So I started to think, well, if I’m never a winner, then perhaps I’m a loser.

I didn’t participate in competitions anymore because there was no point, being a loser and all.

But things changed for me in grade 7.

We did this cute science project where we were given seeds to germinate, then grow into little plants. Academia, being academia and fuelling our need to one-up one another, insisted on a little competitive spin: whoever grew the tallest plant over a set period would be the winner.

I’ve talked about where I grew up before, in a town known for being one of the most deprived in the United Kingdom; even so, my mother hailed from the United States. I was born with a USA passport and had family overseas. I had a privilege, an out, so to speak, and for some reason or another, my mother pulled us out of school for 10 days to visit New York.

During my absence, my teacher took it upon herself to ensure my plant did not wither. She expertly tended it until I returned. On my first day back at school, it was plant measuring day! I had won! I got a little trophy and everything, but I did feel ashamed. I didn’t take care of this plant.

I learned an uncomfortable truth at a young age: some people win without “earning” it by conventional standards. Luck. Privilege. The right people in your corner at the right time. These things are real, and pretending they aren’t doesn’t serve anyone.

As I left school that day, my mother put my award-winning plant, a stranger to me, on the roof of the car while we moved some things around. We got in, and she promptly drove off. My plant was destroyed, and the soil tumbled down the windows.

Another lesson that sometimes, just sometimes, Karma sorts things out for us.

Research confirms that people consistently underestimate the role of chance in human experience, drawing the wrong conclusions from lucky breaks, and acting on them in ways that don't serve them. I did that for years. Called myself a loser because I didn't understand the system I was losing in.

Unemployed but Still Winning

Skip forward to a painfully depressing stint of unemployment. London, around 21 years ago. I was applying for jobs and not having any “luck”. Looking back, my mental health was holding on by a thread, and I don’t think I’d put effort into things much, but I did think to myself, “There has to be another way to create income”. I wasn’t cut out for the 9-to-5.

And so it began, the endless, fervent applying to as many competitions as possible. I uncovered a system for finding them, too: radio channel websites, many magazines, and newspapers, so many competitions, hours a day spent applying. I didn’t care what the prizes were; I was just curious if I’d win anything.

Boy, did I start winning! I was averaging 2-3 meaningful wins a month.

Turns out, this isn't just an anecdote. Psychologist Richard Wiseman spent a decade studying over 400 self-described lucky and unlucky people and found that lucky people are significantly more likely to enter competitions, persist longer on difficult problems, and pursue challenging opportunities. Essentially, they manufacture their own odds. I was accidentally doing exactly that.

I won weird things, like the latest hedge trimmer, and a lawnmower. I sold those on eBay for a pretty penny. Tickets to shows, of note, a beatboxing show, fascinating. Shiny new designer shoes. You name it. The coolest win was a 6-month trip to China to become a TEFL teacher, all expenses paid. I actually missed the opportunity due to a family conflict, which still bothers me to this day, if I let it.

You can increase your good fortune by increasing the number of doors you knock on. Not all of them will open. But enough will, if you knock on enough of them.

Pissing off Croatians

Most recently, I found myself at the Travel & Adventure Show in New York City. As luck would have it, it landed on a day with a huge snowstorm. I was speaking on a panel, and there were maybe 10 people in the audience due to the weather. Not off to a winning start.

As the day progressed, more people trickled in, and as I was on my way out the door, I spotted people gathering around the Croatian tourism board’s area.

They were desperately beckoning for people to come sit and take part in a quiz. We sat. A young Croatian woman sat behind and whispered, “Don’t worry, I will help you”. I smiled, thanked her, but I didn’t need her help.

Around 25 of us checked in, and the questions started. In this game, you are awarded not only for correct answers, but also for the speed at which you submit them on your device.

I won the first round! Hooray!

I stayed on the top of the leaderboard for the second, and the third, and each question produced a prize, a subjectively “better prize” as it progressed.

By question 4, I remained at in position. Not because I was particularly learned on “Croatia”, but because I have this strange little skill where I can often feel where words come from. I can guess linguistic roots and tiny clues; I have a sense of what cultural quirks might belong where, and I can read the energy of a question. Call it pattern recognition. Call it intuition. Call it years of travel and a lifetime of curiosity. I also trust instincts that don’t always make logical sense in the moment, and I move quickly.

