Your Voice Matters: Allison Fallon on How Writing Changes You
This week, we’re looking at self-care through a different lens—one that involves pen and paper. On the surface, writing down your thoughts doesn’t seem like a way to care for yourself. But time and again, it’s been proven that a daily writing practice can transform your life (even if you’re not a writer!). That’s what our next guest, author and entrepreneur Allison Fallon, shows us. As she researched her new book The Power of Writing It Down, Allison discovered that writing can help you change the way you think about a situation, tapping into an entirely new part of your brain that helps you process your thoughts without so much emotion. As Allison walked through painful divorce, she found that writing her story down and asking herself more questions took her from center to spectator, which helped her see how to move her life forward a bit more clearly. Allison reminds us that when you change the story you tell yourself about yourself, you change your life. And no matter how big or small your voice may be, your experience matters and your voice needs to be heard.
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Show Summary
Hi there, Nancy Hicks here, welcome back to So What? Why It Matters.
We're moving forward in our rethinking self-care series. Your body and your soul need care. They need nourishment. Through our time together, I'm reminded that many are limping through crises or seasons that just need more sensitivity and attention--like covid or winter. And we're doing this with little adjustment in the care department. You need care, not your niece who's always struggling or your mom who calls you every day for support. You, my friend, you need care.
Every last one of us at a minimum, having come through covid-19, requires new or tried and true ways to care for your body and your soul. So let's get into today's show to help unpack this a little bit more. It's human nature to want to learn more and improve our lives. I mean, you might be thinking about how to set aside a few moments each day to do something kind for yourself, like make a delicious meal on a weeknight or hop into bed a few minutes early to read a novel. And as we've talked about in this series, those are important things. But two thoughts come to mind.
Number one, philosophy and science podcasts and books about self-care won't help you unless you embrace the now what do I do with what I've learned? Author Jean-Pierre De Cassard wrote this: “To quench thirst, it is necessary to drink.” Reading books about it only makes it worse. So our self-care series is to inform you that water is good and to hand you a glass of it. But you need to drink it.
The second thought I have--we're looking for something a little deeper in this self-care series. We're looking at how to put tools into our lives that we may not have thought about on the surface. We're looking for true, sustainable self-care elements that have the ability to tangibly change your life inside and out for the better. And one of the best ways that we can learn about ourselves, see where we want to go, and get there is through writing.
The written word is one of the most powerful tools that we have as humans. It brings people together all over the world every single day through hundreds of languages. We share what makes us laugh and cry in the small moments of what it means to be human. We write work emails to colleagues, texts to family, and Instagram captions for friends and beyond.
But how often do we use our words to pause and reflect on where we are, and where we want to go? Now you may be thinking, oh, that's just for the go getters in life, Nancy, or the super spiritual kind or think I'm not a dear diary person. Imagine taking the darkest or the brightest of feelings and ideas out of your gut, your internal world, and getting them out on the page, potentially for your eyes only.
I wonder what you could gain by taking a few minutes each day to write down what has you stressed out or what you're thankful for. Science says that it's tremendously valuable for us to do this every single day. My guest today is going to help you grab the tools you need to make a writing practice, even a small one, a reality. Because I guarantee you, carving the space to write for just a few minutes each day will give you the space you need to reflect and grow into the person you want to be.
My guest is Allison Fallon, she's the founder of Find Your Voice, and this company is dedicated to training and inspiring anyone who wants to use writing for personal transformation and growth. Allison's latest book is called The Power of Writing It Down. It's filled with practical tools and tips you can put into your life this very day, and Allison is going to share how writing guided her through life and why she feels so inspired to bring others to the power of writing. You’ll definitely want to stick around for this one.
So here we go, my conversation with Allison Fallon.
So What? Moments
Allison Fallon
I think it would be so powerful and transformative if we recognized that your experience of humanity is not the whole experience, it's one sliver. But it's a sliver that is so unique. No one else in the history of humanity has ever experienced life exactly as you do. And if you don't write down your experience of it, how would we ever know? So even if it's only you, if it's your children, if it's your grandchildren, if it's just one person 10 generations from now. And they feel a little more known or a little more seen or a little more understood or a little more connected to their heritage because they read something that you wrote, then it's worth it.
Nancy
Daily journaling or writing is not what you knew once upon a time. It's not the same. It's not about accuracy, precision, grammar. You are not being graded. Get that out of your mind. You're not being graded.Just get it out of you, however it comes out and onto the page.
Thought-Provoking Quotes
“A daily practice of writing will transform your life, it improves your mood, it improves your immune system, it improves your relationships. There's just no area of your life that this practice doesn't touch.” - Allison Fallon
“Writing down the story [of my divorce] helped me to stand outside of the story and to see it differently than I saw it when I was inside of it.” - Allison Fallon
“Getting a 30,000 foot view on your life, you're able to have a different perspective than you have when you're just sort of in the grind and the day to day.” - Allison Fallon
“Why the hero? The short answer is because it's the only way for you to take agency over your own life. Who else could possibly be the hero of your life, if it's not you?” - Allison Fallon
“It took me going through a divorce to decide I was done sitting in the passenger seat of my life. I was done taking orders from someone else, that my life is my life. I'm the only one who has to wake up tomorrow and live it. So of course, I'm the hero of my own life.” - Allison Fallon
“Right after the divorce happened, people would often say to me, ‘How has this impacted your faith?’ And, ‘Do you still feel like you believe in God?’ And I'm mind blown by that question because I'm like, ‘I don't think I believed in God before.’ I did all the things that a Christian person does, but it was all in the higher level thinking part of my brain, and nothing had really penetrated down to the core of who I am. And now I feel that maybe my church attendance isn't what it used to be, but I feel like my relationship with God, as a force in my life, is more powerful than it's ever been.” - Allison Fallon
“Writing just gives us an opportunity to reevaluate the stories that we've made up about ourselves.” - Allison Fallon
“It's a very, very tough time in the world to try to connect to ourselves and to other people. And yet, if we don't do this, we are in for total destruction as a humanity. We're watching it happen in front of our eyes, right?” - Allison Fallon
“The more you know who you truly are, the more you will know the living God.” - Allison Fallon
“What you'll find is that you have far more wisdom buried inside of you than you ever realized, that you have access to a well of wisdom. You're connected to the God of the universe.” - Allison Fallon
“Your voice matters, your voice needs to be heard. We need your voice in the world. We cannot understand what it's like to be human until we understand who you are. So please don't count yourself out.” - Allison Fallon