True to Quiet Writing’s focus, I have been writing quietly for the past few years. Following my partner’s sudden tragic death in late 2022, it was all I could do to keep moving ahead. Grief affects cognitive space immensely and creativity has often felt like a far off land. Writing behind the scenes has been an anchor and guide throughout this time. But as I wrote recently: ‘It’s the beginning of a new writing time‘. It’s time to reignite my writing in a more committed way and sharing it through re-engaging with craft and community. The Rose Scott Women Writers Festival in late June with its suite of introductory workshops was the perfect place to start this new journey.
As the Festival Event page highlights, this is ‘Australia’s only literary festival run, owned and operated by women for women writers.’ It was held at The Women’s Club in Sydney, which has a long history as a safe and nurturing place for woman and ideas. It opened in 1901 to ‘fill some of the needs of intellectual and academic women’. It was the perfect place to focus on women and hearing women’s voices as I made this step into reconnecting with my writing history and voice after a tender and difficult time.
Here are some personal reflections, learning and highlights from the Festival. This post covers the three workshops leading into the Festival and the following post (to come) focuses on the main Festival event.
Workshops and re-engaging with writing
The Festival began with three workshops in the days leading up the main event. I was determined to make the most of my festival attendance, so signed up for all of them. Plus, the topics were right in my zone of interest and craft needs. They drew a wide cross-section of women with some already engaged in writing projects and poetry. Others saw the workshops as a way of making a start or reconnecting with writing. The workshops provided the opportunity for an intimate encounter with the authors and their areas of expertise.
The writing workshops were:
Writing Historical Fiction: Finding the Story, Finding Your Voice – Cindy Davies with Dr Judith Chapman
From Archive to Memoir: Crafting Life Stories – Tess Scholfield-Peters with Michaela Kowalski
Each workshop began with a conversation about the author and their work, followed by a practical writing workshop. Here’s an overview and what I experienced and gained from each workshop.
Writing Historical Fiction
Historical Fiction is a passion of mine as a reader and writer. I have a 36,009 word draft of a historical fiction novel. Writing those words in November, 2022, I reached that word count on 25 November, 2022. I was taking part in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, aiming to write 50,000 words in a month as a way of finally starting the novel I longed desired to write. Happy with that progress, I wrote on 25 November 2025:
I’ve accepted that 36,000 words is a decent and strong effort for Nano this year and I don’t need to bust a gut to complete the 50K. As good as it would be, it’s been a long year and a challenging one in many years, so that is enough for now.
It felt good to reach this point and know I could pick it up whenever it felt right for me. And then my cherished partner, Keith, passed away suddenly three days later. The world turned completely upside down and sideways, sliding me into a new paradigm. With no cognitive space for writing like this, I could not engage with the draft again until two and a half years later, just before the workshop. Opening the file, I saw with surprise I was well organised and had created characters I couldn’t even remember. But there it was, ready for me to return. So, the Historical Fiction workshop was the perfect opportunity to connect with thinking about that story and my craft again.
Historical Fiction Writing Workshop with Cindy Davis
Cindy shared how she finds her story and researches her novels. Her fiction is based in Iran, Australia and Turkiye. We learnt about the world of harems in 1520s Turkiye which features in Cindy’s latest novel, The Favourite of the Harem. Throughout, Cindy shared about how she incorporates fascinating details she has discovered to include in her novel.
The writing workshop built on this to focus us on our storyline and finding our voice. We were asked key questions to guide us in on the story and central idea, voice (person), main character, setting, research and our pitch. It was useful to think about the key structural elements of our writing or planned project. After writing 36,000 words nearly three years ago, it was helpful to answer the question:
What is your central idea – the story you want to tell?
I spent the most time on this question. Writing Wholehearted:Self-leadership for women in transition and the accompanying Workbook,taught me that having a clear focus on the what and why of our longer projects is a powerful touchstone. I spent time on this a few years ago, but it’s something I need to keep working through to get clarity. The workshop was an opportunity to hear what others wrote about this and the other questions. We learnt about each other’s projects and began some powerful conversations, which continued into the days of the festival.
From Archive to Memoir Workshop with Tess Scholfield-Peters
Of the three, this was my favourite workshop as it led to striking insights on writing archive-based narrative. Tess Scholfield-Peters is a writer and academic at the University of Technology, Sydney. In conversation with Michaela Kolawski, Tess shared about researching and writing her book Dear Mutzi, drawn from her PhD research. Dear Mutzi centres on Tess’s grandfather’s story of coming to Australia from Nazi Germany. It is told primarily through her great-grandparents’ letters to their son.
Harry Peters – formerly Hermann Pollnow, known to his family as Mutzi, fled Germany and never saw his parents again. They died in concentration camps. The story of love and circumstance is told through the letters woven as archival material along with imagined narrative.
I learnt in this session about ‘documentary fiction’, weaving archives in as part of narrative. That was a lightbulb moment for me. ‘Can you do that?’ I said to myself as I listened. In drafting my historical fiction novel, a sense of place is so important that it feels like a character. This approach to integrating archival material into the story offers me new ways of thinking about how that sense of place is conveyed.
We learnt about the Speculative Method, a specialisation of historian and biographer, Kiera Lindsay, and the right to imagine into the gaps of fact and story. With practical exercises to support our exploration, we looked at the ‘literary possibilities of archival work’ including hybrid approaches, narrative nonfiction, documentary fiction and informed imagination.
This was music to my ears as I returned to my historical fiction draft with new perspectives and confidence. I look forward to reading Tess’s book and exploring more of the writing and books featuring the hybrid approaches highlighted.
Sounding Out Poetry Workshop with Paris Rosemont
The third workshop featured poetry and developing our craft, reading our work out. As a published poet not writing poetry consistently for many years (a lapsed poet!), I hesitated joining this workshop. But attending this Festival was about reigniting my writing spirit. I acknowledged to myself, I would love a return to writing poetry and signed up for it.
An intimate group at all stages of development in poetry, Paris welcomed and encouraged us in expressing our poetic voice. She was ably supported by Ally Burnham, writer and creative producer at WestWords – Western Sydney’s centre for writing.
We introduced ourselves through a simple poetic structure, which broke down barriers about writing poetry straight away. Exploring themes of legacy, the role of women in society and the haiku structure, we listened to and wrote poems. Paris chose excellent women poets (Magdalena Bell, Kim Addonizio and others) and work related to these themes, including her own poems. This engaged us with poetic voice and in experiencing the power of spoken poetry. Emboldened, we all seemed to slip easily into expressing our own particular take on these themes in our style.
Personally, writing three poems and reading them out in a small group was a revelation and a self-honouring way to reconnect with my poetic voice. I loved playing with words again, dusting off the cobwebs and making them spark and shine, as I used to. I’m grateful to Paris and Ally for creating a safe and encouraging space for this to happen.
Connecting with kindred writing souls
The three workshops were all inspiring, providing much to reflect on and follow up. I connected with kindred women writers in a continuing spirit over the days of the Festival. These connections continue beyond this time.
We were also encouraged, particularly by Cindy, and throughout the Festival to connect with kindred writing souls through organisations. Here are a few key ones, and I was thrilled to join the Society of Women Writers NSW Inc for ongoing connection.
I’m grateful to the presenters, organisers and sponsors, and The Women’s Club, Sydney, for such an excellent festival celebrating and encouraging women’s writing and supporting our voices to be heard. Next posts will cover the main program of the Rose Scott Women Writers Festival and the South Coast Readers and Writers Festival the following weekend. So stay tuned. Welcome any thoughts or questions.
In my book, Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition, I share about anchoring practices for challenging times. In this post, I describe the linked writing and tarot practice that has helped me navigate a difficult period of change recently. So powerful for me as a grounding and clarifying practice, I hope the writing and tarot insights below provide tips and ideas you can apply in your life.
Challenging times and writing practice
With the sudden death of my beloved partner Keith in late 2022, everything changed and life was difficult. I felt so lost as I navigated the shock and unexpected challenges. This went deep, touching every aspect of my being and daily life with uncertainty.
I am a regular writer. Call it Morning Pages, journalling, daily writing – whatever works for you. I call it Morning Pages, but I make it my own, writing any time of the day, as much or as little as I want. But with Keith’s sudden death, the shock meant I couldn’t immediately engage with these regular practices that supported me like swimming, writing and tarot. I was just surviving day to day in the fog of grief, making it through the initial shock, organising the immediate priorities.
After about two weeks, I returned to the page, writing to make sense of what had happened, was happening. I tapped into that rich weave of practices I already knew as I navigated this time. It has helped immensely. Over time, this practice has grown stronger, helping me navigate the difficult circumstances and intense emotions of deep grief. It continues to support me every day as I move through the stages of grief.
So here is what that practice now looks like and how it might help you.
First steps, working digitally and connecting practices
I write Morning Pages on my computer in a Google doc and I have done this for years now. Here are some reasons:
I have osteoarthritis so it is easier on my hands.
I can search the document for when the same tarot cards and themes have come up before and learn from my own insights.
It is private, transportable, easily accessible anywhere, anytime.
I copy and paste the weekly oracle card, monthly intentions, word of the year – whatever is important – to keep front of mind as I write.
I have a connected practice with the lunar cycle, monthly intentions, a weekly oracle card, and a daily tarot card. Writing helps us live more consciously and reflectively. Tarot is a way of tapping into our unconscious, what is just beneath the surface, making connections between what we might otherwise miss. It is a powerful source of self-awareness, self-leadership and conscious living. Connecting the two, writing and tarot, and making sure we have our intentions in front of us provides a powerhouse of guidance.
Example from my Morning Pages practice
Here is what a recent ‘frontispiece’ to my Morning Pages writing looked like:
Gibbous Moon (Doing) – I trust that the perfect intention is coming into form at the perfect time. New moon intentions for this cycle: Virgo: I find safety in connection. I nurture my most honest hopes and dreams for the future. Aquarius: Each day is an opportunity to live a life that feeds me and improves my sense of wellness Soulful Woman card of the week: 7 Loving from the Inside – It is a blessing to give myself the gift of my own presence. Card for the day: Strength – fortitude, patience, gentle power (The Spacious Tarot) ‘Strength coaxes you to take a gentle but confident approach. There is a similar boldness in Strength as that found in the Chariot, but there is more grace and softness here. Strength affirms that you can bloom delicately even if you find yourself in a harsh environment. Approach challenges with fortitude, instead of ruthlessly bulldozing forward. Find empathy for the terrain you find yourself in. Have the patience to understand your circumstances and find ways to work with them instead of against them. The cactus lives in a dry environment yet holds reserves of water within. As such, this card reminds you that you also have great reserves of gentle power. Tap into those reserves. You are strong and compassionate – believe this, know this, and act accordingly.‘
Sources and scene setting for writing and tarot
Here are some sources for the entry above that support me:
I copy over the previous days ‘frontispiece’ as a template and some of it stays the same. This all sets the scene, helping me to focus and keep in touch with the lunar cycle and my intentions. I often check in with other tarot guides. The Gentle Tarot deck and Guidebook and The Creative Tarot by Jessa Crispin stay on my desk for further insight.
But the ground-breaking piece in this time of change has been connecting the daily tarot card with other occasions when it has arrived. Searching through my current and previous Google Morning Pages documents, I can see where this tarot card has come up before. Engaging with this has yielded powerful insights and learning.
Learning from our own wisdom
Working with a Google Doc makes this so easy. Using the Edit/Find and Replace function and popping in the card’s name, we can locate other times it has come up. It helps us see if it’s a frequent, rare or new card arriving. If it is a card that has popped up many times, that is enlightening. What did we reflect on last time and learn from its arrival?
I scan through the previous times and see what was happening: circumstances, emotions, realisations, priorities, how I coped, what I moved through, recurring struggles. Often I see the progress I have made and that in itself is helpful. We forget how far we have come in challenging times, often focusing on what is before us now. I frequently uncover useful insights, tools and wisdom that I apply anew as an anchor in uncertain times.
Sometimes I copy the text and learning from that time as a way into today’s writing and reflections. I come across lists of ideas already brainstormed I can add to or draw from. This method helps you rediscover a forgotten body of work with the links between writing and tarot strengthening focus.
Try linking writing and tarot more consciously!
It might seem like a lot and sometimes it takes time, but once in the rhythm, it is easily and quickly done. The insights gained far outweigh the time involved. It helps to stitch your progress into the fabric of your ongoing experience. Setting up this platform helps to have richer and deeper awareness to guide you forward. You also identify where you’re going over the same ground and need to try a fresh approach.
The reason I started using a digital approach to Morning Pages was twofold: my hand condition and exploring the advantages of digital methods. I have benefited in both those ways and many more. It provides a structured way to tap into your intuition and go deeper with writing and tarot. The outcomes for supporting you in navigating challenging times are supportive and anchoring.
So try it and see how it works for you. We all need frameworks, guides and anchors in swirly, uncertain times. And you can always fashion your own practice. You can find more tips, strategies and frameworks to inspire conscious, intuitive living in challenging times in Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook. Wholehearted is available in audiobook, print and ebook here.
Terri Connellan shares insights on beginning the journey of a wholehearted life with an audio excerpt from Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition, Chapter 1.
Welcome to Episode 20 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Beginning the Journey of a Wholehearted Life. It’s a solo episode celebrating the first anniversary of Wholehearted’s publication. And other significant life and Quiet Writing anniversaries and a birthday (mine)! I share insights to support and guide you in your own journey of change and transformation to a life that resonates and aligns with what’s important to you.
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, I share about:
The first anniversary of publishing Wholehearted & the Companion Workbook.
The sixth anniversary of leaving full-time work and starting Quiet Writing.
The beginning of transition journeys.
How uncertain and unsettling they can feel.
The beginning of my own transition journey to a more fulfilling life.
Steps and processes that can help in navigating major change.
What can help us in the beginning stages of a making a significant change.
How my Wholehearted books can help guide you if you are going through major change.
How to get your copy of Wholehearted and the Companion Workbook.
Transcript of podcast
Introduction
Hello and welcome to Episode 20 of the podcast. It’s the 2nd of September, 2022 as I record this and an important time for me as I head into some key anniversary times.
It’s six years since I left full-time work and began to carve out a new, more creatively focused, fulfilling life.
Plus it’s six years since I started Quiet Writing as a website, business, community and concept.
These books were crafted from the heart of a deep and transformative time of change. My whole life focus and work changed. I learnt that change is external but the real work is in the transition piece. How we respond, integrate, shift our mindset, skill up in new ways, live with intention and find systems, structures or frameworks to guide and support us through change. For me these included: creativity through writing, intuitive tarot and oracle work, psychological type personality frameworks and becoming a coach.
I share my personal journey of transformation and transition. And what helped me to navigate moving through such uncertain times in Wholehearted.
