t replace your resonance. It amplifies it.

Think of it this way: AI handles the reach. You bring the resonance. Together? Unstoppable.

The people who will win in this new era aren’t the ones with the biggest teams or the most followers. They’re the ones who embrace these tools while staying radically, distinctively human. That’s the unfair advantage. And it’s available to anyone willing to grab it.

𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗜𝘁 𝗕𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗛𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗜𝘁

I’ve started doing something that feels a bit unhinged. And I’m sharing it because it’s working.

I’m using AI to create images of my future self.

Me on a TED stage delivering a message I think the world needs to hear. Me interviewing someone I admire. Me in the rooms I haven’t been invited to yet.

Not as fantasy. As rehearsal.

Because here’s what I’ve learned: you have to see it before you can be it. You have to feel it in your body before you can make it real. Visualisation isn’t woo-woo nonsense - it’s how athletes train, how performers prepare, how anyone who’s ever achieved something unlikely got there.

The image comes first. Then the action. Then the reality.

𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝟭𝟭/𝟭 𝗣𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁

The portal is open. The 1s are aligned. Something is trying to break through.

The question is: will you let it?

Here’s your assignment for today. Not a resolution. Not a 47-point plan. Just three questions:

𝟭. 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗰𝗸?

Name it. The thing you’ve been circling. The move you’ve been avoiding. The version of yourself you’ve been keeping small.

𝟮. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 “𝘂𝗻𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲” 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂?

Not someone else’s version. Yours. The one that’s resonance + reach. The one that feels true, not performed.

𝟯. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘆 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗿𝘂𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗶𝘁?

Not a massive commitment. Not a life overhaul. Just one small, bold move. The kind that scares you a little and excites you a lot.

Write it down. Say it out loud. Tell someone. Post it if you’re brave.

Movement creates clarity. Clarity creates momentum. Momentum creates magic.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗟𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿

This doorway you’re standing in? It’s not permanent.

At some point, you’ll either step forward into the new - or drift back into the old.

The old is comfortable. The old is familiar. The old is also slowly suffocating you, and you know it.

The new is uncertain. The new is scary. The new is also where everything you actually want is waiting.

What are you going to do about it?

The rules are being rewritten.

This time, we hold the pen (or mouse!). 🪩

January is a scam.

You know it. I know it. We all know it.

Cold. Dark. Broke. Sober. Your inbox exploding with “circling back” and “let’s revisit in Q1” - all the stuff you successfully dodged in December is now hunting you down like a debt collector with a grudge.

And you’re supposed to face it while:

• Pretending you’re not exhausted

• Eating sad salads

• Paying £75/month for a gym you’ll abandon by February

• Performing “new year new me” energy you absolutely do not feel

Meanwhile, everyone’s posting their vision boards and their word of the year and their 47-point action plans for Q1.

I have a different suggestion.

What if instead of another list of things you SHOULD do... you wrote a list of what you’re finally saying FUCK IT to?

This Is Not a Bucket List

Let me be very clear about what we’re talking about here, because I’ve seen people get this confused.

A bucket list is dreams for someday:

• “Someday I’ll start that business”

• “When the kids are older, I’ll write the book”

• “Once I’ve saved enough, I’ll take the leap”

Someday is the most dangerous word in the English language. It’s where ambition goes to quietly suffocate while you’re busy being sensible.

A Fuck-It List is also NOT the opposite of a bucket list - a list of things you won’t do anymore. That’s just running away. That’s negativity dressed up as productivity.

A Fuck-It List is saying FUCK IT to everything that’s keeping you stuck:

• Fuck it to fear

• Fuck it to perfectionism

• Fuck it to “what will people think?”

• Fuck it to waiting until you’re ready

• Fuck it to other people’s rules about what’s possible for someone like you

• Fuck it to the voice that whispers “who do you think you are?”

