When you change, what else needs to change?
3 chapters…
01.
I’m not sure if you noticed, and this isn’t a test, not at all, it’s just that at the end of last year I announced a change to this newsletter. I’ll roll us back to my announcement in November: “I’m going to be publishing monthly posts, called The Process - a deep dive into the creative process and personal inner work with an accompanying supportive practice to help you to explore and enrich your own creativity and inner world.” I was super excited about this idea! I shared two examples, this one and this one for free. And the rest were going to be behind a paywall for those people who signed up. Well, that’s no longer happening, and there’s an important reason why…well, two reasons, actually…
02.
Where do I begin…because I feel like there is a long and convoluted, wrapped up in my whole history, answer to this question. And there is also a much simpler but maybe oversimplified one. I’ll try and straddle between the two. Over my career, I’ve loved helping people to grow, transform, heal through individual sessions and group programs. But when I closed my psychology private practice a few years ago, I made a commitment to pursuing a different but somewhat related purpose: Placing healing at the heart of story-telling. Hence, my fiction writing, this newsletter and my social media. It’s not individual healing sessions and it’s not explicit teaching. It’s storytelling with healing at its heart. So here’s what happened…
03.
When it came to planning The Process post for January, I felt resistance. What was going on? Two things. 01. I realised that The Process idea was more aligned with my previous career than my current one. It’s not completely off kilter. But it’s not smack on centre. With a couple of logic leaps I could argue that it absolutely fits into my current ecosystem and, in fact, why wouldn’t I do it? I’ve got lots I could share and it could bring in a bit of money. A no brainer, really. But, no, I couldn’t do it because of the second major realisation. 02. I am no longer the person who ran the previous iterations of my business. I’ve changed, I’ve grown, I’ve healed. Yes, I can do it. But that doesn’t mean I should do it. And in fact, the full realisation was this: I shouldn’t do it because I’m here to honour who I am now. Not who I was. A good idea is no longer good enough if it doesn’t absolutely align with who I am now. We change and we honour that change. That’s what I’m trying to do.
How about you? How have you changed? Who are you now? And is there a change you’d like to honour too?
3 endnotes…
I wanted to give you a little peak into the results from the survey I sent out the other week. I loved learning a little more about you and why you might be here so thank you for your responses!
The most popular topic of conversation, if we met for a coffee, was chatting about writing and being an author. Coming in equal second were psychology, spirituality and creativity.
The most popular article you’d click on was ‘5 ways to be more creative’ followed by ‘Top 10 tips for parenting teens’ followed by ‘Why adults adore teen fiction.’
The majority of you first came across my work as a fiction author. The rest of you first knew me as a parenting educator. And a smaller portion of you first knew me as a psychologist in private practice.
These results are fascinating to me because it feels like an endorsement of what I shared above. Even though many of you first knew me as something I no longer am, you‘re allowing me to be who I am now and not who I was. Enormous thanks for that.
I’m also not ruling out, completely, sharing longer and deeper dive posts like I imagined for The Process. It just it won’t be a monthly thing and they won’t be behind a paywall. We’ll see what emerges as the year progresses!
Until next time, love to you and yours,
If you really want to know who I am now, it’s all in my book, Never, Not Ever - healing at the heart of storytelling.