I was a bit of a tragic fan today - but who cares!

I've just had a pretty amazing afternoon and since I am still buzzing I thought I would quickly share. This afternoon was the launch of the Festival of Voices event. I was invited because of my involvement with the Disruptive event that is part of the Festival, and although that sort of socialising is really not something I'm great at, I thought I should attend.

After snagging a park right out the front of the venue, I went in to enjoy a performance by Tom Thum (a lot of fun). During the launch announcement I noticed that the one and only Paul McDermott was standing about a metre away from me - excitement was increasing. After a few more speeches he favoured us with a performance, still as amazing as ever.

In case you haven't worked it out yet, I feel I should mention that I have been a fan of the Doug Anthony All Stars (DAAS) and of course Paul McDermott since I was a teenager. I had met them all twice before after their farewell shows, but only to get autographs. That will help you understand the gush that is about to occur.

After the performance I was chatting with the curator of Disruptive, Bill Aronson (you can follow us on twitter @DisruptiveTas by the way) quietly swooning over Paul getting all of his promotional photos - I know, tragic. I moved on to talk with some other people and then noticed that Bill was chatting with Paul. Deep breath in and I went up and asked for a photo with him, we did that and then chatted about photos and a few other things. Paul was snaffled by another group for photos, but eventually returned and chatted with another guy and myself for about 10 minutes.

I told him about my Year of TED, and he very patiently listened to me prattle on - a true gentleman Mr McDermott. He even asked me a couple of questions, which meant he was listening a little as well. So, I left the launch buzzing a fair bit - not only had I mingled, but I mingled with Paul McDermott! I think that it was a big step in my networking, and I had to use a few of the skills I acquired throughout my Year of TED.

All in all, a pretty great afternoon - topped off with confirmation that Insight4 will be a Silver Partner for Disruptive and the Evening with Michele Levine partner.  Insight4 are a great company we have been working with for some of the IT systems we have been developing of late, so I hope that the partnering will benefit them as much as it will the event.

I wish I had a teacher like Rita Pierson

I've been a bit busy of late so I haven't had a lot of time to indulge my TED addiction. Since I was sick last week I had the chance to listen to a few of the recent ones. I haven't listened to all of the TED Education talks as yet, but I loved Rita Pierson: Every kid needs a champion.

I wish that I had a 'Rita' in my educational life - I can't remember any of my teachers being that enthusiastic, or that supportive of their students.

When you think about it though it makes complete sense that children learn better from teachers they like. I was thinking about this and realised that it wasn't entirely true in high school for me. I had a few teachers I really didn't like that much, but I respected their intelligence and knowledge so I still learned from them. But there were the ones that I neither liked nor respected and I learned virtually nothing from them.

The most memorable of these was my one of my maths teachers, let's call her Ms T. For some reason I just did not gel with her at all, and she seemed to have an almost instant dislike for me - which was odd because I was a bit of a nerdy student so teachers generally didn't dislike me too much.

Any way, I was quite good at maths, and was in the highest maths class. It wasn't my favourite subject but it was ok. This was the year that we learned algebra, and for some reason I just wasn't getting it. I had gone from the middle of the class to vying for last place with two of my friends. I was stumped, I couldn't get it and there was no way that she could it explain it to me that made any sense.

At the end of the year I was put down a class, because my grades were so bad. That wasn't too bad because I quite liked the teacher of the other class, and this is where Rita's talk rings true. Within a month I had somewhat mastered algebra, and the marks on my first test were that good that there was a meeting called and I was put back up into the top class.

If you are an educator of any sort I highly recommend that you watch Rita's talk. How a student feels about you, or how they think you feel about them is important - and if you could even be half as enthusiastic as Rita you are bound to be a successful educator.

How about you? What were your teachers like? Did you have a Rita, or Ms Ts like me?

As a side note, when I was 25 I successfully taught algebra to one of my friends so he could pass his sergeants exams.

