personality and story podcast self-leadership + leadership

Leadership, Self-Awareness & Life Trails with Brian Lawrence

January 28, 2022

Insights, tools and strategies for being a more whole human.

Welcome to Episode 11 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Leadership, Self-Awareness and Life Trails.

I’m joined by Brian Lawrence, Director of Life Trails Consulting and an accomplished global facilitator, Leadership Coach, MBTI Master Practitioner and EQi Master Practitioner.

We chat about Brian’s journey to leadership coaching and facilitating and his love of working with teams and individuals on self-awareness with many tools including personality type and emotional intelligence. And his recently developed program, Dancing with Your Inner Wolves, which inspires personal growth through an innovative approach to the Jungian cognitive functions. It all focuses around how we can be a more whole human.

You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

Self-awareness and personality type
Leadership and self-leadership
Certifications and learning frameworks
Misunderstandings about introverts
Brian’s Dancing with Your Inner Wolves program
Our 8 inner wolves and becoming holistic person
Working with cards and tactile learning
And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 11 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 28^th of January as I record this. Can you believe it’s nearly the end of January? It’s super warm here in Sydney and the water is just perfect for swimming right now. I’m busy behind the scenes preparing for The Writing Road Trip Free Challenge which kicks off next week. More on that in a moment.

I’m excited to have Brian Lawrence join us for the podcast today to chat about Leadership, Self-Awareness and Life Trails, which is the name of Brian’s business and captures the essence of his work.

Brian Lawrence is the Director of Life Trails Consulting and an accomplished global facilitator and coach. He is an MBTI Master Practitioner and EQi Master Trainer and has accredited over a thousand practitioners in 7 countries over 11 years. He has designed and led numerous programmes in team development, emotional intelligence and leadership across the globe. Brian’s clients include The Warehouse Group, The West Auckland trusts, OXFAM, The Well Connected Alliance, Roche, ASB Bank, Shell, Rio Tinto and BP. He has been a leadership coach and facilitator for 18 years.

Brian and I met via our mutual interest in psychological type, particularly through the Australian Association for Psychological Type. We share a passion for wholeness and integrating aspects of personal experience, valuing and truly knowing our strengths and identifying where we can stretch. I’ve had the pleasure of attending workshops with Brian and experiencing his excellent facilitation and experiential learning approaches including recently when I attended his Dancing with Your Inner Wolves program

Today we will be speaking about Brian’s work in leadership, personality type and coaching especially as they relate to self-awareness and becoming a more whole human.

Before we head to the conversation with Brian, I want to let you know that The Writing Road Trip Free Challenge I’m hosting with my friend, writing buddy and brilliant writing teacher, Beth Cregan kicks off on Monday 31 January with 6 free 30-minute workshops over two weeks. So, sign up for our mailing list now to get all the information. The focus of the free challenge is on Writing Identity and we aim to inspire you to start from where you to create what you desire in 2022. Plus it’s all about writing with the support of a community as we know the value of this from our own experiences. Our private Facebook is open and you can download the Challenge Workbook now. We are going to have so much fun, and you’ll be inspired to engage with your writing plans and writing self in new ways and connect with others focused on writing. So, if writing is a priority for you in 2022 – whether it’s writing a book, blog posts, a course, family history, anything at all, join us. Links are in the show notes. An easy way to find them is to head to quietwriting.com/podcast and click on Episode 11.

So now let’s head into the interview with the fascinating, skilled and inspiring Brian Lawrence.

Transcript of interview with Brian Lawrence

Terri Connellan: Hello, Brian, welcome to the Create Your Story podcast.

Brian Lawrence: Thank you, Terri. It’s great to be on.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, it’s fantastic to talk with you today. So we’ve connected around personality and psychological type as members of the Australian Association for Psychological Type community. Can you provide an overview about your background, how you got to be where you are and the work you do?

Brian Lawrence: Sure. So I’ve been working in learning and development. I would say pretty much my entire life. So I started my career as a teacher and a trainee educational psychologist in Singapore. But found that teaching 8 to 11 year olds, wasn’t quite what I wanted to do. It was turning my hair gray very early in life. So I decided to move on and do a Master’s in Organizational Psychology in the UK and found my love of adult learning while I was doing that. It took a while to get around to that.

When I came back, I worked in user interface design within an IT company for a couple of years. And then finished that and went on to lecture at the Open University in cognitive psychology, and then discovered that I really wanted to work for myself. So I started a company doing leadership development for young people.

And initially I was using games like Dungeons and Dragons to spark creativity and leadership in young people. We ran that for a group of student leaders in Singapore. So that went on for about a year. And then I had the opportunity to be a learning development manager for the British Foreign and Commonwealth office. So they were starting up a group of regional training centers all around the world. So I was one of nine L and D managers to be recruited to start this training center up. So I ran learning and development around the Southeast Asian and Australasian region for four and a half years.

