One of the lowest points in my business career was when things actually starting working for me. After a few years of learning and scrambling and changing service offerings and business models, I set out to make my third iteration of the business a success. And it actually worked. Worked pretty quickly too. Before I [...]
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ARTICLES, EMAILS AND POSTS
21 Days of Gentleness: Day 18 – Fishermen
I had an email exchange over the weekend with a writing challenge participant from Chicago. It emerged that we’re probably related. My great great grandmother came from a tiny island off the coast of Donegal with a population that now tallies about 36. His grandmother emigrated to America from that same tiny island and had [...]
21 Days of Gentleness: Day 17 – Tantrums
She was kicking and screaming. I was looking over my shoulder. My daughter is now a fully fledged toddler and with her new found steadiness on her feet comes an ever-extending will and the first glimpses of tantrums. I was out with her last week when I nipped into a cafe to give her some [...]
21 Days of Gentleness: Day 16 – Folklore
My grandfather was full of stories. And jokes. He loved a joke, or a cod as he used to say. But I only realised a lot of his stories were jokes when I was older because they were all very specific to Derry, its characters and places of business. There were tales about Andy McGarvey’s [...]
21 Days of Gentleness: Day 15 – Bad Poetry
Steve Almond is an author, teacher and co-host of the podcast, Dear Sugars. One of my favourite things about the podcast, which is essentially an audio advice column, is how Steve uses the lens of literature to get to the heart of what the letter writer is asking. He’ll often begin by reading a passage [...]
21 Days of Gentleness: Day 14 – Holding Tension
“I can’t tell you how excited I am,” I told John before the series began. “It’s literally a show about my life.” Just hearing a Derry accent on TV is a novel treat for me, but this… This was to be a show about growing up as a teenage girl attending a convent school in [...]
21 Days of Gentleness: Day 13 – Donegal Beaches
“It’s the most amazing beach. We should definitely go there.” We were on a weekend away with John’s family on the South Coast of England and were making a plan for the day. John’s sister had visited the area before and was extolling the virtues of a particular beach not far from where we were [...]
21 Days of Gentleness: Day 12 – Riots And Rubber Bullets
“You’re not going, Megan. There’s been rioting all afternoon and apparently there’s a lorry on fire on the Buncrana Road.” I thought my mother was being unreasonable. Overprotective. I wanted to go to Gaelic practice and a burning hijacked lorry a couple of hundred yards away didn’t seem like a good enough reason not to [...]
21 Days of Gentleness: Day 11 – A Quiet Power
I ‘m pretty good at remembering names. Perhaps unusually so. I think I get it from my mother. No one I know uses the name of the person they’re talking to more than she does. I noticed it as a kid. We’d bump into someone in the supermarket and her side of the conversation would [...]
21 Days of Gentleness: Day 10 – A Crisis
I made a lot of knee jerk decisions in my early twenties. I quit my master’s degree and my plan of a career in research with no idea what I was going to do next. I had the thought one day and a couple of weeks later I had quit. I got a job in [...]