I am one of them. But I want to make a slightly different argument before I tell you what I am doing, because most of these posts will not survive October.

Here it is.

If you use the last four months of this year properly, you do not need to start over in January.

That is the whole thing. That is why this matters more than a new year resolution ever will.

Why January is the wrong starting line

Every January the same thing happens. People write down goals with real conviction, and by the middle of February most of it is gone. Not because they were not serious. Because January asks you to start from nothing, in the coldest, most expensive, most tired month of the year, immediately after two weeks of doing very little.

You are being asked to build momentum from a standing start.

September is the opposite. You are already moving. You are back at work, the routine has returned, the year has structure again. Starting now means you are adding to something rather than beginning from zero.

And here is the part I actually care about.

If you lock in now and hold it for four months, January is not a reset. It is week eighteen.

You walk into next year already in motion, with proof behind you, instead of standing at the bottom of the hill making promises again.

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I did this in July and it worked

I am not saying this from the enthusiasm of day one. I did this eight weeks ago.

On the first of July I decided to post consistently. That was it. No clever plan. In July I managed about thirty five posts and some days I had to double up because I had missed the day before. In August I posted every single day without exception.

Since then I have gained over one thousand, one hundred new followers. One video did fifty seven thousand views, twenty nine hundred saves and twenty six hundred comments, and it was still climbing two weeks after I posted it.

None of that came from a clever hack. It came from deciding one thing and then doing it on the days I did not want to.

Which is why I know four months is enough time for something real to happen. Eight weeks already changed my numbers. Four months will change more.

What I am locking in on

Four things. I am writing them here so you can hold me to them in December.

One: Ten people into jobs

The Twelve Week Career Accelerator runs October to December. Ten places, twelve weeks, application only.

I piloted it privately from June with two people using the same structure. One of them accepted a Project Coordinator offer with a global health tech and clinical research company, at exactly the twelve week mark.

That is why I am opening it up rather than sitting on it.

The structure is four blocks. Application first, where the CV and profile get rebuilt against real postings and applications actually go out. Then interview, which gets five weeks because it is where most people lose the offer. Then negotiation and the decision, including which offers to decline. Then passing probation, because landing the job is not the finish line and almost nobody prepares for the first ninety days.

Ten people, properly, with real outcomes I can point at in January. Not a hundred people and a certificate.

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Two: Twenty thousand on both platforms, and YouTube monetised by December

Twenty thousand on Instagram and twenty thousand on TikTok by the end of December.

I will be honest that the Instagram number is aggressive. I am at eight thousand, six hundred, so that is a serious jump in four months and I might not get there. I am writing it down anyway, because a target you are certain of is not a target, it is a schedule.

I am also starting YouTube this month, and I want it monetised before the thirty first of December.

That means a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch hours and I am giving myself four months. Starting from nothing. In the busiest quarter of my year.

I have been putting YouTube off for about a year because long form is a different discipline and I did not feel ready. I have decided ready is not a real thing. The first videos will not be very good. They will exist, and the tenth one will be better because the first one happened.

The reason all of this matters is not vanity. Every additional person is somebody who might see one video about fixing their CV and get an interview out of it. The audience is not the goal. The audience is the distribution.

Three: My fitness

This is the one I have been very quiet about, and I have decided that is exactly why it belongs on the list.

I have lost a significant amount of weight over the last two years. I have not reached my goal, and honestly I have stalled. Stalled is not the same as stopped, but it is not the same as progress either.

The pattern I have noticed is that it is the first thing to go when everything else gets busy. Every launch, every deadline, every heavy month, this is the one that quietly falls off. So putting it in public alongside the professional goals is deliberate. It is the only way it gets treated as seriously as the others.

Four: Savings

A specific savings target by the thirty first of December.

Not because the number is impressive, but because I moved countries this year and started from zero. No credit history, no furniture, no safety net underneath me. Building from that position in a new country is its own project and it deserves to be treated like one rather than something that happens by accident.

Four months of deliberate saving now means I go into next year with a floor under me rather than starting the conversation again in January.

How to actually do this

Four things I have learned, none of them complicated.

Pick fewer than you want to: I have four and that is already at the edge. If you write down nine, you have written down none.

Make each one specific enough to fail: Get fitter is not a goal. A number with a date attached makes it SMART, and that is what makes it real.

Write it somewhere you will see again: Not a note you will never reopen. Somewhere you will be forced to look at it monthly and then finally in December.

Expect week seven: Every single time I have committed to something, week seven is where it gets hard and boring and nothing visible is happening yet. That is not the sign to stop. That is usually the point just before it starts working.

Your turn

Tell me what you are locking in on for the last four months of this year.

Write it in the comments. Not privately, not in your head, not in an app you will not open again. Here, where you and I can both find it.

Then come back to this post on the thirty first of December and read your own comment.

I will be doing exactly the same with mine.

Because the thing about locking in now, rather than in January, is that by the time everybody else is writing their resolutions, you will already be four months in.

And you will not need to start over.

The Twelve Week Career Accelerator runs October to December. Ten places, application only, and it is the thing I am putting most of my own energy into this quarter. Details are in my bio if that is what you are locking in on too.

If you are working through your own career move and want someone to look at it with you, I run one to one sessions. Link is in my bio.

And if you are not sure whether a session is the right thing, send me an email instead. I read every one.

Ninety seconds is not enough to answer that question. So here is the full version, including the week I spent doing nothing that looked like progress, and the roadmap I would follow if I had to do it again from the beginning.

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THE THING NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT A PROFILE

Your CV only works when you send it.

Your profile works when you are not in the room. When someone is deciding, at eleven at night, whether to move you forward. When a recruiter you have never spoken to is looking you up before a call. When someone in a hiring meeting says, “let me just check” and opens a tab.

You are not there for any of that. Whatever is on the page is arguing your case alone, and it is arguing it against everyone else who applied.

I did not fully understand this until it happened to me.

THE WEEK I DID NOT APPLY TO ANYTHING

Before I sent a single application, I spent about a week reading job postings.

Not looking for roles. Reading them the way you read a stack of documents when you are trying to find the pattern.

It felt like procrastinating. It felt like I should have been applying.

But I was going into a market I had never worked in, from a country where the conventions are different, and I had no reference point for what good looked like. Applying that week would have meant applying as the wrong person.

Three things came out of that week that changed everything after it.

One: The postings were more specific than I expected. Several of them, after I had already submitted a CV, came back with additional questions. Tell us about a product you have built. Walk us through how you approached this. That is not how it works everywhere, and if you are not expecting it you are writing those answers under time pressure with nothing prepared.

Two: Different industries wanted different things. Same job title, different sector, genuinely different emphasis. What one asked me to evidence was not what another cared about at all.

Three: My profile described the wrong version of me. My profile described work in a completely different sector to the one I was applying into. A recruiter scanning for eleven seconds sees that and moves on, because eleven seconds is not long enough to work out that the underlying work transfers.

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WHAT I ACTUALLY CHANGED

I rewrote how I described my experience using the language I had just spent a week reading.

Nothing was invented. Not one line. The work was the same work, and every claim was still true. What changed was which parts I led with, and what I called them.