And that really cemented my love of adult development and adult learning. Along the way I trained as a coach as well, as an executive coach. So I was doing a lot of internal coaching in the organization. And then I was recruited by what then was sold to the Myers-Briggs company.

So it was a little niche consulting company called Hemisphere Consulting in Singapore. And they then became the Myers-Briggs company in Southeast Asia. So I started running Myers-Briggs certification programs back in 2008. I’d been introduced to the MBTI in 1996 and I fell in love with the concept. I really enjoy ed understanding personality type. I just never had the chance to actually use it as a practitioner until I joined the foreign office and I got certified and we started using it with teams and with employees. So when the opportunity came to actually be a Myers-Briggs practitioner and a certification trainer, I jumped at it. So I was doing that for about 11 years. Trained over a thousand people, I think across Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, right up until, would have been 20 19, 20 18/ 20 19. So yeah.

Terri Connellan: Amazing story. It’s lovely to hear people’s life stories and how something starts as a passion or an interest like teaching and learning, and then moving into adult learning, then moving into personal development. But sounds like development of individuals, particularly to the best of their potential is a key theme in all the work that you do.

Brian Lawrence: Absolutely. I’ve tried to keep developing my interest in both personality type and other aspects of learning and development as well over the years. So I trained as a team coach last year. So my current niche is moving into team coaching and senior leadership teams. But keeping that self-awareness piece with personality type at the center of it as its foundation.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And I can see that leadership and promoting self-awareness and authenticity in leaders is a key focus in your work. So why is that important to you and how does self-leadership relate to leadership?

Brian Lawrence: Well, I believe leadership starts from within, and it really starts with self-awareness and leaders being able to reflect on who they are, what their strengths and blind spots are, the impact that they have on their teams, their people, their organizations, understanding their deeply held values and their principles, what those are and how those impact their teams.

So I work with both individuals and teams to create those deep insights through an understanding of who they are, what their personality is. And I find that that really creates a lot of aha moments.

To give you an example. I had a group of doctors that I worked with a few years ago. And at the end of it, one of the doctors, he was in his mid fifties, I would say. And one of his biggest insights was. Oh, I didn’t realize that other people thought differently from me. I mean, can you imagine that, going through life thinking that your way of thinking is the only way of thinking and just creating those insights is a great start to creating better leaders, I think.

Terri Connellan: And that insight that the doctor had. I think that’s such a nugget for many people, isn’t it? It might not be as clearly articulated as that for some people. But I think it’s that idea that we do tend to think, why can’t you see this? It’s obvious to me that it’s like that. And it’s our own framework of seeing things is so natural for us. We just assume everybody’s the same.

Brian Lawrence: Yeah. And a lot of people, they come out of it, going I just thought everyone was stupid .And then realizing, no, they’re actually not. In fact, there was a video recorded with a mining company in Western Australia and they interviewed the mining supervisor and she actually said that I thought everyone worked for me was actually stupid. And then after doing a personality type workshop with the team realized that they actually thought very differently from her.

Terri Connellan: And that’s that realization too, that having difference can really help you both as a person and as a leader, understanding what you don’t have, understanding what the other has and taking it on. So can you provide some insights into how you work with leaders and teams on self-awareness?

Brian Lawrence: So typically I have been running workshops, so a lot of my work was around doing one day workshop around personality type to create those insights of getting people to understand what the individual types are and how that impacts the people around them, how it impacts the way in which they communicate, the way in which they lead. And I also use it as a foundation piece in my coaching work with individuals.

So I start with the Myers-Briggs or TypeCoach, to create that awareness of who they are, what their blind spots are, what their strengths are, the particular leadership style that they might adopt and how it’s seen by other people, their peers, their direct reports. Their own managers and then start to build on that. So starting with a degree of self-awareness and building on what that self-awareness then impacts for the greater team, the greater organization.

Along with that, I also do some work around emotional intelligence. So, starting with your personality, then emotional intelligence. So then maybe even doing a 360, like The Leadership Circle.

Terri Connellan: And you’ve got an amazing range of tools and frameworks in your toolkit that you can draw on for the work that you do. It’s really impressive to see.

Brian Lawrence: I’ve been collecting certifications, I think over the past 10 years.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, as an individual, everything you do helps yourself as well. It’s a framework of understanding that you have like a toolkit you can dip into whoever you’re working with to be able to apply that knowledge that can help someone shift.

Brian Lawrence: Well, one of my values is curiosity. So I think just being inwardly curious, and then being curious about people as well, I think has helped me work with leaders. So it just putting different pieces of that puzzle together. So every instrument, every tool that you use is a different piece of the puzzle. So the more, the more pieces you can put together, the better.

