Expertise Burbage Mum pays off for new author (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Expertise as a working mum pays off for new author

8:00pm Saturday 28th January 2012 in Marlborough

Mum-of-two Lynne Copp is celebrating after her first book won a Brit Writers non-fiction award before it hit the shops.

Mrs Copp, from Burbage, wrote Dancing ’Round the Handbags, which she describes as “a self-development book for hard-working women”.

The words ‘handbag’ and ‘dance’ are metaphors, she says, for what women do every day – dance around for others with the number of things a woman is expected to do in life as many as the items found in her handbag.

Mrs Copp, who has daughters aged 20 and 19, is managing director of The Worklife Company.

She set up the business 14 years ago after leaving Hewlett Packard, where she worked for 15 years rising to head of marketing communications.

She had to make her own way in life, she said, after her husband left her with two toddler daughters and she had to find a new home and discover a way of making money to pay the bills.

She said: “To define the challenges as stressful would not really capture the extent of the exhaustion, worry, guilt, fear, sadness, happiness and terror of that time.

“I remember crawling – literally – up to bed one night and collapsing. I would long for a time when the children were asleep, the dishwasher loaded, the email tamed and the house was silent.”

Mrs Copp, 50, set up her own business to coach, train and support women in their work-life balance.

Now she has brought all of her advice together in her book, which she said came not only to her in a dream one night but also to a colleague at Hewlett Packard.

“One particular night I had a very strange yet memorable dream. In it I was told to write a book called Dancing ’Round the Handbags. I awoke suddenly. ‘What a fabulous title for a book,’ I said to myself.

“That morning, I bumped into one of our senior managers and I told her I had the most amazingly vivid dream and that I was told to write a book.”

Her colleague took her breath away by saying: “It wasn’t called Dancing ’Round the Handbags was it?I had a dream last night that I was going to be asked to contribute to that book.”

Mrs Copp said her book encouraged women to play a full and equal role in their work. It is priced £19.99 from Ecademy Press.