So I thought it was fitting for these milestone times to share the first pages of Wholehearted with you in a different way, in audio form. It has also been a valuable way for me to honour and revisit these times through voicing them again. I hope that hearing my words in this way helps you in some way especially if you are navigating challenging and changing times. And these times are not one off. I know I’m going through another big time of transition and change. They’re iterative, and these skills can help you over and over again in new ways as you move through.
Get your copy of Wholehearted
You can get a copy of the transcript of this audio, Beginning the Journey, the first part of Chapter 1 as a download by heading to quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1. Or head to quietwriting.com/podcast to find a link to the blog page for this episode, Beginning the Journey of a Wholehearted Life and all the key Wholehearted book links.
I hope you enjoy listening to the first part of my Wholehearted book, hearing about the beginning of my journey to more fulfilling, creative living. I’ve really enjoyed revisiting my own words at this special and tender time of anniversaries and celebratory milestones.
Thank you for being with me on the journey, whether here since the beginning or connecting for the first time. It means the world to me.
I’ll be sharing some more solo episodes over the coming weeks and months. They are centred around the key themes of my work: creativity, personality, self-leadership, transition and wholehearted living. I look forward to sharing insights to support and guide you in your own journey of change and transformation to a life that resonates and aligns with what’s important to you.
And now, let’s head into Chapter 1 of Wholehearted!
Terri Connellan is an author, creative transition coach, accredited psychological type practitioner and podcaster. Her coaching and writing focus on three elements—creativity, personality and self-leadership—especially for midlife women in transition to a life with deeper purpose. Terri works with women globally through her creative business, Quiet Writing, encouraging deeper self-understanding of body of work, creativity and psychological type for more wholehearted and fulfilling lives. She lives and writes in a village on the outskirts of Sydney surrounded by beach and bush.
Welcome to Episode 19 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Fiction Writing and Empowering Your Practical Writing Life. I’m joined by Beth Barany, award winning author, multi genre writer and creativity coach and teacher.
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:
Choosing fiction writing
Genre fiction and life stories
World-building and dialoguing with characters
Centring women in stories as main characters
Women’s power to negotiate in story and life
Creative coaching for genre fiction writers
Writing the best way that works for you
Discovering your best writing process
Beth’s writing process and rituals
Top practical productivity tips for writers
Filling your well creatively
Self-publishing tips and processes
Transcript of podcast
Introduction
Welcome to Episode 19 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 28 of July as I record this.
I’m excited to have Beth Barany join us for the podcast today.
Beth Barany is an award winning author who writes in several genres including young adult adventure fantasy, paranormal romance, and science fiction mysteries. Inspired by living abroad in France and Quebec, she loves creating magical tales of romance, mystery, and adventure that empower women and girls to be the heroes of their own lives. For her day job, Beth helps other novelists write, publish, and market their books as a creativity coach and a teacher. For fun, Beth enjoys walking her neighborhood, gardening, and watching movies and traveling with her husband, author Ezra Barany. They live in Oakland, California with a piano and over 1,000 books.
This is such an incredibly inspiring conversation on storytelling, genre fiction writing, empowering women in story, creative process and finding your own writing process with so practical writing tips all the way through. Beth shares about her own life story as a writer and creativity coach and how she supports other writers to achieve their writing goals.
Grab a pen and a notebook and get ready to jot down ideas to inspire your writing story and practices. I guarantee you will take away so many thoughts to apply in practical and empowering ways from this conversation. Take some time too to learn about Beth’s work and books and connect with her via her website and social media. Beth also has a new podcast out, How to Write the Future, launched in July 2022. The podcast is “for science fiction writers who want to create optimistic stories because when we vision what is possible, we help make it so”. Links in the show notes as ever.
So let’s head into the interview with Beth.
Transcript of interview with Beth Barany
Terri Connellan: Hello, Beth. And welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast.
Beth Barany: Hi Terri thank you so much for having me.
Terri Connellan: It’ll be great to chat today. I know. And it’s just great to connect with you too and to talk about story and writing from many perspectives 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 that you do now?
Beth Barany: Absolutely. Like a lot of writers, I wanted to be a writer since I was small and have been dabbling for quite some time and pursued journalism for a long time. But really my love was fiction and I had a crossroads moment around age 30. Like a lot of people do, and I realized I needed to choose between journalism and fiction. And in fact, a good friend of mine said to me, you need to do one thing, Beth, because I was agonizing between the two. And so I chose fiction because it really spoke to my heart more than journalism. Journalism seemed practical. It was interesting, it was fun. It was also a lot of hard work trying to figure out how to be a freelance writer.
And when I decided to pursue fiction, seriously, it helped me just pursue it as something from the heart while I had a day job. So I didn’t put pressure on it for the longest time to make any kind of money for me. And, fast forward to now where I’ve written all these novels, it really feels like I made the right choice.
I’m so grateful for that. And I started teaching actually, started teaching English to foreigners when I was about the same around 30, 31, because my husband and I were gonna go abroad. We didn’t know where. We got married. And then we were like, yes, we’re gonna go abroad. So we both prepared by getting that four weeks certification to teach English to foreigners.
And that gave me a really lovely teaching background and teaching experience. And I started working in the field as a teacher, teaching English here in the states, before we went abroad, when we ended up going to Paris, France. So I also have been teaching for as long as I’ve been serious about fiction.
I’ve also been teaching actively. And when it came time to be self-employed, which is its own story, that was 16 years ago. I knew that it was gonna be teaching writing, teaching and coaching, coaching writers, cause I had stumbled upon creativity coaching which I got some training in and, you know, always knew I’d be a creativity coach for writers.
I didn’t quite know what that meant at the start, but I knew the creative umbrella was big enough, so I could invent as I went.
So that’s a little bit about that journey and that all kind of coalesced 16 years ago and fast forward to now, I’ve just kind of niched down as I went. First, it was all writers, fiction and nonfiction. It was always oriented towards books because I knew I loved the tangibleness of the books and about eight or nine years ago, I really started honing in on just helping fiction writers and specifically genre fiction writers, which is what I love to read. You know, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, adventure, whatever mashup of those, that was always, always my love since I was a teenager. Actually, since I started reading, as a small girl. So that’s a little bit about my journey and I’m as passionate today as ever about teaching, writing and about writing. It still drives me tremendously today.
Terri Connellan: Oh, fabulous. It’s lovely to hear your journey from that love of books, love of writing through journalism, through fiction, through teaching others and how it’s evolved along the way. Thanks for sharing that with us. So you are an author in several genres, reflecting that love of genre fiction, including young adult adventure, fantasy, paranormal romance, science fiction mysteries. Can you tell us how you came to write in so many diverse genres?
Beth Barany: Well, it didn’t happen overnight. That’s for sure. Ironically, I started with historical fiction, my very first novel, and that was just an exercise in completion. Like I just started writing it spontaneously. I consciously decided, this will be set in 1850s or sixties Paris. Cause I loved that period. I pursued it. It was an exercise in finishing a novel. It took me five years and it taught me a lot. And especially taught me that I did not want to stick to the facts I wanted to make it up. I really wanted it. It kind of came alive for me as I was finishing that project. I’m like, oh, I really love fantasy.
I really love the fairy tales and folklore that I read as a child. So I tried to do that in my second book. It was inspired by the hero’s journey as it’s mapped out in the book, The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. But it ended up being a time travel to the future with romance, with spies, with mystery. And I had a character who was an investigator and the woman was a bar owner who was kind of in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was really fun, but I couldn’t do anything with it. I didn’t know how to sell it. It was just my second book. I didn’t know what I was doing. So then I put that aside after struggling with it. And I came back to a story that I wrote when I was 20, a three page story about Henrietta, the dragon slayer, who was telling her adventure in a tavern and kind of drunk about how she killed this dragon.
And at that point, when I was 20, when I wrote it, I stopped it there. I didn’t know what to do with it. And now here I was fast forward at two books that were shoved in the closet. And I’m like, wait a minute. Now that didn’t quite work and book number two, didn’t quite work. What do I really, really, really love?
Oh, I love fantasy. I love folklore. I love fairy tales and I’ve always, always wanted an adventure story with a woman in charge going on adventures. Cause I grew up with Jack, the giant killer, Jack and the bean stalk, Jack and the seven giants. There’s all these Jack stories. And as a young child, eight years old, seven years old, I was upset that there wasn’t a girl going on those adventures.
So that was the impetus of the original story when I was 20. I’m like, she’s gonna go on adventures, but I was 20. I hadn’t yet gone on any adventures myself. So fast forward to there I was 35 years old about that and I was looking for the next story.
And I remembered this story or maybe someone reminded me of it. I sat down and now with some experience and life experience and writing experience, I was able to write that story. And that’s Henrietta the Dragon Slayer, which is book one in that trilogy. Everything clicked like my deep love from a childhood, my desire to put a woman in the driver’s seat of the adventure.
I now had the chops. I had the experience, I understood what the hero’s journey was, and it felt very intuitive for me. And I was able to write that story. So that’s really how fantasy came about. But I was also in love with romance. I love a lot of things like a lot of people. I’ve read widely and in my twenties I started reading a lot of romance and I really loved how romance helped me as a young woman just open my heart and help me define what I wanted in a love relationship.
So I joined the romance writing community here in the local San Francisco area and was trying my hand at it, dabbling dabbling. And while everyone else around me is writing romance, I was just doing my fantasy. Finally, a whole bunch of different events happened so that I came up with a fun idea. And my critique partners said, well, why don’t we all write a little romance around that fun idea? So I wrote a novella and I really fell in love with that shorter form. A novella is about a hundred pages. Novels are like 230 pages and upward, you know, standard novels, about 300 pages.
And that really got me excited to write short romances. And again, the paranormal, which is basically fantastical elements and I love magic. I always have. So every book has like a different kind of magic. And a lot of it is inspired by folklore. And some of it is inspired by other parts of my childhood, like Christmas elves have a place in my childhood.
So it was really a fun, playful space. And of course it still had the fantastical elements. And then science fiction came about because, again, many interests. I’ve been interested in science since I was a child. I studied science in high school. I was gonna be a doctor until about age 19 when I said, no, the college sciences are too hard and that’s not where my true love is, but I still loved science. And so about six years ago, I was trying to decide whether or not I would pursue more romance and more like paranormal, romantic adventure stories or this other idea, which was a woman investigator on a space station, which came to me in a literal dream.
So I was literally weighing these two ideas at a screenwriter’s conference and had a chance to pitch to the teacher in a big class on science fiction writing, screenplay writing for science fiction stories. The teacher said to me, oh, you’re writing CSI in space. And I said, yes, I am . That was so helpful to see what came out of me, which was an idea, a very strong idea and a very strong concept.
And I got really excited and I knew after sitting on it for about a day, I’m like, yeah, I’m pursuing this. I’m gonna pursue this. It kind of came to me pretty quickly that I would write four books fairly quickly. I wrote all four books in seven months.
I edited those books slowly, cause my father unfortunately was sick and dying. So while that was happening and I was helping with the caretaking, I was able to slowly edit those books while writing my business. And then in the fall of 2019, I knew it was time that I had done all the easy edits.
Now it’s time for the final edits and I released all four books, two in 2020, one in 2021 and then one in the spring of 2022. And those are the four books that I had written very quickly. And now I’m preparing to write book five. So it’s like you never know where the imagination’s gonna take you and who knows? Am I going to come up with other stories and different genres? Maybe, but right now I’m really dedicated to the science fiction mystery series.
I’m still pursuing fantasy. And I still have this romantic suspense adventure story on the back burner that I knew when I first came up with the idea in 2015, that it would take me at least a decade to write because it is big, it’s like a nine book series, all this world building, which I know we’ll get to later.
And so I have many ideas and they brew or percolate on the back burner until I really inquire into my creativity. What am I ready to write next? And I really let that one thing pop up and everything else gets to be pushed to the back-burner and that’s my creative process. So I unexpectedly am writing science fiction mysteries, but not totally. Like, if you look in my past, you’re like, oh yeah, I see all the signs. This is not out of the blue that I’m writing these genres.
Terri Connellan: Mm. Yeah. That’s fascinating to hear how your passion, your imagination and the craft has sort of come together over your journey. As you said, it’s one thing to get the idea, have the imagination, but then, you mentioned all the way through, you know, I was at this conference, I worked with this critique friend. There’s the craft aspects too all the way through.
And I loved too hearing how you follow up on the ideas, but also allow them to brew and to ferment and see what comes to the surface. It’s yeah, beautiful to hear about your process. With all of that, you must be incredibly skilled at world building. So what does world building mean to you and how do you go about creating different worlds in your fiction?
Beth Barany: That’s such a great question. And it’s something I’m deeply focused on now, cause I’m also creating a whole program and I’m launching a podcast on this topic called How to Write the Future. And that’s specifically for science fiction writers who want to build positive futures. But bringing it even further in terms of fantasy, really world building is creating a world that your characters live in.
They live in it. They are the ones who are my guides and every world has a past, you know, how it came to be, whether it’s the origin stories or the things the adults tell the children in school, what everyone’s telling each other in media. Hey, this is how we got here. Right? And then every world has its present day infrastructure and systems and the way things are that other people created in the past. And then every world has its vision for itself of the future. What they tell themselves they can be or what they can’t be. So every world has its rules. There’s always a boundary of some kind, and there’s always the dos and the don’ts, whether that’s through actual laws or the parents telling the children or the unspoken social customs.
So keying into all of that is world building. And making decisions and some writers write that up ahead of time. Some writers figure it out as they write. Some do accommodation, some refine it in edits. I actually do a combination of all of those. I realised early on that it was overwhelming to try and figure out my world from some godlike perspective. That felt alien to me, even though it also felt what was expected.
A lot of people don’t realize that our idea of especially a fantasy is really filtered through what Tolkein did, who was a professor and that was his way. That was his way of going about things. That’s not the way, that was that person’s way. And so a lot of people that have come to expect fairy tales or fantasies to one, maybe have sort of a fairytale feeling where there is no world built or it all starts with a history.
And I just felt that was artificial. I’m a very character driven storyteller. So Henrietta is 17 at the opening of the book. She doesn’t know a whole lot about her world, but I realised if I could understand the world from her perspective, that was enough. So I would interview my character while I was brainstorming the story and also in edits.
And then as the series advanced, because there’s three books so far in the series, I interviewed other characters and what they knew about the world. Then sometimes I would be interviewing characters who never even showed up in the stories, but they became part of the background. Someone who knew someone or someone who maybe never had a speaking role, but they were there. And so I could interview them. And that became how I discovered the world, through my characters.
Terri Connellan: And how do you interview them? In a dialogue, written dialogue?
