I was told I would never amount to anything.
Not in a throwaway way. In a deliberate, said-to-my-face way, by people who should have known better. I was a teenage mum, and in the eyes of some, that was the end of my story before it had really begun.
I have gone on to speak to audiences of 25,000 people. I have won awards. I have built businesses, coached hundreds of women, and stood on the stage of my old school to speak to the students there. I have done all of that while being a mum.
But this blog is not about proving people wrong. It is about something more important than that.
It is about what becoming a mum as a teenager actually gave me. And why I believe it is one of the most significant reasons I am good at what I do.
There is a narrative around teenage motherhood that is rarely kind. It centres on limitation. On what you cannot do, what you have missed out on, what doors are now closed to you.
I lived inside that narrative for long enough to know how heavy it is. And I also know, with absolute certainty, that it is wrong.
Becoming a mum as a teenager does not limit you. It accelerates you. Not in a way that is easy or comfortable, but in a way that builds something in you that no business course, no corporate career, and no amount of networking ever could.
It builds grit. Real grit. The kind that does not come from reading about resilience but from living it, in the early hours of the morning, with a baby in your arms and no roadmap for what comes next.
"Your story is not the reason you cannot build something great. It is the reason you can."
As a teenage mum, you do not have the luxury of waiting until you feel ready. You make decisions with incomplete information, under pressure, at speed. You do it anyway. You figure it out as you go.
That ability to act without certainty is one of the most valuable skills in business. Most people wait until the conditions are perfect. They plan and prepare and hesitate. Mums, particularly those who have had to grow up fast, have a different relationship with uncertainty. They know that done imperfectly beats not done at all.
Time became my most precious resource the moment I became a mum. There was no option to waste it. I could not spend three hours deliberating over something that needed a ten-minute decision. I could not fill my days with busy work and call it progress.
That ruthless prioritisation, the ability to cut through the noise and focus on what actually matters, is something I bring to every coaching relationship. And it is something I see missing in so many women who are working incredibly hard but not moving forward.
When you have been underestimated, you understand what it feels like to be in a room and not feel seen. When you have had to ask for help, you understand what it costs someone to do that. When you have had to fight to be taken seriously, you understand the weight of that battle.
I do not coach from a position of having had it easy. I coach from a position of knowing exactly how hard it can be, and knowing that hard is not the same as impossible.
For a long time, I minimised the teenage mum part of my identity in professional settings. I worried it would undermine my credibility. I thought people would not take me seriously if they knew.
The moment I stopped doing that was the moment everything changed.
Owning your story completely, not the polished version, not the edited highlights, but all of it, is what creates genuine connection. And genuine connection is what builds a business that lasts.
If you are reading this and you are a mum building a business, whether you became a mum young like me, or later, or somewhere in between, I want to say something clearly.
The thing that makes your journey harder is also the thing that makes you extraordinary.
The juggle you are managing. The mental load you carry. The way you show up for your business, even on the days when everything else is demanding your attention. These are not weaknesses. They are evidence of a level of capability that most people never have to access.
You do not need to hide the mum part of your story to be credible in business. You do not need to separate who you are as a mother from who you are as a business owner. The women I work with who own their full story are always, without exception, the ones who build the most powerful brands and attract the best clients.
Because people do not connect with perfection. They connect with the real.
"You are not behind. You are building a business around a real, full, extraordinary life. That is not a disadvantage. It is your edge."
I did not build my business in spite of being a teenage mum. I built it in part because of it.
The 13 years I have spent coaching women, the hundreds of conversations, the businesses built and transformed, the women who came in uncertain and left unstoppable. All of it has been shaped by a deep and personal understanding of what it means to start from a place where the odds feel stacked against you.
I coach ambitious women because I know what is possible when someone genuinely believes in you. I know it because someone believed in me when I needed it most. And I know what it costs when nobody does.
That is not something I learned from a textbook. That is something I lived.
Yes. Completely and without question. Some of the most driven, focused, and capable business owners I have worked with became mums young. The discipline and resilience that comes from navigating early motherhood are genuinely powerful business assets. What you need is the right strategy and the right support, not a different story.
There is no perfect balance, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What there is: seasons. Seasons where business takes more, and seasons where family takes more. The goal is not an equal split. The goal is a business model that is built around your life rather than against it, and the clarity to know what your non-negotiables are.
You reframe it. Not as toxic positivity, not as pretending the challenges are not real, but as a genuine shift in perspective. You are not behind. You are on a different path. And different paths, in business, often lead to places the well-worn road never reaches. The women who own their unconventional journey are almost always the ones who build something truly memorable.
If you are a woman in business, mum or not, and you are ready to stop going it alone and start building with real strategy and real support behind you, I would love to work with you.
I work with ambitious women in two ways:
