 Today, I'm excited to be with Janelle Hardy. She is a member of my Master Heart Business Mentoring Group, and she does really interesting work that I wanted to share with you all. She helps people write their memoirs. First let me say hi to you Janelle. Thanks for being here. Hi, George. I'm really happy to be here. Yeah. So I want to share your bio with the audience, and then we'll get into some tips and sort of why write a memoir and some tips on how to actually get started with doing it. So let me bring up your bio here. So Janelle Hardy is the creator and teacher of an online transformational memoir writing course, and this is really key. Like it's not just about writing your history, but it's the process actually heals. So this course that Janelle you teach is called the Art of Personal Mythmaking. So you use a process that is body-based. So it's not just in the head remembering things, but it's body-based. It's trauma-informed. So it utilizes your life's history, essentially, as a way of healing, right? And you also bring in fairy tales, and the course is themed to modules to support creative people in healing from their life stories as they write their memoirs. So your Janelle's life experiences, I'm going to just continue reading here, Janelle's life experiences growing up in the far north of Canada as a solo mother and artist combined with her studies in anthropology and dance and 13 years of experience doing hands-on healing called structural integration. And that's all created a rich compassion and wide-ranging approach to life story work, writing and transformation. And the best way of learning about Janelle is doing a two-week... Sorry, not two weeks, it's two hour. Although people can do it in two weeks if they want to. Two hour and it's a free online on-demand workshop called Outline Your Memoir. So be sure to check that out. It's free, it's two hours, it's on-demand. So I'm assuming people can watch a little bit, do a little bit. I'll be sure to put the link in the notes below. So the first question I want to ask you, Janelle, is for those who have maybe never really thought about writing their memoir, why, you know, like I said, you know, as I introduced you, it's not just about, okay, well, I was born this year and then this happened and that happened and this happened. It's not just about recounting the facts in a bullet point of what happened in your life, but it's much more than that the way that you teach it. So why is it, why should we write our memoir, especially in the way that you've been teaching people? Oh, good question. Let's take the should out of it. Okay, yeah. I don't love shoulds, so someone told me the shoulds are called the shitty shoulds because they're a way we can beat ourselves up. Yeah, well, why, what's the benefit? What's the, what might people be inspired or, yeah, what motivates people to do this? Yeah, I don't have to inspire anyone to want to write their memoirs. I would say that at least 80% of the people that I mentioned what I do to when they say help people write their memoirs, their eyes light up and they start confessing that they've held a longing to write their memoirs in, that they haven't started, but they know one day they really want to do this. The reasons vary, but it's really quite incredible how many people have actually been holding in their hearts a desire to maybe not write their memoir with the intention of publishing, but examine their life stories, be able to share some of their experiences with children or descendants or loved ones or even their community. And so I approached this work more from the transformational perspective of wanting to offer an opportunity to grow and change. And I, when I first started teaching the art of personal filmmaking, I didn't even know what was memoir work, but I was using a lot of creative writing prompts and discovered that we were generating enough material to get people to the first draft of their memoir. And when I discovered that and I started sharing that and I saw people's eyes light up, I realized that there was a real hunger for support writing memoir that is also oriented towards the support necessary to face the more difficult or painful parts of your life and that the reason so many people were holding onto this desire and doing nothing about it sometimes for over 20 years was of fear of being overwhelmed by certain stories or experiences they had as well as not feeling resourced to know how to go about such an enormous creative project. And I just, I have the tools and skills to offer that support. Yeah. So it really, thank you for sharing that. It's in the process of, like you said, healing through writing and reflection, it's like there's enough material there. And so what if someone says, well, I don't know, maybe there really isn't that much in my life to write about. But yeah, maybe actually some people may have repressed or tried to forget about the past, especially if it's a traumatic situation. Any, any kind of words of wisdom for us on that? I was giggling a little because I have had people say, I don't think I'm very interesting. I don't, you know, I don't have any, any real stories to tell. And it's not true. That's why it's kind of tickles my humor, because everyone is just so interesting. And, and sometimes a coping mechanism is to kind of brush aside or, or push down certain memories or experiences. This is where the body-based focus comes in so handy because where most of us live in, in cultures that really overemphasize the thinking mind and intellectual thought, rationalizing, critiquing, et cetera. And when we cut ourselves off from our body, we actually cut ourselves off from a lot of resource including emotional responses, memory that gets stored in the body. So having done hands-on body work for so long, there's a very popular saying and it really works as the issue is in the tissue. So if we can shift our attention and our awareness into our tissues and, and invite our body into our process, it reveals not just difficult memories, but it reveals delight and beauty and joy that can also get pushed aside when we're not allowing the body to inform our experiences. Yeah, that's, that's really good. Do you have any, you know, let's, speaking of kind of body and grounding this, like maybe you could tell us a story or two of people who have been through your memory workshop and kind of what, what did it do for them? Oh, I have the most wonderful testimonials and just, I can't even dream up what my course does for people until they