Galaxy’s new campaign tackles the deeply ingrained habit women have of downplaying their achievements. Creative Boom’s Katy Cowan reflects on why this campaign hits close to home – and what a back injury taught her about the difference between modesty and erasure.
There’s a question I couldn’t have answered two years ago. Not because I didn’t know the answer, but because the act of saying it out loud felt somehow scary. The question is simple: what do you like about yourself?
I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because a campaign by Galaxy has just landed that puts this exact question at the heart of its creative strategy, and partly because a serious back injury gave me – of all things – the unexpected gift of an answer.
In 2024, I was largely housebound following an injury that stopped me in my tracks. I’d spent 15 years building Creative Boom from a side project into a platform reaching over a million people a month, and suddenly I couldn’t do much at all. What followed was one of the strangest, most clarifying periods of my life. Stripped of the busyness and the relentless forward motion, I had to sit with myself. And slowly, carefully, I started to understand what I actually valued about who I was.
I like my tenacity. And how I genuinely care about the people Creative Boom serves. I like my curiosity and taste, and my commitment to doing things properly. I like that I kept going when my world completely stopped and the floor became my friend.
Writing those words still feels faintly transgressive, which is, of course, exactly the problem.
The campaign: confidence as a creative strategy
Galaxy has unveiled The Unhumble Project, a campaign that tackles women’s deeply ingrained reluctance to promote their achievements – and does something more interesting than simply raising awareness of the problem; it turns the insight into a practical tool.
The centrepiece is a free online confidence training hub: a structured 15-minute course led by confidence coach and self-belief advocate Tiwalola Adebayo. It offers practical frameworks and exercises to help us unapologetically recognise our wins, communicate our value and take genuine pleasure in our achievements.
Developed by brand and impact agency Onward, in partnership with Young Women’s Trust, the campaign taps into a wider cultural shift towards education as a form of engagement. Rather than another awareness-raising moment that quickly fades into the background, this one positions training itself as the creative response, turning a cultural truth into something women can actually use.
The stat that anchors it all is striking: women are five times less likely to self-promote their achievements than men. Five times. F*ck a duck. And yet most women reading that figure will immediately start making excuses for it – contextualising, softening, and explaining away. That instinct is precisely what the campaign is trying to disrupt.
Galaxy’s brand director Romi Mackiewicz puts it plainly: “Women have never lacked talent or achievement, but too often they feel they have to shrink their success to stay likeable. The Unhumble Project is about changing that narrative and encouraging women to say ‘I did that’ and enjoy the moment.”
Beyond awareness: making confidence a skill
What’s smart about The Unhumble Project is that it doesn’t treat confidence as a personality trait you either have or you don’t; it treats it as a skill. Something learnable, practicable, and improvable. That’s not just a useful reframe; it’s a genuinely more honest one.
Anna Öhrling, co-founder of Onward, articulates the tension the campaign is navigating: “Too often women are encouraged to stay modest about their achievements, even though we know that self-promotion is one of the key unlocks to recognition, opportunity and pay equity.”
The campaign launched with a live activation at King’s Cross station in London, where comedian, musician and writer Rachel Parris took on the role of an “unhumble wing woman” – inviting women to step up to the microphone and publicly celebrate the achievements they would normally downplay. It’s a bold, playful gesture that makes visible the discomfort most women feel when asked to advocate for themselves out loud, in public, without hedging.
Galaxy hopes the training will ultimately be taken by 50,000 women, positioning The Unhumble Project as a long-term brand asset rather than a one-off campaign moment. That ambition matters: it signals a genuine commitment to the issue rather than a seasonal content play.
The modesty trap, and what it actually costs
I’ve spent a long time keeping myself behind the Creative Boom brand. Not out of false modesty exactly… more out of a belief that the work should speak louder than I did. But somewhere along the way, that reasonable instinct calcified into something else: an invisibility that wasn’t serving me or the people I was trying to reach.
The injury forced that into focus. When you’re suddenly unable to do much at all, you have to reckon with who you are when you strip the doing away. And I found, slowly and somewhat reluctantly, that there was something worth shouting about. That the platform I’d built from nothing during a financial crisis, the 1.3 million visitors through Google alone, the community of 7,500 creatives I’d cultivated, the relationships I’d maintained over time – these things were achievements worth highlighting. Not to boast about, but because not shouting about them was its own kind of dishonesty.
This is what The Unhumble Project is really getting at. The modesty trap isn’t just uncomfortable – it’s costly. It costs women opportunities, visibility, pay and recognition. It costs them the ability to accurately represent their own value. And it costs the people around them too, because when talented women are invisible, entire industries lose out.
Saying it out loud
I’m still practising. The reflexive shrinking doesn’t disappear overnight. It’s been decades in the making. But I’m more convinced than ever that learning to say “I did that” and mean it, without immediately following it with a disclaimer, is one of the more quietly radical things any woman can do.
What Galaxy has understood is that this isn’t about ego, it’s about telling the truth about yourself, especially in a world that has spent a very long time teaching you not to. The Unhumble Project’s free confidence-training hub is now available.
If you’ve ever caught yourself saying ‘oh, it was nothing really’ about something that was very much something, it’s probably worth fifteen minutes of your time.
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