It’s not much but neither is it nothing – a conversation with Tanya Shadrick author of The Cure for Sleep, memoir of a late waking life; founder of the Selkie Press and editor of the Wainwright Prize-listed Wild Woman Swimming

About This Episode

In this episode I am delighted to be in conversation with Tanya Shadrick - author of The Cure for Sleep: her memoir of a late waking life, a story of breaking free, and making a more creative life; Tanya is founder of the Selkie Press; editor of the Wainwright Prize-listed Wild Woman Swimming.  She is a community builder of writers and storytellers through Substack where she writes, and invites you to share your stories.

We delve together into: 

What it takes - and costs - to build an authentic life of one’s own, while continuing to honour our roles within families, workplaces, and communities.

And explore four key themes:

1. The voices around us - and the beliefs that we form about ourselves and our abilities because of what is praised or punished.
2. Our Size and Shape - and how related to beliefs about ourselves, and our abilities, we (perhaps) make ourselves smaller
3. Work - and how writing about work is central to Tanya’s storytelling
4. The importance of service, of finding the best in ourselves, and each other, for the good of others, and to deliver use and meaning to others

Three key encouragements

1. Look how far you’ve come… We can forget how hard we once found things that are now a core part of our senior roles - public speaking, say, or preparing a visual presentation for stakeholders or investors. Write 500 words from the you of now to the twenty-something you once were, starting out. Be in dialogue. Remember the vivid details. It releases a kind of energy that helps us be better mentors and encouragers to our graduate staff and our career returners. 
2. A list of what you love…  spend an hour making a list of 100 things you love about your work life. It will seem impossible to get anywhere near that number. Your first few items might seem so simple, so insufficient - just a list of obvious things: the salary, the pension, the status, the holiday allowance. But as you persist, the process starts to yield surprising results - by the time you get to around sixty, or eighty, most people find themselves remembering their deepest values, their fiercest ambitions and so on.
3. How do you talk about your job to those you don’t work with?  This is a very different exercise from crafting ‘an elevator pitch’ and its purpose is deeper, broader. Having a simple, authentic way to speak with quiet pride about what you do is one of the most useful ways to connect with other people - it extends to them the possibility of sharing what matters to them too: whether that’s their paid work, their passion, or an unpaid voluntary role.

Contact Tanya via her website, for writing resources, and podcasts:

www.thecureforsleep.com
https://tanyashadrick.substack.com/

To contact Anni Townend
anni@annitownend.com
www.annitownend.com

About Tanya Shadrick

I first heard of Tanya through a friend that I met some years ago via Instagram. Knowing my love of life writing, and of memoir, she asked me if I had read, and did I know Tanya Shadrick.  I didn’t. However the title of her book excited me, I wanted to know more about her, and about her writing. I read the book over a matter of days, snatching moments in my day to read, and was inspired by her openness and generosity of spirit. More recently she has shared via Substack and Instagram her experience of being with her mother at the end of her life, and her death. Tanya writes beautifully, poetically and is an inspiration to us to wake up, to make time to find and be creative, and to share our stories. 

Transcript

Anni Townend 

Welcome and welcome back to Leaders in Conversation with me. Anni Townend, the podcast that helps you to grow care, confidence and courage in your leadership. 

I created this series of candid conversations for leaders to share their personal leadership stories to inspire and encourage you on your own leadership journey. 

Together we delve into what they care about; the people, the places and the experiences that have shaped them and made them who they are today. If you haven't already, please do subscribe, share the podcast, sign up to my newsletter, thank you for listening. 

In this episode, I'm truly delighted to be in conversation with Tanya Shadrick. Tanya is author of The Cure for Sleep, A Memoir of a Late Waking Life, a story of breaking free and making a more creative life. Tanya is founder of the Selkie press, editor of the Wainwright prize listed Wild Woman Swimming. She's a community builder of writers and storytellers through substack, where she writes and invites you to share your stories. 

