It’s one of those pieces where I know what I want to say but every time I sit down it turns into a highlight reel, like I’m trying to convince you of something instead of just telling you what happened.

Almost like a keynote speech version of my life.

“When I was twenty one, my brother became very sick and no one in my family could cope with it except for me. Then my parents divorced and my dad moved away. Oh, and amidst all this, I learned exactly what people wanted to hear from me to be accepted in the world. So when that came to a tipping point, I rebuilt myself. Now I host connection dinner events for women!”

Which sure, is all true. I even let out a chuckle writing that. But it’s not the thing I actually want to say.

The thing I actually want to say is harder to structure because I only just started understanding it myself.

Here’s what I used to believe about my twenties.

I believed I survived them through sheer force of will.

That when everything fell apart, I got through it because I was strong, resilient, capable of taking radical responsibility for my own life. When I hit rock bottom in an AirBnB in Byron Bay and decided to start over instead of give up, that was me.

My grit.

My determination.

My refusal to let my circumstances win.

I was proud of that story and I told it a lot. At events. In Instagram captions and email newsletters. Eventually I shared snippets of it at dinner tables where I’d started hosting events, helping other women discover what they bring to the table, because I’d finally figured out what I brought to mine.

And the story was true. I’m not saying it wasn’t.

But it was incomplete.

Now, I didn’t grow up with God.

I grew up around the concept of him - my dad’s relationship with his higher power, people who went to church, weddings and funerals, the occasional Easter service when someone’s family insisted. But faith wasn’t something I inherited, it wasn’t a foundation I could stand on. It was more like a room in someone else’s house I’d walked past a few times but never been invited into.

Then when everything started to crack and fall apart, I didn’t have anywhere to put the feelings.

My brother was eighteen when he went into a psychosis so severe doctors thought it was schizophrenia. He lived away from us in hospitals for months at a time, and my parents, understandably, struggled to keep it together at home.

He was my younger brother.

He was supposed to be fine.

He was talented and intelligent, always the “star” of the family. You’re not prepared for that at twenty one, the screaming, the crying, watching someone you love disappear into their own mind, losing themselves in addiction and psychosis, not knowing if they’ll find their way back.

Earlier that same year, my parents sat us down and told us they were getting divorced.

I remember hearing all of this and not knowing what to do with it. Not having an emotional container big enough to hold something this terrifying.

So I built one out of the only material I had available: myself.

I didn’t turn to prayer or scream for help or share it with anyone.

I didn’t know how. I just started running.

At the time, I was young and dating someone kind, someone who probably would have stayed if I’d let them. But I didn’t know how to be seen in the middle of all that falling apart. I didn’t know how to let someone witness me when I couldn’t even look at myself. So I pushed them away and told myself it was the right thing to do.

It was like every anchor point I had was pulled up from the ground at the same time and I was just standing there in open water, trying to figure out how to float.

So I did just that.

From the outside, it didn’t look like drowning. It looked like ambition, or strategy. Being the kind of person who could read a room and adapt. Someone who always knew the right thing to say, who collected accomplishments, credentials, and interesting experiences like they were life rafts.

And maybe they did mean something, but mostly they were armour. Things I could list out loud when someone asked who I was, because I didn’t have a better answer.

I could walk into any room and figure out what it wanted from me within minutes. I’d shapeshift, perform, lead with whatever version of myself felt most likely to be accepted - the intelligent one, the charming one, the one with the impressive internship or the interesting opinion.

In fact, I got so good at it I didn’t even notice I was doing it anymore. It just became how I moved through the world.

Five years of building a self out of external validation, because when you don’t have a foundation, you build with whatever’s available.

Somewhere toward the end of all that, I ended up in Byron Bay of all places (and not for a healing retreat)

I want to be careful here because I’m not trying to write a redemption arc.

A friend was doing work experience up there and I went along because I didn’t have anywhere else to be. Barista shifts were slow at home, studies were on my laptop, and life felt like I was just filling in time until something real began.

I remember sitting on the bed in our AirBnB and just stopping. For the first time in years, I didn’t get up and do something to outrun what I was feeling.

I just let it be there.

When you finally stop running, everything catches up. Everything I hadn’t let myself feel for five years, rising around me all at once.

