• My first video is live (and I survived it)

• Getting sh*t done, and the strange new energy behind it

• What a toddler’s birthday taught me about environment

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⚡️ Different Energy

I literally just uploaded my first intro video onto TikTok and Shorts, and I’m posting the same video to Instagram and Meta tomorrow.

I obviously hate how I look and sound in the video, but I’m too tired to care.
Plus it’s the first video, which means it’s bound to be horrible. And since I’m going to be uploading every other day, I need to get over the little things.

Spending all this time editing the video has also helped me get other sh*t done. It’s given me a new kind of energy, where I’m making sure I don’t sleep on things.
I started a new book this week, changed my meal plan, paid my outstanding service charge, and got back to everyone I’d gone MIA on.

Another reason I’ve been so energised is that my son’s nursery is closed next week, so I’ll have to keep him entertained. Less time to work.

I suppose I work better under pressure (or at least, like to think I do).

👦🏻 Changing Your Environment

We took our toddler to his friend’s birthday party over the weekend, and it was one of the most enjoyable parties I’ve been to in a while.

Looking back, I realised it was because the children were so well behaved.
There were no tantrums, well, barely any, and they were all getting along and actually sharing their toys.

Granted, there was a slight advantage: most of the children went to nursery together, so they knew each other and had been taught how to behave. But there were also children there who didn’t go to the same nursery.

This was a big contrast to a recent birthday we went to in another part of the world, where the children were loud, hyped up on sugar, and definitely not sharing toys (my son included).

It put us off birthday parties for a while.

Being British-Iraqi, I understand the cultural differences between different parts of the world, and I’m not saying that there’s one correct way to raise your children.

All I know is that I’m grateful my son is being taught good manners and discipline at a young age.

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👀 What I’m Into

• Watching: The Bombing of Pan Am 103 (with my husband), The Chase (with mum), Ride or Die (on my own)

• Reading: Reasons to be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe

• Listening to: Any Descript tutorials

😌 Small Pleasures

• My boy now keeps saying “Come mummy, come”, and hugs me. Pure heaven.

• Changing my meal plan to a cleaner and healthier one.

• Moving to a new gym closer to my house: smaller but emptier! 💃🏻💪🏼

The rest of this week will be focused on creating more content (I think I’m addicted) to cover the next week (when my boy’s off nursery).
I’m now actually looking forward to it! How lucky am I? 😍

What’s one thing you thought you’d hate that you actually ended up enjoying?

Comments below please - I love reading them 😊

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This week covers:

• Post-holiday brain fog

• Saying “no thank you” to heavy energy

• Back in my routine

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🎬 Start/Stop Mode

I’m starting to get really annoyed at myself for not doing what I keep telling myself (and others) that I’m going to do.

I keep going on about posting content to grow my business; I filmed 6 videos, edited one, and still haven’t posted anything!

I keep stalling at the final hurdle, and it’s getting really annoying now. The excuses are BS: I’m going on holiday so won’t have time, I need to get my nails/eyebrows done before I shoot. I’ve used every excuse under the sun.

No more. Uploads start next week. 📽️

💭 What I’m Attracting

The last three books I read (1 read, 2 listened to) have had very heavy energy. Themes have been rejection, mental health and unhealthy obsessions.

I try not to read too much of that, because it can really drain my energy, but when I do, I add something light in-between.

I suppose it’s a bit of a reflection of work during the summer months: everyone’s travelling, so people are slower to respond to messages, proposals, all of it.

In-case you’re wondering, the books are:
• Bitter Sweet by Hattie Williams
• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
• Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

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👀 What I’m Into

• Watching: Ted Lasso (much needed after Cape Fear)

• Reading: Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

• Listening to: Any videos around editing hacks and trends

😌 Small Pleasures

• My two year old boy saying ‘No mummy, peas’ (translation: ‘No mummy, please’)

• Being back in my house and going back to my routine

• Dropping the holiday weight 💪🏼

Finally getting over myself and getting out of my way is freeing and actually fun! Can’t wait to see how this evolves. 💃🏻

What are you holding yourself back from doing? How are you getting in your own way?

Comments below ‘peas’ - I love reading them 😊

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I was always aware of this, but a holiday I took this summer was the turning point for taking action. What good is self-awareness when we don’t do anything about it?

I admitted that I had no solution (this has been happening for years), but I had a feeling that the way to break this unhealthy cycle was to start building the “middle” on purpose.

This sounds easy on paper, but the middle, to me, is where people without conviction or strong beliefs live, and that was definitely not me. I love what I love and hate what I hate.

The good thing is that I’m not alone. A lot of you left comments on my notes and articles telling me you can relate, which was a massive relief.

I have an update! Since then, two things happened that made me think the middle might not be too bad, and not just a nicer-sounding word for giving up or lacking conviction.

The second holiday

That first family trip this summer was the all-or-nothing beast in full force. The amount of food and alcohol I consumed almost made me feel ill. I was still going to the gym, walking everywhere (while pushing a buggy), drinking my litres of water, but it didn’t help. The water retention was insane. My body, the machine I’d spent years trying to understand, was screaming at me.

What was worse than the number on the scale was the loss of control. It was as if someone had taken over my mind and body, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t even want to watch, so I’d mentally switch off and let it happen.

Then we went away again.

This time was different, because I actually did something about it. I talked to myself.

Don’t get me wrong, I always plan ahead before these trips, take plenty of protein, etc., but it doesn’t help. It just adds to the calories.

I faced it this time, and had multiple conversations with myself. Not in a woo, affirmations way, more like coaching a stubborn client who happens to be me. I’d say things like: You don’t need to inhale everything on your plate. It’s not going to disappear. You’re allowed to stop before it’s gone. Do you really need to order all that food?

My husband was feeling the same way, and we both agreed that we’d order less food, only order dessert and wine at dinner, and try to enjoy the meal.

I ate in a more balanced way. Not restricted, not bingeing, but somewhere in between.

And guess what? No water retention, no holiday weight gain. My body was very happy with the middle, and so was I when I looked in the mirror. So I suppose I learnt that the middle didn’t mean failing at control and failing at freedom. It was just the middle.

The business was doing the same thing

The good thing about these lessons is that you can use them at work. Once I’d seen it on holiday, I couldn’t unsee it at work.

When I started this business, I got obsessed. Of course I did, it’s the only setting I have. I was going to do everything, be everywhere, sign every client, say yes to all of it. Push, push, push. I told myself this was discipline and the only way to grow. It was the same all-or-nothing beast, but a professional version.

A lot of the pushing worked: I met amazing people, sowed seeds, created a name for myself.

On the other hand, a lot of what I was killing myself over turned out to be fully out of my control. You can’t force a client to be ready, or push a relationship into existence. I was pouring all-in energy into things that didn’t respond to force at all.

So I stopped pushing.

I stopped saying yes to every meeting, jumping on every trend, or sending cold outreach messages. Instead I put that energy somewhere it could compound: my own brand. More posts, multiple speaking events, podcasts, and my own video content (coming soon). I stopped chasing clients and started building what would make them find me.

And they did. They started coming to me.

That was the second piece of evidence that the middle is sometimes necessary. It wasn’t just my body that preferred it, my business did too. The constant chasing had been repelling what I actually wanted. Backing off to a sustainable, consistent middle did the opposite, it brought it to me.

What I’m finally starting to understand

I spend my days telling creators that consistency should come first, that you can’t force an audience, and that the steady, sustainable version of showing up again and again is what compounds. And there I was, not taking my own advice, running my own life and my own business on pure intensity, convinced that if I wasn’t killing myself, I wasn’t doing it right.

