I am currently on holiday in Italy in an area where I was at school and university for a time many years ago!
A friend who I made back then is kindly hosting me on this holiday. Back then – in our twenties – we were learning a new culture and a new language together and our friendship was
forged from that experience of mutual discovery. Catching up with her after a long time, however, has given me the opportunity to review my life choices!

I also realise however that, despite many difficulties, I have managed to stay true to myself and my dreams.

Developing connection

Finding love was difficult for me. I experienced punitive and religious schools where sex was
frowned on or misused. In all, I had nine changes of school and none of those schools included any education about sex or relationships! 

Perhaps it was partly to do with this emotional deficiency that I embarked on three separate disastrous relationships with men until my late 30s.  This left me blaming the men in question
for the outcome. 

However, the transformation for me came when I found out that it was the way I was talking to myself that was the main problem. As Taylor Swift has it, ‘It’s me, hi/I’m the problem, it’s me.’

I consider myself lucky to have found someone to click with; someone who had had similar experiences as a young person but who had maintained a positive outlook despite this and also had similar ideals and dreams. In the last few years, we have been able to benefit each other through mutual creativity as well as on practical and spiritual levels.

Self-reflection

One of the outcomes of this supportive and creative relationship is my original research into the transformative power of storytelling and telling personal narratives, for which I gained
my PhD.

During the research, I discovered the way we tell our personal stories and how we reflect on our lives deeply affects those around us including future generations. One of the interviews I
carried out during my research was with three generations of one family over a ten-year period. Through that process, I learnt that having an ongoing conversation in real time – i.e. sharing
our voices across difference, can in itself be transformative for ourselves and others; it can also affect the choices that future generations make with their lives.

Want to know about Narrative Life Coaching? I have an exciting new in-person 90-minute masterclass I will be running in September. Sign up for my newsletter to receive monthly top
tips for changing your personal narrative and to find out all the details of the masterclass!

Have you signed up to my newsletter? It’s all about how we can change the details in our lives to make bigger changes with all the information on my upcoming masterclass, which is available to newsletter subscribers.

Reframing your mindset

Sometimes people say it’s hard to keep track of bigger goals, or that they have too much negative thinking or a mental block, so they can’t make that leap forward. This might just be because of a feeling of overwhelm due to something that happened in the past; and because of the ‘pastness’ of their experience, they feel they cannot change their lifestyle or their mindset.

When we’re in this state of mind we’re automatically in repeat mode and we reach a ‘tipping point’. Suddenly life gets overwhelming and becomes ODTAA – One Damn Thing After
Another.

Pay attention to self-dialogue

But what if one of the problems we have is to do with the way we talk to ourselves. For instance, what if we reframed the thought of ‘I’m unlucky/unfortunate,’ to instead, ‘I’ve experienced quite a lot of misfortune/lack of luck in my life but as everything changes, that situation can change too’. Suddenly a fixed entity or circumstance becomes something that can change or even reverse itself, given the right circumstances and connections.

Lifestyle and mindset (i.e. action and thought) so often boxed up by mental images that fix us into a certain character, position or way of doing things.  But it’s not our past, it’s what we do
from here on that matters.

The Courage to be Disliked

I’ve recently been reading The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. It’s based on a certain kind of future-oriented psychology pioneered by Alfred Adler (1870-1937).

I believe, that while we cannot ignore the past, it’s true that, as Kishimi says, the way we talk to ourselves – the way we deal with our interpersonal relationships — is bound to have the biggest impact on our lifestyle and life course. For Alfred Adler, our view of ourselves is forged from about the age of 10 years old.

My story 

I can see that what Adler said might resonate. When I was 10 years old, I was sent to a boarding school I didn’t want to attend, while my parents left for work abroad. I clearly remember the sense of shock of being separated from my parents for the first time in my life, the emotional and physical cold of the shared dormitories, and isolation among strangers.
I went to several schools both before and after that, so throughout my education, I always felt wary and distant even with loved ones, perhaps fearing abandonment.

