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(Un)spoken Agendas

Let’s look at criticism for a moment, because if you’re anything like me, you’ll have heard a lot of it in your life, from a variety of angles. Here is some of the criticism I have heard:

oYou’re too quiet and sensitive.

oYou don’t know how to get along with people.

oYou laugh too loudly.

oYou have short legs (yes, really!).

But what is interesting is that for almost every criticism I’ve heard from someone, I’ve heard the exact opposite from someone else. I say almost, because unfortunately, no one has ever told me I have long legs!

Here is some of the praise I’ve heard:

oYou’re one of the most outgoing people I’ve ever met.

oYou’ve got such drive and determination.

oYou’re really good at building relationships with people.

So, who is right and who is wrong? And what does it all mean? Well, it means that words come with an agenda. People say things to get us to behave in a certain way. For instance, “You’re too quiet” could really be someone saying, “I’m not comfortable with silence.” And, “You laugh too loudly” could mean, “I feel depressed and your laughter reminds me of how unhappy I am.” But instead of stating a flaw or weakness in themselves, others flip it back as a criticism—hoping that you’ll mold yourself to suit them.

So ultimately, the only thing that matters is what we believe. The stories we tell ourselves and the world hold the key to our individual happiness. If you live by other people’s agendas, then it’s likely that you’ll behave in ways that don’t serve your highest self.

Can you relate to this? To the need to please, to be liked, to be loved? You might feel that need so much that you take the criticism, and, like a sculptor, you begin chiselling away at yourself until—over time—your structure falls. You took too much away here and left not enough there, and now you’re broken and in pieces. So, you have to try and put yourself back together. Except now some pieces don’t fit you anymore. You’re new and different, and not necessarily better. You wish you had never started chipping away at yourself. But now you can’t stop chasing some illusion of perfection that was never there and can never be there.

Where Is the Truth?

When you embrace, believe, and embody criticism without questioning what’s behind it, you can start to believe that you’re not good enough. That’s when your perception of the world becomes skewed.

A key sign is that you keep finding yourself in situations where criticism, bullying, and harsh words are commonplace. That’s not necessarily to say that you are being bullied yourself, just that judgement, cattiness, and “calling people out” seems to happen all too frequently. Plus, if you’re the one that people find fault with, you can start to feel less and less. Worse still, you may be left with no idea how to remedy the predicaments you find yourself in. And if there are no unfriendly people like this in your life, it doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. Maybe you have a critical inner voice, bullying you, pushing you around, and telling you you’re not good enough. Maybe you’re telling yourself that you’re a failed piano player who doesn’t deserve to have music in her life. Maybe you’re telling yourself that you’re just not “good” at writing, you can’t spell, and your grammar is crap. Maybe you’re telling yourself that you want to write, you really do, but you don’t want to dig too deep. What if your ex-boyfriend, grandmother, or childhood best friend sues you after reading the things you wrote about them?

That’s not to say you need to believe you’re the greatest, the best thing ever, and all superior. That’s a fast track to an emotionally empty life. Instead there’s a more optimal way—a middle path of love, one where you don’t judge anything about yourself as good or bad and instead view it as information. Get to know yourself with an open heart and accept what you find. Then write what you find, express yourself, and take care of your needs first. Put fear to one side and create first.

Love and acceptance are gifts we desperately need to give ourselves. And they’re essential for living a fully expressed life. In the coming pages, you’ll find stories, ideas, food for thought, writing tools and techniques, and creative challenges and exercises that will help you to write your way to a self-expressed life. I’ll coax you into expressing what you truly think and expressing what you truly feel. And I’ll help you to write through the darkness until you pierce shadows of light.

I’ll also look at the negative events that happen to us all, which are trying to guide us. The catch is that if you’re not attuned to reading the signs and serendipities, the world will look bleak. But try to look a little deeper and a little closer. If you can squint your eyes and peer through the looking glass of life, you’ll see that signs and serendipities abound. You’ll see them dance across your eyes, pointing out the path to self-love.

