Hannah Ray is a therapeutic career, life + small business coach. She holds space for people who want to develop a greater sense of understanding, trust and belief in themselves so that they can create their own version of success.

Every month, she shares something that she’s learning about right now. The aim is for her words to be as live, from the heart, and unpolished as her perfectionist streak can deal with. This is to show that we are never alone, because it’s a very human thing to always be going and growing through something.

I was thinking about what to write this month, and could feel myself ping-ponging between a few themes. I started writing about control and loss but got stuck as it didn’t feel like it was flowing. I realised that the things I was stop-starting with were just themes within the greater thing I’m really learning about at the moment… CREATING.

Creating takes guts. It takes guts in two ways: courage (i.e. guts of bravery) and intuition (i.e. leading from the feeling in your gut).

I know this as both someone who has created a new career path and business, and as someone who coaches people who want to create different ways of working, living, being, relating, coping, thinking, etc.

I also know that there are many things that can get in the way of acting from courage and intuition.

A few things to name include:

Comparing ourselves to ‘the norm’
The weight we feel of expectations of how we ‘should’ be, from childhood, friends, culture, gender, and the systems we see around us that support success
Coping strategies we’ve had in place since we were young that keep us in our heads and out of our bodies
Fears we’ve developed around ‘what if it doesn’t work?’: shame, rejection, loss, embarrassment, failure (and all the varying articulations of these things).
Voices around us that we subconsciously (or consciously) give more power to, listen to more or trust more than our own
Never having had the opportunity to or experience of connecting with or listening to ourselves

Confronting these things, unpicking and unpacking them, giving them attention and space to be seen, is not always fun. Doing it can trigger confusion, anxiety, or feeling a bit lost for a while.

It can make us feel like we’re losing control. Like we’re not in control of who we are and how we present ourselves anymore.

But… and here is the key… in order to create something, we need to surrender a bit of that control, and accept moving in to explore or play mode.

Because you can not truly create from the heart, if you cannot release control of and attachment to the outcome. You have to be able to say, “I aim to go there, but I accept that I can get there in many ways, and that what I learn along the way might change my destination, and I’m ok with that”.

I’ll share something that came up for me in the past couple of weeks - which is a funny thing to come up for someone who works in personal development… But, hey! I hope that it illustrates what I’m saying and makes me relatable.

As part of my ethical and professional development, I must consistently be in some form of therapy, coaching, or supervision myself. I’ve been working with my therapist on being able to sit in the now and enjoy the present, rather than feeling like I constantly need to DO things and be thinking about or planning things. She made an observation that I came across as quite ‘poised’. I told her that I HATED this (with a big smile of reluctant agreement). She asked me, “if you weren’t thinking about what you need to do right now or what you need to think about, what would you do?”.

Straight after our session I trotted, energetically, off to Praxis to buy some Yves Klein blue paint and freehand painted a pattern in my bathroom. I tell you now… I have been overthinking how (or even, whether) I will decorate my house for MONTHS!

I was worrying about whether it will look how I want it to, whether other people will think it’s nice, whether it will reflect me as a person or will feel like someone else’s house, whether my mum will like it, what I will do if I paint it a certain colour and then don’t like it, what if I have to pay a decorator to come fix my mess, and on, and on, and on.

All of this was getting in the way of me actually listening to my gut (”Hellloooo! Choose blue!”) and then having the courage to trust it and follow it. Future Hannah will figure the rest out.

I’m aware that this may feel like a small example in comparison to creating a career change, creating the conditions for the conversations you need to have with your manager to find a work life balance that works better for you, or creating a business. But I argue that, at it’s heart, the principles are the same.

I work with people every week who want to create some kind of change in how they work or their work itself. I ask them things like:

“Why can’t you do this?”
“What is in your way?”
“Who are you supposed to be?”
“Who or what told you this?”
“What scares you about it?”
“Who would you get to be?”

And this final question is often the most magical - because the response I hear is the person inside who has been squashed, quietened, avoided, shamed, teased, ignored for years. It is the part of you that is finally screaming out in whatever ways it knows how, to be seen and listened to so that it can be free to explore, to play, to CREATE the work and life that is more YOU.

It’s the only voice that’s really going to create something that truly serves you - because really, you are the person who knows you best. Not your mates, not your colleagues, not your family, not your cat.

YOU know you best. Let yourself explore that, let yourself play, trust that you’ll figure it out as you go, and get creating.

As ever, if you are looking for coaching support with anything I’ve written about, I’d love to hear from you and you can get in touch with me via my website.

Unpolished, live learnings from a small business coach part 3: Creating

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