personality and story podcast transition

Embracing a Multipotentialite Life with Laura Maya

March 3, 2022

Riffing with change and living an unconventional, nomadic, multipotentialite life.

Welcome to Episode 13 of the Create Your Story Podcast on on Embracing a Multipotentialite Life.

I’m joined by Laura Maya – Writer, Nomad, Multipotentialite, Author and Coach.

We chat about Laura’s new book Tell Them My Name, the writing journey and living a life that is unconventional, nomadic and multipotentialite. And we explore how she supports and inspires others who are curious and wanting to live a less conventional life.

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

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

Laura’s new book Tell Them My Name
Writing your first book
Being a constant beginner
Giving ourselves permission to quit
Being a digital nomad
Embracing a multipotentialite life
Opening up life options
Riffing with change
How change is always hard

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 13 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 2nd of March as I record this. It’s been raining for about two weeks here in Sydney and there have been massive and devastating floods further north. Along with the tragic Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s been a strange and unsettling time lately. My thoughts are with all those impacted by these events. It’s a very sad time.

In positive news, I’m excited to be a finalist in the Beautiful You Coaching Academy Awards for Book/Product of the Year for my Wholehearted book and Companion Workbook. The winners will be announced at a ceremony on Friday 4th of March this week. I’m so honoured to be a finalist and look forward to celebrating at the online awards ceremony. I’ve been thrilled to kick off The Writing Road Map short course with my writing partner and collaborator Beth Cregan. It’s part of The Writing Road Trip in 2022 and we will be offering other opportunities to work with us further on in 2022. You can join our email list for the latest news.

Speaking of road trips, I’m excited to have Laura Maya join us for the podcast today to chat about her new book, Tell Them My Name and the process of writing it. We also chat about Laura’s fascinating and somewhat unconventional life, which features variety, constant change and movement that she embraces wholeheartedly.

Laura Maya is a writer, coach and culturally curious ‘digital nomad’ who has spent over twenty years wandering slowly through 59 countries. Laura is the author of Tell Them My Name (2022, the kind press) and she runs an online business offering professional matchmaking, project management and coaching programs that help women step into the life they want (even if it’s a life other people may not understand.) Laura has spent the pandemic years living in a converted school bus in Australia but usually bounces between Oz, France, Nepal and Tonga and tries to explore everywhere in between.

Laura and I met as fellow certified Beautiful You Coaching Academy life coaches and as writers and fellow authors published by the kind press. We’ve chatted together about the writing process, becoming an author and ways to publish and share our work with the world. We’ll share insights from these conversations and connections and learn more about Laura’s unconventional, nomadic and multipotentialite life and what she inspires in others from this.

Today we will be speaking about writing, publishing, creativity, being a multipotentialite and nomad and opening up life options to consider unconventional and original paths that integrate our passions and purpose.

So let’s head into the interview with Laura.

Transcript of interview with Laura Maya

Terri Connellan: Hi, Laura, welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast.

Laura Maya: Thank you, Terri. Thanks for having me today.

Terri Connellan: Thanks for your connection across our work, our passions and our businesses, and we’ve connected in many ways around creativity, writing, publishing, coaching and more. And it’s great to be able to share those conversations with people.

So can you kick us off by providing a brief overview about your background and how you got to be where you are and the work that you do now?

Laura Maya: Yeah, that’s always a tricky question to answer for me. My background is a hot, beautiful mess I think that led me to where I am now, which is doing a lot of different things that don’t really connect.

So yeah, my background is that I left Australia in 2001 on what I thought was a gap year to go traveling and to live in school. And I’ve just been traveling the world ever since kind of living nomadically. And I have worked in lots of different businesses and had a lot of different jobs in a lot of different careers.

So, in your book, when you talk about being in transition, I’ve been in perpetual transition, I suppose, for most of my adult life. But that’s what brought me to where I am now, which is running my own business, where I work as a coach and a consultant. so yeah, I do lots of different things. Everything from life coaching to project management and people and culture consultancy, marketing, social media management, translation, writing, whatever. I do a little bit of everything and I enjoy that kind of diversity in my work.

Terri Connellan: Awesome. That’s a great snapshot. And I love that you say being in transition for most of your adult life. You must be incredibly skilled at managing change.

Laura Maya: Yeah, I think I’m a professional beginner. That’s the only thing I’m an expert at. I’m a professional at starting from scratch and I enjoy that process. I really like that point where you kind of get a bit bored or restless and then you think, oh, okay, well, what am I going to do next? And then finding that thing and not being able to do that thing and then having to learn that whole process. It’s a process I really enjoy.

Terri Connellan: It sounds like almost a love of beginner’s mind.

Laura Maya: Yeah. I don’t become a master at anything. For example, I learned the ukulele. I was really obsessed with that for a little while and I can’t play the E chord. It’s been what, seven years now I’ve been playing the ukulele and I can’t play the E chord and that’s okay. I just don’t play the songs that have the E chord in them. I just get myself to the point where like, I’m happy enough with that. And then I kind of get bored and I move on to something else. That’s that’s how I roll.

Terri Connellan: Great. So we’ve both recently enjoyed the process of taking a book from idea to draft, to publish. And as we speak, it’s the 21st of January, 2022. And your book, Tell Them My Name is soon to be out on the first of February, which is very exciting. Congratulations. So tell us about that writing journey and what it was like.

Laura Maya: Yeah. Before I do that, I just want to say a massive congratulations to you for your book, your beautiful book. It’s such a valuable resource. I’ve read it. And it’s such a valuable resource for people in transition.

So I just wanted to congratulate you because having been through the writing process, myself and the publishing process, I know I will never look at a book the same way again. It’s such an achievement just to get it to the point where you can hold it in your hands. So I just wanted to honor you for that.

Terri Connellan: Thank you much appreciated.

Laura Maya: Yeah. And for me, I guess the writing’s journey, I don’t know about you, but it was your first book, it was wasn’t it?

Terri Connellan: It was, yeah.

Laura Maya: For me, I think my first book was all about learning how not to write a book. I don’t think I would do it the same way again. I think the writing journey has been pretty tough. I’ve always wanted to write a book since I was probably about six. I always thought I would be a writer one day. And about seven years ago, I started writing this book. I spent about two years getting a draft down. About three years trying to edit that draft down from about 280,000 words to about 130,000, but without bringing anybody else in that process. Like that was my big mistake. I didn’t get any help. I didn’t get anybody to read it or anything like that. So at the five-year mark, then I thought, oh, I probably need to get some support here.

So I thought I was finished. I arranged a manuscript evaluation from a publishing house and they came back and said, look, there’s a really good story in here, but you’ve tried to squeeze about three other stories into it that shouldn’t be there. So you should start from scratch and start writing the book again. Which was just horrifying, heartbreaking to hear after five years of working on it. But I could see their points when they pointed it out and I took their advice.

I threw a little bit of a temper tantrum and had a moment. And then I decided, okay, they’re right, I’ll take their advice. And I started from scratch and I wrote the book throughout 2020 when, of course the world was in turmoil. And there was a little time to be at home and finished at the end of 2020 and was offered a publishing contract in January of 2021 which I ultimately decided not to take. And I spoke with you. That’s when you and I connected, and I did a shout out in our coaching group, our certified coaching group and said, does anyone know anything about publishing contracts? Because I don’t. And you put your hand out to help me, which was amazing.

And after speaking with you, and speaking with a number of other people, I decided to go a different way. And that’s what led me to the kind press. Now we’ve ended up being publisher house buddies.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s amazing to hear your journey. And there’s so many things that resonate from that description of your journey and lots of commonalities in that journey. It indicates what writing a book, that first putting your heart into a book brings up. Beth Cregan and I, who’s my co-writing buddy, and we’re running a writing program together, we have joked that we’d like to run a program called how not to write a book because we know so much about how not to write a book. It’s like all these things not to do. And like you, I wrote a really, really long, mine was a hundred thousand words.

Laura Maya: That’s tiny!

Terri Connellan: 280 is huge, but I have heard people say that often the early books that we write, we often do put a lot of in there and then it’s either a whittling away or in my case, creating two books. But starting again, must’ve been incredible.

Laura Maya: Yeah, we do put a lot of ourselves in there and I’d heard that. And I thought that I hadn’t done that so much, but then when I got that feedback and I realized, I’ve injected myself into places in this book that are really not relevant. I didn’t know what to leave out was my big problem. I didn’t know what would be interesting for the reader. So going back and starting from scratch, because I said to him, I was like, well can’t I just edit the version that I’ve already done? And he said, no, no, there’s too much in there. And you actually need to start with a blank page.

So that was daunting because I’d spent, gosh, I reckon that number of hours I’ve spent on putting together that first draft I could have become, maybe not a surgeon, but I could’ve put myself through law school, I think probably like in hours that I invested, and yeah, sitting down and saying that blank page, but then just having to look at it, like, okay, what does the reader want to know about this and where would the reader want to start this story? And I started the book in a completely different place than where I would have.

And the beauty of this too, is that now I actually have 65,000 words, which I’ve cut out, which will be the basis of my next book. And so those years, it wasn’t wasted time. And I do think it’s a much tighter, cleaner, more enjoyable book to read now than it was before. I think I would have lost the reader in the original version because it was too all over the place.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s great to hear. And it’s also wonderful too that you can repurpose some of that first draft because 280,000 words, is a huge commitment in time and intellectual energy, creative energy. So to be able to take some of that work and craft it and shape it in new ways.

