Nothing against the people at that table. But it was a sobering realisation, followed swiftly by a tightening feeling in my gut. I was meant to contribute in a very different way.

HELLLOOO, identity whiplash.

So I did what capable people do. I ignored it and hoped it would go away. Head down, bum up, stay busy.

But identity is a pretty hard thing to hide from. That pesky, evolving sucker kept turning up wherever I went, reminding me I’d already shifted on the inside.

I’d evolved past the woman who’d accepted that role six years earlier. And I’d suddenly started to feel very accountable to 85-year-old Zoe, who kept asking, “Have you done that thing yet?” (It would have been great if she’d sent a memo on WTF that “thing” was meant to be.)

So, the question became: “If not now, when?”

My only clues: whatever came next needed to be created by me. It needed to build a legacy, create real human impact and let me learn again. And ideally, it’d be something I did till I was 85 because I freaking loved it.

The tricky part? There was no ladder waiting for me this time. I’d have to build my own.

After a couple of decades dedicated to nailing the KPIs and OKRs on every corporate scoreboard, that was surprisingly confronting. I knew how to succeed against someone else’s measures. But deciding what success should look like when I was the one setting them? That was a muscle I’d barely exercised.

And without it, it’s entirely possible to change your whole career and still pack the old life in the removal truck. Ooops.

The thing is, friends, we’re living longer, with potentially decades of working life still ahead. But the old model of climbing one ladder, then retiring, doesn’t give us much of a map for what comes next. So we’re all out here figuring it out live.

These days I have the joy of working with accomplished people who are questioning their own definition of success and contemplating a ladder of their own. Maybe the old definition was set in their twenties, handed down by their parents, or shaped by years of admirable responsibility while other dreams got shelved. Maybe it no longer makes room for who they’ve become.

So if you’re contemplating building a ladder of your own, start with what you actually want your life to look like when you get there. How high you climb can wait.

A few things helped me work that out, and I now see them helping my clients every week.

1) Find your possibility expanders

When I was in my own identity spin cycle, three expansive thinkers helped me open my mind to possibilities I hadn’t realised were an option for me.

The first was my exec coach, who sent me back to review my values. Values can sound theoretical, but they’re very much your daily operating system. When what you DO on the daily doesn’t match up to what you value, you feel it as friction, even if you can’t name why. At the speed of life I’d been living, I’d stopped checking in on what I valued in this chapter, assuming it was a fixed setting (it was not…)

The second was a mentor, over a gorgeous brunch. After listening to me question the entire construction of my life, they observed, “Perhaps you need to rethink how you measure success?” Simple enough on paper. In practice, it asks a whole lotta you.

Values and success turned out to be two lenses on the same question, and looking through both enriched my take on all of it.

The third came from a Google friend and colleague. They named my superpowers back to me, then asked, “What if you put all those things to work… just for you? Your own thing?”

Well, that threw me for a loop. There’s a particular kind of joy in someone seeing something in you that you’d never even considered a possibility, and it’s a big part of why I do what I do now. Sometimes you need someone outside of yourself to see what can be.

I didn’t have my north star yet. But it felt like I’d been handed a compass and a quarter of a map.

Together, those conversations helped me question three things I’d stopped examining: what I valued, how I measured success, and what I was uniquely equipped to bring to the world. Three pretty useful conversations to have when you’re contemplating a whole new ladder.

So friends, we interrupt this message to turn the spotlight on you. Who are your expanders? The people who see more in you than you've let yourself see. Find someone who can challenge how you're measuring success, reflect your strengths back to you, or help you imagine possibilities you haven't considered. Invite them in. Have that chat.

2) Expect the pull of the familiar

I nearly didn’t start this business at all. When we moved north to a spectacular location in Queensland AU, I very nearly took another CMO role. I knew that world, knew how to win in it, and knew exactly what the pay cheque looked like. I’d even started negotiating the days, with two protected to build this business on the side (a hedge, basically).

It would have been an entirely reasonable decision, and a very easy identity to slip back into. But I’d already had my NOT THIS moment. So I backed myself instead. I’m stretched often, and this business is investing in me as much as I’m investing in it.

It was my first real go at backing myself, with zero muscle memory for it, and it turned out to be the first of many.

And the pull doesn’t stop once you’ve leapt. This month I was invited onto a prestigious marketing panel, the kind of invitation my old self would have said yes to on the spot. It was flattering, and it would also have reinforced the identity I’m moving beyond, so I said no. Not every no is fear. Sometimes it’s proof you’ve worked out the yes you’re looking for.

3) Eeeeaaaase off the handbrakes

Choosing again sounds thrilling, right up until you actually start and the internal handbrakes show up.

My first one took me by surprise: I learnt a part of me was far less scared of failing than of succeeding. I mean, what the actual.

