Soiya Gecaga writes on Africa Rising and her fight against child poverty

 For many years now, the continent of Africa has been synonymous with concepts such as famine, poverty and corruption in people’s minds and even though this may be part of Africa’s story there are many, much more positive things about the continent. Today, the countries of Africa are full of potential and home to a number of incredibly exciting bold new initiatives. In terms of landmass, the continent is larger than the United States, China, India, Japan and all of Europe combined and by 2020, the collective GDP for Africa will be $2.6 trillion, consumer spending will stand at $1.4 trillion and there will be 128 million households with discretionary income. At 1.1 billion workers, by 2040, Africa will have the world’s largest workforce – larger than India’s or China’s workforces. As G. Pascal Zachary wrote in a recent article, “A decade ago, The Economist labelled Africa "the hopeless continent." In December 2011, the magazine predicted that "the continent's impressive growth looks likely to continue." Apologising for their former Afro-pessimism, the editors now conclude that "a profound change has taken hold" in the region.”

Last week, I travelled from Nairobi to Cape Town to attend COMMON Pitch South Africa, where I witnessed first-hand, inspiring examples of some of the new social innovation initiatives that are being developed on the continent. I met people like, Dr Johnny and Clare Anderton, Heather Costaras and Glenda Tutt. I was also thrilled to see one of my friends, Charles Kalama, win one of the prizes that evening. Dr Johhny and Clare (who incidentally took home the top prize that evening) are a loving and kind husband and wife team who run a company called EarthBagBuild. They build low cost houses and schools using a construction system that combines ancient building techniques with 21st century technology. Locally developed and patented high strength polypropylene ‘EarthBags’ that are filled with earth and stacked one on top of the other.

Heather Costaras is the inspirational founder of VENT! - an art and performance platform for South African teenagers with incredible, creative talent and with few opportunities to express themselves. The project uses art and creativity to drive personal growth, education, empowerment and transformation. Glenda Tutt, is a compassionate and determined single mother from Cape Town who founded MPower - an innovative sustainable solution for sanitary menstrual management for women living in developing countries. Charles Kalama is the co-founder of EcoPost, a social enterprise founded in 2010 in Kenya to address the challenges of plastic pollution, urban waste management, health, unemployment, deforestation and climate change. The company uses recycled plastic waste to create plastic lumber products including fencing and signposts. All of the people that I met in Cape Town have one very fundamental thing in common; they are passionate people who are incredibly positive about the future prospects of Africa and who have been motivated to play their part in the change that they wish to see in our world.

I was invited to attend the COMMON Pitch event in my capacity as the Executive Director and Founder of “We the Change” Foundation, an organisation that is tackling child poverty in Africa through early childhood education and care programmes. Our organisation currently supports 30 children between the ages of 2 and 7 in our initial program in Mathare slum, located on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. However, it is our aim to progress our work further and to create a centre for excellence and innovation in the field of early childhood care and education that will comprise of model schools, backed up by a dedicated teacher training and research centre based at one of the top universities in Kenya (Kenyatta University). Our ultimate aim is to develop a model school system that can be replicated both nationally and then later, throughout the rest of Africa.

The first few years of a child's life are critical in terms of human development. Growing up in a stable environment and being properly cared for will mean that a child is more likely to fully develop his or her thinking, language, emotional and social skills, and to suffer less from disease. Having received this kind of support, a child is then able to take these valuable foundations with them when they start primary school. Whilst the years after early childhood are bound to be fraught with difficulty and challenge for many children living in marginalised communities, their journeys in life would be that much harder (if not nearly impossible) without a good and solid start in life. For children growing up in extreme poverty and deprivation, solid foundations in early childhood are very rarely developed. Many young children living in such environments are exposed to multiple risks, including poverty, malnutrition and poor health, all of which detrimentally affect their cognitive, motor, and social-emotional development.

Rather tragically, it is not the norm for early childhood care and education to be given much attention by education policy makers in governments across the world. Therefore, it is also my hope that through this work we will be able to raise awareness about the importance of education in this field and to transform education policy where we can. A report produced by the Centre on the Developing Child at Harvard University outlines the potential benefits of investing in early childhood education by explaining that, "extensive analysis by economists has shown that education and development investments in the earliest years of life produce the greatest returns. Most of those returns, which can range from $3 to $16 per dollar invested, benefit the community through reduced crime, welfare, and educational remediation, as well as increased tax revenues on higher incomes for the participants of early childhood programs when they reach adulthood."

