Malcolm Stern: 0:47

Good morning and welcome to my podcast, slay your Dragons With Compassion, which I'm doing in conjunction with my friends at online events, and we're looking at people who have stories to tell, people who have had their lives, have been moved, but often through adversity they've grown and I'm very happy to welcome today my first publisher.

Malcolm Stern: 1:08

Actually, I've written three books and Judy Piatkus, who I'm interviewing today, published my first two books and I remember going to loads of publishers in my first book I'm just going blanket nose, but I went to Judy's company and they recognised that I had to do something to make it publishable, but they at least took me on and gave me some care in the process and that was your editor, jill, as well.

Malcolm Stern: 1:30

So that was really appreciated and we've been firm friends since then, and Judy runs a series called Conscious Cafe which puts on events where people share and explore, and I used to go to those quite a lot when I was living in London. So, judy, the other thing is that you've managed to write a really interesting exploration of the whole publishing industry and your part in it, and your book is called Ahead of Her Time and is published by Watkins Books. So we're looking at hearing something of Judy's story. Judy was a pioneer in the publishing of personal development books, and Piakka's books are still pioneers and still very well known in that field. So welcome Judy, and lovely to see you.

Judy Piatkus: 2:17

Thank you, malcolm, and lovely to see you too.

Malcolm Stern: 2:21

So we're going to look today at how your life's panned out and what have been the features that you've had to overcome in order to be who you are. So you didn't just start off going well, I'm a publisher, so here we go. Something would have happened that would have driven you in that direction, and you obviously did a very profound job in that direction. So can you tell us a little bit about your background and what took you there?

Judy Piatkus: 2:56

and what took you there. Well, I think the first big challenge I had was that I didn't get good enough A-levels to go to the university I wanted, and this was because already in my teens, I was too busy socialising and starting groups and enjoying myself and I didn't study hard enough, and so all my friends went off to university and I had to go to what was, in those days, the norm for lots of girls from a good school who didn't go to university. I had to go to college and learn how to write shorthand, which nobody ever talks about nowadays, but it was a way of transcribing using little hieroglyphics, and I also learned typing, which has stood me in good stead, especially since technology overtook everything. So I became a secretary and I worked in publishing companies in quite uh, lowly jobs, and then, when I was 24, I had the opportunity to start a company with a partner, and we did that and it worked for four and a half years and then it wasn't working and so we separated. I decided to go out on my own and when I was 29, I launched Biakas Books, and I had at the time, a daughter and another baby on the way.

Judy Piatkus: 4:18

But the thing I really want to say is that I had such a chip on my shoulder for that period of my 20s until I launched my first publishing company, because all my friends had gone to university, they'd had a great time, they knew loads of people and they seemed set for professional careers.

Judy Piatkus: 4:47

So, even though I'd started my first company when I was 24, I still had a chip on my shoulder that I hadn't got a degree. Um, and it was only when I started my second company and I called it Piatka's Books. Um, not because I had a massive ego, but because at that time in publishing, publishing companies were known by the names of the founders. So there was Collins it was Collins then, not Harper Collins, named after William Collins, and Deutsch after André Deutsch, and Gollans after Victor Gollans. So there were several more and it was just the thing to do. So, as it happens, calling it Piatka's book seems to have stood the company in good stead. So I would say that was my first big challenge, which was sort of not being part of the group, being left out, not having those letters after my name.

Malcolm Stern: 5:34

And yet there must have been something very strong as a driver inside you to succeed, because you don't start up a company and create quite a ripple in the publishing pond without a very strong ambition and drive. And I what, what, what was that and how you recommend that?

Judy Piatkus: 5:52

I think that came from my parents, um, because I had shown um good promise at my primary school local state primary school and they pushed to get me into a better school. And at that time, um, it was, it was. It was a very different story. You could get a scholarship and I got a scholarship which was from the local council, and I went to a school that my parents would have had to otherwise pay for. So I was well educated.

