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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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

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

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of interview with Valerie Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terri Connellan: Absolutely.

Valerie Lewis: Have you found that to be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valerie Lewis: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valerie Lewis: This is where the modeling comes in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terri Connellan: Thanks so much Valerie.

Valerie Lewis

About Valerie Lewis

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

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

Newsletter sign-up: Blooming news + free guided meditation

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

Links to explore:

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

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

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

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

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

My coaching:

Work with me

Personality Stories Coaching

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

Connect on social media

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

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

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

personality and story podcast work life

Shaping a Multi-Passionate Life with Meredith Fuller

January 6, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

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

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of interview with Meredith Fuller

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

Meredith Fuller: I’m delighted with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meredith Fuller

About Meredith Fuller

Meredith’s concurrent careers have included author, playwrightcolumnist & media commentatortalkback radio guesttheatre director & producer, TV co-host, actorpsychological 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’s website: https://meredithfuller.com.au/

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fuller.walsh

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-fuller-8075a110/

Links to explore:

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

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

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

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

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

My coaching:

Work with me

Personality Stories Coaching

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

Connect on social media

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

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

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

creativity podcast

Developing an Artist’s Life with Lynn Hanford-Day

December 28, 2021

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

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

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript of interview with Lynn Hanford-Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lynn Hanford-Day: Totally. Yeah.

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

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

Lynn Hanford-Day: It does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terri Connellan: That’s wonderful.

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

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

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

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. Completely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lynn Hanford-Day

About Lynn Hanford-Day

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

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

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

Links to explore:

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

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

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

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

My coaching:

Work with me

Personality Stories Coaching

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

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

Connect on social media

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

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

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

Books self-leadership + leadership writing

Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club

December 8, 2021

The Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club next gathers together to take a deep year-long read together of Wholehearted and the Companion Workbook in December 2022! So get on the waitlist so you don’t miss out! Here’s why I created it, what it is, how it works, how to access it and why you might want to.

About me and my Wholehearted books

I’m Terri Connellan – an author, creative transition coach and personality type practitioner.

I wrote two books Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook over 4.5 years as I went through a major life transition. Shifting from long-term government employee of 30+ years, I now enjoy a more creative life focused around writing, coaching, personality type, wellbeing and inspiring others.

My books written from the midst of transition, share the journey and the learning on the way to inspire your creative transition. The books chose me if you like because of the particular set of experiences I’ve been through and learned from that enabled me to write and share my story with heart.

I know how uncertain it seems, how lost and alone we can feel, when making major change. So I share my experiences to support you to be more wholehearted and shape the self-leadership skills to create what you desire.

Photo by Samantha Burns of the @MaianbarBeachCafe

The why of Wholehearted

The WHY of Wholehearted is to support women to develop the self-leadership skills to live more creative, wholehearted lives.

This WHY helped me to make sense and structure what was happening into something useful for myself and for others from this time of major change. And I offer this learning to you to help you shift to what is more positive to you.

If you haven’t read or bought Wholehearted yet, you can download Chapter 1 for free. This also provides an overview of the contents pages so you can see what’s in the book as a whole.

It was always my dream and desire to create support and a space for discussion about transitions people are going through based on the insights of the books. That’s why I’ve created the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club for a year-long read of the books together.

So why a book club to support you in transition?

So you might be asking, why a book club to support me as I contemplate or go through change?

If you are going through a major change in your life, you’ll know it can feel VERY destabilising! The transitions can be many and varied such as:

  • job change
  • retirement
  • redundancy
  • retrenchment
  • wanting to write a book
  • making space for creativity
  • making art more central in your life
  • working for yourself instead of others
  • tree change
  • sea change
  • moving house
  • becoming an author
  • stepping into a new phase of creativity or writing or art
  • kids leaving home
  • relationship change
  • leaving paid employment
  • learning new skills you want to shape a business or practice around

And so much more. You might not even know exactly what it is but that where you are is not where you want to be.

Navigating change can take time and leave us feeling lonely at times as we re-create a new identity. Our networks might change. We are building on the foundations of what we have already created and working with our personality strengths in new ways which is positive but takes work. It is often about how we have defined ourselves so it means looking at ourselves in new ways.

So the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club is a way of processing all of these experiences in a structured, supported way. Wholehearted is full of rich insights and resources! It’s the wisdom of a lifetime distilled. People are telling me they are savouring it, meandering, going down side tracks, reading other books mentioned within its pages. And that is exactly what I envisaged the reading experience to be like: something we carve out time for. It is a practical book above all; that’s why there’s an accompanying Wholehearted Companion Workbook.

About the Book Club + how to join in

So yes, it’s a book club, because book clubs are an awesome way to reflect and connect around reading. But it’s also a community/group coaching program with 90-minute monthly live calls with me as your coach asking questions to prompt growth, support you in transition and creativity, suggesting just the right resources, and guiding you to the best outcomes. Plus you get to learn from others, tap into my experiences of transition and writing the books and ask me anything you want!

We’ll work through the book and workbook one section at at time in a deep, guided read you can apply immediately in your life. So whatever change is happening (or not happening) for you, I hope you’ll join me in the book club.

This is a cost-effective way to get coaching guidance and commit to change with support and community. There is a monthly payment plan and an annual upfront one where you can save as well as 50% scholarship options for Black Indigenous Women of Colour, women with disabilities and LGBQT women and non binary people to encourage participation and equity. Apply here for to be considered for the scholarship option.

So head to the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club enrolment and info page to find out more and join us. And join the waitlist to be the first to know when enrolment is open for our December 2022 into 2023 start!

I hope you will join me and the community of women that is gathering. You can DM me on social media too if you have any questions.

Want to read more?

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Wholehearted Reader Praise

Wholehearted Book Walk-through

Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch 1

Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch 2

Wholehearted Book Club Notes – generic Book Club notes, but they give you an idea of what we will cover over the year!

creativity podcast writing

Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch 2

November 22, 2021

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

Welcome to Episode 3 of the Create Your Story Podcast!

This episode is the second Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch event on 10 September 2021. I chat with Beth Cregan, Lynn Hanford-Day and Meredith Fuller, who have been key partners and supporters on the journey of writing Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook.

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

  • About my book Wholehearted.
  • The value of co-writing and community to help write with Beth Cregan
  • Moving from Breakdown to Breakthrough with Lynn Hanford-Day
  • How Wholehearted can help people in transition, with Meredith Fuller
  • Tarot and intuition
  • How creativity, writing and art can help us heal, grow and transition
  • And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 3 of the Create Your Story podcast. This is a recording of conversations from the second Wholehearted virtual book launch event, just after Wholehearted was published on the 6th of September, 2021. Being locked down when the book was published, all the initial events were of necessity of virtual.

It was an opportunity to connect with people who’ve been on the journey with me in various ways. And chat about our connections as they relate to Wholehearted, some key themes arising in the book and about the value of the book for people going through transition.

So in this episode, I’m joined by Beth Cregan who is my morning co-writing buddy who supported me as I completed the edits and prepared Wholehearted for publication via our early morning writing connection. Beth’s a writing teacher, storyteller, writer and founder of Write Away With Me and has a soon to be published book on teaching writing.

I’m also joined by Lynn Hanford-Day, visual artist specializing in sacred geometry, Islamic patterns, mandalas and yantras at her business, Sacred Intuitive Art. And she’s also a Wholehearted Story author on Quiet Writing and we’ve connected through social media and our stories have lots of parallels. Lynn’s story Breakdown to Breakthrough is mentioned Wholehearted and is a story I found myself going back to as I wrote because of the parallels, so it was lovely to connect with Lynn in launching and publishing Wholehearted.

I’m also joined by Meredith Fuller, a psychologist, psychological spokesperson for the media, author, playwright, theatre creator and a fellow psychological type practitioner, which is how we met. And she also wrote the first fabulous review of Wholehearted, for which I’m very grateful. Meredith has some fabulous insights about Wholehearted can help people in transition and shares how she is using the book in her work with clients with positive results.

This was a deep two hour conversation, edited down to 1 hour, about Wholehearted, the book, getting to what matters, moving on from an unlived or unfulfilled life, strategies for dealing with uncertainty, how creativity can help us heal and so much more. There’s so much in this conversation that you can apply to your life and to work with clients. In the show notes (below), I share links about where you can find out more about my book Wholehearted and the Companion Workbook as well as more about our guests. The great news too, is that there are solo episodes coming up with Beth, Lynn and Meredith too where we dive deeper into their stories, their writing, and how they’ve created their story. I hope you’ll enjoy listening and that you’ll gain some insights to help guide your life, especially if making a shift to more wholehearted living and writing and creativity are important for you. Enjoy listening.

Transcript of Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch chat

Terri Connellan: Well people, thank you so much for joining me for the online launch of Wholehearted. It’s really important to me to have you all here from different parts of my life: long-term friends, family, colleagues, people I’ve met through social media, Wholehearted Stories authors, my psychological type connections, my morning writing buddy, people from so many places. So you’re all welcome. It’s lovely to have you here.

 I’m delighted to be joined by three special people today who are going to chat with us about writing and about the journey. And I’ll talk about the book as well. So firstly, to welcome Beth, my morning co-writing buddy. And we’ve been both writing books for quite a long time, getting up at 5:30 in the morning and writing together by distance between Melbourne and Sydney virtually co-writing, which has been fantastic. Beth’s a teacher, storyteller, writer and founder of Write Away With Me and has a soon to be published book on teaching writing. So welcome to Beth.

 We also have Lynn Hanford-Day. Lynn’s a visual artist specializing in sacred geometry, Islamic patterns, mandalas and yantras at her business, Sacred Intuitive Art. And she’s also a Wholehearted Story author on Quiet Writing and we’ve connected through social media and our stories have lots of parallels. Lynn i s mentioned in the books, I thought it’d be lovely to have Lynn here to chat today, too. So thanks for coming in early from England.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah, you’re welcome.

Terri Connellan: It’s great to have you. And Meredith Fuller. Meredith is a psychologist, psychological spokesperson for the media, author, playwright, theatre creator, a fellow psychological type practitioner, which is how we met. And she also wrote the first fabulous review of Wholehearted, for which I’m very grateful. So welcome to Meredith and friends from all parts of life celebrating Wholehearted with me. It’s great joy to have you here.

 So what we’ll do is I’ll tell about the book, about writing the book, why I wrote it. And what I think might be in there for people who, who are looking to engage with the book then we’ll have a chat first with Beth and then with Lynn and then with Meredith, but feel free to ask questions any time.

So first of all, about the book. There is Wholehearted and there’s the Wholehearted Companion Workbook. So the two books very much go together. This is the main book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition. And the Wholehearted Companion Workbook sits alongside it, but the two books were born from the same draft. So when I wrote the draft of Wholehearted, it was a 100,000 word draft. And when I sent it to Penelope Love, who was my editor for the book, she said to me, you’ve got two books here, which was lovely to hear. Cause I knew I had to cut it back. But I didn’t quite know where to start. So we went through the big draft and color coded which parts went in the main book, which parts went in the workbook and which parts maybe went somewhere else to be repurposed. But most of that draft was used in some way, shape or form.

So the why of the book. In some ways the book chose me because my experience was that I was moving from a 30 year career in the vocational education sector and teaching and leading within that sector. To wanting to shift towards more creativity and writing, coaching, just getting my life into creating my story in a different way, from the way it was going. And I think getting back to what was important to me, right from the outset in my life, but perhaps going down different paths, sometimes we don’t quite go down the path that we wish to go down. So I found that as I was going through that journey, I had plans to, still have plans to, write a novel and to write other things. But I just found this book was really calling me to write about that story as I was going through the journey of the experience.

So the why of Wholehearted was partly for myself, to make sense of what was happening, to fulfill my dream as a writer, but it was also about supporting women to develop self-leadership resources to live more creative and wholehearted lives. Because what I found is, as I went through the journey, there weren’t a lot of other resources to help me. I actually felt quite alone. And it was quite uncertain. It was a very difficult time. And often when you embark on a transition or a change, other things happen in that mix.