In providing young children across the continent of Africa with good quality early childhood care and education, we will help to alter their life trajectories and to provide them with opportunities that would otherwise have eluded them. I have a vision and dream of a complete paradigm shift - where different stories are told about Africa. Where, rather than living and/or dying in poverty, tens of millions of children have access to good quality early childhood care and education programmes, which in turn leads them to complete secondary school and university and onto becoming the leaders and innovators of tomorrow. Where rather than talking in terms of a hopeless continent, Africa is recognised as a continent of prosperity, innovation and ultimately of hope.


Soiya is an Acumen Fund East Africa Fellow and a Creative Visions Dan Eldon Fellow. She founded “We The Change” Foundation, which tackles child poverty by providing early childhood care and education programmes to children in marginalised communities. Born in Kenya, Soiya was educated in the States and the UK. Trained as a solicitor specialising in charity and corporate law, Soiya has also worked for The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights in Geneva, Nyumbani (an orphanage for children with HIV/AIDS in Kenya), and Mother Teresa’s home for the destitute and dying in Calcutta.

Follow Soiya and “We the Change” Foundation on Twitter at @soiya and @wethechange2010, or on Facebook. Visit www.wethechangefoundation.com.

Mary Fellowes, fashion stylist, blogs on The Woes of the Fashion Bloggerazzi

If power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the same is true of fame. Whitney Houston is its latest victim - there have been countless others before her, and countless more to come. Its victims’ demise isn’t always as dramatic as Whitney’s - death is final and dramatic whether suicidal or accidental in celebrities, but the slow erosion and corruption of a character is in some ways just as sad.

Fashion has often crossed over with fame in the Venn diagram of entertainment and celebrity – more so than any other design form due to its relationship with glamour and the human form. And there is nothing wrong with recognition and achievement - or becoming a household name. As with any fame, the key to it is when fame and recognition has been earned. That makes it easier to live with - the inevitable symptom or by-product after years of coming up through the ranks, jumping through hoops, performing the endless monotonous rites of passage that others have done before to get to the top. 

But what about when fame is not earned? What threats lurk within the psyche when fame has been bestowed instantly, in a heartbeat? There is no need to lament the victims of reality television during the last decade, as it is a given. But the rip-tide of instant fame is claiming new victims for itself: in the fashion world. The ‘bloggerazzi’ have turned fashion week into an ugly circus of attention seeking wannabes, feeding and fuelling egos of its subjects with flashbulbs for sustenance.

Out of nowhere in the last few years, an army of apparent nobodies has swelled in numbers, taking over the front line, making entering into a show like running the gauntlet. More often than not clad in outlandish and forced looking outfits, they have adopted the customs of the paparazzi but sadly they have none of the clout.  Because outside of the microcosm of fashion, no one is interested in what Japanese Vogue’s Anna Della Russo (the bloggers’ favourite) is wearing.

Thanks to the bloggerazzi, a tragic parade now takes place in all the fashion weeks. Since the dawn of the international fashion collections, all of us in the industry have always seized the opportunity of fashion week to have a bit more fun with our outfits, but the presence of this battalion, emerging from their trenches with semi-professional cameras poised like shields, has generated a giant extra swathe of pretentious, attention seeking dressing up and poseur behaviour. Their incessant snapping away feeds straight into the ego and insecurity in each one of their subjects, giving them the illusion that somehow they are - well - famous.

Where is all of this imagery going?  I wondered that when I got ‘papped’ for the first few seasons while the bloggerazzi was in its infancy. Did I play along with it? Sure I did, at first. But after a while, it becomes incredibly tedious. You go to fashion week, surprisingly enough, to work. The schedule is gruelling and the brain switches between overdrive and overload by the second, by the hour. And after wasting time posing for a group of self-important, self anointed pseudo opinion formers, you realise that so few of these images they shoot ever make it into a domain big enough to justify all the hype and chaos, that actually it is not really worth it after all.

