I come from a long line of women who don’t know how to rest. I learnt this not through instruction, but through watching how they moved through their lives, seeing their pain and their toil. I watched women whose labour was expected, whose work held families together while men moved through the world with an ease that seemed built into the structure of things. For many of these women, their toil was also constantly on display for others to judge, to criticise and to measure their servitude.

I have also witnessed the tables turn, and have been part of that turning.

Money can buy rest. It can buy independence and power to operate outside of patriarchal norms. Money can loosen the indebtedness created by unpaid labour. It buys agency. Money creates options, including those that allow you to walk away from that which isn’t serving you.

My father reinforced this, though he would never explicitly use the word money, he would talk about the importance of being able to stand on your own feet. I am a woman capable of standing on my own feet, a change from the norms in the generation before me.

Yet in the pursuit of earning, making, and chasing money, we, I, can forget how to listen to our bodies.

For many women, ignoring our bodies is rewarded. We push through exhaustion, override pain, and keep going because doing so has often helped us get ahead. The promotion, the opportunity, the successful launch. We learn to associate achievement with our capacity to endure. I inherited that rest is a cultural taboo. Back home, people rarely admit to taking a nap. They insist they were simply closing their eyes. Rest carries a moral weight. Across cultures, our interpersonal relationships, in marriages and amongst families, enduring is what wins women favour, a woman in service is a good woman. If you are resting, you are not earning, or rather, helping someone else earn. A woman who craves rest risks being seen as frivolous, lazy, even disobedient.

Each time we override the signals in our body and mind telling us we need to rest, we reinforce that to keep going is morally superior. Do it enough times and you silence what your body is trying to tell you, you stop listening to yourself.

My relationship with rest changed in 2024, after a sabbatical from being a founder for 7 years, I decided to come back to work on different terms, terms that offered me the ability to rest, and the ability to pour into my hobbies and all of my identities outside of work. I wanted to work less and rest more. But I still find myself having a hard time with it. I have written extensively about burnout here and in my book here.

The perception of self

I thought I was a good rester, because I love sleep and I am good at saying no to a lot of things that are asked of me.

But, I realise that when I am in need of true rest outside of my usual pattern and routine, I struggle to reconcile why my body needs extra rest. 10 hours of sleep, sofa days, clearing my calendar and days off working out. I give in reluctantly, but after a negotiation with myself. The negotiation is because I am comparing myself to my startup days, where I would override the signals that my body was tired and sick, where I would burn out frequently and feel quite depressed. The brain also has a way of forgetting just how bad it was and only remembering the outputs of so called productivity.

On a normal week, when I am well-rested and operating as a norm, I am able to maintain my workrate, hobbies, friendships and mood. When my rest needs inevitably change, I think of the following as guard rails. This really is all a note to myself to remember during my negotiations with myself:

I am not a lazy person

Rest is confused with laziness and stagnation.

When I hear the voice creeping in telling me I am lazy I remind myself to look at the evidence of my life. I am not inclined to do nothing. I am not a lazy person, rather just a momentarily tired one. And so if I need to rest, if I need the extra hours of sleep or time off, it is because my body needs it. There is usually always a reason to trace it back to why I am tired, a busy work period, a heavy gym session, an emotionally taxing situation, things that while I may have the capacity to take on, also requires rest.

In pretty much every instance where a friend has lamented about how tired they are, we can almost always trace back to why, beyond it being about just laziness.

My rest needs are allowed to change

The hardest part of rest is not about physically stopping work or the pursuits you have. Being able to rest sometimes requires an identity shift.

I am of the camp that worked incredibly hard in their 20s and wants to work differently in their 30s. However, these are two different identities and sometimes there is a lag and even judgement.

To be able to lean into rest requires me to update my identity to align with a life that no longer requires the same level of sacrifice. In my 20s I needed to pull on reactive startup energy, it was a quicker pace, a hustle. 10 years into my business, it requires a different energy source from me, a shift I have struggled with. It needs me to pull on slower energy, to be able to go deeper, to be able to think about projects, ideas and strategies that are about building over years, not surviving day to day.

My rest needs have changed, in a business coaching session my coach framed it as,

“It seems that your younger self is judging you for not working as hard, and your older self judges your younger self for working so hard all the time.”

And the two are at odds with each other.

This leads to conflicting ideas about myself, the version of me that built a stable business is not the version of me that is running it now.

Your new identity needs support

Trying to rest without the infrastructure in the business creates stress. Knowing you have a pile of things to do while you are meant to be resting, is just a pause.

Doing work you don’t want to do creates unrest. There are things I still do in the business that I need to hand off to someone else, which will unlock another layer of rest, but also allow me to draw closer to the work I want to align myself more closely to. It allows me to go deeper in my work.

In some ways, there are parts of the business that are still asking me to be my past self, and holding me from stepping into my future self and aspirations. To exist in that space is to constantly fail expectations whilst trying to reach new ones that don’t have the space to flourish.

It takes a village to help a woman rest, especially one that is a founder. Here there are no blueprint answers, but it is worth thinking about what are the conditions you need to help you thrive. In the context of business, do you need to make more money, do you need to hire, fire even, change strategy, or need a regular sounding board? What is stopping you from flourishing? When you look at your week, what drains you, what should you no longer do? What conversations do you no longer want to be a part of, what conversations do you want to be having? And on the other side, what are the current conditions holding you back?

For when I still struggle to listen to myself

When deep in negotitations on if I should rest, I have defaulted to following the data.

I know optimising gets a bad rep, but I think data is great to help the woman who struggles to rest to help us understand our bodies when we struggle to be intuitive. I wear a fitbit and find it helps me sync how I feel to what my body is saying.

These are the things I look at:

Resting heart rate - this is a clear indicator of if I am rested, if I am getting sick, my resting heart rate starts creeping up or if I am exhausted it struggles to come down despite resting. These point to needing more rest. A couple nights of poor sleep and I can see it will start creeping up.

Heart Rate Variability -

High HRV: Shows your body is relaxed, resilient, and ready to handle strain.

Low HRV: Points to stress, fatigue, poor sleep, or illness.

A low HRV means taking it a little easier on a workout or maybe changing plan, it is a real time metric to actually listening to your body.

Amount of sleep - The amount of sleep I need is the amount that I naturally wake up to. I keep a keen eye on my sleep hours, less than 8 hours across consecutive days usually is the beginning of exhaustion.

Period - As my period approaches, I need more sleep in the run up, being in sync with my cycle helps me hugely in understanding how my body feels and the difference in hormonal fluctuations vs. other circumstances impacting my body.

Collective Rest

The thing about women who cannot rest, is that usually they have attracted a tribe of people who cannot rest, who transgress their boundaries, because at the core are ambitious women who want to do everything that life has to offer. I am surrounded by women who take their hobbies seriously, who chase their dreams and who do not take no for an answer. High agency women, who have learnt that actually, sadly, in most cases, hard work will outwork the many isms we face.

And so I have learnt who to ask permission from to rest, when I don’t trust myself. I know who to say, I feel tired but I was meant to do x and y, should I do a and b instead? They know me and know when to tell me to push and when to tell me to rest.

It takes a village to be a rested woman.

I come from a long line of women who taught me resilience, generosity and endurance. They taught me things that helped me stand on my own feet. And now I hope that the next generation look at women like me and learn how to be ambitious, how to rest, and most importantly how to create options for both.

I attended a funeral at the gym

3 AM

My cousin died in the early hours.

5:40 AM

I wake up for fajr, just about making it. I make the error of checking my WhatsApp out of habit.

Nothing really happens while I sleep, except death.

Growing up, a phone call late at night or in the early hours meant bad news. The time difference meant that no one else would be calling at that time of night. The shrill ring of the house phone, a klaxon to hold your breath and listen to my mum or dad on the phone. The signal that someone has died or someone is at death’s door.

When the phone would ring, if we were up, I would exchange a quick glance with my mum, almost as if, “Is it what we think it is?” Our hearts would drop, waiting to hear what it was. I remember the words “put the body on ice”, aka we are coming.

With no house phone, and living away from my parents, the news of death now seeks me anywhere and everywhere, as long as I have my phone. There’s no klaxon, no warning, no bracing myself, just an unassuming message or a voice note sitting in my WhatsApp.

It’s caught me at a friend’s house, on holiday, while attending a friend’s brother’s funeral, on the train, while sitting on the stairs in a towel. There is no promise of the comfort of home to brace myself for the news.

The news of death finds me no matter where I am.

5:50 AM

I see two voice notes and

Inna lillahe wa Inna lillahe rajiun.

The phrase we say when someone has passed, a reminder that to God we belong and to Him we return.

I know someone has died. I know it is Shewli Apu. I sit in disbelief.

Inna lilahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon.

Still on my prayer mat, I make dua for her in disbelief that while we thought of this worst-case scenario for her, after a case of medical negligence, we didn’t think it would happen. Death happens to the elderly, not those past 45 with two young kids, or so we tell ourselves.

This is the first death to come to this generation. The rest have been amongst uncles, aunties, grandads and grandmas.

Death is coming closer.

We are getting closer to death.

I consider calling my parents, but they may not be up. I instead opt for letting them rest. It will be a long day, they need it. Breaking the news to them at 5 AM will only bring more distress.

Hearing of death everywhere and anywhere has made me logical. Once my cousin called me, three missed calls, and I knew it could be bad news. Instead, I had a shower first, to brace myself for the moment. To give myself a small comfort.

I add the death anniversary of Shewli Apu to my Google Calendar, 22nd April, recurring, yearly.

I send a message in the group.

I let a couple of friends know and ask them to pray for her soul, she hasn’t been buried yet. Some of them knew she was in hospital. They are in disbelief too.

I eventually go back to sleep. I’ll call in the morning.

9 AM

I wake up and there’s more messages and an image of her. She’s shrouded in white cloth and I can see her face. I look, zoom in and tilt my head to see her.

I am exhausted. I’m meant to work today.

I message the team Slack, let them know I’ll be online later. A team member kindly gives me permission not to be.

11:06 AM

I open up my cousin group chat and call people one by one. Seeing who will answer, trying to find some communal grief. This grief needs to go somewhere.

We don’t get to collectively go through grief like family back home. When someone dies, it brings people together, it’s like an intense family reunion. There’s the person sorting the food, the one being practical, the one who makes a bad joke. All that is a part of it.

In the West you leave the world to grieve, back home, the world comes to you.

My cousin, her brother, through the day updates us through voice notes. The body is coming from the city to the village town. A 4.5-hour journey.

The burial will happen after Isha prayer.

I speak to my cousin, she’s getting ready to go to the house. I phone another, she’s distraught and tells me she would speak a couple of times a day to her. I ask to speak to her mother and she’s distraught, her niece is gone. Everyone I call is heartbroken for her young daughters she leaves behind.

I see my cousin has missed a call from me. I call him back and he immediately passes the phone to another cousin. They are in the car, sat in a row, making a four-and-a-half-hour journey, with the body in front of them.

They show me the shroud and ask if I want to see her face. I nod. I don’t want to, but I feel I owe it to her to witness her in real time, as I have done for so many family members on video call. This is the closest I will get to a goodbye.

I talk to my cousin, he asks how my sisters are. We talk about her and the shock of this loss.

I call my dad, his niece died. I think of my own niece and nephews, the pain of knowing someone from so small and losing them.

My dad is sombre, but at his age he has seen death many times, old, young, sudden and expected. I consider him having lost his father on my 10th birthday and his mother before that, nothing has compared to such grief. Nothing seems to shock him anymore. He tells me we just have to accept this was what was written and everyone will have their time.

2:50 PM

I’m on the sofa, I decide I can’t spend the day here. I get up and I head to the gym.

Somatic healing, I tell myself, if the grief can’t go in community it has to go somewhere. I can’t sit with it.

I spend 10 mins on the StairMaster and then decide to stretch. I’m doing an upper body day today. I decide I don’t have the willpower and mental strength for free weights today, so I move through the machines.

My mum calls me.

Her phone is propped up against the kids’ books in her house. And I realise on the screen, she hasn’t called to talk to me. She’s called to stream yet another funeral back home.

I see the pixelated mud and earth, leaves, the night sky, people’s feet. The grave diggers.

And I hear lots of different voices. People giving instructions. This is us attending the funeral.

I am at the gym, attending a funeral.

My reception is patchy, I walk towards the windows of the gym in search of reception. I prop up my phone on a treadmill and stand there and watch.

I take in the ridiculousness of the moment. I decide to move to somewhere more appropriate for the moment. I walk to the front of the gym, find myself a chair in a corner.