And it was about finding the signposts, the way out. It was about connecting back with what was important to me, about honoring my body of work. From that I developed a suite of 15 Wholehearted Self-leadership skills, which are in the book about things that really helped me to anchor myself and live the way that I wanted to live.

So I shaped all of that learning up. And in there as well there are some shadow aspects too. Often with any journey, there’s the light and the dark side, and some of the shadow aspects were things like having a shadow career which is a concept of Steven Pressfield’s. For me, it was about being a writing teacher when I probably wanted to be a writer. He uses the example of someone who’s a roadie for a band when they really want to be the musician. So it’s interesting just to look at what might be lying alongside or beneath the shadow careers that we’re pursuing as well. Things like grief, comparisonitis, envy are all things that I explore in the book as well.

Meredith had a lovely line in her review. She says, ‘As an introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging female INTJ, her work is well-structured while enabling the reader to meander.’ And that was definitely how I felt when I was writing. I knew where I was going. I actually had the structure pretty much sorted. That’s a mind map from February 2017, which pretty much captures what the book’s about. It says the structure could be personal narrative and application and exercise. And that’s exactly what it ended up being. So a mix of memoir, personal narrative, people engaging with it themselves and then working through it as well. So, yes, so there’s definitely structure there and it certainly is an INTJ structure. The cover of the book with the Nautilus shell, the symbol for my business is very much that idea of spiralling, going over our learning and often the same lessons will come to us or the same experiences and we’ll keep spiraling up through. So that’s, the meandering structure and often in the book, I’m revisiting things from a different perspective because I think that’s how we learn.

So the why that kept me going was that very much about completing the book to support other women. Part of it was about my journey and capturing that and the desire to complete a book and publish a book too was also very strong, but it was very much about that ‘why’, about supporting women to lead more Wholehearted lives through having the self-leadership resources and the skills and the strategies and a bit of a roadmap and a compass or a toolkit to know how to do that.

Beth and myself and another writer were having a chat and the word tenacity came up. And we was saying that it’s a psychological journey of, you know, here’s the ideas and you go through the drafting and for me, it was a four and a half year journey to get from that mindmap to where we are today. And it does require tenacity and it requires a real commitment to the outcome. But also to the process, I think it has helped me to understand the process. There’s a lovely book which Beth recommended to me called the Writer’s Process by Anne Janzer. She compares it to bread making, but you get the ingredients and you mix it up and then you let it sit. Then you let it rise. You move through that stage. And I think for me, that long journey was very much like that, that whole experience of letting things rest, letting them grow. But there definitely were times when I felt like It was all too hard because one, it takes an extraordinary amount of time and two it’s complex and three, it’s just a slog. Beth, do you want to comment? Cause we were chatting about that. You had some lovely insights too, because Beth’s just finishing her draft to head into her publisher. So she’s very much in the slog phase.

Beth Cregan: I feel like I’ve just finished the worst of the slog phase, but apart from the dynamics that you’ve already mentioned, I think for me, part of what was really tough about staying with it was that I feel like I’ve had, not so much a crash course, cause it’s been going for awhile, but a course in learning how to fail and learning how to put yourself up each day and not get it right. Learning that you can write and get notes back to say this argument doesn’t hang together. And I’m not someone who grew up in a family where failing was okay, really. We learned, we had plan A and plan B and plan C and you learn how to plan not to fail. So for me, turning up each day and not getting it right which is part of writing. So I feel like in a way it doesn’t matter what happens with the book. I think for me, part of the journey was learning how to not get things right. And be okay with it. I think that’s part of writing, don’t you think Terri too?,

Terri Connellan: Yeah I do and I think for me, particularly I’ve been surprised at the endurance that it does take. Like a marathon versus sprint mindset. You start with the plans, you do the draft and you don’t know where you’re going. And I had a bit in the middle where I had that first draft finished a hundred thousand words, and I sat it aside and I would tinker with it. I’d fix up the grammar and, move a few paragraphs or sentences around, but I didn’t know what to do with it too. So a lot of it’s about the level of skill you have. And what I learned on that journey was to reach out to other people. And I’m a person who’s very independent and will try and work things out myself, but it was really important to reach out to Penelope who is a publisher and editor of 25 years experience. And worked through with me on that a hundred thousand word draft working out, which was which book. And then chapter by chapter back and forward. One thing I learned is that it takes as long as it takes. Sometimes you can’t rush things. You just have to sit with it. And I found the sitting was sometimes about that incubating and also about letting other experiences come in as well. So I could write what I needed to write. So it was almost like the wisdom had to catch up with the draft.

But the hardest part for me was the editing. I had no idea how hard editing a book is. There’s the developmental editing when you get the structure right. And then we went through chapter by chapter. And then after that time, we probably went back through both books another six or seven times. So you’re just reading and each time it’s a different read.

Sometimes it’s fine-tuning, but it’s still reading. Other times it’s looking at the structure as a whole. So it’s interesting, cause by background, I’m a teacher of reading and writing. Knowing all those things about narrative and structure and writing, and then taking my skills to another level, which has been a really exciting journey. And one I can help others with too, also do some more writing, which is great. Beth and I are going to do a podcast chat soon about all the lessons we’ve learned through that journey.

So I might ask Beth a few more questions, now we have started chatting. We write in the morning. So we hop on usually at six now and set our timer, write for 25 minutes chat for five minutes about writing and about mindset which is fantastic. And then we do another 25 minutes. And you do two or three rounds. We try for five mornings a week and that’s a great way to start the day. So Beth and I formed a really lovely connection through that. So we thought it would be nice to talk about the role of co-writing and support in the writing process. Beth, how has that helped you that whole co-writing, writing together as we’ve written our books?

Beth Cregan: I would say it’s instrumental. I was thinking because you’d sent through the questions, I’ve been thinking about it in the last couple of days and I was really lost. So I had written a book or a manuscript and it had been accepted and then the publisher had changed hands sothey’d been overtaken by another company and they said, this manuscript, we’re not going to go with it as it stands now. We want it to fit into a different structure. So I had something that I envisaged was ready to go and it suddenly wasn’t. And at the same time that that happened lockdown started. So that was March last year. So I was basically without my job, which is writing workshops in schools, which I love. So I’d lost my work. I was in a house with my two daughters who were both working from home and my husband who’s super loud, working from home, like on the phone a lot. And I really felt alone and I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to keep doing it. I just got this idea that I was going to see who would join me to write at dawn. And at that time it was 5:30 in the morning. So we used to wake at five and be ready to go at five 30. So Terri wasn’t part of that first crew and the other two came and sort of left. And by the time they were ready to go, Terri and I had connected. So it’s really been the two of us that have been doing it all that time. I actually don’t think I would be here without that. So it was foundational to get up and to start my day in community with somebody who was a little bit further ahead of the journey than me in terms of, I think you were editing. When you started, you were doing what I’ve just finished. So you were probably a year really ahead of the game. Or a process ahead of me anyway. And without that, I don’t think I would have kept going. So it started, it gave me a structure, it got me out of bed, but it also gave me courage. It was hard. It was a hard job for me to do, to take something that was organized in one way and throw it all up in the air and put it back together. And it required real courage. And it makes such a difference. You’re not writing together, you’re on screen, but you feel the energy, you feel the support and it does give you tremendous courage to do the work that you need to do.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. It was, and that was the same for me because when we connected, I was going through one chapter at a time. And cause I had two books. I didn’t make it easy for myself. I was doing writing two books at once. So as one chapter came and the next one would come back and it was like this constant iteration going through. And then when I finished one book, we go on to the other book and then when I finished that one and then we go back to the first book and it’s a really hardcore process and it does take commitment. So just that ability to have others, as in my acknowledgements in the book I’ve acknowledged many people here and in one way, shape or form. And it made me realize, you think writing is sitting down with a pen and or computer or any creative act, but there’s actually, all the influences, all the connections, the camaraderie that we’ve enjoyed. I totally agree. The other thing we’ve talked about a lot is the value of routines and getting that work done too. So just that discipline, we often know by 7 30, 8 o’clock we’ve got done what was important.

Beth Cregan: That’s exactly how I feel. I feel like by the time I finish, usually my husband wakes during the end of our morning and as we’re finishing up, I can smell the coffee and you know, that it’s time to finish and you do. I come out of that room thinking I’ve done the best of what I need to do. Everything on top of today is a bonus, but I’ve actually met my creative self for the day. And that to me is the most important. It’s not always the most commercial. It’s not always the bit that earns me money, but it is the bit that’s most important to me. So it feels like church, dawn writing.

Terri Connellan: It’s important. For me, it’s about getting what’s important, done because often particularly running a business and earning money. Writing is not a fast way to earn money. It is a way we can combine with other methods to earn income, but it’s actually something that’s easy to put aside because it doesn’t seem like it’s a quick path to income. And because it’s a long haul, it’s easy to put aside. So yeah, to me that camaraderie has been so important. So you’ve read Wholehearted. What would you say it offers women? Who would you recommend it to and what would you be saying to them?

Beth Cregan: Well, I think it’s for anybody who wants to live aligned to their values. And that was really what spoke to me about it. And I think when I wanted to start a business and do something different, I did work in schools originally, it was because I wanted to follow my values. I wanted to put what was important to me first in my life. And I feel like Wholehearted is about that. It’s about living in line with your values and the tools that teach you to trust in yourself. And I think that self-trust is so through, I was always interested. I always had Oracle cards and those sorts of tools available to me. But I think it was after reading Wholehearted that I really thought, it’s not just a fun thing to do when you have a quiet moment, it’s a way of training your intuition. It’s a way of trusting yourself. So I feel like it, that to me really stood out. This is a way to learn to trust your gut instinct and align with your values.

Terri Connellan: Thank you for those insights. I love that idea of self-trust cause we talk about like self leadership to me means lots of things: being self-directed, fulfilling ourselves, but that idea of self-trust I think is a lovely dimension. So yeah. Thank you.

Beth Cregan: You know Terri and I’ve never met each other face and yet we wake up together every single morning.

Terri Connellan: That’s funny. The first person we see

Beth Cregan: It’s a very powerful way to form community without that face to face contact. I wouldn’t have thought it was as possible as it is online.

Terri Connellan: Exactly. It’s been really powerful. And I think for anybody who’s writing or thinking of writing or working on creativity, because I’m an introvert, Beth’s an introvert. One thing I’ve really learned from my journeys… I would walk to the beach on my own, I’d write on my own. I now write with other people. I walk with other people. I’ve actually found that – I don’t know if it’s because of midlife and seeking the opposite, but it’s actually helping me to have that community to get things done. It’s probably lockdown as well. It’s doing things in different ways.

Susan has asked what role did the Oracle cards play and what benefit did they bring to you? So thank you for that question. So tarot and oracle are in my book, I use them quite a lot. And Beth was just mentioning how she’s picked up on that practice too, from reading the book and putting it into place. So when I started my transition journey, I had three goals. So one was to become a coach, apart from writing which was the reason for it, to become a coach, to become a psychological type practitioner and to learn about the intuitive art of tarot.

So I didn’t know why tarot was important but I knew it was something I wanted to do. And as I’ve explored in the book, what I found over time, that it was actually my personality where my extroverted thinking side had been dominant in the workplace. And what I found was I had to get more in touch with my intuition. So what I do in the morning, I do Morning Pages just to write about how I’m feeling, what’s happening and then I do the tarot work and I find that it’s very much about tapping into the wisdom that’s beneath the surface of what’s happening. It’s a structured way to listen to my intuition.

Do you want to make a comment Beth too, I know you’re exploring at the minute.

