For eighteen years, I worked as an Executive Assistant to a Chief People Officer in an NHS Trust. It's the kind of job most people don't ask about at parties, and I understand why, but it taught me almost everything I still rely on. How to stay calm when things are complicated. How to keep things confidential. How to help someone find their way through a decision without making it for them. I still work in that role now, alongside everything else in this story.
Somewhere along the way, I got divorced. I'm not going to turn that into a big dramatic turning point, because it wasn't one single moment. It was a period of things being genuinely difficult, particularly financially. It changed the future I thought I had in front of me. I had to rebuild, properly, from a position that felt a lot more uncertain than I would have liked.
What that period left me with wasn't a grand plan. It was a question I couldn't quite put down: what if I never gave myself any other options?
I didn't want to leave my job. I liked the security of it, and honestly, I still do. But I didn't want security to be the only thing I had either. I wanted choices: in how I earned money, in how I spent my time, in what my life could look like if things changed again. Not everything. Just more than one option.
That's what led me to travel. I've always loved it, and becoming an Independent Travel Advisor gave me a way to build something that was mine, without needing to walk away from the job that still gives me stability. I could do both. I didn't have to choose.
I won't pretend I've been doing this for years or that I've got it all figured out. I'm still building it: around a full-time job, around ordinary life, around all the same things that make anyone's week busy. Some weeks that means an hour here and there. Some weeks it means more. I've learned that waiting to feel ready before starting isn't really a strategy. It's just a way of staying stuck a bit longer. Confidence, for me, has come from doing the thing, not from feeling prepared for it first.
I've made decisions I'd probably make differently now. I've worried more than I needed to about what people would think. I've overthought things I should have just tried. None of that makes for a tidy story, but it's an honest one, and I'd rather tell you that than pretend it's been a straight line from difficult to sorted.
So that's where I am. Still in my NHS role. Still building the travel side of things, one client and one conversation at a time. Still figuring some of it out as I go.
If any of this sounds familiar (whether you're just after a well-planned trip, or quietly wondering whether you could build something of your own alongside the life you already have), you're welcome here.