Career Pivots: Embracing Change and Creating Opportunities

For this Inclusive Growth Show interview, my guest is Iesha Small, Career Pivot Consultant. We’ll have an interesting conversation about how you can pivot your career and how the skills and assets you gain along the way can encourage opportunity.

This is something I did myself. When I left university, I worked in technology as an IT Consultant for Accenture. Then, I moved over to another company to work in healthcare technology. I eventually ended up at the BBC as a technical project manager. I was working in user experience and design on the development of the BBC news website and what is now known as the BBC Sounds app. I also worked on lots of accessibility projects.

 

I used to work closely with the senior leadership team within our technology department and they were concerned at the time about the gender imbalance that we had in tech. 14% of our workforce were women in technology, compared to the rest of the BBC, where we had more of a 50/50 gender split. The senior leadership team created a plan to attract, recruit and retain more women in technology and engineering roles. They needed a Project Manager to execute the plan, so I volunteered myself.

 

It started off as a part-time role one day a week. I quickly found out it wasn’t possible to do as a one day role, so I eventually turned it into a full-time occupation. After which, I then moved over to Deloitte as an in-house Diversity and Inclusion Manager before setting up my own consultancy company.

 

My career pivot was going from being a Technologist over to working as a Diversity and Inclusion Specialist.

 

To set the scene for us, I asked Iesha to start us off by telling us about her own career pivots.

 

‘I started my career off when I read mechanical engineering at university. My first career was as an engineer. I did that for about a year as a graduate trainee. I loved engineering and logical thinking, but it wasn’t quite the right industry for me. I don’t think the industry has changed massively in terms of the huge women and men imbalance, but I was always very well treated, so I did fine.

 

I began to feel tired of engineering, questioning myself, “Is this going to be my career forever?” I eventually decided to leave engineering to become a Maths Teacher. I did a scheme called Teach First. It’s a scheme in England, where you have graduates from particular types of courses and universities who wouldn’t normally go into teaching. They train you to teach for two years. You work in all types of communities, including the working class. My two year commitment stretched, and I got promoted. I ended up working in education as a Maths Teacher, Head of Department and Assistant Head Teacher for 14 years.

 

I ended up quite liking it. Teaching has a very defined career path of becoming a Deputy Head then a Headteacher. I looked at the people who were doing those roles, and they didn’t seem to be living the kind of lifestyle that I wanted to live. They didn’t seem happy. They seemed stressed. I knew a few Headteachers who’d had heart attacks. I knew some who unfortunately died by suicide. I just didn’t want that. At the time I was still relatively young, I was promoted pretty quickly. When I was thinking this, I was only in my early to mid 30s.

 

I knew I still had a long career ahead of me. Another 20, 30, maybe even 40 years of work. I decided this wasn’t my future. I wanted to leave teaching, but I had no idea what I was going to do. I taught for 14 years. Teaching is quite institutionalised as you know exactly what you’re going to be doing.

 

Anyway, I got a job in senior management, and I thought, “Okay, how am I going to be able to change and still be able to afford my commitments with my family?” I had a few side projects going on which allowed me to meet some quite cool people. I decided that I would have coffee with a few people that were doing different and interesting things so I could find out how they got into it. Nearly everyone that I’d spoken to had previously been a teacher at some point, but they were now doing something else.

 

I was on Twitter, now X, and I built a few thousand people that I was connected to and had goodwill. I sent them messages and said, “Look, I’m thinking of leaving teaching. I don’t know what I want to do. Can I just have a chat with you? You look like you’re doing something interesting and like you enjoy your life.” I had chats with many people.

 

Eventually, unbeknownst to me, one of the people that I spoke to was the CEO of this Think Tank. Think Tanks do policy and research for others. We’d professionally overlapped a bit before because of some of the side projects that I’d done as part of a focus group for the Department of Education. After we got chatting, we had dinner, and we kept in touch.

