Mambition

Every parent hates the plastic party bag. Every parent still hands them out. Nobody knows who started it and nobody is brave enough to stop! 😂 Then Charlotte Curl said it out loud and is now on a mission with No Crap Parties. But wait, this conversation is not about guilt or making us feel bad. It is about giving ourselves permission to celebrate on our own terms, without the pressure to put on a...

Pre motherhood I ran a complex set of social calculations every single day. I softened my language, adjusted my tone, managed the room and tried to optimise everything. Then parenting happened and something in me stopped performing. In this episode: → Dancing in a pub when everyone else is sat down, and falling over at the gym, and being able to laugh at myself → The parts of parenting you cannot...

Bianca lost her mum at 11. She helped raise her three younger sisters. She built her career, ended a 12-year marriage and took her children on a road trip through Europe to mark the beginning of the next chapter. She now runs an agency called Nineteen82 and works with Motherless Mothers which is a charity supporting women through bereavement and estrangement. What strikes me most about Bianca'...

Last Friday I published a post that felt cringey and shameless. I posted it anyway. Over 7,000 impressions, 130 likes and more warm connections than I could count later — I started thinking about what actually happens when you embrace the cringe. Before children I celebrated my self sufficiency. But motherhood is a completely different arena. Interdependence is the infrastructure. The village is e...

She was demoted. She did not know it at the time but that moment would become the launchpad. Alice Ter Haar is the founder of Badass Unicorn, a TEDx speaker, a writer for The Times and someone who has spent years helping people unleash what she calls their Return on Individual — the one of a kind magic that makes each person formidably impressive. In this episode: → The Badass Unicorn philosophy —...

Someone I know recently lost her 4 year old son. Loss and grief have a way of cutting through the noise and reminding us of something we already know but sometimes forget. Life is short. Are you deliberate about the one you are designing? This episode is not a sad one. It is an urgent one. I talk about grief as a clarifying force. And I talk about the trip I have been thinking about booking with m...

Some career pivots come with a plan. This one came with a voice Claire did not know she had. Claire Venus is a self described creative who also writes — and she has built a gentle, intentional creative life on Substack after walking away from the exhaustion of running chaotic online projects that left her burned out and questioning everything. This week Alex sits down with Claire for a conversatio...

I used to be quite a private person. Even when I was struggling. Because I was brought up to conduct yourself well regardless of what is happening on the inside. But I took that too far. And in certain chapters of my life I suffered in silence. Motherhood changed that. The guilt, the mental load, a tough year that brought me to my knees. All of it caused me to rethink what I thought I knew about s...

Ros is a former national award-winning teacher and someone who has reinvented herself more than once. Raising her daughters in Singapore she is acutely aware of the pressure the education system places on children — which is exactly why she is so deliberate about what she is building in them instead. In this episode: → Singapore's exam culture and what that level of academic pressure actually...

The internet is full of extraordinary mothers running six figure businesses, maintaining immaculate homes and doing Pilates at 5am. All thanks to discipline, apparently. Just outside the frame? You have absolutely no idea. This episode is about comparison. Specifically about how to stop doing it. And why most of us find it so hard. In this episode: → Everything comes at a price → What grief taught...

She had THE career but then she became a mother and something shifted. Tamara Hinckley spent nine years at Pinterest. She tried interviewing for similar roles and realised somewhere in that process that she no longer wanted what she had been chasing. Motherhood had quietly rewritten what she was actually ambitious for. This episode is about that rewriting. What happens when a high achieving woman...

Motherhood as the art of doing it so well that nobody notices you are doing it at all. Our school morning routine with a 3 and 5 year old is fairly calm. Because someone is behind the scenes orchestrating it all. It takes careful planning, decisions made the night before and timing everything correctly. We do not talk enough about the mental load of this. In this episode: → Time as dominoes — why...