It is not to decry fashion blogs per se. There are countless very successful fashion bloggers out there – Tommy Ton, Tavi, Bryan Boy, The Sartorialist, Susie Bubble, Liberty London Girl and so on. They are the democracy to fashion publishing’s autocracy. David takes on the publishing world’s Goliath and wins. But these pioneers are unwittingly thorough, they attend the shows and have a unique point of view that is worth hearing – and which is why Dolce and Gabbana made media history by putting them all front row several seasons back at their D&G show in Milan, next to super-snapper Mario Testino. And which is why some of them can earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in advertising and brand collaborations.

But it is the legions of street-style snappers, the bloggerazzi that ruin it for everyone else, that turn it into a cliché and a soap opera. Millions and millions of pictures of street style, filling up the world wide web’s vortex with junk and simultaneously creating the myth of fame for people who are otherwise regular people with full time jobs in the fashion industry. They are not performers or actors with immense talent that can reach out and affect the hearts and mind of the great public, they are actually store buyers, writers, editors and stylists. But all these people’s overnight status can escalate within the bubble of the fashion industry, giving them an illusion of disproportionate self-importance. The danger is that people could start believing their own hype and succeed above other more talented, less attention-seeking colleagues, purely because they gained a little fame in the fashion bubble – style over content, the book’s cover mattering more than its story inside. It feels as if Warhol is laughing all the way to the bank.


Mary Fellowes is a London-based fashion stylist. A former assistant to Isabella Blow at British Vogue, Fellowes currently works as a consultant to a number of fashion houses and her work is regularly featured in Vogue.

Vanessa Vallely of We Are The City, blogs on Networking by Design

So if I told you you could obtain the skills that would enable you to develop better career opportunities, generate new business, develop a network of alliances, build partnerships and contacts, make departments talk to each other and be more effective, would you believe me ? If I said that you were able to tap into crossing-selling opportunities, gain market information, set up a business and make a success out of it, alongside improving your own self-marketing skills would you think I was mad? If I told you that all of this was at your fingertips, and all you needed to do was find a little bit of confidence and a small amount of time, would you think I was mad. The skill I am referring too is the ability to network – once you discover the benefits, you will soon find it is one of the most important tools in your business armory.

Networking is often something individuals find especially hard to do and worse still, people don’t realize the benefits it reaps. I hear all to often, so what’s the point, it's all about chewing the fat and having drinks with people you don’t really know – much better to get out there, be excellent at your job, invent a new product, work ridiculous hours and deliver stuff, right ? – well, let me challenge that.

Unfortunately, building a successful career or business is as much about who you know (and who knows you) as it is about doing a good job or selling a good product. If some of you are horrified by the thought of Networking, let’s park the actual word for a bit, and think of it more the “art of career/business development” or “developing key relationships”.

The “art” itself is nothing more than making the effort to go to event that’s right for you or your business and connecting with new people. It is also a fantastic way of keeping your future customers/colleagues or peers informed of what you do, what you are good at and above all how you can help them. It is the cheapest form of PR and bear in mind, no one will ever sell you or your business like you do.

A question I get asked frequently is is it OK to go to events and just hand out business cards to all and sundry. In the right context, handing out your business card is absolutely the right thing to do. What you need to consider is when NOT to do it. In short never hand out your card if you haven’t established a positive/good connection between you and the other people in the group (or the person you are speaking to). Otherwise you might be seen as superficial, pushy, sales-like etc. What you MUST avoid is leaving the wrong impression with people. If you haven’t connected with them we can almost guarantee where your card and brand and reputation will end up… in the bin.

People often ask if there is a case for business networking? My answer is if you want to open career doors, gain opportunities to develop personal skills, extend your personal resources, gain industry knowledge, monitor competitor activity, influence key people, bring in new business, find business partners or new employees, demonstrate abilities, test out ideas and skills, exchange best practice and above all raise your profile, then the answer is Yes. Alternatively, you could always just stay indoors and perhaps miss the opportunity to meet the exact person who will move you, your career or your business forward. As my grandmother always told me, boats come in for the lucky few, for the rest of us, we have to swim out to them !

Vanessa Vallely is a recognized expert in person-to-person business networking, online branding and a sought after motivational speaker. She is regarded as one of the most well networked women in and out of the City and is passionate about sharing her know-how and experiences with others.

