Gill Moakes (00:01.83)
Hey, Sarah, welcome to Heads Together. Thank you for joining me.
Sarah (00:06.908)
Thank you so much for inviting me.
Gill Moakes (00:09.062)
This is very exciting. This has been quite like a short notice one, hasn't it? It's like we connected and I was like, I want you to come on straight away. So thank you for making that happen. I'm really appreciate it. I was just going to share a bit actually of how we became connected because my best friend Katie went on a hike to the Gower Peninsula and came back raving about this very cool woman that she'd met on her hike.
that was you. So of course I said to her, introduce me, I can't have you knowing a cool person that I don't know, introduce me immediately. And thankfully she did and thank you to you for coming on. So how was the hike?
Sarah (00:49.532)
you
Sarah (00:55.772)
The hike was amazing. So it's an organized trip. There's a chap called Ian Finch who runs a company called Walk Wild and he puts together hikes, so day hikes or weekend trips and he'd organized this weekend in Wales in the Gower Peninsula. So there was a big group of us went to that, staying in a bunkhouse together and that's how Katie and I met. We were
literally just hiking together for the full weekend. So we got chatting as you do when you're hiking and you're chatting with somebody, walking and talking leads to great conversations, big fan of that. And yeah, she mentioned writing connection and she talked about you and she said, you've got to meet my friend Jill, I think you're just going to get on like a house on fire. So yeah, as soon as we'd finished the trip, she made those intros and here we are.
Gill Moakes (01:29.35)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (01:43.014)
Yay!
Gill Moakes (01:49.19)
I'm so glad she did. I know it is literally is, isn't it? Yeah. Amazing. so good. It just shows you, doesn't it? That sometimes we really overcomplicate things with like scheduling so far in advance and doing this, do that. Actually, no, it's creating a podcast episode can be as simple as finding someone that you just feel really drawn to have a great conversation with and hitting the record button. It's not that complicated. So I so appreciate it.
Sarah (01:49.404)
the week later, pretty much. Yes. Yeah, very fast.
Sarah (02:17.5)
Funny if everything in life was as that easy.
Gill Moakes (02:19.974)
my God, I would love that. Yes, it's my part of my mission is rewilding businesses. So that's that really appeals to me this simplified version of doing everything. So yeah, this is up my street. Sarah, I'm so intrigued by your background and your journey to doing what you're doing now. And not just professionally.
but also the way that that has led on to the writer's walk as well. Could you just bring everyone who's listening who doesn't know as much as I do because I've been obsessively stalking you, give them a bit of information about your background and what you do.
Sarah (03:07.918)
Yes, so I suppose I've had what you'd call a very wiggly career. I didn't kind of go through the usual university kind of leave school, go to university, doing that kind of route. I kind of, you know, grew up in the north in Yorkshire and, you know, education was an option, but it was an expensive option. So I got a job, you know, because the need to like, you know, put a roof over my head and pay bills and things like that was more pressing. So.
Gill Moakes (03:23.526)
Mm.
Sarah (03:36.092)
I started out in customer service. I had a job working in retail. I worked in Debenhams on the shop floor for a little time. I was made redundant along with a bunch of other people. I ended up working with the building society. And I saw my career started out kind of like in customer service in a bank building society, you know, talking to customers all day long. But along the way, there'd always been this kind of desire to work more creatively. So I found my way to working with.
what's called a brand reprographics agency. So what they do is they kind of make all of the print side of things that brands do like packaging and the artwork and making sure it prints correctly. I got a job with a company that does that as an account manager. So I was now working in a more creative field, but I wasn't doing any kind of creative stuff. I was still very much in that kind of customer service role, but learning more about.
branding at the same time and what that entailed and particularly visual design and things like that. But yeah, how did I get there? So I ended up moving to London because I wanted to get out of Yorkshire and go to the big city. And again, I was still in a customer service role, but this time again, back in banking, working in a creative studio inside the bank, but again, not doing any creative myself, just working with the teams that were doing that and facilitating all of that.
Did that for a while, managed to leave London again and found myself a bit tired of the commute and investment banking that I was working in and wanting to just do something different. And I managed to get a job with, initially it was a temporary job with the Caravan Club. They needed a temporary person to help look after some of the caravan sites that they had around the UK.
So I somehow managed to sort of find myself in this role doing this much more outdoor kind of job, which I really liked being outdoors. I really liked, you know, sort of going out to the campsites and working with the staff on the campsites and doing all of that sort of traveling around and moving around was really great for me. And by then I was in a...
Gill Moakes (05:46.534)
I love that. That was actually, that was something that I wanted to do once. I read this advert somewhere and they were advertising for people to go and live on site on different campsites and they would provide you with a caravan and you would go and live on site. I thought that would be the best life ever just going around to different campsites. So now I have even more life envy. Love that. How fun.
Sarah (06:01.564)
Yeah.
Sarah (06:09.084)
Yes, yeah. I mean, it's a lot of work, you know, for the people that work on the sites and manage it, you know, it's not glamorous like you think it would be. I mean, you're making everything about that campsite run, right, from like taking up the rubbish to cleaning the toilets. And so, you know, no glam here. But on the customer service side of things, you know, and making sure everyone's, you know, checked in and they've got the pitch and they're happy and, you know, dealing with, you know, unhappy campers when it's raining, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, it's...
Gill Moakes (06:17.83)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (06:23.558)
Fair.
Gill Moakes (06:36.646)
Yeah, come to think of it, that sounds awful.
Sarah (06:38.844)
It's, you know, working in... Yeah, you know, and the toilets, you know, I really feel for people who run campsites and have to deal with the shower blocks because they're not pretty necessarily. So, yeah, it's a lot of work. But a lot of people have a lot of passion for it because they like to be outside. They really love camping. And so it's a big part of, you know, it's a sort of job that you would do because you love camping. And so it's nice because people are doing something that they're interested in and passionate about.
Gill Moakes (06:49.638)
No... Mmm...
Gill Moakes (07:03.686)
to do today.
Sarah (07:08.54)
less so when you're just doing a sort of ordinary office admin customer service role, which maybe it wasn't your dream. It's a very different vibe. So yeah, I did that. And then by then I was in a relationship and we'd started scuba diving and we were watching all those shows on TV, things like Get a New Life in the Sun. We just sort of said, let's get a new life in the sun.
Gill Moakes (07:12.778)
I'm going to go to bed.
Gill Moakes (07:31.43)
Ben Fogel's New Life in the Wild. Yes, and Ben Fogel's New Life in the Wild. Whenever I watch that, I really crave Living Off Grid every time I watch that program. And then I remind myself that actually, yeah, I probably would hate it in real life, but it's really easy to get caught up. Yeah, exactly.