Laura Maya: That is a positive.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. That’s great. So can you share with us a snapshot of what Tell Them My Name is about?

Laura Maya: Sure. In a nutshell, it is the true story of two indigenous Nepalese elders who leave their Himalayan farm and travel to Paris on this great quest to understand Western culture. That’s the book in a nutshell.

The slightly longer version of that story is that, my husband and I went to live in the Himalayas in Nepal with this elderly couple in 2009. We were sent there by an NGO to build a library in a local school and this couple, took us in and they sort of adopted us as their children. We called them mum and dad, Aama and Baba. And they taught us how to speak Nepali. They taught us how to take care of ourselves because it’s not the same. In Nepal, they don’t eat with cutlery. We had to learn how to eat with our hands. They don’t have a bathroom. So we had to learn how to wash ourselves in the public communal water source and things like that.

So after five years of coming and going from Nepal, they were just really curious to know where we were from and why we were so incapable of doing some of the most basic tasks, I guess, in the village. And so we offered them the opportunity to come back to France, to Europe, where my husband’s from, and we would travel around with them for a month. And we would just explore the differences between our cultures and, and they could see how we lived. So that’s what the book’s about. It’s really about their impressions of Western culture and a look at everything from loneliness and religion and race.

There’s a lot of big concepts in there. And then there’s a lot of really funny moments, obviously when things happened because they don’t know how to navigate life in our culture.

Terri Connellan: I can’t wait to read it – it just sounds incredible. When I first heard about it, the whole story just sounds like an amazing way for us to understand different cultures, but also get a different perspective on ourselves too. When you take yourself out of your comfort zone, as you’ve done many times, and obviously your Nepalese mum and dad have done. That idea of just getting a different perspective, that sounds like that’s what the book’s about, like really turning the world upside down and just seeing things anew.

Laura Maya: Yeah, that’s exactly it, because I think in some ways, I mean, the book is full of questions, really? The kind of questions that Aama would ask when we were traveling and most of the time, as you’ll see, when you read the book, I didn’t have answers to those questions.

Because there was everything from, ‘why is the supermarket floor cold?’ Well, I don’t know. I’ve never reached down to touch it. To ‘why are people so lonely in your culture’ and like, ‘ why did you set my food on fire on my birthday?’ These sorts of things that I’ve never stopped to ask myself those questions and it’s my culture. And I guess it was a real look at all of the things that you just take for granted.

Terri Connellan: And to capture and remember those moments, did you keep a journal at the time or were you capturing those moments as they happened?

Laura Maya: Yeah, I think that’s the reason why the book blew out at 280,000 words, because at the end of every day, I sat down with a voice recorder and I spoke when everyone else was asleep because the trip was exhausting. You can imagine translating between Nepalese and French all day, obviously neither of those are my first languages. And we were traveling, we were doing a lot of stuff. And so at the end of the day, everyone would collapse and I would get out my phone and I would spend an hour recounting the day to myself.

And then when I sat down to write, I basically did a transcription of what we’d done. So I ended up with this book that was just like, this happened and this happened, this happened, this happened. And then having to then distill that into something that people would actually want to read and would take them on a journey without boring them to tears. There were things in there that just wouldn’t be entertaining for people or inspiring for people or educational. So, that’s how I, I did it. I don’t know how I would do it differently next time, because it was good to have all of that data, but it was too much.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s what I was just thinking, as you were speaking, it’s amazing that you did take the time to do that work and it’s almost like a field research isn’t it? And gathering the data, having the records because so much gets easily forgotten. So apart from the writing, it’s that whole note- taking, gathering of information as well on way through that’s the books obviously created through.

Laura Maya: Yeah, exactly.

Terri Connellan: Congratulations. That’s huge – so how many years in all?

Laura Maya: I started writing in December, 2014, so seven years. A big part of my life. It’s been great. I’ve learned more than I could have, if I’d done a university course in creative writing, I think, by doing it this way in some ways, but I’m excited that all of my other books I think will be easier after this because I’ll have a better idea going in.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. You learn so much writing a book about everything, I’ve found, the drafting, the editing, just knowing what the process is like means, you’re better prepared for next time.

Laura Maya: Absolutely. Hopefully. Yeah. We’ll see.

Terri Connellan: So you’ve also recently had your story, ‘The Truth About Quitting’ published as part of the brilliant kind press collection ‘This I Know is True‘ in 2021 so tell us about that story.

Laura Maya: Yeah. So that story relates to the book that I wrote. It’s the story of the non-profit organization that my husband and I started to prevent human trafficking in Nepal. It’s the story of starting that organization and then ultimately burning out and closing that organization down even though obviously human trafficking still exists in Nepal. So the ultimate goal that we set out to achieve there was never going to be really a way to achieve that and the nature of the work, yeah, I burnt out. And so it’s the story of giving ourselves permission to quit when we’re doing something that no matter how much we want it, we’re just not really able to continue whether it’s for mental health reasons or physical reasons or those sorts of things.

So I think in our culture, we have this belief, never give up, you have to see things through to the end and that’s true in some cases, but I also think that sometimes your personal finishing point might just come sooner than other people’s.

Terri Connellan: I love that. That’s what I love about your life and your work is that you take a really fresh perspective on things. And I think that, we do have this cultural bias towards perseverance and keep going no matter what. And sometimes that’s helpful, like writing a book, you definitely need tenacity and perseverance, but, there may be, you know, like your first book draft, I guess you had to learn to stop that and start again. And sometimes the wisdom is in knowing when to stop, when to pivot.

Laura Maya: Exactly. And knowing when to quit, I think it’s a skill. I quit over and over and over again, but like obviously writing the book, I have felt like quitting at many stages of the process, but it was important to me to keep going and I knew that I could. And so I’ve kept going. But with our non-profit organization, one of the most important things to me in my life but it came at the expense of my mental health. And so, you have to make a call and it’s not easy to do, but I think actually cultivating that skill of evaluating things and walking away when it doesn’t serve you or you’re not serving it anymore, I think is really important.

Terri Connellan: And is that something you share with clients too? That skill? Do you see that for clients?

Laura Maya: Yeah, I do, particularly because I work predominantly with multi-passionate people. who quite often come to me because they’re frustrated with themselves because they quit all the time. They leap from one thing to the other and, they feel like they don’t finish the things that they start. So it’s really drilling down on, okay, well, how important it is for you to finish this thing? Or are you only trying to finish this thing because you think that you should. Like you talk about in the book that these words that enslave you, like should.

Terri Connellan: And that abandoned success idea too, maybe it’s okay to walk away from something that’s successful too. Just because something’s going well, doesn’t mean you have to stay either. That’s something that comes up for me, with clients as well. that’s about looking at what serves you ultimately.

Laura Maya: Yeah, I guess that’s even harder, isn’t it? When you’re at the pinnacle of your career in something you’re actually really successful, but it’s just not giving you any joy. I do have one client like that at the moment, actually. She’s carved a name for herself in a particular industry and now wants to do something completely different and it’s hard to make that choice to walk away from the status and the money, it’s really tricky.

Terri Connellan: So one of the key themes in your life story is being a digital nomad and traveller and you’ve been living nomadically since 2001. You’ve lived, worked and traveled in 60 different countries and you’ve learned to speak four foreign languages, which is amazing, had dozens of career changes and held over 40 different jobs. So what do you love about being a digital nomad and what does it offer that other more conventional lifestyles might not?

Laura Maya: So I, yeah, freedom is just ultimate freedom. I think, because when I first started traveling, I was 21. Last year was my 20 year nomadiversary, but in the beginning, the internet wasn’t really a thing. I mean, we had emails and we would go into an internet cafe and check our emails for half an hour a day. But, we didn’t really have access to the internet, like we do now. So I would get jobs as I went along. I was a nanny in Spain and then I was a tax auditor in the Netherlands. A bar manager in Scotland, always moving around too. I was always changing jobs and there was always the stress around, like where was the next job and the next money coming from. Whereas now being a digital nomad. I have the freedom of taking my income with me.

So I’ve built up my business. I’ve got lots of different clients. I do lots of different things with them, as I mentioned earlier, and I can just take that income wherever I go. All I have to do is make sure that the work that I take on is not bound to a certain time. Like I don’t have to turn up every day at midday. I can just do it over the course of the 24 hours. And it means that I can work from anywhere that has internet access. So we lived in Tonga for four years and I ran my business from this beautiful little private island in the south Pacific. And I’ve worked from Paris and Santorini. I went to Greek school in Santorini for a while in Greece.

You just have that freedom to move around and go, okay, well, where are we going to live this week, obviously with COVID that has all been kiboshed, but up until then, that was the freedom. And even during COVID, my income, the way that I earn it, and I’ll be able to travel around and we’ve been able to house sit all over New South Wales and live in a bus. We’ve been living most of the last two years in a bus traveling around. So we have the freedom to keep our costs really low. And weather the pandemic perhaps more easily than others. I think a lot of people over these last couple of years, if you have a mortgage and expenses and things like that, it’s been incredibly stressful.

