The Best Decisions I Never Made.
I spent five years working for two people who taught me almost everything without any of us knowing it.
Raj came from marketing, George from finance, and between them they'd built something I didn't fully understand at the time. I was close enough to see all of it. How they ran the team, how they spoke to clients, what they said in meetings and what they didn't need to say at all. In a small team you never have just one job. You flex, you fill the gaps, you do what needs doing regardless of what your title says. I absorbed all of it without knowing I was absorbing it, and I've been drawing on it ever since.
A small business has a particular feeling to it. You learn what works by being close enough to see what doesn't.
What I didn't expect was to find my voice there. They invited me into meetings and they listened when I contributed. That sounds simple. It wasn't. There's a particular kind of confidence that only comes from being genuinely heard by people you respect, and once you have it you can't unknow it. I left that job understanding not just how to design or manage a project, but how to be in a room. How to read what a client actually needs, how to hold a conversation that goes somewhere, how to trust that your instincts are worth something even when nobody's handed you a certificate to prove it.
Imposter syndrome doesn't go away. I don't think it's supposed to. After nearly 17 years of stepping into very diverse spaces, justice sector boardrooms, craft studios, therapy practices, investment houses, stages, I've come to think of it less as a problem to solve and more as useful friction. It keeps the fire alive. It's what drives you to keep developing, to never assume you've got it figured out, to stay genuinely curious about every new brief and every new industry. The moment it disappears is probably the moment you stop growing. What Raj and George gave me, without either of them knowing it, was the earliest evidence that my instincts were worth something, and then, as my first regular freelance client, a reason to back myself when it mattered most. That's not something you learn in a classroom. It's something you have to be shown.