Last week I finally completed my mid-year personal review, in which I assessed what brings me energy, what drains it, and what has stood out this year and why. I got to it in August rather than July. Late, but done.

The insight I did not expect: I have been choosing more opportunities to work closely with startups and angel investors again. It reminded me how much doing impactful work brings me joy. It has since become a filter I run new opportunities through.

I will write properly about that filter another time. What I want to talk about today is where it came from, because I would not be holding it if I had not cleared two days in my diary and sat alone with my own year.

My diary mainly has three kinds of meetings in it.

1. Meetings with clients.

2. Meetings with collaborators.

3. Meetings with myself.

The third kind is the one people try to take from me.

Monday morning I plan. Friday afternoon I review. Twice a year I clear two whole days. Monday sets the week, Friday checks what actually happened, and the two days pull back far enough to see the year. Each one feeds the next.

That is the part most people miss when they treat thinking time as an event. On its own, a cleared day is just staring at a wall. It works because something upstream has been collecting the questions, and something downstream carries the answers into the week. When I have a hard problem or a strategy to develop, I book time to walk, run or swim as well. Something about motion helps me think differently.

None of this looks productive from the outside. That is exactly the problem. An empty diary reads to other people as “available,” so unless you block it and defend it, it gets filled nine times out of ten. Usually, by a meeting that felt urgent on Tuesday and is forgotten by Friday.

Defending it is the whole skill. Not scheduling it. Anyone can schedule it.

I was not proud of doing my mid-year review in August. If I had been that late to a client meeting, I could have lost the client. Late to a board meeting, I could have lost the seat. Late to pick up my child, I would have felt terrible about it for days. So I have decided to hold this meeting to the same standard as the ones other people are waiting in.

Which is why my end-of-year review is already pencilled in for December, with two backup dates sitting behind it.

The backup dates are the part I would steal if I were you. Something will come up. It always does. Without a fallback, the meeting does not get moved, it quietly disappears, and you find yourself doing it in February telling yourself better late than never.

Put your next thinking day in the calendar this week. Then put two backup dates behind it.

Here is my question for you: which meeting in your week would you move first if things got busy, and what does that tell you about how much you rate whoever is waiting on the other side of it?

Reply and tell me. I read every response.

On Wednesday 2nd September, I am hosting some intentional 1:1 time. Cowork with me at the newly opened Foundervine Spaces in Canada Water. Book a day pass here, then book a 1:1 with me via the booking form. Three spaces left.

On Wednesday 2nd September, I’ll be hosting some intentional 1:1 time to Cowork with me at the newly opened Foundervine Spaces in Canada Water. All you have to do is book a day pass here, then book a 1:1 meeting with me via the booking form. 3 spaces left!!!

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim MBE

I’m slowly approaching a season in my life where I need to decide alongside my wife and daughter what secondary school my daughter will attend. I know it is cliché, but where has the time gone? I feel like she has grown up so quickly.

I remember being in secondary school; I still have a few very good friends from that season in my life. I had endless energy playing football; I enjoyed teachers rather than specific subjects and GCSE exams felt like a matter of life or death. Honestly, it felt at the time as if good grades meant a good future and bad grades meant a bad future. I almost feel silly saying that now but in that moment, that’s how it felt.

Who do you call?

Some of you may be seasoned enough to remember when your minutes (data) on your mobile phone would run out as a teenager because you have been on the phone too long. Then a few of us were lucky to have free minutes after 7pm. That alone made us smile. Nowadays, I hardly speak on the phone outside of work. I’ve set myself a fun task to make 3 spontaneous calls a week for the next 3 weeks. Who knows…. it could be you!

In my early 20s I booked a trip to South America to go on a backpacking adventure. I remember vividly flying from London City Airport to Frankfurt, Germany for a quick stopover. During my brief time walking between planes, I was pulled aside by one of the flight attendants. She informed me that my ticket wasn't valid and my heart started racing; I was panicking and confused. Instead of trying to solve the problem, in my moment of need, I called the one person whom I knew I could rely on, my elder brother Kwabz.

I explained the situation; he calmed my nerves, and within minutes he bought me a new ticket. I needed him in that moment, and he was there for me.

In your moments of need, I doubt you post on social media. It is more likely you turn to your support network. People who have your back, people you can trust, people you love. The ones who post are often the ones who don’t have someone to call.

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That’s why I don’t take it lightly when people choose me as the person they call (or voicenote). Whether I can assist or not, I don’t take it for granted that they trusted me in their time of need. When I can’t help directly, I also see if I can make an introduction or just sit in the mud alongside them, actively listen and just be a good friend.

I had four calls for help recently. Three of them I could do nothing about directly, but I circled back to check in and see if they had resolved the issues. However, one call I could be helpful with. It was from an unexpected person, but I felt so honoured to help and support them through their time of need.

It was about exam results and it was an emotional conversation. I couldn’t change the result, I couldn’t get him a retest, all I could do was comfort him, tell him I am in his corner and remind him that he has valuable skills beyond his academic results.

He was great at building relationships, working in a team and problem-solving. I’d witnessed this first-hand when I had the pleasure of teaching him. Always asking questions to feed his curiosity and go the extra mile. These are valuable skills, it is such a shame some schools don’t make students feel like they are (but we will save the education system for another post).

I put the phone down and thought about my daughter, and those open evenings we are about to walk around. We will read the Ofsted reports like everyone else. But the thing I actually want for her isn’t in any of those documents. I want her to leave school with people she can call. Kwabz never asked what I got in my GCSEs before he bought that ticket.

As I think about my daughter and this school decision. We will look at the league tables like everyone else. We will read the Ofsted reports and walk the corridors on open evenings to get a feel for the culture. But the thing I actually want for her isn’t in any of those documents or the promise of good grades.

Three calls a week

Some of you may be seasoned enough to remember when your minutes on your mobile phone would run out as a teenager because you’d been on the phone too long. Then a few of us were lucky to have free minutes after 7pm. That alone made us smile.

Nowadays, I hardly speak on the phone outside of work. So I’ve set myself a fun task: three spontaneous calls a week for the next three weeks. No agenda, no favour to ask. Just checking in on someone before they need me to.

Who knows, it could be you.

Because nobody schedules a moment of need. It arrives at an airport gate in Frankfurt, or on results day, or on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. And the network you turn to in that moment was built quietly, months or years earlier, in conversations that felt like nothing much at the time.

As I continue to think about my daughter and this school decision. We will look at the league tables like everyone else. We will read the Ofsted reports and walk the corridors on open evenings to get a feel for the culture. But the thing I actually want for her isn’t in any of those promises of good grades.

I want her to leave school with people she can call in her moments of need. And I want her to know that whatever the grades say, they will never tell the whole story.

Consider who you should call this week; you never know if they might be someone in need of your call in that moment.

We all need people we can call.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim MBE

A few weeks ago, someone walked up to me at a networking event, smiled, and said:

“Andy, you do so much. But... what do you actually do?”

They knew me from Angel Investing School. That was the business I built publicly, the one where I was the face, the voice, the brand. 2,000+ investors trained. A community. A presence. And then I closed it.

Since then, I’ve been building in private.

I wasn’t embarrassed by the question. But I was curious about it, and a part of me was frustrated too. I want people to understand who I am and what I do.

But I don’t want to have to ‘play the game’ on social media to feed algorithms to broaden my reach.

Building in Public

Around the same time of closing my business down, I started noticing a pattern among entrepreneurs who regularly featured on my feed.

They were part of this movement of ‘building in public’, constantly showing proof of work along the journey of building. There were things like #100 days of [insert word such as blogging, coding etc]. Some had genuine drivers like accountability around a commitment they had made. Others were jumping on the bandwagon to increase follower count.

Several of them had built strong personal brands alongside their businesses. They were vocal, visible, and consistent. Their audience knew their story, their struggles, their pivots. They looked, from the outside, like they had it figured out.

Then their businesses ran into trouble. Some closed. Some failed quietly. Some are still limping.

A handful pivoted cleanly to monetising the personal brand itself. Teaching what they knew. Consulting. Speaking. Forming Community. The brand became the business. Smart, if it works. But it can also feel like it is a little too soon for loyal customers left dejected that the products they loved are no longer available, or even worse, bad customer reviews from customers who struggled to get products, unaware the business was facing closure.

Some entrepreneurs found themselves stuck in a more uncomfortable place. They had been so public about the journey that closing down felt like a public reckoning. The same visibility that built their audience now meant the fall was witnessed. Some went quiet. Some seemed unsure of what they stood for now that the business they’d built their identity around was gone.

I don’t say this to judge them. I’ve experienced my own version of this.

But it made me think hard about what we’re actually building when we build a personal brand.

Most entrepreneurship advice conflates two things that are genuinely different.

The problem is that personal branding feels productive. It produces content, followers, engagement, and visibility. It gives you something to show.

Personal building produces none of that. It produces something harder to photograph or post about: clarity.

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Building in Private

Here’s what building in private has taught me.

When you stop performing for an audience, even a well-intentioned one, you start noticing things. You notice which work pulls you out of bed and which work you procrastinate on for weeks. You notice the projects where time disappears and the ones where every hour feels like a tax. You notice the conversations that leave you full and the ones that leave you hollow. You notice the hobbies and activities that become a part of your weekly ritual as you switch off from work.

This data is priceless. And you can only collect it honestly when you’re not simultaneously managing how it looks.

Two things I’ve been doing this past year quietly have shown me this more clearly than anything else.

The first is Founders in Fellowship, a monthly virtual gathering I run voluntarily for faith-centred entrepreneurs. No agenda beyond honest conversation. People from different faith backgrounds, different business stages, different struggles. What happens in that room stays in that room, and that’s exactly why it works. There’s no content to extract from it, no highlight reel to post. Just a group of people being real with each other. The intimacy is the value. And every single month, I leave more energised than I arrived.

The second is a Summer Innovation Bootcamp I ran for teenagers. I watched young people who came in uncertain and guarded start to find their voice, develop ideas, and carry themselves differently by the end. I feel so proud when I see how confident they become in just a week. My goal is to empower all of them with self-belief and higher self-esteem. It was some of the most fulfilling work I’ve done in years. I couldn’t post about it publicly because the participants were minors, so there was no audience, no engagement, no social proof. Just the work and what it produced in them.

The fact that I couldn’t share it publicly didn’t diminish it. If anything, it clarified something. The fulfilment was entirely independent of anyone else seeing it. That matters to me a lot more than a good engagement rate. That’s information about who you actually are.

I call this process becoming the ‘primary source of your own data.’ Not your follower count. Not the testimonials in your DMs. Not the reaction to your last post. You.

That’s what I mean by Self-Influence.

It’s the practice of building your sense of identity, direction, and decision-making from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Before you influence anyone else, you have to influence yourself. And that requires knowing yourself with some precision.

