They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I feel quite able to judge the life coach Michael Serwa by all the books on display in his living room, especially since his Mayfair penthouse appears to be entirely empty otherwise. While he makes us tea I glance at a shelf of titles by beefy, ambitious men such as Richard Branson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elon Musk and, er, Alastair Campbell. Three minutes in the company of the man who describes himself as the UK’s highest-paid personal coach, and I already feel certain that millionaires and masculinity are what he’s all about. Which is worrying, because I’ve come here to sort my life out, and I’m not sure that he can really do it for me.
I’m a freelance writer who has held on to a journalism career despite being terrible at deadlines. I’m someone who started three university degrees and only finished one – and that was by the skin of my teeth – due to the absolute chaos with which I have always sabotaged my own proceedings. Yet I have also managed to work passionately on the things I love, in my own way, and am currently writing a book. But the thing is, I’ve been writing this book for some time now, and finishing the manuscript still feels as distant as Mars, and the clock is ticking. I’m so tired of messing things up. Can Michael Serwa, who tends to work with corporate CEOs, help?
Michael listens, he nods. And then he gives his diagnosis: “Talent, in itself,” he announces, “is completely fucking useless.” Well, he has a point there. “When you add some discipline to it, that’s when talent can make you great,” he continues. He goes on to explain calmly that the difference between talent and success is simply accountability, and because my publishers have left me to get on with the book by myself, I don’t have any. He adds that, given I’m also a single mother, something he doesn’t have much experience of, I might be expecting a certain level of compassion from him. But he questions “whether compassion gets the job done. All that empathy: ‘Ahh don’t worry about it.’ No, I want you to worry about it, because you’re wasting your fucking time.”
So far so brutal, at least on paper. In the flesh, though, Michael is really quite funny. There is a twinkle in his eyes throughout it all, and I begin to feel strangely moved by his caring about my wasted life. He comes from a family of professionals in Poland where he shocked everyone by dropping out of high school. After moving to London he worked in high-end fashion retail for years, on the shop floor, perfecting his English, before becoming a coach (and being able to support his family in Poland). He likens himself to a Polish builder who doesn’t care what day or time it is – he will simply get the job done. He understands your fears then works through your doubts, writing them up on a whiteboard as you confess them – before turning them all around and convincing you to JFDI: Just Fucking Do It. He’s a night-owl, and stays up late then rises at 9am. It works for him. There’s no set way to do any of this, he says.
The thing is, I tell him, I’ve been trying to JFDI for years, sometimes to a heartbreaking degree. I really do care, deeply, and worry, deeply, about all this stuff. I stay up all night trying to finish things. I lose sleep. I read so many other books, thinking I should pay attention to everyone else’s writing, too, and I have ideas for films when I watch films, and I write those ideas down in detail and then I’m not sure what happens after that. And I can’t bear ruining my editors’ days, and yet I do it repeatedly, distractedly. Again, Michael listens patiently, and then cuts through it all. There’s no drama, no blame. “You need to switch from being a consumer,” he says, “to being a producer.”
We come up with a long list of positive reasons to finish this book: honouring the commitment to my publishers, being able to buy a house and raise my professional profile. I ask, sheepishly, if it’s all right to have an unhealthy reason, too, such as really wanting to fuck off certain people from my past. “Fucking them off,” he says calmly, “is my entire purpose!”
Michael then brings out a list of about 20 aspects of life – health, sex, friendships, home, leisure, etc – and says I must give each a mark out of 10. No discussion, just a number. The last question is about my overall happiness and off the top of my head I give it a 6. “I knew you were going to say 6,” he replies. I am curious – how? “Because that’s the average of all your other marks. People come in here every day and ask me what the secret of happiness is – well there isn’t one. It’s simply the total of all those other areas of your life. So if you want to bring your happiness up to, say, an 8 or 9, you do it by raising all those other things up.” And with this information, I am freed. There’s no secret to happiness! No unicorns, no magic – you simply replace your wishbone with a backbone, bit by bit.
