The 3 Most Important Lessons The Pandemic Has Taught Me

As we start to slowly ease out of lockdown I’m taking these moments to reflect on what these past few months have taught me. There has been so much to learn from. I’m going to share my experience of the last three months in all its vulnerable authenticity so that you can see what I learned and why I wanted to share.

My story

As some of you may know already, I was overseas in Singapore for a while last year (which was incredible) and I returned to the UK in December – I feel so grateful to have had that experience prior to such a severe global travel restriction.

I was very lucky to gain a new contract job based in London with a January start date. For those of you who don’t know, I am getting married this year (I say woop, my bank balance says blergh!), so consistency in contracts and finances is more important than ever!

I worked in this role successfully for just 3 months when the beast we know as Coronavirus swooped in and turned everyone’s world upside down and inside out. It was a shock for me because as a result of this, I was made redundant with immediate effect. This effected my world more than it usually would because I had planned my finances down to the last penny due to the wedding being this year. There also seemed to be a massive recruitment freeze and on top of all of this my partner’s wage was also unexpectedly reduced by 20% as well.

Like so many others, suddenly, and almost overnight we had gone from being able to live comfortably and afford our wedding later this year to pondering over how we were going to pay for groceries and afford the rest of our wedding that was already half paid for and of which we were of course tied in to.

A few emotions kicked in during these moments. Fear, desperation and anger followed very quickly by resilience and a burning drive to survive this and put up the middle finger to this pandemic.

I spent a good few days in the aftermath of the shock of all of this thinking innovatively and creatively. In fact, within an hour of my losing my job I was already applying for more opportunities online and reaching out to connections. I felt an overwhelming sense of panic – for anyone who has got married or is getting married, you know the cost of venues; these are in the thousands not hundreds. I had to find a solution to this problem.

Although I was applying for different contracts, there wasn’t much in the way of new opportunities around me to apply for much more. The world was going into shutdown and I felt like I was getting sucked down with it. I knew I had all these large and committed upcoming outgoings but no way to pay them.

To make matters worse (yep, now’s the time to get your violins out!) I was not eligible for any government financial support as my partner was still earning a wage and we live together. My previous employer took the decision to not Furlough me so despite giving my best efforts to that role I was given no support from the company even though this was at minimal risk and cost to themselves. Their reasoning was it was too high a risk to them when they were losing nearly all their revenue for the foreseeable future. For me it was the minimum they could do so I wasn’t on the bread line – there was a reason the government created this scheme to help protect people’s jobs – it felt beyond selfish that they were not honouring it in any way.

I remember I applied for jobs at supermarkets just to get by and got generic rejection letters from most of them as they were full! I felt like no one was giving me a branch.

It was a really weird time for me as I am usually pretty organised with money. I just felt like we were spiralling down a black hole. Panic buying became the new normal for people and the supermarket shelves were empty, no one knew what the virus was, how it was transmitted or what we should or shouldn’t be doing. It was mass hysteria and confusion multiplying by the day and breeding across social media platforms, fed by people’s curiosity and fear.

Reasons to stay positive

It was in this moment of knee jerk reactions all around me that some networking from the previous year paid off. A contract landed in my inbox and I was hired to work on a series about Frontline Workers during the pandemic. It was a 6 week miracle shining the light on some amazing people doing some really amazing things. I couldn’t have wished for a more productive and inspiring contract to be working from home on during these strange times!

Shortly after this I landed another contract starting in June which was again down to some hard work paying off.

Luckily, due to a lot of my coaching sessions and workshops being held online, it hasn’t affected my capacity to carry out sessions too much either. You can find out more information about the sort of coaching packages I offer here. Do get in touch for more information about what the different coaching packages will entail.

Learning something new

Upon reflection of all these strange turns of events, I can say the three most important takeaways for me have been:

1.       Never put off for tomorrow, what you can achieve today

The sentiment of this is something that I normally carry with me as I do get a sense of satisfaction in being proactive and getting things ticked off my To Do list. But it was so deeply heightened by the pandemic. I’m so glad I got to travel and get wedding paperwork sorted before there was a global shut down for a couple of months.

