Daring Greatly with Brené Brown

Ade - Daring

I remember being filled with such excitement and anticipation when in early April I discovered that Brené Brown was coming to London to give a talk at The School of Life. I immediately posted the details on Facebook, and notified a few of the guys who had journeyed with us at The Quest about the event. Since discovering Brené’s work via her TED talks, Darren (Co-Founder of The Quest) and myself had often referred to her research in our work with gay men on the issue of shame, vulnerability and courage.

I got out my diary to put in the date and then noticed that I had another engagement on the same day, which I could not get out of – or could I? I was in the process of starting a monthly group coaching session in June, and our second session would clash with the Brené event. I debated whether to move the session, but everything was already in place and so I gradually settled to the possibility of the talk making its way to YouTube and seeing it there.

Few weeks later as Ernesto, (fellow collaborator at The Quest) told me that he had his ticket for The School of Life event, I silently debated whether I could take my coaching group for an outing to see Brené, but by that stage the tickets were all gone. ‘Oh well, that’s that’ I thought!’ More

Reflections on being Freshly Pressed

Ade FBThree weeks ago, I had no idea what being ‘Freshly Pressed’ meant. I’m rather glad I did not, because such knowledge was bound to have triggered my old chestnut of ‘I am not good enough’, which in turn might have led to me striving and striving to get something Freshly Pressed; all with a view to becoming the illusory and momentary ‘good enough’. Yes I know, what does ‘good enough’ mean anyway? And does being Freshly Pressed really matter? But hey, it’s an old wound I carry and much as I’d like to pretend that I no longer hear its silent whisper, deep down I know that it still rears its stubborn head from time to time, to let me know that I can run but cannot hide.

A couple of days after the Freshly Pressed post, I noticed that my email inbox was filled with tons of notifications of either people following my blog or posting a comment. My immediate thought was that my spam filter was compromised and I decided to ignore them. Later that evening I noticed that @freshly_pressed had tweeted my post. Aww, that’s nice I thought, as I looked though the other blogs that had also been tweeted. I mentioned the tweet on Facebook and got a few ‘Congratulations’, for which I felt embarrassed; ‘its only a tweet I thought, no big deal’. More

The Quartet: Connecting & Conforming – Belonging & Fitting-In

Ade FBI read the words again and again. They had leapt off the screen when I first saw them in the email from my friend who was having a great holiday on the other side of the globe.

He talked about watching the other vacationers and locals, and sometimes feeling like he was “the only gay in the village” and then came the words that had pierced my heart,  “… Sometimes I think it would be really nice to be straight and wander around with my girlfriend LIKE EVERYONE ELSE SEEMS TO BE DOING…”

On reflection I guess those words had resonated with me because just before opening his email, I had been browsing online through the past covers of a UK gay lifestyle magazine. I had not intended to spend as much time as I did going through the covers. But somewhere after coming across the most recent four back-issues, I was curious to see if the magazine had one with a black person on the cover. “I see no one like me here” I thought to myself; at that stage I had lost count of the number of covers I had glanced at. More

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