A bit about me...

Some of you will know from reading the “my story” page of my website or from some of the

articles written about me in the press that I had quite a challenging childhood. I grew up in an

environment where I didn’t feel safe and was bullied emotionally. I was also involved in a tragic accident at school when I was only 13 years old in which I felt responsible for the death

of a class friend of mine.

What this meant was that I took on a lot of negative beliefs about myself, others and the world and I built up a very negative picture of who I thought I was. One belief I took on was that I deserved to be unhappy. Because I believed that -guess what? I worked really hard to ensure that this was so! For many years I felt as though I was on an endless merry-go-round of sadness. There were happy moments, of course, but these were only fleeting, as I would never seem to allow myself to hang on to them for very long.

Although I ‘put on a brave face’ to the outside world, inside I was falling apart. I would wear a mask (of pretending I was OK) at work during the week and then at weekends I would go out and take drugs to escape the mental pain that I was feeling. Up until 11 years ago I believed that my life would always be this way. I couldn’t understand why I had been put on this earth to live in so much misery and sometimes I wished that I hadn’t.

I felt like I was living two lives; one where I had a job and pretended to be successful in the ‘normal’ world and the other where I took drugs and went wild at the weekends. The people in these two lives acted completely differently. You could say that I was a brilliant actress as I managed to ‘fit in’ to both worlds simultaneously. The energy it required to keep them both going, and to keep up the pretence, was enormous.

In March 2001 I had a big wake-up call. I had a car crash that forced me to move out of London and to re-assess my life.

Following my recovery I went to live in a different part of the country and began to rebuild my life. I was sent on a Dale Carnegie sales training course that had a profound effect on me. One of the concepts we were taught was “think and act positively and you will become positive”. For the first time in my life I actually realised that I had a choice as to how I felt and acted.

I was no longer at the mercy of life – no longer a “victim”. I could actually now

choose to think positively. This was great news indeed! After taking the training I

came first in my company’s in-house sales championship and runner-up in an

external competition with 25 other companies.

This was the real turning point for me. It was the moment when I really started to turn my life

around.