Our CEO Story
They say when you start your own business, that’s when you begin the greatest personal development journey of your life. To this day, I don’t think I was anywhere near prepared for what was to come, yet I’m so glad I did it.
My journey to CEO Stories Media has been a long one, with many twists, turns, blind alleys and divergences. But as I write a little of my own story here in reflection, I understand now more than ever that every part of that journey was important to get to where I am now. That all the skills I’ve picked up along the way, the lessons learnt the hard way and the diving into my soul, has enabled me to understand what it is I truly want to do with the gifts I’ve been given.
Going Solo
I quit my full-time job back in 2016, with just an idea in my head. I wanted to work in Social Media and I wanted to work for myself. I won’t lie and say back then I knew who I wanted to work with, or exactly what I wanted to be helping them on. But every journey has its inciting point, and mine was the inability to work in the corporate world in a traditional job.
The first few years of freelance led me from Social Media Marketing and Strategy to mentoring women business owners in how to use it for success, to testing out a networking group that supports women in business. While hugely rewarding and enriching work, it still didn’t support the other part of the puzzle - me, the person with other desires and dreams that needed to be settled.
So, I turned to Employee Advocacy, working with people to build their personal brands through Social Media. This gave me a whole new understanding of what it means to know and tell your story, to support others in the embracing and sharing of theirs. Over the next few years, I oscillated between marketing roles - from community management to training and content creation. I loved working with people, I loved telling stories, but I always felt like something was missing.
Becoming a Mentor
The moment I realised how much I loved to ask questions, to offer my thoughts and insights, and how I came alive when someone saw a door in front of them they’d never seen before, sent me down a new path of discovery. I took short coaching courses, working with a number of willing participants to uncover my skill-set in this area. I Eventually came across a course entitled, ‘Open Hearted Psychology’, which focused on bringing the soul back into mental health and mentoring support. I realised that this was what was missing in the work I was seeing in the world. That your story defines the life you think you can live, and that you can work to change those lines on the page, to the simple fact that we as humans heal through storytelling. That by telling our stories, we both heal others and ourselves in perfect synchronicity.
This led me to begin working with a CEO who had a powerful story to tell, and in sharing it, began healing parts of herself too. I started to see that this was something desperately needed in the world. Women CEO stories, shouted from the rooftops, so they could inspire and heal other people to follow their true passions. Work that I believe will heal the world.
Birth of CEO Stories Media
This is how CEO Stories Media came to life. A place, a vehicle for me to support women and other underrepresented CEOs to tell their stories through writing their books, creating content and working with media outlets to spread the word further. Our mission here is to amplify the voices of these women, to remind them of how far they’ve come themselves and in business. We focus on the real story, and the truth which is just waiting to be heard by those who need to hear it.
Emily Milsom, Founder of CEO Stories Media
