I was burnt out. Borderline broken. And after several years in less-than-ideal working environments, I had become pretty disenchanted with my career.

It was time to come home.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that my decision to return to Australia would kick off a much bigger lifestyle change. One that I desperately needed to recover from corporate burnout, get my health back on track and, frankly, find myself again.

But let’s rewind.

In 2021, I moved to New York for what I thought was my dream job.

Like the old saying about never meeting your heroes, I sometimes think you should be careful about getting your dream job too.

Before I could actually get to New York, COVID had other plans. I spent around nine months working the global role remotely from Sydney, starting work at 3am to overlap with New York, finishing around midday, then often jumping back online between 6pm and 9pm for Europe.

Looking back, that was probably where the burnout started. No shit.

At the time, I didn’t care. I was excited. Ambitious. Desperate to prove that putting an Australian on the other side of the world into this global position had been the right decision.

I would have done almost anything to make it work.

Then I finally landed in New York and discovered that while I might have landed the dream job, I had not landed in a dream environment.

It was highly political. The business was in a state of turmoil. My relationship with my manager had deteriorated to the point where going to work became something I dreaded.

After one particularly hideous Cannes Lions, I decided it was time to get the hell out of dodge.

Unfortunately, the job that followed wasn’t the reset I had hoped for.

I threw myself into it and kept pushing long after my body was telling me something was wrong. By the end, I was having panic attacks in meetings. I wasn’t sleeping properly. I was binge eating. My gut was a mess, thanks in part to a parasite I picked up in Mexico. I was physically and mentally exhausted.

There is one particular day I still remember.

I got a taxi to work, arrived outside the building, got out of the car and physically could not make myself walk inside. So I stood outside and called one of my closest friends, hysterical. She asked a simple question: Why couldn’t I walk away from something that was making me this unhappy?

For almost a decade, I had built my identity entirely through the lens of my career. Walking away from this impressive-looking New York job felt like walking away from part of myself. It felt like failure, despite all the success I had.

Without all the accolades and the big title, who was I?

I’ve written previously about how I eventually detached my identity from my career. But deciding to leave New York was also the beginning of something else.

It was a recommitment to my health. And because I’ve never done anything by halves, I went all in.

I hired a therapist. I started working with a business coach. I worked with practitioners on my gut health. I stopped drinking for six months. I cut out added sugar for three months. I started meditating. I went to sound baths, retreats and breathwork classes.

I tried equine therapy. I did a psilocybin ceremony (which is an entirely different Substack post.) I spent a month in Costa Rica.

Eat, pray, recover

You name the wellness modality, there is a fairly good chance I tried it. Basically, I threw a shit tonne of money at the problem.

And somewhere along the way, my life changed. As did my perspective.

It wasn’t one supplement, one practitioner or one gadget that did it. It was the accumulation of hundreds of little decisions that slowly changed the way I lived.

Over a year, my stress levels came down. My gut improved. My relationship with food improved. I became mentally stronger. I learnt what actually helped regulate me. And perhaps most importantly, I learnt how to chill the fuck out.

Today, my life feels much bigger than my career.

Work is still incredibly important to me. I’m ambitious. I care deeply about what I do. I want to do excellent work. But it sits inside a much bigger, more beautiful life rather than taking up the whole thing.

And somewhere during this process I also became, somewhat unexpectedly, a converted wellness girly.

I’ve changed what I eat, what I put on my body, what I keep in my house, the way I start and end my days, and the way I think about stress.

Recently, I sat down and wrote out everything I’ve changed over the past two years.

So I’m sharing it here.

For paid subscribers, I’ve put together my personal burnout-to-wellness playbook, including:

• The practitioners and providers I’ve worked with

• My morning and evening routines

• My regular wellness habits

• The supplements and products I use

• The way I now approach food and nutrition

• The wellness gadgets and tools I’ve invested in

• My non-toxic home, beauty and personal-care swap

• The mindset practices and resources that have helped me most

• The books I’ve read that changed my mindset

Read more

Preparing for it gave me one of those rare moments to actually reflect on how much the job has changed.

I’ve spent the last decade working across journalism and communications, and I’ve now been the the first communications hire twice.