Beth Barany: Mm-hmm written dialogue. Yeah. I love doing that. And I think it’s important for writers to realize that we’re writers, writers write and the best way to discover the story is through writing. For a lot of people, not everyone has that process. I know my husband, who’s a writer. He can just lie in bed and daydream a whole bunch of things, make a lot of decisions and then write them down. Whereas I tend to be in that playful space, through the written form. I literally discover the story through the brainstorming process and the first drafting process.
Terri Connellan: Great. I love hearing different ways people come into the writing process. So do you think world building is something anybody can do? I guess some people might be naturally able to world build than others, or do you think it’s a skill anyone can learn?
Beth Barany: I think it’s a skill anyone can learn. I mean, if we think back to childhood. Most children get the opportunity to play and play make believe. Well ,they’re world building. They are literally world building. So for most people that is an instinct from childhood and to tap into that and to come back also to that childhood inspiration and then continue to nurture it.
I think there’s two big parts of world building. One is noticing what’s in your imagination and really giving yourself permission to write that down and to really imagine that as a fully realized reality. And then the other part is to study and research and fill your imagination with lots and lots of things that maybe you don’t know. Studying other cultures, reading books that you don’t normally read, getting to know folklore from other cultures that aren’t your own reading. Reading books and watching television, watching documentaries. Follow your interests and there you’re feeding your creativity.
And then from there then you get to sit down and then write down and see what comes out. See what’s ready to be articulated and enter into your story. So I absolutely think anyone can learn to do world building if that’s what they want. They especially have to want it yeah. And then I believe they can learn.
Terri Connellan: Great. And I love those two points about noticing and studying and research it’s beautiful to begin scoping that for people. So thank you. You’ve mentioned earlier that one of your driving themes is empowering women and girls to be the heroes of their own lives and to center them in your stories. I really love that. So tell us a bit more about this focus in your work.
Beth Barany: Absolutely. I really love putting my main characters as women in roles of leadership, either growing into leadership, which I notice I write a lot about in my young adult adventure fantasy. I mean appropriate for the age, being 17, 18. In my little paranormal series so far, all of my heroines are business owners of one kind or another. And I love exploring that.
They’re in charge, they decide and I love seeing that. When I was in my twenties and reading lots of romance, there was this one author who would also often put her heroines in that position of self leadership. I love you use the term self leadership in your work. And they were in charge and learning what that is and working hard to make those dreams reality.
And then I noticed with my science fiction mystery. She’s the lead detective and she is in charge and she’s also newly in charge. She’s in her thirties. So I am exploring kind of that stage of life and she’s in charge. And what does she do with her power and how does she run her team? And some of the day to day decisions while she’s both solving a mystery and running a team and dealing with people who have power out in her system that are deciding her fate.
So she’s kind of in the middle. She’s not entirely on her own. That’s also something I’m exploring. Like we, as women, we need to be in power, need to have our own power. And we are working within systems where there’s other people who have other kinds of power and we’re all in negotiations. And I wanna kind of presence that, that we are in negotiations all the time.
We don’t have to be the victim here. We can be equal to the powers that that are outside of us. And that’s the first time I’ve articulated that. That’s how I see it. And I think for so long, women have, and I’m speaking historically like long term, like several thousand years, we have been trained that we have no power. We’ve been told that we don’t have a voice.
So of course we believe it to survive. And so the paradigms are changing around the world and I want to be a part of that. I want my stories to show women with agency, with power negotiating, with others, with power making changes in the world, small or large, and really stepping into their, think you mentioned in your book, the zone of genius, or I was reading something about the zone of genius today.
I’m like, yeah. What if we are all in our zone of genius? So the more women and girls see that, the more opportunities open up in their own minds. So storytelling is so pivotal to that. This is how we learn is through story. Whether it’s a story from our parents or from the house of worship or from the school or from the government or the community center.
Adults are telling stories to children overtly and without speaking as well. So I’m a culture maker, I’m a storyteller. I want women and girls to open up to their possibilities and to see and hear new stories, whether they’re made up like by me. Or I even have a project where I want to do some retelling of historical stories that have been basically left out. And a lot of those are coming to light as well in our cultures. It’s time. I feel like it’s time. It’s now. So that drives me, the work I’m doing. It’s important that I show my woman investigator Janey McCallister doing her work.
And it’s important to me to show vulnerabilities as well. This is not about being superhuman. As much as I love my superheroes who are behind me in my figurines here on my desk, we all have vulnerabilities. Well, even they have vulnerabilities, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel and Princess Leia. They also have vulnerabilities and look at what they did, look at the power they held and how they wielded their power. Those are the things I want to put into my stories and then continue to generate conversations around.
Terri Connellan: Oh, I really love that. And I love that it’s looking at different ages, like 17, like 30 like, moving on in life. I think that’s great because there’s different challenges for women and girls at different stages of life. And to be able to have stories they can read where they can see women with agency. I particularly enjoyed the points you made about negotiating equally with people in power. I’m thinking of stories which I won’t share cause they’re private stories, but they’ve been very much about that power of women to stand their own ground and to say, well, no, I’m here to do this and I’m not here to do that.
And these are the terms on which I’ll be here and that takes a lot of bravery. It takes a lot of courage. So to be able to have those conversations, have this conversation and to see women having those conversations in story, I think is so powerful.
Beth Barany: Yeah. And just talking about this, you know, I had to learn how to negotiate in business. I didn’t know. I thought I knew, but when it came time in the training to practice it, I realized how I actually was unskilled and unpracticed in negotiation and didn’t really understand the ins and outs. So it is really awesome that we’re talking about this. It’s actually giving me some story ideas for the next book or a subsequent book to like really deeply put it in there and very overtly, because again, we aren’t necessarily taught how to negotiate.
Especially here in the United States, there’s a lot of either or conversations. You know, you’re either with me or you’re against me. Well, that leaves zero room for negotiation zero, absolutely zero. And it’s a zero sum game and it’s all, it’s a win, lose model. And how do you go from there? That’s the question.
Terri Connellan: Look forward to those ideas bearing fruit. Cause I think it’s really important work. So alongside your writing, you also help other novelists write, publish, and market their books as a creativity coach. So what support do you provide novelists and what are the common areas of challenge that you help address?
Beth Barany: I have a school called Barany School of Fiction where people can come in and learn the planning phase of writing novel, the writing phase, the editing phase, the publishing phase and the marketing phase. So we help, with the focus on genre fiction novelists, all these phases. We generally help people who are at the earlier stages of their writing.
They may be experienced at writing, maybe non-fiction, but they’ve never done fiction. And so we really help them gain clarity and offer very practical hands on tools to get moving. These lessons aren’t theoretical. They’re all designed to get you working on your story. And we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of students take our courses, both live and self paced, and it’s just fabulous to watch them really fulfil that dream of being a novelist.
And so we also offer once a year, a 60 day novel course, it’s actually coming up in 2022, starting October, one where we walk you through the process of planning your novel based on our ‘Plan Your Novel Like a Pro’ book, and course, the home study course. So we do this live in terms of weekly calls.
You have weekly support calls, and then in November, we invite you to write your novel. Write alongside the National Novel Writing challenge that was started here in the San Francisco bay area, and which is now international. So we use that energy and we provide support through this class we have. Two teachers other than me, plus me as a support and a coach. That’s the live class that we do every year.
And then I also work with writers one on one. I create customized programs for them. We’ll get on zoom or phone and we will meet on a regular basis sometimes twice a month, sometimes once a month. And we really work at their pace. They need highly customized work. And then every once in a while people come through and they’re like, oh, I just need one session. So we’ll do a deep dive session for clarity and transformational work. I bring in some of my other tools, including N L P, which is neurolinguistic programming, which is really a toolkit helping people with compassion to help them come to terms with where they are as well as support their transformation.
So a gentle transformative toolkit that I love. And I bring in my other skill set as well with all my tools as a writer and an editor.
So those are the main ways that I support people. And of course, I also teach workshops. I’ve been overseas multiple times and I’ve gone to multiple conferences. My favorite thing to do is get people working together in a room on their own material, activating people, inspiring them, helping them really get into action. That’s my absolute favorite thing to do. That’s how I support people in my role as a coach and a teacher and a workshop leader.
Terri Connellan: Awesome. And what sort of challenges do you find crop up most commonly? What issues are people facing?
Beth Barany: There’s the whole craft piece, learning the skills of craft, but really what I notice I’m helping people with the most is making friends with their creative process. Or another way of saying that is getting to know their creative process and separating out the should and the, oh, that’s how other people do it, or this is what it means to be a writer that they might have seen in a finished product. They don’t actually know how deeply messy the creative process is and how there’s a whole host of unknowns that they are basically walking through. And it can be scary if you’ve never done that. It can feel very uncertain. And they could really doubt themselves and then think something’s wrong with themselves.
So really a big part of my work is really helping people come to terms with their creative process and get to know what is their creative process and how can they harness that and make it work for them because each writer is unique. And while I can tell you how to design a character or how to design a world, or how to design a story arc, learning how to sit down and make friends with that creative process is really the work, in my opinion.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, it’s something that’s dear to my heart and my work too. I work with personality type, Jungian personality type in a similar way that you might use tools as insights into people’s personal preferences and processes. And, it’s absolutely right. There’s the writing process and the steps that you can go through, but there’s all the different ways we can approach that and navigate that process and find out what works for us. Whether we’re introvert preference or extrovert, for example, it’ll be different. So, yeah, really interesting. So how can writers use who they are to help write their book their own way?
Beth Barany: Yeah. I love this question and really the first place I usually start with everyone is where is their high point energy in the day? And let’s use that time for your creative work. So maybe some people like to write in the morning, like one of my clients. I have another client who would like to write right after dinner.
My favorite time to write is right after lunch so that’s my high standard energy time. Some people can write any time of day, like my husband. Other people want to write very late at night or very early in the morning . There’s no one right way. But I really inquire and I work with people, like, what is your favorite time? When is your energy the highest? If you could put your writing, let’s put it there and then help people come up with strategies and habits and help them harness the habits that are already working in their life and repurpose some of those things they may be doing unconsciously, but well, and regularly.
Like a lot of the self care habits we have, brushing your teeth is an example I use all the time. Or even just making sure we have our favorite breakfast every morning. Okay, what are the things that you do to ensure that happens? Let’s walk you through the writing process and let’s help you anchor the beginning, getting into the writing, the writing itself, and also some kind of closing ritual that allows you to kind of close the circle, so to speak.
And it allows you to go back to the other things that are happening in your life so these two points of entry are really powerful. Cause once you can really write in your prime time and really anchor the coming in and the doing and the leaving then you can get work done. Then you can show up and you can do the assignments in the planning class, or you can do whatever is next that you know is right for you and do the writing cause writer’s write. That’s what we do.
Terri Connellan: I think that’s great. Two really important places to start and when we’re talking about using who they are, it’s about, like you say, finding what’s the right time for you, when your energy is the best. Cause often we make choices that don’t always work in our best interests. Even though we might think it’s the right thing to do, cause everybody says, write in the morning or do this, but it might not be right for us.
Beth Barany: Absolutely. And here’s another point. Some people are like, oh, all the experts say I should write every. And I say no, if that isn’t working for you, don’t try and squeeze yourself into that. I notice now that I’m generating a lot of nonfiction content consciously, I’m writing every day, because it’s part of my wellbeing. When I’m working on a story, it is generally, I’ve tracked it, it’s like four to six days a week. So just because there’s the perceived wisdom and the experts are saying, you should do it this way, actually do it the way it works for you.
For example, I have another client who tends to write on the weekends. Some evenings he can fit in after a long day of work. But it’s the weekends. He calls himself a binge writer and that has served him. He’s gotten this far, he is polishing up his fantasy novel. It is his way.
Other people are writing when all the kids are out of the house, or other people are writing whatever they can at these odd little moments. So what I notice is it doesn’t really matter what the experts say. What matters is what works for you. So dig into that, lean into that, use your natural inclination and go with it.
Which means writing down ideas in the middle of the night or dictating into your phone, when you’re driving. I have another client, he drives a lot for his work. And so I was helping him figure out the tech and the tools and opening up the possibility that he can dictate his book. He doesn’t need to type his book. And he was like, wow. Oh my God, that’s perfect. Because he also moving into voice acting and he is very auditory and very verbal. So that was perfect for him. And just helping him settle into that routine. He’s like, oh my goodness. I could get my novel done in like a month. It was so beautiful to watch him dig into his skills, his strengths, his habits that were already working for him.
So I really encourage people to open up that possibility and ask what if I could make it work? What would be the best ingredients for me, and really kind of push away perceived wisdom, because that can sometimes get in the way of what your heart is saying to you. No matter how odd it looks from the outside, that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you get in your creative groove. It really doesn’t matter the way it might appear. You’re stepping outside of yourself and you’re putting yourself into someone else’s imagined perception of you. It’s completely made up. it’s entirely a fiction. Awesome. You’re a fiction writer. Let’s focus on the stories you wanna tell. It can be very easy in this world of social media to really feel the gaze of the other, but it’s not always appropriate in the creative writing process to be paying any attention to that.
There comes a time, especially when you’re in the editing phase and where you’re working on bringing your work out into the world. You do want to start perceiving the gaze of the other. That helps us refine our work. But in the beginning phases, we need to protect the space, put up tall walls of that garden and really let yourself flourish within your own vibration, your own energy, your own heart, because that is where the truth is. We all want each other’s truth. We don’t want perceived wisdom. There’s already that stuff out there. We wanna know what you think, what you vision, what’s in your heart.
Terri Connellan: Mm. Yeah, that’s beautiful. And I love that question. Great one for us all to ask ourselves. What if I could make it work? That’s fabulous. I love that. It’s a great one to journal on just to have a good think about as a take away from our conversation. So thank you. So what does your writing process look like? I’m really interested to know. You’ve touch a little bit about the brewing and the ideas that come and the world building but yeah, tell us a bit more about what your writing process looks like.
Beth Barany: Well, I’ve really been going through a shift in the last six months or so, where I’ve realized that I used to have a bucket for fiction writing and then a bucket for the nonfiction writing, which would include marketing writing, and curriculum writing and, and the weekly newsletter, which is like an inspirational essay and the how to pieces and all of the instructional things.
And they were living in two different territories. And I realised, actually this has been brewing for almost a year now, that I wanted to put a bigger boundary around it. So there was one bucket and it was called creating. And that’s where I would create whatever content, whether it was fiction or non-fiction, whether it was for the novel or the short story or the podcast that’s coming out or the weekly newsletter or whatever is ready to pop.