So what does building in private actually look like beyond those two examples?

It doesn’t mean hiding or being secretive. It means being intentional about where your attention goes before it becomes content.

Some things that have worked for me:

• A daily tracker. Seven years of journaling, not for publication, just for pattern recognition. Over time you see yourself clearly. You stop being surprised by what you want. You can check out my digital journaling method here.

• Masterminds over audiences. A small group of people who know your full situation will give you more useful signal than a large audience who only know your highlight reel. For example, for two years, every Monday I start the week with prayers alongside my friends Sope and Mas. I cherish that.

• Time-boxed curiosity. I protect time to follow what genuinely interests me, not what performs well, not what the market wants right now. That’s where real thinking happens. I spoke about this in a previous newsletter on Rabbit Holes

• Energy audits. Regularly asking: what gave me energy this week? What drained it? Not as a journaling exercise, as a decision-making tool. The answers shape what I say yes and no to. I do this every Friday.

None of this shows up in a content calendar. None of it gets likes. But all of it compounds.

Back to the networking event.

The person who asked what I do wasn’t being unkind. They were confused because the version of me they knew, the public-facing founder of a visible business, had gone quiet.

The honest answer is: I’m building differently this time.

I’m not trying to be known before I’m ready. I’m trying to know myself well enough that when I do show up publicly, I’m showing up as something real rather than something managed.

Building in public isn’t wrong. But it’s not the only way. And for a lot of people, especially those of us who’ve been the face of something previously, the most valuable thing we can do is go quiet long enough to hear ourselves think.

The brand can follow. But only after there’s something true underneath it to build on.

That’s what I’m building toward.

Love & Light,
Andy

I was catching up with my brother last week and shared a story about the contrast I experienced between entrepreneurs in the UK and Africa. For context, last year I facilitated two international bootcamps in Ghana where I had the opportunity to coach entrepreneurs across Africa.

Some similarities exist, such as the ambitious vision that drives them to see the difference they can make in the world. They solve problems they deeply care about, and they face the challenge of doing as much as they can with the little they have, given how difficult it is to raise funds, especially across Africa.

One entrepreneur stood out to me. He took great pride in showing the international entrepreneurs around Ghana, ensuring they had a good time, and I could see him grow in confidence from what he was learning. His name is Anthony, and he is the founder of Shaq Express, Ghana’s last-mile delivery courier service. I had the pleasure of having lunch with his management team, who asked me such great questions, feeding their curiosity and eager to make the most of our time together.

After lunch, I joined them for a tour of the business as they walked me through each department and explained the operations of the business. It was evident that this was no ordinary business. Not only did they provide logistics, warehousing and courier services, but they also had a mechanic on-site to maintain and fix their motorbikes and vehicles. This was a service the public could pay for, bringing an additional revenue stream and increasing utilisation. They also had a battery charging station for EV bikes, which are growing in popularity across Ghana. Again, this is for their delivery riders as well as the public, who can pay to access them too. Another source of revenue and smart utilisation of assets. This is the type of smart play we saw with companies like Amazon, which gave birth to Amazon Web Services (AWS) after noticing how much underutilised server space they had.

Shaq Express were so resourceful. They were geniuses, and they were underrated and underfunded. This is the problem with the inefficiency of capital allocation. Some entrepreneurs need and deserve the opportunity to receive funding and scale their ambition. There is a lesson here for all entrepreneurs, I believe. In the current market conditions where the cost of living is rising, selling feels harder, and budgets are being squeezed, we need to be resourceful. When you take stock of your skills and assets you possess, where do you have spare capacity? What could you utilise even more?

The uncomfortable truth is that Shaq Express would raise faster if it were headquartered somewhere else. Capital still flows along familiar lines rather than toward the best operators. That is slowly changing, but the more powerful story is what you have the power to decide regardless of whether you don’t raise funds. I keep thinking about Anthony walking me through that mechanic shop with the same pride he had showing us around Accra. He wasn’t waiting for permission or a funding round to build something durable. He looked at what he already had and asked it to work harder. That posture is available to all of us, whatever the market is doing.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim

https://andyayim.com

PS. I launched my newly branded website; let me know what you think 😊

PPS. I’m opening up a handful of fractional strategy sessions this month (pick my brain 🧠). 45 minutes, one-on-one, where we get sharp on whatever’s stuck, whether that’s product, growth, or your next career move. It’s £250, and I’m only opening four slots since I want to give each one real focus. If that’s useful, reply to this email, and I’ll send you a link to book.

Can A.I really know you better than you know yourself.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending my daughter’s first awards ceremony at her Netball club. She joined midway through the season, my wife and I were so proud when she received the ‘Most Improved Player’ award.

One of the values we are trying to instil in our kids is the importance of deliberate practise. Repetition leads to mastery. I’ve noticed my daughter takes really well to receiving feedback from coaches, putting into practise what they share and feeling fulfilled when she is told, “Well done, that’s it, you're doing it.”

So this award was a wonderful feedback loop for her.

I couldn’t help but think as we made our way home, if my daughter had an A.I coach instead of a human; would she respond in the same way and achieve the same result?

Actual Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence

Honestly, I don’t feel confident A.I could. You see, the lessons I shared above about how my daughter reacts to feedback are rooted in emotional intelligence. Seeing my daughter’s facial expression when she makes a mistake, noticing her self-talk and talking her away from her limiting beliefs, working together with the coaches to tailor how we support her and valuing her contributions even when the team loses.

These things are really nuanced and not the best use cases for artificial intelligence. Seth Godin published a post titled, Real A.I. where he lists all the human skills that differentiate our intelligence from ‘A.I.’

Human skills for me include:

• Making people feel seen, heard, valued and supported

• Deliverate practise

• Listening attentively

• Making informed decisions

• Curating people together around ideas and experiences

• Patience to slow down, reflect and respond

• The curiosity to ask the right questions and probe

• The audacity to dream big

• The resilience to overcome adversity

• The beauty of friendships

• Doing meaningful work alongside value-aligned people in service of people who care

This isn’t a rallying cry but a reminder that A.I. serves as a co-pilot for a reason but you have the agency to choose to fly solo or fly alongside it. The choice is yours.

In 2026, we have reached a point where:

AI is creating our CVs and AI is selecting who gets an interview.

AI is submitting our grant applications and AI is deciding who gets shortlisted.

AI is replacing critical things, and AI is making decisions on our behalf.

I believe we are going to see a return to actual intelligence. We have experienced the edges of AI, and it is pushing us to return to the value of real experiences. We will return to selecting candidates, interviewing grant applicants and doing our own research to inform our decision-making.

This week, reflect on where the boundaries serve you best.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim

I don’t usually do this, but I wanted to write today’s newsletter as preparation for a keynote I have coming up. The key concept of the keynote is the tension between building a profitable business and a purposeful one.

When I get introduced on stage, people naturally share my highlight reel from receiving an MBE to investing in 17 gap-closing companies or training 1,000+ new angel investors and so on. All true, but there is more value in my distance travelled rather than the shiny destination it looks like I’ve arrived at.

So when I was asked to talk about profit vs purpose, it got me thinking.

Framed that way, it would suggest a tension between the two, which is not necessarily true. To challenge this, we must first explore the obstacles an entrepreneur faces when trying to build a business.

Business Building

My first ever business was a spin-out of a university project. It was called Saffirm and my friends Abdul and Denis designed employability workshops shaped around entrepreneurial skills. It was a purposeful business where we wanted to help graduates understand their value and employability skills so that they could land the roles they desired.

The business didn’t reach a profitable status by the time we shut it down. We ended the business because we lacked confidence and felt like impostors selling these services, even though we hadn’t worked in a professional job ourselves.

At that time, I felt an entrepreneur needed to have lived experience in the product or service they provided. Since then, I’ve realised that it is a fallacy as Mark Zuckerberg, Melanie Perkins (Canva) and dozens of other entrepreneurs achieved great things when doing it for the first time.

I built a second business 17 years ago, a music discovery platform called Mixtape Madness (my brother and friends still run it today). We built that business off the back of scratching our own itch to build a central location online to discover and consume the UK music we loved.

That business became profitable, but I left the business before it achieved that milestone. I left because my day job as a management consultant enabled me to travel the world and fall in love with entrepreneurship, which impacted how I felt about the business I was no longer in love with.

I had to feed my curiosity and operate at the edge of my comfort zone to be stretched and grow. Staying would have been too comfortable.

Overcoming Adversity

My biggest challenges and obstacles in life were not in my career or businesses that I had built. It was in experiencing the loss of my life mentor, guide and friend….my father.

I was 25 at the time and so confused, upset, angry and quite lost in all honesty. I had a new job that I started not long after my loss, and I had a manager who I felt didn’t see me or value me so I never shared what I was going through. That manager ended up cutting our ties and letting me go at the end of my probation period without any feedback during those three months.

I was back to square one and felt like I needed to get my life back together, so I focused on first principles and returned to management consulting. I joined an entrepreneurial small challenger consultancy called Elixirr.

It was the first interview in my life where I said to myself f**** it, I am going to be 100% my most authentic self. I decided life is too short to be a restricted version of myself. I add the most value when I am a full expression of myself.

Values-driven business

Before you start a business, you do research on things like how to register a business, finding a domain name and social media handles, finding your first customers, competitors in the market and the list goes on.

How do you find your personal values?

You have to treat it with the same level of rigour and do research about yourself. Answering key questions like:

• What brings me energy?

• What drains my energy?

• What are the things that frustrate me?

• What do I care deeply about?

• What are my non-negotiables?

• What brings me fulfilment?

• What makes me feel most alive?

These are not typically the questions you can answer off the top of your head, it requires introsopection and reflection. In other words, time alone.

My life hack has been my tracker (journal), which has allowed me to connect the dots and surface how my values keep showing up in my decisions, businesses and life.

The Angel Investing School was the first business that I built intentionally with my personal values.

Play the long game became a mantra to guide new angel investors to focus on building a portfolio rather than a single investment.

Seek first to understand was a guiding principle for angel investors to be curious about founders, their context and why they were building their businesses.

Adding value beyond capital was all about writing the cheque, writing it off and going to work as an extension of the startup you are backing as an angel. Adding a lot more value than the money you invest. Put simply, be helpful.

Purpose, Profit and Values

Whether your business succeeds or fails, you can hold your head up high when you know that you have stayed true to your values. Throughout life, I’ve realised that people really respect you when you stick to your values. Even if it means saying no to a lucrative deal or firing a high performer who is toxic to company culture.

Values live on long after the profits fade away.

The sad reality is that purpose is not enough. It is what gets you started, it’s what keeps you going, but it may not result in profit. But who you are matters more than what you do.

When I walk on stage later this week, someone will read out the highlight reel again. The MBE. The 17 companies. The 1,000 angels.

