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Raising Social Justice Awareness with Meaghan Katrak Harris

May 5, 2022

In Podcast Episode 16, Raising Social Justice Awareness, I chat with Meaghan Katrak Harris – author of Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism about her book and how the arts can be a powerful medium for raising social justice awareness.

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Welcome to Episode 16 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Raising Social Justice Awareness.

I’m joined by Meaghan Katrak Harris – Social Worker, Academic, Consultant, Writer and author of Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism.

We chat about writing Memories and Elephants, genres, influences, publishing, casual racism and privileged practices and behaviours and their impact on individuals and society. And how the arts can be a powerful medium for raising social justice awareness.

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:

  • Meaghan’s background in social work and academia
  • Meaghan’s Book, Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism
  • Lived experience and telling your own story
  • How we’re all more than one story
  • The insider/outsider dance
  • Creative non-fiction and memoir-based narrative
  • Creative influences and inspiring authors
  • How privilege plays out in racism and other contexts
  • Raising social justice awareness through the arts

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 16 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 5th of May as I record this.

II’m excited to have Meaghan Katrak Harris, author of Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism join us for the podcast today.

Meaghan is a social worker, academic, consultant and writer. She has a long and diverse social work background. This includes extensive experience and commitment to working alongside First Nations Peoples, families and communities. When not writing, Meaghan lectures and researches in social work at the University of Sydney and works in private practice across social work supervision, individual, group work and organisational change. Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism is her first creative non-fiction book.

Meaghan and I have connected online as fellow the kind press authors, publishing our books within a few months of each other. It’s been exciting to watch Meaghan launch and share her important book, Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism with the world. We chat about Meaghan’s book as well as her work as social worker, academic and writer, and her key themes and lived experiences. They all weave together around the value of community and raising awareness of social justice issues and impacts.

Today we will be speaking about writing Memories and Elephants, genres, influences, publishing, casual racism and privileged practices and behaviours and their impact on individuals and society.

Enjoy listening to this insightful and inspiring conversation!

I hope it encourages you to read Memories and Elephants and to take some time to think beyond the dominant narrative.

So let’s head into the interview with Meaghan.

Transcript of interview with Meaghan Katrak Harris

Terri Connellan: Hello Meaghan. And welcome to the Create Your Story podcast.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Hi, thank you for having me.

Terri Connellan: Thank you for your connection across our writing and books. We’ve connected online as fellow authors in the kind press around writing and publishing. And it’s great to chat further on this today. So can you provide a brief overview about your background, how you got to be where you are and the work you do know?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Sure. Yes. Thank you. So I’m a social worker and I have been for probably nearly 30 years now, working alongside communities in various roles. Probably about the last 15 years, I’ve also been an academic, teaching and researching in social work. So that’s been my career to date and social work’s such a broad profession, it’s given me the opportunity for lots of different ways of working with people. And, academia, I guess, has led me into doing more writing as well.

Terri Connellan: Awesome. Yeah, so it’s great to see how all the different strands of your personal life and professional life have come together to this day. So let’s have a look at your book, particularly, I’m really excited to talk about Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism.

And congratulations on your book published in early December, 2021. So we’ve both recently enjoyed that process of taking a book from that idea from jotting things down, through to published book. Can you tell us a bit about what that process was like for you?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Sure. It actually happened quite quickly, the process, which was exciting and interesting. And it actually started with my submission to the This I Know is True book through the kind press. And that happened really just because a good friend of mine, Annabel Sharman, who writes the introductory chapter, said to me, you should put a chapter in this book. You should get into this. And I looked at it, I looked at the submission and I thought, this looks awesome, but I don’t think that I’m the right fit.

Anyway, I said this to Annabel and she said, look, please just talk to the publisher. Talk to Natasha [Gilmour], everything that you talk about, she has a similar view on crossing genres and perhaps, maybe disrupting genres a bit and writing across academia and also creative writing. And, supporting women led businesses, the whole gamut. So the long story short was I did do the chapter and then I got into a conversation.

I’d already written the essay. And I got into a conversation with Natasha and I said, look, I’ve got about 12 I’d like to publish. And, several months later there we are. I’d nearly finished all the essays. I did another self sort of lockdown to get the last bit done, but, I had the work there and it was just a beautiful fit to find the kind press, I think for me.

Terri Connellan: Yes, I absolutely loved working with the kind press too. Natasha and her team are just really fabulous. Kind, as their name suggests and groundbreaking, I think in the approaches that they take to different voices and as you say, cross genre work, pushing the boundaries a bit. So in terms of the actual pieces, were they written over many years?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Oh no, I smashed it in a few months, probably in lockdown. I got a bit of inspiration and one of the first essays was the privilege of sharing parenting fails. And I wrote that as a response to what I was seeing happening and kind of my internal discomfort with it.

And once I started, I just wrote them all. And, I guess, lockdown probably had something to do with that, time to think, walking and thinking, because I’d written them all in my head. By the time I kind of sat down and put them down on paper. But, I always saw them as a collection. So that’s why I was so happy to put them out together because I kind of felt like it told a story. They are each a standalone essay, but I felt like in their entirety, it was a better story if you like.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And I found reading it that there’s a lot in the spaces between what you write. There’s the spoken of what you experience, but also the unspoken. And I think, as you say, across the essays, it connects off into a bigger picture. So can you share with us a snapshot of what Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism is about?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Sure. So I describe it as a series of sociopolitical memoir based essays. So while they’re memoir based, I share my experiences against the backdrop of a bit of a socio-economic analysis of Australian society, culture, you know, the way we see ourselves.

And I kind of try to shine a broader light on the story, on my story, which I think can be extended to other experiences. So I guess for me, the analysis is as important as the memory or the memoir. And that’s kind of was my focus. Yeah.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, they’re beautifully told, and I think to me, the power of them is really just capturing those moments in life, when, as you call it casual racism and casual because it just seems to slide off, people’s tongues because of that privilege that people feel. And I think it’s that ability to capture the moment, but also the impact on you. You talk about feeling winded at times and the physical reaction of what happens on you is really beautifully told, but also must’ve been hard to tell.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: It was, you know, I shed tears writing it, but I felt like it was an important story to tell. The hardest thing was deciding whether it was in fact, my story to tell. And again, I consulted with people I love and my family and basically, they said, well, you know, this is your story, this is your story. If you can’t tell your own story, then what can you write about? But I was very careful to not to appropriate an experience that wasn’t my own. Because I’m also a white Australian person. So I have with that, all the inherent privileges, that every other white Australian has, but I have borne witness to this casual racism with my Aboriginal family and my multicultural family.

And, it is my lived experience, but I really wanted to be clear to position myself as to not to be appropriating the lived experience beyond what was mine. And I think doing it as memoir based, I just told it how it happened. So hope that that came across and the feedback I’ve had so far is that it, that it did. That’s how I came up with the ‘we’re all more than one story’, we’re all more than one defining characteristic. And, I could be defined by lots of things and lots of things that don’t define me at all, based on my appearance or where I live or what I do when we’re all so much more than that.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, absolutely. I loved that point where you said, you know now we are all more than one story and I think that intricacy to the insider/outsider dance, that’s hard to get right in your memoir. I was interested to hear more about that dance. It’s a dance you’ve engaged in for many decades now.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: I guess it is, but I think it’s probably something that, as we get older and wiser, we think about more, perhaps the complexities of when we’re younger and we’re living our life. And I was always very sure of my place in my family. Absolutely. And I still am in and in my community. But I guess I talk about when, being part of an Aboriginal community and the commitment to the advancement and activism, when that morphed into work, I felt there was a change in me that I became more aware that I could be taking up, as a white person, taking up space.

And I was never made to feel like that by other people. This was my own internal dance, if you like. And I think it’s an important one to be aware of. And I know at times, I consciously stepped back from employment and changed to work in mainstream as we call it, because I was so fortunate to start my career as a community worker in an Aboriginal community controlled organization. And, that was a privilege that has shaped me beyond anything I could say.

But then I also reached that time in that dance when I realized that, you know what, this is part of who I am too. And if I’m not honoring that, I’m not honoring my Aboriginal family and friends. If I’m feeling like I can’t honour that part of my life, then that’s not showing respect to those people that have had such an impact on my children, my family. And I feel like, in some ways maybe the essay, particularly, The art of casual racism was kind of my showing up for that and saying, okay, this is it. This is how I see it. This is who I am, and this is how I’ve lived it and continue to live it.

Terri Connellan: And I think, as you said before, touching into your lived experience is a really powerful lens for each of us. Particularly for you, telling your story with so many different cultural experiences and community experiences and diversity, which is fabulous. Thank you for sharing that. So, how would you describe the genre that you write in and what were your influences? We mentioned cross-genre before.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Creative nonfiction, I guess. They’re memoir based narratives. I have always been a big reader. and I guess I never really realised the impact that reading creative nonfiction has had until quite recently, when I started writing these. And I talk about it in the first essay where I am suddenly drawn back to reading this genre because my head’s in that space. I’m writing these stories in my head. So I’m back reading Helen Garner, I’m reading, Joan Didion, I’m reading Roxanne Gay. I’m just really quite obsessed with reading other people’s stories. And I found that very validating because there is so many different ways to do this. There’s not one right way to write it. You write it as it comes, I guess. But yeah, I don’t think I’d realised the impact that creative non-fiction has had until now.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And you mentioned Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence too, which I also read when I was writing my book and I found that a really validating book.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Absolutely. And I’m glad you reminded me of that because I read that after I pretty much finished that essay. It came out or I got hold of it anyway. Julia Baird talks about, 20 years ago, as a young uni student, I think finding Helen Garner. And I thought, oh gosh, I’ve talked about that. And then I thought, of course, that’s not an accident. We’ve all talked about that because it is such an influence. So hence, my line about. I know, I felt late to the party, but in good company. So yeah, I found that I bought a copy from several friends. I found that book so important.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, and I think that’s been my experience and from reading your work, I think it’s that trying to find a way to bring our personal life experiences into a narrative that it also shines a light on ways it can help people or guide them on their own journey or give them some tools to think about things.

So, you write in the second person, which I love. It’s one of my favorite voices, I guess, in literature. Why did you choose that? How did you come to writing as you, rather than I, or we?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: I can’t do this question justice and several people have asked me. People have contacted me specifically to ask me why I chose to write the essays like that. And I’ve got no good answer, Terri, other than that’s just have they came out. And I don’t know if future writing will come out like that. I don’t know, but I just couldn’t write them any other way. That’s how they came to me in my head. And so that’s how they went down, and any analysis I’m doing now is retrospective.

I’m wondering why did I need to step back from it? But I don’t know. This is all, you know, with the benefit of hindsight and it’s interesting to think about, and I guess part of the answer will be how any future stuff comes out. If I continue to write it in that style or not.

Terri Connellan: I found it interesting. You said you wrote , the ‘parenting fails’ piece first. Cause that’s the one where I actually really noticed how you’re using ‘you wonder’. The piece is about that ability to joke about something with parenting fails that in other contexts would have dire circumstances or have judgment. And what I found was you were saying, you wonder, hmm, you wonder. I particularly loved how you used it in that context.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Well, thank you. And that was, like I said, I would come home and I would say, can you believe it, this happened or that happened. And I was in a way, naively amazed at how people could not see that or understand, or, even feel a bit embarrassed to be able to joke about these things, because it is such a mark of privilege. You know, I would’ve died before I told anyone that my kids had nits and I’m still like that. And I know it’s a socially responsible thing to do, but when people send those messages, oh god, how can they do that?

If you’ve never been judged, if you’ve never been stereotyped, if you’ve never felt that society could be making assumptions about you, then you have that freedom. And I got such great feedback about that essay. One of the best bits of feedback I got was someone messaged me and just said, ‘Ooph – that got me in the gut – and thank you.’ And that was from the perspective of someone who was in a position to be able to do that. And she had never seen that that was a privilege. And I wondered if I’d been a bit harsh then, but, she was very gracious in her feedback.

Terri Connellan: That’s so amazing to hear. My feeling of reading the piece is I think, cause you took people on the journey with you, of like you said: I’m seeing this, and I’m thinking this, and I’m trying to work this out. I think it just works incredibly well to get the point across and for people to hear you processing, with all your knowledge and all your life experiences, where does this fit? This is not right. And I think, that way of approaching that type of content is going to have more impact than people saying ‘don’t do that’, for example. Yeah. I guess it’s raising awareness, isn’t it and consciousness about the impact?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: It is. And I think honestly that’s probably one of my motivators for doing the essay was I actually feel that the arts is a far better way to address social justice issues and awareness, than straight academia. You know, I joke about, as academics, we might write a paper for other academics to pretend they’ve read or students to read because they have to. It may be great work, but it’s to meet certain criteria for academia and it doesn’t necessarily reach a wider audience.

And I’ve long felt that the most powerful stuff that, I think it can be life-changing has been creative and in the arts. And I didn’t consciously think now I’m going to do this. I got a bee in my bonnet about it. I started that. And then there was that sort of ripple effect where it grew from there, but I feel like that’s where I can make a contribution, if any.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. But then also your academic work is important in another way.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Oh yeah. I’m not diminishing it and I’m not a serious academic like some people are but then I’ve written a few things and I’m part of some great research that I’m very committed to. But I don’t have a full on tenured position. I have had in the past. Then I consciously chose not to stay on that path and it’s important work, but I get far more joy out of creative writing, far more joy.

Terri Connellan: And was it hard to shift from the academic voice or academic way of working to the creative, more personal?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: No, no, this is like the natural state, I think. It was great because a colleague and friend, another academic, who read the book messaged me, and this is the wonderful things you learn about people. She said, ‘oh, fellow over-user of capital letters’. Because I talk about in the acknowledgement that I had a very kind gentle editor who let me have my desire to capitalise important thoughts.

And this friend said, you know, I do that too. Everyone who knows me personally knows I do that. And we joked about it and I joked about how my PhD supervisor many years ago had to beat that out of me. But, in creative writing we can do these things.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, it is great. My work was in government and in the TAFE sector, mostly where you’re writing strategic documents and there’s a certain way of writing. So for me, I still think I’ve got a long way to go to get back to probably my more natural voice. It’s sort of dusting off, or shifting from that academic voice. Yeah.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Exactly. Because it is very different . It’s far more rigid in corporate or academic writing. Of course. Yeah, absolutely.

Terri Connellan: But as you say, it sounds like the way that you’ve worked with Memories and Elephants it’s like you’ve hit your natural gear, found a way to really write joyfully and perhaps express things that have been there for a long time.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Yeah. And it was an absolute joy to do. Absolutely. I loved doing it. I had so many ideas and thoughts that I wanted to get down. And as I said in the first essay, I probably think I only had about 12 stories in me. Well, I did, I had 12 and I knew I was done then with that, I felt like that was enough. And I know I spoke to Natasha from the kind press, when I talked about putting them together. And I said, but I’m worried it’s not enough. And she quoted Elizabeth Gilbert, who’s another writer that I really admire as well, in saying that the story tells you when it’s finished, to paraphrase. That the story will end when it ends.

