Hey there Reader - Happy Friday! ๐
I was thinking about my agency days this week, and about one particular gem of advice a mentor gave me. (We're talking GOOD advice here...gods know there was enough bad advice too!! ๐คฃ )
ANYWAY... she told me once that the secret to a longstanding client relationship wasn't just doing brilliant work. In fact excellent work should be the 'given', the bare minimum you could always be expected to deliver. The real secret was making sure your client achieved THEIR goals.
Figure out what they're being judged on; what targets they have to hit; what their next promotion depends on. And then quietly factor all of that into what you're trying to achieve for them.
Cos when their review comes up and they look good in front of their boss, guess who they're going to keep working with? The people that helped them shine and feel proud.
And whle it may not seem like it at first glance, it was actually one of the most generous bits of business advice I've ever been given - because what she was really teaching me was how to pay attention to the human on the other side of the email, and I think it's a lesson I still find helpful when it comes to marketing in general.
We spend so much time these days talking about our offers, our messaging, our positioning, our funnels. And don't get me wrong - those things matter! But somewhere along the way I think we kind of lose sight of something much simpler: the person on the other side of the screen is a human. With their own dreams, their own targets - and crucially - their own quiet measurements of success that probably have nothing to do with what we're selling.
They want to feel proud of the work they put out. They want their boss, their partner, their audience, their younger self to look at what they're doing and think "Hey, this person knows what they're doing!" They want to feel like they're getting somewhere.
And our job, essentially, is to help them get there. Not just to hit our own metrics. Not to push them through our funnel. To actually be of service.
Yeah I know that phrase has gone out of fashion - 'being of service'. But I think it might be an important idea to bring back into the way we do business - cos right now that kind of thinking stands out.
Cos when you actually orient yourself around what the other person is trying to achieve, everything else gets easier. Your messaging sharpens up cos you're talking about things that genuinely matter to them. Your offers get better cos you're solving real problems. And your relationships last longer - because people feel seen.
The divine Maya Angelou famously said: "People will forget what you said, and they'll forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel." I adore that quote, and I think that's the same lesson really. The work you make for someone, the newsletter you send, the product you create, the post you publish - they'll forget the specifics. But they'll remember whether it made them feel good, smarter, more capable, more hopeful, more like the person they want to be.
That's the thing worth aiming at.
Be seen and heard
I've been wanting to do a new video on Canva's captions tool for a while now, and the 2026 update gave me a good reason to finally sit down and do it.๐
In this weeks video I cover not just how to generate and style captions in Canva and make them work harder for you, but - the bit I enjoyed most - a look at WHY they matter (including a bit of research that I found REALLY fascinating), and how some creators have turned their caption style into a genuine piece of brand identity. Not just a default overlay, but an actual design choice.
โANYWAY...check it out on my channel now.โ
Meaningful Creations
This week I want to point you toward something that - tying in nicely with that we talked about earlier - genuinely made me feel seen (and I don't say that lightly!)
Subtle series is created by brand manager, founder, and podcast host Hannah Sosa - and it exists because of a very specific tension: wanting a meaningful, ambitious business without being forced to fake a loud personality to get there.
What I love about this - and why I wanted to share it here specifically - is that Hannah is doing something genuinely rare. She's not telling quiet people to become loud. She's not packaging introversion as a "superpower" so she can sell you a course on how to finally speak up. She's exploring the middle ground between being invisible and being performative - and she argues, quite convincingly, that space is much more subtle than most advice makes it seem.
That feels important right now. We live in a content environment that seems to just rewards volume, noise, and performance - and a lot of well-meaning advice essentially tells people that if they're not thriving in that environment, they just need to work harder at being visible. Hannah pushes back on that, honestly and without drama, and offers something genuinely more useful (and I think, hopeful) instead.
And of course the restraint in HOW she shares is as intentional as WHAT she shares.๐ No shouting. Just clear, honest thinking, presented...well....subtly.
If you get tired of all the noise out there sometimes... I suspect you'll find a lot of value here.
Check out her website or Instagram, and tell her I sent ya.๐
All that's left is to remind you that you are awesome, so don't let the bullies get you down (the ones in your head, or in government! ๐คฃ๐ซข).
โ