#2: My Story

Welcome to Hair to Thrive. I'm your host, Kate Snowwise. This is a podcast with people who are ready to step up and live a happier life. It's for those of us who are dedicated to understanding ourselves and getting the best that we can out of this thing called life.

It's a mix of psychology and modern spiritual thought, always with a focus on practical advice, so that you can take it back and apply it to your own life. I don't believe we're here to merely survive. I truly believe we're here to thrive. So let's get going.

I just wanted to jump in before the episode and let you know that in this one I'm going to be talking about some of the things that sort of traumatized me a little bit as a child. Specifically around religion. So if you have sensitive souls around you or little children that might have sensitive ears, it might be a good idea to put some headphones into this one. Alright, this is episode two.

And this is my story really, and a little bit about who I am and how I got to being a heaviness teacher, life coach and writer. So I'm going to just launch into who I am. And I'm not much of a believer in labels, but I'm going to do my best to tell you a little bit about me in summary form. So my name is Kate Snowwise.

I'm in New Zealander and I currently live in Houston. I've been here for three years. I'm a mum of two young boys. I currently have a four-year-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old.

I'm a wife to a wonderful and supportive husband who happens to be American, which is how I ended up living in the USA. I'm a lifelong soul-searcher and a spiritual seeker. You'll hear a little bit more about that as I continue to tell my story in this episode. I have a Masters in Psychology, and I worked in the field of corporate psychology or industrial organizational psychology for seven years before moving to the USA.

I also have a undergraduate degree in Communications and postgraduate degrees in Management and Industrial and Organizational Psychology. So I spent a few at a time at university studying a whole heap of different things, but psychology has been my true passion and that was the path that I followed. I'm currently an Associate Member of the American Psychological Association and a member of the International Society for Positive Psychology. I first started coaching when I was working as a corporate psychologist or an industrial and organizational psychologist.

The role of an industrial organizational psychologist focuses on people development and organizational development. It's about getting the best out of the people in your workplace and creating the best work environment for them. So I did a lot of team building work, personality assessment, and IQ testing for job selection, leadership development, and a fair bit of executive coaching. What I found out about the executive coaching at their point was that it always ended up going to life coaching as well.

You can't separate somebody's work life from their home life and expect them to feel completely fulfilled. So no matter where I started with people talking about their personal development at work and what they wanted to achieve in their roles, inevitably it ended up in a discussion around the conflicts they had with their work and home life and how to balance being a good mother with being good at their job. And that's really where my coaching career started. I still work in the executive coaching space.

All of my coaching is done online, but I'm equally split now between executive and life coaching. So to launch a little bit more into my background, I'm going to walk you through my story, I guess, in certain sections of my life. I'm going to start with my childhood. So I grew up in New Zealand, a wonderful place to grow up, in many ways it was a very sheltered start to life.

I lived out in the country and so I attended a small primary school or elementary school with about 80 kids. I think I had at the time. And the youngest of four children, but there's a big gap between me and my other siblings. So I really grew up as an only child in a lot of ways.

One of the key parts to my story when I look back at it was an event that took place when I was seven years old at my primary school. In New Zealand in the 80s, we had Bible and schools as part of our public schooling system. And when I was seven years old, our Bible and school teacher was talking about the book of revelations one day in our class. Now I should preface this by saying I was an extremely sensitive young child and that's something I've recognised as I've got older is that I've always been a highly sensitive individual that perhaps I didn't always understand what that meant.

But I was definitely more sensitive to what she was saying than the other children in the class. So she went on to explain that the world was going to end and Jesus would come to save those who believed in Him. And all I believed in Jesus would go to Heaven while everybody else would go to Hell. I consider this an important part of my story because it was my first introduction to a religion that was via based.

And why it was important was because these statements that she made caused a massive phobia in me. She also mentioned that when the world would end, there was going to be thunder and lightning. Now my parents weren't religious but my mom did go to church. My father didn't.