And I honestly felt like that. I would have had enough material, but I just felt that’s what I wanted to say. And I feel that collection is enough as it is. And funnily enough, lots of feedback has been, I didn’t want it to end. And I thought for a minute, oh gosh, is it not long enough. And then I thought, you know, what? It was finished when it was finished. So that’s not a bad thing.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I think it’s beautiful just the way it is. As I said before, to me, it’s that sense of each piece stands alone, but they reverberate and echo and also keep you thinking a long time after you’ve read and something to go back to. So yeah, I think they work incredibly well. So you’re a social worker, academic and author in the social justice area, as well as we’ve mentioned, across all sectors of government and non-government human services. Can you tell us more about your focus, projects and writing there?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: At the moment I’m teaching at Sydney Uni. I’ve been teaching there for the last three or four years, and I’m working on a few research projects with my colleagues there, that I’m really committed to and feel very fortunate to be involved in. So that’s my academic work at the moment. And I’m also working on a couple of other creative writing projects that I’m hoping will come into fruition this year.

Terri Connellan: Oh, fantastic. That’s great to hear there’s more creative work in the pipeline. Yeah. And I’ve spent some time just reading through some of your academic work too. So it’s been interesting just to see the different perspectives. In a way, your theme is pretty much similar.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: It is, my work is all, whatever it is, social justice, underpinned with my commitment to social justice. And it was interesting when I told a friend of mine about the creative work I was doing… he’s a filmmaker, artist, musician, activist. Richard Franklin, his name is, and he’s a very dear friend. And he said “oh, you’ve been dancing around the edges of the arts for a long time. So it’s about time you jumped in.”

Cause I would always be involved, as a participant, as an audience member, as an advocate and a supporter. And I found that very validating from someone, who’s achieved so much in this space.

Terri Connellan: So have you got any advice, if there’s people who have a similar passion or a similar theme or focus in life around social justice and want to write more personally, would you have any particular tips or thoughts for them?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Honestly, I think finding your authentic voice is the key. Then I don’t really have any advice other than particularly as females, particularly as women to be unapologetic about wanting to have a voice and wanting to put something out into the world, not make ourselves smaller or feel we have to justify and apologise for wanting to do that. I think my advice is take up space, find your big voice. As one of my dear friends and colleagues, Dr. Mareese Terare talks about in social work, is find your big voice and find your authentic voice. I think that would be my strongest advice. And it doesn’t matter, if you’re not ready to share your work, I feel that it helps us grow so much in doing it. And you will find your audience.

Terri Connellan: That’s beautiful. I love that. Find your big voice, that’s great.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: I love it too. And I quote Mareese very regularly with that beautiful term.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And as you say, it’s not all about publication. Just working with a group of women writers at the moment and I think publication is important to think about as a potential path. But it’s really great to have that free writing and that exploring and that ability to find your big voice comes from play.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Yeah, I think that we know what we want really in our heart to do with that work. I know when I had written a few of the essays, I told a friend. They said, oh, you know, maybe you won’t want or need to get them published. Maybe writing them will be enough. No, it won’t be, I want them published. I knew, I felt I had something to say and I knew I wanted to put it out in the world. And it’s just about finding the right way to do that and, and the right time and things like that.

Terri Connellan: That’s great that you did find the right way and the right time then. And I think that’s just part of the author journey, isn’t it? It’s meeting the right people, collaborating, the publishers, the editors, the people encouraging us behind the scenes. It’s all part of the rich journey.

So, a question that I’m asking all people on the podcast being the Create Your Story podcast is how have you created your story over your lifetime?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Oh, gosh, how have I created my story? I think that I’ve never really had a plan particularly. I know that works for some people. I’ve always been open to opportunities and not been frightened to take risks, creatively like, in my career, you know, leave a job, find another job. I think I’ve kind of just tried to live true to my values.

And my commitment to my family has been my driving motivator. But, even if five years ago, someone had said that I would be doing creative non-fiction, I would have been like really? It’s not like I had that on the plan. It’s not like I thought I really want to write, I’m going to sit here and think about what to write about. Like, the stories came to me and I just told them, and I feel like a bit of a witness in that sense, that, it’s our obligation to share what we learn. So I guess my plan has just been to try and do no harm and live a good life.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. It sounds like share your wisdom along the way too.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Well, we hope we get some the way. I don’t know, but we hope so don’t we? I say to my students, the more I know, the less I know, I know. And that remains true.

Terri Connellan: Yep. That’s true. So, my book, Wholehearted, is about wholehearted self leadership tips for women and practices. Thank you. And, so I like to add to the body of work I’ve created by talking to people about their top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, especially for women. So I’d love to hear yours.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Honestly, more and more. And I just had a conversation with a dear friend today about this, it’s about, you know, we say, lift a sister up. Let’s take every opportunity to support each other, to promote, to validate, to do all those things that lift us up individually and as friends, but also helps all of us, as women, as writers, as creatives, whatever it might be.

 And about that authenticity, about just showing up as you are, doing your best to support the cause is what I’m pretty big on. I think it’s kind of that simple and that complex.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And it is too, but I love that lift your sister up and yeah, I just really appreciated your support all the way through my writing journey there in the background saying, well done. Thank you. And you know, just liking posts and things. It really helps.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: I feel like we talk a lot about supporting the arts or creativity whether it be black businesses or, and I have this conversation with students where they say they might really want to support a female led business or a black business, but they may not be in a financial position to do that.

And, you can share a post, you can like a post, you can spread the word. And that is helping, that is supporting and that’s showing up. There’s lots of ways we can do that for each. And if we are in a position to purchase something, let’s think about it. I read a quote recently, the way we spend our money basically is a vote for the world we want to live in.

So, do we want to try to support small business, female led, all those things, and less the, you know, big multi-nationals. If we can do that, we should try try the best we can.

Terri Connellan: So true. But I also agree with your point, that there’s so much you can do that doesn’t cost money too. Doing reviews for people, sharing their podcasts, different reviews on blog posts. It’s certainly been part of my journey to both acknowledge others and be acknowledged by others. Again, it’s another type of dance that we can engage in with others and I know my life is so much richer for it as I can see yours is too. So thank you. And, that wraps up our conversation for today. It’s been lovely to have a chat with you, so thank you for your time.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Thank you for having me, Terri. I’ve really enjoyed thinking about some of those questions you posed, so thank you.

Terri Connellan: My pleasure. So where can people find more about you and your work on line?

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Well, I’m on Instagram and there’s a link to my stuff there. I’m late to that party, but you know, I’m there for it. I’m finding it a very supportive environment. I’m on Facebook. I’m on LinkedIn also. So I’m not hard to find.

Terri Connellan: And we’ll pop the link to your book too, in the show notes and yeah, just encourage everybody to read Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism. It’s a really important book. I think everybody should read it. And make sure you do all those things we’ve talked about: post a review and share it with others.

Meaghan Katrak Harris: Thank you very much.

Terri Connellan: My pleasure.

Meaghan Katrak Harris

About Meaghan Katrak Harris

Meaghan Katrak Harris is a social worker, academic, consultant and writer. She has a long and diverse social work background. This includes extensive experience and commitment to working alongside First Nations Peoples, families and communities. When not writing, Meaghan lectures and researches in social work at the University of Sydney and works in private practice across social work supervision, individual, group work and organisational change. Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism is her first creative non-fiction book.

You can connect with Meaghan

Memories and Elephants

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

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-meaghan-katrak-harris-37718a209/

Memories and Elephants: The art of casual racism is a collection of memoir-based essays set against the socio political background of Australian society.

In these essays—written with clarity and compassion by Meaghan Katrak Harris—you’ll explore the intersectionality of Australian culture, classism, racism and identity as the author has lived it. 

Drawing on her experiences of being a teenage mother, a member of a large multicultural family, a social worker, and an academic, Meaghan uses powerful personal narrative to illuminate often uncomfortable aspects of our society—the elephants in the room that have been historically downplayed and ignored. 

Taking you from memories of country life to the city, from the street to national television, Memories and Elephants invites you to think beyond the dominant narrative of Australian identity. 

Terri’s links to explore:

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition https://www.quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1

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

My coaching & writing programs:

Work with me

The Writing Road Trip email list – community writing program with Beth Cregan

Connect on social media

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

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

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

Podcast chats with other the kind press authors including me!

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Ep 10 Intuiting, Channelled Writing & Connecting with Natasha Piccolo

Ep 3 Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch #2

Ep 2 Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch #1

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The Writing Road Trip – Update

April 3, 2022

Beth Cregan of Write Away With Me and I co-host The Writing Road Trip. Beth and I co-write together in the mornings virtually via Zoom. We’ve completed three books between us in 2021 and we’ve found community and partnership helps get writing happening and books written. So from this, we’ve shaped up exactly what helped us into an exciting new community writing program in 2022.

So join us. Get on our email list now and we’ll send you information and inspiration for your writing journey:

Get on the Writing Road Trip email list

The Writing Road Trip is an exciting collaboration for Beth Cregan and me. We have created exactly what we found worked when we faced the task of writing and completing our books together.

The program has three components that we plan to keep cycling through so join us at any time. Join the email list to keep in touch with what’s available. Here are the three components!

  • We kick off with a free writing challenge focusing on writing identity, a two week challenge helps you explore your relationship with writing and your unique writing identity. Whatever stage you are at in your writing journey, this is a powerful foundation for your writing. 
  • Then we have a six-week Writing Road Map course that helps you zero in on your purpose and direction. We work on: creating your vision, getting in flow, mindset, creativity for the long-haul and sharing your work with the world. It helps you map the writing journey your way with the support of community.
  • The Writing Road Trip is a longer community program for extended support as you write featuring virtual writing retreats, community calls to check in on your writing progress and writing input as required based on what you need!

We are kicking off on the Writing Road Trip in May 2022! So get on the email list for the latest news as well as regular writing inspiration and tips from us.

Get on the Writing Road Trip email list

Here’s a map of where the Writing Road Trip is going in 2022:

Watch us chatting about the program here on YouTube

The transcript of the conversation is below if you prefer to read or read along.

Transcript of our conversation

Beth Cregan: Now just waiting. I think we’re going to get Terri up on screen any minute. There we go. We did it. So welcome to anybody who’s watching this live. And also to anybody who might catch up on this, on the replay. We’re so thrilled to have you here and you can tell by our smiles that we’re really excited to be spending this time and telling you what we’ve been planning over the last weeks and months. So I’m Beth from Write Away with Me.

Terri Connellan: And I’m Terri Connellan from Quiet Writing and it’s fantastic to be on Instagram live together. This is our first time popping on together and we’ve had a lot of laughs getting connected and things organised, but it’s great to be with you Beth, and to be sharing our story.

Beth Cregan: Exactly. And I think what we’d really like to start with is to tell you a little bit about how this program came to be, because we have developed something that comes from our experience of writing successfully together and finishing our books. And we’re hoping it will really inspire you to join us next year and take out your writing program.

So if we zoom back to the beginning of last year, I had a draft of a book and a publishing contract, and I was just beginning to restructure that book when COVID hit. And of course, all of our lives changed dramatically. And I was at home overwhelmed and anxious and really wondering how I was going to make my commitment of finishing this book.

Then it really became important to me, or it became obvious to me that I needed support. And I put out a call to writers I knew in my circle to see if anybody wanted to write in the mornings together online. And that was how Terri and I first connected. We knew each other, but that was how we connected in terms of our writing together. And other people came in and out of that group, but we hung in there, didn’t we Terri?

Terri Connellan: We did.

I think the fact that we were both writing books, like we both had a long haul writing project really kept us engaged with that support for each other.

I know for me, for my situation, I was writing two books at once. And I think when we connected, I was well through the draft of one and the other, I still had to do quite a lot of work on. So it was actually quite a hard slog at the time when we connected, because it was working through the editing when you’re going over and over and over drafts. And when I went through that process, it was quite challenging. So to have people who you can connect with really helps with that and getting up early and writing with you really helped to get that writing done. It was so much more fun.

Beth Cregan: Absolutely. That was my sense of it too. And now end of if that was somewhere in the midst of 2020, now we’re at the end of 2021. And I have my book now finished and going through its final edit with the publisher and Terri, tell everybody your great news too.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I was able to get two books finished at once. So ‘Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition‘ and accompanying workbook, which I worked on in conjunction and they were published by the kind press in September this year 2021 and that’s after four and a half, five years of writing. So yeah, it was fantastic to have that support to be able to finish that work. So, yeah. Thanks for being there. And it’s great to share our story.

Beth Cregan: And I think that it is the things that we learned during that time that helped us achieve our goals.

And it became, I think really obvious to both of us that we’d cracked a code that really made the difference for us and that we could then offer what we had learned to others to help them on their writing journey, to guide and support them.

I know for me, that time in the morning felt really sacred. It felt like a safe space. It felt like a creative space and it wasn’t just the opportunity to work and, and know that somebody was holding space with you at the same time and offering you that courage but I think it was just our conversations. We’d have a break and it was our conversations that made all the difference.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And I think for me it was definitely that accountability of getting up early to write, but also very much the camaraderie around writing. So that ability to one, write together, but also just to stop and have conversations about what was hard, what was easy, what we were learning. We often think writing’s a really solitary process. Obviously there’s aspects of it that are, but there’s plenty of aspects of writing that are supported by being with other people. And, people talk about how lonely it is. It can be super lonely and I think having community on the journey can help us incredibly. So, yeah. So it’s like a magic sauce, Beth, that we want to share with others.

Beth Cregan: Yes, absolutely. And I know for me, it was the fact that there was somebody just ahead of me in the journey that made such a difference because the overwhelming part is that you don’t quite know. It’s an organic process and you don’t quite know how it’s going to come together. So just having you one step or two steps ahead meant that I had a path forming and it normalized what I was doing, the overwhelm, the fear that dealing with my inner critic, the resistance. It really normalized all of those things because I knew that you were feeling them too.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely.

That sense of, you’re not alone and it’s quite a normal part of the journey. Yeah, I think the idea of normalising, it’s really important. Also for me, I never went into any session or any times we were writing together without having a note pad or pencil beside me, where I was writing down a whole list: here’s a great podcast, here’s a great book.

And I know you recommended Anne Janzer’s The Writer’s Process. To me, that’s been such a fantastic inspirational book for my journey and for my sharing with others. So I think just sharing insights about writing and resources helped incredibly too. So it’s a whole lot of things, isn’t it?