That distinction matters, because when people hear tailor your profile they hear exaggerate. It is not that.

Backlog grooming and backlog refinement are the same ceremony, it just got renamed. A PRD, a product spec and a requirements document are the same document with three different names.

If the posting says one and your profile says the other, you have described identical work in the wrong dialect. To a person skimming you look like a near miss. To a system doing a first pass you might not register at all.

Same experience. Their vocabulary.

AND THEN THE THING HAPPENED

I was interviewing with a Fortune 500 company.

Partway through, the recruiter told me he had gone through my CV, then gone through my LinkedIn, and found that I had run an AI workshop at Baker Hughes. I had been invited by their Black Engineers Network to teach people how to actually use AI in their day-to-day work.

He said that was what made him certain I was right for the position.

Not my application. Not anything I sent him. A line sitting on a profile I had rebuilt weeks earlier, which he found on his own, and read back to me in the room.

I had put it there deliberately. I had also nearly not bothered, because it was not part of my job title and it felt like a side thing.

That is the part I want you to take.

The line that got me through was not my job history. It was the thing I almost left off.

THE ROADMAP

If I had to do this again from zero, this is the order. It is not the order most people do it in, and that is the point.

PHASE 1 - NARROW, BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE

Pick a salary band and a sector. Write both down.

Not product management broadly. Not whatever will have me. A specific band, in a specific industry.

This feels like closing doors. It is the opposite. You cannot study a market you have not defined, and you cannot tailor for forty different targets.

Output: one sentence describing exactly what you are going after.

PHASE 2 - READ, DO NOT APPLY

Pull up every posting that matches. Twenty is plenty. Read them as a set.

You are not looking at responsibilities. Those are broadly identical everywhere. You are looking for language. Which words repeat. What they call things. What they ask you to evidence that nobody asked you for before.

Note what changes between industries. Same title, different sector, different emphasis.

Output: a list of the words that keep appearing, and the questions that keep being asked.

PHASE 3 - TRANSLATE

Now go back to your own profile.

Every line that describes a responsibility, rewrite it as something that happened. Every term that means the same as theirs but is worded differently, use theirs.

Then look for what is missing. The workshop. The talk. The thing you built that was not in your job description. The volunteer role. Most people leave these off because they do not feel official.

Output: rewritten headline, rewritten summary, three rewritten bullets, and one thing added back that you had left off.

PHASE 4 - PREPARE THE ANSWERS BEFORE YOU NEED THEM

You already know from phase 2 what they are going to ask. Tell us about a product you built. Walk us through how you approached this.

Write those answers now, calmly, while nothing is at stake. You will reuse them across every application.

Output: four to six prepared answers to the questions you saw repeatedly.

PHASE 5 - APPLY ON DAY ONE

Only search when you are ready to apply. Do not browse. Do not save jobs for later.

A saved job is a job somebody else applied to on day one. You want to be in the first thirty people a recruiter opens, not the first three hundred.

Output: applications submitted the same day the posting appears.

PHASE 6 - TRACK EVERYTHING

Every role, every date, every stage, added after you apply and not before.

When several processes are live at once, the thing that loses you an offer is not being unqualified. It is losing track of who asked you for what.

Output: one tracker, kept current.

WHAT THIS ACTUALLY COSTS

The first two phases take about a week and produce nothing you can point at. No applications sent. No progress visible to anyone watching.

Then everything after them moves faster, because you are applying as the right person, in the right language, with your answers already written.

The week is not the delay. The week is the work.

THE PROMPT

If you want the exact prompt I use to audit a profile against a specific job description, including the follow up questions that surface what you have left off, it is here.

Run it against a real posting. Not in general. A profile is not strong or weak on its own, it is aligned with a role, or it is not and reviewing it without a target job produces exactly the generic advice you were trying to escape.

ONE LAST THING

I keep thinking about the fact that I nearly did not put the workshop on there.

It was not a job. Nobody paid me for it. It did not sit under any of my titles. By every measure I was using at the time to decide what counted, it did not count.

It is the reason a recruiter at a Fortune 500 company decided I was the right person before he had spoken to me.

Go and look at what you left off.

If you are working through your own search right now and you want someone to look at it with you, I run one to one session. The link is in my bio.

And if you are not sure whether a session is even the right thing, send me an email instead. I read every one.

Before that, she had never held a product job. Not one. Every role on her CV was project management, and every product role she looked at wanted product experience she did not have.

That is the loop most people get stuck in, and it is worth saying plainly that it is a real loop and not a confidence problem. You cannot get product experience without a product job, and you cannot get a product job without product experience.

Here is how she got out of it, in the order it actually happened.

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IT STARTED BECAUSE SHE WATCHED SOMEONE ELSE DO IT

We had been working together for a while, and we were targeting project management roles. That was the plan and it was a reasonable plan.

Then I moved into a senior product role in the civil service, and she started asking a different set of questions. In one of our sessions, she asked me what a Product Manager does differently from a Project Manager and how could she translate what she already does into product.

I want to be honest about this part, because it is not a strategy you can put in a framework. She changed direction because she watched someone she knew do the thing, and it stopped being abstract.

That is most of what mentoring actually is. Not advice. Proximity to someone one step ahead of you.

SHE ASKED FOR A VOLUNTEER ROLE

This is the decision the whole thing hangs on.

She did not apply for product jobs and hope. She did not enroll on a course. She came to me and asked about volunteering, because she had worked out that the fastest way to have product experience was to go and get some, in whatever form was actually available to her.

One of the things we do in the Ascendia community is post volunteer opportunities when our partner companies open them up. She took one, and she did it alongside the job she already had.

She ended up managing a digital product end to end which changed what she was applying for.

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Now she had real product experience, and it was genuinely real. She had owned something from one end to the other.

But it was voluntary. Which meant that on paper, against a posting asking for three to five years, she was still going to look light.

So, we stopped targeting product manager roles and started targeting Associate Product Manager roles instead.

That is the second decision, and most people never make it, because associate reads like a step down. If you already have years behind you in another function, applying to something called associate feels like going backwards.

The title resets. Your capability does not.

Everything she knew about delivery, stakeholders and how work actually gets done in a large organization came with her. That is exactly what separates a career switcher from a graduate applying for the same role, and it is why she got it.

WHAT AN APM ROLE ACTUALLY IS

It is the entry level version of the product manager role. It exists specifically for people who are new to product.

There are two kinds and it helps to know the difference.

The rotational programmes at Google, Meta, LinkedIn and Uber. One to two years, rotations across different product areas, formal training, a mentor and a cohort going through it with you. These are excellent and they are extremely competitive. Google receives around twelve thousand applications for roughly fifty places worldwide. Application windows are narrow, often open and closed within two weeks, so set alerts rather than checking.

Then there is the second kind, which is simply the job title. Associate Product Manager at government departments, banks, healthcare, retail, insurance, logistics and startups. Same work, structured support, a fraction of the applicants.

That is where most people actually get in.

And people do not stay in these roles long. One to two years is typical before the associate comes off the title.

WHAT TO PUT IN YOUR SAVED SEARCHES

These are the same role under different names, and if you are only searching one of them you are missing most of the market.