Terri Connellan: Fantastic. It must be a great experience for the people that you work with and for yourself. I think, everything we do as a person, whether it’s develop skills, gain skills, a body of work we create helps us to create our own story, doesn’t it, as we bring it together?

Brian Lawrence: And I think almost every workshop I’ve done, every certification and program I’ve done, I’ve learned as much from the participants on the program, as I hope they have learned from me as well. So I’ve grown a lot in working with such a diverse group of people over the years.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, it’s beautiful work to be in. So you’ve mentioned, Myers-Briggs and personality and psychological type as a key framework that you’ve been involved with both, as a framework you use and also as a trainer in that area. So why did you choose to specialize there and how does type help people to be more whole and self-aware?

Brian Lawrence: Like I said, when I first got introduced to type it, it kind of almost opened the door to a whole new world. And I found that that really resonated with me, understanding how I communicate, how I take in information, how I make decisions and what drives those decisions, where I get my energy from in particular being an introvert and understanding that, that’s okay.

Understanding that, no, I don’t want to go and party on a weekend. I’d rather stay in and watch a video or read a book and getting recharged that way. And realizing that a lot of people who were perceived differently, like me would actually take a lot of comfort from that. So understanding who they were and who they were is actually okay. It’s normal.

I think that’s one of the great strengths of understanding personality type, that who you choose to be or who you are, who you are being in the world is okay. Whoever you are and being different is being different. There’s nothing wrong with it. And conveying that to people on teams, especially where you may have a couple of team members who are always perceived to be a little different, a little quirky, you know, there’s nothing wrong with you.

You’re just living differently in the world. Not only did it open up a doorway for me, but I find that it opens up a doorway for a lot of people who start to understand personality type. And it’s such a non-threatening way of working with the team as well.

I mean, there are some personality instruments, there are some psychometric instruments that can be quite judgmental. I mean, do you really want to work with a team where you’re looking at people and saying, well, your level of neuroticism is fairly high. I mean, that’s going to shut people down immediately. Instead of that, you’re saying, you have a preference for introversion. You work with your inner world world a lot more. You’re quite selective about the energy that you put out. That’s such a nice way of actually getting people to understand their place in world.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s what I’ve found also with my personal experience. Same as you it opened a door for me as an introvert, INTJ preference woman. And I think also, as you said, it helps people realize why they might be a bit different. So for me, for example, as a thinking woman, I’m not the norm, you know, the majority. More women have a feeling orientation. So I think for individuals to realise whether it’s in the context of their personal life or in the context of a team.

For me in the workplace, I couldn’t always come up with ideas immediately in the meeting, or it might take me the whole meeting and I’d summarise everything that was said, because I could sort of think it through, but I wasn’t the person to get up and speak impromptu. That was not my forte. So I guess it’s just understanding why some things are easier and some things are harder.

Brian Lawrence: I think Susan Cain in her book Quiet sums it up perfectly. Isn’t it? I mean, a lot of people, women in particular, where it was women in the legal profession who felt that they were losing out on opportunities because they weren’t speaking up because they did have a preference for introversion and it’s such a cultural impact that being introverted has in a corporate atmosphere.

Terri Connellan: But it certainly seems like there’s a lot more awareness these days. People talk more openly about introversion and extroversion and understanding the different types. But I think it’s certainly a great framework for helping people to be more self-aware and understand others.

Brian Lawrence: I certainly think so.

I think there’s still a lot of misunderstanding around introversion. Just a few years ago I was asked, what’s your personality type? And I said, well, I’m an INTP, I have a preference for introversion. Oh, so you won’t be a very good facilitator then.And I said, well, that’s not necessarily the case. I mean, in my case, I know I’m an introvert. I know I have that preference for introversion, but I’ve always done extroverted things. I’ve been an actor. I’ve been on stage. I’ve been in televised school debates. And I enjoy being on stage and I enjoy facilitating.

So, I think that’s something that people still are yet to understand that being an introvert doesn’t mean that you are going to shy away from the spotlight. It might mean that. But it doesn’t mean you can’t do things that require a sort of an extraverted energy.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I love that example. Very true. I think too, it’s that realization that the skills you have. In fact might make you a very good facilitator. That ability to listen, again, you don’t want to stereotype, but some of the preferences for introverted ways of working do mean that you’re going to be very skilled in that environment to pick up individuals, to listen, to reflect back what people are saying.

Yeah. So your recent work in this area is focused on Dancing with Your Inner Wolves. And I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with you recently on this, which I thoroughly enjoyed and am still thinking about. Can you tell us about the eight inner wolves that make up our personality and how we might use this framework you’ve created for insight and growth.

Brian Lawrence: Okay. The concept of your inner wolves came from my own interest in native American culture and the movie Dances with Wolves back in 1991 really struck me And a lot of what was done in the movie actually influenced the creation of my company Life Trails.

