No word of a lie, it was the most boring holiday of my life.

Most days looked like this:

Wake up, work, walk to my local coffee shop, work, go home for lunch, work, lie by the pool, work, go to the gym, cook a healthy meal, work, read, sleep and repeat.

I spent two days at the beach, I went shopping one afternoon and I treated myself to one solo dinner out. That was the whole trip.

Two years ago, that holiday would have traumatised me.

This year, it kinda saved me.

I used to hate my own company

Honestly, even a year ago, I couldn’t stand to be on my own.

Last summer, my housemate went away for three weeks in July and I genuinely had a melt down. Three weeks in the house on my own? No thank you.

When I was alone I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t relax or watch TV so I would always fill the silence. Constant plans, always on my phone, working until midnight, anything that meant I wasn’t sitting still.

Spending ten days alone in a country where I knew no one would have been my worst nightmare.

I’d never willingly do it.

So, what changed?

A lot, honestly.

A year ago, I was sitting in a lot of pain. In the aftermath of breaking up with someone I thought I was going to marry, losing a job I truly loved and ending another relationship with a walking red flag.

Read the full back story here.

This January, for the first time in about two and a half years, I was finally able to say “I’m happy” and mean it.

Accepting what I’d lost, and accepting that my life looked nothing like I’d planned, did most of the work. But two other pivotal things changed too, and these are the ones you can actually build.

Number one — I built a personal brand, and with it a community. People show up for me whether I’m in London or Marbella or Mexico. That’s given me a kind of confidence I didn’t have before, even at my most confident.

Number two — I built a business and it gave my energy somewhere to go besides chasing the next night out. Work I care about, work I deeply enjoy, work that feels important that I can do on my own schedule, wherever I choose to be.

Put those two things together and ten days in Spain alone stops sounding like torture.

(Just kidding, I know that being able to do that is a luxury).

This isn’t the first time I’ve worked abroad alone this year. It feels surreal to say, but this year alone I’ve worked from seven different countries. But, two years ago I had none of this.

The path from there to here is possible and it is copyable.

Here’s how…

How you can build this yourself

Not with a mindset shift alone. With three decisions, in this order.

1. Decide what you actually want, specifically.
   Not “more freedom.” I mean the real, detailed, vulnerable version. Do you want to work from anywhere, or from a quiet cottage in the middle of the countryside? Do you want enough money to keep you content or do you want f**k you money? Whatever you want is fine and whatever you want is possible. But, it won’t happen by accident. Get specific about the life you want, be insanely clear on it, then work backwards.

2. Decouple your income from your location.
   Before I could work from anywhere, I had to stop needing a desk, a team, or a manager's sign-off to get paid. That took building an audience and an offer that lived on my terms. Start smaller than you think. One offer, one channel, one way for someone to pay you that doesn't require you to be in a specific building.
   

3. Build something of your own that travels with you. Whilst I was away in Spain, I missed a friend’s engagement party to spend the weekend on my own. One year ago, I’d have flown back for that party because the FOMO would have killed me. The community that let me skip those engagement drinks without spiralling didn't appear overnight. I built it because I never wanted to depend on an employer again. But it gave me so much more than that (the power to say no). Build the thing no one can take from you. Build your personal brand.

Why this is worth building (even if you never want to work from Spain)

Location freedom might not be your goal. Fine. Underneath mine, and this isn't my only goal, is a simpler idea: build work and a reputation that belong to me and are controlled by me.

That’s what a personal brand buys you. Not just followers, authority and inbound opportunities but leverage over your own time.

None of that starts with a five year plan or a full rebrand. It starts with one decision, made this week.

Which leads me onto.

Your one tiny action this week

Pick one of the three decisions above and take the smallest possible step on it.

• Income: define one offer you could sell without being in the room to deliver it. A short guide, a template pack, a Loom walkthrough.

• Community: post one honest, specific update about where you actually are today. Not the highlight reel but the truth.

• Clarity: write down, in one sentence, the specific life you’re building toward. Not “freedom.” The real version.