• Associate Product Manager

• APM

• Junior Product Manager

• Product Manager I

• Product Analyst

• Associate Product Owner

• Product Manager, Early Career.

YOU HAVE MORE OF THIS THAN YOU THINK

The reason people believe they have no product experience is usually that they are calling it by the name their current industry uses.

Project and programme management: Managing scope and timelines is roadmap planning. Running sprints is agile delivery and backlog refinement. Managing competing stakeholders is cross functional alignment. Your gap is usually discovery and user research, so address it rather than hoping nobody asks.

Business analysis: Requirements gathering is discovery and problem definition. Writing specifications is user stories and acceptance criteria. Process mapping is journey mapping. You are the closest function to product, and your gap is usually owning an outcome rather than documenting one.

Marketing: Campaign analysis is experimentation. Segmentation is user research. Launch planning is go to market. Your advantage is that you understand the customer better than most product managers do, so lead with it.

Customer success and support: Handling escalations is identifying and prioritizing user pain points. Feeding issues back is discovery input. You have direct evidence of what users struggle with, which most candidates do not. Quantify it.

Operations: Improving a process is shipping a fix. Building internal tools is internal product ownership. Operations people undersell themselves more consistently than anyone else I work with. Fixing a broken process is product work.

WHAT THEY ARE ACTUALLY SCREENING FOR

Most APM roles accept any degree. Technical background helps; it is not required.

What they want is one example, described properly, where you noticed a problem, worked out why it was happening, decided what to do, did it, and knew whether it worked.

That is the whole thing. It does not have to have happened at a technology company, and it does not have to have been your job.

Which is precisely why the volunteer route works.

THE BIT I KEEP THINKING ABOUT

She did not wait for permission.

She could have spent a year applying to product roles and getting nothing, which is what most people in that loop do. Instead, she found the smallest available piece of real product work, took it unpaid, and did it properly.

Then she applied to the level that matched what she actually had, instead of the level she felt she ought to be at.

Two decisions. Neither of them required anybody to give her anything.

THE CV CLINIC

Saturday 22 August · 3pm EDT · 8pm UK

I am running a session on exactly how to position your existing experience for these roles. Real examples, the rewrite in full, and questions.

It is free for Ascendia lifetime community members. You can join here:

https://ascendia.org.uk/lifetime

If you are working through your own search and want someone to look at it with you, I run one to one sessions. The link is in my bio.

And if you are not sure whether a session is even the right thing, send me an email instead. I read every one.

So here is the full version. Five decisions that looked wrong from the outside and turned out to be exactly right. Not advice. Just what I did, and what I would do again.

One. I walked away from my entire education.

In Nigeria, when you apply for a course at university and you do not meet the cut-off mark for what you wanted but still performed high enough for another course, you get offered something else. I wanted to do nursing. I was given chemistry instead.

I did it anyway. I was not sure what I would do with it, but I did it.

Then I came to the UK to do a master’s in public health. This was just after COVID had hit the world, and I genuinely thought healthcare was where I needed to be.

I started the programme. And fairly quickly I had a realisation. I might not actually work directly in public health.

But realisation does not always mean exit. I still volunteered in public health roles while doing the master’s. I reached out to local councils, applied for opportunities, showed up. The problem was not the passion. It was the reality. There were not many seats in public health within the UK, and I could see the ceiling forming before I had even started.

So while working as a healthcare support worker, I started working toward landing a project management role. And this was not a complete reinvention because I had been working professionally in Nigeria before I moved to the UK. I had transferable skills and transferable experience. The pivot was a redirect, not a restart.

Project management came first. Then product management. And honestly, I had been doing product-related work for a while before I even knew that was what it was called. A mix of volunteering and stepping into product-adjacent roles had already been shaping me without me having a name for it.

Now, did chemistry teach me to think? Honestly? I just really wanted to graduate. But public health genuinely did. I had a module on change management. One on leadership. One on health promotion. Those modules shaped how I worked in the NHS. The difference between transformational and transactional leadership, I still use that today.

People treated the education as wasted. It was not wasted. It just pointed somewhere I did not expect.

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Two. I worked for free. On purpose. For a long time.

This was not one moment. It was a pattern across my whole career.

When I wanted to move into project management I had no project management experience. Nobody was going to hire me for a role I had never done. So I started finding ways to do the work before anyone was paying me for it.

I volunteered online. I talked to people in my network who had their own startups and I asked them what their project managers and product managers actually did day to day. Not the job description. What does Tuesday morning actually look like.

And then I just started doing that work. For free. Building up the experience that would eventually let me say in an interview, I have done this before.

When I wanted to move into product management specifically I was doing the same thing. Talking to product managers, learning from people already in the roles, volunteering my time and my thinking.

There was no single moment where someone took a chance on me. It was all the small things adding up. All the work I had done without being asked. All the conversations. All the time I had given before anyone gave me anything back.

Nobody hands you experience. You go and get it.

Three. I job hopped. And I would do it again.

Some people thought I was moving too fast. Not staying long enough.

Here is what I learned. If you join a company at a low level, that is often how they will always see you. It is genuinely hard for an organisation to change how they think about you, even when you have grown. The person who joined as a coordinator will fight to be seen as a director in the same place, even if she has become one in everything that matters.

Job hopping resets that.

Every time I moved I moved into a role that reflected where I actually was, not where someone had originally placed me. The market sees you fresh. You get evaluated on who you are now.

I moved at points when people said it was not the right moment. I moved anyway. It worked every single time.

If you are sitting somewhere that has stopped valuing your growth, as long as you’re strategic and you do your reaserch properly, the market will value you better than they will.

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Four. I built in public before there was anything impressive to show.

People think building in public is something you do once you have arrived. Once you have the title and the outcomes worth talking about.

I started when I had none of that.

When I moved from healthcare support worker to project support officer in the NHS, that was when I started creating content. I started talking about how to get jobs in the NHS. What the application process looked like. What I was learning in real time.

I even wrote an NHS job application guide. It has been free since I wrote it and it is still free now. It got over ten thousand downloads. People got jobs because of it. And I wrote it when I was still very much figuring things out myself.

That taught me something I have not forgotten. You do not need to be at the top to be useful. You just need to be honest about where you are and what you know.

I have been bringing people along ever since. From that very first role. Through every pivot. Through the Canada move. The audience I have now did not come from the impressive moments. It came from the honest ones.

Build in public before you feel ready. That is when it counts the most.

Five. I stay in the job market even when I am not looking.

This is the one that surprises people most.

I passively interview for jobs. I take the call. I go through the process. Not because I am planning to leave anywhere, but because of what interviewing from a place of security actually does for you.

When you are not desperate you show up differently. You are not managing anxiety. You are just having a conversation about your work. The process becomes useful data instead of high stakes survival. And imposter syndrome has a much harder time getting to you when the evidence is right there in front of you.

But the other thing nobody talks about enough is the network.

I have gotten opportunities from processes I did not even complete. Recruiters who reached out months later because someone on their team was hiring and they thought of me. Connections made during interview processes that became real doors.

If you do not go to networking events much, interviewing is networking. With people who are actively hiring. At a level of specificity no event can match.