Sarah (07:34.94)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sarah (07:42.716)
Yes.
Sarah (07:48.284)
Yeah, all of that chopping wood and it is, it is. And we, we, we felt that. And so we started thinking about how could we do this? And, you know, looking back, I just think, my God, how ridiculous to think that you could, set up a business in an industry that you don't know really much about and you've never worked in. And, you know, we went scuba diving instructors. So, you know, it was like all of the wrong mix really, when you think about it, but, we found a small dive shop.
Gill Moakes (07:57.03)
Mmm.
Gill Moakes (08:16.678)
How brave though.
Sarah (08:19.132)
I suppose so, yeah. I mean, it's two of us doing it together. So it wasn't as daunting as maybe as one person going like, right, I'm just going to sell up everything in the UK, move to a country that I'm not familiar with where I have to learn a new language and also do a job I've never done before. It's absolutely bonkers when you, you know, when I peel it back that way. But we found a little dive shop for sale and it was completely run down. It needed a lot of love. So we...
Gill Moakes (08:34.95)
Yeah
Sarah (08:46.652)
We started working on that and I suppose that's kind of when I started writing more because we needed a website and customers would send us emails and so I did all of that side of things along with more the sort of day -to -day operations of the business. So working with the Caravan Club overseeing as a regional manager caravan sites, I'd got a lot of good experience within the outdoor recreation industry and how
Gill Moakes (08:57.638)
Right.
Sarah (09:15.004)
how to run an outdoor business. So I had some kind of practical skills there. I did some more training. I became a scuba equipment engineer technician, you know, servicing equipment, repairing things, a million miles away from anything I'd done in London, you know, working in a nine to five office job. All of a sudden I'm like, you know, buying tools and setting up a workshop and figuring out how to do a website and things like that. So
Gill Moakes (09:33.446)
Wow.
Sarah (09:44.156)
The writing kind of came from customers, you know, potential customers sending an email, you know, asking us questions and I would reply and then doing more, more outreach. You know, I sort of experimented with a bit of advertising in dive magazines. I started doing a newsletter and I started doing a feature about like one dive site a month and just kind of writing and writing and writing stuff all the time. And
noticing the impact it was having, noticing that by having a website at a time when our competitors didn't really have websites or if they did at that point, they maybe had one page and maybe nobody was checking the email address on that. So, you know, I was hearing from people saying, I've emailed some of the places, but I've never heard back. You're the only people that have replied.
Gill Moakes (10:30.214)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Sarah (10:39.292)
So kind of winning customers by default because I was the only one who answered their questions. And that was interesting. I saw some of my competitors were then realizing people were coming to us and booking in advance in this little backpacker town where normally people just rocked up, got off the boat or their flight and then just went and looked for a place to stay and then found a place to dive. And they'd go door to door to all of these like.
Gill Moakes (10:41.798)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (11:06.982)
Mmm.
Sarah (11:07.228)
you know, little hotels and hostels and, you know, B and B's and the same with the dive shops. And for us, they would just bypass all the dive shops and come straight to us because they'd found our website. We'd exchanged some emails. I'd answered their questions. I was directing them to places to stay, how much you might need, you know, whether to bring, you know, the limitations of credit cards there versus paying by cash or travellers checks, you know, so they'd come armed with all this information.
Gill Moakes (11:32.166)
Wow. Can I, can I just say what a beautiful micro lesson in marketing. Like it's not rocket science, is it? It's about providing value, being helpful, answering the questions people actually have, not the ones you want them to have because you think that that's what you want to talk about for your business, but actually being responsive.
I think that's so interesting to me because I think about all of the, you know, the people who get so tied up with marketing strategy and the creating of the content that they believe will interest their customers and then never reply to any of the comments on any of their social media posts. And I think, what a crazy, what a crazy
Sarah (12:02.332)
Yes.
Sarah (12:23.708)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gill Moakes (12:28.646)
situation that is because that's where the gold is, is in that building up that relationship and that's exactly what you did and the result was they walked past all the other dive shops came straight to you because they felt like they already knew you and they already had a connection with you. Interesting.
Sarah (12:31.26)
It is.
Sarah (12:44.188)
Yeah, yeah, I guess it made a difference. My background, customer service, I'm not a good salesperson at all. And so marketing, ironically, because my work as a brand writer fits within the world of marketing, but I'm just not very good at it. And sometimes people say, we need somebody to help us with some sales copy. You're a copywriter. Can you help with that? And I feel physically unwell at the idea that I might have to sell something. I'm like, God, no.
Gill Moakes (13:08.294)
Do you?
Sarah (13:11.772)
I'm the last writer that you need. I'm an explainer. I'm not a salesperson. And so I suppose it came from this. My partner and my business and my husband at the time, we were scuba divers. We'd gone on holiday to different places and we'd gone diving in different places. And we were quite independent. We didn't do package holidays. We'd book our flights and find a place to stay and then find the dive shop and get in touch with the dive shop. So we were very much kind of
Gill Moakes (13:36.326)
Yeah.
Sarah (13:40.188)
tailoring our own experience in that respect. But we knew from diving what we wanted. So for us, it was quite simple. We had this kind of very simple principle for the business. You know, what do we want when we go diving? And we dove with some really great places, you know, in the world. And we dove with some really quite shabby outfits that, you know, seemed to cut corners and didn't feel particularly safe. And so we just had three principles, you know, it's, we...
Gill Moakes (14:02.566)
Hmm.
Sarah (14:07.324)
It has to be safe, you know, this has to be, the equipment's got to be good quality and we need to look after it and we want people to feel comfortable and safe diving with us. We're mindful of the environment because we're taking people underwater into a coral reef, which coral reefs are under great threat and we could see as divers, you know, how the impacts of human behavior and trash and all these things were having an impact. And also it has to be fun, you know, it's a fun thing to do. So.
Gill Moakes (14:15.622)
Yeah.
Sarah (14:35.548)
The three things that kind of steered who, what we wanted to do for the business, because that's what we expected as customers. We'd never worked in the dive industry. And I wonder sometimes if that actually gave us the advantage, because instead of going, yes, I'm an experienced industry expert and this is what people want. I was like, well, what do we want when we go on holiday? What do we look for? What questions do we ask when we're, you know, getting in touch with a dive shop?
