Welcome to the first episode of the Create Your Story Podcast!
In this episode, I share about myself and about what to expect in the podcast.
You can listen above or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
An introduction to me and my work.
How the podcast came about.
The signature elements of my work as a coach and author focused on transition.
Three signature elements: Creativity, Self-leadership, Personality
How insights from these areas can help in navigating chance.
The difference between change and transition
Why having a transition mindset is so powerful.
The value of community when going through times of transition.
Upcoming episodes and what to expect.
Transcript of podcast
Hello, I’m Terri Connellan, your host for the Create Your Story Podcast. And welcome to Episode One of the podcast. Today, I’ll be sharing why I’ve created the podcast and what you can expect in future episodes and conversations here. Firstly, I’m so excited to be kicking off the Create Your Story Podcast and sharing conversations on creativity, self-leadership and personality to inspire your wholehearted life and transitions.
So just a little about me, I’m an author, creative transition coach and personality type practitioner. I work through my business, Quiet Writing, and I’ve been on a major five-year transition journey from leader and teacher in the adult vocational education sector in Australia, since 2016. I’ve learnt so much during this time. And I’ve made significant mindset shifts as I’ve totally reshaped my life and crafted my coaching business and offerings, as well as writing two books, Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook. And this was all in my late fifties. I turned 60, not too long ago as I record this first episode in mid-October 2021.
With all of that life change, I’ve also connected with so many fabulous people, having the most incredible and inspiring conversations. And that’s what I want to share more publicly with you here on the Create Your Story Podcast. So why Create Your Story, you might be wondering? I have a piece of paper on my wall here as I speak to you with a mind map of all that I wanted to create and what I’m still manifesting over time in my business.
And at the centre, are the words Create Your Story. It was created some time ago at the beginning of my transition journey. And it’s been a guiding light in all aspects of this journey and creative projects. What that means to me is being an active player in your life story, being the author of your journey, not being a passive participant or bystander, or feeling that you can’t influence events or circumstances in your life.
It reminds me that we’re capable of change at any time in our life, we’re capable of pivoting, shifting, recalibrating, re-evaluating and making sure that we have the tools and practices around us to be able to do this. It’s also important that we don’t leave critical pieces of ourselves behind on this journey.
My book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition shares my personal experiences of how I’ve created and recreated my story over time during my transition. I share my experiences, feelings, and the strategies that helped me to make a positive shift as well as the challenges along the way and how I dealt with them.
Wholehearted self -leadership and create your story are really one and the same concept, slightly different language, but they’re both about that same mindset of being the active creator, author of your most fulfilling life. There are four key elements to creating your story, to wholehearted self-leadership and to my Quiet Writing business.
And you will see these concepts woven together as strands in all that I do in my writing, in my body of work and in the conversations in this podcast. So I thought I’d walk you through those four key elements today. So they are firstly Creativity, secondly, Self-leadership, thirdly, Personality, and fourthly Transition.
So let’s have a walk through each of those briefly as an introduction to my work in the world and to what you might expect on this podcast. So firstly, creativity. Creativity is the number one value in my life and it relates to self-expression. So I express this in many ways through my writing, my creative business and finding creative and innovative solutions to meet client needs, to problems in my life and also to how, people, myself, and others transition to what they desire.
We can all live creatively and strengthen the role creativity plays in our life, whether it’s finding flexible solutions to problems; bringing together our passions and unique strengths in new ways; engaging in creativity to stretch our minds and insights through reading, writing, and art. Many of the conversations on the Create Your Story Podcast, feature people who are creative in how they make a living and how they find solutions to be the active author of their life.
Secondly, self-leadership. I shared in my Wholehearted book how self-leadership developed from my leadership roles and experience as I went through my transition journey and changed my life. It’s about being self-directed and it’s about having choice. Self-leadership takes concepts from leadership, but it applies them first of all, to ourselves. It’s about being active and engaged in practices and insights that help us take conscious leadership of ourselves. And it rests on self-awareness and bringing what is unconscious or less conscious into the light more so we can see it and work with it.
It also means taking responsibility for ourselves. It’s so easy to blame ourselves or circumstances for not feeling like we can make change. And we might often find ourselves saying, “when this happens”, whatever that is, “when I get more time”, “when I reach this milestone” I’ll begin that change or take that action, but often there’s much more we can do to initiate or further the changes we desire to shape in our lives at any point in her life.
And often these are small steps, small tweaks that we can take that can make a huge difference. In Wholehearted, I share 15 self-leadership tools, practices, and mindsets honed from my experiences that can support you when you’re in transition or contemplating life changes. These are frameworks and anchors to support you through the uncertainty that a change of identity or circumstances often brings.
So thirdly, personality. A big part of self-leadership is knowing ourselves well. Personality relates to self knowledge and self awareness, and it’s about how much we are consciously aware of our natural preferences, our strengths and gifts, and also how much we understand our less preferred areas. The more, we can be consciously aware of how we’re naturally wired and how we’re naturally wired also interacts with, how we’re brought up, what we experienced through life, but how we’re naturally wired has a huge impact. The more we can recognize and play with our strengths c an be a really key part of this learning. Understanding and respecting our uniqueness helps us to honor our own ways of working. And therefore we engage less in comparisonitis and envy, and we do that wonderful thing, which is swim in our lane. This helps to recognize a particular brand of saboteurs or self sabotaging mechanisms that we might see happening again and again in our life, and to have strategies for countering them is the most important thing.
As we shift into midlife, we often find ourselves stretching into our opposites and our more unconscious areas as we develop. And this is a really powerful source of growth. But it can also make us feel quite off kilter at times, because it’s not where we feel skilled or where we feel adept. It can also make us think about what we’ve done in the past and whether it was the right thing. So we can feel a bit lost. Personality frameworks can help us make sense of what’s happening. And I’ve found Jungian psychological type frameworks incredibly helpful personally. And that’s why I’ve chosen to focus on this in the work that I do with my coaching clients.
I offer a Personality Stories coaching program that provides both an introduction to psychological type and also insights into your personal, psychological type frameworks. And that can help you with guiding your growth and development. I also weave this knowledge into everything I do, including this podcast and coaching. So I hope you’ll find concepts of personality really helpful for you as we go on this podcast journey..
And the fourth area is Transition. And this is a really important area because it’s where the rubber hits the road. So we have these great practices of creativity, of personality, of self-leadership, but how we use them when we’re negotiating change is where I think we have powerful tools to help.
So an important distinction is that change is external. It’s what happens to us. We might initiate it, but it’s still something that’s external to us, but transition is internal. It’s a psychological process that occurs on the personal level. So you might see it as change is the facts or what’s happening. And then the transition is the how, how we move through that process. How we adjust, how we shift and how we make sense of what’s happening. So using the three tools and insights, from creativity/self-expression, self-leadership/ self-direction and thirdly, personality, which is self knowledge. We can work consciously at these points of change to manage uncertainty and to plot a new path with confidence.
There’s so much we can influence in creating our story. Especially when we’re creating a new story at times of transition, having the framework of these three areas helps immensely to see where we can focus. It helps us to develop practices and anchors we can use each day to keep us on track and moving positively towards our design, goals and intentions. And this is the case, even when the times are tough and when there’s lots of ebbs and flows in our experience. And from my experience, that’s exactly what happens at times of change. It’s rarely a smooth path. So getting these three areas working well together means we have a strong toolkit of practices and mindset that we can call on at any time to support and strengthen us, and also to make sense of what’s happening and to be more conscious about our story and journey, rather than feeling like a passive bystander or participant in our own lives.
And all of this is about making a transition to a more wholehearted life where we feel fulfilled. And when we’re not feeling half-hearted or like we’re in a soul sapping situation, or like we’re living an unlived life. It’s been a dream for, four plus years now to host a podcast, talking about all the ways we can create a wholehearted story going through transition, managing challenges and uncertainty, making decisions at key points, writing books, making art, learning new skills, shaping creative projects and lives and how we thrive and grow through it all and connect with others. Community is so important. So some of the things we’ll be covering as we go through are things like the self-awareness and self-leadership journey and process, learning along the way, what I’ve learned along the way, what people particularly women have learnt along the way, tools, strategies, and tips, how we work with our personality strengths and develop our less preferred areas, realizing how we self-sabotage and what we do about it and community, what we can share with others to inspire their stories, journeys, and creations, so we all don’t feel so alone. And so we can learn from each other and not have to reinvent the wheel every time we’re going through such situations. We can learn so much from real stories from ordinary people, shaping extraordinary lives, honed and crafted from the moments of every day.
So that’s what Create Your Story is all about. I’ll be hosting conversations with writers, editors, publishers, teachers, coaches, coaching clients, creatives, personality type practitioners, psychologists, artists, bloggers, and others interested in creating and shaping their stories in the richest of ways.
I’ll share my insights as author, as creative transition coach, as psychological type practitioner and as midlife woman in transition. I don’t think we hear enough about the lives of women, especially from the perspectives of midlife and beyond and the wisdom learned from the life story journey. We’ll explore all that we’ve learnt along the way and are still learning because connecting with each other through the transitions we make helps to shape our deepest story and is so powerful.
It’s life enhancing, sparking more connections and inspiration, and it helps us not feel so alone. So I hope you will enjoy me in creating your story, listening to the podcast and sharing it with others. Leave a review to help others find it and share it with your networks too so we can encourage others to create their most inspired and fulfilling story.
I see this as a community journey. It’s certainly something I’ve learned through my work that every story that’s told, every blog post that’s written, every podcast that’s shared has the opportunity to have a huge impact on others. So I just encourage you to engage with that community spirit, with Create Your Story.
The next episodes feature conversations from the virtual launch of my books, Wholehearted, and the Companion Workbook, as well as with women, who’ve been pivotal connections on the writing and publishing journey and in my Quiet Writing business. I hope that you’ll enjoy listening. Thank you so much for being here and may these insights and conversations support you in shaping your most fulfilling and wholehearted life story.
Links to explore:
Free resources:
Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition
In Podcast Episode 18, Quiet Empowerment Coaching and Creating, I chat with Jo Slessor about midlife shifts and transitions, embracing the quiet strengths of introversion and the value of creativity, crafting and rewriting our stories.
Welcome to Episode 18 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Quiet Empowerment Coaching and Creating. I’m joined by Jo Slessor, a certified Quiet Empowerment Coach for midlife women, crafter and creative.
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:
Seeking change in midlife
Becoming a life coach
Journey of midlife change
Midlife as a stage not an age
Quiet empowerment in midlife
Being a proud introvert
Valuing crafting and creativity
The power of rewriting our stories
Power of coaching in midlife
Building a new business later in life
Transcript of podcast
Introduction
Welcome to Episode 18 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 20th of June as I record this.
I’m excited to have Jo Slessor join us for the podcast today.
Jo is a certified Quiet Empowerment Coach supporting introverted and reflective women to embrace quiet and thrive in midlife and beyond. After a long career in education, working with young people with additional needs and their families, Jo stepped back to embrace gentle living, combining coaching with running women’s groups based around crafting and exploring her own creativity. Jo lives just outside London with her husband and their Cockapoo, Woody. She enjoys daily walks in nature and weekends away!
Jo and I met online via social media and as fellow certified coaches in the Beautiful You Coaching Academy. We share a focus on being midlife coaches working with quiet, reflective women across the mix of understanding introversion and embracing the opportunities and wisdom of the middle years and beyond. So I am excited to have the chance to speak with Jo on the Create Your Story Podcast to learn more about her and her important work in the world.
Today we will be speaking about midlife, shifts and transitions later in life, working with midlife women, embracing the quiet strengths of introversion, the value of creativity and crafting – and so much more.
Enjoy listening to this insightful and inspiring conversation and take some time to learn about Jo’s work and connect with her via her website and lovely, gentle Instagram profile. Links in the show notes as ever.
So let’s head into the interview with Jo.
Transcript of interview with Jo Slessor
Terri Connellan: Hello, Jo. And welcome to the Create Your Story podcast.
Jo Slessor: Morning, Terri, thank you so much for having me. It’s very exciting.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. Look forward to chatting and thank you for your connection across our work in the world. Especially as it relates to being a midlife coach and working with midlife women who may be quieter and more introvert in preference. There’s so much in common in our work. And I can’t wait to explore more about you and to chat about these topics today. So to kick us off, can you provide a brief overview about your background, how you got to be where you are and the work you do now?
Jo Slessor: Yeah, of course. How long have we got? So yeah, I come from a background in education. I probably should go back a little bit further and say that I’m English born and bred, live just outside London, and went into education when I left school as a teacher, primary school teacher. And, I worked in the classroom for a long time. And then travelled the world with my husband, with his work.
And then when I came back after I had my children, the classroom was a very different place. And I found myself moving into working with children with special needs, which I absolutely loved because I got to work with the families I got to work with their class teachers. And it was a kind of holistic support for children and the people around them.
I worked in an advisory role for quite a long time, which meant that I was going out into lots of schools and doing lots of training. And it was that working with adults and the families and the teachers that I found that I really loved most. Then, I was in my fifties when, it all started to fall apart. And I had a bit of an epiphany in the woods when I was out with the dog one evening.
I was working in a really, really challenging environment, in a rather broken system. And I was grieving. I’d lost my dad. My children were literally at that empty nest phase. And although I hadn’t realized it, I was in the thick of perimenopause. Despite having spent lots of time and lots of trips to my GP saying, I don’t feel right. I feel tired. I feel X, Y, and Z, it was never suggested to me that I was in perimenopause.
So I went home to my husband after this walk and I said, I can’t do this anymore. And he said, yeah, we’ll stop. Ah, okay, and he kind of thrown down the gauntlet. And we worked out a plan between us that we would simplify our lives, downsize, pay off the mortgage, which gave me the freedom to explore what I wanted to do next.
And I was doing a course in mindfulness, just for my own wellbeing and talking to my mindfulness teacher about our plans and how we were about to move. And I said to her, I think I probably need a life coach. And she looked at me and I’m still not sure whether she misheard me or, or not, but she said, Jo, you should be a life coach. You’d be amazing.
And that was it really, that seed was planted. And I went off and I explored courses. My initial course that I did was here in the UK. And that was it. I loved that exploration, that way of working with people. Life went on and we moved house. We took on a project and I didn’t really set up my business, but I wanted to be in that world somehow.
And then during the pandemic, during lockdown, I decided it was my time to get some more tools in my toolbox. I found the Beautiful You Coaching Academy in Australia and did the most amazing online course with people from all over the world and graduated in March 2021. And since then I have been honing my craft, working out exactly who I want to work with and who I do work with and slowly, slowly building my business. And that’s why I’m here today too Terri. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain.
Terri Connellan: Beautiful, and there’s truly so many similarities in our stories, isn’t there? Both have a background in education. Both had that epiphany in our fifties about needing a change and then finding that pathway to coaching others through what could be a really tumultuous time can’t it?, When you decide to make a change but you don’t quite know what it is. You just know it’s time to make a change.
Jo Slessor: Absolutely. And for me it was, there was that epiphany and then there was that moment when my husband said, well, s top. Do it. And then you think, well, how do we make this happen? Between us, we did. And that’s why I’m here today, but yeah, it’s quite a journey.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, sure. It is. And there’s lots of learning along the way. So you’re a midlife coach. What does that mean to you and how do you express your work in the world in this space?
Jo Slessor: So, midlife coach is one of the terms that I use. I think like all of us, when you’re in coach training school and you’re encouraged to find your niche and your own unique coaching sauce. So I spent lots of time thinking how I express what I do and who I am. And I think very early on because of my own journey, I realized that mid-life was a place that I wanted to be because I had been through so many of those peak experiences. You know, the career burnout, the empty nest, the career change, the downsizing, simplifying your life. And also the idea of having been through the grief of losing a parent and lots of life experience.
But also once I was in training from the beginning and I discovered the introvert extrovert spectrum. Oh my goodness. That just opened my eyes to a whole new world and gradually evolved that it was the quiet and reflective and introverted women in midlife that I wanted to work with. I love the fact that I can use my skills, my experience to empower and enable my clients to find their own answers.
But actually, Terri, I also have found that there are some times and I do express myself now sometimes as a mentor. And I will say that I’m going to put my mentor hat on here and can talk with clients about experiences that I have been through, and we can use that as a mirror to help them get through their own. So I do call myself a coach and mentor. And I’m also very clear about the fact that I am still on my own journey and discovering who I am and who I’m supposed to be in this world. We’re never finished, are we?.
Terri Connellan: And I love that idea of being both a coach and a mentor. And I certainly that’s something I also do in my own work. And I know from my own experiences of going through a midlife transition, the coach I chose to work with, I valued as much being asked the questions. But also valued that person who was a few steps ahead of me giving me some tools for the next step in the journey. Don’t you think that’s just so valuable?
Jo Slessor: Absolutely. And I think, where I am in mid-life, I’m 60 this year. So I’m still very much happy to call myself midlife and, might be something we come back to about how that has changed over the years, but I do very much feel, and I look back at myself in my forties and clients that I’ve had in my forties. And think my goodness, me, that was a different person because of everything that I have been through since then.
Terri Connellan: Yes, I loved your recent newsletter you just sent out where you mentioned in your forties, you sort of get a glimmer of what you think might happen. And then the fifties is where the rubber tends to hit the road. And it’s that sense of time running out. If I don’t start to make a change now. Plus you get tired I think of where you’ve been.
Jo Slessor: Absolutely. Yeah.
Terri Connellan: My investigations into midlife is it’s a very slippery term. It’s not well-defined but I think as the lifespan gets longer, I think midlife gets stretched out a little bit. On your website, you say that midlife is a stage and not an age. Why do you think that’s an important perspective?
Jo Slessor: Well, I think as we’ve just touched on, it’s funny, I’ve been giving this some thought recently and writing about it. Because the more I found myself in different midlife communities, the more I realized both the similarities and the differences between women who identified in midlife.
And one particular community that I was in had members from 38 through to 64. And these women were all very happy to call themselves in the midlife stage. But then it’s allowed me to reflect and look back, as I am now entering my sixties, at the fact that it’s not only just a stage that is self assessed. We decide when we’re in midlife. It’s also that idea that there are definite phases.
There is that phase when you’re in your forties, and this might be for some people in their late thirties, but yes, you get the sense of time passing. Time, certainly moves more quickly if you have children and you see them growing up. But in your forties, you’re so busy, you’re still focused on your work, your career, paying the mortgage, that you don’t really have time to stop and focus, but things are changing, both mentally and in your wellbeing and in your body.
But it tends to be a sense until you’re in your fifties. And the fifties phase is, my goodness, isn’t it? Where it all happens. All the hormones. This sudden realization that actually you don’t really care what other people think anymore, which is a huge thing. And then the idea of wanting to claim the time back for yourself and put yourself first. And the fifties were really, it’s such a huge phase within the stage. And the whole perimenopause and menopause carrying you through in one way or another.
We’re all on our own unique journeys, but then post-menopause, as we enter our sixties or late fifties and sixties, I get a sense as I approach my own 60th birthday of a time of still wanting to journey and go deep into who I am, but a stage of slightly more calm. And that might be personal for me because I have come so far with my fifties. But definitely the women that I see out there, there seems to be a more confident self-assuredness for many women in their sixties, about who they are and how they want their lives to be. But we’re still happy to say we’re a midlifer.
You know, my parents’ generation, my mother was claiming an old age pension at 60 and getting on free buses. And it’s not like that anymore. So everything has shifted I think.
Terri Connellan: As we were just saying a moment ago, lifespan is getting longer, the retirement age as a marker gets pushed out. But I had my 60th birthday last year, so I do think as you move, I mean, everyone’s on their own journey, but certainly for me and clients I work with having gone through that, if you are making a big shift in your fifites, that big change, that does tend to happen.
I think once you get on the other side of that, just the amount of things you’ve worked through in the process of moving through that journey just gives you that toolkit that we can keep strengthening to help ourselves move positively in life. So quiet empowerment is a focus in your work also. Do you find that midlife women need to embrace their quieter natures in different ways at this time of life?
Jo Slessor: I don’t know whether it’s in different ways. But what I know now, so having only discovered myself that I was an introvert at 55, that was just revelatory to me, because it just explained so much about me and about how I was and how I felt and how I felt growing up and it was like coming home. And hugely, hugely empowering to me. So in working with quieter, reflective, introverted women, many of whom actually don’t, like me, don’t use that term introvert.
I now say I am a proud introvert and that’s something that I would love more introverts to feel that they could say. But what I know now is having talked and worked with lots of women who identify as introvert or as quiet and reflective, is that my own experience of feeling not enough when I was growing up, too. All these things that teachers say to parents, you know, she’s not talkative enough. She’s too quiet. She doesn’t put her hand up enough. She doesn’t put herself forward enough. Those messages really, really sink home. And I know now that it’s not just me. I really felt that for me, that understanding of what it means to be an introvert felt like I had permission to live aligned with my energy and to accept and embrace the fact that quiet is a super power.