Beth Cregan: Well, the combined resources was just an absolute bonus because I now have bookshelves and kindles full of things that I know you found helpful and no doubt you have the same experience because everybody finds their own, you know, they follow different people. They find their own magic in whatever resources they use. And then we had the chance to pull those together and share them, which was really fantastic.

Terri Connellan: So it might be time for us to share about what we’re thinking of or what we’re planning to offer all these great experiences that we’ve had. What we found was that from that we’re able to create a program that’s something that we wish we had while we were going through the process.

Beth Cregan: I think every time we’ve got together to work and dream up this program cause it’s been a Thursday afternoon burst of inspiration when we get together and do it. And every time I finish, I think, man, I wish I had this when I was writing or when I was doing this journey, because it’s exactly what I would have needed to help me along my way. So how about I start by just talking a little bit about the challenge.

The program will have three parts and we’re going to start with a live challenge. It will involve six free activities or workshops over two weeks. And that’s just to ride the energy of the new year, and get everybody thinking about what their writing goals might be for the year. How they feel as a writer, what is their writing identity as well as just inspire and spark imaginations and creativity. So that will involve lots of hands-on writing and interactive opportunities, which will be really fun way to start the program.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. It’s called The Writing Road Trip, the whole program. The first part is really a bit of way-finding, like getting a compass, getting all the travel books out and deciding where you might go. But again, having fellow travellers, even at the early stage of the journey to have a chat about what you’re thinking about, how you feel about yourself as a writer, as Beth said, and then we thought we’d build on that with a six week more intensive course, which is a Roadmap. And that’s really about creating the shape of your project and what it might look like. So in that program, we’ll have a look at things like, what your purpose is, what your why is, what the steps might be, what do you want to do with what you write?

 My journey has been very much that, knowing what I want to do with it at the end, I needed to know a bit at the beginning or at least have some idea. Do you want to publish? How do you want to publish? And we’re talking in this, it could be a book, but it could also be blog project. It could be feature articles, series of feature articles, could be social media. It could be writing a course, any sort of writing. So in that six weeks Roadmap program, we’ll be looking at: what you want to do, where you might go, why it’s important to you, because one thing I’ve found, and I know you have too, Beth, is that knowing our why really helps us on the whole journey.

Beth Cregan: Yeah. And I love the imagery of the road trip because I think it was born out of a time when we were quite stationary with lockdown and road tripping was completely off the agenda.

But writing is a journey and creating any sort of project and finishing any sort of project, I think, is a transformational journey. So it feels so right to have that image as our starting point.

And then once we’ve done that six weeks together where we will really shape and map out where you’re going and what you want to do with your project, then we have a six month community. And in that community and program, that membership, you’ll have a chance to meet other writers, to work together, to be accountable to each other, to listen to other guest speakers who arecoming into that space, to share our resources.

So, not only will you have the opportunity to connect with our guests, but you’ll have a wide library of resources that we can share with you. And also, which I think will be really helpful because it’s what we have done. And we still do many mornings every week is to have virtual retreats where we come together and we’re online in our own space, but we’re working together and sharing what we’re doing, our goals and our intentions and carving out space, making that container to allow the writing to happen. So that to me is a really important part of this journey because I don’t think I realized until we started working together, Terri, just how I’ve given lip service to community, but I don’t think I really understood it. And now I really do see that that makes all the difference.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve often been envious of people who have writing groups and join together to to write. And particularly with the way things work now that we are perhaps not connecting as much or traveling across the world, or as you said, actually doing road trips as much, being able to connect virtually and write together, have community together and connect asynchronously as well as at the same time, it’s been absolutely perfect. And I know one of my clients said to me, I didn’t think I had time for a group program, I just wanted to get the writing done. And I think that’s, our tendency is to want to put our head down and just get the writing done.

But I think our experiences have taught us that to have connection to someone who knows what’s happening on the journey to talk through, when you get to the really difficult things, to be able to have a safe space to be heard, you don’t always have to solve the problems, but it’s just not having it rattling around inside your head can make a huge difference.

And I think we’ve both said without each other, we wouldn’t be where we are today with the projects that we’ve done. So that’s what we really hope to share with the community work. And yeah, that idea of being connected with creativity.

Beth Cregan: I think if you imagine writing as flow and we often talk about creative flow, I feel like community removes many of the obstacles. For me, it really allows the writing when you have that space to write, you actually use your time really productively, because you have a lot of your other needs met in that community space.

Terri Connellan: I think I’ve said to you before that, we’d get up early, six at the moment. If you’re not there and I get up early, I just faff around. It’s just amazing that having someone there, you know, we write for 25 minutes, we have a break. These are the sort of practices we can share with people. Another thing we’ve talked about doing is buddying people up potentially, if people are interested in this sort of experience we’ve had, because it’s made all the difference.

Beth Cregan: Yeah and I know we were talking this morning about the fact that we’re in the middle of a reno and our, Terri and my, writing time hasn’t been happening. And my rest of the day doesn’t feel the same and it is nowhere near as productive as having that regular routine. So it’s reminded me once again, that a writing practice is made up of so many elements that fit together. And once you get what’s right for you, what you need to move forward. So we hoping that you will be interested in joining us. We’re going to be kicking off at the end of Jan with our challenge, and you can be part of that free challenge and have the opportunity to come and work with us and see what it’s like to have that experience.

Terri Connellan: And so the first step today we’re opening the waitlist, which is really exciting. So inviting you to come on the Road Trip with us. So we’ve both popped the links in our bios and that waitlist information tells you about the program. There’s quite a lot of information there in that post if you have a look and then there’s an opportunity just to join our email list, which is a joint email list. Beth and I have our own businesses, our own email lists. This is a unique one, unique to Writing Road Trip. So we’ll just be sending information out about the Road Trip and, and writing inspiration tips to inspire you particularly about community.

Beth Cregan: And we would love you to join us and have an opportunity to be supported by the lessons that we’ve learned along the way to finish. You finished your two books and I think you’re nearly working on the third.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, I am. Yeah, it’s happening in the background. So again, it’s whatever projects and it’s not genre specific. I think that’s something too we want to mention to people. We’re not going to be talking about say, novel writing specifically. But you could be writing a novel, it’s certainly a goal of mine next year. Mm. But whatever writing it is, we’re here to support you around the writing process generally, the community, the support. We’re both writing teachers by background. We’ve told you about ourselves in that landing page (waitlist page). I’m a coach and teacher and Beth also is mentoring and many years’ experience as a teacher. So together, we bring a fantastic skillset too. And of course everyone who joins brings their wisdom. That’s what I love about group programs. We met through a group program, didn’t we Beth?

Beth Cregan:

And we really feel like this will be a co-creation. We will set that structure up and use what we know in that space or share what we know in that space, but it really will be created with everybody and what they bring into that program as well, which is really exciting.

Terri Connellan: It is absolutely. So yes, we hope you’ll join us. So as I said, we’ll both put a post up today kicking off the waitlist. So any questions feel free to pop them in now, or we can pick them up on our respective Instagram profiles. So look forward to connecting with you and to going on a Road Trip with you, writing away.

Beth Cregan: Totally!. And have a great day and any questions, please shoot them our way. We’d love to answer them. And we’d love to see you on that wait list so that you can get more information as it comes into the world. Yeah. Bye.

We hope you’ll join us!

You can get on the email list here and find our more about us and the program here:

Get on the Writing Road Trip email list
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
creativity love, loss & longing podcast

Creating, grief coaching and pro-ageing with Valerie Lewis

January 13, 2022

Living a creative, easeful and positive life after loss

Subscribe on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | YouTube | Stitcher | Podcast Page |

Welcome to Episode 9 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Creating, Grief Coaching & Pro-Ageing.

I’m joined by Valerie Lewis, Grief & Loss Coach, Lifestyle Model, 60+ Pro-Ager and Creative Dabbler.

We chat about creativity as a central life value and practise and how it helps in so many ways including dealing with grief and loss. And about being a grief coach and 60plus pro-ager!

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:

  • Life after tragedy
  • Embracing creativity
  • Choosing not to climb the corporate ladder
  • Dealing with loss
  • Making transitions later in life
  • Grief coaching + supporting others
  • Creativity + intuitive art
  • Being a 60plus pro-ager
  • Becoming a model
  • And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 9 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 13th of January as I record this and suddenly we are nearly mid way through January! we’ve had a lot of rain here in Sydney so it’s humid and the gardens are going wild. But I’ve been able to swim and enjoy the mid-summer temperatures. I’ve also been reflecting on 2021 via Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year 2022 Workbook this week and also reflecting further on my 2022 word of the year (to be revealed soon). Plus I’ve been planning and preparing for the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club where we focus in on Chapter 1 of Wholehearted and the Companion Workbook next week together. As well as preparing for The Writing Road Trip with Beth Cregan which kicks off with a free challenge on 31 January. So there are lots of exciting new things this year and I hope you’ll join me in one of these offerings! Links in the show notes on Quiet Writing at QuietWriting.com/podcast and find the link to this episode.

I’m thrilled to have my friend Valerie Lewis from Visualise and Bloom join us for the podcast today to chat about Creating, Grief Coaching and Pro-Ageing.

Valerie Lewis is a multi-passionate 60plus pro ager. Through grief coaching and personal growth facilitation, she supports and empowers those who are lost and confused with the direction they want to take following a significant life event that has impacted them and their sense of self. Her interests include being an intuitive reader, Reiki and crystals practitioner and avid creative dabbler.

Valerie and I met through a project of a mutual connection Julia Barnickle, ‘What if life were meant to be easy?’ Sadly, Julia passed away early in 2021 as a result of metastatic breast cancer. We connect today remembering Julia and with gratitude to her for connecting us. And it’s fitting that we remember Julia’s message of living a creative, easeful and positive life even in the face of or after difficult circumstances, as this is the focus of the conversation today.

Valerie has been a coaching client in the Sacred Creative Collective group coaching program. We share many similar experiences including moving through deep grief and our passions – including a love of creative expression in many forms and intuitive practices such as tarot as important self-leadership tools.

Today we speak about creativity and how we respond and learn to move through tragedy, loss, deep grief and challenging transitions including ageing. We have fun in this conversation but we also traverse some tragic and sensitive topics so I wanted to let you know this upfront. We consider creativity and intuition as sources of healing and growth and how they support us in making life transitions. Valerie’s story is an incredibly inspiring one especially around how she creates as a central focus and value, has become a grief coach supporting others and is a passionate 60-plus pro-ager.

So now let’s head into the interview with the wonderfully inspiring, creative and multi-passionate Valerie Lewis!

Transcript of interview with Valerie Lewis

Terri Connellan: Hello, Valerie. And welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast. Thank you so much for your connection and for your support of Quiet Writing.

Valerie Lewis: Thanks for having me, Terri. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Terri Connellan: I’m so looking forward to chatting with you today. We’ve connected in many ways around creativity, transition, grief, coaching and more. So it’s great to be able to share conversations on those topics today with others. Can you start us off by providing an overview about your background, how you got to be where you are and the work that you do now?

Valerie Lewis: Wow. Where do I start? Well, I’m originally from the north of England, south Yorkshire, and I moved to London, in the late eighties, following the loss of my only child, my daughter, through manslaughter and the resultant breakdown of my marriage to her mentally ill father. As you can imagine, that was quite a traumatic time. So I would say, that was the main reason why I moved to London basically to start a new life cause I thought, well, I’ve got nothing to lose. And before my daughter died, I had instigated starting a degree because I left school with minimal qualifications.

So it was almost like something that I needed to prove to myself. So I had embarked on the initial stages of the degree. And then after my daughter died, the tutor that I had at the time, he was very encouraging. He said, well, why don’t you apply to one of the universities or polytechnics as they were called. And study that way rather than doing it as I was going to do through the open university. In those days you received the manuals through post and then you do your assignments and work and then send them off to the tutor to mark.

So I applied and I was accepted at Middlesex Polytechnic and ended up moving down to London to do my four year degree. And, in some ways that helped me, that was a tremendous help. It gave me something to focus on and channel my energies in. And it was whilst doing the degree, a friend brought me a book. I made friends with three women at university, and we’re still friends to this day. And one of them brought me a book called Feel the Fear and do it Anyway. And you could say that started the journey of self discovery, self-development, finding out more about who I was.

Life continued. I got a job. One of my sisters had already moved down. My other two sisters moved down and then they eventually ended up moving back with their families and to buy their own homes because it was cheaper in Sheffield. And I’ve remained in London as has my youngest sister. Through that time, I worked and there was a point at which I think it was in my mid thirties. I don’t know if you want to call it a quarter-life crisis or something. Cause I worked with engineers as their admin officer and I remember looking at them absorbed in their work. And when it was time to go home, I used to think, aren’t they going home? They just seemed content to stay there in the office.

And, I just remember thinking, I don’t want to do this, you know, thinking, well, where do I want to go? I did a post-graduate course, the Diploma in Management Studies, because I thought I’m in an administrative field. Maybe that’s the direction that I want to go in. And I remember thinking to myself, well, I don’t want to trap myself. I don’t want to just focus on this. And I think it was through reflecting on who I was. Where did I want to go? I remember thinking, realizing that actually I needed to be creative because that was what fed me. And, I’d kind of neglected that. I’d always been creative. I kind of like neglected that because I was studying and basically adapting to life in London.

And so I started getting back into being creative, making cards. Then I discovered salt dough modeling and got into that. And one of my other sisters she’s quite creative too. So we used to get together and, when her children were young, the schools would have craft fairs. So we’d book a stall and we’d have maybe have a table together. She’d make her own stuff and I’d make my stuff.

And I thought I enjoy this. I thought I don’t want to be trapped in a job where I’m working all these long hours. I want to have some time away from that, where I can do some of the things that I want to do. That’s basically how I’ve been throughout the past 30 years if you like.

Sometimes I felt a bit conflicted about it because you see your colleagues climbing the ladder in one of the fields they’re in. And obviously earning more money. I did get a promotion. I went for promotion and my pay jumped quite substantially. And I felt comfortable with that because one of the things I realized after my daughter died, I remember thinking to myself, you could have all the money in the world and in some ways it’s kind of meaningless if people that you care for are not here anymore. So in some ways I’m not materialistic in that sense. I like to have nice things. I like to wear nice things. And I like to be able to have my books around me and makeup and eat nice food. But having a lot of money is not my main goal. Feeling fulfilled is more important to me, more meaningful to me. Does that make sense, Terri?

Terri Connellan: It does. Absolutely. So, thanks for that snapshot of your life over many years, and what’s important to you. I think that what comes through strongly is your values and how you want to live your life. So we’ll explore more about that as we go through our conversation today. So thank you for that. So we’ve both shared a major transition in your case from corporate life to a more creatively focused life. So can you describe what that transition’s been like for you and how long it took and the main turning points?

