“If you think you haven't got a story, I'd probably disagree.”
The woman across the table has already apologised twice. “There isn’t really much to say about me,” she says, and Lindsey Stephens nods and asks where she grew up. Ten minutes later the woman mentions, in passing, the year she started her business with no money, or the career she rebuilt at fifty, or the two decades she spent getting very good at something she now calls “just what I do.” Then she moves on to the next thing.
Lindsey stops her. “Hang on. Go back. You just said…”
This is not a rare conversation. Researchers at Harvard Business School and Wharton ran a series of experiments with more than 4,000 participants and found that women describe their own ability and performance to potential employers less favourably than men who performed exactly as well. In one test, people who had scored the same were asked to rate themselves out of 100. The men said 61. The women said 45. The gap did not close when participants were told how well they had actually done.
Lindsey has spent 25 years in media watching this happen without a control group. Her answer to it is not a course in confidence. It is a mirror.
From the Diary of Lindsey Stephens
Lindsey Stephens is the Founder and Editor of The Female Boss Collective, a UK platform that brings together editorial, membership, events and visibility work for women in business. She is the interviewer, ghostwriter and publisher behind Becoming, a collaborative book telling the stories of twelve women, with Volume Two now in progress. She also runs a 90-day one-to-one visibility programme that starts with a single question: what do you want to be known for? Before founding her own businesses she held senior commercial and publishing roles across regional and national media brands.
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The story stops looking like a story
Ask Lindsey why capable women undersell themselves and she does not reach for a theory. “I think because we live our own stories every day, they stop feeling remarkable to us.”
The women she interviews for Becoming did not skip the interesting part on purpose. They built a business, survived something, started again, raised children while working, created jobs. “But because it happened to them gradually, they don’t see the story. They see it as life.”
The pattern she has learned to listen for is the throwaway. “One of the things I’ve noticed while writing Becoming is how often somebody will almost throw away the most interesting part of their story. They’ll say something huge and then immediately move on.”
That instinct came from the page, not from coaching. Her career ran through advertising, radio, magazines and publishing, most of it spent working out what makes a reader stop, read and care. “When you’ve spent years deciding what deserves space on a page, you develop an instinct for the detail that makes a story human.” And the detail, she has found, is rarely the job title. It is why somebody started, what nearly stopped them, and the decision that looked small at the time.
“I’m not inventing anything or making somebody’s life sound more dramatic than it was. I’m simply holding up a mirror and showing them what was already there.”
How she finds it
The method is disarmingly plain. “I talk to them.”
Contributors to Becoming do not write a word of their chapter. Lindsey interviews each woman and then writes the story in her voice, so nobody sits in front of a blank page trying to be a writer. But the interview itself is where the craft lives, and she thinks it is being lost. “That sounds incredibly simple, but I think good interviewing is becoming a bit of a lost art.”
She almost never opens with the business. She wants the person first: where they grew up, what they were like at school, what they thought their life would look like, when it changed, who believed in them and who did not. Then she listens for the shift. “I listen for the moments when their voice changes, when they laugh, hesitate, become emotional or suddenly become incredibly animated. Those moments tell you something.”
Her favourite question has three words. “And then what?”
“People reveal extraordinary things when you give them the space to keep talking.” What she is after is not the timeline. “My job isn’t just to record the chronology of someone’s life. It’s to find the thread running through it.”
That habit of pulling one thread into the next is how Lindsey works on everything. A colleague, she says, would tell you she is “incapable of just having one project on the go.” A magazine article becomes a book, a conversation becomes an event, an introduction becomes a collaboration. It is the same instinct, pointed at her own life.
“I’ll often ask, ‘What happened next?’ or ‘How did that make you feel?’ But one of my favourite questions is simply, ‘And then what?’”
What changes once it is told
The proof, for Lindsey, is not praise for the prose. “With Becoming, some of the most powerful feedback hasn’t been about the writing itself. It has been women telling me that reading their chapter made them realise how much they had actually done.”
The same thing shows up in her one-to-one visibility work, where clients often arrive asking for the wrong thing. “Sometimes a client comes to me thinking they need more social media posts or a press release, but when you dig deeper, the real problem is that they haven’t worked out what they want to be known for.” Once that is settled, the posts and the press release write themselves. “Visibility isn’t just about being seen more. It’s about making sure people understand what they’re seeing.”
Which is why she has written her new book, What are you known for?, so people can get an understanding of what’s needed. It is available on Amazon.
This is where the 25 years earn their keep. A magazine editor learns to hold two questions at once: what does this person want to say, and why should a stranger care? “A story isn’t just about what somebody wants to say; it’s about why another person should care enough to listen.” It is why she does not describe the work she does now as a change of career. “It feels more like everything I’ve done over the last 25 years has finally come together.”
The setbacks along the way have been treated the same way she treats a contributor’s story: as material. “Probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that something not working isn’t necessarily a sign to stop. Sometimes it is simply telling you that the next version needs to be different. I’ve reinvented myself professionally more than once, and I’m sure I will again.”
Two people sit behind that. Her mum, “a huge part of my life,” is someone she always wanted to make proud. Her husband is a support in everything she does, and she has come to realise “how much of my strength and determination comes from” him. Family life has changed considerably in recent years, and it has left her impatient with waiting. “If there’s something you want to do, don’t keep waiting for the perfect moment.”
“I’m much less interested in telling women what they should become. I’m much more interested in showing them what is already there. There is a huge difference.”
Where Lindsey Is Now
Becoming Volume One launches on 26 November in Liverpool, where readers can meet the twelve contributors and hear from some of them in person. Lindsey is already in conversation with the women who will make up Volume Two. Alongside the book, she works one-to-one with clients on the 90-day visibility programme, publishes The Female Boss Collective’s editorial platform, and edits For You Magazines, a community title delivered through schools in West Lancashire to get children reading again. In 2026 she published her own novel, Dancing Did It, with proceeds supporting Liverpool Women’s Hospital. “I adore spending quality time with family and friends,” she adds, and writing fiction has become one more way of doing what she does everywhere else: exploring stories and people.
Her one line for what comes next: “More books, more women’s stories, and building The Female Boss Collective into a platform that helps brilliant women become impossible to overlook.”
Lindsey Stephens’ Playbook
- Start with the person, not the business. Where did you grow up? What did you think your life would look like? The business turns up on its own.
- Listen for the throwaway. The line said in passing, then hurried past, is usually the story.
- Ask “And then what?” Space to keep talking does more than a clever question.
- Decide what you want to be known for before you post anything. Louder is not the same as clearer.
- Treat a failed version as a draft. Something not working means the next version needs to be different, not that you should stop.
Lindsey Stephens is Founder and Editor of The Female Boss Collective (thefemalebosscollective.co.uk) and can be found on LinkedIn.
