I met a really wonderful young woman yesterday through the course of my job and I can’t tell you how much I admire her.

Immediately I found her to be very professional, very on-the-ball and very easy to talk to. After we had dealt with most of the “work” stuff we started to just chat. As we talked about Christmas I discovered she really has had a year from hell, with the loss of one parent in January and the illness of the other now. On top of that she is covering another persons sick-leave in her job, meaning a lot more travelling than usual.

At no point did she have a “poor me” thing going on, though God knows I could have understood if she did. She called it for what it was, ” A Shit Year”, and yes, it had knocked seven bells out of her, but then she went on quickly to talk about the positives; she had recently moved house which meant she now lives opposite her sick parent, how she loves the opportunities the travel in her work has brought her, and her great husband and how much support he has given, ( she met him while volunteering for a support group for a chronic illness, one she has suffered from since the age of nine).

This wonderful woman chose to take a positive perspective wherever she could and accepted the awful things she could not change, no matter how much she may have wanted to. Quite inspirational !

I hope she reads this and I hope I can be more like her. Well done CE.