I talk my mum through how to add me to the call. So that she doesn’t have to stream it for me.

“Top right corner with the icon, Mum.” Find my name, she adds me and my sister.

My sister’s on the bus, her two-year-old in tow.

He is overjoyed to see me and says, “Nafu Tala!”

And I say, “Hiiii.” And we watch the funeral back home. We are in attendance.

I’m not sure if the body’s been buried or we’re waiting. I just know we’re at the funeral.

I ask my cousin to show me the maati, the earth, where she is being buried. I can see the mound being built on top of her.

My cousin says it’s done now, I’ll leave the phone. My dad says to stay, he wants to hear the dua.

We wait patiently, some more digging, and some more covering of the body. We then hear a cracking of the voice. I think the dua started. I don’t think my dad realises they’ve started.

I’m sitting in the gym, plates crashing, people finish their reps. Frank Ocean, or some other artist that I don’t know, is playing. And I’m sitting in the gym, attending a funeral back home.

I see a figure in the corner of the screen, he’s making the dua, my dad raises his hands and so do I while holding the phone.

I catch some words.

Oh God, forgive her.

God, help her, this next life.

And I raise my hands, whilst holding my phone, and hope that these duas, while sitting in my gym, will reach her, and will reach God.

My cousin says, “It’s done. That’s it.” I tell him, thank you.

Assalam alaykum. He says, “Wa alaykum salaam.” I put my phone down.

Tears stream.

I think, what now? I guess I should go and finish my workout.

Somatic healing, I tell myself.

It feels unceremonious to continue where I left off. But such is grief far away from home.

I had a conversation with a founder and asked the question I ask all founders: do you want to stay in your business? I asked because I sensed she didn’t, and also because I’m a curious (nosey) person.

She said, “I’m tired and done.” She was burnt out and had lost her spark. Burnout is a big banner that encompasses a lot of things going on for a founder. I gave her my diagnosis of what I thought was happening, and she was in disbelief that I knew what was going on. But the reason I could see it was because I’ve been through all 5 stages of burnout as a founder. So if you’re burnt out, wanting a way out, this is for you.

Most founders who want to quit are not actually trying to leave. They’re trying to escape a version of the business that is no longer sustainable.

A quick note: I wrote an entire chapter on burnout in my book called How To Make Money - a brutally honest guide to building a business.

If this piece resonates, the chapter goes deeper into burnout and also offers practical advice on how to build a sustainable business.

You can find the book here (hardback, paperback, kindle and audio) and subscribe for more reads like this

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1. Your load of work is too high

You have too much work on, and you are collapsing under the weight of carrying too much in your business. You’ve likely been sustaining this load for years with insufficient rest.

You’re burnt out because you’ve built a business that relies on you to keep going, and you feel like the only way to escape is to burn it all to the ground.

Overworking leads to burnout, and the only way to recover is to work less in the first place, but you don’t know how to.

Overworking in a sustained manner usually leads the founder to a dark place. I remember thinking, if only a car hit me, not so bad that it’s life-changing, but bad enough to not need to work. This was a normalised thought for me. I would consider that I just needed “a pause button”, but the pause felt out of my control, leaving me helpless.

Burnout from overworking affects founders whose businesses are “doing well” and also ones that are struggling, because the issue isn’t revenue, it is a sense of being indispensable to the business and feeling powerless to change it.

But there is almost always a solution. If you have money in the bank, it is easier to solve this burnout because usually the answer is hiring more people. You’re also probably doing a large breadth of work. There’s a shift founders need to go through, from operating as a founder to actually operating in a defined role with a clear remit. Something that helps shift an overworking founder mentality is having a running list of “things I no longer want to do”. That list then informs the job description of the person you need to hire.

If there is little money to hire, there are conversations you need to have with yourself about the viability of your business, the need for a break, or a change of business strategy. Number 5 later in this piece may help you. Also, the upside is that if your business isn’t working, taking a break probably won’t make much of an impact.

Rest before you quit.

The Other Side of Starting

The Night I Wanted to Sell My Business

I turned up to a dinner hosted in a restaurant's private room with 25 other CEOs. I say no to a lot of these events, but I have a lot of respect for the organiser and know he has a great network. I was also in what I like to call my ‘open season’, when I was more inclined to say yes to random things and see where serendipity took me. On the way there, I told myself…

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a year ago · 26 likes · 9 comments · Nafisa Bakkar

2. You stop liking the work

Founders tend to be people who get bored easily and are shocked by having stayed in their business for 10 years. I am one of these people.

After overworking, another way people become burnt out is when the life they are living is not aligned with who and what they want to be. I remember when I first burnt out. It was post-fundraiser, 9 months after we had launched the company. I had spent 5 of those 9 months deep in the admin of term sheets, equity negotiations, dealing with investors, and paperwork. Glorified admin.

Overworking + doing work you don’t want to do = mega burnout

I realised I was burnt out because I wasn’t doing the work I truly wanted to do, which is building the company. Once I was able to hire and lead a team, I was back on track to only burning out because I was overworking.

Sometimes the fix is doing things outside of the business to bring joy and a change of identity. Other times it’s working on projects and ideas in the business that you want to put out into the world. Burnout engulfs both your personal and professional life, and the solution is that you need to pull back into alignment, to live a life that is aligned with how you truly want to live it. You need to start nudging yourself back, one day at a time.

3. You’re not personally making enough money

And the sacrifices you have made no longer feel worth it.

You’re overworking, but the pay isn’t matching. Corporate life starts looking sexy and has an allure. You see your peers making big gains in their careers and wonder if you’re destined to be broke. They are buying their first homes, going on holiday, and seem to be living the good life. You dread anyone asking you, “How’s business?” You’re praised for your gallant efforts of going all in on your business. Everyone loves watching the man in the arena, but few know how to take a punch to the head, and you, well, you’ve taken a fair few blows.

Money makes life easier in a myriad of ways.

Not making enough money as a founder makes you a liability to your business.

You’re more likely to burn out, become resentful, take on extra work outside the business, or eventually give up altogether.

Overworking + doing work you don’t want to do + not making enough money = MEGA MEGA burnout

Making money feels good. Pleasure activism.

In my last workshop, I asked a group of founders, all women of colour, “How much do you want to earn as a founder each year?”

I asked the question because I know so many women of colour who are fiercely passionate and principled, yet somewhere along the way, many of us have come to associate shying away from money with integrity.

There will absolutely be seasons when the business comes first and your salary takes a back seat while you build. But that cannot be a permanent state.

Your business plan needs to account for you being able to live well. You are one of the business’s biggest assets. Money helps you take care of yourself, create headspace, make better decisions, and stay in the work for the long term.

A business shouldn’t rely on the founder’s sacrifice to survive. Too many do. Eventually, the cost becomes too high.

The Other Side of Starting

Business advice I would give you if I wasn’t afraid of hurting your feelings

Sometimes the best business advice is this…

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a year ago · 19 likes · 8 comments · Nafisa Bakkar

4. You lose perspective

Maybe you are living the dream to someone else. You’ve gone full-time on your idea, you’re making money, you’re doing what you love, except it feels like a toxic relationship and you don’t know if you should stay or go.

Burnout makes you lose perspective and distorts your thinking. The life you were once praying for now feels like a nightmare. You start romanticising employment, comparing yourself, forgetting how far you have come and can only see the downside to having a business.

People look at where you’ve got to and wonder how, but you want to tell them not to bother.

You’re tired, very tired.

Overworking + doing work you don’t want to do + not making enough money = MEGA MEGA burnout = loss of perspective

I was in this place for a good three years at least, paired with overworking and not doing the work I wanted to do.

What kept me in the business was being patient. I realised the grass is not greener on the other side. Talking to other people gave me perspective. I remember sitting in front of a friend, and he was in disbelief that I would want to walk away. He was an accountant and told me that most of the founders he knew who were leaving were leaving because business wasn’t doing well. He shifted my perspective and proposed that I just work less in the business rather than give it up. He could see I was tired and that I was looking for that pause button.

I also kept looking at my peers who had left their businesses or had been forced to shut down. The life they were living didn’t look appealing. Being a founder makes you unemployable. I didn’t want to start another business and I didn’t want to commit to what looked like a freelance hustle.

Recovering from burnout takes years. I believe I’m still recovering from multiple bouts, but I haven’t been burnt out since 2023. Having to rebuild whilst recovering didn’t look appealing. I would be jumping a steady ship in order to rebuild one from scratch, with no clue of the destination or what type of ship I wanted to build.

5. You ignore the work you need to do

Eventually, burnout creates a trap, you stop doing the work required to get out of burnout. You simply do not have the willpower, headspace and energy to do the things that will help.

I do believe in most cases:

1. If the business is fundamentally working

2. If there is money in the bank

Then you can solve your problems and be in a better place.

If the business isn’t working and there is little money in the bank, you can still get there, but you’re going to have to really grit your teeth and do the work to steer your business back on track.

I know you’re too tired to solve it, but I’m afraid that this is the only way to get through it. You’re going to be tired either way, so you may as well try and get some forward motion. Floating in this grey space that feels like wading through wet sand is just going to prolong the pain of burnout. The only way forward is to start digging yourself out. And that’s probably the hardest job as a founder. You have to solve the problems you’ve made when you have nothing left to give. This is also where shame can creep in and leave you paralysed. The shame that you haven’t built something better. Acknowledge it and talk yourself into getting to a better place.

It’s okay to coast for a bit in the business until you figure out how. And to be honest, your version of coasting as a founder is an average employee’s 100%. Your years of service have earned the coast, so put the guilt aside and recover.

Before you quit your business, make sure what you’re actually looking for isn’t a pause button and don’t mistake exhaustion for clarity. Burnout doesn’t make founders want to leave, it makes them desperate for relief. The relief is rarely a business ending season, I took 3 months off after 7 years and I came back to a healthy and thriving business, it is possible.

Rest before you quit.

If you’re struggling, reply to this email and I would be more than happy to offer some words if I can.

Good luck.

The Other Side of Starting

22 Things I now do as a founder that would put my past founder self into a coma.

Quick note - if you need business advice, I am doing a talk on starting a business on the 6th December. Tickets are here and if you can’t afford one drop them a note 🧡…

Read more

9 months ago · 12 likes · Nafisa Bakkar

Prev titled: How to Know When to Work for Free 💵

I know, it’s 2026, how can I expect you to want to work for free?! In an ideal world, we would all get paid for any work, labour or time we put in. You might even have a strict rule of no money equals no work. The framework I go by is pay, passion and/or profile and here is a deep dive on it so that you can make better decisions on where you spend your time.

Each engagement I take on fits into one of these, and sometimes more than one. Ultimately, every engagement should offer some form of mutual benefit.

This piece is an adapted excerpt from my book How To Make Money, an honest guide for founders and creatives who want to get paid to do what they love.

The chapter is called Don’t Believe the Hype: Visibility vs Merit, and it’s about how to build both, without confusing one for the other. You can find the book here and subscribe to read more like this.

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Okay, first up, for those that don’t know me, here are some of the clients I have worked with, all of them paid, but to get to this client list, I also had a lot of moments where I wasn’t paid. My job is to literally bring in paid work for AMALIAH - the media company I founded 10 years ago, a byproduct of this is that people ask me to consult, talk, write and run workshops for brands like Apple, IKEA, Vans, Maltesers and more. So negotiating my time and what it is worth is somewhat of a second language.

How to Judge an Opportunity

Over the last few years, there have been increased conversations about money, especially among women. We want to speak about it more, demand more and earn more. You may see screenshots of people telling a brand off for not offering a fee or conversations about how ‘exposure’ doesn’t pay the bills. But there is another side of this; some opportunities are simply good for your career and visibility and should be seen as investments.

If you think about your career as a timeline, each opportunity, paid, unpaid or a low rate, has the potential to open the door to the next. Over time, they build on one another. Yes, exposure might not pay the current bills, but it may lead to a future opportunity that will!

PAY - What is your time worth?

How to decide what is worth it?

You want to figure out what your rate is, SoSher media founder Shereen, gives a great explainer here which is you need to know the following:

Your floor - this is your base rate, what you accept as the minimum for the work

Your ceiling - the top end of what the market is paying

When you are starting out you might not always know this. Figuring out what pays well was trial and error, each time I negotiated I would go higher and higher to understand my ceiling. If someone said yes too easily with no negotation, it meant there was more space.

Don’t be afraid to make your ceiling high, because if you overshoot with someone, you can always accept a lower fee on the basis of goodwill. Many people are scared to go in with a high fee when negotiating, because they are scared of rejection, but negotiating is a conversation, not a final point. Figuring out what “pays well” is often trial and error. Don’t be scared of hearing a no, as it is an indication of your ceiling to be able to understand the higher end of your rate.

