From Me to You

The underestimation of background, why I write, and a short quiz to get you a comprehensive personalised report.

There are three parts to today’s post.

I hope to provide some background as to why I’ve been writing for the last 11 years, why I wrote my sixth book Crossing Between Worlds, and then give you an exclusive early access to a personalised quiz to help you in this season of your life.

I. Background

In Consolations II, David Whyte said

Background is underestimated and calls on us to widen our vision and open to greater breath of attention.

Foreground dominates our lives, is overestimated in importance and hides the greater context from which it has emerged.

Background is always what we start to pay attention to when we start to pay real attention.

Even though I have been on Substack for only a few years, I’ve been writing since I was a youth. Writing has been a place of contemplation during those earlier years. As things evolved, writing became a way of clarifying what I think.

On Substack, I have two avenues for writing. I wished I kept only one, but it didn’t make sense to do so.

First, Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development. FPD serves therapists who see the cracks and limitations of model-centric training and development, exploring the cumulative evidence in psychotherapy.

Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development (FPD) on Substack

On a near-weekly basis for the first #200+ missives, I tried to provide some ways forward for those who are hungry to be at their bleed edge for true development—the type of growth that ultimately sees their clients reap the benefits.

You can dive into the archives on my website. You can also explore by themes (Clinical supervision, deliberate practice, first sessions, etc.)

Second, almost as a sideline, I’ve kept sporadically writing on Full Circles (FC). Even though I hadn’t placed my focus on FC, I knew I had to keep writing. FC was my attempt to articulate some of the unspokens, the less visible, the reflections that keep circling back in my mind (The tagline is called “Reflections on the inner and outer life”).

Full Circles on Substack

I’m not interested in writing about what’s the latest. I want stay focus on what’s timeless. Stuff that keeps knocking us back til we learn.

If you are keen to explore the back catalogue of Full Circles, you can visit my website.

I’ve no intention to turn FPD and FC into a paid subscription (I sure hope Substack’s algorithm isn’t listening). Why? At this point, as a consumer, I really don’t like subscription models.

Even though I’ve ran online courses since 2018, I’ve been resistant to turn my courses into monthly/yearly subscriptions. They were all one-off fees. I can’t imagine how this would be sustainable for someone on an average income to subscribe just 20% of the writers and trainings that they liked. (There are a lot of great writers here on Substack. Check out Paul Kingsnorth, Ted Gioia, Jonathan Haidt).

I’ve had several readers of FC and FPD pledge monthly subscriptions to either of my Substacks. I’m deeply thankful. As far as I can imagine, I have no intention of turning on the monthly subscription feature (sorry Substack). I wish to keep my essays free to access.

If you would like to support my work, pick up one of my books.

SIDENOTE: Do you know the story of Aaron Swartz? He was an internet activist who co-founded Reddit and helped develop RSS and Creative Commons. He fiercely advocated for open access to information and was facing federal charges for downloading academic articles when he died by suicide in 2013. See the documentary below. This story speaks to the need or academic research open access to all, not hidden behind a paywall.

Work and Writing

At the beginning, I was fortunate to be employed by the Redemptorist community as a youth worker whilst studying.

Since 2004, I kept a day job as a psychologist in Singapore, first at a private hospital, and then I moved to our national mental health institution.

I uprooted around 2010 to Australia, as I got a scholarship to do my doctorate.

My wife and I returned to Singapore for a bit, had our first child, and then thought we returned to Australia. We couldn’t imagine putting our kids through the Singapore education system, as rigorous and successful as it is in helping studies achieve the grade.

I’ve kept a private practice with a close colleague since (and the team continues to grow). Perhaps because of the attention my research on deliberate practice got in our profession, I also started to run workshops, get invited to speaking engagements, and consultations/supervision with clinicians and teams from all over.

All throughout, writing has been a close companion. Reading some of my earlier pieces, I don’t think I was any good. I cringed when I read some of my earlier essays that I wrote for the Redemptorist newsletters.