The first time was in 2022, when I joined GALE in New York. It was very much your traditional corporate communications role - with media relations at the centre, and a lot of my time spent working with journalists, pitching speaking opportunities, hosting events and writing award entries.

Then, after moving back to Australia, I joined Ideally this year to lead communications and content. Except this time, some of my first priorities were AI visibility, executive communications, our employee advocacy program, filming video content and launching a B2B creator program.

Same job. Very different playbook.

Somewhere between those two roles, the remit of communications got much bigger. And if you haven’t guessed the fairly obvious thing that arrived between 2022 and 2026 and changed the job forever, it was AI.

The new battleground: GEO

When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it changed the priorities as marketers because it began changing how people discover, research and eventually buy brands.

Once upon a time, we typed a question into Google and got back a page of links. Increasingly, we’re turning to tools like ChatGPT and Claude and getting back a single, synthesised answer.

Which creates an entirely new question for brands: how do you make sure you show up in that answer?

That’s the emerging world of Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO: influencing the information and signals around your brand so that AI systems understand what you’re known for and surface you when it matters.

And this is where things get particularly interesting for communications teams.

Earned media is having a comeback

Machines might increasingly shape discovery, but earned media helps shape what those machines discover.

Which means PR is having a bit of a resurgence. We’re back. We’re the IT girl of marketing. We’re cool again.

Muck Rack found that 94% of citations in AI-generated answers come from non-paid sources, with 82% coming from earned media.

There’s a fairly logical reason for that: earned media gives brands something AI systems value highly (and that we’ve focused on building for decades): third-party authority.

When a credible publication writes about your company, research or point of view, another source is effectively validating that information. That gives an AI system a much stronger signal than a brand simply making the same claim about itself on its own website. It essentially allows your brand to pass the AI sniff test.

And we’re starting to see the impact of that play out in the data.

Research from Stacker and Scrunch AI looked at 87 stories across 30 brands and eight AI platforms and found that content distributed through earned media saw a 239% median lift in AI search visibility compared with the same content published only on the brand’s own website.

That changes the value equation of PR.

Earned media now has two audiences: the human reading the story today, and the AI system deciding what answer to give someone tomorrow.

And I think that is one of the biggest shifts happening in communications right now.

But it’s far from the only one.

The playbook is expanding in a few other directions that I covered at State of Social:"

1. Original research is becoming an unlock for both earned media and AI influence. Journalists and AI systems are hungry for many of the same things: credible, authoritative information that adds something new.

2. Corporate creators are becoming critical. Executives and employees are increasingly media channels in their own right.

3. Media is fragmenting. The definition of a relevant media outlet is getting much broader as newsletters, podcasts, creators and niche publications compete with traditional mastheads for attention and influence.

4. The corporate storyteller is emerging. As the communications remit expands, companies increasingly need people who can tell a story, no matter the medium.

And underneath all of this, storytelling itself is having a comeback.

AI has democratised content creation, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Ironically, the rise of AI slop has made great storytelling more valuable.

I unpacked all of these shifts, and what I think they mean for the next generation of communications leaders, in my State of Social presentation. The full presentation is available for Media Trained subscribers below.

Read more

The short answer: it’s the same game, but some of the rules are different.

When I moved to New York as Global Head of Communications at DDB, I had to adjust some of what I knew about PR. The fundamentals were the same: a strong story, good relationships and a reason for a journalist to care. But the scale, competition and bar for what made a strong story were different.

I then joined GALE as its first communications hire, when the agency was relatively unknown. I built the communications and content function from zero to a team of 10, helping build GALE into one of the most recognised agency brands in the US, ultimately landing Ad Age’s A-List and Adweek’s Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year.

I’ve had countless conversations with advertising and marketing businesses looking to build their reputation in the US.

So, here are some of the biggest differences I’ve learned along the way.

The competition is on another level

The obvious difference is scale.

In Australia, the advertising and marketing trade is relatively concentrated. There are fewer agencies, fewer publications and fewer people competing for the attention of the same journalists.

In the US, you’re competing with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of companies that all want to be part of the same industry conversation.

