courage Archives - Page 5 of 6

Nurture doesn’t exist without unconditional love. Without it, nurture is a business exchange: I’ll give you care and attention and in return you will do the same for me.

I’ve been ruminating on the phrase “nurture is valuable” since January. I’ve thrown out a call to women to answer interview questions on the topic and I’ve received nine sets of answers so far. Not one of these answers has been identical, so clearly it’s a huge topic with a wide variety of experiences and nuances.

Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with the word nurture. Sometimes it sounds weak to me, and I grew up despising all forms of weakness. At other times the word feels soft, warm and approachable, but this is also foreign and uncomfortable in a vague, undefined way.

In my heart, I’ve always been naturally drawn to nurture but it took me a while to build up the courage to admit this. I’ve longed to cultivate it and see it grow, even when I didn’t have many examples of it to learn from. I think it was a seed, hard and unwatered, that took decades of dormancy before it could bloom.

When Ava was born thirteen years ago, like many new parents, I began to understand for the first time what unconditional love might actually look like. I only glimpsed it in fits and starts – it would take me another seven years to finally put it into practice with the help of my counsellor.

I needed to allow my perfect facade to fall to the ground and shatter before I could embrace the messy agony of my own vulnerable humanity. For me, this was the start of unconditional love. It was awful at first; isolating and uncertain. It required me to offer so damn much of myself – initially to my children, then to my husband, my friends and some extended family members.

True nurture doesn’t allow us to hide who we really are. Its price tag is steep for a reason: we have no guarantee that our affection and care will be returned in the same measure it is given. The key is to replenish our own tank by offering unconditional love back to ourselves so we can continue to pour it out to those we love. Without self-care, nurture is a temporary proposition. You will burn out if you don’t know how to refuel.

Nurture has so many elements. I look forward to diving in deeper to this topic over the summer. I’d love to hear from more of you on this. If you consider yourself a nurturer in any way at all, please get in touch to answer five short questions for my research project.

I do believe nurture is valuable and that it only succeeds from a place of unconditional love. This makes it risky and powerful. We give without any assurance that we will receive it back. We must look after ourselves in order to nurture others. My dream is to build a community of nurturers who can encourage, support and care for one another. Without nurture, our world is a cold, terrifying and desperate place.

Would you like to be involved? Get in touch and let’s unpack some of these ideas together!

In Personal Growth, Writing

Rejection

Julianne HarveyMay 24, 2016Leave a comment

Rejection is a bitch. It can take you out at the knees and severely bruise your confidence.

I received a rejection this week for a government grant I applied for. I wanted to take the Literary Salon experience of meaningful conversation to as many high school English classes as possible in the 2016-17 school year.

I thought this project fit well in the Spoken Word category, but the deciding committee did not agree.

Expectations

I fully recognize that a huge part of my problem with rejection is the expectation that I build around certain outcomes. This is my fault. I’d love to be breezy about every aspect of my life (hell, even a few areas would be a good start!) but find this immensely challenging.

In theory, I should’ve applied for this grant and then carried on with my other work – writing a manuscript and a screenplay, querying agents, submitting to magazines, developing new workshop topics, sending out speaking proposals, creating another grant application – and allowed the chips to fall wherever they are meant to without investing in any desired future result.

I need to practice this. I have no shortage of other projects to work on, but I seem hardwired to daydream my way into what I long for most, and then become righteously pissed-off when the reality veers away from my carefully-laid plans.

We all face rejection, in one way or another. As a writer, I’ve stuck my damn hand up in the air and volunteered for it, but some still hurt more than others. Perhaps it’s the cumulative effect of too many “no’s” without a “yes” thrown in to break up the monotony.

Internal Monologue

Our internal monologue is what gets us into the deepest trouble. I should know by now that saying to myself, “It’s okay, Julianne. You tried and that’s what matters. This particular committee didn’t see the value in this work but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. Keep on going – you’re doing fine” is healthier and more productive than the alternative, “You suck and everyone knows it. Why don’t you do the world a favour and stop writing, speaking and creating altogether. You’re only embarrassing yourself.”

Rejection is a part of life. How we handle it is what matters most. I’m going to allow myself to feel this one by having a good cry and then summoning the courage to call the grant office and try to understand why my application failed. If I can learn from this for the next setback, it will help me in the long run.

Where I go from here is the important part. Which voice will I listen to? The angry, critical, shaming one or the loving, hopeful, supportive one? I get to choose that. So do you.

In Identity, Personal Growth, Relationships

Preparing for Change

Julianne HarveyMay 17, 2016May 16, 2016Leave a comment

Change is a process. We can’t see it clearly peering into the future, but when we look back it’s easier to plot the high and low points on our individual graph.

I’ve come to recognize that the groundwork for change gets laid days, weeks, months and years ahead of the actual shift that we can point to and identify. Extreme patience is required in the preparation stage. It’s the seeds, deep underground, beginning to grow but nowhere near ready to burst through the soil and make themselves visible.

So much of this life is preparing. We must wait, whether we like it or not, until the time is right for the longed-for change to take place. As humans, we are wired to become bored and discontent when our existence becomes too predictable and safe. We crave adventure, change, new scenery and experiences. It’s in our DNA.

But between the desire and the reality there is a gap. Sometimes it’s short and other times it’s dishearteningly long. Most of us would not make big changes unless we first felt motivated by boredom or loss or an inner compulsion to inject fresh vitality back into our lives. It’s easy for inertia to set in, to lull us into complacency, but when the spark ignites for something new, we begin to stir up our excitement and then we usually have to wait.

I’m trying to change the way I view this preparatory period. I know that work is happening, deep in my soul, just as surely as flowers bloom out of buried seeds and not by accident. We’ve been painting our house and boy, oh boy, painting is mostly prep work. And the preparation doesn’t look like much, but without it you’d never get to those beautifully altered, crisp and clean walls.