This is something I have been doing for a while and I plan to keep doing. Stay in the market even when you are settled. It keeps you sharp. It keeps you honest about where you stand. And it means when you do want to move, you are never starting from zero.

None of these felt like the obvious call at the time. The pivot looked like waste. The working for free looked naive. The job hopping looked unstable. The early content looked like oversharing. The passive job searching looks like disloyalty.

From the inside they just felt like the only honest options.

I would make every single one of them again.

If one of these resonated, reply and tell me which one. I read every response.

If you want to work through a career decision you are sitting with, the link to book a session with me is in my bio.

I am also hosting a CV Clinic on Saturday August 22nd at 8PM BST, 3PM EDT. It is free for everyone in the Ascendia community. Click HERE to join the community.

Omon

Not a small update. A full change of identity. New name. New narrative. New everything.

I found out the morning I was reviewing my slides.

The organisation had been going through a significant relaunch. I knew this. What I did not know was that the relaunch would happen in the days immediately before my presentation. The product had just become something new, with a new name, a new identity, and a team that had been working around the clock to make it happen.

Most candidates would have stuck to the original preparation. Safe. Predictable. Exactly what everyone else would do.

I made a different call.

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The moment before the presentation started

Before I launched into the case study I asked Ava, not her real name, the hiring manager, a question.

How did the relaunch go for the team?

It was a simple question. But it changed the entire atmosphere of the room.

She lit up. The team had worked enormously hard on the relaunch and here was a candidate who not only knew it had happened but was genuinely curious about how it had landed. We talked about it for several minutes before I even opened my slides. By the time I started the actual case study we were already in conversation rather than evaluation mode.

That shift matters more than most people realise. The best interviews do not feel like interviews. They feel like conversations between peers. Getting there before you have said a single word about your qualifications is a significant advantage.

The research that made that moment possible came from me being curious. I had been monitoring the organisation closely in the days before the presentation. I found the relaunch announcement the morning before my session, before most people outside the organisation had registered it. I entered that call ready.

The case study itself

The brief I had been given was around personalisation. How do you build a personalisation strategy for a product that serves millions of customers with different needs, different behaviours, and different definitions of value?

I had spent weeks preparing a thorough response. The framework. The data approach. The segmentation logic. The implementation roadmap.

But the slide that the panel kept coming back to was not any of those.

It was the slide about what went wrong.

The slide nobody else had

I built a slide specifically about the mistakes I had made on a previous personalisation project. What I had assumed that turned out to be incorrect. What I would do differently now. What I know as a result of having lived through the failure.

Ava told me afterwards that most candidates come to case study presentations to show everything they did right. They present the wins. They present the outcomes. They present the version of themselves that never made a mistake.

She said that slide was one of the most memorable things any candidate had brought into that room.

Here is why I think it worked.

Product management is fundamentally about judgment under uncertainty. You will make decisions with incomplete information. Some of them will be wrong. What separates a good PM from a great one is not the absence of mistakes. It is what you do with them. Whether you extract learning from failure or bury it.

Showing that slide was a signal. Not of weakness. Of maturity. Of self-awareness. Of the kind of professional honesty that makes people trust you with significant decisions.

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The framework, if you want to take it into your next room

This is not just for people applying to PM roles. It is for anyone walking into a high-stakes presentation or a final round. Here is everything in one place.

Before the interview: research until the morning of. Not a week before. The morning of. Companies make announcements. Products evolve. Industries shift. The candidate who knows what changed yesterday signals a different level of engagement than the one who stopped paying attention after the first call.

In the room, before you start: find the human before the professional. Ask about something that matters to them. The relaunch. The recent win. The thing the team has been living inside for months. Make it genuine, because people can tell. The best interviews feel like conversations between peers, and you create that before you open a single slide.

Inside the presentation: include the failure. There is a slide you are not building because it feels risky. The project that did not go as planned. The assumption that turned out to be wrong. The decision you would make differently now. Build that slide. Most candidates edit it out, which is exactly why it is the most differentiating thing you can bring into a room full of people who all look good on paper.

The preparation itself: use AI as a thinking partner, not a writer. I built this case study with Claude, but never to write the slides. I would present a section and ask where the gaps were. What would a sceptical panel member challenge here? What am I not accounting for? The interrogation before the room made the real interrogation in the room much more manageable.

What happened next

Multiple offers came out of that period. I accepted the one from the organisation where Ava was the hiring manager.

The work I built that case study around is the work I do every day. The preparation was not the reason I got the role. It was the reason I got to show who I actually am.

That is the whole point of preparation. Not to perform someone you are not. To create the conditions where who you actually are gets to come through clearly.

If this issue helped you, forward it to one person who has a final round coming up. That is the most useful thing you can do with it.

If you want to work through your interview preparation or case study one to one, the link to book a session with me is in my bio.

Omon

I have not always had a healthy relationship with money.

I have been stranded before. I have felt that specific kind of panic where you check your account and the number looking back at you does not match the life you are trying to live. I have let money control me in ways I did not even fully realise until I was already in it. Spending to feel something. Avoiding the numbers because looking felt worse than not knowing. Pouring everything into my career, my ambition, my vision for my professional life, and treating my personal finances like a problem I would sort out later.

Later kept moving.

I think a lot of us do this. We get disciplined in one area and completely neglect another. We build careers and let savings accounts sit empty. We invest in skills and let credit scores drift. We are focused and intentional in so many parts of life and then somehow oblivious to the fact that money is quietly running things in the background whether we are paying attention or not.

What shifted for me was not a budget spreadsheet. It was a deeper understanding of stewardship. The idea that money is not just a practical matter but a spiritual one. That how I manage what I have been given is part of how I show up. That discipline with money is an extension of the same discipline I bring to everything else I care about. That building a financial life that future me would be grateful for is not just smart. It is a form of faithfulness.

I am not perfect at this. Not even close. But I am intentional now in a way I was not before. And that is what this newsletter is going to document.

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So why start from zero?

When I landed in Canada a few weeks ago I made a deliberate decision to treat everything as if I was starting from zero.

No credit history here. No investment accounts. No financial infrastructure of any kind. Just me, a new country, and a blank page.

Not because I had to. Because I think there is something powerful about documenting the actual first steps as they happen rather than looking back on them from a comfortable distance. About being honest that this is new territory for me too. About showing up for the process rather than waiting until everything is figured out to talk about it.

Whatever country you are in, whatever your starting point, the steps are the same. And I would rather share them in real time than pretend I had it all mapped out from the beginning.

This is not just a Canadian money story. This is a starting over story. And most of us need one of those at some point.

The first thing I did before I set up a single account

Three weeks before I moved I booked a two hour call with Deborah, a Nigerian career and finance creator based in Canada who had done exactly what I was about to do. Moved countries. Started from scratch. Built her financial life properly.

Not a bank advisor who is incentivised to sell me products. Someone who had lived the experience and could tell me what she actually did and what she wished she had done differently.

That call was the best financial decision I made before I arrived. Not because the information was complicated. Because nobody had given me the right order before. And I have learned that when it comes to money, operating without the right order is one of the most expensive things you can do. We skip steps because we do not know they exist. We open the wrong account first. We wait too long to start. We say yes to the wrong products because we did not know what to ask.