One more thing…

I say this all the time and I will keep saying it until everyone on Substack believes it. You can turn your life around in a short period of time.

One year ago, I could barely spend one night on my own without having a total meltdown. Not healthy, and I knew it. This year I spent ten days on my own and didn’t think twice.

I am so proud of myself for that.

Time and working on myself got me here. Both of those things available to you too.

You genuinely can achieve anything you want in life.

So what is it you actually want?

Love,
Mischa x

I have 65,000 followers and I post every weekday without fail.

But, I still get nervous before I hit post.

Not the good kind of nervous. The type of nervous where you re-read a sentence four times and nearly miss your posting time because you’re making last minute edits.

Still…

Nerves are a good thing.

^{Discomfort is a signal, not a warning}

Last week, my friend Magali left a comment on my LinkedIn post that genuinely got me thinking. I hate that phrase but it literally did!!

She said, “if hitting publish doesn’t make me at least a bit anxious, I skip it”.

There are definitely posts that make me feel more anxious than others.

Like…

When I’m talking about the fact I’m 31 and single. When I mention how much money I’ve made. When I’m trying a totally new format.

But being a little scared shows that:

1. You actually care

2. You’re doing something new, and new things help you grow

3. You are finally building something real not safe

Building a personal brand is scary!!!

No matter if you’re posting about your divorce, a new puppy you got or the new algorithm hack you’ve found. Putting yourself out there is scary.

You should feel exposed. That’s kinda the point.

But the thing to remember is…

Experience does not remove the fear. Experience changes what you are afraid of.

I witnessed that first-hand this week

I tested a new format on LinkedIn this week.

Text-only (something I’ve been testing), super short (another thing I’ve been playing around with). All that I’ve tried before. But in this post I mentioned my relationship and referred to my “future partner” (kind of).

Relationships are usually off limits for me, but I thought this post was cute, fun and I really meant it.

ARE WE LINKEDIN FRIENDS YET?

Thirty seconds after posting, I messaged my best friend Charlie, panicking.

“Is my LI post today bait I just re-read it and lowkey hate it”

Charlie has quadruple the amount of LinkedIn followers I have. I needed him to validate my post.

The post didn’t go viral. It also didn’t flop.

It performed below average for me and I do still low-key hate it. I mean it would have been a great story if the post did pop-off and everyone loved it.

But that’s not the point of this story.

The point is I posted it anyway. I doubted myself and I still didn’t delete it.

Discomfort has limits, and that’s fine

You don’t owe the internet anything.

I don’t talk about relationships while I’m in one. I never used to talk about them in general and I rarely do now.

This is a rule for me. I only started mentioning I am single recently, and honestly, it makes me feel so uncomfortable (like I’m using LinkedIn as a dating app, even though I know I’m not) that I’m not sure if I will keep doing it.

We all have topics we want to protect.

The point is not to remove every boundary you’ve ever had. To lay yourself bare on the internet. To tell us your deepest, darkest secrets.

The point is to realise that everyone is slightly scared but the successful ones do it anyway.

My advice to you…

Notice when a topic sits close to your limit. The limit where you feel too uncomfortable.

If the topic doesn’t cross that line, send it anyway.

Don’t wait for the fear to pass. Hit post.

Being visible is uncomfortable by nature.

But, the reward on the other side, the connection, the trust, the people who message you saying “I felt that way too”…

Makes the discomfort worth it.

Before you go

One thing I’d love you to do this week is think about a topic you’ve been sitting on. Something that makes you feel exposed but still sits inside what you are comfortable sharing.

Post it. Post about it on LinkedIn, post about it on your Instagram story, post about it on X where no one follows you. I don’t care where you post it.

Make yourself a little uncomfortable this week and notice how you feel a few hours later.

I’m going to keep testing and I’ll keep messaging Charlie 30 seconds later. If discomfort is the price of building something people connect with, I’ll keep paying it.

Love,
Mischa x

P.S. Want to learn more about how I can build your personal brand on LinkedIn? Add me on LinkedIn and DM me saying “PB”.