So I’ve noticed over the years that when I sit down to write with an intention to write, sometimes surprising things come out. I realised I wanted to offer myself more opportunities to let that happen. So generally now in the mornings, right after breakfast and actually during breakfast too, I’m like in a study mode in the mornings. I watch videos. I listen to things. Ted talks, things about the latest science, launches. I watch the space industry or self-help introspective. I’m very much into human design or some random interesting thing on screenplay writing. And then I want to move into creating. So I like to go walk to a cafe, 12 minute walk from my house here in Oakland and work on, kind of like talking to myself, asking myself what’s ready to be born? What’s ready to be discussed?
So I have a little journaling process where I ask myself, I have little prompts. Literally it’s like a little template. I open up the template and I have my little prompts. And then I just start, cause I read the prompts. One of my favorite prompts is, ‘ So what I really wanna say is…”. It’s almost like there’s a burbling conversation, a little below the surface and I have to start writing to hear the, so what I really wanna say is.. And it’s almost like, okay, Beth, yes, tell us what you have to say.
And then we start going and I do produce a newsletter every week and now I have this podcast brewing and I wanna put the two together. So like today I wrote the script, but I realized, oh, I’m writing the newsletter and I’m writing the podcast script at the same time. That made me really happy, really excited about that.
So I can start to not have to do so much work, double work. You know, now it could be one thing pretty much, which is super exciting. And then generally, I’m in a little bit of a fallow period. And then right after lunch, during lunch, I often go back to kind of a study period. I’m prepping for a podcast or I’m learning about podcasting or I’m studying the latest launch, what just happened or wherever my fancy, my curiosity takes me.
And then I generally move into fiction and I have a little ritual. I get into fiction. I put on my soundtrack that I’ve made, which is like hours and hours and hours of music I’ve brought together. A lot of Star Trek music and from other films and just kind of this moving music that’s very like adventure. There are some songs with words, but mostly none, no words. And I just kind of pick up the thread of wherever I am, whatever I’m doing.
I sometimes start with journaling and I call it journal to write. So I have a journal entry space inside of my writing program, which is Scrivener, where I keep all my story research and where I put my first drafts. And I just talk to myself about whatever with the intent of getting to fiction. So sometimes I’m encountering resistance and I don’t know why. And so I have a little conversation with myself and then somehow I inevitably, I start asking myself story questions, and then I’m like, I’m in.
And then I scurry off to edit or to research or to plan or to write. So whatever’s next. I let that bubble up. And then that’s the writing phase. And then usually in the afternoons, I have appointments. I have a client appointment or a podcast interview or a marketing conversation or a networking conversation. I’m more into the, let’s talk to people phase of my day for a few hours. And then I actually take a dinner break and then my husband and I sit on the couch and sometimes we watch shows together. But often we’re doing our own thing and I might do a little bit more work. If I’m in a high creative phase, I’m like, oh, I wanna have to edit this thing for a client or I need to prep this or I need to plan that or, oh, I’m researching this.
It’s kind of a play space. And sometimes it’s a workspace as well. But I’m not usually creating new content in the evening. That is not the high point for me. So that’s like a typical day, not every day is like that. But I’ve had many days like that.
A big caveat to all of this is like, that’s great. But sometimes it’s not like that. Sometimes like yesterday I took the afternoon off and I watched behind the scenes about Star Trek, Strange New Worlds and it fed my soul. I needed that. I needed to hear other storytellers talk about how they create their stories. And I needed to be in the fan chair instead of in the creative chair. I needed to be a fan girl. It just fed me so much. I love what that show is up to. It feeds me because it helped me think about, well, what am I up to as a science fiction writer. I am very inspired by the Star Trek universe and what that show has always tried to do and by its optimism and its hope, and I needed to connect to that.
So I’m really also working to allow myself to not do what I think I should do, but do what my soul needs in the moment. And it doesn’t look like it should most of the time and that’s okay. Yeah. That’s why I’m a creative entrepreneur.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s right. And in all of that, it’s just shows how complex the world of being a creative entrepreneur is because you’ve got your creative work, you’ve got the preparation, the learning, the craft, the earning an income, the running a business. But the actual writing, and I think what you’ve showed really well in that description, there is how you center the writing in the energy time of the day and protect it and make sure for the most part it happens. But you also of course make time to fill your well, which is lovely.
Beth Barany: Yeah, absolutely. And then there’s some days, like a few days ago I spent a lot of my time marketing and I have people helping me. I have people on my team and I’m like, oh, I have to initiate a lot of the material. Then I can give it to other people to work on. And we’re always creating new things within the business. So I had to create new marketing content and then I’m bringing other people in to help me.
And there a big part of being a creative entrepreneur is I’ve had to learn how to market and then how do I build systems around that? So I also spend time and in fact, today, the rest of my day will probably be working on those systems and helping my team operate those systems. And I love that actually. I love creating systems. That’s why I’m a teacher. That’s why I created all this curriculum. It’s like, here’s a system, go operate it. You know, give it to the writers to operate, create their own stories.
Terri Connellan: Well, that’s fabulous. So with so many books published in a number of genres, what are your top productivity tips for writers?
Beth Barany: Protect your writing time. Figure out what your prime time is and protect your writing time and protect yourself. So for me, that means I have had to cut out interferences, things that would upset me unnecessarily. So I don’t watch the news. And my husband likes paying attention to the current politics of the day, which I find very upsetting.
So he knows not to have it on when I’m around. We have a negotiation about that so that’s protecting my spirit, my soul. So protect your writing space and protect your spirit. Those are two things.
And then something that I do personally, is that I have found lots of ways to be inspired. And I have come to realize that this little study period that I do in the morning, it really is about inspiration. That’s why I kind of let myself do it however I would like in the moment. And it’s so pivotal to me. It means that I spend a lot of time alone and that’s okay. I live with another writer. We both spend a lot of time alone.
And I think part of productivity is also scoping down. What I’ve seen with a lot of writers is they think, oh, I gotta write this book. Oh my God. And they see it as a one big chunk. But in fact, you don’t get there in a day. Right? We don’t climb Mount Everest in a day and, and they do a lot of planning before they climb Mount Everest. So for me, productivity is also about kind of roadmap. I do a lot of planning and I also scope it down.
So I’m constantly asking myself, what can I actually get done today? What can I get done in one hour or even 30 minutes or even five? I’ve seen writers, my students and clients use that tool, that helps them. So whatever gets you moving. And that sometimes means, I have five minutes. What can I do in five minutes? Or. I know for me, I like 15, 20 minutes, but this morning I actually wrote in a span of 10 minutes, I did all this productivity work.
I like it. There’s something about giving yourself a very enclosed amount of time and putting on a timer if you need it. We push out all the distractions and all we’re doing for this very small amount of time is we’re writing on this one thing. We’re not trying to write the whole book. We’re just trying to write a hundred words. I have friends who’ve written novels that way. There’s like 100 word challenges where you write a hundred words every day. I have friends who’ve written books that way. It’s super awesome. I love it. And it’s very satisfying.
Part of productivity is writing more, more often and the people who get really good at their sport and their craft, they do more repetitions more often. And brain science has shown us that that is how we learn. So if you really want to get better at writing, it’s more productive to give yourself five minutes a day. It could be depending on who you are. Even this author of mine who loves to write on the weekends, he’s discovered that he really wants to write more often. So now what he does after his long day of work, he says, okay, five minutes. I’m just gonna work on five minutes for my novel. And then that gets him moving. So now he is writing more often, he’s editing more often, and that allows the learning to happen quicker because what we crave too is results.
So if you can give yourself a daily win, that is self-reinforcing and then you’re like, oh, I did that five minutes. Wow. Well, look at the words I did, awesome. Tomorrow. Boom it’s tomorrow, which is now today. you set the timer for maybe seven minutes, do some writing. Wow. I did it. Right. So you just build up the win and that allows you to get stronger, it’s self-reinforcing and within a week, you know, look at everything you’ve written within a month, look at everything you’ve written. So whatever you can do to give yourself that real world evidence of progress helps build momentum, pick up speed, advances learning.
And then one last piece of productivity is maybe you need accountability, which is just sharing with someone. Oh, look what I did, which is super fun. My husband and I do that all the time. Oh, can I just read you this cool paragraph. Or it’s joining a critique group or it’s hiring a coach joining a class. There’s a lot of ways that you can get accountability. And so I’m kind of in the business of that people say, ah, they pay me money because it gets ’em to show up. It gets ’em to do the work. And it also I’m their first audience. They get to share work with me in a very safe space and they get to say, look what I’ve done. And I get to say yay with them. You know? And, that is like the self-reinforcing positive reinforcement helps ’em keep moving.
That helped me as a beginning writer. I joined a critique group right away, I met my husband there. And I had to show up, I got to critique other people’s work. I had to turn in my work I knew I needed that. And I know not everyone needs that, but if you are serious about pursuing writing and you notice you’re not moving, you probably need some kind of outside accountability and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, for sure. Some fabulous gems there. All the way through, as you were talking through those productivity tips I was nodding and thinking about how important they are. And I particularly like that idea of scoping down. I’m writing a novel. I’m researching a novel, which is what I’m doing at moment. It can feel so huge. But if you can just say, well, today in this five or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, I’m just going to summarize what I just read in that chapter, like just keep it really simple, you can move ahead. So yeah, really resonate with that.
And also the accountability. I learn about accountability by co-writing virtually with a friend in short bursts using, you know, exactly that. And then now we’ve set up a group, The Writing Road Trip, that’s centred around that, just writing together. We actually don’t critique, but we write together and we do it in short bursts and we have a quick chat about what we’ve done, then we do it again and all those practical strategies work so well. So thank you for sharing that. Sure. So, publishing, can you give us a few insights on how you publish your books?
Beth Barany: Yes. So I’m independently published. I’m self-published. Both my husband and I are primarily self-published. I have a few interesting little publishing deals that happened when I wasn’t looking for them exactly. So that means I’m entirely in control of the whole publishing process. And I’ve been at this long enough. So I build in some marketing essentially at the very beginning of the planning process. And actually those are already installed in our Plan Your Novel Like a Pro material.
And this helps us peak at the marketplace, even at the very beginning. It’s also part of the creative design of a book, in my opinion. So I have my eye on publication. It really motivates me. I have a cover designer that I work with and it has always motivated me even right when I was starting out at the very beginning to start to envision my book covers. That’s more from an inner perspective of something that motivates me forward. And then in terms of publishing, I use the tools available. I use print on demand, currently we use Amazon’s print on demand and we use Ingram Spark ‘s version. We use actually Lightning Source right now.
We have invested in tools. So for example, we use this wonderful tool called Vellum. It’s a standalone piece of software that allows you to lay out your books, both epub and print. We love that. Before that existed, I’ve used other tools. And I really care about the finished product. I really care about how a physical book looks. So I take a lot of time to daydream about that and notice that, and I’m always caressing books. So I’ve tried a lot of different things with publishing and the first four books and the science fiction mystery series, the Janey McCallister mystery series I used pre-orders and I’m probably not going to do pre-orders per se.
I’ve experimented with different ways to fund my book. I did a Kickstarter this past spring, which basically reimbursed me. I upfront all the costs, but then the Kickstarter allowed me to reimburse some of those production costs and the book was about ready to be published. So I don’t use Kickstarters to fund the beginning of the process, just mostly to market.
And then publishing is really about marketing. It’s really about finding your audience. So I’ve invested a lot of time and energy and trainings, et cetera, to figure out ways to find my marketplace. And honestly, that’s an ongoing effort. I feel like I’m always improving in that area and I can always do better. I’ve always come up with fun ways to do that, to find my audience.
I offer a class on self-publishing eBooks. I used to book produce for other people. They would hire me to walk them through that whole process so I know a lot about it. I probably produced gosh, over 30 books, including mine and my husbands and clients. And, you know, I love it, I love that the means of production are in our hands. I mean, I really control the entire process just about, except for royalties. I’m beholden to other folks on that unless I sell directly, which I occasionally do, or I did for the Kickstarter. And I’m probably gonna do more of.
I think frankly, that’s the future of publishing, for independently published authors, is to sell direct to the readers. We’re almost a hundred percent. We have the tools and I have friends who do sell direct to the readers and I do occasionally sell direct. And I’ve done a lot of book fairs, where I’ve sold directly to readers as well. So, yeah, I love that publishing has become completely pretty much in our control. And I think in partnership with printers and vendors and things like that.
Terri Connellan: Oh, thank you. Those insights are really fascinating. I’m someone who’s really interested in self-publishing. I didn’t actually self-publish my first book,Wholehearted. I worked with a small press independent publisher, but it was only because I just found it quite overwhelming and I wanted to partner with someone to walk through the process.
But, I just think it’s so exciting as you do that we have this ability to take the whole process from idea through to publish a book ourselves and to control every aspect of the process and it’s a creative process. So thank you really exciting. And, I love too just seeing how people can market. A friend of mine’s just published a book. He’s one of the podcast guest, Joe Arrigo, he’s posted on Etsy, [including] a PDF on Etsy. I noticed your Kickstarter. People use Payhip, lots of different ways. And I think that ability to work through online retailers but also pursue our own options is totally exciting. So thanks so much for that insight.
So we’re just about towards the end of our chat today. It’s been so fascinating and there’s two questions I always ask guests on the podcast. So interested in your insights. So the first one is how have you created your story over your lifetime?
Beth Barany: I really love this question. And I feel like my story is a story of transformation and of almost constant transformation. I really recognized as an adult how many times I’ve reinvented myself and I probably will continue to do so. I really love the imagery of the Phoenix. It lives its life, burns up into a pile of ashes reborn. So I’ve had many experiences like that, where it feels like you’re dying, but really you’re just completely changing yet again. And I’ve had many experiences like this as an adult and pretty much starting probably when I was 16.
I got to live abroad in Quebec and learn French and I was an exchange student and that was a very clear transformation. I could really experience it very vividly. And of course, coming home, and then going to college, all the different transformations. Just being in business as long as I have now, I probably have gone through, I count kind of roughly four or five transformations already, just in the time I’ve been in business. And I’m right in the middle of a new one. I’m starting a new chapter right now with my How to Write the Future material. And it’s exciting.
And so part of having transformation as my story is that there’s always a period of painful, unknown, where, and I noticed you spoke of this in your chapter where what was doesn’t work anymore, and what is, has not come into being in any kind of way.
You just know it’s something out there, but it’s dark and it’s unknown. So there’s this a crossroads feeling, this very low energy feeling, this confusion, this pain about not knowing, which is something I go through. And I feel like I’ve been through that a bit in the last few months. And now as my, How to Write the Future material starts to solidify and I start working on it and I start voicing it, wow. It’s like, oh, I see it. I see the pathway in front of me. I don’t have all the steps in front of me, but I have the next few steps.