Beth Cregan: I used to use oracle cards. Just to ask questions and perhaps look for answers. I don’t think I ever looked that much at the symbols. I would pull out a card and then quickly go to the guidebook and find the answer. So I sort of expected that someone else had the answer and I was going to access it through the Oracle cards. And I think through tarot I’ve started to just pick one or two cards, look at the symbols. See if any of the symbols actually speak to me. So maybe use one of those symbols to think about to anchor that week. So last week it was a pomegranate. That was one of the symbols that came out. So every day I would check in and think how does that symbol speak to me today? Is it the fruit? Is it about feeling juicy, which is an Ayurvedic term for having something to give. I listened to a podcast where the woman suggested that you draw your cards and then you write yourself a spell and that is little rhyming spell. It’s the This Jungian Life podcast and it was an episode about tarot. And I love that. So now sometimes I write myself a little spell and I’ve had some real breakthroughs. I’m finding that really astounding. I’m sure you’re totally used to that, Terri but I’m finding that things are coming up and I’m just like, whoa, that was exactly what I needed for that day.

Terri Connellan: That’s how it works for me. And what I’ve found with writing the book too. I had that structure of where I wanted to go based on that mind map and putting the structure, which I put in Scrivener, which is a writing software, which some of you may be aware of. So when you put it in the Scrivener, you’ve got the whole structure there and you can write wherever you want to write. So, I did most of the bulk of the writing in one month. I wrote 50,000 words in one month using NaNoWriMo, it’s National Novel Writing Month, but it wasn’t a novel. So I wrote 1,667 words each day. And through the practice of Morning Pages and Tarot, I would find that something was surfacing. About my passions or maybe about envy would come up. And then I’d think, well, that’s what I need to write about today. So it was a nice way of tapping creatively into what was surfacing at that time. So I hope that’s helpful, Susan. There’s heaps more in the book about it..

Beth Cregan: And I guarantee you’ll be, curious, and interested in learning more.

Terri Connellan: Thanks Beth, and really appreciate your support and our co-writing together. Thanks so much.

So perfect segue, talking about intuition, to have a chat with you, Lynn. So Lynn Hanford-Day is a visual artist, particularly sacred geometry and her website and her work is around Sacred Intuitive Art. I think we connected online through social media. I have a Wholehearted Story series on my blog. So whilst I was going through my writing of my journey and going through my own journey, I also invited other women to write stories for my blog. And Lynn wrote a story called from Breakdown to Breakthrough, and I found it was a story I kept going back to again and again, as I was writing my story because it echoed so strongly. So that’s one of the many reasons I thought it would be lovely to have Lynn here today. So Lynn,do you want to tell us about moving from breakdown to breakthrough? And it was a huge story, but how you see that process, what it’s like to move from really tough times through to breaking through, to being more wholehearted or whatever language is important for you.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah, thanks, Terri. I look back on that blog post now and see it as a kind of really important milestone in my own recovery, if you like. So I had a breakdown in 2013 which came as a huge shock to me and everybody else who worked with me. Looking back on it, I think that the signs were there. I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t notice. So I’d had a 30 year career as a Human Resources Director. Along the way I qualified as a psychotherapist and as a coach. And that was back in 2008. Yet, having had all that training, I didn’t recognize what was happening for me. So I woke up on January the seventh, 2013. I couldn’t move. And. I told myself for three months that I was fine. Even though I was being signed off sick a month at a time, which is quite unusual in the UK, it’s usually for a fortnight, they keep reviewing, but it was when I accepted that I was unwell, that things began to shift for me.

And during that time I received an email from an artist. I’d bought one of her paintings, which was a very ethereal painting. And she was offering a workshop in meditative art. I had no idea what meditative art was. I hadn’t done art since leaving school. What really called me was the word meditation, and I’d got it into my head that to meditate was my way through to recovery. Although my counselor had said, you’re too ill to meditate. What you need is to learn to relax. So off I went to this workshop and it was a portal for me and it was really a process of automatic drawing. So we had a guided visualization. And then with closing our eyes, we just allowed the pencil to move across the page.

And then we looked at the scribble and noticed whether there were any signs, symbols, actual figures, you know, a house, whatever it might be and then redrew that. We sat in her kitchen and drank lots of tea and ate lots of cake. And it was a very kind of nurturing space for me, but that ignited m y exploration of creativity. In a very kind of monochrome world, I was fascinated with color and it was through those workshops that I was able to play. And I think I hadn’t had a lot of play in my life. I was very much my job. I was very much the career woman or single parent. I’d got divorced in 1999. I’d got a son who at that time was at university. I was going through the empty nest kind of feeling, feeling very lost. And I was living for my job and I also had a lot of unresolved grief. You mentioned grief earlier, so I kind of revisited Jung and in reading various other texts, this whole idea that you’ve mentioned Terri, about the shadow life, but for me, it was about the unlived life. And I became really interested in the symbology and meaning. I was also really fascinated by tarot and oracle. So I kind of started playing with that. And I’ve always had a love of mandalas. So I’d got a coloring book and I would spend hours coloring in cause it switched off my chatter in my head. And as I began to feel better, I tried to find a workshop to learn how to draw Tibetan Buddhist mandalas. That’s what I was after.

Couldn’t find one and ended up buying a book off Amazon, a pair of compasses and a protractor hadn’t used since it was at school. And again, I started playing and I also discovered something called intuitive arts because I don’t view myself as an artist. Intuitive art was a kind of a “real thing” that meant people who couldn’t paint could be allowed to paint and it involved a lot of layers. It’s a paint for the process and the sheer joy of the experience, rather than having to paint a particular outcome or anything representational. And I absolutely loved it. And it was , coming from within, hence the word intuitive. And so not having to draw or to create something that someone could look out and say, haha, that’s a picture of the house down the road cause I really didn’t want that. So a lot of things kind of coalesced and over the course of a couple of years, I did eventually find some classes. There’s a college in London in traditional arts, which are all based on geometry. And I kind of moved from making the stuff up and drawing my own patterns through to learning a lot of the underlying principles of many designs that you’ll see across the world be it in Christian churches or mosques or Shamanic stuff or Native American Indians. This is worldwide. And I was fascinated by it. So I’ve kind of progressed from there. And that was, I think, pivotal in terms of the breakthrough. I know if somebody had said to me, you’re going to become an artist with an Instagram account and people around the world are going to love your work enough to want to buy it.

I would have like, what are you smoking? That’s just not me. And here I am, I still work full time. I became self-employed. So I earn a living through consulting and coaching. Sometimes I take on contracts back in the world of HR. So my art is done at weekends or in the evening, and I’m not an early bird. So my practice is frequently late in the evening or on the weekend.

Terri Connellan: Thank you so much for talking us through a many years journey and a beautiful journey. And I think the reason why your story resonated so much with mine and with the book, I think we’ve tracked along journeys in that we both had long careers, mine was in a government environment and yours in different corporate environments. But that idea of getting to what’s important, not knowing what the path is necessarily, but that’s where intuition comes and that’s what I’ve tried to describe in the book too. Just the whole process of how we can follow our heart and move, seek out people to help us.

And skills. It’s interesting you mentioned courses. For me, skills was the framework. And I don’t know if that’s because I come from a background in skills training, but it was like, and I hear it in your story too: I want to learn this skill. I want to learn this skill. And it’s like a sort of stepping stone that we we go through to get back to what’s important or to get to what we perhaps should have been doing all the time, even though we didn’t know what it was.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Completely, I still do a mix of kind of making up the pattern myself, as well as working with some kind of very pre-defined patterns, particularly from Morocco or Persia, Persian patterns, but that tradition going back to say the 13th or 14th century. But for me, it’s so much more than the pattern because the underlying meaning and symbology of those shapes is really quite profound as is the geometry. So I’ve had an incredible learning experience, which again, I wasn’t expecting because a lot of that underlying meaning takes us back to people like Jung.

There’s a psychology, there’s a lot of numerology that sits within it. There’s a lot of connection to the cosmos. So I absolutely love patterns that reflect the cycle of the moon or Venus. And each of those planets create their own orbital patterns which are truly beautiful and timeless. I often set the pattern on layers of color, which is the kind of going back to that original inspiration about intuitive painting.

So as a creative process, it’s given me the space in my life and within me to do something completely different to the corporate world. And I think that’s why it’s become such an important practice for me.

Terri Connellan: And I think that whole journey you describe in your Wholehearted Story and in what you’re describing, and what I talk about in the book is that in all the discussions we’ll have today, we’re all interested in Jung. We’re all interested in intuition. We’re all creatives, so it makes you see why we’ve connected. It’s about that journey of wholeness often has those elements and we see it time and time again, of how creativity saves us, doesn’t it, art or writing.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. I think particularly with drawing of any type, it takes us to the right brain. And I’ve lived in a very left brain world and emphasis on the rational and the logical. What I’ve also encountered through working with arts is how it brings up the inner critic. If you want to encounter your inner critic, ask somebody to go and paint a picture because it’s right there immediately. And I think whatever your creative passion is, then the inner critic is very much alive and well. So I suspect you encountered that through your process as well, Terri. Learning to accommodate that voice and learning how to quieten that voice. And as you’ve mentioned as well, learning patience and the art of slow, because for me, the voice of the heart is often a whisper and we have to be quiet to hear that and to really pay attention.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for those beautiful words. And again, that’s in my journey and also in all the Wholehearted Stories that different women have written. You hear again and again that hearing a voice, sometimes it’s an actual voice, sometimes it’s just learning to listen to that intuitive pull towards some sort of work or creativity. But there’s continuing themes about that importance of listening to our intuition. I saw it in terms of my personality structure, just as our world is extroverted more than introverted, it’s sensing more than intuitive. One, cause she can’t see it, it’s not a logical thing. It’s not easily seen. A lot of what we’re seeing is that ability to reflect and Lyn has made a comment: ‘this pandemic will have triggered significant reflection on the way we have worked and lived our lives. Wholehearted seems therefore very timely.’ I think that’s exactly what it’s about too, that journey from being very focused and often it’s about money. It’s about income. It’s about identity. I found a lot of my transition shift was about identity. I don’t know if that resonates with you Lynn?

Lynn Hanford-Day: Completely, I realized that I was my job and my identity was very tied up with that. So I also knew I needed to change the way I lived my life. Otherwise I was in danger of repeating the experience. You know, relapse into depression is actually quite high and I was terrified of that happening. I think it’s the most frightening experience I’ve had. I had ovarian cancer in 2004 that you were either terminal or not, but with a breakdown, it’s like, how long is this going to last? Am I losing my mind? All of those things were very present for me. And to trust that I was going in a descent that was an important message for me. So to come out the other side of that living life differently and making considered choices. I think the word is discernment, which is often something a bit tricky to define and to tune into what gives me joy. And I think the pandemic has perhaps brought this into a place of clarity for many people that what really matters to us are not necessarily material things. And you know, what matters to me is actually having the time and the space to paint. I can cope with most things if I give myself that space.

Brian Walsh: I’ve been touched by, there’s something that permeates the three stories from Lynn and Beth and yourself about the capacity that you’ve demonstrated to be able to go to that place of not knowing and to believe it and to live it, despite all the difficulties and then to break through and deliver something.

I think that’s incredibly inspirational and I congratulate you all for doing that..

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. I remember at the time, those opening verses to Dante’s Inferno about being lost in a dark wood. And I was really aware of that and, you know, memories of myths, like Inanna’s descent and so on. I was so conscious that that’s the place I was in and maybe it was intuitive, but it was like ‘I’m here.’ And although I’m trying to resist it and keep telling myself I’ve got the budget to do at work. And like ‘I’m in this place’ and like I said, it took me three months to kind of surrender into it. But that was the moment when healing began.

Terri Connellan: And for me it was choosing to walk away from a job where I felt I was quite successful. Where I got value from it, where I was getting money from it, part of it is stepping away from the certainty of things. But not feeling in alignment, not feeling valued, not feeling it was where my creativity would flourish. And that idea of feeling half-hearted rather than wholehearted is something I talk about it. And Lynn uses the phrase ‘unlived life’, they’re all different versions of the same feeling. I think of that sense of loss of self or not feeling fulfilled where we are. That’s why I love that whole idea of transition and that Six of Swords card that I talk about in the book. If anyone knows tarot because it’s about going on a journey when you don’t know where you are heading. It’s very uncertain and part of what I’ve tried to capture in the book and the conversations we’re having tonight are about is how you find those footholds and frameworks and compass es that help you which is why for me tarot, writing, psychological type, we’ve mentioned Jung a few times, for you, art Lynn. You know, the writing journey itself, all those things help us to move from the unknown. But definitely for me, that whole phase of uncertainty was incredibly stressful. I think that that living in the unknown, why the pandemic itself is also a huge change. We’re all going through our own transitions about it because it’s that unknown and that uncertainty of what the future is and for personal transition, it’s very much about that idea of what our identity will be.