“Are you a content creator?”

I post on LinkedIn five times a week. I have 64,000 followers. I generate 80% of my leads from my content.

Yet, every time someone called me a content creator, I felt offended. My immediate reaction: no, I’m not an influencer, I run a business.

Until last week.

What I was getting wrong

Last week I went to Creator Fest, an event in London built around the creator economy. I went to a talk by Grace Andrews, a loud and proud content creator and previously Marketing Director at Diary of a CEO.

She said something that completely reshaped how I think about creators.

I’d assumed being a creator was the same as being an influencer when they’re two different things.

An influencer builds trust through relevance and inspiration. They give people access to their life and in turn, people aspire to be like them in some sort of way.

A creator builds trust through skill, and value. They build a following based on their work itself, or their expertise.

I want to make it clear, there is nothing wrong with being an influencer. When I was at Edinburgh University (many many years ago), I dreamed of being a fashion influencer. I took photos of my uni fits every day, hoping people would want to dress like me. They didn’t lol.

But that is very different to what I do now. I’ve built a skill in building personal brands on LinkedIn, built a business around it, and now teach others to do the same.

But at the end of the day…

Influence is the whole point

Building a personal brand is an attempt to build influence. This is true whether you’d call yourself a creator, an influencer, or neither. Nobody builds a presence online hoping to stay unknown.

That literally defeats the point.

You build a personal brand hoping to influence someone in different kind of ways. To think like you, to follow you, or buy from you.

A creator might influence someone to buy a service or product they built themselves. An influencer might encourage someone to buy a product they love, made by a brand paying them.

Influence is the name of the game either way.

The biggest difference is that for a creator or let’s say a creator-entrepreneur, influence is not the most important element. Their personal brand sits on top of their business as a tool, it’s not the foundation. Entrepreneur first, personal brand second. Posting is an additional way to get paid for a skill they’ve already built, not necessarily a career of its own.

What’s holding people back

The majority of people think like I used to. They believe being a creator means becoming an influencer, and they avoid posting or building a brand because it feels like they’re chasing clout. Like they’re trying to escape a 9 to 5 and get famous for being famous instead.

This shows up everywhere. Founders worry it will make them look less serious. Employees worry it will look like they want to be somewhere else. Professionals early in their career worry it looks try hard.

All of them are wrong.

Being a creator means building attention, demand, trust — things that strengthen your position, whatever that position is. It helps you become known, it speeds up how fast people trust you, it accelerates your success.

What building a personal brand actually gives you

Demand is the most common thing people mention when they talk about personal branding or becoming a creator, but demand isn’t the whole picture.

Building a personal brand whether you’re an entrepreneur, at school, a full-time employee or launching a side hustle builds you a safety net. A safety net that is even more important in our world of constant change.

I know this firsthand.

Two years ago, I was leading the marketing department at a start-up I had given my blood, sweat and tears to. Almost two years into the role, they fired me with no warning. I spent two months applying for jobs and couldn’t get anywhere near one. That’s when I started building my personal brand. I had no choice but to bet on myself but also, I refused to be reliant on an employer again.

Being a creator means building something that belongs to you, something no one can take away.

A personal brand gives you authority you never have to ask permission for. People stop checking your job title before they trust your opinion. They stop asking for case studies or proof, because you are the proof.

You gain negotiating power in every direction. You start building an inbound life where opportunities come to you. Every conversation changes, whether you’re talking to a client, an investor, or a future employer. You stop being the person asking and become the person attracting.

Demand is the visible result. Security, authority, negotiation power and opportunity build up underneath it.

Your one tiny action this week

Challenge a belief you’ve been holding onto. Mine was that a creator and an influencer were the same thing, and that belief held me back.

Since changing my mind, I see content creation in a new light. I feel different about it, more like building a business in its own right.

What’s something you’ve always believed that might be keeping you stuck?

Maybe you believe posting online is cringe. Maybe you believe building visibility is scary. Maybe you believe changing careers now would set you back.

