An illuminating podcast for writers and bibliophiles where you’ll be taken behind the scenes to discover how a writer really writes.Cecilia Poullain journeys deep into the creative process, as her writing evolves from first, messy draft to final manuscript. Witty, nourishing and life-affirming listening!
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Podcast in English et en français. All around the world there are ordinary women doing extraordinary things. Brave New Woman is about giving those women a platform and a voice. It’s about helping change the way in which women are perceived and it’s about inspiring us all to do what we have always wanted to do. Partout dans le monde, il y a des femmes ordinaires qui font des choses extraordinaires. Brave New Woman donne à ces femmes une plate-forme et une voix. Il aide à changer la façon dont ...
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Transforming Futures: Charlotte Oloya's Journey with School for Life in Uganda
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Charlotte Oloya, Country Director at School for Life Foundation in Uganda, discusses her role and the organization's mission to provide quality education to children. She talks about how she discovered her passion for education after working in a temporary program management role for 7 years, and later joined School for Life as the Country Director…
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"No Ordinary Assignment": Jane Ferguson's Extraordinary Journey as a War Correspondent
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Jane Ferguson worked as a war correspondent for PBS NewsHour and The New York Times. In this episode, Jane shares her unique experiences as a journalist, including being the only foreign journalist in Yemen and catching the last plane out of Kabul after the Taliban took power. She talks about the excitement of being on the front lines, where histor…
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Connect great people to do great things with Sherry Shannon-Vanstone
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Sherry Shannon-Vanstone is a mathematician, cryptographer, entrepreneur and philanthropist. She founded Profound Impact in 2018? Profound Impact's mission is ‘to connect great people to do great things’. She had an early interest in mathematics and learned along her dad who’s was studying to be an electrical engineer. By the time she was in 5th gra…
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Yoghurt and doing the same thing but expecting a different result
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A very short episode about yoghurt...Av Cecilia Poullain
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Why I am so grateful to my parents and what it means to be a man
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In this episode, I explain why I haven't posted in a while. A lot of the stuff I have been writing is about people in my family, and I don't want to hurt them and I will need to check with them before I include things about them in my book. I am fascinated in the different influences of my father and grandfathers and my mother and my grandmothers o…
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I have been working on the structure of the book, and had a great idea this morning. The first part of the book would be about what happened when I followed the masculine, and the second half would be about finding the feminine.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Today, I wrote about the relatively minor, hyper-privileged decision to move out of our holiday flat in Dinard to a house further west along the coast in Saint-Cast, and all that it taught my about making decisions.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Advantages and disadvantages in all things
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I am still trying to work out how to structure the section on death and endings. I have made some headway with the part on death, but I don't yet know how to fit in the part on endings. A very short piece today on the advantages and disadvantages of being alive - and being dead.Av Cecilia Poullain
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I spent a long time this morning trying to work out how to structure this section of the book. I had initially written it as a series of reactions to deaths and leaving places, but that doesn't really work. I'm trying to find the through-line - the central dramatic question - and I think it might be something like: "can I come to peace with death a…
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I had a section called " I can, I can't" in which I was looking at why there were some situations in which I persuaded myself something was impossible and others in which I persisted. But I realised that I needed a central dramatic question with a yes or no answer. My central dramatic question will probably be: "can I change my limiting beliefs?" w…
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A slightly messy text on my happiest memories. I have shifted this section of my book to just before "Dreams and Visions" because I realised that memories are the flip-side of dreams and visions - memories are in the past; dreams and visions are in the future.Av Cecilia Poullain
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I am up to 74 000 words. I have structured my work into themes and I have started rewriting within the themes. I initially wrote three different texts on time - I have now combined them into a single text.Av Cecilia Poullain
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I write about leaving Sydney to come back to Paris. I had no idea that I would still be living in Paris 27 years later. I write about other departures, and what it means to live on the other side of the world from family and friends. I write about just how hard it was to find a job in a foreign country.…
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How swimming, yoga and singing all focus on breathing and on the position of the pelvis and how they are all building on each other.Av Cecilia Poullain
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I have been reading "A Happy Pocket Full of Money" by David Cameron Gikandi. I'm not quite sure what to make of this book - it is a quantum physics / spiritual guide to becoming wealthy. The author talks about seeing time in the "hear-and-now" - time doesn't really exist because there is only the "hear-and-now". This got me thinking again about dif…
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Thinking about how I want to die means thinking about how I want to live.Av Cecilia Poullain
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I have always seen time as linear. Today, I started musing on what difference it makes if we see time as linear or circular. I would be interested to know what you think.Av Cecilia Poullain
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I thought I was going to be investigating why I sometimes conformed to what other people expected of me - or at least my perceptions of what other people expected of me - and why I sometimes did my own thing. In the end, I wrote about moving from childhood, a time of great freedom, to adolescence when I started to conform, to becoming a lawyer and …
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Persistance and "I can't" - two sides of the same coin?
