We do...
🤖Build bespoke Ai engines for Hyper growth.
* Or * 
🔭Investor and CTO (Chief Technology Officer) for Equity 
    📦Turn your business into a tech product
    ⚙️Automate your current business processes
    🔌Making software talk to eachother (API's)

I am...
🧭CEO - HARE.digital
🧑‍💻10+ yr Developer of complex Web and Mobile applications. 
🎓BSc, MSc Computer Science with Business - Univeristy. of Sussex. Highest Grades & Graduate of the Year
🏆Multiple Award Winner including Sussex Business Awards

--- More Info below ---

Quick Win CEO Podcast

YouTube: https://www.YouTube.com/haredigital
Website: https://www.hare.digital
🎙 --- Podcasts --- 
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/quick-win-ceo/id1545855230
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3OY1Jgo3cZl9giE2muwfac?si=eDh6jouFSzmoWZozdk5UEA

Christopher O'Hare

Money does not just shape balance sheets. It shapes behaviour. It shapes judgement. It shapes what leaders say, avoid, delay and carry quietly when the stakes are high.

Many performance, culture and communication issues inside organisations are not capability gaps.
They are money driven behaviour problems showing up under pressure.

I am Lesley Thomas, founder of The Money Confidence Academy and creator of the Financial Self Trust Framework.

My work focuses on how money pressure, identity and emotional patterns influence how leaders and teams think, decide and communicate when responsibility increases and risk feels real.

Through the Financial Self Trust Framework and the Emotional Balance Sheet™, I work with organisations to address the unseen forces behind:

• hesitation in decision making
• inconsistent leadership judgement
• breakdowns in communication
• risk avoidance and over caution
• loss of confidence under financial pressure

This work is not about teaching people how to manage money. It is about changing how financial judgement is held at the point decisions are made.

I support organisations where financial decisions carry operational, reputational and human risk and where leadership performance depends on clarity, confidence and accountability under pressure.

My work strengthens decision making, culture and communication by addressing money driven behaviour where it actually operates, inside judgement, not spreadsheets.

If your organisation is experiencing slowed decisions, growing risk aversion or leaders second guessing themselves around money, I would welcome a conversation.

Lesley Thomas

What a week ! 

Three events. Three rooms full of extraordinary women. Three very different conversations. All connected by the same thing....women showing up for each other.

It started on Sunday at the launch of Women in Wealth, a gorgeous lunchtime gathering organised by Pamela Wynn to celebrate both International Women’s Day and her new community, Women in Wealth.  A room full of energy and ambition. Exactly what a new community should feel like from day one.

Wednesday took me to Rathbones, invited by EKATERINA DOUBININA for another IWD celebration. This one came with a powerful reminder. The facts around women and equality around the world were stark and necessary. Celebration matters. But so does honesty about how far there still is to go.

Then yesterday I was at IOD Kent’s IWD event, invited by Sweena K Badhan to speak. A powerful reminder from Katie Keith about the importance of checking our value at the door. And this was the event that shifted something for me. I’ll be honest, I had struggled with this year’s IWD theme. It hadn’t sat well with me at all. But Dr Blessing Enakimio shared her Roots and Fruit reframe and suddenly it made complete sense. That’s what great speakers do. They take something you’ve been circling around and give you the language to land it.

Three rooms. Three conversations. One consistent thread: when women come together with purpose, the quality of the conversation changes.

A real pleasure to spend time with Katie, Orla Bance and Amanda FitzGerald PR and to share the stage with Debbie Waite, Lydia McKeown BSc MCIM Chartered Marketer, Kat Lees and Nicola C. Wise and to meet so many other great people including Fiona Murchie and Marie Proctor. Grateful for every one of those conversations.

When Financial Pressure Distorts Leadership Judgement, Organisations Pay a Cost Most Never Measure | Keynote Speaker | Bestselling Author | Let’s Talk Money and More Podcast

Happy International Women’s Day. 

Twenty years of building something from nothing teaches you a lot.

But the lessons that have stayed closest to my heart haven’t come from books, frameworks, or boardrooms.

They’ve come from women.

The ones who believed in me before I fully believed in myself. Who shared their own stories openly, the messy parts included, so I didn’t have to figure everything out alone. 

Who celebrated my wins as if they were their own.

On International Women’s Day, I find myself pausing simply to feel grateful.

Grateful for the founders, the mentors, the friends, the quiet champions. The women who show up with warmth, wisdom and a generosity of spirit that I hope I reflect back in some small way.

I am so glad you are in my world.

You know who you are. 🤍

Happy International Women’s Day.

No alternative text description for this image

I am really pleased to have been invited by Sweena K Badhan to join this IoD panel next week to celebrate IWD 2026. alongside some brilliant women, Debbie Waite, Lydia McKeown BSc MCIM Chartered Marketer, Kat Lees, Nicola C. Wise, Louise Brown We will be having a a conversation about leadership, influence and contribution. 

The panel is called “The Give-First Leader: Influence Through Contribution.” And I want to be honest. I understand why this year’s IWD theme has frustrated a lot of women. It did me.  The idea of “give first” can feel like yet another ask of women who are already giving more than is visible, more than is recognised and more than is reciprocated. That frustration is valid.

