21/08/2026
Leaving Cert Results Day always makes me reflect - at the time it feels so big and so final but it really isn’t. So, what better time to share just some of the times I started over since I got my results.
🇯🇵 First up - I changed degree courses (also called “dropping out” of my initial choice). I did this because I was afraid of not getting my 3rd year in Japan funded through scholarship but I told everyone it was because Japanese was too hard and distracted me from my priority - Business Studies. After leaving, the following September the Japanese government sponsored me on a fully funded study tour award trip with 71 other students globally! 🫣
✅ Senior Marketing role checked off the list, I got restless, it wasn’t hard enough 🫣 so I moved into a bigger company selling Leisure Management Software across the island of Ireland and in the UK. I travelled so much and learned bucket loads about my industry and loved it. The recession hit and I was made redundant 😖 Devastation.
Then I stepped back into club management but redundancy came around again, this one hit hard. I felt like a failure. I decided I’d ensure job security forever …. I set up my own business. Weeks working on my brand with a clever logo that literally no one understood or could pronounce 😫 bad start!
I was so passionate I had to keep it going so I failed fast and learned and adapted. Sounds easy now but at the time each set back took another bit of confidence from me. Resilience kept me going.
Another iteration and more pressure! I loved this phase of business but needed investment to grow it and I thought I didn’t have the confidence to pitch it (except looking back I did one time in a packed RDS 🤣).
I got scared, it was harder than I thought so I retreated to the safety of regular income and work I knew I could do. I reasoned with myself it would free up time for me to go back to college…in reality I had eggs in lots of baskets … safety nets because I was so afraid to “fail” at anything.
I dragged myself through my teaching qualification juggling my sales role, my business, 2 weekends a month in college and 2 days a week on teaching practice. I wasn’t on top of anything because