Interpersonal connections

I didn’t really address this until later in life when I started to see that the way I related to others was as much to do with a set of circumstances in my childhood which were no fault of mine, or indeed of anyone else, rather than something intrinsically wrong with me. Realising this has meant that I have been able to connect much more successfully in interpersonal relationships. Before that, I often felt that I had to ‘do’ someone else’s emotions for them as I was so attached to the outcome; as though their wellbeing was the same as my wellbeing. So someone would say, ‘I’m so unhappy’ or ‘I am so frustrated’ or ‘I am so angry’ and I would attempt to ‘go there’ instead of attending to my own needs first.

Want to know about NLC? I have a free masterclass coming up next Friday 17 th May at 1pm. Even if you can’t attend the masterclass, why not sign up to my newsletter to receive the
replay?

There is a famous letter by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) titled ‘On the Acropolis’ written to the poet Romain Rolland (1866-1944) on his 70th birthday. In this letter, Freud writes to Rolland about how his father always dreamt of climbing the Acropolis in Athens but was too busy to do so. Now he, Freud, gets to climb the Acropolis at a late age and writes to the poet about his conflicted feelings — including regret that his father never made it and wonder that he did himself. 

I’ve got an Acropolis moment coming up as I will, all things being equal, complete my research degree this year and will be able to add letters to my name. This was not even a remote possibility when I left university a quarter of a century ago. I never wanted to read another book in my life! Even eighteen months ago I was ready to quit. I got my partner to take a photo of me looking free and happy ready to quit. And yet… 

Many of us have our Acropolis moments – things we want to achieve in our lives but can’t imagine achieving or perhaps would feel guilty about achieving if we did. These moments are perhaps all the more important to focus on in an age when we can distracted by the sheer availability of diverse experiences. After all, travelling to the Acropolis itself – or indeed many other great monuments in the world — is no longer a big deal. 

But the reason for focusing on those Acropolis moments is that ultimately it’s not about us, it’s about the people that will come after us; and the kind of world they will experience. By living our lives to the utmost we not only train the next generation but we also live the lives that our parents, unconsciously perhaps, dreamt of living – just as Sigmund Freud’s father dreamt of visiting the Acropolis.  

The truth is that the last two years would have been much easier if I had quit, and part of me still wishes I had; on the other hand, I realised that pushing myself to the limit to get to the Acropolis was not about me. It was about everyone who had supported me – financially, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually – to achieve the impossible.

What is your current Acropolis dream? Have you even dared to air it with anyone? Who is your trusted circle of friends or family with whom you could dare to share such a dream with? Does it seem impossible to achieve as mine did? Are you googling it? Are you relying on social media to dream it? Although we might gain more information or contacts that way, we will not be able to get lift-off in reality. Achieving your Acropolis takes time and talk, sometimes tough talk, in real-time with real people. 

As my research degree (or my Acropolis as I will now call it!) demonstrates, it’s really only when we unfold our narrative in real-time with a real person – or real people – that our perspective can shift and the unimaginably impossible, starts to become possible. That’s when the magic happens. As Marianne Williamson writes, ‘These are the times. We are the people. This is the time to speak up.’ 

Do you want to find out if we are a good fit to work together to visualize you climbing that Acropolis? 

I’d love to hold your hand as you start to climb your own personal Acropolis. 

Why not subscribe to my newsletter newsletter? Want to book a call to visualise your dream becoming a reality? Why not book a **free** call with me for 30 minutes? 

Here are some of the things people are saying about working with NLC:  

‘What I got from working with NLC was to prioritise your vision. You reminded me to always return to my needs and my vision.’ Karen 

‘Through Narrative Life Coaching, I was able to give form and structure to my vision.  I also learnt life-affirming thought strategies to sustain my vision and illuminate it further.’ Laura 

Have you subscribed to my newsletter newsletter? 