The story of the middle being the absence of conviction is one I always told myself, but it isn’t true. I’d tell myself that people who live in the middle are on the fence, wishy-washy, and lack strong opinions and depth of character. I’ve realised that’s rubbish.

Sitting in the middle on purpose, when every instinct is screaming at you to go to one extreme, might be the most disciplined thing I’ve ever done. It’s extremely difficult and humbling.

I’m still not 100% there yet. The gym beast is staying, I feel alive when I train and being extreme with this has only benefitted me and my body. The food and the work are where I’m still practising, and it is a practice. I’m wired to reach for the extreme, so this will take time to get right.

But for the first time, I have evidence that I’m learning from, and not ignoring: two holidays that ended differently, and a business that grew when I stopped strangling it.

The middle isn’t where things fall apart, it’s where they actually hold.

If you replied to the last one, thank you, you helped more than you know. And if you’re running the same operating system and you’re somewhere in the messy middle of trying to build a middle, tell me where you are with it. I’m still learning this in real time, and it’s a lot less lonely doing it out loud.

I’m all or nothing. I’ve always been all or nothing, and I’m writing this not because I’ve solved it, but because I’m curious about whether or not anyone else lives with this same operating system, and how they’ve learned to dial it down without losing the parts of it that actually work.

Because some of it does work.

The bit that works

When I commit to something at work, I’m all in. I’ve done this since I was in my early 20’s. Whatever I’m building, whatever project lands on my desk, whatever client I sign, I throw the full weight of myself at it. I can get too committed, but honestly, I don’t think that part’s a bad thing. The version of me who goes all in is the version that built the things I’m proud of. Thirteen years inside Google and YouTube, a stint at TikTok, the consultancy I’m building now. None of that happens with a half-in approach.

If I cared more about my own well-being and less about the work, I would dial it back. But I’m being honest with myself: I want to do the work properly, and that requires the all-in switch.

It’s everything else in life where this trait stops being useful, and starts being a problem.

The training

I train like a psycho - weight-lifting, spinning, Hyrox, the full menu. I’m a beast at the gym and I’m not saying that to show-off or flex, I’m saying it as a fact. The weights I lift, the amount of muscle I have, the feedback I get from my PT (and others), all reflect that fact.
I don’t skip workouts, I rarely slow down, and I have trouble “listening to my body” if my body is asking for rest when I’ve decided I’m training. The only time I’ll stop is if I’m really ill and can’t physically move properly.

I can’t tell you how many times my husband and I have argued about this.
He has, at various points, told me that I’m obsessed, that it’s not normal, that I should rest, that I’m about to ruin our holiday because I spend so much time ensuring there’s a “good” gym wherever we stay - I’ll be honest, the part of my brain that gets spoken to like that does not respond gracefully. If someone tells me to slow down, I get really angry. Hot, irrational, “I might never forgive you for that”, “you’re just jealous” angry.
The kind of anger that isn’t really about the gym, but about being told that the system that has kept me functioning for as long as I can remember, is somehow broken.

I was at the gym the morning I delivered my son. That’s the intensity we’re dealing with.

The food

I lost 16kgs a few years ago with the help of a nutritionist who introduced me to macros and explained, gently, that I wasn’t eating enough. I had spent years undereating and then bingeing because I didn’t understand that my body needed fuel, and that if I gave it the right fuel, it would convert it to energy and I wouldn’t feel the need to binge.

The macro system fixed it. Not because it was a diet, but because it gave me a way to feed myself that was measurable, which is the only way my brain trusts anything.
I started weighing my food and understanding what my body needed and what it didn’t.

I now eat almost 2,500 calories a day. 163g of protein, 190g of carbs, 80g of fat. I’m currently 54kg, so most people freak out when they see the amount of food on my plate, and I understand why. But it’s clean food, it’s consistent, and my body responds to it like a machine I’ve finally learned the manual for.

I weigh myself every morning. I can tell you exactly what happens if I drink alcohol the night before, or eat too much fat (which my body is sensitive to). The number goes up by a kilo the next day, and back down by a kilo the day after that. My nutritionist was shocked at how quickly my body responded to everything I ate or drank, and I’ve used that responsiveness for years as a feedback loop.

And then I go on holiday.

The pattern, everywhere

Once I started looking, I saw it everywhere. There’s no version of me that has one cigarette - I’m either a chain smoker or I can’t be in the same room as smoke. There’s no slice of cake - it’s no cake at all, or the whole thing. There’s no single glass of wine with dinner - it’s none, or as much as I can down. I drink it like water, and I eat my dinner like it’s about to disappear. It’s like someone else inhabits my body and takes over - not a pleasant sight.

The collapse

I don’t have access to my clean food on holiday: I’m not in my own kitchen, I’m eating restaurant meals, which are higher in fat and salt than I would normally allow, alcohol, bread, butter. There’s the slow drift of “I’ll get back to it tomorrow” that I genuinely believe in the moment.

I take the scales with me on holiday and see that I’ve gained 5kg in 5 days. Five kilos. In five days. That is insane and I want to be honest about the maths of it because it is not actually fat, it is water and inflammation and the body’s response to a wildly different fuel mix, but it doesn’t matter, because my brain reads the number and registers it as failure.

And this is the bit that I’m writing this article to understand. The collapse on holiday isn’t an accident. It’s a function of the structure I live in the rest of the year.
I don’t have a middle setting, I only have two modes: total control or complete surrender. And the second one is, I now realise, the only release valve I have built for myself.

I don’t have a way of letting pressure out gradually, I don’t know how to do a partial week. I’ve never lived in the middle, because the middle, to me, feels worse than either extreme. The middle feels like I’m failing at structure and failing at freedom, all at once. Like I’m not in control, or like I’m “on the fence” - people who don’t have strong opinions have always triggered me, now I know why!
I default to the extreme that feels controlled, until that gets exhausting, and then I default to the extreme that feels free. And that pendulum keeps swinging.

What I’m starting to understand

This pattern is helping me build a career. It’s also slowly corroding my relationship, my nervous system, and my ability to enjoy a single normal Sunday.

The training thing might never fully change. I’m more than happy with that - I feel alive when I train, and I love being muscular and fit.

The food thing might never fully change either. That’s what I’m worried about. When I said people would look at my plate and wonder how I’d be able to finish all that food, I wasn’t joking. I can eat. But eating food on holiday isn’t the same as eating clean at home. I still train when I travel, I walk everywhere, drink tons of water. It doesn’t help much. I want to stop the “all or nothing” beast when it comes to food.

The swings aren’t just about food and the gym. They’re about my work, my friendships, how I show up at home. The all-or-nothing setting touches all of it, and I’m beginning to understand that the bit I have always sold as discipline is also a way of protecting myself from having to choose. Because if you’re always either fully in or fully out, you never have to sit in the discomfort of being partially anywhere.

And sitting in the partial is, apparently, the actual adult skill nobody warned me about.

Where I am with it

I’m not writing this from the other side. I’m writing it from the part of the journey where I’m noticing, for the first time, that the pattern that built me is also the one that can take over and control me (if I let it).

I don’t have a solution yet. I don’t have a five-step framework. I have a working hypothesis, which is that the all-or-nothing setting is, at its root, a way of avoiding the messier middle of being human, and the only way out is to start, very slowly, building the middle on purpose. I need to learn to sit with that in-between, no matter how mundane I find it. It’s the only way to stop that pendulum.

If you have a version of this, drop me a reply. I’m genuinely asking. I want to know how you’ve learned to live in the middle without it feeling like a failure.