So, the old Cherokee proverb, you have two wolves within you. One is a Wolf of good, and one is a willful evil, and they’re both battling each other. And the one that gets expressed is the one that you feed. So I’ve used that analogy a lot in my work in personality type and talking about type dynamics during my MBTI certification programs, talking about your dominant function, the one that is most prominent within you. And the more you feed it, the more it’s expressed.

So, last year I was thinking about how I could expand that metaphor of the two wolves. And I felt well, it’s not necessarily just two wolves. If you took the idea of the eight cognitive functions that Jung has created and Myers has worked on. So, thinking, feeling, sensing, intuition as the four functions and then the introverted or extroverted energy being applied to each of those giving you eight possible functions or eight possible aspects of your personality. What I call the eight wolves or the eight heroes of your personality. So thinking through that, I thought it’s an interesting metaphor for personality type us having these eight wolves that live within us. But typically we’re only focused on our hero pre-dominant function, which kind of rules the roost, it rules the pack.

But then we don’t usually give ourselves access to the other seven. We typically use the first two, but not the other six. And some people only use the first one. So taking that as a metaphor I thought I’ll develop it into a program around how we could develop each of those eight wolves and get access to each of those eight wolves and become a more holistic human being. So if we could access all seven in a healthy and appropriate way, it would make us a more whole human.

Terri Connellan: I love that. And what I found too, going through the workshop with you is that I love the way you’ve taken the concepts of say, Extraverted Intuition and it’s the Explorer Wolf and how, the Healer is Introverted Feeling. So for people like myself who know the concepts of the cognitive processes and even for people who don’t, I think it makes it a really accessible way of thinking differently about those cognitive functions, maybe fleshes them out in a new way. So I love that.

Brian Lawrence: There’s other researchers who’ve chosen different animals for each of the functions as well. I know a guy in Japan, he’s American and he’s created a whole role-playing game around it. He’s used a rhinoceros and a bear and a Wolf. So there’s different ways of looking at personality and it could be really fun as well. And in just making them more accessible to people.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, exactly. And the great thing we did in that workshop too, was one identify the top, the hero, but also particularly look at one or two that we’re not using some much. So it’s that idea of stretching into our non preferred areas and just practicing. If you’re an introverted person, it tends to be an extroverted type of skill.

So for my two bottom lines, I’m just looking at mine here, were Extraverted Sensing and Extraverted Feeling. And having the opportunity, even in that short time we had in the workshop to practically think about how you might consciously, a lot of it’s about consciousness, isn’t it, being aware of these things. How you might consciously practice these cognitive ways of working in your life was really valuable.

Brian Lawrence: Yeah. So I created a series of cards that initially it was to use in the live workshop. But of course now with COVID, I’ve had to think of different ways in which to present that. So, I’m thinking about virtual cards or virtual focus cards where you can pick a card if you’re doing the workshop off a whiteboard. in a program and look at it and go, okay, this is the activity I need to do.

So, I’ve placed those activities as well on three different levels. So in an easy level one activity could be doing something as simple as observing your chair. What details do you notice about your chair? That’s the Introverted Sensing, or Extraverted Sensing part of you.

There’s also leadership cards where you take a particular Wolf and you look at how that Wolf would respond to a leadership challenge. So, there’s in total about 300 to 400 cards that you could actually access for different activities.

Terri Connellan: Wow. That’s amazing. And you have this passion for developing experiential learning products. Like you’ve just mentioned like a system of cards. So tell us a bit about how this taps into your personal approach to facilitating and learning and how you feel working with tangible things helps to foster insights.

Brian Lawrence: I think that that’s always what I’ve been interested in. As a learning and development manager, I was always looking for new ways to spark learning. I’ve developed lots of different games, activities that people can actually touch, they can use to actually discuss ideas. So one of the earliest games that I had developed was called the Mayan Pyramid. So it’s a series of 40 cards with clues on them. So, you hand those cards out to a team. They each get maybe two or three cards and they put the clues together as a team to solve a problem. In this case to solve how long this pyramid was taken to be built by a group of workers. I’ve always had that interest in tactile learning to.

And, I developed a series of cards called the Pocket Personality Cards back in 2016. And that came from me being overseas. I was in Cambodia doing a workshop for Oxfam around type and change. So we were doing an MBTI workshop. I was sitting in the hotel restaurant and the waitress brought me a menu.

But the menu, wasn’t your traditional menu. It was a series of cards. So you picked out the dish that you want. The dish was on individual cards and you went and gave it to the waitress. And I said, I want the chicken And I thought that was such a simple, elegant way of ordering a meal there. If you didn’t speak English or if you didn’t speak Cambodian, it was fine. All you needed to do is pick out the card and give it to them rather than grabbing them and pointing out that particular dish. And she would take the cards and go and give it to the chef and he would cook up the meal.