Over the last two decades, I’ve been fortunate be involved in several peer-reviewed research articles and co-authored a handful of books. I am grateful for the collaborations. I would never had imagined to co-author with people that inspired me, like Scott Miller and Mark Hubble. Co-writing with both of them has been a steep learning curve, as they are so good with their craft.

I ventured into solo authoring with the book The First Kiss. It’s not a romance novel. It’s about undoing the way most of us practitioners are trained to conduct a first session. We are trained to conduct a thoroughly clinical assessment, focusing on what we are obtaining. I argued that we need to focus less on what we get, but on what we give, right from the get-go. The evidence in the field of psychotherapy was damning. 20-30% of people stop treatment right after the first visit.

Why aren’t we paying attention to this?

I have been pleasantly surprised at the sales and responses to this book. Since the release in 2018, sales have kept going up. I haven’t done any advertising.
I’ve talked about it in FPD during its release, was invited to a couple of podcasts to talk about it, and conducted only a handful of talks and workshops around the world on this specific topic.

Writing FK gave me some confidence. I lost some of that during the process of my P.h.D. Research writing beats the confidence out of you. One time, my supervision said to me, “Is English your first language?” I was shocked by her comment.

Why I Write

I am writing this in my home office.

To my left, is my mini-library.

One section sits several books by the Catholic priest, Henri Nouwen.

His writing has had a profound influence on me in my early adulthood.

He said writing reveals what is alive in us.

This is true for me.

Writing reveals what’s on the inside to the outside.

Here’s what writing does for me:

1. Clarify what I think I know:
   Most of the time, in the process of writing, I realise that there are many potholes to what I thought I knew. Plus, I’ve come to realise, good writing is structuring. Structuring is an act of empathy to lead the reader through, one line at a time. I’ve still got a long way to go at improving at this craft.

2. Write in order to know:
   For the last 13-14 years, I’ve kept a practice of taking notes. I have a hybrid of physical notebooks, combined with a digital tool. I capture first seeds of ideas on paper, and then elaborate on them digitally if it warrants (I also keep a scanned copy of my physical notes).
   I started off with a no-frills app called Simplenote. And since 9th of Aug 2021, I moved to another free app called Obsidian.
   I won’t geek out about Obsidian here, but the reason I know the specific day I switched my note-taking app is because developing a Personalised Learning System (PLS)¹ using Obsidian has been life-changing for me.
   I made an entire video series on this.

   In short, in Obsidian I could start to link one idea with another, and another, and another, using Obsidian’s bi-directional linking system, along with a tagging system that I have already been familiar with using Simplenote.
   

   So much of learning is having the ability to recollect. I started to not just have thousands of dots of ideas, but now I can start to “connect the dots,” like a jigsaw puzzle. Whenever I begin any writing project, I now turn to my PLS. I rarely write from a blank page now.
   Whenever I am thinking about how best to help a particular client, I turn to my PLS. I’ve also developed a habit of capturing my weekly therapy learnings based on my reflections of the people that I met. What’s interesting is looking back at these notes, and marvelling at how forgetful the mind is! And it turns out that, based on research from people like Robert Bjork (I doubt he’s related to the icelandic singer), forgetting is not the enemy of learning. In fact, when we forget something, and have a way to recall it, we retain and learn it better than having not forgotten that input.
   
   In addition, capturing my weekly learnings helps me to see patterns that I probably wouldn’t have, and that makes me pay closer attention to how I conduct the therapy hour.
   
   However, even after 13,994 notes later, note-taking alone was inadequate. It was messy, non-linear, and not “sharpened.” It’s like shooting thousands of blunt arrows, compared to having a handful of sharp arrows to hit the target.
   
   It’s often said by writers that you don’t write what you know, but you write in order to know. For me, this rings true.
   
   The habit of writing consistently over the years has really shaped me. (See this article where I talked about the use of app called Beeminder to keep me close to my intentions. You lose money with Beeminder if you don’t stick with your intentions. I’m Chinese. We love gambling, but hate losing money, even it is just the price of a coffee).
   
