Introduction
At ten years old, she was sitting on what her school called the "special needs table," and she didn't know it. Nobody had told her there were different tables for different levels. She only worked it out by accident, watching her best friend sit somewhere else, watching the boy next to her read a dictionary and another with his finger up his nose, and thinking: wait a minute, what table am I on?
That quiet, accidental discovery is the starting point for one of the most honest conversations this podcast has hosted. Our guest this week, a trained psychotherapist, business coach and qualified social worker who now runs two organisations supporting the community, spent her childhood being told, in ways spoken and unspoken, that she was less than smart. By the time she left school she had been bullied for over a decade, fought her way through most of it, and quietly rebuilt her academic record from predicted U grades to A's, B's and a C in nine months flat. It took her another eight years after that to find her voice at work.
This is a conversation about what it actually costs to let other people decide your worth, and what it takes to take it back.
The table nobody told her she was on
She describes her ten-year-old self as perceived as "less than smart," a bit of a pushover, and bullied. It wasn't until she was ten or eleven, in Year 6, that she realised she'd been sitting at the lowest of three ability tables in primary school, red, green and yellow, without ever being told the tables meant anything. She worked it out by watching who sat where. In that moment, without fully understanding it, she knew the table wasn't allowed to be her definition, even though she hadn't yet shown what she was capable of.
Nine months, and a mother's tears
The turning point came in Year 11. Her mother, a single parent, went into school for a meeting with her science teachers and was told her daughter was clearly smart but kept coming out with Es and Us. Her mother looked at her with pain in her eyes and asked why, over and over, until she broke down crying. It was, by her own account, the first time she'd seen her mother cry over her education, and it landed harder than any punishment could have.
With under nine months before her GCSEs, she retook her exams, studied twelve hours a day between March and June, and stopped fighting. She doesn't recommend the twelve-hour days. But she went from predicted Us to As, Bs and one C. She's clear that memorising for exams isn't the same as understanding a subject, she still says she doesn't "understand" maths, science or English in any deep sense, but she learned to play the game the system was actually testing, and that was enough to change the trajectory.
Fighting to survive, then choosing a two-hour journey instead
The bullying she describes wasn't abstract. She was fighting other pupils, sometimes outnumbered four to one, from around age thirteen through her teenage years, in an environment she compares to the "happy slapping" era, when stabbings among teenagers were rising around her. She never put anyone in hospital and was never stabbed herself, she says, but the fights were frequent and often for no real reason beyond reputation.
To avoid the group who wanted to fight her on her route home, she started taking a two-and-a-half-hour journey instead of a twenty-minute one, hiding her head down on the bus so she wouldn't be seen. Later, when it came to choosing a sixth form college, she deliberately chose one in south London, two hours from her home in north London, specifically so nobody there would know her or want to fight her. She's blunt about the trade-off: if she'd gone to a college in her own area, she doesn't believe she would have finished.
Eight years to find her voice at work
Leaving school didn't end the pattern, it changed its shape. She started working young and describes it taking eight years to find her voice as an adult, as a Black woman, across different workplaces. Where school had taught her to fight, the workplace gave her no equivalent outlet, so when people were rude to her, her default was to stay quiet.
She's careful to separate the person from the behaviour: people who are nasty on a Monday morning, she says, usually aren't nasty because they woke up wanting to be, something else is going on for them. Understanding that didn't excuse the behaviour, but it changed how she carried it, and it took years before she could tell the difference between empathising with someone's issues and accepting their disrespect.
Two stories, one turning point
She tells two stories side by side. The first is from secondary school: two girls picked on her, repeatedly, in the one class she already hated. She planned her response in advance, and when the moment came, she confronted them, one girl ducked under a table to escape, the other she caught. She got suspended and says plainly that she was happy about it. That was her emancipation from being bullied at school.
The second story happened in 2015, on a professional training course. Two older participants tried to dominate the group, excluded others from decisions, and were rude to a man who'd arrived late. When one of them turned that rudeness on her directly, she said, "How dare you speak to me like that, you do not judge me just because of a disagreement." The other participant tried to escalate it to the course lecturer expecting him to take her side. He didn't take sides at all, he said this was healthy discourse and both views were valid. From that day on, she says, she never let anyone speak to her "anyhow" at work again.
Recognise your worth, then demonstrate it
Her framing of what happened in those moments is the sharpest idea in the conversation: "You don't recognise your worth, you demonstrate your worth." Recognition is internal and can stay theoretical. Demonstration is what happens when you actually hold a boundary in front of someone who's testing it.
She describes bullying, and the everyday disrespect that mimics it in adult life, as a boundary violation: people going through your boundaries, rubbishing you, discarding you, making you feel insignificant and irrelevant. And she names something specific about being a Black woman navigating that: sometimes nobody is there to defend you, nobody is there to support you, so you have to build internal resources within yourself, resources that, in her view, more support systems now exist to help with than did when she was growing up.
Build the mirror before you build the voice
Asked for practical steps for someone who's still staying quiet despite seeing microaggressions happen to them, she splits her answer into internal and external work.
First, work out whether this is a work-only situation or a life-wide one. If you can't articulate your voice anywhere, not just at work, that's a bigger piece of work than a single difficult colleague. If you can find your voice somewhere, in therapy, church, family, a hobby, a personal development course, a group like Toastmasters, that's your testing ground. Practise there first, work out what makes that space feel safe enough to speak up in, then look at what you can transport from it into work. Be ready for the fact that it might not land, and that it might even be a sign you need to leave an environment that isn't safe.
Second, define your own self-fulfilment and self-success criteria, because without them you stay under your potential by default. There's nothing wrong with defining success as being a good parent or spouse rather than reaching the top of an organisation, but it has to be a deliberate choice, not a drift.
Third, get a mirror, and not the one in your own house. Self-affirmation without evidence behind it is fragile, she argues: tell yourself you're a good speaker with nothing to back it up, and one piece of negative feedback can undo it. Affirmations built on actual evidence, feedback from people who've seen you do the thing, hold up under pressure in a way empty ones don't. A therapist, a coach, or a genuinely critical friend group all function as that mirror.
She's also candid that she's since come to understand her own high energy, impulsivity and emotional dysregulation as likely undiagnosed ADHD, something Black children in the 1990s were rarely assessed for and were instead told was just being "bad." Without the language to name it, she had to build her own strategies to manage it, and eventually to turn it into a strength rather than something to apologise for.
What leadership actually means
Asked how she defines leadership, she breaks it into three parts: self-leadership, the intrinsic discipline, courage and emotional intelligence a person builds within themselves; people leadership, the ability to engender and collaborate with others, which she calls the glue that holds a vision together; and organisational leadership, the strategy, direction and problem-solving that moves an institution forward. The greatest leaders she points to, in her view, had all three, which is why their movements outlived them.
Underneath that structure sits a simpler belief: a leader is truly a server. She never self-appointed herself into the causes she's taken on, she says, she saw what needed doing and did it. When asked what she's most proud of, her answer was the shortest of the conversation: doing it well, in a way that, at the end, could be met with "well done, good and faithful servant."
