I was talking to various friends this week about those three magic words I love you. Our experiences of hearing and speaking those words all vary widely, and my own relationship with them has changed dramatically over the years.

The first person I ever said those words to, and recall hearing those words from, was my boyfriend when we were twelve or thirteen and we used to write letters to one another. I grew up believing – mainly through movies and books - those romantic relationships were where a person expressed any kind of big feelings.

Saying I love you to family members was more in the domain of those crazy Americans we used to watch on TV. Certainly not in our homes, nor in popular culture in the UK, it just wasn’t something people said to each other; a definite overhang of centuries of emotional repression.

Yet in recent years it has crept in. I personally remember the creep very well, I didn’t just suddenly find myself saying those words to all and sundry, and still don’t of course, I am selective. But my world of expressing and receiving love now goes beyond romantic relationships and it was a process.

My niece and I were having a conversation about what is happening with Russia and the Ukraine. To me, this is all connected; it isn’t something that happens in isolation. I was sharing with her that I resonated with one of Brene Brown’s posts where she said “We stand with every Ukrainian. We stand with the thousands of brave Russians demonstrating in protest, risking their safety to do so, and all those devastated by this unprovoked, terrifying, and reprehensible war”.

It also brought up for me the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world whose governments are not only ignoring their messages about the overreach in regards to COVID19 restrictions, but vilifying peaceful protesters in the mainstream media as violent troublemakers. I’ve seen many times now firsthand live footage of what is actually happening versus what gets reported.

So, what do I think is really going on... first COVID19 extremism and now Putin invades the Ukraine, is the world going to hell in a hand cart? 

No I'd say not. I'd say it's more like Mother Earth is ridding herself of a poison. All that was hidden beneath is bubbling to the surface. The atrocities of 80 years ago amid the horrors of WW2, with characters like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco etc did not just disappear. The narcissistic traits that created pain and war then are still seen in many people today, in many households, workplaces and they are very obviously and sadly seen in many people in power positions.

I think this is a time of taking off rose coloured glasses, and many still have them on so there could be more to come, but we are collectively starting the process of clearing out all the junk in our trunk.

As I awakened to the lie that power is an external force to be complied with, and is instead an internal allowing of love from within, that is when space was cleared within me. I have come to feel this love as the powerful force it is.

I think it was around the time I started to find my feet as an adult I can remember my mum saying “Love you Sho”. For a long time those words would send me into freeze mode. As I spoke to in Who Are You Protecting? Why Telling Your Story Is Powerful the relationship I had had with my mum in childhood had created a lot of anxiety as I grew. Love was not unconditional.

As in most households and upbringings, there were expectations around behaviour and, if not met, there would be punishment, withdrawal of love and words such as “you should be ashamed”. So for many years I was not able to receive those three words I love you from my mum, nor anyone else outside of a romantic relationship.

I would feel like a cat caught in the headlights and avoid saying anything in response and come up with other phrases to smooth over that awkward moment. It wasn’t really until I started doing my own inner work not long before my mum died that I began to clear space for the love that I am to rise up within me.

There was – and is ongoing – a necessary and conscious look at all that dwells in the shadows, and a deliberate process of forgiveness and healing. This also gave rise to new possibilities, new connections and a place to receive and give those three words more freely.

But perhaps the biggest gift has been the ability to feel those three words in relation to myself. As I have begun to reintegrate the parts of me I had rejected as I grew, because they hadn’t fit into what was expected or desired of me back then.

In recent years I’ve been able to more easily say to my closest confidants, family members and girlfriends “I love you” with more and more ease. To me it means something like “I see you, the real you, in all your glory and pain. I’ve got your back. I trust you not to betray me. And it hurts my heart when I see you being dishonored”.

And it’s also been easier to say it to my guy friends recently without that romantic overlay/entanglement. That boyfriend from my younger days is still in my world. The level of intimacy in our relationship has obviously changed over the years as we each went on to have other relationships, had kids and moved to different countries.

But our friendship has endured and I love to hear how he and his family are doing, and we generally have the other’s back when life throws some pain our way. These things are not always easy, and I have to respect and honour the other people in my people’s lives. Everyone is at a different stage of their own journey and the relationship they have in terms of self love and the words I love you.

I do believe that as each person finds their way back to and expresses the love that they are, it purges more and more of the poison that stops each of us from feeling and receiving the love that is there.

