Make Calm your new KPI // Host, Beyond Margins Podcast // I help business owners build calmer businesses with comfortable margins // Speaker, CFO + COO, Consultant

Susan Boles

Everyone tells creators the same thing when safety or privacy comes up: just go private. 

Lock your accounts, stop sharing so much... pull back. 

That advice makes sense if your job doesn't 𝘥𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘥 on being visible. But for creators? Your platform IS your business. Going private isn't a safety strategy - it's a career ender. 

And "stay public and hope for the best" isn't' a strategy either. 

But there's a third option. 

𝗨𝗻𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰: Visible where it matters, invisible where it counts. 

It means showing up fully in your public work while choosing exactly what stays private - and making sure it actually is. 

Your content? Discoverable. 
Your home address? Gone. 
Your platform? Growing.
Your family? Unfindable. 

You don't have to choose between your career and your safety. You just have to stop thinking in terms of public vs. private. 

Go Unpublic.

Stay safe when you show up online// Founder at Unpublic & Beyond Margins // I help creators stay safe when they show up online // Make Calm Your New KPI

If you're interested in the behind-the-scenes of building Unpublic... check out this series from Jay Acunzo. 

Or... if you're not interested in the BTS... just check it out to see how many weird faces I make 😆

I help experts become stronger speakers & storytellers. Trusted by authors, coaches, creators, and brands like Salesforce, Mailchimp, & Wistia. Believer in resonance over reach.

If you’re ready to experience greater momentum & clarity as a speaker, coach, or consultant, this behind-the-scenes series is for you.

This year, two clients have given me permission to publish details from my 1:1 advisory engagements publicly with you, so you can see what it takes to refine a mountain of expertise into 1 signature idea, powerful IP, and signature speeches and stories.

In this series, you’ll learn to diagnose why you might feel scattered in your messaging, why your ideas or posts aren’t creating passionate fans, and what it really takes to earn bigger and better stages, both literally and figuratively.

These individuals arrive with plenty of competence. The goal is to help them achieve greater resonance. Like you, they are genuine experts in their industries. Also like you, they’re realizing it’s possible to be deeply respected in your field but still feel replaceable or constantly stuck reacting and chasing. There’s a big difference between being great at Your Thing and being a trusted voice who shapes how people think about the very same topic. 

These clients are...

Kevin Leahy, founder of the podcast strategy and production firm Podcast Pointman. He’s a former producer for Guy Raz (the famous ex-NPR host who created the shows How I Built This and The Great Creators). Kevin previously helped Guy build his production company before he started Podcast Pointman, and today he has achieved real revenue and built a small team. 

Susan Boles, a former COO and CFO who then spent several years running her first business, a consulting and education firm called Beyond Margins, helping entrepreneurs run calm companies through their finance & ops systems. In 2026 however, she moved beyond Beyond Margins (heh…) to start a new business, Unpublic, offering services and education to help creators stay safe online as they get more visible.

I wrote a primer going into more detail about this behind-the-scenes journey. You can read it here, and if you sign up for my newsletter, you'll get 1 edition of this series per month: https://lnkd.in/eFCDk6Ec

Not every parasocial relationship stays parasocial.
 
Sometimes someone in your audience becomes a mutual. A collaborator. An actual friend.

The one-way relationship becomes two-way. You know them back.
 
That's the healthy offramp on the Parasocial Spectrum.
 
The problem is when someone keeps moving down the spectrum 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 that reciprocity. They're not looking for a relationship. They're looking for access.
 
And they don't need your permission to keep going.

For those of you who love "Calm is the New KPI"... you should consider working with Natalia (because she's the one who actually came up with it 😁)

Humanity-first marketer helping you sound like yourself, sell like hell, and harm less.

I'm looking for 4 founders who have a proven offering that is not selling as easily as it should.

By "proven" I mean two things:
1) You've managed to sell it before
2) It's gotten results

I can help you sell more of it by upgrading your messaging, aka the strategy that informs what you say, why they should buy, what makes your offering the obvious choice, the narratives that build trust...etc.

Because if you've tried selling with no messaging, you're doing random acts of marketing.

If you've tried selling with weak messaging, you've got an ignorable offering.

Gimme one week and I'll give you a messaging makeover that brings in more buyers.

This is best for:
coaches
consultants
service providers
creatives
digital product/program entrepreneurs

...who have at least 1K followers or, better yet, a few hundred good-fit subscribers. 


Full details: https://lnkd.in/gENgCvUS
Feel free to DM me with your questions.