Valerie Lewis: That happened last January. In some ways I saw it coming because for the past few years at work there’d been lots of changes, the constant restructuring. My role, if you like became less than what it used to be. It got less stressful. Certain aspects of it, the nicer bits, if you like, the more creative bits of it were taken away and given to another department. And I remember thinking, me and my colleagues thinking, this is strange, something’s going on in the background, you know? And, the restructure that they had before we were told our jobs were going to be moved up north, it happened with one of the teams. They were restructured. And, I think a couple of people were made redundant and the other team basically transferred up north. So that’s why the two people were made redundant from that. And we thought, well, this is odd, if they’ve moved part of our department up north, what does that mean for us?

So in some ways it was almost like you think it’s going to happen at some stage. And, I actually welcomed it. So when it came, it wasn’t a complete shock.

I wasn’t devastated because I thought, oh, I’m approaching 60. I think it’s time. It felt as if it was time for me to be doing something different, something more meaningful, something that I had more control over. So the only thing that I knew that I would mentally have to adjust to was the lack of consistent income. Because obviously, when you’re working, you’ve got an income coming in every month and you know how much is coming. But if you’re not getting that income, you’ve got to create it yourself. So I knew that would be a challenge, but I thought, well, I’m up for it.

Terri Connellan: Excellent. So, sounds like you knew the transition was coming, so you had some time to mentally prepare and perhaps practically prepare for it. And I think that helps too. Certainly for my own transition, it was quite similar. I could see that writing was on the wall. You could see things were coming. And, for me, I started to make a plan for what my life might look like when that time came. So I think that helps as we move through and change. It’s interesting you mentioned that you made that conscious decision in your thirties, not to climb the corporate ladder so that you had space for creative interests. So how do you feel about that decision now? Was that a good decision?

Valerie Lewis: It’s hard to say. I mean, other people might, well, I don’t think anybody else sort of really looks at it. It’s more about me, isn’t it? There are occasions when I think, oh, maybe if I’d stayed in the job and become this, I might’ve been head of this. And then I think, no, this is the road I chose, you know, so I’m happy with it. And in some ways doing a lot of the things that I’ve done feeds into what I’m doing now.

Terri Connellan: So tell us about what you’re doing now.

Valerie Lewis: I certified as a coach. I’ve been jewellery making. So in some ways I’ve had a taste of self-employment, even though I was employed, if that makes sense and earning little bits of money, pockets of money. So it’s not something that’s totally alien to me. I think that I can use my creativity in my coaching, and in other ways to help me achieve an income.

Terri Connellan: I often talk about Elizabeth Gilbert’s line about the long runway, where we’re preparing along the way, perhaps many years before for what we end up, wanting to do that’s important to us. Does that relate to you?

Valerie Lewis: Yeah, I think so. I don’t think you realise it at the time. Do you? Because I look at other people, I look at my sister, for example, who’s an executive coach and she climbed the career ladder. And when she was made redundant, when she started to think about what it was she could do, she realised that one of the things that she’d enjoyed whilst she was employed was coaching others. So she’s taken that aspect and also got trained, did a Masters in Coaching Psychology. And is using that and drawing from her skills in a corporate or in the civil service, if you like. So I think we do draw on our skills, I’m sure in what you’re doing, you’re doing the same, aren’t you?

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And as you were talking, I was thinking of my own experiences and your sister’s and your own, there are threads that we value that we go back to over time. And often as we’re getting older, we start to stitch them together in different ways. And I think that’s a really exciting part of our journey. Fantastic. So do you want to tell us about what your life looks and feels like now?

Valerie Lewis: It’s kind of like, I’m more in charge of it. Self-leadership that word that you introduced me to. I feel very much my own person. There’s a sense of freedom, if that makes sense. I’m much more at peace with myself. I feel as if I’m more in tune with my own values and I’m not going into work and having to do things that conflict a little bit with how I think or feel.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. So you really have put into practice the things that are important to you, that self-leadership, creativity, embracing who you are. It’s been a real joy to connect with you and to learn from you too and share our experiences as we’ve moved along our road.

So you mentioned, earlier about the tragic death of your daughter and only child and your Wholehearted Story that you wrote for Quiet Writing, The Silent Whispers of my Mind, you share your story and what happened, the impact upon you. Can you explain or share with us what you learned from moving through and on from such incredibly difficult circumstances?

Valerie Lewis: At the time, I wasn’t sure about what I’d learned and I remember sort of thinking. Am I strong? Am I coping with this? And it wasn’t until I volunteered with, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children? I volunteered. They have a helpline, the child death helpline. I think it might be called something different now. But I applied to volunteer for that as a bereaved parent. And it was offering emotional support to basically anybody who was impacted by the death of a child, whether they were the parent, the grandparent, the aunt, the teacher, whoever. Perhaps they were feeling upset or traumatized. It was a free helpline, so they could call the helpline and just pour out their feelings.

And we were there as a volunteer to listen and it was through listening to their stories, it made me realize that I had come a long way and that I was actually quite resilient and emotionally strong.

And I learnt that, I mean, it’s a bit cliche, that there are more questions than there are answers and that sometimes we just have to accept that we can’t know the answers to everything as hard as it is. Because that used to probably torment me in the early days. Why, why, why? And there were certain answers that satisfied me so much. And then I’d want to go beyond that and think, well, no one can tell me why.

I know why she died. I know what was wrong with my ex-husband. I know those sort of medical reasons why. But in the bigger scheme of things, it’s almost like well why was it her time? Why did she go then? And I don’t think anybody can give me an answer to that. So I’ve had to learn to accept that’s just how life is, we don’t know when we’re going to go. Sometimes we have signs, like if you’re ill terminally ill, then you know, but you don’t know necessarily why you became terminally ill, what led up to that? So there’s lots of things that we don’t know, we will never know. And we can’t know. And we just have to come to terms with that or else we’d go mad.

 I’d also learnt how important it is to have a wall of support around you. It’s so important because, I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here with the helpline when I say that there were people who didn’t have that support. And they were really struggling. They had no one to turn to apart from the helpline and I think just knowing that there are people around you can help to keep you, make you feel emotionally supported. And sometimes in the practical sense as well.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. I think the points you’ve raised are just so important particularly that what we learn or the experiences we go through, grief is really a journey over time. That’s certainly something I’ve experienced with the grief that I’ve experienced in my life. And I think you conveyed that beautifully in The Silent Whispers of my Mind. Just that horrible shock when something as terrible as that happens and how we start to make our way through the early days. And then over time. You talk about from fragmented to wholehearted. Yeah. So, thank you for sharing that. And I think the fact that you were able to volunteer to help others helped you realize how much you’d learned is a really powerful story, too.

Valerie Lewis: Thank you. And something else that I learned was that really there’s only, you can decide what your values are. Because I think sometimes when we go through difficult times, it does make us reflect on what’s important to us or not. And really no one else can decide for you.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely.

Valerie Lewis: Have you found that to be?

Terri Connellan: I have. My brother passed away tragically. So, I went through a difficult time and that’s the time that I went back to my creativity, which is my number one value similar to you. And I think the loss of someone so special and so loved and in tragic circumstances, particularly, yeah, it does. It just makes you go back to those places and I think you look at your life in a different way.

So in your work that you do now, you take those experiences to coach others, which is really beautiful that you’re able to take the hard won learning and experiences that you’ve had to be able to support others. So can you tell us about your coaching in this area and how you support people experiencing grief?

Valerie Lewis: Well, grief coaching, if you like, would be seen as a niche or a specialization within life coaching. I think it’s quite new. It’s basically aimed at individuals who’ve experienced loss, whether it’s a death or non-death related and need support and guidance on their grief journey. As you know, coaching is about moving forward. With grief, you’ve got that additional aspect of somebody who may be still going through the various stages of grief. They may still be a little bit hurt, a bit angry, in disbelief.

So grief coaching is also providing practical support using many of the same coaching tools, common to life coaching, as well as providing emotional support through creation of a safe and supportive space for the client to feel that they can heal And that they can express their feelings around grief without judgment.

So there’s a similar way. It is coaching but what I found is that in terms of goal setting, they’ve got to be gentle goals. Very small goals. They may have a big goal, but really with a lot of people who are going through grief, it’s just creating small goals to help them get through the day.

And I find that self-care comes into it quite a lot. So that’s one of the areas that I have tended to focus on with people going through grief. What can they do to be compassionate with themselves, to love themselves, to nurture themselves? What little steps can they take and turn those into goals and actions until they feel strong enough to tackle the bigger goals.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. So that’s a real form of that self-leadership we talked about before is taking control or taking care of what you can in a very traumatic, often very traumatic situation. And what’s the pathway to grief coaching, obviously personal experience of grief is…

Valerie Lewis: Yeah, personal experience and I came across the Institute of Life Coach Training. They’re an American organization. I came across them a couple of years ago and thought about it and then put it from my head like I do with a lot of things that are intuitive and I kept getting pulled back to it. And in terms of thinking about what niche I wanted to focus on, before that I’d looked at working with women who were midlife and who were looking to reinvent themselves. But then I started to think, what can I do with my experience of grief or what I’ve been through? And this is where I discovered this course on the internet and it kept coming back to me. I think it was once I knew that I was going to be made redundant, I decided right, I’m going to sign up for this course.

Because I just felt that I needed some structure. I needed some support around that. So, I mean, I thought I’d been through my own experience, but I need this extra. You know, how do you coach somebody? But as I said, we draw on very much the same sorts of tools as we do as we use in life coaching. It’s just this other additional element of supporting somebody, being there, and creating this safe space for them. And knowing that you’re going to be dealing with somebody who might be a bit fragile and also knowing within that when to refer somebody, , when to be able to say, well, perhaps this person needs more than what I can actually offer them. And it’s counseling that they should be receiving or need to get in touch with.

Terri Connellan: It’s very important work. And I think for many of us, the life experiences, what happens to us, the skills we gain, insight we gain is often what we channel into coaching isn’t it? It’s often a challenging journey, but I think the wisdom that we gain from our experiences, the insight and the tools that we develop are so important to pass on to others. So it’s great that you’re doing the work in this area that will help so many people.

Valerie Lewis: Thank you.

Terri Connellan: So creativity, obviously a very important part of your world. It’s been a touchstone for you over time and more recently you shared in your piece, The Silent Whispers of my Mind, how intuitive abstract painting has been a big part of your journey. So how has creativity been a source of growth, expression and insight for you?

Valerie Lewis: I would say, I’ve been creative in some shape or form ever since I was a child. I think it’s just a natural part of me. It’s something I turn to whether I’m happy or sad. It just helps me. I find that being creative is something I can lose myself in. Whether this taps into being an introvert, I don’t know. But I like to sometimes go into my own little world and shut out everything else that’s going on around me. And I find that obviously you can do that when you’re working on a piece, you’re doing something creative.

And I often find that in the act of being creative, and it’s silent around you, or you might be a person who likes music playing, you can ruminate, you can think, you can think more clearly. And if something’s bothering you, sometimes you find that the answers come to you.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I’m sure it can be the same for introverts and extroverts, but I think introverts definitely draw energy from that time alone and that creative space. So yeah, it sounds to me your personality type, which I know is introverted. INFP – you have a preference for introversion, intuition, feeling and perceiving. It would make sense that a tool like creativity, whether it’s painting or jewelry or some of the things you’ve mentioned provides a vehicle to create a quiet space where you can energize and make sense of things.

So your intuition is also something you share a lot about in The Silent Whispers of my Mind. What I found fascinating in that piece is how you tracked through learning to listen to your inner voice over time. So can you share us with us more about learning to listen to your intuition and how it’s guided you? Cause it’s not often talked about, is it, intuition?

Valerie Lewis: No, it’s still something that I find hard to articulate because it’s abstract, isn’t it? You know, you can’t see it. And it is different for everybody. You know, you look back on things and you think, well, what helped me, and then it’s just being aware that there were certain times when I seemed to know what I was doing, I felt as if I was actually being guided And I suppose some people might say you know, it’s God. And I think, well, it could be God and then over the years, having different experiences when you think that’s what they call your intuition. Like a silent voice or a sense. It’s like your body knows the right thing to do. Something’s baffling you or confusing you, and you’re weighing the pros and cons and then out of the blue, when you’re doing something totally different an answer comes into your head or you’re doing something and you get a reaction in your body.

And it’s through experiencing that. And then learning when I experienced that, that means I’ve got to listen to that. And just learning to be aware of those sensations. It’s learning to be quiet and still, and just being in the moment. And I think being creative helps you do that. I’ve heard people say that running, for example, does that for them, you know, going for a run, clears the cobwebs away and they’re in that moment. And maybe if they’ve had a problem they’d been churning turning over in their heads, they’re getting clarity in that moment.

So there’s definitely something to be said about learning to be still. Shutting out everything else around you and really being in that moment. So for me being creative is like a kind of mindful meditation. And I suppose in some way that that’s where the abstract art came in and that was kind of a mindful meditation. I don’t know what I’m going to paint. I just have these paints in front of me and I start doing shapes and ideas come to my head. Oh, that represents so-and-so. That means so and so, but initially I might not know what it is. I want to get down on paper.

Terri Connellan: I think it’s fascinating that abstract intuitive art was what you were felt very drawn to. It’s obviously something that has called you over time. And when you describe your creativity, the power of it, intuition, it seems to bring all the pieces together. So that’s perfect.

I love that you described yourself as a 60 plus pro ager, Valerie. That’s great. I love that term. What does that mean for you? Tell us a bit about that.

Valerie Lewis: I think for me as I approached 60. I thought my gosh. Am I still middle-aged? And then I actually had to Google it to see what years middle age encaptured. And I thought, well, I’m at the tail end of middle-aged. And it was like looking at older relatives around me and thinking, there’s a part of you, that’s a little bit fearful about getting older and that term to me, it helps me allay those about being over 60 and getting older. It’s about me accepting that, yes, I am getting older. I can’t hide that and really, I don’t want to. I think it’s something to actually be proud of, because not everybody, you know, my daughter died at seven. She didn’t make it to 61. My mum’s mum, I think she died at 63, my mum’s 84 so it’s actually something to be really, really proud of.

And regardless of what society says, I think we’ve got more freedom. We’ve been allowed the opportunity for more self-expression than our parents’ generation, if you like. And I think we should take advantage of that to the full. We should create our own rules, dress, how we want to dress. If you want to dye your hair, dye it. If you don’t want to dye your hair don’t. And live life as fully as you can, within your capabilities.

 I look around me and there’s people my age and a bit younger having hip replacements and, and dying from cancer and things like that. So I think to myself, life’s short. I think you’re just aware of your own mortality when you reach this age. So you think to yourself, I’m not just going to sit here and sort of accept that I’m getting older. I want to live my life. And so being pro age, it’s about accepting that you’re a certain age but not letting that age, define you or defeat you.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. Yeah. And I was fascinated to hear that you did what I also did recently, which was look at middle age and the span, because I was asking the same questions recently because I just turned 60 not long ago. I was thinking, oh, am I still middle aged? Or am I old age now? Or what am I? And I did the same thing.