So I think that as a focus, I really, really want other women to feel this. And I do believe that in our fifties, we’ve jolly well, forties or fifties, we’ve earned the right to live natural and authentic lives. And actually if that is quiet, wonderful, because quiet women are amazing, aren’t they? We watch and we listen and we wait until the time is right. So often we can surprise people, I think. So I think it’s about embracing it and realizing that being who you are, is so much easier than trying to be something that you’re not or feeling bad because you feel you should be more. And I think it’s just that idea that it’s time to embrace who we are and align with our energy and putting our focus where we want to put it and not where other people expect us to.
Terri Connellan: I think that’s so true. And I resonate with so many things that you’ve said there being an introvert, my business, Quiet Writing. So there’s obviously parallels there. But I think, as Susan Cain wrote in Quiet, our world has that extravert ideal and it is oriented around the extroverted personality to a large extent. So I think many introverts can feel a bit out of touch with themselves or like a square peg or know. I was always told at work, I had to speak up more, you know, that sort of language. So you always feel like you’re found wanting rather than finding ways to express that gift in the world.
Some introverts I’ve worked with, for example, I’m sure you see the same. It’s just learning to value gifts that introverts have, like the power of listening, their ability to reflect quietly on everything that’s happening in a meeting and then summarise it. It’s just valuing different strengths. Isn’t it?
Jo Slessor: It is. It is. One of the books that really impacted on me was Marti Olsen Laney’s [The Introvert Advantage] and that was the book that, along with Susan Cain’s Quiet. Actually it was Marti Olsen Laney’s book that really spoke to me. And it is this idea that quiet leaders can be quite profound in an organisation. But too many of them don’t realise it yet.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely, many strengths from being quiet in many aspects of life, whether it be employee, family member, friend, community member, there’s just so much. I love your focus on quiet empowerment. And your newsletter is a beautiful read too about just embracing that quiet spirit in how we live our lives. And you have such a lovely social media presence too, which embodies your work so well. It’s a lovely, calming, gentle, quiet presence, which I really enjoy connecting with. So what do you focus on in your social media and why might people follow you there?
Jo Slessor: Well, if I’m going to be totally honest with you, Terri, thank you for that. But you know, I have very little idea of what I’m doing. Social media, it wasn’t something I really engaged with or used before I started running my business. And it was suddenly this realization, my goodness me, I’m going to have to work at this. I very much don’t really plan. I’m very intuitive and it’s aligned with my energy. And if I don’t have the energy to post and to follow and respond, then I won’t.
I have four main themes. So I suppose pillars, which are quite obvious really: midlife, introvert, creativity, and nature, which are the things really that I talk about the most. They embody for me that quiet empowerment. And I use my Instagram as a place to build my community. It’s not about the numbers. I don’t have huge numbers, but I do have a very engaged community of like-minded women. If we’re using it as a marketing tool, I use it to direct people to my website and to my newsletter. And it’s in my newsletter that I can really talk and be myself because I know exactly who I’m talking to.
Whereas I sometimes think you’re just talking into this space and I don’t know who is looking and who is listening. And with the Instagram algorithm as it is at the moment, I think everybody is saying those people that you’re reaching are absolutely plummeting. So therefore I’ve never put all my eggs in that Instagram basket.
There are times when I love it and I love connecting with different people. I’ve met some amazing people through Instagram. But you really have to do in a way that feels right to you. And I don’t do it naturally. It took an awful long time before I put my face on my grid. And now I do almost every time because that’s where I get the most interaction from people, the most engagement..
I speak as I see around midlife, being an introvert, exploring creativity and the wellbeing that I get from nature. And if other people like that and follow me, then they’re my kind of people. And , that’s what I want. And I do go through and I do knock people out quite a lot. If theyre people and I’ve looked on their accounts and they’re not the kind of people that I want in my community, then I would rather keep it small and engaged.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. And there’s a lot to be said for being able to reach people and engage by doing exactly that. We connected via Instagram through our connection with Beautiful You. But I think it’s that ability to find like-minded souls. Whether it’s just seeing the words, seeing the imagery, seeing the story, it’s a lovely way to connect with like-minded people.
Jo Slessor: But, you know, it’s becoming an increasingly complex place to be, a quite stressful place to be, especially as an introvert. Posting photos is one thing and then we need to be posting videos and then it’s the pointing and the dancing and all this. And I have actually taken a step back and just said, no, I’m going to stay aligned with what feels. And safe to me. And therefore I’ve almost committed that I’m not doing dancing. I’m not doing pointing. And I will do video as, and when it feels safe for me to.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s a great example of honoring your introverted personality and the way you want to do things. There’s always, like you said, with not posting your face initially, there’s a process of perhaps stepping outside our comfort zone too. But I also think it’s important to do what resonates with us, whether it’s how often we post, where we post, how we post. We’re curating ourselves really, aren’t we?
Jo Slessor: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Terri Connellan: That’s great to hear your approach to that. So you’re also a crafter and creator with one of your pillars around creativity, which I found really fascinating too. So tell us more about this aspect of your life and how you see creativity fitting in with midlife experiences.
Jo Slessor: I mean, it’s something that I am so deep in at the moment. But it’s always been an important part of my life. And I have expressed my creativity in different ways over the years in crafting and making. I think I was a creative teacher. I loved teaching art, either displays. I loved finding creative ways to do things. I ran an afterschool club for children in my home, which was an art club. And as we’ve gone through those stages, I’ve always learned new creative skills, but very much, they’re hands on: textiles, glass, mosaic, crafter, and somewhere, I picked up a story that I wasn’t good at art.
And I carried that for four years. That’s just the story that I’m not good at art. And I literally, this year have decided that I’m challenging that now. And it’s been honestly, revelatory to me what I’ve achieved in taking on an Instagram 100 day project where I said, okay, well, I’m just going to do something creative every day. But I am just going to be playful.
And so for me, and this is something that has been huge. And it’s something that I would love to explore with other women, I think it’s an opportunity for us to go back and revisit our inner child. Because where did this message that I’m no good at art come from when I’ve spent my life creating things. So I went back right to the beginning and I have played with paint and layers and scraping things off and mixing colors and really kind of exploring my inner child. But alongside that, I’ve got two really weird things going on, really, really tight, creating precision collage and these other things kind of going on.
So I’ve been doodling and playing and I’ve been creating very focused pieces of work and they are pieces of art. Aren’t they? So if I’m creating pieces of art, then I need to be able to call myself an artist. So for women generally, I think, again, at this stage, it’s about giving us permission to do those things that make us feel good.
And I think for our wellbeing, exploring your creativity for well-being, it’s huge. It’s a time when, I sit down with whatever it is, whether I’m knitting or crochet or making mosaics or painting or collaging. And you just get in flow, don’t you? Everything calms down, you stop thinking about everything else outside of where you are and what you’re doing.
And then the self-expression, it’s just a way to express yourself. So one of the things that I have done recently, was I decided, and this is aligned with my business, it’s aligned with finding people outside social media is that I run face-to-face groups in my community for women who craft and we literally meet together over craft, coffee, cake.
And it’s just wonderful to see the group of 7, 8, 9, 10 women crafting, connecting, talking, and the outside world disappears. And everybody just says, oh, it was wonderful. It’s about giving yourself permission. I’m going to spend two hours in the company of other women crafting with my hands and connecting.
So I think then they do take that back into their homes and we work on our own. But just that idea of crafting for wellbeing, for expressing yourself, exploring yourself, especially with that inner child, I would love to do more of that. It’s a very mindful activity. So I think there’s lots of things about crafting for your mental health, your self expression and just actually committing and time bonding that time for yourself and for your craft.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And what I’m hearing you say is that it’s about taking back time for us as creative women, particularly, certainly been my own experience, when we’ve put all our time into work, into paid employment, into other people, family. Creativity might always be a thread that goes through our lives, but it may get pushed aside. One it’s hard to prioritize it when you’re busy, trying to earn an income and bring up children.
And then secondly, you mentioned permission. It’s just that saying that it’s okay to take the time out to spend a couple of hours working creatively. And I know I still struggle with it. Even with my writing, which I know is important. It’s easy to prioritize the administration, the social media, all the other jobs than it is to sit on this desk behind me and write for an hour or two it’s, you know, it can be a bit of a battle too. So I think we’re when we can create spaces such as you’re creating where we can meet with other women to prioritize creativity, it’s so important.
Jo Slessor: Yeah. I’ve actually just made a commitment to myself that next week I’m going to come off social media completely for the week and look at the time that I spent in there this week and dedicate that time to being creative. I’d be interested to see how I feel about. What impact it has on anything in terms of, am I going to lose all my followers in a week? No, of course I’m not. But I’m going to free up that time and give myself permission to do an online course and take a holiday from social media and invest that time in my creativity.
Terri Connellan: Sounds a beautiful project to focus on. So on your website you say that your midlife transition journey to living and working in new ways involved rewriting some stories you’ve been told and come to believe. What stories did you need to rewrite and how did you do this?
Jo Slessor: Oh, right. Stories, powerful, aren’t they? One of them we’ve already talked about really was that introvert story. That story that I’m not enough, I’m not interesting. I’m not funny. All those ideas around what it is to have a quiet preference and a quieter personality. And that was definitely learning about being an introvert and realizing what it means and realizing how safeguarding your energy just helps you to flourish and live so much more authentically in the world. That to me was huge.
I think one of the other big ones was that as women in a patriarchal society, we are more and more aware of this idea that women in mid-life, well, we’re past our prime. We’re coming to the end of our useful life. What value are we to society? What role, what purpose, those ideas. Which coming back to what you were saying about extended life expectancy, extended earning potential, all those things, actually, it’s a load of baloney. And honestly, I’m happy to feel that I’m only just beginning, although this is a very different stage and phase that I’m in.
That was a massive story. And it’s a story that we’ve been sold for generations. I think finding people who inspire you is incredibly important. And seeing other women.. The whole grey movement. Women who decide to stop coloring their hair. I mean, that movement has come from a few high profile women saying, oh, I’ve had enough of this now. And everyone’s goes, looks it’s amazing. Oh, so does she, so does she.
And it can be finding people who inspire you and make you realize. Yeah. I can do this too. I can be like this. And I think for some women, that’s enough. But this whole idea of stories. Stories are really powerful. You’re a writer, you understand that. And we know that our brains believe exactly what we tell them, because they don’t know what’s true and what’s not.
So if we rewrite our own stories, in the way that we want to present ourselves and the way that we want to be, then I honestly believe that we start living life more authentically. And we step into that power. And I found myself to be a lifelong learner. That’s one of the things far from being finished. I realize now that I’m probably going to be very poor in my old age. Cause I’m going to be doing courses and learning and stepping into new things for as long as I can. So lots of stories, but I think essentially it’s that idea of rewriting our own stories and saying how we want to be and how we want our lives to be and how we want to feel is a very important way to go.
Terri Connellan: I think it’s a mix of societal stories, but also what we internalize too, from that. You mentioned your ‘I’m not good at art’ story, which can be a combination of what society defines as good art. On top of that, our own definition of what an artist looks like and same for writers. I think rewriting our stories, claiming some of those words that empower us, like artist, writer, crafter, it’s really powerful work. A lot of the work we do in coaching is about reframing mindset actually around just helping people to articulate what it is we want to be, and then finding the language and the direction around that.
So yeah, very powerful work in the world. But it certainly starts with our own rewriting of our stories, doesn’t it? So how do you help other women in similar circumstances as a coach?
Jo Slessor: Well, I think that a hugely important part of my work is about helping women to identify their own stories and what stories have they carried with them from childhood, or that have come from somebody’s bad advice or a throwaway comment or something that they’ve picked up in education, or as you say, societal messages.
And I think once we begin to realize that we do carry these stories. And that in coaching, we like to set intentions or goals depending on how your client wants to work, really. But as we work together and we find barriers and things that are getting in the way of them fully exploring or succeeding in their goals and their intentions, what stories are getting in the way.
And I think again, it’s a very powerful, thread to explore what those stories are. And we rewrite them and we rewrite them in a way in which we can explore how they want to feel and how they want to live. The power of stories and rewriting stories is huge. And we can reclaim the power that they have over us. And I think that in coaching, that’s an amazing place in which to do that.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s important work. And I just know myself from making the changes that I made and I’m sure you’ve found too, our own experiences of coaching, how it helps us realize the power for others. And, it’s hard to describe sometimes, the coaching process, but I think experiencing it for yourself is probably the best way to really understand the power of it. Isn’t it?
Jo Slessor: I’m really glad you said that because something that’s really difficult is when somebody says, well, how do you help people? And actually it is quite a magical process. And I’ve tried before to articulate what it’s like to be coach or how I help people. But actually it’s just an amazing process that has its own voice, takes its own journey for every woman, every woman’s coaching experience will be different.
My own personal coaching experience is that idea of well, why wouldn’t I, if not now, when and why wouldn’t I? Just that idea of somebody sitting in front of me asking me very, very simple questions that make me question, well, why not, why not now?
And having that accountability and somebody there to say’ if now is the time, then I’m here for you. I wish I could bottle i n an elevator pitch exactly what coaching is and how I help people. But I think it’s a very difficult thing to do until you’ve been in it yourself.
Terri Connellan: Yes. Yeah. And I think going through the process, you learn so much. But I did also strongly resonate with your comment earlier about coach and mentor. And I think, certainly as a coach, I’m sure you do the same, you’re mainly the one asking the questions to bring the information out, but there’s also a time when you can offer the right resource, the right guidance, the right book to read. This is what happened to me. Do you relate to that? And I think that part of the magic sauce too, is just being that guide, finding that little thing that’ll take the person the next step.
Jo Slessor: Yeah, it does. It sometimes really surprises me. I’m working with a client last week and there was a session which I had felt, oh, I’m not sure how much we achieved. I’m not sure that we were on the same wavelength. And she said to me, I can’t believe how much you’ve shifted me that week. So, there is magic in there that we can’t always understand or see at the time.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. And I think that our introvert intuitive skills help a lot in those situations too. So what does life look like for you now as a midlife courage?
Jo Slessor: Well, I’ll be honest. I’m living the life now that I couldn’t have imagined five years ago. You know that afternoon when I was walking in the woods as a burned out teacher and it’s due in no small part to the changes that we made in our lives as a family, which enabled me to have choices. So my life now is one that I honestly feel that I am able to live with intention. I have just the right balance of work, rest and play that aligns with my life stage and my energy. I have never set out to try and make a full-time salary from what I do as a coach, because there are other things at this life stage that I want to be doing.
And we made changes in our life to take that financial pressure away. So my life now I have to say is pretty good. You know, it’s not perfect and it’s not the life that an awful lot of people would want to live. But I have the work that I love. I have the groups that I run, which I just love the idea of community.
I have time to spend out in nature and to explore my creativity and I’ve also just got a little admin job, which buys my art materials, literally. So it’s a gentle life and it’s a life in which I’m really happy.
Terri Connellan: Congratulations for shaping a beautiful life that is what you need at this time in your life, because it doesn’t come without a lot of hard inner work.
Jo Slessor: No, absolutely. It’s been a lot of hard work and transitions and making hard decisions. And my husband and I, we’re both the same age, we both hit 60 this year. And, there will be more hard decisions to make as we do approach full retirement. But, in this stage of our lives, you make the right decisions with the right support and I think we’re benefiting from that now.
Terri Connellan: Fantastic. So what are some of the challenges you’ve experienced in building a new business later in life? And how have you worked on these?
Jo Slessor: Yeah, well, building a business at this life stage is not for the faint-hearted and I know that I’m probably not alone in wondering whether I would have done so if I had known just how hard it is. And that’s the honest truth. But I love it. I love it because, I said that I’m a lifelong learner and this is part of it.
Every day is an opportunity to learn more and to celebrate every success. The biggest challenge, and I think maybe some of it is our age, but I speak to many younger coaches who are finding the same, is the tech that is involved in running a business, especially an online business.
And I would say if that is something that challenges you, there are plenty of people out there who can help you. I run my business with my hand held high that I am not a slick machine. And that sometimes it’s easier to pick up the phone and have a conversation about an appointment, than set up my diary in a particularly tricky week.
You know, I’m not a slick machine. I love the relationship that I have with my clients and the way that we work together and that’s because my business is my business and it’s authentic and a little bit messy and that works for me. But the tech is a challenge but you only need to use as much as you want to use. And they’re other ways around things. You are working an awful lot of hours for possibly not as big of a return as you might hope in those early days. And I think I’ve gotten to a point where that’s easing now, because I realize where I need to put my boundaries in place, when I need to switch off from my business.
But it’s fun. It’s new, it’s learning, it’s meeting new people and learning new things. And in order to do the work that you love, and if it is work that you love, you do it anyway, because it’s fun. I can’t imagine putting this much work into a business that I didn’t love. I think that’s probably the crux of it. If it was a business, that didn’t mean something to me, I’m not sure that self-employment would be for me.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with all the things you’ve said. For me, there’s a creativity in it too. You can see, creativity is one of your core values, as it is of mine. Even doing the podcast, I was editing today, again, it’s tech focused and it can take time. But I thought, I just love this. I love the conversations we’re having. I love taking the time to craft them, another form of crafting, to shape them into something that I can share with the world and have people listen.
And I get such joy from that. So financially it may reward me in other ways if people find out about my book, find out about my business, find out about you. So there’s rewards from our time. But I think at the end of the day, it’s very much about self-expression. It’s about sharing the wisdom that we’ve learnt over the years that we’ve been living. And yeah, then the tech, I like the tech, but it’s no denying that it takes time and it can be a rabbit hole. But I think your point that , you can make it as simple as you like. That’s a great reminder. So I love watching your business grow in particular, seeing you, your cabin, how you’re meeting with clients. I think it’s really beautiful. How we show up in the world, as you said, it’s all about authenticity.
Jo Slessor: Absolutely. Yeah.
Terri Connellan: Cool. So a couple of questions that I ask each guest on the podcast. So the first is about how have you created your story over your lifetime?
Jo Slessor: I think I’ve always been a really independent spirit and I’ve made up my own mind and I’ve done my own thing. And perhaps this does come out of being an introvert. I think perhaps as a listener and a watcher, you do live slightly independently of other people. I have been incredibly lucky to have a husband who has wholeheartedly supported me in whatever I wanted to do and whatever decision I made at every step. And we’re a great team. But, in mid life, I think it was realizing the importance of self-development and growth, to know yourself, to understand yourself and that we are all on a journey. And that journey still continues.
And I think that creating my own story has just come out of being an independent being who is prepared to learn, work out exactly who I am and what I need.
Terri Connellan: I love that. And I love how many times stories has come up in the conversation today about rewriting stories, the stories we tell ourselves. And, I think that notion of being independent and that personal development journey through midlife is just a fantastic time to reflect on the stories and keep writing new stories. Yeah. The second question that I ask folks, my book Wholehearted has 15 wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices for women.
And I’d love to hear from the people I chat to on the show, what you would identify for people as your top wholehearted self-leadership skills, especially for women.
Jo Slessor: Right. I think the first one is listen and follow your gut. Whether you call it your intuition, your inner knowing, that has absolutely guided me over the years. And for that reason, I was so interested in seeing recently how much research has gone into how many nerve cells or neurons there are in your gut and the link with your brain. So number one, I would say, if you feel something in your gut, then it’s probably the right thing to do.
The second one I was saying is be curious. Maybe it’s part of my creativity, but be curious. Maybe this is why I love being a coach. Cause I’m always asking questions cause I want to know stuff. So be curious, ask questions. Think, well, why not? Rather than what if and I think that will get you a long way.
And then I think the last one that I wanted to say was just to have the confidence to be you in the knowledge that you are not the right flavor for everyone. And thank goodness for that. We will never be the right thing for everyone. It’s an impossible dream. So therefore, why waste time trying to be anything else than be you.
Terri Connellan: Beautiful, love those tips, especially that third one about, yeah, we’re not for everybody. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense to tailor yourself to somebody else who’s not you, does it?
Jo Slessor: Absolutely.
Terri Connellan: Thank you. I love those three really wise tips. Thanks for sharing them today. So that’s just about the end of our time together, Jo. It’s been lovely chatting with you. Can you tell people where they can find out more about you and your work online?
Jo Slessor: Yeah. I have a website which I am tweaking a little bit at the moment, but it’s still up and running and hopefully people will get a flavor of me at www.joslessor.com. I am on Instagram. And my Instagram handle is @joslessor. And I have a newsletter which is called Notes from the Cabin. We didn’t really talk about the fact that I work mostly out of my cabin in the garden, which is my gorgeous little introvert space. So my Notes from the Cabin, you can get on that mailing list from either my website or my Insta. And it’s a monthly roundup of midlife, introvert, quiet empowerment and nature and creativity and all those things that we’ve talked about today.
Terri Connellan: All the good things in life. Thank you so much, Jo, it’s been great to chat with you today.
