love Archives - Melanie Pritchard

The Litmus Test for Happiness in Career & Love

Posted on 27th February 2024 by Melanie Pritchard

“If you can’t figure out your purpose, figure out your passion. For your passion will lead you right into your purpose” – Bishop T.D. Jakes

I often say there are many parallels between careers and love. If you’re not excited by the career or person, don’t do it. Period.

I call it The Passion Test for a reason. If you wouldn’t wanna read a book on it or listen to a podcast on it, you may not have enough passion to hit the fuzzy heights of true success and fulfilment.

If you’re non-plussed or not excited by a date or the prospect of marrying someone, don’t do it.

Case in point – I spoke to a potential client yday. She looked flat and disconnected from her current work but by george, when she mentioned an experience of the past working on the field making a difference in a totally different way to her office job which pivots on the granular detail of technical law, she lit up. She even said she ‘came away from the experience and felt a fire inside’. YESSSS!

Émotions don’t lie.

If you want true career and love fulfilment, you must feel passionate about it and them. Period.

Tough times will come but it’s that passion that drives meaning, purpose and ease and will keep you going on a bad day. ‘The Bad Day Test’ as I call it.

It’s that passion that keeps you going ‘for better or for worse, in sickness and in health’. It doesn’t mean the job or person need be perfect, but passion lines your soul with the grit and determination required to succeed. And makes for the heady success of true fulfilment, align, ease and flow.

Still unsure?

Let these inspiring quotes light a flame in you:

“Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.”
Oprah Winfrey

“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“When you have balance in your life, work becomes an entirely different experience. There is a passion that moves you to a whole new level of fulfilment and gratitude, and that’s when you can do your best… for yourself and for others.”
Cara Delevingne

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
Maya Angelou

“The road to success is not easy to navigate, but with hard work, drive and passion, it’s possible to achieve the American dream.”
Tommy Hilfiger

“Follow your passion. The rest will attend to itself. If I can do it, anybody can do it. It’s possible. And it’s your turn. So go for it. It’s never too late to become what you always wanted to be in the first place.”
J. Michael Straczynski

“Follow your passion, be prepared to work hard and sacrifice, and, above all, don’t let anyone limit your dreams.”
Donovan Bailey

“When you have a passion for something then you tend not only to be better at it, but you work harder at it too.”
Vera Wang

“I think that in order to be successful, women have to figure out what they’re passionate about first. No matter what you aspire to, you’ve got to love what you do in order to be successful at it.”
Michelle Obama

“A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position.”
John C. Maxwell

“You can do anything as long as you have the passion, the drive, the focus, and the support.”
Sabrina Bryan

“Grit is that ‘extra something’ that separates the most successful people from the rest. It’s the passion, perseverance, and stamina that we must channel in order to stick with our dreams until they become a reality.”
Travis Bradberry

Ps That pic is me in Paris, a place that fans the flames of my soul. The decadence, darkness, passion, sensuality and soul spans so many things I’m passionate about. French, food, adventure, travel, honesty and above all, passion.

🐚

Want to create a career and life you love?

Get in touch for a free discovery call at www.melanie-pritchard.com. If there’s one thing I can assure you of having life and career coached for 7 years, it’s that true happiness, fulfilment and success are far closer than you think. You simply need the clarity and the ‘how’ to get there 🪄

The 10 Books that Changed my Life

Posted on 3rd February 2024 by Melanie Pritchard

It’s hard to overstate the impact that books have had on my life, developing my understanding of people and society as much, if not more than, human interaction.

So here are my top 10 book recommends that have been major catalysts for emotional, spiritual and intellectual growth. I hope the below will help inspire you as they have me:

1. The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael J Singer
This NY Times bestseller really expedited the healing process after a life-changing relationship ended. It’s truly eye-opening if you’ve ever struggled with anger or frustration that life or people aren’t how you want them to be. Singer also helps you understand how to overcome blocks within yourself that may threaten relationships whether romantic, platonic, professional or otherwise. His serious mix of EQ and IQ is quite breath-taking.