So that’s why I wrote the book because particularly for women, but I think men can benefit from reading the book. I think it’s about how we can heal in lots of different ways and have tools to help us as we move through change to getting to what’s important.

So Lynn, do you want to make a comment about what you think Wholehearted offers women.

Lynn Hanford-Day: I sent Terri a note only yesterday, I can remember her writing that first draft. What an incredible creation you’ve made. I think it does offer inspiration and I love the way you’ve woven together memoir and personal narrative and the invitation for people to explore for themselves. I think the power of story and memoir can’t be underestimated. It’s the invitation for us as a reader to witness you and at the same time go, oh yeah, me too. And because you also have a story that shows a progression that you’ve also achieved many of your dreams, and that’s also inspirational to people who may be feeling a bit lost or just needing some more encouragement to keep at it with the tenacity. So I loved it and I’m sure many other people will.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, we’ve been on that journey together, so it was beautiful to have you be one of the first readers to provide feedback. So thank you so much for those words and for being here tonight.

Thanks for your comment, Lyn… (in the chat) “it was a loss. I could only feel half-hearted in my leadership roles. There a dream would be that we could work in these critical roles and feel wholehearted while doing so.” And I guess that’s a challenge for the workplace, all workplaces generally about how we can bring our whole self to work. That’s why David Whyte’s work, which I know many of you know David Whyte, the poet. He worked with in workplaces. His book The Heart Aroused is about bringing poetry into the workplace which really resonated with me and his book Crossing the Unknown Sea is very much about how we move from one space to another. He talks a lot with people in work places in all those books about the poetic and how we bring those things more into the workplace so we can feel fulfilled, which is a big challenge.

It’s hard. And particularly if we’ve been in an organization a long time and the organization’s changing, which happens, and everyone has different journeys. But for me, trying to squeeze what was important to me, which was writing, which was creativity, into like, I’d try and do it on in coffee shops on the way to work. And then I’d try and do it when I came home and what I started to do was I, arranged to job share with someone which created time to start to make a transition. And then my mother became ill and I never went back to work, which is what I’ve described in the book. It was a really difficult time, but if we can’t find ways to feel whole in the work that we’re doing, then I think to honor to ourselves to find a way to do that, whether it’s part-time, making a transition, it could be a sideways move within the organization. I’m not advocating people need to leave. It’s about trying to find places or work differently so that we can all get to where we want to be.

Beth Cregan: And I think we have so many more options now than perhaps we had 10 or 20 years ago because it is working for yourself. I always tell a story to the kids that I work with, that when I was about eight or nine, my dad who was a fabulous storyteller, said, the question everyone asks, which is what you want to be when you grow up.

And I said that I wanted to be a storyteller. And I think I probably said that because he told fabulous stories. I wanted to be like him, but I remember him saying, well, you can’t really, being a storyteller is not a job. So you’d be able to tell your stories at night and it really stayed with me that there were set ways to fulfill your dreams, but now you really can be a storyteller. A lot of the boundaries have broken down now. And you would think that would make it much easier, but I wonder sometimes if it makes it harder, because there are a lot of options, if you don’t like what you’re doing, you can see all these people making decisions outside that organization.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. There’s lots of different paths but I think what I’ve tried to do with Wholehearted is provide that storytelling you mentioned, that memoir, that gives people some hope and some footholds. I haven’t talked about money and obviously that’s part of how we make these shifts but I was more interested in the inner journey and the hard inner work of making those shifts because I think whatever the transition is, whatever the change is, that’s how we can negotiate how the money making happens and how we make those shifts.

Moving towards what matters and to feeling more whole, to feeling more integrated and certainly the challenges that I went through with family. And with lots of different challenges where you do hit rock bottom in different ways and you feel really tested. I think it’s that shadow side too where you go into the really difficult emotions and the hard spaces of grief, of rejection and of disappointment and then you work out what next, and I think it’s moving through that gives you the emotional skillset and the tools to be able to move through. And I think they also teach you what does matter.

 Thanks so much, Lynn really appreciate your beautiful sharing of your story and thank you for your support on the journey and for being here tonight.

Yes. So I wanted to introduce Meredith and just have a chat with Meredith. So we connected via psychological type. We are both members of the Australian Association for Psychological Type and both of us value the role of using Jungian concepts. Psychological type for me, it was one of my three pillars of change was learning psychological type because it made such a huge difference for me. And I know it’s something you use in your work as a psychologist. You’re a fellow tarot lover and you also wrote the first review of Wholehearted for which I’m very grateful and a very generous review. Thank you so much for that.

So I wondered Meredith, if you wanted to share about what you see in the book and in your own life about the value of psychological type and personal insights in making change?

Meredith Fuller: One of the things that I was struck by in the book is so many of us are in that liminal state because we don’t know what’s to come. And it is definitely the process of vocation is confusing now for people who are looking at their third part of their life, in their forties, fifties, sixties, even seventies, what next? And there’s no safety, there’s no security, there’s no structure. And given the comment we made earlier about so many people in our society are not like us.

And they are really struggling with the concept of not knowing, the concept of moving towards something that has no guarantee, that makes no sense that it’s so vague and amorphous. And so what struck me about your book for many people is that we’re trying to help other people who get the call and the call can be illness. Our bodies speak to us, they won’t get up and get us out of bed, or there’s some sort of crisis, whether it’s a retrenchment or COVID generally or whatever. And often that dispirited thing that we’re upset, we’re sad, we’re angry, we’re grief stricken, we’re lost. We’re desiccated, what’s happened that we can’t continue.

And in that liminal space that is taking quite a period of time. There isn’t much that is around to help the vast majority of people who can’t trust that inner voice. And they might want to go to see a careers counselor or coach or a psychologist or whatever. And what’s happened is that there’s not enough of us. We can’t service the needs adequately. People are having to wait inordinate amount of times to see people. And also for a lot of us working on the zoom or the technology is not necessarily the best way when you’re doing psycho-therapeutic work. So it’s very frustrating.

What struck me about your book, and I agree it’s good for men and women. And I’ll tell you a story about a man shortly because it’s very pertinent. This is something that I’ve actually started to recommend a number of our clients purchase. As of now, and I’ve explained why and how and we can give them homework and they can be actively engaged in sitting with that not knowing, sitting with the lack of guarantee, sitting with a frightening process, but being held and doing some active work so that when we can hook in and connect with them, given whatever happens with lock downs and whatever, there’s been a sense that they’ve been accompanied as they’re going along this journey, rather than feeling that staccato stop start experience, holding their breath, which is what’s going on for a lot of people who aren’t getting that help.

I see this as something that is an aid or a tool right now for a lot of people because people are being asked to do something frightening, to let go. So they’re afraid to let go and afraid to hold on. . But what your book does is help the vast majority of people who need structure, who need a plan who need to know how, this will guarantee if I take the journey that I’ll end up somewhere. It gives them a process that they can work with. And that’s why I think it’s really helpful. I’ve got two clients at the moment. One of the clients is a female who’s about 57 going through tremendous grief and loss of self and the difficulty was, we just couldn’t see each other very much because of the pandemic. So I actually got her to go through the workbook and then we’ll check in and I found that very helpful for her because she was being held. So that was important.

The other thing is I have another client and it’s very interesting. He’s a man who was in the army. He worked in about 20 or 30 different countries. So he’s always been moved around. School-wise, home wise, lifestyle wise, became very involved in physical fitness and health. During COVID his business disappeared because he can’t see people to help them. And he had a massive break where he absolutely lost it. And he was trying to get some work in a corporation. And of course he’s a feeling male which we know is about 25% of the general male population and a very difficult experience, but he’s also a sensing. So he’s a sensing feeling man which makes it very complicated for him. And he’s a J, very organized man. Very lost. But what happened was, as he was negotiating with the corporations, he was stuck with how political they were, how much they lied, how much he went away, thinking I’ve got the job. They said, they loved what I did. It’s all happening. And nothing happened. And he felt so betrayed and he was really not coping. And the idea of trying to go on a journey where there’s no guarantee. No “you can’t just go and try something else and that’ll earn your money and that’ll work” was absolutely terrifying for him. So I’ve actually been getting him to go through the book because questions are very relevant for a feeling tone male who’s absolutely lost. Okay. But, this is the comment I made about why I like how you’ve done your work. Often there’s this dichotomy. We can purchase career books and they’re like a business book and they’re so twee and tight and structured that they’re really of little use when you’re talking about an internal world in your heart, or you can buy pieces of fluff that are just absolutely not anchored anywhere and are quite silly and vague and amorphous and don’t help.

What I think you’ve done is you’ve created a space where we’ve got enough exploration for the intuitive world we’re moving towards. And certainly the more matriarchal world we’re moving towards but enough to help the vast majority of people who need some kind of plan as they explore what it’s like to know we’re going to come out of the other side of COVID, totally changed everything disintegrating and we’re actually talking about a new sense of how we live and work, et cetera. So for me it’s a psychological type book that’s come at a most helpful time for us to suggest other people read it, to go through it ourselves, that somehow isn’t a dichotomy, it’s a continuum and that’s what makes it a very precious thing that you’ve done.

And I’ve found the other thing is in how you’ve written it because you’ve been so generous and open and how you’ve talked about how other people have helped you, how their resources have helped you. There’s such a baring of your soul that people feel that they can trust you.

That was my experience. The other thing I thought I have to tell you, because this has just blown me away. I started getting involved in tarot when I was 15. So that’s over 50 years ago and my whole life has been about collecting unique, different tarot. So we’ve got several hundred bizarre, queer, odd tarot decks. In all my life. I have never met anyone else who can tell me about other tarot decks I’ve never heard of. You have been remarkable. The other thing you’ve done is your personal interpretation of what you’ve done with the symbolism has been interesting to me because it makes sense to me as we’re losing this very materialistic, 3D world, and we’re going into a very intuitive wave world, communications is very much more on that telepathic connection of using symbolism and synchronicity into how we’ll be living, which is really what the tarot is about. It’s using our unconscious, it’s using how we can embed each other with the messages and tell ourselves that messages and then interpret.

But your particular way of discussing cards particularly the Eight of Cups I’ve never come across before. And I really love the themes that went through the book that transcended every other definition, every other deck and so forth. So for me, your originality was something that I’ve been struck by in the work and why I say, even if you’re very comfortable knowing tarot, there’s something you, new, if you’re very comfortable doing careers counselling, there’s something new. So for me to feel comfortable to say to my clients, take this, go through this. And when we can see each other again, we’ll have done so many chapters or whatever was just such a relief.

Terri Connellan: Thank you so much for those beautiful comments. After four and a half years of writing, it’s so amazing to have readers and looking forward to hearing more feedback as we go forward. I really appreciated that the book can be used by individuals in a psychological coaching/ counseling context. It’s designed as a self-help process, but I wanted it to be whole, reflecting what the book’s about. It’s got my journey, it’s got the tools and then it’s got the support that takes people through. So that’s great to hear that for those people who were quite isolated at the moment with the impact of COVID and also your insights on tarot cause I know you’re a great devotee. So for me it was also making it accessible for people who didn’t know anything about cards which I’ve tried to do. And it’s great to hear that it also has insights for people who know the decks and cards really well. So thank you for that.

So you do think Wholehearted offers something for women and people of all genders? Cause I um’d and ah’d about whether to make it a broader title, but I did feel I was particularly talking about the experiences of women, but it doesn’t stop it being read more widely. Does it?

