You’ve just stepped into something new.

A new role. A new firm. A new team. And the people whose trust you need — the ones who decide whether you’re someone they can rely on — have never heard your name.

Some of them are in another city. Another country. You’ll meet them on a screen, if at all. They’re watching how you show up, and quietly deciding.

There’s no runway. No time to slowly win people over. You have to build trust, and you have to build it fast — while you’re still learning where the coffee is.

If you’ve ever been the new person with all eyes on you, you know the feeling. And you know the instinct that comes with it: prove yourself. Show them what you know. Establish that you belong here.

That instinct is the wrong one. I knew it going in — the thing that actually builds trust, fast, is almost the opposite. Let me show you what I mean.

Let me take you back to the moment I had to put it into practice.

I had spent my career in-house. Corporate roles, on the client side of the table. Then I stepped into a Big 4 firm — as a Director.

If you know how accounting firms work, you know why that mattered. People usually come up through the firm. Years of it. By the time you’re senior, your name carries history. People already know what you can do. The trust is half-built before you walk in the room.

I had none of that.

I came from a completely different world. My whole career had been in-house, in corporate. Every “client” I had ever had was an internal stakeholder — colleagues, other departments, people inside the same business. Now, for the first time, I had to earn the trust of external clients too. People paying for the firm’s name, with no idea who I was.

But even on day one, I knew something that steadied me: my background was exactly what could relate to them. I have sat where they sat. I think like them. I talk like them. Knowing what you can actually bring to the table — that’s just as important as knowing what you don’t yet have.

And I had come straight in near the top — into a high-pressure, competitive environment, with Partners and clients across Europe, the US and APAC who had no reason, yet, to back me.

And everyone wanted me at once.

Different Partners had me running their engagements straight away — the portfolio had been assigned to me, ready or not — while those same Partners were still working out who I even was. Clients needed me for the day-to-day, while I was still learning the place. My own team needed me. All of it pulling in different directions, all of it at the same time, all of it watched.

I remember thinking: I have to earn this, and I have to earn it quickly.

So what do you do?

Before I tell you what I actually did, here’s the first tool of this chapter — and you can use it today, whether or not you read on.

Tool 1 — Reflection questions

Before you can build trust, you need to know with whom, what they’re worried about, and what you’ve actually committed to. Sit with these six.

1. Whose trust do I most need right now?

2. What challenges are they facing — what’s keeping them up at night?

3. Where have I sat in their shoes before? What do I understand about their position that someone else might not?

4. Where do their priorities compete — who wants what, and where do those demands pull against each other?

5. What have I actually agreed to deliver, and to whom? (Trust is built when you do what you said — so be clear on what you said.)

6. Where am I tempted to prove myself instead of understand them? (Be honest — this is the trap.)

Those questions show you where the work is.

The next two tools are how you actually do it — the exact language for the hardest moments, and one specific action to take this week. They’re below, along with the part of the story that matters most: what actually built the trust.

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Here’s a question worth sitting with.

Someone more senior than you questions the work one of your team members delivered. They’re not happy with it. And you don’t agree with them.

What do you do? Do you stay quiet, take the feedback, and pass it down to your team member? Or do you stand up for them?

It sounds easy to answer when you read it here. In the moment, it’s one of the harder things you’ll do as a leader — because the person you’d be pushing back on is more senior than you, and staying quiet is so much easier.

Let me tell you about the day I had to choose.

One busy afternoon, I got a call from a senior stakeholder. She was unhappy about one of my team members. The work was late, she said, and it wasn’t good enough.

I listened. I didn’t defend him, and I didn’t promise to sort him out. I just listened. I wasn’t going to take the complaint at face value, but I wasn’t going to dismiss it either. Somewhere in the middle was the truth, and it was my job to find it.

What I did next is the part worth sharing — because it’s the difference between a leader who passes complaints down the line, and one their team would walk through fire for.

Don’t let one complaint become one verdict

The first thing I did was refuse to treat her complaint as one thing.

