I originally wrote this blog post on my (now defunct) personal blog a few years ago, following an exercise I had done as part of my therapy, looking at my versions of the “ideal” wife and mother. As I am now divorced and am now a business owner (which comes with its own pre-conceived notions)…

Understanding why some people choose to pass judgement can help us to fear it less.

As I am enormously interested in how people tell their stories to themselves, I interviewed Alex to get a better sense of his story and how he found self-confidence at a young age…

Have you heard the phrase “crab bucket”? I came across it in the Terry Pratchett novel “Unseen Academicals”, which centres around the fortunes of three football fans who work in the kitchens of a university. It struck me as such a recognisable phenomenon, and indeed it is a widely known idea – the “crab mentality”.…

I told this story to a friend the other day and she encouraged me to turn it into a blog post. It is about five women whom I met when I was working at a residential home for the elderly in my student days. I worked in the kitchens and as a cleaner at the…

Having talked last time about owning our own stories, I thought it was high time that I told mine. What have been the crucial experiences that have led me to where I am today, what has shaped my personal philosophy? Let me give you my potted history… I am an only child of financially comfortable…

As much as we like to think that we live in reality, in truth we each live inside our own stories. Memory is a tricky thing, often showing us things in a way that isn’t quite accurate. The future is a castle that we build in the sky, to the point that it is quite…

Emotional safety has long been something with which I have struggled, as anxiety runs in my family. My youngest, who struggles with it, asked me to define anxiety simply for him the other day and so I came up with this definition: “Anxiety is when you don’t quite feel safe in your life and you’re…