body of work Archives

How to be more aware of the value of cognitive diversity in the workplace

April 14, 2018

This post shares recent insights from neuroscience, neurodiversity and the ABC TV show, Employable Me, about the importance of valuing cognitive diversity.

Insights from neuroscience and neurodiversity show us there are many ways to approach tasks, teamwork, workplace projects, and recruitment solutions. Valuing cognitive diversity in personality type, cognitive preferences, and brain makeup is an area that has had limited attention in the past. Enlightened workplaces, leaders and human resources practitioners are realizing there is much to be gained from considering these issues and strategies that embrace cognitive diversity.

Recent insights from neuroscience and neurodiversity help inform these approaches. Case studies of job seekers and employer perspectives in the ABC’s Employable Me series also highlight the valuable outcomes when cognitive strengths rather than weaknesses are the focus.

In this post, I share:

insights from my recent WorkSearch guest post exploring this issue
learning from neuroscience workshops with UCLA professor and author, Dario Nardi, including the experience of brain-imaging via EEG
the experience of watching ABC’s Employable Me series and reflecting on jobseeker experiences and employer attitudes.

WorkSearch guest post on cognitive diversity

I’ve recently explored these issues in detail in a guest post over at WorkSearch. In This is how to be more aware of the superior value of neurodiversity in the workplace, I discuss the following:

difference as a source of strength and heterogeneity in the workforce as a value to be embraced rather than a challenge to be overcome;
the value of cognitively diverse and inclusive workplaces;
insights from neuroscience about the value of recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of different cognitive functions;
insights from neurodiversity about valuing the diversity of different brain types and the special gifts they can bring;
some of the ways diversity based on personality and cognitive preference can work for us and for organizations; and
ways to identify your “team’s brain” to see the natural cognitive terrain it covers and whether it is diverse or not.

Here is the article – so head over to WorkSearch and have a read. Welcome your thoughts and feedback here!

This Is How To Be More Aware Of The Superior Value Of Neurodiversity In The Workplace

Learnings from neuroscience workshops with Dr Dario Nardi

I had the pleasure of attending two workshops with award-winning UCLA professor and author, Dario Nardi, as part of the proceedings of the Australian Association for Psychological Type Conference in Sydney in October 2017. Dario Nardi’s work focuses on the neuroscience of personality and using brain imaging via EEG technology to see how the brain works as it undertakes different activities. I had the opportunity to see brain imaging in action and also to undergo my own brain imaging session. Here is a picture of my brain in action!

The EEG and aligned computer analysis help to show the relationship between the brain and tasks. It shows the brain regions that link together as networks and which regions of the brain we favour. The research also shows the links between brain activity and personality type, especially the eight cognitive functions described by Carl Jung in the 1920’s.

It’s fascinating to see how the rich framework that Jung developed on the basis of conversations with patients is now borne out in ways we can directly observe via technology.

As Dario Nardi says in his book, Our Brains in Colour:

The brain is like an orchestra that usually plays our favourite songs.

Through the workshops, we worked to identify:

the regions of the brain we personally rely on most
how this links to personality type and cognitive preferences
cognitive diversity within our workshop group and different ways to process information
insights from learning other ways to process information
brain-savvy coaching approaches for ourselves and others to embrace cognitive diversity
the value of drawing on non-preferences to strengthen cognitive resources and new habits
how we can ‘prime’ ourselves to learn new ways of extending into unfamiliar cognitive areas
how this conscious development of cognitive diversity is a form of self-leadership.

The value of cognitive diversity in workplace approaches

An underlying theme in all of this is the value of cognitive diversity. A driving issue for me based on my own workplace experiences is that a focus on the neurotypical or dominant paradigm can disadvantage some people.

An example is the typical approaches to recruitment and talent acquisition that favour interviews as a dominant mode of selection. As any introvert knows, this type of approach is unlikely to bring out the best in them as an applicant. In two posts for WorkSearch, I’ve explored this issue from the perspective of both applicants and recruiters:

How to make the most of the right recruitment opportunities as an introvert

This is what happens when recruiters make inclusion mistakes (and how to avoid it)

In these pieces, I’ve encouraged a more inclusive approach to recruitment processes to enable all people to bring their best skills to bear. This also means recruiters are more likely to get the best person for the job without the recruitment process itself being a barrier or filter.

Neurodiversity and perspectives from Employable Me

It’s been fascinating to watch the first two episodes of the ABC’s excellent Employable Me series in this light. This series focuses on job seekers with disabilities and how they seek to show their capabilities. It follows people with neuro-diverse conditions such as autism, OCD & Tourette syndrome in their search for meaningful work. Drawing on science and insights from experts, the extraordinary and unique skills of the job seekers are explored.

It makes insightful viewing as the jobseekers’ deeper strengths are identified and as they seek to find a place in society where they can contribute. This is enhanced by employers taking an approach that values the individual and diversity. It means looking at options like removing barriers such as irrelevant interviews in favour of the hands-on demonstration of skills.

With the support of workplaces and employers that value cognitive diversity, the job seekers showcase their exceptional skills. This includes incredible short-term memory skills such as remembering 15 random words in sequence after hearing them once, forensic ability to identify errors in computer games coding and encyclopaedic geographical knowledge. Matching these outstanding skills to the right workplace means working positively through potential barriers.

It was refreshing to hear job seeker Tim’s new employer say that a number of their computer games analysts are autistic as they have a special gift for the task. Fabulous also that as an employer they have shifted from interviews to the practical demonstration of skills. This is because interviews are not helpful for understanding the strengths of job seekers with autism. Job seeker Tim, who found it incredibly hard to travel to work because of the practical and sensory challenges, can do this work from home.

More than one way to do it

As Larry Wall, creator of the Perl open software program, quoted in Steve Silberman’s history of autism, Neurotribes says:

There is more than one way to do it.

This has been my learning as I have taken a deeper dive into cognitive diversity from a neuroscience and neurodiversity perspective. It’s easy to think our way is the best or the only way. Easy also to view traditional approaches to problems or situations as the only options.

I have found from these experiences that being open to cognitive diversity in ourselves and in others can be:

a form of personal growth and self-leadership
an insight into our strengths and gifts and those of others
a way of developing our non-preferred cognitive functions so we can be more well-rounded
a way of being more open-hearted and mindful of the skills and experiences of others
a deeper way to see our interactions, teams and workplaces as rich sources of cognitive and interpersonal learning.

This enables us and others to contribute more fully to society as we personally grow and develop. And this means richer and more cognitively diverse experiences and outcomes for us all.

I hope you enjoy the insights from reading this piece and also the links within it. I look forward to sharing my deep-dive personality type offerings with you soon to enrich your self-knowledge and cognitive diversity.

