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Kate Markland spent twenty years as a physiotherapist and built four award-winning clinics. Listening was her main tool. She learned that what holds people back is often fear, and that they begin to improve once someone hears their story without correcting it. Kate and her son Gabriel had one hour a week together, on a Friday evening FaceTime call. Gabriel was ten.

Kate asked him one question: would he like to write his own story, one where he was the hero? He said yes. She wrote down everything he said and corrected nothing.

Week by week they built a world: a seaside village called Coral Cove, a platypus called Platy, a sea captain called Captain Ali and a monster called Tentaculus. Gabriel named the vehicle that carried them through it Trust. That world became The Adventures of Gabriel, now three books, with more planned.

Kate then took the same approach into schools as StoryQuest: one question, no correction and complete trust in the child's own story. It has been used by 465 children in nine UK primary schools, and every child took part. An evaluation of 318 children's responses identified seven changes the children described in themselves.

Kate has presented this work at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference and published it in the Journal of Novel Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation. She has appeared on BBC News and Times Radio. Her keynote, Create the World You Want, shows audiences how building a world together builds trust, at eight or at eighty.