Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

PART ONE

MY WHOLEHEARTED TRANSITION JOURNEY

1

BEGINNING THE JOURNEY

Our bodies and our personalities are vessels, and

leadership, like captaincy, is full inhabitation of the vessel.

David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea

1.1 Journey beginning

A point comes when you realise you are on a journey bigger than the one you initially imagined. You have been working so hard, throwing yourself at events and opportunities, but your heart is just not in it anymore. The organisation you have worked for has changed. Or is it you who has changed? Perhaps both, but as a result the alignment is gone.

You feel like you are leaving parts of yourself—the most important parts—at the door when you walk into the workplace. You start to go about the day like a ghost, an automaton. There are snatches of conversation where you connect with people and come alive talking about books, writing, creativity. But the rest of the time you feel stranded, like you are in a place where no one speaks the language of your heart.

It’s an eerie feeling. You may have been in the organisation or role for a long time, like me. I invested thirty years in one organisation. In The Heart Aroused, David Whyte recalls the story of working with a group of managers looking at how people sacrifice themselves and their ‘own sacred desires and personal visions on the altar of work and success’.¹ One woman from the group read these lines she wrote about her time in the workplace and the loss of self over time:

Ten years ago …

I turned my face for a moment

and it became my life.

It felt like this for me, and perhaps you relate to the occurrence of almost overnight change in a workplace to which you had, inadvertently, dedicated your whole life. The things you care about seem lost in the day-to-day. The people you connected with are suddenly gone. And then new people arrive to sweep the organisation into something new. Maybe it is needed. There is always change and I have been through plenty of it in my time, but sometimes something is irreparably out of alignment and it just breaks your heart.

A critical first step in making the shift from what no longer aligns is to begin to listen to your heart and voice. What words do you find coming out of your mouth? Is your heart invested in what you are doing and saying in the day-to-day? Or are you wanting the present to be past?

MY PATH TO WHOLEHEARTED WORK

In conversations with people about my place in the new organisation, I hear myself saying the words: ‘I’m just not feeling wholehearted anymore’, ‘I’m feeling half-hearted’ and ‘My heart’s just not in it’.

It is some time around March 2016. I sit in a beautiful sunken garden in my workplace, escaping in a quiet corner, with my heart feeling truly low. That experience becomes the beginning of the path to more wholehearted work and living as I realise I no longer resonate with the organisation.

I listen to myself and wonder, what comes next?

APPLYING FOR POSITIONS I DON’T WANT

In a classic case of not feeling wholehearted, I apply for a senior position in the new version of the organisation that I find out I don’t really want. I am trying to find a place in the new world and it is a role I could do well. Though I do feel the odds are set against this position, it’s possibly a poisoned chalice in some ways, potentially undoable. But I back myself and apply. I spend hours on the application and I believe it demonstrates my ability to perform the job requirements well.

I wait to hear more. Then one evening, I have strange pains in my heart and my breathing is difficult. I am asthmatic and have been on prednisone, as my breathing has been bad in the previous weeks. Eventually I end up in emergency the next day as they try to work out the issues. With the issue being potentially heart-related, I am there all day and feel terrible, and because they don’t know what it is, I can’t even have a sip of water. I become completely drained and disorientated.

Eventually I go home and stay home from work the next day to rest. There is no clear diagnosis, just a possible reaction to something. So I rest, completely blank-minded and exhausted after the experience. There is a call from the recruitment agency about the position I have applied for. They want to see if I can do an initial interview at nine the next morning, as the key recruitment person is in Sydney for the day.

A person interested in the position would have said no and explained their situation, especially with such late notice. I said yes and afterwards explained to my partner Keith, ‘I just wanted to get it over with’. So in a way I was set up for failure, feeling half-hearted and unwell. I didn’t really want the job anyway, as the response shows.

But I showed up for the interview. I didn’t take the time to explain what had happened to me in the days leading up to it. And surprise, I didn’t do well in the interview.

In a way, the mistake was to have applied for the position in the first place. I didn’t apply for anything after that, because the truth was, I was feeling half-hearted about the organisation. We had actually parted ways, shifting in different ideological directions, some time ago. And the strain of being present there day in, day out was starting to show.

