Sonia Saxton

How did you get there?

I was very fortunate. When I was growing up, I didn’t have any rules. My mother had multiplexes sclerosis TB and only one lung, and she was in a wheelchair by the time I was four. She resided at the local hospital, where they took care of her. My father was a chef. My sister brought me up. They left home when they were 18 or 20. Then there was just my father, whom I saw late at night. There were no rules. I just did what I wanted to do. I was very creative – earning money, for example. So I would take my red -wheeled bicycle, gather all the bottles from the neighborhood and take them back to the shop to get the money for the bottles to buy the food to feed my cats and discovered that when I did little jobs around people’s homes, they paid me money. My poor father didn’t know anything about this because he was at the hotel. I wanted to buy food for my cats, I wanted to do things, so I learned early on that there is always a way to achieve something, it’s only a question of how! I did a lot of daydreaming. The power of daydreaming is that you come up with solutions. When I was 10 and a half, my father had a car accident, and my mother died a year later, and I moved in with my sister. The fantastic thing about this is that I was always finding a solution to something. I had a lot of experience with reading people. When I was in the hospital with my mother had to find a way of getting her the last piece of cake on the tray. I had to find a way for us to go out. I would ask complete strangers to push my mother several yards and ask somebody else to take over until we reached a cup and kettle for a cup of tea. I found ways of achieving things, and when I went to employment, I found out that I was a bit of emaboric – I always wanted to do things differently. And my employers were always delighted by how much money I made them because I was always finding solutions. However, they were horrified when they were managing me because I was always doing my own thing.
 
One day I noticed a consultant came in. He came in at 9 o’clock, and at 5 o’clock he left the premises. I was feeling quite astonished that he should leave the premises at 5 o’clock. I turned to my boss and said, “Oh, I noticed that the consultant was leaving at 5 o’clock. And I normally worked until 8-9-10 o’clock because there were so few of us specialists. And he said, “Ah yes, but Sonia, he is from the outside!” “The outside – wow! I would love to be from the outside!”. “Oh, we would never let you go!". And that’s when I learned about language. I noticed that if I added “-ed” to the end of all my words and said, “If he hav'ed decided, I had'ed achiev'ed, If I had'ed been able to leave what would that involve?”. And this is about taking people's imagination to something being an achiever. And when I did that, people started to think differently. So, then my business was born in 1999, and here I am still running it and loving it! Because there is always a way, it is only a question of how.