(Live) A conversation with Lucy Werner on identity, relocation and learning to stop hiding in your work

Thank you to Lucy Werner for joining me in this (Un)learning conversation. We talk about the identity she built in PR, what happened when she moved to France and stripped the scaffolding away, and the slow work of letting two very different versions of yourself merge into one. Lucy is a brilliant advocate for small business visibility and self-promotion - do give her a follow.

I hope you enjoy this chat, do let me know in the comments what stood out for you.

Summary provided by Claude AI 🙂

In this conversation, Lee Griffith speaks with Lucy Werner - PR expert, author, newsletter founder and relocator - about the unlearning that happens when you take the identity you’ve built and move it somewhere else.

The drag alter ego. Lucy described her PR identity - loud, bold, alpha, built for London - as a kind of drag persona. It worked brilliantly, and it carried her through difficult times. But when she moved to rural France at 39, there was nowhere for it to go. No network, no events, no being seen in the right places with the right people. Just countryside, three kids and the slow realisation that she’d been hiding in work for years without knowing it.

The gap she expected vs the one she found. Lucy thought the move would be an Eat Pray Love moment - processing a difficult year, looking at the lake, crying about things that had happened. What surfaced instead was the split between Lucy Werner PR on a pedestal and the person underneath. She’d been aware of it since she was thirty. She was thirty-nine before she had nowhere left to hide.

MVP-ing a life. The decision to move wasn’t heavily planned. She sublet the house, finished with clients, treated it like a product test. Things lined up - a brand partnership, an Adobe ambassadorship, a business coach who pointed out she was sitting near Nice, Monaco, and the Cannes Lions and had been for four years. She’d been too busy trying to be French enough to notice the opportunity.

The story she’d been hiding. For two years, Lucy concealed the move from clients, worried it would make her seem less viable as a UK supplier. When she finally started properly talking about it - the relocation, the pivot, the third baby at forty, the business she was building in a language she was still learning - people were more interested than she thought. She ended up in the Times, the i, and the Telegraph. The thing she thought would count against her turned out to be a real connection point.

Selling what you don’t think anyone will buy. Between Christmas and New Year, with two afternoons a week to work, Lucy put five day-retreat spots on Instagram stories. She was certain no one would come because she didn’t know anyone. They sold immediately. It was, she said, the easiest thing she’d ever sold - and a real shock to her own beliefs about what she could offer.

The rule she’s still bumping against. With three jobs running simultaneously - mother, French learner, business owner - Lucy doesn’t have the balance right and knows it. Four free hours on a Sunday recently and she filled them without thinking: dishwasher, workout, dog walk, one episode of RuPaul. What she’d actually wanted was to lie on the floor and do nothing. The rule still running underneath: rest needs to justify itself somehow. Both of us recognised that one immediately.

Where she’s landed. The two Lucys - the PR expert and the person underneath - have merged. She likes herself more now. She’s still discovering things. She’s still muddling through. And she’s decided, quite quietly, that that’s probably the honest version of this for all of us.

Lucy works with small business owners who are brilliant at what they do but rubbish at talking about it. Weekly guidance on getting seen, getting known, and getting paid - from someone who’s been doing it for herself and others for over a decade. You can find her work and sign up for her newsletter over on Hype Yourself. And she’s on Instagram and LinkedIn. I’ve been part of her community ever since I started my own business and highly recommend connecting with her.