I was very close to my dad when I was young and my mother but I was a real daddy's girl. And so from what she'd said, my little mind interpreted this as when Jesus comes to take everybody to Heaven. My mom and I are going to get separated from my dad and my dad is going to go to Hell and I will never see him again. So I associated this grand fear with thunder and lightning.

So every time there was thunder and lightning, I really went into a state of panic. My little mind thought the world was going to end and it was incredibly stressful. I'm not angry at the Bible and school's teacher. Without that incident in my life, I never would have become the spiritual seeker.

I don't think that I did become. Because from that day forward, I was deeply interested in the spiritual. I needed to understand how this all worked. So I guess fast forward from seven years old where I developed this phobia into probably my early teens.

And this need to understand spirituality and this craving for spiritual information. And I'm sure part of that was absolutely driven by my need to reason my way through my own phobia. So in my early teens, I was confirmed into the Anglican Church, which was the church that my mother was a part of, which is the Church of England. It's a Protestant church.

So I was introduced to the religious side of Christianity and I felt like I had a lot more control of it and was starting to see different sides to the teachings that were a lot less fear based than perhaps what I had initially picked up as a young child. There was a lot more love and aspirational type of spirituality I was beginning to be exposed to. But alongside my craving for information, I didn't just look at the church or the one church I sort of had in my vicinity at that point. I also turned to self-help books.

And now my mother was incredibly supportive about this. Like I said, I feel like in many ways I was just born curious around the soul and happiness and understanding our minds. It was certainly what I came into this world to do because it's always been a part of me. So as a teenager, I would devour self-help books.

And my mother was amazing. She would let me buy any book that I wanted at the bookstore in that department and was incredibly supportive of my desire to learn. I can remember reading books about angels and spirit guides, peered with books on happiness and how to be heavier. And that was where I also came across one of the books that really made a difference in my life called, If Life is a Game, These are the Rules.

And I highly recommend that book still to this day. It's a very simple formula with a set of rules about how we work our way through lives by Dr. Sherry Carter Scott. I'll make sure I put a link to that in the show notes down below in this episode.

And it'll also have a link to that book on my website at dub dub drive dot how forward slash podcast to. So yeah, I would say my spiritual curiosity has been something that's been with me from day dot really. But but that incident when I was seven, I think really made sure it was something that I was going to focus on as I moved forward. Because as I grew into a teen and started to look at other forms of spiritual thought and a lot more than you age thinking, I was able to find a way to reason through my phobia.

And that ultimately came down from rejecting the belief that the world was going to end and that anyone who didn't believe in God was going to hell. So in short, I don't believe in hell. I don't believe there is a hell. And I think we're all going back to the same place after we die if you're interested where I stand on that point.

And I do believe in a loving God or the universal energy if that's what you want to call it. I'm very much against fear based religion and using religion as a form to scare people into a certain way of behaving. So perhaps looking at the other things that have really turned me into who I am today. I was a typical teenage girl and one of the things when I look back on my story and my history that has shaped me into who I am today came from that kind of teenage angst.

I look at the way we portray women in society today and through our media and magazines and as I mentioned I started communications and it breaks my heart because I was one of those young girls who looked to the media and the way they portray women and picked up the message that I wasn't going to be worthy. Unless I was stick then and flawlessly beautiful. It didn't lead to an eating disorder in me, but at times to be honest it came really close as a teenager. I had really unhealthy ideas about where my worth came from and what I needed to do to be attractive.

So ultimately it really led to me looking for myself worth outside of myself and thinking that my self worth was based on superficial elements, not on the deep levels of worthiness that I now recognise we all have. So I went into my late teens and early twenties I would say with really low levels of self worth. And what that translated into was me getting into relationships with people that didn't treat me well and people pleasing and looking for affection and acceptance in all the wrong places. I was looking for other people to accept me and trying hard to be accepted rather than looking to accept myself.

And I truly believe a lot of that stemmed from what I picked up as a teenager with a key to success. So yeah into my early twenties I went to university and I'll talk a little bit more about that because there was some interesting stuff that went on there too. I was looking for love as I mentioned in the wrong places. And so some of the lowest periods of my life I think have been relating to trying to come out of my shell and find my place in the world and find that sort of self confidence that I really lacked and trying to find and believe in myself.

