I can remember early on in my corporate career, amid a restructure that happened swiftly with a new guy suddenly at the helm one morning and several new faces around the Director’s table, I read a quote about speaking truth to power. I can’t remember the quote exactly, but it gave me courage to speak out in an attempt to influence the inevitable management restructure that was about to follow, and the allocation of resources.

In my corporate guise, I was a staunch advocate for the customers’ experience. However, generally speaking this was usually outweighed as a topic of discussion around the top table in favour of whatever the latest and greatest upgrades were in that company or organisation’s offer (with little regard to how it mapped to the overall customer journey and experience) and the vast and pervasive arena of financial tracking and cost cutting.

However, I felt compelled to speak my truth and quickly put together a paper for consideration; drawing the links between the service, the customer experience and the balance sheet, and carefully placed it on each director’s desk before anyone else arrived that next morning.

I’ll admit I was nervous. It felt like I was being naughty because I hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to do it, my boss wasn’t aware of it, though I did give him an apologetic smile and a heads’ up on his way through to his office where he found the same paper on his own desk.

The fact is, had I of sought permission, it’s highly likely it would have been denied since everyone was wary of the new head honcho and, even then, I knew the glaringly obvious fact that people don’t generally like to stick their neck out and speak their truth.

Given that the paper was bereft of any blame, it simply focused on the facts and objectives, there was no big backlash for or from my boss. There were some minor gains as a result. However, what I was naïve about at the time, was that I wasn’t speaking my truth to the real power. The new guy at the helm wasn’t really the head honcho, these guys were just players in the game, as vulnerable to losing their job as I was.

Yet here I found myself, many years later, no longer in a corporate structure and just as nervous about speaking my truth. Let me tell you about it and then I will share how life conspired to give me clarity and courage.

Over the last four years our family have started their journey through education. Entrusting our kids to anyone else is a big leap of faith as parents, the teacher-child relationship is among the most influential in our lives, and so we had chosen a system of education that we felt was closer to our own values than the default state system.

What I was completely unprepared for was the relentless ambush the parents and children face on their time and attention both within and beyond the curriculum, which is quite contrary to the founding pedagogy. While these are usually in support of activities and events that children enjoy, the harm comes from the fact that it is often requires time most parents these days do not have and most harmfully of all, it is all stemming from the school community, leaving little for anything outside of that.

Yet, in today’s world, where most of us are no longer living in the communities where we were born and raised, there is a bigger world outside school that we have to connect with and is healthy for us to do so. This is the world in which one’s family lives in other parts of the country or other parts of the world; and it’s important that there is freedom to connect with places, people, and other rich and rewarding activities and events that are not generated by the school community.

There is, of course, most significantly, the world within that we all need time to connect to. With so much of their time prescribed already within the school day, I feel children must be given time and space in which they can feel into themselves again, and to begin to become aware of who they are and what their true preferences are in life.

So with these gallant observations made, you may imagine some of the colourful conversations I have had with the school over these last years. I’ve often talked about my own anguish and self growth that has resulted through these articles, most usefully teaching me the value of saying yes to the things I can freely and joyfully, and no to anything else (making me a rather low contributor).

Then as I was watching the series finale of Grey’s Anatomy, I was struck by something the character Meredith Grey said “Let me clean up my own mess, stand in my own truth. What I did was wrong, but what I was trying to remedy was so much more wrong, and I stand by that”

It started me thinking about standing in one’s own truth. Unlike the character in Grey’s Anatomy I haven’t done anything wrong, yet I was feeling like I had. I was feeling like a victim and et, at the same time, I was feeling like the naughty kid again.

Yes, it is true that there was little – if anything – in the way of information about all the contribution and activity required that would have helped inform our decision before embarking on this educational journey. I have encouraged the school to look at this more, even created information documents for parents that I would have found useful, which were welcomed in words but not used in practice.

Having had a look at articles and forums across the globe where parents voice their insights, I believe this to be something of an inherent issue with this type of education rather than a localized one. It is also true that, for the moment, this is still the best schooling available for our kids within our locality. So, knowing I need to get in a better place on my feelings in this matter, I thought about what I can do positively rather than negatively.

​Rather serendipitously a podcast interviewing Fleet Maull popped up in my inbox. Fleet was talking about his book Radical Responsibility. While serving a 14-year prison sentence for drug trafficking in a maximum security facility, Fleet had come to understand there was no power in blame, and so had begun the process of self empowerment by asking “what can I do?”

