CHAPTER 2

DAYDREAM BELIEVER

So there I was, stunned by Brendan’s surprise proposal and wondering why he’d sprung it on me. Surely he knew that I didn’t need a ring to feel I was committed to any man, least of all him. As far as I was concerned, I couldn’t have been more committed to Brendan than I already was.

At the time I couldn’t begin to imagine my wedding day – but fast-forward six years to a beach in Ibiza, and there I was, in a beautiful white wedding dress, knowing that I wanted nothing more than to be married to the man standing next to me. Hello! magazine was taking photos and it felt just like a fairy tale come true. But the man standing next to me wasn’t Brendan Cole and I knew now why it had felt so strange when he had proposed to me that night in Hong Kong. We were not really meant to end up together, after all.

When I met Kevin, the man I married, it felt like I had ‘come home’. He was the Yang to my Yin, the destination-happiness I’d been journeying toward for decades. And if that sounds like a cliché, sorry, but it’s true.

Best foot forward

Let’s wind the clock back to the start of my long journey. It’s 1976 and I’m two years old, watching my big sister Jeanet getting ready for her dance class. She’s ten and as I watch her put on her dance shoes and pretty frock, I’m thinking, ‘I can’t wait for it to be my turn to dance.’

I was far too young for it to occur to me that I might never be able to dance, but I’m sure it had occurred to others; when I was in my Mor’s womb, my left foot had folded itself up along my leg and when I was born, it had flopped out limply to the side.

Mor and Far (that’s ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ in Danish, so that’s what I call them) must have thought that maybe dancing would help to correct my poor foot and one day when I was two and a half I put on my first dancing shoes and was on my way to my first dancing class. I don’t think anyone in my family ever imagined how well I would take to it. I didn’t just take to it … I LOVED IT!

Mor may have been determined to correct my foot – and I tell her now that it was her positive thinking that helped to heal it, as well as the massage she gave me every day to encourage my muscles to realign, and my dancing.

Now I tell people that I was born with a burning desire to follow my dreams, and I sincerely believe that if you say that often enough it becomes such a part of your thinking that the last thing you’ll do is give up on whatever your dream is.

Because of my foot, I had to wear horrible, specially made, clumpy and ugly orthopaedic shoes. I can see now how lucky I was that my parents could afford them, for had I not worn them my foot might never have been corrected, but at the time lucky was the last thing I felt. I hated them. I made such a fuss when I had to put them on.

I also had to stand on the staircase, raising my foot onto my toes over and over again. Up and down, up and down, up and down … it wasn’t just hard, it was unbelievably boring. But it worked. All these repetitions helped build up the muscles that made my foot work properly. I didn’t realize then how important repetitive exercise would be in achieving my ambition to perfect my dancing.

If I hadn’t worn those shoes and done the exercises, my foot would probably still be kicking out when I walked and dancing would have been an unachievable dream. I’m telling you this now because we all have impediments, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, that make us feel that we can’t do certain things and that can put a brake on us even thinking about trying to follow our dreams. Please don’t let this happen to you.

Never forget that we always have a choice. We can see a problem as an obstacle or as a challenge. See it as a challenge and it becomes an obstacle that can be overcome.

I remember my grandma sitting me down when I was eight and showing me a newspaper cutting of my Mor holding me when I was a baby. Then she told me that when I was just a few weeks old and on a family caravanning holiday, a glass lamp had cracked and fallen on my head, leaving me with what looked like a big hole in it, and covered in blood. I was rushed to hospital and Mor and the others had to wait outside while I was being stitched, not knowing if I was going to be all right. Happily, I was. Somehow, a local newspaper got hold of the story and took the photograph of Mor holding me. Grandma told me that she had been so traumatized by what had happened that she could never bring herself to tell me about it, never mind show me the newspaper cutting. The story taught me that none of us ever knows what lies around the corner, so we have to make the most of our lives while we can. Why waste even a minute?

As I said, I was eight when Grandma told me that story, and it reinforced what I already somehow knew – that if I faced a challenge I would move mountains to overcome it. I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to prove to the world that I could do whatever I set my mind to.

When I was growing up in Aalborg, my parents were my inspiration. Mor ran a hairdressing salon in our house and Far owned a car dealership right next door, so they were always there for my sister Jeanet and me. It was a great way to grow up. We were raised on values and beliefs that I still hold dear. Believe in yourself. Always treat others how you want to be treated. And when you fall, get up, brush yourself off and carry on. That last one’s a bit like a line from that Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields song Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sing in Swing Time – ‘Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again!’

You shall go to the ball!

Every Christmas for the last few years, I’ve played the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, waving my magic wand and uttering those famous words – ‘You shall go to the ball.’ Every time I say them brings back the sweetest memory of my own first ball when I was just three years old. Mor made me a really pretty red dress, and I remember feeling like a princess as I twirled round and round, watching the voluminous red underskirt swirl around me. Even then, at just three, dancing felt natural to me – the thing I was born to do.

It soon became so obvious that I loved dancing, that Mor enrolled me in all sorts of classes, from Latin to jazz and tap, ballet to ballroom. I also took acting and singing classes and started to think that maybe I would like to be an actress, but living in a small city there weren’t that many opportunities for children to act and it would have been hard for me to get the experience I’d need if I was going to go to drama school.

But when I was six, I realized that if I competed in ballroom and Latin, then even if I couldn’t be an actress, I could still be on stage somewhere in the country every Saturday. Sometimes we have to think creatively and take a roundabout route before arriving at our final destination. Now, as well as being a life coach, I have a career as an actor, but it didn’t start until I was well into my 30s. And I know that the opportunity to ‘tread the boards’ as you say in England, would never have come along, had I not followed my career as a dancer.

