Let’s see if we can sit down long enough to listen

I met my new dentist yesterday. He’s actually lovely. The ‘actually’ is completely unfair; there’s no reason he wouldn’t be lovely. Except for all the reasons in my head, most of which go back to primary school (where there weren’t even any dentists).

Disappointing the authority figures around me, and being humiliated as a result, looms large in my internal world. The ‘fact’ grown-ups somehow take against me and shame me – for not finding my exercise book in my tidy tray fast enough, not running fast enough around the block, not understanding the unwritten rules of social interaction or where the ball is going (usually at my face) – is not based on up-to-date information about me, or about the world. It’s about a 1980s primary school.

I am older now than any teacher is likely to have been in any of my primary school memories. My dentist does not see the child my brain thinks I become when I walk into his room (and, because he is a human being, potentially very likely doesn’t see himself as a ‘proper’ adult because nobody sees themselves as a proper adult; we all believe other people are proper adults and we are just pretending). He is an adult talking to another adult, with genuine interest in who I am and what I do. And because I have built my creative confidence muscles through regular use and can ‘what if’ my way beyond my fears, I can resist going into fear or victim mode and choose to show up instead as the person everyone in the world outside my head – everyone except me – knows I truly am. 

Anyway, none of that is the point (Not anywhere outside my brain, anyway). The point is how little I could concentrate before going to the dentist. 

I call that feeling beginner’s call, when I can feel in all of my body that beforeness. It reminds me of the feeling of time having stopped as stage management over the tannoy called me to my position for curtain-up. You can’t do anything in those moments of ‘before’. You can only wait, and focus on what’s about to happen.

Which is fine when it’s five minutes. The problem with anxiety, if it goes unchecked, is you can end up letting yourself live there. And (worse) thinking that’s helpful.

Luckily, my inner line-manager knows all about ‘beginner’s call’. They know the time before I do something new or challenging feels like this and they know something far more important I would otherwise forget: that it’s okay to feel this way. Therefore, the line-manager makes reminding myself this is something that happens, and needs time around it means taking that time is company policy. 

When I came back from the dentist – who, as mentioned, was lovely – I did more of my work than I had in double the time before. There was no beginner’s call feeling. I could be in my own head and body. I could take my time. And when I take my time, instead of pushing myself to work at someone else’s speed, what I do is deeper, richer and better than if I’d forced it before.

Join me for Coffee & Creativity at Olympic Studios or the Century Club this month, or visit the Writers’ Gym for a Creative Cuppa online every week.

What’s perhaps saddest about these primary school memories is I was one of the luckier ones. I had a diagnosis. They knew I had learning difficulties (mainly dyspraxia, and mild dyslexia). But the message was always, fundamentally, disappointment. I was a nuisance. I was too slow. I shouldn’t find difficult the things I found difficult. Part of it was disguised as a compliment: they knew I was intelligent, but shy. I left primary and secondary school in a state of permanent hurry, which – ironically rather than coincidentally – reflects the posture problems around learning to walk by staggering forward instead of finding my own centre of gravity. This fear of being slow has become an ingrained habit of being early, and natural disorganisation and motor function issues means I relish in recognising what it’s helpful to delegate, and what it’s helpful to do myself taking as much time as I need. My inner line-manager reminds me to be proud of this. I’m not disappointed in who I am. I’m curious about what helps me be the best version of who I am.

I talk to my freelance-career-building clients about our line-manager relationships a lot. It’s often about noticing when our line-manager (us) is recognising our efforts or milking us for all the energy we have.

My back has been better since I noticed my tendency to really, really believe I ‘had’ to be at my desk. (Different had too, around working harder instead of better.)

The truth? The actual truth, not what it says about me but what it purely, simply is? That’s less complicated:

I write better when I move.

And by ‘move’ I don’t even mean standing up, sitting well, talking breaks to move my neck and back or walk around. I mean move from the desk to the sofa.

Longhand, or laptop doing what it’s named for and being on my lap, more happens when I move around.

Because that’s an important part of writing ourselves a truer story than we might have been telling ourselves. Building a healthy professional and personal life often needs to look less like hurry and a lot more like this:

Think on the Page: 

How might your inner line-manager support you this week?

Remember these questions work best if you let them take you by surprise. Start writing before you know exactly what’s on its way. You’re welcome to share in comments, but these aren’t for me or for anyone else – they’re for you.

1. If your line-manager gave you one piece of advice about how you talk to yourself in your head, what might they say?
2. When does your line-manager need to step it and ask you to recognise your efforts before leaping straight to the next thing on the list?
3. If they gave you one suggestion for your work or life, what would it be?