I’ve always been drawn to portraiture and people’s faces. I am endlessly fascinated by the human body in all of its intricacy and grace.

Growing up, it was the portraits in art history books that I first fell in love with – people’s stories and lives looking out at me centuries later.

But those stories are also limited in their scope. While there are exceptions, for most of history, portraits were used to tell just a few kinds of stories.

Portraits are about legacy, but I want to stretch that definition beyond merely “status symbol”. I want your portrait to leave the legacy of your journey, to share the wholeness of your character.

I want to tell new kinds of stories. I want portraits to be inclusive, subversive and dare I say it – a little bit radical. I want to break portraits out of their tiny pigeonhole and invite the whole world in.

I want to honour the lives of those of us who have been historically left out, whether because of gender, race, social status or the thousand other ways people were excluded.

If you think “A portrait? Me? Really? But I’m not [fill in the blank]” but the idea intrigues you, then you’re exactly who I’m talking to.

We all deserve the dignity of having our story told. None of us is boring. We all contain a lifetime of depth in our faces.

I currently live in Ottawa, Canada with a small legion of benignly neglected houseplants. In my spare time, I can be found knitting with an absentminded disregard for patterns, walking the riverside or wandering thrift and antique stores. 

The Professional Bits:
I trained at Studio Escalier in France, spending over 2000 hours honing my craft under master artists. My art has been featured in American Art Collector and Fine Art Connoisseur, and awarded a Certificate of Honour at the Portrait Society of America’s International Portrait Competition. I have demonstrated 18th century portrait drawing techniques at the National Gallery of Canada on several occasions and ran a popular traditional painting & drawing school for 5 years. My work has been exhibited in Canada, the US and Ireland and I am currently working towards another solo exhibition.

Sarah Lacy

To celebrate International Women’s Day this weekend, I wanted to share some of the many fascinating, complex, intelligent, kind, fierce, generous, bold, brave women I’ve had the honour of painting or drawing. 

I do not take it lightly that I get to play a part in telling your story.

Sarah Marie Lacy, SCA

Award-winning international portrait painter. Creating thoughtful heirloom portraits for people who refuse to disappear. Tell your story.

What do paleontology, brain surgery, ballet and therapy all have in common? 

Weirdly enough, my art. 

This week I gave my first artist’s talk in years to a private group of artists here in Ottawa. 

Putting this presentation together was an unexpected rabbit hole. I went so deep into my archives that I had to find my old *burned CDs* to find old paintings of mine. (Yes, I still have a CD reader for this reason!!)

But what I loved seeing the most was how the things that fascinated me as a child and adolescent were still woven into my work now. 

According to my mother, my first real word was diplodocus but more than the actual dinosaurs, it was their bones that filled me with wonder. 

After cracking my head open and needing stitches at 6 years old, I decided I was going to be a doctor and maybe I was going to be a brain surgeon. 

(This is really starting to paint a picture of what kind of kid I was.)

I seriously studied classical ballet as a child, including auditioning for the National Ballet School. (But then when they asked me if I wanted to be a professional ballerina, I told them I was still seriously considering brain surgery as a career, which confused the hell out of them 😂)

And by the time I was in my early teens, I had become fascinated with what makes people tick - our emotions, our psyches, our experiences. I wondered about becoming a therapist. 

Life happened, as it does, and took me in a completely different direction (maybe I’ll share that story here one day), but all of these loves stayed with me. 

Bones and anatomy and how bodies work allow me to paint and draw with more accuracy and nuance. 

The grace and movement drilled into me as a young ballet dancer has become the foundation of every piece of art I make - the grace of the human body and the human spirit is at the heart of my work. 

And my desire to both deeply understand people but also to create a welcoming, empathetic space for you to see your own light clearly - well that’s at the core of my portraits. 

It's so beautifully full circle, even though the journey to get here was, ahem, *memorable*.

I’d love to hear how the things you loved as a child have made their way into your adult work or life. What’s come unexpectedly full circle for you? 

📷 That's baby 21 year old me at her first exhibition of figure paintings

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Hi! I’m Sarah, and I paint thoughtful portraits for thoughtful people. Enjoyed this? Click follow next to my name to add a little colour and contemplation to your LinkedIn feed.

There is nothing like an ID photo to deeply humble you.

I had to get passport photos taken this weekend. (Shout out to all of the other UK dual citizens suddenly scrambling to get their passports.)

The photographer asked me if I was “happy” with the photo he took. 

Let me tell you, “happy” is a strong word. 

Did I think it would meet the legal requirements?

Yes.

