Lou Hamilton is an artist, author, award-winning filmmaker, host of the Brave New Girl podcast and founder of Silk Studios, the podcast guest agency. Whatever the medium, she has made it her mission to use creativity to make a positive impact in the world, through sharing stories of people who have overcome fears, challenges and adversity, with documentaries that draw on social issues and in her books, Brave New Girl: How to Be Fearless and FEAR LESS. She believes everyone has a story to tell and that by giving voice to their experiences, sharing their challenges and lessons learned, they can help inspire and encourage others to live their best lives. This is why she hosts her podcast, it’s why she helps people to guest on other podcasts and it’s why she wrote and illustrated her book Dare to Share – a step by step guide to podcast guesting (published October 2021)

Lou coaches people to dig deep into their stories to explore their passions, pain-points, purpose, peaks and possibilities for the future. In this way she helps them uncover their courage in a crazy world. Her own passion was always art starting with painting and sculpture. After art school she moved to the rural idyll of Lockerbie, South-West Scotland after the exhausting pressure of being a young woman in London. She bought a church and made sculpture commissions. But bohemian bliss came to an abrupt halt when the plane Pan Am 103 was blown up in the sky above her. It wasn’t until years later when she was directing a 5 part documentary series on people with terminal illness that she started to feel the impact of having suppressed the trauma, not only of the terrorist attack, but of losing her best friend when they were children and her very close cousin when they were 26. But it was until Lou was directing a film on soldiers with PTSD that she realised that’s what she was suffering with. She trained to be a coach to help herself and help others, and continued to make films. But getting films off the ground is hard and she felt her creativity sapping away.

Then when she turned 50, grieving once again, menopausal and empty nesting, feeling rudderless and unhappy she suddenly had the urge to pick up a pencil and start drawing again. Out popped a character who later became know as Brave New Girl. Very quickly she became a book, then another book, climbed on t-shirts and eventually inspired the podcast, inviting real life Brave New Girls to come and share their stories of entrepreneurship, creativity and courage. Feeling the desire to champion more women than she could get on the show set up Silk Studios as a podcast guest agency, to help them connect with a global community, bring visibility to their brand, business or book and create a positive impact in the world.

However not everyone can afford to be represented by a podcast guest agency so Lou wrote the book Dare to Share which helps people dig deep into the story, understand how to research and pitch to right podcasts, what to do when they get the gig, prepare for showtime, and maximise the opportunity by spreading the words afterwards. Lou herself guests on podcasts to help people understand how they can use guesting to build their tribe, share their message and serve others.