I felt the discomfort set in.

“Hannah again!”

“Hannah!”…

My name would come up on the screen before they’d had time to read it, and I’d wince a little. The organizers began redistributing prizes to second, third, and even fourth-place participants, despite my technically winning almost every question.

I knew why; their sense of justice was knocking, they felt obligated to reward participation and keep peace, but it still irked me. I could have answered things deliberately wrong; it crossed my mind to do that, but in this low-stakes environment, I wanted to run a kind of social experiment. What actually happens if I just keep going? The worst outcome is… people feeling a bit annoyed at a quiz?

So I kept playing.

They would sporadically throw me a bone, so to speak, to acknowledge that I was doing quite unexpectedly brilliantly. But I heard the huffs each time.

There's actually a German word for what was happening in that room: Glückschmerz - the feeling of displeasure at someone else's success. Psychology research confirms it's very common. We're most likely to envy someone when we feel their advantage isn't deserved, and to a room of strangers watching a random woman they'd never met dominate a quiz about their region, I can see how that landed.

When you get really good at something and keep winning, some people take issue. I know this well from my work as an entrepreneur.

At the very end of the quiz, I won the grand prize. Irrefutably. Undeniably. A little dramatically, and a lot uncomfortably.

Someone asked if I was Croatian. Nope.

How do you explain it? A strange cocktail of seemingly useless knowledge - Adriatic coastal geography, a feel for linguistics, an instinct for how quiz questions are worded in ways that kind of point toward the answer. And then, not to mention, I just kinda knew which answer felt right? You can’t explain it, and I don’t really need to.

I was just the mystery redhead who swept in and beat the Croatians at their own country. 😄

The grand prize, for anyone wondering, was a fancy-pants bottle of some type of alcohol I’ll probably hate, paired with a booklet about its history, all wrapped in a fancy bag. Lovely.

What winning repeatedly teaches you about people…

When you get really good at something, when you win consistently, when you rise faster than others expect, as mentioned, some people will not be happy about it.

It’s not always malicious; often, it’s simply discomfort. A mirror they didn’t ask to look into. A reminder of their own unlocked potential. Or simply: they were hoping they’d be the one.

Winning Lessons:

• You don’t make yourself smaller, so others feel bigger. That’s not generosity, it’s simply self-erasure dressed up as politeness. In my experience as an overly polite Brit who once married a German, I learned quickly that being polite doesn’t guarantee you get what you want; stating what you want is how you get it.

• Trusting yourself is a skill, not a personality trait. You build it by practicing, by acting on instinct and seeing what happens. Speed matters in some decisions. If it feels right, go. Let yourself figure things out - momentum matters.

• Winning is a numbers game. More attempts = more odds in your favor. This applies to competitions, clients, opportunities, and yes, job applications. Instead of getting discouraged, find the joy in the journey, find the joy in knowing most doors knocked won’t answer. A mentor of mine once told me to seek out as many “no’s” in my business as possible, which made me feel like a winner when I got rejected and, in turn, led to more “yes’s” than ever.

• Not all wins look like wins at first. A plant left on a rooftop. A sad, unemployed year in London. These felt like losses in the moment. They were actually training grounds. Not to be cliché, but you literally never know what's around the corner. If we let ourselves be defined by a moment, we risk missing out on meeting the next iteration of our lives.

• People will not always celebrate your repeated success. That’s okay. It’s not your job to manage their discomfort. Keep going and build your personal evidence bank that you are, indeed, a winner, in whatever way winning matters to you.

• The “I’m a loser” story is almost never true. It’s just a story you picked up somewhere along the way. Often from a system that defined winning in a way that didn’t account for you, your weird little strengths, your timing, your particular kind of knowing.

Over to you…

Is there somewhere in your life or business where you’ve decided you’re “not someone who wins”?

A niche you haven’t gone after. A rate you haven’t quoted. A service you haven’t offered because surely someone else already does it better. A love interest you are tiptoeing around?

To knock on more doors? To trust yourself enough to hit submit, even when you’re not sure?

Because the numbers game works. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it in many ways beyond my year of depressed competition entry.

