M&S Food marketing director Sharry Cramond is enthusiastic and encouraging in self-help book

When Sharry Cramond was 12, her family couldn’t afford the blazer she needed for secondary school, but lucked upon one in a charity shop. It wasn’t until she got to her friend’s house on her first day that she realised her second-hand jacket was the wrong shade of blue.

Cramond – now marketing director of M&S Food – simply owned it. To everyone that pointed it out, she responded: “Yes, I do know. But I actually prefer this colour”.

By saying so repeatedly, she ended up genuinely preferring the colour. “Just by thinking differently, I actually was different,” she explains in her new self-help book: Win Your Lottery (Amazon, paperback £8). Its 10 steps are hardly ground-breaking – concepts like setting goals and a can-do attitude are common in the genre – but Cramond’s frank and fast writing style sets it apart from the rest.

It reads like a Ted talk from an enthusiastic and encouraging friend, littered with funny anecdotes of her own and others. There are practical tips too: for example, when asked how she is, Cramond always replies with “never better” or when a negative thought pops into her head, she thinks “delete” as she would an unwanted email.

This way of thinking obviously worked for her – propelling Cramond through a stellar supermarket marketing career. It’s understood the M&S Food team will each be receiving a copy, so time will tell if it works for them. Regardless, Cramond has a way of making you believe it will work for you too. Jackpot.