Judy Piatkus: 6:25

So, as I was doing well, my father, who had left school at 15, he was actually trained as a quantity surveyor and was a builder, and my mother had married him and could have been an amazing businesswoman, but at the time wives stayed at home and supported their husbands, so she was quite frustrated as a housewife. So my parents were programming me from an early age that I was going to have a career and I think my father had really wanted a son. So we think maybe that me having a career was part of um him not having a son, and I haven't got a lot of evidence for that, but I think it's quite possible.

Malcolm Stern: 7:08

I think it's quite possible. I know with my parents. They that I was the son, so I was the one that they fed into careers. The girls were being fed. This is going quite a way back, of course, but the girls were being fed into, um, being good, good wives and mothers and and all of that sort of stuff. And I know that my mum was in the theatre and and then she met my father. My father didn't want to work and so she gave up a very good career. So what I'm hearing is that you actually found quite a strong place inside you and also outside of you to to make your way forward. So what is it about? More than you would? You would? You were training in secretarial work, but what is it about publishing? That actually spoke to you, that pulled you in.

Judy Piatkus: 7:51

I think that we all come into the world with something that we love to do and if you're really lucky, you can turn it into a career and make money from it. And I love to read. And if you go for an interview to a publishing house, you know I'm not really sure that loving to read is quite what they really want to hear. They probably want to hear how you want to help that company do extremely well and how you love their books. But really, for me, I love the idea of working with books and as I hadn't got got a degree, what I was reading was mainly fiction, fiction of all kinds. But I always had a taste for general fiction, commercial fiction, popular fiction. I wasn't very good at English literature and so I wasn't reading much literary fiction.

Judy Piatkus: 8:48

When I became a publisher, I began. I started off publishing fiction for libraries and then over the years we gradually built up a list of original authors. But I'm just going to mention here, malcolm, a book that you probably haven't read. But most women say oh when I mention it, and I was very lucky, say oh when I mention it. And I was very lucky. Just after I started my own company, piatka's Books, I was offered a book to publish in hardback for libraries which is still in print and hugely popular with teenagers, and it's called Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews, and if there's any teenagers or their mothers listening to this, they will know how exciting that book was. So it was. It was after it was a few years after I'd been publishing fiction that we began to publish non-fiction, and then we looked for the gaps in the market that other people weren't publishing, and that's how we became known for publishing alternative health and mind, body and spirit and popular psychology and subsequently, personal development.

Malcolm Stern: 9:59

Well, it's interesting because I went to eight different publishers with my first book and I never really felt like I was a person I was either going to be something that was published, not published, worth investing in, worth getting involved with and I experienced something very different. It was a very human side of publishing that I saw with you. There was something that was very I felt like when I started working on my book with you. I felt like I was part of a more of a family. That's sort of quite a strong word, but I did feel like that. You actually and I know we spoke before about you changing the face of publishing you said no, I didn't change the face of publishing, but I think you added something to publishing that was quite rare at the time, probably is more is less rare now where your authors became part of your tribe. I think that's what I think I observed in that process I was in with you.

Judy Piatkus: 10:58

I think that I didn't have a corporate background and in fact I didn't have any business background at all because at the time this was another challenge. At the time there were few business courses. So, like 20 years later, I could have gone to university and probably would have qualified as a suitable student for a business degree because I was really interested in the commercial world. But my father didn't talk about business with me, even though he became the managing director of a small building company. I only went to his office once over all the years. I think he was quite a traditional man and didn't feel entirely comfortable taking his little daughter to the office. So different from now. Um so, um, there weren't really the business networks for women. There were hardly any women running their own companies throughout the whole of the uk. There were hardly any women who were in um positions of um executive, of executive directorships in that many companies anywhere. So that made everything much more of a challenge because I didn't really have a mentor. But in fact that meant that as a company we could do things the way that we felt would work best for everybody. We could do things the way that we felt would work best for everybody In my first company, which I'd run with my partner, he and I had owned 50 percent of the shares each, and so there was a certain amount of conflict, because he was quite a traditional male as well.