A story that might comfortably earn coverage in Australia doesn’t even get a response in the US.

That changes the threshold for what constitutes news.

You need a sharper point of view, a stronger connection to what is happening in the industry and, increasingly, something proprietary that gives the journalist a reason to tell your story.

The media landscape is more specialised

The structure of the media is also different.

US publications including Ad Age, Adweek, Digiday and Marketing Brew have historically had larger editorial teams with journalists covering specific beats.

You might have one reporter interested in agency business, another covering media, another following platforms and another focused on the creator economy.

Australian trade publications such as Mumbrella, AdNews and B&T operate with smaller teams, which naturally means journalists often cover a much broader remit.

That matters when you’re pitching.

The definition of “news” changes

US trade reporters tend to have a high bar for hard business news.

Think financial performance, major account wins, acquisitions, leadership moves with industry significance, new business models, proprietary data and broader trends that say something interesting about where the market is going.

Exclusives matter. Timing matters. Giving a reporter an angle they haven’t already seen 15 times that week matters.

In Australia, there tends to be more space for the broader ecosystem of industry news: culture stories, awards, hires, promotions, campaign work and local industry moments.

The two approaches reflect very different media markets. If you’re an Australian business trying to build a US profile, understanding that distinction is incredibly important.

You have to make your story bigger than you

This is probably the biggest piece of advice I give Australian businesses entering the US.

Your company news is rarely as interesting to everyone else as it is to you. The question I’d ask instead is:

What does this tell us about the industry?

• Connect what your business is doing to a bigger shift happening in advertising, marketing, media or culture.

• Bring original data. Have a point of view. Use your clients and leaders as evidence of something bigger.

The US Media Playbook

I created a playbook to pull together what I learned from years of navigating the US advertising and marketing media landscape and building brands within it.

It’s the practical version of everything I’ve covered above.

Inside, I break down the US trade media landscape, what different publications and journalists care about, what actually constitutes news, how to find stronger story angles, and how to approach pitching and relationship-building differently.

It’s designed for Australian businesses operating across advertising, marketing and media that want to build a profile in the US, whether you’re an agency, technology company, platform, research business or another company selling into the industry.

I’m now making the full playbook available to paid Media Trained subscribers.

Subscribe for access.

Read more

If you worked with me five years ago… firstly I’m sorry. And secondly, you’ll know that work was my entire identity. Everything revolved around my career.

I was the type of employee who gave everything to work, found very little time for anything else, and was always chasing the next role, the next title and the next opportunity to prove myself.

At the time, I framed it as passion and ambition, and to be fair, those qualities were rewarded earlier in my career. But I also believe in the saying, what got you here won’t always get you there.

As I moved into more senior leadership roles that required patience, collaboration and a steadier hand, my “move fast and break things” approach wasn’t always the right one (or particularly well-received in the US, but that’s another story.)

As I stepped into leadership, I realised that caring so much about the work was creating stress for me and for the people around me. I refused to budge on deadlines and held the work to such a high standard that it was often more a symptom of my perfectionism than a positive for the team.

I recently heard the term “corporate pick me” and immediately thought: oh god, that was me.

The corporate pick me is the person who is always available, always trying to prove themselves, addicted to being useful and holding themselves to impossible standards. Workaholism and perfectionism dressed up as ambition.

There were periods of my career where I think I was holding onto work for dear life. Somewhere along the way, being good at my job had become so tangled up with who I was that I didn’t know who I’d be without it.

If I wasn’t achieving, progressing or proving myself, what was left?

Around that time, I was working with a business coach who said something that has stayed with me ever since.

“If you had invested as much time, energy and identity into a man as you have your career, we’d call it a toxic relationship.”

Yep, that one hit hard.

After that conversation, and then a few years living in New York, I realised things had to change. I needed to unpack my identity from my career and figure out who I was without a job title.

I had to build a big, beautiful, interesting and rewarding life, not just a big career.

I had to decenter work, ironically, to become better at work.

Lately, I’ve been seeing memes and TikToks about how the hardest boss to work for is someone who has nothing else in their life besides work. Having worked with people like that, and having been one myself at times, I think there’s a lot of truth to it.