“Late and not good enough” sounds like a single judgement. It’s actually two, and they have nothing to do with each other. Under pressure from a senior voice, it’s easy to blur them together — and then you either defend the whole thing or accept the whole thing. Both are wrong, because the truth is rarely all on one side.

So I separated them. Was it late? And separately — was it bad? Two questions, checked on their own.

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When you finish something significant, you throw yourself into what’s next.

That’s what I did after I completed my international coaching certification. Head full of new frameworks. New language. New ways of thinking about what helps people move forward.

I started writing on Facebook about career coaching — values, transition, redundancy, the human experience of being stuck. Content I believed in. I was in new territory and fully focused on the new thing.

I wasn’t avoiding my Indirect Tax background. It just hadn’t occurred to me yet that the two things belonged together.

Then I moved to LinkedIn.

And something shifted.

LinkedIn is where people know me. Twenty years of Indirect Tax experience. That reputation was already in the room before I typed a word. And standing back in that space, I saw something I hadn’t seen clearly before.

I didn’t need to choose between who I am and what I was building.

So I tied them together. Deliberately.

What have you been keeping separate — that might actually belong together?

And once I did, something became clear.

What I was describing in career transformation — helping people move from where they are to where they want to be — was structurally identical to what I do in Indirect Tax transformation.

Both move something from point A to point B. Both require holding two levels simultaneously. The big picture and the detail. The internal process and the external goal.

In Indirect Tax: legislation that doesn’t wait, deadlines that don’t move, teams across time zones, audits that land without warning, and a dozen obligations running at once. The kind of work that demands you hold complexity without dropping any of it.

In career transformation: the values worth building around, the strengths worth leaning into, the life you actually want — and the honest work of clearing what sits in your mind and gets in the way.

Altitude and detail. Both matter equally. You have to see the whole process and the steps between it.

I have been doing this work for twenty years. I just hadn’t named it in this context.

Once I did, my writing changed. Not the topic. The depth.

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I didn’t start on LinkedIn. I started on Facebook. I was too scared to post in a network I’d spent twenty years building professionally. So I went somewhere quieter. Two months of small posts, quiet observations, nothing polished. But I was writing. And that turned out to be the only thing that mattered.

When I finally moved to LinkedIn, I played it safe. Tax content. Career transition content. Credible, useful, exactly what you’d expect from someone with my background. I wasn’t wrong to start there. But I wasn’t fully present either.

Then I started writing from my own experience. Real moments. Real observations. Things I’d noticed over nearly twenty years in tax rooms and boardrooms and restructures.

The posts landed differently. More responses.

But what I noticed more was what I was writing about.

It wasn’t career transition tips. It wasn’t how to find your next role.

Subscribe to read the rest of Chapter 4 — what I realised I was actually saying, the photo that changed how I thought about being seen, and three things I’d tell anyone building their platform from scratch.

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One Foot In, One Foot Out

I think God wants me to focus on this. Not coaching as a label. Something bigger than that.

Helping people discover that they are made for more than they have allowed themselves to believe. That their potential is bigger than their current ceiling. That the thing holding them back is rarely skill or experience — it’s the story they’ve accepted about what’s possible for them.

For me that’s tax and finance professionals — because that’s where my 20 years lives. But the belief underneath is universal.

That’s not a career decision. That’s purpose. And it feels completely different.

But I didn’t start there. In September 2025, I was holding on.

Not because I didn’t believe in what I was building. Not because I wasn’t moving. But because I didn’t know who I was beyond the thing I had spent 20 years building.

Nearly 20 years in indirect tax. Director level. A career I had built from the ground up and was genuinely proud of. That wasn’t just a job title — it was how people knew me. It was the shorthand for everything I had worked for. When I walked into a room, people understood immediately what I had earned.

If you’re sitting with a head full of what ifs right now — what if it doesn’t work, what if I’m not ready, what if no one takes me seriously — I want you to know something. Sometimes the what ifs aren’t really about the plan. They’re about identity. Who am I if I’m not that person anymore? What do I lead with if I can’t lead with the title?

That’s the harder question. And that’s what this chapter is really about.