None of that is the talk.

The talk is this: profit versus purpose is a false choice. The thread running through every business I’ve built, the ones that failed and the ones that didn’t, was never profit or purpose. It was whether I stayed true to my values along the way.

Purpose is not enough. Profit is not enough. Values are what’s left when both are tested.

That’s the distance travelled. Not the destination.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim

PS. you can register here for the event: https://luma.com/xs2aq6ar

Thank you to Linkedin Helper for helping me automate my human touch when connecting with people through Linkedin. I’ve hosted dozens of events this year and this tool has helped me fill my seats and make new connections. Try it out with a 14 day free trial here.

In the last two weeks I have absolutely loved being in my element MC’ing for a wide range of events. I hosted the Venture Stage at SXSW London, an annual forum for a Go!London at the Barbican Centre and a breakfast briefing with Entrepreneur Magazine along with my sacred hour on the internet with Founders in Fellowship.

Alongside this I have written a number of guest blogs coming out soon for a liberal society Think Tank, Centre Write and a long-term B2B Software investor, Azlin Software. Then trained 100s of managers in my Human-centred leadership philosophy travelling to Ipswich, Tetford and other parts of the UK I doubt you have heard of. I’ve had to really be on top of my time to ensure nothing slips.

Years ago I ditched to-do lists as they weren’t working for me. I found myself spending ages planning what to prioritise working on then slowly allowing the drift of the week to drag me into a reactive state for things that popped up. I remember doing a simple Time Audit where I ranked all the meetings I had over the last two weeks from 1 to 10. 1 representing a poor use of time, 10 representing it was a great use of time. The results were revealing.

This lead me to transition to time blocking my calendar so that I literally schedule time in my calendar for upcoming two weeks which represents my priorities. Because we all know, once something is in the calendar we honour it. Except it is usually time with someone else, rather than time with ourselves.

Honour time with yourself just as you would a meeting with others.

However, I do schedule in from time to time something I call “Rabbit Holes.”

What are Rabbit Holes

It is permission to follow my curiosity regardless where it will take me. In the past this fostered my interest in anime as well as Far Eastern philosophy such as Taoism and Buddhist Zen. So today I want to share a deep dive into my latest rabbit hole.

I received a newsletter from The Black Venture Network about an upcoming event that I knew I couldn’t attend. I hadn’t come across one of the speakers Shae Omonijo who was a PhD candidate at Harvard approaching AI from a humanities perspective. I was immediately curious given my work on Human-centred Leadership.

I had a play around with her Critical Thinking Bot, bounced an idea I had for a new service to train internal facilitators in large companies to become human-centred facilitators. Naturally, I then checked her Linkedin page, listened to hours of her Critical Thinking in the Age of AI podcast then subscribed to her newsletter.

This rabbit hole, enhanced my opinion on critical thinking, AI and human values. It also formulated a handful of questions so reached out to catch up with Shae, then wrote this newsletter as I await a reply.

What was a highlight from my exploration?

The slow erosion of deep thinking was a road paved by the “attention economy.” Social media was like baby AI, not creating original content but curating user generated content to optimise keeping us on the platform as long as possible.

How can we preserve human intelligence and push back on cognitive decline?

Here are 3 out of the many ways shared by Shae:

1. (Re)introduce “Good Friction” Into Your Life

For me, that includes:

• Journaling regularly

• Honour the practice doing a personal weekly roundup

• Writing my newsletters without AI (only ask it for structural feedback not word editing)

• Increasingly walk and run without headphones so my mind can wander like it does when I swim.

• Using a whiteboard for brainstorming and collaborating with others

2. Create Analog Zones for Deep Thinking

• Time blocking in my calendar for…..house groceries, school activities, exercise and work priorities.

• Public speaking, IRL experiences to make me people feel at home whilst developing through thought-provoking dialogue.

• Having a “Not to do list” which includes things such as no back to back meetings and no meetings before 12

• Read physical books and long form essays (rabbit holes)

• Apart from my bank (silent notification), all notifications are off and I often have my phone screen in greyscale. I don’t want to keep reacting to notifications. I prefer to pick up calls and check my phone during breaks that suit me. My presence is a gift so I honour that.

3. (Re)introduce Pleasure, Leisure, and Boredom

Loved this one, for me it includes:

• Currently reading the book, Avoidance, Drugs, Heartbreak and Dogs by Jordan Stephens. I would never have bought this book but it was gifted to me so I wanted to give it a try. It has been a good aid for switching off during a train journey or before bed.

• Watching Anime, currently watching Wistoria: The Wand and The Sword (so good). I love the story arcs, character development and different cultures presented by such a beautiful art form.

• No phone date nights, let’s just start with regular date nights to be honest. As a parent with two young kids this in itself is a worthy goal.

• Hanging out with non-work related friends. Yes there is a caveat there intentionally as I love messy conversations unrelated to work.

I spent hours as you can see foraging down this rabbit hole and I loved it, it was time well spent.

It is one of the reasons I create a Not To Do list because it creates boundaries that allow me to have space to feed my curiosity like this.

I encourage you to write even just one thing that you will honour this week on your Not To Do List.

Hopefully it allows you to follow your curiosity and lead you to new discoveries, ideas or even rest and recovery.

Go get lost now (in a good way)!

Love and Light,
Andy

I have invested in 17 gap-closing companies as an angel investor and was a Managing Director at Backstage Capital, where we invested millions into underrepresented founders. Creating access to opportunity for people from all backgrounds is close to my heart.

I don’t typically share sponsored posts, but occasionally a value-aligned brand comes along, and I feel comfortable sharing them with my tribe. A big thank you to our sponsors who keep this newsletter free to the reader:

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Lloyds Bank and Channel 4. Last year, I saw several Black-owned brands like Alonuko and Nylah with adverts on Channel 4 thanks to this competition.

There is £200,000 of TV advertising up for grabs for Black-owned businesses.

If you’re building a Black-owned business and thinking about your next stage of growth, this is worth a look. Applications are open for the Channel 4 Black in Business initiative, supported by Lloyds and created to help ambitious founders scale their visibility and reach new audiences.

If you’re ready to scale your visibility and tell your story to a much wider audience, this could be a strong opportunity. Find out more and apply:

Enter the Black in Business awards | 4 Sales (eligibility criteria apply).

Applications close on 7th June 2026 (early submissions encouraged).

Once in a while, we meet a person we think is quirky. It could be the way they laugh or even the way they make you laugh. It could be the way they think or certain mannerisms they have. You might be one of those quirky people.

No one has ever called me quirky to my face. But I've kept a daily life tracker for 16 years, organised into eight categories and four sub-categories, and I run a personal review of it every six months. So, probably.

Where It All Began

In 2010, I graduated from university and secured deferred entry for a graduate consulting role at EY. I took this as a blessing in disguise, as I had a recurring dream that I wanted to travel and see the world. At that stage and age, I'd only been on a plane once, for my grandma's funeral in Ghana.

This inspiration to travel came originally from a place of envy during a work placement I did during a year out of university. During that work placement, two things were confirmed. The first is that I didn’t want to become an accountant despite studying that for my degree. The second was that everyone was sharing stories of all the adventures they had been on from Australia to Southeast Asia, and it fascinated me. I wish I could have contributed to the discussions, but I had no stories to share. They shared such vivid descriptions that I could visualise the beauty of the journeys they described.

As a parent of two young kids now, I realise how much my parents trusted me at 21 when I told them my plans to backpack to South America, and they gave me their blessing. I’m so grateful they were not resistant and instead encouraged me to feed my curiosity. I recall telling some of my closest friends in Tottenham, where I grew up. The initial response was that,

It was a foreign experience for my friends and I understood that. Literally no one we grew up with as friends had ever gone backpacking; it must have sounded so weird to them. In the back of their minds, they may have been thinking, “Andy’s changed,” or “that sounds so sick, love this Andy.” I’m not sure to be honest but they never put me off and they supported me all the way.

Similar to entrepreneurship, ignorance is bliss, and I never really knew what I was getting myself into. I bought my backpack, my sleeping bag, my essentials and a blank journal with a pen.

That trip was the first time I had ever documented my life on a daily basis for three months. My journey started in Peru, experiencing the Inca Trail and visiting Machu Picchu before descending to Bolivia to take panoramic pictures across the Salt Flats. From there, I trekked through the Amazon Pantanal wetlands of Brazil before slowing down on Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro. I visited Chile, Argentina and Uruguay before concluding my trip and returning to the UK.

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That trip represented so much self-discovery for me. I learned how to be more independent, for starters, as I had no one to rely on so I had to step up and be responsible for myself. Small things like deciding to eat healthy to looking after my goods, and staying vigilant in public places. I made friends along the way from a wide variety of backgrounds, Germans, Danish, locals in Latin America, and that taught me that we have more in common as humanity than what divides us. I also fell more in love with nature, with the planet, with preserving traditions and respecting culture. My biggest lesson was that growth occurs at the edge of my comfort zone so tracking where my curiosity leads me leads to my biggest leaps in learning.

Needless to say, I wrote on every page of that journal and ran out of pages. I sent the occasional email to my friends back home, full of excitement of all the new things I was experiencing. I just had to share it, I couldn’t keep it to myself.

That’s a small trait that has been consistent throughout my career as I create pathways to opportunities for people from all backgrounds to succeed as entrepreneurs or in careers. By looking back and connecting the dots in my journal, it helps me keep track of my inner compass, who I am and what I am continuously learning.

16 Years Later

My journaling practice has evolved. I now keep a digital journal I call “My Tracker.”

The main purpose of My Tracker is to track whether my daily behaviours map to the life I want to lead. I capture things in there such as feedback I receive after delivering a workshop, capturing a weekend run or even moments and memories from a family vacation.

It’s a regular practice I keep almost daily to slow down, reflect and capture what comes to mind. Whether that is a screenshot of a message, attaching a picture or pasting a link and writing a few thoughts.

Ok so here is where it gets geeky. Everything I capture has a Category and a Sub-Category (personalised to me).

Categories

🧘🏽‍♀️ Health & Fitness. Did you exercise? How did you eat? How did you sleep? Look at areas such as alcohol, smoking, posture, hydration, etc.

👨🏾‍💻 Work & Business. How fulfilled did you feel at work this year? If you run a business, how did it go?

🗺️ Friends & Community. Did you make new friends? How much time did you spend with your friends? Which friends had the biggest impact on your year? Did you get involved in any communities?

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Personal Life & Family. Did you spend enough time with your family? Any highlights? Do you have a partner? How did your relationships go?

🧠 Learning & Knowledge. Learning new things from books, videos, podcasts, courses and wider life

💡Ideas. Any new Ideas to add to the backlog, regardless if I act on them.

🙏🏾 Emotions & Spirituality. How did you feel today? Any particular ups and downs? Why? Did you take the time to connect with your inner self?