Together, we delve into what it takes and costs to build an authentic life of one's own, while continuing to honour our roles within families, workplaces and communities. 

We explore four key themes in our conversation: 

The voices around us, particularly those related to time and place and the beliefs that we form about ourselves and our abilities. 

We talk about our size and shape and how related to these beliefs about ourselves and our abilities, we may perhaps make ourselves smaller. 

We talk about work and how writing about work is central to Tanya's story telling the particular minutiae of work, the belongings, rituals, and etiquette.

And finally, the importance of service of finding the best in ourselves and each other, for the good of others. 

Welcome, Tanya. 

Tanya Shadrick 

Hello Anni. Thanks for inviting me to talk with you.

Anni Townend 

I'm delighted to be in conversation with you and excited for our conversation. Although we're meeting for the first time, I have loved reading your book Cure for Sleep. And I'm looking forward to hearing you talk about your story. And also reading from your beautiful book. What I'd like to do is to delve straight into our first theme. And that is about how place and time, family, school, workplace and church shape us, how they have shaped you and the voices around you and in particular, what was praised and indeed what was punished by those voices.

Tanya Shadrick 

I believe that all of us are very much a product of our time and place more than we perhaps realise. And perhaps the only thing that made me different is that from a very early age, I was very aware of that. And I think it was because I was different than most of the people in my small market town and surroundings. Because my father had left when I was very young and mother and I were left in a little bungalow on the edge of a farming town. And it was the 1970s and my mum was the only divorced woman. I was the only child with divorced parents in my primary school. So very early in life, I was hyper aware of social structures, and the difference between what was supposed to be the norm and what my life was like. And therefore became very interested in how everybody fitted or didn't fit into their time and place. And that's just been my interest ever since. Because I think those stories, we are told about who we should be, it constrains so much of our potential. Occasionally it helps us fly if we land in a place where we're praised and recognised and kind of fostered. But most of the time, I think for most people, their experiences that they were constrained or held back or learnt to hide or disguise their real needs and ambitions.

Anni Townend 

What was praised in you and shaped you from that time, that place?

Tanya Shadrick 

It was quite odd in the sense that if my parents had stayed together, I would have probably been praised for all the things that everybody around me were praised for, which was in short conformity. There's a little passage in the book where I say, conformity was the kind of measure and anything that made you exceptional would cause your stock to fall fast. You know, like the cattle that were graded at the weekly market, people were always being assessed as well. So that's what happened to my mom her stock fell through no fault of her own when my father left. So she'd gone from being very admired and respected as a working class girl who'd managed to get herself into the bank through doing shorthand and typing, she got out of the hardware store, she'd been put in at 15 and got into the bank, the only non grammar school girl who got in. So she was exceptional through being respectable and talented, then her stock fell. So that was what was praised was conformity. Now with me, it was different in the sense that I was already different than the other children at school. And it was that particular time when there was still some social mobility through education. So my mother wanted me to go to university, I think only to become a teacher, or a lawyer. She liked law and teaching. But my first ever primary school teacher took me aside one day and tested how well I could read. She's still alive. She's 90. And she said, You need to get away to university. That's where you belong. And I wouldn't have known the concept really mum talked in terms of professions, but it was this first teacher who told me about it, it’s a place where you live, and you read books. And that's where you belong. What an incredible thing.

Anni Townend

That is so incredible, and amazing, isn't it, that there are those people, we're talking about people and place, but there are those people in our lives, particularly in our young lives? Who can have such a profound and lasting impact and awaken us to the possibility of something that our own close family and close community may not be alert to?

Tanya Shadrick 

That's something that informs everything I do as a mentor, and why I do so much free mentoring. I'm a firm believer, it only takes one voice. At any stage in our life, one voice that cuts through all of those things. it says, I see you and I recognise something in you. You just need one person who recognises the thing in you, you want to be recognised for crucially, and I think we can go years on that I think we can get through years of education, I think it can keep us rising through a workplace where maybe we don't come from the standard class background that usually does well in that industry. Isn't that motivating to think we can be that person?

