Insanely Normal

“There is a pearl around every turd as through everything bad, there is a lot to learn and this can lead to a lot of good around an event”

Jonah Hill

I’ve just spent my Sunday evening watching Stutz on Netflix. I didn’t know what to expect but the idea of learning something about someone else’s therapist had me hooked. The trailer flashed on to my screen with Jonah Hill stating that by going to see this therapist, his life was made increasingly better as a result and if there was a chance this film could do the same for someone else, he wanted to try.

The first thing to note is this isn’t just any therapist. The documentary’s namesake, Phil Stutz is certainly not your average therapist. Those in the field will most likely agree that he goes against the status quo, has an obvious personal relationship with Hill and thrives on wanting people to leave his sessions feeling better.

The main take-home from the film is a series of tools that Stutz himself has created. Many of which are extremely straightforward and can instantly allow you to think about your life, your way of thinking, and yourself differently. I am going to repeat them all for you here. In fact, this is why Stutz himself agreed to do the show. He wants more people to learn these tools. He wants people to become better versions of themselves. The film gives insights into the therapist himself, showcasing his own faults and misgivings. A broken human helping others to mend. Let’s kick off with the first.

Your life force – “the only way to find out who you are or what you should be doing is to activate your life force because your life force is the only part of you capable of guiding you when you’re lost”

If you think of your life force like a pyramid – you will start to feel well when you change your relationships with all three levels. First off, Stutz talks about the lower tier. Your physical body. I myself learned the impact and importance of my physical well-being and the link with my mental health when I found fitness during the lockdown in 2020.

When you look after your own body, you find this newfound respect for yourself. It’s pride but not in how you look, which Jonah mentioned – this is where he and others around him got it wrong. It’s pride in taking good care of your physical self.

The second tier is other people. Your relationship with other people can massively impact how you feel and who you want to be. If you’re depressed, you may start to back away from relationships, close doors on friendships, or be less polite to strangers in need. Not surprisingly, none of this helps. Building better relationships with other people can have a profound positive effect on who you become. When I started to feel better physically, I spent more time with people. I networked better and listened more.

Finally, the top tier is your relationship with yourself. When you start to have a better relationship with yourself, life gets better. It just does. Learn to like yourself. Learn to love yourself and most importantly, learn to manage the negative feelings you have towards yourself.

This moves us on nicely to tool number 2.

Part X. Part X is the villain in your own story. It tries to f**k shit up. Part X is the voice of impossibility. Whatever you try and do, Part X will always tell you it’s impossible.

You can’t get rid of Part X. You can suppress it for a small amount of time but it will always come back. We need Part X in order to understand who we are. According to Stutz, there are three aspects of reality that no one gets to avoid.

The first is obvious. Through pain, we learn to recover. We’ve all heard the term ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ and we need suffering to make us better. We need bad things to happen to us in order to help us understand someone else’s pain. I myself for example needed to experience the utter darkness of poor mental illness in order to guide others to health. Without my personal experience, I couldn’t empathise with others. I need empathy to listen.

Uncertainty is life in general. None of us know what can happen next. And constant work means we are always looking for ways to improve.

It’s interesting to wish away Part X however, if heroes didn’t have villains, there would be no story. There would be nothing learned and therefore nothing gained.

Interestingly, we learn from everything we do. Life is one long lesson. Not always pleasant but we learn from it nonetheless.

Around 25mins into the film, there is this beautiful moment. A moment where the flakiness of TV and film is stripped away. Hill appears uncomfortable to talk about his own experiences throughout the first half with Stutz openly talking about the death of his own brother and turning the focus to Hill who shifts awkwardly in his chair before turning it back to Stutz.

You can see at these moments within this film, it was not Hill’s intention to have a public therapy session but to learn more about the life of a therapist. However, the vulnerability of Hill in this midway scene, when he talks about how he’s lied to Stutz, reveals the green screen, and even removes his wig (a prop to create continuity) instantly pulled me in further, and made want to see more.

This brings us on to tool number 3.

The string of pearls. The pearls represent our experiences. To boost your motivation, you have to tell yourself ‘I am the person that puts the next pearl on the string’.