InkCouragement is the newsletter of Rachel Knightley Coaching and The Writers’ Gym podcast and membership, online and in London.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3GE0rLJGiOkIN8k9GEnW5g?si=4b0fea00759f4b77

A book birthday, a heat wave boundary and an ode to Sir Michael Palin

Feel free to suggest alternatives, but if I had to show the aliens the best of humanity I think I’d start by exhibiting Michael Palin.

You would say that, you might say. You’re a creative confidence coach. You work with jigsaw careers. You help people develop professional and personal happiness through unearthing all the interests currently on their page/in their world, and those yet to be part of the picture. Michael Palin (you might say) personifies the value of a jigsaw career. Acting, writing, presenting and traveling the world (with a predilection for its most difficult bits) aren’t obvious links for every person who does any one of those things, any more than having clients who range in age from six to eighty is normal for every coach. It’s about knowing who you are and not thinking you have to choose between the aspects of your identity, but celebrating the entirety.

Well, yes. 

But, more importantly, no.

It’s the ‘nice’ thing. 

Or, rather, it’s the misunderstandings about niceness and what niceness (when there’s clarity beneath it) allows him to create.

In case you don’t know (though you almost inevitably do), the first thing people say about Michael Palin isn’t the BAFTA or the knighthood; it isn’t even Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Around the World in Eighty Days. It’s how nice he is.

But here’s the thing about ‘nice’. There’s what it is – and then there’s what it really is. 

Why I would make Michael Palin ambassador for my species is I believe his niceness is the antithesis of the ‘I don’t mind, it doesn’t matter’ pseudo-niceness, the one that leaves us waiting politely for the world to guess what we need and want. The one that leaves us living in the gap between who we are inside and who we want to be in the world. 

As I think about Michael Palin and the life lesson he’s been to me, I’m reminded of what was told to me as an anecdote but lives in me as a cautionary tale. A former teacher who was a massive role model to me had a number of catchphrases she’d inherited from her own adults, one of which was ‘I want don’t get’. Years after I’d left school and was studying for my PhD, she shared with me that when her father found out she would have liked to do more further study herself, he asked why she hadn’t said anything. Her answer – which she even didn’t say aloud to him then – was because that phrase was his phrase and she’d believed it.

Gratitude is not the opposite of vision. It’s not the opposite of ambition. For ourselves, or for the change we can make in our world. But our minds can make assumptions that keep us small; keep us waiting for something that doesn’t know we’re there. Or, that doesn’t exist until we initiate it and make it exist. 

Putting together a jigsaw career doesn’t come from the kind the pseudo-nice of waiting to be summoned, or doing what we’ve internalised we ‘should’ do and not looking at the distant, still-vague horizons of our possibilities. Michael Palin’s niceness is not that of waiting politely on life’s corner but of moving through its water. His awareness of what’s around him, his appreciation of people, places, art and life is not instead of being the engine, seeing what you want to create and putting your strength behind creating it, but because of it.

Last Monday evening I saw Palin speak at a private venue in London. One of the things he talked about was the greatly-beloved Knights who say Ni scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: how physically uncomfortable filming was; how convinced he was – as his woolly armour stuck to him in the unpleasant weather and got heavier with every take – that it wouldn’t be worth it. It wouldn’t be funny. 

Even as he spoke of it he instinctively did the voice of ‘Ni’, and while no one in the audience joined in you could feel us all doing so in our heads. There is so much love for that scene and concept. But the point in telling the story was he really thought it wasn’t going to be funny. Not worth the discomfort. He was laughing at himself when he told the story, but it brought up a question for me which I asked at the end. He’d pushed back on the Knights Who Say Ni because of personal discomfort first and thinking it wasn’t funny second. And he’d been wrong. But what about when he’d been right? What happens in writing partnerships when you see something really is going the wrong way? Where’s the line between peace and politeness on one side, and the right thing for the work on the other?

As I expected, he didn’t really answer directly – although he was (unsurprisingly) lovely in talking about it. I don’t think this was conscious avoidance; I think this is one we genuinely don’t know until we’re in the moment. Because even when you have been nice for a living, including through the most difficult bits of the world, it doesn’t mean you’re a pushover. ‘I don’t mind’ doesn’t create art, or life. Having a sense of what we want to create does. Being nice is how to work with and appreciate people as we consistently do the work of creating the art, work and life we want. That’s the real power of nice. 

