Writing Around the Table Using Emotional Intelligence

Diana Reyers, Founder of Daring to Share Global™

It has been a while since I posted here because my days became full with creating the MasterClass Series and moving through the Pilot Project. I intended to write the first draft of my memoir alongside the Pilot participants and post my writing journey while moving through the WorkBook. Alas, we discovered that the process needed to be changed from "a 12-week" to "a Step-by-Step" Memoir-Writing program because writing your story cannot be a challenge with the expectation to complete it in three months. It needs to be savoured while reflecting on everything that bubbles up, and then processed to gain clarity about what to write, how to write it, and why it is being written. This requires time and however much you need.

With that being said, I did write four chapters of my memoir, Around the Table; Daring to Share My Perception. However, I am going back to the beginning, opening the workbook and watching the masterclass starting from step one again - Emotional Intelligence - how does it support you to live your life and write your truth authentically with confidence and ease?

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This first step in the workbook and masterclass video is packed full of incredible insights and knowledge about how practicing Emotional Intelligence is necessary in order to lead your life and write your story authentically. I have been doing and coaching this work for over ten years, but I learn more about myself every time I move through this self-discovery process. It has provided me with the confidence to respond to others and the world in a way that is mindful of honouring my beliefs and those of others at the same time. This is, of course, just as integral on the written page. But, it can also be tricky because everyone has their own value system, and they don't always align.

This is why having clarity about 'who' you are from your inside-out provides you with the decisiveness you need to create a life and writing plan. Having Emotional Intelligence does just that; it supports you to understand how the way you show up in the world - what you do, say, and your way of being - affects you and others. This, in turn, supports you to consciously choose how you present yourself and others within your story. You can do this authentically if you are mindful about who you were at the beginning of your life's journey, who you have become, and how you got there. Is this who you truly are, or is this who you have developed into being, and what pieces do you want to keep or not keep - which characteristics serve you well and which don't?

Through this process, I discovered a few things about myself and they are reflected in the following Chapter 1 excerpt - keep in mind that any excerpts I share through this process are first drafts with no edits :)

Excerpt from Around the Table: Daring to Share My Perception

"As a child, sitting around the table, experiencing the dinner ritual continued to be filled with the turbulence of the push-pull of clarity and ambiguity. Its process provided the comfort of my mother’s nurturing through the satiation of my stomach with her incredible cooking. But the very feeling that my Dutch relatives refer to as gezelligheid or cozy in English quickly dissipated through my interpretation of the emotional discomfort I felt at the dinner table. From one moment to the next, the pleasure my stomach freely danced in was replaced by an insecure disciplined two-step within its confusion-based pit. I misunderstood, and thus, repelled the patriarchal confidence my father exuded, and at the same time, longed to understand and be part of it – this need for the sense of belonging became the driver I spent decades yearning for. It also, eventually, became an obsessive search for my definition of love. It wasn’t until much, much later, when I discovered that perception is everything and that sitting around the family table was more complicated for me than it seemed to be for the others. I viewed it as a daily period of time to endure and get through without spilling milk or feeling like I didn’t belong. I tried hard to manage the chaos of my thoughts to appear calm and fit into what I believed I didn’t.

Ironically, this natural state of sensitivity became my weakness over time and the culprit of my dinner table angst. The soulful inner passions that guided me with ease early on in my life became a detriment to my emotional survival. With each year of my childhood, I was scarred with a deeply embedded story, telling me I was not worthy to follow my heart’s invalidated messages – they became deemed unreliable, unpredictable, and above all, undefendable. Swirls of thoughts dictated that my way of being was unacceptable. Still to this day, I am fraught with the burden of occasional waves of disapproval within how I interpret others’ responses to me."

For links to the DTS MasterClass Program and my TreeLinks page, go to www.daringtoshare.com/dianareyers