None is greater than the other, but they all add up together to be our experience. However, inside every pearl is a turd. This is the moment when Jonah’s quote impresses Stutz who originally says inside each pearl is a turd but what we learn from this creates the experience.

Not every experience will be perfect. Something will go wrong and learning from it rather than letting it beat us will allow us to take control of it and allow us to come out of it improved rather than defeated.

Hill moves into the next section talking about his lack of self-esteem and his need for happiness. This leads to the next tool.

The Shadow: Here you need to visualise a part of yourself or a time in your life when you were ashamed of yourself. A part of you that you didn’t or don’t like. This part of you comes up every now and then despite you improving those parts of you.

According to Stutz, this part of you only wants attention from you. No one else. He says to consider how you treated that part of you. How did you feel about yourself when that part of you was prominent? And what can you do now to make up for how you treated that version of you? Don’t hide that version of you. If you’re content with your whole true self, what other people think matters less.              

If you do not give your shadow attention or respect, your shadow will disrupt your life and can be quite disruptive.      

Hill reminisces on how he met Stutz five years prior and talked about his lack of self-esteem and how he just worked to achieve success. This leads on to tool number 5.

The Snapshot (a.k.a. The Realm of Illusion). You’re looking for a perfect experience. An illusion of fantasy that will not happen.

Hill talks about how success and awards at work allowed him to feel better but it didn’t ‘fix him’. When it didn’t work, it made him even more depressed. The media joined in talking about his weight and kept him from moving away from his shadow. He states that Stutz allowed him to develop a new opinion of himself and to move away from the snapshot. The snapshot will never improve you and is most likely not related to the things that are causing you most damage.

If you imagine a person down on their luck, living in poverty with no support, winning the lottery. They may now live in riches however, the support they now have might not exist without the money so is it real support? If it was the friendship and supports this person was missing, the money is not the answer to fixing it.

I went through a period where I believed I was crap at my job and I needed to be better at my job to feel good. I wasn’t crap at my job. I was crap at celebrating myself and ignoring my imposter syndrome.  Sometimes the snapshot isn’t always what you want it to be or it’s not the thing you need to strive for to make yourself feel better.

In the next scene, we meet Hill’s mother. They do a joint short session together talking openly about what they need from the other to have a better relationship. This leads Hill to ask Stutz about the relationship with his mother, who saw her own father beat her mother and siblings and not her. She lived her life hating men and regularly said this throughout dinner conversations. She was stuck in the maze.

The maze. A period that always involves other people. It involves Part X who always wants fairness.  You tell yourself I’ll move past this once they admit their wrongs. Being in the maze is essentially being trapped in the past and not allowing yourself to move forward.

The average person wants to be paid back. The only way you can get out of this is through Active Love. Stutz goes on to tell us to ‘imagine yourself taking in all of the love in the universe. Gently but firmly place all of it in your heart. You are now the master of love in the universe. Now picture the person you’ve learned to hate/despise and face them, sending all that love you’ve concentrated toward them.

You hold nothing back. You give everything. You feel your love enter the other person’s body, and you become one with them. If you can become one with that person, you can become one with anyone. This will free you from the maze. So do you want to be right or do you want to become something more? You can get the days/hours back that you wasted on hating them.

There is then a moment where Hill takes on the role of the therapist, and we learn a little more about Stutz. His relationships and how Parkinson’s has stopped him from going for what he wants. They both joke about how they hide pain with comedy and I myself am certainly guilty of this. Hill mentions that relationships only work if we are only ever truly vulnerable but we hold ourselves back. They lead on to the next tool.

Radical Acceptance. Find a state of not getting into negativity but figuring out what am I going to do about it right now. Find something positive about the situation, and although there are negative elements, you are not allowed to say them to yourself. Squeeze the juice out of the lemon. Find the good in small things. Look at all events as having value. If you can do this, you are then in the zone of tremendous opportunity.

The Grateful flow. Sometimes when the black cloud is hanging over us, we forget the sunshine is above the cloud. The question becomes…how do we penetrate the cloud? The answer is gratefulness. There is always going to be something good up there, even if you can’t yet see it. If you create the good things in your mind that you’re grateful for, you say them to yourself and say it slowly. You need to feel it. Next, feel like your going to think of something else but don’t. Feel the thought of it and let it overcome you. Don’t say things over and over. Don’t argue with your own thoughts.