 

After some time, he said, “Oh, I think we might be hiring. Do you think you might want to apply?” I said, “I don’t have any experience in policy,” he responded, “No, I’ve seen you. You’d be fine. I think you’d be really good.” That ended up being my first role outside of teaching. It moved me into the world of policy, which is traditionally quite hard to get into if you haven’t got the relevant background or degree. It gave me a foot in the door.

 

My career shifted to research policy. Then I had a strategy role after that. Now, I am Head of Communications and Marketing for a charity. I also run my own business around career pivots because people in my network realised that I’m good at changing sectors and shifting things around. They wanted to know how I did it and then people started asking me to work with them.’

 

I thought that was interesting. A lot of people starting their career or graduating from university think that their career will be linear. That’s just not the case anymore. People don’t stick with an employer for life. They don’t stay in the same role. Pivoting is very normal. I like how Iesha started off in engineering, moved into teaching, then into policy and strategy within government.

 

I asked Iesha to explain the career pivoting work that she does with clients.

 

‘I’ll start with how this all became to be. Someone who was in my professional network contacted me and asked, “Do you do coaching?” At the time, coaching wasn’t something I’d done properly. Of course, in my teaching role, you often had to coach people, especially if you were in a leadership position and one of my responsibilities was working with the new and trainee teachers. I also was tasked with helping the middle managers develop. Some headteachers that I knew had asked me to go and work with their middle and senior managers to help them with coaching.

 

So, I had done it, and I’d been paid to do it for other schools, but it wasn’t something that I spoke much about. I’m a bit of a reluctant coach. I really love it, but it can be frustrating because people think that coaching is the work, and it isn’t. They think that because you’ve spoken to a coach, you’ve done all the things you’re supposed to do. That isn’t the case at all. You now need to go off and do something.

 

When this person approached me, I was said, “Look, I don’t really do coaching. I find it all a bit frustrating.” I tried to put them off because I didn’t know if they were actually going to do anything. I don’t want to waste my time or theirs. I didn’t know if I was what they were looking for, or if I could be of any use. She told me her situation, there was some restructure in her organisation which resulted in her being demoted. Her current role was going to end, but she wasn’t ready. It was messy, and she wasn’t feeling great about it.

 

She decided that it was time for her to reevaluate what she wanted to do. She’d approached me because she saw me doing interesting things and I was someone who used to have a fixed role but had moved on. At that time, I was doing bits of consultancy on the side as well because people started to approach me after seeing my writing online.

 

I said to her, “If you think that I can help you, then why not? Let’s do this.” My teaching background kicked in. I made a proposal to her. I said, “I’ll do some coaching. We’ll do something once a month, but I’m also going to take you through the actual process that I took.” My engineering brain is always there. I like taking things apart and thinking, “What’s the template? How did I do this? Let’s reverse engineer it.”

 

By the time she spoke to me, I had a couple of pivots. I figured, “Maybe I could write this down and see if it works for somebody else, because it’s obviously tailored to me, and I did it intuitively.” I asked her, “Would you mind if I sent you a weekly task each week?” I was thinking about what had worked before with previous people I’d coached. Having something to actually do to keep them on task and be accountable could be helpful. We agreed to meet around every 12 or 16 weeks and see how it works. That became the templated structure that I use with my clients now.

 

It’s written for someone who knows they want to change, but don’t necessarily know what that change is. If you know what it is, it’s quite easy. All you need to do is talk to people who are doing that thing and follow what they tell you. That’s it. However, if you don’t know, it’s much harder, especially if you’re quite a skilled person and have a bit of experience, it could be any number of things.

 

Anyway, we worked together over a period of time and she ended up getting a new job that she was happy with. A random project she’d been doing on the side was helping people who were speakers and coaching them. She ended up being a very specialist Speaker Coach for people in a particular industry. It’s something she’d always wanted to do. When we looked at her assets and skills, we realised what she wanted to set up wasn’t that out there. She thought it was very outlandish, but it was totally doable given her skillset. She ended up setting up a lucrative side hustle alongside her day job.

