I thought I was alone! What a relief and joy to see that there are so many others of us quiet people out there. I’m definitely signing up to her Quiet Revolution.

Many people who meet me would not know that I’m an introvert. Ever since my childhood, I’ve been working my extrovert muscle – learning to make eye contact when I speak, smiling and nodding when I listen, making the effort to network and be perky. It took a lot of effort and determination on my part when I first started and it’s a lot easier now. I enjoy being with people now and love getting to know new and interesting folk. So all that extrovert muscle building has paid of! I’ve learnt to be a “pretend extrovert” to use Susan Cain’s phrase. But nonetheless, often after events where I interact with a lot of people, I need to have a big chunk of quiet time for myself to recover. I love to retreat for a quiet period of reading or writing to replenish myself.

Reflecting on the clients who come to me for coaching, it occurred to me that they are mainly introverts – creative types who work best alone and who are at their most powerful inside their heads. My work with them is to help them bridge that interface with the world – for example, to birth their book from inside their heads onto the page or to “screw their courage to the sticking point” and get their work, and themselves, out there to their audience. The key, I have found, is helping them focus on their larger purpose for wanting to do the thing that they are finding so tough to do - that takes us introverts out of our heads into action so we can make our vision reality - and then building in quiet celebration of their achievement afterwards.

To all my clients, introvert or extrovert, here is Susan Cain’s TED talk which is a must-view – inspiring for those of us who are introverts, and if you are an extrovert, this will help you understand what’s going on with the introverts in your home or work life!

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As a coach, part of my role sometimes is to work with my clients as they move through the fear and anxiety that may be holding them back in achieving a big dream they have for their lives or business. So I feel it’s important for me to walk the talk – and to make sure I keep doing scary things that may be holding me back from achieving what I want for my life.

So I’ve signed up to tell a true story live in front of a paying audience – without notes! – at the Canal Cafe Theatre in NW London, curated by Spark London. And just to make it even more scary, I’ve chosen to tell a very personal story.

As writer, I feel very comfortable and cosy telling stories on the page and reading them out at author events. I have the stamina and quiet disposition for that – and have three full length books to show for it. Not only that, my stories on the page have so far been fiction or business related – so nothing too personal to expose of myself! I’ve given talks with Powerpoint on business related topics – overcoming my fear of public speaking a few years ago. But this – telling a personal story in 7 minutes that is entertaining or moving or that can somehow hold an audience, and without the crutch of written text… this feels like skydiving without a parachute!

For some people, storytelling in public like this is nothing to be scared of. For them, it’s fun and they want to share an interesting story from their lives. They seem to be able to do it with ease.

Perhaps it’s because in my mind, I’m putting my professional reputation at stake. Can I be as good at telling stories live and in public as I can be when telling them on paper in private at home? Will my story be able to hold the audience – or will they shift in their seats and be bored? And because it’s a personal and true story from my life, if they don’t like the story does that mean that they don’t like me?

So why do it?

I used to be very shy and lacking in confidence. I had a stammer and felt that I had to make myself likeable by fitting in with everyone around me. I used to feel I had to be someone I was not. Over the years, I’ve managed to become more confident step by step and to live my life more fully as I want to live it. If I were able to do this, to engage an audience with my personal story fluently without notes, I would be taking one more step in fully inhabiting the life I choose for myself.

Appropriately, the theme for the story-telling night is Back from the Brink!

For more info:

Spark Stories - 2nd April 2012 at 7:30pm

" People pushed to the very edge of their limits have two choices: to give up and fall in, or to fight against the odds and claw their way back. It is rarely the easy option to come back from the brink, but that’s what makes stories from the edge so satisfying to listen to."

Theme: Back from the brink

Venue: Canal Cafe Theatre, Little Venice, London, W2 6ND, UK - Website - map

Box office: 020 7289 6054 or Book online

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Photo: thanks to PFX Photo from flickr.com (CCL)

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How can you ever know me?

I am not my facts - not my vitalstatics, my demographic, my gender, my marital status, my date of birth, my race, my country of origin.

I am my stories.

My stories tell you about what I love, what bores me, what thrills me, who matters to me, whether I live in hope or fear. My stories offer you a glimpse into my soul.

And as I share my stories with you, they tell me who I am. My stories are my mirror. If I listen very closely, I can see my naked self.

I gaze in the mirror and I know.

