This is a big relief for me. It means my blog and products will be able to be all in the one place. I have moved all the content from wellbeingandhealth to there, so nothing is lost.

This process has taken me much longer than I hoped it would. Apologies for the infrequent posts of late, this has been the reason.

I hope that you have benefited from this blog and so will keep following me on the new blog. To make it easier to follow my posts there are a couple of options. First, for those who feel at home with blogs there is RSS subscritpion. You subscribe by clicking on the orange button – you will then receive each post I do when I do it in your reader. You can click on the big orange button, which subscribes you through the blog; or the smaller orange button in the first sidebar, which subscribes you through feedburner. Second, if you don’t have a feedreader, or are less familiar with these kinds of things, you can receive each post when I publish it into your email inbox – simply type your email where you want the post delivered into the box at the top of the first sidebar.

I also do a free weekly newsletter. This is a quick post each week to give a practical tip about living more authentically – with ourselves and with others. To be put on the mailing list for my newsletter, on the Living Authentically site, just click on the link in the sidebar headed “Newsletter”, and you will be taken to a page where you can give the email address that you would like it to be delivered to.

On the new site, I also have a free report on living with authenticity. To get a copy click on the link called “My Free Report”, below the newsletter link in the sidebar. It is a PDF of about fifty pages full of practical exercises on living with authenticity so that you can experience a life of lasting satisfaction.

Over the next few weeks I will doing some tweaking of the new blog – adding product pages and the option of booking individual sessions with me, as well as pages that will be a guide to the new blog.

Would those of you who have been kind enough to link to wellbeingandhealth on your blogs please change the link to Living Authentically, I’d be very grateful?

I will also be becoming an affiliate for the first time. (For those not familiar with blogspeak, this means selling someone else’s product for a percentage of the sale price – the online equivalent of retailing.) This will be for Nacie’s Happy Rich system, which I think is excellent. In the meantime you can find out about it and buy if from Nacie here.

I hope you have enjoyed and benefited from wellbeingandhealth, I look forward to seeing you on Living Authentically, Evan.

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Changes
I’m making some changes to this blog in the next little while. I’ll be moving it to the Living Authentically website, so that this blog and the products that I sell are all in one place. I needed to have them split for business reasons when I started Living Authentically, but no longer need to do this. It will feel much nicer for me to have most of what I do all in one place.

The hassle will be that if you wish to keep receiving posts you will need to click on the RSS subscription button again. Or you can receive the posts by email by entering your email address in the box provided. The button and the email subscription box are both located at the top of the column to the right of this post. I hope you have enjoyed the posts I have done and that you will want to keep receiving them. If not, I want to say thankyou for your support, and I hope that you have benefitted from my blog.

I have also finally got organised enough to use an autoresponder to deliver my newsletter. The tech stuff is a bit of a hassle for me; a geek I’m not.

Until now I have been sending the emails by hand. Apologies if there have been mistakes, this is the reason. This means that I will be putting all of you who receive my newsletter in at the same time, so that all of you who currently receive the newsletter will all receive the same one from now on. I have been sending the newsletter once a week for the best part of two years (with the exception of one week, where I let things get on top of me). I am now into the mid- to high-nineties for the newsletters. If you would like to have the newsletters between the one you are up to and the rest so far, just let me know and I’ll email them to you.

I’m also making a new product at the moment. It will be a weekly reminder to tune in to your self, to make a habit of authenticity. I think it will be targeted at bloggers, to help them re-connect with why they got into blogging in the first place; and of benefit in other parts of their lives too.

I’ll be making these changes over the next couple of weeks. Hope it all goes smoothly.

As you can see lots is happening in my part of the blogosphere. I hope life is good where you are, Evan.

The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.

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I am investigating MailChimp because the price is right (ie. they have a free option for 3,000 emails a month). I don’t know if the same applies to Aweber and other options.

The trap I have found is that it is difficult to cut and past from a word processor into the autoresponder. So, if for instance you have been doing newsletters for a while and want to change to sending them via an autoresponder, instead of sending the emails manually, you are encouraged to type the text of the newsletters into the autoresponder. This may mean re-typing the newsletters you want to send in the autoresponder. If you have over 90 newsletters, as someone of my close acquaintance does, this is an awful lot of typing.

I am seeing if I can cut and paste them onto Notepad and then cut and paste this into the autoresponder. Not sure if this will work at the moment.

Moral of the story: if you are a blogger who wants to send a newsletter and think you may want to use an autoresponder to do this sometime – start with the autoresponder, otherwise there may be lots of work to do down the track, Evan.

The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.

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This happens even if they haven’t been in touch much in the time in between. They are around the same, different genders. They have similar interests but quite different values on some things.

These are the only two people who I know this happens to. I’m just wondering if anyone else has this experience for themselves or if you know other people like this.

Let me know in the comments if you do. I’d be fascinated to hear.

Coming Soon: Habits for Authenticity

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I think a good life consists partly in developing good habits. Habits like checking in to see we are being authentic and listening to others.