Jo Slessor: Well, thank you for having me. It’s been lovely to talk about the things that we both realize are so important in life. It’s been great. Thank you.
Jo Slessor
About Jo Slessor
Jo is a certified Quiet Empowerment Coach supporting introverted and reflective women to embrace quiet and thrive in midlife and beyond. After a long career in education, working with young people with additional needs and their families, Jo stepped back to embrace gentle living, combining coaching with running women’s groups based around crafting and exploring her own creativity. Jo lives just outside London with her husband and their Cockapoo Woody. She enjoys daily walks in nature and weekends away!
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
An introduction to my book Wholehearted.
How the concept for the book was born
The writing, editing and crafting process, especially with Penelope
The value of retreat in the writing process, especially with Kerstin
Personality and writing
Tenacity and the long-haul writing process
Shadow careers and developing journeys
And so much more!
Transcript of podcast
Introduction
Welcome to Episode 2 of the Create Your Story podcast. This is a recording of conversations from the first Wholehearted virtual book launch event, just after Wholehearted was published on the 6th of September, 2021. Being locked down when the book was published, all the initial events were of necessity of virtual.
It was an opportunity to connect with people who’ve been on the journey with me in various ways. So in this episode, I’m joined by Penelope Love who received the very first long draft of Wholehearted and helped me to take that draft into a form, able to be submitted as two books for publication.
Penelope is a publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as an author of Wake Up in Love. And she is also an incredible editor and partner in the book writing process. We chat about bringing the books to life together in an accessible and sacred way in this conversation.
I’m also joined by Kirsten Pilz, who has been a fellow traveler on the writing and creative solopreneur journey. Kirsten is a published author, former academic with almost 20 years university teaching experience, a TEDx speaker and yoga teacher. She’s a retreat leader and I’ve had the pleasure of joining Kirsten on a writing and yoga retreat in Hoi An Vietnam in 2018. We talk about the value of retreat and how this time was a really important part of my writing journey with Wholehearted though it took me quite a while to realize it in hindsight. We’re also joined in this conversation by Natasha Piccolo, who is a fellow author at the kind press with her new book, The Balance Theory, which is forthcoming next year.
We chat about so many aspects of Wholehearted, the book and wholehearted living, writing, editing, long haul creativity, retreat, personality. I had so many tingly moments listening back to where we really touched on some heart-filled and deep aspects of writing, truth and life. In the show notes, I share links about where you can find out more about my book Wholehearted and the Companion Workbook as well as more about our guests, Penelope and Kirsten. The great news too, is that there are solo episodes coming up with Penelope, Kirsten, and Natasha where we dive deeper into their stories, their writing, and how they’ve created their story. I hope you’ll enjoy listening and that you’ll gain some insights to help guide your life, especially if writing and creativity are a really important part of it. Enjoy listening.
Transcript of Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch chat
Terri Connellan: Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining me for the first virtual book launch of Wholehearted it’s fantastic to have you here. And all people who have been on the journey in some way, shape or form, writing, family, readers, advanced readers, connections on Instagram. So thank you so much for being part of the journey. it’s a real honor to have you here. So, first up, I’ll share what we might track through as we go through the session. First of all, welcome to two special guests who are joining me today. Penelope Love who’s been my editor all the way through, received the first, very large, a hundred thousand word draft, and has been on the whole journey with me as my editor, particularly shaping one book into two, which has been incredible, so great to chat with Penelope, and Kerstin, and also has been on the journey for a long time with me, both are authors of Wholehearted Stories on my Quiet Writing website.
And we’ve connected in lots of different ways. I think through social media initially, I went to a writing retreat, with Kerstin in Vietnam, which was just a beautiful way to, I think get in touch with my writing self. So we’ll explore some of those particular touch points.
First of all, I thought, I’d talk a little bit about the book just briefly, as an introduction, for those who may not know it so well, and about, what it covers, why I wrote the book, how it fit in.my life. Then I’ll have a conversation with Penelope and with Kerstin about their roles and also about Wholehearted generally. They’ve read the books so they can share some thoughts about that.
So first of all, what is, Wholehearted? Why did I write it? When did it come from? So, the book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition emerged from my journey. So I went on a transition journey deciding what to do with my life and realised that I didn’t want to stay on the path that I was, which was working for 30 plus years in a government organization, in the technical and further education system in Australia.
And I started to make a path from that. But as I was going through, I found it was really important for me to write about it and to start to shape the journey in a writing sense so as well as going through it, I felt the need to capture it. And my why was very much about helping me to write, make sense of what I was going through, but it was also about supporting women to develop self-leadership in their own lives.
Because I think if you’re making change particularly midlife, but at any time in life, there’s not a lot of guideposts for us or ways to support us for going through that change. So I thought I’d share with you my notebook from 2017 of how it started. So there you go, this a lovely mind map of the first ideas of what Wholehearted might look like.
And then there’s another page of a summary. And I was just looking at it. That’s sort of the chapter summaries, which actually is what it ended up, looking like you know, chapter four, chapter five. The thing that got fleshed out was the wholehearted self leadership skills, but down the bottom here, there’s three boxes that say the structure could be personal narrative and application and exercise.
And that’s pretty much exactly what it ended up being. So it’s interesting that time four and a half years ago thinking, here’s all the things that I’m going through that I want to be able to put into a book. Here’s how I want to help women, here’s what I’m learning and through that, just knowing that it was a mix of experiences, it was a mix of what I’ve learned from it. And it was a mix of how can I help you with with those experiences. So in that 100,000 word draft all of that was in there. So it was quite a big book, but when Penelope received the first draft, she wonderfully said to me, I think you’ve got two books here, which was like, oh my goodness.
It was an amazing moment. So together with Penelope, we’ll talk about that more in a moment we went through and worked out, which things belonged in the main book, which belonged in the second book. And the second book was a workbook, much more practical. So we teased out those aspects and that journey of writing two books at once commenced, but the focus was on the main book, first of all.
But knowing that in the second book we were tracking along with the main book, but then working out how the two came together. It was like a whole, like a piece of marble and there were two pieces in there and with wonderful help, we went through and pulled out the pieces and brought it together.
Kerstin Pilz: How long is the final book, the main book, how many words?
Terri Connellan: The main book’s about 75,000 and the workbook’s about 37,000. So there’s still quite a lot of text in the second book. And what we worked on was bringing out the examples. Do you want to comment Penelope on what that was like, going through that, seeing the two pieces
Penelope Love: Well sure, you know, today I pulled up our first initial conversations on email, about the book, just to refresh myself on the long journey and the initial steps of it.
And what happened was when I read your outline, it came back to me, it was seven pages for this book and that’s, and it was so Terri, it was so thorough. And it was an experience reading the journey, the outline itself, it took me on the full journey of the book. And I, I saw the one big section of the outline that I put a big circle around.
And I said, this could be a book in itself and you know, Terri asked well. How do you know? And it’s a very intuitive process. And I think it also is combined with, I’ve been editing books for 24 years, or I should say editing material for 24 years , books for about 17 of those. And. I think it’s just a matter of seeing so many books over the course of my career and knowing when something is just too much for a single book. But I couldn’t, and no one could deny how this material worked together. So it was a great initial run. And what I really loved about the process is that in the beginning you could feel overwhelmed or you could feel no pressure. And I took the no pressure approach as I read through it.
I just put a very large liberal highlight over areas that I thought were not the main book. And then I put it in Terri’s court and she was able to that big highlighted section, start to see what I mean and then I think the back and forth made it not overwhelming. If it’s one person facing all of this task of having to sort through and say, which is which it’s not, but it was a really neat little, like a tennis game.
And we, and we pulled together. Or we pulled apart two angels in the marble.
Terri Connellan: Yeah . We actually color coded it. So I think you color-coded at first. So we had blue for the main book sort of a pinky color for the workbook. And then there was another color for things that we thought didn’t belong, but we, we also took the view that everything could be repurposed somehow.
Penelope Love: It’s true. It’s true. And I also embraced that philosophy whenever I edit that nothing is really ever wasted. And I knew that these little sections of texts that didn’t really fall into either book could be perfectly saved in archives, for posts to help promote the book or even the seed of a new book. So that’s how, and when you treat it like that in the beginning, there’s not pressure to do something with everything. It just puts a relaxation around the process.
Terri Connellan: Exactly. Thank you for that. So what the sort of shape that we ended up with that process was you come into the book hearing about my experiences. So I start with my moment – often with transition and turning points, there’s a particular thing that happens in your life. And many of you may have experienced this where, you know, I’m not staying here, whatever it is, relationship, job, place of living. Just a point in life. There’s often a point. In our Wholehearted Stories on Quiet Writing , you see that again and again, and the story is, Heidi’s one, for example, she hears a voice saying “I don’t want to do this anymore”.
And it’s just this thing that often happens to us. For me, it was a particular situation in the workplace where I wasn’t given a job that I thought it was a great fit for. Not a big issue, but in the context of that, it made me realize I could no longer stay where I was.
So it was a real turning point that, took me down a fair way and then had to rebuild. So I write about that in the first part. And then I talk about that journey back. So, what sort of toeholds and footholds helped me to connect back, some major themes that helped me. So things like connecting with our passions and personality, knowing who we are, our body of work, and then there’s 15 wholehearted self-leadership skills that but is sort of the bulk of the book, but they particularly just my learning on the journey, but also ways that people can also support themselves through any type of change or ongoing in their life.
So I guess that’s where that mix of personal narrative and practicality comes from. You have read the book, so I don’t know if you want to make any comments about how that comes together for you just as a reader. That’d be interesting to hear.
Kerstin Pilz: Yeah. I mean, I thought on the one hand, there’s the very organized, the what is it in your, in your personality type? The…
Terri Connellan: INTJ
Kerstin Pilz: which is lovely. And then there’s that interest in the tarot, which I just find so fascinating because it’s not at all encouraged in these workplaces and you and I both have been in Education. And so I’ve found that really fascinating, how that opened a new way of approaching yourself and your life through that emphasis on intuition and also tapping into the archetypes. And in fact, that is one for me, one of the more interesting results of reading the book, the shadow stories and so on. So maybe talk about that a bit more. Yeah.
Terri Connellan: So there is a chapter, Chapter Eight about the shadow side and I found as I went through my journey, there were a whole lot of things that kept cropping up and learnings about things like shadow career. So that’s a Steven Pressfield idea that we often, for example, be a writing teacher when we want to be a writer, be the roadie in the band when we actually want to be the musician. And write the PhD on something when we actually want to be that person. So yes, it’s a great insight into what might be in our story that we can amplify and tap into and also what might be holding us back from that. So that’s helpful. And then those other things like grief, envy, I talk about envy and often when we feel envy or feel that strong jealousy of something or desire for it, if we can try and see that as a force for good, rather than get sucked into the comparisonitis, that can be really powerful too. So there’s actually quite a lot in that chapter. It was interesting. That sort of shadow side, I think, as you’re working through anything, particularly when it’s difficult.
My mother had a terminal illness and I was supporting her in that time when I was writing the book too. So it was actually written from a really challenging place as well. So, it’s important to honor those energies of life too.
Kerstin Pilz: And may I just ask a follow-up question, with your emphasis being on wholehearted and that’s often also not at all where leaders comes from in the workplace, although I’m finding perhaps a little bit more, like my last boss was female and she’s very much an intuitive person. And also heart-centered, I was wondering,are you finding this maybe since you’ve left the workplace, which is now a number of years ago, has there been a shift with regards to that being a little bit more encouraged or are you still a sole pioneer in that field?
Terri Connellan: Well I think I’ve been lucky because of the coaching training that I did with the Beautiful You Coaching Academy, which is very much a female led heart-led community that I’ve been more connected with that sort of energy. But , I do think that more intuitive, receptive side of leadership is starting to come to the fore. It’s probably still got a long way to go, but it’s beautiful to be part of an organization with Beautiful You, for example, that is female led and is pretty much totally coming from that place and just feeling the difference. And I think, you know, for me, that was a beautiful counterbalance from, from where I’d been before.
So I think we’ve got a long way to go with that, but it was interesting to think about where leadership and self-leadership fit together. And the reason I was thinking about self-leadership was because of my experiences in the workplace and how that grew from that.
I think perhaps there’s a lot of self-leadership to be done in our leaders perhaps of all genders to tap into that female, not just female, but the intuition side. Because I found when I was in the workplace, it was very damped down, even though it was my strongest cognitive function, I tended to rely on the extroverted sort of things. It’s a good question, but I, I think we’ve got a long way to go. I might handover to have a chat with Penelope, and further about our relationship. So that’s just a bit about the book and we’ll keep talking about the book as we go through.
So to introduce Penelope more formally. This is her beautiful book Wake Up in Love a beautiful memoir that was published earlier this year written over 16 years and so a long writing journey. Penelope is a publisher at Citrine publishing a writing mentor and editor, and, as I said, Penelope received the draft and really helped me through that whole journey and has continued to be a point of contact and support the whole way through for which I’m very grateful. So thank you for that. So what I’d be interested to explore with you Penelope is what did you see in Wholehearted when you first received it? We talked a bit about that, but what was it like to receive it? I’m sure it was quite overwhelming. It was a long draft.
Penelope Love: I made my initial comment that the outline itself was seven pages. It’s not, nothing is daunting, you know, to a fellow. I N something Jay, because my introversion, lets me be very quietly with these ideas and I, and I love it. So in a lot of ways, the more the merrier. But, you know, I’d been following you on Instagram. I believe we met through a Susannah Conway challenge, something like that. And so when I received the manuscript, we’d actually done a get to know you call probably a year beforehand or maybe six months. And that primed me to sort of watch you and watch your postings in a way that I probably wouldn’t have had we not had that get to know you chat. And so when I saw the outline, it was like everything I knew about Terri in seven pages. And I could, I see the way her mind works. She’s very, very good at collecting details and organizing them. And so I had appreciation for where she was going, because I had been following her journey online. So that led it to not be so overwhelming. Another thing that had I had done, and I can’t remember, I believe this was before you’ve handed me the manuscript, I enrolled in the Sacred Creative Collective. And so in between following you on Instagram and then enrolling in your Sacred Creative Collective, and then receiving the outline and the manuscript. Perfect. This is a textbook for everything I wish I could have gone deeper into during the Sacred Creative, but not in, in that interactive format.
It was like part of it was in PDFs, part of it was in discussions, part of it was on Facebook postings. And so this book outline was, oh, great, everything’s in one place now I get to help organize it. So, it really opened my whole heart. It allowed me to do the work I do best . You know, there’s a fine line between shadow career and what you’re supposed to do. And I know that somebody who has wanted to be a writer and a published author all my life, it’s very easy to find yourself in the shadow career of editor. And I wrote about that in my own Wholehearted Story. At the same time, you know, I couldn’t deny that I was meant to do this project.
It was almost like a karmic fated sort of thing that it fell in my lap. Just before I went through a career transition. So the book itself became a guide for me, guiding me through the year I was editing it. And I’m in the middle of the summer, of the year 2020, when everybody was in COVID crisis of, you know, what am I doing, really with my life? This book was just, it was such a gem to be able to have that, even though it wasn’t in its finished form, I still had all the information and access and I was using it actively. And as a publisher myself, I find that the books that are written from that place of experience that Terri went through with the transition from her job, from her career to her heart career you know,, it vibrates that, it resonates as I was reading this book, I was finding and fine tuning my own career to make it more authentic and wholehearted.
And I was finding, and most of the pieces are there. But during that period, I did find other aspects of esoteric interests that I like to study. And Terri’s brave sharing about how she goes wholeheartedly into tarotist studies, despite the taboo nature gave me the permission slip to do the same thing when astrology came my way.
And I know I read astrology into my daily life and daily work in a way that, I wonder had I not been reading Wholehearted, would I have embraced this?
Terri Connellan: And now Penelope is encouraging me to get into astrology so, it’s that lovely effect of you know, the things we do and the things we share really help us with that next step of the journey. So…
Penelope Love: yeah, and the spiral metaphor that is in her logo and on the cover of the book, I feel it’s, you know, always really spoke to me and the book helped give it meaning and more reflection. And, I feel this is part of the spiral and we find more interests and we go deeper and deeper.
Terri Connellan: In the structure of the book, that was in my mind too of going big and then going a bit more detailed with the chapters. But yeah, that idea of layering, the learning like this, there’s quite a lot of repeated stories and different angles in there, but it’s sort of how we learn over time and we learn in another way. And we often we go back to the same things. Don’t we, look, we repeat, we go back and we’re moving through and that’s, to me what the spirals about is that, that idea of layering and learning and continuing, and I tried to build that into the book too. So I don’t know how, if you had a sense of that, as you were editing that how that sort of energy fits with the narrative.
Penelope Love: It does. And it, what it taught me is that, you know, when you get to this other sort of familiar place along the perimeter, but you’re not the same as you were the time you visited it, so you can go deeper.
Terri Connellan: . Thank you.
Kerstin Pilz: I just had a question too about that process if I may, because I think that might be interesting for other writers, because you said when you sent me the first draft, which obviously I’m sure wasn’t the first draft. I was just wondering how long did it actually take you to get to a point where you felt confident to send that to an editor? And then how long did it take for Penelope the editor to work with you to shape it into what you then send on to your publisher?
Terri Connellan: I’ve got my timeline here to remind me, so I started writing properly in the first half of 2017. I think I sent it to Penelope in the middle of June 2019. And actually I finished that first long draft when I went to Vietnam with you, September, 2018. And then I didn’t know what to do with it apart from just fix up the spelling. Like, there was lots of editing, but it wasn’t structural. And that’s what I didn’t know how to do. And that’s when I reached out to Penelope because I knew what I wanted to write, but I didn’t know what to do next. I just didn’t have the skills. And I think that’s what I’ve really learned is that power of collaboration and of reaching out to people to help. Most of that was pulling the two out, working out the two drafts and then working on the first book. And then the second book, I mainly finished by myself later with the kind press.
Penelope Love: And this is a book mind you that had over a hundred thousand words in the first manuscript. If somebody has a 50,000 word manuscript, the process is not going to take as many months. Somebody asked me that the other day, you know, how long does my book need to be before I send it to you? I mean, I’ve taken a book about 30,000 words and fleshed it out. And then if books come in about 50 to 70, they generally stay around that. And then usually when they come in over a hundred thousand, we’re working at trimming them down. Just as a practical matter of business. That was another consideration that I brought to the table for Terri was that if you put everything in one book, it becomes such a huge book. You have to charge a lot for it.
And. You know, this is a way that now there’s two books and it becomes maybe more affordable. Somebody can get book one and then get book two at another time. So there’s all these considerations that you make when you see things from that outside perspective, that when you’re writing a book, you’re not looking at it that way. Another reason to bring in people with other skillsets, because these points of view help to make the project whole.
Terri Connellan: Oh, they do. And I knew it needed to be less, but I didn’t know how. And then when you said it was two books, that made perfect sense. To be able to just take out the more practical pieces, made a lot of sense.
Kerstin Pilz: Are they sold as a package or individually?
Terri Connellan: Individually, but like on Amazon they package them up together too. You can purchase the two which is good and in terms of working through, you can read the main book without the workbook, but everyone will be different. But the way I envisage is, someone what might read through the first book and then perhaps do another reading and go back and work through and do it in a detailed way.
And I’m starting a coaching program too to collectively work through the book as a group, which I think it’d be really nice way to do it because again, as it was a solo journey for me. And that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, it can feel quite lonely when you’re going through a big change. So I think even if people are working through the book, it might be really nice to connect around that journey and have those conversations, because just as I’ve learned from your stories and the other women’s stories, we all learn from each other too.
Kerstin Pilz: And so that workbook essentially also could be used by a course facilitator for their own course. So it’s like a resource, like a textbook, I guess in a way.
Terri Connellan: Meredith Fuller wrote a lovely review, and she’s a psychologist, she got an advanced copy. So she’s actually been working with a client who didn’t want to do psychological work via Zoom. It didn’t feel comfortable cause they were locked down. So she gave them the book and the person’s worked through the book at a time when they didn’t feel able to have face-to-face consultations. So that’s really interesting to hear. She said, she sees it as valuable for individuals, groups.
Kerstin Pilz: So that’s beautiful feedback already from your book. That is an amazing resource you’ve created.
Terri Connellan: I think so. And that was always how I saw it too. Like it’s got multiple uses.
So what do you think Wholehearted offers women? You know, it really well. What would you say Wholehearted offers women?
Penelope Love: Well, you know, I think it comes down to it being born at this very time, following the year of the pandemic and people really getting this chance to look at their lives and see, am I doing what I’d like to be doing? Am I in my shadow career or is there another step I can take toward getting out and living a wholehearted life where I have my own career, that feels good to my heart. And every day I look forward to doing it because it’s what I love. Wholehearted is a guide to that.