This month’s is full of top tips about how to change your self-talk. To change how we talk to ourselves we need to have better relationships with others. Our minds are so crowded with things and our to-do list continues to distract us from being present. Preparing to go away last week, I found I was trying to fit in as much as possible before I went away: this was so everything would be ready to fly off my desk when I got back! I found I almost forgot to celebrate my birthday with friends.

Being present to ourselves and our vision for our lives requires constant work, involving a full review of our behaviour, attitude and mindset. It was Aristotle who first identified that all our potentialities in life arise from our bodily existence. He observed the inherent potential that exists in all forms of life including our own: the transformation that can occur starts with an inner change sometimes at a microscopic level. In the philosophy of eudaimonia and the Middle Way, he saw that we could actualise our potential in the real world. 

Virtual reality

But how are we to do this when we seem to be so caught up in virtual reality and social media? When our relationship with our email inbox, our phone and our tablet so often takes priority over in-person connections? At NLC, we understand that the hidden transformation we are all capable of comes from holding better conversations with ourselves, with those close to us and with the wider world. 

How do you ‘do’ talk?

So much of our life in virtual reality seems to be about control. I was having dinner with a friend recently and he was showing me how he could control the lighting in his property through his watch. As we were eating dinner, lights were going on and off as he glided his fingers over his watch face. Incredible, but also incredibly distracting. Think about email interactions; how much frustration and difficulty is caused by long-chain emails? I experienced some neighbour difficulties during the pandemic. Over the course of two years, I exchanged hundreds of emails about this with the neighbour’s landlord. But the issue was finally solved in a few phone calls lasting a total of about 15-30 minutes. I think this is because so much ego is involved in written communications. The dynamic tends towards us vs them with very little knowledge or understanding of who ‘they’ are. Where in your schedule can you book time to speak to someone? When you do get to speak, how are you going to go about it? 

Good living – embracing uncertainty

This month’s newsletter is all about enhancing our mindset through holding better conversations with ourselves. One of the points I make in the newsletter is that without having regular conversations out loud, we can start to live in our heads. This leads us to think we don’t need to be vulnerable and that we can control reality. It was the Greek philosopher Aristotle who, when promoting his philosophy of good living – ‘eudaimonia’ –  enlightened us to the fact that, in order to really become fully realised individuals, we need to be able to acknowledge our vulnerabilities as well as our strengths. However, as Susan Jeffers PhD writes: 

‘As long as you think you can beat the very nature of life itself, you avoid looking for a way of being in this world that actually embraces the nature of life itself, which is uncertainty. You continue to live with the delusion that there has to be a way to control everything. If, however, you’re totally clear that there is no way to create certainty in your life, you can then move on to something more life-affirming. That is, you can learn to embrace uncertainty instead of trying to erase it.’

To get to know more about what NLC can offer and find out if it is a good fit for you, why not subscribe to my newsletter here?  

You could also sign up for my upcoming masterclass which I will be running on Wednesday 28th February and Friday, March 1st at 1 pm. 

The 45-minute masterclass will cover 

• An introduction to myself and my methods (10 mins)
• Vision setting (10 minutes) 
• Goal setting (10 minutes) 
• Reflection and revision (5 mins) 
• Q and A (10 mins) 

Just click the link here to join the mailing list for the masterclass and I will send you all the details! 

In my recent research into personal narratives, I made some big discoveries: 

Here are some key findings from my research into narrative and life experiences which I can share with you: 

1. Every word we say, to ourselves or others, is from a particular position and is an expression of our being in the world. Also, every experience we have is contextual. There is no such thing as an abstract experience. 
2. We all have three bodies: emotional, physical and intellectual/spiritual. When we tune into our emotional and physical body, we find our intellectual and/or spiritual body can start to thrive. Then we can transform our thinking. 
3. Part of our personal identity as human beings changes and part of our personal identity remains the same. 
4. Being a human being means experiencing ambiguity and contradiction but also recognising that we have various characteristics and conditions. This is the key to transforming our personal narrative. The more we emotionally commit in one or two areas of our lives the more we can expect to see every area of our life transform.  
5. Communication is key: communication happens at the subatomic level, let alone the non-verbal level. This is hugely significant.  Even if we think we are not communicating – we are. The stories we tell are also always different according to which context we are in. We can never shut off from space and time and each other.  We are always in dialogue – so how we communicate and interact on the micro level will affect the overall big story we are so desperate to tell with our lives.