Also consider all the factors that make up your rate. If you’re asked to deliver a one-hour talk or consulting session, remember you’re not just charging for that hour. You’re charging for preparation, your experience, email correspondence, and travel time. In a recent consulting project, I realised I should have charged a higher rate. What was really being paid for was my thinking time and the value of the decisions and perspective I brought. Often, it took me 5 to 10 minutes to arrive at an answer, or I could offer expertise on the spot, but that comes from years of experience. My understanding of creative direction, Muslim communities, and commercial decision-making is highly specific and hard to replicate, and that should be reflected in a premium rate.

Once you have figured out what is worth it for you. You may say yes to a piece of paid work simply because it pays, but you may also decide to turn it down because it doesn’t pay enough. For me, if the job, say a speaking engagement, is on a weekend I need it to pay a premium for me to want to give up my personal time. If I am in a busy period of work, overwhelmed and stretched, saying yes to that paid work could be costing me something else, so I may say no. In a season where I am not that busy, an extra bit of money is the cost to cover my next flight somewhere!

Free work rarely leads to paid work

Sometimes it can be tempting to work for free because you think it will lead to paid work with the same client. Future opportunities are often used as a carrot to persuade people to undervalue themselves. In my experience, it rarely pays off. The one exception is pitch work, which is generally understood as unpaid work in pursuit of a paid project.

As a rule, if a large company approaches you, don’t agree to work for free on the assumption that something paid will come later. Only do it if the profile or exposure is genuinely valuable to you (see the profile section later). Once you start working for free, it can be difficult to shift the relationship back to one where your value is properly recognised and paid for.

I was once approached by someone working with Meta Platforms on their Eid campaign. They asked if I wanted to be part of it, but there was no fee attached. I just wasn’t in the mood to work for free for Facebook, so I declined and let them know it was because it wasn’t paid. They replied saying that if this year went well, there could be opportunities next year with budget. But I know how these things work. A brand is unlikely to use the same people two years in a row for a campaign, so the carrot dangling didn’t really work on me and I said no. I guess the people who did do it were happy with the profile that came with being associated with Facebook.

Marginalised communities are often called upon for specific calendar moments, with the expectation that they will work for free “for the culture”. It might feel strategic to say yes for one month in the hope of future work, but that rarely materialises. If someone is reaching out two weeks before Black History Month in a rush, it usually means the work wasn’t prioritised earlier, and they probably won’t be hitting you up for future paid work. Sometimes saying no is what prompts them to come back with a budget. You can decline professionally:

“Currently I/we only have the capacity to take on paid projects. If anything comes up in the future that feels like a good fit, please do keep me in the loop.”

Often, the person reaching out is not acting with bad intent. They simply don’t have access to budget. Keep things professional so you don’t burn bridges.

A small side note here: I have generally found that people in DEI roles often have the least budget and the least decision-making power. If you are trying to get work with a large company, you want to pivot towards someone who sits in a more influential position.

Advice on negotiating

Always negotiate, you will be surprised how often there is extra budget, but don’t do it in a hostile way and leave room to stay at the same rate. For example, “For something like this, I usually charge X, could you meet me closer to this rate?.”

Ask others what they charge. If we had more transparency around pay, we would all benefit. I’ve heard of panels where some speakers are paid and others aren’t. One thing I ask is whether they are operating on a favoured nations basis, meaning everyone is paid equally.

PASSION - Turning aligned work into leverage

Working for things you care about

Sometimes, the work that pays the bills isn’t always the work you truly want to do. This is where passion comes in; these are opportunities you say yes to that allow you to do work you genuinely care about. This might align with your personal interests or your business values. In these cases, you may decide to work for a lower rate or for free.

For example, you may be a journalist commissioned for a very specific beat, but there are other topics you want to write about. You might approach different outlets that pay less to build out that body of work or write self-published on places like Substack for free! Or you could be a speaker looking to work with an organisation doing impactful work, even if they do not have much budget.

This kind of work is important, especially as your career becomes more established. If I have the capacity, I will often do talks for free or a low rate if they are for an underserved group, run by a grassroots organisation, or focused on business and benefiting women of colour. It is important to carve out time in your year to keep knowledge and goodwill circulating.

Doing work you want to eventually be paid for

Free work or lower paid work can help you close the gap between the work you want to do vs. the work you currently get paid for. For example, at my company, we invested a lot into sports, run clubs, events, and content because we were passionate about getting more Muslim women moving, we weren’t really making money here it was like our internal side hustle. But it then meant we then had a strong portfolio of work to land a 6 month paid campaign with This Girl Can. You can read about it below:

These projects can become strong case studies for your portfolio. They can also give you leverage for future paid work. You might even ask the organisation for a testimonial to strengthen your positioning.

Doing these gigs are particularly important when you are early in your career to build a portfolio or when you want to switch into a new space like we did for sport.

People won’t hire you for what you haven’t evidenced. I often see creators turn down work because it doesn’t match their rate card, but then they don’t go on to do other work either. In most cases, having no portfolio leaves you worse off than accepting a lower rate to build one. You need evidence of what you can do before you can command a premium rate.

PROFILE - Using selective unpaid work strategically

Business is a bit like Pokémon. Catch enough logos for your About page and it unlocks another level.

Think of profile as moments where either working with a company benefits you, or being platformed by them does.

REACH & NETWORKING

Contributing to a platform with a wide reach can put your work in front of the right audience.

This might look like speaking at an industry conference where you are reaching people you would not otherwise have access to that you can also network with. I have spoken for free or a low rate at conferences and it has led to other people booking me in for a talk. People are seeing your credentials live and it becomes free marketing! Or a digital collaboration with an organisation that has a large audience, helping more people discover you and your work.

The key here is not to say yes to everything, otherwise you can end up booked and busy but unpaid and burntout, with little time to work on other things that bring in income. Ensure the audience is actually relevant to where you want to go.

CREDIBILITY

You can also use certain projects to build credibility.

Doing a lower-paid project with a well-known brand can lead to stronger case studies and more opportunities in that space. When you speak to future clients and have a body of work to show, they are not asking what you were paid. They are looking at what you have done and who you have done it with.

Being positioned as an industry voice also matters. When I took part in a video series for UN Women, speaking about inclusion in advertising and marketing, it positioned me as a leader in that space. It led to lots of other organisations finding out about me and the work AMALIAH does. That visibility strengthened how our work was perceived.

INVESTING IN A RELATIONSHIP

If you genuinely respect what an organisation is building and want a long-term relationship, engaging can be worthwhile.

It can be a way to build goodwill, open doors over time, and strengthen your About page with credible collaborations. The UN Woman piece I did a few years, has come back around with me now being a co-mentor on one of their media programmes!

But like everything else, it should still be intentional. You are choosing to invest, not just saying yes.

Be clear on the exchange

Always be clear on what is being asked of you and how it benefits your business. If the only beneficiary is the organisation reaching out, something is off. If a request is unpaid, consider asking for something in return. For example, an introduction to a department you want to build a relationship with.

Think twice before taking on a lower rate or something unpaid, sometimes I have see it play out where people end up feeling resentful or frustrated. Once you have accepted a lower rate that is on you and not the client, so think about your own capacity and if it is worth it for you.

And if you don’t have the capacity to take something on, pass the opportunity to someone else who might benefit, especially someone earlier in their career.

How to live an analog life, 20 things to do to be interesting, how to live offline, 10 things I did that weren’t on my phone. 2026 has marked itself as the year we all go offline, but come back to write about it.

Being offline has started to feel like an extension of being online. Like a journalist out on field work, coming back to report to an audience what they saw. I find myself wondering if the more pertinent practice is the discipline of being private, and resisting the urge to bring the offline online.

As someone who has pretty much “built in public” before it was even called that, and grown up on the internet, I have put out A LOT of thoughts, ideas and images online (RIP my Twitter account). As a result, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my boundaries online. What is content, what isn’t, and what kind of relationship I want to have with being seen. Because this is at the crux of it, how we want to be seen, and if you don’t define that for yourself, you will be at the mercy of the algorithm, which will eat up the most private parts of your life, never satiated.

Many people trying to build a personal brand or grow a company get drawn into the idea that privacy is something to trade. That if they give enough of themselves away, show enough, share enough, eventually there will be a pot of money waiting at the end of it. Share everything now, cash in later.

I understand the appeal. We’ve watched influencers build lucrative careers by turning their personalities, relationships and daily lives into content, often with brand deals attached. It can make visibility look like the clearest route to income. But being an influencer and building a business are not the same thing.

One may rely on attention as the product. The other can be built through value, reputation, trust, expertise, service, or solving a problem. As someone who has built and sustained a successful business over the last ten years, I can tell you this plainly: you do not need to trade all of your privacy to succeed. Yes visibility is important, for someone to do business with you, they need to know you. The question is not whether visibility can make money. It is what kind of business are you actually trying to build and what are you willing to give away?

READ: If this is something you’re thinking about, I’ve written a full chapter on visibility versus merit in my book, and the strategies to build a business beyond just being seen.

When I started sharing what it was like being a founder building a startup, over 10 years ago, I quickly became aware of the inauthenticity that an online life can create. Around me, I was seeing mostly men, taking fake it till you make it to the nth degree, and I realised I didn’t want to be a part of this facade of success, which almost always ended with their company crashing and burning “out of the blue”. And so every time I shared a win, I felt compelled to tell my followers, “don’t believe the hype”, and almost always shared the reality of something messy. There is pressure for founders to keep up appearances, but this can very easily turn into dishonesty. I had just raised an investment round, I was working full time on my startup and being covered in every media site from CNN, Forbes, BBC, Guardian, CNBC, Metro and more, but despite all of this perceived success, things were uncertain and if we didn’t make things work as a company, we would have to close the business in 12 months.

So I interrogated how I would use online spaces and what I would share, which then eventually led me to writing a book - an honest guide on going from an idea to a six-figure business. In there is the reality of the messy stages of building, both from myself and 10 other founders. So if you would like to know what I do share you can find it all there, including strategies to build your visibility.

The framework of how I want to be seen

Here is my framework I try to practise, based on how I want to be seen. You might land somewhere completely different, and that’s the point. It’s less about what is right or wrong, and more about intention. Thinking about why we share, and what sharing does to us over time. For me, this is an exercise in disciplining my nafs, the lower self, the one that desires to be seen, no matter the cost. And a way to try and not allow the online world to shrink my life.

The algorithm wants to see your beauty, your status, how much money you spend and earn and how you feel. And so below I’ve outlined my boundaries across

• Privacy & Vulnerability - Who gets access to me? What parts of myself do I show?

• Performing Pretty - How do we want to be seen? Where does social media sit in our sense of validation?

• Money & Lifestyle - What version of your life am I sharing and why? If it costs a lot of money, what is the reason for sharing that I have it?

1. The Architecture of Privacy - What I keep private

This is probably where I hold the strongest boundaries, because it’s also the easiest line to blur, and it sets the foundation for everything else.

There’s a version of the internet that rewards emotional openness. Being honest, raw and “real.” And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Some of the most meaningful things I’ve read online have come from people being willing to say what’s actually going on.

I think about this part like the way many homes across cultures that value privacy are designed; there is often a sense of public and private in the architecture of the home. The courtyard or guest sitting room is easily accessible, welcoming and open. But there are very clear boundaries enforced through architecture that mean only those closest to you would ever be able to go into someone’s bedroom, walk through certain doors and be in the innermost part of the home. It is set up for privacy and protection, but also for openness and generosity.

READ: Exploring Islamic Home Architecture and How It Provides Privacy for Muslim Women

I think about my life online in the same way.

There are parts of me that can exist in the “courtyard.” Things I’m happy to share, conversations I’m open to having. I am happy to be open and honest on these topics, be it building a business, the challenges of being a founder or creativity. But not everything belongs there. Some things need to stay in the inner rooms, held more carefully, shared only with people who are actually in my life rather than for parasocial relationships.

And I think part of what’s changed is how those boundaries are being eroded.

There is something that is happening in our lives which I am going to term the businification of the personal. Over the last few years, even people who aren’t trying to build a platform seem to have been pulled into it. People operate like small businesses. Graduation shoots, gender reveals, and home cafe pop-ups feel like PR launches from a small business, maximised for aesthetics. Moments that once just existed now feel like they need to be packaged and presented. These moments have become a way to show the world an extension of our taste and curation. Events, relationships and emotions start to become premium content, even when there’s no one really watching.