Terri Connellan: So it sounds an incredibly creative lifestyle too.

Laura Maya: Yeah. We’re kind of creating all the time. What’s next week gonna look like, where are we parking next week? Or where are we living next week? Yeah. And we’re heading back to Nepal in April and getting back onto the international road again.

Terri Connellan: So, do you think you need certain personality preferences to be able to live that way, or is it something anybody can do if they shift their mindset?

Laura Maya: Yeah, I think it definitely takes a shift of mindset because you have to live a very minimalist existence. So you need to not be very attached to stuff. Or if you are attached to stuff, it makes it very difficult to have that freedom to be able to move around. I don’t know that it would suit everybody. I think that if everybody lived like me, the economy would probably collapse. I don’t know that that’s a good idea, but I think that if anybody’s got that sort of curiosity or that desire for freedom, it’s definitely possible, but I don’t know that it is a lifestyle that would suit everybody. Or even a lot of people.

Terri Connellan: I haven’t asked about the challenges because I was more interested in the positives too. Cause most of us could probably think about the challenges, the lack of stability and the things that would throw people. But, it’s great to hear about the positives and what’s exciting about it.

Laura Maya: Different challenges. Yeah. Everyone’s got challenges in their lives. Mine are just different to everybody else’s.

Terri Connellan: So you also identify as a multipotentialite, and you’ve explored this in a fabulous post on your website, Are You A Multipotentialite, Scanner or Renaissance Soul? How did realising it’s okay, and in fact, amazing to be a multipotentalite impact your life?

Laura Maya: Yeah, prior to hearing that word, multipotentiality. I thought there was something really wrong with me. I thought that I was a quitter. I was a dilettante. I just jumped from one thing to the next, I couldn’t finish anything that I started. I was like, oh, I’ve just got shiny object syndrome. I had all these really negative words, Jack of all trades, which has bad connotations these days. So I thought it was a bad thing.

I thought that even though I was happy and I was enjoying my life that I was doing it wrong because the people around me seemed to have a more linear approach to life. They stuck with their careers for a bit longer than I did or with their jobs for a bit longer. They put down roots, they had homes, they had families, they had children. It felt like I didn’t know how to do any of that normal, ‘normal’ like in inverted comments stuff.

And then when I heard about multipotentiality, I’d realised that there were actually a lot of people out there that have like me, this insatiable curiosity, to just keep exploring and to experiment with lots of different careers and interests and hobbies and those kinds of things.

So, I think it just gave me permission to really just be myself and also to know, once I understood that this was actually a thing that my brain is wired this way, it makes me approach my new careers and interests and hobbies in a different way. I’m not jumping in now going, oh my gosh, I found this great thing. This is the thing I’m going to love forever. And then getting really disappointed when it turns out, but it’s not again. And I want to move on to something else.

I go into everything now, this is the thing that I’m excited about doing now, and let’s just see how it all goes. And there may be an end date and actually taking that pressure off, it sometimes means that it lasts longer than it probably would have before when I used to berate myself for getting bored with things too quickly. So I think it’s just helped me shift my mindset around the fact that it’s not a bad thing. It’s just who I am. It’s just how my brain works. And now I can work with it.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s why I love personality work for similar reasons. There’s such strength in knowing how you’re wired, this is what’s your natural preference. Once you understand that it’s the self-acceptance just reframes your whole life. That’s what happened for me with understanding myself.

Laura Maya: So, yeah, I totally agree that. I mean the personality type things, I’m an ENFP on the Myers-Briggs and I’m a nine on the Enneagram and I love doing all those kinds of things and it does provide a framework that makes me not feel like the way I am is wrong. It gives you the tools to then go, okay, well, this is one of my quirks. How can I a) use that to my advantage and b) make sure it doesn’t get in my way.

Terri Connellan: That’s great. And I know of Barbara Sher’s work in this, I love her., this area started there. She was an influence for you. Are there any other particular influences?

Laura Maya: Massive, yeah. Barbara Sher. So I originally found Emilie Wapnick’s TED talk where she talks about multipotentiality. She’s the one who coined that term. So I saw that. And then I saw a lot of people in the comment section saying, you should read Barbara Sher’s book, Refuse to Choose. So I downloaded that and I cried through the whole first and second chapter.

Oh my gosh. It’s not just me. This is just describing who I am and that book has just become my Bible. And I use a lot of the tools and tricks in that. I think it might’ve been written in the eighties or nineties. It’s been around for a long time. She just passed away I think last year.

Terri Connellan: She did. I was doing some research on her a little while ago. I think it was last year she passed away.

Laura Maya: She was such a pioneer. She did such great work for people like us.

Terri Connellan: Again, it’s that reframing and somebody taking the time to wrap the book to articulate, you know, it’s okay to refuse to choose. It’s okay to say yes to lots of things and live the incredible life that you’re crafting and encouraging others to craft who have similar preferences.

Laura Maya: She did. If anybody is resonating with the way that I’m explaining multipotentiality, definitely read Refuse to Choose because she lays it out perfectly to give you the tips and tools to set up your life, to create your life in a way. And I’d been doing those things unconsciously, but, reading that book was really helpful.

Terri Connellan: So just to touch a little bit on that, in what ways can we limit ourselves and what tips would you give for people opening up and integrating life options?

Laura Maya: This is such a great question. This is looking at me personally. But I think one of the ways that I’ve limited myself and I see this in a lot of my particularly female clients and most, all my clients are female, is that we limit ourselves by what we think we’re qualified to do. So we won’t leap into something unless we feel like we have a certificate or a piece of paper that says that we know how to do what we’re doing, or we have X years of work experience that qualify us for that.

And I see this too in my work in hiring, one of my hats that I wear doing a lot of hiring for startups, Australian startups and high growth companies. And the women have a hard time putting themselves forward for jobs that they don’t necessarily feel like they hit all of the necessary criteria. Whereas the male counterparts might send through a CV when they’re not really qualified at all. And I know that I’ve done that like, oh, can I write a book if I haven’t got a Masters of Fine Arts or I haven’t done a course in creative writing. Yes, you can. I think, that’s definitely an issue.

And I think another way that we limit ourselves is with the beliefs and the stories that we tell ourselves about what we’re capable of. I know I’ve spent most of my life saying, oh, I’m not very sporty. Like I’ll only run if someone’s chasing me, like I’m not very graceful, like Bambi on ice, those have always been my stories. And just in the last couple of years, I’ve really been working on dismantling those stories. I took up running and I’ve started learning Kung Fu and maybe it wasn’t super sporty or graceful in the beginning, but with a bit of effort and determination, you can improve. And you don’t have to live with those stories that you’ve been telling yourself, just because you were always the kid that got picked last for teams in primary school.

Terri Connellan: I’m coming up against one of those stories at the minute. I mentioned a little bit in my book about me and story, like ‘I can’t do plot’. And my plan this year is to draft a novel. So, it immediately rears up: ‘ You don’t understand plot.’ ‘You don’t know this’, so it’s fascinating how we limit ourselves with those. Like who says?

Laura Maya: Exactly. And that’s definitely something that can be taught. There are some things you need qualifications for, you’re a surgeon or even coaching. I think that’s a great thing to get qualifications for because you’re working with humans. But I mean, you can do a course in learning how to plot or you can just, what did they say? If you can pants, what are the two?

Terri Connellan: Pantsers and plotters.

Laura Maya: Do it and then give it to someone for feedback. And they’ll say, you could’ve done that better. Or put this there or whatever. And you can learn just by doing it.

Terri Connellan: Exactly. And in early conversation about writing books, learning how not to write the next one is all part of that opening things up and having a go. Yeah. So, I loved a recent posts you popped up on Instagram that you’re aiming to fail this year. I loved that and it was so refreshing to read that because everyone’s going and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that. And then you pop in and say, well, I’m aiming to fail this year. That’s amazing, especially with all the uncertainty around. That’s part of what you’re talking about. So what does that mean for you and why is it important this year?

Laura Maya: I guess it’s two things. The first part of it is that what’s coming for me this year, which is that the book is going to be released. And, I’m very comfortable in my writing cave, just tapping away on my own, writing stuff, but I’m not comfortable with the promotion and the marketing and media interviews like this. You and I have some rapport, we know each other so it’s easier for me to do this with you today. But thinking about being interviewed on radio or things like that, make me really nervous. So, I guess aiming to fail means putting myself into positions where there’s a big chance that I’m will stuff it up.

And I’ll make a fool of myself, but just putting myself in that position anyway and going, okay. Well, if I failed and I’ve hit my target, I’m pushing myself to do things that, that make me really uncomfortable. So that’s sort of aiming to fail. But then also on the other side, it’s really just living my life this year without obviously because of the pandemic organizing my book launch, even though I know that it might get shut down because of COVID at the last minute. I’ve thought to myself, should I have a book launch? Maybe I shouldn’t because of everything that’s going on.

And then I thought, well, I’m just going to do it. If it all falls apart at the last minute, it all falls apart. If it fails, it fails and booking our flights to Nepal, that probably sounds a bit crazy. Why would we go to Nepal in the middle of the pandemic? But if the flights get canceled or things go wrong or whatever. Okay. Well just going to have a crack this year and if I fail, I fail. That’s really what it’s all about.

