Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Office Hours with Linda Ayoola

I've made plenty of career mistakes, from assuming hard work would speak for itself to staying in rooms I'd outgrown for too long.

In this episode, I share the lessons I've learned navigating banking, the music industry and corporate life and what I'd do differently if I could start again.

Because experience is valuable, but learning everything the hard way is expensive.

The hardest part of being a working mother isn’t always the work. It’s the editing.

Editing how tired you admit you are. How ambitious you allow yourself to sound. How much you let on that you care about your career, without making it seem like you care any less about your children.

Because somewhere along the way, women learn to make their lives sound smaller to make everyone else more comfortable.

In this episode, I talk about the invisible emotional labour of trying to be a good mother and an ambitious woman at the same time and the exhaustion that comes from constantly managing how other people perceive you.

Not because you don't love your life. Not because you're ungrateful. But because you can love the life you've built and still find the weight of carrying it exhausting.

And perhaps the most tiring part is feeling like you have to pretend otherwise.

There’s a difference between loving someone and losing yourself in the process of loving them.

Over the years, I’ve watched women, myself included make compromises in relationships that slowly become sacrifices. We call it being supportive. Being a good partner. Being understanding.

But sometimes, you’re not being a good partner. You’re abandoning yourself.

In this episode, I share 10 things I don’t think women should do for a man, from shrinking your ambitions and putting your career second, to changing who you are to make a relationship work.

This isn’t about keeping score in a relationship or refusing to compromise.

It’s about knowing the difference between compromise and self-abandonment.

Because the right relationship should add to your life.

It shouldn’t require you to disappear from it.

How much of the life we build is actually down to us?

I’ve always been proud of how hard I’ve worked. But the older I get, the more I’ve started to question the story we tell ourselves about success.

Growing up, I thought I knew what a “normal” life looked like. Then, at 12, I went to a different school and realised there were people living lives I hadn’t even known existed.

That experience changed the size of my imagination.

And it kept happening, through university, my career, my husband, travelling the world and eventually leaving a secure corporate job to join a startup.

In this episode, I explore exposure, privilege, luck, confidence and possibility scarcity — and the uncomfortable truth that two things can be true at once:

You can work incredibly hard for what you have and still have been lucky.

Because sometimes the biggest thing that changes your life isn't an opportunity.

It's discovering that there are more possibilities than you thought

Changing careers can feel like you’re throwing away everything you’ve built.

The experience. The title. The salary. The years you spent becoming good at something.

But what if a career pivot isn’t about starting again?

In this episode, I break down how I moved from banking into the music industry and eventually into operations, strategy and entrepreneurship without throwing away the skills I’d spent years building.

Because the biggest mistake people make when changing careers is looking at what they don’t know, instead of recognising what they already bring with them.

Your career isn't a ladder you have to keep climbing in one direction.

Sometimes you just need to learn how to carry your experience somewhere new.

We tend to think ambition comes from wanting more.

A bigger job. More money. A different life. More freedom.

But what if the things we want are largely shaped by what we already know exists?

For years, I thought I was ambitious because I kept setting bigger goals. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised how often my imagination had simply stopped at the edge of what I had already seen other people do.

In this episode, I explore the relationship between exposure, ambition and possibility and why sometimes the biggest thing holding us back isn't a lack of drive, but a lack of imagination.

Because it’s difficult to pursue a life you’ve never seen anyone live.

Sometimes you don’t need more confidence. You need a bigger reference point.

For a long time, I thought being taken seriously was the same thing as being successful.

So I became very good at being serious.

Serious about my career. Serious about how I was perceived and about saying the right thing, having the right answer and making sure nobody could question whether I belonged in the room.

But somewhere along the way, I realised that taking yourself seriously can become its own kind of limitation.

In this episode, I talk about ambition, ego, confidence and the pressure to constantly prove yourself and what changed when I stopped worrying so much about how I was being perceived.

Because sometimes the next level of your career isn't about becoming more impressive.

It's about becoming more yourself.

What happens when you discover that someone doing similar work has been offered almost £40,000 more than you?

I’ve spent years sitting in rooms where salaries are discussed, budgets are decided and people’s pay rises are agreed, often before they ever walk into their performance review.

But early in my career, I made the same mistake most people make: I assumed that if I worked hard enough, eventually someone would recognise my value.

Then I found out what someone else was being paid.

And later, I discovered that someone two levels below me was being offered £10–20k more than I was already earning.

This episode is about what those moments taught me about salary transparency, negotiation and the uncomfortable truth about how compensation decisions actually get made.

Because your company knows what you’re worth to them.

The question is: do you?

We’ve been sold the idea that the goal is to have it all, while somehow keeping every part of our lives perfectly balanced.

I don’t believe that anymore.

In this episode, I talk about motherhood, ambition, fitness, marriage, guilt and the uncomfortable choices I’ve had to make to build a life that actually feels like mine.

From turning down a board seat I desperately wanted to deciding that my health could no longer come last, I’ve learned that sometimes the answer isn’t better balance. It’s being honest about what matters most right now.

Because you can have it all.

You just can’t have it all at the same time.

And maybe that’s not a failure. Maybe that’s the whole point.

I watched a colleague receive £250 to celebrate 25 years at the company.

And something in me went very still.

It wasn’t the £250 that bothered me. It was suddenly seeing, with uncomfortable clarity, what staying could look like 25 years from then.

At the time, I had a good job, a good salary and had just been promoted. On paper, I had every reason to stay.

But I had been hiding something from myself: I wanted more.

In this episode, I talk about the moment I stopped shrinking what I wanted, why being promoted actually made me realise it was time to leave, and what happened when I eventually walked away from banking for a career in music.

Because sometimes the thing that looks like ambition isn't wanting too much.

It’s finally admitting what you want.

What if one of the biggest career decisions you ever make isn’t actually a career decision?

In this episode, I talk about marrying someone who chose a completely different path to the one I thought made sense and how watching him build a life without a conventional roadmap made me question the one I was following.

I thought I was choosing a husband. I didn’t realise I was also choosing someone who would quietly expand my idea of what was possible for my own life.

Because sometimes the people closest to us don’t just support our ambitions. They change what we believe we’re capable of.

If you've ever looked at your life and wondered, “Is this actually the life I want, or just the one I know how to build?” — this one is for you.