Hello and welcome to ways to change the world.

I'm Christian Guru Murthy and this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people

about the big ideas and their lives and the events that have helped shape them.

My guest this week joined the prison service as a psychologist.

She ended up running prisons as a governor and was director of women in charge of all women prisoners.

But she has now left and is the chief executive

of the Prison Reform Trust charity. Pearson, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

How would you change the world?

So it's a massive question and I always sort of slightly worry about coming across to Trite but I shall try and

be grounded in my response. So what it triggered for me the question was when we were doing

practicing psychology, it was a particular type of therapy called solution focus therapy.

And what we did was that when a client was in the middle of a deep sort of stuck crisis, we asked them what was called a miracle question.

And the miracle question works in the way that you'd say, you went to bed at night, and while you were sleeping, a miracle happened.

You wake up the next morning, you don't quite know that this miracle has happened, what would be the first things that tell you

that something was different?

So I kind of used that as a way of framing the response for me.

And I guess what I would do,

so the miracle would happen,

and I would notice that people were reacting to things

in a slightly different way.

And what I would say is that they would be more centered

...