2.       This too shall pass

Another saying that I always keep close to my heart but that was cemented during the coronavirus outbreak. Every state is temporary. The desperation I felt as I lost work and all of the doors seemed to close around me was soon over in just a matter of weeks. If I had known this was going to be the outcome, how differently would I have spent those weeks? Instead of feeling fear and anger what would I felt instead? How much more productive and enjoyable would those two weeks of my life have been? As Dalia Lama said:

“Inner peace is the key: if you have inner peace, the external problems do not affect your deep sense of peace and tranquillity… without this inner peace, no matter how comfortable your life is materially, you may still be worried, disturbed, or unhappy because of circumstances.”

3.       Resilience

Resilience has been one of the most powerful and useful emotional responses I ever learned. It’s so important to remain grounded in this very temporary world. I think it’s all too easy for all of us to become complacent and think that our lives will continue on the trajectory we’ve paved for ourselves. But I think it’s all too easy to forget that sometimes it won’t, sometimes, overnight, something may happen and our world will turn upside down and we have to learn to cope with that. To adapt to that and to not let that consume our entire being.

Self-care is extremely important in maintaining resilience and a level head during hard times. You can read more about tips for managing self-care in my early blog this year here

Afterword

One of the most inspiring things that I noticed during this pandemic was how adaptable and truly versatile we all are as a species. Whilst I was catching my breath, and scrambling to keep my head above water, all around me on social media people were popping up with innovative ideas on virtual everything from PTs (shout out to Seven Movement) to House Parties to Quizzes to those who could working from home. It happened within literally the space of one week and it was truly inspiring and overwhelming to see.  I really enjoyed reading tips from Olivia in her blog What Olivia Did here it is reassuring to know that whilst we are all going through different things, we truly are all in this together.

I think it’s safe to say we will return to some sense of normality, but I know there’s a lot of the old normal I’d like to leave behind. Here’s to a new era of innovative thinkers! Let’s have a drink to this new chapter (when the pubs open of course!)

Winning Tactics For SUCCESS

What is success?

Success can mean different things to different people. For some it’s money, for others it’s family, for other people it may be status or assets. So in order to be successful you first need to establish exactly what that means for you.

I recommend writing it down because then it becomes more real, you can stick it up on your wall somewhere where you will see it every day so you are constantly reminded what success means for you.

For me personally, success is 360° contentment. What do I mean by that? I mean that I believe true success comes from a healthy mind, body, spirit and outlook. When one of these factors are out of sync I believe it leads to unhappiness and unfulfillment. Unhappiness and unfulfillment may get in the way of you reaching your true potential and in turn prevent you from becoming successful.

A healthy mind

For me, mindset is everything. Looking after your mind is laying the foundation for your success. It’s making sure that you have balance within your mind. So you are practicing mindfulness through meditation, breath work, and being present.

It’s about living in the moment so instead of multitasking in everything you do; you’re actively trying to think about just one task at a time in the moment you are doing it. Cleaning your teeth you are thinking about your teeth rather than tomorrow night’s dinner and so on.

A healthy mind also requires positivity. The mind loves to focus on the negative; it’s drawn to it in fact. In order to maintain a healthy mind, we need to actively seek out the positivity and repeat those positive mantras so that we are attracting positivity into our lives rather than negativity.

Positive people attract positive people. Positive thoughts attract positive thoughts. It’s the law of attraction.

A healthy body

In order to take care of other people and tasks such as work and dependants, first we need to look after ourselves. We need to take care of our bodies which function like machines. Food is the fuel. We need to be making sure we are eating a healthy balanced nutritional diet and taking regular daily exercise. This is interlinked with maintaining a healthy mind because a good workout at the gym is proven to reduce stress and what does reduced or eliminated stress give us? A healthy mind. The health and safety announcement on an airplane advises you to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. We need to apply this to life, first we take care of ourselves so that we can be strong and dependable for other people.

A healthy spirit

I know some of you may be thinking well what’s a healthy spirit? Sounds like airy, fairy nonsense? Well sure, but I think we can all relate to a time when we’ve walked into a room and the energy in there is so low that if we’ve been in a great mood, it’s instantly changed our state from positive to heavy and down or we may even start to feel negative. Or, there’s that one person in the office who no matter what you talk to them about they find the negative to moan about and it instantly brings your mood down.