My home is one of the clearest expressions of what I keep private. I’m intentional about who I invite into it, and when I host, I don’t feel the need to document it for an external audience. It’s my space, it holds the people I love, and it feels more meaningful when it isn’t translated for an audience. I’m comfortable with others sharing parts of it (as long as it is not obvious photos of my actual home), and my close friends understand those unspoken boundaries as they see how much I keep offline. Not everything in my life needs to be made visible.

Another part of privacy is emotional privacy. Timing matters too; when I’m going through something difficult, I try to step away from social media. The pull to share in those moments is strong because you’re looking for connection. When there is an urge to be outward during a difficult time in my life, I focus on pulling inward to reflect and process. Not everything needs to be witnessed in real time. If I do share something personal, it’s usually retrospective. Once I’ve had time to sit with it, understand it, and it no longer feels raw. Sharing something once it has been processed feels more controlled and not utilising my vulnerability for content.

Questions:

Is this something I would say out loud, unprompted, in a room full of people?

Am I sharing this to understand it, or to be seen in it?

Does this belong in the courtyard, or is it something for the inner rooms?

2. Rejection of performing pretty - What I choose not to show

The internet can feel like a cesspit of beauty standards, and while it is also a space for diversity and subcultures to find their people, there’s still a strong pull towards a very specific idea of what it means to be “pretty”.

For me, I’ve realised I don’t want to give people access to a version of me where I look my best, which means weddings, big events, holidays, the moments where I am dressed up and look and feel great. This is an intentional act to not perform pretty on the internet. It is very easy to look to online spaces to feel “seen”, “desired” and “affirmed”. We are all partial to it; it feels nice to be complimented. But I do not want to rely on that loop. The more you feed this part of yourself, the more you will want to do it. It requires building your self-esteem and confidence from the core, rather than relying on external forces to scaffold it up. I also recently started practising the hijab 🧕🏽, which has added another layer to my privacy (new headshots pending).

With this comes lots of smaller choices, no selfies (running sweaty selfies don’t count😂). When posting on stories, I am partial to a filter but nothing that totally distorts my face, which includes making my nose smaller, eyes or lips bigger and skin lighter. It is not normal to perceive ourselves like this, and I believe it is the entry point to then seeing these things as things to “fix” and permanently change. In fact, doctors have said they see patients come into their office wanting to specifically have surgery to look like a filtered version of themselves, known as Snapchat Dysmorphia” or “filter-induced body dysmorphic disorder”.

On the other side of what I chose to put out is heavily filtering what I consume, me and the mute button are good friends. The following may be classed as very unpopular opinions. I don’t follow people and actively unfollow people who only talk about how they look, only about weight loss and act as agents for a very specific idea of beauty. We’re already passively served images of beauty ideals everywhere, so I don’t feel the need to actively seek them out through who I follow. My very very unpopular opinion is that we have normalised what I think we should call self-mutilation under the guise of cosmetic surgery and having agency. We have to actively find ways to reject it, as I believe our minds are more fickle than we think, and no one is immune to being influenced. I want to push back against how this very specific beauty ideal seems to travel across cultures, shaping the same preferences for skinny bodies, small noses and big lips. The rise in cosmetic surgery has also been linked to financial nihilism, the idea that because saving for stability, and large purchases like houses, feel out of reach, people are instead spending on looking good, and present-day happiness seems more appealing. I want to ensure that I am questioning the direction things are moving in, rather than passively accepting it.

READ: The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Should Read

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The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Should Read

Welp, another major female celebrity just copped herself a completely new face. That’s right, thirty-six year old Hollywood crone Emma Stone recently got her face snatched so tight that she’s now twinning with OG Iron Chef chairman Takeshi Kaga. Welcome to Kitchen Stadium: the special mystery ingredient on tonight’s episode is (the divine) feminine ins…

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10 months ago · 25774 likes · 1498 comments · father_karine

On the days I may not feel pretty, hello incoming period, I tell myself

1. I don’t need to obsess about how I look, and it is actually a huge distraction from all the things I want to become

2. It isn’t illegal to not be drop-dead gorgeous

3. To get over myself

4. God created me

3. Cosplaying Luxury - Resisting lifestyle performance

Most of what we’re looking at comes down to two things, how you look, or how you live. And more often than not, how you live is shorthand for how much money you can spend.

Sometimes it feels like the unspoken rule is that if you don’t have one, you need the other. And the people who really “win” online often have both.

There is a lot of cosplaying as middle-class and as a luxury babe online. What we choose to show, what we leave out, how things are framed all tell a story of how we want to be seen. Just because you have something nice in your life, it doesn’t mean it has to go online.

For my online presence, I would like to focus more on being seen for how I think rather than the above. How I think about business, creativity, community and self-growth.

I try not to post things that cost a lot of money unless there’s a clear reason for sharing. That includes meals out, certain kinds of convenience, holidays, self-care, or expensive purchases.

For me, the moments where it feels right to share are usually rooted in transparency. When there’s context, or something useful in it beyond just indulging in the ego of being seen to have something luxurious. Otherwise, I’ve found it can blur into a kind of lifestyle signalling that I’m not that interested in participating in. I also think that we should practice being more discerning about inviting jealousy and envy into our lives.

Questions to ask

• Did it cost a lot of money?

• If it costs a lot of money, what is the reason for sharing that I have it?

• Am I posting it to posture about my lifestyle rather than trying to be transparent?

I want to build a life that only I know the highlights of, one that feels best when no one is watching.

I hope this was helpful and I would love to know if you have frameworks and ways of thinking about privacy online.

Enter Bait, a six-part comedy starring, produced and co-created by Riz Ahmed. Across four days, we follow Shahjahan as he tries to become the next Bond, while the show moves through industry racism, immigrant family dynamics, romance, mental health and identity.

Yet after finishing Bait, I’m left feeling that it introduces a new kind of litmus test for Muslim storytelling: can you include something that would normally be considered haram, offensive or culturally off-limits, and still have it feel truthful rather than superficially subversive to a white gaze? The line between offence and authenticity is dictated by who is telling it.

I watched this both as someone who would personally watch it and as a Creative Director working with mainstream brands, used to the push and pull of getting something authentic approved. In my work, I often think about a similar litmus test: can you make an in-joke with your audience? Not a surface-level reference, but something that signals real familiarity. Bait does exactly that. It makes the audience laugh in recognition or explanation, and not at the expense of Muslims, as is so often the case in mainstream Muslim “comedy”.

Bait isn’t trying to copy a reference, it is the reference.

The foundation of Bait is what makes it work. The locations, art direction and writing feel lived in. From the throwbacks in the soundtrack that sent me down a Jai Paul rabbit hole (iykyk), to the locations, shout out to Wembley (where I grew up, and so did Riz Ahmed), to the wardrobe, the script writing, the inside jokes and the many Easter eggs, it all feels known rather than placed. And in an industry that has such little Muslim or South Asian representation , getting that level of specificity on screen is no small feat.

That level of specificity is what makes it feel authentic. It builds a world you actually believe.

Bait creates a world where the characters can be messy and chaotic. The starting point is assumed knowledge, depth and immersion into a South Asian Muslim world, and that is where the depth comes from. Too often, shows and campaigns start from a white perspective and try to sprinkle in Muslim elements, leaving authenticity and nuance off the table because it takes too much justification to get it over the line.

The second hallmark of good creative work is giving people something to feel beyond just representation. At its core, Shahjahan is someone trying to forge a career against the grain, battling his demons and his mental health. Along the way, we get glimpses of love lost, immigrant family dynamics and acceptance.

What gets commissioned vs what gets made

Most people I speak to really enjoyed episodes 1–3 and then thought it got weird. But the second half of Bait is exactly why it deserves its flowers. This story could have been told flatly, a brown boy representation story, predictable, safe and likeable. Instead, it goes on a chaotic whirlwind to reach its final state. It feels like the first half is what gets commissioned and the second half is what happens when you make the work you actually want.

The first half so safely allowed the viewer to nestle into the world in which Shahjahan was living in. There was so much familiarity built and created through the writing and references. One subtle part which was so well done was when the dad said something along the lines of “don’t upset them” when the news headlines broke that the next Bond may be Shahjahan, creating online chatter about if we need a brown bond. Them being the white people we’re expected to be grateful to just for existing in the UK. In one line, it captures a tension between generations: assimilation vs. showing the middle finger to the establishment, precariousness of citizenship vs. a red (blue) passport, being from here but not always of here.

Bait was filled with a number of one-liners that kept nodding to the viewer, this isn’t a setup, I am not an op. The reference to the IDF on GEO News, at a time when being pro-Palestine still gets people blacklisted, lands effortlessly. The critique on the self-tokenising that happens to so many creatives who tell themselves it’s in the pursuit of representation for the community. Bait was able to use humour to critique the creative industries and how they tokenise brown creatives, making light of its one-in, one-out policy with the main character often getting mistaken for Dev Patel.

The second half launches us into a world you can only take the viewer to if the show has been built with depth of knowledge. One in which a pig’s head and clubbing just become background chatter as opposed to something to shred. The characters were nuanced and messy, beyond clean lines of Muslim representation, both marking the shift of the last 10 years and what can now land.

While watching Bait, I thought about a line going from Citizen Khan, a 2012 BBC sitcom, to Bait as the timeline of Muslim storytelling, one a parody of what it means to be a South Asian Muslim family and the latter an honest, observed, chaotic reality of a person’s life that is Muslim. Bait offers a narrative so nuanced and granular that no one can claim representation wasn’t done well. Because the more nuanced a story is, the less it owes to representing everyone. The more it is about just a single story, and this one was the story of a brown boy from ends trying to make it and giving us an Easter egg hunt along the way.

Every now and then we get a line in the sand that creates a new benchmark on what great can look like for work created from a specific lens that isn’t a default one. The default one being a white man that Grayson Perry speaks about. And I think Bait is one of these moments. For the genre and landscape it is outstanding, going forward I hope for its depth to be the norm to then build off.

More than anything, Bait gives us the opportunity to move from critiquing a piece of work for its accuracy of Muslim representation to its actual creative merit. Going from “is it accurate?” to “is it good?” And in doing so, it expands what Muslim storytelling is allowed to look like, it becomes a reference point for other Muslim writers and actors to push the bar when trying to get commissioned.

And so while clubbing and pig heads weren’t on the Muslim representation bingo card, it was exactly what was on Shahjahan’s. And that, ultimately, is what makes it feel true.

I remember sitting in an R.E. class in Year 8. We were learning about Islam and the teacher asked the Muslims in the class to tell everyone what it was like at the mosque. She was probably expecting me to say that it was the most peaceful and serene place ever. Instead, I remember saying, it’s loud.

I often sit in the mosque feeling overstimulated, because it is loud. Especially in Ramadan where every night mosques are packed with people observing Ramadan. Think soup kitchen, community center and a place of worship all in one. The hustle and bustle of volunteers dishing out food in time for iftar to the hundreds of worshippers, an aunty saying she wants more meat on her plate, the imam telling us not to waste any food, the OG aunty telling us to fill in the gaps.

All while I try my best to take up as little space as possible, trying to not add to the burdens of the mosque volunteers. I absorb the loud decibels in search of God within these four walls.

When I find myself in the mosque, I notice that I accept more than I would on a normal day outside of God’s house. I absorb the aunty barging into me, the other one telling me to be quiet (even though I am whispering), the one telling me something I am doing is haram (not allowed), or the one squashing me against the wall leaving me little space to pray.

I absorb behaviours that in no other space I would accept, and would probably have something to say about. When I step into the mosque I am not the person who demands an invoice to be paid, or has to be assertive to win a partnership. In this space, my boundaries shrink and my capacity for tolerance increases. To the point where I find the aunties’ behaviour amusing.

We hear a lot about having boundaries whilst in community. Often this conversation pushes us towards shrinking our capacity in the name of self preservation. In the digital world, boundaries become something to perform and enforce. There are those who “haven’t done the work” and those who have, they are neat boundaries. But in places like the mosque and in offline life, there is no neat expectation of a fully therapised individual who always knows how to hold and uphold their boundaries.

And I have been thinking about how being amongst community, and being a part of community, should expand our capacity.

Our capacity for what, and for who, we can show up for.

And I have been thinking about capacity as something that Allah, God, has given me as a rizq, a provision.

This capacity is not about your ability to make friends with those in your community. Rather, it is about increasing the types of people that make up your community.

True community is not a curated members’ club. It is sometimes loud, overstimulating and annoying.

There should be people who you find annoying in your community. The ones who talk a lot. Who may now and then say ridiculous things. The ones who ask for more than they give.