The more we take responsibility for healing our own wounds, the less we will see of the atrocities that are happening today. We can rise in anger, and well we should, it is better than powerlessness, but we can also find the powerful force of love within and allow that to rise up and to get to know our true nature which is powerful beyond imagination.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race, How to Quieten the Inner Critic, When to Act on Possibility, Embracing the Feminine within All of Us, , What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution, Connect to Your Well-Being  and Could a Broader Perspective Benefit Us All Right Now? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

By happy circumstance I found myself at a Soulful CEO circle this week. Six of us sitting in the shade of a mature Cherry Blossom tree in the summer sun, taking time out to contemplate the topic for the session, which was around using our intuition to grow/start our business.

The conversation centred on those intuitive nudges, or flashes of inspiration, we get and – often in instant response – the voice of the inner critic that comes up with all the reasons why that is a bad idea.

It was a good reminder of the tug of war that often happens in my inner world. The inner critic is very convincing as it’s all about safety. However, its voice was born very early on in my life when safety was linked (as it is for all humans) to approval from my primary caregivers. The messages were then reinforced over and over in various settings in childhood, like school and competitive sports, where the desire for approval was very much linked to the innate instinct for belonging and safety.

There was never really a point in my life where someone said “trust your inner voice”, it was more the opposite. Even as an adult it is the same memo that society often plays back, the messaging around the current pandemic could be no clearer a case in point. The overarching theme – certainly here in New Zealand- is “do not trust yourself, trust your government instead, this is the one source of truth”.

I am in wonder that more people are not incredulous at the wildly differing advice, approaches and mandates globally, from these one sources of truth. The only one source of truth that exists, I believe, exists inside each of us.

And yet I suspect the biggest pandemic on planet Earth today is self abandonment.

This is sometimes referred to as the mind versus heart, or ego versus intuition, and how to know which voice is speaking?

Serendipitously, as I’m reading Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living at the moment, she has been talking about this very issue. She recounts a conversation she had with a friend about a pivotal decision in her life. Her friend had suggested that she get really present in her body and out of her head.

When she had become more present in her body – which for me is most easily achieved by intentionally focusing on breathing in/out my tummy and becoming aware of how my body is feeling – her friend asked her to relook at her choices one by one, each time asking “Does that feel warm to me?”

At this point her decision felt obvious, as one choice felt cold, icy actually, like she might die of cold. The other felt warm, soft and spacious. Her friend said “Your body will tell you things your mind will talk you out of. Your body is telling you what direction life is in. Try trusting it. Turn away from what feels cold and toward what feels warm”.

Glennon goes on to say that these days, in business meetings, she is not looking for justifications, judgements or opinions, she is looking for knowing. She listens for statements like “I did the research and sat with these options for a while, this one feels warm to me”.

I was talking to a friend about growing his business. Since starting the company, he had taken on a couple of employees, both more by chance rather than through a specific job search. I love this organic approach, but I also think its potency truly comes into its own when setting some intentionality around it.

If he can take some time to imagine a future team of people who collectively represent the same values that he himself projects from his inner world, who can collectively deliver his vision, he can start to wonder just how that might come about and listen out for the intuitive nudges that will undoubtedly pop into his head.

Envisioning the biggest contribution I can make in life, spending time just wondering how that could look, then actively asking, “I wonder how this will come about” primes me neurologically to receive all sorts of interesting insights and impulses into how my dreams can be achieved. The trick is to follow the ones that feel right, without letting my inner critic sabotage each idea before it even takes flight.

Right now I have the impulse to update my online presence and profile in terms of what I have to offer in the business arena. My current presence doesn’t convey the level of skills and experience I have working on businesses as well as in them very succinctly.

With all the years I had in senior management, working at the strategic end of business, I haven’t even listed three of the four businesses I have helped set up and run; far less joined a lot of dots that give me quite a comprehensive toolkit as a business coach/consultant. I need to create outwardly the shifts that have occurred within me.

As I said in Do You Want to Make a Heartfelt Change to Your Career? between my own personal growth that needed to happen, and the collective dysfunction that I’d seen over and over in organisations getting in the way of meaningful and lasting change, I hadn’t expected I’d even want to return to that world so I hadn’t really focused too much on it.

Of course my inner critic has been hard as work with every impulse I’ve had, “who are you to offer these services?”, “are you good enough?”, “do you have enough skills and experience?” and lots of comparison with many others out there. In the session under the cherry tree this week, I listened to most of the others voice the same concerns about growing their own ventures while simultaneously thinking, felling and saying to them “Of course you can do it, go for it”.