Meredith Fuller: No and I think that’s why it’s helpful for practitioners because the practitioner can say to a client who may be male or maybe gender fluid or whatever. Take this and do this with it. And then they can guide a person through that. Whereas if you tried, I believe if you tried to make it all men, women, all LGBTQ, everybody, I think you lose a lot of the potency because it really is primarily for the women who are looking at a particular journey, but it also picks up a number of the minorities who don’t quite with our typical corporate world. So to my mind, the care that you’ve taken to make it so personable is better than having it so broad that you can’t go as deeply as you would have liked. And I’m sure that people will be able to recommend,’ look, read it”. That’s enough for people to say, hey, this is helpful.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I know a few people have bought it as gifts for others. I think that ability to gift it to someone as an experience and a journey. Quite a few of my friends have said, oh, I know someone who that will be really invaluable for. So thank you for your comments, that idea that it can be an experience and a journey to help people who really need it. And that it does come from the heart cause that was the question that popped up yesterday about moving into intuitive leadership and from a more rationally oriented extroverted sensing world in. So, I was tapping into my strengths in writing the story and I was conscious, it was a very introverted, intuiting book, but I thought I’ve got to write what I’ve got to write.

So thanks so much for those comments Meredith and for your support and particularly the review. So there’ll be more conversations about wholehearted self-leadership, writing, creativity. Some of the great things we’ve talked about tonight. So thanks for joining and thanks for your support.

Links to explore:

Free resources:

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

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

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

My books and book club:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club – kicking off December 2021

Review of Wholehearted by Meredith Fuller

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/

About Beth Cregan

Twelve years ago Beth combined her passion for creativity with her great love of writing to launch her business, ‘Write Away With Me’. Since then, she’s presented hundreds of writing workshops to inspire and encourage young writers to find their voice, develop their writing skills and connect with their inner storyteller. Her work has branched out to include presenting writing workshops for adults of all ages and stages and taking on the role of a writing mentor. She believes writing simply makes life better so in 2017, she set out on a journey to write a book to inspire teachers to develop a daily authentic writing practice in their classrooms. Soon to be published in 2022 by Hawker Brownlow Education, writing this book was a transformational experience both personally and professionally. Beth lives in Melbourne.

Beth’s website: Write Away with Me

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/write.away.with.me/

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

About Lynn Hanford-Day

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

Lynn’s website: Sacred Creative Art

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

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

About Meredith Fuller

Meredith’s concurrent careers have included author, playwrightcolumnist & media commentatortalkback radio guesttheatre director & producer, TV co-host, actorpsychological 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’s website: https://meredithfuller.com.au/

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fuller.walsh

podcast writing

Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch 1

November 2, 2021

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Welcome to Episode 2 of the Create Your Story Podcast!

This episode is the first Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch event on 9 September 2021. I chat with Penelope Love and Kirsten Pilz, who have been key partners and supporters on the journey of writing Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook.

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

Show Notes

  • An introduction to my book Wholehearted.
  • How the concept for the book was born
  • The writing, editing and crafting process, especially with Penelope
  • The value of retreat in the writing process, especially with Kerstin
  • Personality and writing
  • Tenacity and the long-haul writing process
  • Shadow careers and developing journeys
  • And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 2 of the Create Your Story podcast. This is a recording of conversations from the first Wholehearted virtual book launch event, just after Wholehearted was published on the 6th of September, 2021. Being locked down when the book was published, all the initial events were of necessity of virtual.

It was an opportunity to connect with people who’ve been on the journey with me in various ways. So in this episode, I’m joined by Penelope Love who received the very first long draft of Wholehearted and helped me to take that draft into a form, able to be submitted as two books for publication.

Penelope is a publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as an author of Wake Up in Love. And she is also an incredible editor and partner in the book writing process. We chat about bringing the books to life together in an accessible and sacred way in this conversation.

I’m also joined by Kirsten Pilz, who has been a fellow traveler on the writing and creative solopreneur journey. Kirsten is a published author, former academic with almost 20 years university teaching experience, a TEDx speaker and yoga teacher. She’s a retreat leader and I’ve had the pleasure of joining Kirsten on a writing and yoga retreat in Hoi An Vietnam in 2018. We talk about the value of retreat and how this time was a really important part of my writing journey with Wholehearted though it took me quite a while to realize it in hindsight. We’re also joined in this conversation by Natasha Piccolo, who is a fellow author at the kind press with her new book, The Balance Theory, which is forthcoming next year.

We chat about so many aspects of Wholehearted, the book and wholehearted living, writing, editing, long haul creativity, retreat, personality. I had so many tingly moments listening back to where we really touched on some heart-filled and deep aspects of writing, truth and life. In the show notes, I share links about where you can find out more about my book Wholehearted and the Companion Workbook as well as more about our guests, Penelope and Kirsten. The great news too, is that there are solo episodes coming up with Penelope, Kirsten, and Natasha where we dive deeper into their stories, their writing, and how they’ve created their story. I hope you’ll enjoy listening and that you’ll gain some insights to help guide your life, especially if writing and creativity are a really important part of it. Enjoy listening.

Transcript of Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch chat

Terri Connellan: Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining me for the first virtual book launch of Wholehearted it’s fantastic to have you here. And all people who have been on the journey in some way, shape or form, writing, family, readers, advanced readers, connections on Instagram. So thank you so much for being part of the journey. it’s a real honor to have you here. So, first up, I’ll share what we might track through as we go through the session. First of all, welcome to two special guests who are joining me today. Penelope Love who’s been my editor all the way through, received the first, very large, a hundred thousand word draft, and has been on the whole journey with me as my editor, particularly shaping one book into two, which has been incredible, so great to chat with Penelope, and Kerstin, and also has been on the journey for a long time with me, both are authors of Wholehearted Stories on my Quiet Writing website.

And we’ve connected in lots of different ways. I think through social media initially, I went to a writing retreat, with Kerstin in Vietnam, which was just a beautiful way to, I think get in touch with my writing self. So we’ll explore some of those particular touch points.

 First of all, I thought, I’d talk a little bit about the book just briefly, as an introduction, for those who may not know it so well, and about, what it covers, why I wrote the book, how it fit in.my life. Then I’ll have a conversation with Penelope and with Kerstin about their roles and also about Wholehearted generally. They’ve read the books so they can share some thoughts about that.

 So first of all, what is, Wholehearted? Why did I write it? When did it come from? So, the book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition emerged from my journey. So I went on a transition journey deciding what to do with my life and realised that I didn’t want to stay on the path that I was, which was working for 30 plus years in a government organization, in the technical and further education system in Australia.

And I started to make a path from that. But as I was going through, I found it was really important for me to write about it and to start to shape the journey in a writing sense so as well as going through it, I felt the need to capture it. And my why was very much about helping me to write, make sense of what I was going through, but it was also about supporting women to develop self-leadership in their own lives.

Because I think if you’re making change particularly midlife, but at any time in life, there’s not a lot of guideposts for us or ways to support us for going through that change. So I thought I’d share with you my notebook from 2017 of how it started. So there you go, this a lovely mind map of the first ideas of what Wholehearted might look like.

And then there’s another page of a summary. And I was just looking at it. That’s sort of the chapter summaries, which actually is what it ended up, looking like you know, chapter four, chapter five. The thing that got fleshed out was the wholehearted self leadership skills, but down the bottom here, there’s three boxes that say the structure could be personal narrative and application and exercise.

And that’s pretty much exactly what it ended up being. So it’s interesting that time four and a half years ago thinking, here’s all the things that I’m going through that I want to be able to put into a book. Here’s how I want to help women, here’s what I’m learning and through that, just knowing that it was a mix of experiences, it was a mix of what I’ve learned from it. And it was a mix of how can I help you with with those experiences. So in that 100,000 word draft all of that was in there. So it was quite a big book, but when Penelope received the first draft, she wonderfully said to me, I think you’ve got two books here, which was like, oh my goodness.

It was an amazing moment. So together with Penelope, we’ll talk about that more in a moment we went through and worked out, which things belonged in the main book, which belonged in the second book. And the second book was a workbook, much more practical. So we teased out those aspects and that journey of writing two books at once commenced, but the focus was on the main book, first of all.

But knowing that in the second book we were tracking along with the main book, but then working out how the two came together. It was like a whole, like a piece of marble and there were two pieces in there and with wonderful help, we went through and pulled out the pieces and brought it together.

Kerstin Pilz: How long is the final book, the main book, how many words?

Terri Connellan: The main book’s about 75,000 and the workbook’s about 37,000. So there’s still quite a lot of text in the second book. And what we worked on was bringing out the examples. Do you want to comment Penelope on what that was like, going through that, seeing the two pieces

Penelope Love: Well sure, you know, today I pulled up our first initial conversations on email, about the book, just to refresh myself on the long journey and the initial steps of it.

And what happened was when I read your outline, it came back to me, it was seven pages for this book and that’s, and it was so Terri, it was so thorough. And it was an experience reading the journey, the outline itself, it took me on the full journey of the book. And I, I saw the one big section of the outline that I put a big circle around.

And I said, this could be a book in itself and you know, Terri asked well. How do you know? And it’s a very intuitive process. And I think it also is combined with, I’ve been editing books for 24 years, or I should say editing material for 24 years , books for about 17 of those. And. I think it’s just a matter of seeing so many books over the course of my career and knowing when something is just too much for a single book. But I couldn’t, and no one could deny how this material worked together. So it was a great initial run. And what I really loved about the process is that in the beginning you could feel overwhelmed or you could feel no pressure. And I took the no pressure approach as I read through it.

I just put a very large liberal highlight over areas that I thought were not the main book. And then I put it in Terri’s court and she was able to that big highlighted section, start to see what I mean and then I think the back and forth made it not overwhelming. If it’s one person facing all of this task of having to sort through and say, which is which it’s not, but it was a really neat little, like a tennis game.

And we, and we pulled together. Or we pulled apart two angels in the marble.

Terri Connellan: Yeah . We actually color coded it. So I think you color-coded at first. So we had blue for the main book sort of a pinky color for the workbook. And then there was another color for things that we thought didn’t belong, but we, we also took the view that everything could be repurposed somehow.

Penelope Love: It’s true. It’s true. And I also embraced that philosophy whenever I edit that nothing is really ever wasted. And I knew that these little sections of texts that didn’t really fall into either book could be perfectly saved in archives, for posts to help promote the book or even the seed of a new book. So that’s how, and when you treat it like that in the beginning, there’s not pressure to do something with everything. It just puts a relaxation around the process.

Terri Connellan: Exactly. Thank you for that. So what the sort of shape that we ended up with that process was you come into the book hearing about my experiences. So I start with my moment – often with transition and turning points, there’s a particular thing that happens in your life. And many of you may have experienced this where, you know, I’m not staying here, whatever it is, relationship, job, place of living. Just a point in life. There’s often a point. In our Wholehearted Stories on Quiet Writing , you see that again and again, and the story is, Heidi’s one, for example, she hears a voice saying “I don’t want to do this anymore”.

And it’s just this thing that often happens to us. For me, it was a particular situation in the workplace where I wasn’t given a job that I thought it was a great fit for. Not a big issue, but in the context of that, it made me realize I could no longer stay where I was.

So it was a real turning point that, took me down a fair way and then had to rebuild. So I write about that in the first part. And then I talk about that journey back. So, what sort of toeholds and footholds helped me to connect back, some major themes that helped me. So things like connecting with our passions and personality, knowing who we are, our body of work, and then there’s 15 wholehearted self-leadership skills that but is sort of the bulk of the book, but they particularly just my learning on the journey, but also ways that people can also support themselves through any type of change or ongoing in their life.

So I guess that’s where that mix of personal narrative and practicality comes from. You have read the book, so I don’t know if you want to make any comments about how that comes together for you just as a reader. That’d be interesting to hear.

Kerstin Pilz: Yeah. I mean, I thought on the one hand, there’s the very organized, the what is it in your, in your personality type? The…

Terri Connellan: INTJ

Kerstin Pilz: which is lovely. And then there’s that interest in the tarot, which I just find so fascinating because it’s not at all encouraged in these workplaces and you and I both have been in Education. And so I’ve found that really fascinating, how that opened a new way of approaching yourself and your life through that emphasis on intuition and also tapping into the archetypes. And in fact, that is one for me, one of the more interesting results of reading the book, the shadow stories and so on. So maybe talk about that a bit more. Yeah.