“This is it” was a thought that wouldn’t shake from my mind. I either keep performing and building a life that looks fine from the outside or I start over.

So I started over.

That’s where the business came from. Cue a DIY Canva logo and two friends-turned-clients who needed help with admin. Most days I was making it up as I went.

Some days it felt like building something real and other days, it felt like just another way to keep busy, another thing to hide behind.

But over time, something changed and I started to feel like maybe I wasn’t broken.

Maybe I was allowed to build something new without having to earn it first.

That felt like freedom.

I’d stopped running. I’d built something with my own hands and I thought I’d finally found solid ground.

For a long time, I believed that was the whole story.

I met God last year.

Or maybe I finally recognised him, I’m still working that part out.

What I can tell you is that it wasn’t sudden. It was years in the making, and honestly, I fought it the whole way.

There was an old devotional sitting on my bookshelf, something my godparents gave me when I was twenty or so. Every now and then over the past couple of years, I’d pull it down, start reading and find myself crying.

It wasn’t sad crying, it was something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. So I’d close it, put it back on the shelf, thinking “that was strange…” and go on with my life.

I didn’t want to be someone who identified with religion.

In fact, I’d spent years in the self development world by then and I told myself that was enough.

That I could figure this out on my own.

But all that self development was still me trying to be my own foundation. I’d swapped all my shitty concepts of self for never-ending improvement, but I was still standing on myself and still building with the same material.

Around that time, something shifted in the way my dad talked about his faith.

He’d been in recovery for forty five years, so I’d grown up hearing him talk about his higher power. Then somewhere along the way, his language changed and he wasn’t talking about a higher power anymore, he was talking about someone specifically and personally.

That person was Jesus.

A few weeks after I first went to church, my dad’s partner Jackie died after a ten month battle with Motor Neurone Disease.

Grief has a funny way of pulling old stories back to the surface.

I remember sitting in a service not long after, and there it was again - that familiar belief I thought I’d moved past. That everything I’d survived, I had survived alone. My strength, my will and my refusal to fall back into who I used to be. Even sitting in a church, I was still convinced I’d been the one holding myself up this whole time.

That maybe God had forgotten about me.

Around that time, I read a story about a man named Nathaniel that felt like it was written for me. The story goes that Nathaniel’s friend drags him to meet Jesus, and he’s skeptical because he’s heard it all before and isn’t expecting much. He’d been spending his time beneath a fig tree, feeling bitter and forgotten by God, convinced God had turned his face from him.

But when Jesus sees him, he says, “Before Philip called you here, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.”

I must have read that line ten times that day.

All those years - the devotional I kept pulling off the shelf and putting back, the self development I thought was saving me, the endless searching to figure out who I was and what I was worth - that was my fig tree.

I was seeking the whole time, but I just didn’t have a name for what I was looking for.

And he saw me there, before I knew I was being looked for or I had anything to show for myself.

All that time I thought I was holding myself up.

Turns out, I was being held.

I always think about Michelangelo’s painting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the one where God’s finger reaches toward Adam.

There’s a gap between them as God extends fully, but Adam’s finger is bent and almost passive. He has to reach back.

That’s what all those years were, I think. God extending, and me not yet reaching back.

And now I find him in places I wasn't expecting. In my brother's healing. In my dad's stories. In my mum's drop in visits. In the way someone's face softens when they finally find connection with others, which, if I'm honest, is probably why I began hosting my dinner events.

I want to leave you with a wonderful video I recently watched of Derek Prince talking about what opens in us when we suffer. He said that after his wife died, a kind of compassion became available that he didn’t have access to before. That some depth only comes through pain, because it prepares the heart to actually love rather than just talk about it.

Maybe that’s what the pain was for. It wasn’t punishment, but preparation.

If you've ever sat at a table convinced you had to earn your place there, I get it. I was her for a long time.

And if no one’s told you lately: you were seen before you earned it too.

Love, Emma x

I mean, that’s the deal modern life makes with us, right? The moment something happens, you’re expected to already know what you think.

Let’s use this reality to play a little game.

What comes to mind when I ask you the following questions:

What do you know about Palestine?

What do you know about the United States?

What do you know about Ukraine?

Take a moment to really think about it.

What facts can you recite? Perhaps you know population figures, historical timelines, economic systems, cultural contributions, what daily life actually looks like for ordinary people living in these places right now.

