What’s your story?
When looking to develop our self-awareness, going through the process of telling our story can be a very helpful way to uncover some of the ways in which we relate to and describe the events of our life so far.
The richest and most useful stories combine aspects of both the inner and outer journey. The outer journey representing external obstacles we have had to overcome and the inner journey being more about the inner battles we have had to fight to keep ourselves moving forward.
One of the first exercises I get people who sign up for my Leadership Exploration Programme to do is to capture the 5-10 most pivotal experiences that have shaped them into the person they are today. While it is tempting to pick the experiences that show us in a flattering light it is usually the times when things haven’t gone how we would have liked them to that have taught us most about who we are, what we want and what we are capable of.
Understanding these experiences and the stories we tell ourselves about them can be key to developing a balanced and positive sense of ourselves – particularly if our current stories come from a place of low agency or victimhood. These experiences can also be our clearest guides when it comes to understanding what we are drawn to within work, leadership and life in general.
Here are some of the pivotal events of my life…
Born (1982)
Born in Winchester hospital in May, the youngest of 3 children with a 5 year age gap to my sister and 7 to my brother. My dad was in the army and my mum looked after the family. The older I get the more grateful I feel for being born into a loving, supportive and financially secure family, within a peaceful and democratic country. My earliest memories are of playing sport (apparently from the age of three I was rarely without some kind of bat or racquet in my hand) and studying the natural world (I was particularly mesmerised by lakes, streams and rockpools and the life within them).
The older I get and the more perspective I gain, the more grateful I feel for what I have and the opportunities I have been given.
Boarding school (1990-2000)
Like most kids of military families at that time (who were offered large subsidies), I was sent to an all-boys boarding school at the age of 8. This has given me a strong sense of independence and an ability to build deep relationships with some of the people I went to school with. I was able to indulge my love of sport and had some amazing opportunities to explore the UK and beyond thought the relationships that I built within the school network.
Doing more self-enquiry later on in life and seeing some of the traits of boarding school attendees has revealed that separation from family at a young age can also create challenges when it comes to emotional development. Connecting to what I am feeling can be challenging and the flip-side of the self-reliance can make it hard to rely on other people and know when to ask for help.
Dyslexia assessment (1996)
At the age of 14 my English teacher picked up on the fact that my ability to process visual and auditory information was slower than the rest of the class and sent me to get tested for dyslexia. Understanding my form of neurodivergence and how this makes it harder for me to learn using traditional classroom ways of teaching was a great relief to me as I was struggling to keep up in a very academically focused school. The diagnosis helped me to make sense of a lot of my early school experiences where I would get very anxious around tests and exams and often find inventive ways to get out of them (once pretending I had fallen down the stairs before coming into school and broken my arm!).
Learning more about my neurodivergence as I have got older has helped me understand more of the benefits of it and helped me reframe the challenging school experiences and see it more as a superpower – and respect the resilience I had to show to get by.
Joining Purple Works (1996)
After a couple of graduate level jobs that I didn’t really connect with I came across a job advert for a small Strategy and Communications consultancy in Guildford. They were working with the leadership team of the LTA (British Tennis) on a new strategy for growing the sport. Being a big tennis fan I jumped at the opportunity and after an interview in the Waterloo Burger King (we couldn’t find a seat at Costa!) I was given the job!
Within a few months I had a seat at the table where the big strategic decisions for growing British Tennis were being made, working directly with the CEO and Executive Team to help them engage the wider organisation in the vision.
Going onto work with the RFU (English rugby), professional service firms, retailers and organisations in other industries gave me a feel for how organisations functions and the role of the different levels of leaders.
Post-viral fatigue (2011)
After finishing a very intense 9 month project working with the new CEO of the RFU to help him develop and share the new strategy for Rugby in England I went on a holiday to Asia where I picked up what I thought was just a regular cold. On returning to the UK I found that each morning I woke up, I could get out of bed but after eating breakfast my energy would drain from me and I could barely walk 20 meters without needing to rest.
I tried to push myself back into work but found it very difficult to maintain enough energy to be effective and after a couple of months I decided to stop. It was only when I saw a doctor who my uncle recommended from a time when he had something similar that I started to understand what had been happening in my body over the previous years that lead to being in this state. Being in a prolonged stress state had weakened my body’s immune system and made me more susceptible to a virus. Consistent shallow breathing (typical of being stressed) had led to my body not getting enough CO2 which impacted how my blood was able to hold onto oxygen. This is when I first got into meditation and understanding the importance of managing stress when it comes to sustainable performance at work.
Sensory Processing sensitivity
Ever since my experience with post-viral fatigue I have been curious about how my natural disposition may have contributed to me processing stress in a different way. When I came across Dr Elaine Arron’s work on the Highly Sensitive Person so much about how she described the trait of Sensory Processing Sensitivity (HSS) made sense to me and seemed to be describing my experience of life so far. People with HSS process stimuli in their environments (such as other people’s emotions, a stressful event or a sad film) more strongly.
I have always noticed that my ability to handle and recover from stressful situations was not as good as most of the people around me and that I would always gravitate to keeping my life as stress free as possible. As I have grown to understand my neurotype better I now see that while it has its challenges it also comes with some major advantages. I find it easy to access joyous states of mind through what many people would consider fairly mundane things within our everyday lives. I will often stop to admire a beautiful tree and films will regularly bring me to tears (something I still find hard to be comfortable with).
Discovering meditation
Discovering Transcendental Meditation (TM), a form of meditation where you use a mantra repeated over and over again, was a watershed moment for me in terms of how I process and manage my emotions on a day-to-day basis. Taking the first 20 minutes of my day to sit in stillness and observe the quality of my mind has helped me to bring more of a sense of calm to all areas of my life and create more space between what happens in my life and how I respond.
For someone with HSS this been especially important as emotions can easily get the better of me if I’m not able to calm my mind and access a more balanced and resourceful state.
Training to become a coach
While I had been interested for most of my career in the psychology of performance within organisations, it wasn’t until 2020 that I decided to take the plunge and train to become a coach. What I learnt about coaching and myself in the three month programme changed my life and it was clear that this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my professional life. Having empathetic and bright people hold space for me to explore many different aspects of my life and work was a very powerful (and at times challenging!) experience. It opened my eyes to some of the limiting ways I was seeing myself and the world around me and helped me to see that these were not fixed. The idea that I could help people go on a similar journey and find more freedom in their careers and lives in general was a thrilling prospect!