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

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Gathering my lessons – a wholehearted story

March 29, 2018

This guest post from Shalagh Hogan shows how gathering lessons of self-knowledge over time can lead to wholehearted Creative Soul Living.

This is the eighth guest post in our Wholehearted Stories series on Quiet Writing. I invited readers to consider submitting a guest post on their wholehearted story. You can read more here – and I’m still keen for more contributors!

Quiet Writing celebrates self-leadership in wholehearted living and writing, career and creativity. This community of voices, with each of us telling our own story of what wholehearted living means, is a valuable and central part of this space. In this way, we can all feel connected on our various journeys and not feel so alone. Whilst there will always be unique differences, there are commonalities that we can all learn from and share to support each other.

I am honoured to have Shalagh Hogan as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. My sincere thanks to Shalagh for sharing her story and photographs. Shalagh and I connected on Instagram via our love of creativity. Her story shows how growth and self-knowledge accumulate over time. Embracing creativity wholeheartedly via parenting, blogging, community, writing and social media, Shalagh’s gathering lessons evolve into Creative Soul Living. Read on to find out more!

Gathering lessons of self-knowledge

Despite my low self-esteem and anxieties, I have enthusiastically gathered my self-knowledge with hope for a better life. I accept as a given, my need to seek and grow a more whole version of my formerly fragmented self. Yet up to even a few years ago, the concept of Wholehearted Living, or what I call Creative Soul Living, was still just a conceptual inkling. Having never felt whole, the definition and the feeling of wholeness eluded me.

One lesson at a time is how my self-guided journey has unfolded. I am busy gathering my lessons which rise like cream to the top. From the more important lessons about creativity, community, connection, self-care, and self-trust, I have learned who I truly am, what makes me happiest, and who I want to proudly see myself being. Growth takes its time, yet I always feel like my biggest and best lessons are the ones that have just happened.

Valuing intuition and introversion

As a child, I was fragmented. I held too many pains involving too many people. My self-mirrors were broken, and the chaos was draining. I was a creative with no permission to be me. As a teen, much-needed hope collided with my insatiable appetite for knowledge when my mother’s pursuit of a master’s degree in Applied Behavioral Sciences showed me that knowledge was power, and we can use this power to choose our life’s outcome.

It was then, I also began my life-long journal writing practice, developing my inner voice (which I now know to be my intuition) and the voice of my blog. It was then too that my Myers-Briggs test results pegged me as an ENFP. Although this felt mostly right, last year I was relieved to discover and own that I am equal parts Introvert and Extrovert. Although, for many years I neglected my creative callings, the introverted time I now take to think, write, and create are my self-care practices.

Gathering lessons on self-care and self-esteem

My self-care became essential when I was 38 and pregnant with my son. My anxieties and the last of my self-destructive behaviours shook and woke me. It became clear, how I treated myself would be how my kids would treat themselves. Doing as I did and not as I said, my children would inherit my anxieties, my self-doubt, and my repressed creativity. I truly committed then to taking better care of and healing myself mentally and physically that my children might hopefully do the same. Eventually, I quit smoking, I began eating better, and I continued to seek therapy.

My biggest authentic self “aha”, on which the rest of my work truly depended, was given to me in a therapy session. The therapist offered that I had low self-esteem. At first, I raged against this mis-definition of me. If I wasn’t who I thought I was, who was I then? Yet, this information freed me like a bird from my heart cage. I wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing, nor did I need to help fix anyone I knew. Instead, I needed to have compassion and love for my humanity. And again, I began gathering my lessons.

Writing and connecting to heal

Bad things can happen for good reason, it may just take a while to see why. When my son was one, an American economic slump forced me to close my lovely little gift and antiques store named Bally Eden and I returned home to mourn the loss of my dream shop. I was anxious and desperate not to be stuck at home with my fast-growing-soon-to-be-a-toddler boy without something “just for me”. Encouraged by an old whisper in my ear, I began to write personal essays and publish them online. It then took five more years to start my blog at Shalavee.com which has just turned six.

I purposed the blog to make me a better writer, create a living resume, and voice my lessons regularly. While I achieved these goals, it was the community and relationships I’ve developed here online during my writing journey which have been my truest gift. My new unseen friends and our connections and courtships via comments and kind letters elevated my ego and gave me an immensely better self-image; a self-reflection where there once was none. I began to see my beauty and not my broken. And, as my voice of pain and healing came through on my blog, my readers said, “Keep writing what you are writing. We feel this way too.” Authenticity and vulnerability were my win/win.

Healing through community creativity

These voices from my community have helped to shift my purpose to offering others my voice to speak through. Our self-reflections echo each other through our communications and we begin to see ourselves as both individuals and as a collective of women with one voice of self-love and acceptance. We are gathering our lessons together. Strangers have become mirrors I will treasure forever, and the internet helped make me visible and whole again.

Although I was terrified, in May of 2016, my community encouraged me to host my first Instagram Challenge called the Soul Selfie challenge. For one week, we explored our souls, our fears, and our truths together in a deeper way via the hashtag #Soul_Selfie. My esteem and courage to lead increased incredibly as I hosted another that Fall and two more in 2017.

Then a small gathering on the evening of the first women’s march in January of 2017, inspired me to start a mindful meet-up group of my own in real life. We meet monthly to discuss a soul topic, eat well, and drink prosecco. We witness, acknowledge, and validate one another and that is so very necessary to my process of seeing my wholehearted self. I have created what I needed which benefits me and others and heals us all.

Vanquishing my anxieties with knowledge

Two years ago, even with all the progress in my writing and my self-healing, I knew my anxieties were still running the show. I found a new kick-butt therapist, a new resolve, and heading into my 50’s saw me amp up my efforts of self-discovery and visibility. Reading was one huge resource I used to finally reach the summit of the value hill I’d struggled to climb my entire life. I discovered I could say and mean, “I can”.

I read four books last year with willful intention to change my life’s outlook and my understanding of myself. First, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert gifted me with such validity and permission for my creative process. I came to understand that I was an Uber-Creative and my inner child needed to be creatively indulged until she trusted me again. From this, I was inspired to create online projects and a creative community to support myself and others in being our creative selves.

I had barely put Big Magic down when I read Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. From her brilliant work, I came to understand the necessity of community, vulnerability, and authenticity. Disconnection is our worst fear and we need to be authentic to belong to, trust, and reconnect with ourselves. And I now understand there’s a connection between creativity and vulnerability.

Then, on my therapist’s recommendation, I read Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David R Burns which was the very first book that permitted me to understand and name my anxieties. I learned how to refute the lies called Cognitive Distortions that cause them. Eventually, this book helped me win the battle against my anxieties.

And lastly, on Terri’s suggestion, I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work. This book showed me that I may be even more capable of making a difference in the world if I allow myself the time and visibility to work on and publish my theories. My deeper thinking and writing will help me and the world, and this feels like a noble purpose.

