If you are navigating a sh!t show and do not have the option of simply pulling the covers over your head and staying in bed each day, or of running away from your situation, if instead you have to dig deep and face each day, this book is for you.

In this book I tell some of my stories of tough times. These include traumatic parenting experiences, a cancer diagnosis, a serious car accident, and the grief of my dad dying in his 50s. While none of my sh!t shows were rougher than anyone else’s, they were soul-wearying in their number, their duration and their relentlessness.

You could be going through anything traumatic - from family trauma to brushes with death to any kind of loss or grief. Your sh!t show could be one-off or repeated, and it could be over in seconds or it could last for years.  

When I was in the middle of my sh!t shows, to the outside world I appeared as if I were keeping it together. I held down a complicated CEO job. I led teams of people mostly gracefully. I looked like a parent who was doing a decent job at least some of the time with my kids. People used the words grit and resilience to describe me.

During these sh!t show years, the standard advice was to talk to a therapist and to take some time off work. When I tried these, they typically made me feel worse, certainly in the early aftermath of a sh!t show.

Instead, this grit and resilience people spoke of came from trying a wide range of coping strategies to see if any could help me keep functioning. I never tried any of my trauma-coping mechanisms with the intention of writing about them. Unsurprisingly, I never wanted to become a connoisseur of coping mechanisms at all.

 I share in this book my tried-and-tested coping strategies that allowed me to keep on trucking in the short term. I also share the longer-term, more sustainable ways I have rebuilt my mental and physical wellbeing to a place of peace after living in emergency mode for many years.

As I thought back over what had helped me, I could see that I used groups of strategies for different timeframes: in the middle of a sh!t show, shortly after and long after. These three timeframes led to traffic-light-inspired zones to give you some guidance.

For you, my hope is that this book acts as a resource, not to give you an unwieldy list of 20 things you need to do, but a simple list of practical tools that might work for you.

I also hope the sharing of some of my stories might make you feel less alone as you navigate your sh!t show.