Terri Connellan: I love that. Your word freedom. It sounds very freeing, it frees you up to do the things that you want to do without feeling that it has to go down a certain path. If it goes down another path, then that’s okay. I love that. You’ve inspired me. So I’m taking that on board too.

Laura Maya: Aim to fail to craft a beautiful plot this year, Terri!

Terri Connellan: I will. I think it’s great. We talk about different definitions of success, but it’s still really easy to say I’m going to draft this 80,000 word and it’s going to look like this, but we just got to take ourselves through the process.

Laura Maya: And be kind to ourselves. Absolutely.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. So two questions I’m asking guests on the podcast and they’re fairly big questions, but interesting just to see what pops up for people. So how have you created your story over your lifetime?

Laura Maya: Yeah. This is like a really interesting question. I think one way I create my story, I’ve consciously created every aspect of my life. Because we’re changing so much, there’s no such thing as getting stuck in a rut really for my husband and I, because we change and move on and move to different countries or change our jobs and things so quickly.

So, I feel like a consciously create my life and my story through that way, but coming back to what we were talking about before, I think part of me is constantly trying to dismantle the stories that I’ve created for myself as well, it’s been a big thing for me lately. I think since I turned 40, I know that you follow a lot of Brene Brown’s work as well, and there was this great post that she wrote about the great unraveling when you turn 40. And it’s really since I’ve turned 40 suddenly trying to put myself into all of these situations and positions that the story of who I am would normally not feel comfortable doing.

So, yeah, I feel like I consciously create my story, but now I’m just kind of trying to break it down and stretch it and see how far I can go.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, I just love in everything you do, your writing, your story, being comfortable playing with change almost. It’s not even being comfortable with changes. Sometimes it’s the discomfort of change, riffing with change.

Laura Maya: Riffing with change. I love that. Yes. I love that. And it’s not comfortable. Change still isn’t comfortable for me, even at the position that I’m in. I think that’s the thing that I love to be able to tell my coaching clients is that even after you’ve been through as many transitions as I have, it’s still hard. It’s still uncomfortable. It can be painful. Feeling that discomfort with change, that’s totally normal. Even for somebody as accomplished at being a beginner as I am.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I love that. I think again, it’s about expectations. Sometimes we expect ourselves to be or do something we’re not, which is be totally comfortable with change. Change in its very nature’s moving out of one comfort zone into another.

Laura Maya: It’s always going to be hard. Even though I make the decision to travel and to live this kind of transient life, I’m always anxious right up until it happens. I always cry when it happens. It always feels like the end of the world. And then I do it anyway. I just cycle through that process faster than most, but it’s always hard.

Terri Connellan: Hmm. That’s interesting. So as you’d know, from reading Wholehearted, I share my top 15 wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices. So I’m interested in, to add to that body of work, what your top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices are especially for women.

Laura Maya: I think and you certainly touched on this in the book, for me, it’s following your own light. There’s lights that light the path in every possible direction. And certainly I think in our society we’re given some really clear runway lights of like where our life is supposed to go. And it’s just being able to really look inside and go, where is my light and following that because I work with clients who are looking for maybe a slightly unconventional life or off the beaten track. And it’s detaching yourself from what you think you’re supposed to do and what others expect you to do and what you think society expects you to do. And just following your own light.

Terri Connellan: I love that. Yeah, it’s true. Certainly myself too, working with clients, you often hear, how a parents light of you should take this path has impacted somebody else’s life when they’ve maybe started off on a track that perhaps would not have been their own choosing. It was just part of societal or familial expectations, or what the family has always done or what’s considered to be a good thing. So yeah. I love that, that idea of following your own light and what lights you up. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I love that and it’s not being afraid to be unconventional.

Laura Maya: Yeah, exactly. It’s okay to live a life that other people don’t understand. It’s just having the courage to take that first step sometimes is the hardest.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. And I hope our conversation today encourages many people who maybe feel that that’s part of what they’re doing or part of what they’ve been looking for in life that living that unconventional life, following their own light is a really positive way to go.

So thanks for sharing your insights today. It’s been a great joy to chat. Where can people find out more about you and your work online?

Laura Maya: I’m at lauramaya.com and @lauramayawrites on Instagram and Facebook and probably soon Twitter, but I haven’t sorted that out yet, but I’m told that writers need to be on Twitter. Are you on Twitter?

Terri Connellan: I am. Yeah. There are a lot of writers on Twitter.

Laura Maya: Yeah. So I need to jump on that horse. Holding off, but yeah, potentially Twitter by the time this is released.

Terri Connellan: It’s a good way to research too on Twitter.

Laura Maya: Yeah. I think it’s a good way to share other writers’ work as well, too, and be part of that community and support each other.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. Cool. Well, encourage people listening to check out your work, to buy your book, Tell Them My Name out on the 1st of February, so by the time this is released, it will be out in the world. So we’ll pop the links in the show notes and, yeah, thanks again for our beautiful conversation today. It was really lovely.

Laura Maya: Thank you so much, Terri, for inviting me here to have this chat, it’s been really beautiful chatting with you today.

About Laura Maya

You can connect with Laura:

Website: https://lauramaya.com/

Instagram: @lauramayawrites

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 – community writing program with Beth Cregan email list

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 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

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 13^th 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.

About Valerie Lewis

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/

personality and story podcast work life

Shaping a Multi-Passionate Life with Meredith Fuller

January 6, 2022

Welcome to Episode 8 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Shaping a Multi-Passionate Life.

I’m joined by Meredith Fuller, Psychologist, Author, Media Spokesperson, Career Change Specialist and Theatre Maker.

We chat about shaping a multi-passionate life in practical terms! There are so many tips for living a full, wise and creative life without overwhelm.

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

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

Making transitions from work or a life we don’t love
Tools for tapping into what is not conscious
Living a full, multi-passionate life in practical terms.
Meredith’s book Working with Bitches
My book Wholehearted & how Meredith is working with it with clients
Thinking and Feeling preferences in women
Choosing projects wisely
How personality insights can help
How tarot insights can help
Setting boundaries
And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 8 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 6^th of January as I record this and we’re firmly into the new year. It’s warm and humid here in Sydney with lots of rain, so it’s a perfect time for setting intentions and goals for 2022 and also reflecting on my word of the year. I shared about my word of the year for 2021, Author in the past week on my blog. So pop over to see how that shaped up over the year and some tips for applying this learning in your life! More on my 2022 word soon as I ponder on all that it might mean!

I’m thrilled to have my friend Meredith Fuller join us for the podcast today to chat about Shaping a Multi-passionate Life. You might remember Meredith featured in Episode 3 of the podcast as part of the first Wholehearted virtual book launch.

Meredith’s concurrent careers have included author, playwright, columnist & media commentator, talkback radio guest, theatre director & producer, TV co-host, actor, psychological profiler and trainer. As a psychologist in private practice, providing counselling and career development to individuals and groups, she has also consulted to organisations on professional development and interpersonal skills for over 40 years. She ran a university careers counselling service for 12 years and has been a sessional lecturer in postgraduate courses in vocational psychology at several universities.

Meredith and I met via our mutual interest in psychological type as members of the Australian Association for Psychological Type about 4 years ago. From that we have discovered many shared interests and passions. Today we will be chatting about the value of psychological type and personality insights in making change, looking at how tarot can help, my Wholehearted book, Meredith’s book ‘Working with Bitches’ and writing and creative living. One of the things we particularly chat about is being multi-passionate and having a number of projects. There is some fabulous advice about how to make wise choices about where to focus and how to practically structure your life so you don’t get overwhelmed or burn out.

A reminder before we head into the podcast about the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club as a focus for 2022. One of the things Meredith mentions in the podcast is about the value of community and it’s something that’s integral to my life and work. If you’re looking for community, support and accountability for living a more wholehearted life, join me and a wonderful group of women gathering for the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club to read and work through my book Wholehearted and the Companion Workbook together through-out 2022. Part book club, part group coaching, with weekly accountability and prioritising check-ins, it’s a gentle, focused and value-packed way to keep wholehearted living front of mind and make progress to the transitions and transformations you desire in the coming year.

We start on Chapter 1 of Wholehearted in mid-January so it’s not too late to join us now and there is a space for you. People in the group are already commenting on how the accountability is helping them to do things they might otherwise have given up on! So head to the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club.

You’ll also hear more about Wholehearted in this episode and how it can support you. Meredith wrote a fantastic review of the book you can read too.

So now let’s head into the interview with the fabulously multi-skilled and multi-passionate Meredith Fuller!

Transcript of interview with Meredith Fuller

Terri Connellan: Hi Meredith, welcome to the Create Your Story podcast. And thank you so much for your support of me and my book Wholehearted.

Meredith Fuller: I’m delighted with it.

Terri Connellan: Thank you. It’s great to chat with you today. So to kick off, can you tell people a little about you and the roles that you focus on in your work in the world?

Meredith Fuller: So, I’ve been a psychologist for over 40 years. I have a private practice where I’ve seen many thousands of individuals who come for career developmental or personal growth, and I’ve also spent a number of years working in organizations on organizational issues, whether that’s leadership, team communication, mainly it’s interpersonal issues.