Last September, in a vision workbook, I wrote a whole section titled Fear of Success. Near the top: “Building a business that depletes me.” What if it worked REALLY well? Would I end up with another calendar full of obligations, built around things I was good at but didn’t particularly want to do?

That’s the sneakiest trap of all: building a business to get yourself out of one chapter, only to recreate it brick by brick with your own name on the door this time (same hours, same people-pleasing, same chores you can’t stand, except now you’re the one holding the hammer).

The gilded cage, DIY edition. Autopilot, rebadged. (If you’re a few years in and your calendar’s starting to look suspiciously like your old one, you know exactly what I mean.) The upside of building your own business is that you get a say in its design. A BIG say. So be deliberate about what you're building, before you're too busy running it to notice.

The second handbrake, and the one I see most often, was being seen. For twenty years I’d had a Google or a Bonds logo to stand behind, and the masterbrand did a lot of the heavy lifting on who I was. Stepping out as me, I hesitated to claim my point of view, even when I was the most qualified person in the conversation.

Looking back, that made perfect sense. I was being asked to put my name to someone I hadn’t finished working out yet. You can’t optimise a bio for a self you haven’t defined. Which is exactly why identity comes before visibility.

4) Start with your week

When you run your own show, I've learnt managing your energy is a core part of the job description. You're all the cogs now (even the snack re-stocker), and keeping that whole contraption humming means taking what gives you energy as seriously as what uses it. So I started with the week, because the week is where autopilot does its best work.

Juicy Mondays came first, borrowed from a mate in a very big role who made Monday mornings deliberately HIS. Chilled and chosen. For me it’s a 9:15 yoga class full of very bendy, very strong people light years ahead of me, followed by deep creative time.

Then spaciousness and movement run right through the week: strength class, a swim, or climbing a mountain (there are plenty around here); time to study; space to hold the vision for this business and create, not just be in it; and time with incredibly inspiring humans who’ve made a similar lifestyle shift without any loss of ambition. And of course, deep, delicious work with my clients. Watching them “unlock” couldn’t be more rewarding.

Sounds dreamy, right? The reality? It’s VERY easy to slide back into hustle culture, which, after starting my career in advertising and working at that speed ever since, is pure muscle memory at this point. So I’m deliberate about it. When I want a jolt of founder energy, I work from a tech hub, but I use it judiciously, so I’m topping up on that energy without getting swept back into the old pace with no grace.

So design your week around what you need to feel, as well as what you need to get done, and seek out the places that give you energy without handing you their expectations. Worth asking: what are you protecting in your calendar right now, and what have you let work swallow?

It takes constant course correcting, because a chosen life still drifts, and the 1% corrections matter as much as the 180s.

Keep choosing the ladder you’re building

Building your own ladder turns out to be a series of choices, big and small. The big ones, like walking away from a CMO role mid-negotiation. The small ones, like a Friday review against my own scorecard, or saying no to a flattering panel.

And the choosing doesn’t stop once you’ve made the leap. Good opportunities are VERY persuasive, and it’s surprisingly easy to find yourself climbing a ladder you never intended to build.

So whether you're at the top of a ladder you love, eyeing up a different one, or building something under your own name, if I could tell the woman at that dinner one thing, it would be this: you don't need the whole map before you start choosing. Sometimes that's a leap, sometimes it's staying put on purpose.

Either way, whatever you build, you’re the one who has to live inside it.

Your brief: the Objective

Three questions to help you write your own scorecard:

1. What are you currently measuring success by? Write down three things.

2. Which version of you chose those measures? Do they still fit?

3. If you succeed spectacularly by those measures, what will that success demand of you?

Then finish this sentence: By my own scorecard, success in this chapter looks like…

What's one choice you could make this week that would bring your life closer to that definition?

Hit reply/ drop it in the comments and tell me what made your list. I’d love to know what you’re choosing. 😉

P.S. When you go out on your own, you’re the whole thing, and your name is the Brand. So in February I’m opening the founding “The Unlocking Cohort”: four to six accomplished people building a business and reputation on their own name. I’ll bring the same strategic lens I’ve used on everything from undies to search engines.

Strategy first: who you are, what you want to be known for, the future you’re building towards. THEN the expression: your introduction, your channels, the opportunities you go after. Six months with me and a small group, building a business that suits you (and not a cage of your own making). You’ll leave knowing how to do it yourself, without the ick.

If that sounds like your chapter, shoot me a note on hello@zoehayes.co and we’ll send you more details. Prefer to go deep 1:1? That’s The Unlocking.

Six months into my consultancy, my Business Manager served those words up on our weekly WIP call like a cold bowl of sick. I’d been happily chasing the dopamine hit of working on my clients’ brands whilst masterfully avoiding my own. As a side order, she advised we’d be downing tools on all the back-end set-up (the project management system, the half-built client portal) until I did for myself what I was prioritising for everyone else.

