One of six children, Shirley Yanez was born and raised in poverty on a council estate in Leicester in the 1950s. She received no formal education and would later discover that she was dyslexic. She would go on to use her innate confidence, unbreakable self-belief and indestructible drive to escape her difficult start in life, finally reaching the top of the money and power mountain within the hyper-capitalist world of Wall Street and the City of London finance.
She became a self-made millionaire in the 1990s through building a global financial headhunting firm, moving bankers and trading teams around the world. However, she found herself miserable and empty, entangled in a world of money, sex, drugs and power. Disillusioned with her life at the top in 2000, she gave up her business, put all her money in the stock market and moved to Hollywood, marrying a total stranger on a whim. Three months after she moved to Los Angeles, the dot.com bubble burst, and she lost her millions. In 2005, she had a near-death experience which left her stranded, homeless, penniless and dying in a shelter in Compton, one of the most dangerous places in the US.
Today, 18 years on, Shirley is back safely at home in the UK. Healthy and happy, she has reinvented herself as the Mind Detective. She is back on top with her purpose and passion restored, successfully running a new kind of ethical, sustainable fashion brand: Venus Cow, built on a £300 government business loan. The business is a social enterprise that helps fund one of her key missions, free talk-therapy work with the homeless and addicted.
During her incredible and unimaginable life-changing experience, Shirley began to read the teachings of an earlier 'mind detective', Carl Jung. Using this vital resource, Shirley was able to work herself out of a mental health hell. She went on to self-actualise this new life she deserves and loves.
The Mind Detective is not just another self-help book: it is the story of someone who battled against the odds to climb out of the gutter, reach the top, fall to the bottom again and rise back to the top as the truly enlightened, happy and fulfilled person she was always meant to be.
It takes depression to understand depression. It takes addiction to know addiction. It takes courage to admit failure. It takes reaching the bottom to find out what really matters in life. It takes near-death to realise what happiness is. Shirley knows this, because she survived herself to finally find herself.
Journey through this book with the help of the Mind Detective: it will lead you into your own mind and allow you to discover whether the life you are living today is the life you truly deserve, or whether it is a life handed down to you from your caregivers, circumstances and experiences as a child.