DISAPPOINTMENT, PAPER CUTS, DASHED ON ROCKS

Still working in my usual role, I tried other ways to support the new organisation. I was offered new opportunities to see how I fitted, both of us testing the other out. I thought I had done well in one opportunity. After a short while, in around June 2016, I found out that this same position was to become vacant again. I thought that would be a perfect place for me to be. I had the skills, knowledge and experience.

The position was offered to someone else. This was communicated to me in the middle of a meeting with a whole group of people there—which was not that person’s fault at all, but I can remember the moment, looking up at blue sky outside the window, fixing my gaze there over the buildings and not being able to participate in the rest of the meeting. It was one of those moments of feeling kicked in the guts. It was visceral.

Brené Brown talks about disappointment as being like paper cuts:

Disappointments may be like paper cuts, but if those cuts are deep enough or if there are enough of them, they can leave us seriously wounded.²

This one left me feeling like I was dashed on rocks, like there was blood everywhere. I remember walking down the beautiful heritage timber staircase and viciously stabbing the point of my pen into the top of the newel post. I couldn’t help it; it was how my heart felt, stabbed. Like the Three of Swords, a heart broken open.

I had given so much to this organisation and now I was being treated like some form of leftover detritus, floating around unable to find a place. I cried most of the way home. I couldn’t talk for hours, and the next few days were difficult. I hardly slept.

LOOKING FOR FOOTHOLDS

The next morning, I reached out to two people as a hand extending into the future. One was a creative friend and coach, Victoria Smith. I asked about working with her, as I knew I needed support now to move through this time. Things were going to change. We had been close for a while and she was a support, but for me this was a new move, an acknowledgement of weakness, of needing help. It felt uncomfortable but brave at the same time. She recognised it for what it was and held space for me at a critical time.

I also contacted someone I’d reached out to online before about a possible new venture in ‘new ways of working’. At the time, he had responded asking questions but I hadn’t answered him because I just didn’t know what to say. A new future looked so challenging and so far away that I just couldn’t carve it out then. But I could start now. I never heard from him after my belated response, as he had no doubt moved on. For that reason, I was not discouraged. It was more a stake in the ground, a reaching out to something new.

So now I had two stakes in the ground, or like footholds when you’re climbing—two pieces of solid ground to hold onto in a world that was slipping and shifting away.

I went to see my doctor as I was unable to work. I took a week to rest and start to plan a fresh, wholehearted future. It was like when you know you are moving house or location, or when your relationship is ending and you are still in it. You know the change is coming. You can’t stay where you are. But in your heart, you have already moved on.

A WEEK OF REFUGE AND RESCUE

So in early July 2016 I spent a week in refuge. I hid away from the world. I rested, read and reflected. Brené Brown’s Rising Strong was my choice of book for that week and I couldn’t have chosen a better tome for the time. I read about shame and vulnerability and I read narratives about hitting the bottom, getting through and rising strong. It gave me comfort and connection as I sat in my lounge chair on my own, staring out at the water and trees.

One afternoon, I drew a card from the Wild Unknown Animal Spirit deck. It was the Crocodile, with energy all about ‘resting, submerging, collecting energy, cooling off’.³ The guidebook reminded me it was not a time for decisions, it was a time to wait. A time of intentional withdrawal, gathering awareness and filling up the reserves. A wise, intuitive choice, I thought inwardly, as my reserves are just about completely wasted and gone. There is a wisdom and patience in rest and I took it as medicine, as a form of healing. When I did eventually leave the house, I stopped on the road out in a place I drive through every day to see, to look, to be and to rest in transition. I am on the way now.

As I moved through the week and read Brené Brown further, it all made perfect sense. I realised that this was the way to tell stories, personal stories, personal narrative. I had been telling myself these stories for a while: ‘I can’t tell stories’, ‘I don’t get plot’, ‘I can’t write narrative’. But I have written the narrative and storyline of my life for years in diaries, journals, poems and various other forms. I have written it in strategic policy documents, speeches and media responses as well. Every piece of writing, a piece of my heart.

I still might not ‘get’ formal plot structures. Perhaps I need to learn from this or maybe I can just rely on intuition. But this storytelling of Brené Brown’s is a way that I can write, relate to and, as she says, ‘rumble with life’.