   The process of keeping a PLS and regular writing has also sharpened my work as a clinician. I feel like my mental frameworks are alot clearer, which helps when I’m am attempting to draw from a wide array of methods to help each client in therapy, which I can draw from my previous reflections and writings, which had involved a lot of deep thinking to get to an output.
   

3. Give what I think I know:
   I sucked at school.
   Because I did dismally for my Primary School Leaving Exams (PSLE), I had to take an extra year in Secondary School. In Singapore, most kids takes 4 years in the through the “Express” stream. I was in the “Normal” stream which took 5 years.
   Notice the ministry’s cheeky way of naming conventions.
   But since then, when I started to take learning into my own hands, I started to value deep learning (I even created a course for therapists call Deep Learner). Learning became discovery, and I began to discover so much—so much that I didn’t know!
   I tell the story in greater detail about my education experience in this video:

   Through the years, I think I over-compensated with my appetite for learning. I developed somewhat of a mini-library that I mentioned earlier. When I was a student and couldn’t afford to buy books, I photocopied them.
   
   Now, most of my expenses are on books. I became an avid reader.
   
   I sometimes tell people that they can use me as a librarian. I’m more than happy to recommend them specific books (In fact, my assistant has recently collated my Top Recommendations based on categories. See the Collection on my website).
   
   Books have become my instrumental mentors. If thought is a monologue, reading is like a deep dialogue with someone who has thought of a particular topic for a very long time.
   
   To me, it feels like a natural flow on effect to write.
   
   It is the same with music. I loved music so much that I wanted to be part of music-making. It was such an intense a desire to be part of music, to create music. Around 14, my mates and I formed a band. When we started, all I knew was 3 chords, and was about to learn a fourth chord.

   Each of us saved $5.50 each week to buy Led Zeppelin’s red cassettes, one album at a time. We learned their songs. We played, performed, and recorded music of our own all the way til I left for Australia in my 30’s.

   
   I think it was the same obsession with music and writing. I felt the impulse to put ideas down, and maybe move others, as other authors have reached deep within me.
   
   Paul Graham said,

   You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.

There are other benefits to writing.

Someone once said that writing is an introvert’s way to make friends. I’ve had many people reach out through the years after reading one of my articles or books. I treasure these exchanges. I remember the feeling when I would write to authors that have shaped me. Most of the time, I didn’t hear back. Once in a while, some would reply. It meant to the world to me.

Whenever someone learns that I write, they asked, “Do you like writing?” I find it hard to answer the question. I know of authors who love the process of writing. Others quip that they like having written. I don’t really have a straight answer for this, but it’s a bit like exercising. I don’t exactly like jogging. I don’t get runners high, but I enjoy the movement in nature. I feel okay after a not-so-intense jog, and I know it’s good for me.

Writing has been good for me.

Here’s Henri Nouwen again:

The writing itself reveals to us what is alive in us. The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, writing requires a real act of trust. We have to say to ourselves: “I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write.”

Writing is like giving away the few loaves and fishes one has, trusting that they will multiply in the giving. Once we dare to “give away” on paper the few thoughts that come to us, we start discovering how much is hidden underneath these thoughts and gradually come in touch with our own riches. [Emphasis mine].

---

II. Why I Wrote Crossing Between Worlds.

While I maintained my clinical work and trainings, I made a promise to myself a few years ago to release at least one book per year. The reason I wanted to do so is because I wanted to see if I can actually sustain a small business as an author, and doing justice to the gift of writing that has been cultivated in me all these years.

I really didn’t expect that the latest book would take me 3.5 years to complete.

I think I brood on things too long (even this piece that you are reading now took an entire day to write).

Crossing Between Worlds (CBW) is the first time I’m stepping outside of my lane in the field of counselling and psychotherapy.

First Seeds

One of the early seeds of CBW came from reading family strategic therapy founder, Jay Haley’s 1973 book, The Uncommon Therapy. Even though the book was about the psychiatric techniques of Dr. Milton Erickson, a well-known figure in the world of brief therapy and clinical hypnosis, what struck me was Haley’s observation that much of the clinical distress and symptoms appeared during life transition periods.