DAMMIT.

Happy avoidance could no longer be the plan. It was time to drink my own champagne.

Back on day one, I’d followed my gut into creating this business, then put myself through my own strategy process. No founder’s discount. I ran Brand Archaeology on myself, using the same deep interviews and worksheets I take every client through to find their foundations. Then came inner circle feedback from fifteen people who know me well, and my Human Design.

The inner circle stung in the best way. Turns out I’d normalised my own magic. Optimism, which I’d filed under “just how I am”, everyone else named as a strength: seeing the highest path and walking towards it with the steps mapped out. And they saw a pattern I’d never clocked. I hold things that supposedly don’t always go together. Joy and high standards. Creativity and commercial rigour.

That process emboldened me. I doubled down on LinkedIn to reposition from Google Head of Marketing to Identity & Positioning Advisor to Founders & Execs, and it did its job. People who’d known me in a previous incarnation started sending friends and colleagues my way. A full book of clients. Lovely.

[Image: From my original LinkedIn image arsenal, aka “Selfies in the car”.

What I’d stalled on was showing up as my brand in full force: the website, LinkedIn, my substack long form (hello) coherent and looking like Me.

In my defence, the site I’d set up on day one of the biz wasn’t awful. With a UX girlfriend’s polish it even got compliments. Definitely not broken. But definitely not good enough for someone who’d spent two decades branding for the world’s best.

The trouble was, nothing was on fire. Clients booked, referrals rolling in, things were sweet. And over twenty years in corporate marketing had trained me to run towards alarm bells: the latest fire to put out, the next thing that needed all my attention (plus multiple agencies and a giant team) focused on it. I loved that call. “Zoe, this brand isn’t firing, can you fix it?” High stakes, zero plan, forge it from nothing.

In this chapter I’ve learnt that nobody rings the alarm on good enough. So I coasted. I was standing inside the brand that needed fixing, and it had never occurred to me to dial my own number. With my pedigree, though, I wasn’t going out like that. (Especially once someone had called my bluff… )

So I’d drunk half the bottle. Done the identity work, and conveniently left the visibility for later. Turns out Identity Before Visibility does eventually require the visibility bit.

Awww snap.

In The Unlocking, my five-month program, that second half is called Activation. It’s the bumpy bit. Figuring out your brand is a contact sport: at some point you have to get it out of the strategy deck and into the world. Most of the time that happens in moments far smaller than a grand brand reveal: how you introduce yourself at a dinner, the connections you go out and make on purpose, how you describe what you do and where you’re headed, one conversation at a time. Say the things, put your POV out there, let people see more of you. Brands need oxygen, and they get better for it.

Those first steps are the hard bit: wobbly, decidedly unpolished, all legs, like a newborn foal. Good. Nobody emerges perfectly finished, and honestly, nobody wants you to. Raw and honest is what people connect with. Who you’re becoming has to come into contact with the world, bumps and all, to take shape. And the fun part is it keeps evolving, because you keep evolving and getting bolder as you go.

Activation was exactly where my Business Manager had caught me: keeping a polite gap between who I was becoming and what I was willing to show.

For me, Activation meant a photoshoot. I mean... Eww.

Yes, I’d had headshots in corporate. At Google, with a big glowing G behind me. That was a role I was playing. This shoot asked me to be me, all of me, in a business built around my purpose.

My whole career has been spent directing from behind the camera, making everyone else the talent. Now it was my turn for intense face choreography, and what on earth does one do with their hands? After two decades calling the shots on set, being the talent was excruciating.

[Image: Shoot prep ain’t no joke. Bringing Ash the Hedgehog vibes from “Sing”.]

And the challenge was me. This time I wasn’t a cog in a bigger machine. I was the subject matter, the full kit and caboodle. What did I look and sound like without the personas I’d held? Yes, I’d been me in all of those roles, but a diluted version serving a different masterbrand. Not the balls-out version of me.

That was the actual nerve. The strategy had already answered who I was. The camera wanted to know whether I’d let everyone else see her. No title, no team, no glowing G between me and the world. Just me.

Having branded everything from undies to search engines, I’ve always thought about personal brands through the lens of classic marketing strategy. So while I was wrestling with my very own identity forcing point, it felt familiar. I’d seen it before, at one of Oz’s most loved brands.

I was the Head of Marketing at Bonds (the undies side of my career), who had always been a wholesaler. Our job as the marketing department was earning attention for the brand, building emotional connection and driving traffic to retailers. And we were loved for our TV ads: the dancing girls, Pat Rafter being a larrikin, the cutest darn babies you ever did see. We had our visual language down pat. We’d just never actually spoken.