I was fascinated to find that I could see middle-aged, which is that point. And then there didn’t seem to be a term so much for after. So yeah, I do like that pro ager. I was listening to a podcast, The Magnificent Mid-life Podcast, and there was a guest on there who talked about being age-full, which is nice too. I love that. And, I certainly agree with you about celebrating all that, we’ve learned the sharing of that with others, which in your journey is really important. So yeah, I love your attitude. It’s fantastic.

Valerie Lewis: This is where the modeling comes in.

Terri Connellan: Yes I’ve seen on Instagram. Is that a new career for you?

Valerie Lewis: I wouldn’t say it’s a career, it’s a form of income but it’s another form of being creative if you like.

And it’s also about in a way me celebrating, being the age I am because if you look back 10, 15 years ago, who would have thought that somebody in their sixties will be doing modeling. But I think there’s more of us reaching a certain age. And I think companies are appreciating that their customers want to see a greater representation of people who look like them.

And so this is the right time for me to be doing this because I am not what you would call sort of fashion model. I don’t look like a fashion model. I’m not the right height. I’m not the right build for it, but I might look like somebody who you’d see in the street or your next door neighbor. So that’s basically what I’m doing. Lifestyle modelling and it’s quite fun. It’s something different and it’s fun.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. The pictures you shared on Instagram. I was just blown away. I found it so inspiring. It was fantastic to see. So yeah. Be interested to hear more about it as you get more into your modeling.

So there’s a couple of questions that I’m asking all the guests on this podcast, being the Create Your Story Podcast. It’s a big question, but it’s really just seeing what comes to mind from the question. So how have you created your story over your lifetime?

Valerie Lewis: That’s an interesting one. It’s almost like there hasn’t been a rule book to follow. So in many ways circumstances have shaped some of my story. And other aspects of my story, I’ve taken charge and shaped myself. For example, not climbing a career ladder when that’s something that society expects of you, if you like. I chose not to do that.

Some of the creative things I’m doing, such as modeling and what is interesting is meeting other people who are of the same age group, who have decided to do that as well and thinking, well, you know, this is fascinating.

So my story has been shaped by I suppose obviously my parents and people of their generation, my upbringing, being a black person in a mainly white society. That’s helped to shape it. Being a female. In two of my jobs, I worked in a more male dominated environment.

 And also the circumstances I’ve been through have helped to shape my story. And also I think I’m a little bit eccentric and I’ve got a strong streak of independence. There’s always something in me that slightly wants to dance to my own tune. So that’s helped to shape my story. I’m still continuing to shape my story.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. That’s great. It’s lovely to hear all the different aspects that have shaped you, your personality, circumstances and how you’ve responded to them as well. Thank you for sharing that. So wholehearted self-leadership is obviously part of creating your story and a key part. And I’ve shared some tips in my book, but I’m interested for people on the show to share their top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, especially for women. So what comes to mind for you as the top tips?

Valerie Lewis: I think the main thing that I would say is work on being true to you. Who are you, or who do you want to be? And that might mean a lot of self-reflecting, digging deep within yourself. I would say a good starting point is looking at your values. What are the things that make life meaning to you or could make life meaningful to you? The values that you hold – are they yours or the values of others? What do you dislike about yourself or what do you dislike about other people? Ultimately, are you living your life for you or for others?

And I think that sort of question becomes more important the older you get, especially as you reach middle age. Maybe if you’ve had a family and your life has been focused on your family, I think you can lose yourself, whoever you were. So at some point, I think most of us, you start thinking about who am I, what am I here for? What gives me joy? And that’s where the self-reflecting comes in. And as I say, looking at your values, I think that’s a good starting point because your values change over time, don’t they? And you might be holding on to things that are not helping you anymore. It’s dragging you down.

Terri Connellan: I think that’s great. I think that question about it with your living your life for yourself or for others and sometimes it’s that overlay of family with its family values, cultural values or corporate values, it’s almost like we have to clear them off sometimes just to work out what’s important for us. I relate to that, like a clarifying process. Beautiful. I love that. And that idea of working on being who you are, who you want to be, and what gives you joy, I think a beautiful tips too for women to take to heart. So, thank you so much for our conversation Valerie today. It’s been so heart-warming, so inspiring and a lot of fun. So thank you so much for sharing your story. Can you tell us where people can find out more about you and your work online?

Valerie Lewis: Okay. My website, Instagram and Facebook under Visualise and Bloom. And LinkedIn under Valerie A Lewis and people can sign up to receive my periodic newsletter. I say periodic because I’m not one of these that sends out a newsletter every month. It’s more like once a quarter. So, if they sign up for my newsletter on my website, I’ve just created a guided meditation. They can receive a free downloadable copy of it. It’s called the Violet Cloud Guided Meditation for Difficult Times.

Terri Connellan: Perfect. That’s a beautiful gift for people who connect with you. So, we’ll pop all those links in the show notes. I’ll also make sure the link to your wholehearted story, The Silent Whispers of my Mind and the piece you shared on creative transition too is there.

Valerie Lewis: Oh, it’s been a pleasure, Terri. Thank you so much.

Terri Connellan: Thanks so much Valerie.

Valerie Lewis

About Valerie Lewis

Valerie Lewis is a multi-passionate 60plus pro ager. Through grief coaching and personal growth facilitation, she supports and empowers those who are lost and confused with the direction they want to take following a significant life event that has impacted them and their sense of self. Her interests include being an intuitive reader, Reiki and crystals practitioner and avid creative dabbler.

You can connect with Valerie at her website Visualise and Bloom or via Instagram @visualiseandbloom 

Newsletter sign-up: Blooming news + free guided meditation

You can also read Valerie’s Wholehearted Story, The Silent Whispers of my Mind and an interview with Valerie on her transition journey: Sacred Creative Stories of Transition.

Links to explore:

Book Club: Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club – open for enrolment now, closing soon – join us for January 19/20 book club start.

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

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

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

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

My coaching:

Work with me

Personality Stories Coaching

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

Connect on social media

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

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

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

creativity planning & productivity writing

The Writing Road Trip – Share the journey

January 31, 2022

I’m joining forces with Beth Cregan of Write Away With Me to co-host The Writing Road Trip in 2022. Beth and I co-write together in the mornings virtually via Zoom. We’ve completed three books between us in 2021 and we’ve found community and partnership helps get writing happening and books written. So from this, we’ve shaped up exactly what helped us into an exciting new community writing program in 2022.

We kick off today 31 January! So join us. Get on our email list now and we’ll send you all the information and links to join in:

Get on the Writing Road Trip email list

The Writing Road Trip is an exciting new collaboration for Beth Cregan and me. We have created exactly what we found worked when we faced the task of writing and completing our books together.

The program kicks off with a free writing challenge focusing on writing identity. This two week challenge helps you explore your relationship with writing and your unique writing identity. Whatever stage you are at in your writing journey, this is a powerful foundation for your writing for 2022. 

We want to challenge you, nurture your creativity and provide opportunities to connect with other writers in a positive and affirming community. 

Here’s what you need to know:

✍🏼 The Challenge goes from Monday 31 Jan to Friday 11 Feb.

✍🏼There are 6 x 30 minute live workshops Tues Wed Thurs each week.

✍🏼 Workshops are live at 7pm AEDT Sydney/Melb via Zoom + recorded.

✍🏼 Each workshop has a key focus, writing prompt & time to chat.

✍🏼 The private Facebook group is open for further connection & exploration.

✍🏼 The Challenge Workbook is ready for you to download.

Don’t forget to add us to your contacts so our emails land in your inbox.

The Challenge is free so connect with us, to get writing in 2022.

Sign up to get the info – link in bio or head to https://www.quietwriting.net/writingroadtripwaitlist

If you are already on our email list, then check out today’s email with all the Go Live links. DM us if you haven’t received it for any reason! We don’t want you to miss out.

Watch us chatting about the program here on YouTube

The transcript of the conversation is below if you prefer to read or read along.

Transcript of our conversation

Beth Cregan: Now just waiting. I think we’re going to get Terri up on screen any minute. There we go. We did it. So welcome to anybody who’s watching this live. And also to anybody who might catch up on this, on the replay. We’re so thrilled to have you here and you can tell by our smiles that we’re really excited to be spending this time and telling you what we’ve been planning over the last weeks and months. So I’m Beth from Write Away with Me.

Terri Connellan: And I’m Terri Connellan from Quiet Writing and it’s fantastic to be on Instagram live together. This is our first time popping on together and we’ve had a lot of laughs getting connected and things organised, but it’s great to be with you Beth, and to be sharing our story.

Beth Cregan: Exactly. And I think what we’d really like to start with is to tell you a little bit about how this program came to be, because we have developed something that comes from our experience of writing successfully together and finishing our books. And we’re hoping it will really inspire you to join us next year and take out your writing program.

So if we zoom back to the beginning of last year, I had a draft of a book and a publishing contract, and I was just beginning to restructure that book when COVID hit. And of course, all of our lives changed dramatically. And I was at home overwhelmed and anxious and really wondering how I was going to make my commitment of finishing this book.

Then it really became important to me, or it became obvious to me that I needed support. And I put out a call to writers I knew in my circle to see if anybody wanted to write in the mornings together online. And that was how Terri and I first connected. We knew each other, but that was how we connected in terms of our writing together. And other people came in and out of that group, but we hung in there, didn’t we Terri?

Terri Connellan: We did.

I think the fact that we were both writing books, like we both had a long haul writing project really kept us engaged with that support for each other.

I know for me, for my situation, I was writing two books at once. And I think when we connected, I was well through the draft of one and the other, I still had to do quite a lot of work on. So it was actually quite a hard slog at the time when we connected, because it was working through the editing when you’re going over and over and over drafts. And when I went through that process, it was quite challenging. So to have people who you can connect with really helps with that and getting up early and writing with you really helped to get that writing done. It was so much more fun.

Beth Cregan: Absolutely. That was my sense of it too. And now end of if that was somewhere in the midst of 2020, now we’re at the end of 2021. And I have my book now finished and going through its final edit with the publisher and Terri, tell everybody your great news too.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I was able to get two books finished at once. So ‘Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition‘ and accompanying workbook, which I worked on in conjunction and they were published by the kind press in September this year 2021 and that’s after four and a half, five years of writing. So yeah, it was fantastic to have that support to be able to finish that work. So, yeah. Thanks for being there. And it’s great to share our story.

Beth Cregan: And I think that it is the things that we learned during that time that helped us achieve our goals.

And it became, I think really obvious to both of us that we’d cracked a code that really made the difference for us and that we could then offer what we had learned to others to help them on their writing journey, to guide and support them.

I know for me, that time in the morning felt really sacred. It felt like a safe space. It felt like a creative space and it wasn’t just the opportunity to work and, and know that somebody was holding space with you at the same time and offering you that courage but I think it was just our conversations. We’d have a break and it was our conversations that made all the difference.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And I think for me it was definitely that accountability of getting up early to write, but also very much the camaraderie around writing. So that ability to one, write together, but also just to stop and have conversations about what was hard, what was easy, what we were learning. We often think writing’s a really solitary process. Obviously there’s aspects of it that are, but there’s plenty of aspects of writing that are supported by being with other people. And, people talk about how lonely it is. It can be super lonely and I think having community on the journey can help us incredibly. So, yeah. So it’s like a magic sauce, Beth, that we want to share with others.

Beth Cregan: Yes, absolutely. And I know for me, it was the fact that there was somebody just ahead of me in the journey that made such a difference because the overwhelming part is that you don’t quite know. It’s an organic process and you don’t quite know how it’s going to come together. So just having you one step or two steps ahead meant that I had a path forming and it normalized what I was doing, the overwhelm, the fear that dealing with my inner critic, the resistance. It really normalized all of those things because I knew that you were feeling them too.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely.

That sense of, you’re not alone and it’s quite a normal part of the journey. Yeah, I think the idea of normalising, it’s really important. Also for me, I never went into any session or any times we were writing together without having a note pad or pencil beside me, where I was writing down a whole list: here’s a great podcast, here’s a great book.

And I know you recommended Anne Janzer’s The Writer’s Process. To me, that’s been such a fantastic inspirational book for my journey and for my sharing with others. So I think just sharing insights about writing and resources helped incredibly too. So it’s a whole lot of things, isn’t it?

Beth Cregan: Well, the combined resources was just an absolute bonus because I now have bookshelves and kindles full of things that I know you found helpful and no doubt you have the same experience because everybody finds their own, you know, they follow different people. They find their own magic in whatever resources they use. And then we had the chance to pull those together and share them, which was really fantastic.

Terri Connellan: So it might be time for us to share about what we’re thinking of or what we’re planning to offer all these great experiences that we’ve had. What we found was that from that we’re able to create a program that’s something that we wish we had while we were going through the process.

Beth Cregan: I think every time we’ve got together to work and dream up this program cause it’s been a Thursday afternoon burst of inspiration when we get together and do it. And every time I finish, I think, man, I wish I had this when I was writing or when I was doing this journey, because it’s exactly what I would have needed to help me along my way. So how about I start by just talking a little bit about the challenge.

The program will have three parts and we’re going to start with a live challenge. It will involve six free activities or workshops over two weeks. And that’s just to ride the energy of the new year, and get everybody thinking about what their writing goals might be for the year. How they feel as a writer, what is their writing identity as well as just inspire and spark imaginations and creativity. So that will involve lots of hands-on writing and interactive opportunities, which will be really fun way to start the program.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. It’s called The Writing Road Trip, the whole program. The first part is really a bit of way-finding, like getting a compass, getting all the travel books out and deciding where you might go. But again, having fellow travellers, even at the early stage of the journey to have a chat about what you’re thinking about, how you feel about yourself as a writer, as Beth said, and then we thought we’d build on that with a six week more intensive course, which is a Roadmap. And that’s really about creating the shape of your project and what it might look like. So in that program, we’ll have a look at things like, what your purpose is, what your why is, what the steps might be, what do you want to do with what you write?

 My journey has been very much that, knowing what I want to do with it at the end, I needed to know a bit at the beginning or at least have some idea. Do you want to publish? How do you want to publish? And we’re talking in this, it could be a book, but it could also be blog project. It could be feature articles, series of feature articles, could be social media. It could be writing a course, any sort of writing. So in that six weeks Roadmap program, we’ll be looking at: what you want to do, where you might go, why it’s important to you, because one thing I’ve found, and I know you have too, Beth, is that knowing our why really helps us on the whole journey.

Beth Cregan: Yeah. And I love the imagery of the road trip because I think it was born out of a time when we were quite stationary with lockdown and road tripping was completely off the agenda.

