Latansani

I had one of those weird experiences today…you know, one of those where you’re just thinking or talking about someone and the phone rings and you know its them! I was out walking with a friend, Siobhan, and we were both saying how we hadn’t seen or heard from another mutual friend, Tracey, in quite some time, either in the flesh but, more significantly since the lockdown, on social media. And then Siobhan’s phone rang, and there in the address bar was Tracey’s name.

I cannot tell you how many times this happens to me; I will think about a place or a person and then, hey presto, I see an image of the place, or the person calls or physically turns up, out of the blue – sometimes they even suggest we visit the place I’ve been thinking about. I have had so many of these just lately that I’m beginning to think I’m psychic, or even more mystically, that I have some exceptional power.

And then, I remember that I do. I do have an exceptional power. In fact, I really believe that we all do. We have the power of manifestation. If you are familiar with this idea then you will know that it is tied up with firstly, being really grateful for all the experiences that have brought you to the place you’re now at, for seeing every event that’s ever happened as having in it a golden opportunity to learn from it. And then, with that gratitude, being able to envisage a future that encapsulates all your dreams, all that you love, all that brings you contentment.

So…Tip One is to know that you have the authority to write your own script.

and…Tip Two is to clearly have in your mind a focused vision and an absolute confidence that what you have scripted will become a reality. Get ready to be wowed by your own performance!

So, the good news is we don’t have to live in the past – it was a lesson, not a life sentence! We can re-write the script at anytime and these aren’t just empty words intended to poke at you and leave you wondering (like I did, for so long) ‘Yes, but how? When this is my circumstance, or that seems my luck?’ Of course, you can read the many real-life examples that I give you in the book, ‘The Will To Surthrive.’

But this week, in my blog, I am going to give you some condensed secrets – well, not secrets – but some insider knowledge. And the first one is this – rewrite your past.

I know that I talk about authenticity so much, alongside integrity and being honourable so I don’t mean lie about it and make it up. It’s no good pretending that you went to Oxford University and attained a First Class Honours in Organic Chemistry, if like me, you studied drama in Kent. You can already predict the finale in that kind of fourth wall drama. What I mean is that you should become the director and producer of it – just as if you were staging a show. Your own.

I had a really inspiring real-time example of this yesterday from my brother, who has, in the past been known to catastrophise his ‘bad luck’ and blame it on our troubled, shared up-bringing. A stroke ended his working life, back at the beginning of the year. He had been driving coaches for a well-known national holiday company – a job which he absolutely loved – and he was forced into re-examining his lifestyle and his choices. It was the biggest wake-up call!

He finished work abruptly and at first, bemoaned his bad fortune, along with his poor health. But he has children and Grandchildren and is a wonderful story-teller and an effervescent life and soul of any party, with a brilliant sense of fun and a wicked sense of humour, and he is an avid sports fan and a genuinely kind and gentle soul and he really does have so much to live for. So, these qualities had room to breathe in the time that he was forced to be introspective and they quickly bubbled to the surface, along with his will to surthrive!

Yesterday, he rang to tell me that, in the horror of the collapse of said coach company, if he had stayed on, he would have been given £10,000 redundancy. I was ready for his reaction, expecting him to be lamenting his poor fortune and just about to launch into my usual director’s role to try to get him to see another perspective when he beat me to it. He said that he had been goaded by the guy who had called him, who had received the package, but had responded with the fact that he is mighty lucky, as, if he had stayed on he wouldn’t be alive to accept it anyway and could have resulted in a tragedy way above any loss of any monetary compensation.

A lesson for both of us. I need to butt out and concentrate on directing my own show and leave him to direct his. It will be no surprise to me, if in the coming days, I am writing to tell you about how he has been further rewarded for his change in attitude although he already has. Not only is he several kgs lighter; he is lifted of the heavy load and burden of bearing his past!

I don’t want this to sound overly dramatic, but in the grand scheme of things, life is a bit of a drama, and for the most part, each day is caught up with surviving it. Whether it’s financial security we are fighting to preserve, or love we’re trying to sustain, or – as is permanently in the spotlight as of recent months – surviving a pandemic, we all face challenges and change.

I used to think that it was a never-ending roller-coaster ride; that on some days I am better at riding it and surviving it than on others and that I was at the mercy of Lady Luck. Now I realise that most of the challenges that I’ve faced come to all of us, and what makes it less of a melodrama, and more of a show-stopping pizzazzy festival is how we choose to react to them.

I’ve realised that we write our own script!

Instead of being at the mercy of bosses, authority figures, family – however well-intentioned – or feeling that we are trapped by our circumstances or our environment, we have the power to define our own life-story, to become the CEO of our own thoughts and our own destiny.

Words are unbelievably powerful! They become our thoughts and then those thoughts inform our actions and we can become stuck in a tornado of allowing our past to influence our inner beliefs, which limits our effectiveness and our happiness in the present.

Over the next few days, I will provide some tips as to how we can change our interpretation of yesterday’s journey to secure the present and the future that you envision.

Your dream show!

There is nothing quite so sobering as the thought that everything you think you have worked for is attached by the most fragile of threads and can disappear in the blink of an eye. Prior to the Coronacoaster, I had become so aware of the futility of slogging at an education system which I no longer believe has the right principles, for a life that I don’t especially relish, so that I can buy useless things that I’m not sure I even like.