2. The Power of Now by Ekhart Tolle
This love / hate international bestseller taught me about the power of mindfulness and what it really is, opening with the author’s transformation from suicidal crisis to spiritual enlightenment. Tolle goes on to explain where stress comes from, why you are not your mind and how you can control your thoughts and emotions. It may leave you feeling like you’ve uncovered the secrets of the universe.

3. A Return To Love by Marianne Williamson
I read this book in the wake of a painful but necessary break-up. It clarified the different kinds of romantic love and how they’re part of your wider journey. The number 1 bestseller, it explores how miracles start to happen when you resolve to trust the universe and learn to love yourself, guiding the reader to deep spiritual awakening.

4. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living by the Dalai Lama XIV
This book deepened my knowledge of the most important aspect of human nature in any relationship: empathy. I read it when I felt unsupported in a relationship and the teachings were a catalyst for me leaving. In collaboration with Howard Cutler, a western psychiatrist, the Dalai Lama incorporates stories and meditations on how to overcome challenging emotions and what good relationships are built on. The 2,500 years of Buddhist teachings within will help you understand how to find peace in your daily life.

5. A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled by Ruby Wax
This read inspired me to develop mindfulness workshops in companies, charities and prisons. Outrageously witty, smart and accessible, Ruby Wax’s book on mindfulness explains the well-known term with humour and simplicity across a range of subjects from stress and relationships to careers and mental health. If you thought Wax was just some silly comic, think again. She has an OBE for her services to mental health, her book is inspired by her studies of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy at Oxford University and she believes that mindfulness is the only thing that has eased her crippling depression.

6. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything by Elizabeth Gilbert
I read this worldwide bestseller while I was in New York after emerging from a toxic relationship. It starts at 3am, with Gilbert sobbing on the floor. She’s in her 30s, has a husband, a house and is trying for a baby – and she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it’s time to pursue her own journey in search of happiness. So she travels to Rome, India and Bali where she re-finds herself quite entirely. I’d recommend this book if you’re at a cross-roads in your love life and wondering what makes you tick. I had many laugh out loud moments and equal doses of comfort and catharsis.

7. The Road Less Travelled by M Scott Peck
Peck was an American psychiatrist and best-selling author whose book melds love, science, and religion into a primer on personal growth. At the forefront of spiritual psychology, his book is broken into the grand themes of life like love and parenthood to v powerful effect, sharing his own life stories and those of anonymous therapy clients to bring the complex to life. His words on love and parenting stand out more than any others I’ve read on the subjects.

8. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma
This was the seed of my awakening to what really matters in life – the beginnings of reconnecting to my true self – bridging the gap between the conventional past life of law and the new, more inner-directed life of coaching. Teaching about the difference between ‘shoulds’ and ‘wants’, prestige and inner power, feelings over thinkings, the pearls of wisdom in this number one bestseller have contributed to reshaping my views on careers, love and life at large. This book is, quite simply, one of the most powerful stories you will ever read. Described by Brian Tracy, as a ‘fun, fascinating, fanciful adventure into the realms of personal development’, this is a must-read on how to achieve greater balance, control and happiness in life. Written by one of the world’s leading experts on leadership and personal development and author of 12 international bestsellers, Robin Sharma knows a thing or two about success in the widest sense.

9. The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food & Love by Kristen Kimball
Read at the start of a journey that would change my life, I’d just moved to Madrid after leaving law, I was embarking on a love affair with a Mowgli lookalike French boy nobody would have ever put me with and I was beginning to connect with my true self – closing the gap between who I thought I should be and who I really am. Based on Kimball’s unconventional journey from the glitzy world of Harvard and New York journalism to the rugged wilderness of the countryside with a farmer she falls in love with, ‘The Dirty Life’ is a powerful tale about love, fulfilment and the power of instinct. Exposing stark ironies about conventional perceptions of ‘success’ and ‘happiness’, Kimball takes us on a journey full of surprises, a world away from the corporate sphere she might have settled into in favour of a world full of simple pleasures. ‘The Dirty Life’ is a heart-warming must-read if you’re feeling disillusioned with the daily grind or conflicted by society’s expectations of you versus your inner longings.

