It’s the autumn holidays and I’m still coming to terms with the passing of my mother. As a parent you have a responsibility to guide your children through life and I am grateful to be spending some quality time with my son. The life crises have a way of stripping you of our old certainties and throwing us into chaos and I think the only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.

We live in an age of positive curation where everyone has a personal brand on social media and fear, anxiety and depression are on the rise. Challenges have a way of humbling us and knocking down our egos. The same thing can happen to two different people and one person may see it as a problem, something to complain about or run and hide from, the other can see it as an opportunity to learn and grow, and they dig in and push through. It’s not easy to shift our mindset to view challenges as opportunities, as it takes practice to change our instinctual reaction. Every day I reveal my vulnerable self and this fragility has enabled me to build up an emotional resilience necessary to tackle the next challenge. 

I think what you learn from things not turning out the way you planned can give you a lot more texture and meaning. I definitely would not have seen the richness in my life if I had not suffered setbacks along the way, because without them I wouldn’t be who I am or where I am today, so I am extremely grateful. Success is not about getting things right the first time but stemmed from being able to look at one’s past honestly and then to correct missteps or errors of judgment.