And so that's initially what we put on the website. You know, I was like, okay, this is what we are. This is what we do. And then we put the email address on there and people started sending emails and then they were asking questions. And so they'd be starting to ask questions about, you know, you know, I want to dive, but my partner's really nervous. You know, how does it work if somebody's nervous? I'm like, totally can answer that question for you. Cause I'm that nervous diver. Let me explain, you know, how we do things. Somebody would say, you know, really wants us to go there, but...
Gill Moakes (15:28.422)
Yeah!
Sarah (15:33.564)
I'm not really sure where to stay, you know, this is my sort of budget. And so I was like, okay, well, I can point you to direction of some of the accommodation providers. And then that led to conversations with accommodation providers. And we said, look, you don't really have a website. You're not taking online bookings. We were set up to take online bookings. Why don't we kind of help package it up? If you're happy to recommend us as your dive shop of preference.
Gill Moakes (15:56.742)
Perfect.
Sarah (15:59.964)
You know, we can recommend and we can suggest like make it easier for the people that are making inquiries by we'll take the booking. You know, we can say, hey, you know, we're right here. We'll just pop next door to the accommodation and just say, hey, do you have any availability for a room for two people on these dates? Because somebody's asking to dive with us, but they need a place to stay. It was just about making things accessible and easy for people really at a time when this was like 2005, six, where not every business was properly.
online and had this presence and had the knowledge and the experience. They were just running backpacker destination dive shops. They didn't need to be like marketeers, right? They just needed to be able to run a dive business or a small B &B or small hostel. So that's how we kind of, not disrupted, but kind of got a bit of an advantage because people were starting to search for things online. Booking online was becoming a thing. And so
Gill Moakes (16:37.862)
Mm.
Yeah, absolutely.
Gill Moakes (16:45.382)
Yeah.
Sarah (16:55.836)
in a market where nobody's taking online bookings and isn't replying to emails. It was honestly, it was like catching fish in a barrel. It was actually quite easy because we were doing something that our competitors weren't doing. So it was about a matter of timing and we were just slightly ahead. We weren't experts in any of this, but it was very much about what are people asking from us? What do they need? Let's see how we can fill that.
Gill Moakes (17:15.014)
Mm.
Sarah (17:22.14)
And so from the questions people asked me, I was like, this is really good question. You know, people are asking about accommodation, need something on the website that talks about accommodation, let's give them that. So it was a very unrigorous, unscientific approach to use a research, customer research, but it was like, well, people are asking me this all the time. Every email I get asks this one question. I'm going to put it on the website because obviously it's information people need. So that's how the website evolved. Yeah.
Gill Moakes (17:46.726)
I love this so much. I just love this so much. It's, it's so organic, isn't it? And it's so, it just happened completely naturally. And I think there is just such a lesson in that we everything is too contrived these days, everything is just too strategic. And we're trying to second guess things all the time. Whereas actually,
Sarah (17:50.684)
It was very much led about them.
Sarah (17:56.188)
Yeah.
Sarah (18:12.924)
Yes.
Gill Moakes (18:13.894)
staying curious and listening, listening to what our audience or our potential clients are saying, the questions they've got, not the ones we're trying to post into their heads. I think that's such a lesson in that. I really do. So this was this time. So this time when you were working and running the dive school, is that really the time when
Sarah (18:27.484)
Yes.
It was really interesting, yeah.
Gill Moakes (18:42.598)
your love of writing started to show itself? Or have you always been a writer? Or, you know, when did that really, when did you really realize, hang on, writing is something I can't not do now?
Sarah (19:00.252)
Definitely when I was doing the Dive Shop. So a couple of things. I'd been interested in writing when I was younger and I was definitely at school and I used to write and I really was interested in following a sort of artistic and creative career. My dream when I was a teenager, you know, I did music classes, I learned to play the flute so I was training classically as a flautist. I was also taking acting and drama classes.
And my dream was, you know, I want to go on and pursue a sort of acting career, go follow that drama route. I was like, my eyes were searching at, you know, RADA and the Guildhall, you know, and how can I do this? And obviously my life never took me in that direction, but it was there. But I was just constantly being, finding that the adults in my life, particularly the teachers were like, no, you know, you need to put your feet on the ground.
Gill Moakes (19:38.854)
Mmm.
Sarah (19:53.18)
A common piece of feedback to my parents was, you know, Sarah's really smart, but she has her head in the clouds. You know, she needs to stop daydreaming. And I just kind of took these things to heart. You know, I was being told, you're really smart. If you work hard, you might be able to become a teacher and or a solicitor. And I'm like, I can't think of anything I don't want to do, you know, like more than these two things. I don't want to do that. But everyone's saying, no, this is this is the direction for you, Sarah, because, you know,
Gill Moakes (20:16.294)
Mmm.
Sarah (20:22.62)
You know, you've got to keep your feet on your ground, be sensible. So I listened to all of that and then just gradually the creative side, the music, the singing, the drama, any writing that I'd been doing kind of fell away. And I just started to tap more into that logical kind of side of my brain, like, like knuckling down, you know, I, I, like I say, left scope. Yeah, I knuckled down. I got a, I got a job. I continued my education though. I went to,
Gill Moakes (20:41.734)
Yeah, knuckling down, getting a steady job.
Sarah (20:50.428)
I went to a college of federal education and of all the things I could have chosen, I chose business and finance. I then decided to go to university, so part -time while working full -time. And again, I could have maybe gone back to my dream of like drama or music, but I thought, okay, I'll do something more sensible, but what things interest me. And so I did psychology, you know, because I was interested in how people work and how things tick, you know. So I did something that interested me.
And people were like, well, why psychology? No, why not a business degree? And things like that. But I just, I don't know, I was just kind of trying to find a middle ground, I suppose, somewhere between like this very sort of logical, very good at sort of organizing things and explaining things and making sense of things versus this desire to be a bit more imaginative and a bit more creative and sort of wider thinking. So that's sort of how it happened.
Gill Moakes (21:40.87)
Yeah.
Sarah (21:45.18)
But with the dive shop, because I was doing everything for the business and that included writing about the business and with the website, with emails, with the newsletter I started sending out to customers. That's when I started to realize that this was something I really enjoyed and I started spilling out into other things. So we had a couple of people come diving with us, one of whom had been traveling for quite a while and she was just backpacking around all over and she had like a travel log.
you know, a blog basically, and I'm going back quite a number of years, 20 years now. And so I was like, what is this? And she said, this is, I just write this blog, you know, I, you know, I'm traveling around and it's just a way for me to keep, let everyone know, you know, keep a record of what I'm doing and tell my friends back home what I'm doing. I was like, that's amazing. Cause I'm kind of doing the same thing, but I just email people. And actually every time I'm emailing people and they're saying, you know, what's new with you? I'm like, it's the same thing that I'm saying to everybody.
maybe a blog would make sense, instead of having to sort of say the same thing all the time, when people are asking about me, I could just kind of put it together in this blog. So that's what I started. And so I started a blog called Tales from a Small Island. So I'm living on a small island and I'm...
