I’m going to set a bit of a scene here and I’m going to share a bit of my own story and some of you will have already heard it because you know me, and some of you
will be new to me. So I’m going to try and make it as quick and concise as possible.
Once upon a time, it feels like a million years ago, instead of going to college I decided to run off and go and live in Germany and I was 16 and a half at the time, my mum is German, and I went home one day and they said “have you been to college” and I said “no, actually i’ve got myself a job as an au pair and i’m going to Germany”.
That weekend, I packed my bags and at that point I went by train and I showed up in a city that didn’t sleep, a real city. So Hereford is where i’m from originally and it’s technically a city, but it’s a sleepy hollow in comparison.
I showed up at Dusseldorf at the time it was still West Germany, clubs bars restaurants nothing closed so I would work all day being this lovely au pair looking after these little boys and being really good. And then i literally partied each and every single night sometimes just getting home in time for work.
When I look back it’s probably a miracle that I’m still here! Because I did everything that supposedly we should or shouldn’t do.
It taught me an awful lot though and then my life changed. I did that thing that girls sometimes do and I met a man and that changed everything.
We left Germany and we went to live in Cyprus. He was in the British Military so we lived on an island. I had my first island life and the one thing that that gifted me was how much I love islands which is probably why i’ve ended up in antigua. That’s another story for another time though.
So Cyprus then went back to Europe with lots of different postings as a military wife. Lots of constraints, lots of conformity, which really isn’t me and has never been me.
Because I guess your average 16 and a half year old doesn’t just decide they’re going to Germany on the weekend.
Wanderlust has always been there so I’m going to make it really quick. I was not a model army wife, but I was a model wife! So I was very good, but I didn’t want to talk to people just because I was supposed to, I didn’t want to have the friends that I was supposed to just because they were the right rank and the right authority or the right beret that they were wearing.
So I was a little bit different in those respects. Ultimately I found it really difficult at times and famously have been told off for speaking rudely to certain people that I shouldn’t, but actually not being rude just being my truth.
So truth has been something that’s always been at the core of me.I found myself drifting into army education and then on a move back to the UK actually into special education in the UK. And moving back to hereford I started working for the Royal National College for the Blind.
Working with people with all sorts of disabilities diversity and equality etc;. and it really opened my eyes ironically in a visually impaired environment. To the fact that labeling institutionalized medical models etc confined people, they box people in and actually what these people wanted specifically was more freedom, and we were saying on one hand we were giving them that but, actually we were taking it away.
It started a mind shift of communicating in a completely different way with some of our students and then I would have teachers coming to me and they would ask me what i had been doing because so and so was feeling better. Inadvertently I’d started using something called NLP in the teaching that I was doing.
Even though I’m not a qualified teacher and I have no degree, although, I have lots of knowledge in all the specialist subjects that I’ve studied. Anyway my story changed at that point and I have what I would refer to as an awakening. At about 37 where I realized I wasn’t really living the life that I wanted to live.
Technically if i go by the programme I had everything that I’m supposed to want to have. I’ve got a husband, I’ve got a child, I’ve got a car, I’ve got a beautiful cottage. I’ve got a good job and I find myself not wanting all of those things in the way that they were being given to me.
Because I wanted more freedom I wanted to think outside of a box. Outside of a nine-to-five life. As I look back it’s only really in the last five years that I’ve recognized that the reason that my journey has been the journey that it’s been is because of my mum.
So we had some stuff go on in my childhood and my brothers and sister that impacted us really definitively in different ways. My mum is going to listen to this so I’m going to thank her openly for this because she gave me the gift of doing this as my work so there might have been some discomfort back in those years and there might have been some pain and ultimately it has gifted me the work that i do now.
The conversations that I’m able to have and the courage I guess to be this version of myself and someone very recently told me when they listened to my story that they thought I was really courageous.
And I’ve never felt that before yeah i’m telling you now52 conversations is me being courageous.
So I hope that you’re going to enjoy all the stories that we share