So, I’m developing a new course and website. I think we can develop the habit of checking in to see whether we are in touch with our authentic selves or not. I think having a daily reminder each day for 30 days can help people do this. Which will be my next online course. I think if we develop the ‘habit’ of authenticity we will have much more satisfying lives.

At the moment I am writing the course and the landing page. It should be ready to go in the next month. Watch this space, Evan.

The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.

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Leaving Fusion I got to work with a couple of other Christian groups – largely unsuccessfully.

I also fell in love. This was the first time (and so far the only time) I have fallen in-love in the intense and intensely sexual sense of the term. I love my current partner very much, but it was from liking and respecting and being attracted to each other that we got together; there wasn’t that in-love insulated-from-the-world aspect to it. So far my relationship with my new partner is far better than with my first one and my new partner had been in a relationship that started with in-love and ended up including domestic violence. While in-love for me was precious, delightful and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, there can be some unpleasant sides to it too.

If falling in love is a transition to adult-hood then earning your income is more so. I have always done this but in quite unconventional ways and there have been periods of government support too. I have always been on the margins of the economy. This has its pressures.

I have also often been self-employed. This usually involves marketing yourself in some way and this has peculiar difficulties for introverts. For instance, I can happily evangelise for the Myers-Briggs’ Type Indicator or Gestalt Therapy but feel far more constrained when trying to talk about what I do or what I sell. There are added difficulties if one of your chief concerns is authenticity (as is the case for me). Most marketing joyously embraces ‘perceived value’ but for me this smacks of phoniness. [By the way, as I understand it, ‘phoniness’ was a term invented by the early gestaltists – it was describing the special phone voice some people used to make up for the poor quality of early phone lines: it became a metaphor for starchy, proper and lacking emotional tone.] Self-presentation is quite a hot button issue for an introvert one of whose core concerns is authenticity. This is an on-going issue for me. For instance: what if I’m authentically shy? How does this fit with authentically promoting myself? I still am in the middle of sorting this out.

In one way my early and middle adulthood have been about extraversion: learning to negotiate the external world. I was privileged to have the chance to develop my awareness of my internal world up to the end of my 20’s: this was a rare privilege. I have done less well in becoming familiar with the ways of the external world. One way of saying this is that my adulthood has been dominated by finding a way to make my income by doing what I love. Blogging is part of this journey for me.

Being ‘grown up’ sounds like no fun to me. It connotes doing what you don’t really want to do. In his book The Divided Self the author RD Laing has a preface written several years after its first publication. He ends it with the sentiments that the book (originally his Ph.D.) was written by an old young man, that if he is now older he is also younger. I applaud these sentiments. I was way too serious when young – my adulthood in one way has been becoming more comfortable with the childlike part of me.

Finding my own spirituality has also been a theme of my adulthood. I still see myself in the Evangelical Christian tradition i.e. we need to take scripture seriously. (Others in this tradition would violently disagree with me.) The most distinctive aspect of my own take on Christian spirituality is that it is Christian spirituality is physical.

As I was beginning to explore what on earth it would mean to have a physical spirituality – nothing in my evangelical heritage prepared me to even think about this – I had a busy head and some fortunate experiences.

I formulated my central question about physical spirituality this way: if aerobic exercise helps us be less stressed: what movement would help us be more compassionate? At this stage I found a book in my local library called Shintaido – a book about physical spirituality that excited. What’s more they had a group in Australia. Shintaido is a self-development system that grew out of Okinawan karate. For a little while I was intensely involved. It showed me that a physical spirituality was possible. Unfortunately I joined when the group had just been going through a difficult time (due to authority conflicts in my opinion) and the hierarchical Japanese approach didn’t really appeal to me. [Anglo-Saxon Australians have a distinctive attitude to authority. It is something of a sibling society – achievement is recognised and celebrated but people thinking highly of themselves and looking down on others is regarded pejoratively. There is no hereditary class system and treating others as equals is taken for granted. This has much to do with the children of the white invaders being the children of convicts in my view – which also explains a pragmatic acceptance of and dislike of violence.]

I also discovered a book on the Old Testament by Pedersen- Israel: it’s life and culture. This was a breakthrough book for biblical scholarship. It demonstrated that the OT conception of the person was unitary. This meant for me that the body was part of personhood. This gave me a biblical base for my concern with physical spirituality – it was a liberation for me.

This lead me to writing up my own physical spirituality (it currently waits on illustrations). The way I organised it was in body segments going up the body and with different dimensions to each segment. For instance with the feet I began with exercises to get people in touch with the sensations in their feet, dealt with being grounded, and for the spiritual perspective talked about pilgrimage. I also ran some retreats – largely attended by friends – around these concerns.

This brings me pretty much up to date with my journey seen from the perspective of introversion. Any comments you may have are extremely welcome (even from extraverts). It is hard for me to know how much my struggles have been just my own weirdness (which I don’t underestimate) and how much they have to do with introversion itself. I’d love to hear whether you have had similar problems and struggles to mine whether you prefer introversion or extraversion, Evan.