Want to know more about my research-based methods? Here are some of the things people are saying about working with NLC:  

“What I got from working with NLC was to prioritise your vision. You reminded me to always return to my needs and my vision.” Karen 

“Through Narrative Life Coaching, I was able to give form and structure to my vision.  I also learnt life-affirming thought strategies to sustain my vision and illuminate it further.” Laura 

To get to know more about what NLC can offer and find out if it is a good fit, why not subscribe to my newsletter here [link]?  

You could also sign up for my upcoming masterclass which I will be running on Friday, January 26th and Wednesday, January 31st at 1pm. 

The 45-minute masterclass will cover 

1. An introduction to myself and my methods (10 mins)
2. Vision setting (10 minutes) 
3. Goal setting (10 minutes) 
4. Reflection and revision (5 mins) 
5. Q and A (10 mins) 

Just click the link here to join the mailing list for the masterclass and I will send you all the details! 

‘Where there is perfection there is no story to tell,’ Ben Okri. 

There is no need to be perfect but there is a need to show up for yourself.

When I talk to clients they tend to be obsessed with becoming more productive – the idea that they must be seen to be doing something or being someone 24/7.  

I can relate to this as I used to work on a publication whose production cycle was based on three continents – Europe, Africa and Asia. It wasn’t unusual for me to work until 10pm so I could get up at 7am and then Skype with the other side of the world. Then I realised, after my first holiday with my future partner, when I took a work phone call from the top of a Spanish mountain, also my first holiday in six years, that ‘that’s inhuman.’ 

We are cyclical creatures and the best expression of thriving is a spiral dance, an image that feminist scholars Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway came up with to talk about the need for scientists to start ‘thinking with’ rather than ‘thinking for’ or worse ‘thinking over’ the people and things they study. 

Who are you dancing and thinking with right now? Are you feeling in tune or in some way off-kilter or even rejected by them? If you are feeling rejected, don’t hang on to it. Rather than looking for, or seeking external approval and gratification, zoom in on what you want a bit more. Reflecting more deeply on what you are striving for will help you stay anchored and ensure you are less swayed by the fickle winds of circumstance.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ‘Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. Set down nothing that will help somebody.’ 

It’s taken me years to understand that every experience I have had and perhaps especially, the bad ones – will encourage me or at least give me insight later on.

Perhaps it isn’t someone else rejecting you; perhaps you are secretly rejecting yourself. One of my clients recently pointed out to me that we are often our own worst enemies – rushing around chasing after the far-off dream/activity and in the process likely tripping ourselves up, especially at this time of year. 

I am currently working on the biggest and most challenging project I have ever worked on and the strange thing is, I feel completely confident about it. At every stage in the lead up to it, I have been running around convinced that I have to make even more efforts to make it work – but right now I feel confident every stage of it will work out and I’m going to enjoy it all.

This new state of mind has come about at least in part, through coaching myself out of the what Thomas Harris calls the OK CORRAL, the ‘I’m not OK; You’re Ok’ mode of thinking. This is a way of thinking that sees everyone else as in a better position to oneself. Seeing the world this way is inherently disempowering – if you are thinking the other person is more Ok then you, they will definitely use that position that you have given them. For me, this way of thinking was the powerful mindset I learnt as a child (I attended nine different schools and boarding schools); surrounded by guardians and caregivers who found it incredibly difficult to praise and thank their charges and were (unconsciously perhaps) very emotionally hungry. While I used to think that ‘I’m OK, You’re OK,’ was a recipe for self-satisfaction, I now see how important Thomas Harris’s insight was. 