 

Then COVID happened. I didn’t do anymore coaching. We had three kids under seven, so it was about surviving and working. I stayed at home and realised that the role I was working wasn’t very stable. I had to get another job. Then, I got an email from Head of HR at the technology company that my first client was now working at. The email said that she’d recommended me to work with some of their employees because she said she got a lot out of it. They asked me to tell them more about what I do.

 

I completely forgot about it, but in the back of my mind I knew I should do something with it. It didn’t go anywhere, but that email gave me enough confidence to realise that my coaching was something that was valuable.

 

Fast forward to now. Generally, I talk about career pivots. I believe that the job market is much less stable than people think it is. Even if you think you have a stable job, nothing is really stable anymore. I know a number of people who’ve been made redundant. Even if you’re not being made redundant, companies are always changing, and you don’t necessarily always want to stay on the same path.

 

My clients tend to be mid-career in terms of where they are in life. They have good experience, but they might’ve reached the peak point they wanted to and, like me, realised they have many more years ahead of them. Life circumstances may have changed, for example, I have some clients who have now become carers of older parents, or they’ve had health scares. When you get to a particular age, more people in your life start to get ill or die and it makes you reassess what you think is important.

 

My clients are people who are highly capable, but are thinking, “Is this it?” They don’t want to coast in their careers for another 20 or 30 years. One of my clients said to me, “I could just sit around and collect my money. I would be fine, but I want some stretch. I want stretch over comfort.” I thought it was such an interesting phrase.

 

They’re people who are massively valuable to the workforce but feel that they might be too expensive now if they aren’t going to go for a CEO role, or they want to work in a slightly different way.’

 

A lot of what Iesha is saying resonates with me. When I career pivoted, whilst at the BBC, I started off by doing a side hustle. When I was at the BBC, I did a course that they ran internally called Coaching Skills for Managers. As an agile Project Manager, our style was coaching the team. I loved coaching. Then I went off and did a diploma myself outside of work. I wanted to be a coach; however, at the time, I wasn’t sure whether I would want to do that as a full-time occupation or not. I had similar trepidations to Iesha.

 

I started by testing the waters with coaching on the side. For a while, I reduced my hours at the BBC to a four-day week. That meant I had a day a week to do some coaching which allowed me to build up a little client base. That was a good experiment for me.

 

We also talk a lot about pivoting in IT, where you develop a solution, but you don’t think it’s quite working for your end user. So, you continue doing what you are doing, but then you create something on the side that you AB test. It means you have feet in two camps which allows you to pick the solution that’s performing the best.

 

I took that analogy from software development, and I applied it to my own career development. I figured, “I’m going to continue being a Project Manager at the BBC, but I’m going to have one foot in the coaching industry. I’ll see which one takes off or which one I prefer the most.”

 

‘Similar to AB testing in IT, we use iteration in engineering. You try a thing, you see how it goes, you have your hypothesis, give it a go. Then you look back and see, “Okay, maybe it needs to be adjusted slightly. Let’s do that.” That’s my approach.

 

I increasingly get people asking me to work with them on what’s often referred to as ‘personal branding’, which is not how I would necessarily describe it. In essence, that’s what it is. If I think about the opportunities that I created for myself, I had to brand myself, even without realising.

 

One of my side projects for myself was photography and documentary style photography. I got into that because of a breakdown I had due to stress at work. I took some time out and I started started painting. I didn’t have enough space, and I wasn’t particularly good, so I switched to photography. I like to make things and I’m much better when I have a reason to do things.

 

I decided to make a documentary project. I taught myself how to be a photographer and how to conduct interviews. I learned a lot of skills, which at the time seemed very random, but they helped me get a communications job which helped me later in my career. By doing that, I started to write online, and I started to write professionally about education. I also shared my learnings about leadership.

 

I started learning about education policy because I was interested in how you can make the biggest impact. That was my interest. It wasn’t very consistent. I’d write a blog here, I’d put something on Twitter there. All of those things contributed to my career.