A Pedant’s Post-Script: introversion is spelt with an ‘o’ and extraversion with an ‘a’.

The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.

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One of the great good fortunes of my life was to join an organisation called Fusion Australia – now Fusion International. It is a christian based, non-denominational, youth and community work organisation. Staff were paid by donation (called ‘living by faith’ in the Evangelical jargon) – so few of us were wealthy. Fusion was where I spent my 20′s.

I joined when it was getting organised and it was still quite fluid. The wonderful thing about Fusion was that they took training seriously. I finally found a group who would tell me how to do what they wanted me to do. And they had a genuinely wholistic view of the person (this was rare in Evangelical christianity at the time – it is becoming more common).

How good the training was I didn’t appreciate until I left. When I left I found that there were people charging high prices for stuff which was a fraction of what we had been given in Fusion for free. The biggest learning for me was about my emotions. I found that my emotions were important and valuable. Fusion also introduced me to the world of psychotherapy (touching on Carl Rogers, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, Viktor Frankl and Gerard Egan). This was just the psychology stuff, there was much else.

I was somewhat fortunate that the team I was part of were very supportive and encouraging. We also got on well with the national director and so had (on the whole) quite good support from the national administration. We were largely supported to get on with implementing the vision in our locality. This seemed at the time to be simple good sense – and it still seems so to me. What I didn’t realise until I left was how rare this common good sense is.
It was during this time that I read and worked through Perls, Hefferline and Goodman’s Gestalt Therapy. This book changed my life.

Probably my biggest learning from Fusion, other than the personal one about my emotions, was what people can do with willingness and support. This applied to Fusion staff, some of who were gifted but most of who developed abilities due to the training we received and learning how to do things. It also applied to many of the young people we worked with. Some of these young people were seen as ‘quite difficult’ but many of them achieved good things by anyone’s standards – when their background was taken into account, the achievements were even more remarkable. As a result of this I am very optimistic about what individuals can achieve – especially with some support.

It was toward the end of my time in Fusion that I discovered my own approach to spirituality (through journalling) and found what I thought would be my own contribution: a christian, physical spirituality. This was regarded as either weird or so far off the map as to be incomprehensible.

I left Fusion because my spirituality was leading me other places – I was not fitting with Evangelicalism terribly well. I had also met the woman who would become my first wife. Falling in love had an elation and intensity that I hadn’t experienced before. It was a remarkable and delightful experience.

Being married and negotiating the world of work were challenges which lay ahead.

The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.

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For me at least adolescence was about finding out how to fit in with others and the world in general. This was a bit of a challenge for an introvert.

Especially for an introvert who was a thinker. It seemed to me that there weren’t clear rules; and the rules there were weren’t rational. Why shouldn’t I answer honestly when asked how I was feeling? And how to know when to answer directly and when not to? It felt to me that I was expected to do what others said without being given any good reason to.

The world seemed chaotic and irrational. And I wasn’t terribly interested in it anyway. One of my reactions to this was to do think that, “Well, I may as well just do what I want”. Another was to try and formulate rational principles to live by. Which lead to me being impatient with what I saw as others being inconsistent with their professed principles. I wanted a rational system – and it didn’t occur to me that there may be no all embracing system.

Meanwhile, my inner world was quite intense. Along with the usual hormonal realities I was part of Evangelical Christianity, with its sexually pre-occupied morality. My church had a youth group with weekly outings as well as bible studies. This group largely functioned for me as something of a refuge, for me it was on the whole quite positive. (I was white, male, middle-class, wordy and serious.) For others it was much less so.

The sexualised morality had a curiously complex effect. While pre-marital sex was frowned upon (and some sex sexuality abhorred), this meant that (straight, heterosexual) sex was discussed with some freedom (more than in secular Australian society at the time in my experience). This environment ill-prepared us for sexual relationships – but if anything the boyfriend-girlfriend relationships in the youth-group seemed happier than those I knew of in secular groups. We were also free of expectations about sexual performance.

One positive legacy of church was being part of a group that knew it was a minority. We got the message in many different ways that we were part of a minority and the majority were bad/deluded/not to be copied. For an introvert this was quite a blessing: it gave me some sort of license to not fit in. My church life was something of a safe place, a place where I was personally known and often liked and respected and always tolerated (despite my social ineptness).

At the end of my adolescence I still took my faith seriously and was wondering what to do with my life. And I really had no clue about what job I could do – I felt (entirely correctly I think) that I wasn’t particularly suited to anything. Through attending a conference I would discover a Christian group that I would be part of for my 20’s.

I’d like to know about your experience of adolescence too – whether you are an introvert or an extravert. I’m aware that my experience is probably quite unusual but I’d like to know if it strikes a chord with you. Looking forward to hearing from you.

If you like this post you might also like,
An Introvert’s Journey Part 1 – Childhood
An Introvert’s Authenticity

The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.

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