Name it. Talk about it. Get past it.

Before you go

The label matters way less than you think. Creator, influencer, professional building visibility, whatever gets you moving, call it that. What matters is whether your influence is built on something that outlasts a single post.

That’s all for this week.

Love,
Mischa x

P.S. Want to learn more about how I can build your personal brand on LinkedIn? Add me on LinkedIn and DM me saying “PB”.

No warning. Just a message saying that my account had been restricted.

My entire business is built on LinkedIn. My agency, my coaching, my pipeline. All my income comes from LinkedIn.

So yeah, I freaked out.

24 hours later I was back on LinkedIn (thank the lord), but I kept asking myself: what would I do if my account never came back?

Well, here’s the answer.

The plan I’d run if I woke up tomorrow with zero followers, zero credibility, and no way to generate clients. Properly written down.

When I first started posting on LinkedIn, I had no idea what I was doing. I posted, hoped for the best, and worked it out as I went along.

Looking back, there were so many things I could have done better. This is exactly what I’d do differently based off what worked and what didn’t.

Close your other tabs, focus and take notes. This ones important.

Number 1: Pick one thing and own it

For the first six months, I posted about everything on LinkedIn. Personal branding, LinkedIn growth, marketing campaigns, working smarter. There was a lot going on.

Eventually I found my niche, but it took longer than it needed to.

This time, I’d choose one thing and lock in on it.

There are a three reasons why:

First, LinkedIn’s algorithm and your audience need to categorise you before they can distribute you. Every time you switch topics, you make that harder. You’re slowing down the process.

Second, it’s easier to become an expert in one thing than to be average at many.

Third, the people who grow fastest repeat themselves. If you want to be known for something, be clear on what that something is.

You don’t have to stay in that lane forever. But it’s easier to crack one vertical, then expand.

Number 2: Build three offers at the beginning

Posting without knowing what you’ll sell is one of the most common ways people waste time on LinkedIn.

Before you post, map out three offers:

• Low ticket: under $100 — digital products, a guide, a mini-course

• Medium ticket: $1,000 to $2,000 — group program, a workshop, a community

• High ticket: $2,500 and above — 1-1 coaching, a done-for-you service

You don’t need all three live on day one. You don’t even need them perfected. But you need a rough idea of what you’re selling.

That gives every post a job → move a reader one step closer to one of the three.

Number 3: Get people off LinkedIn immediately

This is the mistake I still get annoyed at myself for.

I’ve built a good business from LinkedIn inbound, but inbound from one platform is a flawed business model. It’s risky by design.

If the algorithm changes, if you get temporarily blocked (hello me), if your pipeline dries up overnight, you’re f***d.

LinkedIn is rented land. You don’t own your audience there. You’re borrowing attention from a company with the power to change the terms whenever it wants.

If I started today, on day one I’d be thinking about long-term marketing, not just LinkedIn growth. I’d build an email list, a lead magnet, and a plan for getting people off LinkedIn and onto something I own. Like Substack.

Not eventually. From day one.

Every person who engages with your content should have the option to go somewhere else. A newsletter, a waitlist, a community.

Add a link to your featured section, to the CTA on every post, to the comments of every post.

Capture that attention.

Are we LinkedIn friends? Follow me

Number 4: Validate content before you create

Here’s where I lost the most time. Guessing what would perform, then finding out hours after posting that it didn’t.

If I started from zero, 60-80% of my content would be pre-validated, rather than 100% gut-feel.

To do that, find 5-10 creators in your space whose work you genuinely love and study their outliers. An outlier is a post that massively outperformed its average. If a creator usually gets 500 engagements per post and one post generates 1,000+, that’s an outlier.

It’s not luck. Something about that post worked. The hook, the topic, the visual, the format, or all of those things.

Reverse-engineer what they did differently, then bring the same structure to your own post in your own voice.

This isn’t copying content. It’s copying what’s already proven to work, then applying your own experience, the part nobody else has.

Your gut still matters. I followed my intuition constantly when I first started posting, and that’s why it felt so honest and authentic.