Anni Townend 

I think it is, I think being seen, and sometimes something in us being seen that we perhaps aren't aware of ourselves necessarily. I have experiences where something has been seen in me and I can think of several people who over the years, childhood, in my 20s and more laterly have seen something in me and believed in me believed in me that I could do something have awakened a possibility and me that I've then reached for even though I might not have believed it in myself at the time.

Tanya Shadrick

When I worked in university years later, myself and I worked in widening participation. I read a report, I think it was the Joseph Rowntree Trust, which said, factually, statistically, and I might be wrong, but I think it was this, it said that already in the 1970s, social mobility and Britain was beginning to contract and move backwards. I was a child going through state education at a time when it was already beginning to shrink back. It's extraordinary, isn't it that statistically, so many of us may have quite long odds of achieving certain things? One of the most popular exercises I do when I mentor large groups and one to one and also on my storytelling project on substack is one called The Voices Around Us where I ask people to get a big piece of paper. Imagine you're back at primary school, and you just make a map, it doesn't need to be pretty and you draw all the institutions, it might be homes, churches, schools, just put them all on one big map like they're all in one time and place together. And then you make a list by each of them of what was praised and what was blamed. You're drawing it all out, you're actually looking at it instead of it just being in you. And then the final part of the exercise, it takes quite a long time, is that you then go back to each of those places. And you hand a short note in at the door as an adult, speaking to each of those times and places. And people sometimes make it really extended project that they keep working on and the amount of people that say the amount of energy and freedom it releases in them.

Anni Townend 

That’s such a helpful way into thinking about the people in the places that have shaped us and shaped our beliefs about ourselves and the world, in terms of the things that were praised, acknowledged, encouraged, and the things that were punished and or we were blamed for, as you mentioned, and how those voices then influence our beliefs about ourselves. And I wonder how those beliefs about yourself affected your size and shape.

Tanya Shadrick

I was just very dutiful, I treated education like a sort of farmer going to the field or a miner, it was like I was digging. I loved school, but it was not a particularly joyful experimental creative. I was a conformist, education was going to be my route out of my time and place. The only one I could imagine for myself. It was almost like I was a worker in a workplace from the age of five is how I found myself to be, because I had such a difficult and increasingly dangerous home life. In my own way, although I was breaking the mould of my culture in one way, there being a young child of a single parent family who wanted to go to university. But in other respects, I had also absorbed that idea of conformity, which in a sense, always makes us small, so I lived a very small and hidden life. I scuttled between home and school and back, I didn't have any extracurricular activities. And that continued once I was in my 20s in work, it was the same thing. I shuttled between home and the office and back again. And it was always about fitting in. And I just felt a great part of myself, the part of me everyone knew I was clever, both in school and in my workplace, and I was liked and valued. But there was this huge hinterland of other things I cared about passionately writing and books, and service and systems, all these really quite deep and particular interests. And that was the work of my first half of life was finding a way to make that kind of mansion of passion and experience more visible to the outside world.

Anni Townend

Which you certainly did in writing The Cure for Sleep, which is such a brave book Tanya, it really is an extraordinary book in which you write about your experience of living and growing up with your mum, which you've just mentioned, it became increasingly dangerous. How did you keep yourself safe?

Tanya Shadrick

It was just nightly arguments, really vicious ones between my mother and my stepfather and sometimes centering on me as a small child and we lived in deep countryside, no streetlights, no telephone, there was no way to get away from it. I lived for school, to be honest, I hated school holidays. Weekends were difficult. It was like a lot of people and I think Rebecca Solnit the writer and also Mary Oliver, they're all people that speak about living inside our childhoods, they were safer outdoors then in, so I was I turned towards nature I'd roam around the lanes in my home but school was what I lived for and then I had my first ever job which I got at a terribly young age, back when you could do such things and was working in a fish and chip shop, and I was terrified at first but that also just became anywhere outside the home, other people's houses that was important to me as well. 