Writing Can Clear a Path to

Self-Love

So, WHO am I? Well, I’m not a love expert. (Who is? I think each of us is a work in progress.) But I am a writer, teacher, and creative writing coach. I’ve also lived a rich and varied life, and I’d like to share what I’ve learned. And it’s perhaps surprising that I want to do this, as I grew up wanting to hide. In fact, I think “easily embarrassed” is a phrase that accurately sums up my early childhood.

But over time I became adept at hiding in plain sight—on stages and in auditoriums. I sang, danced, ran, jumped, and played music. I was Deputy Head Girl in middle school and Head Girl in high school. One friend nicknamed me “shiny happy person” after the REM song. Yes, I smiled a lot, and I had a shiny forehead—something I thankfully seem to have grown out of. I smiled and mixed, and all the while I hid. I mean, I was outwardly positive and friendly. I got along. But inside I felt that no one really understood who I was.

So, I wrote—songs at first. It was 1988, and I would listen to Madonna songs on repeat on my tinny cassette player and write down all the lyrics. Then I would pick them apart to figure out the structure and why this rhymed with that, and so on.

I became a little nine-year-old connoisseur of love songs. I wrote and wrote about love and loss, love and loss—the two themes that define most adult lives. But I also started to realize that writing could be powerful, because it could help me to speak up for myself. So I started to put my thoughts on paper in other ways. I wrote letters to my favorite magazines, Hi! and Look-In, and got such a buzz when they were actually published.

Here’s an example of one where I gushed about my favorite TV program: “I think the Wide Awake Club is brilliant. The bed-making competition is fantastic. I think the WAC team must be rich, because they give such a lot of prizes away.” I mean, it was hardly Shakespeare, but it gave me a taste for the power of words.

Since those days, I’ve written and written and written: two nonfiction books (including this one); a novel (currently unfinished); thousands of articles (some published in magazines, some stuffed in drawers, some languishing on old hard drives); morning pages (three pages of stream of consciousness writing, first thing—as inspired by Julia Cameron); poems; more songs; blog posts; press releases, newsletters, speeches, award entries, and articles as a director at a business-to-business PR consultancy; journals; affirmations; shopping lists (both literal and spiritual); and scribbles here, there, and everywhere.

I continued to ask for things. For instance, after I graduated from university, I wrote letters to virtually every women’s magazine in London, asking for a work experience placement. A couple took me up on my offer, and that’s how I became a journalist.

I realized that through writing, I could ask for things that I wouldn’t dare to speak out loud. Better still, I could write things into existence: things that were never there before, except for wishes or dreams in my head.

Writing unlocked so many doors for me (and not just because I became a journalist who got paid to interview celebrities, go to events, and drink champagne at parties). I think it was because I continued to write to people and ask for what I wanted. And when there were very dark, difficult times, writing was a helpful friend. In the year that I turned thirty-one, my mother committed suicide, and I wrote reams and reams about my feelings, which allowed healing goodness to flow. It was highly therapeutic, and those hours and hours of writing helped me to chart a new path.

A Safe Space to Open Your Heart

Writing allows you to be quiet enough to listen for the signs and serendipities that can guide you toward your highest self. Bad stuff will happen, and we desperately need a way to make sense of it. Writing can help you do that.

I’ll never forget the words of Yair Sagy, an openhearted healer and teacher I met while taking part in a juice fast. He said, “Your heart has remained open because you’re a writer, because you’ve been consistently writing throughout your life.” Yes, I hid everywhere—except on the page. It was all there, written in ink, and it showed me the way time and time again.

I don’t know if you’re also the type to hide. But I’ll bet that you’re the type who wants a little bit more. But to get “more,” you’ve got to go within. Writing is my way of doing it. For some, it’s yoga or meditation, or painting or sculpting. For others, it’s a weekly trip to a farmer’s market and then back home to cook up a delight. Maybe for you it’s a wonderful pick and mix of this and more.

For me, writing brings me back home. I love writing. I love words, their potential, and the goodness they can bring into life. They can heal, help, and harmonize. They can find a way when there is no way.