But gut instinct + validation = the best formula.

What I’d skip entirely

Here are the things I’d ditch if I were starting from zero:

I’d stop obsessing over follower count. I’d focus on which posts drove the most clients, then replicate what worked.

I’d stop pressurising myself to post daily from day one. I’d set a realistic goal and give myself at least one day off.

I’d stop copying other big creators’ tone of voice. When I started writing how I talk and being myself, everything changed. Authenticity is a magnet.

The plan → start to finish

Don’t just look at the actions. Do them in order.

1. Pick your niche. The overlap between what you’re good at and what your audience is stuck on.

2. Map your three offers, even if only one is live right now.

3. Start an email list today. A free Substack takes ten minutes to set up.

4. Find five creators you rate and study their outliers this week.

Do these four in order, and you’ll be ahead of most people two years into posting.

24 hours without LinkedIn taught me more about my business than two years of posting on it did.

Because it forced me to reflect.

Now you have my plan. Don’t waste it.

Love,
Mischa x

P.S. This is the free version of the framework. The version I run with 1:1 clients includes personal feedback on your offer, positioning and strategy, real frameworks, how I reverse-engineer posts, and a full content plan. Add me on LinkedIn and DM me saying “PB” if you’re interested in learning more.

Cannes Lions has been called the Met Gala of Marketing. Also the Oscars. Also the World Cup. And, as much as I never want to hear any of those phrases again…

After watching Raye perform on Spotify beach, Olivia Dean sing at an intimate 30 person dinner, and Oprah Winfrey casually relaxing at the Carlton (not first-hand sadly), I have to agree.

Before LinkedIn, I ran the marketing department for a start up (that eventually me go — read the whole story here). Cannes Lions entered my radar around then, when clients had “Runner up, Cannes Lions” on their website the way other people list a knighthood.

I’ve wanted to go long before I built my personal brand. Before I dared call myself a “LinkedIn creator” and I always thought, one day my company will fly me out.

Well, one day arrived last week.

And the best part?

A company didn’t fly me out.

I did.

AS A GUEST SPEAKER!!!

So how did I go from unemployed to speaking at Cannes?!

To put it simply, I started posting on LinkedIn.

Let me reverse engineer it.

I got fired. I spent two months applying for jobs. Got relentlessly rejected. I started posting about my experience online. An entrepreneur and creator (I loved!!) called Courtney Johnson saw my content. She reached out to me. I started supporting Courtney with her cohort. Then I started co-hosting it. She applied for us to speak at Cannes Lions with Lara Acosta (someone else I fangirl over!!). We got the gig.

We never in a million years thought we would get it. But we did, because of our combined visibility.

Shooting our shot led us to speaking at the B2B Summit at Cannes Lions, right after the CMOs of LinkedIn, OpenAI, Adobe and JLL.

When I saw their names on the programme, I almost passed out.

Speaking meant that Cannes Lions covered my pass. But, the villa, flights and wardrobe (all extortionate) were covered by me and it was the best money I’ve ever spent.

Now I’m back, running on 80% Aperol, 20% canapés, my social battery is depleted but I’d do it all over again tomorrow.

Because being at Cannes Lions taught me something SO exciting…

The rules have changed

Cannes Lions was traditionally an awards festival for the advertising industry but now it’s open to creators. This was the third year they’ve run a dedicated track for them.

This year creators had a large beachfront space of their own. Not a side room or a small rooftop like last year.

Prime real estate, next to the beach activations run by Spotify, Meta and Pinterest.

As a marketer, I’ve watched the advertising industry treat creators as an afterthought for years. Something bolted on at the end of a campaign, once the real budget was already spent.

Watching the shift in person told me something the LinkedIn feed could never. The people who control marketing budgets have decided creators are worth building a room for.

Or in this case, a beach.

The money is starting to show

I wasn’t sponsored by a brand to go to Cannes Lions (this year!!) but a few of the women I was with were.