My stories assure me, like Kilroy, that I was here.

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This story first appeared on Cowbird

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Coming out means to come out of the closet where you have hidden your true self. Where you have hidden your love. Your passion. Your desire for life.

We all have a closet in our hearts, whether we are gay or straight.

To come out as gay is the ultimate declaration of a person’s authentic self, often hard won through a internal journey that takes integrity and courage.

But coming out is more than about being gay or straight - it is about revealing your naked self as a full human being, capable of love, pain, creativity, laughter, sadness and joy.

Everyone, whether gay or straight, longs in their heart of hearts to come out as their full authentic selves.

Stepping into that full power can feel like stepping off a cliff.

It takes our breath away and for a moment, we feel everything we know fall away beneath our feet.

We are falling.

And then we fly.

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This story first appeared on Cowbird

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I’m staring at the blank page of the Word document on my laptop. I’m about to start work on my new book.

There’s something terrifying and exhilirating about that blinking cursor, waiting expectantly for me to begin. It feels like a heartbeat, counting out my life. All those moments slipping away as I hover on the brink of the future.

And then I let the words appear, flowing from my fingertips. Words that grope towards the ideas in my head. Tap tap tap. Backspace. Select and Delete. They are my friends. Tap tap tap again. Backspace. Select and Delete.

Slowly, my thoughts coalesce into coherence on the page.

My heart skips with joy. Look at me, I’m writing!

And the version of life that has been living in my mind pours into the laptop, emerges there in a new form. From invisible electrical impulses in my brain transformed through my fingers into pixels and digital data, my thoughts now live beyond my reach, reflections in the mirror of the computer screen.

I’m working on my new book and I feel alive again.

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This story first appeared on Cowbird

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So - you have three hours spare one day. Do you get on with your writing? Or do you do this:

The seduction of tidying your bookshelves is that you end up with a lovely neat bookcase - or even a fabulous YouTube video!

But what about that book, those poems, that personal project that you’ve promised yourself to achieve?

What are you being seduced by?

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Happy Holiday Season to you and yours!

You can find out more about these two fabulous dancers via their live video web chat with fans on The Washington Post site, when their video went viral:

We watched Woody Allen’s “Play it Again, Sam” the other evening – one of my favourite films for its witty take on the power of films to inspire us to be the best of who we are.

In the movie, Allen plays, erm, Alan, a klutzy, neurotic, overly vocalising film critic whose hero is Humphrey Bogart – specifically, Bogey as Rick in “Casablanca”, the strong hero with few words who loves deeply but is prepared to sacrifice his personal happiness for the sake of the greater good. We follow Alan as he tries to date different women without much success – he is a bundle of nerves and too conscious of his personal failings, putting on a persona that he thinks is smooth and cool but ends up being ridiculous and embarrassing. Through it all, Bogey appears to him in his imagination, giving him advice and listening to his anxious, neurotic, worries. In the end Alan learns that it is only by being his authentic self that he can get the girl and that, without having to be Bogey, he has it in his own heart to make a big sacrifice for the sake of the woman he loves.

This was the film that first introduced me to Woody Allen. I was in my early teens, at that moment of transition when we all begin to transform into the adults we are to become. I’ve watched almost all of his films since then. His social anxiety and self doubt spoke to me – and still do! – as well as evident love of the world of the city: specifically New York but also other major cultural cities like San Francisco, London, Paris and Barcelona.

Alan in “Play it Again, Sam” holds in his imagination his hero, Bogey and looks to him as a mentor. His life begins to take the shape of the movie “Casablanca”, especially the wonderful dynamic of the scene at the very end where “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans” and he finally gets to be the hero he has always longed to be.

Watching Woody Allen again, it struck me that as Alan in the movie was inspired by Bogey, I’ve been inspired by Woody Allen and the world of his films. His vision of life has shaped mine. As a teenager, I wanted to grow up to be a New York Woody Allen type intellectual! Why? Because:

His films have been love letters to cities of culture, arts, film, and books. In his cities, you can meet quirky, interesting, intelligent and brilliant people. You can be all those things yourself! I’ve lived my life in London inspired by that theme.

His message to me was also that you can be anxious, nervous, socially awkward and still be smart, funny and have a bunch of interesting and supportive friends. You can be kind of funny looking and not very tall and still be a hero. It gave me hope as an awkward, anxious and bespectacled teenager.