You don’t have to be the most credentialed person in the room. You do have to show up, trust your instincts, and not talk yourself out of it before the thing even gets good.

My immediate instinct was to tuck it back away. Speak a bit more carefully, sound a bit more polished. Which is funny, as I just started a book which is very timely, on this exact topic.

It’s called The Gender of Sound by Anne Carson, a poet and classicist who went poking around through ancient Greek texts and found something that should have stayed in the past, but didn’t. Her argument: for thousands of years, Western culture has deliberately associated certain voices with disorder, low status, and untrustworthiness, and it has gone to extraordinary lengths to silence them.

Specifically, women’s voices. 👀

Aristotle literally argued that a high-pitched voice was evidence of a woman’s evil disposition, that creatures who were brave and just, like lions, bulls, roosters, and the human male, naturally had large, deep voices. The Greeks had a word for this ideal of rational, controlled, male speech: sophrosyne, self-mastery, soundness of mind. A husband telling his wife to practice sophrosyne was, in practice, just telling her to shut up.

Women who spoke too loudly, too freely, too emotionally were considered dangerous. Monstrous, even. In classical literature, female vocalization was frequently depicted as transgressive, think the Sirens, think Echo, figures who offended or disrupted simply through their sound. The message across centuries was consistent: female sound was something to be managed, contained, corrected.

And it never really stopped.

Margaret Thatcher spent years with a vocal coach, deliberately lowering and slowing her voice to sound more like her fellow members of Parliament. She did all of that work, reshaped her entire sound, and still earned the nickname “Attila the Hen.” The most powerful woman in British political history modified herself to be palatable, and they still called her shrill.

Radio hosts, speakers, podcast hosts: the data is consistent and not subtle. Men’s voices: authoritative, controlled, credible. Women’s voices: helpful at best, an annoyance at worst.

60% of radio hosts are men. In business and tech podcasts, that’s 12 male hosts to every one woman. When we do get the mic, people still reach for a male voice for authority and a female voice for helpfulness. So helpful, in fact, that they named her Alexa. And Siri. And made her answer on command. Aristotle would be absolutely delighted!

You cannot win a game that was rigged before you arrived. But you can create a new game, one that’s actually fun to play.

Carson writes: “Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. A piece of inside projected to the outside. The censorship of such projections is a task of patriarchal culture.”

Every time a woman has been told she’s too loud, too emotional, too much, that is censorship. Every time we’ve been passed over because our voice “didn’t inspire confidence,” that is censorship. Every time we’ve softened our tone, lowered our register, and chosen our words more carefully than our male counterparts ever have, that is us internalizing a system designed, from ancient times, to shut us up.

And then I thought about my accent, too. Because this isn’t just about gender, it’s also about class, geography, and origin.

Here’s something people outside the UK might not fully appreciate: not all British accents are created equal. For a long time, the BBC would only allow the “Received Pronunciation” or “Queen’s English” sound on its airwaves. Only about 3% of the British population speaks it, yet it has become synonymous with trustworthiness, authority, and intelligence. Everything else, simply less than.

And Cockney, working class, East End, my accent, sits firmly at the bottom of that hierarchy. Research consistently shows that Cockney speakers are rated lower in status and competence, and these perceptions directly affect hiring decisions, promotions, and social mobility. Voiceover work and national ads still disproportionately favor RP for “trustworthy” narration. Cockney-coded voices in TV and film are cast as criminals, comic relief, or hustlers, the “bad guys”, and definitely not as authority figures.

This isn’t a uniquely British problem either. In the United States, a Southern accent, particularly a Southern woman’s accent, has long been associated with being less intelligent, less credible, and less boardroom-ready. A New York accent gets you “street smart” at best. Study after study shows that American recruiters rate candidates with neutral “standard” American accents as significantly more competent than those with regional or ethnic accents, before a single qualification has been considered. It takes less than 30 seconds to linguistically profile a speaker, and within that window, judgments are made about ethnic origin, socioeconomic class, background, and ability.

For immigrants and non-native speakers, it cuts even deeper. Accent bias hits hardest in professional and educational settings. Second-generation immigrants recount parents being mocked for their inflections, substitute teachers facing classroom taunts, and people being openly ridiculed in stores. A French accent in an American office reads as sophisticated. A Mexican accent in the same room, the bias research is not kind. A Nigerian accent, an Indian accent, a Filipino accent, all carrying decades of colonial baggage about what “professional” is supposed to sound like, who gets to be the expert, whose knowledge counts.