And being an Introverted Thinker, Extraverted Intuitive, that got me thinking over the next few weeks and months. And I thought well, no one’s actually developed a series of cards for personality type. Okay. That would be interesting. So I started developing the Pocket Personality Cards with little tips on how to communicate or little tips on leadership or on working with teams. So I came up with three sets of cards. So one for communication, one for teams, one for leadership.

Terri Connellan: That’s fabulous. And I love too in the workshop with the Eight Inner Wolves how even though we’re online, we were able to see the cards and use them. As you said , that makes it simple, makes it accessible. And when we think of the whole body of work around cognitive functions and even each cognitive function, there’s a huge body of work out there. Lots of information. And it’s quite technical some of it, the language is quite hard, but if you can distill it. And I’m sure for you, there’s a lot of work in distilling things down to the actual cards.That’s where your introverted thinking and extroverted intuition would come in as great skills. So in a way you’ve done the thinking for us and said well, here’s a few prompts to explore. And I think that’s what makes that work so accessible.

Brian Lawrence: And actually working with an Extraverted Thinker really helped as well. So I was working with Sue Blair and looking at all of the different activities that that I created. And she said, well, that doesn’t quite fit with Extraverted Thinking, this does. So we refined those. So having a different personality type work with you really helped as well.

Terri Connellan: I love that. Do you use other cards in your work?

Brian Lawrence: I do. I use values cards as well. I think developed by Sue Langley. So I use a lot of that in the workshops that I do. So running a leadership program, for example, I might use the personality cards in the self-awareness piece and then use a value card sort.

There’s another set of cards called Points of View which was developed by a couple of Israeli psychologists and that is just a series of pictures on different cards and use that to spark awareness and insight. I find it useful to use those cards at the end of a workshop as a sort of a visual explorer to get people to articulate what leadership now means for them at the end of all this learning.

Terri Connellan: We were just talking before we came on about Roger Pearman’s recent presentation at the AusAPT Conference earlier in November. It’s November as we speak. And he had a top list of top 10 tips if you’re working with personality type, here’s what you should do if you’re serious. And one of those was about playing with cards and playing with that idea of symbols. Wasn’t it? Yeah, it was a top wisdom tip. So it’s great to see that you’ve been doing that for a long time.

Brian Lawrence: Absolutely delighted to hear Roger say that. I say you finally validated it.

Terri Connellan: That’s what I felt too. As someone who’s written about tarot, cause I use tarot a lot and talk about it in my book. It was my absolute favorite moment of the conference. And he talked about how he used cards with executives too. Not necessarily tarot cards in that case, but similar to what you do. And, that’s what I felt that sense of validation too.

Brian Lawrence: I used to use tarot cards when I was at uni actually. So moving from tarot cards and you’ve got Carol Pearson’s Archetype cards as well. And I’ve recently signed a contract with an organization who uses Jungian Archetype cards as well. Just feed that, continue to feed that. And people like playing with things. They like the tactile nature of learning as well, rather than just sitting there and listening to someone drone on. They like getting involved.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s really exciting. And it’s great to hear about how your work’s evolved too over time. It’s been fascinating to connect with you around that. Absolutely. So, can you tell us about your personality type and the psychological insights you’ve gained over time that have helped you with self-leadership and personal growth?

Brian Lawrence: So my type preference is INTP. And so I’m an Introverted Thinker, I’m an analyst and I think that’s something that I’ve always…. I haven’t struggled with it. I think I was lucky enough to have parents who encourage me to just be who I was and so I really thrived in my own skin too. I did what I wanted to do. I’ve followed my career, making sure the jobs that I sought out, the jobs that I applied to, really suited my particular personality type. It didn’t mean however that I didn’t stretch outside of that.

So running my own business, for example, when I started my company in 2015, I found that I really needed to get stronger in my introverted sensing and my extroverted sensing. So, going through accounts on a weekly basis, looking at budgets, looking at scheduling. I now use a bullet journal. So I make lists of things that I need to do. That’s very introverted sensing, that’s very traditionalist.

So learning about how I can flex into those other aspects or those other wolves has really helped me grow into myself. I think my greatest challenges are Extraverted Feeling and Introverted Feeling. So Extroverted Feeling’s my fourth function and Introverted Feeling’s my eighth function. So getting to understand the opposite side of me, to get to understand my shadow has really been quite challenging and quite eyeopening.

Terri Connellan: And did you find, as I did that stretching into that opposite is a real source of growth as you get older, particularly in midlife?

Brian Lawrence: Absolutely. And being married to an introverted feeler helps as well because you really then understand the opposite in a safe environment. And I think I bring out my extraverted feeling quite a bit in my workshops as well. I’ve been told by some of my participants, that they think I might be an extroverted feeler and definitely not. I’m glad that I’m showing some of that.

