Category: career

career · Inspiration · self care · self development · self love

Positive Change

The real KazLeave a comment

The one biggest positive change I’ve made in my life in the last few years is to start to take full responsibility for my life and my decisions. Previous to that I would always want someone to give me their approval when I was doing things. I’d ask for my family view on something I’d like to do, or friends, or even colleagues who barely knew me and if I met with even the slightest disapproval, I would accept it probably isn’t really for me. Even when I felt disappointed by their opinion and felt they didn’t understand my dreams, It would make me doubt that this was the right path for me and I would allow it to be slowly pushed to the side. I never trusted myself, my intuition, my gut to know what was right for me and I think that as women we need to begin to trust ourselves more.

Society has a way of dissolving this inner guidance system. It leaves us doubting ourselves and feeling guilty for doing what is best for ourselves until eventually we just follow “the rules” of how we live and what we are supposed to do with our lives. Lets face it women who challenge these societal expectations can often be seen as “difficult” and “challenging” but are they? Aren’t they just testing the status quo and pushing the boundaries to allow those following behind them less restrictions and limitations in their lives?

Accepting others views as more important than our own gives all of our power away and leaves us living a life that everyone expects of us or that benefits others but not ourselves. I think many girls and women fall into the trap of living their life this way through society’s conditioning that we are here to look after others, we shouldn’t be challenging or argumentative, we should be there to support and nurture and look good but our opinions, hopes and dreams are to be put on the back burner whilst we assist out partners and children to achieve their goals. If we deviate from these expectations we are seen as irrational, bossy, hormonal, unhinged, eccentric, selfish and so much more for not following the traditional pathway of career, partner, marriage, kids, homemaker, nurturer etc…

I have learnt at 48 that we should trust ourselves more. Go inward and stop looking for approval outwardly. Follow your passions, whether it takes you down a traditional path or not, teach the next generation, earlier on than we may have learnt, that it’s ok to be selfish, to live your life as you wish, to become a woman in a male dominated career, to decide not to have children, to never marry, to build your own business, to take risks, be loud, take up space, be unique, wild and crazy without it being a negative.

Women may not be able to be everything to everyone but they can be exactly what they want to be for themselves. Lets show young women this through example and support.

For everyone, life is short. Be true to your passions and trust your gut to lead the way. Your gut knows. Start to hone your intuition, listen to it and how situations make you feel and let it be your guiding system to navigate decisions and situations you are unsure about as well as jump into opportunities that feel amazing to you! Lets cheer on the women in our lives, support our sisters in their life choices and make it the norm, for us to all follow different paths that celebrate our differences without guilt and shame.

career · Education · friendship · Inspiration · parenthood · parenthood · self care · self development · self love

High school taught me….

The real KazLeave a comment

That I didn’t “fit in”

The older I’ve become, the more I wonder if we all feel this way in some respect during those difficult teenage years. Does anyone actually feel totally accepted and comfortable in their own skin and social group throughout their teenage years?

For me, my home life seemed “different” to others. My dad had died when I was 8 years old and my mum was deaf. Both of those things made me self conscious at parents evenings. Mum couldn’t communicate like the other parents, dad wasn’t there. Two things that were enough to make me feel I stood out like a sore thumb. In reality, I didn’t. No one really took any notice or cared enough about my situation at home. Everyone has something that makes them feel like they “stand out” or don’t quite “fit in”

On top of what felt to me like huge flashing beacons of difference, I was also incredibly shy and quiet. This again, created for me a huge insecurity that no one wanted to be around me. I was too quiet, awkward, no fun to be around. Of course none of which was true but that narrative took residence in my mind for a very long time. My shyness often led to situations where if I felt uncomfortable or was put in a situation where I was forced to speak up in front of many others I would go bright red in the face. This would exacerbate the more anxious and self conscious I became. I would feel like I wanted the ground to swallow me up so I could just disappear from the embarrassment of my obvious anxiety and discomfort that everyone could now physically see.

Over the years, I learnt to control this red ripening face reaction to my discomfort. I began to realise that it wasn’t as noticeable as I felt it was to others and those who did notice really didn’t care that much. This took away a lot of my anxiety and fear around this happening and allowed me to take control over how I reacted.