There are hundreds of networking events across the London and the UK, we feature a number of these on www.wearethecity.com. If you wish to contact Vanessa, please email Enquries@wearethecity.com or visit www.vanessavallely.com

Ash J. Lipkin, Editor-in-Chief of The Arbuturian; on the Information Age

I have a terrible memory. We’re talking both short term and long term memory recall. I once forgot where I’d put my glasses and spent ten minutes searching for them, only to glance in the mirror to see that I was wearing them. In the days before BlackBerrys and iPhones and email calendars, I would use post-it notes as memory aids (“You are wearing your glasses”), and I must apologise now because I am probably solely responsible for the devastation of large areas of rainforest due to my incessant note writing (I’m aware that a lot of paper in this country nowadays is FSC regulated and doesn’t come from rainforests, but humour me).

Yet even this didn’t solve the problem, as I would have several notes stuck strategically around my desk, sometimes a few notes layered on top of each other or arranged into the shape of a smiley face or a small elephant, depending on how creative I was feeling at the time, and occasionally a note would come unstuck and slip down behind the desk, only for me to find it a few weeks later and realise that I had forgotten to wish a friend happy birthday, or to collect some dry cleaning, or to board a plane.

Seeing as it’s the 21^st century and all that jazz, and I like to think of myself as a thoroughly contemporary chap with all the latest modcons such as electric lighting and a high-voltage kettle and whatnot, the post-it note has now been replaced with my BlackBerry calendar. This is an extension of my brain, and it contains not only all of my meetings and social arrangements, but also smaller mundane reminders such as when to buy some more milk, or to make a reservation at a restaurant, or to board a plane.

I soon realised that if I ever lost my BlackBerry, my entire life would come to a standstill, so I decided to sync the BlackBerry with my email calendar to prevent this; and also to avoid the reoccurrence of a situation whereby I’d arranged to interview a rather notable celebrity but I had only made a note of this in my email calendar, and yes, you guessed it, I wasn’t at my desk that day and because the note wasn’t in my Blackberry too, I stood him up. I have since been blacklisted from most A-list interview opportunities, though I can’t say that my life is any worse because of it.

But now we have a new problem, or rather, a new irritation: the bombardment of information. I will be sitting peacefully at my desk, sipping a cup of coffee and staring at the wall, wondering if I should do some work or perhaps pop out to Selfridges for a spot of important retail therapy, when all of a sudden my BlackBerry will start beeping away, reminding me to board a plane in ten minutes, and no sooner have I silenced the blasted thing will my email calendar start shouting the same information at me. I think you’ll agree this is hardly conducive for peaceful contemplation on a busy working day!

Granted, I now miss fewer plane flights, but my stress levels are probably much higher than they were in the tranquil days of rainforest devastation. So where am I going with all of this? I’ve forgotten…Oh yes, my BlackBerry tells me that I was supposed to be writing about information overload in the technology age. Or technology overload in the information age…

So, it seems that with all these varied forms of communication – email, text, social media, paper aeroplanes with notes written on them (ah yes, another way that I’ve helped to decimate the green areas of the globe) - we are constantly assailed with a myriad of information, and our feeble brains are struggling to store it all. So we rely on those very same technological advancements as extensions of our brains, as ‘digital memory’, if you like, to help manage our increasingly busy and complex lives which are becoming so reliant on gadgets and ‘connectivity’. Technology, and the internet in particular, allows us to access a wealth of information and learning opportunities, as well as increasing the size of our social networks, our business reach and the ways in which we can customise and extend our lives, our homes, our bodies and our minds. It’s all rather dizzying.

But what would happen if we unplugged it all? What would happen if I suddenly flipped a switch and all of your iPhones and iPads and computers suddenly vanished in a puff of smoke? Besides the fact that the insurance industry would collapse, and you’d all be pretty upset with me, and I suppose the stock markets would cease to exist and the electricity grid would go kaput and global communication would be put back into the Dark Ages…actually nothing would happen. We’d all still be here, with food and shelter and water, and if you’ve watched enough episodes of Ray Mears or Bear Grylls, you might have an idea how to build yourself a fire too. The world would be silent, and we’d simply exist, in harmony with nature and the rainforests that are disappearing like those post-it notes down the back of my desk. We’d huddle around the cosy fires in our back gardens, marvelling at the pitch black London sky, able to look up and see the stars for once, and we’d turn to each other, to our friends and loved ones, and we’d say, “Ah, now I get it…this is what life is really about.”

Now, where did I put my glasses…?