😶‍🌫️Higher Self. Your dialogue with your future self. Who you are AND are becoming

Sub-Categories

• Wins. Celebrating the small victories.

• Lessons: What you learned. Reframing setbacks as growth.

• Actions: Things you want to follow up on or execute.

• Testimonials: Any feedback you received from others.

Mid-Year & End-of-Year Reviews

Every six months, look across each category individually (for example, Health and Fitness) and capture the following:

• What went well?

• What did not work so well?

• Based on what I learned, what next?

• Number of entries in that category (good indication of whether to consolidate or delete an underutilised category)

This allows you to step back, spot patterns, and make intentional adjustments for the next season of your life.

Here is a template of My Tracker you can use for yourself :

1. Notion Template

2. Google Sheets Template

If you do dare to take the plunge and use the tracker, don’t be rigid with it, personalise and make it work for you. From category labels to how you choose to capture things. Don’t feel like you need to honour this practice daily, but it helps to have a weekly nudge in your calendar, even if it is just 10 minutes.

The real magic occurs when you do Mid-Year and End of Year Reviews, which is where the ‘Ah-ha’ moments pop up time and time again.

I would LOVE to hear how you get on if you are quirky like me and give it a go.

Love & Light,
Andy

“No new friends.” That was a DJ Khaled tune I used to enjoy back in the day. Beyond the song, it was a mantra I had in the back of my mind. I used to tell myself that I had to be professional at work and focus on just fitting in.

That rule didn’t last very long. I broke it when I was 18, and my best friend got me a job at M&S. I was working on the bureau de change whilst she was on TV and technology. We didn’t hide that we were friends; I had a crush on her (feels American typing that out). I am speaking about the woman who is now my wife of course, but before that, she was a friend, and she was a colleague.

I facilitated a Team Day last week for an HR technology startup in Manchester. The team had 10 members of staff, and it was the first time they had all met in person after they merged with another technology company.

I noticed straight away with the banter, the body language and the vibe that meeting in person was extra special as a remote-first team. I would go as far to say that there were friendships in the room.

What’s Wrong With Friends At Work?

In primary school, I had a really good friend, she was shy, laughed at my jokes, and we shared a love for watching WWE Wrestling. One day, after school, her mum said she was happy to take me along with her daughter to watch wrestling live as the WWE were coming to London.

I cried real tears that evening as my parents refused. I was devastated. My one chance to see The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Undertaker in person and my parents robbed me of that opportunity. Can you see real feelings resurfacing here? I found it so hard to tell my friend I couldn’t go. In the end I think my mum had to speak to her mum. My friend went and had an awesome time, but as the years went on our friendship started to dissolve. There is a sad time in school where masculinity kicks in and it feels like boys play football, girls skip and we don’t play together anymore. It was wrong, it was dumb but it happened, and our friendship faded away as we went to two different schools.

At school, you are expected to make friends. Do we have that same expectation at work? When I look back at that hard conversation I shied away from as a kid, I think many of us shy away from hard conversations with ‘friends’ at work.

We don’t want to upset them; we don’t want them to be upset with us. We don’t want to offend them, criticise them, disagree with them and ultimately put our friendship in jeopardy. In other words, we sometimes struggle to keep it real. Do you agree?

Friends With Benefits?

I would argue that because we care so much we should have a duty to keep it real with our friends; we just have to do it with care. Contrarian, maybe, but I encourage friends in the workplace. Friendship means I see you, I hear you, I support you, I care.

Friendship also means I look forward to coming into work alongside you, I don’t mind working late, I check in on you personally and I collaborate effectively with you professionally.

Because of friends you stay at the company, you feel more productive and you have someone to vent to like a part-time therapist. You talk about your Netflix shows, you review each other's CVs, but honour the secret when interviewing for new jobs, and the relationship transcends the workplace; it is proven outside of the office.

During that HR Startup team day, I ran an exercise with them called a Pre-Mortem. I asked them, “In 12 months, imagine we ran out of money as a business, list all the things that led to that moment.” They silently brainstormed then individually captured there thoughts. One by one they courageously surfaced their inner feelings and bravely shared what they honestly felt were huge risks the rest of the team should be aware of.

That moment mattered because they really cared.

The “no friends at work” rule isn’t really about professionalism. It’s about protection. If we don’t get close, we don’t have to do the hard work of being honest. We can stay comfortable, stay liked, and never have to say the thing that needs saying.

But that comfort costs you. It costs the team. And it costs the person sitting across from you who needed someone to keep it real with them.

The teams I see doing the best work together aren’t the most professional ones. They’re the ones who actually give a damn about each other.

The best professional decision I ever made started as a friendship and blossomed into marriage.

If you can't be friends with at least someone you work with, you aren't in the right job. Full stop.

Drops mic,
Andy Ayim MBE

PS. To all my FS friends, On June 30th I am co-hosting an event in London on AI, Humans & the future of financial services. Limited spaces so secure your seat: https://luma.com/too70iez

“Hi…..my name is, my name is, my name is Slim Shady.” - Eminem

Imagine you walked into a networking event tonight, unemployed. Someone approaches, extends a hand and asks: “So, what do you do?”

Would you feel as comfortable answering?

We default to sharing our names and our jobs because work consumes so much of our lives that it becomes fused with our identity. Modern Gov estimates we spend up to a third of our adult waking life at work. The BBC explored this in a piece titled Why We Define Ourselves By Our Jobs, noting that occupational titles offer immediate social standing, a sense of prestige, and a way to quickly signal your values or skill set to the world.

And so when we meet a stranger, and they ask “what do you do?”, the answer arrives automatically. No thought required. Our jobs give us a sense of value and pride, a living, relationships and status. There are benefits to this, no question. But it is worth asking: what does it cost us?

The Risks of a Job-Defined Identity

By introducing ourselves with a job title, we signal two things immediately: our social status and the lens through which we want to be seen. For most of us, this happens subconsciously. Like brushing your teeth or walking, you do not think about it. You just do.

But we are so much more than our job titles.

What happens when someone deeply attached to their title is made redundant? It can strip away more than a salary. It leads to a profound sense of lost purpose and grief. Retirement anxiety is a real fear for the same reason. Leaving the workforce can be disorienting for those who rely entirely on their professional title for a sense of belonging and meaning.

So how do we cultivate a more whole sense of identity? We have to rediscover our roots.

What Else Shapes Our Identities

I originate from Ghana, and we have a sacred traditional naming practice. Historically, the Akan tribe were thought to be the original settlers in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana). They believed that the day a person is born is not a coincidence but a spiritual assignment. Each day of the week carried both a masculine and feminine name.

I was born on a Monday, so my name is Kojo. My mum occasionally calls me by this name, and when I am in Ghana it is the name I am known by. My dad was also born on a Monday, and so was my grandad, which makes me a third-generation Kojo Oduro Ayim. In Ghanaian tradition, Monday is regarded as the day of the moon, and people born on this day are seen as emotionally stable, peaceful, and nurturing.

My mother is also a devout Christian, so she named me after Andrew, the first disciple of Jesus in the Bible. There is no book in the Bible named after Andrew. Beyond being the brother of Simon Peter, we do not know too much about him. What I learned first from my mum, then through my own reading, was that Andrew was humble, peaceful, and a connector. He introduced his brother Peter to Jesus, the same Peter who became a pillar of the Church. He brought the young boy with the loaves and fishes to Jesus during the feeding of the 5,000, again serving as a connector, working quietly behind the scenes.

Now all of this could be meaningless, or it could have profound meaning, depending on your perspective. What is undeniable is that our life experiences shape the stories we tell ourselves and therefore influence our identities. From backpacking across South America to experiencing grief from losing a loved one, these experiences matter just as much as your job title. Perhaps more.

In 2019, I asked 12 friends, family members and former colleagues the same question: “If you could name just one or two things that come easily to me but hard to others, what comes to mind?”

A few responses that struck me:

“Connecting deeply with new people in an authentic way, and simplifying complex situations through the use of metaphors.”

“Connecting people from all walks of life, investing in relationships for the long haul, not short-term and transactional like so many people.”

“There is something special about the way you deliver a message and make people feel like they can achieve anything.”

You can see the same thread running through what I learned about my names and what people who know me well reflected back. Connector. Nurturer. Quietly behind the scenes.

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Where to Start

Consider asking the same question I did to close friends, family and former colleagues: “What do you think comes easy to me but difficult to others?”

Create time sanctuaries. Intentional space to reflect, read, research and think without interruption. I timeblock at least five hours across a single week in my calendar for this. It is the opposite of context switching and doom scrolling, so you may have some initial withdrawal symptoms.

Become a Tracker. I believe we should all become trackers of our own lives, understanding deeply our values, strengths, what we enjoy and what lights us up. This is who we are, not simply what we do for work. I journal, reflect on past entries, and often walk through nature or swim to let my mind wander. Take pleasure in the small things that bring you pleasure.

Build Reflection Rituals. I do this every Friday morning using three simple questions, inspired by my good friend Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments: Plus (what worked this week?), Minus (what did not?), and Next (what will I do differently?).

Find Your Tribes. They say you become more like the people you surround yourself with. Finding communities interested in who you are, not what you do for work, gives you a safe space to nurture your whole identity.

These practices work together to help reinforce your whole identity, which is what you are cultivating beyond what you do for work. The equation is simple: in order to feel more fulfilled, you need to operate from your unique identity, which is rooted in meaningful endeavours that may include work, but are not exclusively defined by it.

So the next time someone asks what you do, try answering with who you are. Not your title. Not your company. The version of you that existed before the job, and will remain long after it. That person has always been the more interesting introduction.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim MBE

PS. To all my FS friends, On June 30th I am co-hosting an event in London on AI, Humans & the future of financial services. Limited spaces so secure your seat: https://luma.com/too70iez

I’ve known one of my dearest friends for almost 20 years now. We have celebrated a number of life milestones together, from graduating from university to getting married. As we both approach our 40th birthday (him before me - hehe), it made me reflect on some of our memories a decade ago when we were turning 30.

What did we envision? How did we feel? And what goals did we have for our lives?

The last question about goal-setting sparked a memory for me.

My friend and I were sitting in the park on a sunny summer’s day, dreaming about success. As in what would it look like in reality? The house, the car, the family, the lifestyle. I’m sure it led to some dreadful version of a vision board as a result.

Looking back, we failed to answer the real question that sits underneath it all.

How much is enough?

It is a strange question to sit with. Because most of us have been trained to treat ambition as a virtue with no ceiling. More revenue. More followers. More impact. More, more, more and increasingly now, now now. The word “enough” can feel like giving up. Like settling. Like you are somehow failing to honour the potential inside you.