But writing is a journey and creating any sort of project and finishing any sort of project, I think, is a transformational journey. So it feels so right to have that image as our starting point.

And then once we’ve done that six weeks together where we will really shape and map out where you’re going and what you want to do with your project, then we have a six month community. And in that community and program, that membership, you’ll have a chance to meet other writers, to work together, to be accountable to each other, to listen to other guest speakers who arecoming into that space, to share our resources.

So, not only will you have the opportunity to connect with our guests, but you’ll have a wide library of resources that we can share with you. And also, which I think will be really helpful because it’s what we have done. And we still do many mornings every week is to have virtual retreats where we come together and we’re online in our own space, but we’re working together and sharing what we’re doing, our goals and our intentions and carving out space, making that container to allow the writing to happen. So that to me is a really important part of this journey because I don’t think I realized until we started working together, Terri, just how I’ve given lip service to community, but I don’t think I really understood it. And now I really do see that that makes all the difference.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve often been envious of people who have writing groups and join together to to write. And particularly with the way things work now that we are perhaps not connecting as much or traveling across the world, or as you said, actually doing road trips as much, being able to connect virtually and write together, have community together and connect asynchronously as well as at the same time, it’s been absolutely perfect. And I know one of my clients said to me, I didn’t think I had time for a group program, I just wanted to get the writing done. And I think that’s, our tendency is to want to put our head down and just get the writing done.

But I think our experiences have taught us that to have connection to someone who knows what’s happening on the journey to talk through, when you get to the really difficult things, to be able to have a safe space to be heard, you don’t always have to solve the problems, but it’s just not having it rattling around inside your head can make a huge difference.

And I think we’ve both said without each other, we wouldn’t be where we are today with the projects that we’ve done. So that’s what we really hope to share with the community work. And yeah, that idea of being connected with creativity.

Beth Cregan: I think if you imagine writing as flow and we often talk about creative flow, I feel like community removes many of the obstacles. For me, it really allows the writing when you have that space to write, you actually use your time really productively, because you have a lot of your other needs met in that community space.

Terri Connellan: I think I’ve said to you before that, we’d get up early, six at the moment. If you’re not there and I get up early, I just faff around. It’s just amazing that having someone there, you know, we write for 25 minutes, we have a break. These are the sort of practices we can share with people. Another thing we’ve talked about doing is buddying people up potentially, if people are interested in this sort of experience we’ve had, because it’s made all the difference.

Beth Cregan: Yeah and I know we were talking this morning about the fact that we’re in the middle of a reno and our, Terri and my, writing time hasn’t been happening. And my rest of the day doesn’t feel the same and it is nowhere near as productive as having that regular routine. So it’s reminded me once again, that a writing practice is made up of so many elements that fit together. And once you get what’s right for you, what you need to move forward. So we hoping that you will be interested in joining us. We’re going to be kicking off at the end of Jan with our challenge, and you can be part of that free challenge and have the opportunity to come and work with us and see what it’s like to have that experience.

Terri Connellan: And so the first step today we’re opening the waitlist, which is really exciting. So inviting you to come on the Road Trip with us. So we’ve both popped the links in our bios and that waitlist information tells you about the program. There’s quite a lot of information there in that post if you have a look and then there’s an opportunity just to join our email list, which is a joint email list. Beth and I have our own businesses, our own email lists. This is a unique one, unique to Writing Road Trip. So we’ll just be sending information out about the Road Trip and, and writing inspiration tips to inspire you particularly about community.

Beth Cregan: And we would love you to join us and have an opportunity to be supported by the lessons that we’ve learned along the way to finish. You finished your two books and I think you’re nearly working on the third.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, I am. Yeah, it’s happening in the background. So again, it’s whatever projects and it’s not genre specific. I think that’s something too we want to mention to people. We’re not going to be talking about say, novel writing specifically. But you could be writing a novel, it’s certainly a goal of mine next year. Mm. But whatever writing it is, we’re here to support you around the writing process generally, the community, the support. We’re both writing teachers by background. We’ve told you about ourselves in that landing page (waitlist page). I’m a coach and teacher and Beth also is mentoring and many years’ experience as a teacher. So together, we bring a fantastic skillset too. And of course everyone who joins brings their wisdom. That’s what I love about group programs. We met through a group program, didn’t we Beth?

Beth Cregan:

And we really feel like this will be a co-creation. We will set that structure up and use what we know in that space or share what we know in that space, but it really will be created with everybody and what they bring into that program as well, which is really exciting.

Terri Connellan: It is absolutely. So yes, we hope you’ll join us. So as I said, we’ll both put a post up today kicking off the waitlist. So any questions feel free to pop them in now, or we can pick them up on our respective Instagram profiles. So look forward to connecting with you and to going on a Road Trip with you, writing away.

Beth Cregan: Totally!. And have a great day and any questions, please shoot them our way. We’d love to answer them. And we’d love to see you on that wait list so that you can get more information as it comes into the world. Yeah. Bye.

Here’s a map of where the Writing Road Trip is going in 2022:

We hope you’ll join us!

You can get on the email list here and find our more about us and the program here:

Get on the Writing Road Trip email list
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
podcast

Welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast

October 29, 2021

Subscribe on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Podcast Page | RSS

Welcome to the first episode of the Create Your Story Podcast!

In this episode, I share about myself and about what to expect in the podcast.

You can listen above or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

  • An introduction to me and my work.
  • How the podcast came about.
  • The signature elements of my work as a coach and author focused on transition.
  • Three signature elements: Creativity, Self-leadership, Personality
  • How insights from these areas can help in navigating chance.
  • The difference between change and transition
  • Why having a transition mindset is so powerful.
  • The value of community when going through times of transition.
  • Upcoming episodes and what to expect.

Transcript of podcast

Hello, I’m Terri Connellan, your host for the Create Your Story Podcast. And welcome to Episode One of the podcast. Today, I’ll be sharing why I’ve created the podcast and what you can expect in future episodes and conversations here. Firstly, I’m so excited to be kicking off the Create Your Story Podcast and sharing conversations on creativity, self-leadership and personality to inspire your wholehearted life and transitions.

So just a little about me, I’m an author, creative transition coach and personality type practitioner. I work through my business, Quiet Writing, and I’ve been on a major five-year transition journey from leader and teacher in the adult vocational education sector in Australia, since 2016. I’ve learnt so much during this time. And I’ve made significant mindset shifts as I’ve totally reshaped my life and crafted my coaching business and offerings, as well as writing two books, Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook. And this was all in my late fifties. I turned 60, not too long ago as I record this first episode in mid-October 2021.

With all of that life change, I’ve also connected with so many fabulous people, having the most incredible and inspiring conversations. And that’s what I want to share more publicly with you here on the Create Your Story Podcast. So why Create Your Story, you might be wondering? I have a piece of paper on my wall here as I speak to you with a mind map of all that I wanted to create and what I’m still manifesting over time in my business.

And at the centre, are the words Create Your Story. It was created some time ago at the beginning of my transition journey. And it’s been a guiding light in all aspects of this journey and creative projects. What that means to me is being an active player in your life story, being the author of your journey, not being a passive participant or bystander, or feeling that you can’t influence events or circumstances in your life.

It reminds me that we’re capable of change at any time in our life, we’re capable of pivoting, shifting, recalibrating, re-evaluating and making sure that we have the tools and practices around us to be able to do this. It’s also important that we don’t leave critical pieces of ourselves behind on this journey.

My book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition shares my personal experiences of how I’ve created and recreated my story over time during my transition. I share my experiences, feelings, and the strategies that helped me to make a positive shift as well as the challenges along the way and how I dealt with them.

Wholehearted self -leadership and create your story are really one and the same concept, slightly different language, but they’re both about that same mindset of being the active creator, author of your most fulfilling life. There are four key elements to creating your story, to wholehearted self-leadership and to my Quiet Writing business.

And you will see these concepts woven together as strands in all that I do in my writing, in my body of work and in the conversations in this podcast. So I thought I’d walk you through those four key elements today. So they are firstly Creativity, secondly, Self-leadership, thirdly, Personality, and fourthly Transition.

So let’s have a walk through each of those briefly as an introduction to my work in the world and to what you might expect on this podcast. So firstly, creativity. Creativity is the number one value in my life and it relates to self-expression. So I express this in many ways through my writing, my creative business and finding creative and innovative solutions to meet client needs, to problems in my life and also to how, people, myself, and others transition to what they desire.

We can all live creatively and strengthen the role creativity plays in our life, whether it’s finding flexible solutions to problems; bringing together our passions and unique strengths in new ways; engaging in creativity to stretch our minds and insights through reading, writing, and art. Many of the conversations on the Create Your Story Podcast, feature people who are creative in how they make a living and how they find solutions to be the active author of their life.

Secondly, self-leadership. I shared in my Wholehearted book how self-leadership developed from my leadership roles and experience as I went through my transition journey and changed my life. It’s about being self-directed and it’s about having choice. Self-leadership takes concepts from leadership, but it applies them first of all, to ourselves. It’s about being active and engaged in practices and insights that help us take conscious leadership of ourselves. And it rests on self-awareness and bringing what is unconscious or less conscious into the light more so we can see it and work with it.

It also means taking responsibility for ourselves. It’s so easy to blame ourselves or circumstances for not feeling like we can make change. And we might often find ourselves saying, “when this happens”, whatever that is, “when I get more time”, “when I reach this milestone” I’ll begin that change or take that action, but often there’s much more we can do to initiate or further the changes we desire to shape in our lives at any point in her life.

And often these are small steps, small tweaks that we can take that can make a huge difference. In Wholehearted, I share 15 self-leadership tools, practices, and mindsets honed from my experiences that can support you when you’re in transition or contemplating life changes. These are frameworks and anchors to support you through the uncertainty that a change of identity or circumstances often brings.

 So thirdly, personality. A big part of self-leadership is knowing ourselves well. Personality relates to self knowledge and self awareness, and it’s about how much we are consciously aware of our natural preferences, our strengths and gifts, and also how much we understand our less preferred areas. The more, we can be consciously aware of how we’re naturally wired and how we’re naturally wired also interacts with, how we’re brought up, what we experienced through life, but how we’re naturally wired has a huge impact. The more we can recognize and play with our strengths c an be a really key part of this learning. Understanding and respecting our uniqueness helps us to honor our own ways of working. And therefore we engage less in comparisonitis and envy, and we do that wonderful thing, which is swim in our lane. This helps to recognize a particular brand of saboteurs or self sabotaging mechanisms that we might see happening again and again in our life, and to have strategies for countering them is the most important thing.

As we shift into midlife, we often find ourselves stretching into our opposites and our more unconscious areas as we develop. And this is a really powerful source of growth. But it can also make us feel quite off kilter at times, because it’s not where we feel skilled or where we feel adept. It can also make us think about what we’ve done in the past and whether it was the right thing. So we can feel a bit lost. Personality frameworks can help us make sense of what’s happening. And I’ve found Jungian psychological type frameworks incredibly helpful personally. And that’s why I’ve chosen to focus on this in the work that I do with my coaching clients.

I offer a Personality Stories coaching program that provides both an introduction to psychological type and also insights into your personal, psychological type frameworks. And that can help you with guiding your growth and development. I also weave this knowledge into everything I do, including this podcast and coaching. So I hope you’ll find concepts of personality really helpful for you as we go on this podcast journey..

And the fourth area is Transition. And this is a really important area because it’s where the rubber hits the road. So we have these great practices of creativity, of personality, of self-leadership, but how we use them when we’re negotiating change is where I think we have powerful tools to help.

So an important distinction is that change is external. It’s what happens to us. We might initiate it, but it’s still something that’s external to us, but transition is internal. It’s a psychological process that occurs on the personal level. So you might see it as change is the facts or what’s happening. And then the transition is the how, how we move through that process. How we adjust, how we shift and how we make sense of what’s happening. So using the three tools and insights, from creativity/self-expression, self-leadership/ self-direction and thirdly, personality, which is self knowledge. We can work consciously at these points of change to manage uncertainty and to plot a new path with confidence.

There’s so much we can influence in creating our story. Especially when we’re creating a new story at times of transition, having the framework of these three areas helps immensely to see where we can focus. It helps us to develop practices and anchors we can use each day to keep us on track and moving positively towards our design, goals and intentions. And this is the case, even when the times are tough and when there’s lots of ebbs and flows in our experience. And from my experience, that’s exactly what happens at times of change. It’s rarely a smooth path. So getting these three areas working well together means we have a strong toolkit of practices and mindset that we can call on at any time to support and strengthen us, and also to make sense of what’s happening and to be more conscious about our story and journey, rather than feeling like a passive bystander or participant in our own lives.

And all of this is about making a transition to a more wholehearted life where we feel fulfilled. And when we’re not feeling half-hearted or like we’re in a soul sapping situation, or like we’re living an unlived life. It’s been a dream for, four plus years now to host a podcast, talking about all the ways we can create a wholehearted story going through transition, managing challenges and uncertainty, making decisions at key points, writing books, making art, learning new skills, shaping creative projects and lives and how we thrive and grow through it all and connect with others. Community is so important. So some of the things we’ll be covering as we go through are things like the self-awareness and self-leadership journey and process, learning along the way, what I’ve learned along the way, what people particularly women have learnt along the way, tools, strategies, and tips, how we work with our personality strengths and develop our less preferred areas, realizing how we self-sabotage and what we do about it and community, what we can share with others to inspire their stories, journeys, and creations, so we all don’t feel so alone. And so we can learn from each other and not have to reinvent the wheel every time we’re going through such situations. We can learn so much from real stories from ordinary people, shaping extraordinary lives, honed and crafted from the moments of every day.

So that’s what Create Your Story is all about. I’ll be hosting conversations with writers, editors, publishers, teachers, coaches, coaching clients, creatives, personality type practitioners, psychologists, artists, bloggers, and others interested in creating and shaping their stories in the richest of ways.

I’ll share my insights as author, as creative transition coach, as psychological type practitioner and as midlife woman in transition. I don’t think we hear enough about the lives of women, especially from the perspectives of midlife and beyond and the wisdom learned from the life story journey. We’ll explore all that we’ve learnt along the way and are still learning because connecting with each other through the transitions we make helps to shape our deepest story and is so powerful.

It’s life enhancing, sparking more connections and inspiration, and it helps us not feel so alone. So I hope you will enjoy me in creating your story, listening to the podcast and sharing it with others. Leave a review to help others find it and share it with your networks too so we can encourage others to create their most inspired and fulfilling story.

I see this as a community journey. It’s certainly something I’ve learned through my work that every story that’s told, every blog post that’s written, every podcast that’s shared has the opportunity to have a huge impact on others. So I just encourage you to engage with that community spirit, with Create Your Story.