10. The 5 Languages of Love by Gary Chapman
A woman in Chamonix said this book saved her marriage. I can see why. Its pocket sized dimensions are completely disproportionate to its power, for though you can read it in two hours straight, ‘The 5 Languages of Love’ is a life-changer in the relationship game. A New York Times bestseller, with over 5 million copies sold and translated into 38 languages, it guides you to identify, understand, and speak your partner’s primary love language – quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service or physical touch. This little love bible can transform relationships.

There is Purpose in Pain: How to Find the Magic in Adversity

Posted on 3rd February 20243rd February 2024 by Melanie Pritchard

There is purpose in pain.

If you’ve had a rough ride, it ain’t the end of your tale. Feel the pain, let it out and then dig deep, look for the learnings and good things will come.

Life is like a Super Mario game. You gotta decipher the learning on whatever level you’re on, no matter how hard, to progress to the next level. If you keep doing the same thing again n again you’ll stay stuck where you are.

Give in to low vibe energy and sit in a bog of victimhood (of course this is normal at times) and be prepared to stay stuck there.

If you’re really stuck in toxic emotions like anger, shame and envy, who can you talk to to break that impasse so you can bust upwards to survive and then thrive?

Even when you get through that, it can be hard to keep the faith at times that good things are coming your way so be your own cheerleader daily and champion yourself with positive language as you move through stress.

I regularly tell myself what I’d tell a best friend at those moments: ‘You’re doing really well, Mella, keep going’ or ‘It’s ok you’re feeling burnt-out, you’ve had a lot of change of late’.

Cos y’know what?

Language matters.

What you feed your brain matters.

Even if you don’t believe it, your subconscious mind believes anything you tell it if you feed it that regularly enough.

So repeat after me:

‘Amazing things are coming’ 💥

And wait for the tide to turn in your favour 🌊

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Want to learn more? Book in a free life / career coaching or corporate training discovery call to benefit from my 10% January discount and to optimise success before February is upon us! 🥂 www.melanie-pritchard.com.

Married to Trauma: Loving a Victim of Childhood Trauma

Posted on 3rd August 20233rd August 2023 by Melanie Pritchard

Adult survivors of childhood abandonment and complex trauma abound in our society. Theirs is a sad reality shrouded in the darkness of shame that keeps their experience locked away only to be known by their volcanic overreactions or quiet avoidance that are triggered by present-day cues. They are our sisters, fathers, spouses, etc. They live fenced in by crippling fear and loss of identity stolen at such a young age. They’ve developed and matured as we all do, driven by survival and attachment, the same instincts they came into the world with, the same instincts that gave them a fighting chance at survival. However, the other component necessary for reaching potential, the social environment, was not favorable. It seemed as if this third ingredient almost wanted their destruction from the very beginning as if they were not meant to be alive in the first place. This environment, or soil, if you will, would go on to nurture beliefs deep in the psyche of the individual. These beliefs would become infused with the person’s sense of self, and so they would live out those beliefs as if they had to. They would live out those beliefs in ever reinforcing and destructive consequences. Those consequences reinforce a dark world view and a sense of self-value that is worthless. They live in a reality that holds no possibility for hope. Each day they walk past choice and opportunity only to choose what is familiar.

Read the rest of this superb article here. There’s a surprisingly positive twist!

6 Surprising Signs of a Toxic Relationship

Posted on 3rd August 20233rd August 2023 by Melanie Pritchard

There’s no class in high school on how to not be a shitty boyfriend or girlfriend. Sure, we get taught the biology of sex, the legal ins and outs of marriage, and maybe we read a few obscure love stories from the 19th century on how not to be an ass-face.

Without clear ideas from adults, what we’re left with is basically trial and error, and if you’re like most people, it’s mostly error.

Enter: a string of toxic relationships as we fumble through an already complex dating world.