The relentless pursuit of more, without ever defining enough, is not ambition. It is exhaustion dressed up as purpose. That’s what leads to burnout and depression, that deep feeling of I am failing, drowning, gasping for air. I see it with the clients I coach and I recognise it in my own life.

The problem with always chasing

Honestly, there is so much in life we will never achieve. Things that have no finish line, no matter how hard we chase them. Take certainty about the future. No amount of planning, saving, or preparation will ever make you feel truly safe. The variables keep changing, the world keeps shifting, and you can spend enormous energy trying to eliminate risk and never actually get there. Or take the feeling of being ready.

There is always one more qualification, one more experience, one more connection you feel you need before you take the leap. Readiness is a horizon that moves as you walk toward it. The problem is not that we lack discipline or drive. The problem is that we are chasing things that were never designed to be caught.

We need to be at peace with that and accept it.

Goal-setting culture is everywhere. And it serves a function. Direction matters. Intentionality matters. But somewhere along the way, we made the chase the point. We outsourced the question of “why” to the process of “how.”

And that is a problem, because you can be extremely productive in completely the wrong direction.

Self-Influence, the series I am exploring with you in the coming weeks, starts from a different premise. Before you can lead others, before you can build something meaningful, before you can make good decisions with your time, your money, your energy, you need to understand yourself deeply. You need to ask the questions most people avoid.

Today’s question is this: How much is enough?

You can apply it to rest. To learning. To recognition. To relationships. To pleasure. It is a question for every area of life.

But the lens I want to look through today is the one we tend to avoid most. Money.

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How much money is actually enough?

Back to my close friend and I sitting in the park. He audaciously set an ambition to become a millionaire by his 30th birthday. It was his north star. The number he had been carrying around since his early twenties. A million pounds. That was the goal.

I asked him a simple question. What does the life you actually want cost?

We sat down and mapped it out together. Not the fantasy version. The real version. The specific, honest version.

Here is what we came up with (roughly):

Look at that number.

Not a million pounds. Not even close. To live that life, to genuinely afford every part of it, he would need an income of roughly £320,000 per year before tax. Either drawn as dividends from a successful business or earned as a salary.

That is a significant income. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But here is the thing. It is approximately 70% less than what he thought he needed. His dream life, costed honestly, did not require him to be a millionaire. It required him to be clear.

The difference between a target and a number

Most people set financial goals the same way they set fitness goals. Vaguely. “I want to be rich.” “I want to be healthy.” The goal is more a feeling than a figure.

But a feeling is impossible to achieve. You cannot cross the finish line of a feeling because the feeling keeps moving.

I remember when I got my first professional job, which felt like the dream job after four years at university and my desire to make my family proud. The vision of that job vs the daily reality was very different. Even though I was earning more than I had ever earned in my life up to that point, I felt unfulfilled. In fact, that void led me to start a business in the evenings and weekends, Mixtape Madness.

When you name the actual number, when you sit down and do what my friend and I did, something interesting happens. The goal becomes real, achievable, in reach. It stops being a vague horizon and becomes a specific destination.

That specificity is not limiting. It is liberating. It becomes a driver alongside the other things that truly matter to you, whether that is family or specific causes close to your heart.

Because once you know what “enough” looks like, you can stop spending your most creative years chasing a figure that was never going to give you what you actually wanted.

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What this is really about

This is not a financial planning letter. And I am not telling you to lower your ambitions.

I am saying something more uncomfortable than that.

Most of us have never actually asked the question. We inherited our targets. We absorbed them from culture, from comparison, from the LinkedIn highlight reel, from a number someone told us we wanted years ago. And we have been running toward that number without ever stopping to check whether it is ours.

Self-Influence begins here. Not with a strategy. With an honest question.

Because until you know what enough looks like for you, specifically and honestly, you are not pursuing your life. You are performing someone else’s.

So here is today’s Self-Influence question for you to sit with: How much is enough? Pick one area of your life, your finances, your time, your recognition, your rest, and ask it honestly. What number, what amount, what version of that thing would actually leave you feeling complete? Write it down. The answer might surprise you.

How is my friend doing today?

I write this at a time when I approach the end of a challenging period of renovating a home. In some ways, the endeavour was ‘beautiful pain’. I’m proud of the beauty we have created, but it has been a painful journey at times to get here. Through the ebbs and flows of it all, I now feel like we have more than enough. We are not at our desired dream home state yet, but when I look around at what we call home, it is something I am deeply grateful for. A safe space for the family to always know they can return to. What a privilege. What an honour.

Back to my dear friend.

My friend never became a millionaire. But he did achieve his aspirational lifestyle.

He is doing well and is happy for it too.

He has built a business that generates the income he needed. He has gone on incredible vacations all across the world, from Thailand to the Maldives. He drives a nice car. He lives in a beautiful home. But most importantly, his character is consistent; I can still lean on him as a friend, we can still sit in the mud together.

He is content now, as he knows he has enough.

Until next time.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim MBE

In the startup world, there’s a concept called product-market fit.

It’s that moment where your product reaches a certain velocity, where demand is almost outstripping supply, where you’ve found a pocket of customers who don’t just like what you’ve built, they need it. You feel it before you can measure it. There’s a pull, an energy, a mutual recognition.

I’ve noticed something similar happens in facilitation.

Sometimes I leave a room or close a laptop and I just know. Not just that the session went well, but that someone specifically connected in a deeper way with the experience. That the time was valuable not only for the audience, but for me. The energy was mutual. I call it client fit.

I had one of those moments last year with an American client. A virtual masterclass. A first-time experience working together. One of those sessions where the questions were good, the attendees were curious, and the conversation flowed naturally like a great tennis match back and forth. I stayed in touch with the leader of that team afterwards. And when he found himself in the UK last week, we made plans to have lunch.

I booked the venue. Fairly bougie. We both realised pretty quickly when the menus arrived that we were going to leave hungry. That was established almost immediately.

Then came the champagne tray.

A waiter appeared beside us with it, and I started shaking my head before he’d even finished the approach. ‘Not for me,’ I thought in my head, it’s a Monday! But my friend paused, looked at the glasses, and asked for one. I thought about it for a second. Then I said in jest, I’d have one too, but only if we are celebrating.

We lifted our glasses. He looked at me, smiled, and told me he was retiring.

That toast changed everything about the afternoon.

It wasn’t the word retirement that stayed with me. It was the state he was in when he said it.

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What does it mean to retire?

I’ve heard people say it countless times when I ask the question, “What is one big dream you have?” Nine times out of ten, the answer starts with, “one day when I retire…..” It sounds like a dream, a perfect retirement is what so many envision, but what is more interesting is when you follow up and ask, “What would you be doing when you retire?”

Some answer with more work, as I love what I do. If that is the case, is that really a retirement? Others have loftier dreams, like getting a better handle on their self-care, from Yoga to going for long walks. There is no right or wrong answer, but I get the sense that people feel that they don’t have the space, time or agency to take more control of their time today, mainly because they need to work to survive (as opposed to work to thrive).

What do you envision yourself doing when you retire? and when do you think you would like to retire?

Back to my champagne lunch.

This was not a man counting down the days or collapsing across a finish line. He was fulfilled. Satisfied. Excited, genuinely, visibly excited about what came next. Investing. Property. Travel. Cooking. Laughing with friends. Advising early-stage founders, which is where he started before the bigger companies found him. He was still going to work. Still going to be useful. But now entirely on his own terms with the financial freedom to choose.

No financial pressure. No obligation. Just optionality.

What a blessing. Is this the dream?

I left that lunch inspired. But also sitting with something I haven’t fully resolved yet.

What struck me wasn’t really about retirement at all. It was about selection. The ability to choose what you give your energy to, not because you have to, but because you want to. Because it matters to you. Because it lights something up.

Most of us are working toward that, in some form. Building toward a place where we’re not driven by financial pressure, but by genuine desire. Where the question isn’t can I afford to say no, but simply do I want to say yes.

He had arrived there. And watching him, I found myself asking questions I haven’t answered yet.

What would you keep doing, regardless of what it paid you?

What would it actually look like, not when you retire, but how to start building more optionality into your life?

And what does it mean to remain useful to the world when usefulness is no longer tied to obligation?

I’m still sitting with these myself.

Maybe you are too.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim MBE

PS. I only had a glass of champagne then water as I had work in the afternoon 😉

I’ve never been great at receiving compliments.

I still find it a little awkward, which is strange because I love sharing compliments with others. I’m sure some of you reading this feel the same way. It is easier to give than to receive.

Almost two years ago, a close friend said something to me that I wasn’t ready to receive:

“Your superpower is your pure heart, and you should make it your priority to keep it pure.”

I remember hearing it and not knowing what to do with it. Errrm “Thank You.”

Inside, I started to ask all the questions……. What does a pure heart even mean? How do you make that a priority when you can barely keep up with everything else?

I let the compliment pass without giving it the reflection it deserved.

Then last year, I hit a wall. My energy was being pulled in too many directions. I was busy, but not aligned. Moving, but not forward. I could feel it in my body and in my spirit. Something had to change. I wasn’t living up to one of my own values, direction over speed.

So in July 2025, I did something that scared me. I cleared 90% of my calendar and publicly declared I was resetting. I posted it on LinkedIn, partly as a commitment to myself and partly as a way to ask for permission to start saying no. To pause and just slow down and be still.

Scary because it meant fewer meetings, less work, less money, but most importantly less distractions. My goal wasn’t to just do less for the sake of it.

“Not to do more, but to be more.”

I asked myself one question that changed everything:

“What would it look like if you could be all that you can be... and you couldn’t fail?”

The response from people was overwhelming. Messages came in from people I hadn’t heard from in years. People who saw something in that post (that question) that stirred something in them too. One person wrote, “This gave me chills, the kind of reset that’s not about doing more, but becoming more.” Another said, “I have found rest as my best strategy because you can do A, B, C and D testing strategies and nothing works until you align with God and your identity.”

That confirmed what I already felt. I wasn’t alone in this.

The Work Behind the Work

Here’s what most people didn’t see.

A reset sounds peaceful. In practice, it was one of the most challenging seasons of my life. Not because of what I had to do, but because of what I had to let go of.

I started calling it “internal scaffolding.” The same way scaffolding goes up on a building before structural work begins, I had to build the invisible framework that would allow me to grow. This wasn’t cosmetic work. This was foundation work.

It happened in stages:

1. Getting honest about where I was. I sat down with a mentor and mapped out my whole life across work, finances, relationships, health, faith, learning and purpose. Not just what was working, but what wasn’t. I wrote out what I’m good at, what I enjoy, what I don’t enjoy, and what I’m not good at. That kind of honesty with yourself is uncomfortable but necessary.

