Women in Wellness

Supporting People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Gratitude to Candice Georgiadis and Authority Magazine for this opportunity

Creativity opens us up to living fully. Creativity can be absolutely anything, in anything you do. Moving into a space of flow and openness. It opens us up to a force bigger than ourselves. It helps in healing trauma, and it brings joy and happiness in a way that very few other things do. Creativity is a massive ‘life tweak’ for all of us.

Asa part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Patti Clark.

Author Patti Clark has been described as a cross between Elizabeth Gilbert and Julia Cameron. Patti is an award winning, international best-selling author, accomplished speaker and workshop leader dedicated to helping people through various life transitions on their journey. As author of This Way Up: Seven Tools for Unleashing Your Creative Self and Transforming Your Life, Patti has been featured on TVNZ’s Breakfast Show, and her work has been featured in numerous publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Mindful Word, and Thrive Global.

This Way Up is the Winner of International Excellence Self-Help Book of the Year.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?

Thank you for having me. My backstory is a bit long and convoluted, so I’ll try to keep it relatively short. I was raised in a pretty chaotic home in the San Francisco Bay Area in the ’60s and ’70s. My mother was an alcoholic who died when I was 16 and my dad was a workaholic and ‘functioning’ alcoholic… for whatever that is worth. And being in San Francisco during this period, drugs were readily available, and I was in a lot of pain growing up, so drugs and alcohol helped numb the pain. Fast forward to my twenties, I was living in Alaska bartending and living a crazy life, unhealthy in every way; and finally about six years later, two days before my 30th birthday, I went to my first meeting and began my recovery journey. My partner and I were wanting to start a family, and I was determined to be a better mother to my children than my mother was to me.

My husband and I moved to New Zealand, where we live now, in 1992 and we raised our children here. I started running workshops for teens here in the mid 90’s, and eventually began a charitable trust here called Teen-Esteem Workshops. Eventually some women in the area wanted to experience a similar workshop to these, so my friend and I started running workshops for women around creativity and empowerment. And eventually, I started writing my first book, This Way Up: Seven Tools for Unleashing Your Creative Self and Transforming Your life, which was published by She Writes Press in 2016.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?

The story that means the most to me, may not be the most interesting to everyone else, but it was incredibly impactful to me, so I’ll share that here. In 2006, when my son, Lukas, was 12, we used to go from our small town in Thames up to Auckland for him to go to the Orthodontist. We went once a month and it was a day out for us; he’d miss school, we’d go to the orthodontist, then go out to lunch and then go to the big Borders Book Store and hang out and a peruse books. We’d each take a couple into the café to look at while I had a coffee and he had a hot chocolate. I’d usually be looking at self-help books, taking notes to add pieces to my workshops. At one point, I read something out loud to Lukas, and he looked up, put his hand over the book and said: “Mum you’ve been saying this stuff to me since I was little; when are you going to quit using other people’s stuff and write your own book?”

I stopped, frozen and realized that I had to do it, I had to write a book. I had been telling my sons that they could do anything, that they needed to believe in themselves … and if I didn’t follow this advise and do it myself, then I was afraid my sons would see me as a fraud and not believe my own words. So I started writing my book that very day when I got home. It took ten years! But I finished it, and it got published, and I am incredibly grateful to my son for reflecting my mirror back at me.

Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Trying to do it all, all the time, all by myself. When I first started running workshops, I thought I had to do everything myself. I did everything on a shoe string and didn’t want to ‘bother’ anyone else. I planned the workshops, ran the workshops, did the budgeting, wrote the grants and all of the accountability documents. It was exhausting! I knew it was good, important work, and I got great feedback from participants, but I was burning out and exhausted. I had two young sons that I was raising, taking care of our home while my husband worked full time earning most of the money, so I felt like I had to do everything on my own and not spend any more than necessary on organizing. And what I learned is — ask for help! Get a team, delegate; I had to acknowledge the negative voices that told me to do more in less time for less money, but then I had to work to get past that and acknowledge that I was worth more than that.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Oh I am grateful to so many people along the way. First of all, my sons, Lukas and Devin, who have encouraged me every step of the way, and who are just amazing people. Then my husband who supported me in all my dreams, never discounting them, and often helping me problem solve through them. But in terms of growing as an author and helping me in that field, the two people that I am most grateful to are my publisher Brooke Warner who has guided so many women through the mine field of publication, and to my publicist Joanne McCall who helped me navigate the crazy world of marketing oneself as an author and speaker. It’s crazy out there, especially if you are new to it all. With both Brooke and Joanne, I would get off the phone and cry and think I don’t know how to do this stuff, it’s too hard, I give up… but I didn’t give up and eventually I found myself doing the things, like being on panels, being on TV and on podcasts, that I had been terrified to do. Women supporting women. Thank goodness for women with broad shoulders; we’re all standing on the shoulders of women who walked before us.