Anni Townend

That's so lovely to hear. And before we started recording we shared that we have an unbeknown to us both that we are both known for our passion for being outdoors and for the walk and talk which I have incorporated in all my work with the leadership teams that I partner with, and indeed one to one sometimes in person but sometimes, with my headphones on walking on the South Downs Way with the person I'm working with walking wherever they are based in their place, and how powerful it is to have conversations in that way.

Tanya Shadrick 

It's that side by sideness and looking out at something beyond yourself. I think it just allows so much freedom. I love that we both got that phrase, ‘walk and talk’.

Anni Townend 

I do. And I so look forward to what will be our first walk and talk together, which I know we're going to arrange after this episode. In your, what you describe as your Second Life, you made your size and shape more visible, that inside out outside in, shared that publicly through your book, what has it taken and cost you to live this more visible, authentic life? But also what has it given you?

Tanya Shadrick

Lovely question. I mean, in short, what it took for me because it was so entrenched, this this issue of hiding and holding back, it literally took a sudden near death. So I was 33. I had just become a mother after some fear and trembling not wanting to become a mother because of my childhood. But my darling husband wanted to be a dad. So finally at 33, I have this new baby and I think this is going to be great. I'm very orderly, I think I only have this all under control. And then 14 days after my son was born, I had a very sudden arterial haemorrhage, due to something that went wrong with the Cesarean and an ambulance was nearby and came within minutes and just tipped me upside down, took me away from home. And if there hadn't been an ambulance in the street above mine, I would have died. It was that sudden. So no pain, complete clarity. And what I experienced in that strange existential moment of no pain, but knowing I was dying, was regret. Even though on paper, I'd had very successful life, I owned my little home, I had a lovely husband, baby, I got a first class degree, money in the bank, all the CV qualities, I’d done really well. But this regret just got broken open. And it was like, I didn't even try to become a writer, I've just got private notebooks, I don't have any female friends, I've not found a way to show and share what I really did. Because time slows down when you're in an emergency. Anyone who has been in a car accident will know what I'm talking about. It's like you've got all the time in the world is a strange biochemical thing that feels really quite spiritual. And so I had all the time in the world in the ambulance to think about the way I wasted my potential. And then that leaves you with a real life challenge. And that's why I think I'm proud that I was given the chance to write this kind of memoir, because most memoirs now tend to be about one thing, like a particular journey, and that's not to diminish their purpose and their use. But I wanted to write a big old fashioned story, which tries to show who you are before a sudden life changing moment, not just the change afterwards. And it’s because without all the stuckness and the shaping, the cultural shaping and the forces that are bearing down on me in the first half of my life, the change doesn't make sense. So it's a long answer, because it's a complex thing.

But in short, the change that happened couldn't begin immediately, I had the realisation because I was a mother of a young child, I was on maternity leave, I wasn't even in my beautiful workplace at the university, my safe space, I loved my job. So it took seven years from when my son was born, and then my accidental, beautiful daughter who came very soon afterwards, until I first began to do something in public. But all the time I was living the question. I allowed myself to keep that discomfort and to stay awake to it. It's like I don't know how to fix this yet, but I’ve got to find a way to be the right size and shape to fit in the world better and to offer more. And so for years, it didn't really look like anything had changed. But every day my reading was different, it was just like this laboratory inside myself. Such an exciting time.

Anni Townend 

In your book, you write a lot about your relationship with your mother, because it was the two of you for so long, in so many ways. And I know more recently, in 2023, that she has passed away, that she has died. And I wondered whether you felt ready to talk about that at all, given that your life has been so entwined. And you have written about that experience, which again, I am in awe of. My own mother having died just over a year ago. I'm also sorry for your loss and grateful to you for writing about it. But it's often something that we don't talk about, and you have done and wrote about us as she was dying and you were caring for.