Going in order is always an option, but there’s so much that you can, the book is so modular and that’s what I love. So a lot of people that I know over the course of my career, they like to, open up to whatever page and seeing what they open to. And Wholehearted can almost be read almost kind of like a tarot deck. You open and then you see what chapter and that very much could resonate where you are in your journey and what you need to work on now. I feel that because of Terri’s connection with that esoteric system, that the book invites that and can even be used that way to play with. Yeah.
Terri Connellan: So that’s true. Cause I mean, there’s that linear reading through, but there’s also a bit like a tarot where you pull a card, there’s a way of just engaging with what resonates at the time. And that’s interesting because that’s actually how I wrote it too, because I used NaNoWriMo that 50,000 words in a month model, even though it wasn’t a novel and I actually had the outline and then I’d do my morning pages, do my Tarot and then I’d tend to write with the structure in Scrivener of where I felt drawn. So if something like envy was popping up, then I’d write about that cause it was bubbling up for me. So it was very much written from that time. Even though the structure was linear, the writing process wasn’t particularly. That’s really interesting.
Meredith in that article says “As an introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging female INTJ her work is well structured while enabling the reader to meander.’ So that’s really nice. Thank you for highlighting that. And thanks so much for everything you’ve done on the journey. It’s been absolutely unbelievable having you there and we’ve developed a really deep and close relationship from that whole journey too and so appreciative and thank you. And we’re going to do a lovely double up of me holding Penelope’s book and Penelope holding mine.
Penelope Love: It will be here tomorrow. US, they shipped them out on Monday, but so I’m getting it Thursday. So as soon as I get that, we’ll coordinate.
Terri Connellan: So Kerstin is a writer, writer for wellbeing coach, hosts beautiful writing retreats one of which I attended in Vietnam, yoga teacher, and is also writing a memoir, just about to the end of the first draft called Falling Apart Gracefully, and shared some of those experiences in your Wholehearted Story.
So we thought we might talk about some of our touch points Kerstin and particularly the retreat, the value of retreat, the Wholehearted Story and the role of challenge in our lives. So I found when I went on that retreat and it probably is only in hindsight. I did a presentation on personality and writing, and I looked at my whole journey, psychological journey through the process of writing the book. And when it came to 2017-18 and the writing retreat, I’ve put writing retreat Hoi An Vietnam and then introverted feeling, extroverted feeling, extroverted sensing all these things that are not my strengths. It was a time of my muse reconnecting and coming back. So obviously retreats are important to you and you lead them. What do you see as the value of retreat and incubation in the writing process?
Kerstin Pilz: So for me, actually, I went on my very first retreat when I had what I would call an emotional and mental breakdown. And I went to Thailand to a very hardcore, Vipassana retreat with just locals. And afterwards they said to me, look, for us, we do this every year. It was a lot of burnout housewives and it’s part of our spiritual growth. And I thought, how interesting, I had always thought, you know, holidays should be, and we only get 20 days of annual leave here in Australia. I think in the U S is even less. And I thought, I want to spend those days to do something really constructive with my life. I don’t want to be sitting in a meditation room and just listening to my thoughts in my head, that’s really boring and unproductive. So that was the time that opened my eyes to the fact that the retreat is actually a way to replenish yourself and to do really important inner work, going on an inner journey, because my holidays had always been about exploring adventure, outer journeys. And so the value of that inner journey, and especially for a writer, because when we work on a project, like you said, at the beginning before we started recording, I believe you know, we’re so focused on what we’re putting on the page, but a lot of the information is subconscious and intuitive.
And even as I’m writing my book now, I always give myself plenty of time when I just switch off. And that’s when you actually connect with a lot of the deep messages of the book or the stories you want to write. O r go on an artist’s date, you know, like Julia Cameron says.
So a retreat, I feel is a really important way to just slow down. First of all, slow down disconnect from all the devices. A lot of authors and I love that you are very active on Instagram, which is of course where we met. And where you and Penelope just said, you met. Which is wonderful, but it is so distracting. So that often, you know, when we just give ourselves that time, it doesn’t have to be a whole week to go on a retreat.It’s a time of replenishing withdrawing. There’s a book that came out last year by Catherine May called ‘Wintering: the need for rest and retreat in difficult times’. And it really just explores fully. And for her, it was also leaving a career and becoming ill and then period of resting and retreating and actually exploring what the value of that is, which is not valued in our society. You know, I come from Germany. My father was really judgmental about me resting and retreating for almost a year during my grief time, because I wasn’t in his eyes contributing anything to society, but you do because you actually replenishing from the core and that’s so important.
Terri Connellan: Just to reflect on what you are saying. The reason it came up for me and thinking about that time of retreat was reading this beautiful book The Writer’s Process by Anne Janzer which I’ve written a post about recently. And she compares the writing process to bread making. And she talks about the Muse and the Scribe as two different mental processes, but she talks about bread making, but it’s, the Muse comes in when the bread’s rising, you know, you got to let it sit and I know in taking a long time and it just sat on my desk over there where the finished book is now, and it was like a piece of dough rising and it was, I had to integrate more experiences too and make sense of more things. Sometimes I think it’s letting things come in isn’t it? It’s that, I don’t know, integrating, allowing, receiving.
Kerstin Pilz: Yeah. And it’s also sitting with the idea because a book, unlike an article or blog posts is, a long-haul journey, it’s a marathon. And so to actually sit and have a whole week or even a weekend, just to stay where you’re not answering emails, where you’re not worrying about mundane, everyday things where you’re not even with your partner, having conversations, whether they are good or bad that you normally have. It’s a luxury that you give yourself, but it’s sort of essential.
And also I found when we were on retreat in Vietnam, which is of course interesting again, because you’re in a different country. So like you just said, you’re extroverted skills and suddenly on overdrive because there’s so much visual and olfactory and whatever stimulation. But I find on a retreat that is often also when, especially in my retreats, we do our morning workshop and then we might go to the market and look at the colors or as we did, drinking freshly squeezed juice and, and often that’s when things ferment and compost, somehow deep inside. And then you go back to your afternoon session and something unexpected comes out on the page. There’s a freshness. You wouldn’t find just sitting in your office, looking at what’s going is the day over yet? Have I produced enough?
Terri Connellan: I remember we went to the markets and it was just an explosion of color and smells and I think often we get dulled down too, sitting inside and not engaging with our senses.
And then we cook the meal from the produce and then we ate the food and it was just sensory experience. So for me, I think it, and it’s taken me a while in hindsight to realize that, that time is really important for allowing the work but also allowing myself, to just get back in touch with a broader range of myself and from a personality perspective, some of those things that are not my natural bent, but which really enrich me. So thank you for that experience. It was a really important part of activating the muse in the middle of the journey.
Kerstin Pilz: Yes. And it gives you that distance also, I mean, especially going away whether it’s overseas or to another country, or just out of your comfort zone, it gives you that beginner’s minds lens, you’re looking at it through fresh eyes and I’m sure editors, like Penelope would tell her writers, just let it sit and then come back with fresh eyes after you have some distance. And that’s what a retreat can do as well. Beginner’s mind.
Terri Connellan: So in your Wholehearted story, and I know your memoir is about really difficult times, going through grief experiences and challenge. And certainly my story, different story about, I guess, the similar theme is that theme of going through difficult times and from that creating a positive outcome.
So how do you see challenge and growth fitting? How does Wholehearted play into that, your book? Just interested to explore.
Kerstin Pilz: First of all, when I met you, I said, oh my God, there’s someone on the similar journey and you can actually give your self permission to tap into that, heart centeredness, like you say, in your book. You were at work, feeling like you’re crying in the bathroom or something. And you feel when you then step back into your role or, you know, proper, again, you’re leaving parts of yourself behind and if you have a 30 year career, like you did, mine was almost 20. I realized, and this is thanks to you that I’m an introvert. I had always known, but I hadn’t really consciously thought about how my work as a lecturer was actually forcing me everyday to be an extrovert. So being able to use that wholeheartedness as a pass through life and giving myself permission and understanding why I would feel so exhausted sometimes. It came from being outside of my natural comfort zone is an introvert, which doesn’t mean I’m shy or can’t connect to people.
It just means I have a lot of quiet time, quiet writing, connecting with myself. So I think the difficult times, those threshold moments when our lives become turned upside down they also break us open to a different dimension of ourselves.
If we are in that sensitive, receptive mindset to stop and to just stand still and say, what can I learn from this? What is this opening up inside of me? Because society teaches us to just power through grief and to armor up and to be strong. And like Brené Brown says the really courageous are those who allow themselves to be vulnerable and to sit with the grief and to actually listen into it and to be present to all of those difficult feelings rather than going, oh, let’s just quickly numb ourselves with some wine or run away from the feelings.
So I think it’s a moment of deep growth of possibility, for evolving in ways you possibly consciously couldn’t achieve in the same sort of impactfulness.
Terri Connellan: Mm. Thank you for sharing that. And also how we connected and a sense of synergy along the way, because it does help, it’s hard going through it. You can feel really alone. So to see others who are also forging a path, providing insights, tools, pathway, such as you provided for me through your retreat too. I think we can all help each other grow and understand that, you know, it’s not easy either that work.
The other thing we talk about in the book is a piece you wrote about the role of luck versus hard inner work. And for me there’s certainly elements of luck in our lives, but I think we often can attribute too much to that and not realize just how much hard inner work it does take to deal with situations like this. It’s a long process.
Kerstin Pilz: Yeah, exactly and thank you for bringing that up. I often, and I’m sure you probably get that too when people say, well, how lucky are you that you have the time to write this book? Well, hello I was retrenched. Or how lucky are you, people tell me to be writing a memoir. It’s like, yeah, but I’m writing a memoir about losing the person I married thinking I’d be married to them forever. And then finding out something that I didn’t actually want to know, namely, that he had a second life. So the lucky part is that I allowed myself to actually be open to what these difficult times have to teach us. I think that’s the lucky part that I’m not running away from it,
Terri Connellan: neither are you.
But I think it’s that decision to when it’s another transition, it’s a turning point moment where you think, well, what am I going to do with this? And, as I tell in the book, I reached out to other people, I looked at what they were doing. And that was when I started my blog a long time, 2010. And for me, that was about finding my voice because writing was important, it was just a way of getting that back front and center out of fairly recent grief experiences to take me forward. So Penelope, do you have any comments or questions?
Penelope Love: I was relating very much to the retreat comments that you were making Kerstin because of the trip I just took and my husband’s asking me, well, what exactly did you like about these places that we visited? Cause he wasn’t necessarily resonating in the same way that I was, but what I was. Now, I have a better answer for him. And it’s this process that was occurring. You know, it’s not so much the streets of any one city that made me really love that city, but what I was loving, what was happening inside me when I was seeing something different that I’ve never seen before.
So yeah. Thank you for helping me put words on that. Cause that’s, and I couldn’t agree more of how important that is in the writing process. Because when I look back, you already speak about writing your memoir as a long haul and it’s different from a blog post or an article. I once at the beginning of my journey had an editor say to me, oh, well, if you write enough articles, one day, you’ll wake up and realize you have a book.
And that always stayed with me and I never really thought as I was writing the love life column, that became my book, that it was going to be a book. But when I had that critical mass of articles and I did start to see it, and then the weaving process of past articles, it becomes its own monster of a process.
But what happened was that as I was living my life, I realized that when I went to India, when I first met my husband and when I went to Costa Rica, these were the two places where the book really got started. And they were not on American soil. And there were lines and journal entries that became the foundational pieces of the book. And they were both from India and Costa Rica. So had I not traveled, had I not journeyed I would not have been able to tell this story of being on home soil. So it’s very interesting. The retreat dimension. I love this very rich conversation.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s beautiful. That process too, with the blog for me, a lot of the pieces in the book began as blog posts too. So I think it’s that finding a way to write and get your story out and find your voice in any way, shape or form, they can then become pieces in other places, just as the pieces that weren’t in the book can become something that goes somewhere else. So I think what you’re saying is really true about honoring that writing self in any way we can.
Kerstin Pilz: But that also ties in with something you say in your book, which is about the importance of having these networks, because it was actually very important for me. Like when I found Susannah Conway who started also because of her grief journey and then you Terri, it’s like, oh, I can give myself permission to write this. It’s actually like for a long time, I thought, well, what happened to me was terrible for me, but really I didn’t experience genocide. I’m not a female in Afghanistan, you know, it’s not that bad. But I think the networks are really important to actually validate any story is important, any story of profound transition. Yeah.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s what I’ve loved about the stories of wholehearted living and I’ve just gone through and read them all again, putting them into one document to look at the next step with perhaps publishing them. And it’s incredible how, like the themes in there are in my book. I think the first story Katherine Bell’s prompted your story, Kerstin, so it’s like all the stories and experiences prompt each other’s voices to feel a bit freer and to feel a connection.
In one of them, one person writes a letter in response to Heidi’s story so I think that whole importance of women’s voices and stories and sharing and working collaboratively. One thing I’ve learned and, if you look at the acknowledgements of my book, you think writing is a solitary experience. And then when you stop and think, all the people and all the experiences and all the particular group experiences that helped me: group coaching, mastermind, coaching myself, retreats, all of that was part of this rich journey. I know you said, Penelope, writing acknowledgements was so important to you and your journey too, that thinking back on who was part of it, who helped you? What made a difference? And when there’s still many, many more people I could have included, but I had to stop somewhere, but it just makes you realize writing a particular book is so collaborative and so important.
So thank you both for being part of that journey. So just one last question for you, Kirsten. What do you Wholehearted offers women particularly around writing and creativity and those aspects?
Kerstin Pilz: Yeah, I just thought, first of all, it gives you the permission, like we just discussed, you know, to actually believe that you have a voice and that you have a legitimacy to tell your story. And I like that it is a personal story. So I’m following your journey which is nice because you think I’m not alone, and it gives you very practical tools namely the tarot. I’m aware of Susannah Conway. I have somebody, my community here, in fact teaches writing via tarot cards, but I’m still dabbling in it. And I think that’s a really interesting tool that I would like to explore further. And also of course the whole shadow work, the Jungian shadow work and the personality type, which for example, I used to teach in my work as an intercultural communications lecturer, but I never really thought about it so much with regards to how it actually impacts my own personal life and reading about it in your book that really opened up new ways of thinking.
Even of writing, even writing a character, maybe I identify their profile before I create the character in the book. So I thought that was really helpful. And also the emphasis on writing, being a writer, on a retreat I get a lot of people who say I’m a, ‘want to be’ a writer. Penelope, I’m sure you know, this, everybody resonates with this. We want to write. But we end up in the shadow careers, imposter syndrome. So I think that’s really helpful also in your book that you show people that you are a writer just by writing morning pages, for example, every day..
Doesn’t matter whether they end up anywhere or whether you get accepted to the PhD program at Wollongong University, you’re still a writer. And I think that’s really strong message of encouragement.
Terri Connellan: Thank you. That’s beautiful. It’s lovely to hear the particular areas of focus that resonate with you and that also we had a lovely conversation when I was writing with Beth this morning and another lady, co-writing, we were talking about the long haul writing and the word tenacity came up. And Beth, was saying, it’s very much about tenacity, but it’s about realizing that everyone just starts an ordinary writer and you just keep sticking at it and sticking at it and going through to be extraordinary and it’s, but anybody can do it with what we’re saying. We all have different talents. But it’s very much about by sticking at the process, what we can bring to it, as we go through.
Kerstin Pilz: Yeah. And that’s the other thing, I just wanted to say, because you’re a very organized person and disciplined. Writing a book does take discipline. Cause you know, there is that like Liz Gilbert says, you have the fantasy of the artist and then there’s the artist and the writer who like her sits down. She says, I’m like my farmer parents every morning at six o’clock and I write yes.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, exactly. Because the other lady we were writing with was asking questions about how long it took and what the process is like. And she said, tenacity, it takes tenacity and we went, oh yeah, that’s a good word. It does. Thank you so much. Have you got any questions at all Natasha?
Natasha Piccolo: I just want to congratulate you. I really enjoyed hearing your process. And it’s amazing, like being a young writer I’m only just 30 and having a book out next year. It’s amazing to learn from somebody who has been writing for years, years, years, years, years, almost double my time. And it’s beautiful because it gets me very excited for my career.
Terri Connellan: Oh, thank you so much. That means so much to me. I’m excited to be able to inspire you. Cause I know people inspired me too when I was younger and I think we all need that inspiration to keep us focused on our dream because it starts, like I showed with my book. It starts as that sort of mind map.
Natasha Piccolo: Yeah, I really resonated with that. Because my book, I started writing it when I was 20, so it’s been literally a decade. And I’ve got probably 20 journals and scrapbooks and brainstorms and like a whole archive from the last 10 years that, it just made me really excited to release my baby next year.
Terri Connellan: That’s very exciting.
Kerstin Pilz: What’s your book?
Natasha Piccolo: The Balance Theory. So it looks at the idea that the only universal goal that you can truly observe from cellular to cosmic is that the universe is attempting to balance itself.
Kerstin Pilz: It’s a non-fiction book.
Natasha Piccolo: Yeah. Narrative nonfiction, very similar process. So clinically I’m a speech pathologist. So a lot of my understanding of this concept has come through my clinical work over the years. But in my personal life, there was a lot of loss, grief, trauma that was basically mirroring the lessons as I was going through it clinically with clients so there’s that marriage of science and spirit, which is what the whole book is about.
Terri Connellan: Beautiful. Yeah. I write about that in the postscript, how those things are coming together. It’s like consciousness, the map of consciousness work of David Hawkins and that sort of energy work. Things coming together. So that would be a really challenging book to write too.
Natasha Piccolo: It was, it was a beautiful process though. It was channeled, so I did it through meditation. I would meditate and there was one big meditation that came through as the divine nine. So there was nine chapters and that’s what the proposal was based off, that meditation. And after 10 years of scribbling ideas in journals for a very long time and not actually forming a manuscript. I went that’s what it is. It’s the divine nine. And now I’ve got to work backwards and go from that point. So just this morning I finished the first full draft, so that will be sent to Natasha at the kind press today.
Terri Connellan: Oh, wonderful. And she’s a beautiful person to receive your work. She’s just been amazing.
Natasha Piccolo: She’s a dream.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. I’ve been very blessed to have Penelope with the developmental editing and then Natasha and her kind of press team with the next step of the journey. She’s incredibly supportive. So we will be fellow writers in the stable.
Kerstin Pilz: May I ask a final question about your writing process. So developmental editing with Penelope. Did you have somebody also, who did your line editing or was that done by the kind press? So, you know, your typos.
Terri Connellan: Do you want to answer how you saw your part, Penelope? Because I’m interested too, because it wasn’t just developmental. We did far more than that too didn’t we?
Penelope Love: Yeah. You know, that’s the thing when you’re working with someone like Terri and you have that soul connection, it’s really hard to separate the developmental part from the detailed part. And so especially because that process of finding voice. Not really finding it, but fine tuning voice. It goes hand in hand. So I would say we were able to work that process almost simultaneously. And then at the end of the developmental process, we were relatively confident that when it was going to the kind press, that it would only really need a polishing over. And that has a lot to do with Terri’s willingness to be involved at that level in the process.
Not every writer works that way. Some people just want to get it on paper and then I’ll worry about the lines then I’ll worry about, does this paragraph merge into this one? Fine. But Terri and I were able to do that work along the way.
Terri Connellan: And once we got the shape, right. We then worked through chapter by chapter. And we did the moving things around and sometimes bits moved. But at that stage, it was much more about the content within that chapter. And then the draft that went to the kind press was, it was a strong draft because it had been through all that editing and then the editing team, and Natasha hands-on edits as well. And she has another editor who is very skilled and has worked with a lot of the top houses too. So I’ve been really honored to work with some incredible people and, and I wanted to independently publish. That was always my choice. So you know, for me, it’s been a really great fit and great journey.
Natasha Piccolo: Congratulations.
Terri Connellan: Thank you for joining us today. So thank you for coming live and being here. It’s been really lovely. So I’ve popped in that review just because it was such a lovely one. That’s the first review it’s by Meredith who is part of the psychological type community. It’s been lovely to have people such as yourselves Penelope and Kerstin who know me and know the book and get it. But then others, like Meredith, who haven’t been as closely involved, she knows me through the psychological type network, but her review is really beautiful about how it fits with coaching and client work. And also she understands personalities, being a personality type person. So she highlights that too, that link between structure and meandering, which I was conscious of as I was writing. But it’s lovely when someone reflects that back to you. So that’s really very kind of them.
There are Book Club notes. So if people who were working through book clubs, I’ve created some book club notes, and some coaching opportunities coming up, walking people through the book as a whole, in a coaching space. So how do you think that would be I’m interested in your comments?
Natasha Piccolo: That is definitely what I would be doing with The Balanced Theory.
Terri Connellan: Is it? That’s a nice way to go!
Natasha Piccolo: Absolutely like, just from the structure, it’s because it’s teachable learnings as a coaching module. It works well. And I think that your book is very similar in that structure. Very tangible.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. And it’s one thing to read a book and to do the activities, which you can, and sometimes people will intend to do it but it’s hard to get the time. So another thing too, is that structure helps create the time to do it. Yeah.
