Shivani Gupta

Welcome to the AskShivani podcast, today I have Samantha Nolan-Smith, the founder and the CEO of The School of Visibility. She is a self-professed introverted green tea drinking book reading mom of two children and, and she's been working a lot longer online than a lot of us since 2008. After a career as she calls it, a personality type in law and social justice, she became, unfortunately very unwell with chronic fatigue that we'll find out a bit more about. And she couldn't hold down a regular job. It took her four years to recover from that. And she let go of a lot of unhealthy habits and unhealthy values in that particular time. And in the last decade or so she spent a whole decade building online businesses counting on wisdom practices, and values, and really helping people come into alignment, and also looking at things in life a lot differently. She's got an academic and professional background in Philosophy and Public Policy and Social Justice and Law. And through her studies, she helps women where they recognize their own worth and feel more confident in sharing their perspectives, build a sustainable and successful online business, speak about issues that might shift in the conversations in the home and industries, and establish themselves as a new type of leader, please, it's so lovely to welcome you, Samantha Nolan-Smith. Thank you for joining me today.

Samantha Nolan-Smith

Thank you for having me, Shivani. It's lovely to be here.

Shivani Gupta

And Sam when I read this amazing CV of yours, and you've done so many other things, and obviously you speak about chronic fatigue and your bio, and I know that you go through that with this, take us through a bit of your journey. Take us through your highs and your lows in terms of what's transformed you into who you are today.

Samantha Nolan-Smith

Well, I think this piece around chronic fatigue was obviously a low bar. And but it really built off some other lower lows. Sometimes I laugh at my own journey. So, you know, I have had PTSD since I was 10 from being assaulted at that time. And I didn't know that for a long time. I didn't have a label for it. I thought PTSD was only for people who went to war, it took me a really long time to understand that actually, many, many sexual assault victims suffer from PTSD, it took me a long time to realize all that little bit of drama and chaos that just happened in my life was actually PTSD triggered.

And, and that led to many years from about 15 to about 30-35 I had depression, very serious depression. And really, there were times where I was really what I call white knuckling it to just stay alive. And I spent a lot of time hiding that because of the shame of certainly at the time. I mean, I'm uh, you know, I was born in the 70s. So, I didn't have language for a lot of a lot of the time around even depression, I didn't have language for first of all, and I just felt like I kept having language around. I just feel like there's something wrong with me. But I don't know why. And I don't even necessarily know that I look around me and I have this beautiful family and I have incredible parents. So, these were the highs, where I had absolute stability in my home life. And the things that it happened to me that cause of PTSD have an outside of my home and by strangers. And so, I had this real mix of incredible stability, loving family really encouraging supportive home life, but then feeling like the world was absolutely unsafe. And, and so all of that spent many, many, many years unraveling all of that. And the Chronic Fatigue was almost like the depression, I had found a lot of tools by that stage to really overcome a lot of the depression and really address the extremes of the depression because if you have had depression, you will know that you can go along fine for a while. And then when you dip, you can dip so low, that it becomes very difficult to interact with people to go outside to do you know, to do anything really just breath was the thing that kept me going then it was really I'm grateful for my breath. I'm just grateful to have breath and gratitude. I know that we'll probably talk a bit more about this later. But gratitude and breath were two really key pivotal tools that I use at that time to help me to keep going through life and moving through the Depression as best I could.

I subsequently encountered a lot of therapies trained by a yoga teacher etc. And you know, all that's very heavy, all of those things absolutely opened me up to personal development to myself in a way that I think, perhaps I would not have had I had those challenges in my life, it certainly opened me up to greater levels of compassion for all people. And it really, I realized now that this peace around stability of home and family life was absolutely fundamental. And I feel so grateful to have had that and then to have built that myself in my own family life with my husband. And so that was, that's absolutely been a sort of a core positive thing. That's really, I've been feel very, very fortunate for.