Now ask yourself a different question entirely:

What do you feel about Palestine?

What do you feel about the United States?

What do you feel about Ukraine?

Do you notice something?

The second set of questions probably prompted a more immediate, perhaps even visceral, response in your body.

You might've tensed your jaw, bit your lip or looked into the screen with dilated pupils and a rising heart rate.

More likely, however, is that you were flooded with a montage of images—things you've willingly or unwillingly consumed—that blend together to paint a visual story. I know that for me, flashes of conflict, politics, crisis and agony shift in and out, mixed with a churning blend of anger, sympathy, fear, hope and dispair.

For so many of us (if we're truly honest with ourselves), recounting facts about these places is a more difficult task than you might think.

But we can feel intensely about them within a matter of seconds.

That gap between what we know and what we feel reveals something deeply unsettling about how our minds are being shaped, often without our conscious participation.

To put it bluntly for you: while you thought you were forming educated opinions, someone (or something else) has been carefully influencing your emotional responses.

And they're using many of the same psychological techniques that we learn as copywriters in the world of marketing and buyer psychology.

How I learned to see the programming

Because I spent years learning exactly how to do what's being done on a mass scale across newspapers, outlets, television stations, social media and even inside the entertainment industry.

When I studied Media Practice at the University of Sydney in 2021, we were taught the process of how ideas are planted into someone's head to get them to change their minds—and eventually—to take action, whether subscribing, attending, liking, believing or buying.

But to do this effectively, it wasn't enough to understand how we thought decisions got made, we needed to unravel the reality of human cognition and understanding.

That's why becoming a copywriter was such a natural progression after my studies, as I saw the role of copywriting and storytelling as writing with a job to do.

Every piece, word and tiny little grammatical speck has a specific outcome designed to be achieved, and despite how you may interpret what I'm saying (with unfiltered transparency here) these techniques aren't evil or "bad".

They're incredibly powerful tools that are, more often than not, used for tremendous good. Let me illustrate my point:

• Nonprofits use them to communicate their missions effectively, to help people understand complex social issues, to mobilise support for causes that genuinely help communities.

• Health organisations use them to encourage behaviours that save lives.

• Educators use them to make learning more engaging and memorable.

The problem isn't the techniques themselves. I believe the true issue is transparency about intent and awareness on the receiving end.

Marketing is fine when it's clearly marketing.

You know a car commercial is trying to sell you something. The transaction is transparent, the intent is obvious, and you can engage with it consciously.

But the same psychological frameworks are being deployed across movies, TV shows, news coverage, even educational content without that transparency.

Entertainment is supposed to entertain us.

News is supposed to inform us.

Education is supposed to teach us.

None of these are supposed to be systematically programming our emotional responses using advanced persuasion techniques and certainly not without us realising it's happening.

This is why understanding these techniques is so crucial. Communications is imperative in every industry, in every aspect of how we share and receive information.

If you work anywhere, if you consume any media, if you participate in democracy or make decisions based on information you receive, you need to understand how influence actually works.

Because if you aren't aware of these techniques as a whole, you risk exactly what that gap between knowing and feeling reveals: having your emotional responses programmed by others while believing you're forming your own educated opinions.

The third step most people never consider

If I can impart you with anything in reading this whoooollleee story amidst your busy day, please let it be this: information plus emotion is always designed to lead you somewhere.

ALWAYS.

Every piece of content that uses these techniques has an endpoint in mind—a specific action they want you to take or, crucially, an action they want you to avoid taking.

Subscribe. Buy. Vote. Believe. Share. Ignore. Accept. Dismiss.

Sometimes the goal is obvious: donate to this cause, support this policy, fear this group, and—say it with me now—this is not inherently positive or negative, it is simply part of communication we use as humans.

But sometimes the most powerful outcome they want from you is no action at all.

I was watching The Terminal List on Amazon Prime recently, and this stood out to me (partly because I can’t turn my copywriting brain off and partly because my passion for political-science will die hard)

The show was not just an military based, action-filled story, it was systematically conditioning emotional responses about real-world countries.

Israeli Mossad agents appeared as sophisticated allies, morally complex but ultimately trustworthy, whereas Iranian operatives emerged from shadows with ominous music in a nearly laughable way, with their motivations painted as purely destructive.