But what if you feel blocked and stifled? What if you write, but you never really say what you need to say?

Well, I’ve been there.

For my first six or seven years of being a journalist, I couldn’t freely express myself when writing. There’s a quote by “Red” Smith that I love. When asked about how he got his newspaper column done every week, he said, “You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.” That’s how it was for me too.

I was “good” at writing, but it came at a huge price for me. It simply wasn’t easy. My block (or my writing personality) was governed by fear. (We’ll look at this more in Chapter 1, and you’ll figure out which kind of writing personality you have.) I used to leave all my writing until the last minute and only get it done through fear: fear of losing my job or of losing my colleagues’ respect. There was so much strain and pressure that it was exhausting.

There was one time where my writing personality worked against me in a big way. My first journalism job was at a businesswomen’s magazine. It was the kind of place where you worked for a year or two as a deputy editor straight out of journalism school before moving on. While looking for my next gig, I was invited by IPC Media (now part of Time Inc.) to interview for a position at a new women’s lifestyle magazine that was launching. I was invited to a trial day, and all was going well until I was asked to write a sample feature. And I just couldn’t do it. I kept crossing out and rewriting sentences. I couldn’t decide on the angle, the introduction, or anything for that matter. In the end, I submitted a paragraph. Yes—just one paragraph. I will never forget the look on the editors’ faces. I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was mortifying.

Ironically, my next job (which I got a few weeks later) was in the same building. I was hired as a features writer at another women’s magazine, covering someone’s maternity leave. I was twenty-three, and on paper it was the dream job. I should have been having the time of my life. But I didn’t feel authentic, and I felt creatively blocked. I didn’t have the easy flow of ideas that I have now. I didn’t feel that I had a voice. And I felt like I was on a conveyor belt, churning out articles. I just didn’t feel creative.

So when my contract was up, I went freelance as a journalist, cranking out articles for newspapers and magazines in my force-driven way. But crucially, I decided to explore my creativity and see where it led. I enrolled at a London drama school and starred in adverts and short films. I became a travel writer and explored health and wellness. I did voice and improvisation classes. I wrote lots of songs and poems and got some of them published.

All of these experiences helped with my self-expression. But things really shifted for me four years later when I began studying lyric writing at Berklee College of Music.

The first thing we learned was a technique called object writing, which is something that songwriters use to help them get raw material for songs. And it was life-changing. I will introduce you to this technique later in this book and show you how you can put it into practice in your everyday life. What’s for sure is that object writing opened me up and I was finally able to write freely and expressively. And this way of writing crossed over into my journalism work and all the other writing work I did after that.

After undergoing such a transformation, I realized that I wanted to train as a life coach and teacher and teach people to write. I started off tutoring students. I taught them object writing and other self-expression and writing techniques I’d learned while earning my lyric writing diploma. And it was a big hit. I got a reputation for turning C students into A students because they became self-expressed writers. And I turned my methods into the book Just Write It! How to Develop Top-Class University Writing Skills. I found what I was supposed to do and realized that I loved helping people to better express themselves in writing. And that’s what I have been doing ever since.

The crucial thing is that I feel completely free and able to express myself in writing both privately and publicly. In your own room and own space, you ought to be able to write freely. Cry. Laugh. Feel the feelings. And sometimes you need to write something that is raw and not for public consumption, something that wouldn’t please your eighth-grade grammar teacher or your boss, but that pleases you.

But if you do want to shape your writing into a finished piece, then that’s great, and I’m going to share some tools and techniques that will help you do that. In fact, creative self-expression is cyclical, and if you can add technique to heart and soul, you can keep going deeper down through the layers. I’ll also share my tips for going a step further and creating personal, creative blog posts. Plus, if you’re already an accomplished writer, the stories and lessons in this book will help you go deeper and inspire you to access your writing space from a position of love.

I’m committed to doing all I can to help you to better express yourself in writing and live a full, rich, creative life. As such, my vision for Heart, Sass & Soul is about more than the words you’ll read in this book.