After a great deal of suffering loss, feeling the burn-out from teaching, an existential crisis brought on by my Mother’s death from dementia, deep soul searching, self-work, and relentless happiness seeking (incidentally, not to be found on dating apps – hilarity, yes, happiness, no!) – I had decided that life is too short to be living anything less than the one of which I am capable. There were seemingly no road-blocks, only my own thoughts and fears. Then came a shockingly timed loss of my job, along with financial insecurity, and a global pandemic. That’s a motorway pile-up, if ever there was one. No time to wallow…the show must go on! Time to put into action all the lessons I have learned to thrive in the heart of happiness, even amongst the chaos which surrounds us. I had this nagging thought – ‘Nothing shall come of nothing’ so I’d better do something!

My passion has for thirty years been at the heart of teaching, but education, along with health and economics…well, they are no longer the bedrock of a stable world, are they? Disillusioned with tired same old same old and no sight of my longed-for utopia, I turned to my real love – reading and Shakespeare. His take on love, sex, parenting, race, patriarchy, authority, foolish kings, insane politicians and wise children are mesmeric and I soon absorbed the parallels between his experience and ours: surviving a rat-borne-not-bat-borne plague, furiously writing King Lear during his lockdown, shutting down the world as it is/was known, yet the show still having to go on.

I have out-life spanned, by seven years, the great playwright and poet. I have accrued more than a smidgen of wisdom, so these life lessons, from a Ba(r)d-Ass teacher – revitalised and rejuvenated – are worth a read. They will certainly shed a light on your own performance. The great Bard’s plethora of works, both preceding and following King Lear, are full of observations and golden nuggets of advice on ‘How best to live out a good life on this stage’ – it is after all, widely agreed that “all the men and women are merely players…” As a naïve theatre studies student some forty years ago, I took this at its simplest inference, thinking that we thespians are as magnetically drawn to the theatricality on stage as we are to the dramas of life off. But the crux of Shakespeare’s intent was so much deeper.

We should wake up to life, to who we are, to realise that we are director, producer, playwright, we are even the stage on which our roles are performed. We are everything which precedes and follows the act and as such, we have complete authority to script our contentment.

The fourteen chapters of “The Will to Surthrive” use Shakespeare quotes as titles and the lessons we can learn from them, illustrated with some hilarious anecdotes and self-deprecating humour, are underpinned by a lifetime in education, positive psychology, expert certificated mental health awareness, and an informed passion for the theatre and Will.

As this book immortalises in words the condition of my mind, and the tragi-comedies that I have staged, then it is vital to say that in sooth, I know exactly why I have been so sad; as a direct result of the coronavirus and of the events leading up to the lockdown, I have a better understanding of what is truly important to me and so am at peace. My family may be right when they worry that this is the eye of the storm; they have been before. But forced to delve underneath all of the external trappings – all of those things that I believed made me ‘me’ makes for an entertaining and helpful read.

I might just be at the source of true happiness. Now if that is not a reason for reading – and taking a leaf out of –  my book, I do not know what is. I hope my journey becomes your guide!

I am a one-woman band, a lone author, new to publishing, not new to writing.

I don’t have a ghost-writer or an editor, not even a mentor, and I’m all about honesty and authenticity so I’m not going to pretend I’m someone else and write about ‘Julie’ in the third person! I am a Mum to one son (and about to be a Grannie); I’ve been a brilliant wife – twice; a surthriving divorcee – twice! Brilliance plus wayward husband does not equal permanence, hence my nom-de-plume reversion to my birth name and I may just reinvent this as I become an even more accomplished Covid Chameleon. I am, after all the Mother of Reinvention; a teacher for thirty years, an educational leader for some of those and for all of them a maverick. I’ve directed dramas – on and off-stage. I’ve been a serial dater, and an occasional real-time Bridgette Jones – yes I have been incarcerated in a foreign jail. And I’ve worn ‘big’ pants from a perfect size ten to a bustin’ out of the seams eighteen.

My timing is appalling – or fabulous, depending on which way you look at it! I lost job security two weeks before lockdown and I’d just got myself back into lead vocals in a band but I will be a rock broiler before live performances are permitted ever again it seems. And I was writing a musical before all of this but, with a cast of thirty in my Tolpuddle version of Les Mis, it doesn’t easily lend itself to a Zoom staging and in any case, Sir Cameron Anthony Mackintosh (I’ve moved him to the same categorization as John Hutson) is not in my best books. Besides, Michael Sheen and David Tennant are too hairy to take the lead roles.

But this is just my script so far! The scenes I’ve chosen to act out. The plot I’ve adopted and even without the global lockdown, it’s been a little too theatrical. So I’ve just sacked the scriptwriter! I have become the CEO of my own thoughts and I can hire, fire, demote or promote as I see fit.

Character traits? Well, they’ve enhanced the performance entirely. I’m a warrior but I don’t fight; I make peace, I don’t ever try to keep it; I am resilient and resourceful and that makes me a target for challengers to test those qualities out; I love fiercely, but have no passion for hatred and I truly believe that we have the power to turn the world, and our own performances in it, around.

And now, I am a published author. Here’s to me…and to you, my much-loved reader. I am so excited to see how this change of script affects the performance!