After leaving the US, I started the process of decentering my career. It began with a month-long trip through Costa Rica and a renewed focus on my health. I started investing in hobbies again. I recommitted to reading and now finish a book almost every week. I joined a garden club, a tennis club and Toastmasters. I rediscovered creativity through painting, pottery and sewing

Me in Costa Rica definitely not thinking about work

I wanted my life to be about fun, connection and curiosity, not just work.

Even starting this Substack and sharing more personal reflections on LinkedIn, instead of only talking about the company I work for, has been part of that journey.

One of my long-term goals is to write a book, and I’m committed to building that creative writing muscle by publishing here consistently.

I think it’s made me a better employee and a better leader.

I’m still ambitious and probably still a recovering corporate pick me. I still have big goals. I still want to build meaningful things, lead great teams and write the book that’s been sitting in my head for years.

I just don’t need my career to be the only interesting thing about me.

The less my identity has depended on work, the better I’ve become at it. I’m more patient, calmer under pressure and, I hope, a better leader.

The more I’ve invested in the parts of my life that exist outside work, the more perspective, resilience and creativity I’ve brought back into it.

For years, I thought the way to build a great career was to make it the centre of my life.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your career is give it a little less of yourself.

• How are customers using us?

• Which stories are ready to ship, from first challenge through to results?

• Which customers can be our external advocates?

Work that would have taken months of one-on-ones took a day. And it handed me something a founder never can: a less filtered read, straight from the customer.

Set up your AI environment on day one.
The old version of this was a master messaging document. You’d collect every fact about the company, the client list, the way leadership talks, and build the reference file you returned to for years.

Now that file is an environment. Load it with everything the company has created: every press release, town hall, RFI, interview transcript and policy document. It learns the brand voice and messaging, and becomes the place you build your briefings, releases and key messages from. Keep feeding it and it keeps getting smarter.

At GALE, almost three years ago, we built a version of this trained on the founder’s voice, named after him and drawing on every interview he’d ever given. At the time it felt inventive. Now it’s table stakes.

Get the brilliant basics right.
My team would laugh because I say this constantly. So much of communications comes back to consistency and clarity. The closest thing to a silver bullet is a steady drumbeat: showing up with a clear message, again and again.

It’s unglamorous work. Templates, trackers, calendars, and a way to surface earned media to leadership so they can see what you’re doing.

The basic that matters most is owning the brand voice. A new comms leader almost always inherits language that’s all over the place because no one has been holding the line. A simple AI workflow can tell you every brand touchpoint that feels off brand and help you with the process of updating the language.

What changed is how I start my day.
I have scheduled tasks running overnight that are waiting in my inbox when I log on. One scans market research, advertising and mainstream news, plus a few reporters I follow. One searches for press coverage and brand mentions, right down to Reddit.
Another surfaces angles we should weigh in on. Another generates thought leadership ideas for our executives, mapped to their content pillars.

I probably get 10 to 20% that’s immediately usable, so it still has a way to go, but it beats starting from a blank page. And the briefing document that used to eat an entire day now takes about 30 minutes because it’s mostly pulling existing reference material into a familiar shape.

The repeatable, low-strategy work is exactly what AI should carry so you can spend your hours on the thinking that moves the business.

Find your quick win.
There’s almost always a rich seam of untold stories sitting inside a company that nobody has had the time or remit to tell. Find the one that’s ready to ship and land it early. It proves your value, starts the drumbeat, and gives you evidence when you ask for headcount, tools and budget.

At GALE, mine was an inflation stipend we offered staff earning under a certain amount. It earned strong coverage and bought me room to find the deeper story.

At Ideally, it was our Series A announcement: more than 45 pieces of coverage, a spike in website traffic, and more than a thousand new LinkedIn followers in a week. It showed the whole business what earned media can do, and as a bonus it fast-tracked my understanding of the company because nothing teaches you a business faster than telling its biggest story.

The one thing AI shouldn’t touch.
I’m AI-first and I think every communications leader should be upskilling as quickly as possible. But I have one rule I don’t break: I write my own first drafts.

Writing is our currency. It’s the value we bring.