And to think there was a time – a very short time – when I was five that I decided that dancing wasn’t for me. It was approaching the end of the summer term and classes were coming to an end.

‘Mor,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go back in the autumn.’ I was quite adamant about it.

‘Fine,’ said Mor. ‘I’ll cancel your lessons and tell your partner he’ll need to find someone new.’

Come autumn, though, and my feet were itching to dance again. I begged my poor mother to rebook my classes and try to get my partner back. It was only years later that she confessed that she’d never cancelled my classes – she knew me too well to do that – and she certainly hadn’t told my partner I was giving up: boys who danced were as rare as snow in the Sahara. Well, not quite that, but they were few and far between. Never burn your bridges: that’s another lesson Mor taught me.

Never forget that we always have a choice

So there I was, back to all the hard work that got me where I am today. Lessons after school, where I was always happy with being ‘good enough’. I was never academic. For me, what mattered was what happened after school. I liked to be moving about. If I wasn’t dancing, I’d be playing badminton, or skating. Sitting at a desk all day made me feel as if my brain was going numb: being on my feet cleared my mind. Even now, if I have to learn lines for a speech I’m to make, or for a TV show or stage play, I do it best when I’m walking around.

As a child, whenever I was dancing I would lose myself in the movement and music. Nothing else mattered, just the connection between my mind and my body. It was like being in a meditative state – and I am so thankful that I never gave it up, and thankful to my Mor. She gave me the gentle pushes I needed, but was never a pushy mother.

I think it’s also thanks to Mor that I have come to believe that no matter how old we are, playing is a great way to help us tap into our creative mind, another route to helping us find our dreams. But it’s something we often give up as we grow up, like laughter, and that’s really sad.

Practice makes perfect

When you’re an adult, it’s down to you to push yourself, and I still push myself using lessons my mother taught me when I was very young. One way she kept me on track was to question decisions I made. If I said, ‘Oh, I don’t really feel like practising today,’ she’d say, ‘Well, think about how you’ll feel on Saturday if you don’t do well in your competition. You’ll only have yourself to blame, and you’ll never know if you could have done better if you’d practised!’

Looking back I think she got the balance just right by making me take responsibility for my own decisions and choices.

In my later life, I met plenty of pushy parents when I was teaching children to dance. Often, I’d see kids who were majorly talented, but had absolutely no interest in doing well. I could see how heartbreaking this was for their parents, who were desperate for them to use their talent and succeed. But I could also see that the children were being pushed to fulfil their parents’ dreams, not their own, and that was wrong. My heart went out to them, because when we follow someone else’s dreams for us, even with the best will in the world, we are being untrue to ourselves. And being untrue to ourselves can be hugely detrimental to our development as well-rounded, well-adjusted people.

As a life coach, I meet a lot of people who have fallen into careers because it was expected of them. Lawyers who feel pressured into the legal profession because they come from a family of barristers or solicitors. And it’s only later in life, when they’ve got their law degree under their belts, that they say to themselves, ‘Actually, this isn’t what I want to do at all. It may look like a good job, and it may pay well, but it’s not my passion, and it’s not making me happy.’

It’s never too late to change

When you realize you are in the wrong place, it is a step in the right direction, probably the first one. We live in a materialistic world and the more materialistic we become, the more we lose track of what it is that we really want, what it is that really makes us tick, until we’ve become lost in a life that one day we will live to regret.

Fortunately for me, Danish culture encourages children to grow up as individuals. The system is geared toward helping youngsters to get to know themselves as people before formal education begins – the maths, the science, the Danish and, being Denmark, the English lessons. I’m so grateful for that, because sometimes the pressure to do well academically at the expense of other talents is what in the end leads to the kind of problems that make us unhappy in the career paths we decide to follow when we leave school.

True happiness can only be found within yourself

If you find yourself thinking that you haven’t got the life you wanted or deserved – if you are simply unhappy – then I urge you, please look at ways you can change direction. Remember the dreams you used to have and revive them. Don’t live the rest of your life with regrets, they are a bar to happiness.

Addicted to success

We can sometimes lose track of a dream when we think we’ve achieved it, but we don’t feel any better or any happier. So we start striving for something else we think we need or want to make ourselves feel better, more valid or more important.

Success does not always mean earning lots of money, or having a top job. To some, it might mean knowing that their children have grown up into beautiful, kind, well-rounded people. To others, it might mean running 14 marathons. Or it could mean finding inner peace.

Like most people, there was a time in my life when work came first, at the expense of everything else, including my inner happiness. But now I know that true happiness is not something you can buy with money. It’s not something that a lover or a friend can give you, or something that the best job in the world brings. Yes, they can make you feel happy, but true happiness can only be found within yourself, and comes from learning to love yourself.

Being happy and feeling good enough about yourself is the platform on which everything else is built, and anything built on it is a bonus.

You may find that hard to believe – a lot of people do when they are caught up with the traditional trappings of success, such as power or money, or power and money. If that’s you, then hopefully, when you get to the end of this book you’ll have changed your mind.

TRY THIS

Write down the word ‘success’ in the middle of a sheet of paper, and then draw a circle round it. Now draw lines from it, a bit like the legs of a spider, and then at the end of each one write down exactly what comes to mind – positive and/or negative – when you think about success. Don’t ponder, write down what comes to mind first.

It could be anything – ‘providing for my family’, ‘seeing my children being happy’, ‘being promoted at work’, ‘having a big house’ – anything at all.

Now take a good look at your spider diagram and you may well be surprised by some of the things you have written down.

Next, think about how comfortable you are with your notions of success and then think of one word to describe how this makes you feel and write that down, too. Try and see if there are things you need to change in the future that will make this feel more comfortable to you.

Then put this aside until you get to the end of the book. Look at it again and it will be interesting to see if your priorities and definition of success have changed.