If someone asked you to tell them about your career, you'd probably start with your job titles. Marketing Manager. Head of Marketing. Director. Consultant.

It's the obvious way to tell a career story. It's not the whole story.

Ask an experienced marketer what they've done in their career and they'll give you a list.

"I managed the website." "I led the product launch." "I ran the campaigns." "I managed a team."

All true. None of it tells me what you actually brought to the table.

You know more than you think you do.

That's something I see constantly in coaching conversations with experienced marketers. It came up again in my Unearth Your Story sessions recently, where we looked at the strengths and experience people have built up over their careers, much of which they'd quietly stopped noticing.

The hardest part of marketing is never writing the words. It’s working out what to say in the first place.

One of the biggest questions whenever AI and marketing come up in the same sentence is this:

"If AI can create content, do we still need marketers?"

AI doesn't fix unclear marketing. It amplifies it.

There's a lot of noise right now about how AI is changing marketing. New tools. New platforms. New ways to create content. New ways to reach customers. And yes, AI will change how marketers work day to day. But I think there's a bigger question most businesses aren't asking:

Are your marketing foundations actually strong enough for an AI world?

AI hasn't changed what good marketing is. It's just made it a lot harder to fake.

I started talking about AI Search back in October 2024. At the time, most marketing conversations were still about content creation, productivity and automation. I could see something bigger coming. The way people find businesses was shifting, search itself was shifting, and marketing was going to have to shift with it.

How brilliant you must be at your job if you’re paid to fly around the world to do it.

I saw this reframe shared a few weeks ago.

It really stuck with me.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel around the world, many times, for work.

And it’s funny, because at the time when I was travelling regularly, there was an element of “I have to go to {insert amazing place} again.”

For the most part, I’m one of those marketers who’s really great at telling other peoples stories, and really bad at telling my own.

In fact, here’s a perfect example. Last week I received an email to say a book that I was interviewed for had been published. I’m quoted in this book, as an expert, and I haven’t mentioned it once.

It’s a personal (and career) milestone for me, I should really be shouting about it from the rooftops. Which I will…soon.

What if people laugh?

What if people think I’m stupid?

What if people I know, see what I’m doing?

What if my ideas are dismissed?

What if…

It’s ok to take a moment to breathe.

It’s ok to delete or mute social media.

It’s ok if you can’t work at 100%.

It’s ok to switch off.

I’ve always been a big advocate for celebrating wins, even the small ones.

And even though I didn’t achieve all my (overly ambitious) goals in 2025, I still had a huge amount of growth and achievements to celebrate.

One thing I’ve never been great at, but 100% working on, is shouting about my achievements. Owning the fact that I’m good at what I do, and celebrating my success. It’s super uncomfortable but I’m getting better at it.

There's a particular kind of tired that solo marketers know well.

It's not the tired that comes from a big launch or a deadline. It's the slower, quieter kind, the kind that builds when you've been making decisions on your own for too long. When you're the only person in the room who really understands what marketing does, and every question lands with you, and every answer has to come from you too.

If you're a department of one, whether in-house as the whole marketing function, or out on your own as a freelancer or consultant, you probably know exactly what I mean. It doesn't arrive all at once. It just accumulates.

I still remember what it felt like to step into my first marketing manager role. The excitement, the pride, and then very quickly, the realisation that everything I'd been good at up to that point was only part of what the job now required.

I was lucky. The company I was working for had an excellent program for first-time managers. I came out of it with real frameworks for the practical stuff, how to have difficult conversations, how to give feedback, how to build a team that actually functions well together.

But then came a different kind of step up. The one where I became the most senior marketer in the business.

And nobody had a program for that.

Getting the most out of a coaching session starts before you log on. The simple act of breaking your day - even for fifteen minutes - and shifting your headspace before a session changes what's possible in it. This post covers practical ways to prepare, whether you're new to coaching or want to make your sessions even more effective.

And if you want a simple framework to bookend the whole thing, check out the 15/15 rule - fifteen minutes before, fifteen minutes after. It's the habit that makes everything else stick.

You've booked a coaching session. But here's the thing, the most valuable parts might happen outside of it.

That's the 15/15 rule. Fifteen minutes before. Fifteen minutes after. And it makes more difference than you'd think.

A career graph is a simple visual tool for mapping your career satisfaction over time. You draw a timeline across the bottom - your whole career, a specific role, or any period you want to examine. On the vertical axis: satisfaction. Then you plot the line.

Not the job titles. Not the promotions. The actual experience of being there.

The line goes up when work felt energising, meaningful, stretching in the right way. It dips when it didn't.

Most coaches won’t tell you this. But I think you deserve to know it before you spend a cent.

Anyone can call themselves a coach. There is no governing body, no required qualification, no minimum standard of practice. Some people complete a weekend course, build a website, and are open for business by Monday. Others do not even do that, they assume that because they have experience in a field, they are automatically qualified to coach in it. No training. No understanding of what coaching actually is. Just a belief that experience alone is enough.

It’s not.

That is the reality of the industry I work in. And I’ve seen first-hand what bad actors in this industry do to people who were simply trying to get support - people who were vulnerable, trusting, and deserved far better. It makes me angry. Which is why I am writing this, so you know what to watch out for before you commit.

One of the most common conversations I have with marketers goes something like this.

They tell me about a campaign they drove end-to-end. A cross-functional project they pulled together when no one else would. A junior team member they informally mentored through a difficult period. A stakeholder situation they navigated when it could easily have gone sideways. A strategic recommendation they made that changed the direction of a programme.

And then they say: "But I'm not really a leader. I don't manage anyone."

Every time, I want to stop them right there.

Because what they've just described - the influencing, the connecting, the deciding, the developing, the navigating - is leadership. Not a version of leadership that doesn't quite count. Actual leadership. The kind that moves organisations forward and makes other people's work better.

The title is an administrative designation. The leadership is already happening.

More senior marketers are leaving traditional employment than at any point in recent memory. Some are burned out. Some have been made redundant. Some have simply reached a point where they want more — more autonomy, more variety, more control over the work they do and who they do it for.

If you're one of them, you've probably started researching your options. And somewhere along the way, you've encountered two terms that sound similar but mean very different things: freelance and fractional.

Getting this distinction right matters. Choosing the wrong model — or jumping in without understanding what each one actually requires — is one of the most common mistakes I see marketers make when going independent.

So let's break it down.

There's a gap that doesn't get talked about enough in marketing careers. The gap between being a very good senior marketer and becoming a genuine marketing leader.

It's not a skills gap, exactly. Most marketers who are ready to lead already have more than enough technical expertise. It's something harder to name - a shift in how you see your role, how you show up in rooms, how you make decisions, and how you influence people who don't report to you.

That shift doesn't happen automatically with a new title. It has to be intentional. And understanding what it actually requires - not the polished version you read in job descriptions, but the real version - is the first step.