AI can help me research faster, organise information, challenge my thinking and polish the work. But it shouldn’t replace the foundations of your storytelling.

The tools will continue to change, but great storytelling ain’t going anywhere.

Today, it’s entered the mainstream

We’ve become our own PR teams. It started with curating an online persona, but now that curation has spilled into real life. We instinctively edit ourselves. We soften opinions, remove rough edges and swap conviction for language that’s broadly acceptable. Somewhere along the way, authenticity became something we perform rather than something we practise.

Part of that shift is understandable. I’ve fallen victim to it myself.

The rise of personal branding means more people than ever have an audience. Social media rewards consistency over complexity. Every comment can be screenshotted, every opinion taken out of context, every mistake preserved forever. The cost of getting it wrong feels permanent so people turn to playing it safe.

But there’s a cost.

As a journalist, I’d interview executives who all sounded remarkably similar. The same messaging. The same leadership philosophy shaped by whatever was trending at the time. (For a while there, everyone seemed to be quoting Brené Brown on vulnerability.) The same polished sound bites.

When I shifted to working in communications, I realised why.

I’ll spend an hour with an executive before an interview and they’ll have sharp opinions, fascinating stories and a genuinely unique perspective. Then the interview starts and they default to the approved talking points.

Nothing they say is wrong. It’s just forgettable.

Many people noticed the same thing at Cannes Lions this year. The presentations were polished. The production was flawless. The speakers were accomplished.

But too often they were also predictable. Safe opinions. Perfectly rehearsed answers. Six-person panels where every sponsor gets a seat, but nobody says anything memorable.

The irony is that the most interesting conversations usually happened once people stepped off stage.

As communications leaders, we have a responsibility here.

The purpose of media training isn’t to make everyone sound the same. It’s to help people express what they actually think in a way that others can understand.

Those are very different things.

Polished used to be what set people apart. AI killed that. When anyone can generate a flawless answer in seconds, polish stops being memorable. It’s table stakes.

Which is why imperfection is having a moment. Typos are back. Rough edges read as proof of life.

Maybe the most valuable thing you can be today isn’t polished. It’s recognisable.

The next generation of great communicators won’t win because they’re the most rehearsed. They’ll win because they have a perspective, and because they sound unmistakably like themselves.

The rise of the corporate storyteller is creating a new era for communications and PR leaders. We’ve always known the power of what we do; the difference now is that everyone else is catching on. As leaders scramble to figure out how their brand shows up inside AI environments like Claude and ChatGPT, PR has suddenly found itself with outsized influence.

The reason comes down to how discovery works now. AI is replacing traditional search as the main way people find brands, and AI leans heavily on earned media to decide what’s credible.

• Meltwater analysed over a million AI citations and found 82% come from earned media, and 94% from non-paid sources.

• Meltwater’s May 2026 report found LinkedIn is now the #2 most-cited source in AI answers, second only to YouTube. And three-quarters of those citations come from individual people, not company pages.

• Gartner is predicting earned media and PR budgets could double by 2027, off the back of a behavioural shift that’s already well underway.

So what does this mean for the humble communications leader? The coverage you earn today is the training data for tomorrow’s AI answers. Every placement is now a citation strategy. PR people have undersold ourselves for years, and we finally have the receipts to have our discipline valued.

This newsletter is where I’m going to dig into the forces reshaping the communications role: the rise of the corporate storyteller and the C-suite creator, AI and GEO, and the growing power of the personal brand. Plus the unglamorous bit nobody talks about, which is how you stay well while building all of it. (Yes, I am a wellness convert.)

I’m here to take you on that journey, because it’s one I’m living in real time. I’m a journalist turned comms leader who’s spent a career taking the best of journalism and turning it into something else. I cut my teeth as a business journalist in Australia before moving into the agency world, leading comms at DDB in Australia and globally from New York, then as VP of Corporate Communications at GALE. That career has taken me from Sydney to New York and back, and seen me build two comms teams from scratch on two different continents.

I’m now leading Global Communications at Ideally, where I’ll be sharing exactly how I’m building a comms function, and navigating our own GEO journey, as it happens.

So: welcome.