The system has always been very clear about whose voice deserves to be taken seriously. It just rarely says it out loud.

I have personally spent roughly two decades sanding my own sound down. I know the moment I made the decision, after one incident where I was mocked in an interview, I had taken my best stab at an RP accent for the role, and it all fell apart when the numerous T’s in the word “competitive” were scrambled.

Some of my mixed accent and odd vocabulary is an inevitability when you live internationally for nearly half your life. But some of it was very intentional. I wanted to be taken seriously, to be heard. I knew that sounding like where I came from wasn’t going to help me in certain spaces. So I polished, and I polished. But when I’m back here in the UK, my East End accent comes flooding out, and it’s kind of relieving. I hadn’t truly realized just how much of my voice, the very tool I use to express myself and connect, has been suppressed, and the effort I have been expending to do so.

Researchers have found that people who try to shed their accent often end up feeling they don’t entirely belong in their work or home communities. That in-between place is one I know well.

Adapting or modifying to get ahead isn’t personal failure. This is an ancient, well-documented system doing exactly what it was designed to do: control whose voice counts as credible. Whose autobiography gets to be projected outward and whose gets persistently edited back.

So, what do we do with that?

I think about the many women I know who are building businesses and lives on their own terms, outside the parameters of expectation. The Cockney woman. The woman with the accent that people can’t quite place. The immigrant founder who was told subtly, constantly, that she needed to “work on her communication.” The woman who grew up in the American South and spent a decade un-learning her own voice to be taken seriously in corporate spaces.

All of us, somewhere along the way, were told that our sound was the problem.

And all of us, somewhere along the way, decided to build something different instead.

A client base on our own terms. A community where we set the tone. An ecosystem where our sound is the standard, not the deviation from it.

I was born and raised in Barking and Dagenham, more deprived than 97% of local authorities in England. Not exactly the kind of place whose daughters are told their voices carry weight.

But it’s also the place where, in 1968, 187 women at the Ford plant, surrounded by 54,813 men, walked off the job, shut down production entirely, and didn’t stop until they were heard. You might know it as the movie (highly recommend) Made in Dagenham. Their noise, Cockney-accented, working-class, and completely unapologetic, directly led to the Equal Pay Act of 1970.

They didn’t do it alone. Working class women, marginalized, underpaid, told their work wasn’t skilled, and their voices didn’t count, and they found each other anyway. That collective noise is what made the difference. Not one exceptional woman who made herself palatable enough to be heard. All of them, exactly as they were, refusing to be silent together. That’s always been how change actually happens.

187 women changed the law for millions.

They existed at the intersection of where I have existed, Cockney, woman, on a mission.

That is, I’d argue, one of the most quietly radical things we can do as women in business. To stop performing palatably. To stop sanding down the edges. To build spaces where we don’t have to lower our tone or flatten our vowels or neutralize ourselves to be heard, because we built it, and we set the literal tone.

Which brings me to something I’ve been working on.

Introducing: Unconventional Excellence Podcast 🎙️

A podcast for people who were never going to fit the conventional mold, and decided to build something extraordinary on their own terms anyway. Against the odds. In defiance of the odds, dare I say.

I’ll be having frank conversations with freelancers, founders, and values-led humans from all over the world who stopped adjusting their sound and have achieved beyond most people’s wildest dreams, and more often than not, in opposition to what society typically deems successful.

Excellence was never supposed to sound like 3% of the population.

Every sound you make is a piece of your inside, projected outside. Carson said that. And for centuries, that projection has been policed, softened, corrected, silenced.

Not here.

The first episode drops June 1st, and I’d love for you to be one of the first listeners.

Click here to get notified!

Consider this a love letter from me to you: project loudly. Project proudly. Build the ecosystem where your sound is the standard. Set the frequency. Take up every inch of the space.

And if your accent slips out on a call this week?

Good. Let it.

Hannah 🎙️

PS. This week inside the Virtual Excellence Academy, we’re hosting an all-women solo travel panel, featuring VEA members themselves. Our community, taking up the mic. Come join us (members only). 🌍