by Terri Connellan
I was working in a strategic leadership role in the government adult and vocational education sector. I had previously been a teacher in the same organization where I had worked for over 30 years.
The organization and I were heading in different directions and it was time for me to shape a new life focused on creativity and sharing my experiences with others to support them.
I was keen to build on my platform of skills in new ways and center creative living and writing more in my life.
I Help Women Get In the Driver’s Seat
With a background in teaching and adult education, I was drawn to life coaching as a way of improving myself and also supporting others in shaping their best life and achieving their goals and dreams especially in midlife.
Life coaching is a skill you can combine with other unique skills gained through life experience and formal and informal learning to guide and support others in their personal development.
I focus on transition, personality, self-leadership and creativity in my coaching, based on my experiences. I empower midlife women with the skills, personality insights and practical tools to choose a positive, more creative future enhanced by stronger self-awareness.
I help women get in the driver’s seat, to feel calmer and to choose the life they more actively want to create.
As you can see, being a life coach is very satisfying and fulfilling work. It’s potentially the gateway to a whole new way of life both in becoming a coach and in supporting others.
So I am very glad I made this shift and thoroughly enjoy it and seeing the transformations that result in women’s lives.
I Realized It Was Time to Put Myself and My Creative Needs First
I wrote Wholehearted in the midst of that major life transition from the organization I worked in for 30 years to crafting a more self-sustained and creative life focused on writing in line with my long-held desires.
The need to leave had been building over time. But I knew I had to leave the organization after one particular incident and turning point.
I wasn’t selected for a position I knew I was well-suited for. The way that this happened highlighted that I was no longer valued by the organization after many years of contributing.
I realized it was time to put myself and my creative needs first and work out a path to a new way of living.
Turning Points in Life Can Feel Lonely and Overwhelming
Such turning points often take us down and throw us into chaos and uncertainty, as this event did to me.
Even if we know it’s right, it takes time to work out the way forward including how to earn a living, what new skills you need, and how to take your existing skills forward.
It often feels lonely and overwhelming.
So I wrote the books: Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the supporting Wholehearted Companion Workbook were written from the heart of this transition and transformation journey as a guide for both myself and others.
I Hope to Help People Shift to What is More Positive and Fulfilling
The book chose me if you like because of the particular set of experiences I’ve learned from that enabled me to write and share this story with experience and heart.
I know how uncertain it feels, how lost we can feel and how alone we can feel when making major change. I share my experiences with women to support them in being more wholehearted and to develop the self-leadership skills to make this happen.
The “why” of Wholehearted which helped me to write and complete the book is to support women to develop the self-leadership resources to live more creative, wholehearted lives.
Writing the book helped me to make sense and structure what was happening into something useful for myself and for others from this time of major change. And I offer this learning to help people shift to what is more positive and fulfilling.
What Does “Self-Leadership” Mean and How Can We Lead Ourselves First?
The concept of self-leadership comes from leadership more generally and then looking at how we can lead ourselves first.
As a leader in the government vocational education sector, I learned so much about the personal and self-awareness aspects of leadership.
Whether we are leading others or not, I have found that self-leadership is a fundamental skill in life and in actively exercising choice and being intentional in our lives. It is about being self-directed, leading ourselves first, feeling comfortable in our skin with how we choose to live, stretching ourselves, dealing with self-sabotage, and being active rather than passive in our lives.
I found in my experiences and in the lives of the women I work with, it is easy for women to put work and others first.
Over time we can lose touch with our own priorities and preferences and also with creative projects we may long to bring forth. Self-leadership means being more aware of our desires, passions, body of work over time and our creative soul.
In Wholehearted, I share a number of frameworks for building this self-awareness and choice back into our lives especially at times of transition. I walk through 15 Wholehearted Self-leadership Skills developed based on my experiences and share these.
In the Companion Workbook, I share insights on how to work practically apply concepts of transition, change and self-leadership for a more fulfilling life.
Some Examples of Self-Leadership Skills
These self-leadership tools are a suite of personal strategies you can draw on to support you navigate times of change.
Change is external and transition is our internal response to change. Working with transition as a framework is helping us to work with what we can influence during times of change.