And I also write plays that I direct and produce at our venue, and I assist my husband with his short documentaries. So, we’ve got a very psychological focus on that. So essentially what I do is assist people to be the best they can be. And I mainly find that people are often in a position of distress. It could be interpersonal problems with people at work, problems in relationships, a poor fit, and they need some assistance in moving towards whatever their life stage is.

And it’s interesting at the moment, there’s been obviously quite a lot of people who are looking at what next? I’m in my fifties, I’m in my sixties. What now? So there’s a very strong theme there. And the other thing that we’ve been doing for the past two years because of the pandemic issue is working with a lot of people using Zoom to do group sessions or one-on-one sessions.

So, I guess what happens for me is there’s lots of different projects that emerge and if I’m interested, I’ll grab it. So for example, at the moment, I’m making a film with some colleagues about domestic violence. So it’ll just depend on what seems to be the critical issues. And the other part of what I do in writing is I’m an author of books and I do a lot of book reviews and write articles for newspapers, magazines, do some TV work, radio work, just a lot of helping people to understand more about the psychology of people.

Terri Connellan: So many threads, but so many interesting aspects to your life and to your work. And I love that at its core about helping people to be the best people they can be and I think that’s where your work at my work comes together. We’re both interested in that space where people can make choices, make transitions, practice self-leadership, understand themselves to be the best they can be, but I absolutely love all the different strands. And so we’ll explore quite a few of those in our chat today.

So thank you. And thank you for your review of Wholehearted too cause, that was a beautiful first review, which I’ll put in the show notes, but thank you for that. And the work that you do, I’m sure is hugely appreciated because it’s one thing to write and create something, isn’t it? It’s about sharing it with the world too. So thank you for that. So we met through our mutual love of psychological type and it’s valuable insights. So why have psychological type and personality been such powerful frameworks in your life?

Meredith Fuller: I’ve always been psychologically minded. And even as a child, I wanted to be a psychologist and it struck me that I was fascinated all through school about what do I think people will become when they get older so much so that I used to write down all the names of the kids in my class and write down what I thought they’d be when they grew up.

So obviously, the issue of vocation spoke to me very early on, and it was clear to me that people were different and that you could cluster them in some way. And I used to wonder why doesn’t anyone else seem to see what I’m seeing? So I felt quite different and alone with that and I guess for me, what I love about AusAPT and working with psychological type is we have a group of disparate people who are all keen to understand what our differences and similarities are.

And we like looking underneath and we like reflecting back on what we’re observing and to my mind, there’s a great depth of thinking that is so helpful for people. And I certainly find that psychological type has informed most of the work I’ve done since about 1998.

Terri Connellan: Wow. It’s been a really long-term influence then. Yeah. So just to explain to people listening Meredith and I are part of the Australian Association for Psychological Type, which is a connection of people in Australia, but globally who have a passion for personality and psychological type and it’s great community for people who as you’ve said think really deeply about the way we’re made up, the way we’re wired and the influence of that with nurture too. It’s not all about how we’re wired is it? But it’s obviously a big player in how things play out. So how do you work with these insights with clients?

Meredith Fuller: Individuals will come for counseling or careers counseling, and they’ll normally present with distress about their relationships at work or their relationships in the family, or with significant others or their difficulty in forming relationships, their concern about their careers and we’ll explore their lives. And I like to look at childhood through to the present and I like to understand their narrative. But I also like to look at what are their ability, skills, interests, values to get that full picture and what their hopes and dreams are in terms of who was this child? What did that child want in the future? And who is this adult now? What does this adult want?

And increasingly, I’m noticing that there’s so many problems with people who are not being valued and validated in their relationships and at work. And so, the thing that struck me about your titles about, this wholehearted and the shadow coming to work and the half-hearted working. The turns of phrase you used were just beautiful because they just encapsulated for me how people talk about work versus self.

And, I loved the way you gave a number of activities and exercises that they could reflect on, that helped them to see what the misalignment is and what’s changed. And that just sits so nicely with the sort of work that I do with people where something shifted. And if they don’t address what’s going on for them, invariably, they get sick or they have to sever relationships or rethink a lot of things.

So definitely there’s a sense that people are coming because they’re not happy. They’re in distress. They know something’s wrong. And they know that it’s very toxic for them, but they feel so stuck and they often feel very trapped and they seek some support from elsewhere because there’s something intolerable that’s going on.

Terri Connellan: That makes perfect sense with me cause certainly when I went through my journey, in my case, I reached out to a coach. There’s lots of different people or actions we can take when we feel that. But it’s that, as you say, that real sense of misalignment between who we are, what we want to do, what we want to be, and then what’s actually happening. And there’s lots of reasons for feeling stuck isn’t there.

Meredith Fuller: Oh, absolutely. And also the issue of age, life-stage. The sorts of issues people might present with when they’re 27 are going to be very different to what they’re presenting with at 57. So, that’s of concern to me that there’s quite a number of women I find who haven’t got the financial security that perhaps men might have. Historically, we know why that is. And they find themselves in this position where they’re being edged out of their organization, or they’re not ready to leave, but there’s nothing for them anymore. And they’re really at their prime and they might be in their forties, fifties, and sixties, and they’ve got so much to offer, but they just can’t get a gig anywhere so that’s a real concern. And the other one is that similarly with a lot of men who are really stuck, lamenting that nobody wants them and what are they going to do with the rest of their lives? People that have been chewed up and spat out. So that’s very common.

Terri Connellan: And it’s ironic as we get through life, we get more wisdom, more skills and, then we get in a situation where we feel of less value. So it’s a huge issue and it’s obviously something we’ve both really noticed in the work and, and I’ve experienced it myself. So it’s something obviously you’re seeing in your clients.

So in Wholehearted, in your work with clients, we both use psychological type and personality as like a compass or a framework or a way of seeing personal development. I’ve spoken about that in my book, and obviously your story is very different. So do you want to tell us more about your psychological type makeup and how your understanding of your personality and how you’re wired has helped you grow and evolve?

Meredith Fuller: And so my preference is for introverted, intuition, feeling, perceiving, [INFP] and I was aware when I was very young, that there were two parts of me, two aspects. There was the very introverted—I loved reading. I loved thinking, daydreaming and performing, and this would be my outgoing situations. So I started working very young. So I was in professional salaried work when I was four and a half. That was because I came from a single parent home and my father had left and there was no supporting parent benefit. My mother was very unwell. We also had in our house, her mother and her mother’s sister who had Down’s syndrome.

So my mother was quite trapped, as a caretaker and not really able to go off to work. So it was quite dire. But from when I was very young, three or four, I just love singing, dancing, chatting to strangers, that sort of thing. And so there was a photographer called Athol Smith who was very famous at the time.

And he and his wife, Bambi, wanted me to do some modelling with them. And so that began a modelling career and that also led into an acting career. So I had a situation where I loved all that. I could go off to work and earn some money to help my family, but I could do things I enjoyed, which was entertaining groups, being in plays, et cetera.

But I knew that was a part of me. And the other part of me needed that balance of time alone. And I always had that fascination by how people were different. Why were they different? What can I understand about that and how to make sense of all of that? I guess I’ve always been interested in these things and another connection we’ve had is with the the tarot.

So I started reading tarot when I was about 15 and that’s always been a lifelong interest in collecting decks and exploring symbolism and the unconscious. And so locating MBTI when I was working at a tertiary institution. It was about 97, 98. It seemed to me that things very much came together with that because here was something cogent.

It made sense in a way that I just felt encapsulated everything I’d been thinking about. So I seized on that and became very involved in doing something to help people train and bringing that to tertiary institutions, bringing that to organizations and then working one-to-one with clients.

And I found it’s been the most useful thing because it isn’t about people running around doing a questionnaire. It’s about understanding yourself through that self-reflection and observation and imbibing the theory yourself. So, it’s got a lot more to offer than say, there’s a lot of tests and little questionnaires and things people do, and they’re quite simplistic.

And of course the fewer categories, the less comprehensive and the less good affinity. So there’s something about having 16 types that’s so robust and it’s something that people can grasp very easily and then it can help inform, well, who am I with? How do I work? What do I need? Where am my gaps in communicating? So it’s something very practical and very common sense.

Terri Connellan: That really aligns with how I feel too. First it’s making sense of your own personality and your own view of the world, I think often is part of the lens through which we see type. And then, in my role as a coach or your role as a psychologist using those skills to help others to see what your strengths are, where you’ve got blind spots, what you might be missing, because we all just naturally have certain ways of seeing the world that’s so natural to us, we think it’s the same for everybody.

Meredith Fuller: That’s a really good point you’re raising because obviously one of the issues about working in my field is that we see the people who don’t fit, who have got distress, who have got concerns, who do feel different. So , I do have a skewed sample in that sense.

So invariably, what I find is there are certain types who come for counselling and careers counselling and my husband, who’s a psychotherapist psychologist, he finds the same thing. So, we tend to work more with the introverted, intuitive, thinking or feeling perceiving or judging types than perhaps the more mainstream types.

And that interests me as well, that I can actually reframe a pretty horrible life experience for someone, and they can actually celebrate what is unique about them and then work to their strengths rather than feeling unwanted in our society.