Then we launched into retail, bricks and clicks, and suddenly we had to find our voice. What did we sound like in an email? On our website? In our shop windows? Were we the larrikin, the young and edgy one, or the innocent? Those sub-brands had built a master brand in Australia’s top 12 most loved, and we didn’t know what we sounded like in a “thanks for your order” email.

The retailers held the actual relationship with the people who wore us: the emails, the shop floor, the day-to-day. We did the big shiny stuff: signalled new news, earnt brand love, stayed relevant. But talking? Nope. We didn’t know how to talk because we’d never had to.

So we brought in tone-of-voice experts, a company whose sole job was giving brands an ownable, accurate voice.

Bonds had the look but needed the voice, and Bonds could hire someone to find it.

I found my voice on LinkedIn. What I’d never had to do was be the face.

At Google the mothership stood between me and everything I spoke to. That big glowing G leant me institutional power. Going out on my own meant trading it for individual magnetism, and nobody hands you that with a lanyard. Nobody could stand in front of the camera for me.

What I did have was the inner circle’s answer sitting in a deck. Those tensions I’d never clocked were the brief. Joy and high standards. Creativity and commercial rigour. The camera, the words, and the design all had to hold the parts of me at once.

So I had to find the right people to conjure up the whole me.

First, a photographer who captures humans with wit and personality. So much personal-branding photography is trying to make people look attractive or accidentally homogenises them. I wanted to look like me.

[Image: one of my fave images from the very talented photographer Luke Sartor.]

Then the design. The first designer delivered something with a distinct whiff of Canva template. I didn’t see it coming. Twenty years in the best-of-the-best bubble doesn’t prepare you for the open market. Who knew? (Everyone. Everyone knew.)

So I went out of category, to the designers behind some of the beautiful restaurants around Noosa, Qld Australia. They get reverence. They get craft. They make places people want to linger in. I didn’t want anything that looked like a machine had made it. It needed humanity in it.

That detour cost months. And no, I didn’t revert to Claude Design. How I did it mattered. My values (and my love of all things creative) needed humans behind it. Which is the bit nobody puts on the brochure: like all great things, this takes time.

What made it bearable was the order I did it in. Because the strategy was done, every lift got lighter. Writing content was easier because I knew what I stood for. The shoot was easier (still EWW, but easier) because I knew what essence we were trying to catch. Briefing the designers was easier, since I’d already dug up my essence at my core. I wasn’t deciding who I was in front of the lens. That decision had been made months before.

Now I’m on the other side.

I have a body of images that make me smile when I look at them. A beautiful range. There’s even one where I like my teeth, which is new. I fully expect it to be blown up on my nursing home wall long after the teeth themselves have retired. My Colgate moment.

[Image: Zoe trying out her “range” of performance. Hmm.]

I’m also a proud owner of a “brand bible” with playfulness that also holds depth and reverence for the magnitude of what I do (those tensions, made visible). It doesn’t look like anyone else’s. It looks like me.

And it doesn’t stop at the website. The same brand now runs through everything a client touches: proposals, LinkedIn, this Substack, the strategy decks, the worksheets we work through together. Same lesson as Bonds and that “thanks for your order” email: the small touchpoints are where a brand proves it means it.

Which brings me back to my Business Manager. The tools are back out, the client portal built (on brand, naturally), and on our last WIP call she gave me the review I’d been waiting for. “Your brand is branding now.”

And the bit nobody tells you: once you’re out there, people find you and resonate with your thinking in spaces and places you’d never have planned for. Your real estate for self-expression grows and grows. And it actually, eventually, becomes FUN.

Weird, right?

The shoot was exhausting. Having it done is energising. And seeing my brand loved the way it deserves? That’s what I want for every single client. Which raises an awkward question. Why was everyone else’s brand worth that level of care, while mine got to coast?

Because I’d been treating myself as the one client who could wait.

I don’t teach this because I find it easy. I know exactly what I’m asking people to do, because I’ve just done it. It’s difficult. It’s slower than you’d like. And IT’S WELL WORTH IT.

Turns out I’d been saving the good champagne fo an occasion that was never going to come. Talk about Champagne problems. The occasion was always now.

If you’ve done the knowing and you’re stalling on the showing, reach out.

Before Visibility is where I write about the questions that surface on the way to the visible chapter, and about consciously authoring a life. Some of it comes

from twenty years building brands. Some from the founders and executives I have the privilege of working with.

It shows up when your life is working. Nothing obviously wrong, and yet somewhere underneath it all you know something has changed. It starts as a deep, intuitive pull towards a future self you can’t yet describe. The response is usually to resist the hell outta it, because till recently you were fine and dandy with the identity you had.

This internal storm can be the definition of discombobulating.

Someone recently confessed their version of this to me. They’d started walking into meetings already checked out. Years of building their vision into a successful business. Now they desperately wanted to be somewhere else. The rub is… they didn’t know where that was.