Did I mildly resemble a panicked beaver? 

Absolutely. 

No, I will not be sharing that image with you. I have my pride, albeit it’s pretty dented after seeing this thing. 

It’s photos like this that tend to make us think “Lord have mercy, is this what I look like to other people?”

Dear sweet friend, no, no you do not. 

This is where I give my annual reminder that cameras inherently introduce distortion. 

Humans are binocular (typically two eyeballs!), a camera is monocular. It literally sees the world differently. It produces something we often accept as reality, but it *is not reality*. I cannot emphasize that enough. 

If you thought your outfit was hella cute in the mirror and then you took a photo of yourself with your phone in the mirror and thought “Wait, what on earth??”, you have just experienced camera distortion. 

If you truly despise photos of yourself, this is actually where a portrait painting or drawing can be a life saver. You do not have to disappear from your family’s visual record of your lives.

Maybe the aesthetics of a camera aren’t your thing. 

Maybe where you shine is with paint or pencil or charcoal. Maybe your features don’t jam as well with a camera lens, but they’re just begging for juicy brushstrokes.

There are a million ways to shine. 

Don’t hide just because one lens doesn’t emphasize your best qualities. Put yourself in a room where you can be fully appreciated. 

And for the love of everything holy, don’t ever believe the lie of your passport photos. 

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Hi! I’m Sarah, and I paint thoughtful portraits for thoughtful people. Enjoyed this? Click follow next to my name to add a little colour and contemplation to your LinkedIn feed.

October 31, 2024: I removed the beautifully painted head on a 70% complete portrait. Yep. The whole damn thing. 

This week I’m sharing a portrait with my collector list (that I’m not allowed to share publicly yet) and I’ll be spilling all of the behind-the-scenes tea. 

It was the biggest, most complex portrait I’d ever done. 

I ran into a multitude of “unknown unknowns”. I figured them out. I learned once again that painting will always be here to remind me of what I don’t know.

(People wonder why I don’t have much of an ego about my skill set - painting people is not a practice that leaves much room for ego 😅)

I spent a WILD amount of time on this painting that I will *only* admit to my collector email list. (Yes, it was that much time.) 

It was the kind of project that would make lovers of efficiency and productivity pull their hair out and run screaming down the street. 

But when you choose art as a vocation, sometimes productivity and efficiency aren’t the gods you bow to. 

I had a vision and I stuck to it. I didn’t choose this career to only take on safe projects. This was a dream client and a dream project. (All bumps in the road were of my own making, the client themselves was a delight.)

And despite the ups and downs creating it, I am so happy with and proud of the finished piece. Creating it was a joy. 

I love a challenge: the process, the puzzle, pushing to the edge of my creative capacity.

And I can't wait to share that story with my “inner circle” of collectors and art lovers, because who doesn’t love a good “omg everything went wrong but it still worked out!” story?

Your turn: tell me about the dream projects that taught you more lessons than you wanted to learn but that you're ultimately so damn proud of because you Did The Thing 💃 

Teaser pic of the only part of the painting I feel safe sharing ;) 

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Hi! I’m Sarah, and I paint thoughtful portraits for thoughtful people. Enjoyed this? Click follow next to my name to add a little colour and contemplation to your LinkedIn feed.

Everything you think about what I do as a portrait painter is probably wrong. 

I’m not an unforgiving camera, here to record every tiny wrinkle with the same focus that I record the twinkle in your eye. 

I’m also not a mirror, reflecting you back in reverse, with our own critical eye filtering for flaws first. 

I am an entirely different creature. 

I am here to show you how the world actually sees you. A portrait painting is you through the eyes of a *human*, not an object. 

Every portrait I make is created with a deep love and reverence. 

While on the surface it seems like I’m only drawing eyes, nose, mouth, what I’m actually doing is drawing your character. 

How do your eyes smile? How does the corner of your mouth move right before you share something you’re passionate about? How does that dimple sparkle back at us? How does your soul speak to us through your whole face? 

That’s how other people see you, how they experience you. A portrait is a way to see ourselves the way our loved ones, our communities, see us.

And that’s the best kind of mirror to look into. 

Curious about portraits? Slide into my DMs and ask away. 

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Hi! I’m Sarah, and I paint thoughtful portraits for thoughtful people. Enjoyed this? Click follow next to my name to add a little colour and contemplation to your LinkedIn feed.

Three years ago, I radically changed my signature style on my paintings to honour my own lineage. 

(Apologies to any future art historians who may care about my work.) 