Creativity conquers all

While reading and gathering my lessons, I became aware of an internal dissonance which my therapist suggested was my inner child throwing tantrums. It seems denying my creativity had my creative inner child furious at me for not allowing her to play. So I decided to just give her what she wanted.

First, I indulged in thirty days of creating paper collage through an online creative community challenge. Having really enjoyed that, I created my own Instagram challenge called Our Creative May and this gave me another month straight to play. From this, our IG creative community established the hashtag #ourcreativeselves to continue posting our creations. I immediately did another challenge in June and July creating daily postcard art for the #ICAD project.

Four months straight of daily creating and continuous authenticity had proven that I did have enough time to create and I was trustworthy. My creative indulgence grounded me and greatly dissipated more of my anxieties. As I continue to replace the slave-driving parent who preaches art as impractical with the compassionate empowering present parent, I recreate a trust in myself proving my word is good. Self-trust is the truest most important result of our authentic creativity.

As my anxiety diminished, I began to understand this powerful lesson of how creativity and anxiety cannot coexist, and how indulging one represses the other. Love and presence conquer fear.

Creative Soul Living

This profound understanding of the inverse relationship between creativity and anxiety, and knowing many others need permission to create too, led me to develop and lead a Creativity Workshop this past November of 2017. I believe that our permission to live more creatively is necessary and integral to us being wholehearted individuals. I believe less consumerism and more Creativism will heal the world as we find creative solutions to its problems.

Creative Soul Living is the term I use to describe my process of Wholehearted Living. I intentionally seek and share my life lessons, prioritize my creativity in all areas of my life, develop my self-trust, value authenticity, commit to self-care, am mindful and present, stay connected with my people, and intuit my grandest Why for being here. And while my Why continues to firm up and my path widens, I know I have fought to reach my here and now, gathering my lessons one lesson at a time.

My future “I can” will include more creativity workshops, e-books, and eventually a book about crafting our own life plans based on our life lessons. My inward soul work has brought me the gift of knowing me and that feels like permission to hope. Hope is what I want to share with the world through my writing.

Photos and artwork by Shalagh Hogan used with permission and thanks.

Key book companions along the way

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Daring Greatly by Brené Brown

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David R Burns

Deep Work by Cal Newport

About Shalagh Hogan

Shalagh Hogan, said Shay-la, is a personal essayist, a blogger, a designer, an uber-creative, and mother to a five-year-old ginger girl and just turned teen boy. She resides in an ancient house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, USA, and is always amazed and amused by life’s abundance of lessons. Thrice-weekly she shares the lessons she gathers on her blog at Shalavee.com (Chez La Vie was taken) and currently, Creativity is her Why. Follow her as @shalaghhogan on Facebook and Instagram.

Keep in touch + free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You might also enjoy my free 95-page ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’ – all about wholehearted self-leadership, reading as creative influence and books to inspire your own journey.

Just pop your email address in the box to the right or below. You will receive the ebook straight away as well as updates and inspiring resources from Quiet Writing. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot, productivity and ways to express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. Look forward to connecting with you and inspiring your wholehearted story!

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love, loss & longing transition wholehearted stories

Grief and pain can be our most important teachers – a wholehearted story

March 1, 2018

This guest post from Kerstin Pilz is about how grief and pain can be our most important teachers on our journey to wholehearted living.

This is the seventh guest post in our Wholehearted Stories series on Quiet Writing. I invited readers to consider submitting a guest post on their wholehearted story. You can read more here – and I’m still keen for more contributors!

I am honoured to have Kerstin Pilz as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. My sincere thanks to Kerstin for sharing her story and photographs. Kerstin’s wholehearted story tells of how she moved from passion through to grief and loss and then to deep healing. It’s a story of learning ways to heal through silence, meditation, yoga, writing and living freely. Kerstin now employs her learning from her journey to help others through her work as a writer, yogini, meditation practitioner and online teacher. Read on to find out more!

Beginning the journey

My journey to a wholehearted life began exactly a decade ago with a tragic false start.

I’d sailed around the world aboard a converted cruise ship for four months, teaching intercultural communication to university students from all over the world.

Copies of Eat, Pray, Love circulated onboard. It was hot off the press and everybody but me seemed to be reading it. I’d recently found love and I was busy writing the next chapter of my own life.

Between port calls in Capetown and Barcelona, my Italian sweetheart and I got married off the coast of West Africa, 1 degree south of the equator.

I was living a fairytale. Even before our final disembarkation, I knew that I couldn’t go back to my old life.

I had a tenured, senior position as Head of Italian Studies at one of Sydney’s Universities. It came with good pay and annual trips abroad. Options to climb the career ladder beckoned.

But there was a side of me that was unexpressed. Ever since I was a little girl I’d wanted to be a writer. Leaving Germany at age 22 to explore the world, had muted my writing voice. But the passion had remained.

At 45 I had enough academic publications to prove to myself that I could really write in a foreign language. It was time to explore another, more creative part of myself.

Taking an adult gap year to follow my passion

Long service leave allowed me to take an ‘adult gap year’ to chase a new, wholehearted life. I had a year to work out if I could transition into blogging and freelance writing.

Months of careful planning went into preparing my sabbatical. I booked a Spanish course in Buenos Aires and stopovers in exotic locations. I did evening courses in freelance writing and photography. I fired off pitches for travel writing assignments and started my first blog.

When I handed the keys to the tenants who’d be living in our home for the next 12 months, I felt a pinch of foreboding. We’d planned the perfect year. What could possibly go wrong?

You can’t prepare for life’s worst-case scenario

On the day of our long-awaited departure, my husband felt a pea-sized lump behind his ear. We’d forgotten to plan for life’s worst-case scenario.

He knew straight away that we’d be going on a very different journey – one from which he was unlikely to return.

And just like that, my world imploded. One day I was about to step into the year of my creative transformation. The next day I walked into the nightmare of a progressive terminal illness – metastatic melanoma – and all that it entailed.

Photo credit: Susan Kelly, Natural Images

Without a home to return to, we were forced to live with his adult daughter. Instead of speaking Spanish in Buenos Aires, I became trapped in an Italian melodrama. It unfolded across two continents as an antagonistic family came together in pain and anger.

I’d wanted to write a new chapter for myself and here it was. Except I hadn’t written it. Trying to fit into this alien scenario and its shifting emotional alliances slowly eroded my own identity.

I was unable to read and I was unable to write the travel and lifestyle pieces I’d researched. My own story consumed all of me. I became paralysed by the fear of death and the prison of toxic family dynamics.

Being a full-time carer to my gradually diminishing husband, gave me a sense of purpose and joy, despite the exhaustion.

Eventually, we relocated to a beach-side home in Far North Queensland, but the Italian melodrama never went away.