Terri Connellan: So there is a chapter, Chapter Eight about the shadow side and I found as I went through my journey, there were a whole lot of things that kept cropping up and learnings about things like shadow career. So that’s a Steven Pressfield idea that we often, for example, be a writing teacher when we want to be a writer, be the roadie in the band when we actually want to be the musician. And write the PhD on something when we actually want to be that person. So yes, it’s a great insight into what might be in our story that we can amplify and tap into and also what might be holding us back from that. So that’s helpful. And then those other things like grief, envy, I talk about envy and often when we feel envy or feel that strong jealousy of something or desire for it, if we can try and see that as a force for good, rather than get sucked into the comparisonitis, that can be really powerful too. So there’s actually quite a lot in that chapter. It was interesting. That sort of shadow side, I think, as you’re working through anything, particularly when it’s difficult.

My mother had a terminal illness and I was supporting her in that time when I was writing the book too. So it was actually written from a really challenging place as well. So, it’s important to honor those energies of life too.

Kerstin Pilz: And may I just ask a follow-up question, with your emphasis being on wholehearted and that’s often also not at all where leaders comes from in the workplace, although I’m finding perhaps a little bit more, like my last boss was female and she’s very much an intuitive person. And also heart-centered, I was wondering,are you finding this maybe since you’ve left the workplace, which is now a number of years ago, has there been a shift with regards to that being a little bit more encouraged or are you still a sole pioneer in that field?

Terri Connellan: Well I think I’ve been lucky because of the coaching training that I did with the Beautiful You Coaching Academy, which is very much a female led heart-led community that I’ve been more connected with that sort of energy. But , I do think that more intuitive, receptive side of leadership is starting to come to the fore. It’s probably still got a long way to go, but it’s beautiful to be part of an organization with Beautiful You, for example, that is female led and is pretty much totally coming from that place and just feeling the difference. And I think, you know, for me, that was a beautiful counterbalance from, from where I’d been before.

So I think we’ve got a long way to go with that, but it was interesting to think about where leadership and self-leadership fit together. And the reason I was thinking about self-leadership was because of my experiences in the workplace and how that grew from that.

I think perhaps there’s a lot of self-leadership to be done in our leaders perhaps of all genders to tap into that female, not just female, but the intuition side. Because I found when I was in the workplace, it was very damped down, even though it was my strongest cognitive function, I tended to rely on the extroverted sort of things. It’s a good question, but I, I think we’ve got a long way to go. I might handover to have a chat with Penelope, and further about our relationship. So that’s just a bit about the book and we’ll keep talking about the book as we go through.

So to introduce Penelope more formally. This is her beautiful book Wake Up in Love a beautiful memoir that was published earlier this year written over 16 years and so a long writing journey. Penelope is a publisher at Citrine publishing a writing mentor and editor, and, as I said, Penelope received the draft and really helped me through that whole journey and has continued to be a point of contact and support the whole way through for which I’m very grateful. So thank you for that. So what I’d be interested to explore with you Penelope is what did you see in Wholehearted when you first received it? We talked a bit about that, but what was it like to receive it? I’m sure it was quite overwhelming. It was a long draft.

Penelope Love: I made my initial comment that the outline itself was seven pages. It’s not, nothing is daunting, you know, to a fellow. I N something Jay, because my introversion, lets me be very quietly with these ideas and I, and I love it. So in a lot of ways, the more the merrier. But, you know, I’d been following you on Instagram. I believe we met through a Susannah Conway challenge, something like that. And so when I received the manuscript, we’d actually done a get to know you call probably a year beforehand or maybe six months. And that primed me to sort of watch you and watch your postings in a way that I probably wouldn’t have had we not had that get to know you chat. And so when I saw the outline, it was like everything I knew about Terri in seven pages. And I could, I see the way her mind works. She’s very, very good at collecting details and organizing them. And so I had appreciation for where she was going, because I had been following her journey online. So that led it to not be so overwhelming. Another thing that had I had done, and I can’t remember, I believe this was before you’ve handed me the manuscript, I enrolled in the Sacred Creative Collective. And so in between following you on Instagram and then enrolling in your Sacred Creative Collective, and then receiving the outline and the manuscript. Perfect. This is a textbook for everything I wish I could have gone deeper into during the Sacred Creative, but not in, in that interactive format.

It was like part of it was in PDFs, part of it was in discussions, part of it was on Facebook postings. And so this book outline was, oh, great, everything’s in one place now I get to help organize it. So, it really opened my whole heart. It allowed me to do the work I do best . You know, there’s a fine line between shadow career and what you’re supposed to do. And I know that somebody who has wanted to be a writer and a published author all my life, it’s very easy to find yourself in the shadow career of editor. And I wrote about that in my own Wholehearted Story. At the same time, you know, I couldn’t deny that I was meant to do this project.

It was almost like a karmic fated sort of thing that it fell in my lap. Just before I went through a career transition. So the book itself became a guide for me, guiding me through the year I was editing it. And I’m in the middle of the summer, of the year 2020, when everybody was in COVID crisis of, you know, what am I doing, really with my life? This book was just, it was such a gem to be able to have that, even though it wasn’t in its finished form, I still had all the information and access and I was using it actively. And as a publisher myself, I find that the books that are written from that place of experience that Terri went through with the transition from her job, from her career to her heart career you know,, it vibrates that, it resonates as I was reading this book, I was finding and fine tuning my own career to make it more authentic and wholehearted.

And I was finding, and most of the pieces are there. But during that period, I did find other aspects of esoteric interests that I like to study. And Terri’s brave sharing about how she goes wholeheartedly into tarotist studies, despite the taboo nature gave me the permission slip to do the same thing when astrology came my way.

And I know I read astrology into my daily life and daily work in a way that, I wonder had I not been reading Wholehearted, would I have embraced this?

Terri Connellan: And now Penelope is encouraging me to get into astrology so, it’s that lovely effect of you know, the things we do and the things we share really help us with that next step of the journey. So…

Penelope Love: yeah, and the spiral metaphor that is in her logo and on the cover of the book, I feel it’s, you know, always really spoke to me and the book helped give it meaning and more reflection. And, I feel this is part of the spiral and we find more interests and we go deeper and deeper.

Terri Connellan: In the structure of the book, that was in my mind too of going big and then going a bit more detailed with the chapters. But yeah, that idea of layering, the learning like this, there’s quite a lot of repeated stories and different angles in there, but it’s sort of how we learn over time and we learn in another way. And we often we go back to the same things. Don’t we, look, we repeat, we go back and we’re moving through and that’s, to me what the spirals about is that, that idea of layering and learning and continuing, and I tried to build that into the book too. So I don’t know how, if you had a sense of that, as you were editing that how that sort of energy fits with the narrative.

Penelope Love: It does. And it, what it taught me is that, you know, when you get to this other sort of familiar place along the perimeter, but you’re not the same as you were the time you visited it, so you can go deeper.

Terri Connellan: . Thank you.

Kerstin Pilz: I just had a question too about that process if I may, because I think that might be interesting for other writers, because you said when you sent me the first draft, which obviously I’m sure wasn’t the first draft. I was just wondering how long did it actually take you to get to a point where you felt confident to send that to an editor? And then how long did it take for Penelope the editor to work with you to shape it into what you then send on to your publisher?

Terri Connellan: I’ve got my timeline here to remind me, so I started writing properly in the first half of 2017. I think I sent it to Penelope in the middle of June 2019. And actually I finished that first long draft when I went to Vietnam with you, September, 2018. And then I didn’t know what to do with it apart from just fix up the spelling. Like, there was lots of editing, but it wasn’t structural. And that’s what I didn’t know how to do. And that’s when I reached out to Penelope because I knew what I wanted to write, but I didn’t know what to do next. I just didn’t have the skills. And I think that’s what I’ve really learned is that power of collaboration and of reaching out to people to help. Most of that was pulling the two out, working out the two drafts and then working on the first book. And then the second book, I mainly finished by myself later with the kind press.

Penelope Love: And this is a book mind you that had over a hundred thousand words in the first manuscript. If somebody has a 50,000 word manuscript, the process is not going to take as many months. Somebody asked me that the other day, you know, how long does my book need to be before I send it to you? I mean, I’ve taken a book about 30,000 words and fleshed it out. And then if books come in about 50 to 70, they generally stay around that. And then usually when they come in over a hundred thousand, we’re working at trimming them down. Just as a practical matter of business. That was another consideration that I brought to the table for Terri was that if you put everything in one book, it becomes such a huge book. You have to charge a lot for it.

 And. You know, this is a way that now there’s two books and it becomes maybe more affordable. Somebody can get book one and then get book two at another time. So there’s all these considerations that you make when you see things from that outside perspective, that when you’re writing a book, you’re not looking at it that way. Another reason to bring in people with other skillsets, because these points of view help to make the project whole.

Terri Connellan: Oh, they do. And I knew it needed to be less, but I didn’t know how. And then when you said it was two books, that made perfect sense. To be able to just take out the more practical pieces, made a lot of sense.

Kerstin Pilz: Are they sold as a package or individually?

Terri Connellan: Individually, but like on Amazon they package them up together too. You can purchase the two which is good and in terms of working through, you can read the main book without the workbook, but everyone will be different. But the way I envisage is, someone what might read through the first book and then perhaps do another reading and go back and work through and do it in a detailed way.

And I’m starting a coaching program too to collectively work through the book as a group, which I think it’d be really nice way to do it because again, as it was a solo journey for me. And that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, it can feel quite lonely when you’re going through a big change. So I think even if people are working through the book, it might be really nice to connect around that journey and have those conversations, because just as I’ve learned from your stories and the other women’s stories, we all learn from each other too.

Kerstin Pilz: And so that workbook essentially also could be used by a course facilitator for their own course. So it’s like a resource, like a textbook, I guess in a way.

Terri Connellan: Meredith Fuller wrote a lovely review, and she’s a psychologist, she got an advanced copy. So she’s actually been working with a client who didn’t want to do psychological work via Zoom. It didn’t feel comfortable cause they were locked down. So she gave them the book and the person’s worked through the book at a time when they didn’t feel able to have face-to-face consultations. So that’s really interesting to hear. She said, she sees it as valuable for individuals, groups.

Kerstin Pilz: So that’s beautiful feedback already from your book. That is an amazing resource you’ve created.

Terri Connellan: I think so. And that was always how I saw it too. Like it’s got multiple uses.

So what do you think Wholehearted offers women? You know, it really well. What would you say Wholehearted offers women?

Penelope Love: Well, you know, I think it comes down to it being born at this very time, following the year of the pandemic and people really getting this chance to look at their lives and see, am I doing what I’d like to be doing? Am I in my shadow career or is there another step I can take toward getting out and living a wholehearted life where I have my own career, that feels good to my heart. And every day I look forward to doing it because it’s what I love. Wholehearted is a guide to that.

Going in order is always an option, but there’s so much that you can, the book is so modular and that’s what I love. So a lot of people that I know over the course of my career, they like to, open up to whatever page and seeing what they open to. And Wholehearted can almost be read almost kind of like a tarot deck. You open and then you see what chapter and that very much could resonate where you are in your journey and what you need to work on now. I feel that because of Terri’s connection with that esoteric system, that the book invites that and can even be used that way to play with. Yeah.

Terri Connellan: So that’s true. Cause I mean, there’s that linear reading through, but there’s also a bit like a tarot where you pull a card, there’s a way of just engaging with what resonates at the time. And that’s interesting because that’s actually how I wrote it too, because I used NaNoWriMo that 50,000 words in a month model, even though it wasn’t a novel and I actually had the outline and then I’d do my morning pages, do my Tarot and then I’d tend to write with the structure in Scrivener of where I felt drawn. So if something like envy was popping up, then I’d write about that cause it was bubbling up for me. So it was very much written from that time. Even though the structure was linear, the writing process wasn’t particularly. That’s really interesting.

