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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:
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, playwright, columnist & media commentator, talkback radio guest, theatre director & producer, TV co-host, actor, psychological profiler and trainer. As a psychologist in private practice, providing counselling and career development to individuals and groups, she has also consulted to organisations on professional development and interpersonal skills for over 40 years. She ran a university careers counselling service for 12 years and has been a sessional lecturer in postgraduate courses in vocational psychology at several universities.
Meredith’s website: https://meredithfuller.com.au/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mfpsy/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fuller.walsh
