Did you ever decide that you weren’t good at writing?
That writing a book is for other people not for you?
I was there.
In my high school years our English teacher. Miss Larkin (yes, I can still remember her name) did NOT like me. My school friends confirmed that I wasn’t imagining it.
One of them once helpfully suggested I didn’t put my hair up in bunches because Miss Larkin particularly disliked that! I mean, really?
It was the ‘I’ll show you’ part of my personality that I accessed to deal with this hurdle. (This has been particularly useful elsewhere in my life too!) When a few years later I achieved an A grade in my ‘O’ levels – the equivalent of school certificate in Australia – it was a source of pride and satisfaction.
While I had shown Miss Larkin I could use words well, my real love was numbers.
Entering the business world at a young age I found that the language for communication and reports typically needed to be factual and succinct. Writing for expression or pleasure didn’t find a place in my world back then.
It was decades later that I stated to write my first book The Truth about Transformation. It turned out to be a great way of making sense of the corporate world I had been successful in, but that I had also found many times to be unsupportive and confusing. I wanted to share the lessons I’d learnt, and discovered that to really do that I had to dig deeper and consider what I could have done differently.
Writing turned out to be a slower more reflective way of making sense and consolidating my understanding of my experiences.
Now writing is an outlet, whether journalling or writing articles, I increasingly enjoy the process of playing with words and expression, to communicate an idea or a lesson I’ve learnt.
Do you write? As if so have you found it helpful? I would love to hear your thoughts.
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