Things I wish I understood sooner, a rambling post

There are whole sites and books dedicated to knowledge people would share with their teenage selves. Below is the knowledge I would not only share with my teenage self, but I know a few adults that would benefit from hearing it as well. These are not necessarily all of the most important points, and there are others, but this is what is going through my mind at the moment.

A quick caveat to this, there are always exceptions to the rules but I've found these truths to more universal than not.

You can’t have it all
Chances are if you want to truly be successful at something then you will have to make sacrifices in other
parts of your life. Maybe once you get to the top of your profession you can settle back and focus on your relationships or hobbies, but generally to really succeed you have to give.
The myth that women can have it all, career and family, has had a significant detrimental impact on our society, and the happiness of women since the 60s. We bought into this myth that women could pursue careers and still be amazingly attentive mothers, in tune with their children. Women felt that they were a failure if they didn’t produce perfect children as they continued to pursue their career aspirations. After all, if men could do it so could we.
The issue is that men didn’t do. Absent fathers have been a mainstay of history, and it’s not that they didn’t want to be a part of their children’s lives, but with being the worker/breadwinner and pursuing their careers this wasn’t an option.
Women seemed to forget this point during the sexual revolution and moving into the corporate world. Instead they had to prove themselves more capable than men in the workplace, to get ahead, and more capable than men in the family, as they were still attentive mothers, even with their career.
It’s like men allowed women in to the workforce, as long as they didn’t slack off on any of their duties they had before, and women ridiculously bought into it.
There is nothing wrong with making the decision to be a mum or successful career woman. Many women have managed to do both, but usually not within the construct of big business or without the support of a great husband/family/paid help.

Everybody fakes it sometimes
And I’m not talking about sex here. I spent a long time thinking I was the only person in the room struggling, that I was going to be found out for the fraud that I was. Everyone else had it so together and always understood what was going on. They were on top of things and I felt like a kid playing with grownups.
Then I worked with two amazing women on a senior management team of mainly men and I realised that this was not true. In reality most people in the room don’t know what’s going on but they just nod sagely and work with people they trust to nut it out later, or don’t bother about not knowing. In reality I was actually one of the most capable and competent managers in the team, they had just been playing the game so long that they had become expert bluffers.
I’ve since realised that two things are true of the majority of people in the workplace:

1. We all feel like frauds at some stage and we’re waiting for people to find us out – this is an actual condition called Imposter Syndrome. Interestingly it was long thought that women suffer from this much more than men, but that has been proven untrue.
2. We are all frauds at some stage, but if you keep quiet about it and find ways to deal with it then no one will ever find you out.

Having said point 2, there is nothing wrong with admitting that you don’t understand, or asking why in the room. Chances are that at least half of the other people present with silently thank you for having the guts to say “I’m a little lost with what you mean by that” or “Could you just explain for me again exactly what you need us to do?”
We all live in a constant state of fear about not understanding things or people thinking that we are stupid or incapable. This is not unique to you and if you can find one or two people that you really trust in your office/life then it makes it a lot easier to be able to confide in them when this sort of thing happens.
The important thing is to do it anyway, push through. Chances are that you are capable of doing it, and if you aren’t then quite frankly it will be a learning experience that will help you for next time.

You are more amazing than you think – especially the women
This is another phenomenon that isn’t entirely focused on women, but in my experience women suffer from it more than men. Trust me when I say that more often than not women are more capable, intelligent and downright amazing than they give themselves credit for. I think that a large part of this comes from us not being able to boast, because that is not an attractive feminine trait. So instead we are humble and we slowly convince ourselves that we are “alright but nothing special”.
Again, in my experience, this is usually bullshit. In my experience I have worked with a lot of men who are more than happy to tell you about their brilliance and put their hand up for every opportunity/promotion that comes along, but need help using the photocopier and seem to struggle with some very basic concepts when it comes down to it.
The women just plod along, we accept our lot and think to ourselves “oh he’s going for that job, and he seems so capable that there is no chance I would get it so I’ll just stay where I am.”
A wonderful friend of mine once told me that she never turned down an opportunity because “you never know what you might get from it”.  This also meant that she was very good at promoting herself and making sure that people understood what she was capable of and what she had done. She totally changed my attitude to myself and where I might be able to take my career, and she made me realise that it was a job as a successful woman to do this for other young women.