Then they mentioned that someone had asked them what they do for play. They had no answer. Nothing.

Which sounds small. It really isn’t. Play is where curiosity lives. It’s the part of us that pokes at things with nothing riding on it, that follows something because it’s interesting rather than because it's needed.

And it’s usually the first thing to go, because curiosity has no business case or measurable outcome. The more senior you get, the more your value is measured in usefulness, and so… you stop playing. It’s never deliberate. You just get very good at answering what’s required, and gradually lose the habit of asking what if.

That’s a problem, because the answer to “what’s next?” never arrives as a clear step with an instruction manual. It arrives as curiosity. And you’ve spent years training yourself out of it.

I intimately know that particular flavour of restlessness. The out of body experience where everything you’ve built, designed, worked for no longer fits. The plot twist is that it doesn’t always arrive when everything falls apart. It can arrive when everything's working.

I call it identity lag.

You’ve created a life. Usually a pretty darn great one. Success on all fronts (on the face of it). You consistently showed up, and earnt your way here. And then something shakes it.

Which is INCONVENIENT.

You know how to live this life. You’ve earnt it. You have some form of mastery in it. And now something is pulling you elsewhere. The pied piper music starts playing, and no matter how much you try to plug your ears, you know it’s time to dance to a different tune.

I’ll say it again. INCONVENIENT.

So if you’re here, and you feel that pull, there are two ways I see identity lag arrive.

Door no.1: internal. Somewhere in you, something has already moved. And you are performing fine like your life depends on it. Fine at work, fine at dinner, fine when someone asks. You keep overriding it because you’re busy and the current version of you still delivers. Pushing for more success on the same ladder is a great distractor. Until it isn’t.

Another version of this is being fed up with your own internal handbrakes. Knowing precisely what the bigger version of you is, and watching yourself not do a thing about it. Pure frustration at your own inertia.

There’s a sneakier version of this door too. You know something’s shifted. And the world you’re already in keeps handing you excellent reasons to stay. More money. Bigger scope. Interesting problems. People you actually like. Work you’re brilliant at, which is its own kind of anaesthetic.

That’s what makes a successful identity so hard to graduate from. It isn’t failing you. It’s still delivering. It just isn’t the fullest version of you.

Door no.2: external. Something gets disrupted. A restructure you didn’t see coming. A diagnosis. The business you finally sell. The last kid leaving the house, and the shift that follows.

These create fear and contraction. Understandably so. They also force a pause, and a pause is where reappraisal happens. Because until then you’ve been on the treadmill of doom with blinkers on, running towards the next carrot. And the question you never asked yourself, until now, is “do I actually want that carrot?”

It’s at that moment people give themselves grace, and space. The blinkers come off, and for the first time in this chapter they start a live dialogue with themselves about what they truly want.

And while where they’ve been may have been all goodness, they’ve changed. Their values have changed. Their priorities, different. Circumstances have shifted. Parents they want time with while they’re still healthy. Kids they want time with while those kids still want to play. An aligned place for what they actually want to give their time and their superpowers to in this next chapter.

Plenty of people I work with arrive furious about the thing that happened to them and leave grateful for it.

Either way, the identity that got you here can no longer contain the person you’ve become. And because that shift happens internally, nobody automatically updates the external version of you that walks into the room. You’re still chasing the tail of what’s going on and why.

Lag is the right word, because nothing’s broken. You haven’t failed at anything. Your identity has graduated.

Congratulations.

So, what to do when you feel that gap?

The answer isn’t grasping for the next rung on the ladder you’re already on. (Tried that. It kept me busy for six years, though there are better ways to do these things.) Rewrite the bio? Nope. Flick your CV out to a few things that stoke your ego? Not that one either.

All of these are tactics which amplify the version of you that’s already out of date. A louder broadcast of a signal that’s no longer accurate just compounds the situation.

Going quiet doesn’t save you either. Silence transmits. Beige transmits. Say nothing while everything about you shifts and the people around you keep working off the last version they saw, repeating it in rooms you’re not in, to people who matter to your next move.

Volume was never the answer to a question about accuracy.

There’s a whole essay in what to do instead, and it isn’t this one. This one is about the bit before. Whether you’ll listen when you already know.

There’s no age at which this stops being available to you, which I mean as good news and as a warning.

I’ve watched it dawn on people in their later decades, still head down, still delivering, decades into operating out of a self that was conditioned into them long before. Then the disruption arrives, or they simply stop wanting the path everyone assumed they’d keep walking, and the whole thing opens up.

My own version was less dramatic. The knowing showed up, I heard it clearly, and I answered it with a bigger job.

Which made perfect sense to the version of me answering the question. At that point “there’s more in me” translated straight into level up. More scope, more challenge, more recognition, a bigger stage to test myself on. And it delivered every bit of that. It stretched me, entertained me, and fed the part of me that thought it was the solution.