Around 90 percent of our thoughts come in repeat mode; if your internal conversation is set to thoughts instilled in you by a parent or teacher which say things like: ‘Watch Your Step,’ or ‘You Should Do…./You Shouldn’t Do’ or ‘If Only You Were…’ you will likely see the world in a judgemental way, constantly comparing yourself with others and thus, inadvertently perhaps, rejecting yourself – with all your incredibly valuable imperfections. 

The state of life we should all be trying to achieve is: ‘I’m OK. You’re OK.’ Without that balance of ‘I’m OK, You’re OK,’ we find that, whether on social media or in other spheres of life, we build up a tsunami of self-castigation and rejection. The more you tell yourself a story of rejection, the more it will grow. The feeling might be: ‘I never get what I want’ or ‘I am not good enough’. If we deny ourselves the space and time to overturn these negative thoughts, we could end up losing our sense of inner power to change the narrative. 

My recommendation for your gift stocking this festive season is to gift yourself the space and time to discover something about yourself that you didn’t know, to open a door that you may feel you have closed on yourself or that someone else has closed on you in terms of a holiday, a friendship, a career or a relationship. The feeling of rejection you are experiencing right now could end up being your greatest gift. 

Want to know more? Why not sign up to receive my latest newsletter with top tips for showing up for yourself this New Year? The newsletter will also provide you with free access to my new *FREE* vision masterclass, available only to subscribers. It runs on Friday, January 12th at 6pm! Follow me on Facebook and Instagram to find out more! 

I was lucky enough to be on my first funded writing retreat this autumn. It was slightly broken up due to tasks I had to complete in between but I managed to obtain just over a month away in total, which was magic.

This writing retreat also involved spending a lot of time in nature – including camping on the cliffs by the sea in an equinoctial gale (yes, the tent did blow down, but luckily not when I was in it!)  and in between bouts of writing I took long walks and swims. I picked
blackberries and hips and haws, brewing teas and arranging wildflower posies of nasturtiums, vetches, gorse and yarrow for my fellow guests to enjoy. I found being in nature galvanised the writing so much better and I was able to complete a draft of my play, which is what I was aiming for in the time available.

I’ve been developing a consistent nature practice since the pandemic when walks were prescribed to us for health purposes – so my working day is punctuated at least once or twice by regular short walks in local parks and I now volunteer as a local gardener, garden installation maker and plantsman when I can.

We naturally associate nature with finding freedom and our authentic selves – from the Japanese invention of forest bathing to Martin Luther King’s ‘I’ve Been To the Top of a Mountain Top’ or Rousseau’s ‘Promenades’. Then there is the parable of the phantom city, where a group of travellers are looking for a beautiful city in the Himalayas. On the way, they meet a travel guide who will take them there. When they arrive, they feel rested, but the next day they find the city is gone and they need to get on their way again to discover the next beautiful city. 

For me, writing and travelling have always gone hand in hand. I was placed as a few-month-old baby on a train rack on the way to Italy where my parents lived in my early years and I’ve always thought about travel in terms of gaining insight rather than simply keeping up the pace or making great strides, achieving milestones et cetera.

But there is also the metaphor of the primrose path, taking time to pause and take in the view, breathing deep – and also, of course, losing our way in the middle of life’s journey, like Dante’s alter ego in Inferno. Travel is not always insightful: it can be something that is simply a waste of time and we can lose ourselves in it.

During the last part of my retreat, however, my partner joined me and so I had the pleasure of sharing some of the sights that I had seen alone. I was able to rediscover the things that I had seen and discovered in my daily ramblings together with him: the views of bird sanctuary islands, the sunsets, the sacred sites, the wildlife – let alone sea swimming.