You will make bad decisions (with hindsight)
...but if it was the best decision at the time based on the information/emotions you had then don’t beat yourself up about it. If you know that  you were making a decision that ran counter to your beliefs and didn’t sit right with you, and it does turn out bad then you need to rethink how you make decisions – but you still shouldn’t beat yourself up about it.
Having said this, I beat myself up about every bad decision I’ve ever made, or even times I didn’t seemingly make a decision but bad things happened. I’m trying to get better at this, it’s a slow process.
Accept that you will fail in things, but make sure that you have the wherewithal to take the time to learn from the failures. If you are beating yourself up in lieu of sitting down and thinking about what went right/wrong and how you might stop that from happening again, then you are really wasting your time. I might still beat myself up but this is usually after the post-mortem and the lessons have been identified.

You are only as alone as you make yourself
This comes from an introvert. I could quite happily have little to do with other people, and at times in my life I have had very little to do with others. What I failed to realise for a long time is that this is a result of how I shut other people out and not because I was a (insert one of many negative adjectives here) person who people would not be interested in getting to know.
The other side of this is that I felt that I don’t need human connection, but nothing could be further from the truth. I need to know that I have a group of people that I belong to, a group that I can trust and be myself around. This could be only two or three people, but I need them in my life.
There is also a second part of this, you are not alone in your feelings and experiences. It is unlikely that you are feeling or experiencing anything that nobody on this planet has gone through before. Yes it is unique because of all of the other experiences and knowledge you bring to it that is uniquely you, but there are other people who can understand and empathise with you. There are also other people who have survived it and worse.
With the social media revolution came the phrase “the wisdom of crowds”, never underestimate this, because chances are if you were to post something onto the internet you would have more people than you could imagine come back and say “me too”. I’m not saying you should put it out there, because there are just as many mindless morons who might take the opportunity to tear you down over it, I’m just saying that it helps to remember that you there are hundreds, if not thousands of people in the world’s 7 billion who are going through, or have been through, the same.

Learning is more fun when you leave school
I love learning, but even I struggled with how boring they make it in school. Subjects you have no interest in that have no perceivable relevance to your life, taught (on the whole) by people who are too jaded with the experience to enthuse.
The education system is broken for the students and teachers.
But you do eventually leave and then you get to focus on the things that you want to learn, in the way that you want to learn them.
Oh, and do not buy into the whole “getting a good mark at the end of Year 12 is the most important thing in the world” theory. There is mature age entry, and having a couple of years to work out what you might want to do with your life is never a bad thing. I know many, many people who have careers that having nothing to do with their degree – me for instance. I know many others who are on their third or fourth career.
We are not my parent’s generation, where you picked a job/career at 16 and then you stuck with it forever, regardless of how much you hated it. We are the generations of constant change, where you can reinvent yourself and your career with a little confidence and opportunity.
Back to learning though. With you internet you have so many learning options available to you, the intellect and inspiration of thousands of brilliant minds are at your fingertips. Learning new things helps structure your brain to learn, so you can pick things up at work quicker.
You would also be surprised about the serendipity of learning random skills, knowledge and facts. You never know how and when that random piece of information or seemingly useless skill might afford you with an opportunity you would never have considered.
A day that I learn nothing is a sad day indeed.

