podcast

Welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast

October 29, 2021

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

Transcript of podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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