But I have chosen to reframe it. Because I think the conversation worth having is not whether women should give more. It is about the place from which we give. There is a difference between giving from obligation and giving from authority. 

Between giving to prove your value and giving because you have already decided your value is not in question. Between giving that depletes and giving that compounds.

In my work with leaders under financial pressure, I see this pattern constantly. 

When people feel they need to prove themselves, they over-give, over-deliver and over-accommodate. Not because they are generous. Because they are uncertain. 

And that kind of giving does not build influence. It builds invisible labour.

The most powerful give-first leaders I have met are not the ones who do the most. They are the ones who have stopped performing generosity and started choosing it. From a grounded place. With clear boundaries. On their own terms.

That is the conversation I want to bring to this panel. Give-first leadership works. But only when you trust yourself enough to set the terms of what you give, to whom and at what cost.
 
So IWD Day celebrations continue, 12th March, Ashford International Hotel, Kent. I am looking forward to it.

Link to get your tickets, in the comments below.

#InternationalWomensDay #Leadership #IoD #WomenInLeadership #FinancialSelfTrust

Every quarter, the balance sheet gets scrutinised. Revenue. Margins. Cash flow. Risk exposure.

But there is a risk on every balance sheet that never gets audited.

It is the emotional state of the people making the financial decisions.

This week's newsletter is about why that risk costs more than most organisations will ever measure and what to do about it.

If you lead a finance function, this one is for you.

Every quarter, sometimes more, the balance sheet gets scrutinised. Revenue. Margins. Cash flow. Debt. Forecasts. Risk exposure. All of it reviewed, ch

Open article: The Biggest Risk on Your Balance Sheet Isn't Financial by Lesley Thomas • 4 min read

The Biggest Risk on Your Balance Sheet Isn't Financial

I have spent the last four editions of my Linkedin newsletter, naming something most organisations never talk about. How financial pressure quietly reshapes leadership behaviour, communication and decision quality.

This week's edition goes further.

Financial Self Trust is the variable that sits between capability and performance. It determines whether what a leader knows translates clearly into what a leader does when financial consequence increases.

This is what it actually looks like in practice. When it is maintained. When it reduces. And why the difference is a commercial issue, not a development one.

If the previous editions felt familiar, this one will tell you why.

Over the past four editions of this newsletter I have been naming something that rarely gets discussed inside organisations. The way financial pressur

Open article: What Financial Self Trust Looks Like Under Pressure by Lesley Thomas • 7 min read

What Financial Self Trust Looks Like Under Pressure

The most important thing a leader can do under pressure isn’t make the right call.

It’s make it safe for someone else to say “I don’t think that’s the right call.”

Because in many leadership teams I’ve worked with, the problem isn’t that people don’t see what’s going wrong. They see it clearly. They just don’t feel safe enough to say it out loud.

And I get it. When the pressure is on, nobody wants to be the one who slows things down. Nobody wants to be seen as difficult or negative or not a team player. So they stay quiet. They nod. They go along with it.

The decision gets made. But it’s not a real decision. It’s a performance of one.
And the cost of that? It’s enormous. But it never shows up on a spreadsheet.

If your team can only agree with you, you don’t have a team. You have an audience.

The leaders who get this right aren’t the loudest or the most decisive. They’re the ones who’ve built an environment where honesty isn’t career-threatening.

That’s harder than any financial decision you’ll ever make. And worth far more.

Something I notice, again and again, with senior leaders under financial pressure.
They can read a balance sheet in minutes. Spot the risk. Name the number. Know exactly what it means.

But ask them what happens inside the room when those numbers are not good ? That’s where it gets interesting.

The message that gets watered down before it reaches the board. The decision that gets delayed longer than it should. The question nobody asks out loud because the pressure in the room is already too high.

That’s not a technical problem. That’s not even a leadership skills problem. That’s the Emotional Balance Sheet at work.

Every leader has one. Emotional assets that sharpen judgment when the stakes are high. Emotional liabilities that quietly distort it. And almost nobody in the organisation knows it’s there, let alone knows how to read it.

The financial balance sheet tells you where the business stands. The Emotional Balance Sheet tells you what’s actually driving the decisions that got it there.

That’s the conversation I think more leadership teams need to be having.

Is it one you’re having in yours?

The meeting went well. The analysis was spot on. Everyone agreed on the actions. Nothing changed.

This is the pattern I keep seeing in organisations who are under financial pressure. Capable people. Clear data. Good process. And decisions that somehow still get unmade between the room and the reality.

It is not about the strategy. It is not about execution. It is about what financial pressure does to the people making the decisions before they make them. Their confidence. Their identity. Their willingness to say the thing nobody in that room is saying.

That invisible cost is what I call the Hidden Tax. It does not appear on any balance sheet but it compounds every single quarter. And most organisations do not know they are paying it because nobody has ever asked the right question.

This week in Financial Judgement I am asking it. Read the newsletter to find out more.

I have sat in a lot of post-mortems. Leadership teams reviewing decisions that cost the business significantly. A deal that went wrong. A forecast tha

Open article: The First Question Nobody Asks by Lesley Thomas • 5 min read

taplio

The Battle

Christopher O'Hare

Lesley Thomas

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreLesley Thomas's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Christopher O'Hare

Lesley Thomas

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Lesley Thomas's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreLesley Thomas's LinkedIn Performance