It wasn’t hard to see the alignment, nor the theme of disempowerment to empowerment that I was attracting, I’m also reading Gregory David Roberts novel Shantaram at the moment. Roberts, like his lead character, is a former heroin addict and convicted bank robber who escaped from an Australian prison and found himself in India; in every way.

Both Fleet Maul and Gregory David Roberts’ circumstances were far more extreme and disempowering than my own, but it is often in these extremes answers can be found. Both men realised that that they could blame any number of factors for where they had ended up in life but, instead, both decided to get off the blame train and start to see their own part in what had happened and how they could more forwards more positively.

I was also listening to an interview with Mind Coach Vex King, who talked about his own process when he is triggered by something. Rather than respond from a point of anger, he instead focuses on his breathing and goes for a walk to lower his heart rate and distract himself out of the flight or fight response, allowing for more clarity in his thinking. It was also a good reminder that it is not helpful to vent as that further entrenches the victim thinking,

So with all of this in mind I decided it was time to speak my truth and to advocate to power. First I had to identify who that power is. The intended audience is the thought leaders and policy makers that globally shape that system of education today, but with the system having grown organically over decades and each school operating independently across the world, it took a while to assemble a reasonable list.

It also took me a while to devise a suitable advocacy piece with the main thrust being “less is more”.  I feel the saving grace of this system of education is that most state school systems in the Western world have not evolved either, so many parents are looking at alternatives. But I want them to be an alternative that lives up to the central theme, which is to enable students as fully as possible to choose and, in freedom, to realize their individual path through life as adults.

In short, in a world that desperately needs less vying for our attention, I want the schools to do less in order to be more in support of the awakening of human consciousness.

I was clear in my mind, with thanks to reminders from Fleet Maul and Gregory David Roberts, that appropriating blame is entirely unhelpful. I can see most people within the system are doing the best they can in oftentimes trying circumstances so, in order to evolve education, I had to step outside of that mentality.

A friend asked what I was expecting as a result. The answer that came to me was truly inspired by wisdom beyond that in my head. Am I expecting anyone – especially one vested in a particular system of education- to think "wow, we've been doing it wrong all this time!" ... no... but little drops do make an ocean, and it is on these seas we sail that slowly carve our landscapes.

So the real answer is I’m not expecting anything immediate, change out there is likely to be slow. My family will likely continue to experience the onslaught of requests for our attention, and I will continue to stand in my truth, making the best decisions I can in the moment in support of that.

But something else has changed immediately. I feel elated to have spoken my truth, free of the burden of blame on someone else. I no longer feel like a victim and I will do what I can each step of the way to honour that place within me that knows the most important thing I can all do is to stand in my own love and truth.

​As I believe German author and poet Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914) said Es gibt in Wahrheit kein letztes Verständnis ohne Liebe which, translated, means There is, in truth, no last understanding without love. When we step outside of the victim- perpetrator-rescuer scenario and stand instead in a place of self love and empowerment, then we are truly standing in our truth.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A friend reintroduced me to this word sovereignty recently, something I hadn’t really associated with much aside of the Royal Family as I was growing up. However she was using it in the context of our self-rule, our freedom to make our own choices.
I really like this because for too long I gave away my choices to others, making the necessary choices I had to make as a young child dependent on the adults around me for support and survival, instead of honoring the choices that felt right for me. This, as it does for most of us, become the way I operated in the world. Rules became something I automatically adhered to; deference to authority was a mark of respect.

Even those around me that I saw rebel in many ways, still carried far more deference to the power outside themselves than the power within than they recognised. Those early years of punishment and reward for desirable and undesirable behaviour leave their marks subconsciously on our sense of self acceptance.

As I commented to someone yesterday, we all swim in a soup of early trauma, whether consciously or unconsciously. There are very few people in this world who operate in clear line of sight and complete connection to their authentic selves. 

However, that decision to clear the clutter from the path, to regain sight of who we truly are, is completely within our control and it’s been my driving mission now for a good few years. When I birthed my children, I thought about what kind of parent I wanted to be and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I passionately want them to be free to be who they are.

Note that passion does not translate to being free to run amok and do as they like. I’m talking about freedom of expression, and freedom to become consciously aware of the authentic self, rather than one swathed in the shroud of everyone else’s beliefs and desires.