You are broken, but you are unlikely to be more broken than anyone else
Your life is not normal, guess what? Neither is anyone else’s. There is no such thing as normal. When I was growing up I had a friend with a bipolar parent whose episodes made her incapable of caring for her children; a friend whose dad was a violent alcoholic who used to beat her; a friend whose parents divorced because his dad ran off with his mum’s brother’s wife; a friend who lost both of her parents before the end of Year 12; and so on.
These are normal lives, we just don’t usually talk about them very much. By not talking about these things, we end up believing we are a lot more broken than everyone else, when that is not the case. This goes along with the section on being alone above.

Them liking you is not enough
I've had far too many relationships in my life that were based on someone wanting to be with me, and me not really finding any reason to say no. I wasn't really attracted to them, I even tried to dodge their advances, but for some reason I could not say no. I explored this in 30 days of choice and came to some shocking realisations, but here is a much simpler piece of wisdom.
If you are not attracted to someone, or you no longer want to be with someone, that is all the reason you need to not be with them. It doesn't matter if people think you are great together, trust me many of these people will tell you they thought the opposite if you leave. It doesn't matter if they love you and can't live without you. If you're not feeling it then get the hell out of there, or don't go there in the first place.

This too shall pass
I love this piece of Buddhist wisdom. All of our lives are constantly changing, and as they change we learn to adapt to the new situations that we are in. It is important to remember that everything you have learned, everything you have ever had to endure, seemed impossible to get through at one stage in your life. But the struggles, doubts and pain from those experiences are a memory for you now.
Whatever you are going through at the moment will pass as well – either it will go away or you will adapt and find a way to deal with it. It’s just hard to remember that nothing remains constant, pain subsides, fear goes away, tears dry up – and even when you are happy and loving life you also need to remember that this too shall pass. Nothing lasts forever in its current state, good or bad.

What wisdom would you like to share? What would have made your life simpler if you understood it as a teenager? What would make your life easier if you understood it now?

An exciting April of courage

The traffic on the blog has maintained a steady level since it levelled out after the TED blog post. It's been wonderful to see so many more people on the blog and get more feedback on posts. It feels like I'm not upholding my end of the bargain though, since I haven't been posting very much.

What's been going on
I've been a bit busy with a number of things going on in my life. So I thought I should probably update you
on those, so you know I'm not slacking off entirely:

• Our strawbale house - quite a few weekends and public holidays in the last month have been spent trying to get all of the internal render ready for the painters to come in just over a week. We've actually become quite skilled at the rendering, considering we were completely new to the process when we started the house.
• Writing the book - this has come in fits and spurts, but I feel that I've started to get a good structure in place for telling the story. There is another part of this process that has taken a little time as well, and that is writing a book proposal. It probably isn't detailed enough really, but one of the exciting events from the TED article was that I was contacted by a literary agent about getting them a book proposal.
  Oddly enough, I was so incredibly excited about this and stressed about getting a couple of chapters written that I didn't actually confirm that I would get them a proposal as soon as possible! Yeah the week after the TED article was exciting but I wasn't very focused :-)
• Disruptive event - the other exciting invitation that resulted from the TED article was that I have been asked to be involved in a leadership event as part of the Festival of Voices in Hobart in July. The program for this event will be on-line shortly (don't worry I'll publicise it), and it will involve me talking about my Year of TED, among other things. I'll provide more details about this as it comes closer, but if you are in Hobart or will be coming for the Festival, I encourage you to come along.

All of this, along with doing my job, will give you some indication of why I haven't been posting very much. But that's not important now, what is important is how I've gone about these activities - this last month I really feel that some of the lessons from my YoT (I'm tired of writing it in full) have come to fruition. This also means that the depression has definitely lifted, and not just because of the medication.

Authenticity, vulnerability and extroversion

In the last month I have done a large number of things that would generally make me feel uncomfortable and anxious, that I would normally run a mile from or that I would have suffered a great deal of self-doubt about. These include talking with people about sponsoring the Disruptive event; sending a book proposal to a literary agent; meeting with people I did't know and being very frank about my opinion; and putting myself onto a conference program where I will be talking very openly about myself.