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Reading back over my writing of the last few months led me to ask the question: "why is it that sometimes, I persist with something, and sometimes, I say "I can't"?" What is going on there? Is there a link between these two things, and if so, what is it? That is what I examine in today's episode - and I will probably go further with this a little l…
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The theme of order and creativity came up over and over again yesterday as I tried to pull out some of the themes in my writing. Here are my musings on the relationships between order - also known as structure, technique, habit - and creativity.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Today, I drew out themes from what I had been writing in order to find where the gaps are that need to be filled in. An extremely exercise which helped me to realise some of the dichotomies in my life and how my whole life I have been struggling to become my own person.Av Cecilia Poullain
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I write about how important creating community is to me, and in particular creating community around our house in Brittany.Av Cecilia Poullain
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My latest one-woman show and learning to be in front of an audience
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In this episode, I write about the performance I put on last Sunday in my flat in Paris. I talk about what it is like to be in front of an audience and how I am coming to see that each performance is part of the learning process rather than an absolute.Av Cecilia Poullain
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This is a piece I have rewritten about my grandfather and what he transmitted - or didn't transmit - to me.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Memory, great literature and piano concerts
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A mixed bag of writing today. I am having to dig deep into my memories now, and I think the time is coming when I will have to start structuring my work. I am up to almost 60,000 words.Av Cecilia Poullain
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This episode speaks for itself.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Not easy writing this morning. I am noticing a pattern. When I haven't been writing consistently, I have less ideas. But I did manage a paragraph about weighing myself. It's all about just sticking with it, even when it is difficult. Writing every day is what makes me a writer.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Public speaking with ease for introverted women with Julia Kraft
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Julia is an ‘expression mentor’. She specialises in working with introverted and anxiety-prone women who have a history of public speaking fear or performance anxiety and it's holding them back in their careers or from growing their business. Julia initially trained as an actress and then became a yoga teacher. Eventually she wanted more and she st…
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Finding joy by being in the present and aware of all my senses. Mindfulness in practice.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Today, I wrote down the four major emotions - anger, fear, sadness and joy - then mindmapped what came up around them. Interestingly, the first piece I wrote was about how important emotions are to me. And the second piece was about my day yesterday, which I had been wanting to write about since it happened it was so perfect.…
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Three scenes from our Gestalt therapy sessions about leadership and daring to bring all that is on the inside to share on the outside.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Today, I wanted to feel into whatever it felt right to write about without being too organised about it. I wrote a couple of prompts down: "My voice is" and "Times when I wrote" and immediately, the ideas came. I am feeling a very strong pull to write fiction again.Av Cecilia Poullain
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How not to start a career and other animals
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I am becoming aware that I need to vary my sentence structure when I get to the second draft. I tend to write three-sentence paragraphs - a short sentence, a longer sentence then a very long sentence. I write about how boring it can be when there is nothing to do at work and indications that I was in the wrong job.…
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This is what it felt when the day I discovered I was a writer. Do you think you might be? Would you like to try?Av Cecilia Poullain
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The writing process is teaching me how to live. By getting some perspective on my life, I am learning to recognise my destructive patterns and to work through them. If you have ever told yourself that something is impossible, this episode is for you. I talk about how throughout my life, I have sometimes felt as though things are impossible. By writ…
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Writing is getting easier and easier as I just "do it". I am up to Day 65 and a few words shy of 50 000 words. I am still "just writing junk" and need to decide when I will start structuring and editing. I wrote about the walk I did this morning, about my decision-making process and about appreciating the little things.…
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An easy writing day today. This episode is about how I got the idea for writing my first one-woman show - using songs as my starting point.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Three embarrassing stories about work, and one more satisfying one
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It's always a bit terrifying putting my unedited work out there, especially when I am writing about incidents where I felt so foolish. But I also think that by being vulnerable, this will somehow connect with my audience. These are three terribly embarrassing stories about work, when I was a young lawyer, and a story from my thirties when I started…
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Finally finding a job I loved - at least for a while
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When I haven't been writing for a few days, I really pay for it when I do get back to my desk. My first writing day is always more difficult, and that was the case today. I wrote three short texts about my last job. It was a place where I worked with wonderful people and found real satisfaction - but that wasn't enough in the end.…
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In this episode, I talk about feeling into what I want to write and how trying different styles of writing can help us become a better writer. I read about how I started to sing and my inappropriate behaviour in one of the top London law firms.Av Cecilia Poullain
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In this episode, I talk about how many of the things that we might believe to be the opposites of creativity can be used in the creative process.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Central Dramatic Questions and why I love my coaching clients
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Each piece of writing needs a Central Dramatic Question which has a yes or no answer. For part of my book - and my life - the Central Dramatic Question is: "Will I find a career that is personally and financially rewarding?" There needs to be an overarching Central Dramatic Question for the book and a Central Dramatic Question for each scene. I sta…
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An episode about anxiety - the anxiety of getting back to writing after a three week break, and the anxiety I feel every time I wake upAv Cecilia Poullain
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Meetings, German textbooks and catastrophic teenage relationships with boys
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Boy it was hard to write today. I looked at my list of subjects to write about, and ended up writing about two things: my annoying habit of speaking up at the very end of a meeting and why my friend stole my German textbook. I think it is getting hard because I need to write about things that I am not proud of. I could and probably should be writin…
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Today was a difficult day to get things done. I had wanted to spend all afternoon writing, but it didn't work out like that. I ended up writing about a terrifying incident in Tibooburra, a tiny town in far-western New South Wales in Australia, and about how proud I am to belong to a swimming club.Av Cecilia Poullain
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I had lots of fears and doubts today about what I am writing. This is a very short episode because I spent time looking back through my notes to find ideas and things I wanted to write about. In the end, I decided to write something easy and agreeable - about why I love coaching so much.Av Cecilia Poullain
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Three episodes at work and dancing as a child
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As I was writing the story about how my boss talked about my files in our team meeting - and I let him - I remembered another story about how another boss presented my work, fifteen years later. I realized that between the two, I had gained the courage to say it wasn't OK for me. And a tiny little story about the freedom I felt to dance when I was …
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I met an English writer last night. We were talking about how to "just write junk". Interestingly, this led me to write this morning about a time in my life when I was trying so hard to write well that I couldn't write at all. This then led me to remember lots of tiny details about events that happened in the house I grew up in, in Bettowynd Road i…
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