Uplifting Value - The Next Phase
Continuing to uplift and provide value through Pricing and other Passions.
Welcome to Uplifting Value
Uplifting Value started as a way of using my 20+ years pricing experience to help business especially female-led businesses to price their product or service. Having seen individuals including myself undervalue themselves, impacting their self-confidence and feeling resentful, I resolved to work on myself and help others to truly step into their work’s worth.
I founded UPLIFTING VALUE with the vision to help individuals such as freelancers, coaches, creatives, consultants, and small businesses value their work's worth and price accordingly.
After a few years and many passion projects later, I now view myself as an experienced Pricing Strategist who is looking for uplifting ways to merge her passions for books, writing, cooking and travelling.
My Family Wisdom
I recently introduced My Family Wisdom, my idea to help the sandwich generation preserve family heritage and facilitate family/social connection. This closely aligns with my passions for cooking, books and delving into my heritage.
As a first step I am documenting the process of creating my very own family cookbook. If you’re interested in coming along on the journey, you can subscribe to the My Family Wisdom Substack.
Healing Through Books
Another passion project that I have undertaken, this time with Karen Hollenbach from Confessions of KPH is Healing Through Books. Season One took the form of a podcast. We captured conversations with allied health practitioners and subject matter experts who generously shared their personal experiences with books and how they use them in their work.
Episodes included conversations with Dr Lillian Nejad, Wai Ying Tham, Ingrid Jones, Mike Dyson, Susie Hopkins and Dr Patricia Gallagher.
In Season Two, our conversations and literary prescriptions will take the form of letters to each other on Substack making the most of our zones of joy - reading and writing.
Using Substack as our writing paper and literature as our guide, we hope the letters passed between us may open a door for you, the reader.
Healing Through Books - Karen’s First Letter
Karen’s letter can be found here.
Healing Through Books - My Letter
Dear Karen,
When I first read your letter where you described yourself being alone in Brisbane, I was touched with a twinge of guilt knowing that I could have been there with you. However, when you described that it was such a great retreat for you, that you were able to engage in the experience fully and coincidentally, I was learning about bibliotherapy at the same time I felt reassured that we were where we needed to be.
I remember seeing the bibliotherapy session advertisement and was so excited that there was something happening so close to home that I snapped a picture of it and sent it to you! As it turned out that while you were in Brisbane learning about Bibliotherapy, I was doing the same in Sydney (much shorter, mind you!) at my local bookshop Constant Reader. It felt like we needed to arrive at the same spot in our own way so that we could finally get some traction on Season Two.
An Evening of Bibliotherapy
Germaine Leece is Constant Reader’s resident bibliotherapist, she is also a counsellor and psychotherapist. She is also the co-author of Reading through the Seasons - a book that consists of letters exchanged between herself and your fellow bibliotherapist friend Sonya Tsakalakis as an introduction to bibliotherapy which also details the evolution of their friendship.
I even found out it’s called epistolary - literary works in the form of letters. My local bookshop provided me with books that collates letters of reknown authors:
Writers' Letters: Jane Austen to Chinua Achebe edited by Michael Bird and Orlando Bird.
Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience edited by Shaun Usher.
Seeing letters as books affirmed what I wrote to you previously when your Substack post “Honouring letter writing traditions” reminded me of writers who used to write to each other, just to have conversations about their shared experiences.
I found Germaine’s use of the children’s book Goggle Eyes by Anne Fine as the best definition of Bibliotherapy, poetic and charming.
“Living your life is a long and doggy business. . . . And stories and books help. Some help you with the living itself. Some help you just take a break. The best do both at the same time.”
All of Germaine’s book recommendations were fiction books, and I came away from the session, gaining a deeper understanding on how fiction can provide insights into an inner world much more intimately than non-fiction.
Other notes from the session:
Understand the mind of someone else in order to understand ourselves.
“Bibliothèque intérieure” means your “inner library” in French.
A novel is freedom without responsibility.
Not to read to feel better, read to feel more.
Anything that touches you is a bibliotherapy book.
Book prescription
Yours
Your book prescriptions elicited so many thoughts, here are some.
The Let Them Theory, by Mel Robbins
It is such a coincidence that I had recently given/prescribed this very book to someone close to me. Your experience mirrors some of my own and in gifting this book, my hope that they will experience the same. As mentioned by you, there has been much said about the Let Them theory on social media. Let Me, the next step really resonated with me, it reminds us that we always have choice. It’s fascinating that it was from Mel’s daugher’s research that the genesis of Let Me came about (“The One Tool to Transform Your Relationships: The Let Them Theory” (34:36)), Let Them on its own was not enough.
Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading, by Bijal Shah
I originally borrowed Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading from my local library. I bookmarked so many pages that I realised that I needed to buy the book so that I can refer to the points that I had marked. It reminded me of preparing for our One Roof Book Club and the notes I use to write and the post-it notes that would peek out of my books. I thought you have a kick of seeing it, so I’ve included a picture.
I can imagine The Let Theory being one of the books discussed in the One Roof Book Club. Something to consider?
Mine
Shadowlands: A Play by William Nicholson
This book is forever in my memory due to the following quote:
“We read to know we're not alone.”
To me, that is the very definition of bibliotherapy and an antedote for loneliness. The play is the inspiration for the movie Shadowlands starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. The short novel not only contains this quote but also details the intersection of pain, faith and real-life experience especially when it is triggered by love and then grief. The movie focusses on love, pain and grief while the novel provides an added window to loneliness.
Discovery – A New Type of Library
Funny that you would asked when was the last time I was in Brisbane, it was for a junior tennis tournament in July, it was back and forth between our tennis courts and our accommodation. We didn’t get a chance to explore Brisbane so thank you for the wonderful photos of the Brisbane libraries. I thought you would be interested to know that our closest library has started a Seed Library.
How to use a seed library?
Borrow the seeds
Plant and grow the seeds
Harvest and bring seeds back to the library so others can grow the plants as well.
The circularity of it seems so elegant and apt. I’ve included some photos of the seed library.
Our Small Act
I must admit, my response to you has taken me longer than I expected and I have to thank you for saying ‘Write like no one is watching’ in your original letter. I had a lot of thoughts about who would be reading, was it good enough to go with your writing, how much do I write and reveal, does this mean I am a writer?
And just like you, I had to move through the emotions - especially with that last question, which felt overwhelming for a while. I had to sit down and think about it and then think about it again so many times that I’ve lost count.
Just like you, I remind myself that this is a commitment we made to ourselves that Healing through Books is:
our small act in doing something to help the world
And that we are where we need to be.
With Love,
A