Stewardship requires knowledge. You cannot manage well what you do not understand. That session with Deborah was me taking that seriously.

The order. Because the order is everything.

When you are starting over financially the temptation is to do everything at once. Open accounts, get cards, start investing, figure out taxes. All of it feels urgent.

Her first lesson was to slow down. One thing at a time. In the right sequence. Each step unlocks the next one and trying to skip ahead creates problems that take months to unravel.

Here is the order she walked me through and the order I followed.

Step one. Get your identification sorted.

Before anything financial can happen you need your official identification in place. In Canada that is your Social Insurance Number (SIN). In the UK the equivalent is your National Insurance Number. Without it you cannot open accounts properly and you cannot start building any kind of financial history. This is the foundation. Everything else sits on top of it.

I did this in my first week. It felt administrative. Unglamorous. But I thought about it as laying the first brick. You do not get to build anything before this.

Step two. Open a bank account at a major regulated bank.

Go in person. Ask specifically about their newcomer programme. Most major banks have one designed for people who are arriving without local financial history. Bring your identification and proof of address.

I sat in that appointment and something in me felt the weight of it. This was real. I was actually doing this. A new account in a new country. A new chapter that needed its own infrastructure.

Step three. Start building credit early.

This is the one most people delay and it is the most expensive delay you can make. The earlier you start building credit the earlier it compounds in your favour.

A credit card is the most common and accessible route. Use it for everyday spending you were already going to do and pay it back in full every month. It is not about spending more. It is about demonstrating that you can manage what you have been given responsibly.

There are other ways to build credit too. Secured credit cards. Credit builder loans. Becoming an authorised user on someone else’s account. The right option depends on your situation. What matters is starting something rather than waiting until you feel ready. Readiness is a trap I have fallen into before. I know what it costs.

Step four. Open a TFSA and invest it immediately.

The Tax Free Savings Account (TFSA) is one of the most powerful financial tools available in Canada, the closest UK equivalent is a Stocks and Shares ISA. Most newcomers either open it too late or leave the money sitting as cash inside it, which defeats the entire purpose.

Here is what it does. Any growth inside a TFSA, whether that is capital gains, dividends, or interest, is completely tax free. You pay nothing on it. Your contribution room starts from the year you become a resident. Unused room carries forward so if you do not use the full amount this year it rolls into next year.

The mistake most newcomers make is opening a TFSA and leaving the money in there as cash. The account is just a wrapper. What you put inside it determines the returns. Cash earns almost nothing. Investments inside a TFSA grow tax free. Open it. Invest it. Leave it.

Paying yourself first is an act of discipline. So is not touching it.

Step five. Choose a brokerage platform and start investing.

There are several regulated investing platforms available in Canada. Wealthsimple is popular for its clean interface and no trading fees on ETFs. Questrade is another widely used option. If you already bank with a major institution you can often open a self-directed investing account directly with them. For UK readers the equivalents would be platforms like Etoro, Trading 212, Vanguard UK, or Hargreaves Lansdown.

Whatever you choose, make sure it is regulated and registered with the appropriate authorities before putting any money in. Not every platform that gets promoted online is legitimate. Deborah was firm on this. She had seen people lose money they could not recover because they trusted a name they recognised from social media without checking the credentials behind it.

One thing that trips people up constantly: on most platforms there is a savings version of a TFSA and an investing version. They can look almost identical when you are setting up the account. They are completely different products. Make sure you are opening the investing one.

Where I am a few weeks in

Identification sorted. Bank account open. Credit card active and being used for everyday spending. Payments going out before the due date. TFSA open.

At the end of this month I am going to make my first investment in the Canadian stock market.

This is not my first time investing. But it is my first time doing it here, in these accounts, from this particular starting point. And that matters to me.

I remember what it felt like to not know where to start. The paralysis of wanting to do the right thing and having no map for what the right thing was. I do not want to be in that place again. And I do not want it to be the reason someone else stays stuck either.

Building a financial life that future you will be grateful for is not a one-day decision. It is a series of small intentional moves made consistently over time. It is stewardship practiced one step at a time.

That is what this newsletter is documenting.

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A few traps to know before you start

Deborah ended our session with warnings and I want to pass them on because they are things you would not know to ask about until it is too late.

Life insurance companies specifically target people who are starting over and will frame whole life insurance as a savings plan or an investment product. It is not. Check what your employer already provides first. Most benefits packages include some level of life cover. Do not pay twice for something you already have.

Be careful about foreign transaction fees if you are moving money internationally or spending across currencies. Check whether your card charges a fee before you travel or transfer. Small percentages add up faster than you think.

Do not open too many financial products at once. When you are starting over you will be offered many things. Be selective. Open one thing at a time, understand it, and then add the next. This is discipline. It is also wisdom.

If you are reading this from the UK

The principles in this issue apply wherever you are. Here is how the Canadian accounts map to what you already know.

SIN (Social Insurance Number) — National Insurance Number. Same function. Get it sorted before anything else.

TFSA (Tax Free Savings Account) — Stocks and Shares ISA. Any growth inside is tax free. The annual contribution limit in Canada is currently $7,000. In the UK the ISA allowance is £20,000 per year. Same principle, different numbers.

RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan) — Your workplace pension or a Self-Invested Personal Pension (SIPP). Pre-tax contributions that reduce your taxable income. If your employer matches contributions, always contribute enough to get the full match. That is free money and it compounds.

FHSA (First Home Savings Account) — Lifetime ISA. Both are designed to help first time buyers save with tax advantages. The Lifetime ISA gives you a 25% government bonus on contributions up to £4,000 per year. The FHSA has an annual limit of $8,000 and a lifetime cap of $40,000. Only open either if you are genuinely planning to buy a first home in the near future.

Credit building — The mechanics are almost identical. Use your credit card for everyday spending, pay the full balance before the due date, keep utilisation under 30% by your statement date. The bureaus are different but the behaviour they reward is the same.

Investing platforms — In Canada: Wealthsimple, Questrade, or directly through your bank. In the UK: eToro, Trading 212, Vanguard UK, or Hargreaves Lansdown. Check that any platform you use is regulated by the FCA in the UK or CIRO in Canada before putting money in.

The order stays the same wherever you are. Identification. Bank account. Credit. Tax-advantaged investing. Everything else after.

Want to book a session with Deborah?

Everything in this issue came from two hours with her. If you want someone to walk you through your specific situation in real time she does one to one sessions.

Find her on Instagram at @thedebbyalen and here on substack at

Worth every minute.

If this issue resonated with you, forward it to one person who is starting over right now. Financially, professionally, or both.

If you want to work through your own career or financial transition one to one, the link to book a session with me is in my bio.

Omon

January to June this year. I was sitting at a desk in the UK, working full time and quietly running what amounted to a second job on the side.

That second job was getting myself a job in Canada.

No Canadian history, No Canadian address, No Canadian network. No proof I had ever operated in that market. I was applying into a country I had never worked in, from six thousand kilometres away, competing against people who were already there.

And I was running multiple interview processes at the same time.

Not because I thrive on chaos. Because I understood something early that most job seekers never quite internalise.

