Bio of Victoria
Biography of Victoria
Victoria Armstrong was born on a cool, rainy Sunday in August after a long hot summer in Northern Ireland. She knows this because her mum has reminded her on every birthday since then and apparently it is pure torture being pregnant in hot weather.
During her 2nd year at the University of Ulster, Jordanstown, (UUJ), another opportunity for freedom, sorry independence, presented itself to her to study at Montana State University (MSU) at their Bozeman campus. She grabbed it with both hands and feet …. and graduated in 1999 with a BA Hons in Business Studies and a Diploma in International Business Studies from MSU.
Her marketing tutor at UUJ was very enthusiastic about Father Ted and the introduction of the Internet. He denies dropping this pearl of wisdom but Victoria remembers vividly him telling the class that if you could market and sell technology, you would always be in demand as a marketer! So on that advice, her dissertation was focused on Internet Marketing and Web design.
However, there was one slight problem. Back in 1999, there were very little web sites online or even people with who had email addresses but Victoria found a small mail order food company wanting a marketing student to help them sell online.
Along with learning how to cook Mexican and Thai food, Victoria learnt how to generate over 30 orders a day online. After getting engaged, she moved out of her parents home to live with her fiance and Victoria took a new job as a Product Marketing Manager with a local software house that was building e-government systems before and after the infamous Y2K bug. This is where she learnt the nuts and bolts of developing and implementing e-business systems in organisations.
After reading Robert Kyosaki’s book ‘Rich dad, poor dad’ Victoria left her job to start her own Internet Marketing Consultancy in 2001, the ‘pre-google’ days as she likes to call them. That and the fact that her boss was paying her £60 a day and pimping, sorry hiring her out as an IT trainer for £800 a day. The lightbulb went on and did not switch off!
She then trained with the late Corey Rudl who was the Internet marketing guru at that time. Under his training, her business won the Shell Livewire Award for entrepreneurs under 30.
Victoria has also trained with Tony Robbins and completed his famous ‘Hot Coals Walk’ in 2005. Victoria realised that if she could programme her mind to walk on hot coals, she could programme it to do anything.
She took another opportunityto returnto the USA to Boston, MA in 2007. Boston is home to the well known entrepreneurial school, Babson College and Victoria had the chance to pursue further studies in Entrepreneurship and Innovation based on her working knowledge of e-business systems.
She also completed her first coaching qualification in the same year despite having a broken ankle and marriage! She says ‘At least I knew the ankle would heal, the marriage was well beyond that!’
It was while she was immobile with her ankle that Victoria realised her life had to come to a cul de sac! She needed to change things and for the better. While her friends and colleagues saw her as being successful with the big house, brand new cars in the driveway, 3-4 overseas holidays a year etc, she felt empty on the inside. She was approx 4 stone (50lbs) overweight and was an ideal candidate for a heart attack at the age of 29! Two qualified and experienced marriage counsellors advised her to leave the marriage.
However, with debt of over £40,000 on credit cards due to DIY work being carried out on 5 rental properties, (yes 5) not shopping trips or exotic holidays, she had to pay her husband a lump sum in their divorce settlement. She said she saw the lump sum as a down payment to her future happiness! Also there was very little emotional support offered from her family and friends at this time too. She was at rock bottom and still digging with a JCB digger!
Fast forward to a year later, Victoria paid off the credit card debt in full! Oh yeah, when focused in the right direction, Victoria says that inheriting her mother’s stubbornness can be a powerful thing. Then to celebrate her 30th birthday, she walked into a Landrover dealership and wrote a cheque for £32,000 for a brand new 4×4. She inspired the salesman in the process and a month later he quit his job and started his own business too. Well she says ‘inspired’, we say his boss probably fired him for giving her too much discount!
In 2008, she moved into a home worth £600,000, against the advice of her now ex-solicitor. Victoria recalls sitting in his bland, magnolia coloured office with him that day, in his boring grey suit that matched the filing cabinet behind him and with a smug smile on his long, pale solicitor face say
ing ‘Victoria, as your solicitor I am advising you to not go ahead with the purchase of this house. Do you understand?’ Victoria looked him in the eye and said ‘Yes I understand. Thank you for your advice. It looks like I’ll be needing a new solicitor’ and strode out of the office, taking her turn to smile smugly now.
When she did move into that new house, she decided to ditch the IT world and begin a new chapter in her career delivering stress management and confidence building programmes. She’d been through both ends of it herself. She then added her knowledge to building emotional and mental healing courses that attracted clients from all walks of life.
Clients such as barristers, members of the police force and the prison service, therapists, business owners to divorcees, to single mothers and victims with suicidal tendencies or domestic and sexual abuse history. Victoria’s programmes used tools such as reiki, coaching, meditation and NLP combined with training that she completed with Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Bob Proctor, Brad Sugars, Rhonda Byrne, Joe Vitale, Andy Harrington and Robert Allen to name but a few.
In 2011, Victoria finally gave in to peer pressure and added stand up comedy to her range of skills. Of course, she couldn’t just go along and perform sets at local comedy clubs. No …. she went on to organise her own comedy events and started producing murder mystery evenings to provide a platform for Northern and Southern Ireland based comedy and improv performers. That and to secretly fulfil her love of writing parody songs and fancy dress.
On the health and fitness side, Victoria has dropped 3.5 stone (approx 45lbs) of the extra weight. She claims however that she has lost 12.5 stone (175lbs) of unwanted fat in total, thanks to her divorce! Just a wee joke she has!
At the age of 36, Victoria took the plunge literally and learnt to swim, overcoming her life long fear of deep water. After completing a 5k (3 miles) park run in May 2014, which she claims almost killed her at the time, she is currently training for the Berlin Marathon 2015 in memory of her late father Robert Armstrong and for the charity, the British Heart Foundation.
If you’d like to donate money for Victoria running the marathon and
all proceeds going to this worthwhile charity, follow the link here >>
Victoria is currently writing her first book which will be launched in April 2022. She aims to inspire more people to follow their dreams the way she has inspired past clients and the Landrover salesman. We should say it was confirmed that the salesman did actually resign, he wasn’t fired. We’re guessing he probably drives a Cherokee Jeep or BMW X5 now, just because he can!