Because right now, it still does. And I’m still trying.

Two emails this week showed me where every brand is heading

This started as a rant in my notes app on Wednesday afternoon. The more I sat with it, the more I realised it might be the most important thing I’ve thought about brands all year.

So here we go.

I had two customer service experiences this week. Same week, same person, same general flavour of “I bought something online and I need help.” They could not have been more different, and the gap between them is, I think, the entire next decade of branding.

The first was Space NK. I ordered something almost ten days ago. The estimated delivery was three to five working days, so by Monday I started wondering where my stuff was. I emailed. The reply read like it had been generated by a model trained on the phrase “we appreciate your patience.” Something vague about warehouse issues, no actual ETA, no human anywhere in the email. I rang them. Same answer, slightly different wording, still no idea when my order is coming. I’m still waiting.

The second was Healf. I subscribe to their supplements monthly because I’m bad at remembering to reorder. This month, my order shipped, and right after it shipped I realised I genuinely didn’t need it (still had plenty from last time, classic me). I emailed with very low expectations because, you know, the items had already left the warehouse. Within hours, a real human had replied, recalled the order, kept my balance on file for next month, and signed off in a way that made me feel like I’d just messaged a friend who happens to work there.

Same week. Same me. One brand I’ll quietly never order from again, one brand I’ll sing the praises of to anyone who’ll listen for the next ten years.

Here’s what’s been sitting with me ever since: the bad one wasn’t rude. It was flat. There was nothing in that email that was specifically Space NK. The same email could have come from any retailer, any industry, any decade. Generic apology, generic timeline, generic sign-off. Which is exactly why it didn’t land. It didn’t feel like a brand had replied to me. It felt like a system had.

Where this is actually going

I spent 13 years at Google/YouTube, then a stint as Agency Acceleration Lead at TikTok UK. I’ve worked with creators, brands and agencies across MENA, the UK, and basically anywhere TikTok has a business team. So when I tell you the marketing world is about to go through something significant, I’m not saying it because it’s a nice essay hook. I’m saying it because I’ve watched what happens every time a new layer of automation gets added to how brands talk to people.

Scale always wins. Voice almost always loses. And right now, every brand in the world has access to roughly the same AI tools, prompted in roughly the same way, optimised for roughly the same outcomes.

Which means: in about 18 months, most brand communication is going to sound the same. Not bad. Not wrong. Identical. The same cadence, the same vocabulary, the same “we hear you and value your patience” energy in every email, every caption, every chatbot, every reply.

The Space NK email I got this week is the future, if nobody does anything about it.

The unfair advantage nobody’s clocked yet

Here’s where it gets interesting. If everyone sounds the same, the brands that bother to sound like themselves are about to have an absurd, almost unfair advantage.

That’s what Healf are doing, whether they realise it or not. They’re not doing anything revolutionary. They reply like humans. They use language that sounds like a person wrote it on a Tuesday afternoon, not a template generated at 3am by a model that’s been trained to never offend anyone. They catch small things before I have to ask twice. They use my actual name without making it feel like a mail merge.

In 2018 that was table stakes. In 2026 it’s a moat.

The wild part is that most brands are about to spend the next two years pouring money into making their communication more automated, more templated, more “scalable”, at exactly the moment when the actual advantage is in doing the opposite.

So what do you actually do

I haven’t cracked it, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot for client work, and here’s roughly where I’ve landed.

You protect four things, even if you automate everything else.

You protect the places where your customer talks back to you. Customer service replies, DMs, comments under your posts, anywhere a human has gone to the effort of writing something to you. Those moments are the brand. Automate the routing and the triage, fine. Don’t automate the reply.

You protect the places where you tell people who you are. About pages, founder stories, welcome emails, the manifesto in your bio. If you let AI write these, you’ll end up with the same About page as every other brand using the same model. It’ll be perfectly fine and say absolutely nothing. Healf’s email to me wasn’t more articulate than Space NK’s. It was specifically theirs.

You protect the places where you actually have an opinion. Newsletters, social posts, anything where your job is to say something interesting. The thing AI cannot do is have a specific, slightly weird, occasionally wrong, deeply personal opinion. If your content is “five tips for productivity,” AI will write that for free and it’ll be just as good as yours. If your content is “here’s the thing nobody tells you about saying no to clients,” AI cannot write that, because it hasn’t lived it and you have.

You protect the places where you apologise. When something goes wrong, the difference between a templated apology and a real one is the difference between losing a customer forever and earning ten years of loyalty. AI can draft it. A human has to actually send it.

Everything else, automate to your heart’s content. Truly. Use AI for the operational stuff your customer will never see, the research, the first drafts you then rewrite, the admin, the formatting, the thousand small jobs that have nothing to do with how your brand actually feels.

The bit I keep coming back to

Space NK didn’t lose me because they were slow. Brands are slow sometimes, life happens. They lost me because their reply could have come from literally any brand in the world. There was nothing in it that made me think “oh, this is them.” It was a sentence factory output dressed up as a customer email.

Healf will have me as a customer for a very long time because the opposite is true. The reply sounded like them. It made me feel like I was talking to a brand, not a process.

That’s the whole essay. The brands that quietly win the next decade aren’t the ones with the smartest AI stack. They’re the ones who use AI for everything except the moments where being a brand actually matters, and in those moments they let the humans through.

If you’ve had a customer service experience recently, good or bad, that changed how you feel about a brand, I’d love to hear it in the comments. I think this is the most under-discussed thing in marketing right now and I want to keep poking at it.

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A roundtable that was meant to last 45 minutes and ran for one hour and forty-five (I ate lunch at 4pm).

It’s the most public speaking I’ve done since I left Google, and the first time I’ve done it without a platform logo on the slide behind me.
That’s the bit I want to write about.

For 13 years, the name did a lot of the work; Creator Lead at Google, Agency Acceleration Lead at TikTok UK. I walked into rooms and people listened in a particular way, and I didn’t fully understand how much of that was the logo until I didn’t have it anymore.

The first stage was Create London. I was on a panel with Kevin Lingley from Fremantle, Guy Gadney from Charismatic AI, Pavit Sanghera from Deep Fusion Films, moderated by Maria Valenzuela from Brisa Media. Everyone else had a company behind their name, and I had halajil.com, four months old, with no platform doing any heavy lifting on my behalf.

The imposter voice that turns up in that moment isn’t the cinematic one, it’s not “what if I forget my words”. It’s quieter and meaner.
Mine sounded something like: nobody in this room needed your opinion until you decided you had one, the Google name used to do that work for you, you don’t have it anymore, and what if there’s nothing left when you take the badge off?

I went on anyway, because the alternative was getting back on the train without speaking, which felt worse than messing it up.

I didn’t mess it up.

The panel was about where generative AI is taking the creator economy, and most of the conversation was optimistic. My turn came and I said something close to: AI can genuinely help creators, and it can also strip away everything that made the creator economy worth building. We’re heading for both at the same time, and most of the industry is only equipped to talk about one of those.

It’s the kind of thing you can’t really say from inside a platform. Inside, the answer has to lean one way, and the product has to be the hero.
Sitting on that panel as the only person without a company logo behind me was the first time I’d said something publicly that I couldn’t have said two years earlier.

The room didn’t push back, a few people nodded, and one agency lead found me afterwards and said it was the first version of the AI conversation that hadn’t felt like a pitch. That comment is what stayed with me, because it’s the version I couldn’t have delivered with Google on the slide.

The next day I got on a train to Manchester for Creator Economy Live. My talk was “AI for Creators: what works, and what doesn’t”, and it was the slot right after lunch, which I assumed would be the post-lunch slump graveyard.