And then off the back of that, then I was able to have adventures at the same time. And so, you know, one of my great highlights was becoming crew on a 200-foot-tall ship that sailed from Toronto to the Bahamas. And we took eight weeks to do that. And that was just incredible to be out in the ocean, with no land anywhere inside and just, you know, occasional whales or dolphins or it's just, it's such a, you know, it's such an adventurous experience and such a beautiful experience. And I think the couple of the other highlights would be absolutely having children, I have a girl and a boy. And becoming a mother wasn't necessarily something that I wasn't a person who grew up saying I absolutely want to become a mom. And I was so aware that I had all of these mental health issues that I needed to address, I really put that off a long time because I thought I don't want to, I'm not in a state to be able to take care of other people until I've really got better myself, or at least feel like I'm really tooled up. And so, I didn't meet my husband till my late 30s. And then we had two children. And really, it's been just such a beautiful thing to be a parent, at a time where I was ready to be a parent and excited about being a parent.

And then I think the other big highlight for me, obviously, starting The School of Visibility, and running my own business has been an enormous privilege and highlight, and I love it so much. And for many years, I worked with Aboriginal communities across New South Wales. And then I did some work across Australia as a whole. And that as a non-Indigenous woman, has been one of the great privileges of my life. And so many times I just found myself feeling in awe of different communities and nations and their knowledge and wisdom, and the fact that they were willing to share that with me. I just felt like the luckiest human being on the planet.

Shivani Gupta

Wow, that is so beautiful. And vulnerably thank you for sharing that, Sam. I just really appreciate that. And so, you spoke a bit about, you know, the challenges that come our way. Sometimes people have a process, sometimes they have a philosophy. You just talked a bit about breath there. And that and you talks a little bit about gratitude as well. But and maybe they're not part of your, you know, almost like your tricks in your bag. And so, when challenges come your way, and you've got some really big ones in there with sexual assault, and depression and PTSD. Talk us through, you know, how do you kind of go about addressing challenges, whether they're big ones, like the ones you just mentioned, whether they're more day to day, like how do you go about addressing them and coming across them and getting over them?

Samantha Nolan-Smith

I think that it has developed over the years. So certainly, I started I just was trying to really literally just stay alive and get into a place where my head was. It didn't even have to be happy. It just had to be neutral like it was trying to find a place of neutrality. And that was when I came across gratitude journaling. And so, I just started every day doing you know, five things I was grateful for and often I couldn't find five I could just find a breath that was it or bed like that's an incredible one how fortunate we are those of us who are have homes of any sort, how I often think what a wonderful thing it is to have a bed.

So, I started with those things. I also I don't even know first of all how I came across it, but I started with yoga and I wasn't a practicing yogaing at the time I wasn't, I wasn't aware really much of yoga, but somehow you know yoga It has always found me. So, yoga nidra came into my life. And I started using that. And it was wonderful because my mind was so challenged in so many ways. And, it just gave me something to follow. So, I could lay down in bed, and I could just follow the voice and follow the thread of it. Because at the time, I definitely couldn't do meditation in the sense of just going into stillness, and, and being still and my body felt very unsafe, and so forth. So listening to this voice, and following the thread of the voice was, I was shocked, I remember, when I first started doing it, within a month, I felt so different in my being that I thought I am just going to keep doing this forever. So that was, so that was a tool that I used early on, but I continue to use.

And if we skip forward those years of chronic fatigue, really by that time I had been practicing yoga for many years, I had become a yoga teacher in my spare time. And really, they were the years. For those who know, Raja Yoga, Raja Yoga has eight limbs to it. And it wasn't so much that I was practicing arsenal, because I couldn't physically do a lot with my body at that time. But I was practicing pratyahara by virtue of circumstance and pratyahara pratyahara is sense withdrawal. And so, what I was learning, then through force of circumstance, I was I couldn't have any light, I couldn't have any sound, I couldn't have any electronics near me, I just had to be completely in a room in a dark room and just lay there. And I wouldn't recommend this for everybody because it's not great for your mental. But I was already in such a bad place with my mental health, it was actually incredibly healing. And it was hard, first of all, and I resisted a lot, I wasn't trying to get up and I was trying to keep going and I was I still had that push in me, and I had a lot of steel, my nervous system was too wide quite tight. And so, I pushed for a lot of time.

