Story of You

From a French saying my father used to deliver whenever I failed to make my point, to my brother, aged two, pulling at the tablecloth because nobody understood him. And what I eventually learned about what happens when we stop listening to ourselves.

Sometimes a story about who we are becomes so familiar we can no longer see beyond it. On changing where we look from, self-access, writing and what becomes visible when we take a step back.

If you hear someone say 'I'm terrible at talking about myself,' know that their problem isn't communication. It's almost always a problem of self-access. They've lost the door inward, and without it, the words can't carry their shape.

What looks like a communication problem is almost always something else, and that something else is what my work is built to address.

After a workshop with the Op-Ed Project, I had a worthiness wobble. I came out, a few days and one bank holiday later, with a double triangle, a name in Sanskrit, and an Arkanoid-inspired game.

Have you ever held back from sharing a part of your life story or career on purpose? Maybe you were worried about confusing people, or being misunderstood. But what is really at play when we amputate a chapter of our life in the service of a new self-narrative?

In this piece, Anne reflects on something most of us struggle to articulate: our energy, how we work, what it actually feels like to be in a room with us. Words like "consultant" and "coach" don't tell you much. So she lets other people's words do the translating.