I was so wrong!

They were awake from the first slide.
I’d built the talk around the gap between the AI tools creators are being sold and the workflows they actually need, and watching the room nod in real time at the parts I’d been quietly thinking for months was the most validating 40 minutes I’ve had since I left.

The roundtable afterwards is the one that surprised me the most. 45 minutes ran into 1 hour 45, and people stayed; kept asking questions, kept swapping notes, kept finding me afterwards to carry on the conversation. I felt like a celebrity!

A creator with around 200k subscribers asked: “Every AI tool I get sold promises to save me time. None of them have. What am I missing?” The honest answer, which I gave: most of them aren’t built to save you time, they’re built to be sold to you. The important part isn’t the tool, it’s redesigning the workflow around the two or three tools you actually trust, and the rest is noise.

She wrote it down, and so did half the table. That’s the conversation I couldn’t have had inside Google, because inside Google, “the tool” was usually mine to sell.

Now I don’t have to. That’s the trade: the badge is gone, and the point of view comes through cleaner. It also means there’s nowhere to hide. If the information is wrong, that’s on me. If the room doesn’t engage, that’s on me. There’s no platform-shaped scaffolding holding any of it up.

A friend asked me last week if I missed the badge, and I had to think about it.

The honest answer: I miss the bits that made the work easier, the rooms that opened on the name, the meetings that happened without me having to chase them, the emails that got replied to within the hour. I don’t miss the version of myself who could only say half of what I actually thought.

Standing on those stages without “Google” or “YouTube” on the slide was the most exposed I’ve felt in years. It was also the most useful feedback I’ve had since I left. The work had impact because it was good, not because of the building.

People queued.
Three audience members from Manchester Met posted about the session afterwards, and one of them, Husain Ratlamwala, wrote that “human thinking, creativity, and perspective still remain the real differentiators. How you make AI work for you is what truly sets you apart.” That was basically the thesis I’d been trying to land on stage, said back to me by someone I’d never met until that day.

The badge didn’t get him to write that, the work did.

I’m writing this partly to remember it, and partly for anyone reading who’s about to leave a big platform and is wondering if the badge was the thing that made them credible.

Some of it was, but lot of it wasn’t.

You find out which is which the first time you walk on stage without it, and most of it, it turns out, was you.

It went a bit far.

Hundreds of likes and restacks I didn’t expect, as well as comments from people who clearly recognised themselves in it. Including me, by the way. I am one of those people: I curate in public most days.

So I want to write the post that nobody writes. The fully honest one with the bag of (protein) crisps and the cold email count, because the tidy version doesn’t help anyone, and the rest of us are out here pretending we have a system when we are mostly just throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Here’s what’s actually been happening since I launched the consultancy in January:

1. I reached out to people in my network, specifically content partners I used to work with when I was still at Google, and while they were all eager to get on a call and discuss how I could help them, I got crickets when I sent over my proposal.

2. I’ve sent countless cold messages and have heard back from a small fraction, but the conversion from “interested” to “signed contract” is roughly the conversion rate of a two year old saying yes to dinner.

3. I’ve priced things wrong. Then, priced them right. Then priced them wrong again, because the right price for one client was the wrong price for the next one, and I’m still figuring out which signal to trust.

4. I’ve written posts that I thought were excellent and watched them sink. I’ve written notes I dashed off while trying to feed my toddler, tell ‘Google’ to ‘play Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, and making sure he didn’t feed or trample the dogs, and watched them go further than anything I’d planned.

5. I’ve started Mondays convinced the business is going to work and ended Mondays convinced I should have stayed at Google. The two thoughts can occur within forty minutes of each other.

6. I have a toddler who needs picking up at three on Fridays. Actually, up until last week, I was picking him up at 3pm every day, trying to entertain him, and trying to work at the same time. Extending that deadline has done more for my productivity than any system I tried at Google. It has also torn me apart (mum-guilt) multiple times, and I’ve been back-and-forth about this for far too long.

7. I’ve built things I’m proud of. A workshop framework I genuinely believe in. Agentic systems I wouldn’t have dreamed of a few months ago. A point of view on AI in the creator economy that I haven’t seen anyone else articulate. A network of agency leads who are taking my calls.

I have also rewritten my own bio nine times in three months. Nine. I’m an experienced operator with a clear positioning and I cannot decide whether to lead with “ex-Google” or “creator strategy consultant” or “agentic AI workflow builder”, and the indecision tells you something true about how much of this is figured out.

That’s the messy middle. That’s the bit nobody posts because it doesn’t fit a thread.

The people who teach you how to build in public almost never share this version. They share the one where the lesson is already learned, the framework is already named, the pivot is already visible in the rear view mirror. The vulnerability is performed at a flattering angle.

Real building in public would mean showing you the email I sent on Tuesday that didn’t get a reply, the workshop I priced too low, the sales call where I talked too much, and the ten minutes I spent staring at LinkedIn yesterday wondering if any of this was a good idea. It means cringing because I have to keep coming up with content to post on LinkedIn in order to grow my business. LinkedIn, technically a professional platform. Ironically, the posts that perform better there are the personal ones, so I’ve had to share my life, my toddler, my dogs, all of it with a lot of people I barely know.

It would also mean naming the thing nobody at this stage wants to say out loud: the fear that the corporate role you left was, in fact, the easier path. Not the better one. The easier one. There is a version of you who could have stayed, and that version sometimes shows up at 11pm on a Sunday and asks loud questions.

I’m not arguing for confessional content. Turning every business decision into a vulnerability post is just performance in different clothes. But there’s a middle ground nobody’s occupying: I am building this. I think it can work. I’m not sure yet. Here is what I tried, here is what I learned, here is what I’m still confused about.

That’s the post that nobody writes, and it’s the one I’ve been avoiding, because everyone else’s feed makes it look like they have a plan.

So this is mine.

I have 200+ subscribers, three live proposals in my inbox, a toddler waiting at the gate on Fridays, and no idea whether I’m doing this right.

I just know I’d rather get it wrong out here than get it right inside a building I’d already outgrown.

If you’re somewhere in the same middle, hi.

If you’ve cracked it, reply and tell me how. I’ll read it twice.

Last week, I published a note that said something like: real building in public would look like “I have no idea if this will work, I’ve sent 12 cold emails and heard back from zero people, and I just inhaled half a bag of crisps.”

760 people liked it. Which tells me I’m not the only one who’s tired of the highlight reel.

So here’s what building in public actually looks like from where I’m sitting.

I started my Substack in January.

Not because the timing was perfect - timing is never perfect.

I started it because I’d spent 13 years inside Google, YouTube and TikTok telling other people how to build audiences, and I’d got to a point where I needed to find out if I could do it myself.

What nobody tells you about starting something is how loud the inside of your head gets when there’s no job title to hide behind.

At Google, I was Senior Something, and the title did a lot of the work. People took the meeting, they replied to the emails, and listened in a particular way. The credibility was infrastructural - it came with the building.

On your own, you have to build it from scratch, in public, while everything else is also happening.

And everything else is always happening.

Here’s what the last three months have actually looked like.

I have a 20-month-old called Kai who gets the zoomies post-nursery pick-up. and has recently started narrating everything he wants out loud. “Shoes” (when his shoes come off), “Na-na” (when he’s hungry) “Shasha, Keika, Kai, Shoesh” - my dog’s names (sort of), and anything else he can remember.

I have two dogs who need walking regardless of whether I have a deadline, a proposal due, or a low-grade existential crisis about whether anyone actually cares what I think about the creator economy.