Loss Processing. This is a tool that allows you to process loss. Most people are bad at this. It doesn’t involve you preparing yourself to lose everything. It’s about understanding that you are still you without what you’ve lost.

If we put too much emphasis on ourselves based on something we fear losing, we allow it to control us and who we are. This was a simple task when Stutz told Hill to imagine you were holding on to something you’re afraid to lose. Like hanging off a tree branch. Then imagine letting go and falling but not fast, gently. He then says you now fall softly into the sun and your body becomes the rays. Your physical body is now gone but you are still part of something more.

This one I struggled to comprehend as when he said to imagine something you’re scared to lose, I pictured my children. I couldn’t help it as they are the thing that I would be terrified to lose most. This tool didn’t help me here as without my children, I don’t believe I would still be me. Perhaps I could try it with other things – my job, my home, etc and have a different outcome. Who knows. Maybe I’ll try again later.

In conclusion

This film is a beautiful picture of human relations. It’s a deep insight into the power of therapy but also about the intimacy of a therapist and a patient who have a deep level of love and respect for each other.

There are moments of genuine laughter and smiles from the people I’m watching and myself. There are also touching moments of deep vulnerability between both therapist and patient. I looked into myself a lot during the film and I’m grateful for seeing it. All in all, I genuinely found it beautiful with some extremely useful tools that could help anyone approach life a little differently.

“Responsibility is accepting that you are the cause and the solution of the matter.”

Anonymous

I remember the moment I eventually realised I was mentally unwell. I had
shouted at my son who was only 2yrs old at the time. When I say “shouted” it
was not the shout a scared parent bellows when they fear for their child’s
life. He didn’t run into traffic. He had made a mess and I really shouted at
him.

I do remember being emotionally exhausted. I had left him with his sister
playing in their bedroom while I was cleaning the house.

I can’t even remember what mess he had made exactly, which is why I feel
even more guilty thinking about it. It wasn’t a big enough deal to stay in my
head but I do remember my reaction which was most likely not in-line with the
act itself.

This was certainly a clue that I was unwell. My reaction to a lot of things
were not in proportion to the events themselves.

I realised I was shouting a lot. It was worse at home towards my child and
his dad. The guilt I felt about leaving my daughter when she wasn’t even one
was enough to keep her out of the firing line.

I didn’t shout at my friends or the rest of my family. I held all my anger
deep down when talking to them. Telling them I was tired but hiding how unhappy
I really was.

At work I wasn’t shouting either. Maybe I knew I would have probably lost my
job. However, I was rarely in a good mood. I laughed with my colleagues over
bad jokes and joined in conversations. From their perspective, I’m not sure I
made it obvious that anything unusual was going on. They probably and naturally
assumed I was ok if just a little moody.

This is why mental illness can be tricky. Sometimes the person going through
it doesn’t even realise it’s happening and when they do, it is possible to hide
it from most of the people around them.

Many people who have a mental illness without diagnosis will not accept
responsibility for their actions as their actions are just a consequence for
something else.

Unfortunately, those who have a diagnosis but haven’t been given the right
support, whether that’s access to therapy or medication, still continue to
evade responsibility. It can become very easy to blame mental illness for your
behaviour.

However, if you have that diagnosis, it soon becomes your responsibility to
ensure you do everything you can to improve it.

Sadly our NHS services do not have enough funding for physical healing but
you know if you go to A&E with a broken leg, it’s highly likely you will
not leave that hospital until you’ve had it confirmed with an X-ray and most
likely had your leg put into a cast.

With mental illness however, a diagnosis isn’t always that straightforward.
Sometimes it is but the remedy, whether in medication or therapy, isn’t always
straightforward either.

However, once we’re aware we’re unwell, we not only have a responsibility to
ourselves but also those around us. Illness makes it difficult for us to
control the triggers that set us off, but we do need to work hard on how we
respond to them. Anyone who has experienced CBT will be aware of this. It’s all
about reframing the situation and not focussing too much on the bad.