To have the confidence to put myself out there to meet new people and also to stand up and say I shouldn't be treated like that by people. I believe my worth was tired and having a boyfriend or tired and having a relationship which I now know to be absolutely not true but I know I'm not the only person that has gone through that or is going through that. And so that was a crucial part of my development was moving from really low levels of self worth and how I treated myself to throughout my mid twenties changing that around completely. And in summary I mean the crucial changes I made were the mindset from looking outside of myself for my worthiness and focusing my energy inward and recognizing that my worthiness came from inside of me.

And that sounds so simple and it's so much easier said than done. And it's certainly something I help other women with. So jumping back a bit and going back to when I started college or university. I went to university with the intention of studying law.

So I'd been really good at English at high school. Kids who were good at English went on to law school. Kids who were good at science went on to engineering or medical school. That's kind of how I saw it.

I was dedicated to having a profession when I came out of university. I wanted certainty around my career so law is psychological. So I went and did my first year of law school and got through no problem. And then it came to my second year.

And I was distracted by life. I was struggling with that low self worth and really unhealthy and romantic relationships. And I just didn't prioritize school. I didn't go.

And so I managed to convince them to let me into law school to redo my second year. And I flunked out again through not even going. And there was a lot of stuff going on for why I didn't go. I had.

And most of it came down to my self confidence. I missed the first small tutorial group and then I wouldn't go again because I was too embarrassed to turn up and be the new girl coming in all by myself. I look back and just can't even believe that was me as a person but it just really demonstrates how far you can come. So after flunking out of law school twice I really didn't have the option to go back.

And I was devastated. And it really forced me to look around and think what am I going to do with my life? What am I going to do here? Law is an option.

And that's when I looked at psychology. I've been taking psychology as purely interest papers. And it was the stuff that I loved going to. I was fascinated about human nature and why we do what we do.

And the reason I hadn't really thought of psychology before as a career option was purely because the course of study was too long. And New Zealand it was going to be an eight year course of study for me to become a psychologist. Which in hindsight I ended up doing. But when at 18 you were talking about another eight years at school that sounded a little bit too overwhelming.

So I went on to pursue psychology and like I said I loved it. I started picking up my textbooks because I wanted to not because I had to. And I was reading this information because I was interested genuinely. And I of course I started getting good grades and I was attending my classes and everything went really well.

So as I went through with psychology I started to recognise that I was much more drawn to positive psychology or the positive aspects of psychology rather than the clinical aspects. And in New Zealand at the time I really only had two choices for postgraduate study and two paths to registering as a psychologist. And so I chose rather than going to clinical route and working with people dealing with disorders or mental illness to focus on the industrial and organisational route which was the business psychology. I did my masters in the impacts of stress and well-being and emotional intelligence in the workplace.

So whether or not more emotionally intelligent people coped better with their stress. And they did. But mainly with the interpersonal stress interestingly enough. Which is no surprise really.

So my idealistic dream is I was going through my masters in psychology and I wasn't sure how to pull it all together. Was that I wanted to make the world a bit of place. I could see huge levels of stress and unhappiness in the world with increasing levels of depression and just general unhappiness. And I wanted to somehow make a difference.

Fate sort of took over and I ended up getting a job of prestigious consultancy in New Zealand and the business psychology space. And I'm a big believer in being able to look back and interesting that all of your pieces will fit together and you'll see exactly why you walk the path you did. And my life has very much been like that. So I worked for a couple of years for the consultancy there in Auckland was where I was based.

Before I actually moved down to Christchurch when after I met my husband. And we were in Christchurch for a couple of years. I set up an HR consultancy arm of a recruitment company down there and did a lot of consulting with businesses around how to get the best out of their people, how to create the right kind of climates and have the right types of leadership to motivate, manage and inspire their teams. I also did a ton of our placement work there which is helping people through redundancy and career changes.