tell me. One student kind of shifted out of a need to be right and good all the time, which is a really restrictive state to be in when you're trying to be good and get it right and, and avoid mistakes. So one student was able to shift out of that and embrace, you know, the grumpy, the snarky, the more embarrassing memories of being a human teenager, for example. Another student was working on her memoir. So I often, I get people coming into the course from two different directions about half come in wanting the transformational support. They're not really interested in writing a memoir, but they're creative people. So they like the idea and they're more interested in the support that I offer for healing and that other people come in really interested in writing their memoir, maybe with a bit of awareness that healing support might be useful, but not seeking it out. And then it all kind of moves into the one flow. So I had another student who's a professional writer show up having been working on her memoir for years and getting nowhere. So kind of a third stream of people that show up are people who have actually started writing, but get stuck in the messy middle of the creative project and, and realize that they just need some support and can't do it all alone. And so she was kind of in that state. And yeah. And so she by the end of this was in my live course, I have a self directed in a live version, but she had discovered a completely new direction and themes for the story, which really supported her in moving forward because often a lack of clarity of the core theme is part of how we can get stuck is just generating things without an orientation towards structure. And so she discovered this real clarity about the theme of her memoir. Because with memoirs, we don't write everything in our life. We work with a theme. And she managed to generate even more writing to reorganize the writing that she had and to get a book proposal written or almost finished, I think, which if you're aiming for publishing is a really necessary part of the process. Wow, that's fascinating that it's around around the theme. Now, how, how might someone choose that theme? Because, of course, our lives can be seen from many different angles. So yeah, so if somebody says, well, gosh, I could look at this way or that way, my, my, my professional life, my personal life or this situation or this relationship. Yeah, how do you, how do you advise them to that? Well, this is where my Outline Your Memoir workshop comes in and fairy tales. So fairy tales. Okay, yeah. Tell us about that. Why, why, why using fairy tales in this part of this board? I'll, I'll broaden it to ancient tales, not just fairy tales, but fairy tales is the most, most well known version of ancient tales. I, I truly believe that there are forces outside of our individual selves available in the world, archetypal forces and stories that hold medicine and hold energy and hold cultural knowing and wisdom that are much more ancient than us as a single human. And so ancient tales are actually one of those culturally generated forces that come out of telling and retelling and traditions of oral history. So this is important because for most of humanity, we were not literate, broadly literate. And so story and knowledge and meaning and understanding was always passed down through the more ephemeral arts, what, what are now considered in most cultures as not as important as the big thinking processes, but are actually incredibly important hand, handwork, textiles, ceramics, dance, storytelling are always that we create meaning. And so with storytelling, we have ancient tales that have been certain tales have been traced back to being 6,000 years old or more through linguistic studies. And when you consider a story that has managed to survive that long through waves of colonization and waves of different kinds of religions taking over an area and a culture through language changes, through mostly in a tradition of oral history until the last one or 200 years really when things started to get written down. When we choose an ancient tale that resonates with us and we start to work with it, these stories that seem quite simple. They start revealing an incredible amount of guidance and from the perspective of finding a theme or a pattern to work with and a force, the resonating force in your life, the ancient tale that we choose immediately offers us a narrative arc and two or three themes that we can work with and set everything else aside until the next memoir. So the nice thing about memoir work is it's not just one and done. It's not like an autobiography, which is a linear list of your life and events, but a memoir is a writing memoir as a way of working with yourself and a certain experience or theme to understand more deeply yourself in that context. So my Outline New Memoir Workshop actually prefer people take it before they sign up for my course because then I don't have to explain and educate how important working with something like a fairy tale or a myth actually is to the rest of the process unfolding. Yeah, this is very helpful and also you just mentioned this difference between autobiography and memoir and that's really good as well. It's like autobiographical, it's more about listing facts. It's like a personal history, whereas a memoir is really telling a story and reframing it into something really meaningful. So can you give us some tips? So let's say someone is or kind of walk us through the structure of that free two-hour workshop. Like what are we actually doing during that time? It's a really productive workshop. We start in the recording. I actually explain a fair bit about my own self and my background and my life for two reasons. One is so you get to know me as a teacher if you're thinking about my work but also to demonstrate by example how I'm selecting the different events of my life to illustrate how I got to the point where I teach this kind of work. So it's a bit of a very short storytelling and action sort of exercise and then I do three things in order. I get people to choose a favorite ancient tale and I talk people through what to do if they really can't figure that out. Sometimes it's a bit of a foreign concept. We've really moved away from storytelling as a way of life in the sense of storytelling to each other. We consume a lot of story because through TV and film but that's a little different than the tradition of speaking into each other. So sometimes it's such a new concept and so I have some options