Growing up, I’d admired the dramatic flourishes I’d see on paintings in museums and tried to emulate that.

When I was 16, I started taking private art lessons with a Parisian artist who had trained at the Ecole de Beaux Arts.

One of the first things she insisted I figure out was how I was going to sign my paintings. 

(In hindsight, this does not feel as important as she made it sound. And her rigid decree that my style of drawing meant I would only be good at watercolour painting and was forbidden from learning oil painting is a story for another day. Clearly, I have since rebelled.)

So I spent a whole Saturday afternoon figuring out how I wanted to sign my work. 

I hated the way “Sarah Lacy” looked as a painted signature. 

“Sarah Marie Lacy”, while I think my parents nailed it in terms of awesome names, just took up too much space. 

I already knew I didn’t want my signature to detract from the painting itself, and a 3 name signature is BIG. It felt distracting. 

And so, “S. M. Lacy” was born and it’s how I’ve been signing my work since 2004. My website, my Twitter handle, my IG name - all S. M. Lacy. 

For a long time, I leaned into the flourish potential in “Lacy” but I was never quite satisfied with how it looked in oil paint. More often than not, it ended up…blobby. 

Now, my father is a trained ships draftsman and I grew up around the classic block letters that all draftsmen, architects and engineers are familiar with. 

My father would sign his hand drafted drawings with those clear block letters. 

And it hit me 3 years ago that instead of fighting with the paint and my name and my desire to have my signature be legible yet subtle, I could just lean into the lineage and legacy I already have. 

I could start signing my paintings like my father signed his drawings. 

And so a new signature style was born and it feels so right.

(Small paintings, like the one below, are signed SML.)

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Hi! I’m Sarah, and I paint thoughtful portraits for thoughtful people. Enjoyed this? Click follow next to my name to add a little colour and contemplation to your LinkedIn feed.

Often when we talk about accomplishment and achievements, we talk about the external stuff - the promotions, the awards, the financial milestones, the big contracts. 

And don’t get me wrong - that stuff is important. 

But a successful life is a journey, one with a lot of ups and downs. 

The highlight moments are great, but only flashes in the timeline of our lives. 

I’m more interested in the quiet pride and satisfaction we have in the every day wins. 

The way we showed up even when it was hard.

The way we overcame that private, personal fear and did something we were terrified of but had never told anyone just how much it bloody scared us.

The way we quietly impacted other people’s lives, not with grand gestures, but with the daily work we do and do damned well. 

The satisfaction and pride we feel in doing our best work in the world. 

The way we love, the way we give, the way we support. 

These are the moments that make up our lives, that make up our characters. 

They are the moments that make our faces what they are. 

*This* is the story I tell in paint.

I love your highlights reel, but I love the way you show up and build your life every day even more. 

That’s the story that deserves to be told. Because it’s the one that matters most. 

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Hi! I’m Sarah, and I paint thoughtful portraits for thoughtful people. Enjoyed this? Click follow next to my name to add a little colour and contemplation to your LinkedIn feed.

Look, the world is a *lot* right now. Things feel heavy. Most of us are feeling the economic pinch. 

And often in these moments, the arts becomes the thing we drop, the thing that feels less necessary, less essential. It's a "nice to have", not a "need to have". 

Even I, a literal full-time professional artist, can fall victim to this. I get stressed and I go into full blown biz dev mode and think "Oh I'll make art later when things feel safe and better."

Except I'm going to problem solve better if I'm also still in my creative practice. Making art makes me better. Being surrounded by art makes me more emotionally resilient. 

But of course, I am obviously extremely biased about this stuff, and I have a pretty big horse in this race. 

So it's always nice when someone else says these things too.

CEO by day, corporate rebel always 💥 | Trained 70k+ in global orgs on impact, communication & influence | Built the world’s biggest confidence conference | Award-winning speaker, author & proud multi-hyphenate

One of my favourite FACTS is that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are 22 TIMES more likely than their peers to be poets, playwrights, novelists, magicians, dancers, GLASS BLOWERS etc.

I love it as a reminder that HOBBIES are important. 
ART is important. 
CREATIVE EXPRESSION is important. 
MENTAL AGILITY is important. 
BEAUTIFUL SHIT is important.
MAKING STUFF is important.
PLAYING is important.

It fuels us, it fuels our ideas, it fuels our problem solving. It's an absolutely essential component of being the top of your game.

Just a reminder before your weekend friends. ❤️🎨

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The Battle

Susan Boles

Sarah Lacy

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Posts

Engagements

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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);}Susan Boles's LinkedIn Performance

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