This is your spirit. You want to attract positivity, wealth and health into your life and you do this by living positively. Having a healthy, happy spirit. It’s about having good energy and passing on positive vibes. So if you have a bad experience happen to you, reflect upon the learning from that negative experience and take away the positive from it. There is a positive to all bad situations if you fight to look hard enough. And it is a fight, life is HARD, there’s no denying it, but the positivity is truly there if you want to see it. One of my favourite quotes of all time is by Roald Dahl:

“Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”

I’ve lived my life by this little mantra. It’s so true – there is magic and positivity everywhere – it’s just sometimes harder to find or see it. Sometimes negativity clouds our vision. Sometimes it’s just easier to be cynical and choose to let our negative beliefs limit us.

A healthy outlook

For me a healthy outlook is one that recognises what is happening but chooses to find the positivity, learning and development from every situation. This isn’t always easy either, but it is always possible. It is important to acknowledge feelings of hurt, anger, upset, despair – sometimes things do feel unfair. But once we’ve taken as much time as we need to feel that pain/frustration or anger we need to then learn and apply to our lives the lesson from it. Life repeats patterns to teach us lessons, only when we apply our learning do these negative patterns or cycles stop occurring.

Stats and Facts

For those of you who believe the proof is in the science – please click here and let me refer you to this article showing various studies that support the majority of what I mention above. Furthermore, click here for an article exploring the science behind the law of attraction – there’s also much more available on the internet about this – so don’t listen to me! Explore your own research!

Wishing you positivity in abundance and I hope you too can live a successful life by applying the 360° approach.

COACHING Is Crucial To Your Business. Learn Why!

Coaching is an essential tool for achieving business goals

A coach will come into a business with a fresh set of eyes and an objective point of view. They will be able to spot key trends and problems that maybe hadn’t previously been identified and come up with solutions and strategies to help you rectify these areas.

They provide focus whilst remaining confidential. They actively listen and have sound judgment without judging. Asking open ended, clarifying or inviting questions to draw out the answers that may otherwise lie buried.

They identify and work with a businesses KPIs so that employees are meeting them and if not, they are providing strategies and goals for leaders to implement within a team so that KPIs will be met.

Coaching is important for employee professional development

Business coaching typically includes exercises around personality and leadership style, and empowers the individual to better understand themselves.

In the world of work, you’ll be introduced to many different personality types and leadership characteristics, so business coaching is a great way to better hone how to work with diverse types of people, too. This will benefit the retention of quality employees and cut down costs on recruitment and training.

Investing in people helps them perform better

A coach will help leaders to combat the unconscious incompetence that may be a blind spot in a business. A business coach asks poignant questions that challenge a leader to think critically about the business and objectives for the business. They can then apply this knowledge to their team to maximise their overall team output.

Investing in an employee’s professional development is proven to retain staff.

@Forbes mention in their brilliant article about making strategic investments in employee development that when you strategically invest in employees, you attract and keep all the best candidates, and you also build a strong work culture unafraid of innovation, change, failure and success.

In summary

• Coaching improves employee Wellbeing

• Increases staff engagement

• Accelerates productivity

• Boosts Morale

• Organizations with high employee engagement outperform those with low employee engagement by 202% (Business2Community)

• Employees who feel their voice is heard at work are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work (Salesforce)

The truth about designing your life

I recently set up the Facebook Group Design Your Life Global to start to build a community of like-minded people. I wanted to set up a positive environment for people to share ideas, tips and knowledge for designing a life that you want to live. A life where you are living each day to the full and not merely existing to pay the bills. I want to spread the happiness I have found in doing what I love to other people.

So, if you’re reading this, and you fancy joining in, please click “join” to be a part of the journey.

What does “Design Your Life” mean?

I realised that being part of a coaching community, I have quite an in depth knowledge and awareness for a lot of buzzwords that are trendy on the scene at the moment such as wellness, mindfulness, owning your life, peak performance and so on.

But I want to explore the meaning for anyone who doesn’t understand – it is a bit of an odd concept because it’s assuming you don’t already have some kind of ownership over your life, when of course, you do right?

Well, let’s put it this way. Do you want to be doing the job you are currently doing? Do you enjoy your daily commute? Do you socialise with people who bring you joy and give you energy? Are you in the best health that you can be at the moment? Are you working towards small, medium and large life focuses or goals to help improve your overall health and wellbeing? If you answered NO to any one of these questions. You have not designed your own life. This nicely brings me on to my next point…

How do I “design my life”?