if you can't figure out a favorite ancient tale right away and then we make a timeline of that. I'm not going to give it all away because it takes a lot more time to explain than the time we've got together but we make a timeline not of our own lives but of the fairy tale first and then we go through a document I provide. It's called the rites of passage document. We go through that so that people have a chance to take in all the possibility of experiences in your life that are transformative. So it's a document that is really great as a writing prompt resource. If someone thinks they don't have a lot of good stories for example if they circle even five things on that document that'll generate a bunch of stories but what we actually do next is we create a life story timeline and we put the things that are relevant from the rites of passage document into the life story timeline and so here's where we actually do get linear even though my experience and perception of time is that it's much more circular. It really helps to just make a linear timeline from start to finish so we create a life story timeline and the two hour workshop is really not enough time to get it all done but it's enough time for me to set people on their process to feel like they know how to organize ideas and material going forward if they want to keep working on their own or even in my course they still have to generate that material. And then the last step is actually reflecting back onto the two timelines to look for shared patterns and themes and without fail I've taught this workshop live over 15 times now in the last year and a half without fail there's always some really cool insight that arises and offers a reframing of someone's ideas about themselves in their life so and the reframing is really important because we get so stuck in our ideas of who we are and what we've experienced that that when we get stuck in a specific idea we don't allow all the other memories and options and experiences and possibilities available to us into our consciousness and so the reframing opens things up makes things more spacious for us as we kind of turn around and look down and back in our own lives. Wow that sounds like such a rich workshop and you're able to accomplish this in two hours it's amazing and well you've done it you've done it more than a dozen times so of course when people register they're seeing the latest version of it so thank you so much for for sharing that process I will again put the link so those of you watching this look below the video or above wherever the links are and find the link to the two-hour on-demand free outline your memoir workshop and you also have a couple other resources I want to just mention that I will link in the notes of the video which is one of them is 10 impactful memoir writing prompts for healing and transformation so that's that's one link another link is 10 gentle yet effective ways to heal painful memories using writing and your body so that's really that's there as well so for those people who are thinking gosh okay yes I want to do this two-hour online workshop and if they need more after that you have the the complete course for them to do so tell us about tell us a bit about that people like how long is the full course if they wanted to take it I don't know if it's too much to talk about here but give us a quick sense of that a quick overview yeah so those three links will actually part of signing up you'll get an invitation into the self-directed version of my course which is available for sign up at any time I teach the same material two different ways one is self-directed which is 13 modules contained in a platform off of Facebook called Mighty Networks which includes the course as well as the community space and so with the self-directed version of course it's cheaper because it's less intensive for me to offer you get lifetime access to the material as well as the online community and monthly coaching calls from me which are quite informal they're just all about showing up to address whatever healing and creative writing challenges are arising for folks so that's the self-directed version and then once or twice a year I teach the same thing live so when someone signs up for the live version in addition to everything in the self-directed version and some people actually upgrade from self-directed to live we have five months of weekly calls in small class sizes so my classes are always between five and 12 people per class because it's really designed for discussion and connection and part of the healing process is actually showing up together to explore our stories through the lens of the different really cool themes in my modules and be able to be in a space that is safe and solid enough to share very openly and honestly wherever you're at so it's my favorite thing teaching the live version nice that's really great well the place of course is to start is the free two-hour practical workshop that's online so folks you know go ahead and do that and you'll you'll have a really good sense of what your outline's going to be and then whether or not you want to continue doing the work with Janelle to do it on your own so you know one of the things I guess as we close off is this process of kind of reflecting and mining the meaningful stories in our life I think it can also be used in our you know like I talked to people a lot a lot about content creation for for their business but of course when we're creating an authentic business the content ideally should be as personal as possible or as personally meaningful as possible so I can imagine that this memoir writing process also creates potential content for business it does actually one of my testimonials was from a naturopathic doctor who took my course a few years ago and one of the things she commented she was in the middle of building her practice and her website and business online and she she shared that she was so excited that she had so many ideas for blog posts and content for her business through the process of working with her life story so it's very cool to hear that's yeah not surprised so I look forward to seeing how people benefit from that and thank you so much Janelle for doing your work any any final kind of words of send-off for us as we close this um this interview oh um well I would just say everyone is interesting and everyone has a story and there are always people interested in honestly told story no matter what you might think of it yeah thank you so much Janelle thank you