Alex and Tiffany are back for a catch up! We talk about the Great North Run, cheering loudly in public and the particular joy of embarrassing your children. About the village, the support that makes this all possible. And about raising curious children without pushing them toward a specific path — just creating the conditions for discovery and watching what sticks. In this episode: → The Great Nor...

My 5 year old son ran the Great North Run for Kids on Saturday. He loved it. But I only discovered that he loved running when I took him for a run a year ago. He loved it. He said mummy let us go again. Now he keeps up with me. I also started playing music in the mornings. My daughter catches a lyric from a song we played earlier and repeats it after school like she has been rehearsing it all day....

Before Morgan Wider became the woman behind The Worthy Wardrobe, there was her mum. And the thread between that maternal influence and how she developed her own relationship with style, identity and being seen is one of the most interesting places this conversation goes. Morgan is an image consultant, stylist, speaker and author working with professional women on the two things that actually chang...

My birthday is coming up. And this typically comes with anxiety. The internal voice that asks — are you where you should be? Have you done enough? Another year has passed. What have you got to show for it? I know that voice well and I know where it comes from. Loss warps your relationship with time. You stop feeling like time is infinite. Birthdays become a reminder that another year has gone and...

Alex and I are back reflecting on the summer holidays that have somehow came to an end. Six weeks of keeping the children entertained, going on adventures, meeting strangers at parks and soft plays, making fleeting friendships that lasted an afternoon and somehow meant gave us something. We both made a deliberate choice to prioritise time with our children this summer. And to also make sure we got...

The kids go back tomorrow. Six weeks that felt endless at the start and gone in what felt like an instant at the end. Though I know it was long — there were days that felt like we had too much time and not enough to fill it with. That is the time warp of summer holidays.. And I think it tells you something important about this season of life. In this episode: → The time warp of parenting that I si...

The summer camp spreadsheet. The INSET day gap. The colour coded calendar nobody else in the house understands. If you know, you know. Kathryn Hatcher is the founder of Camply — a platform helping busy parents find, plan and coordinate summer camps and school break childcare without the overwhelm. She spent 15 years in consulting and leading complex high stakes projects. Now she is applying that s...

If I met myself at a party I think I would want to sit down and have a conversation. And I think I would walk away thinking — wow, that person is really something. For someone who spent years being insecure, this is major. This episode is about self acceptance. The kind that holds both things at once — knowing you are a work in progress and still liking the person you are right now. I talk about t...

Why is it always mum who knows what day non-uniform day is? Therese is the founder of Hey Ladybird — an AI powered app that turns school emails, WhatsApp messages and permission slips into an organised family calendar. She built it because she was living the problem every single day. In this episode we talk about the mental load and the invisible labour that falls disproportionately on mothers — f...

Pre-mum me wore heels a lot because I tied a significant part of how I felt about myself to how dressed up I was. Motherhood changed that. First out of necessity then out of choice. Jumpsuits, trainers, and somewhere across 3 to 5 years of motherhood the casual dressing stopped feeling like a compromise and started feeling like exactly enough. But there is more to it than just the clothes. In this...

Not every lesson that shapes you as a mother happens after you become one. This episode is my top six experiences from before motherhood that I now recognise as the foundations of the mother I am today. → Solo travel → Quitting my job and navigating a career pivot → Solitude → Losing my mum at 9 → Frugality with money → Heartbreak Motherhood blows everything wide open. The rules change. The priori...

My daughter asked to go inside a woman's house I had just finished a professional shoot at. My immediate instinct was absolutely not. That is odd and a bit much. She got really upset. And knowing my daughter, really upset has only one destination. So I knocked on the door and asked. The woman said yes. My daughter asked without knowing that asking can be scary. No history of rejection. No inte...

She walked into the Dragons Den at 9 months pregnant. She walked out with £50,000. Her son arrived a week later. Olivia is the co-founder of Cubbi — the UK's first discount platform for new and expecting parents. But this episode is not just about the Den moment. It is about everything that came before it and the conviction that carried them through when nothing else could. In this episode: →...