2. Making the hard cuts. I stepped back from commitments and WhatsApp groups that were good but no longer aligned. Roles, projects, things I’d said yes to out of loyalty or habit. I reclaimed my time and backed myself. This was the part that felt like loss; at times, it even masked itself as guilt. guilt not from others but from the stories I told myself about how others may perceive me. I had to accept that this didn’t matter and was based on assumptions. That helped me let it go like an Origami boat left on the stream of flowing water.

3. Building the infrastructure. I got clear on who I serve and how. I created systems, hired support, and designed processes for how I work with clients. I cleaned up how I manage my time with proper time blocking, sprint planning and space to think, reflect and create. I stopped trying to hold everything in my head. Notion became like a new limb, an extension of me as my second brain.

4. Dreaming bigger than I felt comfortable. I challenged myself to think 10x, not 10%. Not just incremental improvements, but stretching my imagination about what my life could look like. The kind of home I wanted for my family. The stages I wanted to speak on. The book I wanted to write. The impact I wanted to have.

It was during this process that my friend’s compliment finally landed on my pure heart. In the quiet, I got back in touch with my inner compass, my gut feelings. I started to get directions based on what felt right, on where the path is that I was meant to be on. My feedback validated this when people would say things like “I love your style” or “that was refreshingly different and reflective.” I knew then that slowing down and resetting was time well spent, as people who experienced me could feel the difference.

Everything clicked. The reset wasn’t just about strategy. It was about alignment. Keeping the heart right so everything else can follow.

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10 Non-Negotiables I Now Live By

Through this season, certain convictions became clearer. Not rules, but truths I keep coming back to:

1. Honour time for reflection. For me, that looks like praying regularly, meditating on scripture, swimming and journaling almost daily. I have a whole journal tracker system that I will share in a future post.

2. Living by my values matters. It helps me sleep better at night, knowing I am true to who I am.

3. Connect on values to create value. I get a lot of meaning from helping the right people. It is life-affirming and gives me energy. I’ve especially loved collaborating with Hattie Willis and the amazing work she does at Guessworks.

4. Accept that not all work is paid, don’t devalue that. I’ve loved volunteering with mentoring four young adults, speaking at entrepreneurial events at Amazon like Power Up by Ben Wynter, career events at Spotify and running Founders in Fellowship with LSE Generate.

5. Go with the water. Go with the flow of where the water is taking you. Trust God, He is the process (inner compass).

6. It’s nice to be important, but it’s important to be nice. Believing in people costs you nothing but means more than money could buy. When people feel that you believe in them and have their back, they can go on to be so much more of what they were born to be. I sometimes call this “borrowed belief.”

7. Less is more. Stress less and enjoy more now, don’t wait till you retire. Don’t get attached to things, money or achievements to determine your value in life. Happiness, great relationships, peace and good health are the better measures.

8. Experience is overrated. Hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most great things are done by people doing it for the first time. Someone’s past CV shouldn’t restrict them from unlocking potential in a new role. People who believe in the vision are always willing to go further when trusted. This has been a guiding star for hiring!

9. Express Love & Light in all that I do. Not just when I am paid. Especially to those who feel unseen and undervalued.

10. When you can’t look far, look deep. And it is ok to ask for help. You don’t have to do it alone. “Go fast, go alone. Go far, go together.” - African Proverb

The Honest Update

So how is it really going? Nine months in?

I’ll share what’s going well and what still needs work. Because I think that’s more useful than pretending everything is sorted.

What I’m proud of

• Released the Untangling Life podcast and received so many lovely messages about episodes that resonated with people

• Had four wonderful Group Coaching sessions with founders on the third Digital Catapult Black Founders Programme

• Designed and delivered development programmes to over 1,000 leaders and entrepreneurs

• Worked with almost a dozen new clients, including The Welsh Government, AXA Partners and The Women’s Super League

• Fasted more than in any year before

• Returned to swimming more regularly (my happy place)

• My faith and work felt more connected this year than ever before

• Started Monday morning prayer with close friends, something I now treasure

Where I still have gaps

I’m not going to pretend the reset solved everything. There are things I’m still working on:

• I miss working with teams. The deep collaboration, the energy of building something together day after day. Facilitation and consulting are fulfilling, but there’s something about being embedded in a team playing long games that I haven’t fully replaced yet.

• I want to speak on more stages. It brings me energy, and I believe I’m good at it. There are bigger stages and more global stages ahead.

• I want deeper, longer client relationships. Working as a trusted adviser alongside a smaller number of clients for a longer duration, doing deep, meaningful work.

• The book still isn’t finished. It was the one goal I didn’t get to last year. I’ve learned a lot and enhanced my perspective, but the writing needs to happen now. The book can tell the story of this whole journey, living intentionally by design, not by drift.

• I have to give myself more grace. I can be harsh on myself when I am in good health, have a loving family, a great team and an incredible life, plus I have been renovating a new home (need to cut myself more slack).

When I look back at the memories that actually stuck with me over the past months, most had nothing to do with work. A close cousin getting UK citizenship, I was over the moon. Then on the other side, my aunt passed away and so many childhood memories came flooding back, especially with her children.

That tells me something. The non-negotiables are pointing in the right direction.

What I’ve Learned (Really)

I have designed a lifestyle that works for my family and me rather than centering it around a job. The caveat is that I have worked for 17 years + to afford this privilege. That part matters. It didn’t happen overnight. But the decision to design it was a turning point.

One of the most powerful shifts? Going from building in public to building in private. Not everything needs an audience while it’s still forming. Some things need quiet, patience and trust before they’re ready to be shared.

One of the most valuable truths is that less is more. I honestly believe that with all the money in the world, in my heart, the things I would really want are the things I can do today. Spending time with family and friends. Eating great food. Having good health. Travelling to amazing places. All it would afford me is less financial pressure and therefore more peace of mind in that department.

This is why honouring the cleared-up space in my calendar has been core to maintaining the fulfilment I have. Money, business and work can fluctuate but through the ups and downs, I’m still Andy Ayim. No one can take that from me, that’s what I have learned, to remain consistently me, consistently Love & Light.

The reset taught me that sometimes the best progress comes from going backwards first. From stripping things away rather than adding more. From listening rather than performing.

What’s Next

2026 is the year I want to explore some of life’s more important questions. Not just for myself, but together, in community.

Questions like:

• Why are we here?

• What is unique about me?

• What would I love to do if money were no issue?

• How can I overcome limiting beliefs?

• I need to earn money, but I need more purpose in my work

I’ll be hosting a series of events this year exploring these themes. Some online, some in person (get in contact if you would like to collaborate or provide space). If any of that resonates, keep an eye on my newsletter and socials. The first one is a live conversation with Andreia Afonso about reinvention, identity and carving out a path that actually feels like your own. Because what most people don’t realise is that identity is the strategy.

The Reinvention Conversation (TOMORROW) Tuesday, April 21st, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Sign up here

Love & Light, Andy Ayim MBE

PS. I have a new Instagram page, please follow and interact with me there too! https://www.instagram.com/andyayim_mbe/

Happy Easter,

This morning I had coffee with two of my favourite people, Mike, a philanthropic adviser and author, and Stephen, my best friend since nursery school. Looking back I love how that conversation over two brought two completely different influencers in my life together in such an organic way.

We were just sharing stories. Laughing. Being real with each other.

And then Mike shared a story from his book that stuck with both Stephen and I. It created a shared language we could hang so many relatable experiences on.

He was referencing a story from his book How to Be a Better Human about Simon Sinek from an interview Simon did on Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett. Simon opened up about his struggle to form deep, meaningful relationships. And during that difficult season, people kept saying to him, “I’m sure you’ll be okay. It’ll all work out.”

He said it was unhelpful. More than that it was insensitive.

Because in that moment, he didn’t need reassurance. He didn’t need answers. He didn’t need someone to fix the mud he was sitting in.

He just needed someone to sit alongside him and be there. Nothing more.

Sitting in the mud.

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Muddy Matters

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been in that exact posture not metaphorically, but literally in the work I do. I recently finished a coaching engagement with a founder. When he first approached me, honestly I had imposter syndrome as I don’t position or sell myself as a coach even though it is something that naturally comes out when I express myself. A part of my creative art form.

The reason I said yes to his request was because I had a quiet confidence in me that I could sit alongside him, in the mud and allow him to just……Be. To belong, believe and become whatever he needed to be.

What he needed was for me to sit alongside him. To create the conditions for him to speak freely, feel safe, and be honest about what he was actually experiencing, how he was feeling and upon reflection what that means for him. It wasn’t about me at all, it was all about him.

I let go of the agenda. I sat in the mud.

And something shifted between us.

The same was true during our last Founders in Fellowship session, a virtual gathering for founders who draw strength from personal faith, who want to come as they are rather than perform as they think they should be.

The theme was active service.

I barely spoke. I held space. I listened. And in the silence and the sharing, something sacred happened that no keynote or workshop could have manufactured. One by one people were sharing their truth and others could feel the room shifting to a place where they could relate, empathise and relate to stories. Not my stories, not my teachings but the power of peer to peer communities.

Then there are my clients navigating real challenges at work, restructures, leadership changes, moments of doubt. They don’t always need an answer from me, in all honesty, I didn’t have any solution to offer. They need someone who won’t flinch at the discomfort. Who won’t reflect their own stories in attempt to empathise but instead creates distance as their own agenda surfaces. Someone willing to stay in the mud.

Mud is messy and that’s the point, it isn’t comfortable but it helps knowing you are not lonely in the mud alone.

Moulded From Mud Like Clay

I’ve been sitting with why this has become easier for me over the years. And I think it comes down to practice.

Long swims alone in my thoughts, no distractions, just rhythm and breath.

Walks in nature that slow everything down.

My daily journaling practice that helps me process what’s beneath the surface.

And most importantly, my daily bread. Time in prayer, morning, midday, evening sitting quietly with God.

That’s where I first learned how to sit in the mud.

Not with another person. But with myself. With the uncertainty. With the questions that don’t resolve quickly. With the parts of life that are genuinely uncomfortable.

That practice of not rushing to resolution, of being still, of being present is what has prepared me to do it with others.

You can’t offer someone what you’ve never experienced yourself.

I want to leave you with a question.

Who in your life is sitting in the mud right now?

Not asking for advice. Not looking for silver linings. Just needing you to be present.

Can you resist the urge to fix it? Can you sit with them in the discomfort?

And closer to home are you able to sit in your own mud?

To be still with the unresolved things without immediately reaching for distraction or a solution?

I’m hosting a virtual gathering on Tuesday 21st April on LinkedIn Live and I’d love for you to join me. The theme will be exactly this. Presence. Listening. What it means to truly show up for ourselves and know our worth.

Details and title coming soon. Keep an eye out.

Until then don’t rush out of the mud. There’s something important down there.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim MBE

A warm welcome to everyone who has recently joined Letters from Andy Ayim. I am glad you are here. We will be announcing our coaching session competition winner on 1st April over on Instagram and LinkedIn, so keep an eye out.