We agree that I will start writing the book in shorter bursts, three hours per day, divided into two 90-minute sessions, starting at a specific time. He feels I’ve been spending too long on it, and my mind has wandered. So I go through my diary marking these hours in as an actual daily appointment, checking for prior engagements that might interfere. I start to feel like the Velveteen Rabbit, that children’s book character who comes into consciousness only through the attention of others. This is real. I am real! On my way home I walk more proudly than usual. The guilt dissipates. The city feels full of opportunities; the expensive houses don’t make me feel bad. At bedtime, the gnawing fear that usually accompanies my journey into sleep seems to be shifting.
Two weeks later I return to Michael’s flat, delighted to report that I’ve sent a chunk of new chapters to my agent and publisher and that everyone is excited. Michael has been texting me every single day when my time is up to ask my word count and, even though I’ve dodged him a couple of times and been distracted by a friend’s funeral, he hasn’t given up and neither have I. God, the trust you can develop in yourself. It’s like having a friend inside your own head. There is one day when I really feel I can’t write anything at all, that everything is pointless, that my work is a disgusting joke. A quick voice message from Michael later and I end up writing for a couple of hours in bed that night, newly determined not to go to sleep without producing. From a place of disgust, this chapter turns out to be one of my favourite things I’ve written.
Another two weeks pass, more chapters, another meeting. Michael feels like a friend now. We laugh a lot. It seems I have gone from despising a business-like, corporate vibe to appreciating its fierce beauty. The book is more than halfway there! The thought that there will come a day, probably soon, when it will not be Michael Serwa’s job to cheer for me on a daily basis is sad. But I guess we all have to grow up at some point.
Coming from a background of coaching high-flying CEOs, he says he’s used to working with a fear of failure. “Fear of success, though,” he says, smiling at me as if regarding a curious new exhibit, “is a new one.” He finds it interesting that I have dedicated so much of my journalism career to interviewing the famous, “because I don’t think you would spend so much time around wealthy celebrities if there wasn’t something in their lives that resonated with you personally”. Hmmm, I think. Mmmmm, I think.
This might explain why, for my other part of the sorting-my-life-out plan, I have chosen to visit Lynne Franks in her new holistic retreat in the small town of Wincanton, Somerset. Lynne ran a highly successful PR agency in 1980s London, representing some of the biggest names in fashion and entertainment, but has long since moved into women’s development, and consulting on sustainable entrepreneurialism. Now, she wants to use her lifelong interest in healing to help others refocus their lives, and is as passionate about working with schoolgirls and shopkeepers as with her fabulous friends.
Because, of course, she is still best-known for being the inspiration behind Absolutely Fabulous, and if Edina Monsoon is an image she wants to leave behind, she isn’t entirely managing. I say this because at 8am, the morning after my arrival, Lynne gets me doing Buddhist chanting in front of her shrine, only she has to break off from the ferocious pace of her Sanskrit recital to take a call from a makeup artist who is outside the front door trying to get in, but Lynne is fed up because Mercury is retrograde and everyone’s turning up at the wrong time, so she gets rid of the makeup artist and goes back to her chanting, and to be fair, it’s my fault she’s annoyed, because I found the alpaca duvet she gave me so insanely comfortable that I slept right through my alarm and was late to the shrine. “I never recognised myself in Ab Fab,” she will say later, as the feathers in her hair waft slowly in the breeze.
Still, nobody said that setting up a centre of relaxation was in itself an act of relaxation. Lynne is now 70, which I find hard to believe, as she is an absolute titan, constantly making tea, cooking, washing up, organising builders and discussing the state of the world and our souls with the team of alternative healers she has brought together, for when Hub at No 3 officially opens in February. Since selling her PR agency she has worked in rural African villages and with women leaders in Kazakhstan, and written several books about women running businesses. I’m in awe of her work ethic and feel slightly ridiculous talking about my problems, but that is why I am here.
She is firm but fair, and says she doesn’t believe have a problem not finishing things, that this is just a story I’ve been telling myself. As for love – we have moved on to relationships – she doesn’t really believe that I have any problems there either, despite every single sign to the contrary. “Your heart is open to love. You just have to choose it,” she says. Lynne is divorced but not without company, and what I am thinking of choosing, specifically, is to copy the layout of her house, where she has one bedroom for sleeping and one for sex. “Leave London and you could afford that extra bedroom, too,” she points out cheerily. So if I ever tell you I’ve moved to the countryside for my daughter to get more fresh air, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
Lynne wants me to try her treatments, so I greedily take them all. First a massage, with a zapping device invented by the Soviets to clear blockages in their astronauts. The masseur, Gordon John Hughes, is also a psychic, so takes my mind off the weird Russian tingling by telling me all about my family’s trauma.
