Be Brilliant

The quest to be brilliant

I was born to a working-class, farming family in a small village called Guiseley in Yorkshire in the north of England. My dad was a poultry farmer and my stay-at-home mum juggled kids, the farm and the market on weekends. While riding around on my dad's lap on the tractor, he would often say (in his strong northern accent) ‘Where there's muck there's brass, love', which meant, ‘if you put in the hard work, the money will come'.

Mum, on the other hand, would share her pride at being ‘the first girl in the family' to attend Leeds secretarial college and then the disappointment at having to give it all up when she got married.

Something many people don't know about me is that I received a full student grant and financial support from the government to go to university. There's no way my farming family could have funded my further education without this. Suddenly, I was off (hooray!). I packed my backpack and headed to Birmingham, not realising at the time that I would never return home to live again.

I remember that first term — the conversations, the people, their backgrounds — my eyes were well and truly opened to the world of possibility, and also to self-doubt, lack of confidence, imposter syndrome, imperfection and all of my flaws.

I worked and played hard and graduated four years later with a Bachelor of Science, a significant amount of debt, some lifelong friends and a suitcase full of memories. Over the next eight years, in London this time, I ...