Terri Connellan: I found it very warm being in your workshop, even online with all of us all around the world. So, yeah it’s great for us to stretch into and take our strengths forward in new ways. Because when we blend that strength with what’s not so natural for us, often we can really weave some magic, can’t we?

Brian Lawrence: Absolutely.

Terri Connellan: So a question I ask all guests on the Create Your Story podcast is how have you created your story over your life time?

Brian Lawrence: That’s a good question. I think I’ve let it unfold naturally. And I’ll have to say, trust in the universe to give you what you need rather than what you want. And my wife believes very strongly in the law of attraction. I’m coming around to it, but I found that it actually has worked quite well.

For example, back when I was in the army for two and a half years and I just finished. It was my last day in the army. I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Hadn’t had an offer to a university yet. And the day I left, I sort of, well, okay. I’ll see what happens. And a friend of mine calls me out of the blue and says, there’s this university that’s doing interviews. Do you want to come down? I said, okay. And I went and I got offered a place at university and then that chapter, that trail of my life kind of unfolded.

So your life is a series of decisions that you make. And each decision you make gives rise to another part of your trail. So your trail kind of unfolds as you go along.

And that’s what’s happened to me as well. Moving to New Zealand was almost on the spur moment. We were on holiday in Ireland, in Spain, and we came back and my wife said, you know, I think we’ve got to move. And I said, yeah, where do you want to go? And she said, well, how about New Zealand? Oh, okay. The following year we were in New Zealand and I was wanting to start a company. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was going to do, should I apply for another job? And she said, well, why don’t you write it down, write down what you want, put it away and see what happens.

So I wrote down, I want to start a company by the middle of the year 2015. I put it in an envelope, put it away. By the middle of the year, I’d started my company. So I think letting your life unfold, but also stating what you want, is really important.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, I love that. And I think that idea of being intentional and I found a similar thing. I write my goals down for a quarter and be conscious of them, but sometimes forget exactly what I thought I would do. And then I went back and the podcast was one, and I think I had create the podcast kickoff in November. And I’d forgotten and that’s exactly what happened. Yeah. So I think it’s that combination, as you said, that unfolding and I love that your company is called Life Trails Consulting

Brian Lawrence: And it’s similar to your book as well with the spiral. And, I use the spiral in my company logo as well, and that came to me, on my trip to Ireland. I actually had this, you know, in the hour before you wake up and you’re sort of half awake and half asleep, I had this vision of a spiral and I didn’t know why. And I came downstairs to the breakfast table and I started drawing out all these spirals and thinking, okay, we’re talking about trails, we’re talking about life unfolding. And that particular day our friends were taking us to these burial mounds just outside of Dublin and on every burial mound, guess what was inscribed? The spiral.

So it was, it’s kind of mystical and the whole idea of spiral is a trail, but spiraling back to where you were and looking at the patterns that have got you there and whether or not you break out of that spiral sometimes and find a different path.

Terri Connellan: For me the spiral’s about those things, but also about revisiting, like relearning, learning more and to relate it to psychological type too is that we’re often repeating similar patterns. We’re working on our strengths. We’re still having trouble with those things that are a bit pesky for us that we can’t sort out. And we will often find ourselves having the same arguments, butting up against the same situation.

Brian Lawrence: And looking at your limiting beliefs as well.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, exactly. So all those things that come together to make that journey, which obviously we both see in a spiraling evolving, unfolding way.

Brian Lawrence: I’d love to get a hold of your book as well as a gift, actually.

Terri Connellan: Okay. Yeah. We can send you the links cause yeah, it’s available.

Brian Lawrence: Because I know someone I’d like to get it as a gift.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. Quite a few people have bought it as a gift for people. And I really love that. I think it’s that idea that people can see that there’s somebody, you know, either in a time of transition, or someone who needs to reflect deeply on that time. So I look forward to sharing it with you. The book has 15 wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, so that’s a toolkit that I’ve developed based on my experiences. But I love to ask others to add to this toolkit we can all access what your top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices would be.

Brian Lawrence: Be comfortable with your own skin. Be grateful every day. Understand that you can be more powerful than you think you are. And there’s this resonant power within you that if you just unlock it, you could do anything. I think those are things that I’ve learned over time. Don’t hold yourself back, speak your truth into the world.

Terri Connellan: I love that. And I think that taps into sometimes what we see on social media where we tend to see other people as experts and, you know, there’s a time for learning. But I’ve heard of procrasti-learning to where people can just keep learning but don’t own their own learning. And writing my book for me was the time of owning my learning. Is that how you, you see it too?

Brian Lawrence: That must’ve been such a growth experience though. I mean, I’ve been listening to your podcast and waking up at five in the morning and writing for 20 minutes and then having a chat and writing again, that takes a lot of discipline.