Meredith in that article says “As an introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging female INTJ her work is well structured while enabling the reader to meander.’ So that’s really nice. Thank you for highlighting that. And thanks so much for everything you’ve done on the journey. It’s been absolutely unbelievable having you there and we’ve developed a really deep and close relationship from that whole journey too and so appreciative and thank you. And we’re going to do a lovely double up of me holding Penelope’s book and Penelope holding mine.

Penelope Love: It will be here tomorrow. US, they shipped them out on Monday, but so I’m getting it Thursday. So as soon as I get that, we’ll coordinate.

Terri Connellan: So Kerstin is a writer, writer for wellbeing coach, hosts beautiful writing retreats one of which I attended in Vietnam, yoga teacher, and is also writing a memoir, just about to the end of the first draft called Falling Apart Gracefully, and shared some of those experiences in your Wholehearted Story.

So we thought we might talk about some of our touch points Kerstin and particularly the retreat, the value of retreat, the Wholehearted Story and the role of challenge in our lives. So I found when I went on that retreat and it probably is only in hindsight. I did a presentation on personality and writing, and I looked at my whole journey, psychological journey through the process of writing the book. And when it came to 2017-18 and the writing retreat, I’ve put writing retreat Hoi An Vietnam and then introverted feeling, extroverted feeling, extroverted sensing all these things that are not my strengths. It was a time of my muse reconnecting and coming back. So obviously retreats are important to you and you lead them. What do you see as the value of retreat and incubation in the writing process?

Kerstin Pilz: So for me, actually, I went on my very first retreat when I had what I would call an emotional and mental breakdown. And I went to Thailand to a very hardcore, Vipassana retreat with just locals. And afterwards they said to me, look, for us, we do this every year. It was a lot of burnout housewives and it’s part of our spiritual growth. And I thought, how interesting, I had always thought, you know, holidays should be, and we only get 20 days of annual leave here in Australia. I think in the U S is even less. And I thought, I want to spend those days to do something really constructive with my life. I don’t want to be sitting in a meditation room and just listening to my thoughts in my head, that’s really boring and unproductive. So that was the time that opened my eyes to the fact that the retreat is actually a way to replenish yourself and to do really important inner work, going on an inner journey, because my holidays had always been about exploring adventure, outer journeys. And so the value of that inner journey, and especially for a writer, because when we work on a project, like you said, at the beginning before we started recording, I believe you know, we’re so focused on what we’re putting on the page, but a lot of the information is subconscious and intuitive.

And even as I’m writing my book now, I always give myself plenty of time when I just switch off. And that’s when you actually connect with a lot of the deep messages of the book or the stories you want to write. O r go on an artist’s date, you know, like Julia Cameron says.

So a retreat, I feel is a really important way to just slow down. First of all, slow down disconnect from all the devices. A lot of authors and I love that you are very active on Instagram, which is of course where we met. And where you and Penelope just said, you met. Which is wonderful, but it is so distracting. So that often, you know, when we just give ourselves that time, it doesn’t have to be a whole week to go on a retreat.It’s a time of replenishing withdrawing. There’s a book that came out last year by Catherine May called ‘Wintering: the need for rest and retreat in difficult times’. And it really just explores fully. And for her, it was also leaving a career and becoming ill and then period of resting and retreating and actually exploring what the value of that is, which is not valued in our society. You know, I come from Germany. My father was really judgmental about me resting and retreating for almost a year during my grief time, because I wasn’t in his eyes contributing anything to society, but you do because you actually replenishing from the core and that’s so important.

Terri Connellan: Just to reflect on what you are saying. The reason it came up for me and thinking about that time of retreat was reading this beautiful book The Writer’s Process by Anne Janzer which I’ve written a post about recently. And she compares the writing process to bread making. And she talks about the Muse and the Scribe as two different mental processes, but she talks about bread making, but it’s, the Muse comes in when the bread’s rising, you know, you got to let it sit and I know in taking a long time and it just sat on my desk over there where the finished book is now, and it was like a piece of dough rising and it was, I had to integrate more experiences too and make sense of more things. Sometimes I think it’s letting things come in isn’t it? It’s that, I don’t know, integrating, allowing, receiving.

Kerstin Pilz: Yeah. And it’s also sitting with the idea because a book, unlike an article or blog posts is, a long-haul journey, it’s a marathon. And so to actually sit and have a whole week or even a weekend, just to stay where you’re not answering emails, where you’re not worrying about mundane, everyday things where you’re not even with your partner, having conversations, whether they are good or bad that you normally have. It’s a luxury that you give yourself, but it’s sort of essential.

And also I found when we were on retreat in Vietnam, which is of course interesting again, because you’re in a different country. So like you just said, you’re extroverted skills and suddenly on overdrive because there’s so much visual and olfactory and whatever stimulation. But I find on a retreat that is often also when, especially in my retreats, we do our morning workshop and then we might go to the market and look at the colors or as we did, drinking freshly squeezed juice and, and often that’s when things ferment and compost, somehow deep inside. And then you go back to your afternoon session and something unexpected comes out on the page. There’s a freshness. You wouldn’t find just sitting in your office, looking at what’s going is the day over yet? Have I produced enough?

Terri Connellan: I remember we went to the markets and it was just an explosion of color and smells and I think often we get dulled down too, sitting inside and not engaging with our senses.

And then we cook the meal from the produce and then we ate the food and it was just sensory experience. So for me, I think it, and it’s taken me a while in hindsight to realize that, that time is really important for allowing the work but also allowing myself, to just get back in touch with a broader range of myself and from a personality perspective, some of those things that are not my natural bent, but which really enrich me. So thank you for that experience. It was a really important part of activating the muse in the middle of the journey.

Kerstin Pilz: Yes. And it gives you that distance also, I mean, especially going away whether it’s overseas or to another country, or just out of your comfort zone, it gives you that beginner’s minds lens, you’re looking at it through fresh eyes and I’m sure editors, like Penelope would tell her writers, just let it sit and then come back with fresh eyes after you have some distance. And that’s what a retreat can do as well. Beginner’s mind.

Terri Connellan: So in your Wholehearted story, and I know your memoir is about really difficult times, going through grief experiences and challenge. And certainly my story, different story about, I guess, the similar theme is that theme of going through difficult times and from that creating a positive outcome.

So how do you see challenge and growth fitting? How does Wholehearted play into that, your book? Just interested to explore.

Kerstin Pilz: First of all, when I met you, I said, oh my God, there’s someone on the similar journey and you can actually give your self permission to tap into that, heart centeredness, like you say, in your book. You were at work, feeling like you’re crying in the bathroom or something. And you feel when you then step back into your role or, you know, proper, again, you’re leaving parts of yourself behind and if you have a 30 year career, like you did, mine was almost 20. I realized, and this is thanks to you that I’m an introvert. I had always known, but I hadn’t really consciously thought about how my work as a lecturer was actually forcing me everyday to be an extrovert. So being able to use that wholeheartedness as a pass through life and giving myself permission and understanding why I would feel so exhausted sometimes. It came from being outside of my natural comfort zone is an introvert, which doesn’t mean I’m shy or can’t connect to people.

It just means I have a lot of quiet time, quiet writing, connecting with myself. So I think the difficult times, those threshold moments when our lives become turned upside down they also break us open to a different dimension of ourselves.

If we are in that sensitive, receptive mindset to stop and to just stand still and say, what can I learn from this? What is this opening up inside of me? Because society teaches us to just power through grief and to armor up and to be strong. And like Brené Brown says the really courageous are those who allow themselves to be vulnerable and to sit with the grief and to actually listen into it and to be present to all of those difficult feelings rather than going, oh, let’s just quickly numb ourselves with some wine or run away from the feelings.

So I think it’s a moment of deep growth of possibility, for evolving in ways you possibly consciously couldn’t achieve in the same sort of impactfulness.

Terri Connellan: Mm. Thank you for sharing that. And also how we connected and a sense of synergy along the way, because it does help, it’s hard going through it. You can feel really alone. So to see others who are also forging a path, providing insights, tools, pathway, such as you provided for me through your retreat too. I think we can all help each other grow and understand that, you know, it’s not easy either that work.

The other thing we talk about in the book is a piece you wrote about the role of luck versus hard inner work. And for me there’s certainly elements of luck in our lives, but I think we often can attribute too much to that and not realize just how much hard inner work it does take to deal with situations like this. It’s a long process.

Kerstin Pilz: Yeah, exactly and thank you for bringing that up. I often, and I’m sure you probably get that too when people say, well, how lucky are you that you have the time to write this book? Well, hello I was retrenched. Or how lucky are you, people tell me to be writing a memoir. It’s like, yeah, but I’m writing a memoir about losing the person I married thinking I’d be married to them forever. And then finding out something that I didn’t actually want to know, namely, that he had a second life. So the lucky part is that I allowed myself to actually be open to what these difficult times have to teach us. I think that’s the lucky part that I’m not running away from it,

Terri Connellan: neither are you.

But I think it’s that decision to when it’s another transition, it’s a turning point moment where you think, well, what am I going to do with this? And, as I tell in the book, I reached out to other people, I looked at what they were doing. And that was when I started my blog a long time, 2010. And for me, that was about finding my voice because writing was important, it was just a way of getting that back front and center out of fairly recent grief experiences to take me forward. So Penelope, do you have any comments or questions?

Penelope Love: I was relating very much to the retreat comments that you were making Kerstin because of the trip I just took and my husband’s asking me, well, what exactly did you like about these places that we visited? Cause he wasn’t necessarily resonating in the same way that I was, but what I was. Now, I have a better answer for him. And it’s this process that was occurring. You know, it’s not so much the streets of any one city that made me really love that city, but what I was loving, what was happening inside me when I was seeing something different that I’ve never seen before.

So yeah. Thank you for helping me put words on that. Cause that’s, and I couldn’t agree more of how important that is in the writing process. Because when I look back, you already speak about writing your memoir as a long haul and it’s different from a blog post or an article. I once at the beginning of my journey had an editor say to me, oh, well, if you write enough articles, one day, you’ll wake up and realize you have a book.

And that always stayed with me and I never really thought as I was writing the love life column, that became my book, that it was going to be a book. But when I had that critical mass of articles and I did start to see it, and then the weaving process of past articles, it becomes its own monster of a process.

But what happened was that as I was living my life, I realized that when I went to India, when I first met my husband and when I went to Costa Rica, these were the two places where the book really got started. And they were not on American soil. And there were lines and journal entries that became the foundational pieces of the book. And they were both from India and Costa Rica. So had I not traveled, had I not journeyed I would not have been able to tell this story of being on home soil. So it’s very interesting. The retreat dimension. I love this very rich conversation.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s beautiful. That process too, with the blog for me, a lot of the pieces in the book began as blog posts too. So I think it’s that finding a way to write and get your story out and find your voice in any way, shape or form, they can then become pieces in other places, just as the pieces that weren’t in the book can become something that goes somewhere else. So I think what you’re saying is really true about honoring that writing self in any way we can.

Kerstin Pilz: But that also ties in with something you say in your book, which is about the importance of having these networks, because it was actually very important for me. Like when I found Susannah Conway who started also because of her grief journey and then you Terri, it’s like, oh, I can give myself permission to write this. It’s actually like for a long time, I thought, well, what happened to me was terrible for me, but really I didn’t experience genocide. I’m not a female in Afghanistan, you know, it’s not that bad. But I think the networks are really important to actually validate any story is important, any story of profound transition. Yeah.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s what I’ve loved about the stories of wholehearted living and I’ve just gone through and read them all again, putting them into one document to look at the next step with perhaps publishing them. And it’s incredible how, like the themes in there are in my book. I think the first story Katherine Bell’s prompted your story, Kerstin, so it’s like all the stories and experiences prompt each other’s voices to feel a bit freer and to feel a connection.

