A Career Less Ordinary

The moment that changed my career didn’t happen in a boardroom or on a stage. There was no audience for it, no applause, no announcement. It happened in the conservatory of our small Edwardian terrace house a few weeks before Christmas while the heating clicked on and off against the cold.

I had recently returned to work after the birth of my son, and I was sitting at a little white antique bureau that doubled as my writing desk, looking at papers spread around me and trying to quiet the growing feeling that something was no longer working. For years I had been toying with the idea of going freelance. I knew I was capable of working independently. I liked building things. I liked shaping my own ideas. More than that, I needed work to fit around the reality of having two young children and a life that no longer aligned neatly with the rhythms of full-time corporate employment.

Before returning to work, a friend who ran a competitor publication had offered me a long-term freelance contract. At the time I turned it down because my employment agreement required me to return after maternity leave for six months. I tried to make it work, but after I came back it quickly became clear that I felt lost in the role I was in. I had been offered a promotion and asked for a pay rise to reflect the additional responsibilities and to bring my salary in line with male counterparts. I was told that it was not possible.

The next day, while working from home, I reached a point where I simply thought, enough.

For reasons I still cannot fully explain, I decided the bureau needed to move downstairs. The conservatory was brighter, more open, more hopeful somehow. So I emptied every drawer and dragged the desk down the narrow staircase by myself. It was heavier than I expected and it still has a wobbly leg because of that journey.

Once it was in place, I cleaned it thoroughly, reorganised everything and sat down with a pink fabric-covered notebook with a cupcake on the front. It was the sort of notebook my peers used to laugh at. Most of them were men. By then I had stopped caring.

I made a list.

First, tell my boss I was leaving.

Second, come up with a name for the company I wanted to build.

Third, buy the domain name and create the website.

Fourth, call my friend and ask whether the freelance opportunity was still available (spoiler: it was).

I wrote down several names before landing on The Intelligent Miner. People often assume I chose the title because it sounds like an oxymoron. I never saw it that way. To me, the future of mining belongs to people who are informed and curious and thoughtful about the world around them. Intelligent miners.

Later that evening my husband came home and asked why the furniture had been rearranged. When I told him what I had decided, he laughed and said, “Well done. It took you long enough.” We opened a bottle of champagne we had been saving for Christmas and drank it from old-fashioned champagne saucers in the kitchen while I stood there in my pyjamas smiling into a future full of uncertainty. He took a photograph of me that evening that I will keep it for the rest of my life.

What strikes me now is how ordinary that moment must have looked from the outside. There were no big accolades attached to it. No dramatic career milestone. Yet it changed the trajectory of my life more completely than any title or promotion ever has.

In many ways my career began with another moment that did not fit conventional ideas of success. I originally went to university to study anthropology. At eighteen, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. University felt like the expected next step and anthropology sounded interesting enough to hold my attention for three years. Within a month I realised I had chosen the wrong course.

I was lonely there too. I had been placed in student accommodation with older students who already had established friendship groups and routines. Gradually I became more withdrawn and isolated. After three months I left and went home.

For the following year I worked in a department store. It was a perfectly good job with a good company, but I was intensely bored. Around the same time, my boyfriend was studying geology and struggling with essay writing. “Can you help me?” he asked.

I liked writing and I ended up helping with many of his first-year assignments. Somewhere in that process I realised that geology fascinated me. I had always loved natural history programmes and museums and being outside in nature looking closely at things. The subject felt intellectually alive in a way anthropology never had.

A year after leaving university, I enrolled again, this time to study geology and geography.

I worked incredibly hard because I knew what it felt like to drift without direction. By the time I graduated from Brighton University with a first-class degree, I had won an award for my research into mineralisation in Cornish granites; the same geology now contributing to the UK’s emerging lithium sector. I loved the work completely. The technical detail, the research, the process of trying to understand how landscapes and mineralisation systems formed over immense stretches of time. It suited the way my mind worked.

I considered doing a PhD, but the global financial crisis arrived shortly after I graduated and geology jobs became scarce almost overnight. I needed to earn a living. Then I saw an advertisement for an assistant editor role at Mining Magazine.

I remember thinking that I had enough technical understanding to follow the subject matter and enough confidence in my writing to do the job well. I assumed I might stay a year or two. Instead, I spent more than a decade there. What kept me in mining was not only the technical challenge, although that remains a huge part of it. It was the storytelling.

Mining is full of people whose experiences are extraordinary and yet rarely visible to the wider world. Over the years I have travelled extensively, interviewed countless individuals and gradually assembled my understanding of the industry piece by piece. I often describe it as building a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box. Every conversation adds another fragment of understanding. One person explains ventilation systems underground. Another explains metallurgy. Another talks about community relations or financing or tailings management or exploration geology. Twenty years later I’m still adding pieces.

That process suits me because I’m intensely curious. I always have been. As a child I was the one asking difficult questions and following ideas far beyond the point where most people lost interest. I still do that now.

The stories themselves matter deeply to me because they humanise an industry that’s often discussed only in abstract terms. Some of the most compelling stories I’ve encountered have emerged unexpectedly from people I thought I knew well already. That was one of the reasons we started the Five Minutes With interview series through The Intelligent Miner. Once people begin talking openly about their experiences, remarkable things surface.

Storytelling also has the power to change how people understand mining itself. Much of modern life depends directly or indirectly on minerals and metals, yet there remains a disconnect between end users and the people who produce those materials. Human stories help bridge that distance.

