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I help small business owners build confidence, get visible, and attract the right clients with simple, effective strategies.

September's in full swing.What's one thing that's already back on track this week - even if the rest of the list is stil...
06/09/2026

September's in full swing.

What's one thing that's already back on track this week - even if the rest of the list is still a mess?

Tell me in the comments. 👇

Back to school week always does something to me.It's not that long ago I'd have been sat in a teacher training day this ...
04/09/2026

Back to school week always does something to me.

It's not that long ago I'd have been sat in a teacher training day this week. Being told things I already knew. The kind of session where the learning is never differentiated for the adults in the room because if education is good at telling people how to teach well, it's remarkably bad at practising it on itself.

I'm genuinely glad I'm not sat in one of those training days.

But there's another feeling sitting right next to the relief, and it surprised me a bit. I miss meeting a new class. Standing in front of thirty faces on day one, setting the expectations, watching that first flicker of interest catch. Lighting the fire in the bellies of children who don't know yet what they're capable of.

I get a version of that through tutoring. It's not nothing. But it's not the same either.

Two feelings, both true at once. Relief that I left. A quiet grief for the bit I actually loved.

If you've left something behind (a career, a role, a version of yourself) and you still feel the pull of the good bits even though you know leaving was right, you're not being ungrateful. You're just human.

Anyone else get proper mixed feelings this week?

She told me almost apologetically that it felt like fun.She’d left a career that had ground her down, built something ne...
02/09/2026

She told me almost apologetically that it felt like fun.

She’d left a career that had ground her down, built something new, and here she was genuinely enjoying herself. Not every day. Not every moment. But in the main: it felt good.

And somehow that felt suspicious to her. Like she wasn’t allowed to say it out loud. Like work was supposed to feel harder than this.

I want to say this clearly: loving your work is not a red flag.

It doesn’t mean you’re not taking it seriously. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t count. It doesn’t mean you’ll stop trying or stop growing or stop pushing. It means you built the right thing.

The people I see working hardest in their businesses are often the ones who genuinely love what they do. The work doesn’t feel lighter because it’s less important. It feels lighter because it fits.

If you left something that was making you miserable and built something that makes you feel like yourself you’re allowed to say that.
You’re allowed to like this.

Back from holiday, and the first thing I want to say as September arrives:There is no such thing as behind.There’s a pla...
31/08/2026

Back from holiday, and the first thing I want to say as September arrives:
There is no such thing as behind.

There’s a plan you had for the summer and a reality that didn’t quite match it. There’s a list of things you were going to sort before September that is still only half done. There’s a version of how the last few months were supposed to go that looks nothing like how they actually went.

That doesn’t make you behind. It makes you human.

You are where you are. And where you are right now is the only place the next step can come from. Not the place you planned to be. Not the place you think you should be by now. Right here.

The pressure to be further ahead (to have more done, more planned, more sorted) that’s not a signal that you’re failing. It’s a signal that you’re measuring yourself against someone else’s timeline.

September is a new start whether you feel ready for it or not. You might as well take it.
What do you need to let yourself off the hook for before September properly begins?

About a month into working with a client, something small happened. A student cancelled a session. Same situation she’d ...
29/08/2026

About a month into working with a client, something small happened. A student cancelled a session. Same situation she’d been in many times before.

A month ago, her instinct was: we’ll leave it until next week.
This time, without really thinking about it, she said: we’ll fit it in this week.

One sentence. Four weeks apart. On the surface, just a rescheduling call. But it isn’t.

It’s a business owner making the call instead of a teacher. The teacher brain says the student’s schedule comes first. The business owner brain says: that session is my income, I planned for it, we find a way to keep it. The shift didn’t announce itself. She didn’t flag it as a mindset change. She just did it differently.

That’s how real change embeds. Not as a decision you make in a big moment. As a thing you simply start doing without noticing.

As September arrives and a lot of people are thinking about what they want to do differently, that’s worth sitting with. The big intentions are fine. But watch the small everyday decisions.

That’s where the shift actually happens.

September has always felt like a new year to me.More than January ever has. January is the middle of winter. Things are ...
27/08/2026

September has always felt like a new year to me.

More than January ever has. January is the middle of winter. Things are slow, dark, quiet. The idea of resetting in January has always felt like pushing uphill.

But September? September has energy. New term. Something that shifts in the air.

Even now, years after leaving the classroom, my brain still treats September as the start of something. I think once a teacher, always a teacher in that respect.

If you’re someone who finds January resets hard, try September. Give yourself a proper new start now, when the energy actually supports it. The summer was what it was. Some of it went to plan. Some of it didn’t. All of it is behind you now.

What’s one thing you’re setting an intention for this September?

She came to me knowing exactly what she needed.More visibility. More promotion. More showing up. She’d decided marketing...
25/08/2026

She came to me knowing exactly what she needed.
More visibility. More promotion. More showing up. She’d decided marketing was the missing piece and she was ready to go.

Within about ten minutes of talking, it was clear the marketing was not the problem. The issue wasn’t that people weren’t finding her. It was what happened when they arrived. No consistent process, no follow-up, nothing that would hold the weight of more enquiries coming in. If we’d gone straight to the marketing she wanted, we’d have been building on an unstable base.

Better marketing into a leaky process doesn’t bring in more clients. It just makes the chaos arrive faster.

This is one of the most common patterns I see. The presenting problem and the real problem are almost never the same thing.

What do you think you need next in your business and when did you last question whether that’s actually it?

September is almost here.What’s one word to describe how you’re feeling about it? Drop it in the comments.
23/08/2026

September is almost here.

What’s one word to describe how you’re feeling about it? Drop it in the comments.

Your values aren’t a poster on the wall.Or they shouldn’t be.I worked with a client who had “well-being” as a business v...
21/08/2026

Your values aren’t a poster on the wall.
Or they shouldn’t be.

I worked with a client who had “well-being” as a business value. Which is fine, except that well-being could belong to any business in her sector. You could find it on a hundred websites. It doesn’t say anything specific about her, or what she does differently.

So we dug into it. What does well-being actually look like in your work? What does it look like at two o’clock on a Tuesday when a difficult situation arises? What came out was this: a specific, deeply held belief that a client who feels settled will do
better work than one who feels judged. That the environment comes first. That you can’t get results if someone doesn’t feel safe enough to be honest with you.

That’s not well-being. That’s a belief she’s built her entire approach on.

Values do their job when they become the thing you use to make decisions. The yes and the no. The client you take on and the one you gently redirect. The moment you recognise something isn’t quite right and you can name why.

If your values are just words on a website, they’re not working hard enough.
What does your most important business value actually look like in practice?

Two weeks apart, the same client went from intellectually knowing she was a business owner to actually being able to say...
19/08/2026

Two weeks apart, the same client went from intellectually knowing she was a business owner to actually being able to say it.

Those are different things.

Knowing something is true and being able to say it - out loud, to yourself, without the caveat or the qualifier - aren’t the same step. The understanding can sit in your head for a long time without ever making it to the place where it changes how you behave. How you price. How you talk about what you do.

That gap (between knowing and saying) is where a lot of people are quietly stuck.

The tell is usually the qualifier. “I suppose I’m a business owner.” “Well, I’m kind of running my own thing.” “It’s still quite new.” When the qualifier drops, something has shifted. And in this case, it shifted in two weeks.

What would change about how you describe your business if you said it without the qualifier?

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