I have client work - real, demanding client work, that doesn’t stop because I’ve decided to also start a newsletter.

And I have a husband who is wonderful and supportive, but who has a high pressure job, and is barely around - he also and occasionally goes to Paris for work, which is how I once found myself doing the 4:30am dog walk, the nursery run, three client emails, and a pitch deck before 9am, and then writing about it on the internet because apparently I find that helpful.

This is what building looks like. It does not have a ring light.

The version of “building in public” that gets traction on LinkedIn usually goes like this:

Lesson 1 from my journey so far.
Lesson 2.
Lesson 3.
It hasn’t been easy but I wouldn’t change a thing.

I’ve written that post. Or something like it. And I understand why - it performs, it’s tidy, it makes you look like someone who has processed their experience and extracted value from it.

But it’s not the whole story, and the part that gets left out is the part that’s actually useful to anyone who’s thinking about starting something themselves.

The part that gets left out is: I have no idea if this is working.

I have 173 subscribers. That’s not nothing - every single one of them chose to be here, which still feels slightly unreal to me. But it’s also not the number that makes you feel like you’ve figured it out.

I write something, publish it, and then spend the next 48 hours oscillating between “that was the right thing to say” and “nobody cares and I should go back to having a normal job.”

Then I write the next thing anyway.

That’s the whole strategy. It’s not very frameworkable.

The creator economy - and I say this as someone who has worked inside it for over a decade - sells a very particular story about what building looks like.

It looks like systems, consistency, a content calendar, a niche, and a monetisation strategy - all this before you’ve said anything worth paying for.

What it actually looks like, for most people, in the early stages, is messier and quieter and more uncertain than any of that.

It looks like writing a post you’re not sure about and publishing it because you said you would.

It looks like a note going unexpectedly viral and having no idea why, and trying not to reverse-engineer it too aggressively because the thing that made it land was that it was honest and you can’t manufacture that.

It looks like Kai running circuits around the living room at full speed for no reason, completely committed to the movement, completely unbothered by where it’s going.

I’m trying to be more like that.

If you’re building something - a newsletter, a consultancy, a creative practice, anything - and it doesn’t look like the version you see on LinkedIn: good!

That version is the highlight reel. The thing you’re doing, with all its chaos and uncertainty and 4:30am dog walks, is the actual work.

Nobody talks about the gap between “I’m building something” and “I know what I’m building.”

That gap is where most of the real stuff happens.

I’m in the gap. If you are too, you’re in the right place.

P.S. Every once in a while I actually leave the house, look vaguely like a functioning human being, and go to things. This week it was a Claude Code event - highly recommend!

Nobody was pretending to already have the answer.

I wrote a note about feeling like Sisyphus the other day; pushing the boulder up, watching it roll back down, pushing it again. A few of you could relate, so I wanted to expand on that, because the boulder has been teaching me things lately.

Understand your service offering before you actually sell it.

When I left TikTok and went independent, I didn’t have a quiet moment to think about what I was actually building. The inbound started almost immediately (a blessing in disguise). People from my network were reaching out, asking for help, wanting to work together. I was so grateful (and flattered!), but it meant I skipped the part where you’re supposed to decide what your business actually is.

So I said yes to everything. Platform strategy? Yes. Creator training? Yes. AI integration consulting? Sure, why not. My offering was basically “whatever you need, I can probably do it.” Which sounds flexible, but really it meant I had no idea what I was selling.

I told myself I’d sort it out during Ramadan, a quiet period for the MENA market. I’d have space to think, finally write down my goals, figure out my positioning. Then the war happened. And MENA, my largest market, went silent. Budgets cut, projects deprioritised, conversations paused indefinitely. That silence forced me to do the thing I’d been avoiding: actually look at what I’d been doing, what I was good at, and what I’d only been doing because someone asked. The forced pause was the thing I needed. I just wish it hadn’t taken a war to get me there.

Pricing is personal.

Calls are easy for me - I know my stuff. Thirteen years at Google/YouTube and a stint at TikTok UK means I don’t need to exaggerate. I can talk about creator strategy with real confidence because I’ve built creator ecosystems from the ground up.

Proposals are a different story. How much do you charge when you’re good but brand new as an independent? How much do you charge when the person on the other end of the email is also your friend? When they consider you family?

There’s no AI tool that can factor that in - trust me, I’ve tried multiple LLMs. ChatGPT will give you an insanely high number, Gemini’s the in-between, and Claude gives you the lowest. When I push back, they all ‘agree with me’, which doesn’t help when I need an answer! LLMs also don’t understand nuance; relationships you’ve built, cultural differences between different markets, etc.

I’m still figuring this one out, but I’ve stopped apologising for my prices. The moment I sent a proposal without adding “happy to discuss the fee” at the bottom was the moment something shifted.

The boulder is heavier when the energy is heavy.

This one’s hardest to explain. When things are stagnant and you’re getting glimmers of hope, a “let’s circle back next quarter” or a “we love this, just need budget approval,” it’s difficult to keep pushing. You’re not failing, but you’re not moving either.

The situation in MENA has made this worse for everyone. Budgets frozen, priorities shifted, people dealing with things far bigger than marketing strategies, which I understand. But understanding it doesn’t make the uncertainty comfortable.

Some days the boulder doesn’t roll back down the hill. It just sits there, and you sit there with it.

But here’s what I keep coming back to - the boulder has moved. Not dramatically, or the way I imagined when I thought I’d have a full client pipeline within six months. But it moved. I know what I’m offering now, and I’ve stopped undercharging. Also, I’m still here, which on some days feels like enough.

If you’re in this phase too, tell me: which of these three has been your biggest struggle?

Nobody tells you that building a business feels less like a steady climb and more like running around like a headless chicken.

Last week I was on a call with a potential client and they were saying all the right things: “This is exactly what we need,” “We’re all in,” “Send us the proposal.” I hung up properly buzzing, drafted the scope that evening, sent the price the next morning, and they agreed without flinching. I wasn’t used to that because I was braced for the usual silence and back-and-forth, but this person seemed to genuinely want to go all in.

Then the scope changed. It got way bigger, so I had to increase the price to match the time and the labour, and the client agreed to that straight away too. Brilliant, I thought. But then things got strange: a bit of silence, followed by more questions, followed by a suggestion to split the payment so some was upfront and the rest came through a percentage of revenue. I could work with that, so I said yes. But then came more pushback, more questions about whether the system would actually work, whether payment could come post-deployment instead. I spent a full week on this, going back and forth, trying to read between the lines, trying to figure out if this person was serious or just couldn’t bring themselves to say no. I still genuinely don’t know.

Then a few days later, completely out of nowhere, someone I’ve never spoken to messaged me on LinkedIn saying they’d been following my content for a while and wanted to work together. No pitch needed, no convincing, they just wanted to crack on. That’s been the story of these first few months: headless chicken energy from start to finish.

I spent 13 years at Google/YouTube, built creator programmes across MENA, led agency partnerships at TikTok UK, championed stuff I’m still extremely proud of. Then I stepped out on my own and suddenly all that history doesn’t carry in the way you’d expect. You’re not “Hala from Google” any more, you’re just Hala, firing proposals into the void and refreshing your inbox like a lunatic.

I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing it because there’s a version of this journey that gets told on LinkedIn, all “excited to announce” and “grateful for the opportunity,” and then there’s the actual version, which is messier and more confusing and, honestly, a lot more interesting. So here’s what the last few weeks have actually looked like.