In his book, Haley addressed various developmental periods in one’s life, such as courtship period, getting married, childbirth and dealings with coming of age, middle marriage difficulties, weaning parents from children, retirement and old age.

Haley said,

Symptoms appear when this is a dislocation or interruption in the unfolding life cycle of a family or other natural group.
The symptom is a signal that family has difficulty in getting past a stage in the life cycle.

This bears out in my clinical practice. When I learned to see symptoms as signals and not just treat them as “noise” to get rid of, I started to see what is often taken for granted.

For instance, we don’t often ask about the specific localised context to which someone develops obsessive-compulsive symptoms, or when someone develops panic attacks, what is actually happening in the background, and what sort of liminal space the person might be in.

In other words, bridge-crossing phases of our lives is important. It shapes not only the direction that we take, but also who we become.

I had Jay Haley’s book at the back of my mind for some time. I knew I didn’t want to write a book about the various stages of human development, as it would read like a textbook. Plus, I didn’t want to write a “one-size-fits-all” book. I wanted to write a book that is more nuanced and could speak to each person in their own unique circumstances.

Crossing Between Worlds is for those who no longer want to live in the shallows, who yearn for a deep and meaningful life.

Here’s what I wrote down in one of my Obsidian notes about the aim of the book:

To no longer be season-blind and trying to force-fit ideas that were not designed for you. Instead, allow yourself to move and be moved into the life that is waiting for you.

The book seeks to help you find not only what you want from life, but also what life asks of you.

In Crossing Between Worlds, I address the issues of

• Applying generic solutions to personal change,

• Being “season-blind” during life transitions periods,

• The trappings of Value Capture, which leads to a shallow life,

• Not tapping into our inherent gifts.

• Our obsession with “How-tos,” especially in self-help books and talk therapies, without first clarifying the “What” (i.e., what is truly essential, and the goal behind the goal),

• Constant progress and self-improvement without asking the deep questions, and

• Focusing solely on what you want out of life, without considering what life is asking out of you.

I secretly hope that this book doesn’t get label as a “self-help” book. Honestly, I don’t know what to call it.

Above and beyond that, my wish is that this book nourishes you, and helps you take steps towards a life that is waiting for you, so that you become more fully alive.

Going forward, my commitment is to write more on Full Circles. In my notes, I have 208 notes labelled as “seedling,” which means they need lots of TLC to grow, and 166 notes labelled as “budding,” which means they are halfway there, vying for a place in Full Circles through the evolutionary process.

I bet some of my writings are crap and would never see the light of day.

But some are probably going to make the cut.

I’d keep writing.

(BTW, Write a comment below if you would like me to cover a particular topic. Might even be one that is already germinating in my Obsidian notes).

---

III. A Personalised Report

Finally, I would like you to check out a new survey that I’ve just created.

It is an ultra-brief 10-item questionnaire that spits out a comprehensive list of personalised recommendations based on the book.

You are the first people that get to do this.

Thanks for reading.

P/S: Apologies that I have yet to reply to those who were trying to make it to the First 50 readers of Crossing Between Worlds. I will write back to you this weekend.

---

Crossing Between Worlds is now available at all good bookstores. Or, you can buy direct. Cuts out the middlemen.

NOTE: If you buy the paperback, you will get the ebook and audiobook at no extra cost. I don’t believe you share pay twice (or three times) for the same content. The link to access the ebook and audiobook is in the book.

Thanks for reading Full Circles: Meditations on the Inner and Outer Life. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Daryl Chow Ph.D. is the author of The First Kiss, co-author of Better Results, and The Write to Recovery, Creating Impact, The Field Guide to Better Results, and the latest book, Crossing Between Worlds.

If you are a helping professional, you might like my other Substack, Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development (FPD).

1. This is often called Personal Knowledge Management, or PKM. My intention for note-taking focuses on improving how I learn and apply them especially in my clinical work, and less about “managing” information. Thus, I’ve stuck to calling mine PLS and not PKM.