There are people however who want to feel good but can’t. Ask for support but don’t get it. Want to recover and work really hard to get their life back on track but struggle. Keep talking. If you have no one willing to listen, try out any of the resources on this site. Someone is always willing to hear you out. 

Sometimes, its hard to know when we’re not well. Even when we’re being told. 

Thinking back, I have a sister who is two years younger than me. We grew up
together and loved each other’s company until we were teens. I think it’s fair
to say we were not friends throughout these years. However, once we came back
together over 15yrs ago in our 20s, we soon became good friends – best friends
even. We’ve only ever had disagreements but not exactly an argument.

Not too long after me shouting at my son, we fell out. She was genuinely
worried about me as she could see the difference. She knew the real and well me – 
even if I was still in denial.

We fell out as I tried to cover up my pain and was frustrated that she
didn’t believe me. I was angry that she could see what I had unknowingly spent
so long trying to hide.

The fear of falling out with my best friend and the person who knew me
better than anyone else was too much to take. Within days I had explained why I
was so upset and apologised. And although she accepted it, I could see she
wasn’t convinced by the story I was telling us both.

After recovering from mental illness I was finally able to see all of the
ways in which it had affected me. How it had affected my relationships and how
it changed the dynamic of my family.

The minute I started to get better, I was able to take responsibility for my
own actions and behaviour. I made a lot more apologies than I normally would have.

Even when arguments happen or can happen, I am in much more control of my
own reaction to it. It’s easy to state you can’t control how someone behaves
but you are in complete control of how you respond and react to it – even if it
takes some serious work.

The moment you realise you can reframe everything, it gets easier.

Recently, I met an incredible man called James Brett. I won’t give you too
much backstory as if you get the chance to see this man speak, I urge you to
take that offer. James has had one of the most difficult starts in life, abuse,
the suicide of his own mother, crime and cancer to name but a few. However, this
man takes all of the anger he feels for the wrong in his life and focuses that
energy in a really positive way. Check out his website to see what I mean.

He talked about feeling lucky to be alive. He takes solace in the moments he
has to wait. He doesn’t allow the stresses of life to get the better of him.

My life has been easy in comparison to James’.

I know, its all relevant, however, if a man who has gone through so much darkness can find light, I’m sure there is hope for us all. If we have hope, we have something.

Take responsibility for what you do. If you can’t, take responsibility for
how you handle it and always be accountable for what happens next.  

“If you can’t find your purpose, figure out your passion. For your passion will lead you right to your purpose.”

Bishop T.D. Jakes

Without purpose

Three years ago My life was only divided into two parts.

Motherhood and work.

This was certainly not in equal measures.

At home, I was the main care giver on the weekends while their dad did most of the care in the week. On weekdays, I dressed my son and took him to nursery while my partner dressed our daughter before she was picked up by family.

I then travelled two hours by train to work where I muddled through before getting home just in time to kiss them both goodnight.

On weekends I did the majority of the childcare. I also did most of the cooking, housework and laundry. I didn’t feel burnout as I was permanently burnt out.

After the birth of my son, I struggled with PND and although unlike most media suggests, I had a brilliant relationship with my son. My PND affected my relationship with his dad.

As things were not great at home, after getting back to work, I threw myself back into my job and was promoted to direct and lead the entire team.

I thought things were starting to pick up again and then I became pregnant with my daughter.

Mat leave with both kids was tiring but I didn’t miss work in the slightest. I got to spend all day with both children and I threw myself back into motherhood.

During this time, we had moved out of London and into the centre of Kent.

Finding friends in a new place is tough. Finding friends on mat leave is almost impossible.

Therefore, I didn’t do anything for myself in this time. I can count on one hand the amount of times I asked family to babysit and as I had no friends local to me, I didn’t really need to.

It was a lonely time. But I ignored it. I just focussed on the children and didn’t even notice how much of myself I was losing.

Because of this guilt I didn’t really push myself at work. I felt as though I didn’t deserve a promotion and told myself I’m at the highest level I need to get to as anything more would result in more time away from my family, and the guilt I felt wouldn’t allow for that.