And it’s so clear to me that as long as I continue having conversations, writing content and talking to the people I would really like to talk to, I am creating the path as I go. I’ve just seen that time and time again. And that’s what they talk about in the entrepreneurship world. Very much as a creative entrepreneur, it’s like you are creating the path as you walk it. So part of the journey is having a tremendous amount of trust in this process, which is very scary and very kind of lonely on some levels because I’m the only one who can walk this path, but I’ve actually come to terms with that. I feel expansive towards what’s possible.
And I also see how I’m bringing people along with me, which is so beautiful. And I also see how there’s the other trail blazers out there, who I get to wave at and compare notes to and talk shop. We’re all these amazing trailblazers and we’re all weaving together something. It’s still in the unknown phase which is a whole new world I hope, that’s positive for everyone and of the benefit of all.
Terri Connellan: Mm, I love that. It really gladdens my heart, that whole description, because that’s pretty much what my whole book was about too, in many ways, just how to navigate that messy middle of, whether it’s a big change or just like you were saying, different transformations that we go through. And I feel like I’m in another messy middle myself at the minute. It’s iterative, but we learn new skills for navigating that uncertain space. And I think we learn that it’s okay to sit with it and as you say, from your practices that you do each day to learn new skills, to fill your well to do the work, to sort of find the way ahead through just sitting with what might be in that liminal space. It’s quite an exciting time, isn’t it?
Beth Barany: It is. It is. And I also want to presence that sometimes, I mean, we have been through and maybe still will continue to go through very challenging time on a global level. And there’s a lot of grief. There’s a lot of sadness. I write about grief. My first four books. Grief is part of those stories and losing my father in 2018, it’s like boom presencing the grief and his illness that, you know, when someone goes through a progressively declining illness, that’s very, very sad. So being okay with the emotions, whatever they may be, whether it’s sadness or just that down energy, for me, I’ve just have to create space for that.
And part of the transformation is letting myself be in that, not knowing, feeling sad, the doldrums, just things aren’t moving. And you know, there’s no wind in my sail and I get kind of upset about that because I’m such a productive person. When it’s not happening and I don’t feel any kind of energetic push towards the next thing, I can make myself wrong for that. And that will just compound it. When I just kind of like be in the sadness and eat ice cream, it’s okay. And watch my favorite TV show is fine. Cause I know the energy will shift and I know the inspiration will come back. But too often it’s easy to put ourselves down for being down. And it’s actually like, well, what if we could just be down and that’s okay. Mm.
That allows actually the energy of emotion to just move through us, which is the definition of emotion. Right. It’s e-motion, to move this movement, this current and, just kind of allow that to be. Cause it is right? There’s actually nothing we can do. Like you were describing in your book in your beautiful first chapter, it’s like sometimes we just need to sit on the couch, cozy up, have our favorite dear pet with us. I too have cats and just really let ourselves be there.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s amazing.. So what are your top wholehearted self -leadership tips and practices, especially for women?
Beth Barany: Well, I would go back to being with our emotions and being very compassionate with ourselves and those emotions. I would say that’s number one. Number two, really trusting the instincts that come up, whatever those passions might be. They may seem unusual. They may seem outta left field, or maybe there’s something deep from one’s childhood, to really explore them and nurture them and take a little risk and do something a little bit new. And then the third thing is to ask ‘what if?’ what if it could be different? What if it could be better than this? What if it’s actually all okay?
Terri Connellan: I love that. It’s just lovely to hear people’s learning over their lifetime of how they’ve created their story and what their tips are for for others. So thank you for sharing that. Just to finish up, Beth, can you tell us where people can find out more about you and your work online?
Beth Barany: Absolutely so people can find me at bethbarany.com. I hang out a lot on Twitter for social media. So that’s at @BethBarany and then the other social media channel that I like to interact on is LinkedIn actually same @BethBarany. I’m not so much on the other socials so if you try and get a response from me, you’re not going to get one on a timely basis. I also invite people to email me and my contact information is out there. And then lastly, I have a really fun blog. It’s called Writer’s Fun Zone and it’s by and for writers. And it’s really a fun way to engage with material and learn more about what we do also, and it’s there for everyone. Also, How to Write the Future podcast is blossoming and people can find me through that as well.
Terri Connellan: That’s exciting. A new podcast. That’s great. Oh, thanks so much for your time, Beth today, it’s been really great to chat.
Beth Barany: Oh, really wonderful. So thank you so much for having me.
Beth Barany
About Beth Barany
Award winning author, Beth Barany writes in several genres including young adult adventure fantasy, paranormal romance, and science fiction mysteries. Inspired by living abroad in France and Quebec, she loves creating magical tales of romance, mystery, and adventure that empower women and girls to be the heroes of their own lives. For her day job, Beth helps other novelists write, publish, and market their books as a creativity coach and a teacher. For fun, Beth enjoys walking her neighborhood, gardening, and watching movies and traveling with her husband, author Ezra Barany. They live in Oakland, California with a piano and over 1,000 books.
Thoughts on moving from one transition phase to the next and the different shapes transition takes. Also with tarot and reflection prompts!
The Sixes are all about journeys. After the feeling of being blocked with the Fives, you have finally moved past that and are now able to make progress again. Sometimes you’ll know where you are going, and sometimes you will not. Sometimes you will be excited to be on an adventure, and other times you’ll be simply plodding forward, hoping that your circumstances will change. No matter how you feel about what you’re doing, however, the Sixes do imply that you are on the right track. The direction you have picked is the right one. All you need to do is keep moving forward.
The Creative Tarot – Jessica Crispin
Transition takes different forms, sometimes a distinct turning point and other times a slower burn or less well-defined, uncertain intention. Having written two books about transition and also been through a major transition over about five years, I know a thing or two about navigating transition times. But you know what? I am still learning more about the nature of transition and the different forms it can take. I share thoughts on moving from one major transition phase to the next transition phase of a different kind. Here are messages from reflecting on the recent past and a new reckoning transition phase
.
What transition looks like
Transition times can look like a specific event or a turning point where life is irrevocably different or you know it means no going back. That typifies major transition experiences and examples such as:
Knowing you won’t stay in a job role any longer.
Leaving a location or moving house.
Leaving or experiencing the loss of a relationship..
Death of a loved one.
Deciding on a phase of life change like retiring or leaving paid employment.
Becoming a carer, parent or empty nester.
What transition also looks like
Transition can also look like a slower burn, a less defined desire, a sense of unease and uncertainty. There may be triggers and turning point events that make you reflect on where you are and where you are heading. But they might be quieter disappointments or feelings. Experiences gather over time to send a message about where you might head next. Or perhaps they simply say in different ways: ‘This needs to change, it’s unsustainable, it’s not what you really want.’
Transition can look like: integration, recalibration, different priorities, alternative choices, choosing more rather than less, working out your own unique path. Examples from my experience and the women I coach include:
deciding that a career choice is not an either/or; it’s a both/and – realising you can be both a corporate employee and a coach.
working out where writing and other creative priorities fit within your life and making space for them.
negotiating life post paid employment as the main focus and seeing what that landscape might look like eg casual days of working, self-employment, creative projects, volunteer work, investing, property development, travel, consulting – or a mix of some or all of these.
embarking on a new career via studying or learning a new skill like coaching, professional writing, psychological type, shamanic healing, self-publishing.
expanding self-expression and support for others via writing, publishing, social media and podcasting.
Long-term government employee (30+ years) no longer feels valued or finds satisfaction in her employment. She takes steps to craft a new life based on the creative and writing goals that are dear to her heart. Up-skilling in coaching, psychological type and tarot as guides and supports, she creates a new life focused on self-employment and building on the resources and skills already developed in life with her partner. Reflecting on and sharing about the experience enables her to coach and write books to make sense of this journey and to support others along the path.
Along the way Sacred Creative Collective Group coaching brought together midlife women seeking deeper meaning and creativity via a skills, community and project focus. I created the Personality Stories ecourse and coaching program for 1:1 guided support with personality insights.
Seeing a need, I volunteered to help AusAPT, the Australian Association for Psychological Type with social media and communications. This I continue to do as well as becoming President of AusAPT in 2020, leading psychological type learning and community in Australia.
In October 2021, fulfilling a long-held desire, I launched the Create Your Story Podcast featuring inspiring conversations on personality, creativity and self-leadership. In the past twelve months, I launched (and created) two books, the podcast, the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club and The Writing Road Trip with Beth which includes a free 6 day challenge, 6 week Writing Road Map course and 6 month Writing Road Trip membership program.
It’s been a blast and a huge five years of creativity and major transition.
The publication of two books on my 60th birthday in September 2021 felt like the beginning of the end of that transition phase. Fulfilling a long held writing dream, people were reading my books. I was building on that body of work and still do. But I felt like I moved into a new transition time. It is one of reckoning, inventory, prioritising, refocusing and realigning. I’ve created and learnt so much, but I’ve had to look at how I want to live my life. And how I can make the most of what I’ve already done and go further. I’m asking myself questions like:
How can I do more of what I enjoy like writing and content creation?
Where does writing fit with coaching? – a perennial question in this midlife transition
How can I launch in less labour-intensive ways?
What about writing the novels and other books I long to create and self-publish? Where does that fit?
How much is this ecosystem of coaching and writing costing (time, money)? Is this sustainable?
Do I want to be freer to travel more without restrictions – if not now, into the future?
How can I work in partnership more as I have done with Beth with great success, providing support, backup, new insights and skills?
And to be perfectly honest, there are days when I think, I could just let this all go and not coach or write any more. Just relax and read and enjoy my days. But would this be fulfilling? Is it what I really want to do with my life? (Actually, no! Creativity is a strong motivating force and value as is making a difference in the lives of others.)
Six of Swords arrives again
If you’ve read Wholehearted, you will know the Six of Swords features as a pivotal tarot card recurring during my time of transition. And guess what? It arrived again recently via The Spacious Tarot with this beautiful card.
As Jessa Crispin reminds us in The Creative Tarot, the Sixes are all about journeys and about moving on from that place of feeling blocked. I have felt quite blocked for the past few months. It hit after experiences of exhaustion and disappointment including:
exhaustion after 12 months of launching continually.
disappointment after not being able to have live launch events for my Wholehearted books.
book sales generally being slower than I would like.
It coalesced as an overall sense of disappointment of where I thought might be now – especially the number of readers, reviews, clients, income. But if I look at what I’ve achieved, it is significant and extraordinary. Part of the reckoning process is looking at achievements, creations, taking stock and acknowledging the immense learning and creativity. Now I need to move into building on all of this in a new way, not letting disappointment or expectations stop me. And I am well-placed to do that.
Eight of Swords follows up with a message
A couple of days later, the Eight of Swords followed up with a message about how we choose to be blocked and avoid taking action. It’s easy to get stuck in a phase of being blocked. A common image of the Eight of Swords is a woman in a (possibly) self-imposed blindfold or form of captivity. In The Wild Unknown, it is a pupa phase, full of the opportunity of turning into a butterfly. As we move on, it’s important to work out the one or two actions that might take us into the next transition phase. Taking off the blindfold off and stepping into being free to transform.
Eight of Swords in various tarot decks. Top, left to right: Rider Waite Tarot, The Robin Wood Tarot, The Sakki Sakki Tarot; Bottom row, left to right: The Fountain Tarot, Dame Darcy’s Mermaid Tarot, The Wild Unknown.
Moving through to the next transition
I’m heartened by the message of the Sixes that this is the right path as I know it is. And that I need to keep moving forward. The Eight of Swords suggests how – one valuable step at a time.
Transition and transformation is an iterative process. We end one phase and move on to another all the time; sometimes longer journeys, other times shorter ones. I hope these messages from the next phase of transition help you with any changes you may be moving through.
Here are some questions to reflect on or journal about your current or next transition:
Where are you feeling you are on a transition journey?
Are you beginning, in the middle or nearing the end of one cycle of change?
If you are feeling like you are in that messy and uncertain middle, what frameworks might helps as guides? (See my Wholehearted books for many tips on this!)
Where are you feeling stuck and why?
How can you take inventory of your achievements, operations or skills to help you move forward?
What have you already created and what can you repurpose or use as a springboard? (I have a Content Repurposing Strategy list of ideas to inspire me! We don’t have to start from zero – you most likely have so many starts underway.)
What are the one or two actions you can do now to move forward?
Warmest wishes for the next transition steps or phases you are going through. I’m here to help and support you. Just shout out or explore my books or body of work for insights. Links below.
About the author and resources to help you
Terri Connellan is an author and life transition, creativity and personality coach for midlife women in transition to a life with deeper purpose. Terri works globally through her creative business, Quiet Writing, and Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook are published by the kind press.
In Podcast Episode 17, Gentle Living for Highly Sensitive People, I chat with Gentle Living Nurse, Becky Corbett about what it means to be a highly sensitive person (HSP) and Becky’s gentle living framework that provides support for HSPs.
Welcome to Episode 17 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Gentle Living for Highly Sensitive People.
I’m joined by Becky Corbett, aka The Gentle Living Nurse, a holistic nurse and coach for highly sensitive souls.
We chat about what it means to be a highly sensitive person (HSP) and Becky’s gentle living framework and podcast that provides support for HSPs. Becky also shares insights on burnout and impacts on health care workers in recent times and how people can nurture and prioritise their own well-being as they care for others.
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:
Becky’s background as a nurse and challenges faced
Shifting to a path of gentle living
Being a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)
Strengths and challenges of being highly sensitive
How to balance your nervous system
High sensitivity and other personality preferences
Experiencing burnout and making change
Signs of burnout
Being a holistic nurse
Impacts on health care workers in covid times
Social media options as a highly sensitive person
Transcript of podcast
Introduction
Welcome to Episode 17 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 25th of May as I record this.
I’m excited to have Becky Corbett join us for the podcast today.
Becky Corbett (aka The Gentle Living Nurse) is a holistic nurse and coach for the highly sensitive soul based in sunny Brisbane, Australia. The Gentle Living framework was birthed as a result of Becky’s personal healing journey of anxiety and navigating the world as a highly sensitive person (HSP).
Becky now supports other HSPs to create their own Gentle Living journey to nurture the nervous system, through combining elements of evidence-based science, spirituality and intuition. Her mission is to support as many HSPs as possible to connect with their sensitivity gifts to flourish and thrive!
Becky and I connected via social media and I have had the pleasure of chatting with Becky on The Gentle Living Podcast. So it was wonderful to connect again and focus on Becky’s very important work in the world. We chat about what it means to be a highly sensitive person (HSP) and Becky’s gentle living framework and podcast that provide support for HSPs. Becky also shares insights on burnout and impacts on health care workers especially and how people can nurture and prioritise their own well-being as they care for others.
Enjoy listening to this insightful and inspiring conversation and take some time to check out Becky’s fabulous framework and podcast.
