Introduction
Mariel Lear spent nearly a decade in a job she didn't enjoy, in rooms full of "very busy white middle class males" where she "didn't quite fit in", before a career coach in New York handed her a set of personality tests and told her something she'd never considered: she was never meant to work in a corporate environment.
That single sentence reframed a career she'd spent a decade proving herself in. Today Mariel is a LinkedIn Top Voice, a LinkedIn Learning instructor and a personal branding coach whose recent LinkedIn course attracted more than 13,500 sign-ups before it had even started. Speaking to Sope Agbelusi on Everyday Leadership, she traced the line from a teenage girl watching Eddie Murphy's Boomerang to a woman who now helps professionals and entrepreneurs get seen for the work they're already doing.
An introvert who loves networking
Mariel opens by correcting a common assumption: introversion isn't shyness. She's never been shy, she says, she simply builds her energy alone and needs that time to recharge before she can show up fully in a room. As a teenager she was, in her words, "a lowkey teenager", someone who loved reading and cooking and stayed mostly home, and she says that hasn't fundamentally changed even now that her public work looks the opposite of low-key.
From a film to a career: how PR found her
The starting point for Mariel's career was almost accidental. Watching Boomerang as a young teenager, she was struck by the image of "high-powered women working in these really opulent environments" and decided PR or advertising looked like the glamorous route in. It wasn't glamorous. Her first agency job, landed after being one of two hires from around 500 applicants, was loud, chaotic and highly stimulating in a way that clashed directly with her introversion. But it taught her the foundational skills she still uses: how to write, how to pitch, how to communicate under pressure. She always knew it wouldn't be forever, and having that internal deadline, rather than open-ended endurance, is what made 18 months in a mismatched environment bearable.
The rock-bottom moment that led to a career coach
Years later, working in Corporate America and being repeatedly passed over for promotion as the only woman in the room, Mariel hit what she calls rock bottom. She hired a career coach, a British-born woman living in New York who understood both cultures, and went through personality assessments (Strengths Finder, Myers-Briggs) for the first time. The results said what a decade of experience hadn't taught her: she wasn't built for bureaucratic corporate structures, she was a creative, a visionary, a "big blue sky thinker", and that mismatch was what had been crushing her spirit. Naming that clearly is what gave her permission to build something different.
Brazil, alone, and the moment control became visible
The real turning point wasn't the coaching session itself, it was a solo one-way trip to Brazil in 2010, after quitting what she calls a miserable job. Sitting in Salvador listening to drums in the mountains, journalling alone, she realised she had never before given herself the space to identify who she was without other people's opinions shaping the answer. People around her had questioned the trip outright, telling her black women didn't travel alone, asking who she thought she was. She shut the noise out. That trip, she says, is where she first understood she was in control of her thoughts, her actions and her daily habits, and it directly preceded her move to New York two years later.
Defining values with the "ideal day" exercise
Asked how she worked out what she actually wanted, Mariel points to a specific exercise from a book she keeps close by: writing out an ideal day in granular detail, what time you wake up, which city you're in, what you're doing hour by hour. Mapping her own ideal day exposed how far she was from living it, and from that gap she extracted her core values: freedom, creativity, impact and income. Freedom, in particular, meant the ability to determine how she spends her time, who she works with and what she earns, and she's stayed close to that value ever since, even as the specific form of her business has changed multiple times since leaving Corporate America in 2016.
Losing five years of work, and choosing not to mourn it for long
In 2020, a server issue wiped five years of content from Mariel's original website, thousands of dollars of investment, gone overnight. Her first reaction was a day of genuine upset. Her coach's response was blunt: "Good. I'm glad it's gone, because you would not have let that go otherwise." Mariel now describes the loss as cathartic, clearing space for a website and a brand that better reflected who she'd become. Her framing for anyone facing a similar loss: ask what you need to let go of to let something better in, rather than trying to preserve what's familiar simply because it's familiar.
Courage or comfort, but never both
Mariel's clearest message, and the line she returns to most often, is that you can have courage or comfort, but not both at the same time. She traces most people's reluctance to self-promote back to ego, not in the sense of arrogance, but in the sense of self-consciousness: staying in your own head, worrying about judgement, making the moment about yourself instead of your message. Her own reframe was realising that most people are far more preoccupied with their own lives than with judging hers. She contrasts UK reticence about self-promotion with the US habit of stating your accomplishments plainly, and argues the useful position sits between the two: credible, substantiated confidence, without either false modesty or empty bragging.
Boundaries, self-care and knowing your own energy
Running a visibility-based business as an introvert requires deliberate energy management, and Mariel is unapologetic about her boundaries: full switch-off during time away, no scheduled posting, an out-of-office that means what it says. Her self-care list includes an infrared sauna blanket, juicing, journalling (inconsistently, by her own admission) and EFT tapping. The point isn't the specific routine, it's the underlying discipline: she can't pour into her clients and audience from an empty cup, so protecting her own capacity is part of the job, not a luxury around it.
