My journey started on the 9th October 2016 when I left the UK to fly to Bulgaria for the purposes of seeing the production of my new book ‘Stop Anxiety and Grow Confidence’ in the factory. Before I set off towards the capital, I spent a few days in my apartment.

Of course, I was not resting with my feet up – No!

I had been actually very busy writing 36 new articles for 2017 for my three companies and over 1,000 social media posts. This was exhausting, but it was the beginning of my new adventure to visit the place where NLP4Kids book was being printed and bound.

The story really starts during the summer of 2016 when I hosted a series of webinars that together formed the content for the book. The webinars were transcribed to written form and were then continuously edited to produce the first NLP4Kids book.

The factory where my book was being published was half-way across Bulgaria and a decent distance from where I was staying. Whilst I was quite excited to get going, I needed to plan my journey. I decided that it was safer to take the bus, as the Bulgarians are very ‘interesting’ drivers. I also had to prepared myself for the journey; bus travel isn’t my favourite pastime since I often feel travel sick on buses!

To start the journey I took the bus to Burgas which is the city centre; this was a twenty-five minute trip. From there I made my way to another bus which would take me to the capital city (Sofia). Of course, I knew I should have got out of bed earlier as soon as I realised I’d have to wait another two hours for the bus to come. So I decided that it would be a good time to go shopping in Burgas.

The journey was long on the bus with only one quick stop for a toilet break. After six hours on the bus, I was tired and hungry. I made my way into the hotel to get check in for the night.

After a good sleep, I woke up in the morning ready to begin my journey on the third bus from Sofia to Blagoevgrad – the location of the factory. I admit, I had to use google maps to ensure that I would get off at the correct town. I had never been to this part of Bulgaria before and whilst the scenery was absolutely gorgeous with mountains and lovely green fields, I couldn’t understand the bus driver who only spoke in Bulgarian, so never quite knew when we’d reached the right stop. When I arrived in Blagoevgrad I had a 25 minute walk to the factory which was welcomed given the amount of time I’d spent sitting on buses for the last two days!

At last, I had made it to the factory where I eagerly made my way in to meet the manager of the company who I had been dealing with over email. The printing company was a family business set up in the ’80s and Strahil introduced me to his parents and his partner. He then showed me the book creation process from start to finish, beginning with a machine that creates lasors impressions of each page of the book onto aluminium printing plates. The plates are sent to Germany for recycling where they can then be re-used for all sorts of other things. Strahil also told me that once the printing plates are done, they mount the plates onto the cyclinder of another machine. Some of the machines used in the factory were quite old but they were working at a good speed. Others were very new, having been part funded by the EU.

Strahil was a great host who show me how books were made and how the factory works. It was incredible to get the opportunity to see it all happening before my eyes and whilst the bulk of the copies of my book were already in the UK, there were five copies waiting for me in the factory.

The book is available now on Amazon: ‘Stop Anxiety and grow Confidence’.