Which film heroes (and I include both male and female heroes in this word) have inspired you? Who is the hero who mentors you inside your imagination?

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Pixar is the production company behind some of the greatest computer animation films - Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Wall-E. In the last two decade, they seem to go from success to success, as one of the dominant players in the genre. But did you know that they started off as a computer hardware company? And almost disappeared into oblivion several times before they ever made a feature film?

I’ve been reading The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company (Vintage). It takes us back to the 1970s when computers were the size of rooms and used primarily by the military. Some computer geeks started working on animation using the clunky undeveloped tools of the time and in the process created and evolved the software that eventually made the genre accessible to the world. They were joined by a Disney artist whose knack was to make inanimate objects come alive as if with a personality of their own.

What is fascinating about the Pixar Story is that in different forms, the core team of geeks and artists worked for George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars series, and Steve Jobs, the man who is synonymous with Apple, both visionaries in their own fields, but who were unable to see the meteoric potential in animated films. Lucas saw the team as useful for some special effects but not as film creators in their own right. Jobs bought Pixar because he was interested in the hardware and software for creating images and initially, had little interest in the animation side.

To me, looking at this story as a life coach, there are a number of inspiring themes:

# The Pixar guys had a vision to make animated movies with computer graphics back in the 70s, when the technology was at its infancy. They worked and worked at developing the hardware and software, finding funding by any means possible and perfecting their art for over 20 years before they were finally able to produce their first feature film, Toy Story.

# Their investors and patrons such as Lucas and Jobs gave up on them several times but they just kept going at what they loved, even if it meant pretending to be a computer company while they worked away quietly on their animation.

# They didn’t do it for the money - they had a passion and a vision. These are the only motivators that can keep you focused on a seemingly impossible goal for more than 20 years, especially while others around you think you are deluded. The key artist of the Pixar band of brothers, John Lassiter, was invited to become a director at Disney but he turned them down. He turned down Disney! He could be a director at Disney, he said, but he would rather stay where he was at Pixar (at that time with nothing but a few short films of under 5 minutes to their name) and “make history”.

And make history they did.

Their films and also their technological developments have changed not just the genre of animated films but also how films are made. Computer generated graphics are in most films and even TV shows now. The wonder of computer graphics is how it can take us into impossible spaces and amazing worlds and even make the world on screen seem animated with a reality that is more real and alive than our ordinary world. It has changed they way we tell and take in visual stories - and in so doing, it is changing the way we look at the world around us.

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Here is one of their first short films, Luxo Jr, that was inspired by a lamp on John Lassiter’s desk:

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The books are collections of recollections about his memories of childhood growing up in a small village in rural East Malaysia and also his musings on the changes over the last decades as the nation has become more prosperous and modern. They are written from the heart and play an important part as a personal view of a landscape that is transforming fast.

I was touched by what Wan told us about how they’ve been received in Malaysia, and especially in Trengganu, a relatively rural state compared to the more urbanised West Coast where the metropolis of Kuala Lumpur sits. His blog is largely in Malay but the books are written in English. Many who came to his book signings were of the older generation of Malays who could not read English but they bought the books anyway. They wanted their children to read the books because they felt it was important for the next generation to know what it was like, growing up in “old Malaysia”. They felt that his books preserved a part of Malaysia’s history, as a legacy for the future, holding on in words to a world that will soon be gone.

The books have also been bestsellers in Malaysia for the reason that there are few books that speak to Malaysians about being Malaysian in a reflective, contemplative style. What I draw from his books is that we all want to read stories about Us.

We learn about who we are and how to live through books and stories and it is so important that we can find images of ourselves and lives in art and narrative. When we find our own personal experiences reflected in books, it is as if we have been seen and our lives witnessed.

As a writer myself, I was approached by many readers at book signings in Malaysia, telling me how much my novel The Flame Tree felt true to their own lives. It meant a lot to me to hear them their stories of which parts of their lives were reflected in my book. Now years later, as a coach, I have the privilege of reflecting back to my clients face to face in real time the amazing human beings that they are - and I know that it is a powerful experience for them to be witnessed in this way. I can see it my clients’s faces - the strength and power this acknowledgement gives them and how it can allow them to see themselves fully.

So I hope that Wan keeps publishing more books so that he can keep reflecting back to his readers the stories of who they are and where they have come from.

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Photos: my collection

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