Another thing Palin mentioned on Monday that is great jigsaw-career advice: he was the fifth person to be asked to do Around The World in Eighty Days. Even now as second in the queue behind Attenborough as national treasure of travel, it’s important to remember that (also like Attenborough) there was no God-given decree. Just as Attenborough only ended up in front of the Zoo Quest camera when someone was ill, we do not know what our current circumstances could be Chapter One of, but creative confidence means asking ourselves how, not if, we take those circumstances forward.

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My first short story collection, Beyond Glass, will be five years old this Wednesday 27 May. I’m running a daily Instagram giveaway in the UK with online options if you’re outside the UK. Join in here. 

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Kindness has often been described as niceness with boundaries, and niceness as kindness without boundaries. Being kind to the work we’re creating means setting those boundaries, knowing our values and our direction of travel. It means creating a map of a land that isn’t only uncharted but doesn’t even exist yet, and won’t until we commit to creating it.

Boundaries around our time (for being not at work in some of our cases; for showing up for our writing in others) actually gets better results for our friends and family, clients and colleagues not to mention ourselves, than having no boundaries at all – which leaves us unfulfilled, tired and permanently in the waiting room for work to call us in. The things Palin has said no to as much as the things he’s said yes to are how he gets to do what’s most important to be done.

That’s what I want the aliens to know. What we do is important. But how we do it, and how wholeheartedly we choose what we do and (see photo of me in the heatwave) don’tdo, can be more important still.

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Think on the Page…

1. If there’s a phrase you’ve inherited, what is it? Whose voice do you hear it in?
2. In what ways do you agree, and disagree, with that phrase now?
3. How do your circumstances or values differ from the person who said it?
4. If that phrase weren’t true anymore, what words could be true instead?

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InkCouragement is the newsletter of Rachel Knightley Coaching and The Writers’ Gym podcast and membership, online and in London.

Writing the circumstances of writing.

Behind my desk is a bookshelf. 

Either side of that bookshelf is a wall. 

If I were to turn around and knock on the wall, I would be reassured of its wall-ness.

I’ll come back to the wall in a moment.

A lot of people looking to find their voice – and their time – and their writing life – start by saying ‘I don’t have enough time.’

More often than not, the belief is something like this:

The amount of time I have in my life will need to get bigger before I can give any of it to the thing that I have come to you saying I want to do.’

It took me a PhD and a decade before I came close to shaking my own version of that belief (or accepting I had it in the first place). Which is why I do what I do now. Writing is important. I do a lot of that. But freeing writers to write is important too. A block is a block is a block, even when it’s one of permission.

So when I meet this, or something related to it, I sometimes go and knock on one of those walls. 

When we put time around our writing, the boundary that exists around that time needs to be as real to us as to that wall. 

That wall isn’t a wall because someone tells me it’s okay for it to be a wall.

It’s a wall. I can’t walk through it and neither can you.

That belief (or perhaps we could call it a realisation?) doesn’t begin with it being real to everyone else in my family, friendship group and work life. 

The reality begins with me, if it is to become real to anyone else.

We design the wall. We build the wall. We can do it in seconds. Except usually it’s taken us years to realise we can do it in seconds.

This is my time. This is my writing’s time. So that my writing exists, my time exists. And it’s mine.

So when someone says ‘Can you do this at this time?’ the answer doesn’t need to be a nasty no; it can be a very loving and (if necessary) repetitive declaration of fact. I’m not free at that time. How about this other time…

I need to be able to believe in my no. Which doesn’t start by having solid feelings of my own permission. 

It starts by committing to a behaviour.

Creating a reality.

Repeating and stabilising the reality.

Until that’s the real story.

Not a bad warm-up for the actual writing you’ve created it for…

Adapted from this week’s InkCouragement with Dr Rachel Knightley on The Writers’ Gym Podcast. Listen on Apple, Spotify, Podbean or wherever you get your podcasts.

Visit RachelKnightleyCoaching.com for more.

An interview with Doug Naylor this week, and a theatre car park in Hayes in 1995

I learnt about DNA at school. Probably. I also probably learnt about viruses, evolution and life and death. But school science lessons involved a LOT of copying down sentences from the board while not feeling anywhere near confident (or anywhere near engaged) enough to follow, let alone enjoy and connect. Home life, on the other hand, involved the far clearer teachings of the gestalt entity Grant Naylor. 