 

Nowadays, people call that personal branding. At the time, it was just me sharing what I knew and understood. That’s quite a scary thing to some people. People around their mid 40s tend to not think about personal branding or feel comfortable about writing things online.

 

All my clients have realised that it can be hard to sell yourself on a CV when you have so much to offer. They don’t quite know how to make it work. I’m notoriously terrible at CVs. I only learned how to do a decent one about two or three years ago. I got my first engineering job by writing to about 10 or 20 different firms, I didn’t need to send in a CV. I narrowed down what the shortage areas would be and I matched my skillset to that. I wrote directly to the Engineering Directors and then said what I could offer. I got two interviews out of it and both of them offered me a job. I didn’t ever have to do a CV for that. I never quite worked out how to do them. Similarly, I never needed one for when I was teaching.

 

For me, I like to think of them from a more creative point of view. I often have my creative hat on. Artists and creatives have a portfolio that tells you what they can do. I believe that people in the corporate world and more traditional professionals could benefit from something similar. We should be using the internet as a professional portfolio and as a way to show what you can do. An ongoing scrapbook, if you wish.’

 

I agree with Iesha as CVs really don’t do a good job at demonstrating your potential. Often people are selected for an interview because they’re good at writing CVs, not because they’ve got the real skills, experience, potential or the growth mindset that a lot of employers are looking for. I really like Iesha’s ideas of curating your own portfolio and communicating that out to the world. It’s probably a better way of doing it.

 

If you consider someone who has pivoted in their career, a manager might look at that CV and start jumping to conclusions. They might think the candidate doesn’t know what they want to do with their life. They can’t stick at the same thing. That can be really unhelpful.

 

Iesha agreed, adding ‘I’ve been on both sides of the hiring panel. I’ve been part of hiring panels where my colleagues have said, “Oh, they jumped around different careers a lot.” I had to tell them that you can’t discount people because of that. You have no idea. I don’t think people who are in seniority positions understand how difficult it can be for people who aren’t, or the reasons they may leave their workplaces. Sometimes you will get people who appear to have jumped around a lot and it’s because they’ve actually experienced quite a lot of discrimination, but they can’t say that.

 

Sometimes hiring managers will question why they have a succession of temporary roles. They have a succession of temporary roles because they can’t get permanent roles. That is a structural issue.

 

I would rewrite my CV for every single job that I ever applied for, to specifically tailor it, which you ought to do anyway. I’ve had three, or four different roles since teaching. I probably wouldn’t ever have got called to interview for some roles because there was nothing in my set of experiences that would show that I could do that role. I think this is going to increasingly become a problem as AI starts to be used. When I spoke to the people who were leading those companies, they said they saw that I could definitely do those jobs which I would’ve never applied for. Although I’ve jumped around a lot, there is a strong thread connecting each role and job title I’ve had.

 

There’s one client I’m currently working with, who initially asked me to work with her on CVs. I told her that I don’t do CVs. She goes, “No, I know, but I’d like to understand how to describe myself better.” We’re working on how she can tell her story and have it make sense for the kinds of roles that she’s interested in. We’re coming at it from a completely different angle. She has a common thread which is about the importance of grassroots, community and how it can impact wider society. That’s a common thread. It just happens to come out in different ways.

 

I’m all about opportunity. When I was a teacher, I worked in London with working class communities, similar to a community that I grew up in. Education was very important to my parents and they made sure I went to a grammar school that was outside of my area. I went to a great school and then I went to a good university. It gave me access to things that many people living in my area wouldn’t have had access to. I knew it wasn’t fair. People that I knew and grew up with were just as clever as me and resourceful as me, but they just didn’t have those opportunities.

 

The lens has always been about opportunity, but in different settings. At school, I was aware that I was given a great education. That helped me have access to different opportunities. I would like to be able to help other young people from the kinds of backgrounds I was from to access that. I did that as best I could when I started teaching. I tried to make sure everyone had a great maths education especially since maths is notoriously taught terribly.