I recognise these voices for what they are, momentary doubt from my inner critic just trying to keep me safe. But it’s all good, I am safe. It’s actually mainly with excited anticipation I think about stepping back into the arena. I have an authentic edge now that makes all the difference to me in the type of work I’ll engage in, assisting and guiding people in running a business by helping them clarify the vision of their business and how it fits with their personal goals. 

As I listened to some of the others air their inner critic at the Soulful CEO circle, I thought of Glennon’s advice and realised that, when I lean into this, it feels warm, smoking hot, like I’ve got this. I can hear and I trust my inner knowing.

What about you, have you had any impulses or intuitive nudges regarding your career or business? What has your soul been whispering and what has your inner critic had to say about it? Maybe it’s time to thank our inner critic for trying to keep us safe but, smiling, say “I’ve got this” and go step forward into your new future.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race, How to Quieten the Inner Critic, When to Act on Possibility, Embracing the Feminine within All of Us, , What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution, Connect to Your Well-Being  and Could a Broader Perspective Benefit Us All Right Now? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A man told me a story of a woman he had known growing up and, one night, their relationship unexpectedly became more than friendship. It had all felt so natural and he had never felt so in tune with anyone as he did then. However, the next day he panicked, lost in a sea of feeling unworthy and misplaced loyalties to others.

As a result, theirs was a story that never unfolded. Both went on to other relationships, the kind of relationships that played out every painful thing they had each believed about themselves.

It was a sad tale, and one particularly poignant for me, I was that woman.

What could have been I wondered? Yet if I am to wonder anything, it cannot be regrets for there is a future still to be lived. I certainly wonder at the path I took, always looking outside myself for love.

I had had some really good relationships up until the one. As he walked across the train station, a friend of a friend coming out with us that night, the moment seemed to slow and everything else faded away except him walking. I knew right then I was in trouble, my heart lost.

After almost two years together, he decided it was time to leave, and I was broken; devastated, left standing at the edge of an abyss. I wallowed for a long time in a sea of utter misery, blaming myself for who I was, who I had been. I had grown up thinking relationships are where I find the love I had been seeking, and if this guy didn’t think I was worthy then that was my truth.

Other relationships followed, all reflecting the parts of me I rejected through their incompatibilities or – if they were compatible – they were unavailable. Each one reinforced the painful beliefs I had about me. These ranged from lack of worth, to feeling like I was too much, through to feeling like I was unseen, with many others in between.

So in the aftermath of that night with my friend, it was just further confirmation, and I felt hurt, abandoned and alone.

Now many years later, I look back and see so clearly that it was me who had abandoned myself thirty years ago, when the one turned out not to be.

It isn’t until recent years that I began to really wake up to how much more I deserve, and how that it is an inside job. I have to love me before anyone else can.

My friend said he often thinks of that night when he wants to forget the painful things in his life for a while. I replied “The thing is, I’m not a forgetting-things-for-a-while kind of woman. I’m a remembering who you truly are kind of woman.” I guess that is why the memory has stayed with us both.

I had decided this week to participate in Teal Swan’s 7-day self love challenge. On day four she posed a list of ten questions, I got stuck at the first one “What thought do I most want to think about myself?” I couldn’t think of anything, “Something kind and loving but what?” I wondered. I thought if I could look at what’s on my mind most, what I am feeling the most, then I could flip it and create a loving thought.

There’s an almost constant pain in my throat and chest, like I’m trying to swallow down big emotions. I’m sure that is exactly what it is, I’m well practiced, and now I am feeling into the pain of the last fifty years instead of pushing it away. But I couldn’t match the thoughts to the feelings, they were at the edge of my awareness beyond my reach. I decided just to wonder and to let the words arise in their own time.

Learning to love myself is one of the hardest, most gratifying things I have ever done. I feel pain a lot, I think it’s inevitable and most probably temporary. It’s certainly better than the pain of rejected myself and all that life brought me in response.

Glennon Doyle talks about this when she tells the story about going to her fifth recovery meeting (on her sixth day of sobriety) and how she decided to explain how much she hurt and how being alive doesn’t seem as hard for others as is for her. Someone explained to her “It’s okay to feel all the stuff you’re feeling. You’re not doing life wrong, you’re just human, feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re there for. Feelings are for feelings. All of them. Even the hard ones.”

She did not know that all feelings were for feeling. She had thought she was supposed to feel happy. That happy was for feeling and pain was for fixing and numbing and hiding and deflecting and ignoring. She thought when life got hard she’d gone wrong somewhere, that pain was weakness and she was supposed to suck it up. The more she sucked it up the more booze she drank down.

From that day she began to return to herself, to practice feeling it all. She learned “Firstly, I can feel everything and survive. Second, I can use pain to become. I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not pain is the fire of revolution. Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.”