Tanya Shadrick 

That was extraordinary in that I got the book deal in extraordinary circumstances. In the end, this one, and maybe the only book I've written came to me like a pear kind of coming off a tree. An agent said, I think you've got a story to tell. And I just said, How about this title? And how about this? And he said, Oh, yeah, a few 1000 words. And I had a preempt book deal from a major publisher one month later. So anyway, I had that, I began writing the book in 2020. And then pandemic happened. I had my husband home, my children at home, and then my mother called say she was finally getting divorced after 40 years, and help. She had no money. It was the most crushing set of challenges. And it's funny because I'd already written the book in first draft by the time this happened. And so there's this extra chapter at the end of the book the chapter begins on my mum saying, Do you love me? Which I say is the terrible question that we only really ask when everything depends on it. And the answer was an I do find a way to tell her Honestly, no. But I might again, if we get through this. I helped my mother get a divorce, paid a lot of her bills, spoke two her three times a day on the phone. And this is a woman who you know, I left her home when I was 15. And I'd looked after myself ever since. And I hadn't really loved her since I was about nine years old because it wasn't really safe to love her. I looked after myself. It was a big life challenge. Just as I got free I'd finally become this writer with a book deal like being trumpeted about in like the bookseller, and it's like, oh, no, I've got to look after my mom. But it was beautiful, it was the most extraordinary thing. She had two years of freedom and a little flat of her own and got free of chaos. And she began to recover her reason and boundaries that she'd never had with me. And then I did nurse her to end of life. And then I was there for the last 10 days sleeping on the floor next to her and I was right next to her when she died. So quite an unusual turn of events for two women who'd had such a difficult relationship.

Anni Townend  

And who found love and loved each other.

Tanya Shadrick 

So I give a sense of the huge emotional impact of my life with her in that awful second marriage. But I don't go into terrible shaming details. It's not necessary. But what my mum could see, and with unusual restraint, she chose not to read the book. I read lots of bits to her but all of her brothers and sisters and in laws read it and she could tell from their reaction. And from the reaction of people online. It actually meant that a lot of people around the world, mainly women, got in touch to say, I've made a big late change in my life because of you. And what I love is that the book is called in its hardback version, the cure for sleep memoir of a late waking life. But of course, what happens in the very last chapter of the book, is that the late waking life becomes my mother's when she leaves a marriage for her ninth decade. And so then that gives the book a whole extra dimension and use in the world, which is it's speaking to women. From teenage years, men and women right up until 80-90 and beyond. And that's more than I intended for it. It's been lovely.

Anni Townend 

Amazing Tanya. What an incredible story and an inspiring one. Another Love of yours is writing about work, and the importance in your storytelling, and particularly the minutiae and rituals of everyday working life. Tell us a bit more about why that's so important to you.

Tanya Shadrick 

I'm smiling because I read there's a very short paragraph in the book, which is me as a child, listening to my mum get ready for work each morning. And by then she was working in a grocery store, but she was also a star in there like she'd been in the bank. And young me is hearing all these stories of my mom's life before me when everything was better. And she's talking about the bank. And I read that little paragraph at her graveside service. And that was a really special feeling because we buried her with her maiden name as well without the two men that had made her life difficult. So there's this wonderful moment of she's got her maiden name back and here she was in her prime in the bank. 

Anni Townend 

Do read that.

Tanya Shadrick 

So I'm sitting at her feet while she dresses up for the spa shop. I'm listening to her talk: 

The joy of work the bank oh how she loved it. The status symbols her name badge the clerk's coat which fitted like a glove. The weekly pay packet which kept rising till it neared her father's rules and regulations that are orderly mind thrived on single entry Ledger's demanding her best copperplate handwriting. So whole afternoons passed in a happy bliss of bitten lip concentration. The end of day cash balance which had to be penny precise before they were allowed home. Its feud or system of rank and etiquette relating to how each staff member and customer should be addressed. 