All the while, American intelligence sat somewhere in between, uniquely (almost innocently) flawed but worth fighting for from within.

The same production team had completely different emotional treatments for different nations' intelligence operations.

And that is not a coincidence, nor is it just innocent storytelling.

Whether it feels comfortable to see or not, this is programming about who deserves your trust and who deserves your suspicion.

So when we relate it back to my main point above, we are led to ask: what action is this programming designed to produce?

Consider how language gets weaponised to redirect your emotional response and your willingness to act.

When a genocide gets relabelled as a "conflict" or a “war”, or when an invasion becomes a "special military operation," refugees become "economic migrants" these aren't just semantic choices.

They are also not preferences.

In the world of storytelling, these are words *very* intentionally recalibrated to emotionally change your comfort zone towards something as small as somebody’s outfit to something as large as the cost of human life.

• "It's complicated" becomes a phrase that shuts down moral clarity.

• "Both sides have valid points" creates false equivalencies that make decisive action feel inappropriate.

• "We need to understand the full context" can easily be a code for "don't act on what you're seeing with your own eyes."

The ol’ analysis paralysis chestnut isn't always accidental and would you believe me if I told you that sometimes, confusion is the product being sold.

Confusion IS the action that we discussed earlier.

Next time you feel overwhelmed by contradictory information, every source seems unreliable, or the situation feels too complex to understand, remember that exhaustion you feel is often the intended outcome.

“But why Emma!?”

Because tired citizens who justifiably retreat towards the feel-good corners of the internet are much easier to manage than engaged citizens asking difficult questions.

Where to from here, you ask?

I'm not going to give you some panic inducing, five step framework because that's not how this works and unfortunately, that has long been the desired as the "quick fix".

And I used to wish I could give it to you, too.

So in light of that bittersweet pill, what I will tell you is this: once you start seeing these patterns, you can't unsee them.

Here is what you can do with that fact:

• Notice when something wants you to feel without giving you something concrete to think about.

• Ask who benefits when you're angry, afraid, or overwhelmed.

• Question why certain stories get amplified while others disappear.

• Your emotional responses are valuable, your attention is currency and what you do with both matters.

The people who understand this are already using that knowledge, now the question is whether you're going to catch up.

For everyone building something—whether it's a business, a movement, or just chipping away at living their own lives—understanding how influence works is unfortunately no longer an opt in.

It can be the difference between being someone who can shape a conversation, and someone who risks being shaped by them.

The techniques I've shown you here aren't going anywhere, in fact, they're only getting more sophisticated.

But now you know how to spot them.

Emma

PS. I love the em-dash (—) and you’ll have to pry it out of my callused hands. Remember this when you read (a selfish please and thank you from me!!)

I’m building my work around helping people see storytelling for what it really is - not just a marketing tool, but a force that shapes how we think, feel, and act. If you’ve ever wondered whether the stories you’re consuming (or telling) are shaping you more than you realise, this is the place to explore that.

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Not around the boardroom table, nor during the scheduled “networking break.”

Not even at the dinner parties that were meant to be about connection.

They’ve happened in the in-between places.

In the carpark after an event, leaning against the bonnet of someone’s car with the night air around us.

On a balcony at a party, where the music softened into background noise and someone finally admitted, “Actually, I’ve been struggling.”

In kitchens (always kitchens) while the “main party” carried on in the living room and the stories spilled out over the chopping board.

It’s in these unscripted moments that the masks loosen, pretence drops, even for a second, and you catch a glimpse of someone’s truth that was never going to make it into their presentation slides or their carefully curated small talk.

I’ve always been drawn to those spaces. I think because they remind me that the performance of life, the most acceptable, digestible, PG version of ourselves is only ever half the story.

That’s the energy I want Story Table to hold.

It has never been designed to emphasise or contribute to rehearsed conversations, but to give a safe place to those that leak out in between.

They are usually the ones that feel a little risky, but also the import powerful.

Behind Story Table…

I’ve always been fascinated by what happens when you gather people around a table.

Food is the excuse, but it’s never really about the food, is it?

It’s about the way stories slip out between bites, the way silence can stretch and then crack open into laughter, the way strangers leave as something more than strangers.

In fact, that’s why I’ve started hosting events called What You Bring to the Table.

