Introduction
A recruiter told Vanessa Sanyauke the diversity and inclusion role at Standard Chartered Bank was simply out of her league. A month later, a different agency called her about the exact same role. She had put it on her vision board a year earlier. This episode traces how an eight-year-old who was told on her school report to stop talking became someone who has built a platform reaching more than 60,000 women, one vision board entry, one uncomfortable rejection, and one redefinition of rest at a time.
The eight-year-old who was told to stop talking
Vanessa grew up in North London to strict Zimbabwean parents who had her on an academic, medical-career track from early childhood, complete with a doctor's kit for her fourth birthday. At eight, discovering Oprah Winfrey on television changed something: seeing a Black woman command a room of white listeners on her own show left her mesmerised, at the exact moment her school reports were describing her as too talkative, someone who "disrupts everyone." She wanted to go into journalism from that point, and her parents said no outright, keeping her fixed on the medical path throughout secondary school.
From biomedical science to a 2,000-strong social enterprise
Vanessa studied biomedical science at Brunel University, planning to sit the GAMSAT and go into graduate medicine, until the entrepreneurial culture around her, friends starting their own ventures, gave her the courage to test ideas of her own. She started with events promotion before founding her first social enterprise at 20, mentoring young people at risk of gang and knife crime in Lambeth and Southwark, eventually reaching over 2,000 young people with mentoring and career events. She later completed a master's in sustainability and management at Royal Holloway specifically to formalise her understanding of how businesses could do good, while working full-time in financial services and running the enterprise on evenings and weekends for over a decade, a sacrifice she says only made sense because it generated genuine additional income, enough eventually to get onto the property ladder and later fund her transition to running her business full-time.
The vision board, the rejection, and the job that found her anyway
Vanessa had put a diversity and inclusion director role at Standard Chartered Bank on her vision board in 2019, despite having no prior DEI experience specifically within financial services. When the role opened in January 2020, a recruiter told her directly it was out of her league given other candidates had over a decade of relevant experience. A month later, in February 2020, a different agency called about the same vacancy. She got the job by leaning entirely into storytelling in the interview, walking the notoriously selective hiring manager through concrete examples from her time at UK Parliament rather than treating the process like an exam, precisely the kind of doer the hiring manager said she was trying to find among a stack of underwhelming applicants.
What people miss: the human behind the impact
Vanessa is direct about the parts of running a social impact platform that don't show up in the highlight reel: constant, overwhelming DMs and requests, people offended that she doesn't remember them personally from among thousands of event attendees, and the emotional toll of an industry, social impact and equality work, that she describes as genuinely harder and less lucrative than it looks from outside. She's candid that the sector is a daily fight to stay afloat, and that people underestimate how much behind-the-scenes pitching, following up and managing is required to keep a mission-driven business running at all.
Redefining rest when you can't take three weeks off
Vanessa admits plainly that she is bad at rest and was burnt out at the time of this conversation, having been unable to take a summer break given how difficult the year had been for diversity and inclusion work. Rather than waiting for a rare, lengthy holiday, she has redefined rest as smaller, regular acts: slower weeks with a lighter diary, monthly massages, acupuncture and reiki, prompted in part by a friend who pushed her to take her own wellbeing seriously. A six-week break in South Africa the previous December left her genuinely well-rested, only for her to return directly into a wave of disruption to the DEI sector, a reminder that even well-timed rest doesn't insulate a leader from what's coming next, though it does build the capacity to meet it.
Personal branding is not a persona
Vanessa pushes back on how "personal branding" is typically framed, arguing it isn't about performing a title, CEO, founder, director, but about letting people see the human behind the name: your values, how you make decisions, what you actually stand for. She illustrates the point with her own consumer behaviour, buying Gymshark specifically because she has followed founder Ben Francis's journey from his garage, not because of the product itself. Her critique of much current content, particularly on LinkedIn, is that posting for its own sake, generic captions, aesthetic coffee photos, chasing virality, misses the point entirely: brands now evaluate saves and shares over raw likes, and her own experience bears this out directly, her most viral post ever, wine content from a trip to South Africa, has never converted into paid work, while her steadier "founder diaries" content consistently does.
From perfectionism to consistency
Vanessa is honest about a specific regret: pausing her podcast for six months after reaching number four on the business charts because she was chasing perfection rather than simply publishing. Her fix was lowering the bar deliberately, setting an internal standard of roughly 80 percent and publishing once content clears it, rather than waiting for it to feel finished. She now runs the show biweekly rather than weekly, treats her output as a live AB test, and is openly transparent with her audience that she's figuring the format out as she goes, a shift she credits entirely with getting her back into consistent production.
Leadership as living in your own lane
Vanessa defines leadership as creating your own path rather than following trends, living in your own truth with conviction even when it isn't the popular direction. She names Oprah Winfrey as her clearest example, someone who built a talk show around helping people live better lives at a time when the genre was moving toward the tabloid spectacle of Jerry Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael, and stuck to that instinct regardless. Vanessa's own experience following trends, she says plainly, has consistently led to mistakes, reinforcing her belief that staying true to purpose, even when people don't immediately understand it, is what leadership actually requires.