Above all the writing retreat helped me to clear a backlog of stuck emotions and a sense of unworthiness about my own projects and endeavours. Facing nature – the sea, the winds – I was reinspired to climb what had seemed an impossible mountain of work when I was back in town. It was as though I was able to trace the thread of what I wanted to write through the landscape I was walking in. It reminded me of a book I read at college called The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. The Songlines are the tools of navigation that aboriginal people use when trying to navigate across a great desert – the landscape is made sacred as a means for remembering the stories that keep the aborigine people together. So when we are walking we are literally walking a new narrative for ourselves. And if we’re not sure what the next narrative is meant to be then finding a new path – literally – across a landscape we don’t particularly know, is going to open up new perspectives on what we are trying to achieve whether in writing or any other creative endeavour. As Rebecca Solnit reminds us in Wanderlust – A History of Walking (1970),  the landscape becomes our tool for creating a new narrative.

If you are currently facing a block in your creative practice or finding an impasse in your life in some way, I highly recommend taking a break and going for a long walk or two – or perhaps a hike. Even if you take a walk in wintertime, that will also help you to reflect on where you are in your life’s journey.

As Solnit writes:
‘Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there – not saints and gods anymore but shepherds, hunters, engineers, emigrants, peasants to market or just commuters. Symbolic structures such as labyrinths call attention to the nature of all paths, all journeys.’  (Solnit: 1970: 72)

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I’ve been working on my new play for teenagers. Discussing with a group of 15-year-olds the other day, I asked if social media was a good way of making friends. ‘No, it’s a good way of making strangers’, one bright spark answered.

Teenagers are more in touch with the world than we think – and they don’t necessarily trust Social Media. They know that it’s in the real world that we can make friends and build futures for ourselves.

But we need a more rested and reflective way if we are going to live without virtual props. If we are not going to be dominated by other people and personas; we need to find space and time within. The battle to live in a more trusting world begins with oneself.  

Circle of Trust

Creating a circle of trust means making better friends with ourselves. We so often feel discontented and disconnected with our core sense of self, which leads to our buying more and more to satisfy our unmet needs. And society’s values depend on us consuming more to fill our imaginary needs, even if we are to go into debt for it.

While we may secretly know that getting better connected with ourselves will lead to more health and more joy, it necessarily means letting go of what doesn’t serve. This can sometimes lead to misunderstandings with friends and family who are not expecting us (and perhaps also don’t want us) to change.

But if we don’t change we get into a cycle where we get more and more disconnected with joy and inspiration as we find we need to be accepted by the group – at all costs.

Finding health and joy

That was me a few years back. I wasn’t enjoying my life. I had the outside-in model of happiness. I felt that the world needed to prove something to me before I enjoyed my life. I felt it needed to offer me the perfect partner, the perfect job, the perfect future – I had the qualifications after all! But I was so easily swept up in other people’s opinions in an era of virtual pets and unhealthily late nights that I would sabotage my own chances of happiness just to be cool. I didn’t understand that change comes from having a healthy inner dialogue.

How do you talk to yourself? To receive invaluable FREE top tips and testimonials about how NLC can improve your inner dialogue so you can start to live more of your vision for your life, subscribe to my newsletter here.  I can’t wait for you to join my mailing list.

And finally… I love this anonymous quotation:

‘It’s impossible,’ said Pride.

‘It’s risky,’ said Experience.

‘It’s pointless,’ said Reason.

‘Give it a try,’ whispered the Heart.

ANON 

I have been off social media recently, doing an offline cleanse in the last ten days! My bed has been Mother Earth (well, with a tent) and my ceiling and walls – the moon, sun and stars!

This retreat, which I obtained with funding for my new play (more about that another time!) – has helped me not only mentally but also physically.

Not only have I been much more productive than usual but I have also been able to make a lot of relationship shifts. The move has helped me reflect a lot about both the positives and the negatives of becoming a digital human.

On the one hand, I couldn’t have had the career that I have had without the Internet – living and working abroad, doing off-site postgraduate research, let alone life coaching – all of that has relied on my digital presence. But how much have I lost touch with significant others due to the common reliance on digital? It reminds me that one of my significant others, six years ago, said they would stop speaking to me on the phone full stop because it was ‘inconvenient’.

