Transformation toolkit
Ask pretty much any business, personal development or spiritual leader about the practical tools they use to achieve success, and journaling will be one of them. From bullet journaling, to gratitude lists to morning pages to personal inventories – there are an array of techniques you can use for personal and professional growth.
However, most journaling methods require you to ‘come as you are’. Meaning that they don’t help you to access the deeper layers of your self-expression – unless you already naturally do that.
This means that you can simply end up swirling around your surface mental chatter. Your intuition, inspiration, creativity and the heart and soul of who you are can remain masked. Even though you are ‘doing the right thing’ by performing the act of journaling.
My transformation toolkit helps you to bypass fears, blocks and doubts so that you can get your inner thoughts and feelings freely on the page. So that you can get out of your own way and allow yourself to process how you feel. This way, writing can act as a creative buffer for criticism, throwaway comments, insensitive observations and even downright nastiness. You can process things that happen in your life from the heart space. This helps you to transmute powerful emotions such as anger and fear into creativity – which can act as fuel for your life.
This toolkit helps you to get started and go deeper, so that you can truly unlock the power of writing for you. Once learned – you carry this forever, so that you always have the means of healing and self-expression within you.
When you write, do you feel truly able to express yourself? Are you able to really say what you need and want to say? When I ask these questions in my writing workshops, 90 per cent of people say, “no”.
It’s usually not enough to have the practical equipment to write. Emotions and personal truth often need to be coaxed out, especially if they’ve been hidden for a long time. What’s more, most people have blocks around the actual act of writing. Consider this: What do you tell yourself about writing? That you’re not ‘good’ at it. That you can’t spell. That your grammar is crap. That you’re confident in writing but are afraid to dig too deep. Maybe someone has already read your diary or journal and shamed you about the contents. And now, it feels as though you’re always writing for an audience.
The first tool is The Transformation Pyramid. This is a handy tool I created to help you visualise the different layers of self-expression that you can access.
At the top is the mind – the place where most of us write, and live, from. Most of us have had an experience where we’ve written something heartfelt or creative and the response we’ve got back has been all about our grammar and punctuation. This is grammar shaming, and it can run deep. And this kind of shaming, around emotions and creativity, can happen in all aspects of life.
In addition to healing grammar shame, the other main tools are understanding which of the seven writing personalities you embody and using an amazing, fun technique that songwriters use, called object writing.This enables you to access your creativity and bring your writing, and yourself, to life.
I help you to get your out of your mind and into your body, and from there you can begin to go down the layers of the transformation pyramid to find your voice. Think of this as stripping off the layers of social conditioning, so that you can find what lights you up. Because as Howard Thurman says: “Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” And this has never been truer than in the crazy political and social times we currently live in.
You’re not a machine who needs to fit into the cogs of a system that’s already been designed for you. You get to decide what you think, feel, do and say.
You are a whole person, who needs a whole-brained, whole-hearted approach to life.
I discovered this when I veered off the conventional path in 2002, aged 24. People around me thought I had everything, as I’d been a model student and then a successful magazine journalist. But when my ‘armour’ cracked, I needed to lose it entirely and find out who I really was. This is why I write. And I hope to inspire you to grab a pen and write your way to a life that doesn’t just look good – but feels good.
You’ll also find a host of additional tools, including walking and writing, creating a loss list and a joy list, and writing through fear and grief. Prescribing poetry prescriptions and doing a deep dive into metaphor – the language of the soul. Exploring your shadow self and the masks we all wear in life. Plus, a whole practical writing toolkit if you want to take what you’ve learned and turn it into blog posts, articles or even a book.
There’s also a host of writing exercises and journal prompts from understanding people, power and control, getting to the heart of your ‘why’, dreaming up your cosmic shopping list, and paying attention to the signs, signals and serendipities in your life.