Last week I facilitated a masterclass.

As we approached the end of our time together, I could feel the weight in the room. Not tension. Weight. The kind that comes when a group of people are genuinely sitting with something.

I had taken them through the Team Emotional Audit framework, which maps the emotional state of a team across four zones. I asked them to identify what zone their team was currently in. Then I paused and asked the follow-up question I always find more revealing.

“And what zone are you personally in right now?”

It became an individual exercise. Heads down. Quiet thoughts. People were still in that space when I invited them into my closing question.

“Based on our time together today, what surfaced for you, and how are you feeling?”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was honest. The kind of silence that tells you the room is working.

Then one participant, courageously, chose to share.

“It’s given me some food for thought,” she said. A pause. “Firstly, about what zone I am in, and therefore where I need to transition from, before I am in a place where I can genuinely support my team in shifting their emotional tone. Thank you for this.”

The room didn’t respond with noise. It responded with more silence. The kind where you can feel everyone quietly applying what was just said to themselves.

She had taken personal responsibility for her own inner state as a precondition for leading others well. I loved that sense of ownership, honesty and vulnerability. I was cheering her on - on the inside.

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But there was another moment in that room that stayed with me longer.

A woman who has been in her organisation for almost thirty years raised her hand. She wasn’t celebrating a breakthrough. She was sitting with a question that was clearly causing her real discomfort.

“My concern,” she said, “is that the organisation is changing. There’s a new generation. A different way of working. And I’m wondering if I can adapt. I’m wondering if I’m still relevant.”

The room went very still. This one felt more tense than the last silence.

What she was naming wasn’t a leadership problem. It was an identity problem. After three decades of knowing exactly who she was in that context, the context had shifted. And she was left asking: if the organisation changes, who am I?

I don’t know if her redundancy came this week, or if it will come next month, or if it will come at all. But I know with absolute certainty that what she was feeling in that room, that erosion of identity, that fear of irrelevance, that question mark over her own adaptability, is exactly what lands on someone when they’re told their role is being eliminated after twenty or thirty years.

It’s the same weight. Just arriving differently.

That moment is why I want to speak directly to you, if you’re reading this and you’ve just received that news. If you’ve been made redundant after decades in a large organisation. If the identity you built, the routine you knew, the peer group you belonged to, all fell away in a conversation that lasted twenty minutes.

This isn’t easy. Redundancy after two decades feels like loss, not opportunity. That’s real and valid. Sit with that for a moment. Don’t skip it. The mortgage, the kids, the flexibility, the friendships, it all matters. It is a different type of mourning.

But before you can move others, you have to move yourself first. And that starts with honest questions.

Am I burnt out, and do I need space to recover before I can show up well for what’s next?

Are there strengths I am underusing, or patterns I have been avoiding, that are quietly shaping how I see myself right now?

Do I protect time for genuine reflection, to ask what I did well, what I could do better, and what I would do differently?

These are not comfortable questions. But they are honest ones. And honest questions, asked in private, are often the beginning of real change.

Because here is what I have come to believe about moments like these. The disruption is rarely the real story. The real story is what you choose to see when the dust settles.

What is ahead of you, even now, even in the uncertainty, is an opportunity. Not a consolation. An actual opportunity worth being excited about.

The questions that help me reframe in these moments are ones I return to often:

1. If I detached my identity from my job title, what strengths would remain?

2. What have I always been intrigued by that I have never given myself permission to pursue?

3. What would it look like to fulfil my potential, not just replace my income?

4. What would make work feel like play?

The biggest barrier is rarely a lack of options. It is a lack of permission to explore them. Fear of what others might think, or the weight of financial pressure, can keep us anchored to a path that no longer fits.

But transitions, however painful, have a gift inside them. They force the question of who you actually are when the structure falls away.

The woman in my masterclass found her moment in a facilitated room, sitting with the question before the disruption arrived. The person I spoke to this week is finding their way in open water, learning to move forward in the disruption itself.

Both are doing the same work. They are building influence over themselves before they can exercise it over anything else.

That is self-influence. And it is where everything else begins.

So as you close out this week, one question worth sitting with.

Be selfish for once. When you reflect on your identity, are you where you want to be? If not, find some quiet time to walk through the questions outlined above.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim MBE

Growing up, my parents had a saying they repeated so often it became part of me:

“Don’t tell everyone your business. Not everyone wants the best for you.”

At the time, I thought it was just a West African parent thing. Protective. Maybe a little guarded.

But the older I get, the more I understand it as wisdom.

There is a version of success that is performed before it is earned. And social media has made that temptation louder than ever.

I want to talk about the other version.

When I shared a post recently about building in private, the response surprised me. Not the volume of it, but the depth. People weren’t just agreeing. They were confessing. Sharing the quiet seasons they’d been through. The grief. The career missteps. The years that looked like nothing from the outside but were actually everything.

One comment stopped me completely. Tasha wrote:

“What I thought were lost years was building in private. The sobbing, the breaking, was all private building for re-entering. God never forgot me. He was shaping me.”

I’ve been sitting with that ever since.

So today I want to go deeper. Not just on why building in private matters, but on how I actually decide what stays private and what I share. Three practices that have shaped how I think about this.

1. Direction Over Speed

My dad passed away in 2013. I was 25.

My first instinct was to run.

I didn’t take time to grieve. I didn’t sit with my family. I didn’t let myself be still. I went straight back into work, frantic, trying to build my way out of the pain.

Looking back, that was the only role in my career that simply didn’t work for either party. And I know exactly why. I never slowed down long enough to understand what I actually needed. I just rushed to keep building. I mistook speed for progress. I was moving, but I had no idea where I was going.

It was a mistake.

Since then, I’ve watched friends share similar stories. Career transitions. Grief. Overcoming adversity. The instinct is almost universal: push through. Keep moving. Stay busy.

But what those quiet seasons are actually asking of you is the opposite. Rest. Recover. Be still. Refill your cup while you sit with the harder questions. What is my purpose right now? Who am I becoming? Where am I actually being called? How can I be useful? What gets me out of bed feeling excited for the day ahead?

Those answers don’t come from speed. They come from stillness. And they only come in private. It is more of a feeling you get internally rather than a response from something you share externally.

In those seasons, you don’t want to build anything publicly. You want to do the inner work first. Question your identity, your strengths, your purpose, your direction. Then come back out when you’re ready. Not when they are ready, when you are.

When you rush through those seasons, you risk building the wrong thing, in the wrong direction, for the wrong reasons, for the wrong people. Direction always matters more than speed.

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2. Journaling as Your Extraction Phase

I write approximately 20,000 words a year in my digital journal.

I process. I reflect. I categorise. I waffle. I vent. I just get out whatever is on my mind. I sit with what I’m going through until I actually understand it. Sometimes, I settle on being at peace with not understanding too. Regardless of the ups and downs of life, I try to consistently be authentically Andy. Journaling brings that balance.

And I share about one percent of it publicly.

My journal is my private laboratory. The messy thinking lives there. The contradictions. The doubts. The half-formed ideas that aren’t ready for anyone else to see yet. The prayers. The questions I don’t have answers to.

But without that space, I wouldn’t know what to share at all.

Journaling isn’t just therapy, although it is that too. It’s discernment. It’s what I call the extraction phase — the ongoing process of sorting through what I’ve learned, what I’ve processed, what I’m ready to offer, and what still belongs to me alone.

By the time something appears in this newsletter, it has already been lived with. Questioned. Written and rewritten in private, many times over.

That one percent that makes it out into the world is the distilled version. Everything else was the work of getting there. This isn’t procrastination for perfection, it is deliberate practice before progressing.

If you don’t have a journaling practice, I’d encourage you to start small. Not to share. Just to process. Give yourself a space where you don’t have to perform, where you can be honest with yourself about what’s actually going on.

You might be surprised what surfaces.

3. Be Deliberate About What You Share, and to Whom

I think my parents knew deep down that I love people and found it easy to form meaningful relationships with people. Although they shared guardrails to warn me, knowing it wouldn’t stop me.

99% percent of my building stays private.

The mastery work. The continuous learning. The experiments that haven’t resolved yet. None of that gets posted. And that is entirely on purpose.

Because here’s what happens when you share everything in real time: you create pressure to keep up appearances. You start performing your process rather than living it. You end up chasing the status instead of running your own race if you are not careful. You feel the need to maintain a version of yourself publicly that may not match where you actually are privately. We have to ponder the questions before sharing anything publicly:

Why am I sharing this?

Who do I want to share this with?

Why now?

There’s also something important about timing. Think about a biography. When you look back and connect the dots across someone’s life, the story makes sense. The setbacks led somewhere. The detours had a purpose. The hard seasons produced something.

But if you’re narrating every moment as you go through it, before you know what it means, you risk adding noise instead of signal. You risk sharing something that isn’t ready, under pressure that isn’t helpful.

I post on LinkedIn because I believe in being signal in a sea of noise. But what you see is curated. It’s intentional. I’m very deliberate about posting to community when I’m actually ready. This raison d’être becomes even more important with the noise produced by AI-slop.

The goal isn’t to hide. The goal is to play your long game, not everyone else’s.

You know you best. Trust that.

A Founders Dilemma

The question I get asked most by founders is this: How do I know when it’s the right time to go public? When do I tell the world I’m building something?

Here’s my honest answer: going public isn’t a single moment. It’s a filter.

The most important question isn’t when. It’s who.

When building in public as a founder, the voices that matter most are the people you’re actually building for. Not your former colleague, not your parents, not your closest friends. Your potential customers. The communities you’re serving. Their validation and feedback is signal. Most other voices, however well-meaning, are noise.

So before you post, ask yourself: am I sharing this to get genuine feedback from the people this is designed for? Or am I sharing it to feel seen, to build hype, or because everyone else seems to be doing it?

If it’s the former, go ahead. Share early, share often, and listen hard to what comes back. That’s not building in public for performance. That’s building in public for learning.

If it’s the latter, sit with it a little longer. The world will still be there when you’re ready.

A few honest signals that you might be ready:

You can hear “I don’t get it” without it derailing you. Early ideas are fragile. If criticism from strangers would cause you to abandon something that deserves more time, protect it a little longer.

You have something to show, not just something to say. Announcing you’re building something and demonstrating early proof are very different things. The latter earns genuine attention and real feedback.

You know the story well enough to tell it clearly. If you can’t yet articulate what you’re building, who it’s for, and why it matters, you probably need more private time with it first. Clarity is a good signal of readiness.

The fear is about exposure, not execution. There’s healthy caution, and there’s fear of being seen. If you’re delaying because you’re still refining something real, that’s discernment. If you’re delaying because you’re afraid of judgment, going public might actually help you move through it.

Private and public are not opposites. They’re different seasons of the same work.