And then eventually I realized, oh, I'm being invited to let go of all of this, I'm being invited to let go of all the stories that I have about who I am or how I'm supposed to show up in the world and being invited to even let go of being able to do anything, I couldn't do more than go to the bathroom and then come back to bed. And that would be enough like that would be really all I could do in a day. And that experience of many years of that really taught me the value. One of observing resistance in this in myself and noticing what the resistance is recognizing that resistance is exhausting. And it takes a lot of energy to resist what is. And so, I became very attuned to my own levels of resistance, I then started to meet them, and started to have compassion for the resistance that was within and really taught me about how extraordinarily important it is to be still. And whether that's a formal meditation practice, or lots of people will find stillness in inaction, say by going for a walk-in nature. And so, there's a stillness that comes over the body, when you're walking in nature, not when you're kind of walking through a supermarket or a shopping center, or very, you know, there's a lot of stimulus there. But when you're walking in nature, there's a stillness that comes with that.

And for me, now, one of the practices that I do all the time, is if I feel like I'm having a very busy week, I will just sit in my garden, and I will do nothing I might observe and it's not a conscious practice, it's just something that evolved organically where I will sit maybe I'll observe the breeze or the sun or the leaves, but I just do a lot of nothing. And then it grounds me, It brings me back into a place of connection with body and with Earth. And with breath again and with emotions and there there's a cohesion to that which then enables, brings through, creativity brings through clarity and enables me to know what's next steps for me.

Shivani Gupta

Yeah, that’s beautiful. And that probably starts to I was going to ask this question later. But you know, so part of your wellness and particularly part of your mental wellness is that space, so we actually do nothing will be out of stillness because it rounds you. And a lot of I know, I've had some meditation teachers, I'm currently learning to be a meditation teacher as well. And a lot of those practices about grounding, right? It's not about Sanskrit mantras and me being really complicated. It's just about that grounding aspect. Are there other things that you do, Sam, for your wellness and your mental wellness in particular, and sometimes, you know, those rituals that exist. You know, sometimes people do things yearly, and they go on a retreat, what are some of the other things that you do so you do your beautiful garden ritual, but what are some of the other things that you do for your wellness and your mental wellness?

Samantha Nolan-Smith

One of the things that I am really conscious about doing as a mother is, I consciously take joy in my children. And that's something that I think that we can overlook, because, you know, there can be a lot of activity in the days, and there's so much going on, for everybody. And the very first thing I do every morning is I just spend time, and the first thing I say to my children is, it's so lovely to see you. And I just take joy in their presence in my life. And, and so I just hug them, and I let them know, it is wonderful. Like, I want them to know how wonderful it is that they exist. And so, we spend the morning very slowly I used to rush through the mornings, and now I'm quite slow in my mornings, and all my practices and behaviors and things change when I got sick. And so, we cuddle, and we laugh, and we just don't rush out of the slowness of the morning, we find a way to take joy in the moment. And then we obviously then we have to get dressed, and we have to eat, and we have to do all of those things. But there's just that very first touch point of look at this, what a lovely, this isn't it wonderful to be here together in this moment. So often family hugs in the bed, and you know, that kind of thing. So that's one thing that I think really starts my day, there was a lot, there's a lot in the particularly in entrepreneurial spaces, about doing, you know, lots of things that you can do in the mornings to prepare yourself for the day. And, and I'm sure all of those work because you know, there's so many billions of us on the planet, that there must be billions of ways to start the day. And for me, a lot of those I was happy, it came to me around the time when my kids were very little, like babies and you know, first couple of years, and I thought this is not practical or realistic for mothers, or parents if the you know, if there is a partner and if that partner is engaged. I remember having many conversations, my husband saying, I can't possibly like meditate for an hour in the morning where my kids.

