What is an expectation, really? I’ve been turning that question over, and I’ve landed on a definition I rather love. A belief, a mental picture of the future. Or its anticipation, that feeling that something is about to happen. And that’s exactly where I find myself at this moment. On the cusp of something. I haven’t the faintest idea what it is, only that it’s coming, somewhere around 2027. So I’m treating this whole stretch of time as preparation, for whatever it turns out to be.

It would be easy to find that unsettling. Most of us like a plan, a date in the diary. But I made a decision a while back to trust the universe instead, to work from a blank sheet of paper rather than a project plan signed, sealed and secured. After decades steeped in business discipline, where everything had to be in place before you moved an inch, that was a frightening change for me to make. But you just jump. I’m not waiting to be pushed. Which, of course, is the very question at the heart of my book. Are you going to jump, or are you waiting to be pushed? Because change happens regardless. The only real choice is how you meet it. But you just jump. I’m not waiting to be pushed. Which, of course, is the very question at the heart of my book. Are you going to jump, or are you waiting to be pushed? Because change happens regardless. The only real choice is how you meet it.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with conforming, if I’m honest. My father was expecting a boy, he’d even settled on the name William Richard, and he fully intended to call me Bill. He never quite got over not having his son. It set the tone, in a strange sort of way, for a life spent quietly refusing to fit the shape other people had in mind for me.

Growing up in the late 1960s, the expectations laid out for a young woman were narrow. You married, you raised a family, and if you were lucky enough to have a vocation, perhaps teaching or nursing, that was considered respectable. Everything else needed qualifications I simply didn’t have, having moved school after school as my father’s postings took us from Singapore to Warrington to Gloucestershire. And there’s a story buried in all that disruption that I’m still grateful for. My headmistress at Ribston Hall grammar school, a Miss Mortimer, took one look at this bright but constantly uprooted girl and told my parents, in no uncertain terms, to leave me be for two years so I could finally get through a full syllabus. Fortunately, they listened, and I came out the other end with seven O-levels, and I’d still love to go back and tell that school what those two years gave me.

Even with those qualifications, the doors open to me were few. Sales was one of the rare careers that asked no questions about pedigree, and it was a job selling advertising space for a local paper that, almost by accident, set my whole career in motion.

If you want a glimpse of how my mind has always worked, look no further than the story of how I landed my role at Bejams, a frozen food supermarket chain. I’d gone in, out of simple curiosity, to see what the new freezer store on my patch looked like, and found the meat section in a dreadful state. Untrained staff, messy stock that looked like it had been thrown into the freezers, and no thought given to the fact that this was, in fact, the highest revenue line in the entire building. Most people would have tutted and moved on. I went home, bought a sheet of real parchment paper, and wrote to the marketing director asking for forty seven minutes of his time, certain I had ideas that could improve his sales.

There was no job for me to apply for. I wasn’t a home economist, hadn’t trained in retail, didn’t fit any box on the organisation chart. So I made him an offer instead. Give me three and a half months out in the field, and if my ideas worked, we’d talk about making a role for me. If they didn’t, he could simply put me back in the pond. I’d already resigned from Orchard Farms by then, which meant giving up a company car and a steady wage on nothing more than a hunch.

The marketing director was a betting man by nature, fond of a day at the races in Cheltenham, and he decided to take a punt on what he affectionately called “this old mare.” I very nearly undid the whole thing by asking him for a company car too, which he wasn’t expecting at all. But I reminded him he was a gambling man, and he backed the old filly anyway. Whatever hurdle he put in my path after that, I simply jumped it, went round it, or went under it, until I reached the other side. 

We revolutionised the product range. This was at a time when domestic fridge freezers were only just finding their way into people’s homes and nobody else was doing anything like it. I even fought, and won, the right to sell a variety pack of small joints when I was told flatly that it couldn’t be done. His gamble on me paid off. We rebuilt the entire supply chain, and sales increased by £11 million. I became known as the meat lady, and I’m still friends, all these years on, with the people from that chapter of my life.

It’s a theme that’s run right through my career. I was never the expert sitting in a single discipline. I was the link between production and the customer, always far more interested in how the pieces fitted together than in mastering one small corner of the puzzle. I’ve never separated art from science, and I suppose that’s why I’ve always felt such kinship with Leonardo da Vinci, the original polymath who never drew a line between the two either. 

When I lost my husband Colin, that lifelong habit of deciding things together went with him. For the first time, I had to make life’s big choices entirely on my own, without the other half of the duo I’d relied on for decades. My response was to do exactly what I’d always done when faced with a closed door: I went looking for the gap. Rather than cling to certainty, I chose the blank page. A fresh, unplanned start, with no map and no guarantee of where it leads.

I think what I’d say to anyone reading this and wondering whether to make their own change, is that the courage doesn’t arrive before you need it. It turns up once you’ve already started moving. I wasn’t ready when I gave up a steady wage and a company car on nothing more than a hunch, and I certainly wasn’t ready to build a life again without Colin. I just didn’t wait to feel ready, I started anyway. If there’s a closed door in front of you right now, you don’t need permission to go looking for the gap. You just need to decide you’re the kind of person who looks.

And that brings me back to where I began. The sense that something is on its way, that 2027 holds a chapter I can’t yet read, and that the only sensible response is to trust it. I can spend my life waiting for circumstances to push me into change, or I can choose to jump first. I’ve spent eight decades proving which one suits me better.

So perhaps that’s the real question great expectations leaves me with, and perhaps it leaves you with it too. Not what do you expect from the future, but are you waiting for it to arrive, or are you ready to go and meet it?