Q1. Hello, can you please introduce yourself? Readers would love to know more about you.
I was born in Belfast, one of seven girls, and spent my early childhood there until we lost our family home during the Troubles in the 1970s and had to leave Northern Ireland.
Despite the unsettling backdrop of those years, I consider myself incredibly fortunate. I grew up with wonderfully loving, solid parents who gave us a strong sense of family, belonging and resilience. Those foundations have stayed with me throughout my life.
I’m now a mum to two wonderful women and an absolutely besotted Nana to eight grandchildren. Watching the people they’ve become, and the families they’re creating, is one of the greatest joys of my life.
I’ve been fortunate to live and work in different parts of the world, including Canada in the 1980s, and I’ve had a home in Spain for more than 25 years.
These days I live in Stamford, a beautiful historic stone town in England, home to Burghley House and the famous Burghley Horse Trials. It’s also been a backdrop for period dramas, including adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. I’ve lived in Cambridge too, another place I feel very fond of.
I’ve spent more than 30 years working as a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator, helping people navigate the complexities of working life, relationships and, perhaps most importantly, the conversations that shape both.
I’ve had what I consider to be a fabulous life. Not because it’s been without difficulty, far from it, but because it’s been full of people, experiences, learning and love.
I feel a particular affection for everywhere I’ve lived. Although, interestingly, I’ve always had this slightly contradictory feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere. I suspect that’s connected to losing our home so suddenly as a child. Perhaps some part of me has been exploring what it means to belong ever since.
Q2. What were the key challenges you faced while writing your book Stuff Nobody Taught You About Relationships?
Rather inconveniently, I developed a significant neck problem just as I was reaching the final stages of writing the book. There’s nothing quite like physical discomfort to test your commitment to finishing something!
The other challenge was knowing when to stop.
The more I wrote, the more subjects occurred to me. Relationships touch almost every aspect of our lives, from family and friendships to romantic partnerships, colleagues and the relationship we have with ourselves. There’s enough material to keep me writing for another decade.
I had to keep reminding myself that the purpose of the book wasn’t to tell readers everything I know or everything I’ve learned. It was to give them something accessible, useful and thought-provoking.
Sometimes the most difficult part of writing is deciding what to leave out.
Q3. What books or authors have most influenced your own writing?
It’s difficult to know precisely who has influenced your writing because I think we absorb something from almost everything we read.
David Whyte has certainly been a significant influence. When I first discovered his work, I was fascinated by the way he brought poetry, philosophy and the experience of being human into the world of work. He seemed to give language to things I had felt but hadn’t quite known how to articulate.
Margaret Wheatley is another. I must have read Turning to One Another ten times over the years.
Her belief in the importance of conversation, community and our capacity to make a difference through how we relate to one another resonates deeply with my own work.
I’m drawn to writers who invite us to look more closely at the ordinary, and often extraordinary, business of being human.
My fiction tastes are wonderfully inconsistent! I love Scandinavian and Nordic noir, but I also remember reading The Bridges of Madison County many years ago and buying copies for practically everyone I knew.
I don’t feel the need to be terribly loyal to a particular genre. A good book is a good book, and I love it when something makes me think, feel or see the world a little differently.
Q4. What’s your favourite spot to visit in your own country? And what makes it so special to you?
Northern Ireland will always have a very special place in my heart.
There’s something about returning to the places that hold your earliest memories. The coastline is particularly beautiful, and places such as Ballyholme Beach in Bangor evoke a wonderful sense of familiarity and connection.
I think when you’ve left somewhere under difficult circumstances, returning brings its own mixture of emotions. There can be nostalgia, sadness, affection and gratitude, sometimes all in the same afternoon.
But I also love exploring the country I’ve made my home in. Stamford is beautiful, and we’re very fond of Yorkshire. Harrogate is a particular favourite.
I suppose I’ve come to believe that home isn’t always one geographical place. Sometimes it’s the people, the memories and the feeling a place gives you when you arrive.
Q5. What inspired you to write the book Stuff Nobody Taught You About Relationships?
The inspiration actually came from my work.
After more than 30 years coaching and working with people, I became increasingly aware of the gap between the extraordinary amount of knowledge available to us about human behaviour and relationships, and how little of it makes its way into our everyday lives.
I would recommend books to clients, only to discover that they hadn’t had the time or inclination to read them. So I began writing short summaries of the ideas I thought might be particularly helpful.
To my surprise, people loved them. They found them interesting, easy to digest and, most importantly, useful.
At the same time, I was becoming interested in the research and discussion around our changing reading habits, attention and the way we consume information.