I see and feel many aspects of who I am reflected back in many ways through others. There have been tens of thousands of people doing this 7-day Self Love challenge right along with me, I hear their stories and feel their pain, and everyone has a story.

The years of stuffing down my own needs and desires and true feelings, are now welling up and wanting to be seen. I imagine it’s very much like the pain of coming off a drug, the pain wants to be seen and acknowledged. There are only two choices, one is to seek a salve, for me that would be connection with others who can validate me externally. The other is to sit with the pain, and validate myself.

A good friend said to me this week “Name one thing you love about Shona”. It gave me pause. At first I was actually unable to answer. “After all this work I’ve done, surely I can find one thing to love about me?” I thought.

Then a voice within me said “kind”. Yes, I can own that, I am a kind person and I do love that. Then the voice said “perceptive”. Yes, I can own that too. Then the voice kept coming, soon I had a decent list.

Circling back to the question I couldn’t answer on the Self Love challenge “What thought do I most want to think about myself?” it’s “I’m here, I’m listening”. And I am listening, I feel and am processing the hurt of having abandoned myself for decades, but it’s better late than never. I’m coming home.

In her book Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living, Glennon says we are all bilingual, we speak the language of indoctrination but our native tongue is the language of imagination:

“The language of indoctrination is the language of the mind, with it’s should and shouldn’t, right and wrong, good and bad. In order to get beyond our training, we need to activate our imaginations, our storytelling faculty. So instead of asking ourselves what is right and wrong, ask ourselves, what is true and beautiful?”

She asks:

“What is the truest, most beautiful life you can imagine?

What is the truest, most beautiful family you can imagine?

What is the truest, most beautiful world you can hope for?

Write it down, these are out blueprints, our marching orders...”

So did you, like Glennon, like me, like too many, believe that happiness was for feeling and pain was for fixing and numbing and hiding and deflecting and ignoring? Are you ready to sit with your pain and make plans for a more beautiful version of your life? What is the truest most beautiful version of your life you can imagine right now?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Attract the Blissful Relationships You Actually Deserve, Do You Want to Make a Heartfelt Change to Your Career?, Simplify Your Life to Be Accepted and Loved as Your Authentic Self, Does Your Heart Long to Be Accepted for Being Just You? and How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This week I’ve been contemplating taking on work outside home for the first time in almost seven years.

When I left my corporate career I knew I’d never return to work in the way I had done until then, yet I knew I’d gained a lot of skills and experience that I would no doubt put to good use at some future point.

As I often recount, at that juncture in my life I simply felt my outer and inner world were not a match, I had a gnawing frustration I was not all me, yet I had no idea who or what that looked like.

When my children came along I had become more determined to live the way I wanted them to, so when I left corporate life to spend more time with them, it was also with a steely determination to tune in and figure out who I really am, what I really like and what I really want out of life.

Jungian analyst and author Dr James Hollis believes asking “What does my soul want of me?” to be one of the most important questions to ask ourselves if we want to live a fulfilled life. He says “This is especially imperative for people journeying into the second half of their lives”, something he’s explored in writing for almost thirty years.

I haven’t quite been writing that long, but I have written continuously over the last seven years. In fact this is the three hundred and sixty first week of publishing my life lessons as I come home to more of me and learn to nurture my true nature.

It’s been a big journey, one where I’ve looked into a lot of dark corners, faced a lot of fears, brought to light and merged together parts of myself that were in conflict. All the while the question on my mind has been “What comes next?  What wants to find expression through me?”

I had been thinking perhaps I’d move away from the business world altogether and work more one-on-one with individuals. The field of Customer Experience represents the output of an organisation. The issues, frustrations and customer complaints reflect the amount of collective dysfunction within an organisation, which in itself is fuelled by the dysfunction within individuals, particularly in leadership teams.

Patrick Lencioni sums this up well in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (a Leadership Fable) where he spells out the five most common dysfunctions as absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results.

Now that I am more trauma informed, I deeply understand how much of this directly maps back to how the human psyche is shaped by early childhood experiences in each individual, unknowingly influencing the way people show up – and often limit themselves – as adults.

I was no exception with my perfectionist and people pleasing tendencies, I worked long and hard to do and be it all for everyone. There was one particularly competitive, controlling and manipulative colleague who really contributed to me eventually learning a valuable lesson, summed up well by an unattributed post I saw this week:

“You absolutely have to become okay with not being liked. No matter how loving or kind you are, you will never people please your way into collective acceptances. You could be a whole ray of sunshine and people will hate you because they are used to rain.”

