Annalie Howling
Annalie Howling is a performance coach, speaker, and mental wellbeing advocate, known for her work helping people break through shame, self-doubt, and emotional barriers. With a ba...
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Who are you?
I'm Anna Lee Howling. I'm a performance coach, trauma specialist and author, acclaimed known voice in the industry, particularly around Shane and places that we can limit ourselves in relationships. But I'm also a mother, a single parent. I'm divorced, I'm in my mid forties. I'm navigating midlife second time around opportunities in relationships, and capturing my own career aspirations.
What's your story?
My story is like most people's in many acts, but it didn't run succinctly at first, or at least I didn't think so, and that was due to trauma. I experienced a very traumatic childhood. My father was very violent, and my mother colluded, which meant that I was effectively isolated and afraid throughout my entirety of my childhood. I had no safe person in my life. And that led to me experiencing a catastrophic burnout in my late twenties because I was so desperate to make myself feel safe and secure. And for me at that time, that meant financially secure, which meant people pleasing, never being myself, trying to be perfect so that no one would see the deep wounds and cracks underneath those wounds. And cracks rose to the surface of me as well. I self-harmed for many years, which was deeply shameful, especially as a therapist and as a coach, someone that was able to seemingly help others. When I was unable to stop harming myself. All of this culminated in my divorce coming towards my late thirties and me needing to really focus and face the breaks in my relationship. But what was also happening under my own surface, through that work, I uncovered that it was shame that was the root of my suffering. I firmly believe shame is the root of nearly all of our suffering. Anxiety is something that lives on our surface. It's constant thoughts that we can chase around all day that keep us up at night, but it's shame that makes us perform it's shame that tells us we're not good enough. It's shame that tells us we have to be anything other than ourselves. And when I was able to face my shame to unravel it and work with it, and ultimately release it through training in EMDR protocols, through understanding the role that trauma had always held in my own life and been a root of my own suffering, that's when I was able to transform my personal pain into my purpose. In my book Unapologetic, I write all about shame. I give shame a voice for the first time. I've translated shame, which is a felt sense, a deep felt sense, this insidious liar that lives within our system that makes us act in ways that are not authentic to ourselves. And my story, my brave client stories and expert interviews from the industry, it's a way that you can liberate yourself from shame's grasp with every page that you turn. As I sit here now, I'm 44. I'm a single mother to an incredible daughter. I'm so unbelievably blessed. I have a second opportunity at love as well, and navigating leaning into relationship again and trusting myself and that opportunity to, I speak all over the world on stages. I bring groups together in really intimate and impactful retreats. So we cover off our trauma. And I do a lot of work in the corporate space as well, particularly around Mergers and acquisitions and opportunities for businesses to transform their teams and keep everyone together while undergoing huge periods of change. Fundamentally, part of my story is something that I learned, which is I don't believe in work life balance. I believe we have to look at our whole life and where we're out of balance and where shame might be pulling us further away from our own shores. And my story is nowhere near done at 44. I truly believe that I am starting an entire chapter and life for myself until I worked through my shame. I had a shame full life, which included self-harm and traps of perfectionism and people pleasing. And now I sit here completely shameless. And what that means to me is I'm utterly, utterly and unapologetically free to be myself. And I'm incredibly excited.
What is “goodgirling”?
Oh, good. Girling. The thing that I try to stop myself even saying to my daughter for tidying her room or getting a result and I have to put the words back into my own mouth. Good girling is a place that we've been rewarded for too long. Colouring within the lines, not showing our emotions, not being messy. Being a good girl is someone that's polite, that's well kept. That's in many ways perfect. So perfect that we fly just slightly under the radar. We have these aspirations and we look at people like Beyonce or Adele who are iconic and individual, and we think that's beautiful. I'd like to be like them, but then we move too close to the sun, a bit like Icarus, and suddenly we are too much, and then we're going to be rejected for being too much often by our own peers. And so what we do then is we dial ourselves down, we become a bit more good. We stop ourselves just short of asking for what we need. We may find ourselves in a situation where some conflict may arise and we start to placate and move back and form. Instead. For those familiar with the trauma response fawn, we want to fit in and stay within the group. We naturally fear social rejection is the number one human fear. And so instead what we try and do is we stay and try and stay in this pretty and polite and palatable place because when we are compliant, when we are easier, when we're a good girl, it seems to be more acceptable and I'm here to challenge the social constructs of that.