The full story
For those who are interested there is a slightly longer story of my life changes below.
I could waffle on for days about my life with it’s highs & lows, ups and downs, often resembling a rollercoaster ride. This is the story of who I am and why I have developed Positive Transitions:
So I will try to keep it brief and to the point and focus on the beneficial changes I have made towards becoming someone I like and have time for.
I was an extremely shy child who was far happier in her imaginary world than the real one – which was far from great! At school I was constantly in fear – fear of being told off again, fear of being picked on or being bullied, fear of being asked to do something that was hard, fear no one would be my friend, you name it I had a fear for it! I had what nowadays is called a mild learning difficulty, I wrote words that looked fine to me but others said was gibberish, I would read words that were not there but looked to me to be the same, so reading out loud was and still is extremely difficult. I found hand, eye, ball co-ordination impossibly hard. Today this is known as dyslexia, back then it was lazy, not trying, bad spelling, stupid – well you get the picture. No I didn’t have a high level of confidence how could I?
Luckily I did have a tiny taster of what confidence felt like because I had a talent for ballet. In class or when dancing I felt beautiful, happy, skilled and wonderful for those few short hours each week!
I escaped from my hated school at 16 years, with only a few qualifications. I was so unhappy at school, some subjects I couldn’t see the point in and often I would not pay attention or listen preferring to daydream by looking out of the window. This is the reason why I endeavour to make my workshops & courses as enjoyable as possible as I believe happy people tend learn more.
Lack of qualifications didn’t matter back then, I fell immediately into a job in couture fashion and by 18 years was running a showroom, designing the clothes, dealing with the customers and doing the books! Not bad for someone who is lazy and stupid.
Around this time I also discovered not only that I wasn’t stupid and talent-less but also that I was not as plain as I had been led to believe.
I landed job after job, each one being a little more exciting than the last. I worked as a designer, buyer, researcher and reporter. Travelled to Paris, Florence, New York, South Africa and the Far East and appeared to be successful in most things I did. I bought my first house in London at 27 years and started my own business at 31. I also had relationships with attractive eligible men.
However, none of this gave me satisfaction, nothing came close to the feeling I had known when I danced as a child – I was constantly in search of a glimpse or repeat of that feel good factor. It came briefly in an important relationship, but when this finished I became devastated and unable to cope eventually becoming clinically depressed. I couldn’t understand why I was unable to sort myself out, pull myself together and get on as I always had.
Drugs and therapies did little to help, psychotherapy pointed out the many reasons why I felt so bad but was unable to tell me how to fix it so I felt well again.
Enter a kind, gentle Indian psychiatric welfare nurse, who gained my trust taught me self-hypnosis and used NLP visualisation techniques to help me deal with past traumas and problems that were affecting me adversely. In a 10min exercise I felt completely different and relaxed about something I previously could not even talk about. This was something that made sense to me, it felt good, this was a route towards re-gaining that feeling of confidence I had alluded me for years.
With his help and the discovery that I needed additional hormones I shook off my depression in a matter of weeks and started my new life’s path.
I took a very well paid full time job but in every spare minute I read self help books, learned meditation and visualisation techniques, qualified as a healer, studied the Native American Medicine Wheel which I found fascinating and uplifting. Finally when I was made redundant from my job, I studied NLP. It took me over a year to qualify as a Practitioner. I then studied counselling and cognitive therapies and gained my NLP Master Practitioner in 1997. It was during the intensive 18 day training that a further huge life transition happened. We were being lectured on anorexia and its condition when I piped up with “Yes I understand this as I have always felt big and clumsy with huge hands and feet” which met with a whale of laughter from the group who were looking at a 7.5 stone 5ft2” slim person with size 4 feet. The tutor just said “Well we can all see you are none of these things, but do you know someone who does look like that?” - “My mother” was my reply. My mother who always said I was just like her. I had observed her, a large women, always breaking things and with size 8 feet and had carried the belief that I too was like that for so many years.
A enormous identity shift happened for me then. I won’t pretend it was easy, it took many months before I began to truly feel good, but from then on there was no looking back.
To finance my years of study I worked part time as a PR for charities and worthwhile causes, I also lectured at Thames Valley University on PR and communications discovering my great love and natural skill for tutoring and engaging an audience.
I was brought up in the countryside, Buckinghamshire and Dorset and have always felt a strong attachment to animals and nature. My Native American training showed me how much joy I got from being near the earth and nature. I imagined & manifested a dream cottage, with a great garden, surrounded by fields and views, sunshine and animals. I found my present home in Somerset moving here in 1998.
Since moving to Somerset I worked first as a PR, then in many different part-time jobs including a care worker and a tutor and advice worker for local adult education, whist facilitating and developing my own courses and workshops and building Positive Transitions. In 2004 I went completely freelance so I could devote all my time to my private clients and running my own courses. I love living in the beautiful Somerset countryside amongst friends and with my 2 dogs, 4 cats and assorted chickens and ducks. I am not suggesting everyone needs to move to the country some people feel far happier in the city, the important factor is that we feel happy about who we are.