So let’s head into the interview with the lovely Becky.
Transcript of interview with Becky Corbett
Terri Connellan: Hello, Becky. And welcome to the Create Your Story podcast.
Becky Corbett: Hello, Terri, it’s such an honor to be here. Thank you for having me on your podcast and congratulations on launching your podcast as well.
Terri Connellan: Oh, thank you so much. It was great to be on your podcast a little while ago, share our podcasting journeys and stories together.
Thanks for your connection across our work in the world, especially as it relates to personality, sensitivity and living our best life. And we’ve connected online around our work, so it’s great to chat further on this today. So can you tell people a little bit about you, a brief overview about your background, how you got to be where you are and the work you do.
Becky Corbett: Absolutely. Well, first up I’m very excited to be here because I’ve been following your work for a long time. Well before I even created my own business, so yeah, this is exciting. To give a bit of background about me, so I am a registered nurse, I’ve been nursing for about 12 years now, more recently in the mental health space. I’ve always had a fascination with the human mind and the body and what makes us tick and always searching for those deep answers to deep questions.
And through my nursing career, I’ve always felt as though something were missing. And I actually resonate a lot with what you say in your book Wholeheartedabout feeling half-hearted about what you might be doing and not feeling that sense of complete fulfilment. Like something’s missing, it’s sort of partly there, but it’s also partly missing. So yeah, through my nursing career, I always felt that something was missing. I don’t know. There’s probably listeners who work as nurses or doctors or health care workers and in the hospital system. It’s very directive. It’s very much, you tell patients what to do. You’re the expert, they’re not the experts. You have all the knowledge and the information. There’s a big hierarchy. The politics of the whole system, bullying is a really big problem as well. And so I experienced burnout quite a number of times through the hospital system and to deal with this, I really just pushed through because there’s this real culture in the healthcare system about we’re the people taking care of people.
So we have to push through and keep going. And so, yeah, I had lots of unhealthy habits as a lot of nurses do. So sugar, caffeine, bad foods, not exercising enough because I was always so tired. Alcohol is a big one for nurses as well. Just blowing off some steam with a few drinks because, it’s the quickest way to de stress. And anyhow, I eventually left the hospital system all together. I found it wasn’t serving me. I was really burnt out. I wasn’t really serving the people as best as I could do. Just wasn’t thriving in that sort of a culture.
So that led me down the path of gentle living, which is my business today. So I call myself the Gentle Living Nurse. And so somewhere along that path, I really reconnected with myself and my unique traits as not only being an introvert, but also as a highly sensitive person. And I understood that the root of all this anxiety and overwhelm and panic I was feeling sometimes was because my nervous system was so out of balance and I was just doing all the wrong things and seeking for the wrong answers.
So when I turned to the path of gentle living, which is all about gently exploring your nervous system health and taking care of yourself that led me to more fulfillment and that led me to the path of wanting to support people, to, nurture their gifts as a highly sensitive person, which is what I’m excited to speak more about today.
Terri Connellan: Well, thank you. Thanks so much for sharing about your journey from that sense of not feeling fulfilled in your work to moving through, to finding a path that takes those areas that you feel passionate about into new spaces and in new ways, and also growing your own self knowledge in that process.
So thanks for sharing about your journey and I love too that your focus now is on the nervous system and health and living holistically and living gently. So look forward to exploring that with you today. So your work focuses on the highly sensitive person, HSP, which you identify as, so how did you identify this in yourself and how might others also know they are highly sensitive?
Becky Corbett: Yes. So my work around the highly sensitive person, it evolved as wonderful things do. So when I first created my journey of gentle living, probably around the end of 2018, where I was really taking care of my nervous system and doing the things to nurture myself again and address the overwhelming anxiety that I’ve been experiencing for such a long time.
Through that process, yes, I had always identified as being quite an anxious person. I’d always been quite an anxious child. I suppose I didn’t really realize it at the time, but I look back and I think I was quite shy. I was quite anxious. I was quite withdrawal and at times, and there was never really an aha moment, I suppose, where I realized that I was a highly sensitive person.
It was just looking back in hindsight, I think. Oh yes, there were all these signs that, okay, this makes sense. I am highly sensitive. So as I was walking my path of gentle living to restore my nervous system, I realized that I wanted to empower and support other people to go through the healing that I had gone through and three things it and the stress and the burnout.
And through that, I learned a little bit more about the highly sensitive person. So I don’t know how I came across it. I don’t know whether it was 10 years ago, could have been earlier. Five years ago. I’m not quite sure, but it just all came to make sense. And a lot of people that I speak to who didn’t realize that they were highly sensitive and then I introduced them to the work of being a highly sensitive person, they sort of have the same, aha, yeah, that sounds like me.
So a lot of the research around being a highly sensitive person was pioneered by Dr. Elaine Aron, who is a therapist and scientist based in the United States and high sensitivity is a trait which is actually held by about 20% of the population.
So it’s much like hair or eye color. It’s not actually a disorder. It’s not a weakness. It’s nothing that’s wrong with you. Not any more than say having brown hair or blue eyes is a disorder. And it’s also not necessarily synonymous with being shy or introverted. In fact, there’s a strong correlation between being a highly sensitive person and being an introvert, but there are certainly highly sensitive extroverts as well. I think it’s around 30% of highly sensitive people are actually extroverts as well.
So to break it down for people that haven’t heard of the highly sensitive person, what it is, they’ll have no idea, the highly sensitive person, or as a highly sensitive person, we have more highly sensitive, nervous systems.
So what that means is we have very perceptive to the environment around us. We don’t really have as much of a filter on our nervous systems. I like to give the analogy of that. It’s not as filtered as say someone who’s a non highly sensitive person. So we navigate the world in technicolour. I sort of see it as so much sound, sensation, feeling, experiences that we go through. And that’s normal to us. We don’t know any different. And so that’s why as a highly sensitive person, if you’re not navigating life, taking care of yourself, taking care of the environment that you’re in or setting yourself up with the foundations that you need, you can become quite overwhelmed, stressed, burnt out because the world isn’t really set up for the highly sensitive person.
We pick up on subtleties in the environment, nuances, and actually some signs if you are a highly sensitive person and I suspect many of the people listening to this podcast, are probably highly . sensitive because most creative people, I would argue, have high sensitivity.
But the signs of being a highly sensitive person are things such as feeling your emotions really deeply, being moved by beauty, by nature, by the arts, by music, you might get quite teary if you engage with something that’s quite meaningful to you. I know for myself, I get quite inundated and flushed with emotion when I go and see a musical, for instance.
And I used to find that really embarrassing. Now I just take tissues with me and I allow myself to just really feel the experience of going to a musical. Cause it’s not a sadness. It’s sort of just an overwhelming sense of emotion that we experience. As a highly sensitive person, you’re probably also very sensitive to physical sensations. So very perceptive to things like touch, massage, might be a bit more sensitive to pain as well. We’ve got a really rich inner world and deep imagination, which makes us very good storytellers. Our imagination can sometimes run a bit wild and we can become overwhelmed and think anxious thoughts with that.
So we have to keep that in check as well. And like I mentioned, we’re very much effected by the external environment. So a lot of highly sensitive people will have some sort of sense that is a little bit overwhelming for them sometimes. And for myself that’s noise. I was just saying to Terri before we got on these chat that the man next door is mowing his lawn.
And that’s actually what aggravating to me, not to the sense that I’m going to tear my hair out, but, to the sense that it’s just a bit much. So I’m very sensitive to noises within my environment. So for other people that might be taste, it might be the smell, it might be emotions, it can be a whole range of different things.
It might mean that you’re also really affected by being in busy environments like airports or public transport, buses, shopping centres, being stuck in traffic, gyms, those types of things. And we’re also very deeply affected by the moods and the emotions of others too. So we’re very good at stepping into a room and then being able to detect the energy in a room. We can often tell if there’s been some sort of a conflict or there’s been something not quite right happen.
And we need to be careful not to absorb that as well. So a lot of highly sensitive people might get home from work and just feel absolutely drained. Not because anything significant has happened, but because the interactions, the sights, the sounds, the smells, everything that’s been going on through the day can become quite exhausting.
What else? Our conversations, we like to have really, really deep, meaningful conversation. So we make good podcasters. So like yourself, Terri, seeking deep, deep answers to deep questions. And with that too, we can ruminate a little bit, I suppose. We might come away from conversations and really over analyze what we’ve said or what the other person said. And did I say the right thing and what did they mean when they looked at me in that way? So we really need to take care to withdraw when we need to restore ourselves. And retreat into a little bubble sometimes too.
Terri Connellan: Thank you. That’s an amazing snapshot of what it’s like personally and for others who may be highly sensitive. So it sounds to me like, it’s almost like everyone has their own brand or experience of being highly sensitive that they need to learn to understand and then manage. Is that how it works?
Becky Corbett: Yeah definitely. Being a highly sensitive person. It doesn’t mean we’re all the same. We are all very diverse. And like you said, beautifully. Yes. It is almost like having your own brand of high sensitivity. So like I mentioned earlier, you can be a highly sensitive extrovert, so you can really enjoy being in loud environments, but at the same time, you might also be very sensitive to the sounds. Or you might be very sensitive to the conversations that are going on.
Or you might be more of an introverted, highly sensitive person. So it can just get a bit too much having too much social interaction, as well. So yeah, it looks entirely different for everyone. And it’s interesting because people that I have bought on to my podcast, actually, that didn’t identify as being highly sensitive, when they learnt more about the traits and what it involved. A lot of people have said, actually, that’s me. I think I’m highly sensitive because I think the word sensitive has a lot of negative connotations attached to it. And I think that’s sort of a cultural thing where we’ve been told that sensitivity is weak, or if you’re too sensitive, then you’re feeling too much and you need to toughen up. So perhaps some of the language around it can deter some people as well.
Terri Connellan: Well, that’s fascinating. So you’ve touched a bit on this, but interested to explore a bit more, what gifts do highly sensitive people bring to the world? You’ve mentioned creativity. That’s obviously highly correlated by the sound of it?
Becky Corbett: Yes. I love this question so much because so many HSPs that I work with HSP, highly sensitive person. So many HSPs I work with come to me and they just sort of feel like everything’s become a bit too much. They are overwhelmed. They’ve been told that they’re too weak, too sensitive, too emotional, too this, too that.
And so a lot of the work that I do is supporting people to realise that actually sensitivity can be a gift. And there is a lot that comes along with that as well. So interestingly, a lot of the great minds of the world, so artists, creatives, musicians, environmentalists, humanitarians, a lot of them are HSPs.
So some examples, actually if you have a Google, some examples I’ve found were, apparently, Albert Einstein, Princess Diana, Martin Luther King, Jr, Alanis Morissette, Jane Goodall. And so you can say they’re not just women either. So men are also highly sensitive, but again, I think a cultural thing is that men are meant to be sensitive. So perhaps women embrace it a little bit more, but I think the research shows it is 50 50. But yeah, women are more forthcoming about it. So yes, when HSPs let go of the story that they’re too sensitive or they’re too much, that then offers them the route to explore their gifts.
So yes, creativity is absolutely one. So deep imagination that we have brings life to things like novels, poetry, songs, beautiful books to the world. We’re very empathetic as well. So HSPs make wonderful friends, wonderful therapists, healthcare workers. But by the same token, need to be very careful not to become overwhelmed or to give too much or to take on people’s emotions too much.
We’re also quite intuitive. But often that is masked by anxiety. So if we’ve got an imbalanced nervous system that often manifests as feeling quite anxious and overwhelmed. We struggle to listen to our intuition, but when we can calm that anxiety down, then we can better tap into the intuition. And it’s very strong for us as well.
We’ve got a strong will to make a meaningful difference in the world. So we’re not interested in surface level questions or answers. In fact, those types of conversations are quite draining for us. There’s nothing, I hate more than being stuck in a meeting with surface level questions.
And oh yes, what are you doing on the weekend? You know, that kind of stuff. So I’m more likely to pursue those complex topics and to really seek answers there. We’re also peace and harmony seekers as well. So sometimes people may say that, we’re a little bit idealistic, but I think we need more idealism in the world looking at what the world is like right now.
That’s absolutely what we need and we do make wonderful leaders too. So I think there’s a lot of belief around leaders as being quite aggressive or arrogant, and that hasn’t gotten us very far so HSPs when they are in leadership, they make very fair, very strong and very wise leaders as well. So, yeah, that’s just skimming, the surface I’d say of the strengths of sensitivity.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, fantastic. What a great list of areas of gifts: creativity, empathy, intuition, meaningful differences, peace and harmony, leadership. They’re such a beautiful set of gifts to bring to the world. So I guess part of the challenge in learning to bring those gifts as well as you can to the world as a highly sensitive person, is learning to navigate the challenges. So what are some examples of the challenges that HSPs might face?
Becky Corbett: Yes. Well, because we are only about 20% of the population. The world is not really set up for the HSP. We do live in a very noisy world and if we don’t manage our experiences of anxiety and overwhelm, we are more prone to experiencing things like chronic illness or to experience even heightened mental distress, like severe anxiety or depression.
Some of the challenges in navigating the world as a highly sensitive person that come along because the world hasn’t been set up for us, we often try and camouflage in. So that can sometimes make us people pleasers. We’re very skilled at camouflaging and making sure that others’ needs are met so that we don’t seem like we’re too much of a bother or too much of a fuss.
So we’re very skilled at identifying the needs of others, but sometimes that comes to the detriment of our own wellbeing. And that might look like things I saying yes too often when you really want to say no. It might look like having really poor boundaries, not taking the time out that you need.
The overwhelm that we experience too can often lead to us, trying to perceive quick fixes to ease the overwhelm that we’re experiencing. So an example that I gave earlier in myself was my unhealthy habits, which was sugar to keep myself going, because I was always so exhausted. And when you’ve got heightened cortisol, the stress hormone in the body, you just more likely to crave and to seek out sugar, to mitigate that.
Alcohol as well can be a problem for some highly sensitive people, because it is a quick fix with our sensitive nervous systems. We are very responsive to alcohol very soon. So it just gives that. sort of instant relief. Caffeine as well to keep ourselves going, but then by the same token, and HSPs can become quite jittery with caffeine. And I suppose the strength that I mentioned before around having a lot of empathy or self-awareness, being able to look into conversations quite deeply, with that comes a tendency to ruminate. So we can go over things over and over and over in our minds and there’s no solution. It just makes us feel worse and our attention to detail as well.
We have a tendency to perfectionism. So a lot of the people I work with and most HSPs do identify as either being a perfectionist or a lot of them say that they’re recovering perfectionists, which is yeah, a challenge to overcome. And I don’t think there’s any quick fix to that either. It’s something we’re constantly navigating.
