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I hope you had a really enjoyable Easter and you were able to get out into the garden. With the clocks having changed last weekend our days are staying lighter for longer and this really does enable us to go for a walk in the evening which is such a treat at this time of the year with leaves appearing on the trees, blossom in full flower and daffodils glowing like sunshine in our garden. I love it!
Next to post-Christmas, I recognise that Easter is the second most popular period of the year for folks to be motivated to shed a few lbs and become fitter for the summer. Even when I was running my earliest classes in the 1970s, this is when I used to advertise for more members. Over the next couple of weeks, we will see lots of advertisements for diet products, slimming clubs, gyms and fitness classes appearing on television and on social media offering to help us look fabulous for our holidays. But for me, the biggest motivation to get in shape is the fact that after a very wet winter, spring brings us real joy, and for those who suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD) in the dark winter months, they can begin to live life to the full again.
Mary is going to describe to you the enormous benefits of gardening and recently I heard of a lady who adores gardening and has made a business out of it. She makes the most beautiful bouquets and on Mother’s Day a few weeks ago, Dawn, my daughter, came over to visit and presented me with one that was exquisite and full of fresh spring flowers. The blooms were quite unusual with some really beautiful colours and different varieties from the normal Mother's Day flowers we all recognise. I absolutely loved it.
Dawn went on to tell me the story of her friend Lauren and how she followed her passion for growing flowers by filling her own garden with plants and bulbs, then her next-door neighbour’s (who was delighted that she also took over her garden!) and, on top of that, also had an allotment.
Lauren was planning on taking a stall at a local Spring Fayre where she hoped to sell her beautiful blooms for Mother’s Day but her reputation had spread and she received so many private orders that she didn’t have enough flowers left to hold a stall!
I thought this was such a charming story and I loved hearing of an enterprising woman who had turned her hand to combine her passion with hard work as well as caring for a family and three dogs, and make a great success of it.
For the last 15 years I have been delighted to be the President of Young Enterprise in Leicestershire – an organisation where students at school sign up for the one-year programme through which they will be taught how to run a business, create a product to make money, experience the likely personnel issues that being in business inevitably brings and finally, how to wind up the business in an appropriate way. At the end of each year the Young Enterprise ‘companies’ present their ups and downs of running a company and share their experiences in a competition to find the best-run and most effective business.
Each company team is judged by a panel of experienced and successful businessmen and women as well as experts in health and safety, the environment, and so on. I absolutely love seeing the teams working with such cohesion and confidence. It is positively inspiring!
Whenever I am invited to speak to them or at any Speech Day at a school, I always say 'Look at what you are good at right now, in school. Where do you excel? What do you enjoy most? Which subjects are you really interested in? And if you can incorporate all of those elements into your future career, you will love every single day of your working life and it won’t feel like work - and you’ll be successful.’
Mary and I are very fortunate that we both, in our different ways, created businesses that involved our passions – helping folks to become fitter for Mary and helping people to lose weight for me. Mary was inspired by her amazing PE teacher who managed to get even those pupils who hated PE to participate by incorporating music and dance. This was all Mary needed, to know what career path she wanted to take and she qualified as a PE teacher and later started her own very successful Health Club business.
I was average at school but I enjoyed art, movement to music, English and biology - all things that unknowingly led me to start my local slimming club 52 years ago. Over the years, all of those subjects have played a very big part!
I hope you are able to cultivate your interests in a way that still motivates and inspires you to get out of bed every morning. It is so wonderful if it does.
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![By Unknown author (Chadborn & Coldwell Manufacturing in Newburgh, New York) - Garden and Forest, February 29, 1888 issue (available from the Library of Congress)Transferred from en.wikipedia.org [1]: 2005-09-10 07:44 . . Kayaker . . 1300×1150 (82,708 bytes), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1124801](https://mcusercontent.com/d7fc1b42e28b55b7b84301e26/images/6747bcd0-9efc-bed5-b992-29d8b321fb77.png)
The Lawn-mower was invented and patented in 1830 by Edwin Beard Budding of Stroud, Gloucestershire. His device was intended for cutting the grass on sports grounds and other large gardens as an improvement to cropping such spaces by hand using a scythe!