Judy Piatkus: 12:44

So when I started my second company, I thought I just want everybody to enjoy coming to work. So what has to happen for people to enjoy coming to work? Well, you've got to be flexible with your time. You've got to be flexible whether people want to work at home in publishing. Editors do work at home, have always worked at home, sometimes well, perhaps, perhaps not in corporates, but certainly in smaller companies, and I was really looking to make the whole atmosphere of the workplace pleasant.

Judy Piatkus: 13:08

And because everybody did enjoy this atmosphere and did like coming to work, when I subsequently sold the company, we had 28 employees and a lot of freelance people. Everybody enjoyed working with us because that was the whole point and that we should enjoy our lives in the workplace. And we were ahead of our time in those ideas. And obviously the authors felt it as well, because the staff felt empowered to make what they felt was the right decision, and they wanted to make the right decision for everybody in the company and all the people working with us. So now that's sort of a concept which is people, planet and profit, but we didn't have any ideas like that at the time. We just wanted to enjoy ourselves during the day at work and, as I said to the staff, I don't need you to work overtime, I just want you to work hard while you're here and then go home and have a life and then bring that life back into the company and be creative so there's your, your, your business world, and it's sort of.

Malcolm Stern: 14:12

You know, you grew a very, a very successful company, which you've since sold, I believe, um yes, I no longer own any part of Piakka's books.

Judy Piatkus: 14:21

I sold it many years ago now and the sale was very successful. And it was the right time for us to sell before the world economic collapse in 2007 2008 and we could see at that time that publishing was going to reinvent itself and digital was going to become all important. And we'd all been doing it for many years by then and it was time for us to embrace the rest of our lives and enter a new phase.

Malcolm Stern: 14:52

So you've obviously been very good at spotting times when it's good to shift direction, shift direction.

Malcolm Stern: 15:02

And so when you, when you sold the company or sometime after you sold the company, you started up something that was um, was again the head of the game, which was conscious cafe, which I used to attend and and I used to love them because you would get together some very good, um, thinking, feeling people and we'd be exploring a range of topics around spirituality and and there was something about again feeling like there was a very good holding.

Malcolm Stern: 15:25

So I can see the same pattern here as you've got with, you've had with your publishing that you create, and it's probably tribal, is closer to to it than family, but it's something about creating an environment where people feel like they belong and and so you drew some very um, um great thinkers to your, to your um, uh, to your project.

Malcolm Stern: 15:49

But one of the things you did was also that what I liked was at the time a lot of people were sort of putting out these, these very well-known speakers and and sort of it's almost like deifying the speakers and and I've, and I ran the series called alternatives, as you know, and and it was very much my plan, then to that the audience would be part of it, they wouldn't just be willing sponges. And I think when I came to conscious cafe, when I came to your project, which has since um, blossomed and mushroomed since there into lots of other environments and venues, what I found was being in the company of like-minded others, which is very much my thing. About sangha, which was a very important part of my book Slay your Dragons With Compassion, that the concept of creating an environment where you're in company with others of like mind.

Judy Piatkus: 16:40

And tell me about what, what, what drove you to to bring that into being after I sold Piatka's books, I began to miss the conversations that I'd had with authors such as yourself, malcolm um, about, about the mystical world, the spiritual world, what was happening on the planet, and, um, I decided that I would launch Conscious Cafe and invite people to my home and just see if they were happy to have a conversation, and the topic of the first conversation was what is consciousness? So I asked about 25 people and we came and divided into groups and they enjoyed it and I said would you like me to do this again? And they said yes, and after that, this was the summer of 2011,. I began to do it every month and I did it every month for several years and people were invited to bring a friend and then sometimes the friends brought friends and I couldn't advertise it publicly because it was in my home, um, and my luckily, my.