Terri Connellan: That’s really powerful work. I think type’s such a valuable tool for reframing, for understanding. I like the idea of it as a compass, as Jung used that idea of the compass and the framework for taking us forward. So, thanks for those insights. You mentioned tarot, which is another love we share. I write about tarot as a tool and a support for wayfinding and personal insight in my book. And I know you have been collecting decks and have lots of insights. What are your thoughts about tarot as a personal development practice?

Meredith Fuller: I love the visual aspect for people. It’s very clear that some people are very auditory and they need to have deep conversation and, and music might be really significant in how I might work with them. For some people it’s visual. So films, things like tarot, help them get the awareness, get the insight, help them to name what’s going on for themselves, and also really help them connect with their unconscious.

And the thing that I particularly like about tarot is that it sits so beautifully with doing dreamwork and how in our dreams, we understand that present, past and future are interconnected. We don’t have linear time, that images can be constructed or archetypal. There are messages in our dreams.

And similarly with working with your tarot and working with your unconscious, you’re actually helping yourself to appreciate what’s going on for you in a way that enables you to perhaps have a few more resources in the moment when you’re feeling lost, uncertain, confused. So it’s something very tangible. And it’s also something that I really appreciate because I love ancient cultures, ancient religions, ancient symbolism, and also futuristic work. So I love how it just seems to combine all of those.

And it’s a great tool for quickly communicating with someone else. It’s a little bit like the way we use type that, you know, we can say, oh, you know, my preference is X. So suddenly we understand a lot very quickly. And similarly with cards, oh look, I keep getting certain cards, what’s going on with me. It’s a good way of quickly absorbing and integrating information that helps us.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. So I love two things you said there, firstly, about both tools,type and tarot, or both frameworks are ways of tapping into that unconscious, like what’s beneath the surface or what’s less conscious for us.

And then secondly, how they both like languages or symbolic systems or languages, we can become more fluent in. I love that idea because they do. At a type conference, for example, when we’re together, I just love it. We all understand, at different levels, but it’s sort of a language we can speak.

And as you say, it’s the same with tarot. When I talk about the Six of Swords and the Eight of Cups in the book, I hope people who don’t know that can also get a way in. But for those who understand that, they will bring that understanding to that book. So it just means we’ve got a language for communicating.

Meredith Fuller: It’s interesting. There was a line in the book that was really interesting for me, that you made that I hadn’t seen anywhere else before. And it was very significant. I think, as a teaching tool for a lot of people who are looking at this business of career change. You’re talking about, you’re leaving success. So you’re leaving things that are working, you’re leaving things and you’re going off and you made the comment, you’re actually choosing to leave the successful things.

And that was a very significant statement because for a lot of people where I find they’re stuck is: I earn X amount of dollars and I don’t want to learn less. I’ve been doing this for so long and I’m a partner or a senior administrator or an executive, or I’m a X, Y, Z ed. I can’t leave all this, all this work. I can’t stop and start something where I might earn less or not have my status or not have the recognition. And that can actually paralyze people.

And so we’re looking at the duality of, well, on the one hand, you’re saying you feel dead inside, you hate going to work. You feel there’s so much inside you that’s not being expressed. You’re bored with what you do, even though you’re busy, you feel trapped. And yet you’re saying I can’t let go, you know, do I stay, do I let go?

And there’s something about the way you’ve talked about this card and saying, you’re actually choosing to leave your success. It was just a beautiful way of describing an active decision. And I think that’s very empowering for people who are frightened about letting go of material things, or letting go of how much work they’ve put into something to begin something different.

And with that thread, you also talk about we bring ourselves to every new thing we do. So it’s just a different iteration of what we’ve done before, but some of those phrases will resonate with a lot of people. And it will help give them a boost to say, I can do this. I’m choosing to do this.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that idea of abandoned success, and the image of the Eight of Cups. If you have a look at a fairly traditional pack the cups stacked up, and then a person’s choosing to walk away from the full cups. Yeah. And to me, it’s about identity. It’s about how much of our identity we’ve invested in that role, that position, the money that we earn, whatever it might be. And then that choosing to find a new path is incredibly difficult.

Meredith Fuller: I guess what makes it hard is our society doesn’t understand. So when people say I’m having a change, I’m leaving X or, I was doing a more senior role, but I’m going back to do a more specialist role in the same organization, or I’ve worked long and hard for this and I’ve got all these qualifications and so forth, but I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m doing something else. And how other people really try to interfere and say, you’ll regret it. You shouldn’t do it. What if you can’t get another job and everyone will laugh at you and what a stupid thing to do. And they’re actually, I think often frightened because they don’t want that other person to go off and be happy because they’re not happy either.

So a lot of investment in keeping the status quo. So I think the way you’ve talked about the Eight of Cups in that sense, that it’s a really sound decision to choose to walk away from amazing success, because you know you will have different success and the success you will have is more congruent with who you truly are. There’s something in a lot of those comments that you’ve made that I just think for people reading the book will strike such a chord.

Terri Connellan: Thank you for those comments. I really appreciate it because it’s something I really felt personally. And my aim in writing the book was to help cause when I went through it, I also felt a bit lost. And there weren’t a lot of frameworks in writing the book. It was working through what I experienced, but then trying to provide some anchors for others.

Meredith Fuller: That was another thing. I did want to mention this because I was very struck by how you wrote the book. What’s unique about your book is that you talk about your own process, including everything you did, every book you read, every person you saw and you very generously talk about what you took from each experience. And it’s almost like a little road map of, here’s a whole lot of books you can buy or types of people you can go and see, and how a coach might be different to a therapist.

And there’s so much that you give in that that is so helpful because traditionally when people write self-help books or here’s your way of looking at your career or change or whatever. They’re very much about, well, this is the system and this is what you follow. And, they don’t compare and contrast other techniques or things that they’ve struck. They don’t suggest that very wide exploration and they don’t talk so much about the internal distress.

They’re much more about, okay, so here’s your problem. So here’s step one and that’ll go to step three and then you’ll be at five and then you’ll be done. And so there’s something quite desiccated about reading those books. Whereas with yours, a) because you’re so honest and open about everything that happened to you, people can feel that you understand them. But the way you talk about how you made decisions about, will I go here? Will I read that? What did that trigger? What did that mean? Why is this person good at this? It’s so much more comprehensive for people to say, okay, well, I didn’t like that book and I didn’t like that person. But you know, it’s like a hairdresser. I’ll go and find one that cuts the hair how I want. Thanks very much.

You’ve really given people permission to play with the way through. And I can certainly see how this kind of approach has been missing in the past because there are a lot of books came out in the eighties and the nineties. It’s almost like we get waves of things happening, but they never really hit the spot about people who had this profound sense of emptiness and loss and confusion and concern.

And they didn’t help people who couldn’t just snappily work through each exercise and tick off all the goals and have it neat and tidy. And, I like it cause it’s messy and our lives are messy. And you’ve really captured that for people, which is nice. And that sense that you have with your work is, well, it is going to be unexpected. We don’t know how this is all going away, but it could be this. It could be that. It could be something else, but there’s growth in it and there’s excitement. And there’s learning in this curiosity, and there’s a sense of mastery rather than having a person feel well look, I’m hopeless, even the help books don’t help me cause I’m so hopeless. So to me, you’ve really picked up on a book for our time.

Terri Connellan: Thank you. I really appreciate that cause often when you’re writing a personal narrative like that, it’s that challenge of sharing your experiences a bit like, show don’t tell. I was just chatting about this in another interview, the difference between telling people to do something versus this is what I went through. And here’s what I suggest, which I thinks a more powerful way to go. And you’re also an author. So tell about your books and the topics you focused on in your writing career.

Meredith Fuller: So I’ve written a number of books that were more academic, but the one I did that was more mainstream was called Working with Bitches and it was identifying the eight types of nasty people that you find, nasty women and how to deal with them. And why I did that was, again, part of the theme of what was happening with my work is women were saying I’m really struggling with a particular woman at work who might be my support person, my boss, my team leader, my colleague, and they were being undermined or they were being distressed and they couldn’t understand what was going on.

They didn’t know how to manage it. And they were being so triggered. It was causing great alarm. So I wanted to identify what was happening with these themes. So I did some research and worked on about 2000 cases and put together types based on all of the materials, the data that I gathered and then worked through, well, how could people deal with that in a way that was safe and in a way that also appreciated their personality structure. Because usually the people who were coming to see me were very much feeling preferred women who avoided conflict, who were frightened by power and control issues and were really getting decimated at work or in relationships. Often it might be something about a mother-in-law or a sister-in-law or somebody’s sister or something.

So it was a way of validating that what they were feeling was true, because there’s been such a theme of, oh, you can never complain about another woman. We women have to stick together because we’re all a homogenous group and men are the enemy. So you can’t say that you’re struggling with a woman. So they’re actually being silenced before they could even articulate what was going on for them. So it was a way of appreciating that all genders walk up and down a continuum of nice to nasty and what you can do to manage that better.

Terri Connellan: Oh, it sounds a really practical book cause that’s something a lot of us experience in different ways, but maybe don’t have any reference points to make sense of all of that. And often when that happens, we tend to think, oh, it’s us. Is that something you’ve come across?

Meredith Fuller: Absolutely, and of course the other thing with that too, is that often it’s about different personality types. And if you’re not as aware of your own style, you certainly not going to be able to identify what someone else’s style is or where there could be a mismatch or a misunderstanding, or how you could broach that to make it a little more palatable at work.