Gill Moakes (22:55.814)
Which is still your Instagram handle isn't it? One of them.
Sarah (23:01.308)
It is, yeah. So it's still my handle, but I kind of closed the blog site down because I'd got to a point where I was moving on and doing different things and it got me there though. So I started writing the blog. I started, you know, then I found like in rainy season when it's a bit quieter, you know, I had more time on my hands. You had fewer customers and we went diving as much. I just started writing other things for the business. You know, I wrote a sort of a set of templated kind of...
Gill Moakes (23:08.262)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (23:12.198)
sure.
Sarah (23:29.82)
responses to email so that if I took a day off and somebody else needed to kind of respond to a customer email, they kind of knew what to say. I wrote an instruction manual on how to run a diving business. Yes, because I had the time and I wanted to write, you know, I was just writing anything. And then people kept saying to me like, you know, you're so good at writing, you should write a book. And I was like, really? You know, gosh, you know, how should I do any of that? You know, and I didn't really have a clue. But then
Around this time, my partner and I were kind of starting to break apart and go our separate ways. And I took a bit of time out and I started exploring, you know, well, what if I did want to do something with writing? How would I even do that? What does a writer even do? How do you even get into it? You know, and and so I started looking for degree programs and I was looking at creative writing programs and I was thinking, gosh, three years.
Gill Moakes (24:15.27)
Yeah, what would that look like? Mmm. Mmm.
Sarah (24:27.804)
three years full -time back at university, that's a lot. You know, I'm older, you know, is this something that I want to do? Have I got the money? No. How else can I do this? So I, you know, it's just kind of like doing little courses here and there. And I'd gone to San Francisco and I spent a little bit of time there and I found myself having this fantastic routine where there was a local bookshop, Aardvark Books, not far from the Castro area.
Gill Moakes (24:31.366)
Yeah.
Sarah (24:52.572)
and I would go and I would troll through all of their books and they had this small bookshelf section with books on writing. And I know I found a lot of great books there, including Stephen King's on writing, you know, on that bookshelf. And I just hoovered them all up. You know, I used to go in, find a book and then go find a coffee shop somewhere. And I would, you know, sit and read the book for a bit. And then I'd go out and I'd go for like a walk, cause I'm in San Francisco and it's amazing. And I want to explore the city. So I'd walk around a little bit.
Gill Moakes (25:03.462)
Mm -hmm. Yep.
Gill Moakes (25:20.742)
That sounds like the dream of a day.
Sarah (25:23.132)
And then I would kind of like find another coffee shop and I would sit and then I would write for a little bit. And it just became this kind of weird sort of self -led way of learning to write. I would, you know, read a bit about it, you know, go for a walk and, you know, because I'm exploring a city and then I would stop walking and I'd sort of sit and write a little bit. And so somewhere between...
Gill Moakes (25:37.542)
Mm -hmm.
Sarah (25:48.732)
between sort of reading the, doing the theory, I guess, is the reading bit of the writing and then going for that walk where it just kind of starts to, I don't know, absorb and I start to assimilate and think about what I've been doing, even not necessarily consciously, then the writing would come. So I had this very, very wonderful short period of time in my life where this sort of emerged. I was very lucky and...
Gill Moakes (25:52.486)
Yup.
Sarah (26:14.3)
While I was doing that, I heard about a master's programme back in the UK in Falmouth University, a master's degree in professional writing. And I thought, that's the degree, that's the way, you know, that will, that's going to give me everything I need because instead of it being just about one area of writing, like poetry or creative writing, it was about, very much about how you can work and make a living as a writer.
Gill Moakes (26:24.678)
Now that's up my street, yeah.
Gill Moakes (26:32.934)
Mm -hmm.
Sarah (26:38.204)
within a particular discipline. So it was modular. You could make the degree what you wanted it to be. So you could either focus on screenwriting, narrative nonfiction, writing for business, and writing fiction novel writing. And I thought, this is it. So I'm going to write a book. I'm going to write this novel. And so I applied and I got in. And that meant a return from working in this tiny island in the Caribbean to the UK, working in a small
Gill Moakes (26:54.854)
Mm -hmm.
Gill Moakes (27:06.31)
Yep.
Sarah (27:08.476)
coastal town in Carmel, which was fantastic, and discovering through the business writing of the course that actually I'd been doing this for a really, really long time. You know, I'd been writing for this business, my business, I'd been, you know, yeah, because I didn't consider myself a writer and the tutor was like, well, you are a writer. You know, you've...
Gill Moakes (27:22.054)
how interesting.
Gill Moakes (27:27.334)
Mmm.
Sarah (27:29.82)
You've written a website and you do customer comms and you've done ads for the business and you write a regular newsletter and you've been writing a blog. What makes you think you're not a writer? I'm like, well, you know.
Gill Moakes (27:35.206)
Mmm.
Gill Moakes (27:40.358)
Isn't that funny? And that's actually very common, isn't it? That we want to call ourselves a writer, but we feel like we haven't quite earned it or we haven't quite got some kind of official stamp that allows us to call ourselves a writer. But when you write, you're a writer and it really is as simple as that, right? So that must have felt so good to...
Sarah (27:58.172)
Yes.
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. You know...
Gill Moakes (28:09.542)
come back from what must have been an incredible experience in the Caribbean. But I guess things do naturally come to an end, don't they? And life does move on. It does take different directions. But this spark of writing that ignited over there obviously just didn't go away. So you found this master's degree in Falmouth, came and did that. And that must have felt so good because what I'm hearing is that, you know,
Sarah (28:17.308)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (28:36.934)
like most of us, definitely I was the same. It's how I ended up in insurance. We're young and we don't really fight against the you need a steady job with a pension brigade, you know? But this must have felt like for the first time going into education of sorts, purely for yourself, for your own motivation.
Sarah (29:00.476)
Yes, yeah. And it felt great and it was very daunting. I had to take out a loan to pay for it and I didn't have any money. I'd come back to the UK with basically a suitcase and pretty much that was it. There's a joke in scuba diving, how do you make a million dollars running a scuba diving business? Start with two million.
Gill Moakes (29:08.678)
Mm -hmm.
