Angi Scott is one of the kindest, most generous, loving and courageous people I know. She is the lady on the end, in the far left of the image below.
I first met her on the AJC Career Coaching School in 2022.
I was immediately drawn to her. She was one of the quieter people and definitely didn’t want to be at the front of the room.
Quiet and unassuming for sure and yet with an underlying strength and energy I hadn’t felt very often.
I was soon to discover that Angi Scott, underneath that quiet exterior, is an absolute powerhouse of a human being, businesswoman and coach.
Over the two years we attended the AJC together, I got to witness her go through an incredible transformation. I watched Angi become a person that when she raised her hand to speak or came to the front of the room, I was immediately tuned in. I knew that whatever she said was going to be worth hearing. It was going to be impactful.
In getting to know Angi, I got to know that life had thrown some pretty tough challenges her way.
Two years ago, Angi suddenly and lost her partner of many years Matt. They were partners and they were in business together. While Angi was dealing with her grief and loss at Matt’s sudden passing she was having to figure out running their businesses without him … and she did.
If I was to make a list of the challenges life has thrown at Angi, even this year alone, it would be easy to create an argument that life just isn’t fair to some people and Angi would be one of those people.
One of the businesses they ran was the Queens Hotel in Blaenau Ffestiniog.
Three days ago, the Queens Hotel was destroyed in a fire.
Angi has lost a lot more than her business. Angi lived in the hotel with her kids and her five cats. They have lost everything.
Thankfully everyone including her family and all the hotel guests got out alive and four of Angi’s five cats also made it out.
Angi has shared a little about what happened on Facebook. You can read her post here.
I spoke with Angi this morning.
She is in the early stages of coming to terms with the loss of the business she loved and built over many years, and which meant so much to her. She has also lost pretty much every material possession she owned. Her home, her clothes, her photographs, her furniture, her business, her books, her keepsakes.
She is also trying to deal with all of the challenges that come with a fire of this nature. Meetings with lots of different bodies and companies as they all try to figure out what happened and next steps.
When I was talking to Angi I didn’t hear any anger, or blame, of victim mindset. I heard only love and appreciation that she and her family and her guests were OK. Also love and appreciation for the people in her community, both local and virtual, who have her back and are supporting her. I could almost feel the love coursing through her veins, even though she had just lost her business, her home and all her possessions.
I mentioned earlier that Angi is one of the strongest and most courageous people I know. What I have shared in this newsletter is only a glimpse into the challenges she has faced. She lost both her parents earlier this year within a two-week period and buried them on the same day.
Yet Angi keeps getting up and taking steps forward again and again and again.
When I spoke with her this morning, I could see her already starting to do this again, even though she is just at the early stages of coming to terms with what has happened.
When I think of Angi, I think of innate resilience and strength.
When I think of Angi, I think of the power of love.
I worked as a psychotherapist for over 10 years and people who came to me almost always had a story to tell about a major challenge or challenges, they had faced.
What I learned over time was that I could never tell how much someone was going to be impacted as a result of the specific challenges they had faced.
Some people who had horrendous challenges and bounced back pretty quickly. For others with similar challenges it looked to them like their life was over.
Some people who didn’t have so many challenges also bounced back pretty quickly. For others in similar circumstances it looked like their life was over.
There didn’t seem to be a direct correlation between the apparent amount of challenge (stress, trauma, tragedy or abuse) that someone had experienced and how they coped with it or recovered from it.
It looks more and more true to me that coping with what life throws at us has a lot more to do with our thinking about the circumstances … a lot more to do with the narrative that looks true to us about those circumstances, than it has to do with the actual circumstances.
This is good news for all of us, because it means we aren’t just living life at the mercy of our circumstances. As I mentioned in last week’s edition when I quoted Michael Neill, ‘We are only ever one thought away from a completely different experience of living.’ You can read last weeks’ edition of Uncommon here.
To take this a little further I want to share a story I read last year in an incredible book called, ‘The Gentle Art of Blessing’, written by Pierre Pradervand. I’d recommend it to anyone. A link to the book is here.
In it he tells the story of a prisoner who was liberated from a concentration camp by American soldiers in 1945 at the end of the second world war. The prisoner was known as Wild Bill. At the time of his release, he had shining bright eyes, an upright posture and boundless energy. Even though there were many ethnic groupings within the camp, they all regarded Bill as a friend. Because of how he looked and behaved it was assumed he had only been imprisoned for a short time.
The American soldiers who liberated the camp were amazed to later learn that he had been there since 1939. ‘For six years he had lived in disease-ridden barracks, eating unidentifiable food and surviving in conditions under which thousands had died or been reduced to skeletal vestiges of humanity’.
When Wild Bill shared his story, it turned out he had been a lawyer living in a ghetto in Warsaw at the start of the war. One day Nazi soldiers lined everyone in the street up against a wall except him because he spoke German. They opened fire killing everyone else including his wife and five children. He pleaded to be shot with his family, but the soldiers refused.
Then he said, ‘I had to decide right then, whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done this. It was an easy decision. In my practice, I had seen too often what hate could do to people’s minds and bodies. Hate had just killed the six people who mattered most to me in the world. I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life – whether it was a few days or many years – loving every person I came into contact with.’
Wild Bill didn’t make this decision to forgive on any religious grounds. It was a decision simply based on his observation of life and on the understanding that love regenerates, while hate destroys – starting with the one who does the hating.
If it was possible for Wild Bill to choose love in those circumstances, perhaps it’s possible we can choose who we are going to be in any circumstances we find ourselves in.
It looks more and more clear to me that we are enough and have enough built in to cope with anything, literally anything. We can’t control the cards that life deals us, but we have a huge amount of choice in how we play those cards.
I didn’t know Wild Bill, but I know Angi. How she copes in the middle of huge challenges, how she bounces back, how she lives never ceases to touch and inspire me.
What challenges are you facing?
My message today … ‘you are only ever one thought away from a totally new experience of living’. How you live through your challenges … who you choose to be in the middle of whatever you are experiencing … really is a choice.
You are enough. You are more than enough…for whatever you are facing
Finally, I know most of you don’t know and had never heard of Angi until you started to read this, but if her story has touched you and you’d like to help, a Just Giving page has been set up to support her at this time.
Without any expectation or pressure and also knowing it would make a real difference to Angi, you can participate here.
As I once learned from Steve Hardison, ‘I don’t need to know someone to love them’.
Much love
Peter