Ash J. Lipkin is Editor-in-Chief of The Arbuturian, a magazine for the foodie, the stylish, the explorer, the artistic, the culturist, and the idler: www.arbuturian.com

Elinor Olisa of www.degreeart.com on Hockney's current show The Bigger Picture

The excitement surrounding Hockney's 'Bigger Picture' solo show extravaganza is reaching fever pitch as art critics from around the world release their reviews following their sneak peek at this undoubtedly landmark exhibition.

It is highly amusing to me, as a curator of an online gallery, that I will be more likely to view this must see exhibition on a computer screen than on the walls of the Royal Academy as its almost impossible to get through on the ticket hotlines.

I bet Hockney would approve of people looking at his work online as he often refers to his fascination with technology. Like so many of us today, Hockney used his iPad to plan and prepare for his big presentation.

Hockney sketched 'The Arrival of Spring, East Yorkshire' on his Apple tablet. This combined with his employment of cameras, mounted on Jeeps Google Earth style, to capture the Yorkshire landscape’s changing seasons, has cemented him as a pioneer of our digital era. (You can view the result of his ground breaking 'multipartite' film created for the BBC's Country File program, here).

The paintings I have glimpsed online and in print achieve an admirable feat for UK tourism giving you a yearning to visit Yorkshire. Hockney’s frequent referral to his admiration of Post-Impressionist painter Van Gogh, explains much of his life’s ambition to encapsulate a snapshot of time - be it LA or Bridlington - on his canvases by layering more than just imagery onto the surfaces resulting in truly tangible viewing experience for the viewer.

I have been trying to put my finger on what it is that makes Hockney, a man in his 70s, so attractive to so many and such an inspiration to the emerging artists I work with. I wonder if it is his ability to get us to pay greater attention to the world around us using traditional techniques effortlessly and unquestioningly combined with the latest technology - a feat that should leave many a tech entrepreneur quaking in their boots. After seeing his work you are left compelled to examine and appreciate your own 3D landscapes through Hockney tinted glasses.

The fundamental consequence of this exhibition for me personally is a combination of the fact he makes it OK for artists to use technology to enhance their practice and the eternal legitimacy it has provided for the enjoyment and benefits achievable from viewing fine art online. This has been achieved by the exhibition of his on-pad sketched on multiple iPad screens.

I believe that this exhibition will be the artist's most successful ever not only because of the huge appetite our nation has developed for blockbuster exhibitions or because he is a proper artist painting proper landscapes en plein air (outside) but because he captures and preserves moments of our times successfully merging techniques of old with those of right now.

I am ending this review with sneaky hand of crossed fingers behind my back praying that I manage to reserve my tickets (perhaps I'll abandon the phone and try booking online this time) and also thinking - gosh - a good old fashioned artist using an iPad - Brilliant!

Some examples of Hockney-inspired Degree artist’s work:

From Eggerdon Hill

By Lachlan Goudie

Bart's Treehouse
by Rob Reed

The Great Escape
by Hannah Lewis Davies

www.degreeart.com is an innovative company selling, renting and commissioning the finest art work created by the students and recent graduates emerging from the most prestigious art establishments.

Guest blogger: Felice Hardy of welove2ski ... on snow

Travel writing is my business but skiing was where it all began. I first put on a pair skis in Switzerland at the age of four and gradually became so hooked that I later found I had to make my living out of it.

The first time I fell in love was in Obergurgl in Austria. I was seven years old and his name was Walter. He was my ski instructor and seemed ancient at 25. My heart broke when I had to fly home without him. Next year I was back again, but by then Walter had moved on to Squaw Valley in California. Another instructor, Pepi, swiftly replaced him in my affections.

And my heart is still in skiing today. I have been to hundreds of resorts – from well-known destinations in Austria and France to lesser-known villages in Japan and Chile. I have skied fresh deep powder in winter and on sunny glaciers in summer, and I am never bored.

It’s the reason why I enjoy my job as co-editor of the ski information website welove2ski.com. Every day is different and every skiing year varies enormously. No more so than this season, which started in late November without a flake of the white stuff. “Snow drought!” The newspapers yelled. But they were wrong.

Within a week the skies dumped bucketfuls of snow on the worryingly brown Alps. By Christmas more snow had fallen in France’s Three Valleys than during the whole of last season.

At other resorts across the Alps similar records were broken – and still the snow continues to fall. High resorts such as St Anton, Zermatt and Val d’Isère have been cut off from civilization for days at a time; even if there wasn’t a drop more snow all season they’d still have enough to last until April.

