I was talking to a friend recently who suggested that perhaps I should share my story um so here goes 31 years ago I left school to be a hairdresser it's all I ever wanted to be and um I went back and did my GCS part-time and I became a hairdressing Apprentice then at at 19 I opened my own salon and I really thought I'd made it in the world and my dream had come true and then unfortunately when I got to 24 I became um really ill and it transpired that that was an allergy to perm lotion and as a result of that I had to sell my salon uh which I did sold it to the girl who uh worked for me self-employed and um proud to say that 20 OD years on she's still running it and my niece still goes there to get her hair done and I went and got a 15h hour a week temporary contract as a cashier while I worked out what to do now um when your life dream has suddenly come to a crashing hold um so I started in the bank and very quickly I moved from being cashier to receptionist to to uh interviewer to branch manager then moved around uh working for the likes of Halifax egg Capital One barley RBS at West I moved across to the alaman um and eventually found myself um operating at Sea Suite in a footy 250 still deep down wondering whether or not anyone was going to find out that I was the impostor that I was the heading Apprentice who only had an mvq in hairdressing and didn't have anything else and now I'm approaching my 46th birthday I'm mother to a beautiful 2 and a half year old girl and realized that life really is in your gift and that if you just believe in yourself and are kind and keep trying there's nothing you can't do and I look at my nieces and nephews and and their friends and the amount of pressure that we put ourselves under to make the right choices and to Define our life and that everything that we do now is going to be perect minent and I realized that that's just not the case actually you can do whatever you want to do as long as you're kind and as long as you try hard and as long as you just keep moving forward then actually your goals are your own and if this helps somebody to just push on and do something different then perhaps it's worth sharing