The mosque represents this community for me, they support and help people who can’t pay their bills, in Ramadan they feed people twice a day for free and across the year they look after children whose parents need to work and have no childcare. They help those that have fallen through the cracks of society, and all other structures have failed them. They are relying on the capacity of the collective.

Community is about shared resources. Sharing your empathy, your time, your money, your privileges, your home, your safety and so on. Sharing the things that God seems to have given you. And when you consider that none of these resources are truly yours, but rather provision from God, the Creator and Giver of all resource, it then follows that your capacity is not truly yours either. Because your capacity is drawing from a higher power.

And God tells us about His own unique capacity that we are able to draw upon. That He is the Most Kind (al-Ra’uf), the Almighty (al-Aziz), the Most Loving (al-Wadud) and The Provider (Ar-Razzaq).

So if my capacity is not truly mine, but something given to me by a higher power, then perhaps the question shifts.

Rather than thinking about who should not benefit from your resources, perhaps we should ask: who tests my capacity, and what does that reveal about my own character rather than theirs?

-

Ramadan Mubarak to those who are observing. I pray it is accepted from you.

Here are also some further prompts:

• What if emotional capacity was not something we built alone, but something given to us?

• How does believing that patience, empathy and tolerance are provision change how I show up for people?

• What does it mean to hoard capacity?

• What would it look like to treat time, attention and listening as a form of charity?

• Can community be a place where we practice trusting in divine replenishment?

• How would community look if we truly believed Allah was the provider of all that we give?

Quick note - if you need business advice, I am doing a talk on starting a business on the 6th December. Tickets are here and if you can’t afford one drop them a note 🧡

If you would like to read business advice, you can get my book here.

1. Booking a 5-star hotel for a work trip

On my first-ever work trip to LA, we were broke, and I felt guilty spending any money. I stayed in a hostel, sharing a room with three others and an old lady who lived in a cupboard.

In the early years, so many of my decisions were guided by the fear of running out of money and staying in a beautiful hotel felt like the ultimate luxury. I would still have made the same decision!

2. Having breakfast every single day

I used to rush out of the house every day to transport myself and my laptop to an office in central London, always feeling behind because I am not a morning person. Now I rarely skip breakfast, and it is probably my most considered meal of the day. A slow morning with a nourishing breakfast sets me up for the day.

Back then, lunch was a meagre afterthought, or I would skip it altogether. My cortisol rises just thinking about my life pre-pandemic. Now I work from home and have a day in the week to travel in for, batching all my meetings on the same day.

Back then, I thought moving at a slower pace meant not having ambition, but I now know that is a silly thing to think.

3. Buying a laptop and other equipment outright

When we were starting out, every cost had to be minimal. My old boss gave me a laptop, but the ‘b’ key didn’t work. I handed it to my co-founder, and she had to find the letter ‘b’ online and copy and paste it every time she needed it. My laptop only worked if it was plugged into the charger.

Once we were in a meeting at someone’s fancy office, and the Wi-Fi password had a ‘b’ in it—we both wanted to laugh because she couldn’t get online to copy one. She eventually started keeping a Word document handy just for her ‘b’s.

We finally upgraded her to a proper laptop, and backmarket.co.uk is a great ethical alternative for your tech needs.

4. Not being logged into Amaliah social accounts, and even needing someone in the team to approve my login

I used to manage every social media account myself. Now I need team approval to log in, and sometimes I have no clue what is in the social calendar.

Your biggest skill set as a founder, as you grow is rarely in the doing of the things that could be delegated out to others. You need to operate using your highest skillset that someone else can’t easily do - for me, that is split into:

CREATIVE - coming up with ideas, leading on creative direction/directing

COMMERCIAL - getting more business in, figuring out long-term strategy

Each year in the business, I am always thinking about what I can delegate and not be involved in, which frees me up to work on the business, not in the business. If you want to read more about that, I have a chapter in my book about working on the business vs. in the business.

5. Paying everyone who works with us

In the early days, we relied on SO MUCH goodwill from Muslim women who wrote for us, worked with us, volunteered and gave us so much time and love. Thank you all so so so much. We are so, so grateful for all of those people. Now, we try to ensure we pay people for their time, even if it is a small contribution.

6. Eating rice and curry for lunch

My pre-pandemic trauma response is never wanting to eat a meal deal ever again in my life. Two reasons I dislike working outside of the house:

a. There’s never enough protein in the meal options (especially in workspaces and members’ clubs, where things are rarely halal).

b. The lack of spaces to be able to pray whilst at work, especially in winter, when prayers are in quick succession because of shorter days

A sandwich just doesn’t cut it anymore.

7. My speaking fees are going to me and not the business

In our first year of business, I probably earned about £25,000 in speaking fees. Not a single pound of this came into my account because I wanted to give the business every opportunity to survive. And I have never “paid this back” to myself either.

One of the reasons companies fail is that they run out of money, and so I held onto as much of it as we could to give us the best chance. Again, no regrets, but now, especially since my book, I earn my speaking fees as an individual!

8. Working out

My current self considers working out three times a week a poor effort, but I went years not working out, leaving the house at 8:00 am and coming back at 10 pm and repeating it all the next day.

Exercise felt like an arduous task that drained time and energy. I once thought signing up for a half-marathon would solve that, but instead, I showed up on race day with no training. I redeemed myself earlier this year by running the same half-marathon with training.

I think many seasoned founders will relate to getting to a point where you can no longer abuse your body in the ways we did when starting a startup. I am no longer willing to consistently put my body through what I used to. Committing to working out and looking after myself has done wonders for my creativity and ability to be productive.

9. Expensing things to the business

For the first couple of years, I didn’t expense anything. I was terrified the business would run out of money, so even things I could legitimately claim, like a phone, a laptop, or day-to-day costs like a coffee at a meeting or a work lunch, came straight out of my pocket. Looking back, it seems almost absurd, but at the time, it felt necessary. That scrappiness shaped how I managed money early on.

10. Taking sick leave

When I was sick, I would just work with reduced capacity. There was no one else to pass the work on to, and everything always felt so urgent. But now I know a day of rest means I will recover quicker, we plan more as a team, and we have more people able to take things on.

There are still some periods where we are busy in the business or in peak campaign seasons and everyone is at capacity, but generally, I am able to have time off unannounced, and that is a huge win.

11. Having a whole crew for a campaign shoot

In the early days, I would pitch, sell, shoot, illustrate, and post every campaign myself. I took being a one-woman band very seriously; I was the whole creative and commercial department.

Now, we have a brilliant in-house team and work with freelancers and production companies. It lets me focus on quality and directing rather than every single task.

Overall, it’s meant our work has levelled up. Focusing on high-value tasks and delegating the rest really helped me up my own game. You can read more about what goes into a campaign in my recent newsletter.

You can see some of our recent branded work with British Airways, This Girl Can and CoppaFeel!

12. Having a work phone

This felt like a luxury to have, and what were boundaries even? I used to blur my work and personal life. Now I have a work phone, and it means I can fully switch off from work. The problem isn’t that someone messaged you about work on a Sunday afternoon, it’s your fault for checking. Having separate phones makes a huge difference, and my team have my other number for anything urgent.

13. Being on a livable salary

I still find it unbelievable that we have payroll and people to pay. Praise the Lord truly. I started on no salary and then upgraded myself to £12k, and then eventually an actual salary. The realisation that we have been making payroll for 10 years is a little wild to me.

14. Running events, we don’t make money from

In our business, we have things we have to do to earn our revenue, and things we want to do out of love for Muslim women. Events are a huge part of this. We love the joy it brings, from run clubs and book clubs to art nights and film screenings.

Check out our next events in London and Manchester

2 years ago, we decided to invest in our events and community even if it cost us, and it has paid off now too, as we now run sponsored events and more clients want them.

But regardless of clients, we still run ones that don’t always make us money.

You can join one of our book clubs in London or our event with CoppaFeel! In Manchester here.

15. Saying no to paid work

Not all paid work is worth it, sometimes the smallest budgets end up taking the longest time and are a distraction from working to get larger clients.

Also on a personal level, if I am asked to speak on a weekend, I think twice, even if it is paid, I am mindful of stretching myself too thin and it impacting the things I need to get done.

16. Taking Bank Holidays off

I remember in my first year, someone scheduled a meeting on Good Friday. I was so focused on work that even with my whole family at home, I said, “Oh, I’ve got a meeting to go to.”

I trekked all the way to Old Street, only to find the office closed. I still had no idea it was a bank holiday.

I emailed the person asking if they were running late, and they replied, apologising—they hadn’t realised it was a bank holiday either, and asked to reschedule.

17. Going on holiday without my laptop

This was a huge one. I first did it in 2023, and it felt illegal. I would always take my laptop on holiday “just in case” and there have been so many times I have sat in a hotel room while on holiday working on a deck or taking a client call for time-sensitive work.

I still occasionally travel with my laptop and I remind myself that having to sometimes work when I am off is the price I sometimes have to pay for all the other freedoms that running a business can give you.

18. Not attending all the events we go to

Early on, I felt like I had to attend every event we ran. In the early days, we were still figuring out what vibe we wanted and what type of events we wanted to run. Creating events where the founder's presence is essential means it is unsustainable. Now we have a host for events, and team members who plan and attend the events.

Sometimes we are asked why our ticket price can’t be lower and the answer is that everyone who contributes to organising the event gets paid, including the host, the team organising it, and we pay rent to the venue, which is the beautiful Restless Beings.

Paying people instead of relying on volunteers makes events more sustainable to run.

19. Working from home

Pre-pandemic, commuting and office chaos felt unavoidable. Now we’re fully remote, and I am honestly 100% more productive as a result, and it is one of the reasons I am now able to prioritise working out.

20. Still being in business

Honestly, I didn’t think we would make it this far.

21. Not burning out for 2.5 years

I used to burn out regularly. Then in 2023, I took a 3-month break from the business, came back refreshed and changed our ways of working so that they weren’t depleting me.

I haven’t burnt out since then.

I’ve gone from someone who was burning out multiple times in a year, to now not having burnt out in over 2 years. I think this is worth a separate Substack post!

22. I wrote a business book!

I came into business with no experience, terrified, with a background in the Sciences. I was approached by my publisher, Harper Collins, to write the business book I wish I had when starting out.

It is an incredibly honest guide on how to make a business work, and it includes interviews with a range of founders too. You can find it here.

This month, Amaliah - the media company I founded for Muslim women, launched our 6-month partnership with This Girl Can, an initiative that aims to encourage more women and young girls to get into sports and fitness.

Our launch for The Way We Move campaign kicked off with this reel here, which is a story about Rabiah and her running journey featuring Asra Run Club, and this reel here, which is the story my mum and me taking on open water swimming!

People see the end product, the 2 minutes and 36 seconds of content, but not the many hours that went into it or the years of pre-work to get a client on board.

This has been one of my favourite campaigns I have worked on that I also directed, and having my mum in it was truly special! Thank you to everyone who was involved in making this happen - you all smashed it!

So here is a comprehensive breakdown of how many emails, meetings, shoot days and people it took to make this paid partnership come to life.

The headline stats are:

~400 emails, including before winning the pitch, while pitching, pre-production details and post-production communication and counting as the campaign is still live.

~139 files which include pitch decks, revised pitch decks, internal versions, client-facing versions, shot lists, storyboards, talent contracts, production contracts, scripts, social copy, timelines and briefs.

~387 tasks on Asana, which is where we document everything that needs to be done for this project, assigned across 4 people, including myself, Senior Creative, Head of Content & Partnerships and also Project Assistant. This also doesn’t include the hundreds of messages that happen across Slack in our channel for the project.

~ 26 hours of meetings, according to my calendar, which includes pitch meetings, internal team meetings, a post shoot 5-hour debrief, external client meetings and a weekly status meeting with all parties, which the team attended.

~20 hours of shooting / on set across three days, not including travel to and from locations.

~39 people involved, which include 6 AMALIAH team members, 10 Production members, 8-10 agency people, 2-5 This Girl Can/Sport England members, 4 runners from Asra Run club, 3 talent, including Rabiah, my mum and me and 1 guard for our lake shoot. These are just the people directly involved; there will be more behind the scenes.

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THE BACK STORY (scroll through if you just want to know about this specific campaign)

The Beginning: 2021

The This Girl Can campaign first came onto our radar in 2021. They were looking to reach more women of colour and found they were under-indexing with this audience. Our work at Amaliah helps brands reach diverse audiences. 1 in 3 people who are categorised as BAME in England, are Muslim, so for brands that want to reach diverse audiences, Muslim representation and engagement must be a part of this. Muslim audiences are hugely overlooked despite our growing presence (33% increase between 2011 and 2021), and there are several reasons why, but that’s for another day (hello, Islamophobia and prejudice).