Rob Grant and Doug Naylor formed their writing partnership as students, prior to working on Spitting Image (yes, including The Chicken Song), the Ten Percenters and Red Dwarf. Realising they were on the wrong educational course for who they were was an important learning experience, as was taking control of their own direction to go somewhere very different. They called themselves a gestalt entity because – as Legion would illustrate – the whole was greater than the sum of its parts (although, their bio in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers stressed, for tax reasons they had completely separate wives). Doug’s interview with me on the Writers’ Gym this week pays tribute to Rob, whose death was announced the day before we were due to record. Doug is enormously generous about sharing what working closely with someone truly means, and how the lonelier aspects of writing – particularly our old friend Imposter Syndrome – don’t get smaller just because the spotlight gets bigger.

‘In space no one can hear you cha-cha-cha.’

One of my favourite Red Dwarf quotes was spoken by a virus turned humanoid, tap-dancing on the walkway of the edge of the Jupiter Mining Corporation spaceship while Lister tried to focus on fixing it: It’s such a neat reworking of the even by then clichéd science fiction line, a great example of the point Grant Naylor always made of not giving you the science fiction tick-boxes you expected (Doug talks about the one exception he pushed back on being Kryten). But it also, as a figment of Lister’s imagination, reflects the through line of what I really feel Red Dwarf taught me (see also anxiety, choice and freedom) is what Lister’s survival and even enjoyment of his life as the last human, three million years from home reflects all along: no amount of ‘why’ is going to improve the situation. It’s the ‘what next’ and the ‘how’.

‘Smoke me a kipper. I’ll be back for breakfast.’

Ace Rimmer. Oh God, Ace Rimmer. Chris Barrie, really. And the Ace wig. When I was in Year Eight we went to see Chris Barrie’s live show and while we were waiting in the foyer after the tannoy called out numberplate and we had to go outside as our car had been broken into. They’d taken nothing – our crappy cassette player was still in place – and I was absolutely in pieces that I wouldn’t get to meet Chris Barrie. But we went back in and we were in time and I’m not sure I managed three coherent words while my mum chatted to him about car insurance.

I digress. 

Doug and I talk on the podcast about how Rimmer doesn’t get the joke of the circumstances the way Lister does: from their opening conversation of The End (Red Dwarf’s beginning), Rimmer is already in a competition only he is playing, forsaking the potential to be truly loved and respected because everyone is the enemy, the competition. Whereas Lister, the one person lower down the pecking order than him, has friends and ethics and a sense of who he truly is, beyond who anyone tells him to be. Whereas the story Rimmer tells himself is his brothers got all the looks and all the breaks. Even when Rimmer meets another version of himself in Dimension Jump, he treats him not as a chance to learn but even more desperate competition.

Rimmer has always blamed his shortcomings on not having the breaks or looks his brothers had. When he meets an alternate version of himself — a hero — it’s because he got a break the other guy didn’t. Ace tells Lister, out of Rimmer’s hearing, what the one difference in their lives actually was: he was kept down a year at school and Rimmer wasn’t: 

Ace: By his terms, he got the break. But being kept down a year made me… made me buckle down. Made me fight back. And I’ve been fighting back ever since.

Lister: While he spent the rest of his life making excuses.

Rimmer: Maybe he’s right. Maybe I did get the lucky break.

The iconic quote Ace says instead of goodbye manages to be both silly and optimistic. For Ace, and for Lister, there’s always a next chapter and they’re not its victim or its subject; they’re its writer. 

‘A moon cannot make light, right? And yet there’s such a thing as moonlight… but the sun can’t make moonlight without the moon. And the moon can’t make moonlight without the sun. So who’s making the moonlight?… Even though a moon cannot make light, moonlight exists. Like you. Smeghead.’

In The Promised Land, which I reviewed for Starburst Magazine after my first interview with Doug, is one of the more undisguisedly moving, scientifically and emotionally accurate conversations in the Red Dwarf universes. 

A deep-dive on the same idea behind one of my favourite lyrics of all time, ‘I don’t stand in my own light’, which I’d also vote for as the best writing reminder of all time: you can’t show up perfect, but you can show up. And by simply being part of the infinite chorus of voices you’re doing more good than you ever get to find out about. On that, in case you need the reminder (and I know I do) I’ve had two people in my extended network tell me things I’ve written have really spoken to them this week. Did they press like? Did they share it with someone else? No. But the good was happening. Everything we write is moon or sun to someone or something. We might not see it from where we are, but that doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t. So keep writing, and trust there is moonlight.

Download Doug Naylor’s interview on The Writers’ Gym Podcast on Podbean, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Build creative confidence and explore the power of your stories online or in person at writersgym.com and rachelknightley.com

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