Business Fit Magazine Special Editions Mother & Daughter Special Edition | Page 6

Welcome Welcome again to this Business Fit. Special Edition. It’s very exciting to showcase people from England, Wales, UAE, Sweden, USA and St Lucia and I urge anyone reading this to please circulate this magazine whether online or in print to get the ladies stories out there to inspire as many people as we can. on mothers and daughters So, who I am? I wasn’t going to talk about me in here as I wanted this to be dedicated to the contributors but Claire, the editor made me. I come from a disfunctional family and I had no real parenting from the age of 12. By that I mean I mostly fended for myself. I could go into many finer details of the violence, alcoholism, living in a house with no electricity or gas and only candles and a camp stove with baked beans for food much of the time. However, the past is the past and has shaped me, I am grateful for being me. What I feel is more important to share is how I dealt with the situation and how now I deal with it, without negativities against my family or what happened. I started working in a restaurant at the age of 14 to earn enough money to get the deposit to rent my own bedsit at 16. I loved work and I loved being with people. This love led me into bar work and starting a three-year college course to become a Master Chef, which I completed with flying colours. Due to the unsocial hours I wanted to change career and started applying for jobs I thought were out of my league. I landed an Operations Manager position at a contract cleaning company managing a 500+ workforce, again I loved it, worked very hard and within a year I was General Manager on £21,000 a year, company car, mobile phone, you name it. This was over 20 years ago! I was bloody good at what I did. I was good with people. I cared. I met my husband when I was 21 and by 25 we were married. I was told that I was unable to have children, which was devastating as all I wanted to be was a mum. We were just going to try for IVF 6 when we found out I was four months pregnant with my first child, James who was born in 2001. Then in 2003, Alisha (Ali as I have to call her!) came along without planning. Wow, amazing, thank you universe for these amazing children and husband which I still have today. I decided before having Alisha to leave my position as a General Manager (which is another long story for another day!) to look after my own future with my husband and start property development and investment. That is where my career went for many years and we still owned the portfolio until last year. I trained to become a Commercial Chartered Surveyor (which I still am) and worked in corporate in Birmingham, UK. All of this is a story for another day as these years were some of the most challenging in my life especially with my husband in the military and not at home. But again, it has made me the person I am now today. Then, oh my gosh I hear you say! I got into personal development, international speaking and business coaching. I have spoken in over 34 countries and again have loved it. I started an immigration company, bought a café restaurant and ran that and supported my husband in his Cyber Security Business. Are you getting the gist here? I never really knew what I wanted. I was always striving to be the best, pushing to have everything, be everything and boy wasn’t it hard work, everything had to be my way! How my husband put up with me, I don’t know! I never knew who I was. Who Vikki Thomas REALLY was as a being. Then I started my journey to self-discovery and many other exciting things. I have invested over £400,000 in my education in the last three years and have become more spiritual. I started in secret at first as I was a powerful business woman, a powerful speaker and being spiritual doesn’t fit into that mould (so I was led to believe!) 7