Featured in Northampton Living Magazine: The Early Story of Boss Diplomat

In 2022, Northampton Living Magazine featured me in an article about my journey from diplomacy into the work I was building through Boss Diplomat.

Reading it now is like opening a time capsule. At the time, I described myself as a Personal Brand Expert and Image Consultant, and much of my work focused on helping solopreneurs become more visible and confident as the face of their businesses. My language and my work have evolved considerably since then, but the instinct underneath it is remarkably familiar: I was already fascinated by the relationship between who someone is and what other people see.

What I was beginning to see

One of the ideas I spoke about in the original feature was that identity goes far beyond clothes or style. I was interested in the experiences, choices and stories that brought somebody to where they were, and how those things affected the way they showed up in front of other people.

My years in diplomacy had already made me acutely aware of presentation and perception. I had spent time around senior government officials and learned how much people read before a conversation has really begun: how you enter a room, how you communicate, what you emphasise, what you minimise and whether the person people encounter matches the authority you are trying to carry.

The thread that stayed

Back then, I was applying those observations through personal branding and image consulting. Today, I work in public identity and perception, and I can see much more clearly what I had been circling all along.

I am interested in the clues people give us about themselves. The things they repeat. The stories they almost dismiss. The contradictions they do not notice. The qualities that are obvious from the outside and surprisingly difficult to see from the inside.

That curiosity eventually became the Human Brand X-Ray.

A record of where Boss Diplomat began

I am keeping this feature in the Boss Diplomat archive because evolution matters. I do not want to rewrite 2022 as though I had already arrived at the language and work I use today. I hadn’t.

What I can see now is the thread running through it. The job title changed. The services changed. My understanding of the work became much sharper. The fascination with people, identity and perception stayed.

Northampton Living captured one of those early chapters.