You do not get to decide where you land. The market decides. Your job is to stay in motion long enough for the right thing to find you.

So I built the infrastructure to stay in motion.

And that infrastructure was AI.

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What I was actually managing

At various points I had live processes with a Big Five bank, a major health tech company, a leading law firm, a mining corporation, and others. Each one at a completely different stage. Some at screening call. Some at hiring manager interview. Some at final panel with a case study or presentation.

The complexity was not just the number of processes. It was the context switching. Each organisation had a different culture, a different set of priorities, a different interview format, and a different version of what good looked like for the role. Moving between them without losing the thread of any single one required something my brain alone could not reliably hold.

Two of the processes resulted in offers. One of them became the role I am in now.

That outcome did not happen by accident. It happened because I treated the job search like a product I was building and iterating.

Same discipline I bring to work. Applied to getting the work.

Why most people are using AI wrong in a job search

Before I explain the system, I want to name the thing I see constantly that drives me slightly mad.

People are using AI to generate CVs and cover letters. Blanket-applying to hundreds of roles with AI-written applications that sound like every other AI-written application. Recruiters can feel this. The applications that land interviews are the ones that feel specific and considered.

That is not how I used AI.

I used it the way I use it at work as a Product Manager, as a thinking partner, a research engine, a system that compounds knowledge over time and makes me sharper in every subsequent interaction.

The difference is strategic deployment versus convenience usage. One gets you interviews. The other gets you ignored.

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The operating system I built

I am a Product Manager. Systems thinking is how I approach problems. So I built the job search as a system with distinct components that fed into each other.

Here is every layer and exactly how it worked.

Layer one: Claude as the preparation engine

Claude was my command centre. Not a chatbot I occasionally asked a question. A persistent thinking partner I returned to at every stage of every process.

The way I used it was specific. Before every interview I would open a session and front-load it with context. Something like this:

“I have a hiring manager interview tomorrow for a Senior Product Manager role at a major financial institution. The role focuses on digital transformation of retail banking (add JD). The hiring manager has a background in operations rather than product (add their Linkedin details). The job description emphasises stakeholder management and delivery at scale. I come from NHS digital transformation and government product delivery (add more context on your experience). Here is what I know about their recent strategic priorities (add details from your knowledge base). Here is what I am worried about being asked (add weaknesses). Build me the preparation.”

What came back was not a generic list of interview tips. It was preparation specific to that exact role, that exact person, and that exact stage of the process. Then the real work started.

I would push back on answers that did not feel authentic. It would push back on answers that were vague, too safe, or did not directly address the question. We would go back and forth until every potential question had an answer I could stand behind that was also genuinely compelling.

The key insight here is the difference between prepared and rehearsed. Rehearsed is when you have memorised an answer. Prepared is when you understand the problem deeply enough to answer any version of the question. That is what I was building in those sessions. Not a script. Fluency.

After every interview I debriefed in the same session. Not the next day. Immediately after, while everything was sharp. What landed well. What I stumbled on. What the interviewer visibly responded to. What I would change. That debrief is where most candidates leave points on the table, they walk out of an interview, feel either good or bad, and move on. I was treating every interview as data. The data directly fed the preparation for the next stage.

By the third or fourth stage of any process I had a rich preparation that was already built on everything that came before it. I was never starting from scratch.

Layer two: Perplexity as the intelligence layer

Before every single first call, I ran a deep targeted search in Perplexity.

Not a Google search. Not a LinkedIn browse. A structured research session with specific queries: the company’s most recent product announcements, any strategic pivots or leadership changes in the last six months, what their competitors were doing and how the market was shifting, and wherever possible something specific about the person I was about to speak to, their background, their public writing or talks, what they seemed to care about professionally.

The goal was not to perform knowledge. It was to ask questions that demonstrated I had done the work. There is a specific quality of attention you receive from an interviewer when they realise you genuinely understand their business and not just their job description. The conversation changes register. You stop being a candidate they are evaluating and start being someone they are thinking with.

One specific example. Before a hiring manager interview I found through Perplexity that the organisation had made a significant strategic pivot that was not reflected on their website yet but had been covered in an industry newsletter. I referenced it early in the conversation.

The hiring manager stopped mid-sentence. She asked how I knew about that. I told her I research properly before conversations that matter to me.

The rest of that interview was different from the beginning.

This is not a trick. It is what serious professionals do when they take an opportunity seriously. AI just makes it possible to do it at scale across multiple simultaneous processes without burning yourself out doing it manually.

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Layer three: Voice notes as the connective tissue

This layer is the one most people would not think to add and it is the one that made the biggest difference to how the whole system functioned.

In the minutes immediately after every interview, every call, every debrief conversation, before I did anything else, I recorded a voice note. Walking away from a coffee shop where I had been prepping, On the tube home, or even sitting in the same chair I had the interview.

The content was everything my brain was holding in that moment. What the interviewer said that surprised me. The question I was not expecting. The moment I felt the conversation shift. The thing I wished I had said differently. The follow-up I wanted to send.

The moment after an interview is when your observations are most honest and most specific. That clarity fades within hours. I stopped letting it fade.

Those voice notes fed directly back into Claude at the start of the next preparation session. I would share the key observations and ask Claude to factor them into the next stage preparation. The voice note from the Tuesday afternoon call shaped the strategy for the Thursday final round.

This is what I mean when I say I built an operating system rather than just used a tool. The components were connected. Information flowed between them. The system got smarter with every interview.

Layer four: The review cadence

Every Sunday evening I ran a brief review session. I would open Claude and walk through every active process.

Where was each one? What was the next action? What preparation was needed in the coming week? What had I learned in the previous week that should change my approach to any live process?

This took thirty to forty minutes. It meant I was never caught off guard by a process moving faster than I expected. It meant I always knew exactly where I stood across every simultaneous application.

For anyone who has managed a product roadmap with multiple workstreams, this will feel familiar. You hold the overview. You allocate attention deliberately. You make sure nothing falls through because something else is louder that week.

The job search is a project. Treat it like one.

What I would build differently today

I ran this system earlier this year when the AI tools were already very good. They are significantly more capable now.

If I were starting this process today I would add two things:

The first is batch analysis of job descriptions. When you are applying to hundreds of roles you cannot give every description the same attention. I would now use Claude to read batches of descriptions and score them against my specific background and goals, identifying the ones genuinely worth my full effort versus the ones I should pass on or give a lighter touch application. That filtering alone would have saved hours every week and concentrated my energy on the highest probability opportunities.

The second is deeper use of Perplexity’s synthesis capabilities. The ability to pull together recent news, earnings calls, strategic announcements, and industry commentary into a coherent picture of where a company is right now has improved considerably. What took me forty minutes of manual research per company now takes five with the right prompts. At the volume I was operating that time saving compounds significantly.

The system I built worked. It works even better now than when I ran it.

The emotional reality nobody talks about

Here is the thing nobody mentions when they tell you to run multiple processes at once.

The logistics are manageable. The emotional weight is a different matter.