The work bit

The hardest lesson so far is that enthusiasm on a call does not mean money in the bank. Someone can be genuinely buzzing about working with you and still vanish the moment the proposal lands, and that doesn’t always mean they were time-wasters. Budgets get pulled, someone senior gets cold feet, priorities shift. But when you’re this early and every lead feels massive, that silence properly stings.

I’m also learning that I can’t always follow up the way I’d like to. The situation across MENA right now means some conversations just have to pause because you can’t chase a proposal when someone’s city is being hit by drones. You have to be a human being first. And if I’m being really honest, the crisis has also become a handy excuse for people who were never going to say yes anyway. It’s hard to tell who’s genuinely affected and who’s just gone quiet because the answer was always no, and I’m trying to sit with that uncertainty rather than drive myself mad over it.

But then there are the people who find you, the ones who’ve been reading your posts quietly for weeks and one day just decide to reach out. Those conversations are a different thing entirely because there’s no convincing needed, no justifying your rates, no awkward gap after you send the number. They already know what they want, and that feeling is brilliant. It keeps you going through the silent inboxes.

I’m starting to think the business won’t be built on the people I chase, it’ll be built on the people who come to me. Which is ironic, because that’s literally how the creator economy works: show up consistently, build trust, and the right people find you. I’ve been telling clients this for over a decade, and it turns out it applies to me too.

The life bit

Here’s the part that doesn’t make it onto LinkedIn.

I’ve been ill, nothing serious, just that rubbish lingering kind of unwell where everything takes twice as long and you’ve got half the energy. The kind where you power through a client call sounding perfectly fine and then spend the rest of the afternoon horizontal on the sofa, feeling guilty about the twelve things you haven’t done.

Kai and the dogs have been gorgeous chaos. Some days are properly lovely with slow mornings, the park, that unhurried time with my son that I never had when I was sitting in traffic on the way to an office, and those days remind me exactly why I did this. Other days are just exhausting: the whining (him), the barking (them), the endless negotiation with a very small person who has very strong opinions about what constitutes an acceptable lunch. On those days, “building a consultancy” means answering emails while trying to feed him and making sure he doesn’t hurt the dogs (toddlers aren’t great with dogs), with “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” on full blast in the background.

And then there’s the news. I lived in the UAE for over a decade, I’m originally Iraqi, my husband is Lebanese, most of my friends and colleagues are in the region, and my family is in Jordan. Watching what’s happening right now sits in your chest all day. You scroll, you message people, you feel useless, and then you’re supposed to switch tabs and write something insightful about AI tools. The two things don’t go together and yet they’re both happening at the same time, every single day.

The headless chicken thing isn’t just about work, it’s everything all at once.

What I’m figuring out

Three months in, here’s where I’ve landed.

The right people will find you, and your only job is to keep showing up so they can. Do the work, do the outreach, but allow space for people to come to you because they will.

You can’t power through a crisis, and sometimes the most useful thing you can do is slow down and just be a decent person.

The days that feel wasted rarely are. The mornings with Kai, the afternoon spent messaging friends in Dubai instead of chasing leads: that’s not wasted time, that’s the life I left a corporate job to have.

And the headless chicken energy doesn’t go away. You just get a bit better at running in roughly the right direction.

If you’re building something new and running around like a headless chicken too, drop me a reply. Chances are we’re having the same sort of week.

The thing is, I don’t know what I’d say back.

I wrote a LinkedIn post earlier this week about the situation in the Middle East. It got quite a bit of traction, which tells me a lot of people are feeling the same way and just needed someone to say it out loud. But LinkedIn only gives you so much space, so this is the longer, more honest version.

I’m Iraqi-British, my husband is Lebanese, and my son is all three. That used to feel like a fun fact, something I’d share at dinner parties or when people asked where my name was from. Now it feels like a list of places that are falling apart, and I’m watching it happen from a house in London where my biggest daily problem is whether my toddler will eat the food I cooked for him. The guilt of that is hard to explain.

I’ve never lived in Iraq. My parents left before I was born, and I grew up hearing stories about a country I’ve never been able to experience fully. I visited a lot, but it’s not the same. Having said that, my dad instilled a love for Iraq in me and my brother, he’d tell us all about our family history, the history of the country, how focused it was on education. I think I knew more about Iraq than the people living there.

Lebanon is different. It was where the Arabs went to party. I was always in Beirut, and I loved it. I know Beirut more than my husband does; the restaurants and the chaos and the warmth of it. Last summer, my family and I were there when the 12-day war happened, and we almost got stuck. We made it to Jordan for my brother’s wedding, and every night we heard blasts and watched rockets being intercepted from the window. My son was less than a year old and didn’t understand what was happening, but we did.

I spent the last 10 years in the UAE. I met my husband there, built my career there, and made the kind of friendships that only happen when everyone around you is far from home and building something new. The UAE was supposed to be the safe one, that was the deal. You move to Dubai and in exchange for the heat and the cost and the distance from family, you get safety. You leave your car unlocked, your children play outside, you don’t think about bomb shelters because there aren’t any. And then in one weekend, that all changed.

What’s been strange is watching two very different reactions from my friends there. My non-Middle Eastern friends are terrified, they’ve never experienced anything like this and they don’t know what to do.

My Middle Eastern friends are scared too, but there’s this resigned calm underneath it. “This is nothing new for us.” The fact that people from this region have normalised living through war is one of the saddest things I can think of.

Being Middle Eastern in the UK right now is a strange experience. There’s this thing that happens when you carry multiple identities: you spend most of your life code-switching between them so smoothly that you almost forget they’re separate. I’m Hala at the school gates, Hala the consultant in meetings, Hala who lived in Dubai for a decade, Hala whose mum still makes Iraqi dolma every time I visit. But weeks like this collapse all of those identities into one. Suddenly you’re not the woman who works in the creator economy or the mum at pickup, you’re the Middle Eastern one, and everyone is looking at you to see how you’re coping, including yourself.

My son will grow up with three identities, but one day he’s going to ask me where he’s from, and I’m going to have to explain why two of those places were never really an option. I don’t know what I’ll tell him. “It’s complicated” doesn’t feel like enough.

What I do know is that there are millions of children across Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and the wider region who don’t have his options. No second passport, no way out, their futures being decided by people who will never have to live with the consequences.

Peace isn’t complicated. We’ve just decided that war is easier.

At Google/YouTube, I built creator programmes and ran workshops about how to grow on the platform. I looked at analytics dashboards and said things like “your hook needs to be stronger” and “you need to post more consistently.” At TikTok UK, I helped agencies figure out how to grow their creators on TikTok LIVE.

Not to sound too arrogant, but I was VERY good at it. 😏

And now that I’ve gone independent, I have to do it myself to build my brand. And I am, frankly, terrified. 😅
Terrified of putting myself out there, of cringing at myself whenever I watch one of my videos, of people judging me, all of it.

I launched my consultancy two months ago, and the plan was clear: help the creator economy work smarter with AI. I have the network, the knowledge, the positioning. What I didn’t anticipate was the content problem.

Nobody tells you this when you leave a big platform role: your credibility used to be attached to a logo. When you email someone from a @google.com address, you don’t need a personal brand, because the brand does the work for you.

Now it’s just me. And if I want clients to find me, trust me, and pay me, I need to show up. On camera, on LinkedIn and Instagram, and on this very Substack.

I know exactly what I should be doing, I’ve literally built frameworks for this. And yet, I keep procrastinating. Because I know that once I show people that vulnerable side, there’s no going back. The good, the bad and the ugly.

But then I look into my boy’s eyes and I remember why I started this business. To spend more time with him, to build a better life for him. It’s all about him.