The next episodes feature conversations from the virtual launch of my books, Wholehearted, and the Companion Workbook, as well as with women, who’ve been pivotal connections on the writing and publishing journey and in my Quiet Writing business. I hope that you’ll enjoy listening. Thank you so much for being here and may these insights and conversations support you in shaping your most fulfilling and wholehearted life story.

Links to explore:

Free resources:

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

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

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

My books and book club:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club

My coaching:

Work with me

Personality Stories Coaching

Connect on social media

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

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

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

creativity podcast

Developing an Artist’s Life with Lynn Hanford-Day

December 28, 2021

Subscribe on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | YouTube | Stitcher | Podcast Page |

Welcome to Episode 7 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Developing an Artist’s Life.

In this episode, I’m joined by Lynn Hanford-Day of Sacred Intuitive Art – a visual artist working with sacred geometry, mandalas and Islamic patterns and a coach and psychotherapist.

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:

  • Challenging transitions
  • Moving on from difficult times
  • Developing an artist’s life
  • Lynn’s art business & practice, Sacred Intuitive Art
  • Balancing corporate and creative living
  • Patterns and spirals in art and life
  • Manifesting & discipline
  • Living wholeheartedly & in the moment
  • And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 7 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 28th of December as I record this and we’re in that lovely liminal time between Christmas and New Year with an opportunity to reflect on what the past year has taught us and the chance to plan and set some intention for 2022. I’ll certainly be making some time for past year reflections. My word of 2021 is Author so it’s been wonderful to step into that space and publish my Wholehearted books. And I’m crafting up new year intentions around my 2022 word of the year which I will reveal soon. Stay tuned!

I’m thrilled to have my friend Lynn Hanford-Day join us for the podcast today.

Lynn  is a visual artist working with sacred geometry, mandalas and Islamic pattern.   Lynn is also dual qualified as a coach/psychotherapist and works with women in transition who are seeking meaning, purpose and wellbeing.  Lynn is especially interested in creativity and intuition, positive psychology and strengths, helping people to access and express their inner wisdom.  Lynn helps women discover clarity and confidence, path and purpose. 

Lynn and I met via our mutual interest in creativity. You might remember Lynn from Episode 3 and the Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch. Lynn has also written a Wholehearted Story for the Quiet Writing blog called Breakdown to Breakthrough which I also draw on in my book Wholehearted as Lynn’s story resonated with mine in so many ways. Lynn’s wholehearted story tells of how she moved from burnout and a corporate HR career to working with sacred geometry and crafting a multi-faceted career as artist, coach and facilitator working with women in transition and organisations going through change.

And that’s what we chat about in today’s episode: that transition, Lynn’s creative journey to developing an artist’s life alongside her corporate career, art and creativity as a source of healing and growth and intuitive ways of living, working and creating.

A reminder before we head into the podcast about the two programs I’m offering to kick off 2022.

  1. If you’re looking for community, support and accountability for living a more wholehearted life, join me and a fabulous group of women gathering for the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club to read and work through Wholehearted together through-out 2022. Part book club, part group coaching, it’s a gentle and focused way to keep wholehearted living front of mind and make progress to the transitions and transformations you desire in the coming year.
  2. If you’re looking for community, support and accountability to get writing done in 2022, join me and Beth Cregan for a Writing Road Trip. We begin with a free challenge in late January on your writing identity and then shift into a 6 week course looking at your writing road map and then come together for a 6 month community writing program where the writing gets done in earnest together and with support.

So now let’s head into the interview with the lovely and inspiring Lynn Hanford-Day!

Transcript of interview with Lynn Hanford-Day

Terri Connellan: Lynn, welcome to the Create Your Story podcast and thank you for your connection and your support of Wholehearted and Quiet Writing.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Hi Terri. It’s really good to be here. I’m feeling a bit nervous, also excited. So I really appreciate the offer and the invitation to take part.

Terri Connellan: It’s a great pleasure to talk with you today and to explore more about you and more about your work in the world to share with others. So we’ve connected in many ways around creativity, wholehearted living, art and writing and so much more on our journey together. So it’s great today to be able to share some of those conversations that we’ve had more publicly and with others. So can you provide an overview about your background, about how you got to be where you are now and the work that you do?

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. I’ve got a corporate background. I’ve spent some over 30 years working in human resources and 25 of those years at director level. And I’ve been in work for 40 years cause I’m 61 now to my horror. But art came into my life in 2014. So in parallel with becoming self-employed, I’ve also developed a life around being an artist. And that’s obviously what we’re going to talk about more as we go through the conversation today, but I’ve got this mix of corporate work and non corporate work.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. So very much like me, you’ve had that shift in midlife from one life that was going down one path and another life, but both of us heading towards more creative living. So we’ve both shared that major transition from long-term career, yours, as you said, in the case of corporate HR to that more creatively focused life. So can you describe what that transition has been like for you? How long it took and what the main turning points were for you.

Lynn Hanford-Day: I covered some of this on the guests blog post I wrote didn’t I, which is, I think about three years ago now, Breakdown to Breakthrough. So in 2013, I had a breakdown. I didn’t work for a year and a half. Some of the impacts of that time were quite catastrophic because I did lose my job. There was no way I could continue working beyond the kind of paid period of sick leave. So we agreed that I would leave and then I run out of money.

So I sold my house in order to get hold of some of the equity that was left in that, which wasn’t huge. And as I came through the other side of that, I became self-employed because I knew I needed to change the way I lived. I recognized that I was my job and how unhealthy that can be.But it was also the . Way in which I could earn a living. So I turned to consultancy and executive coaching and interim management, which is a kind of form of being an agency temp. So I did that, but what had entered my life while I was unwell which was kind of unexpected, but it was also the path forward. It was part of the breakthrough story, this unexpected arrival of creativity in my life.

 I started playing around with various courses. It actually began with coloring books. And I got into some online art courses and I was always fascinated by mandalas and patterns. So I tried to find a class and I couldn’t. So I bought a book from Amazon and a pair of compasses and started playing. And it was in 2014 through some serendipitous events that I then found a school in London called the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts which actually teaches a master’s program based on geometry that people can work with a huge range of medium. So it could be stained glass or it could be painting, or it could besculpting, or marquetry all kinds of things and they run public courses and that’s where I began to immerse myself in this practice.

So I’ve had a thread alongside my ongoing corporate work that’s been developing my creative process and becoming an artist which surprises me even now that I would ever describe myself in that way. I hadn’t touched paint since I left school, so, you know, over 30 years ago. And it keeps me sane. It’s really important to me now.

Terri Connellan: That’s just such an amazing story. And I know you’ve moved to the seaside and are working as an artist in a more full-time capacity?

Lynn Hanford-Day: It’s not full time. My work kind of flexes. It’s feast or famine as most people would say when they become self-employed. So it is something that I tend to do on a weekend or some in the evening if I’m doing some full-time work in an organization, but more recently I completed a contract at the end of March and over the last six months, I’ve given myself quite a lot of time and space to what I call faff. So I’m earning my degree in faffing and spending a lot of time walking by the sea and making the most of this lovely place that I moved to two years ago.

And I also thought, oh, I’m going to paint every day, which I haven’t, because it’s been summer time here so I wanted to get out of the house with the ending of lockdown and just experience nature and some fresh air. So the arts kind of comes and goes, but in the last couple of months in particular, it seems to really taken on a life of its own again.

So I was super excited a couple of weeks ago to become part of a new gallery that’s opened in the town here in Eastbourne. They had an open evening last week where it was for all the artists being represented. I met a heap of other lovely people. So I’m really excited about seeing my work properly hanging on a dedicated wall space.

So that’s really good. And the Instagram followers that I’ve got just keeps on growing. And that’s gone a bit wild in the last two or three weeks as well. Where a particular new piece that I’ve been posting seems to have attracted a lot of interest and gained about 200 followers in three weeks. Where’s this all coming from?

Terri Connellan: That’s fantastic. And it’s been wonderful. We’ve been connected for quite some time now watching your journey over that time and how you’re managing to shift into what you love to do. And as you say, flexing, as we all have to do with income and balancing creative living with resources and with freedom, creative freedom as well. So that’s wonderful.

So you mentioned your Wholehearted Story on Quiet Writing, which you shared about your journey from breakdown to breakthrough. So what did you learn from moving through and on from such difficult times?

Lynn Hanford-Day: it was such a pivotal. It wasn’t a moment. It was a protracted period of time. And what, what happened for me is during 2012, I had begun to feel very, very tired. And I can remember at Christmas time, a meeting of the leadership team at work and saying, I feel like I’ve run into a brick wall and I’m really looking forward to… I was going to take the full Christmas through to new year break. And I returned to work something like the 6th or 7th of January. So I did a day back at work and the following morning I couldn’t move. So my body decided for me and so it was a really serious message of like, you have got to stop so physically I was stopped. I saw my GP. I worked with a counselor. I was on antidepressants and my counselor was also a mindfulness teacher. So I got obsessed with the notion that meditation is good for you. But she was a very wise woman who said, what you need to do is learn to relax. You’re actually not capable of meditating right now. She kind of did demonstrate that to me. She gave me a CD, which I just found impossible to listen to. So that got put to one side.

I was in denial for probably three months probably through to Easter time that I was actually ill. I kept telling myself I’ll be back at work. I’ve got the budget to do. I never did go back to work ever. So during that time it was almost a gift and I was very aware of kind of going very, very deep within. Once I was able to concentrate a bit better, I did start to return to some books about Jung. This is one of our other connections, around Jung and types and archetypes.

And so there’s an expression from Carl Jung about having an unlived life. And I got a real sense that that’s where I was at, that I had become my job. I was very overly identified with it and that there was an opportunity here to explore who I was in the world, beyond my job. As I started to recover, to have the energy, to think about what do I want to do in the future.

And part of that was also the time spent painting and playing, giving myself a lot of time to play and also visiting Ireland. A dear friend of mine had moved to Ireland in the middle of 2012 to retire there with her husband she’s on the west coast, on the Dingle peninsula, right at the end of the peninsula.

And I stayed with her many, many times. And that space was also very important space because of the nothingness of it. And it was just a very magnificent seascape and very barren land, which was also incredibly beautiful, but I loved being able to just sit in my car to protect myself from the incredible winds that they get. It really blows a gale. But I loved the sense of the wind and being sat in the car and just staring off into space. And I think that was important time as well. So that transition was, I think, made up of many threads with an inner journey, support from medical professionals and medical help, support of friends, time in Ireland and this kind of emergence of creativity and the willingness to encounter my own intuition and what my heart was saying. So it was a soul journey. And I think there are many wise people who do describe breakdowns or severe episodes of depression as the heart seeking to speak. And I love the expression about being depressed to be rewritten as the two words, deep rest. Hmm. And that’s what I needed was deep rest. Cause I had incredible burnout and the feeling of just turning to ash. So little left in terms of energy.

Terri Connellan: You describe that beautifully, that challenging situation in that image of turning to ash, which really resonated with me too. Just what I’m hearing you say, what I’ve experienced also through my own experiences, which are not the same, but have some similar hallmarks and milestones is that loss of identity or that having to reshape identity. Because I think too, particularly when we’re invested in one path or in work, our identity gets very stitched into that. And then when we need to recalibrate it or something happens and we’re unable to continue down that path, I think that emptiness you describe and that space is often what we need to work with to regather ourselves and collect ourselves and redefine ourselves.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Completely. I met with a friend yesterday and we got into a conversation about unraveling and I know you and I think connected through Susannah Conway. One of her online courses is about unraveling the heart. And it’s a wonderful word. And talking with my friend and also other people through working as a coach, I think there are so many people, before COVID and particularly in a post pandemic world, who’ve got that sense of unraveling.

And once you’ve identified various threads, the opportunity to reintegrate: what do we want to now make of ourselves and this moment going forward? Yeah, unraveling transition. There’s a lot of it about. Isn’t it? The whole world planet is unraveling.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yes. When you think about transition, the way I’ve been thinking about it, just in the context of my book Wholehearted, it is the individual journeys, but also now we’re in the context of a global transition as well. So it’s multilayered.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Totally. Yeah.

And I love that word, wholehearted. I know when I first got to know you and got your newsletters and you’d created the wholehearted blog. There was something about that word that really spoke to me. So hence participating as a guest blog writer cause I really wanted to spend time asking myself what a wholehearted life looked like as I came out of this kind of space of falling apart, unraveling. I think it’s more than a word. And to really inquire into: what does it mean to be wholehearted? And what does a wholehearted life look like now?

Terri Connellan: Your contribution and the contributions of others to that blog series has been so powerful because every woman has bought their own story and has also found in the writing of that story and the thinking about that story, what it means for them. So I’ve been really grateful for that for opening up my own insights. Each story seems to open up the opportunity for other women to think about it differently too.

Lynn Hanford-Day: It does.

Terri Connellan: So tell us more about sacred, intuitive art and what you focus on in your artwork.

Lynn Hanford-Day: I kind of fell into a niche without realizing it. So as a child, I loved Spirograph and making spirals and flowery patterns. And I loved kaleidoscopes, labyrinthes, mazes, that kind of stuff. But as I went through my childhood and adolescence, I would love coloring and messing about with paints but I never embraced it as a potential way forward as a career.

I wanted to be a doctor or a teacher, so art didn’t really feature, but I have always loved mandalas and particularly Tibetan Buddhist mandalas. And I guess I’ve always been fascinated by pattern. So right through to my thirties, I was a knitter. So I was more into textiles. And so I would make Aran patterns, Fair Isle patterns, lacy jumpers made of mohair.

So it was still, always about the pattern. So I think that’s something that’s within me. And in the corporate world, in terms of organizational change and organizational systems and group dynamics, a lot of that’s about patterns of behavior. And I trained as a psychotherapist along the way like you do. So I qualified in 2008 with a lot of that was about the repeated patterns of our own behavior, where they may originate from whether they’re helpful or hindrances. There’s always been something about patterns. And, so when I really fell into art, well, I think it came and claimed me, what I was really finding myself doing was drawing circles. And one of the teachers I was with asked me why I kept drawing circles.

I said, I’ve no idea. I like circles. So I thought maybe I’m just going round in circles. Maybe it was some kind of metaphor for where I was in my life and she just said, it’s a really ancient symbol. So perhaps it’s worth exploring. I do prefer circles to squares. We all have our preferences. So as I discovered the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts and started doing some classes with them, it just spoke to me so much and the underlying symbol and meaning of circles, triangles, squares, curves, or straight lines and so on. I never thought I’d be talking about geometry, but I don’t really do it for the math. I do it for the underlying meaning. And it’s possible to look at any pattern and say, that’s a lovely pattern. I like it. Or I don’t like it. But what really stirs my heart is the origin of pattern and where it’s come from and the meaning of square and circle is consistent across all traditions, whether it’s Islamic or Buddhist or Celtic or north American.