It was as if a second cancer had spread. Emotions and estates were negotiated amid the tragic suicide of my husband’s son and the discovery of my husband’s infidelities.

Photo credit: Susan Kelly, Natural Images

The healing power of writing

I discovered the healing power of writing by accident. Living remotely, I didn’t have easy access to counselling. My journal became my on-call therapist.

Watching my life implode felt like watching a movie in slow motion. It had more plot twists than I could’ve ever come up with.

I wrote my story in mad, obsessive bursts. Naming my pain and anger felt liberating. Without noticing, I started to treat journaling like a creative writing assignment. The many hospital visits – flogging the old car for long distances across the wild remoteness of Far North Queensland during an epic wet season – became little vignettes. Creating word pictures was intuitive. Trying to capture the irony of my situation, finding beauty in pain, was a form of therapy.

Writing allowed me to become a detached witness as my story unfolded amid the ruins of Rome and the Sardinian coastline of my husband’s homeland.

In my journal the dramatic settings and the ongoing family feud wove into an epic tale. For several years I thought of it as a blueprint for a novel.

Following my intuition to find the trail to a wholehearted life

My second attempt at creating a self-directed life started somewhere in the pages of my journal.

When I accepted that death was inevitable, my writing showed me that this was a chance for deep transformation. If I was open to it.

I knew that to find myself again, I could not slip back into my old life. For two decades I’d taught Italian Studies at universities. Italian was the language I spoke at home after I’d left Germany. But the Italian part of my identity died with him.

I needed a new identity and a new professional direction, but I had no clue where to find it. My sabbatical year had been spent being a full-time carer. Resigning from a tenured position in mid-life was considered foolish. Everybody cautioned against it, but I followed my heart.

I was scared and at my emotional rock-bottom, when I stepped into the unknown.

Learning about the impermanence of everything

I’d planned to give myself a few months to grief quietly surrounded by my beautiful community in remote Far North Queensland. The remoteness made me feel safe. I would have time to consider the next steps. But life had another dramatic instalment in store for me.

Less than three weeks after the funeral I was asked by State Emergency to evacuate my beachfront home. The biggest cyclone in living memory hauled all night, blowing my beach-side haven to pieces. The next day an entire community was grieving. Overnight, my own grief became eclipsed by tales of lost homes and devastated gardens.

When the airport re-opened, I caught the first flight out. The devastated landscape was a mirror of my inner devastation. I needed to look at things that were whole, not broken. I needed to speak to people who weren’t grieving.

Meditation and yoga became fundamental tools of my healing

For many months I didn’t speak at all. I locked myself away in austere meditation retreats all over Asia. Meditation, like writing, became fundamental to my healing.

Sitting in stillness, listening deep inside, trained me to recognise the voice of my inner knowing. It took months for the noise in my head to subside. Vipassana meditation taught me to become a detached observer. Watching pain and physical discomfort rise and fall for 10 hours a day for many weeks, was healing.

Everything in life is impermanent. Nature’s fury had already hammered home this fundamental Buddhist lesson. But I needed to hear it again and again from my teachers.

Sitting in the presence of His Holiness for two weeks in Bodhgaya, I learned about the true nature of suffering. Pain is inevitable. My story wasn’t unique.

Yoga was another important anchor in my healing journey. My body became grounded through asanas. Living with death had made me tired and skinny. I didn’t sleep enough and I drank too much red wine. Yoga made my body stronger. Conscious breathing felt like reviving a dead tree. I was finally breathing oxygen back into myself.

Finding my writing voice through journaling

The landscape of my beach-side home has healed itself, as have I. After sadness has followed joy. I now know that deep pain can fade if we allow ourselves to heal.

A sealed plastic box with two dozen moleskines is still the first thing I’ll throw into the back of my car the moment a cyclone warning goes out. I am no longer defined by my pain, but I keep my journals safe because they are an important record of my transformation as a writer.

For the two years of my husband’s slow decline and during the years of my healing journey, I wrote compulsively. I told the same story over and over until I was finally free of it. It trained my writing muscle like nothing else could have.

I haven’t opened my diaries for some time, but I know they contain some of my best writing. It’s raw and straight from the core.

Finding joy after grief and pain

Ten years after my first attempt at a life-changing sabbatical, I feel happier than I ever have. Going through the fires of grief has transformed me at my very core.

The journey was long and lonely. Crashing head-first into my own vulnerability has taught me that we can rise strong after falling hard.

It took many years to find a new professional direction. I revived my old travel blog. I worked as a Volunteer for International Development in the Maldives. I reviewed luxury resorts as a travel writer. All of it was fun, but none of it satisfied my core.

For several years I exhausted myself, trying to prove that resigning from a flourishing career in mid-life hadn’t been foolish. I was surprised by how naked I felt without a career.

Giving myself permission to heal, was met with envy. It was considered a self-indulgent luxury. And yet, the inner work I did in the aftermath of those events, laid the foundations for what I do today.

When I finally allowed myself to be guided by the voice of my heart, not the expectations of an achievement-driven society, things started to fall into place.

A new partner walked into my life. A new domain name appeared in the pages of my journal. I finally saw a new way to combine my passions of writing, travelling and yoga with my professional skills. I identified an income stream that allows me to be location independent.

I taught myself basic graphic design, photography and how to build a website. I did a yoga teacher training course. I radically decluttered my house and listed it on Airbnb. Then I packed a small suitcase and headed to Vietnam to make my dwindling funds last a little longer.

Today I live for most of the year in a rented home in the beautiful World Heritage town of Hoi An in central Vietnam.

I’ve always loved teaching and I am finally teaching again. Sharing the tools that have helped me in my healing journey is deeply rewarding.

In Hoi An I lead a weekly writing group. With my partner, who is a professional musician, I teach yin yoga and sound bowl meditations. Once a month we combine it with journaling in our signature “Journey to Self” workshop. Through my website, Write Your Journey, I run online courses. My first writing retreat will be held in Hoi An, this September.

After years of stagnating, I gained momentum when I allowed the voice of my heart to write the next chapter of my life.

Living a wholehearted, self-directed life is the only way to live the nanosecond we have on this earth. But make no mistake, it’s not the easy option.

People tell me all the time how lucky I am. But luck had nothing to do with it. Hard work, the courage to follow my passion and being open to uncertainty is what allows me to live the way I do.

PS: I wrote this post lying on my daybed on a tropical summer’s day with this view in front of me.

Photos by Kerstin Pilz, except where noted and used with permission and thanks.

