Becoming Tash

Recently, I’ve had the space to stop and think.

I’m not sure whether what I’m noticing is signs, coincidence, the universe giving me a nudge, or simply what happens when you name what matters and start paying closer attention. Maybe it’s a bit of everything.

Whatever it is, I’ve been wondering what building WOTwithTash is showing me about myself.

For most of my career, the easiest way to explain who I am has been to start with work: where I work, the role I hold, the customers I support or the people I lead.

That shorthand isn't wrong. My career has given me extraordinary opportunities to grow, contribute and become more capable than I once knew I could be. It has brought me alongside people who trusted me with work that mattered.

I’m proud of that part of my life. I just don’t think the answer has to begin and end there anymore.

I’m Tash.

I care deeply about Women of Tech. My purpose is helping people and businesses evolve.

Even now, writing that feels brave. There is something different about naming what you care about in your own words, without waiting for a role description or somebody else’s invitation to make it official first.

When I look back across my career, I can see how often other people recognised something in me and invited me forward. The wording varied, but it was usually some version of: Tash would be good at that. Ask Tash to pick this up. We need Tash in the room.

And so I went.

Their trust opened doors for me, and I took that trust seriously. I turned up, put in the effort and built the skills. I had the conversations, carried the responsibility and kept stepping into rooms I hadn’t always imagined entering. I earned my place in those rooms, and I remain grateful for the people who first saw that possibility in me.

That pattern also made me very good at answering the call.

Give me something meaningful to solve, someone to support or a team that needs steadiness, and I'll find a way forward.

What I’ve had far less practice doing is making the call myself.

I think there is a difference between execution and authorship. I’ve always had plenty of agency in the execution: give me a direction and I can make things happen. Authorship is deciding which direction is mine to choose in the first place.

That’s the part I’m practising now.

Creating something of my own asked that of me. Nobody appointed me to do it. There was no position to apply for, promotion process to follow or invitation waiting for me. I had to decide for myself what mattered enough to create, where I wanted to place my energy and what I hoped another woman might feel when she encountered the work.

I think WOTwithTash became that somewhere for me.

What I hadn’t fully understood until recently was what I would choose to do with that space.

When I attended REVVED with a young Woman beside me, I arrived ready to learn, meet people and take something from the day myself. But as it unfolded, I became far more interested in how she was experiencing the room.

I found myself making introductions, bringing her into conversations and staying close while she found her feet. I wanted her to feel that she didn’t just have access to the room, but that she belonged in it.

It wasn’t planned. Nobody asked me to do it, and at the time I didn’t think of it as anything other than the most natural way to spend the day.

When the direction was mine, I chose to use what I had: my relationships, experience, confidence and place in the room to help someone else find hers.

It didn’t feel like a new version of me. It felt like a familiar part of me I was finally choosing on purpose.

I now have a name for the purpose underneath that choice: HOPE: Help Other People Evolve. I found those words in 2025, but perhaps the truth of them had been there much longer.

The more I build this, the less I see it as separate from the rest of my world. The way I lead and the woman creating this platform come from the same place. The setting might be different, but the values, curiosity and desire to help people move forward are the same.

I’m also beginning to recognise myself in the many versions of the Woman of Tech I want this work to reach.

I can see something of myself in the 17-year-old entering a room for the first time and wondering where she fits. I can see myself in the woman building her capability and learning to trust it, in the leader carrying more than most people realise, and in the woman who has done everything asked of her but is beginning to wonder what she might choose for herself.

I don’t need to decide which one is the real Tash. Every version of her comes with me.

I’m proud of the woman who learned to answer the call, built the capability and earned the trust. Now I’m learning to let that same woman hold the pen.

For years, other people’s belief helped me see what I was capable of. I continue to value that belief. I’m simply learning to meet it with more of my own.

I'm still becoming, and I hope I always am.

This time, I’m paying closer attention to the woman already here.