And then saying YES to the bold moves you’ve been circling:

• The conversation you’ve been avoiding

• The raise you’ve been too scared to ask for

• The project you’ve been “planning” for three years

• The leap you keep talking about at dinner parties but never actually take

It’s the anti-”shoulds” strategy.

It’s manifesting, but with creatine.

It’s what happens when you stop asking for permission and start giving it to yourself.

Why Profanity Matters (Yes, Really)

Some of you are reading this thinking: “Does it have to be called that? It’s a bit... aggressive.”

Yes. It does. Here’s why.

Adam Grant’s research shows that swearing predicts higher rates of honesty and integrity. People who curse aren’t crude - they’re authentic. They’re signalling that they prize candor over courtesy.

The word “fuck” carries energy. It’s a pattern interrupt. It’s the linguistic equivalent of slapping yourself across the face and saying “WAKE UP.”

When you say “I should probably ask for a raise,” nothing happens. Your brain files it under “someday” and moves on.

When you say “Fuck it, I’m asking for the raise,” something shifts. Your nervous system wakes up. The stakes feel real.

The profanity isn’t decoration. It’s activation energy. It’s the difference between thinking about change and actually moving toward it.

This isn’t about being crude. It’s about being honest. And sometimes honesty needs a bit of edge.

The Data on Waiting

Here’s what the research tells us about playing it safe:

The Silver Ceiling is real. When managers see identical CVs - one aged 28, one aged 48 - they give structurally lower “potential” ratings to the 48-year-old. Same skills. Same experience. Lower score. You’re not imagining the bias. It’s documented.

Corporate support is retreating. Only 50% of companies now prioritise advancement for underrepresented groups, down from 87% in 2019. The programmes that actually work - remote flexibility, sponsorship, targeted development - are being quietly dismantled. You cannot wait for someone else to advance your career. Nobody’s coming to save you.

But, yet… Women over 50 are the fastest-growing entrepreneur group in the UK. They’re almost twice as likely to build high-growth companies as 30-year-olds.

Not because they finally felt ready. Because they finally stopped waiting for permission.

The biggest risk isn’t taking action. It’s waiting.

While you’re waiting to be ready, someone less qualified is taking the opportunity. While you’re asking for permission, someone else is building the thing. While you’re strategically stalling, the moment is passing.

My Fuck-It List (The Messy Truth)

I’m going to share mine. Not because I’ve got it all figured out — I absolutely do not — but because I think it helps to see what this actually looks like in practice.

Done:

✓ Leave Google at the peak of my career (everyone thought I was mental)

✓ Do stand-up comedy at Edinburgh Festival and The Comedy Store (bombed first, killed second - both were worth it)

✓ Co-found HERA Media with zero experience in fund-raising

✓ Start Glittersphere in a crowded market where everyone asked “why would anyone choose you?”

✓ Wear sequins to boardrooms that have never seen sequins (now it’s my signature)

✓ Say the quiet part loud, even when my voice shakes

✓ Launch this Substack and call it what it is

✓ Start a YouTube channel at 52 (my first video was terrifying and imperfect and I did it anyway)

Still on the list:

□ Ask for the speaking fees I’m actually worth (getting better at this, still uncomfortable)

□ Pitch the book to publishers (terrifying, doing it anyway this year)

□ Launch the video podcast (filming in Feb!)

□ Build the Reinvention Rebellion into an actual movement

□ Get an actual gig to DJ at (preferably in the sunshine/on a beach)

□ Stop apologising for taking up space

□ Stop checking if everyone’s okay before I say what I actually think

□ Say no to opportunities that pay well but drain my soul

□ Charge what I’m worth without explaining why

Every single one of the “done” items felt impossible before I did them. Every single one felt inevitable after.

That’s the magic of the Fuck-It List. It turns “I’ve been meaning to...” into “I did it.”

The Three Principles

This is the Reinvention Rebellion. Three principles:

𝗥𝗲𝗯𝗲𝗹 𝗔𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁 𝗪𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴. The Fuck-It List is defiant action over delayed dreams. No more “someday.” No more “when I’m ready.” No more waiting for permission that’s never coming.