Key book companions along the way

While my own story unfolded into a story of grief, I found it very hard to read fiction. Instead I found solace in memoirs about grief, in the words of Buddhist masters and in Natalie Goldberg’s zen-inspired writing practice.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Helen Garner, The Spare Room

Claire Bidwell-Smith, The Rules of Inheritance

Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, Freeing the Writer Within

About Kerstin Pilz

Kerstin Pilz Phd is a former academic, writer, photographer, yogini and meditation practitioner based in Hoi An, Vietnam, where she teaches a weekly writers group and holds workshops and multi-day retreats combining yoga, writing and mindfulness meditation. Through her website Write Your Journey she offers e-courses and downloadable guided soundbowl meditations. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

Keep in touch + free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You might also enjoy my free 95-page ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’ – all about wholehearted self-leadership, reading as creative influence and books to inspire your own journey.

Just pop your email address in the box to the right or below. You will receive the ebook straight away as well as updates and inspiring resources from Quiet Writing on personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot, productivity and ways to express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. Look forward to connecting with you and inspiring your wholehearted story!

transition work life

Your body of work: the greatest gift for transition to a bright new life

February 22, 2018

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

Leaving an organisation where I have worked for over 30 years, I reflect on this transition and the gift of learning from my body of work over time.

Leaving a long-term job role

Today marks an auspicious day when I leave an organisation where I have worked for over 30 years. It’s not without sadness. And it’s been a strange conclusion in many ways. I’ve been on leave for some time caring for my mother who recently passed away after a long battle with terminal cancer. So not being in the workplace as I leave, the usual farewells have not been part of the process. It’s as if I have disappeared off into the sunset on another journey.

This is in part very true. I realised about two years ago that I no longer enjoyed my job or working in the organisation. The organisation had changed and so had I. It was time to get back to my long-harboured creative loves and pursuits that lingered in the margins of my days. The books and creative inspiration I craved and hung onto as I made a long commute to work by car and train became key. This liminal time became a passage of transition as I sowed the seeds of my leaving into the stitches and seams of my days. I realised my heart was no longer in it as I applied for jobs I didn’t really want.

In truth, this leaving had been a long time coming and at this stage, I had already started to move on and transition to another life. The one I really wanted to be living. You may know that feeling – your heart has left the building, or relationship or place. And you walk in the door each day feeling so empty dragging yourself through the day until it’s time to leave. So you make a plan to leave for good to create a new life.

The greatest gift

My time in the organisation – a large government department focused on adult vocational education, TAFE NSW – was not without great joy and opportunity. The greatest gift of this transition has been to reflect on my body of work over time to plan a vision for a new life.

It’s so easy when we feel the sadness of moving on to devalue the past, all that we are and all that the organisation and its people have given us. The opportunities, the connections, the people, the learning, the vision, the strategy, the excitement – it can all get snowed over in a narrative of loss. There’s a tendency to risk losing the good and the valuable continuing threads with all of these feelings.

Pain is a player in this scenario too as we may feel undervalued. In my situation, I’ve been made ‘redundant’, my job ‘deleted’ in a restructure I am no longer a part of. The language itself is a challenge to deal with, not exactly creating the best of feelings. We can tie our self-image to this boatload of emotions and feel ourselves being towed behind it, awash with anger. In this, we can risk losing focus on the valuable gift of the resources of such timing.

But the greatest gift hidden in all of these experiences is what Pamela Slim calls our ‘body of work’ – the thread that ties our story together. This is the story we have been crafting and creating from our desires, our dreams, the opportunities, the interactions, the people we worked with, the projects envisaged, the products created and the services delivered. Therein lies the seeds of so much wisdom.

Your body of work

It took a painful experience for me to realise all of this and to start to move on. A chance gut-wrenching workplace experience one day was the catalyst that made me realise I could no longer stay. I had to make changes. The next day I reached out to my friend, Victoria Smith, a life-coach and inspiration, someone who’s been down this road before me, to help me track a new path.

I’d reached a low point and I knew I could no longer navigate this time by myself. My coaching series with Victoria became the blueprint for a new life. A conversation about Pamela Slim’s ‘Body of Work’ in that coaching series was a pivotal piece that helped to tie my transition journey together.

The trick with a wise transition is to reflect on the driving force and heart of your work over time. What really drives you? Across all the job roles you have done, what are the recurring passions? What makes you come alive? Which themes occur in various ways again and again?

Pamela Slim says that her motivation in writing the book was to:

find a set of “new” skills for the world of work in the twenty-first century that would provide options, flexibility and freedom to workers across every mode, in every industry.

Her work enables us to do just that by identifying these core elements:

defining your roots
naming your ingredients
choosing your work mode
creating and innovating
surfing the fear
collaborating
knowing your definition of success
sharing your story

My body of work in transition

As I’ve moved through this time of transition, I have worked through all these areas. You will see these themes woven through my blog posts, as I’ve shared my story along the way. I have realised that the key threads that tie my story together are:

making a difference (always a motivator for me, sharing skills and knowledge to help others);
teaching, coaching, mentoring, blogging (different forms of empowering others and sharing knowledge, skills and experience);
creativity (innovating, leading it, fostering it, writing);
leadership and self-leadership (leading others means leading yourself first);
being a reflective practitioner and knowing myself (a constant search for self-understanding, professional development and reflecting on experiences in work and other life roles);
writing (the authentic heart of it all, being a writer, becoming a teacher of writing and weaving it as a strategic and professional superpower in my life);
introversion and intuition as key strengths and gifts as an INTJ, the captains of my personality ship I needed to learn to work with; and,
in all of this, being wholehearted in how we live and work, not bringing parts of ourselves to the door of any workplace or relationship.

Bringing all this together in a new way into a new life and business is exciting but challenging work. It’s taken consistent work towards my vision sustained over time. And it is about hard work and not luck as Kerstin Pilz reminds us in this beautiful piece, ‘Why luck had nothing to do with my self-directed life.’

Making a path for my transition

So finding myself feeling half-hearted, experiencing a ‘loss of heart’ as Lynn Hanford-Day describes it, a kind of burnout, I shifted to a job-share arrangement 18 months ago to plan a new future. Coaching with Victoria helped me shape this new path and I knew the ingredients for the future, based on the key threads of my past and taking them forward.

I set my goals of:

becoming a Beautiful You Coaching Academy life coach (achieved July 2017)
becoming a certified Jung/Myers-Briggs personality type practitioner (achieved December 2016)
working with my Introverted Intuition preference as a key compass especially via tarot and oracle card tools (achieved via courses, personality work and ongoing practice in 2017)

Setting and achieving these goals has been the backbone of my transition journey, with key learning milestones stepping the way.

Core desired feelings as guides to transition

My core desired feelings are at the heart of everything I do. I want to feel and convey being:

creative, connected, flowing, intuitive, poetic.

Connection especially has been a theme now and finding new kinds of networks. Not being in a traditional workplace can mean a loss of connection. At a time of leaving the workplace, I’ve developed rich connections with a beautiful community of fellow life coaches. We support and inspire each other. I’ve also had the chance to develop deep connections with valued coaching clients who have honoured me through sharing their journey.