We also had a new cat in the house, Azzie, a rescue cat who had joined us at the age of six a few months before. I was learning from her too. She sat with me on the bed, in the library, on the window sill, and we got to know each other. I learned from her about slowing down, napping. We rested together, both having been through trauma for a few years, it feels. It was good to have comfort, a home to be inside while storms raged outside.

As the week progressed, more rest ensued and the weather continued to be wild outside as if reflecting my inner turmoil. It felt lovely to be housebound with my rescue cat, as we clung to each other’s presence in the quiet. My emergent tarot and oracle practice took shape during this time as I sought intuitive support in the silence.

A card I drew at that time was number 36, Commitment, from the Enchanted Map deck by Colette Baron-Reid. I realised questions of commitment were at the heart of this transition time. Commitment to what, though? I committed thirty years to my organisation and at the end of it, it just felt like a waste of time.

It was not a total waste, I knew in my heart of hearts, but the lack of valuing of people is endemic and I think it’s a hole in the heart of the world that I can address. I decided I would write and reflect my way through and find a way to craft a business helping people transition from an organisation or lifestyle that no longer loves them into another future that they love with their whole heart.

The Talisman card from Marcella Kroll’s Sacred Symbols oracle deck also made a regular appearance at this time. And the key image of the Talisman card—a literal key—is in the Commitment card also as a key with wings flying and finding itself. I was watching for signs, but they were pretty well shouting now. Clearly there was more and different work to do.

I read some insights about emotions that day too:

When you frame your emotions as something that other people make you feel, though, you’re quietly giving away all that power.⁴

I remember resonating with the feeling. At that point in time, I felt defined by all I had given away, by what was missing, by lack. A classic burnout episode. There was nothing left. I was just all anger, frustration and pain.

CREATING QUIET WRITING

Over time, I gathered the pieces of myself back together. I already had a blog, Transcending, that I had started in 2010 as a way of expressing myself creatively and finding my voice at a time of being work-focused. But my new life required a new identity online as well.

After a few months of working with my coach on my transition plan, I launched Quiet Writing, a website, community and business in September 2016. Quiet Writing is about the strength that comes from working quietly in writing and other spheres to create, coalesce, influence and connect. It provided an opportunity to reconnect with myself and my core values of creativity, intuition, resilience and strength, and the interplay between them. Self-leadership, transition, creativity and personality emerged as key counterpoints.

As I worked on shaping my wholehearted story and building skills in real life and via my website, I began gathering other women’s stories of transition and publishing them on my blog. I will share some of these other women’s voices alongside my own in this narrative because it shows how common the feelings and experiences are. It is amazing how many of the stories also feature a moment of burnout, breakdown or other similar key turning points.

My friend Lynn Hanford-Day describes her experience of burnout as losing heart:

For me, burnout is about loss of heart. There was no heart attack, but I was turned to ash and I wasn’t even sure whether there were some embers glowing. My internal landscape was like those images after the forest fires in California, an apocalyptic scorched landscape. Both my doctor and my counsellor said that this had been coming for many years and looking back on my life I can see the truth of that. They told me that recovery was possible, yet I wasn’t sure what would rise from those ashes.⁵

I felt like this too. What a monumental journey to commence working on myself before supporting others through it.

BEGINNING A JOURNEY BACK

So following that critical turning point in July 2016, I began a journey of transition back to a life that more fully reflects me. For three decades, work had taken over and important pieces of me were missing in action. David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea describes how I felt when that time hit:

When you get to the bottom, you’ll find everything you’ve disowned and thrown away from yourself lying around on the ground.⁶

If wholehearted means being whole and finding our meaning, whether in work or another context, this phase of the journey was the polar opposite. I had reached a point where the person I was, day in, day out, was exactly what I did not want to be.

And somehow, following a hard landing into a surprisingly soft place, I now found myself in the midst of the search to gather back the pieces that were missing.

MOVING ON

It is a strange feeling to be in a situation from which you know you are moving on. For me, this was the work situation where the organisational changes underway led to the realisation that I was not going to stay or be there anymore. I wanted a different future. It felt the same as being in a relationship that you know will end. You no longer see it on the long-term horizon. It is finite, and there’s an end you know you will need to facilitate and negotiate.

