Emily Pattullo Of 12 Creative Steps To AFulfilling Life: How Journaling Helped Me Be More Calm, Mindful And Resilient
An Interview With Jake Frankel
Journaling gives us a voice and a means with which to express, and maybe what we write will help someone else one day.
Journaling is a powerful tool to gain clarity and insight especially during challenging times of loss and uncertainty. Writing can cultivate a deeper connection with yourself and provide an outlet for calmness, resilience and mindfulness. When my mom passed on, I found writing to be cathartic. When I read through my journal years later, there were thoughts that I developed into poems, and others that simply provided a deeper insight into myself. In this series I’m speaking with people who use journaling to become more mindful and resilient.
As a part of this series I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Emily Pattullo.
Emily Pattullo is an award-winning author and certified life coach. She is the author of two novels and a non-fiction self-help journal. She has worked in magazine publishing in London and briefly in New Zealand, as well as owned her own writing, editing and proof reading business. She is currently working as a life coach, both in person and online, and also runs creative group workshops. In between times, she is writing another novel, as well as planning for the next in the series of 12 Creative Steps to a Fulfilling Life.
Her passion lies in human potential through creativity. And she is the first person she knows to have been replaced by a robot.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! We really appreciate the courage it takes to publicly share your story of healing. Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your childhood backstory?
As a child I was painfully shy, but always with a burning desire to create, to write. I wrote poems, songs, stories, anything to find a channel through which to express how I was feeling at the time, and then as a way to try and make sense of the world as I grew up. I hated school and was badly bullied, and writing was my sanctuary, a place I could connect with my heart and my feelings. I have always had a fascination with people and what makes them tick, and as a way to try and understand them I wrote songs and played them on my guitar in the hope people would also understand me better. I then eventually began creating characters for stories that then subsequently became books.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about journaling. Have you been writing in your journal for a long time or was there a challenging situation that prompted you to start journal writing? If you feel comfortable sharing the situation with us, it could help other readers.
I had many journals growing up, filled with a variety of creations, but often just words poured onto the page about how I felt. I wrote poems to my parents begging them to let me come home from school, song lyrics about escaping where I was and going somewhere, anywhere less challenging and more safe. Writing about how I felt was always my go to for expressing my struggles with growing up. Even then I seemed to have an understanding of how writing was helping me.
How did journaling help you heal, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?
Writing thoughts and feelings down, in whatever form I chose at the time, gave me an outlet for my emotions and helped make them feel more manageable. It brought me into the present moment and gave me space away from whatever I was experiencing in my life at the time. It gifted me perspective and the ability to really feel what was happening in my body and realize it wasn’t something to be afraid of.
Did journaling help you find more self-compassion and gratitude? Can you share a story about that?
I have so much to be grateful for thanks to journaling. It really helped me understand what was happening for me, and instead of ruminating for hours on something that I had no control over, I wrote about it, created something from it, and basically transmuted my experience into a positive thing, which eventually transformed my entire belief system.
What kind of content goes into your journal? For example, do you free-write, write poems, doodle?
All my writing is mostly free-writing, I have found amazing benefit in just letting the words flow. It’s how I write my novels, for the most part, to the point where sometimes I read back what I’ve written and I don’t remember writing it! Poems and songs too are really just structured flow!
How did you gain a different perspective on life and your emotions while writing in your journal? Can you please share a story about what you mean?
Writing things down, really feeling what I was experiencing emotionally, gave tangibility to something I otherwise found hard to comprehend. It bought me into the present and empowered me to work with those feelings in a constructive way. For example, if I found myself wishing I had someone else’s life, I would ask myself questions like, what do I want? What would really make my life feel more fulfilled? I could then use my imagination to create on paper a whole world for myself, like I would for my novel characters, except that it would be personal to me and what I desired. Sort of like choose your own adventure. That then brought visualization into the mix, so that rather than look at others and how happy they were and wish for the same, I was creating something for myself based on my needs and desires. It’s much easier to go inwards and work with what we have at our disposal than project outwards and try and control someone or something else out there.
In my own journal writing, I ended up creating poems from some of the ideas and one of them won an award. Do you have plans with your journal content?
Out of my journal writing has come many creations and the ability to make sense of the world. My stories have become books. I have performed my songs in public. I write poems for family and friends on special occasions to express how I feel about them and what they mean to me. And also, through the life coaching that I do, in which I encourage the use of creativity as a way to bring clients into the present moment and explore all the emotions that present in a tangible way, I have created an interactive journal. Through the use of writing and drawing, and imagination, the journal invites people to take a journey of self discovery through a 12 step process. It walks them through various stages in which they are given the opportunity to write and draw about each stage and to explore the steps they need to take to live a more fulfilling life. I hope that it empowers people to take back control of their own life experience and create the life they truly desire.
Fantastic. Here is our main question. In my journaling program, I have found that journaling can help people to become more calm, mindful and resilient. Based on your experience and research, can you please share with our readers “five ways that journaling can help you to be more calm, mindful and resilient”?
- Journaling brings us into the present moment, and so inwards, where it’s easier to work with and understand our feelings and emotions.
- Creativity, in all its forms, puts us back in control of our life experience.
- Journaling gives us the opportunity to let our feelings flow onto paper so that we can make sense of what they might mean for us.
- Journaling gives us a voice and a means with which to express, and maybe what we write will help someone else one day.
- Journaling becomes like a friend we can tell anything to, it’s comforting and familiar, and a safe place to write whatever we want in whichever way we choose.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of peace to the greatest amount of people, what would that be?
I would want people to remember the power of creativity. How each of us is creating our own life with every step we take, and to learn to do that from a conscious place, of working with rather than against our feelings and emotions, puts us back in control of what it is we actually want and how we might obtain that. Everything we need is right here, inside us, the outside is just a reflection of what needs to be healed within us. Writing allows us to really focus internally and understand ourselves better and what we truly want to experience in life.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
I think I would very much enjoy meeting and hanging out with Jim Carrey.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
My novels (Silent as the Snow, and Ring Around Rosie) and journal (12 Creative Steps to a Fulfilling Life) are published through https://www.roottorise-publishing.com/
My instagram account is @emilypattullo_writer
Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/emilypattullo.writer/
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued fulfilment and success with your writing!