One of the problems is that a lot of toxic relationship habits are baked into our culture. We worship romantic love—you know, that dizzying and irrational kind that somehow finds breaking china plates on the wall in a fit of tears somewhat endearing. And we scoff at practicality or unconventional sexualities.

Men and women are encouraged to objectify each other and to objectify their romantic relationships. Thus, our partners are often seen as achievements or prizes rather than someone to share mutual emotional support.

A lot of the self-help literature out there isn’t helpful either. And for most of us, mom and dad surely weren’t the best examples.

Read the rest of this excellent article on the 6 signs of a toxic relationship here.

The Surprising Similarity between Careers and Dating

Posted on 13th July 202313th July 2023 by Melanie Pritchard

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” – Confucius

Ever gone on a date you weren’t excited about to discover, well, it was a waste of time?

Ever sent in multiple job applications or done an interview somewhat half-heartedly to discover, shock horror, you weren’t successful?

Or maybe you’re struggling to excel in your current role (or even get through the day..) because your heart’s just not in it?

I always say there are multiple parallels between love and careers. If you’re not excited, it’s not the right one! What happens when we settle on a half-hearted love? Yup, it ends in tears. Careers are no different as I explain in my short video here.

Do not, I repeat, do not, settle with your career.

Feeing disconnected 5 days’ a week is a BIG DEAL and will affect your mental health and wider life whether your love life, relationships with your children, wellbeing or otherwise.

If you think you’re lost, confused, stuck – you’re not nearly as lost as you think, trust me. I see these feelings ALL THE TIME with clients who invariably become unstuck within just 1-3 sessions. Confusion, apathy and frustration may alarm you but they excite me (!) because they are merely signs of unmet needs and when you work out what you need to be happy, the rest is easy.

Don’t believe me?

One creative career coaching client thought she was totally lost job wise and was sliding into depression when we first connected. She was also worried her career joylessness was endangering her relationship. By session 2, she was a different person – with a 360 energy / clarity turnaround once she got clear on her values. She wasn’t remotely crazy or even that lost once she had the space to explore what was really going on – she was just in the wrong role in a misaligned work environment.

She now has her dream job for a leading fashion house in Amsterdam and feels truly seen, heard and fulfilled.

If that resonates, hit me up for a free discovery call and feel the anxiety reduce and hope spike!

As an ex-lawyer turned career and life coach who works with smart, successful people in high-stress jobs, my superpower is helping ‘confused’ clients get unstuck fast and reconnect with careers that make them truly happy, fulfilled and excited to get up in the morning.

Remember: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” – Steve Jobs

#career #careers #job #interview #mentalhealth #wellbeing #work #finance #managementconsulting #consulting #lifecoaching #careercoaching #coaching #success #happiness #leaders #leadership #wellbeing #insurance #redundancy #HR #law #property #CEO #manager #lawyer #jobs #people

Relationship Anxiety: What Causes it and When You Really Need to Worry!

Posted on 12th July 2023 by Melanie Pritchard

‘Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life’ – Susan David PhD

Hands up if you’ve ever felt doubt, insecurity or the need for reassurance in a relationship? Cue all of us.

What causes relationship anxiety and when do you *really* need to worry?

What’s the difference between helpful and unhelpful anxiety in relationships?

How does relationship worry show up?

And how can we handle it?

I coach many life coaching clients on relationship pain-points whether work-related or romantic – in fact, it’s a favourite topic of mine, dealing with themes that go to the heart of what it is to be human – confidence, self-esteem, identity, values, communication, happiness, success and beyond.

The cost of poor quality or broken relationships is high, which is why it’s so rewarding teaching clients simple tools to overcome relationship challenges to minimise breakdown and optimise happiness.

A recent client mentioned the varied (mainly negative) advice she’d received from friends around her potentially impending divorce and one thing struck me – a real lack of balance, objectivity and hopeful guidance.

I saw something different to ‘let’s expedite the divorce’ / ‘what a d*ck’ / ‘things have ruptured so it’s game over after nearly 20 years’.

