From the book

You may not think that unlocking your courage is something you can do right now. I hear you. I didn’t think that in my 50s I could walk away from a career that I’d spent a quarter of a century building, putting my relationship and my home on the line!

But that’s the thing about believing in yourself – you realise you do have it in you to do things you didn’t think you could because they’re uncomfortable or challenging, or indeed scary.

It’s a pretty scary thing to step out of our comfort zone, to shake up the status quo. What will people think? What will our husbands, our wives, our children, our friends – Oh, my God, the neighbours – make of it?

Comfort zones are strange things; what seems impossible to one person is no big deal to another. When I turned 50 there was an assumption that I’d be scribbling down a bucket list of things I had to do, now I’d arrived at the crest of the hill and the only way forwards was, apparently, down, down, down.

But what would I write on my bucket list? I’ve already ticked off most of the things that would be on there. I’ve sky-dived over Lake Taupō in New Zealand, bungee-jumped off a bridge in Australia, abseiled off Table Mountain in South Africa, trekked through the hills of northern Thailand, sat with wild gorillas in the mountains of Uganda, fallen backwards from a helicopter over the Andes Mountains in Chile (on purpose, I must add) and skinny-dipped at midnight in Cuba.

I’ve been married three times and I’m raising four beautiful children

– two of my own and two stepchildren. My life has been full thus far, and that fullness has meant falling over, getting hurt and learning how to get back up again and let those scabs heal.