Katherine Bush takes us on a tour of her journey moving from corporate to coaching and finding new values and expression in the process.
It all started when I was around 29. I had just finished a Master of Science that I did while working in the remote Panamanian jungle, full time, with a team building one of the biggest mines in the world.
This is what my day looked like: 6am wake up, 7am – 6pm day job, 6pm run, dinner, coffee, 7:30pm – 9pm do my masters.
As an expat you work on a rotational basis, this means you work weekends, but then you get time off. My rotation was 8 weeks on, in which I got 3 days off, and then 2 full weeks off after each 8-week rotation. So, the schedule I told you about I did for 2 months straight at a time, with only 3 days off, on those off days I studied all day.
This was my life for 2 years.
And this was more or less my whole life, from the moment I learned that in order to be loved and to matter, I needed to achieve. But I never felt whole, I was continuously trying to fill a bottomless pit. Later, I would realize that this pit could never be filled with achievement.
Two things happened at this time: I got an amazing promotion, and I got a distinction for my masters, and I felt absolutely incredible for 1 day, all my hard work had paid off, I had reached all the goals I had set for myself, I had done it, I had proved to myself that I mattered. And 2 days later, I was back to square one, feeling empty, and anguished because the achievement high had worn off, I was so tired, burnt out, I didn’t know how to top my last achievement, I had nothing more to give, and that meant, I didn’t matter.
This realisation was a big event, I had spent my whole life trying to reach the one goal I had set for myself as a teenager. When you’re young, you can only see so far into the future. I had hit all the goals I had envisaged for myself; this was it. Once I hit those goals, I would be happy. But I wasn’t happy. And so, my realization was that my whole life I had been working on this happiness equation, and it was flawed.
My 29th birthday was coming up. I realized I had spent my whole 20’s on remote mine sites, away from my friends, not having fun, just working. I realized I had one year left of my 20’s and I was going to make it count.
I also realized that my achievement obsession was a distraction from my issues, serious issues that I hadn’t dealt with.
So, I resigned from my job, I took a year off, and I went into therapy.
During my therapy, I pulled at all the threads and began to unwind my tightly wound life.
The one thing that became very clear to me that it all started with my upbringing.
Now, I need to caveat here because I find it very difficult to talk about generational trauma, and I want to do it in a way that is very respectful of all members of the cycle. You see, I truly believe that there aren’t bad people, there are only hurt people who are trying their best with the tools they have been given.
The truth is, I grew up in financial security, but emotional insecurity. I grew up with a single mom, to 4 children. My mom was an entrepreneur, she built up her own wildly successful business, and she provided me with financial security, but she had not been taught emotional regulation. It didn’t start with her and while she is responsible for my upbringing she is not at fault for it. And that distinction is vital.
Another vital distinction is that there is no black and white to my upbringing, there are very good things I am taking from it, and there are many things I am choosing to leave from it.
It was within this conundrum I started to think of what I was doing, not as breaking the cycle, but rather as starting a cycle. My mom started a cycle of good work ethic and financial independence, I am starting a cycle of emotional wellbeing, we are all making our own contributions. I am grateful for what I’m taking, and what I am choosing to leave is where I can make my contribution to the cycle.
This realisation birthed another important goal for me: I decided that I was not going to have a child until I felt I was able to not pass down my own issues to them.
So, I stayed in therapy and kept working until I reached this point.
When I did, we started trying for a baby.
At this point, I had dealt with my anxiety and my depression. But I still was not happy, I was still using achievement as my happiness.
I still was not whole inside. I was neutral. Just as a person devoid of flu or a cold is not vibrantly healthy, without anxiety or depression I was better, but I wasn’t thriving.
I began researching, and I came across the field of positive psychology. And I realised that this was the framework I was missing. While I knew how to not be depressed or anxious, I didn’t know how to be happy. This framework illuminated it.
This framework would also teach me how to release my need to achieve for happiness. It would teach me how to actually be happy.
The one last thing I wanted to let go of for my son what this hyper achiever tendency. I didn’t want him to feel the constant pressure I felt for over achievement. But I couldn’t figure out how to do this. I kept thinking, what will I say to him, how can I go on achieving for love while telling him that he doesn’t have to. And then it hit me, the only way I was not going to pass this down to him was to let go of it myself. Was to choose to leave it behind and in its place, introduce positive psychology. The research-backed way to true wellbeing and completeness.
After my son was born, I resigned from my job (it took me 6 months to finally pull the plug, my hyper achiever did not want to let go). In fact, my whole identity was linked to achievement. I literally did not know who I was without it.
But I let go, for him. I let go of the last little piece of myself, and began building up from scratch a way of being that he would want to take with him, a way of being that would hopefully offer him little that he would want to leave behind.
It’s very interesting how life gives you what you need.
At this point, Ollie was 8 months old, I had just resigned, and I was starting a program in positive psychology. I was living in the remote Panamanian jungle, a new mother, with no one around. And I mean no one (head over to my Instagram to see the daily videos of my experience).
I couldn’t have planned this better, in hindsight. Because what happened was a perfect experiment, in perfect conditions. I was a new mother, and all I had was the science of positive psychology to use for my happiness. I got to test the theories in a vacuum. I began to see that some of what the science said was great, but it did not really work in the context of motherhood, so I began adapting it. I was also reading a lot about child development at the time.
While learning positive psychology and child development simultaneously, I noticed something important.
Child development would tell you how to raise a happy well-adjusted child. They talked about attachment, and parenting styles and it always came back to one thing, the role of the primary caregiver. The most important thing to a child’s development is the wellbeing of the primary caregiver, yet child development literature didn’t tell you anything about how to do this. They said emotional regulation was critical, but did not tell you in any non-superficial way how to do this.
But every gap there was in child development, was answered by positive psychology. I began to see that positive psychology was the precursor to raising a child to feel whole inside. And that while there are things you need to do, more important was who you were:
“Little brains develop into adult brains according to the wiring instructions given to them through the actions of their primary caregivers”
Adapted from Lisa Feldman Barrett, Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain
“Our babies brains wire to their environment through their experiences. Their experiences are cultivated by the emotional states of their primary caregivers. The very first order of business for a mother is to address her own well-being”
Adapted from Gabor Mate, The Myth of Normal.
While you couldn’t guarantee that your child would grow up to be whole inside, the one thing that would tip the scales in your favour was your own wellbeing.
Chid development literature was important but the keystone for everything was your own wellbeing, was positive psychology.
At this point, my desire grew from learning positive psychology for myself, to adapting positive psychology for the context of motherhood to start cycles of generational well-being all around me.
And so, this business was born.