And one of the key findings in my work, and this has also been researched by Ian Ball, who is our colleague at AusAPT. Interestingly enough back in the day, many, eons ago, I used to work at a university with Ian where he was Head of the Psychology department. So I already knew him before we found ourselves back together in our association.

His research found that while there are far more feeling preferred females, for women in the workplace who had a more senior role, they usually had a thinking preference. So if there’s only about 25% of females have a thinking preference, 75% of those females will be in a senior role in the workplace.

And one of the things that was very clear to me was that people were coming to me with this terrible distress about a thinking preferred manager who actually wasn’t being a bitch, wasn’t being horrible, was actually really trying to help them grow and develop, monitor them, train them, work well with them, but there was such a misunderstanding about the way they went about this. They were really at cross purposes.

So it was also part of my book to say, hang on, maybe that person you’re having trouble with, isn’t a bitch. Maybe it’s something about you you have to look at. So let’s have a look at how you can work better with those people. And I certainly used to find that working in organizations. I’ve done a lot of work in banks and legal firms and universities, where there tend to be more thinking preferred females in positions of leadership and authority. And often they would be having difficulties with their feeling preferred females. And it really was, talking two different worlds, two different languages and so much misunderstanding.

And there were some things you could do to make it work and that really excites me. And again, one of the things I loved in your book, as a thinking preferred female, you operate very much using your feeling and your thinking preferences. And you talk about your integration of those things. And this is so important in terms of, I think all of us men and women being able to access all the parts of ourselves. So I thought you handled that very well. And one of the things I’ve noticed as, I guess walking the talk in your role as President of our association, I noticed that you do the very thing we talk about. You identify well, who are the people on the team, or who the members, or who am I working with? What do those people need to do their best? How can I respond to that, so that I honor the difference that I have around me and I see you actively do that. So I see you working very hard to connect with your committees and your staff and your members and your groups and whatever, and doing it well. And so to me again, there’s that sense of, okay, so here’s someone who writes a book and she actually practices what she’s talking about and I see it. So that was another thing that struck me about what you’ve achieved in this work.

So it also sat really nicely with me about knowing that, it’s very good for many women, I believe to understand a little more about what the thinking preferred woman’s doing, because, historically, that’s been really a problem for thinking preferred females. They’ve had a terrible time at school. They’ve often had a dreadful time when they not yet in a position of authority and they’re struggling. It’s one of those things where the more we understand our gender, the better, and you seem to be saying on our journey to become all of these aspects, let’s understand how it might be played out as we sometimes swing from one extreme to the other till we find that fulcrum balance and why it is important for us to take the time to consider that innermost part of our souls and how we are who we bring to work. We can’t divorce ourselves from all of that.

What happened for me with the book [Wholehearted] was thinking, well, I’m not able to see as many people. I can’t see them in person. We’re doing Zoom work. It’s a bit tricky holding people. Here’s a resource that people can work through that I would say is safe, trustworthy. It doesn’t humiliate anyone. It doesn’t cause people to feel stupid if they can’t work through the exercises or there’s no problem about working through the Companion Workbook and the book. And it’s something that gives us some dialogue when we have a couple of weeks gap between sessions. So I thought you’ve really come up with a tool, right when we must need something.

There used to be a number of books. Everyone would get one every year, like What Color is my Parachute? They were very superficial and they really didn’t hit this spot about people are really saying, who am I really and how do I want to live my life? What does my life stand for? And how am I in relation to others? And so those very fundamental questions and the way we’re changing work. We’re changing work to be, as you would appreciate, most small business run by women, most new business women setting up, most people going off becoming specialists or consultants who are collapsing who they work with at different times.

This is the way that we’re working and doing several jobs in a year. And just going with the flow. And historically, a lot of the books about careers and development just didn’t take into account the new way that work is emerging. So, I’ve been really happy to say, well, here’s a tool that I can recommend both to men and women, interestingly enough, and get them to work through. And then when we talk, they’ve had the chance to really work through some thoughts themselves and that really adds to our work together. So I’ve been really struck by how you’ve put, certainly your understanding of type in, but also your understanding about how organizations have been working and where they need to be working in the future. So it’s got a real breath of fresh air to it.

Terri Connellan: Oh, thank you. And I was really appreciative too of your comments that it’s a book you can use with clients, that idea of particularly in times when we’re not having as much, face-to-face, it’s something people can take away. And it was certainly designed to be part of a whole that people can work through the workbook, read the main book, have their own reflections, have space, create their own ways of working through it. But have a mix as we’ve talked about before of meandering, but also structure to work through. And I guess that’s the teacher in me as well as INTJ coming out. So, yeah, it’s designed to be that sort of self coaching, self-leadership guide as well, supported by also having a face to face.

Meredith Fuller: Yes, that was another thing I liked about it. We want people to sit with the uncertainty. We want people to explore symbolism and dreamwork and art and literature and film and tarot and everything possible. But we want them to be able to do it in a way that they can then integrate that into their everyday life and this helps them do that. Whereas some sort of new age materials, there’s no relationship to get up each day and go to work, come home, and you have to earn an income and you have to feed yourself. And, you have to be in relationship with other people who aren’t on the same journey and all of this sort of thing.

So I felt that you provided those safe walls if you like so there was plenty of space to bounce around in this, but you knew that you were being held in a very caretaking way while you went about exploring all of these, for some people, very new ways of looking at their careers, particularly looking at tarot cards, for example.

Terri Connellan: Exactly. And I think from looking at your body of work, which is a concept I talk about in the book, that all the skills, all the work that we do, the volunteer work, all the different work that we do, often that idea of having multiple sources of income, being a multi passionate, multipotentialite, is very much embraced, I think, by how I’ve moved and certainly it’s embraced in your life. So with all that amazing body of work you have over time and what I also hear from clients is sometimes having lots of passions, people can feel overwhelmed, by which way to go, what to do, what advice would you give to others who are also looking to embrace their multi passionate body of work and interests?

Meredith Fuller: So I had an INTP mother, which is a great mother to have, so she was quite unique and unusual, and her attitude was, you find your own way, Meredith. Value education and trust yourself, back yourself and so for me, I’ve always felt a little different from a lot of people because I’ve always known exactly what I wanted to do is from when I was very young.

So I’ve never felt, oh, there’s too many things, or I don’t know which one to do first. What I’ve always done is I’ve said to myself, I have to go with what’s most important to me at the moment. So what’s the most burning, exciting thing for me now. And I know there’ll always be plenty of time to either come back to something or do it, postpone it and do it later, or do a little bit of it, stop, do something else. I’ve never felt, aw gee, you can’t play with it all. I just knew you could never do it all at the same time. So I find that my question always will be when there are so many things I enjoy doing, how do I choose? I’ll go with what sits inside of me being best, right thing that I have the most energy for. So for me, it’s often about energy.

So I do a lot of pro bono work for clients, particularly cause I work in the creative arts a lot. There are a lot of people in the creative arts, who’ve got no money and I often see a number of those people for nothing. And how do I choose? Because so many people, how do you choose? And something will happen in that engagement with that individual that I’ll feel, and I’ll go with that. So for example, at the moment, this is a funny story, but it’s a good example of how do you choose what you do? We mainly do a lot of our house maintenance ourselves, but in a two story house, there was no way my 70 year old husband was getting up a ladder.

So we had a housepainter come to do the top bit. And he brought his son with him to help hold the ladder. And they were talking and his son had wanted to be an artist and he was really lost. And he was very distressed and there was something in this young man that I felt. So I’ve now been working with him for some months. So he comes every week and we’re exploring his move towards becoming an artist, how he will go about choosing a course to do, how we’ll go about earning some money, to be able to be a student, to purchase all his materials, how he works in the field.

And his sense of identity and who he’s becoming and how he deals with issues because we’ve all got issues, obviously. And because he’s such an aware person, he has a lot to work through. So there was something I felt in him where I felt he had something very special and I wanted to nurture that. And he’s a very humble person and he’s a very respectful person. He’s got qualities as well. So I’ve really felt drawn to working with him. So there’ll be something about that. Or if I’m choosing a play, I want to write, it’ll be a burning issue that I’ve got some energy for. Nothing that might be commercially successful.

It’s always about what I’m interested in and that’s what I’ll do. And if friends come to me and say, how about a project? I’m doing this. Are you interested? Again, it’s always going to be because I either love working with those people or I love the issue and I’m happy to just trust my own sense of where my energy is saying to go.

And it’s very much like that Eight of Cups card. Often it means I walk away from successful things because there’s something new I want to do and different I want to do that the energy is there for. And I know I’m not saying goodbye to everything forever because there’s plenty of time. So it’s something about noticing what’s the spark, what’s the energy, what’s the curiosity. And if you follow that, they’ll always be a few things that bubble up to the very top, rather than everything. And I really love this notion of, just because you’re really good at something, you don’t have to keep doing it. Do something else.

Terri Connellan: Hmm. I love that too. I think that’s great advice because just some of the people I’ve worked with, what you’re saying resonates. And some of them are INFPs too, which is interesting, it’s that idea of just so many passions, so many interests and they compete. But I think that idea of being more attuned to what you’re drawn to and prioritizing that. I’m also hearing you say almost taking a bit of a project approach to things, to help compartmentalize, I guess?