When I went back to work, the PND crept back in. This time I felt guilty. Guilty for being at work and two hours away from my children but I also felt guilt when I left the office on time to ensure I got home in time to relive the family who were watching my children while I worked.

I did feel moments of joy through my children but I found very little joy for myself.

Realising my purpose

However, then I trained as a mental health first aider. This training changed me. I wanted to learn more about mental health and illness and started to research it.

Lockdown enabled me to put my training into practice – supporting the wellbeing of my colleagues through the pandemic.

I realised I could learn so much more about mental health and illness and create more support at work. So, in the day, I did what I was essentially paid for, marketing the agency and helping to run the new business pitches.

In the evenings however, once I’d spent time with my children and put them to bed, I started writing well-being material to share with and support my colleagues.

I lead my agency’s mental health team and encouraged more to train as first aiders. I created a community of passionate people who could find purpose in their roles and become better colleagues, line managers and leaders.

I found my true passion.

After lockdown ended and my content was shared across our parent company and sister agencies I realised I was pretty good at it and it felt good.

I became the mental health lead for the group and have just been promoted to marketing, wellbeing and DEI Partner. Essentially the only member in my agency to be paid to protect the culture and health of my colleagues.

After an incredible experience training with TMA last week, I learned that in order to find my true purpose, I need to do something that sets my soul on fire and, if can get paid for it, even better.

Helping people sets my soul on fire.

I’m now training for a level three diploma in health and wellness consultancy with a plan to do a intro to psychotherapy in the new year.

I would do it all right now but I’m aware of my own constraints and the potential of burn out. I can’t afford to quit my day job and my new role proves that this newfound skillset has a need.

Thanks to finding my own purpose, I now have a board level position in my company. This confidence enabled me to become one of 30 marketing professionals selected for a once in a lifetime training and mentoring opportunity with TMA. And to top it off, I am studying to be a consultant in an area I love.

On the side, I am also still working pro bono for a mental health charity, writing this blog to encourage people that it is ok to talk about mental illness, and finally and, in no means least, I am also a mother, and a bloody good one at that, to my two beautiful children.

Three years ago I would have never congratulated myself. I wouldn’t praise my achievements or celebrate my own success.

However, it’s perfectly ok to back yourself. We can be our own worst enemies at times. Finding our purpose and doing things that make us happy can create a huge ripple effect with those around us.

If you can, find something that sets your soul on fire. It may just save you from yourself.

“We judge ourselves by our own intentions.

We judge others by their behaviour”

Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst

Did you know in Psychology, there is something called ‘The Mirror Effect’? Essentially, it’s about walking in someone else’s shoes, or seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. Therapists regularly mirror body language and facial expressions in sessions with patients to put them at ease and encourage them to open up.

I’ve just experienced the power of mirroring on a leadership programme. On day one of the programme, 30 strangers stood awkwardly in a room and had to create a beat using musical instruments. None of us were musicians! This in itself, allowed us to laugh together at the awkwardness we were all silently facing. We did a few different sessions throughout the day and ate dinner together that night sharing little bits of the information we were happy for strangers to know.

On day two however, everything changed.

We were split into 3 teams of ten while our various speakers told us we were going to get to know each other. Now, we had already told each other our names, job titles and a sticky fact about us – mine was one I use every time this question comes up. Anyone from the corporate world will recognise the question instantly and usually have one or two facts about themselves up their sleeve just in case. This is usually to bring a little of our personalities into the space and helps us share something that makes us sound more interesting, knowledgeable, lucky, privileged etc.

The one I always use is a safe bet. When I was about 8years old I learned to say the alphabet backwards. I can do it in around 6 seconds. It comes in really handy… none of the time. It doesn’t give away anything about my personality, my childhood or my personal life. It’s pretty low risk choice and normally when I share, I’m asked to prove it almost instantly.

However, THIS ‘getting to know each other’ session was something completely different…

Our trainer started to talk about her childhood, her family. The relationship she had with her parents, good and bad. She talked about the tragedy and pain she went through when she was younger and the mistakes she made in her teens and early twenties. She talked about the lessons she learnt, how she met her husband and about details about her relationship with her three daughters. She talked about becoming a mother, the things she regretted and the things that changed her forever. She talked through her own tears when things she brought up still held pain for her and laughed at the things that brought her joy. By the end of her 15min intro we were all dumbfounded. I felt like I knew this woman better than some of my own family.