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From Corporate to Clarity is the real story behind building Elite with Heart Leadership. Not the highlight reel — the actual journey. The wrong turns, the tools, the moments of doubt, and the decisions that eventually made sense. Written for anyone who is building something themselves, or quietly thinking about it.

After I finished my coaching certification, I did what made sense.

I built a website.

I’d been through this before — a few years earlier, helping my husband with his business. That one cost around $3,500 and took months of back and forth to get right. So I was braced for the same.

Five days later, mine was done.

Roughly two hours a day. Wix. A couple of hundred dollars a year. I kept waiting for it to get hard. It didn’t. For someone who spent twenty years in corporate — where every project has a steering committee, a timeline, and a budget that somehow always blows out — building something real in five days for almost nothing felt a little surreal.

I started writing blogs. Posted every few days. Told myself I was building something.

Waited.

Nothing much happened.

Facebook and Instagram

Wix lets you cross-post to Facebook and Instagram simultaneously. Convenient. I tried it.

Facebook felt manageable. Instagram was a different story.

It wasn’t that I was being fake on Instagram. It was simpler than that. Instagram — the way everyone told me to use it — is built for reels, short punchy content, people who are comfortable being watched. I am not that person. I’m after deeper conversations. The kind where something actually gets said.

So I stopped.

Facebook stayed. Quietly, in the background. I kept posting there, kept writing blogs, told myself that was enough.

But I knew it wasn’t.

Two months of silence

My real audience was on LinkedIn. I knew that. I’d known it the whole time.

And I hadn’t posted a single thing there since launching Elite with Heart.

Two months of silence. Not because I’d run out of things to say — because I was terrified of what the people who knew me would think. Twenty years of credibility in indirect tax. A network built entirely around that identity. And now I was going to tell them I was becoming a coach?

I still say this exact sentence when I talk about it: I thought people would think I went crazy.

So I convinced myself I’d just focus on Facebook and the blog. That was fine. That was enough. I didn’t need LinkedIn.

Except the whole time, something was nagging at me. I kept coming back to the same thought: I’m not throwing away twenty years of experience. I’m expanding. If I can translate what’s in my head — everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve lived — into something practical for the people coming up behind me in tax and finance, that’s not a pivot. That’s the whole point.

I just needed someone to say it back to me.

I reached out to a friend. I’d been watching him write on LinkedIn about his own journey after leaving a corporate role — honest, specific, no performance. I knew he’d give me a straight answer.

I asked him what he thought. He asked me what was holding me back.

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My role became redundant.

When it happened, I expected to feel something dramatic. Fear, maybe. Or the particular kind of panic that comes when a version of your life closes without warning.

What I felt instead was peace.

I know that sounds strange. But the moment that confirmed it for me wasn’t a quiet one I had with myself. It was the conversations I had with the people I’d been working with.

I remember telling one of the Partners. He asked me what I meant. I told him - my role has been made redundant. He asked me again — what do you mean? I said - I am no longer needed. Three times, he asked. Three times, I repeated it. He wasn’t being difficult. He genuinely couldn’t process it. Then he told me he was going to have a chat with my direct Partner about it.

That reaction — that specific moment of someone not being able to take it in — told me something important. Not that I was irreplaceable. Nobody is. But that I had shown up fully in that role. That the work had mattered. That the relationships were real.

When you leave somewhere and people are shocked, it means something. It means you were present. It means they felt it.

I could walk away with my head high. And I did.

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When my role was made redundant, the people around me were more shocked than I was.

Clients. Stakeholders. Colleagues who had worked alongside me for years. They couldn’t quite believe it. Some were visibly upset. Some reached out within hours.

And I remember noticing, with some curiosity, that I felt... peaceful.

Not numb. Not in denial. Peaceful.

I’ve thought a lot about why. And I think it comes down to this: somewhere along the way, I had stopped keeping my identity inside the job title. The work I’d done was real. The relationships were real. The value I’d created was real. And none of that disappeared when the role did.

The clients being more shaken than me told me something important — that I had done my job well. That the value was never the structure around me. It was me.

I didn’t fully understand what that meant yet. But I was about to find out.

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