To be honest the people I’ve been meeting here on the retreat are a thriving community who support each other through life’s ups and downs: they visit each other and phone each other mostly – their reliance on emails and text for communications is less important than in-person and face-to-face relationships.

That’s the argument I make in my PhD: without encountering a rather special group of people in real-time I would never have engaged in their lives enough to want to do in-depth research and find out their hidden stories. I know my argument is much stronger because I engaged face-to-face with my subjects in their own language and in their own environment.

When you’re living by the sea, faced with nothing but the elements, it’s hard not to see your life and other lives in terms of universal time: and also you’re able to make more of every single moment you have, just because of that insight.

It reminds me of two of my favourite quotes by Henry David Thoreau from his book ‘Walden’. The first is, ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in’ and the second is, ‘I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poorest misanthrope and melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still.’

Being in nature has also helped me to focus on doing some of what Byron Katie, in her 2002 book, Loving What Is, calls ‘the work’. At Narrative Life Coaching we go deeper to reflect on how you talk to yourself, and how you talk to others and then we transform the story that you tell the world. The process can seem painful in some ways but there is also the joy of letting go of old ways of thinking and doing and finding out what’s possible for you right now.

For tips about doing The Work and other self-development tips delivered directly to your inbox every month, sign up for my newsletter here.

And finally – my members’ site is just about to go live and we’ll be launching our autumn offerings very soon. More about that in the next newsletter! Be the first to hear by signing up here.  

This month’s blog is all about relationships. Before I got hitched I received some very good advice from a friend of mine who said ‘it’s not the relationship – it’s a relationship.’ Another friend said ‘a relationship, even with an intimate partner is not a community project it’s a relationship’ – i.e. something you work on which is no one else’s business.

So many of us become overdependent whether with an intimate partner, children, or even a boss or a pet. Sometimes the urge to get someone or something else close to us to take over the reins of our being in the world can be very strong especially if we are going through grief, loss or illness. It can seem that if only someone could take us away from events in our lives that are unpleasant we would be able to be let off the inner work that grief and sadness confront us with.

In such situations we tend to wish that if only someone else could take the steering wheel and be in the driving seat we would be better off as we try to get a sense of proportion back in our lives. But the phenomenon of anxious attachment can arise in the context of loss. An anxious attacher will often feel a terrifying sense of abandonment that builds.

Unfortunately it’s usually impossible for our emotional and material needs to be met by significant others alone. Although it’s natural that we should seek support from our nearest and dearest we need to meet our own needs as much as possible.

A few years back I strongly felt the need to have my voice heard in the world. Although I was successful in my career I was also an introvert and had a tendency to feel drained from being around people. I’m not alone: according to a You Gov personality study of 2019, the majority of us in the UK – 57% – identify as being shy! At the time I met my partner I was emotionally frayed, my confidence was shot to pieces and I could only hold my own in a crowd with some difficulty.

As my partner is a very confident public speaker I felt a little inadequate and even envious (although don’t tell them that)! Sometimes I couldn’t explain how I felt to them but at the same time I found myself using them to reduce my feelings of panic and abandonment. Then, unfortunately, I started to blame myself because I just didn’t understand why I couldn’t overcome my feelings of inadequacy. What I didn’t understand was that introversion is not an inherent character trait but  a response to the environment – I just wasn’t in the right place emotionally and work wise to thrive.

I had to dig deep to get back to ‘me’. Luckily I was engaged in postgraduate research at the time and doing field work. From talking to my cohort of interviewees I discovered that it was the small stories that mattered to them: the reciprocal everyday connections made in community or with strangers such as myself as well as the ability to develop creative ways to live their lives, that made a difference.

I started to tune in to more of what my research was telling me i.e. to listen to the notes at the back of the orchestra. I developed new daily routines to maximise my potential and tell a new story with my life. For more top tips on how to overcome emotional blocks so you can achieve your goals this year why not subscribe to my newsletter and/or join my vision boarding masterclass on 15th August? Or you can follow me on Facebook and Instagram!