Kerstin Pilz: They can work through it as a week by week program program.
Penelope Love: Terri, I think it’s going to be amazing because the Sacred Creative Collective was almost like an early incarnation of what’s possible. I think you’ll find it probably a lot easier as a leader of such a collective to have this resource.
Terri Connellan: Thank you. I appreciate that feedback. Awesome. So any other questions or comments before we close?
Penelope Love: I have one comment. I just wanted to say Natasha. It’s so nice to meet you. We connected on Instagram and this is almost a rare opportunity to meet somebody that you’ve connected with in a more live way. Look forward to connecting over our posts in the coming years.
Natasha Piccolo: Definitely.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. Great to connect with you too, Natasha. It’s exciting. You’re getting to that stage with your book and yeah. Keep in touch. Thank you so much Penelope for everything and for joining today.
Penelope Love: Thank you too and I didn’t mean to overlook, it’s just that I feel almost like a colleague shift that we’ve had through the Wholehearted Stories and Natasha is completely new in my life, but I’m going to make sure that I’ve also connected with you on social media and then refresh myself on your story and stay more connected with you as well.
Terri Connellan: Thanks so much Kerstin for coming and being part of it. And for your support over the years, Write Your Journey and Quiet Writing have been very much kindred souls.
Kerstin Pilz: In parallel.
Terri Connellan: We connected in Sydney, totally synchronistically we were in Frankfurt at the same time and then in Vietnam. So we’ve had some lovely in-person catch-up.
Kerstin Pilz: And now we’re all grounded in Australia!
Penelope Love: Really remarkable. The chances of that, that’s amazing – that’s some really aligned stars there.
Terri Connellan: Thanks so much for being here.
Kerstin Pilz: Good luck with your next one. Have fun and enjoy the moment.
Terri Connellan: Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.
Links to explore:
Free resources:
Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition
Penelope Love, MA, is a publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as author of Wake Up in Love. In 2000, her career launched in the editorial department of the University of Michigan Press, followed by Barnes & Noble, and the original publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul. As she expanded into book design, production and business management, it was a natural evolution into the role of publisher. In 2016, she founded Citrine Publishing based on a visionary publisher-author partnership. Penelope passionately supports people in writing the books that only they can write, while also sharing the memoir only she could write, about sexual trauma healing and marriage to her spiritual teacher along a united path of Tantra and Self-Inquiry, illuminating these essential steps on the journey to liberation.
Kerstin Pilz PhD is a published author, former academic with almost 20 years university teaching experience, a TEDx speaker and a 200 RYT yoga teacher. She is currently completing her memoir Falling Apart Gracefully. Her previous publications include academic monographs and travel features in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and the New York Times and travel industry magazines. When tragedy turned her life upside-down, she discovered the healing power of writing and now teaches creative writing online and on multi-day retreats in her beautiful home in Mission Beach, Far North Queensland, Australia and in Hoi An, Vietnam, where she lives part time.
Welcome to Episode 13 of the Create Your Story Podcast on on Embracing a Multipotentialite Life.
I’m joined by Laura Maya – Writer, Nomad, Multipotentialite, Author and Coach.
We chat about Laura’s new book Tell Them My Name, the writing journey and living a life that is unconventional, nomadic and multipotentialite. And we explore how she supports and inspires others who are curious and wanting to live a less conventional life.
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:
Laura’s new book Tell Them My Name
Writing your first book
Being a constant beginner
Giving ourselves permission to quit
Being a digital nomad
Embracing a multipotentialite life
Opening up life options
Riffing with change
How change is always hard
Transcript of podcast
Introduction
Welcome to Episode 13 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 2nd of March as I record this. It’s been raining for about two weeks here in Sydney and there have been massive and devastating floods further north. Along with the tragic Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s been a strange and unsettling time lately. My thoughts are with all those impacted by these events. It’s a very sad time.
In positive news, I’m excited to be a finalist in the Beautiful You Coaching Academy Awards for Book/Product of the Year for my Wholehearted book and Companion Workbook. The winners will be announced at a ceremony on Friday 4th of March this week. I’m so honoured to be a finalist and look forward to celebrating at the online awards ceremony. I’ve been thrilled to kick off The Writing Road Map short course with my writing partner and collaborator Beth Cregan. It’s part of The Writing Road Trip in 2022 and we will be offering other opportunities to work with us further on in 2022. You can join our email list for the latest news.
Speaking of road trips, I’m excited to have Laura Maya join us for the podcast today to chat about her new book, Tell Them My Name and the process of writing it. We also chat about Laura’s fascinating and somewhat unconventional life, which features variety, constant change and movement that she embraces wholeheartedly.
Laura Maya is a writer, coach and culturally curious ‘digital nomad’ who has spent over twenty years wandering slowly through 59 countries. Laura is the author of Tell Them My Name (2022, the kind press) and she runs an online business offering professional matchmaking, project management and coaching programs that help women step into the life they want (even if it’s a life other people may not understand.) Laura has spent the pandemic years living in a converted school bus in Australia but usually bounces between Oz, France, Nepal and Tonga and tries to explore everywhere in between.
Laura and I met as fellow certified Beautiful You Coaching Academy life coaches and as writers and fellow authors published by the kind press. We’ve chatted together about the writing process, becoming an author and ways to publish and share our work with the world. We’ll share insights from these conversations and connections and learn more about Laura’s unconventional, nomadic and multipotentialite life and what she inspires in others from this.
Today we will be speaking about writing, publishing, creativity, being a multipotentialite and nomad and opening up life options to consider unconventional and original paths that integrate our passions and purpose.
So let’s head into the interview with Laura.
Transcript of interview with Laura Maya
Terri Connellan: Hi, Laura, welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast.
Laura Maya: Thank you, Terri. Thanks for having me today.
Terri Connellan: Thanks for your connection across our work, our passions and our businesses, and we’ve connected in many ways around creativity, writing, publishing, coaching and more. And it’s great to be able to share those conversations with people.
So can you kick us off by providing a brief overview about your background and how you got to be where you are and the work that you do now?
Laura Maya: Yeah, that’s always a tricky question to answer for me. My background is a hot, beautiful mess I think that led me to where I am now, which is doing a lot of different things that don’t really connect.
So yeah, my background is that I left Australia in 2001 on what I thought was a gap year to go traveling and to live in school. And I’ve just been traveling the world ever since kind of living nomadically. And I have worked in lots of different businesses and had a lot of different jobs in a lot of different careers.
So, in your book, when you talk about being in transition, I’ve been in perpetual transition, I suppose, for most of my adult life. But that’s what brought me to where I am now, which is running my own business, where I work as a coach and a consultant. so yeah, I do lots of different things. Everything from life coaching to project management and people and culture consultancy, marketing, social media management, translation, writing, whatever. I do a little bit of everything and I enjoy that kind of diversity in my work.
Terri Connellan: Awesome. That’s a great snapshot. And I love that you say being in transition for most of your adult life. You must be incredibly skilled at managing change.
Laura Maya: Yeah, I think I’m a professional beginner. That’s the only thing I’m an expert at. I’m a professional at starting from scratch and I enjoy that process. I really like that point where you kind of get a bit bored or restless and then you think, oh, okay, well, what am I going to do next? And then finding that thing and not being able to do that thing and then having to learn that whole process. It’s a process I really enjoy.
Terri Connellan: It sounds like almost a love of beginner’s mind.
Laura Maya: Yeah. I don’t become a master at anything. For example, I learned the ukulele. I was really obsessed with that for a little while and I can’t play the E chord. It’s been what, seven years now I’ve been playing the ukulele and I can’t play the E chord and that’s okay. I just don’t play the songs that have the E chord in them. I just get myself to the point where like, I’m happy enough with that. And then I kind of get bored and I move on to something else. That’s that’s how I roll.
Terri Connellan: Great. So we’ve both recently enjoyed the process of taking a book from idea to draft, to publish. And as we speak, it’s the 21st of January, 2022. And your book, Tell Them My Name is soon to be out on the first of February, which is very exciting. Congratulations. So tell us about that writing journey and what it was like.
Laura Maya: Yeah. Before I do that, I just want to say a massive congratulations to you for your book, your beautiful book. It’s such a valuable resource. I’ve read it. And it’s such a valuable resource for people in transition.
So I just wanted to congratulate you because having been through the writing process, myself and the publishing process, I know I will never look at a book the same way again. It’s such an achievement just to get it to the point where you can hold it in your hands. So I just wanted to honor you for that.
Terri Connellan: Thank you much appreciated.
Laura Maya: Yeah. And for me, I guess the writing’s journey, I don’t know about you, but it was your first book, it was wasn’t it?
Terri Connellan: It was, yeah.
Laura Maya: For me, I think my first book was all about learning how not to write a book. I don’t think I would do it the same way again. I think the writing journey has been pretty tough. I’ve always wanted to write a book since I was probably about six. I always thought I would be a writer one day. And about seven years ago, I started writing this book. I spent about two years getting a draft down. About three years trying to edit that draft down from about 280,000 words to about 130,000, but without bringing anybody else in that process. Like that was my big mistake. I didn’t get any help. I didn’t get anybody to read it or anything like that. So at the five-year mark, then I thought, oh, I probably need to get some support here.
So I thought I was finished. I arranged a manuscript evaluation from a publishing house and they came back and said, look, there’s a really good story in here, but you’ve tried to squeeze about three other stories into it that shouldn’t be there. So you should start from scratch and start writing the book again. Which was just horrifying, heartbreaking to hear after five years of working on it. But I could see their points when they pointed it out and I took their advice.
I threw a little bit of a temper tantrum and had a moment. And then I decided, okay, they’re right, I’ll take their advice. And I started from scratch and I wrote the book throughout 2020 when, of course the world was in turmoil. And there was a little time to be at home and finished at the end of 2020 and was offered a publishing contract in January of 2021 which I ultimately decided not to take. And I spoke with you. That’s when you and I connected, and I did a shout out in our coaching group, our certified coaching group and said, does anyone know anything about publishing contracts? Because I don’t. And you put your hand out to help me, which was amazing.
And after speaking with you, and speaking with a number of other people, I decided to go a different way. And that’s what led me to the kind press. Now we’ve ended up being publisher house buddies.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s amazing to hear your journey. And there’s so many things that resonate from that description of your journey and lots of commonalities in that journey. It indicates what writing a book, that first putting your heart into a book brings up. Beth Cregan and I, who’s my co-writing buddy, and we’re running a writing program together, we have joked that we’d like to run a program called how not to write a book because we know so much about how not to write a book. It’s like all these things not to do. And like you, I wrote a really, really long, mine was a hundred thousand words.
Laura Maya: That’s tiny!
Terri Connellan: 280 is huge, but I have heard people say that often the early books that we write, we often do put a lot of in there and then it’s either a whittling away or in my case, creating two books. But starting again, must’ve been incredible.
Laura Maya: Yeah, we do put a lot of ourselves in there and I’d heard that. And I thought that I hadn’t done that so much, but then when I got that feedback and I realized, I’ve injected myself into places in this book that are really not relevant. I didn’t know what to leave out was my big problem. I didn’t know what would be interesting for the reader. So going back and starting from scratch, because I said to him, I was like, well can’t I just edit the version that I’ve already done? And he said, no, no, there’s too much in there. And you actually need to start with a blank page.
So that was daunting because I’d spent, gosh, I reckon that number of hours I’ve spent on putting together that first draft I could have become, maybe not a surgeon, but I could’ve put myself through law school, I think probably like in hours that I invested, and yeah, sitting down and saying that blank page, but then just having to look at it, like, okay, what does the reader want to know about this and where would the reader want to start this story? And I started the book in a completely different place than where I would have.
And the beauty of this too, is that now I actually have 65,000 words, which I’ve cut out, which will be the basis of my next book. And so those years, it wasn’t wasted time. And I do think it’s a much tighter, cleaner, more enjoyable book to read now than it was before. I think I would have lost the reader in the original version because it was too all over the place.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s great to hear. And it’s also wonderful too that you can repurpose some of that first draft because 280,000 words, is a huge commitment in time and intellectual energy, creative energy. So to be able to take some of that work and craft it and shape it in new ways.
Laura Maya: That is a positive.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. That’s great. So can you share with us a snapshot of what Tell Them My Name is about?
Laura Maya: Sure. In a nutshell, it is the true story of two indigenous Nepalese elders who leave their Himalayan farm and travel to Paris on this great quest to understand Western culture. That’s the book in a nutshell.
The slightly longer version of that story is that, my husband and I went to live in the Himalayas in Nepal with this elderly couple in 2009. We were sent there by an NGO to build a library in a local school and this couple, took us in and they sort of adopted us as their children. We called them mum and dad, Aama and Baba. And they taught us how to speak Nepali. They taught us how to take care of ourselves because it’s not the same. In Nepal, they don’t eat with cutlery. We had to learn how to eat with our hands. They don’t have a bathroom. So we had to learn how to wash ourselves in the public communal water source and things like that.
So after five years of coming and going from Nepal, they were just really curious to know where we were from and why we were so incapable of doing some of the most basic tasks, I guess, in the village. And so we offered them the opportunity to come back to France, to Europe, where my husband’s from, and we would travel around with them for a month. And we would just explore the differences between our cultures and, and they could see how we lived. So that’s what the book’s about. It’s really about their impressions of Western culture and a look at everything from loneliness and religion and race.
There’s a lot of big concepts in there. And then there’s a lot of really funny moments, obviously when things happened because they don’t know how to navigate life in our culture.
Terri Connellan: I can’t wait to read it – it just sounds incredible. When I first heard about it, the whole story just sounds like an amazing way for us to understand different cultures, but also get a different perspective on ourselves too. When you take yourself out of your comfort zone, as you’ve done many times, and obviously your Nepalese mum and dad have done. That idea of just getting a different perspective, that sounds like that’s what the book’s about, like really turning the world upside down and just seeing things anew.
Laura Maya: Yeah, that’s exactly it, because I think in some ways, I mean, the book is full of questions, really? The kind of questions that Aama would ask when we were traveling and most of the time, as you’ll see, when you read the book, I didn’t have answers to those questions.
Because there was everything from, ‘why is the supermarket floor cold?’ Well, I don’t know. I’ve never reached down to touch it. To ‘why are people so lonely in your culture’ and like, ‘ why did you set my food on fire on my birthday?’ These sorts of things that I’ve never stopped to ask myself those questions and it’s my culture. And I guess it was a real look at all of the things that you just take for granted.
Terri Connellan: And to capture and remember those moments, did you keep a journal at the time or were you capturing those moments as they happened?
Laura Maya: Yeah, I think that’s the reason why the book blew out at 280,000 words, because at the end of every day, I sat down with a voice recorder and I spoke when everyone else was asleep because the trip was exhausting. You can imagine translating between Nepalese and French all day, obviously neither of those are my first languages. And we were traveling, we were doing a lot of stuff. And so at the end of the day, everyone would collapse and I would get out my phone and I would spend an hour recounting the day to myself.
And then when I sat down to write, I basically did a transcription of what we’d done. So I ended up with this book that was just like, this happened and this happened, this happened, this happened. And then having to then distill that into something that people would actually want to read and would take them on a journey without boring them to tears. There were things in there that just wouldn’t be entertaining for people or inspiring for people or educational. So, that’s how I, I did it. I don’t know how I would do it differently next time, because it was good to have all of that data, but it was too much.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s what I was just thinking, as you were speaking, it’s amazing that you did take the time to do that work and it’s almost like a field research isn’t it? And gathering the data, having the records because so much gets easily forgotten. So apart from the writing, it’s that whole note- taking, gathering of information as well on way through that’s the books obviously created through.
Laura Maya: Yeah, exactly.
Terri Connellan: Congratulations. That’s huge – so how many years in all?
Laura Maya: I started writing in December, 2014, so seven years. A big part of my life. It’s been great. I’ve learned more than I could have, if I’d done a university course in creative writing, I think, by doing it this way in some ways, but I’m excited that all of my other books I think will be easier after this because I’ll have a better idea going in.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. You learn so much writing a book about everything, I’ve found, the drafting, the editing, just knowing what the process is like means, you’re better prepared for next time.
Laura Maya: Absolutely. Hopefully. Yeah. We’ll see.
Terri Connellan: So you’ve also recently had your story, ‘The Truth About Quitting’ published as part of the brilliant kind press collection ‘This I Know is True‘ in 2021 so tell us about that story.
Laura Maya: Yeah. So that story relates to the book that I wrote. It’s the story of the non-profit organization that my husband and I started to prevent human trafficking in Nepal. It’s the story of starting that organization and then ultimately burning out and closing that organization down even though obviously human trafficking still exists in Nepal. So the ultimate goal that we set out to achieve there was never going to be really a way to achieve that and the nature of the work, yeah, I burnt out. And so it’s the story of giving ourselves permission to quit when we’re doing something that no matter how much we want it, we’re just not really able to continue whether it’s for mental health reasons or physical reasons or those sorts of things.
So I think in our culture, we have this belief, never give up, you have to see things through to the end and that’s true in some cases, but I also think that sometimes your personal finishing point might just come sooner than other people’s.
Terri Connellan: I love that. That’s what I love about your life and your work is that you take a really fresh perspective on things. And I think that, we do have this cultural bias towards perseverance and keep going no matter what. And sometimes that’s helpful, like writing a book, you definitely need tenacity and perseverance, but, there may be, you know, like your first book draft, I guess you had to learn to stop that and start again. And sometimes the wisdom is in knowing when to stop, when to pivot.
Laura Maya: Exactly. And knowing when to quit, I think it’s a skill. I quit over and over and over again, but like obviously writing the book, I have felt like quitting at many stages of the process, but it was important to me to keep going and I knew that I could. And so I’ve kept going. But with our non-profit organization, one of the most important things to me in my life but it came at the expense of my mental health. And so, you have to make a call and it’s not easy to do, but I think actually cultivating that skill of evaluating things and walking away when it doesn’t serve you or you’re not serving it anymore, I think is really important.
Terri Connellan: And is that something you share with clients too? That skill? Do you see that for clients?
Laura Maya: Yeah, I do, particularly because I work predominantly with multi-passionate people. who quite often come to me because they’re frustrated with themselves because they quit all the time. They leap from one thing to the other and, they feel like they don’t finish the things that they start. So it’s really drilling down on, okay, well, how important it is for you to finish this thing? Or are you only trying to finish this thing because you think that you should. Like you talk about in the book that these words that enslave you, like should.
Terri Connellan: And that abandoned success idea too, maybe it’s okay to walk away from something that’s successful too. Just because something’s going well, doesn’t mean you have to stay either. That’s something that comes up for me, with clients as well. that’s about looking at what serves you ultimately.
Laura Maya: Yeah, I guess that’s even harder, isn’t it? When you’re at the pinnacle of your career in something you’re actually really successful, but it’s just not giving you any joy. I do have one client like that at the moment, actually. She’s carved a name for herself in a particular industry and now wants to do something completely different and it’s hard to make that choice to walk away from the status and the money, it’s really tricky.
Terri Connellan: So one of the key themes in your life story is being a digital nomad and traveller and you’ve been living nomadically since 2001. You’ve lived, worked and traveled in 60 different countries and you’ve learned to speak four foreign languages, which is amazing, had dozens of career changes and held over 40 different jobs. So what do you love about being a digital nomad and what does it offer that other more conventional lifestyles might not?
Laura Maya: So I, yeah, freedom is just ultimate freedom. I think, because when I first started traveling, I was 21. Last year was my 20 year nomadiversary, but in the beginning, the internet wasn’t really a thing. I mean, we had emails and we would go into an internet cafe and check our emails for half an hour a day. But, we didn’t really have access to the internet, like we do now. So I would get jobs as I went along. I was a nanny in Spain and then I was a tax auditor in the Netherlands. A bar manager in Scotland, always moving around too. I was always changing jobs and there was always the stress around, like where was the next job and the next money coming from. Whereas now being a digital nomad. I have the freedom of taking my income with me.
So I’ve built up my business. I’ve got lots of different clients. I do lots of different things with them, as I mentioned earlier, and I can just take that income wherever I go. All I have to do is make sure that the work that I take on is not bound to a certain time. Like I don’t have to turn up every day at midday. I can just do it over the course of the 24 hours. And it means that I can work from anywhere that has internet access. So we lived in Tonga for four years and I ran my business from this beautiful little private island in the south Pacific. And I’ve worked from Paris and Santorini. I went to Greek school in Santorini for a while in Greece.
You just have that freedom to move around and go, okay, well, where are we going to live this week, obviously with COVID that has all been kiboshed, but up until then, that was the freedom. And even during COVID, my income, the way that I earn it, and I’ll be able to travel around and we’ve been able to house sit all over New South Wales and live in a bus. We’ve been living most of the last two years in a bus traveling around. So we have the freedom to keep our costs really low. And weather the pandemic perhaps more easily than others. I think a lot of people over these last couple of years, if you have a mortgage and expenses and things like that, it’s been incredibly stressful.
