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I’m renowned among those who know me for my eclectic taste in music that’s driven by my absolute lack of any musical knowledge whatsoever.

Growing up my music education consisted of one Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) song – Fathers and Sons – a selection of old folk/ children’s songs that my dad could play on the guitar ¹, Michael Jackson’s Bad album and Big Fun, a favourite of my brother’s and the reason I was gobsmacked to learn Blame It On The Boogie was originally a Jackson Five song when I was in my 20s.²

In the early 2000s I made friends with a wonderful Scot with CF and we spent many nights chatting via text and IM ³. He also discovered that I had a dreadful taste in music and so he burned me a CD⁴ to help me discover more artists.

In having a clearout at home recently, I found the CD case again (he called his compilation album ‘Jaffa Cakes’, a shared passion of ours) but the CD appears to have been long lost. This morning I invested some time in re-creating the album’s track list on Spotify.

If I’ve learned anything about music since my friends and, most notably, my wife started educating me properly in my late-teens and early-20s, it’s the ability for it to transport you to a time and place instantly.

As I write this, I’m listening to the playlist and remembering the days when life was so different.

The last two years – essentially the whole of 2018 and 2019 – have been horrendous, and at times it has felt that any light at the end of the tunnel we saw was nothing but a train headed in our direction. But listening back to this reminds me just how far I’ve come in the intervening years.

It’s been a tough journey, with much grief and sadness along the way. But I’m alive and I’m able to do things I couldn’t have dreamed of when I first listened to this CD.

Anders, who authored this album, has managed to not only take me back but also to bring me forward to give me deep gratitude for the life I have, despite challenges I may be going through at the moment and those that lie ahead.

This post is for Anders, though he’ll never read it. He died not too long after I was given my second chance at life, but this playlist is always in my heart.

Fate doesn’t hang on a wrong or right choice, fortune depends on the tone of your voice.

Songs of Love, Divine Comedy – from the compilation album ‘Jaffa Cakes’

Welcome to a whole new decade! What the next ten years (and indeed the future in general) hold for any of us we’ll never be able to tell¹, except for the inevitable death and taxes², we can know only what we intend to do.

We equally know that intentions don’t quite stand up to the rigours of time; see only the lapse rate in gyms in February and March for confirmation.

The fantastic thing about Beginnings, though, is that they can take take place whenever you’d like. A resolution taken today – 1 January 2020 at the time of writing – is worth no more nor less than a resolution taken in a day, week, month or year.

The oft-dreaded onward march of Father Time is merely misunderstood. For each and every step he takes is another opportunity to Begin.

Our seconds feed into our minutes into our hours into our days into our months into our years into our decades and within each of those seconds comes the chance of a Beginning that wants only for the will to make it happen.

We should make our resolutions then not because of the pressure of the day, but because we want to Begin.

What we choose to start, of course, is something else besides.

It’s been more than a year since I last wrote here, and it’s been a turbulent twelve months at that. During the entire time I’ve tried to come back and write, to capture thoughts, to reconnect with my love of words and I haven’t made it happen.

It’s been a long time since I kept any kind of blog up-to-date and chances are I’m not going to be able to this time, either, but just in case – in case this time is different – I’m stepping out of the shadows once again to begin the process from scratch.

Not quite from scratch, clearly, because there’s a giant archive and a book, but this isn’t likely to be a lot like those things. I don’t know what it’s going to be like, I just know I need to start something creative, something that forces me to think a little, and to chase myself to get things down on paper, even if it’s just a log of my day.

We’ll see if this lasts, but I hope it does.

“In the end, we cannot become who we need to be by remaining who we are.“

Max De Pree, Leadership is an Art

I’m quite open online and offline about my story. Of course, I don’t share everything, just the bits that I think are important about where I’ve come from and what I’m doing now. I share because I know the impact personal stories can have in the world.

The difference in how these stories are told can be stark. Consider two charity events: one that has someone from a non-profit talking about how they make a difference, and one that has someone who has lived experience of the reason the charity exists. Without a doubt, the more effective stories are told by the people who’ve lived it.

It’s one of the main differences between the most recent moves in my career: World Vision UK and the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. At the Trust, we have the ability to put someone with CF in the room with people, to look into their eyes and connect with them on a personal level. My role at World Vision involved finding new and innovative ways of helping supporters walk hand in hand with the world’s poorest children, even when they’re thousands of miles apart and unable to tell their stories face-to-face.

People are understandably fond of quoting Gandhi:

Be the change you want to see in the world.

It’s a great philosophy to share, because it encourages you to tell your story to create the change you want to see. I stand as someone who shows the impact of organ donation and transplantation, as well as the possibility of hope for people living with CF who are struggling, for whom transplant may be the only option.

It doesn’t have to be that grandiose, though. Sharing your story – the change you want to see in the world – can be as simple as telling people how you think your job should be done differently, how your industry should change, how you personally want to change with fitness, ‘wellness’ or just stopping a bad habit and starting a new one.

Your stories matter because they have impact. A personal perspective is powerful, it’s a tool with remarkable influence if you’re willing and able to communicate your experience. Because no one has your unique perspective on the world, don’t be afraid to share it.

I’m creating a 10th-anniversary copy of Smile Through It, the book I self-published back in 2012¹. It’s going to be fully revised and updated – there were a disappointing number of spelling and grammatical errors in the current version (that’ll teach me to be my own copy editor) that I’ve been keen to correct for a while, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and correct the errors while expanding some of the copy.

In the process, I’ve realised how helpful writing the old blog was to me as a place to work through things. It was a space to talk through what I was experiencing and try to explain my own feelings and reactions as I went.

When I rejigged my online presence at the start of the year and shift my blogging over here I wanted to create a space for comments and lessons about storytelling and how it can be applied to everyday life or used in the right situations for significant effect. There will be posts like that here going forward, but what I’ve realised is that this needs to also be the space for me to give voice to the thoughts and experiences of life, things I shouldn’t shy away from.

I’ve learned over the years that being open can really help people (including me), and while there are obviously things in my life that I’ll not be able to share, I still need (and want) to be able to talk about things that matter to me and why.

So that’s what to expect from here on. A return to a space that I’ve found to encourage me to share things that are happening and explore my own mind, as well as notes from the books I’m reading ² and tips and techniques of storytelling. It’ll be something of a smörgåsbord of content, but that’s because that’s who I am as a writer and creator and that shouldn’t be hidden behind some half-hearted attempt at ‘branding’ myself as something specific. I hope you’ll read on.