Underneath the anger and acting out was simply a breakdown in communication, a lack of tools around HOW to communicate effectively and a disconnect from their own selves since becoming busy working parents. Yes, that’s a few blockers but pretty resolvable blockers if there are enough shared values and vision for the future.

This is where coaching can be pretty game-changing, bringing awareness and balance to complex situations untrained listeners may be naturally more inclined to judge from their own frame of reference. This is what we call projection (!) which isn’t always helpful when we need to be heard and we want to connect to the truth in a balanced, non-polarised way.

If you’ve ever felt anxious in romantic relationships, wondered whether this is normal and what the difference even is between good and ‘bad’ anxiety, read my article below in Women’s Health. There’s a game-changing magic trick for dealing with anxiety in there which is as miraculous as it is simple. To read about this and the full article in Women’s Health, click here.

And if you’re looking to uplevel your relationships, whether in work or love, drop me a message to book a free discovery call here – I regularly help clients like these with tips to gain the clarity and tools to optimise dating, their relationships and love lives!

What’s stopping you from creating a life you love?

#love #relationships #success #happiness #lifecoaching #career #communication #stress #mentalhealth #cbt

The Love Story to End All Love Stories: Why the Queen’s Death Heralds Her Greatest Journey Yet

Posted on 10th September 202212th July 2023 by Melanie Pritchard

“He has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, over him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know”

Queen Elizabeth

In many ways, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were an unlikely pair. They first met at Britannia Royal Naval College in 1939, where an 18-year-old cadet Philip was introduced to a 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth of England while she was touring the grounds. From then, it’s said, the young royal never thought of anybody else.

The two began to exchange letters throughout the war years. While Elizabeth’s character is captured by typically British epithets like ‘understated’, dignified’ and ‘stoic’, in many ways Prince Philip was anything but. ‘It’s a vast waste of space’, Philip said, entertaining guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.

Known as the King of the faux pas, Philip was a cheeky chappy ready to inject mischief into any exchange, no matter how risqué. But though they were superficially as different as night and day, this was a love affair to end all love affairs. As different as they were similar, this is what made them so perfect for each other — he was the yin to her yang — what one had, the other didn’t — and vice versa. Where she was measured and impartial, he was expressive and provocative. Where she was understatedly British, he was more European in his heart-lead, impassioned self-expression that caught people off guard, disarming formality with wit and fun.

As Elizabeth Gilbert, the bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, reminds us: ‘People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life’.

It’s impossible to celebrate the Queen without recognizing the powerful union that underpinned her magnificent sovereignty — and the enormously significant role she felt her right hand man played during her remarkable 70 year reign.

For brilliantly handsome and silly as he was, his charisma and quips belied incisive wit and integrity, just as Queen Elizabeth’s stability and impartiality belied her intelligence and power.

This was a one of a kind power couple, with Queen Elizabeth’s right hand man being far more than a devastatingly handsome seaman who swept her off her feet. Despite being the consummate man’s man, Philip gave up a prestigious career in the Royal Navy to assume the role of Queen’s Consort, subjugating himself to support her reign over 32 sovereign states during her reign of 70 years and 214 days, the longest of any British monarch and the longest recorded of any female head of state in history.

He was a man of serious honour, parking his ego in the way that only true men can, to support his remarkable other half to carry out a life of duty of service.

And though this may seem more of a tribute to Phillip than Queen Elizabeth herself, I’m not sure she would have wanted it any other way.

This was a man who cherished his Queen so deeply that he movingly orchestrated his own funeral to end with the National Anthem ‘God Save the Queen’, rendered all the more poignant as she sat alone in her pew in the midst of the pandemic, with only a black mask for company.

So while the Queen’s passing has been immeasurably sad for the British people, it’s also been a moment of great poignancy and comfort for the romantics amongst us: a moment which we are told brought her much comfort — when she would be reunited with the man she described on their golden wedding anniversary in 1997 as: ‘My strength and stay all these years’.

So as we mourn the loss of the inimitable, one of a kind figurehead that was Queen Elizabeth, let us celebrate one of her most longed for, treasured moments: the reconciliation with the man she counted as so critical to her happiness and success as a monarch.