Terri Connellan: So in your work you provide solutions and strategies for some of these challenges based on your experiences and your skills. So as The Gentle Living Nurse, you offer a Gentle Living Framework and the Gentle Living Podcast for people who are highly sensitive. Can you tell us more about the gentle living framework and about the podcast too, and how it supports people?
Becky Corbett: Oh, I’d love to. Absolutely. So, as I mentioned earlier, gentle living is a framework that I really created for myself to start with. It was my own journey of trying to overcome this anxiety that I’d experienced really throughout my whole life, but never actually managed it properly.
I think it was because I’ve always been highly sensitive, but I grew up in a loving environment and everything, but I didn’t have parents that probably identified that I was highly sensitive. So when I pursued the path of gentle living, I was burnt out, overwhelmed, exhausted. And so I just returned to the basics of self-care, which involved taking care of the nervous system.
So it’s a framework really, which is based on my personal experience, my spirituality practices, but it’s also drawing upon the evidence-based strategies that I have used and learnt about through my psychology studies and also working in the mental health space. A lot of people who were experiencing mental distress or mental illness were highly sensitive people.
And so the foundation of it is really based on understanding your nervous system, how it works, viewing the self as a whole as well. Because I think in, especially in the Western framework, we see mind and body is separate and we still categorize them as mind, body, and spirit, but we are a whole person. And so we need to understand ourselves in the context of a very noisy world and understand exactly what we need as highly sensitive people to enable us to flourish and thrive. I see the HSP as being, like a rare flower or a plant, not a weak flower or plant, but just a rare one that needs ideal conditions to grow and to thrive.
And we know that when we’re immersing in the modern world and we’re not addressing our own needs and the nervous system is becoming more and more overwhelmed, it can really cause us to, wither up, so like a plant or a flower might wither up and not survive.
So I do a lot of work with people around identifying exactly what the stresses and triggers are in their lives, because we’ve got this tendency in our modern world, to just keep pushing through, keep going, ignoring any symptoms that we’re experiencing, ignoring any challenges that we’re going through. But really, we need to address the issues at the source.
So it might be things such as looking at well, what is your work situation like? Is your work burning you out? What’s your home situation like? Are you living somewhere that’s actually quite noisy and you’ve got noisy neighbors? Or you’re living in a big city and it’s not really the ideal environment for you. What do your relationships look like as well, because we as HSPs, although a lot of us are introverts, we still need that social connection. We need deep connections. So it’s important that we establish those deep supports.
The other thing is, are we living aligned with our values? And I know that’s something that connects with your work as well, Terri to really identify what are your values and are you actually living in alignment with them because we try to seek out the things that we think are going to be aligned with our values. But a lot of the time we are sort of living this lifestyle that’s just become too overwhelming for us.
The other thing is, do you listen to your intuition? I do a lot of work with my clients around listening to your intuition. What does it sound like? How is it different to your anxiety? And also rewriting any narratives that we have. So that may involve what I like to see as sort of re-parenting yourself in a way. So if you grew up in an environment where you might’ve had well-meaning adults or teachers or carers trying to look out for you, but they might’ve told you, “Oh you’re too much or too emotional, too this, you should go out, you should do this…”
And so a lot of that is going back to that, giving ourselves self-compassionate around that and identifying, ‘Hey, it’s okay that I’m this way,’ addressing what you need as a parent would to a child. So yeah, a lot of work is around identifying that the way that you are is okay. It’s not better than the non HSP. It’s not less than. It’s just as worthy as anyone else. And it’s really about creating a lifestyle that supports you. So again, thinking about that flower that might need the sunshine, might need ideal soil, shade, whatever it is, what are the things that you need to really flourish and thrive?
Terri Connellan: Mmm, it’s such important work in the world when you think of those beautiful cluster of strengths and gifts that we’ve mentioned. And then the challenges, your work is just so important bringing together personal experience, spirituality and evidence-based practices that, can really support people to get practical strategies for shining the way they are and not being too impacted by the challenges or being able to understand the challenge. A lot of the work I do, and I’m sure the work you do is about being conscious of things that are sort of bubbling away and I guess that’s where intuition comes in. Because often things are unconscious and then we don’t know why we’re going off the rails. Isn’t it? It’s about becoming more aware.
Becky Corbett: Exactly. And actually something just came to mind when you were speaking then I’m not sure who said this quote or where I read it, but someone out there and anyone that’s listening can, if they’ve heard the quote or whatever, I’m alluding to they can chip in. But there’s something said out there about being a highly sensitive person.
So when we’re navigating the world as a highly sensitive person, it’s like we have a pack of 48 colored pencils, whereas the HSP has a pack of maybe 12 colored pencils. So it’s okay to be exploring all of that, but perhaps not all at the same time. We need to appreciate that. Yes, we have these deep rich world, but we need to also honor our energy and our value system and our lifestyle too.
Terri Connellan: That’s a great way of looking at it. And it’s like, yes, you can do all those things, but not all at the one time. And your podcast too explores those areas too. You’ve got some great conversations with people about spirituality, evidence-based practice. And of course, just as on this podcast, personal experience, which is so important.
Becky Corbett: Yes. Yes. I love combining all of them because none of them need to be mutually exclusive either that you don’t need to just be a spiritual person or just be a science person. You can combine all of them to have the best results.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, I think it’s great. So I know you’re also an INFJ in Jung/ Myers-Briggs terms. And as you’re talking and describing all this, I’m thinking, that sounds a lot like NF sort of temperament, and I’m thinking, how does this relate to personalities? So, how does being highly sensitive relate to other personality preferences, like being introverted, intuitive, or feeling, for example.
Becky Corbett: Yes. It’s funny because you don’t necessarily need to be an introvert to be highly sensitive, but so many HSPs I know are also INFJs, which are as you know, the rarest type. So it’s funny. A lot of the people I work with, when I ask them, what’s your personality type? A lot of them say they’re INFJs. So I tend to attract other INFJs into my orbit as well. But yes, it makes sense. There is a strong correlation between the N and the F parts of the personality profiles.
So for people that aren’t aware N is the intuitive part and F is the feeling yes, yes. Which are both strengths to the HSP. We’re all often deep feelers, we’re deep thinkers. And interestingly, the personality preferences leaning towards connecting with emotions of the self and others are more likely to be highly sensitive people.
So if you do have that NF component, as part of your personally preference, there’s probably some high sensitivity there. I don’t know if there’s been many studies actually done on it, but I think it would be really, really interesting to explore. From what I understand, the feeling component is often linked with personality types who are inclined to follow their hearts, their feelings, emotions. They’re often compassionate, warm, and friendly. But then they often uphold the needs of others before their own. Is that right?
Terri Connellan: Yeah, very much so. And the other key things with the NFs, they often idealists. And their key focus is often around values. It’s very values driven. And as you were talking, naturally having that sort of knowledge in my head, I’m hearing you talk about that really strongly, that what we value and what we want to share with the world and how we connect with people and have those deep, meaningful conversations about it.
Becky Corbett: Yes. It’s so interesting. Whereas I know personally preferences, which are probably more T and what is that the T [Thinking]?
Terri Connellan: I’m an NT [Rational/Intuitive, Thinking] I’m I N TJ. So I actually have the same dominant preferences as you, which is introverted intuition. I think we chatted about this on your podcast. But as you say, it sounds like being highly sensitive could cross any of those, but is more likely to be correlated with someone who’s intuitive and feeling in preference.
Becky Corbett: Yes. Yes, I think so. And this is probably generalizing, but perhaps preferences that are more leaning towards facts, figures, logic, probably less inclined to be highly sensitive doesn’t mean that they don’t care. It probably just means that they’re less inclined perhaps to hold the highly sensitive trait. But it’s not impossible by any means, but certainly because intuition and feeling are so deep for the highly sensitive person. I think that makes sense. Yeah.
Terri Connellan: So for example, an ENFP for example, could be highly sensitive. And as we were talking about, that sort of brand or how it manifests for individuals. For that person, there’s an extroverted way it might manifest and P [Perceiving] is often about opening up options, not having closure, having choice. And I guess that for that person being highly sensitive, may have many strengths, but also might manifest as too many options, which can get overwhelming. So is that how you see it play out?
Becky Corbett: Yeah, I think so. I don’t have as much in depth knowledge about Myers-Briggs or Jungian psychology types as you do, but certainly I have noticed that there definitely is a trend or a pattern there. And I like actually what you said about it, having your own brand, perhaps the different Myers-Briggs types are sort of different brands of the highly sensitive person.
So say an ENFJ versus an INFJ might be very, very similar, but the difference there is the extroversion, but they’re still more inclined to be very intuitive, have those deep feelings and, and still to perhaps ruminate and be people pleasers as well.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah, the people pleasing comes into it because it’s about harmony. Particularly for people who have that temperament, it’s very important and some more than others, but have that sense of, everybody being happy about a solution or an outcome and not wanting to rock the boat.
We could talk about this all day and we might have some other conversations on this. I think it’s fascinating. So you’re a nurse by background, but as you mentioned before, you found that hospital-based nursing wasn’t for you and that resulted for you in a time of burnout and unhappiness. So how did you rebuild refocus and rewrite your story to help and inspire others?
Becky Corbett: Yes, I’ve had about three burnouts, I think, through my nursing career. And each time it happens, it’s trying to tell me over and over again, Becky, you’re on the wrong path. Do something different and it can be the case for a lot of other people too, to experience burnout more than once.
So the first time I experienced burnout, really the most significant time was in 2018. As I mentioned earlier, that’s when I first created or came up with the idea of gentle living for myself. So I took some time off from work. I was very unhappy. I took a trip to India and they say that India always has something to teach you. Have you been to India?
Terri Connellan: No I haven’t, but I always love hearing stories about India and visits there.
Becky Corbett: Yes. I had read extensively that India will always teach you something and it may not necessarily be something that you want to learn. And that was my experience. Absolutely. So at the time I was working a lot of shift work, I was saying yes to all these shifts. I was doing double shifts. I was burning out, drinking too much alcohol to calm down, to manage my stress, had next to zero unhealthy habits. And when I was in India, I had planned to go on a meditation retreat and to do my training as a meditation teacher.
And before I went on the retreat, the day before I was due to start… So I’d traveled around India with my partner for a couple of weeks. And then I was going to do this retreat for myself. The day before I just had this intense panic attack. And it came out of nowhere. I didn’t have anyone there. My partner had gone home by that stage. I was in a foreign country and although I felt safe, my surroundings felt quite safe. I found the Indian people to be quite warm and I really loved where I was. It was just this internal state of panic that all of a sudden came out which I’d never experienced before.
And I think because of my mental health training, I knew how to identify a panic attack. So I said to myself, okay, you’re having a panic attack. Just do this, you know, name five things in the environment. Breathe. Do all those practical grounding strategies. In the midst of that panic though, I just thought I need to get out of here. I just had this intense desire to just go home.
And so I spent way too much money to book a flight back home, and I didn’t end up going to this meditation retreat, even though it probably would have done me a lot of benefit and on the flight home, I just thought, gosh, I need to change something. This is too much. Okay. Yeah.
Anyone that’s experienced a life turning event like that would understand that it’s really hard to put into words what was actually going on. But it was just this real intense desire to make a change. So I got home and I just decided, yes, it’s time to overhaul my lifestyle. And that began with quitting the job that was burning me out. When I spoke earlier about stresses and triggers, that was the number one thing that I just had to cut out. I know it’s not always practical to say, just quit your job. And I was lucky at the time that that was something that I was able to do, but it’s really just about mitigating whatever stresses you’ve got going on in your life.
So for someone else that might not have the option of quitting their job. It might be about reducing hours or just finding something else that’s not as triggering to the nervous system. So I ended up going into community mental health and I had another burn out there. I had better balance, but I had another burn out and I still wasn’t feeling that sense of wholeheartedness, which you describe.
And that’s when I really decided that I would create my own business. So I took care of myself first. I made small little changes along the way, and I think that’s really important to highlight to people as well, that it doesn’t need to be this whole, I quit my job and I changed my life overnight. It is a series of small steps.
When we look at other people that may have changed their lives or created a successful business, we tend to think, oh, they have it all. They’ve done it so easily when really it’s just making tiny, tiny, small steps along the way. So yeah, I decided to create my own business as soon as I’d gotten my health back on board and I decided, yes, I want to work with people that are like me because I always felt so isolated in who I was. I suppose I always felt like a little bit of an outsider. I was very good at fitting in and camouflaging, like I said earlier. But I had this sense to really want to connect with other people that were like-minded.
I had this really strange aversion to the word coach though, which is interesting. And it’s funny. I think there’s a lot of words that we need to challenge for ourselves and the meanings that they hold for us. And another one that I mentioned earlier was sensitivity or sensitive having a negative connotation.
So I had this strange aversion to the word coach and I thought, no, I’m not a coach. I’m a mentor, I’m a teacher, I’m a guide. And I just got real with myself and I thought, well, why am I feeling that aversion? And I think it was just because of these perceptions that I had around what coach meant to me. In my head, coach held the connotations of maybe being really upbeat, really rah rah, change your life and change your mindset, change your life, which is not my style at all.
And I think that extreme approach to overhauling things really quickly, made me feel a little bit unsafe, but now I’ve transformed that belief anyhow, and I know that coach could mean a whole different range of things, and I embrace that title now.
So I certainly, I didn’t quit my job and throw it all away, but I steadily built the blocks to get to where I want to be in a way that felt safe to me. So it was just about pivoting. So for anyone else, that’s listening. If they’re experiencing a challenging time, don’t feel like you have to get from a to b straight away. Just take a small shift or pivot with what’s realistic for you. That might be reducing your hours, setting more boundaries, changing up your relationships. And for me, it really started doing the work of taking care of my nervous system. and yes, now I’m just continuing to build and grow and not looking back.
Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s awesome. And they’re tough times, aren’t they?, when we hit b urnt out or hit the bottom or go through crisis. I certainly can relate to what you’re describing when you just know where you are is not the right path, but trying to work out what the right path looks like can feel quite challenging. But yeah, so agree with you, it’s just building small practices and often we can sort of say, well, I either stay or I go with our job, but there’s plenty of in-between options that people can explore. Like it could be working four days instead of five or working from home a couple of days or just something that helps manage. That maybe opens up some time for us to look at other options.
Becky Corbett: Hmm. That’s right just reducing the stress by even 2% to start with, 5%.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. We get a bit stuck, sometimes cause we’re overwhelmed, but then because we’re overwhelmed, we don’t have the time or the mental headspace to look at other things. Well, thank you for sharing your story. And, that’s really inspiring others and the work that you do is just fabulous. So what does your life look like now for you as a holistic nurse and coach on a day-to-day basis?