Then my husband got a really good training opportunity back in Auckland, New Zealand, which was when I was able to go back to the initial consultancy I'd worked for, which was wonderful. So I moved into a leadership position there and ended up managing a team of 13. By the time I was in my late 20s. So that was a wonderful experience and I wouldn't change it for the world.

But it also was everything I had set out to achieve. So here I was in my late 20s. And all of the striving I had been striving towards, I've been hoping to have kind of registered psychologist and I achieved that by the time I was about 28 I think. And then I'd wanted to be in management and wear corporate suits and high heels and talk in boardrooms and be taken seriously.

And all of that had happened. And so I actually got pregnant and had my first baby when I was 29 years old. And it was when I had him that I sort of took a step back from my life and had a moment of self-reflection I guess. And I know everybody and I know so many other people are just like I was.

They're just on the treadmill going through the daily grind. They get up. They think they move into what's everything they want. And you don't even stop to question if you're actually doing what you want to do or you're getting the joy or fulfillment out of what you are doing that you had hoped you would.

And so it wasn't until I was sort of forced to stop by having my baby that I really stepped back and thought what does my life look like? What does my future look like? Because if my future looks exactly like this within 30 years then I don't think I want to buy into that. And so it was really one of those moments after having my first child of looking around and realizing that I was at the top of the mountain that I had set out to climb.

But I wasn't feeling these grand levels of fulfillment or joy that society sort of sells us other keys to success if you just keep striving and climbing your fearless. And on paper I had everything I wanted. I was married to a great man. I had my baby.

I was the top of my office. I was in management and a consultancy being taken seriously and respected for what I did. And it really was this kind of empty feeling of how can I have all this and still not feel fulfilled. Like I'm sure these deeper levels of fulfillment.

I'm sure these more and why do I feel like I'm still missing a puzzle piece here? So I guess in many ways that was sort of the start of me recognizing that things had to change in my life moving forward. Another really important part of my story which deserves some attention and I think helped me sort of recognize that the things that I had been chasing perhaps weren't going to completely fulfill me was that I converted to Judaism when I was 28 or so. As I mentioned earlier I was brought up in sort of a Christian household although my family weren't very weren't observant at all.

But when I met my husband he was Jewish. And I'd grown up in New Zealand and to be honest I don't think I'd ever even met anyone who was Jewish. All I knew about Judaism was Charlotte from Sex and the City had converted to marry her husband. And so I didn't convert to marry my husband but I did want to know more about his family, his religion and his culture.

So I started attending courses at our local synagogue in New Zealand. And I really enjoyed the spiritual discovery and having an outlet and a place to discuss these deep and meaningful aspects of our lives and what gave our lives purpose and about history and big questions around what makes somebody a good person and charity and Sadaka and family and all of these amazing things that this class on Judaism was giving me weekly this ability to talk through and question within myself as well as our group that we were in. We spent two hours every Sunday for a year. And so I loved it.

Part of me was getting that spiritual need in myself that hadn't been getting attention was had an outlet. The other thing about Judaism and why I finally decided to convert is all of the things that had brought me great fear and stress about Christianity and the Judaism I was exposed to that was never a part of it. We talked about in our classes a messianic age more than waiting for the Messiah and I truly believe in a messianic age or an age of enlightenment and that really resonated with me and my spiritual beliefs and my new age thoughts. And so to convert to Judaism when I was that age was quite a natural process for me and I decided that I liked the teachings for my children because I do feel like there are a lot of bad things about religion.

But at the same time, you don't want to throw out the baby with a bathwater and if we look at all of our religions and I am absolutely one of these people, they all come down to the same thing. They're all about love and I love for one another and to treat our neighbors like ourselves. So you're just coming full circle. I think that that outlet for my spiritual curiosity in my late twenties was also a really important part of me continuing to develop and question and inquire about myself.