What I took away from High School wasn’t really a great education, I underperformed and under achieved. It wasn’t a supportive friendship group as I had a better group of friends outside of school, than inside its gates. It wasn’t a sense of belonging or safety.

For me school was just a somewhere I felt unable to find my place in, I wasn’t really a neat piece of the schools tapestry. I didn’t belong with the cool kids, because I just wasn’t cool enough. I didn’t belong with the nerdy kids, because I just wasn’t nerdy enough. I didn’t belong with the sporty kids, because I was rubbish at sport. I didn’t fit in any box reliably enough, so I existed between them all. Never really making good friends in any but being around for lots of them.

So school really only taught me to feel I didn’t “fit in”.

career · Inspiration · self care · Self Development

When I grow up

The real KazLeave a comment

Childhood dreams……

When I was a child, I can remember imagining myself becoming a nurse or an author and writing books. My mum didn’t really talk about or encourage big ambition and I never really felt much more was possible than becoming a secretary or having a family of my own. When I daydreamed though I would dream of other more wild and unachievable paths in life, like writing a novel or working as a nurse in a hospital, at least they felt pretty out of reach at the time. I haven’t actually achieved either although I have always worked in a profession where I am caring for others. I almost became a nurse but never quite made it, life threw me a curve ball and took me down a different route and I never came back to it. No regrets there though, I still work in the field of care, which is in my bones but my family took priority and that feels right to me.

My caring career started as a personal journey when my first child was born with Cerebral Palsy when I was 18. That experience determined my path in supporting others who were in a similar position after my personal caring role ended. The thing is I also knew from a very young age I wanted to be a mum, have kids and that was where my heart lay so even though I hadn’t expected to be a young single mum to a disabled child, I was a mum and that felt like where I was supposed to be.

When my son passed away at 13 years old, I then pursued work in the caring arena starting as a childminder, then respite carer for disabled children, a nanny, a carer for elderly, an advocate and now a Social Prescriber for local GP surgeries. I’ve worked in social care most of my adult life and have a passion for helping others. Its a fantastic and rewarding sector but requires a lot of self care too and boundaries, especially when you have experienced social care from a personal perspective on the other end, you need to be able to separate yourself and take a step back.

As for writing, I have always enjoyed putting pen to paper, or now more fingers to the keyboard. I remember as a child my best friend and I would sit for hours with our Victoria Plumb notebooks, writing, talking and imagining our stories being made into books in their own right. Kaz and Suze, famous authors, just like the wonderful Enid Blyton, whose books I was devouring at the time. As a teenager I can remember fanatically chain-reading the Sweet Valley High series of books, whilst my hormones were racing and by the end of my teens I was a proud Stephen King and Dean Koontz horror addict.

It’s interesting because in thinking about this a memory resurfaced of a time when I was around 17/18 and I became quite low. The one and only time in the first 40 years of my life I can recall that I may have possibly had some depression. I remember sitting in my room, not wanting to leave, staying in bed but mostly, I remember writing, mainly poems. I think I still have them somewhere, in the back of a closet. They were quite dark poems and I find them difficult to read even to this day. This time of sadness and introspection soon passed and I moved into becoming a carer, in my personal and professional life and writing took a back seat.

Its intriguing to me that now, at this point in my life where I am going through some quite traumatic major life changes, I have finally come back to writing down my thoughts and seeing where it takes me. This process is becoming therapeutic to me. When I get my thoughts out and onto paper/ screen, everything feels clearer, there’s a clarifying of a situation and an unscrambling of the jumbled up stories that frequent my mind. Some fact and truth, others the result of me overthinking and hoping, catastrophising and stressing. I’m an overthinker and have recently become aware of the stories I can allow myself to create in my head which are not based on fact, so I am learning to come back to what is real. Writing helps with that. So for now this little blog is my therapy I think, my thought decipherer, and the blog allows me to explore ideas and thoughts about myself and that’s enough for me. Who knows maybe one day I’ll get that one book written and become the author I dreamt of being as a child but if nothing else writing heals.

Taylor Swift – Never grow up