Via social media, especially Instagram, I have found the most amazing kindred creative souls. Through Quiet Writing, women have shared wholehearted stories of transition inspiring me and others as we reflect on and initiate change. The hallmarks are startlingly similar across the stories, though they play out in different ways. I am meeting more and more online friends in real life in the most incredible encounters where we share our stories. The personality type community is another tribe of people where I feel a strong connection and source of learning and growth. And I know I will reconnect in different ways over time with many special people from the workplace.

Creating your story

As we move through times of transition, we can create our story, as George Bernard Shaw reminds us. The special ingredients of our body of work, our drivers and passions, are the greatest gifts and teachers on the journey of change. Painful as it might be at times to feel redundant, rejected or no longer belonging to the team, it’s an opportunity to create ourselves anew.

This time can be an opportunity to interrogate what Steven Pressfield calls our ‘shadow careers’, where our lives are an imitation of the real thing we want. He suggests in ‘Turning Pro’:

If you’re dissatisfied with your current life, ask yourself what your current life is a metaphor for.

That metaphor will point you toward you true calling.

So now I move full steam into a new career focused on being a writer and a personality and life coach supporting women to create their wholehearted story at times of transition. I know the ingredients of my body of work. Writing, creativity, making a difference, coaching, teaching, reflecting, sharing knowledge, leadership, self-leadership, introversion and intuition are the threads taking my story forward in support of others.

Distilling all of this brings me to the focus of this transition and new phase of life:

choosing to journey deeper into your wholehearted story

This is the theme of my journey and body of work. And it is what I offer to you through my writing, this blog, my coaching and personality type work and my intuitive tarot work. My deepest threads weaving together into a new story to inspire yours.

Thank you for your support on this journey. May you find your true calling, bringing together all the elements of your body of work forward into a new life. I look forward to sharing my newly formed self-sustaining creative life with you in all its guises in support of your own.

If you’d like to find out how to work with me, you can find out more here. I’d love to work with you!

Image of me by Lauren of Sol + Co

Thank you

With gratitude and love to my family and all my key influences, special friends, life coaches, teachers, coaching clients and fellow travellers on the journey this past year or so, especially my dear friend Victoria Smith.

Thanks to TAFE NSW and all my colleagues for our time together. It is a time I treasure and one from which the deepest friendships and connections have come. I’ve been blessed with inspiring leaders and mentors who have taught me so much about leadership and self-leadership.

Much love too to my beautiful mum, Shirley, who supported my journey transition generously and with the greatest enthusiasm even as her journey was coming to a close. This truly is the greatest of gifts for which I am forever grateful, her body of work being the deepest love of family.

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Embracing a creative life – a wholehearted story

December 30, 2017

This guest post from Jade Herriman is all about embracing a multipassionate, creative life as the key to more wholehearted living.

This is the fifth guest post in our Wholehearted Stories series on Quiet Writing. I invited readers to consider submitting a guest post on their wholehearted story. You can read more here – and I’m still keen for more contributors!

I am honoured to have Jade Herriman as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. My sincere thanks to Jade for the contribution of her story and the photographs she shares from her work. Jade combines the creativity of art therapy with coaching to help people see themselves and their situation in new ways. Her wholehearted story tells of how she came to embrace the multiple dimensions of a creative life. It is a really valuable reflection piece as we end a busy year and many consider changes in their life for 2018. Read on to find out more!

Building and leaving a career

This is a story of building and leaving a career. It is the story of tasting burnout, choosing healing and moving toward a softer more creative life. Most importantly this story is not finished, it’s still being written.

These days I love the mystery and watching it unfold, without a firm and clear plan but rather trusting intuition and the accumulation of small choices to lead me somewhere new.

Over 15 years I worked hard in various jobs related to environmental management and sustainability. I had been keen on science and environmental issues since I was a kid and wanted to get in there and make a difference. From starting out after uni with no clue about how to apply for work and very little useful work experience to ending up in a senior role in a research organization managing large projects, I had a steady job with long-term career prospects. On the face of it, I was achieving what I had set out to do – so why was it feeling so hollow?

After a while, I began to feel sick of the professional mask required to work in these roles, the way that people came together to speak about work issues but often not what was in their hearts. I felt like the workshops I was running with professionals from different industries were sitting at a very surface level, all about the mind, but rarely about what mattered most to people. I longed to help facilitate more meaningful connection. I wanted to create spaces where people could be honest and share their hopes and fears as well as their competency and their ideas for work.

Over time I started to have a yearning to do something more creative. Our work was deeply creative in a sense – we were always designing and innovating, but I yearned to do something that involved the visual arts and making things. I started studying art therapy, part-time, on my weekends and days off, just in case one day I might find a way to use it.

Burnout helped me take the leap

I had always been quite competent but not very confident, terrified on the inside of all that was required of me, but reliable and seemingly calm. I liked doing well and getting lots done but at times the burden of what I was carrying felt too much, and I would eventually buckle under the weight of the stress.

Burnout was a hard teacher. Finally, I learnt that my body had limits and that I could not be in stress mode indefinitely without it affecting my ability to continue. Burnout taught me that downtime is important to balance the busy periods. It taught me that constant worry about the future is not helpful. It also taught me that I still exist without work, without a title, without ‘outputs’.

In art therapy, we often talk about the hero’s journey and the descent into the ‘nadir’. This is the challenging place at our lowest where we feel that part of us is dying a symbolic death – before our ascent back into the ordinary world refreshed, wiser and more enriched by the journey. Burnout was this for me – the worst fear realized and endured – the catalyst that helped me leave my job and past career and take baby steps in a new field.

Feeling my way as an art therapist and coach

When I decided to start my own business, I gave myself permission to try things to see what I liked. In some ways work for me had always been doing ‘what was needed’ or ‘what I had been asked to do’. This was a chance to ‘feel’ my way through life – what actually felt satisfying, enjoyable and absorbing. Without stress fuelling my actions, with time and space to do and not do, I was able to observe what tasks I was able to do joyfully without much effort.

I had to adjust my pace through the first year especially, as my body was still quite exhausted and recovering its energy. I dialled back my expectations and allowed myself to have days that weren’t very productive. More and more I listened to the quiet voice of my body and less to the fear-driven voice of my ego. It felt like Persephone, a popular archetype for the wounded healer, spending time periodically in the underworld before returning to the productive harvest of summer aboveground. I embraced yin and yang, light and dark, productivity and rest.

Starting again wasn’t always comfortable. It was a brand new area of work and rather than being an experienced practitioner, I was a beginner all over again. I had to adjust to no longer having big and fancy projects to talk about or other trappings that made my ego feel secure. I had to sit with grief, loss, self-doubt and feelings of failure that came up sometimes. A book that resonated with me especially at this time was Wild Creative by Tami Lynn Kent, a love song to a life lived intuitively and in tune with our physical selves.