And self-leadership is central to this as we tap into what we know about ourselves, both consciously and more unconsciously, as compasses and guides for moving through these uncertain times.
Some examples of self-leadership skills are:
- Being intentional – knowing what you want to achieve and where you want to focus—each year, week and day.
- Writing – using the power of writing for insight and self-awareness.
- Knowing yourself – knowing your personality preferences, how you are wired, how you self-sabotage, because we all have different and unique ways of doing this that we can get a better understanding of.
- Tapping into our intuitive sides – especially via tools like tarot and oracle is another area we can choose to support us.
- Movement – building exercise and other forms of movement into our days so we are looking after ourselves physically, mentally and emotionally.
Simple Shifts that Can Make a Big Difference When Managing Change in Your Life
Working with these tools and frameworks help us to center and ground ourselves in many ways. They help us to:
- know ourselves better, including what is less conscious or strong for us;
- be more well-rounded;
- have choice;
- and be self-directed.
They are often simple shifts but they can make a huge difference.
Writing three pages in the morning, for example, via Morning Pages, can be an important foundational tool for being more aware each day or working through challenges. Writing your intentions for each month and week can help you prioritize what is most important and stop you wasting time on what is not important.
Wholehearted is full of practical strategies to help you with self-leadership if you are going through change or wanting something different. Plus the experience of reading the book and also working through the workbook is a deep self-leadership and self-coaching experience in itself.
3 Signs You’re Ready to Transition in Life
Three signs that a person is ready to transition in life to a new phase of life are:
Feeling a lack of value or purpose.
It might be in a work role, as it was for me, or in a relationship or place.
For me, this manifested as feeling unwell in the workplace and lacking meaning in the work I was doing. I felt “half-hearted.”
Turning points arrive.
Often there is a significant event that sharpens attention and makes you realize this is a “no turning back” moment.
This happened to me when I wasn’t appointed to a job role I knew it was a good fit for. Not a big deal really, but in the context of how I felt, it very clearly signaled it was time to move on.
Synchronicity and intuition kick in.
I’ve asked women to share their Wholehearted Stories on my blog and just as I found, intuition and synchronicities often occurred for them at times of transition.
The inner voice often guides us if we listen, but we need to learn and craft ways to hear. This is why writing and intuitive tools like tarot can be helpful to tap into our less conscious inner knowing in transition times.
This is also why a coach can be helpful at such times too, asking questions to focus on what we cannot see ourselves.
Two Mistakes Women Make When Life Calls Them to Make a Change
Two mistakes I see women make when their life calls them to make significant change are:
1. Not taking the time and space to listen within.
Sometimes it is simply fear of what change might bring that keeps us living on the surface, but taking the time to listen within is so powerful.
Other times we are busy and we find it hard to shape this time.
But taking the time and space for the practices and learning that will take us where we want to go, even if we don’t know the exact destination, is a vital part of the puzzle and process.
These shifts don’t need to be sprints. They often take place over a longer period of time. Building in practices to help us navigate these times is a skill worth cultivating. Working with others such as coaches or talking to trusted others to facilitate this process is also a worthwhile investment.
2. Getting stuck in either/or thinking.
In my coaching with women, I often find myself facilitating the opening up of options and blends of options.
It’s easy to get caught in binary thinking—a choice of two paths—when in reality there are often many ways to live, earn an income or be creative.
Thinking of multiple streams of income or a portfolio career, for example, are ways to begin to reframe our life. Rather than jump from one job to another way of living, we might work part-time, job-share, develop a side-hustle, learn a skill, shift in hybrid ways that can be very powerful and self-supporting, giving us choice.
Or we might embrace a multipotentialite approach and have many different strings to our bow that might connect via our values.
How Does It Help Women to Identify Their Strengths?
It’s amazing how many women I work with initially cannot articulate their strengths or talents, though they are abundant.
It seems it is hard for women to take time out to reflect on their body of work and personality, often because they are busy working or looking after others. We can be typically more self-effacing, downplaying our strengths.
I know I didn’t explore this fully until I was in a real time of crisis and needed to make change. But when I did, it made a huge difference. The personal development journey of becoming a coach and personality type practitioner and being coached myself helped immensely with this inner work.