That passion was something I recognised when I was listening to a podcast of Tami Simon interviewing Dr Tererai Trent last week. Dr Trent has an amazing story, having been born into an oppressive colonial society in rural Zimbabwe only a few years before I was born. The oppression that she endured in her circumstances separated us by more than just distance, but the passion she felt united us.

Tererai came from generations of women silenced because of their gender. Held back from even the most basic education, which was her greatest desire, she was instead married off young in exchange for a cow. Yet her remarkable story about how she chased (and claimed) her dream is among the most moving I have heard in a while.

In the process of pursuing her dreams there were desperate times, times when she wasn’t even able to feed her children, times when she wanted to give up and go home. When asked why she didn’t she said simply “I didn’t want to pass on the baton (of women silenced because of their gender) to my daughters.” It brought tears to my eyes.

Her journey and her baton are quite different to mine, but the burning desire for oppression to end is the same.My journey is also one of liberation, reclaiming the sovereignty of my true self and preserving that of my children, at least within their own home.  The baton is painful to hold onto because, having embarked on the journey to authenticity, I can attest that all the while the same neurons still fire as they learned to in childhood, so the same thought patterns play out.

The anxiety we feel as parents in response to our children’s negative reactions, is the same anxiety we felt as a result our own parent’s reactions. We therefore feel a pull to react as our parent’s reacted “obey me or else”. But I will keep a hold of that baton until it turns to dust as each fragmented part of me becomes integrated.

It’s a challenge being confronted by children who have all these big feelings and are learning to express them in a world that is still controlled by the adults around them. Like last weekend my daughter was asked to sit up at the kitchen bench to eat her cornflakes. But it was the straw that broke the camel’s back after a tiring week at school, her reaction was nothing short of instant and unadulterated rage.

She screamed, roared and yelled so sincerely any passerby would be forgiven for thinking this was a life and death play for the sovereignty of her soul, which she obviously felt it was, rather than a request to sit at the kitchen bench while eating. Any attempt at saying anything was like adding fuel to the raging inferno, her rational mind gone as she looked around for things to destroy, including the source of her throttle, me.

As I stood there in that impossible moment between past and future, every fibre within me wanting to react strongly to this little girl’s fury, matching fire with fire, I did not. Instead I let out the energy of my frustration with a guttural scream and withdrew.In that instant, Dr Gabor Maté’s words were never so true. “It is often not our children’s behaviour, but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates difficulties. The only thing the parent needs to gain control over is our own anxiety and lack of self control.”

In frustration I inwardly wished I had never embarked on this journey with my kids, I wished the kids just did as they were darn well told. The thoughts that accompanied it were the same thoughts I heard my own mother express, a jabbering chunter about ungrateful kids who were acting maliciously.

Then Dr Tererai Trent came to my mind “I did not want to pass on the baton to my daughters” and gave me the strength and clarity I needed in that moment to not react to fire with fire, instead I held still and observed as that fire, bereft of fuel, burned out.My purpose in life could not be clearer. Just as Dr Trent is now building schools in Zimbabwe that allow all the local children to attend, giving girls access to education, I am on a mission to reclaim the sovereignty of my soul, and my children’s and help others do the same.

Regardless of the constraints we find upon us, allow them to fuel your passion towards your own authenticity,
the reclaiming of your true self. For it is that person who came to live in this world, and that person we need to create a more authentic world to live in.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Looking Back to See the Clues to Your Destiny and  Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I used to think it was indulgent to nurture myself; the fact that I viewed nurturing myself as pampering was the problem. To nurture is to care for, or to tend to one’s needs. To pamper is when we go beyond that, indulging every whim.

The thing is though, our needs are all different and they change throughout our lives. I’ve learned that the perfect way to show the world what I need is to give it to myself. There was a time though that I used to think that was the job of the other people in my life.

The belief I held was along the lines that if they truly valued me they would know what I needed and be only too glad to give it to me unprompted, in appreciation of that which they valued. If no kind words or deeds were forthcoming that meant I did not feel valued; then I would get resentful and defensive.

Another tact I tried was nurturing others in ways I’d like nurtured to see if they’d get the hint, or – after reading Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages – nurturing other’s in the way I thought they needed nurtured and asking them to read the book to understand me. The same belief still held true though, that it was up to those significant others to nurture me.

