Diana’s book launch – speaker Mary Hutchison, a Canberra-based author
and public historian
It’s a great pleasure to be
launching Diana’s book Setting Yourself
Free: a practical guide to self-change, and to be part of the celebration
of her achievement. Particularly because
she’s my sister.
A book launch is a great
opportunity to tell something of the story of a book beyond what is between the
covers. I want to tell you a bit about
the journey of writing Setting Yourself Free, as well as introduce you to its
content and intentions.
Diana wrote the first draft during
the 1990s and I can remember our mother Elizabeth announcing with pride, and some
surprise, ‘Diana’s written a book!’ I
also remember having coffee with Diana and a psychologist friend of ours at
around the time she must have been working on it. Her conversation with Henry that day about
aspects of her work as a psychologist in the NSW Department of Corrective
Services gave me a glimpse of the issue that is central to her practice – then
as a psychologist, now as a life coach – the issue of how people can take
charge of their lives and set a course for themselves that is positive and
fulfilling. This issue is the raison
d’etre, the heart, of Setting Yourself
Free.
At the same time that Diana was
thinking about this issue in relation to the wide range of people she
counselled in the prison system, she was also starting to seek new directions
for herself. This eventually led to a
graduate diploma in the psychology of life coaching at Sydney University. As
she says, the book grew out of her own journey of self-discovery, as well as
having its genesis in her professional practice.
As you may have gathered Setting
Yourself Free has been something of a family affair. One of Diana’s first
readers of her first draft of the book was our cousin Rod Hutchison. For many years Rod had been creating exquisite
small pen and ink drawings of local landscapes and Diana wondered whether he
would do some illustrations for the book.
He agreed, and in a departure from his usual style responded to what
Diana had written through a series of perceptive, wry cartoons that highlight
moments in the process of working out who you are and what you want. I am so sorry that Rod did not live to see
the book published but I am very glad that he is part of it.
As things worked out, it wasn’t
until a number of years after Rod had done the illustrations, when Diana
thought she had almost let go of her psychologist self, that she came back to
the book.
My own role in helping with
redrafting and editing came at this point of the book’s development.
At this stage another family member, Michelle Herriot, also read the
book and provided comments which fed into my work with Diana. This
involved successive drafts created at a
distance using email and track changes – (not Diana’s favourite) – and detailed
sessions at Diana’s kitchen table. It
was an interesting process for both of us – moving us into a relationship more
related to our different expertises than our position as sisters, which in turn
required new ways – I think better ways – of communicating.
This is a small example of how the
process of writing the book has been as much about self-discovery and change as
its content. For Diana it has been a
long term experience of personal development, which she stepped into on the
basis of the same principles and practices that she writes about in the
book. In working on the book with her,
I became part of that experience.
I think it’s a great strength of
Setting Yourself Free that it is so thoroughly based on both professional and
personal experience. Another great strength is that Diana talks about personal
development in a very practical and down to earth way. She provides simple
examples of how we work psychologically as a basis for exercises which she sets
out as a step by step program. And I think a third strength is the way Rod’s
sympathetic humorous illustrations highlight the process Diana describes.
Diana wrote Setting Yourself Free particularly to encourage and support people
who might be making conscious changes in their lives for the first time –
people who have perhaps reached a decision that change is necessary to improve
their lives but are unsure about the next step. But making life changes is a daunting task whatever our experience. Lessons we think we have learned usually have
to be learned again in the context of the particular circumstances we find
ourselves in. So Setting Yourself Free
may offer food for thought for anyone in the process of sorting out life
issues.
One of the sections in Setting
Yourself Free I found most instructive is about communication. It’s something I
generally think I’m pretty good at understanding, but the way Diana describes
what can go wrong in communication helped me realise that in one particular
situation I had been ignoring something that when you know about it seems
obvious. The distance between obvious
and insoluble can be so near and yet so far. Another aspect of the book that
strikes a chord with me is that it doesn’t promise a quick fix or marvellous
revelations. It emphasises the hard work
of
working out life directions and
setting goals to achieve them. Diana’s
model for self-change is not a recipe for instant results but a map for an
ongoing journey.
I want to finish with a summary of
what I see as the key ingredients of the book.
In Setting Yourself Free, Diana highlights aspects of the process of
taking charge of your life that are crucial for anyone to take into account as
they work on change, whether a whole of life change or changing the outcomes in
a particular context – and whether they are new to considering their directions
in life or not. She has stern words to
say about taking responsibility for our actions. She offers ways of identifying
our impact on others. She suggests ways of moving carefully through the
process. She invites us to think about
what we value and shows how this can lead to a sense of purpose. She encourages us to think about what we
believe about ourselves and suggests ways of replacing beliefs that hold us
back with ones that move us forward. And she provides a model for setting goals
that are achievable.
Setting
Yourself Free provides a program for change that people can follow if they
wish, or adapt to their own needs. It is
also a straightforward guide to the self that provides important reminders
about how we work as individuals and in interaction with each other. It offers tools that can help individuals
take greater charge of their lives and set directions that are relevant it
them. It also understands the
difficulties that people can experience in learning about themselves and making
changes and offers encouragement through the process. Setting Yourself Free respects its readers
and believes in their capacity to make changes in their lives for the
better.
These ingredients seem to me to be
the essence of life coaching and I like to think of the book
as a pocket life coach.
I now declare this pocket life
coach launched and commend it to you.
