Introduction
In one stretch of a few months, Vanessa Bello lost her flat to a fire, ended a fourteen-year relationship, and was working an insecure, fixed-term contract with no guarantee of what came next. Ninety to ninety-five per cent of her belongings, gathered over her entire life in the UK, were gone. Christmas was coming. She had no spare room to fall back into and no long-standing support system in the country to lean on.
She did not wait to feel better before she chose how to respond. Every single day, she woke up and decided to choose joy, then took a photo of herself smiling and sent it to her parents, not because she felt happy but because her eyes were tired and she needed to decide what she was going to focus on. That daily decision, repeated through one of the hardest periods of her life, is the clearest example of the distinction she has built her coaching practice on: happiness is a state that depends on what is happening to you, joy is a choice about how you respond to it.
The difference between joy and happiness
For Bello, an accredited executive coach, brand consultant and inclusion strategist who has worked with more than eighty brands over eighteen years, the distinction is not semantic. Happiness, she says, is a state of being. You are happy, or sad, or something else, largely in reaction to what is going on around you. Joy is different. It is proactive and intentional, something you choose every day rather than something that happens to you.
That distinction matters most when circumstances are hard. Plenty of people tell themselves that joy requires everything to be going well first. Bello's experience says the opposite: choosing joy in the middle of the storm, while the sadness and the tears are still there, is what gets you through it and what you actually learn from.
Choosing joy when everything falls apart
The clearest test of that belief came when a fire in her flat, a breakup after fourteen years, and an unstable work contract landed in the same few months. She had never experienced a house fire in the UK before and did not know how quickly things would be resolved. She did not have the kind of long-term support network that lets you simply go and stay with someone, so she had to build her own sense of safety from the inside.
Her response was small and repeatable: choose joy each morning, then send her parents a smiling photo, partly to reassure them and partly because she needed them to know that everything they had taught her was showing up when it counted. Underneath the smile, she says plainly, there was still real sadness. Choosing joy was never about pretending the hardship away. It was about deciding, every day, what she was going to give her attention and energy to.
Three weeks after the fire, she was booked for a much bigger role at a gender equity conference in Europe than she had been given at the same event the year before. Friends around her said she should cancel. She refused, because she needed the proof, to herself, that she could still do the work despite everything happening underneath the surface.
Way forward, not dreaming
Bello is candid that she does not dream in the conventional sense. As a middle child, she says she learned early not to let herself dream too far ahead, because failing at something she had openly hoped for felt unmanageable. Instead, she built what she calls a "way forward": one hurdle in front of her at a time, tackled with the same discipline as a SWOT analysis, weighing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and being ruthless about what she could and could not control.
That distinction between dreaming and moving forward is also how she manages her energy. She does not spend valuable energy on things outside her influence. She limits how much time she spends around people and noise that pull her away from her own clarity, because she has learned that her way forward depends on tuning in to herself first, not to the loudest voice in the room.
Redefining success
Bello measures success against a line she borrows from Maya Angelou: success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. Not money, not property, not follower counts. The questions she actually asks herself are whether she can look in the mirror and feel proud of what she has put into the world, whether the work energises her rather than drains her, and whether she is putting in the hours and staying curious enough to keep growing.
She also weighs it against what she calls her 360: work is not the only measure. Time with her partner and her dog matters just as much as professional wins. Success, in her framing, is a whole-life calculation, not a career scoreboard.
Believing in your own story before anyone else does
Two moments changed the course of her career, and both required her to back herself before she had proof it would work. The first was as an intern, already holding two master's degrees from France, when she pushed her way into a conversation with a department head who had offered an open door but never expected her to use it. She reminded him that he had said his door was open, and pushed until a contract that was ending in six months turned into a full-time graduate role and a run of yearly promotions.
The second came years later, when an agency spent two months persuading her to speak publicly about her own career. She nearly turned it down, carrying the kind of imposter syndrome that made her ask why anyone would care about her story. She said yes anyway, spoke to a room of well over a hundred women, and received a standing ovation. That was the moment she understood that her story mattered, and that someone else had believed in her before she fully believed in herself.
What leadership really means
Asked to define leadership, Bello keeps it simple: having a clear vision, understanding the direction of travel, and supporting the people around you, starting with supporting yourself. What she stresses most is the part leaders tend to underweight, the mood along the way. How you make people feel while you are getting somewhere, she argues, matters as much as the destination itself, especially in difficult periods. Leaders who miss that lose the very thing that enables innovation and commitment from their teams.