Two years ago, I never thought brands would pay people to post on LinkedIn, never mind attend Cannes Lions.TikTok? Instagram? Obviously.

But LinkedIn? No way.

Things are shifting. Brands are sponsoring B2B creators to attend events, and I run one to three brand partnerships a month myself. The money is good too.

One woman I met charges $10,000 minimum for a single LinkedIn post. Not a campaign. One post.

Most people still treat LinkedIn as a place to find jobs. The more advanced are using it to attract clients. Very few are looking at it as a platform for brand partnerships.

The truth is you can do all three, plus more. Brand partnerships are newer, and priced lower than the same audience size gets on Instagram or TikTok.

But, the gap won’t stay open for long.

A quick note on the villa

I was lucky enough to stay in a villa with eight women, all creators running six or seven figure businesses, organised by Courtney Johnson.

Every one of them more successful than me.

We spent the week debriefing on the events we’d been to and the people we’d met, filming for each other, comparing pricing, talking through hiring and negotiation, in between playing mermaids in the pool and arguing over whose turn it was to order the Uber Eats.

No brand sponsored this villa. We asked. No one took us up on it. All of us paid to be there.

Since coming back, multiple brands have reached out to sponsor the next “B2B Baddie Villa.” Proof enough of where this is heading.

Brands are waking up to B2B creators. The smart ones are not building community from a content brief. They are finding the communities creators already built and showing up to support them.

Where the marketer in me lands on all this

You do not need a beach in the South of France for any of this to apply to you.

Creators did not move from a small rooftop to a beachfront because of proximity to yachts. They moved there because brands watched creator content outperform their own campaigns long enough for the budget to follow the evidence.

The other shift, on every panel I sat in on: the barrier to making decent content has almost disappeared. Someone with a basic phone anywhere in the world now produces content which competes with a full setup in London. AI closed the gap.

Anyone can be a content creator now.

The thing to remember? AI does not have your specific experience, your specific story, your specific opinion on the thing you know best. This is the edge now, and it is the one thing nobody else copies from you.

Your one tiny action this week

Two timelines here, because they need different approaches.

This week: make one piece of content shooting your shot. Look at CatGPT for inspo, the creator who built nearly 800,000 followers explaining AI in plain English. It doesn’t need to land you a brand deal to Cannes or fund a new wardrobe. Tag a creator you love to get on their radar. Ask for an invite to a conference. Keep it simple.

The longer game: decide the one thing you want, and say it out loud to people in a position to put you forward for it. Courtney thought of me to speak on stage with because I had talked about LinkedIn, consistently, for two years. She knew exactly what to put me forward for. None of it happens if you keep the goal to yourself.

Keep dreaming big, my baddies.

Love, Mischa x

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The year everything broke.

In 2024, I was going through it. Quarter life crisis, Saturn return, whatever you want to call it — it sucked. It was the kind of year you look back on and wince, where one thing goes wrong, then another, then another, until it stops feeling like a universe problem and more like a you problem.

I was 29. I had just ended a five-year relationship with the person I genuinely thought I was going to marry. I moved out of the home we lived in together and back in with my aunty and her family. I was lucky to have them, but moving back into the same room I lived in at 23 when I first moved to London was jarring.

And then I got fired.

Up until that point, I had always been an over-achiever. Straight A’s at school. Went to one of the top universities in the UK. My first job in London was at a fashion PR agency where I got to work with brands like Valentino, Givenchy and COS. Every promotion I went for, I got and I’d never had a bad performance review in my career.

Then came my December 2023 review. At this point, I was running the marketing department for a start-up. Six months prior, in my June review, I’d been promoted to Brand Marketing Lead.

But, this review was about to go very differently.

My Co-founders at the time told me I was not performing at the level they expected. They were bringing someone in to manage me.

For the next three months I worked hard, I worked late, I built a great relationship with my new manager. But none of it mattered. The decision had already been made.

I was out.

Bad things comes in threes right?

I’ve always been a positive person. I’ve always been resilient. Brush yourself off, pick yourself up, go again.