 

When I became an Assistant Headteacher, I realised there were a number of things that were structural issues. That’s why I then shifted to policy. I thought, “Maybe I can start to change that at scale instead, similar to the people who make the policy that teachers have to work underneath.” Policy is a bit too slow moving for me, unfortunately.

 

I ended up working in strategy at a national charity. That was out of luck. Someone that I had met in my previous role had shared the job with me. I applied for that job and didn’t get it. They said, “We think you’d be great at this job instead,” and they created a post for me which they thought was better suited to my skills around strategy and policy. They were starting a new 10 year strategy to change the focus of this national charity so that it would be much more accessible to a wider range of people. They felt like that was something that fitted my background, so we did that. My role after that was change and strategy related.

 

The communications thing has come about because, again, it’s an area that I care about. It goes back to young people who are experiencing particular issues in their educational lives but now working with the school leaders. That goes back to my previous leadership experience. The communications and marketing stuff is because I’ve been doing that work throughout for myself with my own consultancy that people approach me about. It allowed me to develop storytelling as well. For me, it’s a vehicle to help people create opportunity. The common thread for me is opportunity because I feel like everyone, from whatever background they’re from, should have equal opportunity. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world.

 

I understand there are particular structural inequalities and I’m not best suited to be an activist. It’s just not for me. However, what I can do, is try and work it from the other side and give people the skills that I have learned. I can help people. That’s why I always write stuff for free because I want people who can’t access my services to be able to teach themselves if they want to.

 

My next question for Iesha was, ‘If the person listening to us right now is thinking of pivoting their career, how should they go about doing that? What’s your advice to them?’

 

‘I’ve thought about this for a long time which means I can talk about it succinctly. Initially, I couldn’t. There are four or five pillars to follow. The first one is starting off with your values and your assets. That’s very important, particularly if you’ve had a bit of experience in the workplace. I think when you’re a younger person, you tend to do what you think you’re supposed to do. That either works out, or it doesn’t. Some people happen to choose the right thing and find where they belong, but others don’t get as lucky.

 

It’s hard to identify your assets if you’re stressed. If you’re someone whose been made redundant and you don’t have any financial security, I would start by telling them to get any job. Get some money in. You can’t pivot successfully if you’re in a stressed place. You’re not going to make great decisions.

 

This doesn’t have to be a massively convoluted process. I can do this with someone in about an hour. Once you come out with your top three values, you can start to think of a framework for what your decision making will be going forward. I get people to ask themselves whether or not those values have been in place in their personal and work life for the last 30 days. Then going forward, how would you like your values to be displayed. I’ve had clients tell me it’s been a valuable exercise for them because they’ve realised they’re quite disconnected from their values, how they want to be living in the world and what work they want to be doing.

 

It doesn’t tell you the work you might want to do, but helps you identify what lights you up and what is interesting to you. It allows you to filter out certain opportunities, but it also allows you to say yes to opportunities that you might otherwise have questioned. It helps you realise what is in accordance with your values.

 

If you aren’t sure what to do, and you have more than one opportunity, always go with the values and the people. The people that you get the best vibe from. Everything can change, but the people and values won’t. The vibe is not going to change.

 

Then you consider your assets, however this doesn’t work if you’re earlier on in your career. I noticed people undersell themselves in terms of what they can do. We look at six different assets that people have. For example, one of them would be your connections and people that you know. People have a variety of assets that they don’t realise. It’s useful for them to know all the things that they can look at. So, we consider the kinds of things that could be interesting and valuable to other people that they don’t necessarily realise.

 

If you work in an organisation, you do have assets but they often belong to the organisation. That’s another reason I’m so bullish on people building their own portfolio. When you lead the organisation, it belongs to that organisation. If you’re building your own stuff alongside, then that’s something you can always bring with you.