Bringing together my passions and loves

What my new work brings me is a chance to sit with people in honesty and create a space where all feelings are welcome. In art therapy groups, we speak about all aspects of life – and there is often a bittersweet tone to the conversations, about loneliness, about challenges, about grief, loss, trauma and mental illness. But there is also joy, sweet playfulness, and heartfelt connection between participants. There are shifts and development for individuals on the most humble of levels that are also quite profound – as they stretch their windows of tolerance, as they develop confidence in themselves as a creative person, as they practice speaking and being listened to with respect. In coaching, clients navigate self-doubt as a step forward towards long-held dreams.

I love that my work involves art now – helping other people make friends with art, playing with art materials, attending client exhibitions, making art myself, facilitating spaces where people make art together and reflect on the insights it has for their lives.

It also involves design and creativity in terms of thinking of new workshops, new programs, new writing that might be helpful for my clients. I love problem-solving and brainstorming with my coaching clients. I love the way that each session draws on all that I have to offer and there is a requirement to be in the moment, fully absorbed and focused with that person, responding to the mood, situation, communication styles, needs and more of each client.

Embracing my scanner self and a meandering path

Another big part of the journey towards a more wholehearted life has been embracing the part of my personality that is enchanted with learning and novelty. After discovering Barbara Sher’s work on scanners (multipotentialites, multipassionates, renaissance folk), and especially her book Refuse to Choose, I have found it easier to be kind to myself about my moving passions. Beyond just kind, I also approach my multiple interests with more respect and curiosity. I look for underlying patterns between the things I am interested in and know that to be happy I must do what I love.

How wonderful when we can give ourselves permission to do what we love, and not be wracked with guilt about being ‘selfish’ because we realize that people doing what they love benefits us all.

I went on to train to become a coach with Barbara Sher. This was face-to-face training over five modules all held in Germany! Geez, that was a lesson in following my instincts to do what I love even if it ‘makes no sense’. Since then I have been honoured to work with amazing multipassionate people around the world as they take steps to bring their dream projects into being.

What this insight into my personality has mostly given me is lightness in holding onto whatever it is I’m working on now. So for example, while my creative life at the moment looks like being an art therapist and coach, I no longer define myself entirely by my roles. Instead, I give myself permission to always be learning about how I can contribute my skills in the world, and what configuration of work feels good to me. I know that this will change over time, and I am less attached to having a CV that ‘makes sense’ to others than I am committed to listening to my inner voice, my curiosity and my fascination to see what might be the next thing for me.

What is wholehearted to me?

Becoming more wholehearted has been about embracing my softer side, my fearful side, the side that needs rest and can’t always ‘produce’, my intuitive and heart connected side.

It has been about living through and beyond perfectionism, overwork and burnout. It has been about creating a more gentle and caring way of working that plays to my gifts not just my skills.

In some ways, it has been about letting go of control and being okay with not knowing how the river of my work and life will meander. As a keen gardener, I like to imagine my life as a creative garden, which might be replanted frequently and feature a different mix in the years to come. In part, being more wholehearted has also been about stepping back from work, and having it take up a smaller part of my life, and unhooking myself from the wheel of achievement as a primary driver.

Key book companions along the way

Wild Creative by Tami Lynn Kent

Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher

Live the Life you Love and Stop Just Getting By by Barbara Sher

The Soul’s Palette: Drawing on art’s transformative powers for health and well-being by Cathy Malchiodi

Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life by Parker J. Palmer

Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler

About Jade Herriman

Jade Herriman (Dip TAT, BSc and MSocSci) is a creative business owner, art therapist, artist and certified Barbara Sher life coach based in the Inner West of Sydney. She loves using art therapy and coaching to help people see themselves and their situations in new ways, and helping others create, connect and work towards their dreams. For more information, go to www.jadeherriman.com or connect via Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Keep in touch + free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You might also enjoy my free 95-page ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’ – all about wholehearted self-leadership, reading as creative influence and books to inspire your own journey.

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Creative and Connected #8 – Ways to honour your unique life blend

August 4, 2017

Onlyness is that thing that only that one individual can bring to a situation. It includes the journey and passions of each human.

Nilofer Merchant

Inspiring resources to keep you creative and connected – this week with a focus on ways to honour your unique blend or onlyness.

Here’s a round-up of what I’ve enjoyed and shared this week on various social platforms on finding and honouring your unique blend of passions, skills and experience. A term for this, created by Nilofer Merchant, is ‘onlyness’. Whatever we call it, it’s about how you bring the threads of your unique personality, experience together so you can shine and have impact as only you can.

Finding my unique blend

I’ve been on a journey of transition over the past year, seeking to shift to a life focused around Life Coaching and Writing and feeling more wholehearted each day.

In going through this journey, I’ve really had to do think about the unique skills, knowledge and experience that I bring forward from my previous roles and experience. It’s so easy to leave pieces of ourselves behind as we seek to change. But all those pieces of who we are make up our uniqueness or onlyness in the world.

Nilofer asks in her 2012 TED Talk on this theme:

Who are you? What makes you so unbelievably special? What is it that calls you into this world and how can you bring it out so other people can see it. When we learn to stand in our onlyness, we actually celebrate the kickassness that we are. And that to me is the key. How do we unlock that part of us that is so kickass. And so incredibly different and our story to bring into the world. Because when we do that it will unlock that part of us to be more fully alive.

She further comments on her talk on her website saying:

It’s not that everyone will, but that anyone can contribute.

And until we celebrate onlyness, we are not honoring the person. And, until you unlock your onlyness, you are not fully alive. And, collectively, until we honor onlyness, we are limiting ourselves, our organizations and our economies.

So in the spirit of helping us all unlock that ‘kickassness’, here are some recent and favourite resources and references on this theme.

And I welcome your contributions in the comments or on Facebook or Instagram about your favourite resources for bringing our unique stories, onlyness and blend of life alive. Let’s share so we all can shine!

Podcasts on honouring your unique life blend

How to Turn Ideas into Impact with Onlyness – Nilofer Merchant on Jonathan Fields Good Life Project

The whole concept of bringing together the threads of our story is a central part of Quiet Writing and being wholehearted. In the Beautiful You Coaching Academy program that I have just finished, we worked through the concept of ‘onlyness’ and our unique blend of skills as a central thread in the course. And I’d been working through this with my coach as well before I started my life coaching program.

But I hadn’t really concentrated on the work of Nilofer Merchant until this week! I love Jonathan Field’s podcast, it’s always full of treasures and this one was a beautiful one to be brought to my attention. So I bring it to yours!