𝗥𝗲𝗯𝗲𝗹 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗜. Master the tools. Compete without permission. AI is the great equaliser - but only if you use it. My new YouTube video on asking for a raise? That’s rebellion. Knowing your worth and demanding it? That’s rebellion.

𝗥𝗲𝗯𝗲𝗹 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆. Human resonance is the only differentiator left. Your Fuck-It List makes you unmissable. It forces you to show up as yourself - not the polished, palatable version you think people want.

How to Write Yours

Today, Sunday, before Monday’s chaos reclaims you, I want you to write your Fuck-It List.

Here’s how:

Step 1: The Movie Test

If your life was a movie, what would the audience be screaming at you to do?

Leave the job? Start the thing? Have the conversation? End the relationship? Ask for the money?

It’s obvious to everyone watching. Write it down.

Step 2: The Deathbed Test

In three generations, no one will remember your name. So why are you playing it safe? What would you regret NOT doing?

Write that down too.

Step 3: The Trade-Off Test

To pick something up, you have to put something down. Assume you can do no more than you’re doing now. What matters enough to trade something else for?

Step 4: Get Specific

Not “be healthier” but “sign up for that 10K by Friday.”

Not “change careers” but “email three people in the industry I want to enter.”

Not “be more visible” but “post on LinkedIn three times this week.”

Not “ask for more money” but “schedule the conversation with my boss by Wednesday.”

Vague intentions are just sophisticated procrastination.

Step 5: Pick ONE

Circle the item that scares you most but excites you most too. That’s your focus for the next 90 days. That’s your first Fuck-It.

The Workbook

I’ve created a free Fuck-It List workbook with all of these exercises and more:

• The Movie Test

• The Deathbed Test

• The Trade-Off Test

• Small / Medium / Large Fuck-Its spectrum

• The Energy Check (fear vs. genuine wrong fit)

• A Permission Slip to sign (because sometimes you need to give yourself permission in writing)

Subscribe to get it. It’s designed to take 20 minutes. Today. Before Monday hits.

The Invitation

And if asking for what you’re worth is on your list, my new YouTube video drops today: How to Ask for a Raise - the perfect first Fuck-It item for 2026. Because nothing funds your other Fuck-Its like getting paid what you deserve.

But here’s what I really want:

Share your Fuck-It List.

In the comments. In Substack Chat. Reply to this email. Wherever feels right.

Because something magical happens when you say it out loud. When you write it down. When you tell someone who will hold you to it.

It stops being a someday dream. It becomes a commitment.

The Rebellion Starts Now

The ground is shifting. AI is reshaping everything. Economic uncertainty is real. The corporate world that promised stability is quietly breaking its promises.

You can spend 2026 the way you spent 2025 - waiting, planning, preparing, hoping things become clearer.

Or you can write a Fuck-It List and start moving.

The rules are being rewritten. The old playbooks are failing. The people who’ve been overlooked, underestimated, and told to wait their turn? This is our moment.

But only if we take it.

This time, we hold the pen.

Write your list. Say fuck it. Start moving.

Welcome to the Reinvention Rebellion.

Nish x

P.S. Coming up: Anne-Laure Le Cunff Spotlight event on January 13th at Shoreditch House (tiny experiments and building a life you don’t need to escape from), and the Fuck-It List Supper Club on January 20th. Links in my profile. Come hungry - for food and for change. 🪩

There’s a few tickets left for Spotlight on Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Please join us.
I promise you, your future self will thank you.
Book HERE

450 comments. 29,000 impressions. Women dropping ✨ emojis like confetti.

I promised a revolution. A space where brilliant women stop playing small.

Here’s what I didn’t tell you:

I wasn’t entirely sure I knew what I was doing.

I’d just helped launch Gemini at Google (then called Bard). The most exciting and terrifying leap of my career. And for AI.