Meredith Fuller: Yeah, I think it’s really important to compartmentalize because I notice for me, if I want to fit a lot of things, I couldn’t keep doing too much of one thing because there wouldn’t be the space. It’s almost like asking yourself, how many days a week are you fit for counseling? How many days a week are you fit for writing? How many days a week are you fit to do radio interviews or whatever it is, and work out roughly what those clusters will look like, and then be really strong.

So I’ll be able to say, well, I counsel on these days so if you can’t fit in with me, sorry, I’ll refer you to someone else because I can’t keep stretching across taking the space from other projects that I really believe in. Because if I do that, I’ll end up getting sick. I’ll end up trying to overstretch and I won’t manage, and it won’t work.

Terri Connellan: So there’s a couple of questions I’m going to ask podcast guests as we go through. And, this being the Create Your Story podcast, it’s a big question, but I’m interested to see just what comes up for you when you’re asked the question, how have you created your story over your lifetime?

Meredith Fuller: Okay. I’ve created my story by allowing myself to sit a bit away from the mainstream. And I’ve enabled myself to listen to what my heart wants to do, even when it seems at odds with what the sensible thing to do is, or the smartest thing to do is, and almost like back myself, even when it looked ridiculous, because I told myself when I was very young, there’ll be a pattern, I don’t understand it yet, but there’ll be a pattern that will make sense to me, but it’s something that I’m doing that’s going to be unique to me. So I can’t be impacted by what everyone else thinks I should do or what one should do.

I have to trust that little voice in me that says, I know I’m here to do something unique for me. And I’ve always done that and to my detriment often, but it’s like I’m absolutely convinced for me that what’s helped me is by wanting to go off and do whatever it is I want to explore because I’m curious about it. Even if it’s not fashionable or even if it’s way too early and then once I’ve understood it or mastered it or done enough, I don’t have to keep doing that. I want to do something else. So a little bit like saying, yeah, just because you’re good at something you don’t have to keep doing it, do something else, as long as it’s what you’re interested in and you believe in it and it sits with your values.

And my values very much came from my childhood and my upbringing, which was about, to care for people and to care for relationships and to care for what the purpose is that we’re here for. And in a deeper sense, in a much deeper sense. And I’ve always appreciated self-expression. And so for me, creating my story was about saying, well, okay if I can trust myself to follow what my interests are and use that as my guide and not be swayed by what everybody else says you should do, or how everyone else goes about doing things, that’s going to keep me most aligned with my true self. And that’s what I’ll follow. And it was pretty clear to me very early on that I didn’t have a lot of the values that mainstream society seems to have.

I believe that if you do things that are really important to you and you do them very well, somehow you’ll be rewarded and it may not be quid pro quo or tit for tat or something, but somehow it’ll work out. If you are transparent and if you do believe in what you do, and if you do respect other people in how you go about that. You know, that whole thing, isn’t it about freedom but freedom as long as you don’t impact on other people’s freedom.

So that’s been a bit of a narrative for me. And it’s almost like if I had to say, well, where does all that come from? I’m convinced it came from being a little girl who used to believe in her dreams and sitting around daydreaming and imagining the future and imagining things way ahead of time and backing that instead of what was just literally right in front of me.

And that came from coming from a family where we didn’t have a lot, it was very difficult. So we had a lot of trauma in the family, a lot of poverty in the family. But what I had with my INTP mother was a woman who said, use your brains and you can help other people. Use your brains and you’ll find a way to construct something positive out of whatever happens. And I saw her do that. So I had a very good role model in my mother. And I also had a very good role model in reading because I love to write, I was always reading books.

I just found that I was far more interested in thinking big picture future than I ever was in what was going on in the here and now. So it was some something about a knowing that I had and that I couldn’t not know once you have that feeling. And also what was good for me, if this makes sense, it’s like I lived my life backwards.

So if you start working at four, that’s a long time that you’re in the workplace, and if you’re very famous, when you’re a child, well, you’ve sort of been there, done that. It doesn’t matter. It’s like I didn’t have to build up to anything. It’s like, well, I’ve already ticked off this and I’ve ticked off that and I’ve ticked off something else.

And so there’s so many things that I had done that really didn’t concern me at all that I could just go along my own merry way, do what I liked because I didn’t have to prove anything. If that made sense.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Thank you. It’s just fascinating to hear how, with all those different things in the mix, how you created your story to where you are now. So thank you for that. So in Wholehearted, I share 15 wholehearted self-leadership tips, particularly for women, but for all people. So I’m interested in what your top wholehearted self-leadership tips might be for women.

Meredith Fuller: The first one is I believe that it’s a good idea to have a small group of people with you, like your clan or friends or colleagues who you trust, that you feel safe with and who have similar shared values. I take that very seriously. I won’t work on projects with people that I don’t feel that we’re aligned about our values and honesty, transparency, trust, loyalty, all those things are really important to me.

So, that’s a very important issue about who do you connect with. I believe that it’s important to work on communication. So, if I’m going to do it, I need to know how I feel. So I’ll do a lot of checking. How am I feeling? What’s being triggered in me? What do I need to do about that? Can I talk to someone? How do I do that? So in my life I’ve always been keen to look for wise counsel. When I was a child, I got to figure out what I would look for in a partner, because how would I know I didn’t have a father. We were very isolated in our home. There weren’t very many male role models.

So I read all the classics when I was in primary school and I thought, I don’t want all the exciting men. I want all the nice men that I’m reading about in these classics. So I thought: these are the qualities I want in a man. I want a nice man. And I got it from the books. And then as I got older, I realized that I want to understand myself and that will help me understand others.

So anything that would help me do the best I can for myself, I will do. So I went into therapy. I went into supervision. As a psychologist, I think it’s important that we do our own therapy and we do our own supervision. So, whether you go to coaches or whoever you go to, it’s going to someone where you can actually explore your process. So I think that’s really important.

And of course, reading, I’m always reading millions of books so I think that’s important. The other thing I think is working out very simply, what do you need for wellness? So, I’m a diabetic, I’ve got a lot of health issues. I have to say part of my day is managing my diabetes, is going to appointments and is to understand that as I get older, I have less energy than I did when I was younger because of that.

So therefore I have to really cherry pick my projects. So I think, know what your health is. One of the biggest problems I’ve seen in nearly every woman who’s come to me is they push themselves way too far. They work too long hours. Doing work that’s killing them and they can’t stop. And so I think it’s really important to say in the week, how much space have you got for work? How much do you need for sleep? How much do you need for your internal life? How much do you need for your relationships and make that pie and make it work?

And I’d also do that with being strict about those boundaries. So both Brian and I, because we’re helpers and we’re feelers, we’re busy. So people come to helping, feeling, busy people and you need to learn to say no. And so while it would be nice to do everything everyone wants you to do, I can’t. So, be really clear about how do you cluster it. So it might be for me, I work in clusters of time. So it might be two days for this and all night for that and a weekend for that. And that’s how I like to work. Other people it might be well mornings isfor this and afternoons is for that. So know what your best rhythm is and then be really strict about how you protect that. And don’t keep saying, oh, I’ll just let this one in. I’ll just let that one in because you’ll get overloaded and you get sick and then, you’re no good to anyone.

So I think they’re probably the key things for me, but, really overall, it’s something about, got to know who you are. You got to know what’s important to you. You got to know what you’re here for. What’s your purpose. And the threads will probably stay the same, although the execution of that will shift over time.

And so you have to keep saying, does this matter to me? Is this engaging me? Am I growing in this? Am I learning in this? Am I sharing with others with this? What’s the point of me doing this and doing it because you want to do it, you believe in it and you love it. So they’re probably the most important things, but you know, it be sensible. Like you might have to say to yourself, well, how much money do I need to earn to live for the week? Okay. I need to earn x dollars. How many hours a week can I possibly work x hours? Well, what do I need to earn per hour to do that? And what will I do to get that? And then if I’m prepared to say, I’ll do a day for that, then that gives me three days for something else. Okay. That’s fine. So it’s not like a childish, I’ll just do what I like, blow everyone else. It’s about making choices and decisions that give the bulk of your time to what you love and you think is very important, but also that you’re mindful that you do live in a society and you do have to buy food and pay rent and, you know, whatever. So something about, honouring, not only yourself, but the other in relationships.

Terri Connellan: It’s a rich body of knowledge, honed from all your experiences and all your client work too. So thank so much for sharing that. And thanks so much for your time today. It’s been a fantastic conversation and I’m sure the listeners will get so many gems of wisdom and prompts to think about themselves. And thank you also for your comments and kind insights about Wholehearted, my book as well, really appreciate that and your support. So, Meredith, where can people find more about you and your body of work online?

Meredith Fuller: My website’s MeredithFuller.com.au. That’s probably a good place to start.

Terri Connellan: That’s great. And you’ve got so much on there about all the things you’re up to your books, your work with your husband, Brian, which we didn’t talk about so much, but he’s a filmmaker, psychologist as well, and your partnership is an incredible part of your life as well. So we’ll pop the links to Meredith’s key work in the show notes and thanks everyone for listening and thanks so much Meredith.