Judy Piatkus: 17:48

I had a very big main room and everybody could just about fit in there and people were loving it so much they were traveling from other towns that were sometimes two hours away just to come and spend the evening talking about consciousness or creativity or unconditional love, or what does it mean if we're? What does fear mean? There were so many topics that we shared, and I would provide food for all the travellers. So it really felt like I was organising a party every month. And I remember Malcolm telling me oh, this is such high level networking, and he brought along loads of people too, so he added to the mix. But after several years I realized that it was going to have to leave my house and I was going to have to find venues if it was going to grow, and several people said to me that they would love to start a conscious cafe in their hometown. So we now have eight in the UK and two in Switzerland, and at this moment a new one has just launched in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and we hope to have a few more by the end of the year.

Malcolm Stern: 18:58

So you've obviously got a very strong passion for doing the things that float your boat effectively and so certainly with publishing, you did revolutionise, certainly the personal development world aspect of publishing. But I think the Conscious Cafe was also an idea whose time had come, that actually I think we so need to be in good dialogue. It's like the people like you and I and the guests I have here on the programme don't want to talk about the weather I mean, it's nice to say today, but that's about as far as I'd like to go with the weather and don't want to talk about what was on television. But I think there's a like what are we here for on planet Earth? What's our need to develop ourselves earth? What's our, what's our need to develop ourselves? How can we get support to be who we are and who understands?

Malcolm Stern: 19:47

Very often I feel like what happened in the spiritual world. Again I saw that with alternatives and again with conscious cafe um I. I think in the spiritual world there's a sort of sense of um that people have often felt lonely and isolated because they don't think the same as everybody else, and actually we need affirmation that actually we're on a track that's really worth exploring, even though it goes against or to the side of the mainstream as well. So you've thrown yourself into this, both with your publishing and with your um, with with conscious cafe. And how do you see conscious? It's wonderful that it's spread out and starting to spread out across the world even as well, but how do you see that developing now?

Judy Piatkus: 20:32

I hope we can launch more conscious cafe groups, because when people come to conscious cafe, often for the first time, they say, oh, I just want to talk about all these ideas and I don't have any friends who I can share this with and I love my friends, but they just don't know what I'm talking about.

Judy Piatkus: 20:52

So when you come to a conscious cafe group there's. You don't have to explain yourself. You don't have to explain, um, that you're interested in various alternative therapies, or that you've just done a new coaching workshop and it's really far out, or that you were exploring different topics in your mind but didn't have anyone to talk to, because everybody's the same. So, um, if anyone listening to this is interested to find out more, we're wwwconsciouscafeorg and we run online events and local events in our local groups, and we're not the only group doing this. There are many groups out there doing this. So I want to encourage everybody to look for your local group. You can have and you can find the online groups and talks, but the local group where you actually meet in person is where you meet the people in the high street who might become your friends.

Malcolm Stern: 21:52

So how good is that well, it's lovely in fact, quite a number of my firm friends have come from meeting them at conscious cafe but also deepening friendships with people I already knew and bringing them along, which, as you say, I brought quite a lot of people along to Conscious Cafe because I thought it was such a lovely concept and I just thought it was very warm and sort of homely homely not in the sort of way of sort of being plain and unassuming, it's more it felt like home. It felt like we were hanging out together and it's what Pete Russell home. It felt like we were hanging out together and it's what, um, pete russell, who is someone who, um, we used to put on alternatives called high level hanging out. And I think there's definitely a level of high level hanging out at your, in your environment oh, thank you.

Judy Piatkus: 22:36

So conscious cafe is about raising consciousness. One conversation at a time, and so, um, I say to everybody listening just have the conversations with the people you can have them with, because every time you do, that conversation gives you the opportunity to explore your thoughts, and it's harder to do this unless you're an author or unless you're having the opportunity to express what you're thinking about the planet and how we're living and the mystical world.

Malcolm Stern: 23:08

Just give yourself that opportunity to explore your thoughts and then you have another opportunity to deepen them now I have a regular um um because we call it an inquiry session with a friend on a Monday morning, which I've done this morning before we started our recording, and we take 20 minutes each to talk about whatever's going on in our lives and then five minutes each to reflect back on what we've heard.

Malcolm Stern: 23:34

And what often arises in that place where we are exploring things is that I'll talk about something, and this happened this morning.