It’d be easy to read this as “bigger” being the problem. It isn’t. Your next chapter might well be bigger. Louder. More consequential than anything you’ve done. Mine is more ambitious than the job I left. It’s just measured against very different things.

The more interesting question is which version of you is doing the choosing.

There’s the version that authors what’s next from a deep understanding of what they actually want. And there’s the version that takes the shiny thing that came past because it was shiny, it was offered, and saying yes has always worked before. Same outcome on paper. Completely different life.

I hadn’t created enough space in mine to tell those two apart. So I did what I knew how to do extraordinarily well. I climbed UP.

The bigger job answered a lot for me. Could I operate at that scale? Could I lead there? Was I actually as good as I thought I was?

Yep.

But the persistent call was never about capability. It was about finding my aligned path that felt exciting on the daily. Butterflies with what I COULD to do, not what I SHOULD do. No amount of recognition was ever going to answer that one.

Which is why I’ve stopped calling those six years of UP a distraction. They were an answer that ran out of road.

So when I talk about listening, I don’t mean follow every restless thought and blow up a perfectly good life. The signal deserves attention. Listening earlier isn’t the same as acting earlier. It’s noticing something’s shifted before you get so practised at overriding it that you can’t hear what it’s saying. Tune into the frequency of You. There is nothing more important.

"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom." Aristotle

The people who’ve been through this once catch it sooner the next time. They don’t necessarily blow anything up. They start a conversation with themselves. They make a bit of room. They get curious about the pull instead of explaining it away.

Which is, I think, the actual skill. Not surviving the transition. Reading the next one coming.

You may have absolutely no dang idea what’s next. You can still know “not this”.

So. What would you hear, if you made the space to listen?

Before Visibility is where I write about the questions that arrive before the visible chapter, and about consciously authoring a life. Some of it comes from twenty years building brands. Some from the founders and executives I have the privilege of working with. Because before we're visible, there's a much more interesting question: who are we becoming?

My life became the next project to optimise. Neglected life admin, sorted. A solo trip to Europe, booked. An interstate move for the family, directed. The classic get-fit project, on track. An extortionately priced naturopath protocol, regrettably, also executed. Look at all that output! Productive, useful, and completely distracting from connecting to my next chapter. All noise dressed up as momentum.

It took me an awkwardly long time to realise I didn’t need another project. I needed a true pause. Not a seventeen self-help books in a fortnight pause. Not intro coffees. Not scoping out my old industry in a new city. Actual rest. Creativity. Sleep. Long walks. Nature. The odd saucy day in bed with Netflix (should’ve done more of those, TBH). Staring out the window without trying to justify it.

Giving myself permission for any of that was the hardest part. But when I’d run out of things to project-manage and still hadn’t found the thing I wanted to do next, I tried the last thing that made any sense to a recently exited corporate wench… I chilled the fudge out.

Only then did everything I’d been trying to force start making sense.

I’d truly misunderstood momentum, and what it looks like for humans at moments like these. After decades of smashing the scoreboard on KPIs and OKRs, I thought stopping meant losing points. Turns out it works more like a slingshot. Stillness wasn’t where momentum disappeared. It was where direction showed up.

The pause came with one rule. If it feels expansive, GO. If it makes you contract in any way, it’s a NO. The GO was a ticket to bypass the head jail. It didn’t have to make sense. I just had to feel the curiosity and the pull towards it. The hard part was getting my head to STFU long enough to let the feeling come through.

Four things pulled a yes out of my gut, each one over my head’s strenuous objections.

The first, was gifted from my Adland friends.

I’ve had a front-row seat to the birth, re-birth, and re-vitalisation of a shedload of brands, with a mind-boggling array of problems to go with them. I was there for the era we started celebrating what wasn’t in the product (zero sugar, [X]-free!). I’ve tailored Disney ads to land more fart jokes for the UK market. Relaunched one of the big four banks. Celebrated the sexiest phone in the country back when Nokia owned half the market. Helped the peach growers shift a glut of fuzzy balls. Spent real strategic hours getting Australians to eat more red meat (genuinely one of the most strategic accounts in the country). And everything under the sun for Google.

Business is never dull. But amongst all that stimulation, the brief that lodged in my brain and wouldn’t stop burrowing was the one that broke the pattern.

A former colleague, now a Hollywood starlet, had briefed my brides-man (also a former colleague, and the owner of an astoundingly sparkly strategy brain) to work on her brand. Her request was simple. Do for me and my brand what you do for corporate brands.

And that charmed the absolute pants off me.

Someone spending unadulterated amounts of time thinking that deeply about one human. About how a single person’s identity meets the outside world.

So I followed the pull towards this idea: straight into a spiral of research on identity, brand strategy, personal development, the lot. No idea where it was heading. It just felt expansive. And by my one rule, that meant GO.