An interview goes badly and you are carrying that into the next day whether you want to or not. A rejection lands on Tuesday morning when you are already preparing for a final round on Thursday. A process you were genuinely excited about goes quiet for two weeks and you cannot tell if it is dead or just slow and you have to keep moving regardless.

The discipline I built here was compartmentalisation. Each process lived in its own mental space. When I was preparing for one role I was entirely in that role. When I was in an interview I was completely in that room.

The reset ritual between processes was what made this possible. I would close the preparation, step away, and come back fresh to the next one. Not immediately switching from one context to another. Giving each one a clean start.

I also had to manage the relationship between the AI system and my own emotional state. There were weeks when I did not want to debrief. When I wanted to close a call that had not gone well and not think about it again. The system required me to process it. To capture it. To extract something useful from it even when it felt bad.

That discipline paid back in the end. But it asked something of me.

What I would tell you if you are in this right now

One. Apply for more than you think is reasonable. I submitted 276 applications. Most went nowhere. You cannot know in advance which ones will matter. The only way to find out is to keep going.

Two. Do not self-select out before they reject you. I applied for roles I was convinced were out of my reach. Several of them called me back. One of them is where I work now.

Three. The preparation is the whole game. The candidates who get to final rounds are not always the most experienced. They are the most prepared. Specific, considered, evidenced preparation is what separates the people who get offers from the people who get close and cannot understand why.

Four. Use AI strategically not conveniently. There is a version of AI-assisted job searching that makes you sound like everyone else. And there is a version that makes you more specifically and compellingly yourself than you could achieve alone. Build the operating system. Do not just use the chatbot.

What this actually required

I will not dress this up.

Running multiple interview processes while holding down a demanding full time job, while preparing to relocate to another country, while managing the emotional weight of not knowing how any of it would land, that asks something real of you.

The system made it manageable. It did not make it easy.

What made it sustainable was trusting that the process was working even when individual moments felt like they were not. One rejection did not mean the strategy was wrong. It meant one door closed and I had to keep walking toward the others.

Two offers. One decision. One flight booked.

The system got me there.

The tools, summarised

For anyone who wants to build their own version:

Claude, session-based preparation before every interview, debrief after every interview, Sunday review across all active processes. Front-load every session with specific context. Do not ask generic questions.

Perplexity, company and person research before every first call. Look for what is recent, what is not on the website, what the competitors are doing, what the person you are meeting cares about publicly.

Voice notes, capture observations immediately after every call before the clarity fades. Feed them back into Claude at the next preparation session.

Weekly review, every Sunday, thirty to forty minutes, a full overview of every active process and what the coming week requires.

The components connect. Information flows between them. The system gets smarter over time.

Build it before you need it.

If this issue helped you, forward it to one person in a job search right now. That is the most useful thing you can do with it.

Omon.

I had not decided.

Not when I started applying, not when I got the interviews, not even when the offers came through. There was no grand moment where I sat down, made a pros and cons list, and chose Canada. It was not that clean.

What I had was a Permanent Residency invitation, and a quiet but persistent sense that if I was ever going to consider this move, it could not be for just any role. It had to be for something I genuinely thought was impossible for me to get.

So I started applying. Without deciding, Without announcing, Without even fully admitting to myself that I was doing this.

276 applications later, here is what I learned.

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The first attempt and what God was doing in it

This journey started in November 2025, and not with a clear plan. It started with over a hundred applications into the Canadian market in one month. Applications that went mostly nowhere, auto rejections, silence, closed doors with no explanation attached.

I kept going until the end of November, and then I stopped. Not because I gave up, but because I was honest enough with myself to know something was not working. I just did not know what yet.

What I did know was that strategy alone was not going to get me there. I had tried that. A hundred applications worth of trying.

The Bible says in John 14, “I will give you the Spirit of truth, and he will teach you all things.” That is not just comfort language. That is instruction language. And that is exactly what was happening in November. I took a break. I was not just resting, I was being recalibrated. Being taught what was missing.

By mid December I had figured it out, not through a course or a coach alone, but through that combination of research, reflection, prayer, strategy, and the kind of clarity that only comes when you slow down enough to actually hear.

I had already sent over a hundred applications. But now I knew exactly what I was going to do differently. The question was whether I was actually ready to do this, whether I was actually going to go.

And that is where Isaiah 55 came in.

The nation I did not know

There is a verse I kept coming back to during this entire season, Isaiah 55, “Surely you will summon nations that you do not know.”

A country I had visited but never lived in. A market where I had no professional network, and no reputation. A nation I did not know.

And yet something in me knew that this was the direction. Not because everything in the UK was bad, because everything in the UK was actually going well. Great job, good life, career momentum. By every external measure I had nothing to complain about.

But I knew. The way you know things when you are genuinely connected to the Holy Spirit, not just as comforter but as the one who leads you. I knew that God was calling me toward something higher, and I was doing everything in my human power to talk myself out of it.

Because it is one thing to feel called somewhere. It is another thing entirely to actually go.

So I made a compromise with myself. I would not decide, But I would be ready. And at the beginning of 2026, when my PR confirmation started coming through, I came back to the Canadian market with something I did not have the first time.

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The second push

There is a version of a job search you do when you are hoping something works out. And there is a completely different version you do when you know the stuff you are made of.

I came back clearer, more intentional, less desperate. I applied specifically and strategically, targeting roles that scared me, making a list of companies I genuinely admired and applying there first, before I talked myself out of it. Because the longer you sit with an application, the more reasons you find not to send it.

I started receiving interview invitations. The Canadian job market had started to open up and I was getting through doors. But one invitation was different from all the others.

The impossible application

An invitation landed in my inbox from one of the biggest banks in North America. Product Manager role, first stage. And something about seeing that name in my inbox made me stop in a way the others had not.

And do you know what I did?

I posted it on my Instagram story.

Not to flex, I want to be really honest about this. I posted it because somewhere in the back of my mind, even after everything I had built, even after the career pivot and everything that came with it, there was still a version of me that thought a role like this was not possible right now. I genuinely did not think I was going to get past the recruiter stage. I thought, “this is probably as far as it goes, might as well document it.”

That assumption was wrong. About the role, and about myself.

I attended the call, and they kept calling me back. I scaled through all the interview stages with the best feedback I have received in my entire career journey and yes,

I GOT THE JOB.

And here is something I discovered in those interviews that I did not expect.

The secret weapon I did not know I had

We interview exceptionally well.

Every person that has lived and worked in the UK carries something that most people underestimate: the ability to go deep, to tell a story with structure and specificity, to walk into a room and hold your ground under pressure. If you have ever successfully navigated a civil service competency framework, an NHS band progression panel, a banking and financial services assessment, a legal or professional services interview, or any structured interview process in the UK, you already know how to perform under questioning. You already know how to take an interviewer through your thinking in a way that is clear, compelling, and specific.

I walked into Canadian interviews with that skillset, and it showed, because I knew how to demonstrate my value in the room.

But the more doors that opened, the more complicated the decision became. And then, in the middle of all of this, I did something that most people would consider crazy.

The options that showed up

I withdrew from a signed offer.

I had accepted a role, signed the paperwork, and then something better came through, and I made the hardest professional phone call of my life.

