It was back in my distant past, whilst travelling in the backwaters of Malaysia that an ancient Chinese Malay fortune teller read my palm.

Considering how many years ago this was, I do recall being quite surprised at her excellent grasp of the English language.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been – the English did fight wars in Malaya!

There were a few key things that I still remember from this slightly bizarre encounter.  She declared that I would get married when I was 22 or 30.  Neither happened, but to be fair, I was proposed to at 22 and had my twins aged 30.  She said I would be very close to my children – I am.

She also said I was very creative and would end up in a role where this skill was required.  I think the reason I remember this comment so well was that I had never considered myself to be a very creative individual.  I mean I got 18 % in my last art examination…….

So quite sometime later I was fortunate enough to land a role in the whacky world of PR. Public Relations is not the glamorous, champagne-filled, lunch loving industry that outsiders often think, this perception often gained from having watched too much Ab Fab.

It is more often than not a world of long hours, journalist deadlines that can on occasion be quite frightening and a great deal of head-scratching from the need to come up with fresh ideas, together with campaigns that are going to excite the client and ensure that their audience’s attention is captured.

So, it is was at this juncture and facing some of these dilemmas, that I found I did indeed have a creative gene hiding within.  Working with the highly inspired team at Oracle I have felt my creativity being unleashed and been delighted with the results.  They do say that many hands make light work and this definitely is true for Oracle and our passion for finding innovative ideas that will make our clients stand out from the crowd.

There isn’t a week that goes by that we don’t get together for an idea’s session.  This could be anything from creating a completely fresh campaign for a new development or new client, working on the best way to deliver an event, finding an interesting influencer to be the face of a project or coming up with feature ideas that will get a journalist’s attention.

Now I have been with Oracle for over three years, I personally believe that everybody has some creativity in them.  It is our job to help our younger colleagues to have the confidence to think outside the box and not be constrained by their fear of saying something crazy.  Some of the best ideas we have used have been conceived by an outlandish idea that has be melded into a workable solution.

I am looking forward to ensuring that our clients get the best out of us again in 2020.