Happy Wednesday on this wet September day! 🌧️ Feeling a bit sad to say goodbye to summer already…. This letter is an attempt to capture my thoughts, feelings and experiences from the last 6 ish weeks and convert them into ideas, reflections and stories that might get us closer connected. Enjoy a 5 minute read (maybe with with my favourite drink ☕). I love replies! 📧
👋 Hello Friends,
Yes, I met disappointment again! This time, in connection with my birthday. 🎂
It is dawning on me that the theme of my last letter in August also included a section on being disappointed and a part of me is concerned that in sharing this I’ll be perceived as negative or unappreciative of all the good stuff in life (which I agree, there is plenty of!). This voice seems to be part of a well-known narrative - the story that we can’t feel sad or unhappy because there are other people starving in Africa, or something like this.
I keep reminding myself that all feelings are valid, although they are not always about what we think they are about.
Getting very upset or angry in the moment might not be in response to an incident in the present, but instead the incident represents something much more intense that happened in the past. 🔙 And all the feelings that are coming out now were all suppressed before because it was too much/too dangerous to feel them then.
The disappointment I recently felt seemed out of proportion in the moment and so means it is likely to do with my past. Although not ‘fun’, it was a great experience to go through - deep, healing and liberating - and I’m hoping it has extended my range of feelings I get to feel. So something really… to celebrate! 🙌
Read on below to discover more or feel free to scroll down to whatever you’re most called to.
And remember… all your feelings are valid. 🤗
1. Thinking About… Disappointment 🥹
2. What I am Celebrating 🙌
i. 6000+ words written of my book ✍️ ii. Becoming a Birthday Circling Leader ⭕
3. Consumable Delights 😋
i. 📖 Article - Friendship Benches 🧰 ii. Tool - Rise App for Better Sleep
4. A Parting Thought📝
by James Clear, Author of Atomic Habits
Thanks, as always, for reading (and responding!). 🙏
Sending (Virtual) Hugs, Love & A Warm Smile,
Georgie 🤗💜
1. Thinking About… Disappointment, Needs and Celebration 🥹
Late August turned out to be a difficult as I learnt to face feelings I don’t like to feel - loneliness, mundanity, disappointment. 🎂 It was my birthday, and due to a variety of factors, plans for fun and celebration fell through. Birthdays are often full of expectation and I didn’t feel like there was much to look forward to which upset the maximiser in me who wants to live life to the full. Then this combined with a few close friends forgetting the day, and being alone in my flat for most of the week created the space for feelings of sadness to arise. It was the perfect opportunity to also meet old stories and feelings about being forgotten and undervalued, and recognise them as the past needing to be healed. The experience was incredibly needed. Although not ‘fun’, I’ve been wanting to get in touch with and to meet these feelings for a long time.
We tend to design our life to avoid circumstances that bring up difficult feelings. I struggle with empty space with nothing in it, especially away from people I love, so the planner in me ensures that it doesn’t happen often. I want to become more ready to meet these empty moments, because life is and will be full of them. And I was ready for it - more ready than ever, to hold compassionate space for a part of myself to grieve. It felt like beautiful growth (although I was exhausted afterwards!).
I’m also happy to report that my birthday celebrations didn’t end on a low ( 🙏 hats off to friends and family who made time for some last minute connection. ) Whilst not rushing or avoiding the difficult feelings, I was also eventually able to feel into what I needed to celebrate this milestone. This was with the help of a great old friend with creative superpowers and a pack of NVC needs cards. I highly recommend these needs cards as a way to start to define and articulate what can be quite unclear longings, sensations or desires. I’ve also since used them with a friend who came to stay with me, to work out how best to share time and space. They can be pretty enlightening and also create the space for a shared ‘social contract’ of sorts.
🍲 I organised a small gathering to celebrate my birthday with friends, that included co-created elements (inviting individuals to add a desired activity into a hat - e.g. deep questions, improv, circling), many heartfelt cards and messages, and a storytelling moment over drinks to share fun memories from our friendship (including a recent playfight, crazy dancing and singing whilst washing up, and savouring the moment of desire before eating a banana!). The stories brought up interesting feelings of delight, nostalgia and discomfort, as I practiced receiving kind words in front of an audience (British people especially might relate to the discomfort!).
It was also a great moment to reflect on just how many great memories I’ve had with amazing people over the years, and feel into a sense of gratitude for the abundance of it all. That is one intention I’ve been working on this year and hope to continue - how can we appreciate what is already here, more?