I am telling you this because I want you to understand what taking this step actually created, options. Not one opportunity, multiple opportunities. The kind of position where you are choosing between good and better, rather than accepting whatever comes because you are afraid nothing else will.

That does not happen by accident. It happens because you take the step before you feel ready, because you send the application before you feel qualified, because you show up to the interview before you feel certain you belong there. And it was only when I was standing in the middle of all of those options that I finally made the decision I had been putting off for months.

What I want you to take from this

Let me put this into perspective for you.

And through all of it, a destination I still had not fully decided on, right up until three weeks before my flight.

I have mentees who come to me through Ascendia because they want to build careers that cross borders and they do not know if it is possible for someone like them. I needed to be able to tell them not just that it is possible, I needed to show them. Because here is the truth about impossible applications, they are only impossible until someone does them. And once someone does them, they stop being impossible for everyone who comes behind.

If you are sitting on an application right now, if you have been looking at a role and telling yourself it is not quite for you, if you have been waiting until you feel more ready, more qualified, more certain, send it. Not because you are guaranteed to get it, but because the act of sending it is already proof that you believe something better is possible for you.

And if you are in a season where God is calling you toward something that does not make logical sense, where everything around you is fine but something in you knows there is more, lean in. Not to the noise, but to the Spirit of truth who teaches all things.

He will show you what is missing. He showed me.

See you next Monday.

Omon

I am terrified.

Not the polished, photogenic kind of terrified you see on moving vlogs where everything is aesthetically packed into matching luggage sets and the background music makes leaving feel glamorous. The real kind. The kind where you wake up at 3 am doing mental arithmetic about whether you have made the right decision. The kind where you walk through rooms you are about to leave for the last time and feel something you do not quite have a word for yet.

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The first time I did this

I have been here before. Not Toronto. But this feeling.

When I arrived in the UK my parents were already here. So I was not alone in the way people imagine when they hear the word immigrant. I had family. I had somewhere to go.

What I did not have was a career.

I was studying and working manual jobs to get by. My first role was in a care home. Then I moved into the NHS as a healthcare assistant. There was no plan. No roadmap. No professional safety net. No version of me that looked like the person I am today existed yet. That person had not been built.

I built her.

Not quickly. Not in a straight line. But the same way I am building everything, by showing up, figuring it out, and refusing to stop moving forward even when the direction was not yet clear.

That is what I am doing again now. Except this time I am not starting from nothing. I am starting from everything that version of me built with the help of God.

I am arriving in Toronto not as someone starting from zero but as someone who knows exactly what she is doing and has done it before.

That does not make it less frightening. But it does make it something I know I can survive.

The decision

In 14 days, I am relocating from the UK to Toronto, Canada.

I am a Product Manager. I have spent the last several years building my career across Nigeria, the UK, and now Canada. I have a life here that I am not erasing, just expanding. People I love here who I am not leaving behind, just loving from further away for a while.

And I am leaving.

Not because things were bad. Things were actually fine. The career was progressing. The life was comfortable. The routine was established. And that, if I am honest with you, is exactly why I am going.

I did not move to the UK, navigate every obstacle that came with being a first generation immigrant and the daughter of first generation immigrants, build a career from nothing, buy a property, co-found a company, and do all of it simultaneously, to settle for fine.

There is something waiting for me in Toronto that I cannot tell you about yet. I know that is frustrating. I promise it is worth the wait.

What I can tell you right now is that it is big. And that it is the reason I am sitting here in this terraced house surrounded by boxes at what is simultaneously the most exciting and most terrifying moment of my adult life.

The calculation

People keep asking me if I am sure.

Family. Friends. Colleagues. People in my community who have followed enough of my journey to feel invested in the outcome. Everyone wants to know: “Are you sure?”

And I understand the question. I really do. Moving to a country you have never lived in, with no family nearby, no local network, no Canadian credit history, and no guarantee that the life you are imagining will materialise the way you have planned it is objectively a significant thing to do.

But here is how I actually think about it.

“Every version of my life that I am proud of came from a decision that looked uncertain from the outside. The move to the UK looked uncertain. The career pivot looked uncertain. The decision to co-found a company while working full-time seemed uncertain. Every single time, the people who loved me asked some version of Are you sure?, and every single time the answer was the same.”

No. Not entirely. But certain enough.

Certainty is a luxury that most extraordinary things do not offer upfront. You do not get certainty before the leap. You get it after, when you are standing on the other side looking back at the version of yourself who was brave enough to jump.

I have jumped before. I know what the other side feels like. And I know that the fear I am feeling right now, the 3 am arithmetic, the rooms I am walking through for the last time, is not a sign that I am making the wrong decision. It is a sign that I am making a real one.

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The fear

I want to stay with the fear for a moment because I think it deserves more than a paragraph.

I am scared of being financially stranded. Of something going wrong in the first few weeks before I have built any kind of safety net in a new currency in a new country. I have thought about this more than I have thought about almost anything else. What happens if the unexpected happens before I am ready for it? What happens if I land and something goes wrong, and I do not have the cushion to absorb it? This fear is practical and specific, and I am not going to pretend it is not there.

I am scared of loneliness. Not the temporary kind that comes with any new city in the first few weeks. The deeper kind. The kind that comes from being surrounded by people and still feeling like nobody in the room quite understands the specific shape of your experience. I know this feeling. I have felt it before. I also know it passes. But knowing it passes does not make the in-between any easier.

I am scared of the gap between who I am trying to become and who I actually am on the days when nothing goes right. The days when the confidence falters, and the impostor syndrome creeps in, and the voice in the back of your head wonders whether you have overestimated yourself. Those days exist for everyone. They do not discriminate based on how prepared you are or how hard you have worked or how deserving you are of the opportunity in front of you.

I am telling you all of this because this newsletter is not going to be a highlight reel.

If you want curated success content, there are plenty of places to find it. Beautiful aesthetics, perfectly timed announcements, and the polished version of a life that looks effortless from the outside. That is not what this is.

This is the honest version. The 3 am version. The boxes-everywhere-in-a-terraced-house-in-the-UK version. The version where I tell you I am scared and doing it anyway because I think that story is more useful to you than the one where everything looks perfect.

What this newsletter is

Every Monday I will write to you from wherever I am in this journey.

Career strategy that actually works internationally. Personal finance across borders. The emotional reality of immigration and starting over. Business and entrepreneurship from someone building something on the side while navigating all of the above. And life. The full, complicated, extraordinary thing.

I am a Product Manager, a co-founder, a first-generation immigrant, and a Nigerian woman who has decided to build an extraordinary life across borders. This newsletter is the unfiltered version of how that actually happens. Week by week. Monday by Monday. With you.

What is coming

In 14 days, I land in Toronto.

I will tell you everything. The thing that is waiting for me there. The apartment I am moving into. The financial reality of building a life in a new country from scratch. The first week. The emotions. The moments that surprised me. All of it.

Between now and then, I will be here every Monday.

If you know someone who is navigating a career move, a relocation, or the particular challenge of building a life in a country that was not where they started, send them this. Not because I have all the answers. But because sometimes the most useful thing is knowing that someone else is in the middle of the same questions and refusing to stop anyway.

This is just the beginning.

See you next Monday.

Omon