There was to a performative element she lived for that showcase her beauty even more effectively than the art masters table of a shop window as cashier behind number one till at the National provincial on market day, framed like a painting by its wouldn't move. Maria Ann Stevens of black hair and blue eyes was visited by every retired colonel and rich farmer in the surrounding area. And then she joined the young conservatives and went skinny dipping in the sea.  

It was just her. It was the time of but she also loved even though she had to go and work in the spa shop, she loved that she just loved work, and order and routine and earning around money. 

And so that was always and so it was for me. I had an unhappy little spell after I graduated in television, which is very impressive job title and good money. And everyone thought that must be the perfect job and I hated it. It didn't feel like real work to me. And I got back to the university and was hired as the head of undergraduate recruitment at the University of Sussex where I'd studied. And by the time I finished I was a division head and I had like a budget of over a million, including the staff costs and I'd set up visitor services and I just loved it and loved it from the first day to the last and thought I would stay there until retirement. Yeah, and I love the etiquette of work and this is the thing is that after the near-death for a while, when I didn't have very much time, I thought, how can I already be of service and so I would volunteer my time, I created a role for myself at the local hospice. And although it's not statistically significant, I wasn't a researcher, in my experience, more of the people who wanted to talk to me at the end of life, about what had mattered to them, that sense that they wanted to share something before they went. As many of them were thinking back to jobs they’d wished they'd had, that they weren't allowed to have, because of their gender, or their class or their circumstances, people that had wanted to go into the priesthood but, their family weren't religious, or women have an upper class that you weren't allowed to work, because you were so wealthy. it was extraordinary, you think it's going to be that they want to talk about their families doesn't mean they didn't love their families. But what was on their minds, was not always there were a couple of people that had love affairs that were still tugging at their heart decades later. But most people were talking about their work identities. That is not the cultural story. There's a best-selling book called Top Five Regrets of the Dying. It's very fine book. But the top line from it that's always shared by newspapers is that everybody regrets spending so much time in work. And I’m not sure, that wasn't my experience when I was working with the dying, I think it's a more complicated story.

Anni Townend 

And related to work, as well as everything else that you've spoken about, being in service to others. And you talk about that in a very particular way of being in service to help other people be their best selves every day in all that they do. How do you do this in your everyday things through your writing?

Tanya Shadrick 

I have a free substack. It's basically three years worth of monthly writing prompts. So I began even before the book came out, because I felt passionately that I wanted to try and do something different. So it was never about selling the book. It was more about saying whether you read my book or not, here are some free extracts from each month. And then I want you to write me a short true story from your life in turn on that theme. There won't be any new prompts. Now I've decided quite recently, I want it to be a self-contained list, there’s three years worth. And then whatever else I do for work from now on, that's my writerly way of using that side of me, I have a gift for I'm not scared of people's truths. I feel equal to the challenge of whatever might come through that route. And sometimes people share, there's some community guidelines to protect them and myself. That's my writerly vocation. I've just turned 50. So it's taken me 50 years, minus three years to find that way of being open to the world. Before that, when I was struggling with this revelation, from the age of 33 onwards, that I must find a way to be of more use in the world beyond home and family and work. How did I start thinking about it? I did start thinking about it in terms of the smallest unit of time and action possible because that's really freeing. Because the minute you say, what's the smallest thing I can do with the time and the health I have available? And so for me, one of the practices I started back then is just not having a curtain at my window in the little street and lived in across town. It was a little mid terraced house with a pavement outside it and lots of people would come up in the dark from the station when we moved into the street, all the windows were net curtains and heavy curtains. By the time I left, three, four years later, almost every window was open in the evening for people to look in. And once I was at a party years later, and somebody said, there used to be this dear little house on your road, where when I was coming back in the dark, tired from a long day at work off the train, I just love that the light would spill out. And there was a woman in there dancing with her children. That's an act because you never know who that's important to. I didn't have a safe and good home life. So glimpses I got of other people's were painful, but also important. They were revision of a different kind of life. So at the very least, we can be a person on a park bench, who sits open and noticing, and that's not being unboundaried. It's not saying everyone can have my time, it's saying there are times in my day, or in my week or in a month, where that's when the smallest unit of putting ourselves somewhere beyond our normal circles of belonging, just to say I’m a quiet invitation. Some lonely person can just have it. To me, that's not nothing. It's like being a lamp that you light and you carry around in the world on dark days, and we're in a dark time at the moment. It's hard, isn't it to get up every day knowing what's happening to people in another part of the world. When that despair kicks in, it's like, okay, I've got to get up and get out of the house and light a lamp because somebody might need it today. And I don't know, that's how I have found a way to live.