Terri Connellan: Oh, it does. Yeah. It takes a huge amount of discipline. It’s a long haul creative journey too that whole idea of writing a book. But just as you said with your being comfortable in your own skin, Owning your own stories, that unfolding you talked about, you know, it’s very much a book about unfolding through a time of major change. So, yeah, it’s certainly a big growth journey, but something that’s been really powerful for me to do exactly what you just said, which is own my own knowledge and my own learning and step into my own space as someone who can speak about transition in a meaningful way for others to help them.

Brian Lawrence: Are there more books on the way?

Terri Connellan: There’s one in draft at the moment. So, as part of the work that I did, I asked other women to tell their stories. So there’s about 24 stories that I’ve gathered over time. Partly because I was a bit tired of hearing my own voice. I wanted to hear other people’s voices. So I’ve gathered those voices together and I’m looking to publish that as another book. I went back to those stories when I was writing the book to hear how other people were negotiating similar things. And things like intuition came up time and time again, particularly when people were at a crossroads. It’s particularly then, and when challenging things happen that people start to really listen within or they actually hear voices.

Brian Lawrence: It’s a crucible moment.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. So that piece of work is something I’d like to bring into the world because I think those stories really amplify what it means to be wholehearted in different ways and they’re all different personalities of course so you get to see different aspects.

Brian Lawrence: I’ll look forward to that.

Terri Connellan: Thank you. So thanks so much for being part of the podcast Brian sharing about your story. It’s been fascinating to learn more about you and I hope many of those ideas that were shared will inspire others in different ways or spark some thoughts and some trails to go down for themselves.

So where can people find out more about you and your work on this?

Brian Lawrence: Well, first of all, thank you Terri for having me on your podcast, it’s been really exciting. It’s been really fun talking to you and learning about your own journey as well through the book. So if people want to find out more about me or the inner wolves, my email is brian@lifetrails.co.nz or you can go to my website, www.lifetrails.co.nz. I have a Facebook page as well, Life Trails Consulting. And I think I’ll be starting off a separate Facebook page for the Inner Wolves soon.

Terri Connellan: Fantastic. Yeah, we can pop those links in the show notes so people can head off and explore a bit about the inner wolves cause I’ve found it really fascinating and personally inspiring. So thanks again. Great to chat.

About Brian Lawrence

You can connect with Brian:

Website: Life Trails Consulting

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lifetrailsconsulting

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianlaw/

Email: brian@lifetrails.co.nz

Links to explore:

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

https://www.quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1

Other free resources: https://www.quietwriting.com/free-resources/

My coaching & programs:

Work with me

Personality Stories Coaching

The Writing Road Trip – a community program with Beth Cregan – kicking off Jan 2022

Connect on social media

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writingquietly/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/writingquietly

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terri-connellan/

inspiration & influence introversion work life

Shining a quiet light – working the gifts of introversion

May 15, 2017

As a proud introvert, I am keen to promote quiet voices speaking in the world.

I’m sharing a piece here that was originally published in Issue 1 of The Introvert Effect Magazine edited by Katherine Mackenzie-Smith in February 2017.

Just because you are quiet by nature, it doesn’t meant you can’t speak out and influence. You might do this a little differently to what feels like mainstream approaches. And it can take a little while to learn how your skills can best be played out.

My piece is an account of how I learned to understand and work the gifts of introversion. I hope you enjoy it and I welcome your thoughts especially if you have had similar experiences.

Evolving as an introvert

I’ve always been aware of a sense of feeling a little different, a bit quieter, slightly outside the mainstream. Not necessarily in a bad way, but enough to feel at a distance from what was happening at times and to not say as much as I wanted.

As a young adult, I was drawn to the work of Carl Jung, to his visions, dreams and insights and to his writing on symbols, synchronicity and personality.

I found some of his Collected Works volumes with images of mandalas that I would gaze into as if they held something secret.

I became a teacher of adult literacy and then over time, a leader in adult education, heading up large work groups, honing the vision for my teams and business area, delivering educational programs that made a difference and developing the people that worked with me.

I’ve always been interested in personal development and creativity, mine and other people’s. Learning to me is paramount and even if the terrain is tough, there’s knowledge, experience and strength from that. I incorporated and shared these lessons in my work as a leader and in more personal writing on my blog.

Do you ever close the door?

With all of this, it wasn’t until I worked through my Jung/Myers-Briggs psychological type type with a coach that I began to truly understand myself and the key to how I work.

I identified as an INTJ personality type – Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging – with a very strong preference for the I – Introverted.

I remember a single moment in the debriefing conversation when my coach said to me:

“Do you ever close the door?”

I can remember my stunned silence.

It seemed so obvious and still does. But the words were like a permission slip that I clearly needed to be authentic in my work in the world.