Malcolm Stern: 23:40

I'll talk about something that had some meaning for me at the time, but I hadn't really sort of delved down into it, and when I started exploring it, I realised there was a lot of feelings around it that I hadn't been able to access, and I think that's it sort of makes me feel happier to be human, to be really delving into the depths of who we are are, rather than getting by. As well, and you will have encountered, because the series is very much about slaying our dragons, about coming thriving through adversity, and that became very important to me after I lost my daughter to suicide in 2014. I realised that I'd been able to thrive through adversity and the book I wrote, slay your Dragons With Compassion, which you very kindly wrote a very nice review of as well, but the book I wrote was really my way of saying this is what I've learned on this journey, and I wonder whether adversity has taught you anything that you'd be prepared to look at here in this podcast Anything?

Judy Piatkus: 24:41

that you'd be prepared to look at here on this in this podcast. I am, I was 26 and married, and when my first child, sonia, was born, it was a difficult birth and we did not know for a few months how she would develop, because she was having to, she wasn't. She struggled while I was having her and we didn't know how she would be. And at four and a half months we took her to the consultant and he said she's just about doing okay. So I was working at the time, I had a full-time job and I had a lady at home coming in looking after Sonia. And when she was nine months we had some friends come and visit and we were the first of our friends who had had a baby, except for this couple. But they lived on the other side of London, so neither my husband nor myself were seeing many babies or many of other people's children. So these friends came with their daughter, who was the same age as Sonia, and this little girl picked up her bottle and fed herself, and Sonia couldn't do that, wasn't anywhere near able to do that, and that was was the first sign, both to my husband, who actually worked in the hospital where I'd had Sonia. That was the first sign to us that things were not going to be okay. So he went to the hospital and spoke to the consultant, and the consultant came to our house and said Sonia had cerebral palsy and she wasn't going to develop as other children developed. But nobody knew how she was going to develop. So our friends had observed that things. Other friends of ours had observed Sonia and seen that things weren't quite going to plan but didn't want to tell us. So then we had the task of breaking the news to our grandparents that Sonia had disabilities. But the word disability wasn't used then and children who were not developing the same as other children were called handicapped. It was a different word, it was a different time, it wasn't in our language and these people were marginalized, little children, adults. It was a very, very hard time for anybody with disabilities.

Judy Piatkus: 27:08

So I was working full-time and as the months passed and Sonia didn't really develop, we were hopeful. But she didn't really develop and we embarked on a very controversial way of trying to help her whereby we and two or three other people worked with Sonia to try and move her limbs in the hope that that might enliven the cells in her body which weren't really functioning very well functioning very well. So we did this for 18 months. Neighbours came to our house, friends came to our house, family came to our house and we spent three or four hours a day, six days a week, doing this patterning, as it was called.

Judy Piatkus: 27:52

But when Sonia got to the age of three and was offered a place in a very good school for children with disabilities, we thought we've given her the best shot we could, and we're going to have to let her go into the world now and do her best, and we felt we had done our best for her. I would say, the greatest lesson that I've learned over the years. And I just want to say now it was Sonia's birthday last week and she's in her 40s and she lives in a home and she's really well looked after and she is very, very much loved by all the people who care for her. So I want to say that she has had a good life. She has had the best possible life in that she has been surrounded by love and care and we as a family have been very, very privileged that she was able to go to this home, which has been paid for by the local council, when she was very young.

Judy Piatkus: 28:50

And what I learned from having Sonia as my daughter I later went on to have two more children is that nothing is really that important. I mean, when you live with a person who cannot speak, cannot lift their hands, well, sonia can just about lift one hand, very slowly, very slowly, to express a choice. So you might say do you want, do you like coffee, sonia? Do you want a cup of tea, or something like that. She can express a positive wish to have that drink by raising one of her hands, but she can't move the other one of her own volition, she can't get out of her wheelchair, she can't do anything unaided. When you live with a person like Sonia, you know everything else is a great gift and I have felt great gratitude since then that Sonia has shown me these lessons, and shown me these lessons at such an early age, because I was in my 20s when she was born.