This conversation is all about our unique capacity to make a big impact to change the world. As the show notes point out, especially with social media and technological change,

….we’re living in times that, maybe for the first time ever, have made it possible for people who’ve been marginalized, disenfranchised and stripped of power to bring forth and build momentum around ideas that, in her words, are mighty enough to “dent the world.

Merchant believes that everyone can contribute and:

The fact that we don’t is society’s greatest problem and the greatest opportunity.

The TED Talk is awesome too, so I encourage you to listen and reflect on your onlyness and unique blend of skills.

Your Body of Work with Pam Slim – The Creative Giant Show with Charlie Gilkey

Pamela Slim is another fabulous champion of finding our unique blend of skills and body of work. Pam’s work focuses on identifying the special ingredients that thread together in our lives. She especially looks at how they have played out over the long term through our body of work.

Pam talks with Charlie Gilkey about transitions and how we find work that is significant for our unique blend of skills and the mode of life that serves this. This might be creative entrepreneurship or any way of building a business around values that are important to us.

Books and reading notes

My reading week

I’ve continued reading David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity on work and identity. This book also featured in Our Heart Always Knows the Way – a wholehearted story on Quiet Writing this week.

I’m also enjoying Jojo Moyes’ Paris for One. I love Jojo Moyes and have read pretty well all her books and this is a fun, relaxing read that has kept me quietly smiling.

I’ve also continued reading The Writer’s Guide to Training Your Dragon, by Scott Baker as an audio book. As a result, I’ve started using dictation for my emails and other writing in a small way as I start to employ these skills. It’s been exciting and will let you know how this goes as it evolves.

Book notes on this week’s theme of onlyness and unique life blend:

Pamela Slim’s book, Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together, has been a go-to book for me as I’ve negotiated this time of transition. I’ve read it as an ebook and audiobook soaking it all in, then bought the hard copy book, because I need it right by me each day. This book focuses on how you can tease out the threads that tie your story together – the values, the skills, the themes, the ingredients of you. It also identifies how you can use this skill and knowledge to find new ways to do your work in the world.

Nilofer Merchant also explores ideas around onlyness, your unique blend and how to use this to impact the world in her new book, The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World. This book will be released later this month and looks a fascinating read on finding our purpose and power and acting on it for change and impact.

11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra is an earlier book by Nilofer Merchant premised on the fact that “value creation in the 21st century starts with each of us”. I haven’t read this as yet but have downloaded as an ebook. It has 4.6/5 stars on Amazon with fabulous reviews so look forward to exploring this one.

The other book I would recommend on this theme is Steven Pressfield’s Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work This book is about how we find our power by turning professional and doing the work. He talks about shadow careers which are a metaphor for the real thing:

Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead. That shadow career is a metaphor for a real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalisingly the same. But a shallow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us. (P13)

Blog/Twitter/Instagram posts and interactions:

Part of our unique blend of skills is how we connect with others. A Study of the Champagne Industry shows that women have stronger networks and profit from them.

I want to share with you this post from a member of the Quiet Writing community, Kerstin Pilz, on Tiny Buddha, How a 10 day silent retreat helped heal my grieving heart because it is such a beautiful wholehearted story.

In Guided Meditation and Tips for Spiritual Grounding, Nicole Cody reminds us about the power of being grounded as we go through challenging circumstances and provides practical tips for keeping well grounded.

I also enjoyed this piece on Forest Bathing: A Retreat to Nature can Boost Immunity and Mood by Allison Aubrey via Dave Stachowiak on Twitter.

Clearly, I am looking for ways to ground myself and connect with nature at this time! I’m going back to swimming tomorrow after an interrupted time with illness and minor surgery, so cannot wait for that. Swimming is very grounding for me.

On Quiet Writing and Tarot Narratives

On Quiet Writing, I have been exploring this theme in various ways of how we find the threads that bring our story together for more wholehearted living. I see a critical part of finding our whole heart as identifying the central pieces that connect our narrative. Sometimes these have become lost along the way in our life. Or they may have manifested as a shadow career, not quite hitting the mark of where we want to go. Or maybe we just haven’t pulled the pieces together in a way that we can see new options.

Here are some relevant posts on Quiet Writing on this theme:

The unique voice of what we love

How knowing your authentic heart can make you shine

Our heart always know the way – a wholehearted story

Creative and Connected #4 – the wholehearted edition

My Tarot Narratives on Instagram have continued to be a rich source of inspiration and insight for my creative journey. Thanks for all the creative interactions. On honouring our unique life blend into action, in a recent post, Sharon Blackie in ‘If Women Rose Rooted’ reminds us:

”But sooner or later, no matter how cleverly we try to hide ourselves, to turn away from the truth, we are called to change. To wake up, and to see, and so to take responsibility. To reclaim our power, and to participate in the remaking of the world.” p83

Quotes on this theme

Just to finish, here a few fabulous quotes on this theme:

“Create your own style… let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.”
Anna Wintour

“Each of us is a unique strand in the intricate web of life and here to make a contribution.”
Deepak Chopra

“Behind every mask there is a face, and behind that a story.”
Marty Rubin

“To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it’s hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.”
Simone de Beauvoir, Prime of Life

“Be uniquely you. Stand out. Shine. Be colorful. The world needs your prismatic soul!”
Amy Leigh Mercree

And here’s the beautiful orchids continuing to come out in my garden. Almost every flower is out now and it’s such a stunning display.

Have a fabulous creative weekend!

Creative and Connected is a regular post each Friday and the previous posts are below. I hope you enjoy it. I would love any feedback via social media or comments and let me know what you are enjoying too.

Feature image via pexels.com

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The value of cognitive diversity in workplace approaches

Neurodiversity and perspectives from Employable Me

More than one way to do it

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

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Key book companions along the way

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Beginning the journey

Taking an adult gap year to follow my passion

You can’t prepare for life’s worst-case scenario

The healing power of writing

Following my intuition to find the trail to a wholehearted life

Learning about the impermanence of everything

Meditation and yoga became fundamental tools of my healing

Finding my writing voice through journaling

Finding joy after grief and pain

Key book companions along the way

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Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

Leaving a long-term job role

The greatest gift

Your body of work

My body of work in transition

Making a path for my transition

Core desired feelings as guides to transition

Creating your story

Thank you

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Building and leaving a career

Burnout helped me take the leap

Feeling my way as an art therapist and coach

Bringing together my passions and loves

Embracing my scanner self and a meandering path

What is wholehearted to me?

Key book companions along the way

About Jade Herriman

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Onlyness is that thing that only that one individual can bring to a situation. It includes the journey and passions of each human.

Finding my unique blend

Podcasts on honouring your unique life blend

Books and reading notes

Blog/Twitter/Instagram posts and interactions:

On Quiet Writing and Tarot Narratives

Quotes on this theme

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