Terri Connellan: So it sounds an incredibly creative lifestyle too.
Laura Maya: Yeah. We’re kind of creating all the time. What’s next week gonna look like, where are we parking next week? Or where are we living next week? Yeah. And we’re heading back to Nepal in April and getting back onto the international road again.
Terri Connellan: So, do you think you need certain personality preferences to be able to live that way, or is it something anybody can do if they shift their mindset?
Laura Maya: Yeah, I think it definitely takes a shift of mindset because you have to live a very minimalist existence. So you need to not be very attached to stuff. Or if you are attached to stuff, it makes it very difficult to have that freedom to be able to move around. I don’t know that it would suit everybody. I think that if everybody lived like me, the economy would probably collapse. I don’t know that that’s a good idea, but I think that if anybody’s got that sort of curiosity or that desire for freedom, it’s definitely possible, but I don’t know that it is a lifestyle that would suit everybody. Or even a lot of people.
Terri Connellan: I haven’t asked about the challenges because I was more interested in the positives too. Cause most of us could probably think about the challenges, the lack of stability and the things that would throw people. But, it’s great to hear about the positives and what’s exciting about it.
Laura Maya: Different challenges. Yeah. Everyone’s got challenges in their lives. Mine are just different to everybody else’s.
Terri Connellan: So you also identify as a multipotentialite, and you’ve explored this in a fabulous post on your website, Are You A Multipotentialite, Scanner or Renaissance Soul? How did realising it’s okay, and in fact, amazing to be a multipotentalite impact your life?
Laura Maya: Yeah, prior to hearing that word, multipotentiality. I thought there was something really wrong with me. I thought that I was a quitter. I was a dilettante. I just jumped from one thing to the next, I couldn’t finish anything that I started. I was like, oh, I’ve just got shiny object syndrome. I had all these really negative words, Jack of all trades, which has bad connotations these days. So I thought it was a bad thing.
I thought that even though I was happy and I was enjoying my life that I was doing it wrong because the people around me seemed to have a more linear approach to life. They stuck with their careers for a bit longer than I did or with their jobs for a bit longer. They put down roots, they had homes, they had families, they had children. It felt like I didn’t know how to do any of that normal, ‘normal’ like in inverted comments stuff.
And then when I heard about multipotentiality, I’d realised that there were actually a lot of people out there that have like me, this insatiable curiosity, to just keep exploring and to experiment with lots of different careers and interests and hobbies and those kinds of things.
So, I think it just gave me permission to really just be myself and also to know, once I understood that this was actually a thing that my brain is wired this way, it makes me approach my new careers and interests and hobbies in a different way. I’m not jumping in now going, oh my gosh, I found this great thing. This is the thing I’m going to love forever. And then getting really disappointed when it turns out, but it’s not again. And I want to move on to something else.
I go into everything now, this is the thing that I’m excited about doing now, and let’s just see how it all goes. And there may be an end date and actually taking that pressure off, it sometimes means that it lasts longer than it probably would have before when I used to berate myself for getting bored with things too quickly. So I think it’s just helped me shift my mindset around the fact that it’s not a bad thing. It’s just who I am. It’s just how my brain works. And now I can work with it.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s why I love personality work for similar reasons. There’s such strength in knowing how you’re wired, this is what’s your natural preference. Once you understand that it’s the self-acceptance just reframes your whole life. That’s what happened for me with understanding myself.
Laura Maya: So, yeah, I totally agree that. I mean the personality type things, I’m an ENFP on the Myers-Briggs and I’m a nine on the Enneagram and I love doing all those kinds of things and it does provide a framework that makes me not feel like the way I am is wrong. It gives you the tools to then go, okay, well, this is one of my quirks. How can I a) use that to my advantage and b) make sure it doesn’t get in my way.
Terri Connellan: That’s great. And I know of Barbara Sher’s work in this, I love her., this area started there. She was an influence for you. Are there any other particular influences?
Laura Maya: Massive, yeah. Barbara Sher. So I originally found Emilie Wapnick’s TED talk where she talks about multipotentiality. She’s the one who coined that term. So I saw that. And then I saw a lot of people in the comment section saying, you should read Barbara Sher’s book, Refuse to Choose. So I downloaded that and I cried through the whole first and second chapter.
Oh my gosh. It’s not just me. This is just describing who I am and that book has just become my Bible. And I use a lot of the tools and tricks in that. I think it might’ve been written in the eighties or nineties. It’s been around for a long time. She just passed away I think last year.
Terri Connellan: She did. I was doing some research on her a little while ago. I think it was last year she passed away.
Laura Maya: She was such a pioneer. She did such great work for people like us.
Terri Connellan: Again, it’s that reframing and somebody taking the time to wrap the book to articulate, you know, it’s okay to refuse to choose. It’s okay to say yes to lots of things and live the incredible life that you’re crafting and encouraging others to craft who have similar preferences.
Laura Maya: She did. If anybody is resonating with the way that I’m explaining multipotentiality, definitely read Refuse to Choose because she lays it out perfectly to give you the tips and tools to set up your life, to create your life in a way. And I’d been doing those things unconsciously, but, reading that book was really helpful.
Terri Connellan: So just to touch a little bit on that, in what ways can we limit ourselves and what tips would you give for people opening up and integrating life options?
Laura Maya: This is such a great question. This is looking at me personally. But I think one of the ways that I’ve limited myself and I see this in a lot of my particularly female clients and most, all my clients are female, is that we limit ourselves by what we think we’re qualified to do. So we won’t leap into something unless we feel like we have a certificate or a piece of paper that says that we know how to do what we’re doing, or we have X years of work experience that qualify us for that.
And I see this too in my work in hiring, one of my hats that I wear doing a lot of hiring for startups, Australian startups and high growth companies. And the women have a hard time putting themselves forward for jobs that they don’t necessarily feel like they hit all of the necessary criteria. Whereas the male counterparts might send through a CV when they’re not really qualified at all. And I know that I’ve done that like, oh, can I write a book if I haven’t got a Masters of Fine Arts or I haven’t done a course in creative writing. Yes, you can. I think, that’s definitely an issue.
And I think another way that we limit ourselves is with the beliefs and the stories that we tell ourselves about what we’re capable of. I know I’ve spent most of my life saying, oh, I’m not very sporty. Like I’ll only run if someone’s chasing me, like I’m not very graceful, like Bambi on ice, those have always been my stories. And just in the last couple of years, I’ve really been working on dismantling those stories. I took up running and I’ve started learning Kung Fu and maybe it wasn’t super sporty or graceful in the beginning, but with a bit of effort and determination, you can improve. And you don’t have to live with those stories that you’ve been telling yourself, just because you were always the kid that got picked last for teams in primary school.
Terri Connellan: I’m coming up against one of those stories at the minute. I mentioned a little bit in my book about me and story, like ‘I can’t do plot’. And my plan this year is to draft a novel. So, it immediately rears up: ‘ You don’t understand plot.’ ‘You don’t know this’, so it’s fascinating how we limit ourselves with those. Like who says?
Laura Maya: Exactly. And that’s definitely something that can be taught. There are some things you need qualifications for, you’re a surgeon or even coaching. I think that’s a great thing to get qualifications for because you’re working with humans. But I mean, you can do a course in learning how to plot or you can just, what did they say? If you can pants, what are the two?
Terri Connellan: Pantsers and plotters.
Laura Maya: Do it and then give it to someone for feedback. And they’ll say, you could’ve done that better. Or put this there or whatever. And you can learn just by doing it.
Terri Connellan: Exactly. And in early conversation about writing books, learning how not to write the next one is all part of that opening things up and having a go. Yeah. So, I loved a recent posts you popped up on Instagram that you’re aiming to fail this year. I loved that and it was so refreshing to read that because everyone’s going and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that. And then you pop in and say, well, I’m aiming to fail this year. That’s amazing, especially with all the uncertainty around. That’s part of what you’re talking about. So what does that mean for you and why is it important this year?
Laura Maya: I guess it’s two things. The first part of it is that what’s coming for me this year, which is that the book is going to be released. And, I’m very comfortable in my writing cave, just tapping away on my own, writing stuff, but I’m not comfortable with the promotion and the marketing and media interviews like this. You and I have some rapport, we know each other so it’s easier for me to do this with you today. But thinking about being interviewed on radio or things like that, make me really nervous. So, I guess aiming to fail means putting myself into positions where there’s a big chance that I’m will stuff it up.
And I’ll make a fool of myself, but just putting myself in that position anyway and going, okay. Well, if I failed and I’ve hit my target, I’m pushing myself to do things that, that make me really uncomfortable. So that’s sort of aiming to fail. But then also on the other side, it’s really just living my life this year without obviously because of the pandemic organizing my book launch, even though I know that it might get shut down because of COVID at the last minute. I’ve thought to myself, should I have a book launch? Maybe I shouldn’t because of everything that’s going on.
And then I thought, well, I’m just going to do it. If it all falls apart at the last minute, it all falls apart. If it fails, it fails and booking our flights to Nepal, that probably sounds a bit crazy. Why would we go to Nepal in the middle of the pandemic? But if the flights get canceled or things go wrong or whatever. Okay. Well just going to have a crack this year and if I fail, I fail. That’s really what it’s all about.
Terri Connellan: I love that. Your word freedom. It sounds very freeing, it frees you up to do the things that you want to do without feeling that it has to go down a certain path. If it goes down another path, then that’s okay. I love that. You’ve inspired me. So I’m taking that on board too.
Laura Maya: Aim to fail to craft a beautiful plot this year, Terri!
Terri Connellan: I will. I think it’s great. We talk about different definitions of success, but it’s still really easy to say I’m going to draft this 80,000 word and it’s going to look like this, but we just got to take ourselves through the process.
Laura Maya: And be kind to ourselves. Absolutely.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. So two questions I’m asking guests on the podcast and they’re fairly big questions, but interesting just to see what pops up for people. So how have you created your story over your lifetime?
Laura Maya: Yeah. This is like a really interesting question. I think one way I create my story, I’ve consciously created every aspect of my life. Because we’re changing so much, there’s no such thing as getting stuck in a rut really for my husband and I, because we change and move on and move to different countries or change our jobs and things so quickly.
So, I feel like a consciously create my life and my story through that way, but coming back to what we were talking about before, I think part of me is constantly trying to dismantle the stories that I’ve created for myself as well, it’s been a big thing for me lately. I think since I turned 40, I know that you follow a lot of Brene Brown’s work as well, and there was this great post that she wrote about the great unraveling when you turn 40. And it’s really since I’ve turned 40 suddenly trying to put myself into all of these situations and positions that the story of who I am would normally not feel comfortable doing.
So, yeah, I feel like I consciously create my story, but now I’m just kind of trying to break it down and stretch it and see how far I can go.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, I just love in everything you do, your writing, your story, being comfortable playing with change almost. It’s not even being comfortable with changes. Sometimes it’s the discomfort of change, riffing with change.
Laura Maya: Riffing with change. I love that. Yes. I love that. And it’s not comfortable. Change still isn’t comfortable for me, even at the position that I’m in. I think that’s the thing that I love to be able to tell my coaching clients is that even after you’ve been through as many transitions as I have, it’s still hard. It’s still uncomfortable. It can be painful. Feeling that discomfort with change, that’s totally normal. Even for somebody as accomplished at being a beginner as I am.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. I love that. I think again, it’s about expectations. Sometimes we expect ourselves to be or do something we’re not, which is be totally comfortable with change. Change in its very nature’s moving out of one comfort zone into another.
Laura Maya: It’s always going to be hard. Even though I make the decision to travel and to live this kind of transient life, I’m always anxious right up until it happens. I always cry when it happens. It always feels like the end of the world. And then I do it anyway. I just cycle through that process faster than most, but it’s always hard.
Terri Connellan: Hmm. That’s interesting. So as you’d know, from reading Wholehearted, I share my top 15 wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices. So I’m interested in, to add to that body of work, what your top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices are especially for women.
Laura Maya: I think and you certainly touched on this in the book, for me, it’s following your own light. There’s lights that light the path in every possible direction. And certainly I think in our society we’re given some really clear runway lights of like where our life is supposed to go. And it’s just being able to really look inside and go, where is my light and following that because I work with clients who are looking for maybe a slightly unconventional life or off the beaten track. And it’s detaching yourself from what you think you’re supposed to do and what others expect you to do and what you think society expects you to do. And just following your own light.
Terri Connellan: I love that. Yeah, it’s true. Certainly myself too, working with clients, you often hear, how a parents light of you should take this path has impacted somebody else’s life when they’ve maybe started off on a track that perhaps would not have been their own choosing. It was just part of societal or familial expectations, or what the family has always done or what’s considered to be a good thing. So yeah. I love that, that idea of following your own light and what lights you up. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I love that and it’s not being afraid to be unconventional.
Laura Maya: Yeah, exactly. It’s okay to live a life that other people don’t understand. It’s just having the courage to take that first step sometimes is the hardest.
Terri Connellan: Beautiful. And I hope our conversation today encourages many people who maybe feel that that’s part of what they’re doing or part of what they’ve been looking for in life that living that unconventional life, following their own light is a really positive way to go.
So thanks for sharing your insights today. It’s been a great joy to chat. Where can people find out more about you and your work online?
Laura Maya: I’m at lauramaya.com and @lauramayawrites on Instagram and Facebook and probably soon Twitter, but I haven’t sorted that out yet, but I’m told that writers need to be on Twitter. Are you on Twitter?
Terri Connellan: I am. Yeah. There are a lot of writers on Twitter.
Laura Maya: Yeah. So I need to jump on that horse. Holding off, but yeah, potentially Twitter by the time this is released.
Terri Connellan: It’s a good way to research too on Twitter.
Laura Maya: Yeah. I think it’s a good way to share other writers’ work as well, too, and be part of that community and support each other.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. Cool. Well, encourage people listening to check out your work, to buy your book, Tell Them My Name out on the 1st of February, so by the time this is released, it will be out in the world. So we’ll pop the links in the show notes and, yeah, thanks again for our beautiful conversation today. It was really lovely.
Laura Maya: Thank you so much, Terri, for inviting me here to have this chat, it’s been really beautiful chatting with you today.
Laura Maya
About Laura Maya
Laura Maya is a writer, coach and culturally curious ‘digital nomad’ who has spent over twenty years wandering slowly through 59 countries. Laura is the author of Tell Them My Name (2022, the kind press) and she runs an online business offering professional matchmaking, project management and coaching programs that help women step into the life they want (even if it’s a life other people may not understand.) Laura has spent the pandemic years living in a converted school bus in Australia but usually bounces between Oz, France, Nepal and Tonga and tries to explore everywhere in between.
Welcome to Episode 8 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Shaping a Multi-Passionate Life.
I’m joined by Meredith Fuller, Psychologist, Author, Media Spokesperson, Career Change Specialist and Theatre Maker.
We chat about shaping a multi-passionate life in practical terms! There are so many tips for living a full, wise and creative life without overwhelm.
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:
Making transitions from work or a life we don’t love
Tools for tapping into what is not conscious
Living a full, multi-passionate life in practical terms.
Meredith’s book Working with Bitches
My book Wholehearted & how Meredith is working with it with clients
Thinking and Feeling preferences in women
Choosing projects wisely
How personality insights can help
How tarot insights can help
Setting boundaries
And so much more!
Transcript of podcast
Introduction
Welcome to Episode 8 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 6th of January as I record this and we’re firmly into the new year. It’s warm and humid here in Sydney with lots of rain, so it’s a perfect time for setting intentions and goals for 2022 and also reflecting on my word of the year. I shared about my word of the year for 2021, Author in the past week on my blog. So pop over to see how that shaped up over the year and some tips for applying this learning in your life! More on my 2022 word soon as I ponder on all that it might mean!
I’m thrilled to have my friend Meredith Fuller join us for the podcast today to chat about Shaping a Multi-passionate Life. You might remember Meredith featured in Episode 3 of the podcast as part of the first Wholehearted virtual book launch.
Meredith’s concurrent careers have included author, playwright, columnist & media commentator, talkback radio guest, theatre director & producer, TV co-host, actor, psychological profiler and trainer. As a psychologist in private practice, providing counselling and career development to individuals and groups, she has also consulted to organisations on professional development and interpersonal skills for over 40 years. She ran a university careers counselling service for 12 years and has been a sessional lecturer in postgraduate courses in vocational psychology at several universities.
Meredith and I met via our mutual interest in psychological type as members of the Australian Association for Psychological Type about 4 years ago. From that we have discovered many shared interests and passions. Today we will be chatting about the value of psychological type and personality insights in making change, looking at how tarot can help, my Wholehearted book, Meredith’s book ‘Working with Bitches’ and writing and creative living. One of the things we particularly chat about is being multi-passionate and having a number of projects. There is some fabulous advice about how to make wise choices about where to focus and how to practically structure your life so you don’t get overwhelmed or burn out.
A reminder before we head into the podcast about the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club as a focus for 2022. One of the things Meredith mentions in the podcast is about the value of community and it’s something that’s integral to my life and work. If you’re looking for community, support and accountability for living a more wholehearted life, join me and a wonderful group of women gathering for the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club to read and work through my book Wholehearted and the Companion Workbook together through-out 2022. Part book club, part group coaching, with weekly accountability and prioritising check-ins, it’s a gentle, focused and value-packed way to keep wholehearted living front of mind and make progress to the transitions and transformations you desire in the coming year.
We start on Chapter 1 of Wholehearted in mid-January so it’s not too late to join us now and there is a space for you. People in the group are already commenting on how the accountability is helping them to do things they might otherwise have given up on! So head to the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club.
You’ll also hear more about Wholehearted in this episode and how it can support you. Meredith wrote a fantastic review of the book you can read too.
So now let’s head into the interview with the fabulously multi-skilled and multi-passionate Meredith Fuller!
Transcript of interview with Meredith Fuller
Terri Connellan: Hi Meredith, welcome to the Create Your Story podcast. And thank you so much for your support of me and my book Wholehearted.
Meredith Fuller: I’m delighted with it.
Terri Connellan: Thank you. It’s great to chat with you today. So to kick off, can you tell people a little about you and the roles that you focus on in your work in the world?
Meredith Fuller: So, I’ve been a psychologist for over 40 years. I have a private practice where I’ve seen many thousands of individuals who come for career developmental or personal growth, and I’ve also spent a number of years working in organizations on organizational issues, whether that’s leadership, team communication, mainly it’s interpersonal issues.
And I also write plays that I direct and produce at our venue, and I assist my husband with his short documentaries. So, we’ve got a very psychological focus on that. So essentially what I do is assist people to be the best they can be. And I mainly find that people are often in a position of distress. It could be interpersonal problems with people at work, problems in relationships, a poor fit, and they need some assistance in moving towards whatever their life stage is.
And it’s interesting at the moment, there’s been obviously quite a lot of people who are looking at what next? I’m in my fifties, I’m in my sixties. What now? So there’s a very strong theme there. And the other thing that we’ve been doing for the past two years because of the pandemic issue is working with a lot of people using Zoom to do group sessions or one-on-one sessions.
So, I guess what happens for me is there’s lots of different projects that emerge and if I’m interested, I’ll grab it. So for example, at the moment, I’m making a film with some colleagues about domestic violence. So it’ll just depend on what seems to be the critical issues. And the other part of what I do in writing is I’m an author of books and I do a lot of book reviews and write articles for newspapers, magazines, do some TV work, radio work, just a lot of helping people to understand more about the psychology of people.
Terri Connellan: So many threads, but so many interesting aspects to your life and to your work. And I love that at its core about helping people to be the best people they can be and I think that’s where your work at my work comes together. We’re both interested in that space where people can make choices, make transitions, practice self-leadership, understand themselves to be the best they can be, but I absolutely love all the different strands. And so we’ll explore quite a few of those in our chat today.
So thank you. And thank you for your review of Wholehearted too cause, that was a beautiful first review, which I’ll put in the show notes, but thank you for that. And the work that you do, I’m sure is hugely appreciated because it’s one thing to write and create something, isn’t it? It’s about sharing it with the world too. So thank you for that. So we met through our mutual love of psychological type and it’s valuable insights. So why have psychological type and personality been such powerful frameworks in your life?
Meredith Fuller: I’ve always been psychologically minded. And even as a child, I wanted to be a psychologist and it struck me that I was fascinated all through school about what do I think people will become when they get older so much so that I used to write down all the names of the kids in my class and write down what I thought they’d be when they grew up.
So obviously, the issue of vocation spoke to me very early on, and it was clear to me that people were different and that you could cluster them in some way. And I used to wonder why doesn’t anyone else seem to see what I’m seeing? So I felt quite different and alone with that and I guess for me, what I love about AusAPT and working with psychological type is we have a group of disparate people who are all keen to understand what our differences and similarities are.