Leadership in our 24/7 world, filled with social media and electronic devices, implies always being available and accessible. These simple words about closing the door as my source of power and learning to respect this, ironically, opened the door to so much.

After that, I did start to close the door briefly and found it so valuable in getting peace and focus. I still do whatever I can to breathe, to collect my thoughts, to envision, to put the pieces together in a mind-map, to research, to craft words and to prepare for the next interaction.

Shining a quiet light

A few years later, I read Susan Cain’s ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking’. It was another watershed time and I understood myself more deeply as the words unfolded.

These words from Susan Cain spoke to me:

Everyone shines, given the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight, for others, a lamplit desk.

It’s true: I shine most brightly from the light of my desk or from the shade of trees at the beach where I sit writing, feet in the sand, staring out into the water and sunlight. All the incandescent ideas and visions flow from that inward space.

It’s not better than a Broadway stage, it’s just different. But it has taken me years to realise it’s just as significant a power as the brighter magic of a more extraverted and colourful performance. And it’s also taken me time to have confidence in this quiet strength as a source of expression and wisdom.

I’ve been told in my professional life, as I’m sure many introverts have, to “speak up more” and also to consider “voice coaching”.

There are times when this might be helpful and to some extent there’s truth in there. However, I gained the ability to speak up and influence more effectively through learning to work my introvert by sharpening up my practices of how I prepare, strategise, listen and write.

From this base, I can speak to large groups without undue stress and have impact in challenging negotiation contexts.

Gifts of introversion

I can follow the flow of discussion in a meeting that meanders and then sum up the main ideas into a distilled message for future action.

I can listen in a very focused way and ask the right questions to help others move ahead. I can use my strategic writing ability to bring diverse ideas together to influence an outcome or argue for a position.

I have always had these skills to some degree. Over time, I have had to learn to recognise them as assets and to deploy them more appropriately and with confidence.

The linchpin has been the awareness of knowing the symbolic and practical power of the closed door and the lamplit desk, working from the wellspring of private moments however I can find them.

And it’s not that other people are not involved or important.

Connecting with critical others, listening to others’ ideas, engaging with creative communities and working with coaches and mentors are all part of the rich mix of input.

But it’s the quiet moment of distilling all of this knowledge and experience to its essence that is the vital catalyst for action.

We are all on a hero’s (or heroine’s) journey.

As Steven Pressfield says in ‘Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work’:

In the hero’s journey, the wanderer returns home after years of exile, struggling, and suffering. He brings a gift for the people. That gift arises from what the hero has seen, what he has endured, what he has learned. But the gift is not that raw material alone. It is the ore refined into gold by the hero/ wanderer/ artist’s skilled and loving hands.
You are that artist.

For the introvert, this important work of refining, distilling and reworking is more likely to happen if we can find space in our days.

And if there are silent walks along the beach, or elsewhere, collecting thoughts like shells.

And if we remember that the gentle light of ideas can be just as radiant as any stage performance, illuminating dark corners with presence.

Next steps in my personal journey

The next step in my personal journey is to take this learning forward. As an INTJ, my dominant function is Introverted Intuition and I’m activating this power now with more awareness.

I’m combining my passions for learning, teaching, writing, Carl Jung’s ideas and MBTI tools to support people to harness their particular brand of brilliance to express their voice in the world.

Learning to work our introvert strengths to deploy our gifts ensures that the unique voice of what we love, who we are and what we have learned is not drowned out.

We can never know the difference our influence can make or the impact we can have on another’s life journey.

Recognising our abilities, crafting the raw material of our lives and then communicating the gold we find can be the greatest offering, enabling others to likewise shine.

About the author, Terri Connellan

Terri Connellan is a certified life coach, author and accredited psychological type practitioner. She has a Master of Arts in Language and Literacy, two teaching qualifications and a successful 30-year career as a teacher and a leader in adult vocational education. Her coaching and writing focus on three elements—creativity, personality and self-leadership—especially for women in transition to a life with deeper purpose. Terri works with women globally through her creative business, Quiet Writing, encouraging deeper self-understanding of body of work, creativity and psychological type for more wholehearted and fulfilling lives. Her book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the accompanying Wholehearted Companion Workbook were published in September 2021 by the kind press. She lives and writes in the outskirts of Sydney surrounded by beach and bush.

Join the Quiet Writing mailing list and receive your free Chapter 1 of Wholehearted or my Personal Action Checklist for more Meaning and Purpose. Just click on the link to choose and it will be with you in no time plus I’ll receive inspirational insights and connect with a community of like-minded people.

Book your Self-leadership Discovery Call with Terri here.

Read Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Want to learn more about personality, creativity and self-leadership for positive transition to the life you desire?

Head over to read about Wholehearted and the accompanying Companion Workbook now.

Available in paperback and ebook from retailers listed here:

Wholehearted

Companion Workbook

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