I’ve watched people apologise for their brilliance before they even share it. I’ve seen someone hesitate, then share the story they swore they’d never tell in public and be met not with judgment, but with a chorus of nods that say, me too.

What struck me again and again was how universal the ache was. We’re all walking around with it, the same longing to be seen for who we actually are, not for the masks or facades that we think we’re supposed to wear.

That ache is the heartbeat of Story Table.

For me, the table is more than a piece of furniture. It’s a metaphor. It’s the place where nourishment happens and not just of bodies, but of souls.

It’s where discourse can be constructive instead of combative and where honesty and kindness stop being opposites and start working together.

This publication is my way of extending that table to you.

Inside The Publication

I’ve spent most of my career helping other people tell their stories, from entrepreneurs, organisations to education institutes and government bodies.

But Story Table is the place I get to write without a brief and without needing it to be “on brand.”

Most of all, I don’t have to worry if it’s too much or not enough.

So what will you actually find here?

You’ll find reflections on culture and politics, not the hot-take kind but more so one that asks, what would happen if we talked about this with construction and compassion instead of rage?

You’ll find pieces that sit in tension between honesty and kindness, between individual and collective, between despair at the state of things and the stubborn hope that we can do better.

And sometimes, you’ll find other voices here too.

Guests, collaborators, perspectives that challenge mine and hopefully expand yours.

I don’t want this to be another publication shouting over over the same echo-chamber of clamouring voices that (probably) could’ve stayed in a diary.

I want it to feel like pulling up a chair at the end of a long day and finally having the conversations you’ve been craving.

Why I Write

I started out studying international relations and political science, where I learned that communications, specifically storytelling, shape governments, elections, wars and entire cultural identities.

Narratives determine whose voices get amplified, whose get silenced, and how entire populations make sense of what’s happening around them.

Later, I moved into marketing and copywriting.

At first, it felt like a completely different world when I was swapping policy research for product launches, however the truth is that it was the same lesson.

Stories move people and they always have.

The problem is, not all stories move us toward something good.

A story handled carelessly can manipulate, divide, or harm, but a story told with compassion can change how we see each other - it can heal.

That’s the thread I’ve been following my whole life from headlines in publciations, to speeches for CEOs to intimate dinner parties where someone finally admits the thing they’ve been carrying for years, it’s always about the same question: what do our stories make possible?

I write because I believe stories are a powerful privilege, and the way we wield that power matters.

Who Is This Made For?

• For the people who’ve ever walked away from a conversation thinking, we could’ve gone so much deeper than that.

• For the ones who feel out of place in spaces where you’re expected to pick a side before you’re even allowed to think.

• For the ones who crave nuance when everyone else is obsessed with a black and white reality, or instant certainty.

• For the person who can see the brilliance in others but struggles to see it in themselves.

• Those who downplays their own story until someone else gently says, don’t you realise how much that matters?

Importantly, it’s for anyone who has ever felt the frustration of watchig the world scream over each other, all while knowing in your bones that more LISTENING, reading and absorbing is the answer.

If you read this and feel even a little tug of recognition then this space is for you.

Who This Isn’t For

Not every space is for everyone and I stand by the fact that it is okay for that to be true.

If you’re looking for feel-good pieces of writing that stroke your ego or tick every “correct” box or mainstream narrative, I’d say this isn’t the place for you.

If you want to read conversations that are catered to every nuance and feeling you have, to the point where it would be impossible to read? This isn’t for you.

And if certainty is what you need, or if you want the world reduced to neat conclusions, then this space will not land for you.

I don’t write because I have all the answers, I write because the questions are worth exploring together.

A Final Note

But if you’ve ever longed for conversations that go deeper…

if you’ve wanted to read an essay or piece without the pressure of being made wrong, to pick a side or to already know 50 pre-requisite things about it…

If you’ve wanted a space that feels more like a kitchen table at midnight than a manic debate with your cousin at Christmas you loves to argue with you just for the sake of it, then you’re in the right place.

Story Table is free and as I’ve mentioned before, I’ll only write when something insists on being shared.

Sometimes it’ll be politics, sometimes culture, sometimes the small stories that crack open a bigger truth.

But always through the same lens of compassion and constructive discourse.

So welcome inside.

Bring your curiosity, your contradictions and your thoughts.

There’s room for you here.