I began wondering whether I could write books that were accessible enough for someone who rarely reads, but sufficiently interesting and substantial for someone who reads all the time.
That was the beginning of my Stuff Nobody Taught You series.
The first two books explored being human and the world of work. Relationships felt like a natural next step, because so much of our experience of life is shaped by the quality of our relationships and the conversations we have within them.
We spend years being educated, yet many of us reach adulthood without being taught how to navigate conflict, communicate our needs, set boundaries, repair relationships or even understand what’s going on inside our own heads.
And that’s quite extraordinary when you think about it.
My hope is that readers will recognise themselves in the pages, perhaps laugh a little, learn something useful and come away with a different way of looking at themselves or someone else.
You can read a chapter in the time it takes to have a cuppa. You might find yourself thinking about it for considerably longer.
Q6. How long did it take you to write your book Stuff Nobody Taught You About Relationships?
The writing took place over approximately two years, although I was working on several books during that period, including Stuff Nobody Taught You About Being Human and Stuff Nobody Taught You About Work.
In some ways, though, these books have been more than 30 years in the making.
They’re informed by decades of working with people, listening to their experiences, observing human behaviour, and reflecting on my own rather eventful life.
The actual writing might have taken two years, but the thinking, learning and collecting of stories and insights has been going on for most of my adult life.
And it’s still going on. I don’t think we ever finish learning how to be human.
Q7. On what platforms can readers buy your books?
All three books in the Stuff Nobody Taught You series are available on Amazon.
They’re also available through my lovely local independent bookshop, Walkers, in Stamford.
I’m currently putting together a Linktree page to make it easier for readers to find my books and other writing in one place.
And I always love hearing from readers, particularly when something they’ve read has helped them see a situation differently or encouraged a conversation they might otherwise have avoided.
Q8. Tell us about the process of coming up with the book cover and the title Stuff Nobody Taught You About Relationships.
The title really grew out of the central idea behind the whole series.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time being taught things we’re expected to know, but surprisingly little time learning how to navigate some of the most important parts of being human.
We’re taught all sorts of things at school, but how many of us were actually taught how to have a difficult conversation, recognise our own emotional patterns or maintain a healthy relationship?
And yet those are the things that can make an enormous difference to the quality of our lives.
So Stuff Nobody Taught You seemed to capture exactly what I wanted the books to be about. It’s deliberately informal and a little cheeky, which probably reflects my personality too.
With the covers, I wanted something clean, recognisable and consistent across the series, rather than the kind of design that might make people think they were picking up a heavy academic or traditional self-help book.
I wanted the books to look approachable because that’s what I hope they feel like when you open them.
There’s plenty of substance inside, but you shouldn’t need a dictionary, a psychology degree or a free weekend to get something useful from them.
Q9. When writing a book, how do you keep things fresh, for both your readers and yourself?
I’m endlessly curious about people, which helps enormously.
After more than three decades working with individuals and teams, you might imagine I’d have heard it all. But people still surprise me, delight me and occasionally leave me scratching my head.
I also think some of the most useful insights come from the smallest everyday experiences. A throwaway comment, a conversation that went badly, something someone says in a coaching session, or a moment when I catch myself behaving in exactly the way I’ve spent years encouraging others to reconsider!
I try to write as though I’m having a conversation with the reader rather than delivering a lecture.
That means mixing research and practical ideas with observations, stories, humour and the occasional gentle challenge.
I don’t want readers to feel they’re being told how to live. I’d much rather they find themselves thinking, “Oh, I do that!” or “I’ve never thought about it that way before.”
And I think humour matters. We can take the work of understanding ourselves seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.
Thankfully, human beings provide an almost inexhaustible supply of material. Myself included.
Q10. What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing?
I’m not sure there’s one particular piece of advice that stands out, but something I’ve come to believe strongly is that you have to find your own voice and trust it.
It’s very easy to start writing what you think a writer is supposed to sound like, rather than writing as yourself.
I spent much of my professional life helping people find the courage to speak honestly, express themselves and have the conversations that matter. It would be rather ironic if I then sat down to write and tried to sound like somebody else.
I want my writing to feel like me. Warm, curious, occasionally irreverent, sometimes challenging, and always grounded in the belief that people are capable of learning and growing.
I also think we can become so preoccupied with making something perfect that we never allow it into the world.
At some point, you have to stop editing, take a deep breath and let the words go.
Perhaps that’s the advice I’d offer anyone thinking about writing a book: Write in your own voice. Write something that matters to you. And don’t wait until you think you’re good enough to call yourself a writer.
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