Second, a deadline for a “Tech Ready Women” founder course landed, and the business idea downloaded out of my fingertips with barely any interference from me. Founders could build the thing. What many struggled with was becoming part of its story. They’d happily sell the business, but selling themselves felt faintly horrifying, even when, to everyone else, founder and business were inextricably linked. There was something in that tension I couldn’t leave alone.

The plan was to use the course to work out the real business idea, pitching it to the mentors and alumni until it sharpened. I researched it with trusted brains. And somewhere in there, the founders and the trusted brains turned into clients. Whoopsie. I’d launched a business before I’d decided to have one. The ABN showed up after the clients did.

Third, I followed on nothing but gut, and it made no head sense at all. Human Design.

Nothing like my usual information diet. Spiritual, intricate, the opposite of the big-picture altitude I like to live at, thanks very much. Every rational bone said not for me. My gut said GO. So I followed it, honestly just to understand myself a bit better. It was only halfway through getting certified that I clocked what it actually was. A system for reading human patterns. And, in a world that is increasing in speed externally, we’re now en masse turning to tools that help us understand our inner terrain. This was that - on steroids. And unexpectedly, it became another lens for exactly the question I was becoming obsessed with. How do you help someone see themselves more clearly?

The fourth, I nearly didn’t follow at all. A women’s retreat, the kind I’d historically have sprinted in the opposite direction from. My gut said yes. My head had a helluva lotta reasons. I went, uncomfortable the whole way in.

And it cracked open a way of doing business I hadn’t clocked from inside corporate walls. A room full of people running real businesses, turning real profit, on energy and alignment rather than force and grind. From within corporate, those two things had always seemed like the trade you made. You drove hard, and the driving was the job. I’d learned otherwise on my own balcony a few weeks earlier. Now I was watching a whole room run on it.

What I found across all of it was that my obsession with brands converted almost frictionlessly to human identity. Same discipline. Different subject.

Then I started working with Clients on their identity, positioning, and that juicy intersection between their personal and professional brand. What I didn’t expect was the rawness of those one-on-ones. Then the strange, exquisite joy of handing someone the truest, most resonant version of themselves they’d ever held. And consequentially - the awe inspiring shifts they felt and created because their inner transformation delivered outer results.

Eventually I understood why that original brief had got under my skin.

In my advertising and marketing chapters we’d spend months understanding a brand before deciding how it should show up in the world. Yet when it came to humans, particularly accomplished ones, the advice seemed to skip straight to visibility. Write the bio. Fix the LinkedIn. Start talking.

I’d become fascinated by what happened if you gave the human the same strategic attention first.

Not to manufacture an identity. To see clearly what was already there, what had changed, what was distinctive, what they wanted to carry forward and what they were done with, and only then decide how the outside world should meet them.

Identity, then visibility. In that order.

I just didn’t have the words for it yet.

The phrase flopped out of my mouth, awkwardly writhing in front of me like a dying fish. I was on a call with my exec coach at Google. Not being versed in vulnerability, I wanted to shove those words back in my gob. Too late.

Back then, my life was cranked to warp speed. My calendar was packed wall-to-wall as I steered my team through endless corporate plot twists. Sunday nights were booked for negotiating parenting coverage with my equally swamped husband. I’d sprint from work to daycare pick-ups with team members “grabbing me for a sec” all the way to the car. 6am dance sessions were my sacred space to crank my energy just high enough to hold it all.

All of this “momentum” created such a vacuum of busy-ness that the idea of stillness felt... actually dangerous. Like if I did stop, all the Tetris blocks would come down at once. So I did what any sensible corporate warrior woman would do. I marched on.

Then my internal voice started whispering: Not this. I remember sending a selfie to the family WhatsApp group from the bathrooms at work. A comedy photo pretending my face was falling off. Later that day I saw it again in the chat, paused, and wondered: is this actually funny... or is this actual pain?

I kept going for another three months because that’s the only way I knew how to do things. Marched forward, despite the out-of-body, face-sliding moments coming ever faster, made all the more surreal by showing up in all the rooms I’d historically have killed to be in. Strategy sessions with my leadership team. Big team building sessions. Judging creative excellence awards. My body was in the room. My brain was hovering somewhere above it, thinking: Not this.

The case for staying was good. My other internal voice was loud and convincing: “Everyone is so bright and lovely!” “You’re one of the chosen few who get into the building.” “Stay for the golden handcuffs and provide for your family!” And there was free food. (Never underestimate free food.)

But underneath it all, the counter voice held. Less noisy. Less frequent. Stiller, quieter and so much stronger. A bit like a bass guitar. That inner voice wasn’t new. I’d heard it six years before in another role.