Sarah (29:23.356)
You know, it's not a job you do for the money, right? And so that was never the goal. It was more about the lifestyle and the changing and doing something you enjoy. But yeah, so I came back with like, gosh, you know, I'm gonna have to borrow money, you know, moving to a place where beautiful as Cornwall is, I'd not been there before. And this time I was completely out on my own. But I was just so drawn to it and it just felt like absolute best.
Gill Moakes (29:24.07)
That's good.
Bye.
Sarah (29:50.876)
thing for me to do and it was daunting. I was really worried I wouldn't be up to the mark. As I say, I didn't think I was a writer, but it turned out that most people there were in the same boat. Like, you know, the reason why we're doing this degree is because we wanted to be a writer, we were aspiring and we didn't see ourselves as that. And I remember the course director one time saying, you know, you are writers. You got onto this program because we see you as writers. You wouldn't have got here.
if we didn't think you had what it will take to pursue this, they had an application process and they didn't accept everybody. I was like, gosh, wow, this is maybe a bit more pressure as well, but it just kind of helped me to see that one, maybe I wasn't gonna be a novel writer after all, as much as I was really hoping that I would be,
Gill Moakes (30:34.79)
Yeah.
Sarah (30:48.028)
somehow inside of me was this dazzling, like, book award -winning work of fiction. Actually, what was inside me was somebody who's very good at explaining things and making things simple and breaking it down for other people and good at bringing people's voice to life. So what I'd found with the business was obviously I'm British. My partner was British and so I put everything together with the website. It was in UK English, you know, British English.
And our customers were coming to us primarily from the US and Canada, but mostly from the US. And I had recognized that I was changing the way that I was writing when I was communicating with those customers. So somebody would send an email and I would mirror my language and tone to theirs. So I realized that like, well, you know,
Gill Moakes (31:40.582)
Yeah.
Sarah (31:44.796)
This kind of seems a bit crazy to be having a very UK centric website when you're a business in the Caribbean and everyone here speaks English with the American eyes, you know, North American kind of accents and speech pattern. And all of my customers are writing to me in US English. You know, I should be writing to my customers in US English. So.
Gill Moakes (32:07.398)
Mmm.
Sarah (32:07.74)
That, I guess, was a shift and I didn't really know much about brand writing or tone of voice, but I just recognized that I need to speak my customers' language. And I suppose that for me is what is the difference maybe. As you said, with marketing, it can all feel very strategic and contrived. And I certainly see that in the brand world. You know, brand tone of voice is often devised or designed by strategists who...
say, well, these are our values, therefore we think the tone should sound like A, B or C. And then they bring somebody like me and say, can you bring this to life? And I'm like, wow, no, you know, I just, what made you decide that your tone is these three words? You know, how did you get there? What does that sound like? And then they'd be saying, well, that's for you to decide what it sounds like. I'm like, well, kind of isn't because you've come up with three ways of describing something, but no, you haven't actually explained what it is. It's
this is such a strange way about going about somebody's voice and personality, you know, and I, I know that this is how fun, how it's done, but for me it was like, surely it's got to come from a place of authenticity in some way, you know, I need to listen to the people that have kind of founded this company or like, or who are the beating heart of this business, because I want to hear how they speak because surely that's where some of this voice is actually coming from. It's got to be coming from somewhere real. It feels like you're,
Gill Moakes (33:08.934)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gill Moakes (33:30.246)
Mmm.
Sarah (33:33.532)
doing a tick box exercise or you're trying to paint by numbers, you know, by doing it this way. And that just didn't feel natural to me. So I looked back at what I'd been doing and just like, you know, this was more about my brand voice for the dive shop started to become less about me and more about the customers. So in the, in the branding world, there's an awful lot of talk about brand engagement and all the rest of it. And, you know, this is what you're trying to do in marketing teams are pumping out like
Gill Moakes (33:38.022)
Mm.
Sarah (34:02.268)
thousands upon thousands of direct mail emails all the time, you know, hoping to hook just a few people in. I was getting something like an 80 to 90 % conversion rate from inquiry to booking. One in part because nobody else was replying to their emails. So it was like I said, they, you know, I kind of had a sort of winning formula there without realizing it, but also because I was
Gill Moakes (34:08.262)
Mm.
Sarah (34:26.524)
listening and giving them what they needed. You know, I wasn't forcing anything on them. I was just answering questions because I, as I say, I've never been good at sales. So it was all about customer service. You know, my way of doing writing for a company is all about customer service rather than sales. So it's why I've never leaned naturally to advertising because I'm not very confident or comfortable with that. It's why I'm very good at explaining things because, you know, I'm just
Gill Moakes (34:28.87)
Absolutely, yeah, completely.
Gill Moakes (34:38.694)
Mmm.
Sarah (34:56.476)
That's my forte. So brand working works out quite well because it's very much about the foundation for how a brand speaks and the language it's going to use and how that connects with the people that you're speaking with. Where do you find those points of connection? How do you start a conversation? And I feel like you say with the social media side, brands pump things out and then people respond and then the brand doesn't like...
Gill Moakes (34:58.886)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (35:15.686)
Yeah.
Sarah (35:23.964)
communicate or respond to the customer or the personal social media. I'm like, well, you know, this isn't engagement. You know, brands talk about engagement, but what they want really is they want a soapbox. They want everybody else to listen to them. I was like, no, the only way you get this engagement is it's a conversation. And I know at scale and massive international global brands are going to struggle, be able to give that one -to -one personal service. But I think there are still ways in which you can actually...
Gill Moakes (35:36.902)
Absolutely right. Yeah.
Gill Moakes (35:49.03)
But the ones who do massively stand out. So going back to your experience with the dive school, you stood out and partly it was because no one else was doing that. And I think there's such a massive lesson in that of how important that is. So Sarah, I'm interested in how the writer's walk came into being. So your...
Sarah (35:53.948)
Yeah.
Sarah (36:06.876)
Yeah.
Sarah (36:16.348)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (36:17.83)
you're working as this brand writer, you're a very successful brand writer, but that's not your only outlet for writing of course, because you also have a, would you say is the brand, is the Writers' Walker community, is that how you would describe it?
Sarah (36:35.932)
I'd like it to be, although because it's a newsletter, it doesn't have that same kind of format. I write it and I publish it through substacks. So people can add comments and people do, but often people just reply to the newsletter edition that gets sent out. So sometimes it's, you know, people and I'm having one -to -one conversations behind the scenes sometimes with people who read something that resonates and they then respond. So...
Gill Moakes (36:37.638)
Right?
Gill Moakes (36:46.822)
Yes. Yeah.
Gill Moakes (36:53.958)
Got you.