So after I had my baby, I did go back to that job just two days a week and the company I was working for were incredibly accommodating. But as quickly as I went back, my husband had an amazing training opportunity in the US so we moved to Houston, Texas, which is where I now live. So I was pregnant with our second child when we moved to the States and did have a green card when we first got here. So I just took a few months out really to enjoy my pregnancy, which was a luxury and get settled into my new surroundings really.

And believe me, there was a decent amount of culture shop moving from New Zealand to the States. Driving on the wrong side of the road was a challenge. But I've got it done now for years and no longer going through rims and tyres like I did when we first got here, which is great. So then I guess there's the next phase of my life, which is really what I would find as motherhood.

And I was a stay at home mom and completely immersed in that role of being a mama. Alongside that I obviously lived in another country away from my family and contacts and friends and my husband's family didn't live in Houston either. They were on the East Coast. So my husband had started a new job and was incredibly busy with that.

And it was long hours of big time commitments. And I was at home with a one and a half year old and then a brand new baby boy. So by the time our single one came along, our first son wasn't quite too. And in hindsight, I can see now that I just really threw myself into being a mother and a martyr.

I have completely stopped doing anything for myself whatsoever. And I'm sure if you follow me on Facebook or have done any of my challenges, you can see throughout this is a consistent thing throughout my work of how important I believe self care is. And obviously that comes from my theory. I think what is a little ironic about this is here I had a master's that specialized in stress and well-being.

And then here I am burning out as a mother. And part of that was because I truly thought burnout belonged to the corporate world. I felt like I didn't have a right to be burning out as a mother. And that was something that I just taken on unconsciously.

But I didn't think burnout could affect me when I was a stay at home mom. And I just want to say right now, hands down, being a stay at home mom is the hardest job I've ever had in my life. And like I mentioned, I was managing a team of 13 at one point and corporate consulting with deadlines and contracts and proposals and prison tables. And I was in my own home and proposals and presentations and international travel and training courses.

And being a stay at home mom is so much harder. So I just want to give a hands up out there to all the stay at home moms who can hear me on that one. So here I am in my early 30s and I've thrown myself into motherhood and I was really being a martyr. Like I said, I was doing nothing for myself whatsoever.

And I got to a point, my little boy, my youngest was probably 10 months old. And I can just remember crying and just sitting in my bedroom and thinking, who the hell am I anymore? I have no idea who I am. I don't know what I want.

And I felt lost. I no longer had the security of home. If you like, registering as a psychologist wasn't going to be a possibility or particularly easy in the States. It would have been for me training here.

And so here I was going, I can't hold on to my titles. I can't hold on to the things I told myself I was because that doesn't work in America. So who the hell am I? And what do I want?

Where am I heading? What do I even like? What do I love? What gets me excited?

When was the last time I did something for me? And all of this kind of came crashing down. And I can remember having a conversation with my husband, where I just looked at him with tears in my eyes and I said, I don't even know who I am anymore. And that's truly how I felt.

So it was from that point that I started to piece together the life that I have today. I have a thriving life mini guide that is part of my website. And if you sign up to join my community, you get it delivered to your inbox. And that document I outlined some of the simple things I did to really help myself come back to myself.

And the reality was, it was baby steps. And I was so lucky that I had psychology as something I could fall off. Something I could fall back on because I knew the theory. It was about applying it to my own life.

So to come back full circle right to back to my teen years, I guess, and how I mentioned I've always been a soul, a secret and a spiritual surture if you like. So when my husband met when I was 25, he asked me what my hobbies were. And I said to him, not even kidding. I said sleep, drinking wine with friends, and self-help books.

And it's true. One of my hobbies has always been that personal development that's searching for self and knowledge and wisdom. And so when I was starting to pull myself back together and remember the things I loved and who I was and what made me unique, one of those things was coming back to doing the things I loved. And that was reading self-help books and suggesting wisdom and spiritual information.

So I threw myself into that. And I encourage people in my self-care challenges to write a light you up list. And I'm going to link, I'll put a link in the show notes to the blog post that I've written about exactly how to do that. But I think it's such a vital thing to do for everyone.