I’d answered it the way high performers do. With “up”. A bigger role, a shinier brand, the chapter at Google. It was a magnificent distraction, and it worked for years. But this time, I finally listened to that Not this voice.

I quit my Head of Marketing role at Google AUNZ. Without a plan. Colleagues called it ‘brave’. By then it didn’t feel brave. It felt inevitable.

Looking back now, I’m not sure I was afraid of stopping. I think I was afraid of meeting the version of me that existed outside of all the roles I played. I wasn’t sure what was there anymore after giving so much of myself to everything and everyone else.

I’d spent years becoming the person each chapter of my life required. A leader. A marketer. An earner. A colleague. A wife. A mum. Calm under pressure. Commercial. Reliable. Optimistic. The one who could hold complexity and keep moving. Somewhere along the way, I’d become exceptionally good at being who everybody else needed me to be and life rewarded me for it.

She wasn’t the wrong version of me. She was extraordinary. She built an incredible career, a beautiful family and a life I’m deeply grateful for. She just wasn’t the whole story.

I’ve realised each chapter of life asks something very different of us, but, because of the speed most of us are living, the responsibilities we take on accidentally become firm identities. We stop choosing, we start defaulting. That was the real cost of constantly moving so fast. I couldn’t hear what life was asking of me next because I was still answering yesterday’s question.

What I needed wasn’t another promotion. It wasn’t another plan. It was enough stillness to hear myself again. Then I could consciously redesign my life - all of it.

Cut to today.

We’ve moved out of Sydney metro to the Sunshine Coast, upgraded from the bucket list to the phuck it list (thanks to for that phrase), into a house that actually fits us all instead of a dark Bondi apartment.

What does that look like on a Tuesday? Butterflies in the morning about the work I get to do with inspiring clients. A convoy of six whales off the balcony while my tea goes cold, because they keep surfacing. Lunch with my husband. A local mountain climbed with the kids that afternoon, because I have the energy for it. All of it from switching off autopilot. Nothing about that Tuesday happened by accident.

Don’t get me wrong. It ain’t all sunshine and rainbows (well, there are A LOT of rainbows here.) But yes, solopreneur overwhelm kicks in at times. Tax returns... regrettably don’t go away. But it’s pretty dang epic.

I'd always loved the phrase "You can have it all, just not at once." It helped me neatly compartmentalise my career and parenting ambitions. But now I don't want that. I want integration. Career, family, health, and the creativity and play I'd written off.

Now, this life fits. One I’ve consciously authored, rather than gradually accumulated.

I don’t believe you have to resign to find the next aligned chapter. For me, it meant building a business of my own. For plenty of the founders and executives I work with, it doesn’t involve leaving at all.

For them, the context stays exactly the same. They don’t. They stop making decisions from a version of themselves that belonged to the last chapter, and get clear on what they stand for, what they’re building, what they’re no longer available for, and the contribution they actually want to make.

The best part? Watching when the outside world starts responding differently too. Not because they’ve become someone new, but because they’re finally expressing the version of themselves that was on mute. Their reputation catches up. Their opportunities change. Their legacy starts building on purpose.

Before Visibility is where I’ll write about the questions that arrive before the visible chapter, and about consciously authoring a life. Some of it will come from twenty years building brands. Some from the founders and executives I have the privilege of working with. Because before we’re visible... There’s a much more interesting question.

Who are we becoming?

Because we all reach a point where the next level, however you define it, won't come until you get still enough to hear yourself.

We accumulate identity over time. Some of it we build deliberately, the way a bowerbird collects its bright blue treasures. Some of it we strap on like armour, in the moments we felt most vulnerable. All of it served a purpose. Not all of it is meant to stay for the long haul.

Most people find me when they feel a version of this. Their career looks impressive from the outside, and something has shifted on the inside. Their reputation is telling an older story, and they’re ready for the next chapter to reflect who they’re becoming.

I call it identity lag. And it arrives at a point I’ve come to think of as the portal. A disorienting, and equally fertile stretch between who you were and who you’re becoming. It can feel like crisis. My belief, with plenty of proof, is it’s the most interesting chapter you’ll ever author.

But… the tricky thing about being human is that we’re not great at seeing ourselves. You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.

So, Before Visibility is where I write about that. Identity, work, and consciously authoring a life. The questions that arrive before the visible chapter, and mostly get skipped because, “busy”. Some of it draws on twenty years building brands, for Google, and loved Aussie brands Bonds, Berlei and others. Some on the founders and executives I work with now. But all of it points back at you, and the chapter you’re stepping into.

Because before you’re visible, there’s a much more interesting question.

Who are you becoming?

Essays land every three weeks.

If you want to know where all this came from, start with the first one. It’s the phrase that fell out of my mouth on a call with an exec coach at Google, the words I wanted to shove straight back in.

→ “I don’t know what will happen if I stop.”

Zoe.