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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:
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/