And then it was our turn…

There was something magical that happened in those few hours. I cried through the tears of others sharing their stories – so much so in fact that I didn’t really cry through my own – not sure there were many tears left as I went 6^th out of the 10.

However, the vulnerability of the people in that room allowed me to open up more than I ever could have planned. I said things out loud that I had never said before in my life. I’ve always thought I was an open book but there were parts of me that even I held back from me, my friends, my family. My secrets. My lessons. My mistakes. These nine strangers and I now knew some of the most intimate things about each other. Things we’d kept to ourselves our whole lives.

It was the most powerful group therapy session I’d ever had – Not that I’ve ever had group therapy before. Sharing my own story was cathartic and liberating. It was freeing and pulling off that mask to show who you really are enabled me to build soild relationships and friendships throughout the week. I no longer had to play a role. A role I thought others wanted to see. A role that was exhausting to stick to. No, now I was able to be my true self. The real me. Warts and all.

Hearing the stories of these people, people I had only met 24hours before, created bonds that will now be very tough to break. We were together a total of five days in that hotel in the middle of beautiful countryside outside of London and I have never experienced connections like that happen so quickly. I’ve never felt anything so powerful in my entire life.

The training we were on was part of a wider scholarship programme for The Marketing Acdemy. This part of the training was from a programme called The Living Leader and was created to help us all become brilliant leaders. The strategy behind it was pretty straight forward… Revealing ourselves and allowing people around us to learn about us, what makes us tick, what can trigger us and keep us awake at night, enables our teams to work better with us. It also gives them the opportunity to open up and share their stories ensuing that we enable them to play to their key strengths, find good working patterns and truly understand the people we rely on professionally.

This got me thinking about why I believe some people find it easier to support others on their mental health journey. If people are willing to show their own vulnerability, this in turn can make others feel comfortable and therefore open up. They don’t need our life stories, but by being open about our own journey with mental illness can enable them to freely talk about their own. Without judgement.

If you want to have a good understanding of the people around you, tell them about you. Tell them everything that has created the you that you are. Hopefully in turn, they will mirror you and share their story too.

And for those of you who are concerned someone you know is hiding something painful and suffering in silence, this could hopefully be the breakthrough you need and allow them the opportunity to ask for help.

Thanks to feeling comfortable to be vulnerable, I now have 29 incredible friends, 30 odd if you include the incredible speakers we met on this course. All of which showed their own vulnerability as part of their own storytelling. It was incredibly refreshing to witness, and experience and I honestly believe the last five days have changed me forever.

If we get the opportunity to understand the people around us, we’ll understand more about the intentions behind their behaviour and this in turn will enable us to see the world through their eyes.

Mental illness can do so much damage to our self-confidence.

As is our confidence, so is our capacity.

William Hazlitt

While suffering with perinatal depression, I struggled with really bad imposter syndrome. It affected almost every aspect of my life. I never felt I was good at anything. I didn’t think I was a good mum. The thought of taking both children out on my own terrified me. I panicked that the kids would misbehave and I’d be judged by anyone who saw me. This also affected my working life too. I didn’t think I was that good at work because I was a mum, I had to leave on time and had to leave the late nights to the rest of my team. This then stopped me from pushing myself hard at all. I felt like I could only just cope with what I had.

Now, what I had wasn’t always easy. I had a full-time job managing a team of five in a pretty big media agency, two very young children, one in nursery, one in reception. It didn’t help that I was commuting for two hours a day, four days a week in order to do that job. I was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. Looking back I did so much with my children. I was by their side as often as I could be. I could count on one hand the number of times I actually asked for a baby sitter. I didn’t want to give that time up. However, the guilt I put on my own shoulders happened for being sad that I still didn’t deserve a night out.

Now don’t get me wrong – I love my job. I love the agency, the people, the work itself, and my team. I feel lucky that we all collectively worked really hard, and we enjoyed it together.

