If you have ever thought about giving up, read this ❤️
I had a meeting with IKEA once for a leadership training contract. At the time I was living in Devon, in an unhappy, deeply difficult marriage, getting myself into an increasingly difficult financial situation. I had lost my spark. I had lost that elusive...thing that made me...me. So it was hardly surprising when I didn't win the contract. I remember being...so disappointed. (I actually filmed a video for my Instagram and cried on it. You can watch that here if you fancy something from the archives).
But honestly it was more than disappointed. I was depressed. I felt like everything, everything, was going wrong. I was sitting in the rubble of former successes looking around at the shrapnel of my life thinking what the fuck am I going to do.
I didn't yet know it at the time, but a few short weeks after not getting that IKEA contract things were going to go from bad to...the bottom has fallen out of your life. I found out my ex husband had been having a series of affairs (I knew, but then I knew, ya know). The country was about to go into lockdown. All of my business totally collapsed and I ended up without a home, or income, over the course of a few days. I didn't know that I would soon have one of the hardest days of my life, desperately trying to get everything in to a skip or storage, so I could move out of the home I could no longer afford, solo, putting all my possessions into one bag because I had no idea where I was going. I remember calling my mum in floods of tears collapsed on the floor saying "I can't, I can't" and she, like any good Northern woman raised by Victorian era parents simply said "Chin up, crack on".
Friends, I put my chin up, and I cracked on.
I also didn't know, during that time, that everything I was doing then, in that messy, difficult, painful chapter would seed now. Years later.
I didn't know, that the book I began writing that week, would be weeks away from being published in 2025.
I didn't know, that the deeply difficult marriage would have long since been ended and healed, followed by some glorious single years and a partnership that honestly I cannot even. (We got engaged recently).
I didn't know that I would be winning contracts just like I hoped I would.
God it took a long time for things to come together in the way my heart really hoped they would, deep down. But as I was planning my week over coffee on Monday morning I turned to Henry and said "my goal for this week is to slow down and notice it. Notice how work I have put in for years and years is now coming to life. I have worked so hard, for so long and I am feeling that effort now. I never gave up, ya know".
Earlier today I realised that my book has been promoted in bookshop.orgs actual newsletter. That is huge. HUGE. And that is because of you, the support of my community, with all your preorders. 🥹
I don't know what chapter you are in in your life, but I do know this.
Don't give up. If you have a little dream, a tiny hope, buried somewhere so deep it is genuinely scary to even look at, keep tending to it, lightly. Don't let it get swept away by the no's and the rejections and the maybe I am just not good enoughs, because that tiny hope? That's the real you, begging to be heard. I would like to hear her.
Thank you so f*cking much for being here. It feels like a big time for me, professionally. Got a lot of exciting things happening and it feels really really cool. ❤️
📕 Preorder my book HERE
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