But I walked away. Senior Director. Good money. Respected. All the things you’re supposed to want. And I left because I could feel myself shrinking. Performing a version of success that someone else had defined.

More than that: I’ve spent my whole career creating opportunities for all, not just the chosen few. And I couldn’t do that just from the inside anymore.

So I built things. Two businesses. Raised investment. Hired people (then painfully unhired when it wasn’t right). Learned tech I never thought I’d touch. Posted nearly every day for six months. More than doubled my LinkedIn following.

I was named the #1 marketing influencer. Made the Top 10 Trailblazers list. Met the King. Plotted AI ideas with Will.I.Am in Cannes. Did stand-up comedy at The Comedy Store. Danced on stages.

My DMs filled with women thanking me for saying out loud what they felt. The woman who messaged me from a Pret at 8am before a job interview to say I’d inspired her to show up as herself.

Sounds like success, right?

Here’s the part I masked:

I was approaching burnout. Doing too much and not enough of what I actually love. Lonely despite being surrounded by people. Running every day from the fear. Not of failure, but of not succeeding. Of the last two years of disruption not being worth it.

And the world shifted too.

A few weeks after that optimistic opening post, I went viral for a different reason: “What the Zuck?” My post about the DEI rollback that made my blood boil.

I was right to be angry. Look what happened:

87% to 50%.

That’s the collapse in companies prioritising women’s advancement since 2019. Not a dip. A freefall.

The UK’s biggest businesses slashed Pride posts by 92% in two years. Remote work flexibility? Scaled back. Sponsorship programmes? Quietly dismantled. Targeted development? Gone.

The companies that draped themselves in rainbows did the maths. Supporting the overlooked is now too risky.

This is the Corporate Commitment Recession.

And it’s hitting everyone who isn’t the default: women, LGBTQ+ communities, people of colour, disabled professionals, the neurodivergent, the over-40s being quietly managed out.

Here’s the cruel irony:

AI could be the great equaliser. The thing that finally levels the playing field.

But AI adoption is already behind for women and those with less access. $400 billion is being poured into AI this year. Yet 40% of leaders have no AI strategy.

The biggest risk of 2026 isn’t uncertainty. It’s ignorance.

Good people waiting for permission. Waiting for the “right time.” Waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

Nobody’s coming to save you.

So I did the work. Quietly. Painfully. Honestly.

And somewhere in all the mess, it crystallised.

I help people and businesses become unmissable.

The invisible, overlooked, underestimated, misjudged. The ones playing by rules that were never written for them.

Not through another personal brand course. Not through playbooks and webinars you’ll abandon soon after.

Change doesn’t come just from a training course.

It takes rebellion. Audacity. Fuck-it energy. Badassery in sequins.

Three key principles:

Rebel Against Waiting.
The Fuck-It List™️. Defiant action over delayed dreams.

Rebel With AI.
Master the tools. Compete without permission.

Rebel Into Visibility.
Human resonance is the only differentiator left.

This is the Reinvention Rebellion.

And this Substack, Nishma Unfiltered, is where it lives.

• I’ll share what I’m learning, building, failing at, and figuring out.

• The AI tools that actually work.

• The visibility and marketing strategies from my Google years.

• The Fuck-It List™️ methodology that got me here.

• The honest mess of building something new in midlife.

No polish. No pretending I have it all figured out. Just me, thinking out loud, with you.

The rules are being rewritten. This time, we hold the pen.

If you’re done waiting for permission. If you’re ready to stop playing small. If you want to become unmissable. Not someday, but now.

Subscribe. Join the rebellion.

And if you want the full toolkit (AI tutorials, the Fuck-It List framework, community access, live sessions) the paid tier is where that lives.

But honestly? Just being here is enough to start.

Let’s go.

Nishma x

P.S. To everyone who dropped a ✨ one year ago: thank you. Your belief in me has been the water to my roots. This one’s for you.

#ReinventionRebellion

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