Once upon a not-so-excellent time…

I was a practical, cynical, overachieving architecture graduate with a life that looked great from the outside.  But if I was honest with myself (which I usually wasn’t), I felt pretty numb and unfulfilled.

I lived in a constant state of indecision, people-pleasing, and accidentally snapping at my boyfriends.

Eggshells were mentioned.

I felt that I was missing a seriously crucial piece of the puzzle.

My pessimistic, numb self eventually got sick of my own bollocks and decided to try to sort that shit out. As an overachiever hamstrung by perfectionism, I knew a fair amount about succeeding at most things I put my mind to, but nothing about how to wake up feeling content.

Nor how to stop snapping and self-sabotaging my relationships. Nor how to work out what to do when I unexpectedly quit my career in architecture with no better plan.

It took a while for me to work out that putting my mind to the problem was the problem.

I spent years travelling the world – grumpily vacuuming my way around the Mediterranean on the superyacht of a Russian Billionaire… befriending a white guy called Black Jesus in Nicaragua…

Attempting to vegan myself into happiness at an ashram in the middle of Swedish nowhere. (Didn’t work. Though I did discover that lentils are not my friends.)

I’ve tried like buggery to piece together the life puzzle.

Cripes, I’ve done a lot of self development courses, and I have to say… much of it was utter bollocks. But some of it slid into my brain’s DMs and changed… well, everything really.

More on that over here: What to do when you feel like something is missing… and it’s not chocolate.

There’s a lot of self help out there, but my superpowers involve:

(A): Not being a dick about it.

—AKA being honest AF about the ridiculous pickles I get myself into so you can laugh about it with / at me…

And (B): (in Karen’s words) “making the complex so easy to understand and relate to” using self-deprecating laughs and gaspingly honest personal stories.

If you’re sceptical, as you should be, you could take my blog readers Katie, Laura, Suresh, Sara and Jaclyn’s words for it, because I glued a bunch of their emails together (there was much overlapping sentiment) in one lovely feat of shameless self-promotion:

“I always hold a bit of cynicism as to how ‘perfect’ and ‘figured out’ self-help authors really are. You don’t hide behind a pretence and people adore you for that.

I LOVE your blog posts, they’re bloody hilarious. It’s refreshing to get emails that make you laugh out loud. They make me feel so much better (the relief to know I’m not alone and crazy is incredible!)”

I’ve whisked together all the unconventional techniques that have changed my life, added a dash of sass, distilled them into a few online programs, and put them to the test with over 2,000 indecisive overachievers, many of whom also describe their experience as life changing.

Check out our free and paid programs over here.

Read more radically honest blog posts over here.