There's a crack in everything...

It all started with a fall down the stairs.

One morning, while feeling groggy and distracted, I attempted a journey I'd taken many, many times before. A short trek down the stairs to silence my forever hungry cat, and to satisfy my unhealthily urgent craving for coffee. Nothing new, nothing out of the norm. Until, without warning, my sock adorned feet slipped down the stairs, sending my phone flying, my arm desperately grasping for purchase on the rail, and my shoulder tendon inconveniently ripping away from the bone.

And that's it. a hungry cat. A coffee craving. Warm feet. That's all it can take to totally turn your life upside down.

So what next you ask? A gripping but inspiring LinkedIn post to share the “5 things falling down the stairs taught me about business”?

No. No that didn't feel like me.

But I did go on one hell of a journey. And most of it was incredibly challenging. I've been challenged in ways I never knew possible - and trust me, I was no stranger to challenge even before this happened.

So sitting here, 5 months post-surgery, with a lot more distance and objectivity between me and my pain, I felt called to speak up and share. Because this is why I do what I do, and why I was drawn to the world of coaching. I want to help others by showing them what it looks like to be a real human, living a real human experience. No filters attached. So let’s go. Here are some honest lessons I learned.

On sadness:

We're not supposed to be happy all of the time, but we're also not supposed to do the opposite. Too much time at the bottom can make it feel like you're never coming up again. We have to release our emotions when they need releasing, and we have to reach out to our people when we need support.

On asking for help:

As someone who has been hyper independent all of her life, I've never felt it was ok to ask for help. I wore stubborn independence like a badge of honour, telling myself some version of a story about overcoming the patriarchy by never needing anyone's help. A woman of strength and success can do it all alone. But that simply isn't true. We all need help sometimes, and in my pursuit of "I've got this-ness", I created an island that I got stranded on. You see there's a fine line between independence and isolation, and I've since realised that I quite like the idea of having a team of people to help me and love me and to be my village. To let them wash my hair when my arm isn't working, let them reach out to ask me how I am without my knee-jerk I'm fine's rebounding back. Let them in, truly in, to the most vulnerable iterations of me.

On control:

Big breath. We all feel this one right? Letting go of control. Boy was this one hard. Because during this process, I had absolutely no control over anything. My body, my mental health, my sleep - no control. My work pipeline as it disintegrated before my eyes - no control. My bills, my responsibilities, my goals...yeah you guessed it, no control.

There’s a saying that talks about holding sand in relation to control. The tighter you squeeze, the more it slips through your fingers. When you loosen your grip, you can hold more with ease. At first I did the former. I just couldn’t let go - couldn’t relinquish control. I just wanted certainty, to know when I was going to feel like myself again, hint: it never happened.

Because the self I was trying to feel like didn’t exist any more. She was evolving, changing, and even as I gripped on to her as tightly as I could, just like the sand she kept on slipping away from me. Until I stopped gripping. I let go, and gave over my power to something greater than me.

And so,

I’m still here, in this new unchartered space, figuring out who I am and how to keep going without all of the answers. It’s stopped feeling terrifying, and it’s started feeling kind of amazing. 

And of course there are more lessons I’ve learned, and am continuing to learn, and I’d like to share these with you too. But for now, this is my declaration. My claiming of space. My unveiling. I’m here to do wonderful things. For me, and for others. And to remind you that you can be broken and on your way to becoming something magnificent, in fact I’d argue the latter isn’t possible without the former. In the words of the late and great Leonard Cohen, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”