Designing your life requires honesty, bravery, commitment and dedication from you. It’s hard, but the amazing reward is, it’s possible to live a fulfilling life that makes you truly happy. It isn’t always changing what you’re doing, it’s sometimes about changing your own mind-set towards what you’re doing and the way you’re doing it.

If you’re not in the best shape at the moment, it’s about thinking, what small steps can I, but also WILL I take to change that. If you hate going to the gym, but say to yourself, I need to go 5 times a week to get fitter. You’re not going to keep to those goals. So don’t set them, if you hate the gym and feel rubbish after going, don’t set that as a fitness goal. Focus on what you do enjoy, it may be going for a run in a local park, or doing a dance class, or maybe yoga or pilates. It may be meeting up and going dancing with friends, think about actions you WILL take.

If you’re not enjoying the career or job you’ve chosen to be in – why is that? When you’re in control of your own life, you make choices to do things don’t you? If you’re not happy, it’s simply because that’s the way you’ve designed your life.

Trust me, every single person in this world has commitments, has bills to pay, dependants, we all have the same amount of hours in a day as each other. So if you’re not happy in your job it’s because you’ve designed your life that way, let’s be accountable here. Life is HARD!!! But it’s hard for everyone, you’re no different!

You have to ignore the excuses, and take responsibility. Only then, will you start to make the necessary changes to impact your life and propel you from a life of existence to a life of living and abundance! Once you choose to be accountable for your own life and mood you become unstoppable.

What do I mean by a life of existence? I mean choosing to stay in a job that makes you unhappy to pay for an apartment that you don’t like in a city that you’re not enjoying. To drown your sorrows every weekend with a bunch of people you don’t care about to distract you from the fact you’re living a life that doesn’t make you happy.

What do I mean by a life of living? I mean enjoying your daily commute because you’ve been given an amazing opportunity that you’re happy to go and fulfil, I mean doing a job that inspires you to grow and energises you to be the best version of you that can exist. I mean you’re socialising with people who inspire and motivate you so that you grow and develop as a person.

You can find out more about techniques for helping you to achieve the above in 1:1 coaching sessions with me – you can find more information on the Coaching Page on my website.

What will “designing my life” give me?

Designing your own life will give you FREEDOM. Whether that be financial freedom, freedom from society, freedom from negativity – it will set you free.

It will empower you to see the beauty that life has to offer and to enjoy the five days in between weekend number one and weekend number two.

It will stop you from wasting that precious gift of life that so many people are so ungrateful for. We were all blessed with life, to enjoy it, to develop, to learn and to grow. Most of all we were blessed with the ability to enjoy our lives and be happy – both emotional choices, both can be impacted by the negative environments we put ourselves in if we let them.

Everyone has off days, or uncontrollable shifts in circumstances. But there’s a famous saying by Stephen Covey and that is “feel the feeling, choose the response” and he discusses this in detail with various different diagrams in his book The 7 habits of highly successful people if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. But the point is, we are in control of how we react to every circumstance we are faced with, we all have a choice.

It’s time to take back control, own the excuses and enjoy the life we are blessed with.

How do I know anything about “designing my life” at all?

I’ve actually designed my life for the better. A very interesting thing happened to me recently.

In January, I had already decided I wanted to go to the gym a minimum of 5 times a week for this entire New Year. I’ve always gone to the gym, but to improve my overall fitness and wellbeing, I had now upped this to a 5 days a week minimum workout (#maximumgains)!

I also wanted to face my fears of creating video content and videos to promote my business on social media. It is so important to not hide behind your logo as an entrepreneur. People want to connect with you – so you need to be visible right!

Finally, I wanted to spend time getting to know and investing in new clients which meant various meetings, groups, phone calls and so forth.

Also in the New Year I was offered a very nice freelance contract for a decent amount of money (a sizeable amount considering it was just after the Christmas period). But, this freelance contract would have meant I couldn’t achieve my business goals for January and it meant I wouldn’t have easily have been able to keep my fitness goals either due to long hours over 5 weekdays and a very long commute.

So what did I do? Despite the fact I really could have used that money, I stuck to living my own life that I designed and I took January for me. Yes I’ve still worked, but I’ve worked on my terms allowing me to meet my business and fitness goals for this month.

So, February, what’s next?!! LET’S DO THIS

New Year, New You!