Shivani Gupta

No, it's more stressful doing it.

Samantha Nolan-Smith

Or I'd be trying to do yoga asanas and they'd be climbing all over me and maybe like, I realized I really have to simplify. And that's another practice that I do a lot is I look for simplicity. And I know I'm going to have to simplify and just get really boiled this down to the essence of what is it that I really need in the morning. And what I knew for myself is what I needed was connection. And I needed that presence, and some joy. And so that's a simple practice there.

And then I think the other thing ritual that I have, which is less of a ritual, and it's more of it very integrated into my working day is I continue that practice of noticing when I'm in resistance. And so, as I'm working away in my day, if I suddenly notice my body is feeling tight, or tense, or I'm just in a not in a great space, emotionally or something I don't push through, and I don't ignore it, which is what I used to do. I used to think I'll deal with that later. And so, then I'd have to you know, it would build up through the day and then I really would have to deal with it. And I realized this is not this is not ideal; this is not optimal. And so now I just stopped straight away. And I have different tools that I use, I use compassion Qi which is a self-compassion technique, where I'm giving myself compassion for if I've got emotions coming up and I'm feeling upset or I'm feeling like this isn't working for me what's going on here? I use compassion Qi and so you can just say there's like self-compassion.

It's just like I'm so sorry this is happening. I'm so sorry. If feeling like this, I'm so sorry. And I use that to help the parts of me that are feeling frustrated or annoyed or agitated, to feel seen and heard, one of the things that I share at The School of Visibility and that I have learned over the years is how healing it is, for us to feel seen and feel heard. And just that simple act of giving that to ourselves, that gift of seeing the wounded part of ourselves, or the upset part of ourselves, or whatever it is, and taking a moment to be with that part of ourselves. And send that compassion is something that then enables that part of me to just go, ah, okay, she knows I'm here. I'm okay, I'm at peace. Because we're like this, those parts of us are a bit like toddlers, we're like, we're gonna get noisier and noisier and noisier until we're actually heard. And, you know, anybody who's spent time with toddlers knows that the toddler will say - Mom, mom, mom! we don't pay attention to them. And so, it is with our inner selves. And so that's another thing that I do all the time. Or I do things like, I think I'm just not in flow. Now I need to create, some creative input, or I need something. And so, I live in Canberra, in Australia, and I need some beautiful, incredible National Art Gallery and Portrait Gallery, and so forth. And so, I often will just take myself off to the gallery, and I will just sit amongst the art. And I'll take in, I won't ask myself any questions about work, I won't put any pressure on myself about business, I'll just sit amongst creative energy, they have a beautiful sculpture garden out from this, and then I can go out into nature and be in the sculpture garden, looking at the lake. And invariably, something like that, will just what will happen by letting go, will be an idea, will come through or a resolution will appear or there'll be some something that will clarify for me, and then I'll be ready to go again.

Shivani Gupta

Amazing, that was gold, there was so many things in there, I was like, oh, that's just so amazing. So, for the listeners that listen, that I'm going to rewind that part and be able to do that. And I remember, I used to get so frustrated when the kids were little too, Sam, because you know, they climb all over me while I'm there trying to hum and do my meditation practice. And I remember one of my teachers going, well, you know, if you only get three minutes in, where you get to lots of three minutes in, then that's the best you can do. I want to do more, I want to do more. It's just these little kids are climbing all over me and I don't like it may actually be quite stressful leading up to the meditation. There was just all this angst, you know, trying to get to that. So, I think what you just shared was so beautiful in terms of being able to do that.