Are the people judging me going to put food in my son’s mouth? Are they brave enough to put themselves out there? No, they’re not. So F-it. 🔥

I’ll let you know how video number five goes. 🤯

If you’re building something and finding the content side terrifying, reply to this. It helps to know I’m not the only one!

I don’t believe in manifesting, I believe in creating.

When you manifest, you’re asking, when you create, you’re declaring. You’re the architect of your own life.

We all have this creative power through our collective consciousness, our superconscious. But most people never tap into it. We've sadly stopped listening to our inner voice/intuition - instead we spend more time listening to the external noise around us (social media, news, etc.)

The framework that changed everything

One of the most powerful techniques I learnt from Create Your Destiny: creating “choices” vs “affirmations”.

How it works:

You start with the Land of Plenty meditation, a guided audio that walks you through visualising everything you’ve ever wanted as if it’s already real. You don’t observe it, you feel it as if you’ve experienced it.

(Message me for the audio)

Once done, write what’s in that Land - don’t think, just write. It’ll flow effortlessly.

Then create 10-12 “choices” using this format:

“I choose the end result of [exact outcome].”

Examples:

• “I choose the end result of raising a smart, healthy & beautiful baby boy”

• “I choose the end result of a massive abundance of wealth, success & growth in my career”

• “I choose the end result of a deeply loving, playful & peaceful relationship with Elias”

Be extremely precise - you’re telling the universe exactly what you’re creating.

The two anchors

Two choices stay constant:

1. “I choose the end result of living my true nature & purpose”

2. “I choose the end result of being healthy & staying healthy”

These are universal. The other 7-8 are personal and evolve with life stages.

The daily practice

Every day, go through all your choices (20 seconds each). Visualise each surrounded by a gold ring (the highest frequency), walk into that circle, embody it.

Then focus deeply on two choices (rotate daily).

Create a bridge - look back from inside that choice, from the future where it’s already real. The actions you need to take become obvious. Your intuition tells you what to do.

The annual review

Once a year, or when choices come true, update your list. Some materialise, some evolve, new ones replace old ones.

What actually happened

June 2021, theme: “graduating/transforming/momentum”, Hala 2.0.

What I chose:

• A beautiful, modern home in London ✅

• A flexible, rewarding & lucrative job that I love ✅

• A healthy, beautiful baby boy ✅

• A deeply loving, playful & peaceful relationship with Elias ✅

• Massive abundance of wealth, success & growth in my career (currently creating)

When pregnant, my choices reflected that. Now, launching my consultancy, they’ve shifted to exponential career growth and accessing my superconscious.

The choices evolve, but they all come true.

Why this works

We’re all connected through collective consciousness. Most people just don’t tap into it because we’re too busy ingesting external content.

Creating your choices forces you to:

• Get specific about what you want

• Declare it as already done

• Embody it daily

• Look back from the future to see the path forward

• Trust you’re the creator, not the recipient

When you walk into that gold circle, you’re not imagining a future version of yourself, you’re becoming it, right now.

Try it

1. Do the Land of Plenty meditation (message me for the audio)

2. Write 10-12 choices: “I choose the end result of [specific outcome]”

3. Go through all daily (20 seconds each)

4. Focus deeply on two per day (rotate them)

5. Look back from inside each choice to see what actions to take

6. Review annually

You’re not manifesting, you’re creating.

We’ve all always had the power to do it.

Subscribe now

I was obsessed.

I got Google Analytics certified, Adwords certified, all of it. I applied to every single role, even if my experience didn’t match. I got an interview, but then the role got filled and I thought my life was over because it was perfect for me.

A few months later, a Googler approached me for a contract role and I was over the moon.

I took sick leave to do the interview, but my manager at the time called me just as I was about to leave the house to ask about a project we were working on, so I ended up being late. I also couldn’t find Google on Google maps - I was all over the place and couldn’t see that the massive colourful building was right in front of me.

I cried, and thought there was no way I’d get the job because of how late I was. Which actually helped me. I had nothing to lose, so I went in relaxed and enjoyed the interview.

They called me back and told me I got the job - I think that was one of the happiest days of my life.

I spent a year in that contract role, networking and trying to convert to an FTE. My parents thought I’d have a heart attack, but I told them it was worth it for Google.

The role I originally applied for (the one that got filled before I had a chance to interview) opened up again, and I knew it was mine. I did everything I could to prepare for that interview, and I got it. I threw my heart and soul into the role - I became even more obsessed. I was still based in London at the time, but a year later, I had the opportunity to transfer to Dubai. I took it.

This all happened 13 years ago.

Being married to a company is dangerous. I put Google on a pedestal and when anything ‘bad’ happened - dealing with toxic managers, not getting promoted because of office politics - it destroyed me. I had some of the best times and some of the worst times at Google. I burnt out so many times that I stopped noticing when it happened. It became normal.

I met some of the most amazing people. But I also saw how power can change people, and that was hard to watch. I also learned that company culture is shaped from the top, and when that shifts, everything shifts.

When I first started, I loved the culture at Google. I wanted to live at the office. Most of my colleagues were my friends.

Then, something shifted.

COVID happened and it changed everything. We were all sent home and ended up working from home for two years.

In the middle of all that, I lost my father - RTO happened at the beginning of my grief.

It was horrible. I didn’t want to see anyone - I just wanted to be left alone to cry.

I’d also lost 16kg during COVID. I’d started working with a nutritionist who changed my life and the way I eat. I loved what I achieved. But coming back to the office and hearing “Oh my God, you look amazing - how did you do it?” and “What? You’re engaged?! Congrats!” (I’d also met my husband during COVID) felt impossible to navigate when all I wanted to do was grieve.

I’d end up bursting into tears anytime someone spoke to me and tell them my dad had died. They didn’t know how to react. I only wanted to be around people who had faced loss, so I could cry openly and be vulnerable without having to explain.

A lot happened during those years - they say what doesn’t happen in 10 years can happen in 10 minutes. True.

Anyway, back to Google.

The transition back to the office was strange. We’d moved to a new building. New people had joined from another office. It felt like two different cultures forced together, and everyone was scared of the upcoming layoffs.

The company culture shifted. It became more about survival than collaboration. It wasn’t the Google I’d joined.

I knew it was time to leave.

I didn’t leave straight away. I was waiting for my promotion - a common story at Google. My manager was new and didn’t understand the system, so it took forever to go through. I had to go skip level.

Then I got pregnant, and life started making decisions for me.

My husband’s company had been pushing for him to move to the UK. I didn’t want to raise our son in Dubai, so we decided to go.

I tried applying for roles internally before we left, but Google had changed. They wanted more junior people - I was too senior for what was available. Most of the new roles didn’t feel like the right fit anyway.

Then TikTok reached out.

I loved my team there, but the culture was different. Extremely fast-paced and intense. You were expected to work all day, every day, including weekends. Four days a week in the office meant I barely saw my son.

When they announced RTO five days a week at the end of the year, that was my cue to leave and start my own thing - something I’d been dreaming about for years.

Now I work independently with creators and agencies, helping them scale across platforms using AI-enhanced strategies. I’m loving it. This is what I’m passionate about - helping creators grow and thrive. It’s what kept me at YouTube for so long.

The difference? I get to do it on my time, on my own terms.

And I officially divorced Google.

I had some of the best times of my career there. But I’ve learned to recognise when something stops serving me - and more importantly, when to walk away.

Thank you, Google.

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Long-form and short-form content. Posts, Reels, Stories, all of it. Not only is this exhausting and overwhelming, it also means they’re spreading themselves too thin.