Build in private until you’re ready. Then share with the right people for the right reasons.

A mosaic in an artist’s hands looks like fragments for a long time. Broken pieces. Scattered. Nothing obviously coherent. And then one day, it all makes sense. That is what years of private formation feel like from the inside. Disjointed. Sometimes confusing. Sometimes painful.

I lost my dad, my mentor, my job, my business. All fragments of my life I could have discarded as worthless, useless, waste of time, things that didn’t make sense. But faith, family, friends, reflective walks and journaling served as glue to piece it all together.

Like a mosaic in the hands of an artist, it will all make sense when you’re ready to reveal it. When you are ready to reveal your Masterpiece.

But the work of getting there? That happens in the quiet.

What are you building in private right now? And what’s your signal for knowing when it’s time to share?

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim MBE

The first was that I was cute. Honest to God, it used to embarrass me, it didn’t feel macho or cool. I never knew what to do with a compliment like that, I’d shrink into the corner rather than receive it gracefully.

The second was that I was the spitting image of my dad. The face structure, the walk, the way I carried myself in a room. He’s no longer here now, but when I look at old photographs I see it too. In many ways I’ve spoken about my dad often, the social capital he extended to me, the trust he placed in me early, the relentless work ethic he modelled. He shaped me enormously. But people would comment on our similarity on the surface, on the outside.

My mum heavily shaped the inside.

Mummy

She told my brothers and I we don’t give up.

Not as a suggestion. As a statement of family identity. “Us as a family, we don’t give up.” I believed her then, and I believe her now. That conviction is woven into my DNA.

I watched her prove it firsthand. She worked as a nursery nurse for years, month to month, never quite comfortable, always pushing forward, overcoming one adversity over another. And quietly, steadily, she purchased our family home, the house where my brothers and I grew up, the house each of us lived in for a year as young adults with our children, as she helped launch us into the world. She didn’t announce it. She just did it.

My mum went through the transition of being a caterer to attending college then transitioning to supporting children with special educational needs and disabilities. I remember reviewing her annual assessment of children as she prepared to present to their parents. Even though I was a teenager, often feeling frustrated that my mum wants me to proof read another report. I respected her humility to ask me for help, she always maintained a no ego mindset. I would always read it for her too as I recognised that English wasn’t her first language and she wanted to ensure she was expressing herself well with the right grammar and punctuation.

It was in her nature to nurture us but what inspired me was her consistency. She also told us she loved us. Regularly. Openly. Even as adults now.

I’ve thought about that a lot. It isn’t guaranteed. Not every parent carries that warmth into the adult years of their children’s lives. But she did, and I think it planted something in me. It’s why I sign every letter with Love & Light. It’s where that comes from. She modelled that love as a practice, a daily habit, a way of being in the world.

And then there’s faith. My mum gave me that too. I’m a deep believer in Jesus. I follow the Lord. And so much of how I try to show up in the world, with forgiveness, with care for my neighbour, with the belief that every person carries a light worth protecting, traces back to lessons she taught me. Not just in words. In how she lived.

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She started a business at sixty

She moved back to Ghana where she grew up before moving to the UK for 40 years. Not put off by stage or age in life, she started a successful nursery there where she provided employment to women and nurtured parents as well as their children. A tireless worker.

She ran it for nearly a decade, then pivoted, converting it into serviced accommodation and relaunching it entirely. She’s in her 70’s now. I tell her to slow down. She can’t help it, she loves to live and execute on her ideas. She is the tortoise not the hare and she is proud of it. Whether it takes her 3 months or 3 years, she never gives up and always see’s things through once she puts her mind on an idea. Just last week she was on the WhatsApp group posting photos of freshly made-up bedrooms, ready to welcome guests. Rest now*? No, she’s still going.*

When I look at myself as an entrepreneur, the resilience to keep building, the belief that tomorrow holds something better than today, the willingness to reinvent rather than retire, I know exactly where that came from.

My mum.

It is Never Too Late

Sometimes there is a stigma that it is too late in life to make a change for the better. I can’t fully accept that, it has been engrained in me by my mum. Small acts, done repeatedly add up and compound to something bigger. And it is bidirectional, new relationships, new knowledge and new lessons.

If you’re reading this and you’re 50+, still carrying dreams, wondering whether it’s too late to begin, I you to look at my mum and answer that question for yourself.

That’s part of why I’m so energised about a new programme I am shaping alongside The London School of Economics and GuessWorks called The Next Act. Over the course of several sessions, we’ll explore what it actually looks like to step into entrepreneurship, angel investing, or a non-executive director (NED) role in the next chapter of your life. No theory. Practical, grounded, real.

If that sounds like you, or someone you know, join us for the webinar on Tuesday 17th March: https://luma.com/lb6krf4x

As ever, thank you for reading. I hope something in this letter landed.

Love & Light, Andy Ayim MBE

I’d met up with an old boss of mine. He became a partner at a management consultancy, which means he gets an unusual view of leadership. Not just one organisation, but dozens of them, across industries, at the same time. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and we fell into the kind of honest conversation you can only have with someone who’s known you long enough to skip the performance.

I asked him what he was really seeing out there right now. Not the polished version. The actual picture.

He didn’t hesitate.

“Leaders are struggling, Andy. And most of them won’t say so.”

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What he described wasn’t a capability gap in the traditional sense. The leaders he’s working with are experienced, smart people who have navigated complex organisations for years.

In an AI-driven world, the honest answer to most strategic questions is: we don’t fully know yet. Nobody does. Not the consultants. Not the technologists building the tools. Not the board. The pace of change is outrunning everyone’s ability to have tidy answers.

And yet what he keeps seeing, across sector after sector, are leaders doing one of three things.

The first is performing certainty. Briefing teams with confidence that doesn’t match what they actually feel inside, because they’ve internalised the idea that the leader’s job is to have the answers. The second is delegating upward. “The board will figure this out.” “This is above my pay grade.” Both responses transfer the discomfort without resolving it. The third, and perhaps the most corrosive, is the generational deflection. “This is a next-generation problem.” Implying that AI is something to be passed on rather than reckoned with, now, by the people whose names are on the door.

Walking by the water this morning, I kept thinking about how all three of those responses share the same root. They’re all ways of avoiding a simple, difficult thing: saying out loud that you don’t have the answers.

There’s a conversation that almost no leader is having honestly with their teams right now, and it’s the one that matters most.

Which skills in this organisation are going to be amplified by AI?
And which ones are at genuine risk of being replaced?

That conversation requires a particular kind of courage because it doesn’t stay abstract for long. It gets personal quickly. It touches people’s roles, their sense of worth and their sense of the future. And it touches the leader’s own role too. Nobody is fully exempt from that question.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe: the discomfort of having that conversation now is far smaller than the damage of not having it. Teams know when their leaders are managing information rather than sharing it. They can feel the gap between what is said and what is believed. That gap doesn’t create stability. It creates quiet anxiety and quiet exit plans.

The reframe I keep coming back to is this one.

The leader’s job has never been to have all the answers. It has always been to create the conditions for the right answers to emerge. In a period of genuine uncertainty, that means something specific. It means being honest about what you know and what you don’t. It means designing a structured, intentional space where your team figures things out alongside you, not just executes for you. And it means providing something that uncertainty doesn’t cancel out: clarity on direction, alignment on how decisions get made, and a consistent signal about what the organisation stands for, even when the landscape is shifting.

That’s co-learning with direction. It’s different from normalising confusion, which is what happens when leaders confuse vulnerability with abdication and mistake openness for the absence of leadership. The leader is still the architect of the environment. They’re still shaping how the team navigates. They’re just doing it with honesty instead of performance.

The leaders who will come through this period well aren’t the ones who knew the most about AI from the start. They will be the curious ones who were best at leading learning.

Walking home this morning, I thought about how rare it still is for a senior leader to stand in front of their team and say: I don’t have a complete answer to this. Here’s what I believe, here’s what I’m uncertain about, and here’s how I think we find our way through together.

It’s a simple thing to say. It costs very little and earns you the respect of the room.

And right now, it might be the most powerful thing a leader can offer.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim

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A friend from primary school had found me on social media. We hadn’t spoken in over 15 years. We grew up as the closest of friends, thick as thieves through primary and secondary school, then life did what life does, we took two divergent paths and gradually lost touch. No falling out, no drama. Just the quiet drift of two people growing up and moving in different directions.

When his message came through, something unexpected happened. My mind flooded. Childhood memories I hadn’t thought about in years surfaced from somewhere deep, the kind that make you smile and ache at the same time. I found myself wondering what was the same about him, what had changed and whether he’d recognise me.

We got on a call and spoke for over an hour. Time flew.

We covered everything: family, mentors, lessons learned and new ideas. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started noticing something. Certain things hadn’t changed. His voice. His humour. His curiosity. His hunger for learning. The respect between us felt exactly as it always had.

At one point he said to me:

“You were always a nice guy, Andy. You treated people well. I bet you still do.”

It stopped me.

Not because it was flattering, but because of what it revealed. He was offering me a reflection of who I was before I had a career, a public identity, a philosophy about leadership or purpose. He knew me when I was just me. And what he saw then, he still recognised now.

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What caught me most off guard wasn’t the memories.
It was how quickly we picked up where we left off.

You would never have known it had been 15 years from our laughter, the easy exchange of stories, the way we bounced ideas around like no time had passed at all.

It made me think about the nature of certain relationships. Most of the connections we maintain in adult life are held together by shared context, same job, same city, same season of life. When the context shifts, the relationship naturally thins. That’s not a failure, it’s just how most connections work.

But some relationships are different. They were built before you knew who you were trying to become. They weren’t formed around convenience or circumstance; they were formed around something closer to character. And those connections don’t decay with time and distance. They go dormant. Not dead.

I call these root relationships. Not the branches of your social tree that grow and shift with every new chapter of life, but the roots that hold regardless of how far the branches grow in different directions.

This connects deeply to something I explore in my upcoming book (Ahhh, I said it!!).

Playing the long game isn’t just about patience with your goals or your work. It’s about recognising what’s worth holding onto across time, including the people who knew you before the world started shaping your identity.

There’s something quietly clarifying about reconnecting with someone like that. They don’t see you through the lens of your latest achievements or your current title. They see the thread that runs through all of it. And sometimes that thread, the thing that has always been true about you, is worth being reminded of.

My friend didn’t know about the work I do now. But he described it before I told him, then kept mentioning I have an MBE to tease me.

I want to leave you with a question.

Who in your life fits this description? Someone you lost touch with, not through falling out, but through the natural drift of diverging paths? Someone who knew you before you knew yourself?

Is there a call you’ve been meaning to make?

The long game isn’t always about what’s ahead. Sometimes it’s about honouring what’s always been there.

Love & Light,
Andy Ayim