I say eventually as it took many more years in a similarly intensive personal relationship to fully awaken to the level of trauma within my psyche and body. Being good was a childhood lesson my nervous system had learned well, and – as such – I carried extremely high levels of anxiety into adult relationships and interactions. That is something I have had to consciously learn to recognise in the moment and apply learned skills around having and holding healthy boundaries in order to move away from defensive states of being.

In my corporate career I worked closely with people at all levels of business. From executives at a strategic level, to those at the coal face delivering the product or service, it became very obvious to me that true success comes from people being, well, authentic. That sums up in a nutshell what Patrick Lencioni was pointing to.

Left unchallenged, the school bullies are still bullies, the nerds are still nerds, the rebels are still rebels and the compliant kids just become compliant adults. From the water cooler to the board room it could often be like a school playground. There are those who strut around acting entitled and superior and those who are repressed, with everything in between. All human dysfunctions come to the fore.

Because I worked to transform the customer experience through people and cultures, I could clearly see what did not work. For example, I learned that job descriptions and key performance targets – even giving them lots of training and development or new systems or processes – doesn’t change their inner landscape.

So between my own personal growth that needed to happen, and the collective dysfunction that I’d seen over and over in organisations getting in the way of meaningful and lasting change, I hadn’t expected I’d want to return to that world.

In terms of living a fulfilled life, to Dr James Hollis’ point, what my soul had been yearning for was me to step into my full potential. I can’t say I’m all the way there yet, that feels like a lifelong journey, but I certainly feel like I’ve a stepped into a much healthier, more evolved version of myself. I know for sure that any future work I do with people and organisations must be based around one thing – authenticity – both from me and them.

Talking to a business owner this week, who has several things they need help with, brought my lens into sharp focus. As I listened to the issues and tasks at hand, I started to mentally take on what they might look and feel like, some felt great, and others not so great.

“Boundaries” I thought on a personal note, “this is hugely helpful in gaining clarity around the stuff I’m great at and enjoy, the real value-adding stuff that is a win-win, versus the kinds of things I’m might be proficient at but I really do not enjoy”.

I started to think in terms of my skills and experience across three categories:

• What I’m great at and enjoy
• What I’m proficient at but do not enjoy
• What I’m just not good at

I know whatever I do has to be about the first category; it’s where I can really make a difference.

But there is a lot in that middle category after decades of perfectionism and people pleasing, and I can get distracted and tripped up by taking on things just because I am capable of doing them, but then |I just end up demotivated and unhappy, and it shows.

Then I remembered that a few years ago I went through my Linked In profile and purged dozens of skills endorsements I had for skills I really did not want to use again professionally, like contract management. Anything structured like that gives me a headache just thinking about it.

I also similarly took out bullet points of achievements that I had no desire to recreate. That was hard to do because they were hard won, but made no sense to keep unless I wanted to invite more struggles.
But I did keep all the ones that make my heart sing; those that centre around understanding people and their potential, writing, speaking, personal development, leadership development, communications, strategic planning, coaching and mentoring to name a few.

In my thought process this brought me to a dilemma, how to succinctly convey this breadth and depth of skillset and experience with just the right flavour of me. The me who no longer gets driven by wiring that wants to please and perfect to the exclusion of my soul, but the me who is learning to dance to my soul’s rhythm.

When I have done contracting or consulting work in the past I’ve just used my name, as I have on my website. But I got invited to a Soulful CEO circle a while back, and I immediately thought “Oh that name is amazing”, I could see the benefit of having a name that gets directly to the heart of matters.

The bringing together of what is often seen as a juxtaposition – the sharp edge of business with the authentic resonance of the soul – is something that excites me. Having a real passion for authenticity, creating structures in society (whether a business or part of a larger system) that thrive on and enhance people being their full authentic expressions of themselves motivates me.

As for a business name, I like Authentic Edge, or something similar, but the right thing will fall into place at the right time. I’m just blown away by the possibilities of getting back into something I thought I’d never go near again, and it’s really all down to tuning into and defining more of who I am and learning the skills I need to honour that.

What about you? Does your career honour who you are on the inside? Does your role reflect the biggest version of your contribution you can imagine right now? In what ways could you shift focus to attract more of what would excite and empower you and deliver more of what you have to offer to the world at large?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Living Your Passions Fully Combats Feeling Lonely, Simplify Your Life to Be Accepted and Loved as Your Authentic Self, Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, Ask No One to Be Different So That You Can Feel Good, What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)? and How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.