Clutching a paper takeaway coffee cup, and flicking through papers ordered meticulously on the plastic table in the window sits the state’s top office bearer.

Gladys Berejiklian will work anywhere. She’s our work-your-guts-out Premier. Ask anyone, including her.

Hearing that refrain over and over again, it’s easy to imagine Berejiklian in a hard hat spruiking at any one of the $80 billion worth of construction sites she’s shepherding through the state.

But sometimes, working your guts out looks just like this — grabbing a spare five minutes to read up on state business on a plastic chair in a coffee joint in Strathfield with no porcelain tea cups or ivory towers in sight.

Designer Kate Spade handbag by her side? Check. Glamorous? Not on your life.

In many ways, Berejiklian is a study in contradictions.

The studious workhorse who examines every problem from every angle exudes an almost girlish charm when she confesses her love for Ed Sheeran’s music (there’s a photo of him in her office) or coyly refuses to reveal her favourite TV shows because they are “embarrassing”.

And even when she is unwinding at night watching her so-called embarrassing shows, she’s usually also devouring a book in front of the TV at the same time.

On her recent trade mission to China, she pored over a philosophy paperback, The Story Of Philosophy: A History Of Western Thought by James Garvey, in her brief downtime in airport lounges.

She’s got a goody-two-shoes reputation — a stickler for rules who expects 100 per cent every time — yet it’s hard to find anyone in politics who doesn’t like her.

True to her work-your-guts-out ethic, Berejiklian worked through Christmas, but her highlight of the season was celebratory lunches and gift-swapping with her extended family.

She’s never had a real cup of coffee in her life, but orders a skim mocha every day. (It’s a snack: “I don’t need the caffeine buzz,” she says.)

And while she stakes her leadership style on hard work, she makes one admission that’s rare for a politician — she needs a good night’s sleep.

That’s about seven hours, and she’s not interested in repeating the in-vogue claim of politicians who say they only need a few hours sleep a night.

“I’m not going to pretend. There are some people who say they only sleep for four hours but I’m not one of those,” she says.

Berejiklian does things her way in a landscape where the challenges are stacked before her. She will face her first election in her own right as Premier with a surname most of NSW would struggle to pronounce on first sight. And no female premier has ever won an election in this state.

Berejiklian, the state’s first Liberal woman premier, doesn’t talk about gender as a factor in her leadership. You get the feeling she might one day when it’s all over, but it’s not a story she’s going to tell when she’s got a state to run.

EYE ON THE FUTURE

Three weeks out from clocking up exactly one year in the top job, Berejiklian’s looking ahead.

She hopes to put behind her a year of scuttling legacy items from the last government and settle into the business of driving her own plans for the state. She sees that as creating jobs, driving big infrastructure projects (once a transport minister, always a transport minister) and reconnecting the party with the regions — where it’s deeply vulnerable and risks a widening gap between haves and have-nots.

Just seven seats stand between Berejiklian and minority government and she goes into 2018 with her commitment to spend more than $2 billion on new stadiums threatening to be politically poisonous.

The party, meanwhile, has its own clear-cut challenge for 2018 — selling Berejiklian.

The question is just how can the Liberals get people in all corners of the state to know this Gladys, the hardworking, non-pretentious premier who takes public transport to work.

Berejiklian’s is a sellable narrative that speaks to aspirational NSW and is the stuff anyone-can-make-it dreams are made of.

She is proud of her humble Armenian migrant background — her dad a welder and her mum a nurse — and the fact that she started school unable to speak English but wound up top of her class.

She’s not loud, in-your-face or politically extroverted. She expects her work to speak for itself.

But the truth is the party brains trust will need to get that message out there.

One thing they know is this: put Gladys on the streets, have her mingle with people and her personality will sell itself.

The Daily Telegraph’s award-winning photographer Phil Hillyard was, for the first time, granted intimate access to capture Berejiklian’s unguarded moments in the last weeks of this year.

AT EASE WITH THE PEOPLE

As he followed her along to events, meet-and-greets, a family lunch, and even riding the bus, it became clear that those who come across Berejiklian in the streets take to her almost instantly.

She can diffuse tense moments with a combination of warmth and smarts.

At ease with children, on FM radio and with all walks of punters in the street, Berejiklian’s staff rarely need to constantly scan for interference — they can relax in knowing their boss can handle almost anything “the public” throws at her.

She’ll stop a conversation she’s in to coo at a baby, but then swiftly shows she’s capable of doing both at once, switching back to her initial target seamlessly with laser- sharp focus.

Many days a week, she’ll take the bus to the city, sitting alongside regular folk who only sometimes stop to remark on the fact they’re riding with the Premier.

She waits at the stop with everyone else. Sometimes politeness dictates some travellers will offer her to get on ahead of them, but Berejiklian declines.

If Berejiklian disagrees with you, she’ll set you straight.

For one thing, she’s not interested in the narrative that she’s inherited prime economic conditions and is leading at the most opportune time, quick to point out that the Coalition government has created those conditions.

“I’ve been there from the beginning of my government,” she remarked recently while on that China trade mission.

“I’ve worked my guts out for I don’t know how many years. Not only do you have to work hard, you have to keep working hard. You let things slip for a little bit and that’s it.”

Time and time again, it comes back to the work hard and do your best narrative.

Asked to assess her first year in office she says, “I judge myself and I’m a harsh judge, but I ask if I worked as hard as I could and did I do my best. And think I have.”

She says in her first 12 months in the job, she’s realised she has stamina.

“A lot of people remark that I’ve done a lot in a day, but that’s what I do every day,” she says.

“I’m someone who likes to pack a lot in. I don’t like to miss an opportunity. I enjoy trying to fit as much as I can into the day.”

Asked if she’s a morning person, she says she is — “but I’m also a night person”.

She admits she pushes herself and you get the feeling we haven’t seen Berejiklian in full flight yet.

“No matter what job you have and whether it’s paid or not we should always try and push ourselves a little bit. So I do that and try to grow in the role,” she says.

When asked what her New Year’s resolution is, Berejiklian pauses to think.

“Good question,” she muses, before answering with a grin. “I’m going to take it up a notch.”