Ok perfect. Now let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?

I think it’s important work … the workshops for teens, for women and my books. I think a quote from a review of my book might help:

“Clark speaks to the woman who thinks it’s too late to start a new life. She offers optimism, insight, and a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Whether you suffer from empty nest syndrome, divorce, the loss of a loved one, midlife crisis, or all of the above. You can heal. You can discover a richer existence.

And this book is precisely what you need to help get you there”

I have teens, now as young adults, that have come up to me and said: “You know that stuff you taught us in those workshops, I’m still using it, it’s still helping me.”

And women who have read my book and done online workshops still contact me telling me that some of the skills they learned have made them a better mother, a better partner, a better friend. The ripple effect should never be under valued.

Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.

Hmmmm, top five. Well I guess I should go to my book and look at five of the tools offered there:

Using Creative Visualisation; practicing Positive Psychology; practicing forgiveness, focusing intention, and practicing Gratitude for what you have right now. And of course Creativity. I know that’s six…

1. Creative Visualization, for those of you not familiar with the term is the art of using mental imagery and affirmation to produce positive changes in your life. The book, published in 1978 by Shakti Gawain, was my first real ‘self-help’ book that really hit home. Gawain’s clear writing style and vivid examples made Creative Visualization easy to read and so compelling. Gawain’s simple yet powerful techniques were so easy to use and worked almost miraculously the first time I used it, and made me an avid follower ever since.
2. Positive Psychology is the scientific study of what makes life most worth living (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). It studies “positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions and it aims to improve a person’s quality of life. Positive psychology focuses on both individual and societal well-being. I loved it the first time I took a character strengths test. It helped me learn more about my best and strongest qualities and how to use these strengths to heighten my own well being and help others to access their own strengths. (Good free resource: https://www.viacharacter.org/)
3. Practicing Forgiveness is essential to my own well being and is vital in the work I do with people. I love Annie Lamott’s quote: “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.” Sue Monk Kidd said: “People in general would rather die than forgive. It’s that hard. If God said in plain language: “I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,” a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.” It’s one of the hardest things that a lot of people say they face, and yet forgiving is setting yourself free, it’s the key to unlock the gate to wellness.
4. Focusing Intention every morning sets my day up. I have learned over time, that starting my day with some journalling, a brief meditation and and a clear intention for my day sets me up not only for success in my day, but for a much more joyful day.
5. Practicing Gratitude in all I do. I say three things outloud every morning before I start my day. Sometimes I journal about it too, but I aways say what I am grateful for, first thing upon waking. Research has shown that practicing gratitude actually changes our brain. It is vital for creating new, more positive synaptic pathways. I could write and talk about this for hours… but here is not the space. But I cannot stress this enough… if anyone starts practicing gratitude right now, just a few minutes every day focusing on the good, being grateful for what is instead of what isn’t, their life will change… guaranteed.
6. Creativity opens us up to living fully. Creativity can be absolutely anything, in anything you do. Moving into a space of flow and openness. It opens us up to a force bigger than ourselves. It helps in healing trauma, and it brings joy and happiness in a way that very few other things do. Creativity is a massive ‘life tweak’ for all of us.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?

It would be helping everyone know that they are OK, just as they are. That harsh critical negative voice that lives in your head, that imposter syndrom holding your back, that belief that you have to be small to be ok in this world is not true. Be You! Be All of You. You as an individual have so much to give to this world. Let’s all hold each other up and support each other.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

I wish I had learned/heard that I was OK just as I was, that I didn’t need to be like anyone else, that I was good enough; I wish I had learned earlier that drinking and using didn’t make my life better, that would only exacerbate the problems; I wish I had been told that asking for help and getting support was a strength, not a weakness; I wish someone had told me about and taught me how to meditate a lot earlier — it would have saved a lot of spin outs; and I wish someone had led me to therapy earlier to help shed my demons, I thought your had to be really ‘sick’ to go to therapy… whereas there was a lot of stuff I could not heal on my own and I really needed professional help.

Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?

They are all so important! But I guess mental health is closest to my heart, due to my own mental health journey. But with that said, unless we tackle sustainability and climate change there will be no future for my kids and grandkids, so that is massively important to me. And I guess I’m hoping that with mental health help, more people will realize how important all the other problems are as well, and that unity is the reality, and if we are indeed all one, then we have to work to save the planet for all of us.

What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?

https://www.patticlark.org/ https://www.facebook.com/ThisWayUpBook https://twitter.com/PattiClark1 https://patticlark.medium.com/ https://www.instagram.com/thiswayupbook/?hl=en

Thank you for these fantastic insights!