The Podcast Series 

What motivates me is helping business leaders achieve personal and commercial growth while delivering a positive impact. Why do I feel compelled to do this?

Always attracted by innovation I carved out my career first as an event programmer and then as a marketeer within tech start-ups. I worked alongside visionaries helping launch new products and services in cutting edge sectors – at the same time, I became increasingly aware of the power we ‘business people’ have to impact people’s lives – both positively and negatively.

Later on, I set up my own event series to address issues close to my heart.

Be You Talks began life as a series of events tackling the narrow choices brands and media campaigns had offered women and girls – often portraying stereotypical gender roles and presenting unattainable images of ‘perfection’ plus a singular version of beauty. The event series set out to explore ways to reverse the damaging social impact of such pervasive images and messages. We gathered politicians and leading business leaders to demonstrate the commercial case for using more diverse imagery in advertising.

What became clear from these events was the appetite for the business community to do good, to think more carefully about their output and to behave responsibly whilst still enhancing their bottom line.

I am now focused on championing inclusion in the workplace. I’ve set up the social enterprise Neurodiverse Works, to spark conversations to lead to a deeper understanding and wider social acceptance of the value of our neurodivergent workforce. In order to achieve this, building psychological safety in the workplace will be a vital step to allow our different ways of communicating, thinking and behaving, to become a recognised catalyst to innovation, wellbeing and productivity. 

It is time for us to explore better, more inclusive ways to operate.