And we like looking underneath and we like reflecting back on what we’re observing and to my mind, there’s a great depth of thinking that is so helpful for people. And I certainly find that psychological type has informed most of the work I’ve done since about 1998.
Terri Connellan: Wow. It’s been a really long-term influence then. Yeah. So just to explain to people listening Meredith and I are part of the Australian Association for Psychological Type, which is a connection of people in Australia, but globally who have a passion for personality and psychological type and it’s great community for people who as you’ve said think really deeply about the way we’re made up, the way we’re wired and the influence of that with nurture too. It’s not all about how we’re wired is it? But it’s obviously a big player in how things play out. So how do you work with these insights with clients?
Meredith Fuller: Individuals will come for counseling or careers counseling, and they’ll normally present with distress about their relationships at work or their relationships in the family, or with significant others or their difficulty in forming relationships, their concern about their careers and we’ll explore their lives. And I like to look at childhood through to the present and I like to understand their narrative. But I also like to look at what are their ability, skills, interests, values to get that full picture and what their hopes and dreams are in terms of who was this child? What did that child want in the future? And who is this adult now? What does this adult want?
And increasingly, I’m noticing that there’s so many problems with people who are not being valued and validated in their relationships and at work. And so, the thing that struck me about your titles about, this wholehearted and the shadow coming to work and the half-hearted working. The turns of phrase you used were just beautiful because they just encapsulated for me how people talk about work versus self.
And, I loved the way you gave a number of activities and exercises that they could reflect on, that helped them to see what the misalignment is and what’s changed. And that just sits so nicely with the sort of work that I do with people where something shifted. And if they don’t address what’s going on for them, invariably, they get sick or they have to sever relationships or rethink a lot of things.
So definitely there’s a sense that people are coming because they’re not happy. They’re in distress. They know something’s wrong. And they know that it’s very toxic for them, but they feel so stuck and they often feel very trapped and they seek some support from elsewhere because there’s something intolerable that’s going on.
Terri Connellan: That makes perfect sense with me cause certainly when I went through my journey, in my case, I reached out to a coach. There’s lots of different people or actions we can take when we feel that. But it’s that, as you say, that real sense of misalignment between who we are, what we want to do, what we want to be, and then what’s actually happening. And there’s lots of reasons for feeling stuck isn’t there.
Meredith Fuller: Oh, absolutely. And also the issue of age, life-stage. The sorts of issues people might present with when they’re 27 are going to be very different to what they’re presenting with at 57. So, that’s of concern to me that there’s quite a number of women I find who haven’t got the financial security that perhaps men might have. Historically, we know why that is. And they find themselves in this position where they’re being edged out of their organization, or they’re not ready to leave, but there’s nothing for them anymore. And they’re really at their prime and they might be in their forties, fifties, and sixties, and they’ve got so much to offer, but they just can’t get a gig anywhere so that’s a real concern. And the other one is that similarly with a lot of men who are really stuck, lamenting that nobody wants them and what are they going to do with the rest of their lives? People that have been chewed up and spat out. So that’s very common.
Terri Connellan: And it’s ironic as we get through life, we get more wisdom, more skills and, then we get in a situation where we feel of less value. So it’s a huge issue and it’s obviously something we’ve both really noticed in the work and, and I’ve experienced it myself. So it’s something obviously you’re seeing in your clients.
So in Wholehearted, in your work with clients, we both use psychological type and personality as like a compass or a framework or a way of seeing personal development. I’ve spoken about that in my book, and obviously your story is very different. So do you want to tell us more about your psychological type makeup and how your understanding of your personality and how you’re wired has helped you grow and evolve?
Meredith Fuller: And so my preference is for introverted, intuition, feeling, perceiving, [INFP] and I was aware when I was very young, that there were two parts of me, two aspects. There was the very introverted—I loved reading. I loved thinking, daydreaming and performing, and this would be my outgoing situations. So I started working very young. So I was in professional salaried work when I was four and a half. That was because I came from a single parent home and my father had left and there was no supporting parent benefit. My mother was very unwell. We also had in our house, her mother and her mother’s sister who had Down’s syndrome.
So my mother was quite trapped, as a caretaker and not really able to go off to work. So it was quite dire. But from when I was very young, three or four, I just love singing, dancing, chatting to strangers, that sort of thing. And so there was a photographer called Athol Smith who was very famous at the time.
And he and his wife, Bambi, wanted me to do some modelling with them. And so that began a modelling career and that also led into an acting career. So I had a situation where I loved all that. I could go off to work and earn some money to help my family, but I could do things I enjoyed, which was entertaining groups, being in plays, et cetera.
But I knew that was a part of me. And the other part of me needed that balance of time alone. And I always had that fascination by how people were different. Why were they different? What can I understand about that and how to make sense of all of that? I guess I’ve always been interested in these things and another connection we’ve had is with the the tarot.
So I started reading tarot when I was about 15 and that’s always been a lifelong interest in collecting decks and exploring symbolism and the unconscious. And so locating MBTI when I was working at a tertiary institution. It was about 97, 98. It seemed to me that things very much came together with that because here was something cogent.
It made sense in a way that I just felt encapsulated everything I’d been thinking about. So I seized on that and became very involved in doing something to help people train and bringing that to tertiary institutions, bringing that to organizations and then working one-to-one with clients.
And I found it’s been the most useful thing because it isn’t about people running around doing a questionnaire. It’s about understanding yourself through that self-reflection and observation and imbibing the theory yourself. So, it’s got a lot more to offer than say, there’s a lot of tests and little questionnaires and things people do, and they’re quite simplistic.
And of course the fewer categories, the less comprehensive and the less good affinity. So there’s something about having 16 types that’s so robust and it’s something that people can grasp very easily and then it can help inform, well, who am I with? How do I work? What do I need? Where am my gaps in communicating? So it’s something very practical and very common sense.
Terri Connellan: That really aligns with how I feel too. First it’s making sense of your own personality and your own view of the world, I think often is part of the lens through which we see type. And then, in my role as a coach or your role as a psychologist using those skills to help others to see what your strengths are, where you’ve got blind spots, what you might be missing, because we all just naturally have certain ways of seeing the world that’s so natural to us, we think it’s the same for everybody.
Meredith Fuller: That’s a really good point you’re raising because obviously one of the issues about working in my field is that we see the people who don’t fit, who have got distress, who have got concerns, who do feel different. So , I do have a skewed sample in that sense.
So invariably, what I find is there are certain types who come for counselling and careers counselling and my husband, who’s a psychotherapist psychologist, he finds the same thing. So, we tend to work more with the introverted, intuitive, thinking or feeling perceiving or judging types than perhaps the more mainstream types.
And that interests me as well, that I can actually reframe a pretty horrible life experience for someone, and they can actually celebrate what is unique about them and then work to their strengths rather than feeling unwanted in our society.
Terri Connellan: That’s really powerful work. I think type’s such a valuable tool for reframing, for understanding. I like the idea of it as a compass, as Jung used that idea of the compass and the framework for taking us forward. So, thanks for those insights. You mentioned tarot, which is another love we share. I write about tarot as a tool and a support for wayfinding and personal insight in my book. And I know you have been collecting decks and have lots of insights. What are your thoughts about tarot as a personal development practice?
Meredith Fuller: I love the visual aspect for people. It’s very clear that some people are very auditory and they need to have deep conversation and, and music might be really significant in how I might work with them. For some people it’s visual. So films, things like tarot, help them get the awareness, get the insight, help them to name what’s going on for themselves, and also really help them connect with their unconscious.
And the thing that I particularly like about tarot is that it sits so beautifully with doing dreamwork and how in our dreams, we understand that present, past and future are interconnected. We don’t have linear time, that images can be constructed or archetypal. There are messages in our dreams.
And similarly with working with your tarot and working with your unconscious, you’re actually helping yourself to appreciate what’s going on for you in a way that enables you to perhaps have a few more resources in the moment when you’re feeling lost, uncertain, confused. So it’s something very tangible. And it’s also something that I really appreciate because I love ancient cultures, ancient religions, ancient symbolism, and also futuristic work. So I love how it just seems to combine all of those.
And it’s a great tool for quickly communicating with someone else. It’s a little bit like the way we use type that, you know, we can say, oh, you know, my preference is X. So suddenly we understand a lot very quickly. And similarly with cards, oh look, I keep getting certain cards, what’s going on with me. It’s a good way of quickly absorbing and integrating information that helps us.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. So I love two things you said there, firstly, about both tools,type and tarot, or both frameworks are ways of tapping into that unconscious, like what’s beneath the surface or what’s less conscious for us.
And then secondly, how they both like languages or symbolic systems or languages, we can become more fluent in. I love that idea because they do. At a type conference, for example, when we’re together, I just love it. We all understand, at different levels, but it’s sort of a language we can speak.
And as you say, it’s the same with tarot. When I talk about the Six of Swords and the Eight of Cups in the book, I hope people who don’t know that can also get a way in. But for those who understand that, they will bring that understanding to that book. So it just means we’ve got a language for communicating.
Meredith Fuller: It’s interesting. There was a line in the book that was really interesting for me, that you made that I hadn’t seen anywhere else before. And it was very significant. I think, as a teaching tool for a lot of people who are looking at this business of career change. You’re talking about, you’re leaving success. So you’re leaving things that are working, you’re leaving things and you’re going off and you made the comment, you’re actually choosing to leave the successful things.
And that was a very significant statement because for a lot of people where I find they’re stuck is: I earn X amount of dollars and I don’t want to learn less. I’ve been doing this for so long and I’m a partner or a senior administrator or an executive, or I’m a X, Y, Z ed. I can’t leave all this, all this work. I can’t stop and start something where I might earn less or not have my status or not have the recognition. And that can actually paralyze people.
And so we’re looking at the duality of, well, on the one hand, you’re saying you feel dead inside, you hate going to work. You feel there’s so much inside you that’s not being expressed. You’re bored with what you do, even though you’re busy, you feel trapped. And yet you’re saying I can’t let go, you know, do I stay, do I let go?
And there’s something about the way you’ve talked about this card and saying, you’re actually choosing to leave your success. It was just a beautiful way of describing an active decision. And I think that’s very empowering for people who are frightened about letting go of material things, or letting go of how much work they’ve put into something to begin something different.
And with that thread, you also talk about we bring ourselves to every new thing we do. So it’s just a different iteration of what we’ve done before, but some of those phrases will resonate with a lot of people. And it will help give them a boost to say, I can do this. I’m choosing to do this.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that idea of abandoned success, and the image of the Eight of Cups. If you have a look at a fairly traditional pack the cups stacked up, and then a person’s choosing to walk away from the full cups. Yeah. And to me, it’s about identity. It’s about how much of our identity we’ve invested in that role, that position, the money that we earn, whatever it might be. And then that choosing to find a new path is incredibly difficult.
Meredith Fuller: I guess what makes it hard is our society doesn’t understand. So when people say I’m having a change, I’m leaving X or, I was doing a more senior role, but I’m going back to do a more specialist role in the same organization, or I’ve worked long and hard for this and I’ve got all these qualifications and so forth, but I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m doing something else. And how other people really try to interfere and say, you’ll regret it. You shouldn’t do it. What if you can’t get another job and everyone will laugh at you and what a stupid thing to do. And they’re actually, I think often frightened because they don’t want that other person to go off and be happy because they’re not happy either.
So a lot of investment in keeping the status quo. So I think the way you’ve talked about the Eight of Cups in that sense, that it’s a really sound decision to choose to walk away from amazing success, because you know you will have different success and the success you will have is more congruent with who you truly are. There’s something in a lot of those comments that you’ve made that I just think for people reading the book will strike such a chord.
Terri Connellan: Thank you for those comments. I really appreciate it because it’s something I really felt personally. And my aim in writing the book was to help cause when I went through it, I also felt a bit lost. And there weren’t a lot of frameworks in writing the book. It was working through what I experienced, but then trying to provide some anchors for others.
Meredith Fuller: That was another thing. I did want to mention this because I was very struck by how you wrote the book. What’s unique about your book is that you talk about your own process, including everything you did, every book you read, every person you saw and you very generously talk about what you took from each experience. And it’s almost like a little road map of, here’s a whole lot of books you can buy or types of people you can go and see, and how a coach might be different to a therapist.
And there’s so much that you give in that that is so helpful because traditionally when people write self-help books or here’s your way of looking at your career or change or whatever. They’re very much about, well, this is the system and this is what you follow. And, they don’t compare and contrast other techniques or things that they’ve struck. They don’t suggest that very wide exploration and they don’t talk so much about the internal distress.
They’re much more about, okay, so here’s your problem. So here’s step one and that’ll go to step three and then you’ll be at five and then you’ll be done. And so there’s something quite desiccated about reading those books. Whereas with yours, a) because you’re so honest and open about everything that happened to you, people can feel that you understand them. But the way you talk about how you made decisions about, will I go here? Will I read that? What did that trigger? What did that mean? Why is this person good at this? It’s so much more comprehensive for people to say, okay, well, I didn’t like that book and I didn’t like that person. But you know, it’s like a hairdresser. I’ll go and find one that cuts the hair how I want. Thanks very much.
You’ve really given people permission to play with the way through. And I can certainly see how this kind of approach has been missing in the past because there are a lot of books came out in the eighties and the nineties. It’s almost like we get waves of things happening, but they never really hit the spot about people who had this profound sense of emptiness and loss and confusion and concern.
And they didn’t help people who couldn’t just snappily work through each exercise and tick off all the goals and have it neat and tidy. And, I like it cause it’s messy and our lives are messy. And you’ve really captured that for people, which is nice. And that sense that you have with your work is, well, it is going to be unexpected. We don’t know how this is all going away, but it could be this. It could be that. It could be something else, but there’s growth in it and there’s excitement. And there’s learning in this curiosity, and there’s a sense of mastery rather than having a person feel well look, I’m hopeless, even the help books don’t help me cause I’m so hopeless. So to me, you’ve really picked up on a book for our time.
Terri Connellan: Thank you. I really appreciate that cause often when you’re writing a personal narrative like that, it’s that challenge of sharing your experiences a bit like, show don’t tell. I was just chatting about this in another interview, the difference between telling people to do something versus this is what I went through. And here’s what I suggest, which I thinks a more powerful way to go. And you’re also an author. So tell about your books and the topics you focused on in your writing career.
Meredith Fuller: So I’ve written a number of books that were more academic, but the one I did that was more mainstream was called Working with Bitches and it was identifying the eight types of nasty people that you find, nasty women and how to deal with them. And why I did that was, again, part of the theme of what was happening with my work is women were saying I’m really struggling with a particular woman at work who might be my support person, my boss, my team leader, my colleague, and they were being undermined or they were being distressed and they couldn’t understand what was going on.
They didn’t know how to manage it. And they were being so triggered. It was causing great alarm. So I wanted to identify what was happening with these themes. So I did some research and worked on about 2000 cases and put together types based on all of the materials, the data that I gathered and then worked through, well, how could people deal with that in a way that was safe and in a way that also appreciated their personality structure. Because usually the people who were coming to see me were very much feeling preferred women who avoided conflict, who were frightened by power and control issues and were really getting decimated at work or in relationships. Often it might be something about a mother-in-law or a sister-in-law or somebody’s sister or something.
So it was a way of validating that what they were feeling was true, because there’s been such a theme of, oh, you can never complain about another woman. We women have to stick together because we’re all a homogenous group and men are the enemy. So you can’t say that you’re struggling with a woman. So they’re actually being silenced before they could even articulate what was going on for them. So it was a way of appreciating that all genders walk up and down a continuum of nice to nasty and what you can do to manage that better.
Terri Connellan: Oh, it sounds a really practical book cause that’s something a lot of us experience in different ways, but maybe don’t have any reference points to make sense of all of that. And often when that happens, we tend to think, oh, it’s us. Is that something you’ve come across?
Meredith Fuller: Absolutely, and of course the other thing with that too, is that often it’s about different personality types. And if you’re not as aware of your own style, you certainly not going to be able to identify what someone else’s style is or where there could be a mismatch or a misunderstanding, or how you could broach that to make it a little more palatable at work.
And one of the key findings in my work, and this has also been researched by Ian Ball, who is our colleague at AusAPT. Interestingly enough back in the day, many, eons ago, I used to work at a university with Ian where he was Head of the Psychology department. So I already knew him before we found ourselves back together in our association.
His research found that while there are far more feeling preferred females, for women in the workplace who had a more senior role, they usually had a thinking preference. So if there’s only about 25% of females have a thinking preference, 75% of those females will be in a senior role in the workplace.
And one of the things that was very clear to me was that people were coming to me with this terrible distress about a thinking preferred manager who actually wasn’t being a bitch, wasn’t being horrible, was actually really trying to help them grow and develop, monitor them, train them, work well with them, but there was such a misunderstanding about the way they went about this. They were really at cross purposes.
So it was also part of my book to say, hang on, maybe that person you’re having trouble with, isn’t a bitch. Maybe it’s something about you you have to look at. So let’s have a look at how you can work better with those people. And I certainly used to find that working in organizations. I’ve done a lot of work in banks and legal firms and universities, where there tend to be more thinking preferred females in positions of leadership and authority. And often they would be having difficulties with their feeling preferred females. And it really was, talking two different worlds, two different languages and so much misunderstanding.
And there were some things you could do to make it work and that really excites me. And again, one of the things I loved in your book, as a thinking preferred female, you operate very much using your feeling and your thinking preferences. And you talk about your integration of those things. And this is so important in terms of, I think all of us men and women being able to access all the parts of ourselves. So I thought you handled that very well. And one of the things I’ve noticed as, I guess walking the talk in your role as President of our association, I noticed that you do the very thing we talk about. You identify well, who are the people on the team, or who the members, or who am I working with? What do those people need to do their best? How can I respond to that, so that I honor the difference that I have around me and I see you actively do that. So I see you working very hard to connect with your committees and your staff and your members and your groups and whatever, and doing it well. And so to me again, there’s that sense of, okay, so here’s someone who writes a book and she actually practices what she’s talking about and I see it. So that was another thing that struck me about what you’ve achieved in this work.
So it also sat really nicely with me about knowing that, it’s very good for many women, I believe to understand a little more about what the thinking preferred woman’s doing, because, historically, that’s been really a problem for thinking preferred females. They’ve had a terrible time at school. They’ve often had a dreadful time when they not yet in a position of authority and they’re struggling. It’s one of those things where the more we understand our gender, the better, and you seem to be saying on our journey to become all of these aspects, let’s understand how it might be played out as we sometimes swing from one extreme to the other till we find that fulcrum balance and why it is important for us to take the time to consider that innermost part of our souls and how we are who we bring to work. We can’t divorce ourselves from all of that.
What happened for me with the book [Wholehearted] was thinking, well, I’m not able to see as many people. I can’t see them in person. We’re doing Zoom work. It’s a bit tricky holding people. Here’s a resource that people can work through that I would say is safe, trustworthy. It doesn’t humiliate anyone. It doesn’t cause people to feel stupid if they can’t work through the exercises or there’s no problem about working through the Companion Workbook and the book. And it’s something that gives us some dialogue when we have a couple of weeks gap between sessions. So I thought you’ve really come up with a tool, right when we must need something.
There used to be a number of books. Everyone would get one every year, like What Color is my Parachute? They were very superficial and they really didn’t hit this spot about people are really saying, who am I really and how do I want to live my life? What does my life stand for? And how am I in relation to others? And so those very fundamental questions and the way we’re changing work. We’re changing work to be, as you would appreciate, most small business run by women, most new business women setting up, most people going off becoming specialists or consultants who are collapsing who they work with at different times.
This is the way that we’re working and doing several jobs in a year. And just going with the flow. And historically, a lot of the books about careers and development just didn’t take into account the new way that work is emerging. So, I’ve been really happy to say, well, here’s a tool that I can recommend both to men and women, interestingly enough, and get them to work through. And then when we talk, they’ve had the chance to really work through some thoughts themselves and that really adds to our work together. So I’ve been really struck by how you’ve put, certainly your understanding of type in, but also your understanding about how organizations have been working and where they need to be working in the future. So it’s got a real breath of fresh air to it.
Terri Connellan: Oh, thank you. And I was really appreciative too of your comments that it’s a book you can use with clients, that idea of particularly in times when we’re not having as much, face-to-face, it’s something people can take away. And it was certainly designed to be part of a whole that people can work through the workbook, read the main book, have their own reflections, have space, create their own ways of working through it. But have a mix as we’ve talked about before of meandering, but also structure to work through. And I guess that’s the teacher in me as well as INTJ coming out. So, yeah, it’s designed to be that sort of self coaching, self-leadership guide as well, supported by also having a face to face.
Meredith Fuller: Yes, that was another thing I liked about it. We want people to sit with the uncertainty. We want people to explore symbolism and dreamwork and art and literature and film and tarot and everything possible. But we want them to be able to do it in a way that they can then integrate that into their everyday life and this helps them do that. Whereas some sort of new age materials, there’s no relationship to get up each day and go to work, come home, and you have to earn an income and you have to feed yourself. And, you have to be in relationship with other people who aren’t on the same journey and all of this sort of thing.
