Thursday 9 September 2021 at 7:30pm - via Zoom

WSW AGM

and Penguins, the Antarctic and Motivation with Karen Espley

Along with the election of the committee and reports / feedback on the past year we will discuss the way West Sussex Writers can progress through the coming year and gain an overview of the proposed programme for meetings.

After the AGM, Karen Espley will join us as a speaker for after the AGM. Karen is an author and also a business coach and motivational speaker. Her book 'The Impulsive Explorer', is about her impromptu Antarctic adventures; there's a sample here https://www.book2look.com/book/FQKffCa5h6. Her talk is Penguins, the Antarctic and Motivation and will include some workshop elements to help remind us how much fun writing really is. The talk promises to be energetic and exciting.

Karen Espley is the author of two books; The Profitable Business and The Impulsive Explorer which she published in March this year. It became a Kindle best seller in the category of Adventure and Explorer Biographies ahead of Ant Middleton and Ben Fogle.

After 15 years working in large businesses, clawing her way up the greasy career ladder starting as an admin assistant through to being the business manager on a £12m IT project where she worked increasingly long hours with almost unbearable levels of stress, Karen realised there must be more to life.

Having had a life-changing trip to the Antarctic in 2000 and saved enough money to last a year, she took the plunge and began her journey to find a different way to live and to escape from the expectations she grew up with.

She went on to work in start-ups, has been in businesses that have failed, been in a business that grew from nothing to 150 employees and was bought, was an owner and shareholder of a successful consultancy practice and now runs her own business supporting growing consultancy businesses.

She's lived on a Russian base in the Antarctic and worked as a project manager in a rainforest in Ghana with Raleigh International. She then travelled back to the UK through West Africa using only public transport which she can't recommend to anyone! She had a midlife crisis at the age of 50 and travelled around New Zealand and Australia in a camper van in 2013.

She lives in West Sussex with her two cats planning the next stage of her adventures and writing her next book!