Lisa Forrest
The idea for my most recent book Glide – taking the panic out of modern living came from being at a low point in my own life back in 2013 after my fantasy novel, Inheritance, was published.
I went looking for answers to a few questions including, ‘why no matter what I achieve am I never enough for myself’ and ‘how can I stop my thinking taking me down into very dark, unhelpful places’.
I was astonished to find not just the answers but a renewed sense of optimism and joy in the practices of mindfulness and self-compassion – which I initially approached with deep scepticism.
On becoming a convert, I then used mindfulness and self-compassion as the lenses to look back at my career, starting with my years of swimming for Australia when I was a teenager and progressed into the media in various forms and featured a repeated cycle of love, hard work and burnout. How and why had I been convinced (along with everyone else in the world these days) that all those unforgiving mottos that abound in sport like, ‘when the going gets tough the tough get going’ could be more helpful than gentle words of encouragement like those used by the women who ran my first swimming club, the Dee Why Ladies, ‘Come on, sweetheart, you can do this.’ The result is Glide.
I went looking for answers to a few questions including, ‘why no matter what I achieve am I never enough for myself’ and ‘how can I stop my thinking taking me down into very dark, unhelpful places’.
I was astonished to find not just the answers but a renewed sense of optimism and joy in the practices of mindfulness and self-compassion – which I initially approached with deep scepticism.
On becoming a convert, I then used mindfulness and self-compassion as the lenses to look back at my career, starting with my years of swimming for Australia when I was a teenager and progressed into the media in various forms and featured a repeated cycle of love, hard work and burnout. How and why had I been convinced (along with everyone else in the world these days) that all those unforgiving mottos that abound in sport like, ‘when the going gets tough the tough get going’ could be more helpful than gentle words of encouragement like those used by the women who ran my first swimming club, the Dee Why Ladies, ‘Come on, sweetheart, you can do this.’ The result is Glide.
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