Sam, tell us a little bit about future aspirations for yourself, for The School of Visibility, tell us, you know, where do you want to take care? Do you plan? Do you look out a year 10 years? What do you see happening in your life, both personally and professionally.

Samantha Nolan-Smith

I mean, personally, I just really want to get my renovation done. We've been, you know, in the middle of COVID, this part of COVID I feel like COVID is gone through a few different phases, this part of COVID where you know, supply chain issues are still a big thing. So, on a personal level, I really do feel very happy when I complete because, having that stable, quiet home is such a big part of my mental health practice. So, I have noticed some challenges around that. And I really worked, you know, really been working with those I have an incredible partner who is the real note he's very naturally nurturing, he takes care of so many things from the shopping to the cleaning to the, you know, he does, he really is the machinery that keeps the family going. And so, one of my big aspirations is just to continue to, to value him to grow our relationship and just to really always appreciate that support that I have in my life. I find it incredible, and I feel very, very fortunate for it. I think also as a mother, you know, every parent hopes that their children are happy and resilient and you know, insert whatever adjective you wish there for me, I really want my children to be a globally aware citizens, who are aware of their own privileges, who are compassionate, who are empathetic human beings who know how to advocate for injustice around injustice in the world. So, I've set them up, I've done various things to try and support them in that endeavor, and to make them aware of some of the experiences that they have in the world that other people don't have, and what we can do about that, so we're a very socially justice minded family and also environmentally conscious family. So, we're also a big aspiration for me is what more can we do around climate change and supporting nature and, and really turning things around in that regard.

And then for The School of Visibility, my ambitions are really around, I've worked very intuitively in business. I'll often be listening to my body, and to guidance that's coming through intuitively around where to take it next. But one of the things that's been coming through for a long time is write more published books. And, and do more in the space of shows podcasting, that kind of thing. And so that they're two of the ways that I see us developing as a company, as into more possibly more of a media company over the next 10 years and beyond. And continuing to support the community and look for partnerships within the community. We do a partnership with Just Peoples, it is an organization, NGO that was set up by two of our students to eradicate with the goal of eradicating poverty globally. And obviously, that's a huge mission. And you know, they're one NGO that's working in that space. And but their philosophy is very much the kind of philosophy that I also developed through working with Aboriginal communities, which is locally led solutions to local problems. And so, we partner with them. So, when we approach our people that come and study with us, we then donate a portion of those funds to a project, whether it be we've donated to many different projects, and, you know, from sex trafficking to sexual assault survivors to entrepreneurial work in many different countries, they work in many countries across parts of Asia, parts of Africa, etc. And so, continuing that work with them growing that is something that I would like to do. And then doing more in support of Aboriginal communities in Australia as well is something that will always be near and dear. And the first for that, for me is whatever we can do to support the referendum and implementation of the roof that another half.

Shivani Gupta

Incredible, that is incredible, I feel like I want to speak to you all day. And would really like to find out more about some of the work that you do around that outside of this podcast as well. And so, tell us from a school of visibility from your profiles, what's the best place for people to find you.

Samantha Nolan-Smith

So, our websites, https://theschoolofvisibility.com/ , and we spend most of our time, so on socials, on Instagram, which is @theschoolofvisibility, and Facebook, we're https://www.facebook.com/theschoolofvisibility , we're very consistent with our branding. And so, they're our primary places. We've just started a private podcast for our students, which if you come across to https://theschoolofvisibility.com/ , you can find that, you can hear more from me that goes out exclusively to The School of Visibility community, that's called Visibility Matters. And we're gearing up in the next couple of months to release our public podcast, which will be The School of Visibility podcasts. But for now, all the conversation happens on Instagram. And all the resources are at https://theschoolofvisibility.com/

Shivani Gupta

That's incredible. Such a pleasure speaking to you, Sam, thank you for making the time today.

Samantha Nolan-Smith

Thank you for having me. And thank you for all the incredible work you do in the world. I think this project of yours with this podcast is really so important.