For as Marianne Williamson reminds us in her powerful memoir, A Return To Love, those of us who find divine love are truly blessed, for it is the highest form of love that transcends all others and raises us up to everything we can be:

“The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.”

~ Sir Cecil Spring Rice

From New York Journalist to Farmer’s Wife: What The Dirty Life Teaches Us About Happiness

Posted on 22nd February 2022 by Melanie Pritchard

What are you?

A professional or an entrepreneur, a country bumpkin or a city slicker, a conformist or a free spirit? Or are you a hybrid – a suited and booted banker or lawyer with the ‘perfect job’ but a niggling desire to explore less well-trodden paths? Or maybe you’re just plain confused about where you fit and what really drives you.

Whatever category you fall into, most of us from Generation Y were bred by folks with far less opportunity than us professionally. With more conventional views of what constitutes a ‘proper’ job, our parents may have inadvertently left us stuck between a rock and a hard place – between what we should do and what we want to do. But ‘should’ is where it all goes wrong.

Expectations versus reality

Nobody knows this better than Kristen Kimball, author of ‘The Dirty Life’ and former freelance journalist and Harvard graduate from New York. After a chance interview with a hunky farmer, she upped sticks to set up farm with her green-fingered interviewee, leaving the city lights and life as she knew it in her wake. You heard right – East Village in favour of mud and veg in the middle of nowhere. This is a story of two love affairs that interrupted the trajectory of an intellectual glamour-puss’ life – one with farming and the other with a man who milks cows for a living. A striking tale about love, happiness and the power of instinct, ‘The Dirty Life’ is a must-read for anyone feeling a little disillusioned with the daily grind or what life’s all about.

The product of a neat, middle-class world, Kimball’s novel charts the mental and physical challenges she faced leaving the glitzy world of ‘convention’ in favour of rural slog. ‘Writ[ing] with precision, authority and gratitude about what is evidently, despite its rigours, an idyllic life’ (New York Times Book Review), Kimball challenges our views about wealth, success and love, giving food for thought as compelling as the gastronomical delights she chronicles.

Kimball’s union with Mark, a rugged hulk of a man with a passion for food and farming, is a world away from the corporate sphere she might have settled into. But as with the different kind of ‘wealth’ she finds farm-side, Kimball takes us on a journey full of surprises, a journey which exposes some stark ironies about our perceptions of ‘success’ and ‘happiness’ of City life.

Does success equal happiness?

‘The Dirty Life’ makes us question our ‘values’ as we know them. In Kimball we find a cosmopolitan New Yorker who, like many of us, supposedly ‘has it all’. A woman with all the trappings of refinement, yet one who is, by her own admission, blinded by ignorance. Openly admitting her surprise that a ‘salt-of-the-earth-type’ person such as Mark could talk with dexterity and intelligence and that ‘the physical world – the trades’ was not in fact ‘the place you ended up if you weren’t bright or ambitious enough to handle a white-collar job’, Kimball shows us the danger of defining people by what they do. In Kimball we find a highly educated woman who has travelled the world with her job, yet whose eyes are opened by an entirely different world, stunned by the happiness she finds ‘pulling warm eggs out of a nest box’.

Shake things up…

So, what is the moral of the tale? Keep meeting new people, keep an open-mind and be true to yourself. Work out what is important to you and don’t be afraid to question reality as you know it. Have the courage to live a life true to yourself, not the life others expect of you and remember, the most successful life is one which unearths what makes you truly happy. Fulfilment goes far deeper than an impressive job title and it will bring you fruits that money can’t buy.

Watch an interview with Kristin Kimball here.

The Theory of Everything: What Stephen Hawking’s Divorce Teaches Us About Love

Posted on 22nd February 202222nd February 2022 by Melanie Pritchard

The Theory of Everything was quite something for Eddie Redmayne. He was already high on my list just for being a dazzling, redhead, for his (inoffensive) public school charm and for those stunning green eyes, but his performance in The Theory of Everything propelled him into unchartered territory.