Sarah (37:03.484)
I've then got the social medium on Instagram and I'm trying to encourage people to kind of join in conversations there as well, you know.
Gill Moakes (37:07.142)
Mm.
Because it does, for me, the writer's what feels like it will be a community. And maybe that's the journey it's on at the moment, isn't it? I think, and I see this a lot actually with Substack. I think Substack's really good at this as a platform for building community.
Sarah (37:21.212)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (37:30.502)
And I can see that happening with the Writers' Walk. It's a beautiful, I'm gonna put links obviously in the show notes for everyone to follow or go and check that out. But it is a really beautiful newsletter that you put together. I love it. Tell us a bit about the format for that and why did you start it?
Sarah (37:30.556)
Yes, yeah.
Sarah (37:48.156)
Thank you.
Sarah (37:54.076)
So I stopped writing Tales from a Small Island quite a number of years ago. And, you know, they say there's like, that's the danger in, you know, getting good at something you love. I was, you know, I'm good at like helping other people. I'm good at writing for other people and I'm writing in their voice. So I say to my customers, you know, these are your words, you know, you own them. You know, they're your voice, they're your values and your opinion, your viewpoints on things.
Gill Moakes (38:18.598)
Mmm.
Sarah (38:22.812)
So I'm always writing somebody else. I'm effectively a ghost writer. And I was starting to feel like I wasn't really doing any writing of my own anymore. And I wasn't writing creatively as much anymore. So I wasn't doing, I'm really interested in short stories, but I hadn't written one for the longest time. And I just, when you're working all day long doing a thing, sometimes, like do electricians spend their evenings rewiring things when they've spent all day doing electrical work?
probably not, you know, and so I wasn't doing anything for myself in terms of being a writer and I wasn't, I felt like I wasn't flexing my skills in as many directions as I would like. And I wanted to do something and I wanted to write something that was about, you know, me that I could actually say that, that was in my voice. And I was feeling like I was losing my voice among all of this writing for other people. And so it was, it was.
Gill Moakes (39:01.51)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (39:16.262)
definitely a occupational hazard, isn't it, I think, for a brand writers. Yeah, I can understand that completely.
Sarah (39:21.116)
Yeah, yeah. And I do know a lot of people, yeah, I know writers who's, you know, got a screenplay inside them or a novel and it often takes a long time to emerge, you know. It's, if at all, you know, because you're doing all these other things. And when most of us are multifaceted, we don't just have one singular interest. We don't have just like, we're writers and that's all we do. You know, people might be into music or going to gigs or to...
Gill Moakes (39:44.134)
Absolutely.
Sarah (39:50.844)
art things or sport, you know, and so, you know, all of these activities and things you're pushing yourself into, you know, there's only so much time in your day to do it all. So I, it was, it was a strange sort of thing because I also like walking and I like going hiking and I'd started to notice a connection within myself where, you know, walking had become part of my sort of daily working life.
So I live in central London and often I go to meetings with clients and
Gill Moakes (40:20.614)
as beautifully indicated by the siren just then. no, don't apologize. Don't apologize.
Sarah (40:25.052)
Yes, I'm so sorry. Yeah, as if on cue, Brick Lane comes back to life and reminds us. Yeah. So when I got back to London, I did my year in university in Falmouth and then I moved back to London. I'd lived here previously, but I moved back because it felt like the most logical and obvious place to be if I wanted to start my journey as being a brand writer, especially being freelance and deciding to go out on my own. And so
Gill Moakes (40:31.558)
Yeah, love it.
Gill Moakes (40:48.806)
Mmm.
Sarah (40:49.756)
I discovered that, well, I always knew this, I hate the tube, I feel claustrophobic on it. And so I was avoiding going on the tube. And so I would walk off and to business, to meetings, even the buses would be crowded. So if the bus was too full, I'd just start walking. And then I realized quite quickly, I could walk there in the same amount of time as it was taking the bus to get me places. So I'd walked to and from meetings and I'd started to notice that, you know,
when I wasn't doing that sort of walking as much, I was sort of often feeling like I was a bit stuck, you know, things were a bit slower to kind of come out of my head and onto my screen. And I started wondering about that, you know, like, you know, what am I doing here? You know, and sometimes if I'm working on something, I might just go for a walk, you know, clear my head, go for a walk around the block. Maybe the idea will come to me and the ideas would come to me. And so,
Gill Moakes (41:27.27)
Hmm.
Sarah (41:44.828)
A few years ago, gosh, quite a few years ago, I started exploring, you know, is there some kind of connection here for me? Is this my process? You know, you hear about writers who have a process, you know, you hear about writers and authors who go, you know, dedicated to every day, they will do 500 words. Absolutely, you know, that's it. And they make this a habit and a practice. And I thought, I wonder if there's something here that's like a kind of like a habit or a practice for me. And so I started.
Gill Moakes (41:52.87)
you
Sarah (42:13.724)
paying more attention to it. But it was really, and I hate to keep kind of bringing back things to the pandemic, because it is quite a number of years ago now. But when we were locked down and we weren't allowed to go out for very long and we only had those 30 minutes, I felt like I'd been cut off from something really important, which was this time of walking. And so that's when I started to explore, this is really important. It's actually doing something for me creatively and imaginatively.
Gill Moakes (42:22.213)
you
Gill Moakes (42:30.886)
Mm.
Sarah (42:43.868)
What is that? So I started thinking about how I felt. I'd go for a walk and just go, you know, could it just a walk around the block, you know, five minutes be the thing that I need, or do I need to walk for longer? Is it a case of walking fast? Do I have to walk for a really long time before these ideas come? And I started to pay attention to what was happening for me when I was walking and when that moment would come from getting out of my own head to just having sort of feeling like,
but ideas are flowing. And so I discovered that it takes about somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes of a nice, good brisk walk for me to start like letting go of whatever's on my mind or preoccupying me and, you know, and, and start to actually drift, you know, imaginatively. And I think it's because that's the point at which your body starts to release endorphins. You know, when you're moving and you're exercising, there's a point when your body releases endorphins. And I started to notice that when that happened, I would just like,
Gill Moakes (43:31.91)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (43:37.67)
Yep. Yep.
Sarah (43:43.356)
Well, they're not a big sigh. And then whatever was bothering me would start to drift away and I wouldn't be able to hold onto the thought that was holding me back. It would just almost be like it's flying out of reach. And that's when I'd find the other part of my brain would kick in and I'd start being a bit more observant, you know, noticing things and things would start to come in, you know. So I started playing with that and this became a sort of idea, but not one that I really shared with people. It was just, you know,
Gill Moakes (43:52.806)
Mmm.