 

The next thing that we discuss is the employee versus entrepreneur mindset. I don’t want to confuse people, I’m not saying that everyone should become an entrepreneur. It’s definitely not for everyone. However, I believe that people should build their careers like an entrepreneur. They can treat themselves like a business. You don’t have to be one. You just need to think like one. It’s about how you spot opportunities.

 

Create your own opportunities opposed to waiting to be picked. Be paid for your expertise as opposed to being paid for your time. Taking ownership of stuff versus needing permission, solving problems over selling your skills, making offers and sharing your work instead of waiting for validation and qualifications. Take control of your own time. That’s how I define it. I do a lot of work with clients on this because it allows you to think of yourself as someone who solves problems, as opposed to someone who’s a commodity.

 

That’s really important, whether you’re in an organisation or not. It allows you to show up with a different energy. It also makes people approach you with a different energy. You become the person who is asked to help set things up as you develop all these skillsets that allow you to shift into an entrepreneurial life.’

 

‘I want people to build their career like an entrepreneur. Think about entrepreneurially speaking. When you work with organisations, think about it as a partnership. They give us stuff like our salary and some degree of job security, but what else are we getting? It’s a much healthier view to take. You need to deliver, but so does your organisation.

 

The other thing I consider is mindset. The mindset thing sounds a bit nebulous, but it’s mostly about confidence. People can do the other bits, they can do the value, they can think about their skills, they can think about this. However, I’ve noticed that people stop taking action when they start to doubt themselves. They start to question, “Am I really as good as I think I am?” I find this especially when I’m talking to women in their 40s and 50s. Their lives many begin to change, they might have been through a divorce or they’re starting to hit menopause. It means they might be a bit more tired than they once were.

 

The things that you once could do when you were in your 20s aren’t possible anymore because of the new energy level. You become more aware of the dreams that you once had. Maybe you didn’t quite reach them, or you are aware of the things that you did meet and they weren’t what you thought they would be. Many different circumstances can knock people’s confidence. They might have been made redundant. Lots of things have happened to you by the time you’re in your mid 40s, maybe people that you care about aren’t around anymore.

 

We do a reasonable amount on confidence. Due to my more logical and scientific background, I’m not massive on things like affirmations. I think they’re great, but they don’t help logical people like me. I talk to people about collecting their receipts so you have evidence of things that you can be proud of in your career. I get them to think about the evidence. It can help them build up their confidence in order to try a new thing that they may not be too sure about. Chuck the 3:00 AM gremlins in the bin and tell them to stop talking.

 

For me, I’ve never been the Head of Communications and Marketing before. Somebody approached me about it, so they must have thought I could do it. But, if I look at the elements of this role, I’ve done every element of this role in other jobs. I haven’t done this one thing, but I’ve done all the bits of it in other places and people have been happy with it. That evidence suggests that I have the skills that will allow me to succeed in this role. That’s how I tend to approach confidence.

 

The last pillar is about personal branding, if that’s what people want to call it. I call it influence. Me being on this podcast is evidence of it in some ways. I wrote some articles on LinkedIn and the Mildon team contacted me. That wouldn’t have happened otherwise because we wouldn’t have come across each other. Influence is for my clients who are particularly interested in this kind of thing. It’s for the ones who want to build more of a portfolio type career that attracts opportunities.

 

It’s me teaching individuals how to do marketing. I’ve never thought about it like that before. My tools are online to suit that person, but it’s also about them using their existing network as well. People think you have to do all this crazy stuff to get clients or to get new opportunities, but all the new opportunities in the very beginning come from people that you already know.

 

We also discuss this when talking about assets. It might be the friend of a friend, or the person that you never paid any attention to that you met in a meeting once but they were impressed by you. Then once you’ve started talking more about the things that you’re doing, they think to themselves, “Oh yeah, I remember them. They were quite cool.”