We were approached to consult on part of the This Girl Can strategy. We worked with them and their agency to share a strategic campaign plan filled with ideas, activations and approaches on how to cut through and meaningfully reach communities like ours.

The agency ended up winning the pitch to service This Girl Can as a client, and This Girl Can stayed on my mind as I knew there would be a great fit between us.

Back Your Own Ideas: 2023

Our team are genuinely passionate about sport. Between us, we horse ride, hike, climb, swim, do taekwondo, and have taken on everything from Couch to 5K to full marathons, half marathons and triathlons. I’ve always cared about getting more Muslim women moving and have documented my own journey in order to do so.

We decided to take a bet on ourselves, putting on our own events, from hikes and run clubs to a callisthenics workshop. All of them were oversubscribed, selling out with a waitlist.

Most of these didn’t make us much money, but they were investments in the kind of work we wanted to do and the stories we wanted to tell. We were building a body of work that showed what it looks like for Muslim women to move, train and play, and creating the work we wanted to get paid for.

Pitching for work: 2024

Fast forward to 2024. This Girl Can was once again up for tender, looking for a new agency, and we were invited to pitch a part of the strategy. We now had loads of proof points on why we were a good fit because of our investment in sports, but the agency didn’t win the overall pitch, and so neither did we win our share. We then pitched out our ideas to various brands and kept on making plans to do things without the backing of brands.

I also reached out to the agency that I knew won the This Girl Can pitch.

They got back to me and actually said that they had pitched Amaliah into their strategy, and turned out they had actually spoken about my personal journey in taking on triathlons and open water swimming as a way to show how role models and people within a community can empower each other. It is worth noting that various Muslim women, including Bonita and Foreda, were constantly advocating for Amaliah in rooms. We appreciate you gurlies!

New Pitch on the Block: 2025

Now, this year, I got an email with the title This Girl Can - It’s back

The agency that won the pitch that Bon was on (above) had built Amaliah into the pitch and then briefed another agency to brief us to be a part of the partnership!

The Pitch

This campaign involved 139 documents. The first was a 50-slide pitch deck laying out our rationale, creative strategy, the stories we wanted to tell, and how we’d tell them.

Of the 400 emails, about 101 were at the pitch stage.

For this campaign, the team included me as CEO [ Director], our Senior Creative [Co-director], our Head of Content and Partnerships [Producer] and Project Assistant.

My job is to set the strategy and vision for the client and to set the team a brief on what we want to pitch and how. Then once we win a pitch, my job is to oversee creative direction and also direct in the run-up, on shoot and in post-production to guide the edit. One of the key parts is making sure what we create aligns both with the client’s objectives and with Amaliah’s creative vision. You’re constantly trying to bring together two worlds: the brand’s and ours — to create something that feels like it speaks both their language and ours.

From the start, I knew I wanted to push ourselves to create something with a premium feel that showed Muslim women in motion, stories that felt cinematic, grounded, and inspiring. I wanted to ensure we didn’t exceptionalise the Muslim women in the stories; they weren’t breaking stereotypes, they were just getting on with their lives, trying to move their bodies, and we were documenting how small starts can snowball.

This campaign was ambitious, outdoor and active shoots, multi-cam setups, drone footage, lots of firsts for us and lots of learning. It was our first time working with a sports client, and we wanted it to stand out.

We sent it off, then pitched via video call. There was back-and-forth, a round of feedback, revisions, and a final sign-off. This means we have won the pitch.

The Production

This stage is where most of the work happens, where the ideas turn into logistics. We create another deck — this time breaking down everything: what the talent will wear, shot lists, scripts, camera setups, and angles. Bringing to life the idea that we have pitched through all the details we can.

There were a total of about 400 emails sent across this campaign. This is an underestimate as it doesn’t include some of the other emails, e.g us liaising with talent, the emails I am not in that my team sent, the ones where the team are communicating with the shoot locations to ask questions and with our insurance to ensure we have 2 million in public liability cover.

In this stage, my time goes into refining the creative, the shot list, the script, the intros, the endings and the references for each shot, ensuring we have clarity for shoot day and are preparing for high-quality visuals.

MEETINGS

Approximately 16 hours and 35 minutes, which I would round up to 26 hours, as there were internal chats within team calls and partnerships calls that we had, along with calls I was not in.

These 16 hours include a status call every Tuesday where we update the client on the status of relevant parts, e.g status on talent selections, location of shoots, shot list, storyboard and narrative, clothing, timelines, etc. It is an opportunity for the client to offer feedback for us to work on.

DOCUMENTS

We had about 139 files in this campaign folder.

Part of this process is documentation to make sure everyone is on the same page, including detailed shot lists, references for the types of shots. The idea is that if a key member of the team isn’t able to attend a shoot, there is enough documentation to understand what needs to be executed. Another key part was on the final shoot day, I would be in the water, so I needed to comb through the shot list and the logistics as I wouldn’t be able to look at them regularly on the day.

TASKS

We had about 387 tasks across the team, which is where everything is documented that needs to be done and assigned to those who need to do it , with due dates. This is a meticulous project management task that our Head of Content and Partnerships leads on.

THE BIG DAY

For this, we had 3 shoot days totalling 20 hours on set.

Shoot day 1: 4.5 hours at Swim serpentine - which made up 38 seconds of the final video.

Shoot day 2: 8.5 hours at Tooting Bec Athletics Track and in the common, and also included an hour of audio recording for the voiceovers.

• An impromptu 4-5 hour meeting after as we wanted to implement feedback from the shoot for the shoot happening the next day (see 26 hours of meetings)

Shoot day 3: 7 hours at Divers Cove - which made up 43 seconds of the final video

That’s 20+ hours on set, not including travel, with a 15-person crew.

For just the 10-second intro sequence of Rabiah running, it took 2.5 hours to shoot. Multiple takes, multiple angles, constant adjustments.

Some transitions, such as the one from forest to track, took 6–9 attempts to get right. We had to ensure the camera whip and movement synced perfectly so that in post, we had options to make it seamless.

On the shoot day, we are trying to capture as many angles and options as we can so we can maximise what we are working with in the edit. Once you finish on set, there are no reshoots, and you are working with what you have!

POST PRODUCTION

We usually have two rounds of edits per asset. Our editor sends the first version, and then I, as Director and the co-director, go through it frame by frame, down to seconds, combing through each shot, the intro, the narrative, music choices, and pacing. I can’t account for the editing time, as this is an external editor.

We make notes, hop on calls, and talk through each change:

• Does it tell the story we want?

• Is the pacing right?

• Are there shots we captured but haven’t seen in the edit yet?

• Are we feeling what we wanted to when we watch this?

• Does the narrative land?

We cut down a lot from the original script for both films, constantly balancing storytelling with attention spans.

For the swimming video in particular we had to move a lot of the script around from the original edit, we also changed the sequencing, narrative and pacing.

POST CAMPAIGN

We aren’t there yet, but sometime in 2026 Q1, we will deliver another 40-deck presentation about the campaign and how great it went, so if you haven’t already, go have a watch here and here and show it some love.

Sometimes the best business advice is this:
You are the problem.

1. The chaos in your business is often a reflection of the chaos in you.

Your business mirrors you. If you’re disorganised, your business will be disorganised. If you avoid conflict, you’ll struggle with difficult conversations. If your boundaries are blurred, your business boundaries will be too. Whatever you haven’t worked through in yourself will show up one way or another.

The tough part of running a business is that you are a huge part of the problems you create and face. Your decisions can pave the way for problems or ease.

As VC Sitar Teli said in my book How To Make Money:

“You have to be able to recognise that you made a shit decision. And most people don’t feel comfortable with that. Most people just are not comfortable admitting that they made a real big mistake with something very serious. So they just keep going with it: they stay in jobs, in bad relationships, and they stay kind of unhappy. But you have to be really, really comfortable with saying: This is just not right.”

This is difficult because not only do you have to recognise that it is your fault that you made a bad decision, but you also have to take responsibility for that decision and be the one to find the right move after you just made an awful one. You have to have incredible amounts of self-awareness, be able to take accountability and make sound judgements.

It’s easy to bury yourself in shame over “dumb” decisions and stay paralysed or worse, to blame everything and everyone else for the state of your business. But if you work on your own chaos, you’ll start to see the shift in your business too.

2. You’re more obsessed with looking like a founder than being one

You care more about the status of being a founder, about looking like you run a successful business, than actually making your business work.

You’re spending too much time curating carousels, tweaking fonts, doing talks and panels, and posting “day-in-the-life” Reels and not enough time doing the real work that builds a business.

When I went through a business accelerator, they talked about “vanity metrics.” These are data points that make your business look good, likes, follows, views, but don’t actually drive your business forward.

I get it because there is a lot of noise out there. You’ve seen businesses go viral, so of course you want to replicate that success. And I say this as a business owner who literally makes money from running social media campaigns for clients.

If this sounds like you then do the following:

• Look at your screen time - most likely it is too high

• Pick your poison, if you are starting out, choose one platform to double down on and experiment on there

• Stop getting fomo because other people have done well on social

• Start doing work that you are avoiding

Here is an excerpt from my book on how to get your business back on track:

“Divide your business into sections; for example, marketing, revenue, team, etc. What section doesn’t feel right? Which feels like it could be going better? Which is going well? How do each of these sections contribute to your top-line goal? Which sections are being over- or under-invested in? If you raised standards in some of these key sections, what difference would that make to your goals and overall business health?”

Dedicate the next 30 days into those areas with clear habits and outputs.

3. If you can’t pay yourself a liveable salary, you don’t have a business — you have an expensive hobby. Something needs to change.

It’s great that your business is making money. But are you making money? You have to factor in all the unpaid hours, sacrifice and effort you’re putting in.

I get that you might not be able to pay yourself much in the early days. When I first started out, I paid myself £12k in the first year. Getting that payslip felt huge, it’s a real achievement to earn from something you’ve built with your own hands. And yes, it makes sense to start with a modest salary while you get things off the ground. But that can’t be the norm.

You have to work towards paying yourself a liveable salary, otherwise, it’s not a business, it’s a hobby. And often when founders spend years in this space what ends up happening is that a job with a stable salary starts looking way more appealing than “following your passion”. Ensuring you get paid is also about ensuring you are able to continue being an asset to your business instead of looking elsewhere to get paid.

I talk about the tension of making money vs. building a community in my book in a chapter called Integrity Doesn’t Pay the Bills. I find this particularly affects women of colour who are socialised to invest time and labour for little in return.

“Without a community, our business is not fulfilling its mission, and without money, we cannot build resources for our community, nor can we invest into or sustain our community. If a community cannot be sustained, then it cannot achieve its aims. In 2018 we had been going for two years and our community was thriving, but our business was not. We were on incredibly low salaries and often relying on goodwill from volunteers or interns to help build Amaliah and keep it going. I realised that if we didn’t make enough money, we would become resentful of our community, resentful that we felt we were doing so much but getting so little back. Spinks says at this stage founders can burn out and the community will eventually fade away due to being under-resourced and founders not being able to support themselves. At the same time, if you only focus on money as a means, you are at risk of viewing the community as a cold machine to just extract value from, this then can see the company lose its moral compass and create a toxic ‘by any means necessary’ approach to growth and harmful practices.” - An excerpt from my book How To Make Money

4. Sulking about other businesses doing better than you is not a business strategy

I’ve seen it time and time again: founders moaning about how talented they are, wondering why that guy over there seems to be thriving and getting all the opportunities.

That jealousy that you feel when you say, “their brand isn’t even that great”? It’s not about them, it’s about you not feeling as far ahead as you’d like. Jealousy usually points to something we actually want for ourselves.

In business, you don’t get rewarded just for showing up, talent isn’t enough, if it was, everyone would have a thriving business. You need to interrogate what is and isn’t working. It might be that you need the courage to take risks and make bold moves or it might be that you need to be more strategic, you will only know if you take an honest look at your business and why it doesn’t seem to be getting the success you want.

For some businesses it might be that they have an issue with not being visible enough to the specific people who will do business with them. If no one knows about you, they can’t do business with you.

“Visibility is like a shop front on a high street: it intrigues people, they see the shop as they pass it on the bus, they may want to know more, or at the very least they now know the shop exists.

To have visibility is to be seen: to be known. Say a shop sells mirrors, and every day on your bus route you saw that shop from the window. The next time a friend says, ‘Hey, I’m looking to buy a mirror’ you might suggest the shop, purely based on visibility. But you don’t know the mirrors are of high quality, or are at a good price point: you don’t know if they are worth buying.”