Change is a long, messy, unpredictable process. You get great news and you’ll be flying high, then a rejection or a disappointment hits and you feel abject despair, all of that inspirational hope erased like a whiteboard. Life is a series of hurdles. Some you clear with room to spare and you are filled to the brim with success and optimism. Others you smack into and fall hard, occasionally breaking a bone or bruising your confidence, and you have no choice but to muster the courage to stand up and try for the next one.

Preparation is critical to implement change at some point in the future. We wait, we dream, we continue to work even when the odds are stacked against us. It’s better to believe that those seeds are, in fact, growing, even if we can’t see them. We show up, day after day, learning what we can and refusing to give up on what we long for most. And one day, perhaps when we least expect it, all of that prep work will turn into actual change, just in time to start the process over again with something else.

In Culture, Identity, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Roar Gently

Julianne HarveyApril 26, 2016April 25, 2016Leave a comment

Do you ever feel like you’ve been silenced? In one way and another, incidents have been piling up for me and in a flash of insight, I realized that I’ve been staying quiet when perhaps I should’ve been speaking up.

To right this, I put Katy Perry’s Roar on repeat and cranked the volume up while I was driving. Just letting the words wash over me, “You hear my voice, you hear that sound, like thunder gonna shake your ground” tightened my resolve to let the world (or at the very least, a few select people) hear me roar.

As women, this can be a tough sell in our culture. We often feel the pressure to be nice, to get along, to not rock the boat, to avoid being labelled as difficult or bitchy. Facing conflict head-on can cause many of us to panic and retreat.

I struggle to find a balance between speaking up when something affects me or my kids and choosing to stay quiet when it’s none of my business (even if I may have strong feelings on the subject). I long to be as kind as possible, like most women do, but to also demonstrate courage by going boldly into tense situations without backing down. This is not an easy line to walk.

After feeling pumped up by Katy Perry’s beautiful and strong anthem, I wanted to simply say whatever came to mind to several people. But this didn’t seem right either, as we need to practice discretion so we aren’t abusive or cruel in our self-expression.

I’m trying now to think in terms of Roaring Gently. I have every right to use my voice, as every person does, but in order to stay true to my values and integrity, I also desire to choose gentleness in my delivery. Both of these words together give me a better framework for this important process.

Practicing new skills is hard. We should expect setbacks. We’ll bite our tongue and wish later we had spoken up. Or the opposite will happen: we’ll be stirred up and pissed off, so we’ll push our filters aside and let the person have every one of our nasty, unvarnished thoughts. This might require some apologies in order to keep our relationships healthy, but we can offer ourselves grace and love as we work through these normal bumps in the path.

Feeling voiceless gives us a sense that we are not in control of our lives. We can slide into victimhood, lashing out in a passive aggressive manner instead of bravely asking for what we need. This is not a healthy long-term strategy. But neither is saying hurtful things in the heat of the moment that can never be unsaid. Roaring is critical to our health, but a gentle roar is preferable to an angry one.

Let’s roar gently together – women who aren’t afraid to step up and be heard, but who value kindness as much as we do honesty.

In Culture, Identity, Movies/TV, Personal Growth

That Rey Moment

Julianne HarveyApril 12, 2016June 13, 2016Leave a comment

We bought Star Wars: The Force Awakens and watched it again as a family this weekend. It lost none of the magic from when we first saw it in IMAX on opening day in December, but this time, one particular moment deepened in meaning for me.

When Rey faces Kylo Ren in the forest and her fingers close around Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, she crosses over in that instant to her new identity – the person she was born to be but lacked the courage to become before this defining moment. I recognized a profound identification as I watched this dramatic scene unfold, for every one of us has either had that Rey moment ourselves or will at some point.

We all know, deep down, who we really are. But then we must access the strength to step into it, to cross over, to accept that invitation we receive to live as our truest selves. For Rey, in that second she grips the handle of the lightsaber, it’s written all over her face. This will change everything and she knows it.

These key moments are exhilarating and terrifying, at exactly the same time. It’s thrilling to stop running from our calling at last, but embracing our real identity means walking away from the old one. This involves loss and pain. It’s a bridge we cross, from one inner destination to another, and we can never return in the same way.

The Hero’s Journey requires forward motion. If we stay stuck in the same place, we are not on a journey. We are in a loop. When we finally embrace our own Rey moment, we step from the old, familiar pattern and move on to who we are meant to be.

Now we are moving forward with new things to learn and experience. It’s like Dorothy opening the door to Oz and experiencing every single thing in bright, vivid colour, leaving the black-and-white version of herself behind. There are fresh adventures ahead, provided we are brave enough to go for them. It helps to form a new tribe of other like-minded travellers, who are on their own Hero’s Journey, and can provide support and encouragement in the loneliest spots.

Another helpful practice is stillness. Rey summons the power of quiet later in her fight with Kylo Ren, closing her eyes and taking the time to focus her energy and her mind. This is a requirement for those of us fighting our way through this life in the boldness of our true identities.

Don’t give up. Keep on going. Know that we are all making our way together. We have grasped our unique lightsabers and found out who we really are. Now we must continue to walk this path, even when it’s impossibly hard. Especially then, for we will find what we are looking for if we don’t give up.

The joy and the inspiration is found in the power of who we are meant to be. If you haven’t had that Rey moment of identification, start watching for it. And if you have, keep walking your Hero’s Journey. You are not alone. There are many of us, finding our true legacies and callings, believing that our power and our future lies along this path of who we are and were always meant to be.

Showing all posts tagged courage

Nurture is Valuable: Unconditional Love