Anni Townend  

I think that's really lovely. You mentioned despair there. It sounds to me, like you're tapping into something which I've noticed having conversations with leaders around hope, and how as leaders, we have to hold the both, and we have to hold the hope and some of the despair. But how we do that and you're lighting a candle for you don't know who might be passing by? It is an offering, isn't it and an invitation to notice. And maybe it is a glimpse of something, a glimpse of hope. 

Tanya, as we come towards the end of our conversation and what a lovely conversation it is to have had with you. I would love to invite you to share your three encouragements to listeners and those listeners who are leaders in a way I think we're all leading our lives. We're all living and leading. I very much believe that leadership is personal and relational. And that being able to tell our stories and find a way of telling our stories really matters and often speak with leaders about their leadership stories, which are informed by all the things that they have lived in their lives as a human being. What are your three encouragement for listeners and leaders looking to build an authentic life and leadership, one in which they find their shape and size, share their stories, as part of growing and developing?

Tanya Shadrick 

I'm glad you gave me these questions in advance Anni, because they gave me a lot to think about. And I'd love to run some workshops on this at some point, if anybody listening wants to book us to do that, that would be really good fun. I think a really clear one for me, having written a whole life memoir now, it's quite a special feeling to have spent really concentrated time looking at how far I've come. Do you remember the kind of skills tests you had to do? Do you remember what it was like to try and guess the right clothes to wear? Really go back and spend time with those younger selves when you were starting out in your industry, filling in those CVs, just the fact that you have revisited it will make you so much more approachable. 

Anni Townend

And what's your second encouragement? Tanya?

Tanya Shadrick 

This is one I do with people more widely, but I also think for leaders who are carrying real heavy responsibilities. Life is serious, right? It is to take again, take some time out. This is an exercise which ideally should take a morning. A morning of your life, take a morning off work, if you can. Sit somewhere not in your usual space. If you normally sit in a coffee shop, go sit on a backstep somewhere where you're not in your normal routine. And you make a list of 100 things you love. And this really helped me after the near death when I didn't even know what to aim for. I was so lost it was so strange. It was like what do I love? It was so awkward. But then what happens is you start to warm up. And then really interestingly around number 60-70 on the list, you start to surprise things in yourself, you start to tap into your value system, not just the things you like, but what you care about. And then usually, by the time you get to that 90 to 100, those are your big vision things. And there's a lot of energy in that list. Now I look back and so many of the things on that list, I have now found a way to do in life, even while I'm still a wife and mother in a small town. There were ways to do it, but nothing you could have applied for, there was no course I could have signed up for that would have delivered some of the things on those lists I had to make it happen myself. 

Anni Townend

That is a wonderful encouragement to all of you listening to this podcast to write a list of what you love, 100 things. And as we come to your third, encouragement, what would that be?

Tanya Shadrick

This is another thing I'm passionate about, which is how do we speak about the work that we do? I always was proud of my work at the university. But because it didn't fully speak to everything in me, there was always a little moment of disconnect. While I work in Student Recruitment at a university now, I approach those kinds of questions both when I'm asked and when I ask other people as an opportunity to speak about what you care about. It opens up a question. So in short, even if we feel a little ambivalent about our roles, there is nothing to be lost and everything to be gained by speaking simply and with quiet pride about what we do, even if it's not what we want to do forever. Find something in the work you do that is meaningful and valuablen and speak to that. Because then what you're going to find is even if the person you're speaking to doesn't have a job at the moment and feels very shy and embarrassed about that, you're offering them the ability to speak about what they hope to do or what they have done. So when I worked at the hospice, I said, I'm a life story scribe. I meet people in their last days and weeks and they can talk. I created that role and it made a real difference to people and it changed my life. That's the story.

