Winning Silver at the Best Business Women Awards 2024
18 October 2024 - LONDON
I want to tell you something honest about the night I won Silver at the Best Business Women Awards for Marketing and PR.
It was a complicated week. The kind of week where life piles things up in ways you cannot plan for or explain to a room full of strangers. I travelled to London alone. I was nervous in a way I had not expected, the quiet kind of nervous that sits in your chest and does not shift.
And then my name appeared on a big screen. Silver. Best Marketing and PR.
I have thought about that moment a lot since. Not because it felt the way I imagined it would. It did not. But because it taught me something I did not expect about recognition and what it actually means.
Recognition rarely arrives at convenient times
This is something nobody tells you when they talk about awards and visibility and professional milestones. The moment of recognition does not pause everything else. Life continues around it in all its complexity. You show up carrying whatever that week has handed you, and you receive the acknowledgment anyway, imperfectly, humanly, in the middle of everything.
I think that is actually more true to the experience of senior women than the version we usually share publicly. The polished highlight reel. The perfectly lit photograph. The caption about being humbled and grateful. Those things are real too. But so is the complicated week, the table that does not quite work, the moment of seeing your name on a screen and feeling something more layered than pure joy.
What the award actually meant
Winning Silver at the Best Business Women Awards is not something I take lightly. Debbie Gilbert has spent a decade building a platform that genuinely champions women-led businesses and to be recognised within it, in the category of Marketing and PR, for work that is built entirely around helping women own their professional reputation, means something real to me.
It is validation that the work is landing. That the mission matters. That helping senior women close the gap between who they are and how they are seen is not just meaningful work, it is recognised work.
Showing up is the whole thing
I nearly did not go. There were very good reasons to stay home that week. And I went anyway, alone, into a room full of strangers, carrying a week I would rather have set down at the door.
I am glad I did. Not because the evening was everything I hoped it would be. But because my name was on that screen. Because I had entered, prepared, shown up. Because the work spoke for itself even when I was not in the mood to speak for it.
That is the thing I want to say to every woman who is considering entering an award, applying for a board role, putting herself forward for something that feels too big or too exposed or badly timed. The timing will rarely be perfect. The conditions will rarely be ideal. Show up anyway. Let the work speak. Your name on that screen will mean something, even if the evening around it is more complicated than you planned.
A final thought
To every woman who hesitates before sharing her wins, who wonders whether she is allowed to take up that space, who has ever talked herself out of entering because someone else probably deserves it more. This award is for you as much as it is for me. Because the world does not need you to wait for a perfect moment. It needs you to show up for the imperfect ones.
Laura Taylor is an executive LinkedIn strategist and ghostwriter working with senior women and C-suite leaders on visibility, reputation and authority. Based in Liverpool, working globally. ©️