“Something happened to your father when he was three,” he intuits from the knots in my back, “and he has never got over it.” I weigh this up, decide it could actually be true, and feel rather sad – but not to worry, he now wants to talk about my sister, and I don’t have one, so that’s easier to dismiss. “Did your mother lose a child?” he continues. Well, yes she did, as it goes. “So you do have a sister!” he says proudly. “She’s there, in the spirit world.” Oh.
After two and a half hours of this I feel very, very awake. So I check my phone, where there is a text from Michael, whom I have forgotten to tell that I’m going on retreat. “Are you producing?” he asks. No, I want to text back, I’m communing with my dead sister in Somerset, but I suspect he might not be the target demographic for such news.
Over the next two days I have a flower essences session with Saskia Marjoram, who holds a pendulum over her floral potions, a natural health consultation from Clive de Carle who believes we could all cheer up by taking magnesium, and an astrological reading from John Wadsworth, author of Your Zodiac Soul.
When Lynne sets me up with a pile of old magazines to make a collage, I reach my limit. She wants us to listen to inspirational music, then create a vision board, finding pictures and words that resonate with my dream life, my future goals. When the glitter pens come out I say a firm no – I have a seven-year-old daughter and if my life needs a transformational journey, it is to a world in which there are no glitter pens. I do not want to do this tonight.
It is strange, then, that long after Lynne has gone to bed, I am still there, completely engrossed in my collage. It’s ridiculous – I can’t stop doing it. Somehow, not only have I cut up Vanity Fair and Grazia to find headlines that relate to my future: “Bestselling Novelist” and “Outstanding Writing for a Comedy TV Series”, and “Warm Addictive Drama” – that’s my writing, not my love life – but unlikely words from my past have also popped up. My beloved grandparents’ village in Devon, the town where my daughter was conceived, even my school. I cut out all these place names and stick them on to the trunk of a big knotty tree, and the big knotty journey of my life appears. I look at it, and all the things that ever made me feel wistful and sad and unfinished start to make me feel proud.
The next day, Lynne is very impressed with my collage. I tell her I can’t understand how I got so gripped and focused on it. “Do you not remember taking Saskia’s floral essence for procrastination beforehand?” she says, her eyes twinkling. Oh my God. No. It is at this point that I notice that the kitchen doormat says “A Witch Lives Here” on it, and I read it aloud. “Well, she does,” says Lynne proudly.
Unexpectedly, the final part of my healing then appears. It is the missing link. “Do you know who you’ve reminded me of the whole time you’ve been here?” asks Lynne. “Dawn French! You sound like her, you have the same sense of humour – you even look a bit like her.” This means everything to me, because I grew up believing Dawn French was actual God – my work on Earth is done. “You were better at the chanting than her, though,” Lynne continues. “At least you tried to learn the Lotus Sutra. When I worked with her and Jennifer Saunders I got them to sit at the shrine with me, but they wouldn’t do it in Sanskrit. They just chanted ‘Frenchandsaundersfrenchandsaunders’ repeatedly.”
Back in London, I stick my collage on my bedroom wall. I’ve made peace with it all. But I have other work to do and struggle to get back into writing the book. I anticipate a bollocking from Michael, but in fact he simply tells me to do one single hour’s writing. This advice saves me – again. A week later, I print out all the old and new chapters of my book, having found the thread that weaves them all together, the pulse that runs right through it, and I realise it is finally done. I could cry. I do cry. The life lessons of heartfelt hippies and brutal billionaires both had something to offer, it transpires. I’m cured of chaos.* For now.
*This piece was filed one week after deadline
Coaching with Michael Serwa costs from £3,000 (michaelserwa.com). Overnight stays at Lynne Franks’ Hub at No 3 from £85, exclusive of treatments (hubatno3.com)