Now maybe it was just because I've been riding high since the TED article, but I'm usually really good at turning positive things into anxiety-ridden episodes of waiting for the other shoe to drop. So the fact that I've remained generally positive and stepped up to increased exposure is a little shocking for me.

As I've mentioned a number of times, one of the main things I learned about myself was that I am more courageous than I thought. That is now the internal story I have about myself, and why would a courageous person be concerned about the list of things above? 

I've had the courage to believe that I am interesting enough for people to want to hear my story, and to make myself vulnerable to the possibility that I'm not.

I've displayed my extroverted side to casually have conversations that would normally make me feel anxious and tongue-tied. I'm not saying I didn't breathe deeply before ringing the people involved, but when I started the conversation I wasn't self-conscious.

More than anything though, I feel like I've made a massive step in embracing the authentic Kylie, the one who used to be the quiet voice in my head that the other voices would criticise and shout down. I feel like I have been more authentic in my thoughts, feelings and actions in the last month than I can ever remember being - and it scares me out of my mind!!! It's invigorating and I hope that it continues to grow but when the world is quiet and it's just me and my thoughts, it's just a tad overwhelming.

Having said all of this, if I don't hear back from the literary agent shortly my head will explode - not in a good way. You can't change the habits of a lifetime completely in a year :-)

How about you? Have you been your authentic self of late? Have you stepped outside your comfort zone and trusted yourself more than usual for anything? I'd love to hear your stories of courage.

A rambling post on my friends

I've been going through a lot of the older blog material in the last month or so, gathering things together in the process of writing the book. There are two things that I have noticed:

1. There are some shocking spelling errors in the blog that I probably should go back and fix, now that I know they are there - yes I am that person :-)
2. More importantly, there are a lot of little bits and pieces about the activities and talks that I had forgotten.

Jessi Arrington

The one that struck me yesterday was reading back through the launch post for 30 days of fashion. I had forgotten the part in Jessi's talk about gathering the right people around you so that you can be quirky without fear.

This made me smile, because I realise that I really do have a lot of people close to me who really wouldn't bat an eyelid if I started to become a little quirkier. There would certainly be comments, but I think that they would be incredibly supportive at the same time - and that made me realise how lucky I am.

Friends and "friends"

I've mentioned previously, in posts about introversion, that I have never had a huge number of friends at any given time, and that's how I like it. I did spend the majority of my youth and teenage years thinking that this meant there was something wrong with me, and that feeling stuck with me for a very long time. Let's put it this way, I've spent the majority of my life not taking chances to make friends because I firmly believed that I was not interesting enough or something else enough for people to want to be friends with me - these are the things that it still freaks me out to write on the blog.

When we moved to Tasmania we left a small number of very special friends behind - but we are both used to long distance friendships so we have worked hard to make sure we maintain those connections. For me it's very important because I have lost contact with a number of people over the years who I now really regret losing, and I want to try to avoid that in my life.

Back to Jessi

When we moved to Tasmania we really knew no one down here, and for two introverts and hermits that is a real risk. I've been fortunate to work with some wonderful people, and out of this I have developed a few lovely friendships.

These friends have been very important in my success from my Year of TED. Like Derek, they have been very supportive and encouraging of my crazy ideas. I tend to forget how much I do need other people at times, and now that I have embraced vulnerability I realise that I need them more than ever.

It was just nice to be reminded of this, and to remember all of the lovely friends that I do have in my life. Some of them are scattered around other parts of Australia. Some of them I have lost contact with but I still consider them my friends, and if we were to meet again I would like to think we would slip straight back into that.

I know I need to make sure I tell people how important they are, I've learned that lesson, but there is still a tentativeness around it. 

This is a bit of a rambling post really, but I think that it is important. I can't be the only person in the world who takes my important friendships for granted. When was the last time you really appreciated your friends? When was the last time you even thought about how much they impact on your life, in a positive way?