Another time I had felt like this was years earlier in 1989 when I was in Sydney in the middle of the city and moving to the country. It was something I had always wanted to do. And suddenly everything about Sydney seemed wrong: the construction going on, the urban development, the traffic, the environment. It was like something deep shifted inside me—and the lens I applied to my everyday world in Sydney was filtered and coloured, making it a place I no longer wanted to be.

In all of these cases, there was a slow build-up, a desire for something else: a different lifestyle, love to be expressed another way, a cottage in the country, a deeper connection.

For this work transition, it came down to identity. The time invested in my former workplace had been fruitful, but there were critical parts of me lying dormant, unexpressed. I tried to capture them on the daily commute, in cafes on the way to work, or afterwards at night when I was just too tired to read anymore or create. I had to carve out space in my days for transition. I had to plan for a different future. I had to keep doing something each day as a path to this new way. I had to keep cutting a scythe through the vines and tendrils that kept me contained in this place where I was losing myself.

At the same time, I had to learn to honour this time and experience. It was painful, there was no question—all those paper cuts and rocks had impacted. I was so invested in my identity in this place, it was hard to see another one.

The Eight of Cups tarot card kept arriving, both before this time and as I was going through it. This is a card of abandoned success, of choosing to walk away. The challenge in choosing to walk away is not to shut the door completely on the skills, experiences and connections of the place you are choosing to leave. I have had to work through my identity, and my body of work over time, to recognise the threads about what makes me feel wholehearted. To revisit what it was I went into the organisation for in the first place so many years ago before it got clouded over in bureaucracy, administration and a feeling of lack of value.

It took me a long time to untangle these skeins of experience and to work out how they could fit together in new combinations. I had to go through a deep process of finding, recognising and honouring them, identifying the strands I could blend and weave together anew. The threads were about making a difference, about language and learning, about teaching and supporting others, about guiding them, and about being a gentle but informed guide, at least one step further along.

Once the threads were crystal clear, I needed to learn how to take this guiding light into a new paradigm, to find the passions that brought me alive and to cast them in a new light. I needed to recover and revisit the lost skills and loves: reading deeply, writing poetically and lyrically, holding space for others, and bringing my unique personality to bear in the best way possible. In this way, I could be satisfied and my work would be fulfilling. Other people would benefit and I would be able to create a new lifestyle that integrated all these precious aspects and was not lost in hours commuting and work that left me feeling like critical parts of me were missing in action. In short, I wanted to feel wholehearted each day in my work and my life. So I needed to take some time to rediscover myself and my passions to make a way back.

And throughout all of this, it has been important to share my experiences and see where, through my learning, I can support, be a guide for and make a difference for others. This book, written from the heart of my transition journey, tracks the path I walked and my learning along the way as a light and guide for others going through similar times.

It is not the easiest of journeys and you can feel alone and lost as familiar footholds disappear. I hope that, through reading and connecting with my experiences and learned wisdom gathered along the way, you find a kindred soul to guide your own wholehearted transition. It is my deepest wish that these insights can help guide you along your own unique path.

WHOLEHEARTED LIVING REFLECTIONS

Was there a time in your life (and it might be now) when you felt like you were going on a journey?

Have you experienced key turning points like the loss of a job, a change in relationship status, or a move to a new home? What did it feel like and what transition did it forebode?

Did you look for or are you looking for footholds and places to take you forward into the future? What do these look like and how can you establish firmer footholds?

Have you needed or do you need a time of withdrawal, of refuge and rescue to reorient yourself and your future? How did you or might you carve it out?

If you are beginning the journey and would like to dive deeper into wholehearted living reflections for this vital early stage, I invite you to explore the first part of the Wholehearted Companion Workbook.

1.2 In the heart of transition

So what is transition and what am I talking about when I say ‘women in transition’?

It could be any type of transition really but it is moving on from a situation that no longer serves. It could be a relationship, a job, a way of being, a place. The reasons and conditions for leaving or moving on could be of your volition or imposed by others or be a combination of the two.

But as you move through, you realise that you cannot stay. There’s