After my first blog post on recruitment, many people asked me: what was the biggest change when you moved to in-house recruitment with Shazam? What makes the role better than working in an agency?

The natural assumption, I think, is that a pot of gold exists at the end of the in-house recruitment rainbow. It doesn’t. It is a job like any other. Don’t get me wrong, my job is ace, but it’s made even more ace by the energy I choose to bring to it.

The biggest change has quite simply been: my attitude. I now exist with the attitude of gratitude.

You see, good people of the internet, our perception of the world really can entirely influence how we exist within it. Attitude really is everything. Changing that attitude is well within our power, by making better choices.

When I was allowing myself to feel like a professional loser in my 20s, I allowed that perception to consume me and that was what I shone out to the world. I felt unsure of what my contribution to the world truly was. On the surface I would have seemed happy enough, but that negativity found a way of seeping out through my pores. My attitude and perception of the world was not founded on gratitude, everything felt hard and my soul felt troubled on a daily basis. Regardless of what we are doing in life, our attitude can be the biggest determining factor.

I went through a considerable amount of self-led personal upheaval when I turned 30 and started my life over again. After wading through a big slice of adversity, I started to discover who I truly am in this world. Having gone through such a huge thing personally, it changed my perception of the world and my place in it entirely. I embarked upon a journey to learn how to love myself, and that love has now infused everything I do. I approach each day with a full heart and huge smile, and that’s where the shift has really come from.

Nothing is really ever as bad as it seems. Nothing is permanent. Everything can and will change. No two moments will ever be the same. People don’t often mean the words they speak, or certainly the way they say them, everyone is fighting their own internal battles and sometimes those battles can impact the people around them. Whatever the thing is that feels so terrible in that moment is never going to be the way we feel forever, and remembering that what millions of other people are living through in that moment is likely to be far worse than most of us could even imagine, quickly snaps me out of any self pity and reminds me just how blessed I truly am.

I made a decision to make all of my choices based on happiness, and have built my new life around those choices. Put simply: I now only feel blessed, happy and thankful. Even on my darker days – which we all have – I know that the next day I get the chance to start over and create something even more awesome, it really is that simple.

What happens when you start to project that kind of energy out into the Universe? It comes back to you tenfold. I’m delighted to say I’ve started to feel that too, in the form of an incredible array of wonderful friends, both pixelated and in real life, professional and personal. It’s that attitude that enabled me to start to unfurl my love of art and music in a big crazy way and broaden my horizons. And it’s that attitude that made a lovely chap named Ryan Broad call up yours truly, when he was looking for new talent for his (then) team here at Shazam. I count my blessings and I am truly thankful.

At the end of a very tough SoulCycle session recently, the instructor said to the class: ‘Be thankful that you have the opportunity to even make the choice to be here, let alone be here. Now go out and spread that gratitude with the world.’

I couldn’t have put it better myself.