It wasn’t until a prior relationship was breaking down and my mentor suggested that I take a corner of the house and make it mine, wholly mine, that I first really heard this idea of nurturing myself. She recommended that I go buy a picture I like – not one that I thought would be acceptable to the other person – and hang it on the wall in my corner, my little nurturing nook where I could read books or write in my journal.

Once I understood that it was up to me to love myself, I ran with the concept and had great fun making that space mine. I booked in regular massages and time with my mentor because I felt I needed to for my wellbeing and personal growth. I took walks on the beach and spent time reading for the same reason.

With Mother’s Day upon us this week, it reminded me I was likely not alone in my prior beliefs. Mothers are renowned for nurturing others to the detriment of themselves, but I think it extends beyond that. In this frenetic society I hear from and see many people putting the needs of others before their own for years and years. Yet how can others truly nurture us if we can’t nurture ourselves?

I have an important and busy job in looking after my children, among other roles I play in life, but I now also know that to do those well I have to look after myself. There is nothing I consider more important to my wellbeing than the integration of my emotional, mental and physical self, so I make a point of making space in my life to nurture this regularly.

This can take many forms. Whether I’m diving deeply into the study of something I find fascinating, creatively expressing myself through these articles, undergoing self discovery work or healing, swimming at the local pool, contemplating nature or life in the great outdoors or meditating in my cosy nook, it’s all part of nurturing myself.

There was a point in my life not so long ago when all my time was focused on work and work, things I did not find in the least nurturing, it wasn’t pretty for anyone, but it’s still taken me a while to get used to carving out time to nurture myself. When I started to do this I used to feel guilty, but I’m truly a better person as a result, much more able to give of myself in ways that are loved rather than resented.

When a friend of mine recently recommended Hawaiian massage, I was intrigued. As I mentioned, I used to regularly have massages when I worked in an office environment to relieve the aches and pains of endless physically inactive hours and the agonizing posture adopted in meetings to pay attention to whomever was taking lead.

However, in those days I saw massage as something to help my poor body get through the days of living my inauthentic life. Since leaving that environment, I’ve been more focused on living life from the inside out.

Hawaiian massage, otherwise known as Lomilomi, goes far beyond massage though; it’s more of a restorative healing. According to Gloria Coppola, it reflects the connection we have with the land (‘aina), the spirit guides or ancestors (‘aumakua) and the breath of life (aloha).

This sounded to me like the perfect kind of massage for where I’m at in my journey, so I decided to gift it to myself.

Nurturing yourself may look completely different your life, it really depends on what is actually important to you and what you enjoy, the important thing is to make some time to do it. Mother or not, male or female, we all need time to put our own needs first in order to live our best life and give our best in life. So how will you nurture yourself today?

If you enjoyed this you might enjoy reading Connect to Your Well-Being and What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution. Contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information if you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

I was sitting in a waiting room yesterday morning next to a baby girl who I’d guess to be around three months old. She was curious about the world from the security of her mum’s arms. Each time I looked around and smiled at her, she would take great delight in this and reward me with a beautiful smile right back.

​To get my attention, she would make an “ouh” sound with her mouth and I’d look around again and we would exchange smiles and she would get all giddy and cuddle into her mum’s shoulder. Then another middle aged man came into the waiting room and sat opposite, he too was soon engaged in this happy little game.

It’s a scene I am sure will be familiar to you, happy babies tend to have this kind of effect. At the same time I was aware of my own beautiful daughter sitting on the other side of me but, in that sharp contrast, I can see just how encumbered by life she has become in her short years.

She was anxiously awaiting her natural therapy appointment, which deals with ailments seen and unseen – physical and emotional. Although we had been there before, I could see she was worried there might be some judgment involved because she has a lot of big feelings to process at the moment and has already learned from the world about what is deemed good and bad behaviour. So she feels ashamed of her emotional outbursts and is understandably reluctant to talk about them.

In contrast, while babies may feel anxious when they are apart from their mum (or haven’t been fed, or have a wet nappy or desperately want to shut out stimulation so they can sleep) those feelings of judgment and shame are just not part of a new baby’s world.

But there comes a point, I think it happens not long after an infant becomes mobile, when society appears to expect a child to be trained. The prevalent form of training in our society is punishment and reward. Punishment may be in the form of something taken away (including the withdrawal of the parent’s positive attention) and in the form of something dished out (like a chore of some sort, a physical rebuke or a verbal attack).