At the same time, entering the industry as a young woman brought its own challenges. I was in my early twenties when I joined Mining Magazine and there were very few women working in mining trade media at the time. I was frequently introduced as the editor’s assistant regardless of my actual role. There was an assumption that because I was young and female, I was probably making coffees and fetching dry cleaning.

Respect came slowly. I had to work harder and longer than many of my male peers to establish credibility, but over time I did. At 24 years old, I became the youngest editor in Mining Magazine’s history and only the third woman to lead the publication in more than a century. Later I ran what was believed to be the first all-female editorial team in mining trade media.

Those milestones mattered, although perhaps not in the way people might expect. I’m proud because they quietly shifted assumptions about who belonged in those spaces.

For a while I tried to blend in. Then eventually I realised I was happier simply being myself. If that meant taking notes in a pink cupcake notebook during important meetings, then so be it.

I have always been small physically. I am five foot two with a slight build, pale skin, freckles and grey-green eyes. A family friend I had not seen since childhood recently looked at me and laughed, “Oh, you’re still little.” My daughter, who is eleven, is nearly as tall as I am now and loves borrowing my shoes.

What I lack in stature I make up for in determination. From an early age I was outspoken and opinionated. “Bossy” is a word that’s been used to describe me often. It’s a term I’ve always disliked because it’s so frequently applied to ambitious women and almost never to men.

Writing comes naturally to me in a way speaking sometimes does not. On paper I can articulate thoughts and ideas clearly and instinctively. In conversation I often need more time. I choose words carefully. Yet writing has always felt less like a profession than a way of understanding the world.

That understanding deepened over time as I wrestled with my own relationship to mining. When I first entered the industry, I was uncertain whether it aligned with my values. I care deeply about environmental issues and social equality and there were periods when I questioned whether mining was really the place where I wanted to spend my career.

The longer I stayed, however, the more nuanced my understanding became. There’s a quote by Mark Cutifani that I return to often: mining underpins roughly half of the global economy, directly or indirectly. Once you begin to grasp the scale of that influence, it becomes difficult to argue that meaningful societal change can happen without mining being part of the conversation.

If you care about climate transition, infrastructure, energy systems, environmental restoration or economic development, there really is no better place to work.

That perspective changed the way I viewed my career. Rather than standing outside the industry criticising it from a distance, I realised I would rather be inside it contributing to better conversations and better outcomes.

The Intelligent Miner gave me the freedom to shape that work more intentionally. One of the privileges of building my own company is that I can choose who I work with. Over time that became a natural filter. The organisations that approach me today tend to share similar values around sustainability, communication and responsible leadership because those values are embedded visibly within my work.

I take enormous satisfaction in helping other people tell their stories well. Much of what I write is ghostwritten, so my name is not always attached to the final piece, but I still feel proud when an article or report resonates strongly with readers because I know the work behind it.

Success, for me, increasingly became less about visibility and more about growth. I think that’s one reason the Women in Mining UK board role and my communications work with Sandvik Mining have been so meaningful.

Both experiences have expanded my perspective considerably. Sitting in board meetings with people from very different backgrounds and disciplines has shown me new ways of thinking about leadership, governance and influence. Every conversation teaches me something.

At the same time, these experiences have reinforced how many talented women the industry continues to lose. The traditional career trajectory in mining was not designed around the realities many women navigate. Women leave at multiple stages. Some struggle to establish themselves early in their careers. Others step away when they have children because the structure surrounding them offers too little flexibility. Others reach senior levels only to find themselves balancing executive expectations with caring responsibilities, menopause or simple exhaustion.

Too often, organisations fail to adapt around those realities and exceptional people leave. I’ve seen this repeatedly in recent years. Some of the most capable women I know have stepped away from major corporate roles not because they lacked ambition or expertise, but because the shape of the work no longer fit the shape of their lives.

That tension influenced many of my own decisions too. I’ve always had to consciously rebalance work and family life. Left unchecked, I can work endlessly because I genuinely love what I do. I become absorbed in projects and ideas very easily. But there are school pickups and plays and ordinary family moments that matter just as much.

When I was commuting into London every day before leaving full-time employment, I was leaving home at seven in the morning and returning around seven at night. Eventually I realised I was barely seeing my children.

Building my own business created a different kind of possibility. Not necessarily an easier life, but one with greater flexibility and autonomy.

I think we speak far too narrowly about success, especially for women. There remains an assumption that careers should move continuously upward, becoming louder and larger and more financially rewarding with every year. If movement slows or changes direction, people often interpret that as failure.

I’ve accepted roles at various points that may not have looked like obvious progression from the outside because they offered something else I valued more highly at the time: fulfilment, flexibility, time with family, creative freedom… the ability to contribute meaningfully. Those things matter too.

I still love travel and adventure. My family recently bought a new campervan and my husband, who is mechanically minded in a way I will never be, is slowly fitting it out so we can travel further through Europe together. I still write creatively outside work. I write poetry and fragments of prose because I cannot imagine not writing. It’s how I process and understand the world around me.

Sometimes achievement means building a life that fits who you are. And maybe that’s the message I would want another woman to hear if she finds herself sitting at her own metaphorical bureau one day, wondering whether she’s brave enough to start over or step sideways or slow down.

You do not have to follow the obvious path to build a meaningful career. Some climb mountains in straight lines. Others wander. Mine wandered, and I’m grateful it did.