So the circle represents heaven and the square represents the earth and they are brought together to bring heaven on earth. And then there’s many, many other layers of meaning depending on the pattern. That excites me so much. I created Sacred Intuitive Art as a means of sharing my work. I started to put my work on Instagram because I wanted to have a kind of digital gallery that I could see the progression of my work. I wasn’t on it to deliberately sell my work. It wasn’t the conscious reason.

But that’s what grew, and the name, I mean, how do we invent names? It was sacred from sacred geometry and intuitive arts, because the other thing I got into quite early on was intuitive and expressive arts, which I discovered was an actual ‘thing’ for people who aren’t artists and it’s actually quite abstract work. And I was kind of doing both. And as I built up my own geometry practice, I wanted to combine them. There’s a big theme for me in life about integration. So what I tend to do is use layers of color in the background and then place a geometric pattern on top of it. And that’s how I’m playing with color and shape and form.

And my Instagram account, I was heading towards 1700 followers now, and I’m like, gosh, and I sell most of my work through Instagram. I had a website built in about 2016 and then I didn’t pay much attention to it in the last two or three years because my mom died and then my dad died and I got preoccupied with other personal matters.

So I came back to it this year and had it rebuilt. So that went live in August.

So it’s the new website, which I’m really thrilled with because was just like, gosh, it’s all my work. I know you write about having a body of work. So doing the website was really revealing as to just how much I’ve done. Not all my work is on that website but it was a moment to reflect and take stock and to see that transition from my early work to what I produce now.

Terri Connellan: That’s been the most incredible journey and, two things. I love that thread of that love of patterns through all different aspects of your life and your artwork, and also your personality, through your workplace and the sort of modalities that you’ve focused on and the tools that you’ve used.

And then, secondly, just how wonderful it’s been watching you share your artwork and also your process. I think that’s probably one of the things I know I love and people love on Instagram and through websites is seeing the artistic or the writing process, going through it and being able to almost participate in that process as well as seeing the beautiful art created. And your new website is just stunning, so congratulations.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Thank you. Yeah. I love listening to other artists describe their process and seeing the work in progress photos and I actually began selling my work through mind, body, spirit shows. So I would have a stool and display my work. And that was such good fun. And what I learned is people are really interested in who you are as an artist. How did you get to do this? And also people are really interested in the story of a picture. Because for many people, this creative process is alien. We lose it, usually through school. I think schools have got a lot to answer for, in how we take creativity out of childhood. It’s such a shame.

 And then as adults, we become fascinated with people who have this creative intention as part of their life. So I just got to the stage of thinking, well, I love watching other people paint. Isn’t that weird, but I love watching paint dry from all the people and seeing howthey go about it. Why not do that myself and just talk about what I’m actually creating.

I end up having some lovely online chats through Instagram, with people who are curious and want to ask a question or give some kind of reflection on the work. That’s so enjoyable.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And I think Instagram is such a great medium for that too. Isn’t it? It’s the instant side of it and the fact that it’s visual as well as the ability to have conversations. It’s fantastic. So we both love spirals, the spiral imagery and the mandalas you feature in your work. And they also feature in my Quiet Writing logo, which has the nautilus with the Fibonacci sequence and the cover of my book Wholehearted features that. So just thought it might be nice for us to just have a chat about spirals. What is it that about spirals that attracts you or attracts us generally to them do you think?

Lynn Hanford-Day: I’m not sure, Terri. I know I’ve always loved them and there’s something about the movement towards the centre. And there’s also something about the movement that’s contained within a spiral as well, so there’s a kind of energy and the vibration in a spiral that attracts me. And then you also get enormous metaphors around how we spiral through life. So it gets a kind of cerebral level. I find that fascinating and also very true, but spirals they’re so easy to draw. You can sit doodling spirals, which I frequently do and then we get people on the beach here where we have a lot of pebbles and people go and use the pebbles and make spiral patterns out on the beach or build a labyrinth from them. And so I think there’s something really deep rooted in the psyche over millennium about a spiral. So what calls you? Cause I love the Fibonacci sequence as well and the whole kind of Ammonite shell and the Nautilus.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, I definitely feel drawn to them. And for me, for my business, for Quiet Writing and for the book, it’s that idea of repeating lessons, like going over the same ground. And I’m drawing a spiral with my hand as I’m talking, which doesn’t really work on the audio waves, but, that idea of spiraling, but often it’s as we’re learning and going through life, we’re repeating lessons and often because of how we’re wired or how we brought up, it’s often similar lessons, but we’re often repeating them but learning at a higher level. So that idea of Wholehearted and the work that I do is about that idea of creating our story and building our wisdom through all the things that we go through, but learning and going deeper. But it’s also like going higher and often we’ll find that there’s that repetition of patterns or of learning and behavior or the same thing cropping up and you think, well, there’s that thing again? You know? Yes. How, how have I dealt with that, but what resources do I have? How can I do this better? So I think to me, it’s a very integrating , you mentioned integration before, so that idea of how we seek to be whole, I think that’s what it’s about.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. Yeah. And just listening to you describe that, I’ve got the image of the spiral staircase. So you can have a spiral as kind of flat on a piece of paper or make one in the garden, out of shells or something.

But if we turn it into that kind of 3D representation of how we spiral through life we can move up another level and another level and still see what was beneath. And see the repetition or the similarity, and then look up as to do I need to build on this repetition in order to move wherever we’re seeking to develop in our self leadership or other aspects of our life.

Terri Connellan: I love that. And I love spiral staircases too. So for people at the beginning of such a journey or feeling of being a bit stuck or lost or going through major turning points but wanting more creativity or a different life, what advice would you offer from your experiences about that really tough time going through that big transition?

Lynn Hanford-Day: I would say, be willing to sit with the discomfort. Whether or not, it’s a breakdown or some kind of severe illness or some other aspect of crisis that happens to, I think most of us at some points in our lives, they are deeply distressing, uncomfortable periods of time, and in a world of busy-ness and doing, then to sit in opposition, to busy-ness and doing, and the impulse to find the solution. I certainly felt that, you know, and I felt that I’ve got to get back to work and obviously money is a feature of that. But what I’ve learned since then, and over the years since is, there is a message in the discomfort.

And if we don’t slow down, then we don’t always get that message. Hence the repeating patterns. Cause it comes back to bite us on the bum in some way. Yeah, I think that’s how I would sum it up and use help if necessary to kind of stay in that space. So whether it’s through a therapist, trusted friend, a coach, I know you do coaching too. And I do as well. There are people and spaces and places available to give yourself that time. And even if it is only an hour a week with a therapist or a couple of hours with a coach, it can be so valuable just to allow something to emerge.

Because I’ve found that the heart will often speak in a whisper and we need quietness to really connect with that. Some people managed to do that through meditating. I do it through painting. I suspect yours is through writing, but to find something that allows us to connect inwards and listen to that voice inside, no matter the discomfort that’s going on around.

Terri Connellan: No, that’s very wise and hard won insights. So, yeah. Thank you for that. And when we had the virtual launch and we had a chat about a similar theme, we talked about living with uncertainty too, which I guess is part of that discomfort. I talk in my book about the William Bridges change management model, which I know you’d know from your HR work as well, but that idea of that messy difficult middle, which feels so uncomfortable and uncertain, but it’s also where the great potential is too.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah, completely. That word transition, we use it for giving birth, don’t we? So we know that transition’s painful. But we have to go through it.

Terri Connellan: And I think your point about support too, is absolutely critical because that’s the other thing I’ve found and I know you’ve found going, one, they’re difficult, incredibly difficult journeys. And it’s about identity, as we said earlier, which can be quite unsettling and then it also can feel quite lonely. Cause it feels like now no one else has been through this type of thing. But when, as we’re talking now, often you find people one step ahead or have been through or have the strategies for dealing with people who have been in such moments of difficulty in crisis, and it’s important to reach out. So that’s a great reminder.

So, a question that I’m asking each person who comes on the podcast is how have you created your story over your life time?

Lynn Hanford-Day: How have I created my story? Haphazardly, organically. I’ve kind of gone through life in a fairly opportunistic way. I’ve not consciously set out to have this or be that or live somewhere. I know some people do. So I guess what I’m saying, I’m not particularly goal-focused. Maybe I should be, I don’t know. So I’ve created my story, particularly in the last 10 years or so often by looking back to notice the threads and the patterns, particularly in approaching my fifties and then approaching 60, which horrified me. How the hell did I get here and why am I still asking the question, what do I want to be when I grow up? it doesn’t ever seem to go away. So I guess I’ve created my story backwards. Which is curious, actually, in talking now with you about this. There’s a lot of people would say look forwards and coaching is very much about forward focus and forward momentum.

And I suppose it’s in the last three or four years, since my mum died and then my father died and then moving to Eastbourne which was two years ago. That was actually much more deliberate and much more focused around intention. And after my mum died, it was also a year in which three friends died of cancer. And I think that death does put us in contact with life and often leads us to reflect on, oh, well it could all be over tomorrow because actually, yes, it could be. None of us know. And as I’ve become older and got bigger and bigger numbers for my age, the realization that time is passing. So how do I want to live my life? And what does a wholehearted life look like for me at this moment in time? And what do I imagine myself doing when I’m 65 or 70? If I’m given that time, what do I want it to look like? So I’ve become much more conscious. And one of those desires was to have an art studio by the sea. So I’ve managed to move to the seaside two years ago and I still do my arts from home. Finding an art studio has proved to be quite elusive, but I’m lucky that the work I produce can be done from a table in the kitchen, which is what I do.

Terri Connellan: Wonderful. Your story makes me think of, in the writing circles, some people outline, plan ahead and are fairly goal focused and there’s others who… they talk about plotters and panters and the pantsers fly by the seat of their pants and are more organic,

But there’s often a point in a draft of a book where they’ll do a reverse outline and the people who have that tendency and stop and then go back and make sense of what’s happened to then work out where to go next. So it sounds very much like your story has been created that sort of way, which is wonderful.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah, I guess I am a kind of here and now person. I’m opportunistic. The other thing I’ve learned particularly in the last six months is I am quite good at manifesting. So I need to be careful about these thoughts. It says, wouldn’t it be good if because literally it arrives the next day. I was like, oh my God, no, not yet. Not now. I’m not ready.

Terri Connellan: That’s wonderful.

Lynn Hanford-Day: That tells me there’s something about alignment and noticing opportunities and so on. So yeah. Be careful what you wish for. But watching you go through the process of writing your book, which, I remember you starting that a few years ago.

There are some things we need to work at and have a discipline around to manifest, the creation of a book or the creation of a painting, whatever it might be, find our dream home. We need to stick at. Sometimes it’s not always going to come immediately.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Often, and it’s a nice mix between the two when it works well, as we’re manifesting, we’re setting the intentions, but we’re also putting the work in, getting the skills, which is obviously part of your artistic journey, and my own writing one and putting in that hard inner work too. That’s the other thing in your story and mine is that it’s the showing up to the page and the showing up to life is also because of doing that hard inner work over time and going on retreat, learning new skills and moving through that discomfort as you talked about earlier.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. Completely.

Terri Connellan: So you’ve read my book, I know, you kindly me some wonderful advance praise which is much appreciated. So you know about the wholehearted self-leadership tips there. So what are your top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices for women based on your experience to add to my body of work?

Lynn Hanford-Day: I come back to that, building on what I said about sitting with the discomfort, that there is, I think something here about the importance of paying attention to your inner weather. And noticing what brings joy as well as what brings discomfort. We’re kind of wired for negativity as a species because it’s there to protect us and to serve us. Yet, for myself, again, it’s only in recent years that I’ve really paid attention to what brings me joy and pleasure, playfulness, contentment satisfaction and so on. And some of that is through the world of work. That as a workaholic in recovery that it’s been about paying attention to: where does joy come from beyond the workplace? Cause you know, I’m not going to be prancing around as an HR director for the rest of my life. I don’t want to. So where does it come from? And then to give yourself the time to do it, if it’s a thing that you do, or if your joy comes from sitting, staring at the sea for an hour, which is what I do. Then I allow myself to do it. So there’s something about the allowing as well.

Terri Connellan: Hmm. That’s beautiful. Thank you. And as you were saying that beautiful list of words, of, joy and fulfillment and that beautiful list that you shared with us, I was feeling all warm inside that just tapping into the more positive aspects of life. I think it’s so true. And often they’re very simple. Like it’s just that a cup of tea in the sunshine and for me swimming is a big source of source of joy. And a lot of that is about just being in the moment.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yes, it is. And this is where mindfulness practitioners are constantly encouraging us to be is in the here and now and in the moments. And I’ve learned the truth of that. It’s really powerful. And to just step outside, literally to go into nature or to step outside the busy-ness of the day and it doesn’t need to take up huge amounts of time either. We often say we can’t do that. Haven’t got time. I have given myself the discipline of doing it. And some of that happened in the first lockdown because I do live literally across the road from the sea. And it came from a suggestion from a friend because I post lots of pictures of the sea on my Facebook page with friends. And she said, why don’t you turn it into a potential installation piece, which I haven’t done, but I then took a video of the sea every day for three months.

And I was working during lockdown. I was working from home doing my HR-y stuff, but having that commitment to literally go outside no matter what the weather was. Cause it began in March so we get quite a lot of storms. It was to just stand there and take a 30 second video. And that turned into, go for a walk, go sit by the sea, go meditate by the sea.

Terri Connellan: Powerful practices and easy habits to get out of and easy habits to get into too. So that’s a great reminder to everyone listening. Well, thank you so much for your time today, it’s been such a beautiful conversation and so many layers and great things to draw on from ourconversation today. So thank you for sharing so much of yourself and your beautiful work. So if you can let people know where people can find more about you and your art and work online.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Thanks, Terri. Thank you so much. It’s been a lovely conversation. Yeah, people can find me on my website, which is SacredIntuitiveArt.com and also on Instagram. And my Instagram handle is the same name. So it’s @ sacredintuitiveart

Terri Connellan: Thank you so much. It’s been a great joy speaking today.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. Thank you, Terri. Go well.

Lynn Hanford-Day

About Lynn Hanford-Day

Lynn Hanford-Day is a visual artist working with sacred geometry, mandalas and Islamic pattern.   Lynn is also dual qualified as a coach/psychotherapist and works with women in transition who are seeking meaning, purpose and wellbeing.  Lynn is especially interested in creativity and intuition, positive psychology and strengths, helping people to access and express their inner wisdom.  Lynn helps women discover clarity and confidence, path and purpose. 

Lynn’s art can be seen on her website at www.sacredintuitiveart.com. 

You can also connect with Lynn via Instagram and email lynn.hanford-day@sophrentos.com

Links to explore:

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

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

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

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

My coaching:

Work with me

Personality Stories Coaching

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

Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club – open for enrolment now – join us for 2022.

Connect on social media

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

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

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

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