Gill Moakes (44:01.926)
Mmm.
Sarah (44:12.796)
Yeah, when I'm stuck, I go for a walk. That's it. And yeah, so then I kind of started thinking about what to write about. And I thought, well, I like walking. I like writing. These are the things I could write about. You know, I don't know whether anybody else would be interested in this. And I then spent the absolute longest time trying to think about a format for this. You know, would I write it down as a book? What would that look like? You know, maybe I could.
Gill Moakes (44:39.11)
Yeah.
Sarah (44:40.124)
show people, maybe I could run some workshops doing this. And then one day the name just came to me and I just thought, that's interesting. Let's see if I can, I don't know, can I get the URL, the domain for that? And I could, because it was available. I was like, there's a sign and I got the social media handles. And then I thought, you know, maybe if I write about this, how would I do that? And I
Gill Moakes (44:57.382)
That's a sign.
Sarah (45:04.828)
dug out my old Tales from a Small Island blog, which is archived. And I was like, I wonder if this would be the right format. By then, people were not on the old blogger sites and things. They were using Substack. And I thought, well, that's interesting. And what I liked about Substack was the fact that it's not a newsletter on its own and it's not a blog site on its own. It's a combination of two. So you can email out this post to your subscribers as well as the content that you created sitting on the website as well. So it's evergreen. I thought,
Gill Moakes (45:16.102)
Mmm. Mmm.
Gill Moakes (45:33.35)
Yeah. Yeah.
Sarah (45:34.332)
maybe that's the way. So I started tinkering with it and I had a very complicated format initially where I would go, right, I'd talk people through like walking first and then I would explain a bit of research, like some research that I would include and then I would include something for them to watch like a video clip and then I would include something for them to read like a book link and then I would explain some writing stuff. yeah.
Gill Moakes (45:54.697)
We always start thinking like, you know, more is more, don't we, I think? Yeah.
Sarah (46:01.052)
Yes, yeah. And I kind of drafted it down. And I started to try and draft a post like this. And I was like, there's a lot here. This isn't going to be sustainable. Because what if I can't find a video link somewhere every single time? And then I would just, you know, maybe it's just walking and writing. And so I'd gone back to Falmouth. I'd gone back to an event at Falmouth University. And there was another writer who'd done the same program as me, but a couple of years earlier before me.
Gill Moakes (46:10.566)
Mmm.
Sarah (46:28.188)
and we'd both been at this event and we met for breakfast the next day and we were chatting and I said, I've got this idea and I'm not quite sure what I want to do with it, you know, and I explained it to him and he was like, I think this is a fantastic idea, you know, I think you should do it, you know, you've just got to put it out there until you put it out there, you don't know. So I was like, I spent so long doing brand stuff, my brain immediately went to, well, who am I writing this for? Who is my audience?
Gill Moakes (46:49.51)
Yeah, absolutely.
Gill Moakes (46:56.422)
Yeah.
Sarah (46:57.244)
What do they need? How do I? I'm like, you know, immediately I went into work writer mode and so he gave me a lot of encouragement and, you know, we were saying like, what are you doing for the rest of the day? And I said, well, I'm actually going to go for a walk. And he said, well, of course you are. And so I did. And I went to that walk and I really thought about it and I thought about the encouragement he was giving me, which was fantastic. You know, I'd only mentioned the idea to a couple of people at that point. Friends knew about it, but nobody in the writing world.
Gill Moakes (47:03.654)
Of course.
Sarah (47:27.516)
And I thought, well, you know, he's somebody who's really encouraging me. He's a brand writer too, you know, and he also does his own creative writing and, you know, and his own other writing as well. So I thought, right. And so I came back from that walk and I was like, you know what, I think it just needs to be walking and writing. And so that's how we went for it. You know, I just kind of thought, right, let's pare it back down to something really simple and just...
Gill Moakes (47:45.35)
Mmm.
Gill Moakes (47:51.558)
and what a willing formula that is. I just want to go back to something that you were saying earlier when you were in San Francisco and how this routine grew there, which was consuming something in the cafe, then going for the walk, then creating. So that connection, I guess, started there, didn't it, of the writing and the walking becoming connected for you.
Sarah (48:20.7)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I even have a playlist from San Francisco called Walk the City. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't until much later. Yeah, sorry. I didn't know because...
Gill Moakes (48:22.598)
And I think so.
Do you? I was going to say, so do you see that as a connection and that being the birth really of this connection between the writing and the walking? Because it's amazing, didn't you? No, I can really see that.
Sarah (48:42.332)
Cause I would walk around San Francisco and I didn't always wear headphones and listen to music, but sometimes I did and I'd made a playlist and I called it Walk the City. And I'd completely forgotten that I still had this playlist, you know, 15, 14 years later. And I found it actually, I think last year, I was like, my goodness, wow. I even have a playlist with the walking idea in it. So yeah, that's when I realized I actually, this really started for me, you know, many years earlier, like walking around San Francisco, a bit of time spent like reading about stuff.
Gill Moakes (48:52.87)
Wow.
Gill Moakes (49:04.486)
Amazing.
Sarah (49:12.38)
The walking was about thinking about stuff and creative spark. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Gill Moakes (49:12.71)
Yeah, so a bit of a creative spark and amazing. And so for the writer's walk, which is now this amazing substack. And like I say, I'm going to drop a link to it in the show notes. What do you say? Where do you see that going? What do you see that becoming? Or is it that you're not sure yet and you're letting it kind of take its course?
Sarah (49:40.156)
That's a good question. I'm not sure. I do have some ideas, but I'm kind of seeing where it goes as well. I like the formula. I think it's working very simple. I just pick a theme and that theme becomes the idea for the walk and how you can use that walk to kind of observe and pay attention and then spark ideas. And then I pair it with a writing prompt that links that theme as well. So there's a connection between going for a walk with an idea or a
Gill Moakes (49:43.878)
Hmm.
Gill Moakes (50:00.326)
Yep.
Sarah (50:09.596)
a focus in mind and then the writing prompt helps you bring that focal point out in a creative way. So it's a really great simple format.
Gill Moakes (50:17.446)
I love that. And we should say, we should say, shouldn't we actually, that this isn't just a newsletter that you kind of can sign up to and read, although you can if that's what you want. There is this interactive part and you can become, you know, you go on the writer's walk as well. So like you say, you have the theme and the writing prompt, which I think is beautiful. I love that.
Sarah (50:39.199)
Yeah. Yeah, the idea is that you could just give you an idea, you know, and it's really about observation, you know, so it's like, you know, people say, you know, I'd love to be a writer, but I don't know what to write about. Well, there's things everywhere you look that you could write about. So the walk is very much about get you out of your normal space and your normal head space or physical space. When you walk, you know, you might be looking at color or paying attention to sounds or
Gill Moakes (50:43.91)
Yeah.
Gill Moakes (50:52.39)
Absolutely.
Sarah (51:06.108)
You know, it could be all sorts of things, how you're feeling inside. It could be a walk to pick up the trash, you know, or walk around a local park or walking a street that you walk all the time, like your local neighborhood that you're familiar with. But the idea is to look at it with fresh eyes and find things that you show interest in things, because things aren't, I don't think, interesting in and of themselves. Things are inherently interesting.
Gill Moakes (51:11.494)
Bye.
Gill Moakes (51:20.23)
Mmm.
Sarah (51:29.468)
things become interesting when we focus our attention on them and see something of interest in them. So you might have been walking past a building for years and never really given it a second thought. But if you just stop and like, hang on a minute. Yeah, I didn't notice that door knob or I didn't notice that weird window that they've got up there. Now there's something more interesting because you're being interested in it. And then the idea is that you take that focal point of that interest and then you...
Gill Moakes (51:53.158)
Yes.
Sarah (51:57.212)
follow that strand and use it as a prompt to write with. So that's where the format is. So I'm kind of seeing where it goes and seeing what people kind of tell me in terms of their comments, because as I say, it was very much more about I want to write something and have, you know, like in my words for a change and I'll see if it lands, you know, people will like it or they won't. Maybe it'll appeal to writers, maybe it'll appeal to walkers. I don't know until I do it. And so it's kind of a
Gill Moakes (51:59.238)
Yeah.
Sarah (52:26.588)
It feels a bit scary in a way because if I was doing this for a brand, I'd be very much more strategic about, well, what exactly do you want to do with this? What's your objective here? You know, who actually are we speaking to? I'm like, I haven't really got a clue. I'm learning that as I go by listening to the people who find their way to it and say, I think this is really interesting. So I'm finding that people that like being outdoors, camping, you know,
Gill Moakes (52:49.542)
I love it.
Sarah (52:53.916)
are finding it interesting, people all like hiking and I'm finding that writers are finding it interesting. So the idea isn't to be a massive hiker that I'm not saying to anybody go and do 20 miles in a day and this is what you need to become a writer. Absolutely not. There are ways you can channel this approach into just going for a walk around the block, you know. And I do one where I say, you know, walking to work if you work from home, you know, use your walk as a way to kind of get your head in the game as it were. So.
Gill Moakes (52:58.918)
Mm -hmm.
Gill Moakes (53:21.126)
Mm.
Sarah (53:21.692)
Who knows? I've started to do in -person walking and writing workshops or workshops as a few people have been calling them because people have asked me to do that. So I've got more of those lined up so I can kind of introduce people in person to what I'm doing, explain the concept. And we go on a short walk together, you know, really just a short walk, just about 15 minutes is all it takes for me to show people what I'm doing as I'm paying attention.
Gill Moakes (53:35.462)
Hmm.
Sarah (53:49.916)
And then I sort of guide them with some writing prompts, you know, and you don't need to be a writer to do this. You know, we're all having to write every day in various ways. It's just about channeling that in some other way. So, yeah, but we'll see, you know, maybe, you know, maybe more workshops are in the line for sure.
Gill Moakes (53:59.206)
Absolutely.
Gill Moakes (54:09.286)
It's a watch this space at the moment, isn't it? And if someone, if someone would love to have you facilitate a workshop for them or with them, where can they, where's the best place for them to find you, I guess is what I'm saying. So I know we've got the sub stack, but is there an anywhere else that people should be looking for you?
Sarah (54:12.508)
It is, yeah.
Sarah (54:27.036)
Yes.
Sarah (54:31.164)
LinkedIn is a good spot to look at me, just because a lot of my former clients, current clients and people kind of write testimonials about me and my work. So you can see, you can hear about me and my customers words rather than me saying what I do. So that's a really good place to do it. And yeah, it's actually actually how I find a lot of working partners and collaborators and clients. So yeah, that's a really good spot to do it. Yes, because...
Gill Moakes (54:34.054)
Great.
Gill Moakes (54:39.43)
Yup.
Gill Moakes (54:49.606)
Okay.
Gill Moakes (54:55.75)
Mm.
Gill Moakes (55:00.294)
Thanks for watching.
Sarah (55:00.668)
I'm very open to that. People, like I say, are starting to ask me and within my work that I do with brands, training is a key part of that. So I do do things like that and I'm always trying to get people to come for a walk with me. You know, instead of sitting in a windowless stuffy office with air con and artificial light, you know, let's get outside. And people actually really value that. You know, the amount of times people say, yeah, that's a great idea. Let's get out of the office. People just...
Gill Moakes (55:17.318)
Yeah!
Sarah (55:28.7)
need the invitation to actually get out of their normal workspace. You know, I say to my clients, you know, the idea that the solution, the answer you're looking for is unlikely to be staring you through the blue light of your laptop. You're going to find it in the least, you know, expected moment. And probably when you're not staring at the problem, you need to step away from it. So yeah, people really love that.
Gill Moakes (55:30.726)
Definitely.
Gill Moakes (55:47.91)
absolutely.
Gill Moakes (55:56.518)
Wonderful. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been so, what a beautiful conversation. What I love about this conversation is that you've been so generous sharing your story and you're, you're someone who, and I really appreciate this in people, you're someone who's very humble and also very able to share the kind of the good, the bad and the ugly and say, well, I didn't like to do that or I didn't think I was good at that or I
I wanted to go in this direction, but I didn't choose to. And I love it when people are open enough to share their whole story. So I really appreciate that. Thank you. And like I say, for everyone listening, I'm going to put the links in the show notes where you will find out more about Sarah. Definitely go and check out her sub stack, The Writers Walk, because it is a really, really good one. Sub stack is getting busy and I definitely am.
kind of thinning out a bit and pruning the number of subsets that I subscribe to just because I don't want to subscribe and then not do them justice by actually, you know, consuming and reading them and opening them, etc. And the writer's walk is firmly on my list of ones that I am absolutely subscribed to opening reading. So thank you for that.
Sarah (57:19.516)
Well, thank you very much. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks for giving me the time and for listening. It's been a real treat. Thank you.
Gill Moakes (57:24.838)
my goodness, my pleasure. Thank you and bye for now everybody.
Sarah (57:32.828)
Bye, thanks for listening.