I had assumed that The Theory of Everything would be about physics, planets and a famous scientist. And though it is, of course, about the incredible Stephen Hawking and his awe-inspiring achievements, it’s about far more than physical matter.

A Bit of A Game-Changer

This is a tale about the great themes of life – love and loss, strength and frailty, courage and fear, comedy and tragedy. This isn’t a perfect love story with violins and roses, romantic longevity untainted by challenge, this is a story about the varied and subtle shades of life at its most difficult and most beautiful. This is a story of reality and hope united, a story of a young couple bound by a love so strong that we are carried to dizzying heights with Jane’s passionate commitment to Stephen, a commitment at its most beautiful on his diagnosis with Motor Neurone Disease. Her inner courage is heightened by her miniature size, a gumption soaring way above the testing physical and emotional obstacles which are laid in their marital path. Stephen’s strength is as inspiring, manifest in his wicked sense of humour, sparkling eyes and remarkable scientific achievements despite his physical constraints. Nothing grips human nature more than strength in adversity and boy is this a hero’s tale – not just of the incredible scientist himself, but of his steadfast wife, unbending in love and sacrifice for the man she loves.

Where’s The Real Wow?

But for me, a more subtle ‘wow factor’ lies in the twist towards the end. The Hawkings’ ability to adapt to new and uncomfortable truths is established early on through Stephen’s illness but later, with the breakdown of their marriage, come some truly powerful messages. That the changed status of their incredible relationship didn’t undermine their happy ending bears poignant testimony to the power of the human spirit, challenging our perception of romance, commitment, happiness and success. For despite being the most brilliant example of ‘for better or for worse’, this ended up being a tale whose value wasn’t determined by whether the couple remained together or apart… this was a tale about success in a far wider sense – the ability to accept the twists and turns of life and adapt to changes thrown your way, no matter how unfair or futile.

What Can We Learn From The Theory of Everything?

In this respect, The Theory of Everything is aptly named, for it really is rich in messages about so many aspects of human existence. The aforementioned twist, set against a tale of such supernatural love and professional achievement, shows us that imperfection can still be inspiring and that magnificence is not always born of picture perfect endings. Intelligence is not just about brilliance and jaw-dropping achievement. It can be of a quieter kind, found in dignity, courage and the ability to adapt to change. In an increasingly digital society dependant on the disposable, this film shows us that those who don’t end up with perfect Facebook statuses can still find immeasurable success in their lives, looking back and looking ahead, whether personal, professional or familial, external or internal – together or apart. Indeed, any other type of ‘perfection’ seems rather superficial and mundane set against a tale so rich in challenges and beauty that follows – but a static snap from a virtual world built to dazzle. The Theory of Everything challenges this empty cultural norm, showing that real beauty shifts and moulds to the circumstances of life – a life which can be rosy, shady and just plain difficult. A real life where real brilliance goes way beyond a perfect picture, inspiring hope in loss, beauty in pain, humour in suffering.

And it is in this vein that The Theory of Everything finds its cosmic power – in the quiet beauty of one of the closing scenes which sees the former couple united in the Queen’s perfectly manicured gardens, sharing their pride in the children that they have created together. The dignity with which they move on to confront life apart from one another after their incredible love story, without compromising the deep respect that they developed for one another, struck me as a great perfection. Nothing supernatural, nothing cosmic, nothing to write home about on a Facebook wall but a flawed reality rich in hope, humanity and dignity.

Why Should You See The Theory of Everything?

The Theory of Everything is a remarkable tale about the power of the human spirit – a spirit which can be dazzling, other-earthly in abilities and passions and spell-bindingly inspiring but one which is also, just that – human – flawed, challenging and complex. A truly metaphysical tale, The Theory of Everything unites improbable points of likeness on so many levels to incredibly powerful effect – strength in adversity, humour in suffering, passion in frailty and happiness despite separation. I can see why Stephen Hawking said he was proud of Eddie Redmayne. Both seem to be remarkable men, probing life’s deepest questions in dazzling fashion.

Tag: love

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