Let It Go: My Extraordinary Story - From Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist by Stephanie Shirley & Richard Askwith

Author:Stephanie Shirley & Richard Askwith [Shirley, Stephanie & Askwith, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Autobiography, Memoir, Media Tie-In, Film, Information Technology, Business, United Kingdom
ISBN: 9780241395509
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

13.

Common Ground

Returning to work must rank among the two or three hardest things I have ever done. On my first morning back, I had to decline a much-needed cup of tea, rather than risk drawing attention to the wild shaking of my hands.

It wasn’t the prospect of the work itself that worried me: it was the fear of what people would be thinking. I had been used to being seen as Superwoman. Now, surely, people would see me as weak, damaged – a victim instead of a champion. The very fact of having been proved to be vulnerable increased my vulnerability.

In fact, my colleagues couldn’t have been kinder. They were supportive and tactful and gave me space to rebuild my confidence. But those first few weeks still felt alarmingly similar to the last few weeks before my breakdown. My world seemed brittle, as though it might shatter at any moment.

There was, however, a difference. Each day, instead of feeling like a little bit more of a struggle than the one before, felt a little bit easier. I gritted my teeth and told myself that, if I could just keep going, all this would become second nature to me again. So it proved.

Before I knew it, I was forgetting to think about the nightmare behind me and was thinking instead about the day-to-day challenges in front of me: decisions, proposals, meetings, plans, ideas. Within a week or two I was looking back in the evening with satisfaction on what I had accomplished that day. It seemed that, contrary to my worst fears, I still had my intellect, my focus, my vision, my technical skills. Perhaps, in short, I was still the person I had been before.

When self-doubt troubled me, I boosted my determination by focusing on a private sense of anger – at those in the outside world who had been watching my company’s progress sceptically for years and who would, I knew, have treated my breakdown as a gender issue. Of course, they’d have said, she’s a woman; of course she can’t cope. The thought of them saying this maddened me. Yes, it was true: for a while I hadn’t coped – but not because I was a woman. Rather, it had been because of an intolerable personal situation, of a kind which few men ever even attempt to cope with. How dare anyone patronise me in such an unfair, ignorant, sexist way? I fanned my resentment into a flame of motivation. The best way to refute this slur on my gender was to get back in the saddle and make the company even more successful than it had been before.

Then I thought about how to do so, and my spirits rose. There was still much in my business to get excited about.

F International had flourished in my absence. Annual turnover for 1976‒7 had grown to £738,671 (from £403,969 the previous year), with pre-tax profits more than doubled to £45,244. We had a regular workforce of around 340 and an

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