Chris, Ros and myself all started out having one thing in common, we all worked for Tesco Ltd. Later we would discover many more things we had in common. Although we all worked for Tesco for a long period of time it was not until later on in our careers we would meet!
Chris had varying roles in store over many years and with her extensive experience was drafted in to deliver a new initiative called living service. Living service was a cultural change programme to help improve customer service amongst other things within the company. As the programme developed it was decided that a select few would be trained as coaches to work regionally with management teams. Meanwhile Ros was based at head office and had also been selected for the training.
During the training Chris and Ros meet, bonded and became firm friends. They shared many of the same life values, interests and had a passion for helping others to improve and reach their full potential. Chris and Ros returned to their change agent roles, but kept in touch and would occasionally cross paths.
Ros decided to leave Tesco to pursue other dreams and a simpler way of living. She contacted Chris to tell her she was moving on and hoped they would keep in touch.
A year or so later Living Service was coming to an end and the economy had taken a nose dive and Tesco announced a number of redundancies. After 20 years service it was time for Chris to start a new adventure. Chris called Ros to tell her the news and that she had done a distanced learning course and was a qualified life coach. Chris had the learning bug and was going to go back to school to study NLP. Ros had also been busy gaining new knowledge and skills, in the form of Myres Briggs and Reiki.
When the girls would get together they would talk about dreams of starting a business doing what they loved, which was coaching and helping others to recognise their potential. Chris had been volunteering with young adults and said how her coaching and leadership development knowledge had helped them change their perspective on unhealthy behaviour. One night over a few glasses of wine Positive Change was born. A little seed was planted!! A dream of providing affordable coahing and development to individuals, companies and comunities that might not necessrily have acces or be able to afford specialised training. All they needed was a website, a business plan and most importantly some work!! This my friends is where (drum role) I enter!!
Now not many people know this but Chris is actually my mum! (Shocking revelation GASP). I was invited (told to attend lol) a brain storming session to help grow the little positive change seed. At the time I was a stay at home mum, but my background was customer service, HR, project management,finance and according to Chris and Ros I am a whizz on all things techie (geek).
So over a few months we planned the website, got together marketing material, opened a bank account, registered a partnership, contacted everyone we knew and got ourselves a logo. Now the logo I feel is very important because it helps you to understand what we stand for. Our logo is the tree of life. Collectively we are all earthy, spiritual, creative and intuitive powerful women and the tree of life suited us. We have strong foundations and we never stop growing. We are always reaching for the sun. We adapt and change as a tree does through the seasons and even through the coldest winter we remain strong and know spring will bring fresh hope and new life.
In our sapling stages of Positive Change we did batering, swapping our services, skills and knowledge for other peoples services, like coaching for beauty treatments. we also conducted sample sessions and mini workshops to schools and charities. Both of these ideas paid off as we could demonstrate and show people our products and use their feedback to improve our products. During this time we recognised that many business leadership tools could be adapted to help young people and parents to better manage behaviour. With this concept in mind Chris and Ros did an NVQ in working with parents and became parenting practitioners. We developed a concept called Parental Leadership which I wrote about on the blog and you can read more here. It has become very successful and a really good training tool.
We started Positive Change 3 years ago and it's been a roller coaster!! Mainly ups and a few downs thank god! We have laughed and cried and enjoyed every minute!! We have worked with and met some amazing people and companies (Saint Francis Hospice, The Queens Theatre, Team London & The Vibe just to mention a few) and look forward to all the new challenges and opportunities coming our way.
Our dream for the future is to work with large organisations and schools to create several programmes to help future leaders within our communities. We recognise that in the current economic climate some young people will not be able to go onto further education and will have to call on their entrapanureal skills to start businesses etc. There will be a lost generation that will need help to contribute to society. We have a few ideas for this and I like the sound of The Leadership Legacy, a chance for established entrapenures and large corporations to pass on their knowledge and expertise to a younger a generation. There are so many companies that started out small and grew and grew through a single mans/woman's determination and vision, ironically one of these such stories is Mr Cohen who founded Tesco. FromWell Street Market, Hackney selling broken biscuits to multi million pound retailer No 1!! So here I end my blog post where I started at Tesco!
I hope you enjoyed our journey to work :)
Lucy x
P.s. little mini celebration for my 100th blog post!!
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