 

My first five or six commissions were all as a result of partners that I had come across in my day job. Every single one. That was before I started doing the career pivot work in my consultancy. My first few clients were people in my existing network, but oddly they found out about what I was doing because I wrote about it online. I was too shy to tell people in person.’

 

Iesha’s experience has been very similar to mine and how I started my business. When I left the city to set up my own diversity and inclusion consultancy, I wrote a list of people in my network, and I arranged to meet them for a coffee. I said to them, “I’m leaving the city. I’m leaving my job. I’m setting up my own diversity and inclusion consultancy. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I don’t know what projects I’m going to do. Can I just meet with you? Pick your brains to get clarity for myself and in what I’m going to do with my own business.” Loads of people were on board to meet me for coffee, to have a catch up and a chat. Some of those conversations led to paid projects. When I first set up my own company, my marketing was non-existent other than just reaching out to people that were already in my network.

 

Iesha responded, ‘I’d been doing some consultancy on the side alongside my day job. When I started my business, I’d thought I’d give it a proper go alongside my part-time day job. Now, I have an old website, which is just like a blog, but I don’t really have a website about my business.

 

My LinkedIn banner used to be a picture of me on a mountain in Scotland, it was a mess. It was terrible. That’s why I’m reluctant to call it personal branding as such because that is a big scary thing that people worry about. What I actually did was take five months out. I had some savings and I knew I didn’t want to do a random panic job, so I gave myself some time to think about what I actually wanted to do and to have a rest. I knew that whenever I wrote things, good things happened. That’s all I knew, so I decided to write every single day. I had a small newsletter list of around 70 people but I didn’t want to annoy them by writing every day to them, so I decided to use LinkedIn.

 

I thought no one would see it on LinkedIn. No one cares, but it’ll just help me get things out. I wrote every day, and I decided I’d do it for 30 days. Not everyone is comfortable doing it every day, but that regularity helped me shape my ideas. Initially I was talking a lot about networking. There wasn’t much uptake with that. Then I started talking about career pivots and that’s when people started to talk to me. In essence, I was testing the market without even realising it.

 

Using an online platform can be really important to your audience. Not everyone can go somewhere. Not everyone lives in a big city or has access to one. If you’re somewhere rural, you can’t be meeting others in person to network all the time. It would take so much time, energy and money out of you. However, you can jump on a Zoom, you can talk to people, you can write things online and then you can reach anybody in the world.

 

By doing that, I got approached by this international consultancy. I started writing some more. Then people who were in my existing network started asking me to tell them more about the topics. Over time, I managed to figure out what people find interesting and what they don’t and that was it.

 

So for me, personal branding is not the right way to describe it because it’s really about people testing ideas. That’s key when you’re trying to create opportunities. You can create a project or offer something to people, but you don’t know if people will care about it until you’ve offered it. Sometimes people can waste a lot of time designing things that nobody wants. The easiest test is writing a post about your idea or creating a video. If no one replies to you, you know there’s no point in you trying to develop that idea because no one cares. However, if people do ask you about it, then that’s a good sign.

 

Test your own ideas in public, however that looks for you. For me, that was writing online because that’s what I’m comfortable with. However, some of my clients have existing networks that they do their tests in. They use their closed networks with the people that they already have access to. Use your content to be known for a particular thing. That is when all the opportunities start to come. It snowballs.’

 

My final question for Iesha was, ‘What does inclusive growth mean for you?’

 

‘For me, growth is synonymous with success. In our society, that means a particular thing. If we’re going to think about it in an inclusive way, I think we need to reframe what growth and success looks like. It doesn’t have to mean you’re only successful if you earn a particular amount or if you’re a CEO.

 

There may be people who are very capable of that or who’ve done that, but now want to do something else. That, to me, is what inclusive growth is. It’s something that should be celebrated and that we respect as much as becoming the richest person in the world.’

 

Iesha recommends you visit her newsletter, and drop a follow on LinkedIn where she’s more than happy to chat to people in a DM.

 

For further information and resources from Toby and his team, head on over to our website at Mildon.