👉Here is a fun practical way to get started where the process is as important as the product: go through your digital photos 📷 from the past 5 years, select 100 ish of your favourite moments, send them off to get printed online, when they arrive in the post, spend some time looking through them all, decide which ones to display and put them up on a wall in your home you frequently see. Savour every part of the experience.
I now have a wall of photos above my bed and near my desk, which I look at multiple times a day. It is great to look at in moments of stress or simply when lost in thought, and has reminded me how life is already pretty damn rich. 🤗
2. What I am Celebrating 🙌
This section is an experimental way for me to practice the challenge of self-celebration, feel into the experience of pride and gratitude for good things happening in life. Hopefully, it will encourage you too to outwardly celebrate achievements in your own life!
✍️ i. 6000-9000 words written for my book on conversation!
I have found the perfect procrastination activity from my PhD! 😂 Chances are, now PhD deadlines are looming, I’ll likely make more progress on both of them now.
✍️Writing a book on conversation has always been a dream of mine. A dream that I think about most days, and wonder why I am not actualising. I’m a big fan of the ‘show me’ don’t ‘tell me’ mentality so decided I needed to actually create some sort of system that would enable me to stay accountable to writing it, little by little.
I found at least 20 documents containing books notes, proposals, paragraphs on topics (and know there are more), which I have now compiled into one document under 65 mini chapters. Of course, there won’t be 65 chapters but it has helped me chunk down my thinking into a manageable scale - each mini chapter captures a central idea or theme. I’ll sort the ordering of these mini-chapters into real chapters later on; right now, I just need to get the ideas out of my head.
The first paragraph was a hard slog to write (my god, such resistance!!), but the second and third were so much easier and satisfying. The blank page is always so intimidating so it feels really good to always have somewhere to pick up off.
Right now I have 9000 words, although some of this is notes so will likely reduce down to 6000 ish before going up again. The aim is 1000-2000 words a week so I should have 15-25k done by Christmas. I’m excited for the challenge! 💪 And know that writing this here will give me much more social accountability. Wish me luck. 🤞
⭕ ii. Becoming a Birthday Circling Leader
This August, after six months of weekly circling, 3 circling retreats and a festival, I qualified as a Birthday Circling Leader with Circling Europe.
You’re probably wondering what the hell circling is and why I spent so much time practicing it.
It’s a great question.
⭕ Unsurprisingly, we sit in a circle . And express what it is like to be us now...
Circling, like Authentic relating (which I already bring into my conversation curriculum) is a relational tool that helps us understand what is most true or authentic for us in a given moment, and to communicate this powerfully in a way that helps us stay in connection with others.
As well as the focus being on connection, it’s all about being here ‘now’. There is no need to go somewhere.
This is one of the elements I love about circling that connects to what I perceive transformational conversation can be - endless exploration with another human being, tapping into the present moment and what it is like for us to be ourselves with another.
It can lead to statements like…
- ‘Being here with you I notice your smile is infectious’
- ‘I feel very playful right now’
- ‘I’m really curious about what you just shared’
You never run out of things to say, because the present is so rich and keeps changing. It can create a deep sense of being seen and understood. It can create so much deep and authentic connection with another, accelerating intimacy in a single interaction.
It helps us tap into our aliveness and a state of flow. Which is what I think Transformational Conversations are… dynamic, endless flow and aliveness in the moment.
I’m excited to bring more of this into my work, and to potentially run ongoing circling sessions in London.
3. Consumable Delights 😋
📖 i. Article - Zimbabwe’s therapeutic ‘friendship benches’, coming to a city near you
I was surprised I hadn’t come across this before project before. It employs grandmothers to deliver therapy in their neighbourhoods, on a easily accessible bench (so reducing the stigma of it being therapy, and giving elders a role in their community). They’re expanding to cities around the world. Up next? London.
🧰 ii. Tool - Rise App and tracker for better sleep
Some of you may know that I seem to hold a record in my friendship group for the my capacity to sleep ; I can easily sleep 10-14 hours on weekends. Some recent research on how and why I can do this led me to the realisation that I am just not getting my daily sleep needs met in the week and therefore build up a lot of sleep debt. Using phone data from the last year, the app has calculated that I need around 9 hrs 15 mins a night (I know, crazy amounts!) - which is way below my 8-8.5hrs average. No wonder I crash towards the end of the week. I’ve recently started using the app in a gamified way to see if I can reduce my sleep debt to under zero, by going to bed earlier, taking short naps and waking up later. Turns out, that extra hour in bed really does make a difference to my mood, energy and focus. I’m trying to find ways to ensure I make it viable to get this amount of sleep without it affecting my social life and my morning deep work sessions.
4. A Parting Thought📝
“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”
– James Clear, Atomic Habits