The Long Way Round
Freedom without clarity is its own kind of trap
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. 🪩
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