I’m not sure how I feel about this saying to be honest! It seems so overused and somewhat cliché. So this year I haven’t set a New Year’s Resolution as such. I’ve got various rules and habits that I live by and a recent event really influenced me to make a daily change in my own mindset which I would like to share:

A shift in mindset

There is a saying that to succeed you need a role model. On my coaching journey, I have many role models such as the famous Tony Robbins and another of my favourite inspirational leadership coaches Jean-Pierre De Villiers. JP was in London this week doing a speaking event for the first time in London in 2 years and I was very excited to go to it. I posted a video on my Instagram feed @bethinkcoaching about how excited I was. I wore a nice outfit and did my make-up nicely for it. I allowed enough time to get to the central London location which was the beautiful Bloomsbury Hotel and I was in an energised, happy mood because I’d had a really good work out and productive day earlier that day.

Now what happened was, when I got to the train station, my train was cancelled. Delaying me by half an hour which was in turn going to make me what I thought was about 15 mins late. For anyone that knows me, you’ll know that I HATE being late to anything let alone something I’m really passionate about. For me, lateness just gives the wrong message. I’m a performance coach, big on time management and value. I also see it as a sign of disrespect to turn up late to a presentation or talk or event, it’s distracting for the audience and just isn’t how I like to show up.

Knowing that I was going to be late for someone who was very influential in my coaching journey was unacceptable for me. I felt stressed and annoyed at the train company. I was also stressed because it would reflect badly for my business as well if I turned up late. So when the next train did finally arrive, I was in a terrible mood. All my positive energy had drained out of me. I had an unenjoyable journey into central London and then I ran…literally ran to the tube. I was conscious I was being rude to other people by running past them, but this was so important to me I had to show up! I had to commit!

When I finally got to the hotel, and found the meeting room for the event, a funny thing happened. They told me…don’t worry, you’re 45 minutes early. The event time was printed incorrectly on the ticket and everyone is early! Obviously, I was even more frustrated, but it taught me a valuable lesson which I will carry with me for the next 354 days…

What did I learn from this experience?

I already know this, but I learned that shit happens and that’s ok! It’s how you deal with it that matters. I also learned that NOTHING happens as a coincidence. Do I think it was a coincidence that the one day I was late (considering I’m rarely late!!) the time was wrong – NO…I think it was meant to teach the valuable lesson for me of 2019.

The lesson was NEVER let external factors dim your light! Let the negativity lie with the negativity because it isn’t something I need to let penetrate me and negativity shouldn’t dim your light either!

Wishing you all the best for this year ahead – to 2019 – a year of lessons, dreams and ACTION.

Is it too late for a career change?

‘Is it too late?’ The most common question I hear from my clients who want to change their career direction but have the ‘fear’. A lot of my clients fear that they are too old for a career change. They feel like they are too old to change what they have known for 10 -15 or more years.

Some of them have dependants and worry that it will be too difficult to change direction at this point in their lives. Other people are perhaps single parents. Maybe they are worried that they have learned a particular skill set and it will be hard to learn a new one. Maybe it has been 10 years or more since they last trained for a particular direction. Perhaps financial implications are blocking their vision.

You are never too old to do ANYTHING

The truth is, you are never too old to re-train and do something different. As human beings we are always learning, evolving and developing. The average employee spends a total of 82,068 hours working over their lifetime. That is a phenomenally large percentage of your life so it is important that you are doing something that you enjoy doing. It’s even better if you can do something that you are truly passionate about, that aligns with your own core values and beliefs.

@VeraWangGang Vera Wang did not design her first dress until age 40.

@SamuelLJackson landed his first big Hollywood part at age 43

@jk_rowling rose from a suicidal single parent at 28 to an internationally acclaimed bestselling author at 46.

There are many ways to achieve a new direction; from part-time courses, to home-study courses as well as bursaries and funding that may also be available. The resources are plentiful.

So where do you even start?

As a personal performance and career coach, this is the most important part for me. The start. It is a person identifying and acknowledging that they aren’t happy doing what they are currently doing in the way that they are doing it in order to make money and seeking help in order to make a positive change in their lives. It is TOO easy to be complacent in life. Do you want to reflect in 10 years’ time on a life where you hated 5 days a week but lived for the weekends and 20 days holiday?

I work with my clients in various ways. This may begin with a vision board of what a client is passionate about, or if they are not sure what they are passionate about it might be brainstorming ideas to help them find their passion that lies within them using a variety of different coaching tools.

