Introduction
Four years ago, Mildred Talabi's life was, in her words, full on. Two young kids, a job, a business, everything moving. Then she had a brain tumour, and her life stopped, not by choice, but because her body gave her no other option. For months, she had to relearn how to walk. On Everyday Leadership, the LinkedIn visibility coach and former self-described "shy kid" traces a line from that forced stop to the boundaries, rest and deliberate visibility that now define how she works, arguing that the margin she had to build back into her life after illness is something everyone needs before a crisis forces the issue.
The Shy Kid Who Became a Visibility Coach
Talabi now teaches women how to build personal brands and businesses through LinkedIn, but she's upfront about how unlikely that looks against her own personality. "I am the absolute opposite in terms of my personality type. I am an introvert by nature." As a child, she was so shy that being asked a question in class made her blush visibly. She chose journalism partly because writing let her stay behind the scenes rather than in front of people.
Quiet Is Not the Same as Shy
A turning point in how she understood herself came from Susan Cain's book Quiet. Talabi draws a distinction she says reshaped her thinking: shyness is an obstacle that stops you doing what you're meant to do, while quietness is simply a personality type, one she notes "the Bible even honours." The problem wasn't being quiet. It was mistaking quiet for a ceiling on what she could do. "I think that means that I can't get up on stage, I can't speak, and those things terrified me."
Saying Yes Before Fear Can Talk You Out of It
The shift started with a single invitation. A mentor from her journalism days, Adeline, asked a mid-twenties Talabi to speak to a class of young journalists for a fee. "I found myself saying yes before I can talk myself out of it." She describes the adrenaline afterwards as the first evidence that pushing past fear led somewhere good. From there, she deliberately built the muscle: attending networking events alone, specifically because going alone forced her to talk to strangers, and eventually joining Toastmasters to get comfortable on stage.
Nine Businesses Before Thirty: Following the "Inner Vocation"
Talabi's route to LinkedIn coaching runs through a string of earlier ventures that look unconnected until she explains the pattern. At eleven, she and her siblings ran a typing business from her father's old typewriter. At nineteen, she started a magazine funded by her student loan. Later, seeing badly written CVs and cover letters cross her desk as a magazine assistant editor, she started a CV writing business that ran for twelve years, alongside a full time job, before she went full time on it herself.
Her first attempt at going all in failed. She left her day job too early, before the business income had overtaken her salary, and was back in employment within eight months. "I had no structure, I had nothing really kind of set up." She calls this her working definition of the pattern: "if your side hustle overtakes your day job, that's when you let go."
The Divine Timing of Going All In on LinkedIn
Talabi describes feeling an unexplained urgency at the end of 2019 to focus properly on LinkedIn, a platform she'd used inconsistently for years. She joined a thirty day posting challenge in January 2020. She never stopped. Weeks later, the pandemic hit and networking evaporated overnight. "Nobody's going to networking events, no one's doing all this stuff, and people are like, how do we connect with each other? Oh, LinkedIn." She calls the timing "divine", and it became the foundation of her coaching business.
Why Going Viral Doesn't Pay the Bills
One post, about the film The Woman King, brought in over 6,000 reactions and comments, more engagement than anything else she'd posted. It also generated zero coaching clients. Talabi is blunt about the gap between attention and business results: a viral post outside your actual expertise gives you a dopamine rush and nothing else. She warns against chasing it, and against taking the inevitable drop in engagement that follows a viral post personally. "You have got to detach your ego from your post, because if you don't, that thing will drive you crazy."
The Brain Tumour That Rebuilt Her Boundaries
Four years before this conversation, at a point when her life was, by her own description, entirely full, Talabi had a brain tumour. Her recovery took months of relearning basic movement, including walking. She frames what came out of it as a forced audit of how she wanted to work: fewer evening coaching calls, because evenings belong to her children; no calls before ten in the morning, because that time is hers; and, more recently, a fixed Wednesday with no calls, no work, entirely her own. "This thing didn't, it means it ain't my time to die, and it means I've got things to do."
Building Margin Into a Full Life
The concept Talabi returns to repeatedly is "margin", the blank space around the edges of a page that lets you actually use what's written on it. Most people, she argues, live with none: no space for an emergency, no space to help a neighbour, because every hour is already booked. Rebuilding margin into her life, she says, hasn't just protected her. It's made her a better coach, because she now shows up to client calls rested rather than depleted. Within seven months of relearning to walk, she ran her first 5k. "There is so much more in you than you're currently showing."
