Sue Allen
Change in Women’s Lives: An Interview with Sue Allen
Sue Allen
Women have so many different roles and faces in one life time. Many of these changes are very challenging – partnership, mothering, and then letting go of mothering when it has motivated so many of our years. Retirement is another challenge and these are all times of stress in our lives. We change through the life stages of childhood, teens and young, middle and older adulthood. We move between singledom and partnership, maybe several times. We become sisters, mothers, mothers in law, grandmothers, aunties. In amongst it all, we are changing careers and jobs and finding our purpose and meaning in life too.
The Challenge of Changes
It seems to me that change is a major challenge in women’s lives, even though it shows the human ability to adapt. A quick search through the internet showed that Life Change is usually only interpreted as the menopausal change of life. So I decided to interview some ladies who have navigated these changes successfully so that they can share their and top tips with you.
Sue Allen
Interview with Sue Allen
Sue Allen is a coach and a trainer with Psychology of Vision, the mother of grown up children, and a former teacher. Along with her personal coaching and workshops, Sue has also found time to write a Schools Study Programme for Personal and Social Education. This focuses on emotional intelligence, team building and leading. Sue’s partner Jeff, is a Master Trainer who is frequently away in Asia and Africa and Sue sometimes accompanies him to hold joint workshops.
Sue highlighted:
- the importance of welcoming change
- women’s natural connection to change through physiology and biology
- reaching out to others in our common human experience, a natural part of life and growth
- our attitude to change determines the level of pain we experience
- or successfully moving into the next stage of our life, a more expanded self.
- when change comes we can move into fear or trust ourselves to handle the change.
At the beginning of our interview, Sue shared that at the end of a workshop in India, she had recently said goodbye to her daughter, who is staying on there for 5 months. Sue had thought her daughter would be feeling the loss, and was surprised to find how powerful the feeling was for herself.
“It brought back all of those moments of letting go of our children like starting school, which starts really from birth – they may be looked after by somebody else, learn to drive, get a boyfriend, leave home, etc. All those moments of letting go.“
Change – expansion is the process of life
For Sue the question of women’s many roles triggered the question “What is it about change, that we either embrace it and accept it, or not?”
“When we don’t change, there is fear, something we are afraid of, something we are attached to – we want things to be the same because of the feelings that gives us. We are comfortable with where we are, we understand it and have come to terms with it – to go somewhere else – feels like a big ask.
We need the nudges to change, the moments or the people who push us into change. We can resist it, but it is not in our interest to camp out in our comfort zone. Somehow the universe, life, people around us, will push us into some bigger expansion because that is the process of life. It might be an accident, an illness, a new job, a relationship breaking up, something is always encouraging us to expand into the next ’something’ –whatever it is.”
Celebrating Change
Fear or Trust?
“If we are resisting the flow, aren’t taking our opportunities, life will push us in that direction of change, maybe in ways we don’t like. Life is about our attitude to change, we are always moving in either a life or death direction, we are shrinking or expanding, we are accepting or refusing. Refusing or shrinking is a reflection of fear, doubting ourself and our ability to change, to handle the change. The opposite of this is trust, trusting ourselves to be able to handle the change, welcoming the change.”
Attitude to change
“Chuck Spezzano (Founder of Psychology of Vision) often says our attitude to change reflects our birth, the change from the womb to the world, and that is a blueprint for our attitude to change. That’s a metaphor that can be used for any change, the transition from one world to another, from one paradigm to another – the next ripple in the pond, the next expansion of our consciousness in some way or another.”
It is our attitude to change that is giving us our direction in all of our life changes, rather than placing the blame on the change itself. Given our levels of fear, it is amazing that any of us ever make the journey through our life changes, and probably without the prompts of our lives we wouldn’t.
Caspar David Friedrich - Woman Before the Rising Sun
Women’s Natural Connection to Change
Sue said that she feels very grateful to be a woman.
“There is something about our biology, physiology that makes us face up to change. Our bodies change dramatically during our life, and the hormonal/physiological changes tie us into natural cycles of birth and death, in a way that men don’t have so immediately.”
“Men often define themselves by one aspect of themselves, often their job or career, and when that falls away, there is a big life change, a big emotional shift.”
“In general women are not so tied to defining themselves in terms of their career. Perhaps they are able to define themselves in terms of their families as well as their careers, their friendships, interests, etc. It is a little bit broader, which means that the issues of self esteem and confidence have a wider base, there are more areas to build on in terms of confidence, trust and self esteem.”
“Many women find the menopause really difficult – they feel that their sexuality, their fertility – their juiciness is over. This can be a difficult transition and for some women it will coincide with children leaving home. It is a time when women need support and understanding.”
Successful Transition
“Successful transition is about emotional responsibility, understanding and honouring our emotions, without inflicting them on the people around us. If we fight the people around us, blaming them for how we are feeling rather than accepting our emotions as our own, we avoid the transition – it is like fighting the flow of life. We get caught up in a fight, rather than stepping up to the next stage and phase of our life.”
“There isn’t a script for change but it is important to welcome change as a teacher. Change teaches us more about who we are. It calls out and widens our skills and abilities and if we accept it, we become more of our true or best self.“
Our Common Human Experience
“Change is natural to all of our lives and it is common to our human experience. Other people, far from being separate from us, are connected by this common experience and have a great ability for compassion.”
“When we suffer the pain of our change alone, and don’t reach out for help and compassion from those around us, it grows bigger. When we reach out to ask for help or to give help to others, we more easily make the transition. All successful change starts with successful communication and the nature of our communication will set the path for our transition.”
“For instance, if we are blaming ‘him’, ‘life’, ‘God’, or whoever, we are holding onto our pain and heading off in a direction that will lead to more pain. We are reacting rather than acting with emotional maturity.”
If we avoid the pain or discomfort of change, we are holding onto the past and our role in it, and then we actually intensify the pain and its duration. When we accept, even welcome the change, trusting ourselves to deal with our emotions and the future to bring more joy into our lives, the next stage in our life can unfold for us. When we remember that we are not alone in our human experience, we can reach out to others and receive support ourselves, and this speeds our progress through the change.
Links for more information:
Sue Allen- Workshops & Coaching
Vision Works Programme for Schools
Principles of Transformational Communication – Psychology of Vision
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