So I felt that you provided those safe walls if you like so there was plenty of space to bounce around in this, but you knew that you were being held in a very caretaking way while you went about exploring all of these, for some people, very new ways of looking at their careers, particularly looking at tarot cards, for example.
Terri Connellan: Exactly. And I think from looking at your body of work, which is a concept I talk about in the book, that all the skills, all the work that we do, the volunteer work, all the different work that we do, often that idea of having multiple sources of income, being a multi passionate, multipotentialite, is very much embraced, I think, by how I’ve moved and certainly it’s embraced in your life. So with all that amazing body of work you have over time and what I also hear from clients is sometimes having lots of passions, people can feel overwhelmed, by which way to go, what to do, what advice would you give to others who are also looking to embrace their multi passionate body of work and interests?
Meredith Fuller: So I had an INTP mother, which is a great mother to have, so she was quite unique and unusual, and her attitude was, you find your own way, Meredith. Value education and trust yourself, back yourself and so for me, I’ve always felt a little different from a lot of people because I’ve always known exactly what I wanted to do is from when I was very young.
So I’ve never felt, oh, there’s too many things, or I don’t know which one to do first. What I’ve always done is I’ve said to myself, I have to go with what’s most important to me at the moment. So what’s the most burning, exciting thing for me now. And I know there’ll always be plenty of time to either come back to something or do it, postpone it and do it later, or do a little bit of it, stop, do something else. I’ve never felt, aw gee, you can’t play with it all. I just knew you could never do it all at the same time. So I find that my question always will be when there are so many things I enjoy doing, how do I choose? I’ll go with what sits inside of me being best, right thing that I have the most energy for. So for me, it’s often about energy.
So I do a lot of pro bono work for clients, particularly cause I work in the creative arts a lot. There are a lot of people in the creative arts, who’ve got no money and I often see a number of those people for nothing. And how do I choose? Because so many people, how do you choose? And something will happen in that engagement with that individual that I’ll feel, and I’ll go with that. So for example, at the moment, this is a funny story, but it’s a good example of how do you choose what you do? We mainly do a lot of our house maintenance ourselves, but in a two story house, there was no way my 70 year old husband was getting up a ladder.
So we had a housepainter come to do the top bit. And he brought his son with him to help hold the ladder. And they were talking and his son had wanted to be an artist and he was really lost. And he was very distressed and there was something in this young man that I felt. So I’ve now been working with him for some months. So he comes every week and we’re exploring his move towards becoming an artist, how he will go about choosing a course to do, how we’ll go about earning some money, to be able to be a student, to purchase all his materials, how he works in the field.
And his sense of identity and who he’s becoming and how he deals with issues because we’ve all got issues, obviously. And because he’s such an aware person, he has a lot to work through. So there was something I felt in him where I felt he had something very special and I wanted to nurture that. And he’s a very humble person and he’s a very respectful person. He’s got qualities as well. So I’ve really felt drawn to working with him. So there’ll be something about that. Or if I’m choosing a play, I want to write, it’ll be a burning issue that I’ve got some energy for. Nothing that might be commercially successful.
It’s always about what I’m interested in and that’s what I’ll do. And if friends come to me and say, how about a project? I’m doing this. Are you interested? Again, it’s always going to be because I either love working with those people or I love the issue and I’m happy to just trust my own sense of where my energy is saying to go.
And it’s very much like that Eight of Cups card. Often it means I walk away from successful things because there’s something new I want to do and different I want to do that the energy is there for. And I know I’m not saying goodbye to everything forever because there’s plenty of time. So it’s something about noticing what’s the spark, what’s the energy, what’s the curiosity. And if you follow that, they’ll always be a few things that bubble up to the very top, rather than everything. And I really love this notion of, just because you’re really good at something, you don’t have to keep doing it. Do something else.
Terri Connellan: Hmm. I love that too. I think that’s great advice because just some of the people I’ve worked with, what you’re saying resonates. And some of them are INFPs too, which is interesting, it’s that idea of just so many passions, so many interests and they compete. But I think that idea of being more attuned to what you’re drawn to and prioritizing that. I’m also hearing you say almost taking a bit of a project approach to things, to help compartmentalize, I guess?
Meredith Fuller: Yeah, I think it’s really important to compartmentalize because I notice for me, if I want to fit a lot of things, I couldn’t keep doing too much of one thing because there wouldn’t be the space. It’s almost like asking yourself, how many days a week are you fit for counseling? How many days a week are you fit for writing? How many days a week are you fit to do radio interviews or whatever it is, and work out roughly what those clusters will look like, and then be really strong.
So I’ll be able to say, well, I counsel on these days so if you can’t fit in with me, sorry, I’ll refer you to someone else because I can’t keep stretching across taking the space from other projects that I really believe in. Because if I do that, I’ll end up getting sick. I’ll end up trying to overstretch and I won’t manage, and it won’t work.
Terri Connellan: So there’s a couple of questions I’m going to ask podcast guests as we go through. And, this being the Create Your Story podcast, it’s a big question, but I’m interested to see just what comes up for you when you’re asked the question, how have you created your story over your lifetime?
Meredith Fuller: Okay. I’ve created my story by allowing myself to sit a bit away from the mainstream. And I’ve enabled myself to listen to what my heart wants to do, even when it seems at odds with what the sensible thing to do is, or the smartest thing to do is, and almost like back myself, even when it looked ridiculous, because I told myself when I was very young, there’ll be a pattern, I don’t understand it yet, but there’ll be a pattern that will make sense to me, but it’s something that I’m doing that’s going to be unique to me. So I can’t be impacted by what everyone else thinks I should do or what one should do.
I have to trust that little voice in me that says, I know I’m here to do something unique for me. And I’ve always done that and to my detriment often, but it’s like I’m absolutely convinced for me that what’s helped me is by wanting to go off and do whatever it is I want to explore because I’m curious about it. Even if it’s not fashionable or even if it’s way too early and then once I’ve understood it or mastered it or done enough, I don’t have to keep doing that. I want to do something else. So a little bit like saying, yeah, just because you’re good at something you don’t have to keep doing it, do something else, as long as it’s what you’re interested in and you believe in it and it sits with your values.
And my values very much came from my childhood and my upbringing, which was about, to care for people and to care for relationships and to care for what the purpose is that we’re here for. And in a deeper sense, in a much deeper sense. And I’ve always appreciated self-expression. And so for me, creating my story was about saying, well, okay if I can trust myself to follow what my interests are and use that as my guide and not be swayed by what everybody else says you should do, or how everyone else goes about doing things, that’s going to keep me most aligned with my true self. And that’s what I’ll follow. And it was pretty clear to me very early on that I didn’t have a lot of the values that mainstream society seems to have.
I believe that if you do things that are really important to you and you do them very well, somehow you’ll be rewarded and it may not be quid pro quo or tit for tat or something, but somehow it’ll work out. If you are transparent and if you do believe in what you do, and if you do respect other people in how you go about that. You know, that whole thing, isn’t it about freedom but freedom as long as you don’t impact on other people’s freedom.
So that’s been a bit of a narrative for me. And it’s almost like if I had to say, well, where does all that come from? I’m convinced it came from being a little girl who used to believe in her dreams and sitting around daydreaming and imagining the future and imagining things way ahead of time and backing that instead of what was just literally right in front of me.
And that came from coming from a family where we didn’t have a lot, it was very difficult. So we had a lot of trauma in the family, a lot of poverty in the family. But what I had with my INTP mother was a woman who said, use your brains and you can help other people. Use your brains and you’ll find a way to construct something positive out of whatever happens. And I saw her do that. So I had a very good role model in my mother. And I also had a very good role model in reading because I love to write, I was always reading books.
I just found that I was far more interested in thinking big picture future than I ever was in what was going on in the here and now. So it was some something about a knowing that I had and that I couldn’t not know once you have that feeling. And also what was good for me, if this makes sense, it’s like I lived my life backwards.
So if you start working at four, that’s a long time that you’re in the workplace, and if you’re very famous, when you’re a child, well, you’ve sort of been there, done that. It doesn’t matter. It’s like I didn’t have to build up to anything. It’s like, well, I’ve already ticked off this and I’ve ticked off that and I’ve ticked off something else.
And so there’s so many things that I had done that really didn’t concern me at all that I could just go along my own merry way, do what I liked because I didn’t have to prove anything. If that made sense.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Thank you. It’s just fascinating to hear how, with all those different things in the mix, how you created your story to where you are now. So thank you for that. So in Wholehearted, I share 15 wholehearted self-leadership tips, particularly for women, but for all people. So I’m interested in what your top wholehearted self-leadership tips might be for women.
Meredith Fuller: The first one is I believe that it’s a good idea to have a small group of people with you, like your clan or friends or colleagues who you trust, that you feel safe with and who have similar shared values. I take that very seriously. I won’t work on projects with people that I don’t feel that we’re aligned about our values and honesty, transparency, trust, loyalty, all those things are really important to me.
So, that’s a very important issue about who do you connect with. I believe that it’s important to work on communication. So, if I’m going to do it, I need to know how I feel. So I’ll do a lot of checking. How am I feeling? What’s being triggered in me? What do I need to do about that? Can I talk to someone? How do I do that? So in my life I’ve always been keen to look for wise counsel. When I was a child, I got to figure out what I would look for in a partner, because how would I know I didn’t have a father. We were very isolated in our home. There weren’t very many male role models.
So I read all the classics when I was in primary school and I thought, I don’t want all the exciting men. I want all the nice men that I’m reading about in these classics. So I thought: these are the qualities I want in a man. I want a nice man. And I got it from the books. And then as I got older, I realized that I want to understand myself and that will help me understand others.
So anything that would help me do the best I can for myself, I will do. So I went into therapy. I went into supervision. As a psychologist, I think it’s important that we do our own therapy and we do our own supervision. So, whether you go to coaches or whoever you go to, it’s going to someone where you can actually explore your process. So I think that’s really important.
And of course, reading, I’m always reading millions of books so I think that’s important. The other thing I think is working out very simply, what do you need for wellness? So, I’m a diabetic, I’ve got a lot of health issues. I have to say part of my day is managing my diabetes, is going to appointments and is to understand that as I get older, I have less energy than I did when I was younger because of that.
So therefore I have to really cherry pick my projects. So I think, know what your health is. One of the biggest problems I’ve seen in nearly every woman who’s come to me is they push themselves way too far. They work too long hours. Doing work that’s killing them and they can’t stop. And so I think it’s really important to say in the week, how much space have you got for work? How much do you need for sleep? How much do you need for your internal life? How much do you need for your relationships and make that pie and make it work?
And I’d also do that with being strict about those boundaries. So both Brian and I, because we’re helpers and we’re feelers, we’re busy. So people come to helping, feeling, busy people and you need to learn to say no. And so while it would be nice to do everything everyone wants you to do, I can’t. So, be really clear about how do you cluster it. So it might be for me, I work in clusters of time. So it might be two days for this and all night for that and a weekend for that. And that’s how I like to work. Other people it might be well mornings isfor this and afternoons is for that. So know what your best rhythm is and then be really strict about how you protect that. And don’t keep saying, oh, I’ll just let this one in. I’ll just let that one in because you’ll get overloaded and you get sick and then, you’re no good to anyone.
So I think they’re probably the key things for me, but, really overall, it’s something about, got to know who you are. You got to know what’s important to you. You got to know what you’re here for. What’s your purpose. And the threads will probably stay the same, although the execution of that will shift over time.
And so you have to keep saying, does this matter to me? Is this engaging me? Am I growing in this? Am I learning in this? Am I sharing with others with this? What’s the point of me doing this and doing it because you want to do it, you believe in it and you love it. So they’re probably the most important things, but you know, it be sensible. Like you might have to say to yourself, well, how much money do I need to earn to live for the week? Okay. I need to earn x dollars. How many hours a week can I possibly work x hours? Well, what do I need to earn per hour to do that? And what will I do to get that? And then if I’m prepared to say, I’ll do a day for that, then that gives me three days for something else. Okay. That’s fine. So it’s not like a childish, I’ll just do what I like, blow everyone else. It’s about making choices and decisions that give the bulk of your time to what you love and you think is very important, but also that you’re mindful that you do live in a society and you do have to buy food and pay rent and, you know, whatever. So something about, honouring, not only yourself, but the other in relationships.
Terri Connellan: It’s a rich body of knowledge, honed from all your experiences and all your client work too. So thank so much for sharing that. And thanks so much for your time today. It’s been a fantastic conversation and I’m sure the listeners will get so many gems of wisdom and prompts to think about themselves. And thank you also for your comments and kind insights about Wholehearted, my book as well, really appreciate that and your support. So, Meredith, where can people find more about you and your body of work online?
Meredith Fuller: My website’s MeredithFuller.com.au. That’s probably a good place to start.
Terri Connellan: That’s great. And you’ve got so much on there about all the things you’re up to your books, your work with your husband, Brian, which we didn’t talk about so much, but he’s a filmmaker, psychologist as well, and your partnership is an incredible part of your life as well. So we’ll pop the links to Meredith’s key work in the show notes and thanks everyone for listening and thanks so much Meredith.
Meredith Fuller
About Meredith Fuller
Meredith’s concurrent careers have included author, playwright, columnist & media commentator, talkback radio guest, theatre director & producer, TV co-host, actor, psychological profiler and trainer. As a psychologist in private practice, providing counselling and career development to individuals and groups, she has also consulted to organisations on professional development and interpersonal skills for over 40 years. She ran a university careers counselling service for 12 years and has been a sessional lecturer in postgraduate courses in vocational psychology at several universities.
You hone the craft of writing through practice; it does not arise from understanding the mind alone. But the practice is easier and more enjoyable when you approach it in a way that complements your mind’s behavior.
Anne Janzer, The Writer’s Process
My friend and writing buddy Beth Cregan recommended Anne Janzer’s The Writer’s Process, so I downloaded the audiobook and listened on my travels. I loved it! Then I bought the ebook and worked through it again closely for a presentation on personality and writing. Recently the beautiful hard copy arrived because I want this book close by to inspire me as I write and so I can read it again and again.
As it has inspired me so much, I share a few insights from the book here and encourage you to read it!
I’ve read MANY books about writing over the years. What I love about The Writer’s Process is that it looks at the cognitive aspects of writing. Drawing on research from cognitive science, Anne Janzer helps us understand how the brain works in the writer’s process. With that insight, we can work more consciously in partnership with our brain in our creative processes. We can craft our own writer’s process and actively guide our creativity in a more informed and self-aware way.
The more mysterious aspects of writing, the numinous, the inspiration, the moments when the blood flows and the writing is white hot are exciting. But that is just one part of the process to be combined with other more structural and pragmatic elements. Working in a metacognitive way with our brain through all steps of the writer’s process is a practical way to create what we desire to shape.
Here are a few key tips from The Writer’s Process – but read the book in its entirety! It’s a gift of insight from Anne Janzer to writers and creatives.
Know and use your inner gears
Janzer explains two key inner gears in the writer’s process: the Scribe and the Muse.
If you’ve worked through a long-haul writing journey, as I have with my book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition, you will know the parts that make up the writer’s process feel very different. Some steps like crafting those first creative insights are more aligned to the Muse. Other steps like editing and proofreading are more the work of the Scribe.
Getting clear on these two different perspectives and their associated writing skills has helped immensely. Here is Anne Janzer’s succinct summation:
Within each of us, the Scribe summons our verbal skills to find the right words, assembles them in grammatically correct sentences, and creates sensible structures. The Scribe manages deadlines and gets the work done.
But writer also access intuition, creativity, and empathy. These processes are the domain of the Muse.
The Writer’s Process page 17
This is something we intuitively know and, as a teacher of writing, I was aware of and taught these unique skills. But the framework of the Scribe and the Muse provides a way to move practically with awareness through the steps of the writing process. Critically, they have different kinds of attention:
MUSE: creative, wide-ranging attention, including periods of rest, incubation
When we are drafting, ideally the Muse and Scribe work together in a state of flow.
Understanding these different skill-sets and types of attention means we can harness them. We can draw on the interplay between them in our creative process. Janzer’s practical tips for leading ourselves help us negotiate through the ebb and flow of the demanding cognitive task of writing, especially when working on a longer project.
Understand the 7 steps of the writing process
Anne Janzer provides a very useful 7 step model of the writing process using the analogy of bread-making. She aligns these writing (and baking) steps with the inner gears of the writing process.
Getting clearer on this writing process, one we often cycle back and forth through, has been incredibly useful. I like to have a map, compass or framework for anything I am doing. This overall flow of the writing process and being more cognisant of the inner gears at work has supported me as I’ve moved through writing my book:
1 Research (Scribe)
2 Let the ideas incubate (Muse)
3 Structure the piece (Scribe)
4 Write the first draft (Scribe + Muse)
5 Rest before revision (Scribe rests; Muse may choose to return)
6 Revise and proofread (Scribe leads; occasional Muse input)
7 Publish (Scribe)
It’s powerful to see the process in this way and where the Muse and Scribe fit, especially the role of incubation. We often think we are procrastinating or delaying if we are not always in forward movement with writing. Through the analogy of writing with bread-making, Janzer highlights the importance of letting ideas or drafts rest. Just as bread needs time for the ingredients to activate and integrate, so we need to allow time to reflect on what we have written.
Sometimes, we need to stop writing so more things can come to light in our life. In writing Wholehearted, there was a long period of incubation before the deeper editing process, including reaching out for support. It felt uncomfortable, but now I can see the work required it to be integrated and complete. Knowing this is part of the cognitive and creative process of writing assists us in making sense of the uncertainty and confusion as we let our work rest and ideas incubate.
Apply cognitive science for personal writing productivity
Here are a few further insights for The Writer’s Process that helped in my personal writing productivity and process and in coaching work with others:
Managing multiple writing projects with awareness
The idea of having different cognitive processes at work and tasks has helped with my creative productivity and planning. Janzer encourages us to use the insights from the inner gears and the writing process to stagger our work. It’s challenging to work on the same type of cognitive tasks across different projects at the same time. So look at it another way!
Instead, stagger the start times so the projects are in different phases: research, drafting, incubation, revision. Create the right work environment conditions for each type of work. If you are freshest mentally in the morning, do the drafting first thing. Schedule research and revision for other parts of the day, and remember to leave unstructured time to ponder what you’re learning in the research.
The Writer’s Process page 142
This insight was gold! Now I think about how I structure and schedule my writing in terms of the phases of various writing projects and the processes involved. I’m considering how and when my brain works best and have more self-mastery by choosing the gears and timing. Having multiple writing projects on the go is demanding, but this framework helps us work with more ease and insight. Projects can influence each other. We choose what we work on depending on the project phase, processes and our personality preferences. We can work on the research for one project, the draft for another and the editing of a third, and build a writing schedule around this. Life-changing!
Reflecting on how cognitive science writing insights link with psychological type
I have also reflected on the insights from cognitive science in The Writer’s Process and the link with psychological type. I presented a session on ‘What 100 Years of Type can Teach us About Writing’ for the British Association of Psychological Type in April this year. Reviewing the field of personality and writing over the years was fascinating and yielded insights into how we go about the writer’s process in different ways as individuals. Our preferences influence how we draft, for example. Some of us would never speak to another person when we draft and work out what to write. It’s a totally introverted and internal journey. Others enjoy a conversation or brainstorming session with others to get ideas and inspiration to write.
It’s valuable to think about how we can bring together the cognitive aspects and our personal cognitive preferences to navigate and flex through the writing process. Insights from the two fields together yield practical tips to help us move through the writing process successfully, especially when we are in it for the long haul!
We might look at:
What is our natural way of writing through the writing process?
What happens when that doesn’t work or we feel blocked?
How can we use knowledge of the gears, the steps and our own preferences to more strongly lead ourselves through the writing process?
How can we get to know our unique writer’s process – that mesh of psychological preferences, process and what we desire to craft?
These reflections can lead to more productive and enjoyable creative experiences and journeys.
Writing is intensely personal. Productive writers develop strategies that suit their individual personalities and environments.
The writer’s Process, p1.
Next steps and thank you
Anne Janzer’s book and my further exploration promoted exciting insights I’m applying and sharing with others in my coaching. Join me and my friend and writing partner, Beth Cregan on The Writing Road Trip in 2022.
Join me in Personality Stories Coaching to get deeper insight into your personality preferences for creativity, writing and all aspects of life. This includes how to honour and work with your strengths and stretch into your less preferred areas to grow.
I’m grateful to Anne Janzer for so many fascinating and supportive insights about the writer’s process. It’s a valuable read with many complex cognitive science ideas clearly articulated. The frameworks are practical for writing more consciously and moving through the writer’s process with clarity.
I encourage you to read The Writer’s Process to inspire and support your writing process. And please share your insights and thoughts in the comments!
Images by others used with thanks to the creators: [ID in Alt text]
