"The best way to predict the future is to create it".

After working as a nurse and NHS manager, then as a director in the voluntary sector, I am now an independent coach and consultant in leadership and health and social care. Much of my role is helping people to see the choices they have and their ability to influence them.

We have all faced challenges and been blinded by the here and now, caught in our own thought traps or paralysed by the current reality. Our energies are sapped as a result and the chance to imagine a different future is lost.

My role is to open up the imagination, to help with exploration, to enable people or organisations to recognise their real strengths and talents and to uncover their choices. What I love about my work is that moment when people understand what they want or need and are willing to do the work to achieve it.

So I shared the above quote on Twitter. What I didn't expect was the number of Yes supporters who shared it.

The route for individuals, or indeed organisations to self-determine, gain confidence and imagine a new future, applies equally to nations. At the heart of it we have to believe we have a choice and we are capable of making that choice reality.

As someone who has had a cancer diagnosis twice in my life, perhaps I have a different perspective on risk now. I would never have called myself the bravest child - maybe a bit of a fearty if I'm honest - but now I recognise that it's not the amount of life you have that counts, it's living the life that makes you whole. So the greatest risk is for me is to regret not living my dreams. It's the same recognition that gave me the courage to become self-employed and to write my first book. I'm not glad to have had cancer but I'm glad it has taught me that. What does all that mean to me now as we approach the independence referendum?

Once, I wouldn't have considered there was any need for independence. Much of my family are based in England. But working in organisations which are UK-based opened my eyes to the power dynamics, the size differential and its impact, the cultural divergence, the difficulty of being the smaller sibling whose voice is drowned out. The inherent and, in my experience at least, usually unintended institutional bias that is completely understandable but is nonetheless disheartening and is empowering. That's what has shown me the bigger risk is to stay as we are.

Like many others, I have at times voted SNP not necessarily for an independent Scotland but because I believed they offered a different choice. I have also voted for them because of their competence and integrity in government and their willingness to listen. I have seen how devolution under all administrations has enabled us to forge different paths in health and social care and in education which are much closer to my personal core values. This is not what I feel when I see some of the choices at Westminster, where widening inequality is presided over with what seems to be a wanton blindness. This is not what I feel when I see choices at Westminster that makes us less inclusive as a nation, where we turn our back rather than reach out. I know many in England feel as I do about their government but I am powerless to help them. I voted with them before and it made no difference; we all still got a government we didn't vote for.

And so my vote on September 18 will be Yes. Conversations with friends in England tend towards the 'go for it, wish we could' attitude. It's my hope that when Scotland fully awakens to its real choices and possibilities and chooses Independence, that this too will enable a similar awakening in England so that people and political parties there will be enabled to change. The Scotland I aspire to is one that can light the way showing that we can all have a compassionate, inclusive and equal nation. I'm at best bemused when I hear remarks like an independent Scotland will be a foreign country to England and the rest of the UK. The majority of my family live in England as do many of my friends. There are parts of England and Ireland I'm very much at home in. Will that change should Scotland vote YES, of course not. I enjoy the links and the diversity across the UK and Ireland, a more confident Scotland can only enhance that in my opinion.

It's about choice, it's about self-belief, it's about self-determination. It's not about promises of a land of milk and honey. It's about being mature enough to make your own decisions, mistakes and successes and see your country flourish with all its potential, freed from the learned helplessness and hopelessness of the past.

I believe we can do it, if we are willing to put the work in.