For example, for our business, the work we really needed to do was email 50 companies a week to try and pitch to them, we needed visibility within the industry we were in. Usually there are a couple of key relationships you need to build that will take your business in a different direction and in an upward trajectory, this may be people you need to hire, clients you need to get or an advisor you need to bring on board.

Learn to solve your own problems, no one is coming to solve them. I loved this piece called Maybe you’re not Actually Trying by .

5. If someone asking “How’s business?” fills you with dread, that’s the problem you need to fix

If a simple “How’s business?” makes you want to shrink, avoid eye contact, or change the subject, that is something you should pay attention to. That reaction is telling you exactly where the problems are.

Whatever your honest answer would be, sales are slow, cashflow is tight, I’m working all the hours I can, but nothing is working, I’m drowning in operations, I don’t know how to grow, that’s the work you need to focus on. Admitting your problems to yourself is the first step in solving it, the longer you avoid it, you will be be consumed by anxiety. Learn to run towards your problems, even if it is one small step at a time.

Avoiding the truth doesn’t make it disappear. The only way to stop that question from filling you with dread is to confront the gaps in your business head-on.

I hope this was helpful, if you would like more tangible business advice then you can find loads in my book How To Make Money - a guide on building your idea into a six-figure business. Available in hardback, paperback, on Kindle and audio.

Starting a business will teach you a lot about yourself. One of those things is your relationship with discomfort.

If you’re a people pleaser, business can feel especially tough. You find yourself giving too much, bending too far, and saying yes when you mean no. But in business, and in life, the person who gets what they want is often the one who’s least willing to be inconvenienced.

Whether it's in negotiations, navigating client expectations, or managing team dynamics, there’s a constant tension between compromise and conviction. The “win” doesn’t always go to the person with the best idea; it often goes to the one who simply refuses to budge.

This week, I’m sharing reflections on what it means to navigate that tension — the silent negotiations, the pressure to accommodate — and how learning when to yield and when to hold your position can shape both the outcomes you get and the person you become.

This came up for me recently. Well, not so recently (and that’s part of the problem). I did a talk for a brand. Afterwards, the organiser emailed the usual pleasantries and asked me to invoice, with the caveat to do so by December 2024.

It slipped my mind. Life happened. I ended up invoicing six months later, with an apology. My bad.

I got a reply telling me they couldn’t pay the invoice because it was outside of the company’s financial year, and that they could make a donation to a charity instead.

As someone who runs a business, I’m used to being paid late. We’ve waited up to eight months for payments from major clients. And I’m also used to people sending invoices late. It happens.

But this reply? It annoyed me. I could never imagine telling someone they won’t be paid for work they’ve already done just because of how our internal systems are set up. Especially not if we were a billion-dollar company.

To me, it was clear, this was going to be a test of who was more willing to be inconvenienced. And I had already decided it wasn’t going to be me.

I replied:

They responded with:

That would be me. I’m the president of our [internal employee group].

And they reiterated that I wouldn’t be paid, that finance couldn’t process it, and reminded me that they could make a donation instead.

Now, these internal diversity or employee groups are important. They build community and create visibility. But they’re often volunteer-led, with no decision-making power when it comes to finance. So I was confused by this pseudo "pulling rank" reply that I got, with the underlying message of “You’re not getting paid.”

I was irritated, not just because of the principle, but because of the tone.

I replied with:

This wasn’t the first time I’d learned that lesson. Years ago, while negotiating my book deadline, I was given timelines that felt completely unreasonable. I later found out those deadlines were being driven by someone’s upcoming maternity leave.

A friend of mine said something at the time that stuck with me:

“It’s not impossible. It’s just inconvenient.”

They were right. It was inconvenient for the team to include my book in a maternity cover handover doc. Inconvenient to shift internal timelines and find another editor. Inconvenient to make space for a schedule that centres the author. But it wasn’t impossible. And in that moment, I found my voice. I pushed back. I stood my ground, my publish date was moved back a year.

So, back to the invoice.

At this point, it was a choice between two outcomes:

Option 1. They get inconvenienced: their internal budgeting gets messy, but I get paid.
Option 2. I get inconvenienced: I walk away unpaid, but they get to donate to charity (and benefit from a tax write-off).

And honestly? Purely based on the tone of our exchange, I wasn’t letting this go. I had full conviction that I would be getting paid.

After 14 days of silence, I followed up on my previous email with:

On the same day, I got a response:
We’ve processed the payment.

No hello. No pleasantries.

Safe to say, they weren’t thrilled.
Safe to say, I was.

It confirmed what I’d known all along — it wasn’t impossible, just inconvenient. And from the start, this person didn’t think I was worth the inconvenience.

But this could have played out very differently.

If this was someone I wanted to build a relationship with, if they’d reached out with care, tried to find solutions or explained the situation in good faith, I might have responded differently. I might’ve said, “Totally understand — let’s chalk this up to a donation and call it a lesson learned.” Or, “Could we find a middle ground? Maybe 50% to charity, 50% to me.”

The default isn’t always standing your ground because, when you’re deciding who should be inconvenienced, the context, relationship, and long-term goals matter.

But that wasn’t the case here.

I knew we didn’t have a relationship to build with this company as they aren’t in an industry we work with. I also knew the person I was talking to wasn’t in a position that could lead us to future opportunities and, above all, I didn't want to build a relationship with this person. So, all in all, there wasn’t a future in this relationship that I felt I needed to be inconvenienced for.

So next time you find yourself in a sticky situation — whether it’s a negotiation, a missed opportunity, or a “no” that doesn’t sit right — ask yourself:

Is this actually impossible? Or just inconvenient for them?

And, more importantly, am I willing to be the one who gets inconvenienced?

If so, what’s the trade-off?

Because sometimes, the difference between not getting what you want and getting it is just who’s more willing to hold their ground.

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When’s the last time you played?

Like really played—not for productivity, not for personal development. Just play. No outcome, just joy.

As a kid, I was always in motion, playing sports, drawing, running in the park or riding my bike. Somewhere between growing up and growing responsibilities, we abandon the things that made us feel alive. Often it can be because we think we’re not “good” at them, they don’t make us money or because there’s just no time.

For a while, my work felt like play. We rented desks on Shoreditch High Street, on a floor called "The Playground." We’d mess around with other teams all day, share snacks, trade advice, and then spend the evenings catching up on all the serious work we didn’t do in the day. Some of my deepest friendships came from those days. But even then, it was all in the context of offices and work. Weekdays and weekends blurred. I didn’t make space to play outside of work.

I then took up Taekwondo as a way to have a sense of identity that wasn’t tied to work. Moving my body, learning something new, being around people who didn’t know me as “work Nafisa” felt like an escape. On friday nights I wasn’t Nafisa, CEO and co-founder, I was Nafisa, yellow belt in training trying to master kicking someone in the head. It was here I found my love for play.

As adults, play can feel indulgent, even irresponsible, like something we need to earn. When you’re in a busy work season, play can come with guilt because you’re not doing the 101 things on your to do list. But for me, play has become essential; it’s how I wind down, reconnect, and remember what life is really about.

And while this isn’t about productivity I do find that play also helps me show up better, it’s often during this time where my brain connects the dots on ideas I have been thinking about for weeks. It's where clarity often sneaks in the back door. And it’s backed by science—play reduces stress, improves brain function, supports creativity, and nurtures relationships.

But more than anything, it just feels good and that’s enough.

If you're feeling foggy, maybe it's not discipline you need. Maybe it’s play.

20 Ways to Play as an Adult

The thing about this list is… what feels like play to me might feel boring to you. So pick and choose. And let me know what you’d add! No goals, just joy — and often more fun when shared with others.

1. Go and play in the water

I started swimming last year and I have absolutely loved swimming in lakes. You don’t even need to be able to swim to enjoy it, many outdoor lakes and swim sites offer a tow float to rent or borrow and you can hold onto it and just swim along enjoying the lake views. Here are some I have visited:

• Divers Cove - gorgeous, with Sauna pods and a lil pizza place for a post swim bite

• Shepperton Lake - beautiful, with a coffee van too

• Royal Docks - not my fave when you’ve got the other views to compare, but if it’s local to you, it’s still worth a try

• Beckenham Place Park Lake - a small lake where I did my first open water swim, nestled in a lovely park

• Buckland Park Lake - yet to go but looks dreamy!

2. Parallel play—read or draw next to someone

Parallel play is what we used to do in nursery, sitting across the table from each other and just getting lost in our own worlds, occasionally coming up to show each other our progress and have a chat. I stayed over at my friends house and we ended the night reading our books, winding down, it felt so fun and cute to do an activity together that we both loved. You can do this with drawing, colouring, painting or anything really.

3. Go to FAIRGAME

I love Fairgame in Canary Wharf — an adult’s arcade. About £19 per person, you rotate through 8-ish games. Shooting, throwing and whacking things. All-you-can-play deals on weekdays. Perfect for groups or a playful date.

4. Play pool

Go a couple of pounds? Pop it into a pool table and play pool with a friend, I recently played with two other friends and we made up our own game and it was so fun.

Play should not be a luxury. But at this very moment there are children and adults in Gaza who are not able to play without a constant threat to life from the Israeli Occupation.

While we reflect on the joy and freedom of play, let’s not forget those who are being denied even the most basic safety. Please consider donating to Children Not Numbers - a charity on the ground, providing immediate aid and working towards sustainable solutions for the children of Gaza.

You can donate to their work here.

5. Sketch. Doodle. Draw like you're 10 again

I think people give up drawing because they don’t think they are good at it but you don’t have to be good at things to enjoy them. I have recently loved drawing and painting. Doodle away, look up references to copy or just fill the paper with as many designs as you can.

6. Take a trip to the seaside

Seaside towns are full of hidden joys, filled with cute alleys and corners to potter around, fish and chips on the beach and sand in the wrong places.

I recently visited Margate and enjoyed swimming in their tidal pool, afternoon tea at The Walpole, bowling and pool at Bugsy’s and fish and chips at Beach Buoys, it felt like a whole day of play and it was really fun, all just an hour and a half train away from London.

7. Games Night with friends

I adore having friends over and playing games, it is also such a good way for people to get to know each other without small talk. Having games night helped build a really cute community in my home and everyone also contributes with their own latest game they are loving. Some of my fave games to play are Code Names, Risk, Werewolves.

8. Get on a bike

I feel so free when I am on a bike with the breeze on me, I used to be on my bike all the time as a kid, my first real mode of transport. I am no longer one for road riding and so if you are like me you could go to Richmond Park where you can rent a bike, the views are beautiful, you might see some deers and you can stop to have a picnic by the water too if you fancy it.

9. Build Lego

I really love playing with Lego, building blocks, magnetic blocks and find I get lost in them because the possibilities really are endless. The Lego hub by this year’s Serpentine Pavilion has loads of Lego and a wall to play with. 10/10 would recommend, pre or post a walk around Hyde Park.

10. Visit an exhibition

Summer is when London comes alive and there are so many beautiful galleries and museums to potter around. If you fancy it, a National Art Pass also gets you free and reduced access to loads of places. One of my fave areas to go around is South Kensington because you can have a whole day of play across the museums and galleries, then head over to Hyde Park and end with some delicious food.

11. Arts & Crafts

The possibilities are endless here, go into a hobby craft or an arts shop and a whole world of play opens up, embroidery, clothes making, crocheting and painting.

I think painting deserves its own category to drawing and doodling. Painting is how you bring your doodles alive! I recently painted this for a friend and acted like I had been commissioned.

If you are really doubting your painting ability or are a bit stuck because of perfectionism, the Royal Horticultural Society has some really gorgeous painting by number kits.

12. Design something just for fun

Whether it is a top, a tote, packaging for a pretend brand (I told you our ideas of fun could be different). Designing the artwork for these newsletters is play for me! Creating on pro create, on a piece of paper or on canva can be a fun way to get in your design bag.

13. Do henna on yourself or a friend

Another medium that sits in the, you don’t have to be good at it to enjoy it. I started doing henna out of a want to have henna for Eid many years ago, and now I treat it as a way to slow down and just enjoy the process of drawing whatever I want on my hands. I especially love things like henna as it is near impossible to double screen while doing it and so you really just focus in your own little bubble.

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14. Make something with clay or playdough

I love buying a pack of playdough from a corner shop or a random bits and bobs store, or air dry clay, I have invited friends over before to just chill and make things with air dry clay. Our hands spend so much time holding phones and typing, it is a real welcome change to be able to mould and shape a bit of clay. TK Maxx often has air dry clay on sale there!