Becky Corbett: Yes. So I’m so pleased now that I balance an employed role that I really do enjoy as a health coach actually. So I support people in that role to reduce their risk of chronic disease. But I also run alongside that my business. Which I don’t see it as my side hustle. I see it as my main business and perhaps my employment is my side hustle. So the Gentle Living Nurse allows me to support my beautiful fellow HSPs, which has been amazing because I’ve been able to connect with other highly sensitive people from around the world. And connect to people who never even realized that high sensitivity was a thing.
So I support people through my one-to-one nurture program in which we address nervous system health. I’m looking to build into creating a group program as well, because I think it’s so important that us HSPs find one another, stick together and learn from one another’s experiences. Because like I said, we are in this noisy world where the majority of people are not HSPs.
I have periodic wellbeing workshops to learn more about sensitivity and what it means and how you can draw upon your own sensitivity gifts and learn more about the trait. And as you’ve mentioned as well, I have the Gentle Living Podcast, which you have been a guest on, which was so much fun to speak on all things about high sensitivity and how to nurture your nervous system. So I speak to people on a range of different things to address all the scientific elements, the spiritual elements, the practical elements, all of it, yeah.
Terri Connellan: Oh, that’s fantastic. You have a wonderful newsletter. I always love it when your newsletter lands in my inbox. It’s always like a warm hug around you as you read. We’ll pop the link in and just encourage people to connect with you.
So with the stresses on nurses and healthcare workers with COVID and other issues, what impacts are you seeing on individuals and how are you supporting them? You’ve covered a lot of work that you do, but perhaps there’s extra special things you’re doing in that field at the moment?
Becky Corbett: Yeah. Such an important issue. And I think a big problem is that a lot of nurses and healthcare workers don’t really seek the support that they need. There’s a big culture of not taking care of ourselves and one another. There’s the whole saying of nurses eat their young. So younger nurses come through the healthcare system and older nurses, which are burnt out. They might not even be that much older. They might have just been in the hospital system for five years or so, really give younger ones a hard time. And so they’re just not taken care of well enough, I believe. And the thing is a lot of HSPs are drawn to the areas of healthcare nursing, because they have a desire to make a difference.
But because it’s not the best environment, hospitals, are very noisy. They’re busy. They are overwhelming. They smell bad. They’ve go bad food. They’re not the best places for healing. So it’s understandable that even if you’re not a highly sensitive person, you just burn out quite easily in those fields. We’re losing so many wonderful doctors and nurses and therapists as well having worked through COVID and I’m not sure what the solution to that is.
But I think the entire health care model needs to change for a start. And I think more health care workers need to understand the signs of burnout for themselves. Because it’s very subtle to start with. As I’ve mentioned before, when I was in India, I was feeling exhausted. But realistically, looking back, I was burnt out, but I didn’t really realize it. And so I think identifying those signs of burnout. When I work with people in the healthcare field, it’s about identifying, well, actually are you burnt out? Cause burnout doesn’t need to necessarily mean that you’re physically burnt out.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t move necessarily, although it can be that, but it can also just be the experience of not thinking clearly, brain fog, feeling as though you’ve lost a lot of compassion. Not that you’re not a compassionate person, but compassion fatigue is a really big one for nurses and healthcare workers, because they giving, giving, giving so much of the time, but then they’re not receiving the support that they need.
It’s a really difficult question because I don’t know what the answer is. And I know for myself, the answer was to step away from that field. And I know that it’s not practical for everyone, but perhaps it’s taking those small pivots away, and finding something that’s more sustainable for them.
Terri Connellan: And also, as you said, just being more informed and more conscious of what’s happening to them. I think for all of us, but I’m sure those in the healthcare profession are probably even more likely to, like you said before, push through and think I’m okay, I’ll be right tomorrow. I’ll be better. But it’s just stopping, time out to identify those signs of burnout and that empathetic overload. The old oxygen mask story. Certainly experienced it when I was caring for my mother, a time when I was in that caring role, fairly intensely and that learning for me going through that time was I had to learn to look after myself to be able to care for my mother. And I think we all learn that on our life journey, but for those in the healthcare profession, that must be super intensified, it’s all about caring, isn’t it?
So speaking of self care, one thing I’ve noticed you have done recently, which I’ve been watching and finding really fascinating is that you stepped away from Instagram altogether and you also stepped away from social media generally for a while. So how does social media fit with being highly sensitive and living gently? And how do you manage your energy and choices?
Becky Corbett: Mm. Yes, I did step away from Instagram. It was a bit of an experiment, I suppose, towards the end of last year, I had a bit of a love, hate relationship with it for a while. So I loved the opportunity to connect with people. I connected with you and I connected with so many other wonderful people and I’ve been immersed in other people’s work. And I love the opportunity for collaboration and creativity. But it’s also an overwhelming space with complex algorithms. And I sort of stepped back and I started to think, if this was a physical place, what I want to be stepping into Instagram and immersing in all of this all the time?
So I did a lot of work around, I was really mindful of who I was following and I was trying to implement boundaries about not getting on and scrolling too much and fall into self comparison. But by the same token, it’s easier said than done too. So I found over time that the stuff I was creating wasn’t reaching people like it used to. And the algorithms have changed a lot as well. So there’s this whole thing with Instagram, where you have to be on the stories you need to do Lives, you need to do this and that and make reels.
And it was actually becoming overwhelming for me as a highly sensitive person. I was feeling, and I think it was pressure I put on myself obviously. But I was feeling this pressure that, oh, if I want to connect with people, I’m going to have to make a reel. I’m going to have to post this many times a day. I’m going to have these hashtags. And I got someone to help me out with my social media who helped with the scheduling for a little while, and she was wonderful, but it just didn’t feel right either. I like to be at the front end of creating all of my content and being in charge of that, I suppose.
I just was really cautious with how I was extending my energy and it was taking a bit too much of my time. And I found, I’m spending all this time creating this content. It’s not even reaching the people that I really want it to reach. And I experimented with maybe just diverting my attention to content that I knew was going to have a meaningful difference. For example connecting with my email list, connecting with my community. Having more time and energy for my one to one clients. Spending more time on my podcast as well, because that’s quite, time-consuming spending more time writing, blogging, all of those things.
And I just felt like my creativity flourished. It was sort of like if an HSP maybe steps out of a busy environment, like a shopping centre or a busy workplace, and they go into a little bit of a quiet bubble for a period of time, the creativity is more likely to flow again. And that’s just what I found stepping away from social media for a little bit of time.
And I went back on after a couple of months and I thought I don’t really miss this. I’m going to miss maybe seeing people’s stuff. But I don’t miss it as much as I don’t miss being in a really, really busy environment. And so I’m not probably off forever but certainly I’m enjoying being off it for now. And I think with some of the ethics, and this is going a bit deeper into it, but some of the ethics around social media and how it’s run as well didn’t align with me and my values. And some of it was a little bit icky for me. But I don’t judge people that are on social media and I don’t think I’m better than. Just a choice that you can make as a highly sensitive person. Just as much as you can choose to step out of a relationship that’s not serving you.
Terri Connellan: Good on you for honoring your creativity and your sensitivity and making those choices. I’ve shared that I love social media, but I must admit at the minute. I’m actually finding it a bit draining, which is unusual for me. So I think it is important just to tune into how you’re feeling about it at any one time and managing it, setting up structures, like you said, scheduling, someone else to support you. The nice thing about it is you can choose to turn it on and off. I love the way you described channeling your energy into connecting with your community, podcasting, writing, blogging, because it all takes time. And there’s so many hours in the day.
Becky Corbett: Yeah, that’s right. And I think there’s this big misconception as well that if you’ve got a business, you have to be on social media. And it’s absolutely not the case. It can be one part of it, but it doesn’t have to be. I think it’s a big trick that social media has made us all believe that you have to be on there to be making a difference, but you don’t.
Terri Connellan: Yeah. And just to choose for a while. We always want to be nurturing our community that we’ve built, but you know, to really focus on that, I think is really lovely way to look at it.
So a question I’m asking all guests on the podcast, being the Create Your Story podcast is how have you created your story over your lifetime?
Becky Corbett: It’s such a beautiful, reflective question. So I think many of us float along in life and we don’t, we don’t realize that we are the creators. We might have that realization at an early age, and then you may not, or it can be later in life that you realize actually, I am writing my story. And so I think I consciously took more control of this around 2018.
That magic time when I was in India, when I created Gentle Living. Before that, because I have experienced anxiety throughout my whole life, I just sort of thought, just float along thinking it’s just what it is. A lot of people don’t see themselves as in the driver’s seat.
So I have done a lot of work about rewriting my narrative, which has been a key thing. Understanding that no, I’m not too sensitive. I’m not too emotional. I’m not too much spite beliefs I might have had. Whether they came from adults or peers or people at school when I was younger. But actually learning more about being a highly sensitive person has been really, really liberating and empowering so much so that I feel that this is now my life’s work to support other people, to understand sensitivity and what it looks like for them and to come to the same realization that you really can create your own life.
And you really can overcome the challenges of sensitivity too. I think with the negativity bias that a lot of us humans hold or all of us humans hold in our brains where we weigh up the negatives in life a lot more than the positives. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of feeling as though a trait that you may have, or something about you just makes you not a great person or whatever. But really, there is so much more that you can rewrite and understand that yes, there are challenges and sensitivity or whatever it may be.
And you can capitalise or harness those gifts and then create your path going forward. So now I’m trying to set up a life that is supportive of my high sensitivity, going back to the rare flower analogy where I make sure that I have a lot of time in solitude, but also deep, meaningful connections. And I’m doing work that’s meaningful to me. That I’m constantly connecting with my values and doing that deep inner work as well to understand myself better. Setting up my life the way that I want it to be, which which we can do.
Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And I love that as you said, since 2018, particularly taking that time to rewrite your narrative to reframe both yourself and the work that you do in the world and focusing on that mission, that’s so important for you about supporting your own life. To live the way you want to live as a highly sensitive person, but also supporting others based on all your learning and your skills. Yeah. Beautiful.
Another question that I’m checking in with people on. As you know, I wrote Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and share 15 tips in that book. But love adding to that body of work through hearing what people would share as their top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, especially for women. So I’d love to yours.
Becky Corbett: Yes, absolutely. My top one and I think because it lines up with one of my values, is I very much value learning and growth. And I would guess that probably everyone listening to this podcast values the same. I would say never stop learning, especially about yourself. Because we live in our own body and we deal with our own thoughts every day, I think we think we know ourselves quite well. But in fact, we probably don’t. So explore more about yourself, understand yourself better, whether that’s through personality profiling, whether that’s through exploring the high sensitivity trait, if that’s something that you resonate with. And approaching that, learning with a childlike curiosity, as well is so important.
So approaching everything with a beginner’s mindset, not going in and thinking that, you know it all, because I think when we go in and we think we know it all, that’s when we stop growing. And yeah, I think we have sort of stopped evolving by that stage and we don’t need to close our minds. So never stop learning would be my top one about the self.
The second one would probably be to take a really honest inventory of your life, which is something that was key for me when I got back from India. So you might not be able to change everything at once as we were talking about before. I think when we get real with ourselves, we sit down and we think, okay, what’s going on in my life? What’s not serving me? Even if I can’t change it, writing it down, just really getting clear about what it is.
So whether it’s being unhappy or unfulfilled in your job, your relationship, all those things that we talked about before. Do you need to make some changes? And what’s one small step that you can take each day, whether it’s 1% of where you want to get to or 0.5% of where you want to get to. What can you do each day?
There’s always some action that we can take each day and something that I like to do. I don’t get a chance to journal every single day. I would like to make that more of a habit for myself, still a work in progress. But one thing I try to do each day is just write one step. I can take towards whatever my higher vision is. So that could be something like speaking up for yourself. So you might have something challenging coming up that day. But really, you want to be able to set your boundaries a little bit more and you want to be more authentic to yourself. So it could be speaking up for yourself even though it’s scary. It could be setting some sort of a boundary or could be working on yourself, learning something about yourself, learning something about someone else, taking an honest inventory.
And the third one, which I think is really especially relevant for highly sensitive people, but I would argue it applies to all people is to really expend your energy wisely. Not only to avoid burnout but because we are under an illusion that we need to be productive all the time and it’s just not true. It burns us all out.
And as women, especially, we do have greater fluctuations in our energy than men, perhaps. Say with hormonal cycles, men have more of a 24 hour cycle, whereas women’s fluctuates a lot more of a day to day whether you experience a menstrual cycle or not. Our energy is quite different, so we’re not designed to go, go, go all day, every day. We do need those periods of rest, restoration, balance. It’s like the yang and the yin. Yes. We need to get up and do things, but by the same token, we need to care for ourselves. So how can you take care of your energy a little bit better?
So for myself, I always schedule time to rest, do nothing, have solitude in between periods of busyness. So if I’ve had, even if it’s an enjoyable social day or I’ve seen friends and been a bit of a social butterfly that day, I’ll make sure the next day that I’m resting and not doing anything. Because I know if I keep going, if I socialize the whole entire weekend, I’m just going to burn my wick too short, and I’m going to feeling so exhausted.
So just identify, how can you expend your energy more wisely? Like how generally, most of us would have an idea of financial budget and how much you’ve got to spend. I think we should have the same approach with our energy too.
Terri Connellan: I love those answers. Three really top tips about learning, taking an honest inventory and expending our energy wisely. So some immediate takeaways for people to implement in their lives now, and shift towards more wholehearted living, which is what we’re both about I think in our work in different ways. That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure to chat with you today, Becky. So where can people find out more about you and your work online?
Becky Corbett: Yes, well, the best place to find me is on my website. So you can go to www.thegentlelivingnurse.com. And I’ve got the Gentle Living Podcast as well. So I’m just about to start season three on that. So that’s exciting. But they’re probably the main places to find me. And you can find out more about how to work with me or a bit more about what it means to be highly sensitive as well. I’ve just created a Self-Soothing Guide for the Highly Sensitive Person. How we can take care of ourselves, nurture ourselves, soothe the nervous system, practical strategies to take away. Yes, but thank you so much for having me, Terri. It’s been so much fun and again, it’s been an honour to be here.
Terri Connellan: Thanks so much, Becky it’s been great.
Becky Corbett
About Becky Corbett
Becky Corbett (aka The Gentle Living Nurse) is a holistic nurse and coach for the highly sensitive soul based in sunny Brisbane, Australia. The Gentle Living framework was birthed as a result of Becky’s personal healing journey of anxiety and navigating the world as a highly sensitive person (HSP).
Becky now supports other HSPs to create their own Gentle Living journey to nurture the nervous system, through combining elements of evidence-based science, spirituality and intuition. Her mission is to support as many HSPs as possible to connect with their sensitivity gifts to flourish and thrive!