However, when lockdown hit, not seeing the people I worked with every day was tough. I spent more time with these people than I did my own family and felt strange to see them only on screen – something we hadn’t really done before.

I found it hard to not have that direct feedback I would have received at our desks. Calling someone or waiting to be called felt like an interruption. I didn’t realise how much I had relied on face-time with my team especially with my imposter syndrome playing hardball.

Lockdown however meant no commute. I gained back four hours, four days a week. I had 16 hours back giving me more time to manage my house and more time to enjoy with my children. This in turn meant that the guilt started to ease and ultimately resulted in me now finding more time for me.

With the loss of the commute however, I started to put on weight. I was walking from my bedroom to downstairs and that was the only exercise I got. However, with conversations now on screen, I had to constantly look at my own face. I didn’t like what I was seeing.

Four months into lockdown, I decided I needed a change.

My partner had converted our basement into a make-shift gym, so I started exercising. I tried yoga, weight training and eventually found my passion again for dance. Every day I would spend my lunch hour working up a sweat, dancing to my favourite music and 8 months later, I was 3 stone lighter and ready to take on the world. My imposter syndrome started to slip away.

My physical health improved my mental state. (read more in my post entitled How Getting Physical helped my head to heal). This in turn enabled me to rediscover the person I was before I became a mum and identity I had lost almost completely since the birth of my son.

Spending more time with my children in the week, enabled me to go away for the occasional evening or weekend. Concerts, dinners and musicals – all guilt free.

My newfound confidence allowed me to start pushing for more at work. More areas that filled my passion points – wellbeing, mental health and D&I. I wanted to stay in my agency but work on things that truly gave me job satisfaction around my already very fond love of marketing.

I asked for more and invited myself to meetings, groups, and teams that I had no part of previously. I wanted to create a positive change and I was reading more around subjects that would help me get there.

Just before Christmas, I was contacted by a young entrepreneur who had founded a charity initiative to create a large mental health event in the UK. He was looking for support and I jumped at the chance. Not only was his idea something I already felt passionate about, but I knew my years of experience could really help him. Something I truly think I wouldn’t have believed in myself enough for previously.

Supporting the Be;Live initiative then pushed me to launch my own dreams. I started writing for Insanely Normal just after Christmas and went live with the blog on 3^rd Feb – the UK’s Time to Talk Day. I wanted to create hope for others struggling with their own mental health and create a space for those who had managed and recovered and were willing to share their experiences.

So now I wake up at 6am, dress my children for school & nursery. Take one or both to their various drops offs and head home to start work. On the days I work from home, I also run out in the middle of the day to pick up my son from school. I take him to appointments or his friends’ houses before rushing back to jump on my next call. I work harder in the day than I ever did before and I do this to ensure I get a couple of good quality hours with my children in the evenings. Cooking for them, reading to them and putting them to bed almost every night.

I then spend most evenings working on my passion projects whether its content for the event or copywriting my posts. In fact, I am busier now than I’ve ever been. But I am happier. I am full of ideas. I want to learn more. I have so much more to do, and I am not going to stop until I feel satisfied. I am, for the first time in years, truly confident and back to my old self.

Very recently I was offered an incredible opportunity at work. A prestigious scholarship via The Marketing Academy. Something I had been supporting my colleagues to obtain over the years and for the first time, I was one of the chosen few. If this had been offered to me two years ago, I would have been terrified. Made an excuse as to why I couldn’t commit to it and moved on swiftly.

However I was excited. Thrilled. Ready. Hopefull.

For the first time in a long time, I honestly believe I’ve not been happier and believe I think I can make it. I want to be challenged, I want to expand my horizons and meet new people. I want to learn from them and use that knowledge to continue the changes I want to implement. I want to back myself, I want to move out of my comfort zone. I am ready to be pushed.

If I don’t get in, I’ll be disappointed but not disheartened. I entered myself into an award for the work I’ve done around mental health and just heard I was shortlisted. I am already over the moon. However, I also believe nothing will stop me on my mission to better myself. I am definitely ready to make an impact and I am very aware this newfound confidence is behind it.

This is my time.