Other People Are Like The Weather

What if the life you built isn't the life you're meant to live? 

Growing up in a small Yorkshire village, Vicki Anstey believed success followed a simple script: work hard, marry well, build a respectable life and stay the course. And for a long time, she did exactly that. But when the foundations of her marriage began to crack and the certainties she had relied upon started to dissolve, Vicki was forced to confront a question she had spent years avoiding, who was she, really, when she wasn't trying to manage everyone else's expectations? 

At forty, she walked away from the life she had built. What followed looked, from the outside, extraordinary: elite military selection as one of the first women to reach the final stages of SAS: Who Dares Wins, world-record ocean rows, ultramarathons across ice and desert. From the world of advertising to the barre studio she built from scratch, from divorce and betrayal to rowing unsupported across the Pacific Ocean. But the real challenge was never physical. It was internal. 

Other People Are Like the Weather is the story of one woman's journey from quiet conformity to radical self-reclamation, and the moment she realised that the hardest thing to overcome were not the conditions around her, but the patterns within. Candid, searching and fiercely honest, this memoir explores love, endurance, betrayal, friendship, ambition and the complicated business of becoming yourself. It is about the relationships that shape us, the seasons that test us, and the courage it takes to step out from someone else's climate and into your own. Because other people are like the weather. You can't control them. But you can choose how you live beneath their sky. 

Vicki Anstey is a double world-record holder, entrepreneur, and speaker specialising in courage, resilience, and performance under pressure. As a speaker, mentor and stress-resilience coach, she works with individuals and organisations to help them take meaningful action in the face of fear. 

This is her first book.