Our own way of being can be so ingrained, we don’t see it as special. Or worse still, we see it as a weakness. This can happen with people who are introverted and whose quieter skills like listening, encouraging others and writing are not always valued or seen as valuable by society.
If we can shine a light on our strengths through looking at our body of work over time and the vital ingredients and skills we bring to the table, as well as our personality strengths, we can learn to be more self-honoring and self-aware. This can help us follow paths that align with our special gifts and support others through them.
Being more conscious and aware about our strengths can guide us to be more conscious and self-accepting of our weaknesses and less preferred areas too. Small tweaks in these less preferred areas can make a huge difference in our personal growth, balance and awareness.
Is It Really Possible to “Find Our Purpose?”
I think connecting with what is meaningful and purposeful is about becoming more self-aware of what is important to us and our strengths.
I see it as a weave of skills we work with around self-leadership, personality, and creativity that helps us shine a light on where we can feel more aligned and contribute, as well as show up as our best selves.
It is about inner work to more clearly articulate what makes us come alive and how we connect more with that, then build it into our lives.
This work can often feel so expansive, it’s overwhelming. But if we can work with frameworks such as personality type and intuitive tools like tarot, we can put some shape around these explorations and feel more grounded in doing this work.
It’s not a one hit process. It’s something that continues to evolve as we learn new skills and become more nuanced in our insights about ourselves. So it is more about creating awareness of what is meaningful and purposeful and then seeking to apply this practically in how we live our lives.
Tapping into our values is also a way into purpose. We can explore this through looking at our body of work over time and how we desire to feel in what you do.
I created a Personal Action Checklist based on ten areas that I have found can guide us to create more purpose in our lives. And reading Wholehearted and working through the Workbook will take you on a journey of building a tool-kit to support you in crafting a more meaningful and purposeful life.
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Terri Connellan is an author, creative transition coach and accredited psychological type practitioner. She has a Master of Arts in Language and Literacy, two teaching qualifications and a successful 30-year career as a teacher and leader in adult vocational education.
Her coaching and writing focus on three elements—creativity, self-leadership and personality—for midlife women in transition to a more creative life with deeper purpose. Terri works globally through her business, Quiet Writing, encouraging personal transformation through deeper self-understanding of body of work, creativity and psychological type.
Her books Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook published by the kind press are a wise mix of memoir, practical strategies and positive self-leadership resources for women going through or wanting change. Terri offers 1:1 coaching and the Writing Road Trip program. She lives and writes in a village on the outskirts of Sydney surrounded by beach and bush.
For more information about Terri and her work, please see her website and podcast, and connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition is a personal recount of one woman’s journey about shifting from being a long-term government employee towards enjoying a richer, more self-directed and creative life as an inspirational life coach.
When author Terri Connellan realizes she no longer aligns with the organization where she has worked for thirty years, she turns her back on a successful career and searches for a different, more purposeful life. Wholehearted unveils this transition journey and path to shaping a more fulfilling, creative and values driven life; through low and high moments and life altering decision making.
Wholehearted contains a set of self-leadership skills including intention setting, writing as daily practice and prioritising exercise and self-care, whilst providing guidance and a toolkit for women seeking to transition positively, whether self-initiated or instigated by others or circumstances. An aligned Wholehearted Companion Workbook provides deeper reflection and crafting personal strategies to live more wholeheartedly.
Available at Amazon, Indiebound, Bookshop, and other bookstores.
Free Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: https://www.quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1
The Wholehearted Companion Workbook works hand in hand with Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition, unveiling Terri Connellan’s transition journey from a successful thirty-year career in one organisation towards a different, more purposeful life. From her experiences, Terri provides positive self-leadership insights for women going through or seeking major change in their lives.
The Companion Workbook goes deeper with how to put the learning into practice. It walks you through the key ideas in Wholehearted including fifteen self-leadership skills, providing deeper reflection and crafting personal strategies to live more wholeheartedly. You will learn how to apply skills and practices like intention setting, writing as daily practice and prioritising exercise and self-care in this practical toolkit for women seeking to positively transition, whether self-initiated or instigated by others or circumstances.
If you love making notes and engaging as you read, reflecting on how what you read might apply in your life, you will find the workbook a valuable companion.
Available at Amazon.