We can then work together as coach and client to discover which career those values, passions and beliefs are most suited to so that a client is being fulfilled. For example if your passion is being precise and working with data and spreadsheets, you may not be happiest working in a job that is mainly people orientated or customer facing.

It is NEVER too late to make a change for the better. You are never too old to change your direction in order to improve your life. I’m not going to say that it won’t be challenging, because it will be. I’m not going to say it will be without its struggles and hard work. But there is always a solution to every single problem and block that we face. Problems and solutions are like Yin and Yang. They come as a pair like positive and negative magnetism. As humans, we just always find it easier to identify the problems. But, change your mind set, start looking at the solutions first. What can you do in order to facilitate a career that will not only pay your rent or your mortgage but will fulfil your hopes and dreams in life?

Start with Step 1. It sounds silly, but Step 1 is the start.

The strength to make a cup of tea

I posted a post recently on my Instagram page about strength. It actually really resonated with me. It made me think about all the people who are silently suffering.

It also made me reflect upon the message I was trying to convey. I’m not sure if it was entirely clear from my Instagram post so I thought I would explore it further in my blog.

I don’t want my message to be misunderstood that I was glossing over tragedies and traumatic experiences and dancing the happy dance condoning pretending that everything is okay. Instead, what I was trying to say is that many people are going through horrific experiences, ones that you wouldn’t wish upon anyone and they are finding a way to keep going.

The inner strength and inner fire keeps burning within them and they use it to continue through their days.

I think it is all so very easy to become a victim to circumstance and to make excuses for why you cannot be what you wanted to be. The trauma or tragedy becomes the reason for our failure when instead, look how powerful that energy could be, if you turned that into a positive and made it part of your inner strength. Despite whatever has happened, you have still managed to turn it around, to be the best version of you that there can be. You have still managed to reach your version of success, whatever that may mean to you.

You may wonder why I’ve called this post “the strength to make a cup of tea”. It’s relevant because when a social worker tests an elderly person on independence and capability in their own home, one of the tasks that demonstrate their ability to be capable and independent, is whether they are able to take instructions to make a cup of tea, and successfully carry out the exercise. If they cannot, along with a few other factors, they may be required to leave their own home and go into residential care. So for an elderly person, suddenly making a cup of tea may require all the inner strength they have to prove that they can in fact remain independent.  

There are no limits in this world other than the ones we set ourselves. There are literally NO limits. When you think of it like that the world becomes an incredible place. I know the cynic out there will claim there are limits – what if they can’t afford it? Or they don’t have time, or it isn’t curable, or they’ve tried everything so far, or it’s genetic.

There is NOTHING stopping us, there is a solution to every single obstacle out there if you want to take the time, patience, energy, money to seek out that solution, I promise you it will be there. We are extremely powerful as a human race. If you don’t have the time…MAKE IT…every single being created on this earth has one thing in common 24 hours in EVERY SINGLE DAY. Find time. If you can’t afford it…find the money, generate more money. Think outside of the box. If you don’t have the skills, LEARN THEM, learn the craft. If you don’t have the energy – create it. Have you ever tried being miserable/lethargic whilst you are smiling, jogging on the spot with upbeat music on in the background? You can’t be lethargic, you have the power to change your own mental state. However, silly it may feel, give it a go…when you’re feeling low energy or low mood, go for a run and put some EDM music on at a volume that makes your heart sing and try to continue being in that low energy mood. You won’t be. Because you have physically changed your own mental state.

I think you may have got the message now that what I am saying is the only limiting factors are in our own minds. I’m not saying obstacles don’t exist, and I’m not saying we need to ignore our problems, I’m saying limitations we set ourselves get in the way of our solutions. Try turning the negatives into positives. Acknowledge the problem, feel the pain, find the solution. Yes, sometimes life sucks, but its sucks for everyone, you’re not special, it’s not always you, people have dealt with much worse and undoubtedly much better but it’s about using every single situation to help yourself grow. To help yourself evolve. To always be the best version of yourself that you can be NO MATTER WHAT.

To one person strength will be surviving cancer and to another person it will be being able to make a cup of tea. The subject matter is not as important as them being able to turn their personal traumas into undeniable, invincible and unbeatable inner strength.

NEVER. GIVE. UP.