It's so important to know the things that light you up and the things that speak to your soul. And so I basically did that in my own life. I wrote a whole big list of all the things I just loved. And I started to remember the things I loved that I'd forgotten and slowly but surely I started to remember myself.

So the simple things that I love, I love the beach, but I don't like swimming. So that one can fail a little bit. I don't want to. But I love the smell of the sea air.

I love hot cups of tea. I love hot showers. I love the smell of lavender. It reminds me of my childhood.

All of these simple things that I had forgotten to include in my life. And they're the little things that make me different from everybody else. So anyway, I launched myself back into my passion around psychology and self-help and spiritual seeking and development. And that's where I started a blog called Heart Home Happy.

And I decided I wanted to use my voice and start sharing that with the world. And I sat down with my husband and I said, look, I'm going to start a blog. And I decided this after watching an Oprah episode with Marston Koehabria Elberg, and I looked at them and they weren't that much older than me. And I thought, hang on, if they can do that, I can too.

And it was one of the first times I felt like my intuition really gave me a boot up the butt and was like, get on with it, start doing something. And so rather than questioning, I just followed my gut. And so I started this blog, Heart Home Happy. And I sat down with my husband.

I said, I'm going to start a blog. And he was great. He was all supportive. And I said to him, and I remember this so clearly, I said, worst case scenario, nobody reads this.

Not a single person. And I'm just doing this for myself. At least it will make me happier. And that's honestly been my motivation.

This, I started Heart Home Happy with the hope that reconnecting with my own spiritual search and my love of positive psychology and having a reason to pursue that. Would bring me back to myself and make me happier. So I already knew then that worst case scenario, I was only going to make myself happier. And as I said to him, best case, this turns into something.

And somebody asked, actually wants to read my stuff. And it turned into best case scenario. So I started writing and I learned how to blog. And oh my gosh, I tell you what, some of my first blogs were so terrible.

I can't even begin to laugh too hard about it because they were bad. But it was really a matter of you have to start somewhere and it's one foot in front of the other. And so I started writing. And then I had a piece published on Mind Body Green and I realized, oh my gosh, I can do this.

It was the little pattern on the back I think I needed from the universe if you like to say, no, you can play with the big boys. You're a good enough writer to hold your own here and you have something to say. So after that, I went on to start my business, Thrive.How? And that's really where I bought a coaching element to it and started offering my services more professionally, I guess.

So yeah, in short, that's how I got to where I am today. It was my background in psychology and my experience with coaching and personality work and emotional intelligence. And everything I'd done in the corporate world, that post-Mummy-Dum, in my own breakdown and burnout, I really bought together as an offering to help other people out there. And I have to admit, now when I look back at those idealistic dreams I had, when I was going through my masters in my early 20s thinking, how can I make the world a better place?

I want to be the type of psychologist that can help in some of the pain I see in individuals and the stress and unhappiness and lack of fulfillment I see in others. And I realized now that I didn't know I was doing it at the time, but I was walking the perfect path to create that theory business for myself and be able to offer that to the world. So yeah, that's how I got here. That's why I do what I do.

I do this for the passion. I'm in this for the love. There's no other way about it. I absolutely want to see the world become a better place.

And I truly believe that starts with us each understanding and recognizing our own worthiness. So by each of us becoming happier and more fulfilled individuals, I truly believe we will see a brighter world. So yeah, I mentioned that the last podcast and the introduction podcast about here to thrive the podcast and what I hope this will be. But if you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to me.

You can find my email address on my website. It's www.dotthrive.how and it's H-O-W. As I also mentioned in the introduction podcast, I'll be recording podcast every week with every fifth or so episode being an interview. So in between that, you'll be getting tips from me about how to live a happier life.

I'm incredibly practical. So you'll always get plenty of practical tips about how you can apply stuff to your own life. That's really important to me. So thanks for listening today and I hope to see you back next episode.

Thanks for listening to Here to Thrive. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love if you could go into iTunes and subscribe and leave a review. I'll be back again next week with more tips on how to live a happier life. See you then.