Introduction
Jessica Huie built an entire career on a feeling she never talked about publicly: not enoughness. A teenage mistake she carried as private shame for years became the same engine that later drove her to the top of the PR industry, working alongside major public figures while still a young single mother. It worked, for a while. What Jessica Huie describes now, as the author of Purpose and founder of Colour Blind Cards, is what happened when that engine finally ran out, and what she built to replace it.
The shame that took years to reframe
As a teenager, Jessica was expelled from school after stealing a pair of trainers for her first boyfriend during a work experience placement. She'd been, by her own account, a strong student, active in drama and dance, with a head teacher who wrote her a note expressing regret at having to make an example of someone with so much potential. For years, the incident sat inside her as a private source of shame rather than a single mistake among many.
It was only much later that she came to see the moment differently, not as evidence of who she was, but as a point where an education system failed to see beyond a single error in a student it had every reason to invest in further. She's careful to frame this as recognising a pattern many adults carry: an incident from adolescence that continues to quietly script the story someone tells about themselves decades later, until it's deliberately examined.
Turning shame into fuel, until it wasn't enough
Jessica became a single mother at seventeen and describes drawing, largely unconsciously, on resilience she considers almost ancestral. Alongside that resilience sat something less comfortable to name: shame as fuel. The drive to prove something, to work through the night studying, to take the extra internship nobody asked her to take, came from what she calls not enoughness rather than pure ambition.
She's honest that this combination genuinely worked, for a period. It took her from social housing into a career built around major clients, high-profile rooms and a version of success that looked, from the outside, complete. But she's equally clear that fuel built from fear and shame has a ceiling. It can carry you a long way, she says, until it starts to eat you up, and a different set of tools becomes necessary to keep growing rather than simply keep achieving.
The business that was born from love, not fear
In contrast to the fear-driven engine behind her PR career, Jessica describes the origin of Colour Blind Cards, the multicultural greeting card company she launched in 2006, as coming from an entirely different place. She was looking for a card reflecting her young daughter and couldn't find one. The idea arrived, in her words, full of love, with none of the fear about professional risk or reputation that might normally accompany stepping into an unfamiliar, politically charged conversation about representation at a time when that conversation barely existed in mainstream retail.
She ran both the card company and her own PR agency, JHPR, for a year before committing fully to building her own ventures, a decision that required both financial necessity as a single parent and a growing confidence in the idea itself.
What her father's life taught her about identity and value
Jessica's father arrived in the UK from Jamaica in the 1950s and became, by her account, the first Black bus driver in Nottingham, despite having been a qualified teacher in Jamaica. She's candid that he never fully made peace with the gap between his actual capability and what the world allowed him to become professionally, a tension she describes as a real, lifelong journey around equating personal value with occupation or worldly achievement.
What he passed on to his children, in her account, went deeper than any specific career advice: principles about staying true to yourself above all else, and a conscious approach to relationships, sorting people by genuine closeness rather than obligation. She's clear that recognising her father's full humanity, including where he struggled, has been its own part of her healing, describing it as taking a parent off the pedestal to make peace with the whole person.
The presence that changed everything
The most significant shift in Jessica's life came while caring for her father as he was dying. She describes it as a period of profound presence, catalysed by proximity to someone she loved preparing to depart, that made the achievements and identities she'd built her sense of self around suddenly feel far less important. She struggles, by her own admission, to fully put language to the shift, describing it as spiritual and transformative on multiple levels.
When her father died, she says a significant part of who she had identified with went with him. The internal work that period catalysed didn't stay contained to grief. It eventually led her to recognise she wasn't the same person who had built her earlier life and relationships, which included, not long afterwards, the amicable ending of her marriage.
Three years in Jamaica, confronting the dark
In the early days of the pandemic, around the time of George Floyd's murder, Jessica relocated to rural Jamaica with her young son, a decision she describes as equal parts a genuine calling and, she now recognises, a form of running from feelings she didn't want to sit with. Part of the motivation was wanting her son to experience being part of the racial majority as a Black boy, in a world where that global moment had made the stakes impossible to ignore.
Life in rural Westmoreland stripped away the usual distractions, no reliable power some nights, no convenient way to numb out. She's direct that the isolation forced her to confront fears she'd usually avoid: the quiet, the dark, being genuinely alone with her own feelings without Netflix or food delivery as an escape hatch. The gift inside that discomfort, she says, was that facing those fears directly is what eventually loosened their grip, opening capacity for more connection and love than avoidance ever could.
Redefining success as truth, not achievement
Asked how she now defines success, Jessica doesn't reach for a career or financial marker. Success, in her current framing, is how honestly she's living in line with her own truth across every role she holds, as a mother, daughter, friend and leader. That honesty, she argues, is what creates the presence needed to actually notice where a gap has opened between who she wants to be and how she's showing up, and to close it deliberately rather than let it drift.
She's candid that she doesn't tell herself she's proud of herself often enough, though she's actively working on that, particularly reflecting on the choices she made for her son during her years in Jamaica, choices that weren't easy but that she now looks back on with real pride.
What leadership means when ego gets out of the way
Asked to define leadership, Jessica describes it as the capacity to move ego aside in order to serve, guide and contribute in a way that's bigger than a person's own small, individual agenda. It's a definition that tracks directly back through her own story: from a career built on proving something to herself, toward work, including her book Purpose and the retreats she now runs, built on helping other people find the same presence and self-acceptance that took her years, and real loss, to reach.