But, the morning after that happened, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even get out of bed.

I didn’t know it at the time but I was depressed.

Although 29 is not old, you expect to have things figured out by that age. Most of my friends were buying houses, living with their partners, engaged or on their way to be and in senior positions at work. Six months earlier so was I.

So, to be miles away from that in the last year of your twenties was terrifying.

Two months of silence

After a lot of crying and a lot of, “life is so unfair!!!”, I finally made it out of bed.

I felt genuinely lost but I had to do something about it. I had to hold myself accountable. I’d spent the majority of my twenties relying on someone else (financially and emotionally) but it was time to rely on me.

I spent two months applying for jobs. Roles I wanted, roles I didn’t want, roles I was overqualified for. I got rejected from a couple, but for the most part I heard nothing back.

And, there is something specific about silence that no one prepares you for.

Rejection you can process. Silence you just have to sit with.

So I started posting about it on LinkedIn.

Not because I wanted to, but because I literally had no other choice.

The post that changed everything

I went viral.

I’m not talking kinda viral. I’m talking viral, viral. Like, 3851 engagements, 202 comments and 349,573 impressions viral.

Those two posts changed everything.

Back then I had no following, no optimised profile, no LinkedIn presence. Yes, I’d been posting ad-hoc about cool marketing campaigns when I worked full-time but, I was not a “LinkedInfluencer”.

I wrote a couple of honest posts about losing my job and something connected.

That connection gave me hope when I had none, it gave me confidence when mine was on the floor, it opened my eyes to a new life.

Two people reached out asking for help with their personal brand. They wanted me to write their LinkedIn content. I didn’t even know that was a job.

But that was the beginning of working for myself and building my new life.

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2 years later…

I now have 60,000 LinkedIn followers, I’ve coached 250+ people on growing their personal brand. I’ve shown up on LinkedIn almost every weekday for 18 months. I’ve built a six-figure business driven almost entirely by LinkedIn inbound.

My life looks radically different to 2024.

I am financially free. I am location free. I am genuinely happy.

I’m not saying this to boast or to impress you. I’m saying it because two years ago I was unemployed, invisible, and genuinely depressed. The thing that changed it was posting honestly about exactly that.

But if we’re being honest…

It hasn’t been easy.

I am so grateful for LinkedIn, my personal brand and everything it’s brought me. But, building a personal brand comes with a cost and I will never sugarcoat that.

The problem with building a personal brand…

Building a personal brand is hard, don’t get it twisted.

There are days when you don’t want to show up. When you are going through something, when you’re in a bad mood, when imposter syndrome is loud or you’re exhausted. The last thing you want to do is write something for strangers on the internet and fake positivity.

But, when something is attached to your name, you have to. You can’t hand it off.

That is draining.

Not many people talk about that part. Like being chronically online, tying your self-worth to likes, constantly comparing yourself or living in fear the algorithm will make you irrelevant.

However, I would take all the bad every day because of how good the good is.

I want you to understand: the opportunities on the other side of that effort are not the ones you expect.

I thought LinkedIn would help me find my next job. Instead, it replaced the need for one entirely. I thought building an audience would take years to convert into anything tangible. Within weeks of that first post, I had paying clients. I thought the ceiling was a bigger salary. One year later, I signed a $7,000 paid partnership deal for three posts.

None of that was the plan. None of it was even on my radar.

That is the thing about building a personal brand properly. It doesn’t just open one door. It removes the door entirely. New job. Inbound clients. Speaking invitations. Paid partnerships. Location freedom. Financial freedom. Opportunities from people and places you would never have reached through a CV or a cold email.

You will not see it coming. That is kind of the point.

I am not going to tell you it is easy. But I am going to tell you that the people who do it, who show up consistently and honestly, look back and cannot believe they waited as long as they did.

That is what this Substack is about.

And, I hope you bloody enjoy it.

Love,
Mischa x

Every week, I will give you one specific, practical thing to do differently. No vague advice. No inspiration without instruction. The tactics, the strategy, and the honest version of what it actually takes.