Anni Townend

And a wonderful encouragement to leaders to think about, and talk about with quiet pride. What we really do and why we do it. And what we really care about. Thank you, Tanya, I would love to finish by asking you to read something else from your wonderful book.

Tanya Shadrick 

It's not much, but neither is it nothing. It's from the penultimate chapter of the book, when I have significantly changed my life, I've also made some really serious mistakes, and I've lived with the social consequences of those in my small town. So you see me as someone who's in effect, in her third life, I've taken myself off to a shepherd's hut, I've been given this book deal, and now I have to write the book:

Here in this wooden room on wheels, it is the end of January and a year on my small country begins its retreat from Europe. In the silence, I feel the hut, my tiny island drift away from the protections and constraints of being joined with those other countries. How shrunken life has begun to feel resources and freedoms being daily stripped away, it is so easy to feel in that and without purpose, what use any one small soul. But then a phrase from my time as a hospice scribe returns to me, it's not much, but neither is it nothing. And so I will try and write a book of my own inch by inch that might reach beyond my narrow self and add to the Russian of courage stories are for us all, to share this learning I have, which was only accidental at first, but when I painted the railings in my street, that more of us might find more and many little ways to step out from our circles of safe belonging, to show and share what we know and surprise interest and others who encounter us to be people who simply sit on park benches open and noticing so that a lonely person might feel able to risk a smile, then take a seat and speak, to spend even a few of our spare hours in this way, being calling cards and quiet invitations. 

Anni Townend 

Thank you, Tanya. I absolutely have loved our conversation. And speaking to the last part of your invitation really, to help people to connect with people, how can they best connect with you listeners who would like to know more about you more about what you do, and what you offer?

Tanya Shadrick 

The easiest way, I have a website, which has got all my podcasts, lots of resources for people to use, and that is thecureforsleep.com. And then I'm also over on substack. It's the cure for sleep with Tanya Shadrick on substack. And that's free. And that's the writing project. I have my real conversations with people over on that substack. it's a really safe space if you've never published anything before, because that's the other thing. Not only do you write for my prompts, I then take them and publish them on the book website. So for most people, it's their first publication credit. And now people are getting agents, book deals, they're setting up community writing projects. Because that's the other thing with writing. It's like you can take all the courses in the world, but nobody ever helps you with that crucial thing of going from unpublished to published, that's what my project does. The rest is on you, but I will publish you and I will give you feedback on your short piece of writing. And that's where I also have an ask me anything thread where people can ask questions about writing practice and creative practice. thecureforsleep.com and the cure for sleep on substack. 

Anni Townend 

I encourage you the listener to absolutely take Tanya up on that to check out her website. Sign up for Substack and a huge thank you, Tanya, for our conversation today. I'm smiling with quiet pride in you and all that you've shared and in our conversation so a huge thank you to you.

Tanya Shadrick 

A pleasure. And let's look forward to a walk and talk on the downs. Thank you Anni.

Anni Townend  

That would be really lovely. And also I think you quietly mentioned the possibility of maybe doing some sort of workshop together so to you the listener, listen out, watch out for our sharing around that.

Huge thank you to you and a huge thank you to my support team, the Conscious Marketing Group and to Coco O'Brien, who helps me with the production of the podcast and for creating the wonderful intro and outro music. 

If you would like to listen to more Leaders in Conversation with me Anni Townend do head to my website, annitownend.com And if you would like to contact me directly then please do on anni@annitownend.com 

Thank you for listening. Do subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting with you. And thank you again Tanya for sharing.