Malcolm Stern: 29:55

And what I'm hearing from that it's the first time I've heard that story in full depth. I knew, of course, the rudimentaries of it, but it's the first time I've heard you really unravel that. But I hear you use it's almost like you had the talk about an unhealthy driven. I don't hear an unhealthy driven, I hear a healthy driver that actually has been, is going to make the best of your circumstances, regardless of what happens. And I just was incredibly touched that, for you know that you had neighbors come in that you really gave it everything you possibly could before you were able to say, well, I've done everything I can, and now it's moved on and and, as you say, she's, she's in a home, but she's loved and cared for.

Malcolm Stern: 30:45

And in fact my sister, beverly, was in a home where she was loved and cared for and I saw what difference that makes and and how beautiful that can be. And we can't just write off lives because people don't have, are disabled or or handicapped or something along those lines. Actually they have. There's a different life. That's there. And and presumably what I'm hearing is I think I'm hearing that Sonia is happy where she is as well um, everybody who spends time with Sonia knows, um, what mood she's in.

Judy Piatkus: 31:18

In spite of her challenges, she is very good at getting her needs met. So if she hasn't got what she wants, she'll just raise a storm and everybody will come and say OK, sonia, let's work through it. Have you got a pain? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Do you hate the music? Do you want to change the television station? Do you want to go for a walk? Music do you want to change the television station? Do you want to go for a walk? And gradually sonia will calm down because at some point everybody will recognize what she needs. So she is capable of making all kinds of sounds and the people who live and work closely with her can interpret those sounds. And huge, huge gratitude to the carers of son, the carers of all the people in the home and the carers everywhere. Without carers, what kind of society would we be? Carers are the most loving amongst us.

Malcolm Stern: 32:11

It's interesting. My sister died recently after having spent the last 10 years in a care home, and when she died, her favourite carer was sitting in her room and she reached her hand out to him. He took her hand and she said I'm going. He said no, you're not Beverly. And then she died in that second.

Malcolm Stern: 32:30

But actually he loved her and she loved him and I recognised the great gift you just talked about carers that carers bring and and how extraordinary it is that people can still receive and give love, and that's what I hear is is happening for sonja and it's certainly what happened for my sister, beverly as well. So we're coming towards the end of our our podcast. I'm really grateful to to see you and to have you share um so beautifully here on this, on this program as well. Um, the question I always ask people at the end and you may have answered to some degree already, but you can reiterate, if you have which is what dragons have you had to slay, what? What's, what have you had to overcome in order to be who you fully are?

Judy Piatkus: 33:14

um, well, um, I had had my husband and I had Sonia, and we had two more children and my career became successful.

Judy Piatkus: 33:24

But our marriage wasn't a success and we separated and the children were fairly young and I became a single mother in my 30s.

Judy Piatkus: 33:35

Sonia was still living at home and her brother and sister were quite small, and I was, I think, really I wanted Sonia to go in that particular home because I had known a bit and knew it would be the right place for her, and when she went to live in the home she was so much less frustrated because her brother and sister weren't running around doing stuff that she was unable to join in with.

Judy Piatkus: 34:04

So I would say, probably the gift of Sonia going in the home and the gift of us being able to live, to be able to walk in and out the house without manipulating the wheelchair, up steps, without manipulating Sonia into the back of the car every time we wanted to go anywhere, um I I would say that was probably the biggest gift. And so, therefore, um, I think I came in the world with a happy, positive temperament. I think we're born with that. But I think that gift of having the responsibility of Sonia taken over by people who could give her what she needed, and especially as she grew older and needed two people. That has been definitely the biggest challenge of my life.

Malcolm Stern: 35:06

That's lovely. Thank you so much for sharing, judy, and it's really lovely to see you, and obviously we will meet again at some point in the not distant future, but I appreciate you joining our podcast today. Thanks very much indeed.

Judy Piatkus: 35:19

Thank you, Malcolm, for inviting me.