In one of them, one person writes a letter in response to Heidi’s story so I think that whole importance of women’s voices and stories and sharing and working collaboratively. One thing I’ve learned and, if you look at the acknowledgements of my book, you think writing is a solitary experience. And then when you stop and think, all the people and all the experiences and all the particular group experiences that helped me: group coaching, mastermind, coaching myself, retreats, all of that was part of this rich journey. I know you said, Penelope, writing acknowledgements was so important to you and your journey too, that thinking back on who was part of it, who helped you? What made a difference? And when there’s still many, many more people I could have included, but I had to stop somewhere, but it just makes you realize writing a particular book is so collaborative and so important.

So thank you both for being part of that journey. So just one last question for you, Kirsten. What do you Wholehearted offers women particularly around writing and creativity and those aspects?

Kerstin Pilz: Yeah, I just thought, first of all, it gives you the permission, like we just discussed, you know, to actually believe that you have a voice and that you have a legitimacy to tell your story. And I like that it is a personal story. So I’m following your journey which is nice because you think I’m not alone, and it gives you very practical tools namely the tarot. I’m aware of Susannah Conway. I have somebody, my community here, in fact teaches writing via tarot cards, but I’m still dabbling in it. And I think that’s a really interesting tool that I would like to explore further. And also of course the whole shadow work, the Jungian shadow work and the personality type, which for example, I used to teach in my work as an intercultural communications lecturer, but I never really thought about it so much with regards to how it actually impacts my own personal life and reading about it in your book that really opened up new ways of thinking.

Even of writing, even writing a character, maybe I identify their profile before I create the character in the book. So I thought that was really helpful. And also the emphasis on writing, being a writer, on a retreat I get a lot of people who say I’m a, ‘want to be’ a writer. Penelope, I’m sure you know, this, everybody resonates with this. We want to write. But we end up in the shadow careers, imposter syndrome. So I think that’s really helpful also in your book that you show people that you are a writer just by writing morning pages, for example, every day..

Doesn’t matter whether they end up anywhere or whether you get accepted to the PhD program at Wollongong University, you’re still a writer. And I think that’s really strong message of encouragement.

Terri Connellan: Thank you. That’s beautiful. It’s lovely to hear the particular areas of focus that resonate with you and that also we had a lovely conversation when I was writing with Beth this morning and another lady, co-writing, we were talking about the long haul writing and the word tenacity came up. And Beth, was saying, it’s very much about tenacity, but it’s about realizing that everyone just starts an ordinary writer and you just keep sticking at it and sticking at it and going through to be extraordinary and it’s, but anybody can do it with what we’re saying. We all have different talents. But it’s very much about by sticking at the process, what we can bring to it, as we go through.

Kerstin Pilz: Yeah. And that’s the other thing, I just wanted to say, because you’re a very organized person and disciplined. Writing a book does take discipline. Cause you know, there is that like Liz Gilbert says, you have the fantasy of the artist and then there’s the artist and the writer who like her sits down. She says, I’m like my farmer parents every morning at six o’clock and I write yes.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, exactly. Because the other lady we were writing with was asking questions about how long it took and what the process is like. And she said, tenacity, it takes tenacity and we went, oh yeah, that’s a good word. It does. Thank you so much. Have you got any questions at all Natasha?

Natasha Piccolo: I just want to congratulate you. I really enjoyed hearing your process. And it’s amazing, like being a young writer I’m only just 30 and having a book out next year. It’s amazing to learn from somebody who has been writing for years, years, years, years, years, almost double my time. And it’s beautiful because it gets me very excited for my career.

Terri Connellan: Oh, thank you so much. That means so much to me. I’m excited to be able to inspire you. Cause I know people inspired me too when I was younger and I think we all need that inspiration to keep us focused on our dream because it starts, like I showed with my book. It starts as that sort of mind map.

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah, I really resonated with that. Because my book, I started writing it when I was 20, so it’s been literally a decade. And I’ve got probably 20 journals and scrapbooks and brainstorms and like a whole archive from the last 10 years that, it just made me really excited to release my baby next year.

Terri Connellan: That’s very exciting.

Kerstin Pilz: What’s your book?

Natasha Piccolo: The Balance Theory. So it looks at the idea that the only universal goal that you can truly observe from cellular to cosmic is that the universe is attempting to balance itself.

Kerstin Pilz: It’s a non-fiction book.

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah. Narrative nonfiction, very similar process. So clinically I’m a speech pathologist. So a lot of my understanding of this concept has come through my clinical work over the years. But in my personal life, there was a lot of loss, grief, trauma that was basically mirroring the lessons as I was going through it clinically with clients so there’s that marriage of science and spirit, which is what the whole book is about.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. Yeah. I write about that in the postscript, how those things are coming together. It’s like consciousness, the map of consciousness work of David Hawkins and that sort of energy work. Things coming together. So that would be a really challenging book to write too.

Natasha Piccolo: It was, it was a beautiful process though. It was channeled, so I did it through meditation. I would meditate and there was one big meditation that came through as the divine nine. So there was nine chapters and that’s what the proposal was based off, that meditation. And after 10 years of scribbling ideas in journals for a very long time and not actually forming a manuscript. I went that’s what it is. It’s the divine nine. And now I’ve got to work backwards and go from that point. So just this morning I finished the first full draft, so that will be sent to Natasha at the kind press today.

Terri Connellan: Oh, wonderful. And she’s a beautiful person to receive your work. She’s just been amazing.

Natasha Piccolo: She’s a dream.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I’ve been very blessed to have Penelope with the developmental editing and then Natasha and her kind of press team with the next step of the journey. She’s incredibly supportive. So we will be fellow writers in the stable.

Kerstin Pilz: May I ask a final question about your writing process. So developmental editing with Penelope. Did you have somebody also, who did your line editing or was that done by the kind press? So, you know, your typos.

Terri Connellan: Do you want to answer how you saw your part, Penelope? Because I’m interested too, because it wasn’t just developmental. We did far more than that too didn’t we?

Penelope Love: Yeah. You know, that’s the thing when you’re working with someone like Terri and you have that soul connection, it’s really hard to separate the developmental part from the detailed part. And so especially because that process of finding voice. Not really finding it, but fine tuning voice. It goes hand in hand. So I would say we were able to work that process almost simultaneously. And then at the end of the developmental process, we were relatively confident that when it was going to the kind press, that it would only really need a polishing over. And that has a lot to do with Terri’s willingness to be involved at that level in the process.

Not every writer works that way. Some people just want to get it on paper and then I’ll worry about the lines then I’ll worry about, does this paragraph merge into this one? Fine. But Terri and I were able to do that work along the way.

Terri Connellan: And once we got the shape, right. We then worked through chapter by chapter. And we did the moving things around and sometimes bits moved. But at that stage, it was much more about the content within that chapter. And then the draft that went to the kind press was, it was a strong draft because it had been through all that editing and then the editing team, and Natasha hands-on edits as well. And she has another editor who is very skilled and has worked with a lot of the top houses too. So I’ve been really honored to work with some incredible people and, and I wanted to independently publish. That was always my choice. So you know, for me, it’s been a really great fit and great journey.

Natasha Piccolo: Congratulations.

Terri Connellan: Thank you for joining us today. So thank you for coming live and being here. It’s been really lovely. So I’ve popped in that review just because it was such a lovely one. That’s the first review it’s by Meredith who is part of the psychological type community. It’s been lovely to have people such as yourselves Penelope and Kerstin who know me and know the book and get it. But then others, like Meredith, who haven’t been as closely involved, she knows me through the psychological type network, but her review is really beautiful about how it fits with coaching and client work. And also she understands personalities, being a personality type person. So she highlights that too, that link between structure and meandering, which I was conscious of as I was writing. But it’s lovely when someone reflects that back to you. So that’s really very kind of them.

There are Book Club notes. So if people who were working through book clubs, I’ve created some book club notes, and some coaching opportunities coming up, walking people through the book as a whole, in a coaching space. So how do you think that would be I’m interested in your comments?

Natasha Piccolo: That is definitely what I would be doing with The Balanced Theory.

Terri Connellan: Is it? That’s a nice way to go!

Natasha Piccolo: Absolutely like, just from the structure, it’s because it’s teachable learnings as a coaching module. It works well. And I think that your book is very similar in that structure. Very tangible.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And it’s one thing to read a book and to do the activities, which you can, and sometimes people will intend to do it but it’s hard to get the time. So another thing too, is that structure helps create the time to do it. Yeah.

Kerstin Pilz: They can work through it as a week by week program program.

Penelope Love: Terri, I think it’s going to be amazing because the Sacred Creative Collective was almost like an early incarnation of what’s possible. I think you’ll find it probably a lot easier as a leader of such a collective to have this resource.

Terri Connellan: Thank you. I appreciate that feedback. Awesome. So any other questions or comments before we close?

Penelope Love: I have one comment. I just wanted to say Natasha. It’s so nice to meet you. We connected on Instagram and this is almost a rare opportunity to meet somebody that you’ve connected with in a more live way. Look forward to connecting over our posts in the coming years.

Natasha Piccolo: Definitely.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. Great to connect with you too, Natasha. It’s exciting. You’re getting to that stage with your book and yeah. Keep in touch. Thank you so much Penelope for everything and for joining today.

Penelope Love: Thank you too and I didn’t mean to overlook, it’s just that I feel almost like a colleague shift that we’ve had through the Wholehearted Stories and Natasha is completely new in my life, but I’m going to make sure that I’ve also connected with you on social media and then refresh myself on your story and stay more connected with you as well.

Terri Connellan: Thanks so much Kerstin for coming and being part of it. And for your support over the years, Write Your Journey and Quiet Writing have been very much kindred souls.

Kerstin Pilz: In parallel.

Terri Connellan: We connected in Sydney, totally synchronistically we were in Frankfurt at the same time and then in Vietnam. So we’ve had some lovely in-person catch-up.

Kerstin Pilz: And now we’re all grounded in Australia!

Penelope Love: Really remarkable. The chances of that, that’s amazing – that’s some really aligned stars there.

Terri Connellan: Thanks so much for being here.

Kerstin Pilz: Good luck with your next one. Have fun and enjoy the moment.

Terri Connellan: Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.

Links to explore:

Free resources:

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

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

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

My books and book club:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club – kicking off December 2021

Review of Wholehearted by Meredith Fuller

My coaching:

Work with me

Personality Stories Coaching

Connect on social media

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

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

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

About Penelope Love

Penelope Love, MA, is a publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as author of Wake Up in Love. In 2000, her career launched in the editorial department of the University of Michigan Press, followed by Barnes & Noble, and the original publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul. As she expanded into book design, production and business management, it was a natural evolution into the role of publisher. In 2016, she founded Citrine Publishing based on a visionary publisher-author partnership. Penelope passionately supports people in writing the books that only they can write, while also sharing the memoir only she could write, about sexual trauma healing and marriage to her spiritual teacher along a united path of Tantra and Self-Inquiry, illuminating these essential steps on the journey to liberation.

Penelope’s Blog: https://www.wakeupinlove.com

Citrine Publishing: https://www.citrinepublishing.com

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

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

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/penelopelove

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/penelopelove

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/PenelopeLove

Subscribe to Penelope’s Love Life Column: https://wakeupinlove.com/subscribe

About Kerstin Pilz

Kerstin Pilz PhD is a published author, former academic with almost 20 years university teaching experience, a TEDx speaker and a 200 RYT yoga teacher. She is currently completing her memoir Falling Apart Gracefully. Her previous publications include academic monographs and travel features in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and the New York Times and travel industry magazines. When tragedy turned her life upside-down, she discovered the healing power of writing and now teaches creative writing online and on multi-day retreats in her beautiful home in Mission Beach, Far North Queensland, Australia and in Hoi An, Vietnam, where she lives part time.

Kirsten’s website: www.writeyourjourney.com

Instagram: @writeyourjourney

Facebook: @writeyourjourney

TEDx talk on The Healing Power of Writing: https://www.writeyourjourney.com/kerstin-pilz-tedx-townsville-the-healing-power-of-writing/

or shortened version:  https://youtu.be/btxVXcRDhqY

Natasha Piccolo

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

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