15. Ball games

My 8 yo nephew (aka a play expert) and I spent ages just throwing a ball back and forth, we ended up making our own games too and the other day we ended up playing football. Play has a way of freezing time and before you know it the sun is setting. Play doesn’t need to be extravagant, it can just be a tennis ball in the park being thrown back and forth or a basketball on a free court.

16. Swing on actual swings in a playground

If I ever visit a park with my niece and nephew or friends kids, I cannot help myself, I just have to get involved and it is always so much fun to play in a playground. If you are not blessed to have kids in your life I would still highly recommend going, perhaps in off peak hours just to give the kiddos a chance.

17. Play with kids (or let them teach you)

Kids are always sooo eager to play and will teach you how to, they are the experts. If you are blessed to have kiddos in your life sit and play with them!

18. South Bank art evenings

Southbank centre has loads of free creative workshops. Fom Dabke dance workshops to arts and craft evenings you can get together with other creative souls and generally for free!

19. Play video games

Okay not my way of play but Bonita in the newsletter chat said this is her go to! A way for her to lock in and unwind from work and kids, just uninterrupted play.

20. Watch nostalgic TV shows

I remember every Saturday sneaking out of bed earlier than my parents to go and watch Saturday morning TV. It was the biggest treat. Watch a fave show and the rule is - no double screening.

Hope you enjoy these ways to play and if you have ones to add to the list lemme know in the chat or in the comments!

I turned up to a dinner hosted in a restaurant's private room with 25 other CEOs. I say no to a lot of these events, but I have a lot of respect for the organiser and know he has a great network. I was also in what I like to call my ‘open season’, when I was more inclined to say yes to random things and see where serendipity took me. On the way there, I told myself, “This dinner is going to change my life.” I was feeling fed up with myself, yearning for change, and needing some guidance.

In the lead up to this feeling my personal life had been really tough, and while the business was doing well, it had come at a cost of spreading myself too thin and being in cycles of burnout. My co-founder had also left the business, which was a difficult experience, and I was, to put it lightly, deeply exhausted.

I’d been stuck in a constant loop of “should I stay or should I go” in my role as CEO of Amaliah — a role I’d been in for eight years by that point. I was struggling to know what my next move should be. It was a secret I could only whisper to my closest founder friends, often finding out that they were in the same boat. Many founders face this feeling at some point, but it feels risky to speak it out loud publicly. I understand the need for the secrecy and hushed tones because I can’t imagine my team feeling confident seeing me going around saying I think I want to leave! A founder-CEO leaving a business can have a huge impact, and I’m only speaking about it now because I’m on the other side of it.

But holding onto this feeling as a secret can lead to poor decision-making. No matter how much you try to mask your unhappiness, it filters through your work and your team. Burnout can happen because how you are living your life is not in alignment to where you truly want to be.

I knew I wanted something different but I stayed stuck.

The secret created a gap between how I showed up publicly and how I actually felt, and over time, that kind of split became unsustainable. It seeps into how you lead, what you prioritise, and how much of yourself you can even bring to the work. In trying to protect the business from uncertainty, I was hiding from doing the work to find clarity on how to move forward.

That night, I wanted to test out the version of me that had made a decision and found clarity, without the risk. I walked confidently into that dinner, wanting to be someone different, someone who knew what they wanted. I was tired of being a person who flip-flopped between decisions and I was done with the small business talk us founders often get trapped in to avoid the difficult conversations. It goes something like this:

“How’s business?”

“Yeah, good, just really busy but good. How about you?”

“Yeah, good, just working on some new features which we are really excited to get out.”

And both leave the conversation carrying the same heavy load they arrived with, when instead, they could have shared their challenges and tried to help solve each other’s problems. It often happens because people want to keep up appearances; everyone around them looks like they’re killing it, and admitting you're struggling can feel uncomfortably close to failure.

At the dinner someone asked me, the inevitable, “How’s the business?”

I paused. Then, I lied: “I’m thinking of selling it, actually.”

I forced my hand.

I had listened to a podcast where a therapist narrated a story about a couple who were deeply unhappy. They were regularly attending sessions, but nothing was being resolved. The therapist broke typical protocol of not giving advice and said, “I think you should get a divorce.” The couple were shocked, offended even. How could she say that? The therapist explained that they’d both been stuck in an endless cycle and a place of stagnation and by making that decision for them — a decision she didn’t actually believe in — forced them to confront what they actually want, it showed them how to operate as a unit vs her, the therapist.

When you’re stuck in endless, sometimes incredibly boring, cycles, you need to be forced to make a decision. To move. Or you risk staying trapped in limbo, endlessly talking but never changing. And for people like us, being in a place of stagnation eats away at our souls.

Sometimes we make a decision not because that's what we truly want, but because we want change. The key is knowing what change we actually want, because otherwise it can lead to bad decisions, bad marriages, bad jobs, bad financial decisions and irresponsible risks. All because we want to get out of a cycle, want something new and different, and it doesn’t matter if that change is bad for us, as long as it is different.

That night, I wanted to indulge in a possibility I hadn’t truly allowed myself to explore because I was stuck. And while I was afraid of making a “bad decision”, sometimes the worst decision you can make is not making one at all. Because stagnation, doing nothing, is still a decision. And it can quietly erode your energy, your hope, and your joy. While I know I have the ability to make good decisions, I had been afraid that my tiredness would lead to making bad decisions, and that fear kept me from creating change.

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That conversation, while we tucked into our starters, sparked something. The CEO I was sitting next to introduced me to another guy a couple of tables across, who had recently sold his business. We talked, and I gave him the headline stats of where I was at. He offered me some words of advice, and I left feeling hopeful that change was coming. I followed up with both of them and had more conversations about where I was at, and through those conversations, I started to see my business and myself in a new light.

Talking to people who could see things from the outside gave me perspective. It became clear there was more value in me staying than in walking away, for both the company and me. I realised I didn’t actually want out. I wanted out of the version of the business that was burning me out. I was trying to escape the fatigue and the sense of being stuck but I wasn’t actually done with the mission, the vision or the impact. What I was craving was change, not an exit.

I’d been trying to run from problems that needed solving, not because they were unsolvable, but because I was too tired to face them. But the truth is, solving them would make the business stronger and my day-to-day life easier. Whether I stayed or eventually sold, fixing those issues was non-negotiable. That clarity shifted everything.

It gave me a perspective shift, and I realised I didn’t want to sell. I wanted to stay.

Sometimes, the answers come when we name what we want out loud, even if they’re not yet true.

I find clarity when I name my problems and I run towards them. Tackling them reduces overwhelm and gives me hope. You come out of stagnation and find solutions and momentum.

One of the questions that helped was:

Are you trying to escape from something, or are you trying to go towards something else?

Whether you have a business or not, it is a valuable question: Are you moving towards something, or are you trying to leave something behind? Both answers can show you what you really want and desire, what change you are looking for.

On the window in front of my desk, I have a note that says: Always talk to people when you don’t know your next move. It’s a hugely de-risked way to make good decisions. Conversations help us coach ourselves, try out possibilities, and most importantly, make decisions rooted in honesty with ourselves.

If you’re feeling stuck in your own “should I stay or should I go” moment, you don’t have to have it all figured out right now. Allow yourself to explore, to speak your fears and hopes aloud, and to lean on others for support.

Because the path forward is often less about making big leaps and more about taking small steps, honest conversations, gentle self-reflection, and brave decisions to keep going, even when you don’t yet know exactly where you’re headed.

If you have any feedback, thoughts or comments, I would love to hear from you. And if there’s a decision you feel stuck on and would like to share, just hit reply.

I’m obsessed with starting things.

Something powerful happens on the other side of starting. When you start something new, you catch a glimpse of a different version of yourself. You open a door to new people, new knowledge, and new experiences. You silence the small voice in your head that says you can’t, and prove to yourself that you can.

And you become.

Maybe that’s what I’m really obsessed with — the idea of becoming. Becoming the best version of myself. Unlocking what’s buried within. Exploring new worlds.

In every beginning, there’s a quiet promise: a chance to transform.

All around us, people are trying to become something — sometimes consciously, sometimes without even realising it. The pursuit is everywhere. In business. In sport. In creative work. In relationships. In faith. We start, we stumble, we begin again. We chase a version of ourselves that’s just out of reach, and every now and then, we get closer.

Every day, people are striving to become:
Rich / Disciplined / Free / God-conscious / Fit / Powerful / Comfortable / Famous / Loved / Smarter / Accomplished / An Iron(wo)man / A Champion / A Better Parent / Less Afraid / More Alive.

Some people pursue these things intentionally, with purpose and clarity. Others drift toward them, unaware of what they’re becoming. And too often, I’ve found that those who drift carry a quiet grief, a grief for the person they haven’t become.

This newsletter is for people who want more for themselves.
Those who believe they have more to give, more to unlock, more to become.

In each edition, I’ll explore different topics like:

💸 The Night I Wanted to Sell the Business — How to make decisions when you’re stuck
🪦 Unfinished Business — What’s death got to do with business?
💅🏽 How to Get What You Want — The battle of being inconvenienced
✨ Rules for a Great Week — On digging yourself out of a rut

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I’d also love to hear what you want to read about. Hit reply and tell me what you want to start, whether it’s a business, a hobby, a creative project. I may also interview people about their beginnings along the way.

To understand what this newsletter will offer, it may help to understand me first.

I warn you, this part makes me feel a bit queasy, but I recognise that credentials matter when there are so many newsletters out there. I truly hope you stick around for this one to unfold.

My life over the last decade has been underpinned by a craving for:

• Business and creativity

• Play and adventure

You’ll like it here if you want more from both work and play.

Nearly 10 years ago, I co-founded an award-winning media company, Amaliah, which has grown into the leading media platform for Muslim women in the UK and beyond. What started with £50 and a huge amount of naivety turned into something I could never have imagined. It became my full-time, overtime, all-the-time job.

As CEO, I work across strategy, sales, partnerships and creative. Amaliah has worked with brands like Spotify, Lush, Maltesers, Universal, eBay, Dove and Sainsbury’s, and built a beautiful a community that reaches over 7.2 million each month. All of our work centers Muslim women, from our articles, our socials, partnerships and our events. We’ve been celebrated by the BBC, TechCrunch, CNBC, CNN, The Guardian, Sifted and Forbes, to name a few. On some days, I am closing partnerships with clients; on others, I’m ideating with the team or directing a shoot.

I’ve spoken to audiences of thousands about business and creativity for Apple, Netflix, Channel 4, BBC, Google, YouTube, NatWest, Vans, Spotify and TOMS. My work and ideas have been recognised by Forbes 30 Under 30, Ad Age Women to Watch Europe, Evening Standard Progress 1000, and the Great British Entrepreneur Awards.

I’ve mentored hundreds of founders and served on the boards of EY Foundation and Free Word, advised fintech startup Algbra, and sat on committees for Soho House and The Garden Museum. I’ve written for Ad Age, Campaign Magazine, The Independent, and Forbes, and I’m a contributing author in It’s Not About the Burqa, published by Picador.

Through it all, I’ve shared candidly about the intersections of business, creativity and growth. This also led me to write a business book with HarperCollins called How to Make Money, an honest guide to taking an idea into a six-figure business. It’s the cheat sheet I wish I had when I was starting out as a founder with no network, experience, or capital. Some chapters are practical, like what to do in the first 100 days, how to hire when you’re broke, and a 101 on raising investment. Others are deeper reflections on business culture, like the myth of impostor syndrome, how to hold onto your values, and what to do when you're burnt out.

While much of my life has been defined by being a CEO, speaker and author, I’ve also spent time on pursuits that don’t make it onto LinkedIn, including pottery, taekwondo, travelling, painting, surfing, henna, hosting friends, writing, and more recently, training for a half Ironman and learning Arabic.

In all my pursuits of becoming, I’ve always tried to encourage others. Whether on Instagram or LinkedIn, I’ve shared honest reflections and little nudges to help others believe they can start too.

This newsletter is an extension of that. I write for people who want more for themselves and who are curious about the next version of who they could be.

Some days, I’ll talk about business. Other days, about play. And always, about the shared, deeply human pursuit of more — for ourselves, our lives, our work, and our inner worlds. Whether in business, creativity, sport, or faith, we are all in the process of becoming.

If you’ve ever felt the urge to stretch, to try, to evolve,
I think you might like it here.

The central question I would love to leave you with is:
What are you becoming, and why?

Welcome to The Other Side of Starting.

Nafisa Bakkar