Just thinking about managing all that content is exhausting, never mind actually creating it.

What I Used to Tell Creators

When I first started at YouTube, that was the strategy. My job was to tell creators to be everywhere in order to amplify their content.

And to be fair, it made sense at the time.

Back then, there were 1-2 types of platforms and 1-2 types of format. You could feasibly manage it. YouTube for long-form. Maybe Twitter for updates. Instagram for photos. Done.

That’s no longer the case.

The Problem Now

YouTube. Instagram. TikTok. Snapchat. LinkedIn. Threads. And that’s without even getting into the types of content you’re expected to create on each one.

Long-form videos. Short-form clips. Carousels. Reels. Stories. Posts. Lives. Newsletters.

It’s insane.

And creators are burning out trying to keep up with all of it because everyone keeps telling them they need to be “omnipresent.”

What Actually Works

Stop chasing every platform. Start thinking about depth, not breadth.

Ask yourself:

• What content caters to your audience? Where do they actually spend time?

• What content do you enjoy creating? What feels natural to you?

• What format suits your content? Does it need 10 minutes to tell the story, or 30 seconds?

If you like spending 10 minutes speaking to your audience, long-form works for you. YouTube is your platform.

If you’re making quick cooking videos or tutorials, short-form content makes sense. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts.

If you’re sharing industry insights and want professional credibility, LinkedIn is where you should be.

The Reality

You don’t need to be everywhere. You need to be where it makes sense for YOU and your audience.

Pick one platform. Master it. Build something real there.

Then, if you have the capacity and it makes strategic sense, expand.

But most creators never get to that point because they’re too busy trying to post everywhere and doing none of it well.

The Advice That’s Killing Creators

“You need to repurpose your content across every platform to maximise reach.”

Technically true. But completely unsustainable for most creators.

You know what else maximis

es reach? Creating one piece of excellent content that people actually want to share. On one platform where you’ve built real trust with an audience.

That beats posting mediocre content across six platforms every single time.

What I Tell My Clients Now

Focus. Build depth. Stop spreading yourself thin just because some growth guru told you to.

The creators who last aren’t the ones posting everywhere. They’re the ones who picked a platform, figured out what works there, and committed to showing up consistently in one place.

Once you’ve mastered that? Sure, expand. But not before.

Don’t just do what everyone else is doing. You’ll burn out and end up doing nothing.

What platform have you committed to? Or are you still trying to be everywhere? Drop a comment.

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It took me some time to get pregnant. I was dealing with grief, then a miscarriage. When I finally did get pregnant, I was so happy.

I wanted a girl.

Actually, I wanted (and still want) one of each, but I wanted the girl to be first. Maybe it’s because I’m one of each and I’m the older sister. Maybe it’s just to guarantee I have at least one girl.

It’s ironic because when I was a child, I didn’t want a girl. I thought I’d be jealous of her.

Then I grew up resenting men, mainly because they got it so easy (especially in the Middle East).

My father was extremely liberal. I was so fortunate to grow up in a home where there was no such thing as sexism. In fact, my father almost went the other way just to show me that he didn’t believe women were ‘less’ than men - a belief that’s sadly adopted in a lot of the MENA region (and the world, if I’m being honest).

So why did I resent men?

I was born and raised in London where I had carte blanche to dress, say and do whatever I wanted. We then moved to Jordan (because I wanted to be closer to Iraq). I obviously didn’t know there was a massive difference between the UK and Jordan when it came to women’s freedom.

Jordan isn’t that bad, but you do see a lot of men inappropriately hitting on women (mainly because they don’t see many) and staring. A LOT.

Then there was curfew and the fact that I wasn’t allowed to have boyfriends, when my younger brother was more or less allowed to do what he wanted. That wasn’t fair, but my father explained that it was because of the society we were living in.

I think you can imagine how badly I wanted to move back to London.

That wasn’t the only thing. I dated some messed up men.

My first boyfriend was the worst. He didn’t let me do anything. I wasn’t allowed to talk to other guys - he basically wanted me in a cage. We were both 17 and he was extremely insecure. I didn’t know that at the time, so it really messed me up, and I definitely carried it with me through all my relationships.

I could go on, but I won’t. I think you get the idea.

So I changed my mind and wanted to have a girl.

A girl I could raise to be as outspoken and hard-working as me. A girl who didn’t take shit from anyone.

I got a boy instead.

And that boy is now my heart.

He is everything.

He’s sweet, kind and so loving. He looks a lot like me, which basically makes him the spitting image of my late father. He sits on my lap and plays with my hair (and his hair) to self-soothe. He loves to read (like me and my father), he loves music and he loves to cuddle and show me affection - not something I expected from a boy.

I can’t watch shows or films where boys die or are hurt anymore. I watched the Hamnet trailer last night and broke down.

He’s opened me up and taught me so much. Nothing I say can capture the beauty of what my king means to me. A moment with him is a lifetime in heaven, so I’ll take whatever moments I can get.

Getting home at 6:30pm after a long day at work and commute wasn’t working for me anymore. I’d see him for 30 minutes and then put him to bed (he’d have to be in nursery till 6pm).

And then on the weekends, I’d be scared to be left alone with him because I didn’t know how to entertain him. I didn’t know my baby.

He wasn’t happy because he was barely seeing his mother, so he was throwing tantrums and getting super clingy.

I now pick him up at 3pm and get to spend almost 4 hours with him in the evenings. It’s not easy, but we’re getting closer and starting to understand each other more.

I now know my boy, and he knows me.

Don’t get me wrong - I still want a girl. I’m hoping our second will be a girl.

But if it’s another boy? I’ll be just as lucky. Because now I know what I didn’t know before: having a son doesn’t mean raising the men I resented. It means raising the man I wish existed all along.

And that feels like the most important work I’ll ever do.

Not because of algorithm changes or bad content, but because of three preventable mistakes:

1. Disappearing

We’re all human - everyone needs breaks.

Having said that, consistency is fundamental to growth, and too many creators treat it like it’s optional.

The mistake: Posting daily for three months, burning out, and vanishing for six weeks.

What works: Think ahead. Can you sustain daily content for a year? If not, should it be 2-3 times a week? Once a week?

Block-shoot content, batch record, and build a buffer.

Consistency doesn’t mean posting every day. It means showing up predictably so your audience knows when to expect you.
Disappearing kills momentum.

2. Changing Who You Are

Authenticity is what got you here, so why do so many creators think turning into a celebrity is what their audience wants?

The mistake: A creator grows, gets attention, and suddenly starts acting like someone else. They change their tone. Polish their rough edges. Try to be “professional.”

And then their audience leaves.

What works: Stay yourself. Evolve, yes. But don’t abandon the authenticity that built your audience.

Your quirks, your flaws, your realness. That’s your edge. Remember that people can smell inauthenticity from a mile away.

3. Getting Too Big for Your Boots

I’ve seen countless creators become arrogant and difficult to work with after they get too big.

They start treating people like they’re doing them a favour, and become impossible to collaborate with.

This kills their career faster than anything else.

What happens: Word spreads. Brands stop calling. Platforms stop pushing your content. And when the algorithm shifts (it always does), no one’s rushing to help you.

What works: Stay humble, be professional, and treat everyone with respect.

The industry is smaller than you think - people talk. No-one likes a difficult creator.

The Pattern

Consistency. Authenticity. Humility.

These aren’t flashy and don’t make headlines. But they separate creators who build sustainable careers from those who burn bright and disappear.

The ones who make it long-term? They nail the basics.

Which mistake do you see most often? Drop a comment.