It’s the best start to a European winter in a generation – maybe two generation –  and a huge boost to the British ski industry in these hard times. For a decade, global warming experts have spouted gloom and doom. But the storms in early January have made a travesty of it.

It can all be viewed on my website, which has some of the most accurate snow and weather maps on the internet. They're produced exclusively for us by the Swiss forecasting service meteoblue, and are based on cutting-edge NASA technology. It's complex stuff that allows us to make precise predictions, and we run two forecasts daily.

But welove2ski isn’t just about weather forecasts. ‘No bull no bias’ is our motto. It’s a specialist website loaded with independent information compiled by acknowledged experts for all things in skiing and snowboarding. There are detailed reports on over 100 ski resorts, equipment and fashion, fitness, ski news and competitions. All of it is a vital tool to help people enjoy what is surely shaping up to be the best Alpine ski season ever.

Felice Hardy is editor of www.welove2ski.com, an independent guide to skiing and ski holidays.

Guest Blogger: Susie Pearl, writer, coach and mentor, talks about the promises of a new year

Well, hello there 2012. Are we going to be friends?

I’m not really a big fan of Christmas. It’s lovely to soak up a sense of ‘good cheer’ but in general it often ends up feeling more stressful and hectic rather than full of peace and glad tidings.

CHANGE AND TRANSITION

For me, it’s the bringing in of the New Year that lights up my imagination. I love the change and a sense of transition into the new. 2012 is tipped as a powerful year of planetary shifts and has been predicted by the mystics to be the year when change kicks in and major transitions take place. Let’s see what unfolds...

This brand new year feels full of promise. A sense of optimism sweeps like a new broom. It’s a new blank canvas where all mistakes and regrets of the year gone by can be swept away under the carpet with a good kick and we can press the ‘reset’ button to start afresh and begin over again, with new rules and new balls in the life game.

Whether that’s true or just imagined, it doesn’t really matter. What I do believe is that this year will be a time of major transition for the planet. There will be some very big changes where we’ll all have to look at things differently. The way we live, how we consume, the way we think and the way we handle the planet’s resources. We are going to have to face some big questions and come up with some answers fast, in order to cope with some of the effects we are seeing in our bio-sphere, culture, banking, economic systems and food chains.

Some friends and I were talking on New Years Eve about what we would do if knew that we were only going to be around for a short time. A lively debate followed with some common themes. All involved us slowing down, taking time out, doing more simple activities, living more from the heart and being more attentive to those we love.

DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY

Here’s a list of the top 10 things that people said that they would do differently if they lived life over again:

1. Spend more time with friends and family, and spend a lot less time worrying about things we had little control over.

2. To realise that happiness is within us and is a choice. We can choose to be happy whatever is going on around us. To feel happy ever day and to make a point of living life this way.

3. To take time out regularly to really talk, listen, engage and laugh out loud.

4. Realise that the world doesn’t stop if we stop working. To work less and live more.

5. Take time out to tell others how much we love them. To express our gratitude for the good things and boost our appreciation of the simple natural things in life that make life so good. To slow down and appreciate it all.

6. To smile more, laugh at ourselves and drop the inner critic.

7. Get healthier and look after our bodies – doing some physical activity every day with enjoyment and to eat fresh uplifting food.

8. Take a walk in nature each day and breathe in the air. To notice the incredible beauty of nature. Reduce the days spent indoors staring at computer screens.

9. Be kinder to ourselves, forgive others' mistakes, and make an effort to build stronger communities with kindness being a central part of the infrastructure.

10. To live a bigger life where we step out of the safety and the sameness of our daily lives and head for some big new adventures and take a few risks to experience more in this vast world.

Maybe this is the year for just one simple resolution: to cut out the boring bits, get happier and cram in a lot more fun. That’s my plan for the year. How about you?

Happy 2012

Susie Pearl is a writer, coach and mentor to successful entrepreneurs, musicians, actors, artists and creative people around the world. She ran her own international celebrity brand PR agency and a personal enhancement training business with Paul McKenna and NLP founder, Dr Richard Bandler. She now runs seminars, courses and personal training in her unique reality creation system.

Instructions for Happiness and Success by Susie PearL (Quadrille, £12.99) is published on 5th January 2012.

For more information, visit www.happinessandsuccess.org