As a parent I could always feel judging eyes upon me in scenarios just like that, in waiting rooms, where my then infant daughter would be climbing on things she ought not to, and exploring places she shouldn’t. The reason I could feel those judging eyes is because I too had been trained as a child, indoctrinated in the ways of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and I too had become a judge.

Based on all I have experienced, observed and read about, it seems to me that there are very few of us experience unconditional love for anything more than that first few months of our lives, if that. Yet I have arrived at the conclusion that in order to thrive in this world, feeling unconditional love is essential to our wellbeing and so we must learn to give that to ourselves.

The work of Lise Bourbeau, who compiled 20 years of research in the field of metaphysics and it’s physical manifestations in the body into her book Your Body is Telling You “Love Yourself”, repeats this advice over and over. Forgiving the origins of our shame that has no conscious memory attached to it even, and other emotions like fear, anger and insecurity that get triggered within us, are all easy to understand in the context of the waiting room example.

As some of you may know, I’ve also been fascinated with the work of Dr Gabor Maté lately. As a revered physician and author who has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) himself, Dr Maté explores the myth of ADD as a genetically-based illness in his book Scattered Minds and demonstrates it is a reversible impairment and developmental delay.

Being a physician his book is full of academic references and dives into the world of neuroscience, epigenetics and psychology, but in the final sentence in his book he concludes “If we can actively love, there will be no attention deficit and no disorder”.

In fact, as I read his book, I could see that the very journey I’ve been on personally, the journey to authenticity, is a journey to love. Figuring out who we are beneath the layers and layers of beliefs that began to shroud us in those early years of our lives as we met those first expectations put upon us, is a journey that every single person on this planet would benefit from.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s a journey that each of us would not only benefit from, but that it would also benefit us hugely in terms of evolving our society and its archaic systems and it would lead to a healing of the planet itself.

As grandiose as that all sounds, I for one know this is not an easy journey.

When this beautiful child of mine was born, I was working in a corporate environment where I was experiencing a lot of resistance to the role I was put in. This was being played out predominantly by a colleague who kept trying to discredit and undermine my work. Much of my time there was overshadowed by this dynamic. I was constantly infuriated and distracted in trying to remain professional. 

You can imagine that as a mother with a young toddler and new baby, a household to run and senior work role to carry out, there was very little in my life that got positive attention never mind unconditional love, certainly not me.

It was the turning point, with two children physically acting out the meltdowns I was having inside, I felt no choice other than to turn towards myself. I knew I had no more to give unless I could figure out who I truly was underneath all the layers of expectations that had become mixed up in my psyche over my lifetime as beliefs.

As patient as I was with my children much of the time, there were inevitably moments that I erupted in sheer frustration. And, as beautiful as my children are, I was simply unable to give them the adoring and unadulterated attention they needed to build a healthy self concept.  

A few years on, with much of my journey recorded through these articles, I have found my way back to love and understand much more about my authentic self. There is still some work to do, I imagine that to be a lifetime, but I am at a stage now when I am able to be the parent that I feel my children deserve; one who is able to more consistently give them unconditional love.

There is little joy for me in knowing my children are able to honour others if they don’t know how to honour themselves. Here too, there is work to do in unraveling some of the inadvertent damage caused along the way. But here I am, able and thrilled to be able to turn more wholeheartedly to the task.

Earlier in life I thought unconditional love was something I would find in other people, but I can’t see something in others that I haven’t got in myself. That love had been obscured under layers and layers of expectations and beliefs, and I’ve now gone a good way towards seeing and feeling what lies beneath.

A tip I heard a long time ago is to ask “what would someone who loves themselves do right now?” when I am faced with options, expectations and demands; it has served me well. It firstly means seeing that I have choices and then it means responding to things in new – often uncomfortable – ways.

But as I have become more practiced at putting myself in the line of love, I feel more loving towards others and I’m able to help people in ways that work for both parties rather than only one. Rather than seeing myself as separate, I now see everything as separate expressions of the one. So if I take from one, I take from all, but if I give to one, I give to all.

Far from being selfless, loving ourselves unconditionally is a reclaiming of our authentic perspective. It is this perspective through which we can best serve ourselves and the world around us.

If you enjoyed this you might enjoy Do You Need to Cherish Yourself? Contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information if you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog