The January round up.

Your dinner party recommendations for reading, listening and learning sorted.

I spent the summer break in family mode, disconnected from emails and trying my best to be present. When I had the opportunity and 30 minutes of kid-free time, I took in new sources of inspiration and content about topics I wouldn’t usually get the chance to explore. It did exactly what I hoped it would, expanding my mind and belief system to see that more than what I currently know to be true is possible. Here’s your January round up of what to listen to, read and pass on to friends at a dinner party. Enjoy.

What to listen to: The Telepathy Tapes

You do not need to listen to another episode of DOAC, there are no more 5am routines you need to learn about. Do yourself a favour and give this podcast a try. It’s a documentary series exploring the phenomenon of telepathy (and other related gifts) in non-speaking people with autism. It’s fascinating, mind bending and loaded with scientific experiments that test the very fabric of what we know and understand about the universe, including the Materialism paradigm.

What to read: The Toxic Truth about the Bureau of Meteorology

Have you had conversations in your household over the last 18 months about how unreliable our weather apps are? We have. I assumed climate change was the reason to blame but it turns out the culprit is a toxic workplace environment and poor management at the Bureau of Meteorology. A series of investigative articles expose that the culture is so toxic that a man was hospitalised twice for psychiatric care, another had a heart attack while working extreme overtime, and others took stress leave because of panic attacks and anxiety regarding management oversight - as reported by The Saturday Paper. It is a fascinating read, to not only learn that our publicly funded BOM does not meet the international standards for meteorology because nobody wants to work there, but a sharp reminder about the impacts of culture and leadership in the workplace.

What to stack: 3 substacks to discover

Rachel Katz

- beautiful and honest essays about life and redefining success after being a CEO.

Natalie Holloway

- the founder of Bala who has recently joined substack and I’m sure will share many pearls of wisdom.

Link in Bio

- by Rachel Karton, all about social media and how to navifgate the ever changing landscape to grow your business.

What to think about: Portfolio Careers

It’s the buzz word of 2025 and for good reason, people are realising they want the opportunity to explore more passions and amongst a cost of living crisis the appeal to diversify income streams is extremely appealing. If you missed my webinar with

Anna Mackenzie

where we discussed portfolio careers and personal brands, you can access the recording here. Password: 6G.CR%hZ

What to try: The 2025 tool kit

In my newest paid subscriber article, I have collated a list of 40 tools I use for my business and personal life across digital, strategy, social media, people, finance, retail and US growth listed for you to explore. Here is a little taste of what’s in that article…

Strategy Tools

• Tracksuit - This is the sidekick of every marketer trying to convince their CEO, CFO and board to invest in brand activity. Tracksuit provides real audience insights to see if and how your brand work is actually raising brand awareness and contributing to business growth over time. It’s full of lessons, data and insights and it’s very easy to use - invaluable IMO.

• Particl - Your competitor analysis bestie. It saves you time and energy by collating everything you need so you can do the actual analysis part of competitor work, not the screenshotting part. Access to real-time sales, pricing, and sentiment data.

Digital Tools

• Notion - once you go notion, you’ll never go…back? An AI led productivity, planning, ideating and managing tool that has endless applications. I use it for life planning to idea capturing to entire building systems that I operate my client work and courses on.

• Shopify Plus - Simple and easy, we’ve been using it for 11 years at frank body for a reason. You can start with Shopify and move to Shopify Plus as you grow.

• Gorgias - A customer service platform that makes it easy to manage and monitor all CX. I’ve recently come across Commslayer which is FREE and looks very cool.

• For startups Mailchimp is the best email tool out there. You could switch to Emarsys or Klavio as you grow, but unless you’re doing multiple 7 figures I would always invest in copywriters to create amazing content based emails before I invest in an automation software that sends boring, product related emails over and over.

• Kajabi - for creating and hosting my LinkedIn Growth course. I find it so easy to use and quite affordable, so if you’re looking to develop a course I would choose this over the others on the market (and I’ve used the others).

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the full list of tools and my weekly emails on growth, productivity and scaling a business or career.

And finally…

2025 Mantra to live by: From Zoe Foster Blake

If it’s not a Heck YES, it’s a NO.

Share your January recommendations in the comments below and I’ll choose a few to share it in my next post.