“The Right Reverend Dr Jonathan Holland, Sister Gillian and Sister Sandra, Sisters of the Society of the Sacred Advent, Ms Debbie Smith, Chair of School Council, Ms Ros Curtis, Principal, distinguished guests, members of staff, students, families and friends of St. Margaret’s.
I am delighted to be here this evening and I want to thank you all for having me. It’s an honour to give this speech on the same stage on which I spoke as school captain 30 years ago.
Congratulations to the recipients of the awards and honours tonight. Congratulations to Olivia and Zara, and a heartfelt thank you to teachers, staff and parents for your wonderful support of our girls. To the senior students—you’re almost there! I have a son in Year 12 and I just want to give all of you a big hug for getting through the past couple of years. It’s been tough, and you deserve to celebrate.
It’s an anxious time, though, isn’t it? You still have your final exams to go and it feels like everything depends on the results you get and the choices you make right now.
But if you look at my career and the careers of more than half the people I know, there are all kinds of starting points, challenges and deviations along the way. As often as not, where we end up bears no relationship to where we thought we wanted to be in the beginning of this crazy obstacle course that is life.
What I’m saying is, relax! There is all the time in the world to get where you’re meant to go. And if you think of it that way, that at each stage of your life, you are where you were meant to be, it will help you to enjoy the present and be less anxious about the future. Ironically, focusing on the present, on what you can do right now, is the best way I know to achieve your long-term goals.
Now, I’m a writer, so when I was asked to speak tonight, I immediately went in search of inspiration—which is to say that I procrastinated for hours watching university commencement speeches on YouTube.
At first, I thought a lot about the school motto – born to fly upwards. It has a sense of lightness to it, doesn’t it? You might think of beautiful birds or rhythmic gymnastics ribbons spiriting through the air.
But when I heard that the Year 12 motto for this year was “Roar as One”, I didn’t think of pretty birds and ribbons. I thought of the dragon that is the mascot of our school. I thought of a fierce group of young women, ready to stand together and take on the world, spread their powerful wings and soar.
So how do you step into your power? Here are two things I’ve learned.
- When you worry too much about other people’s opinions, you give them your power.
For the few years that I was a lawyer, I loved what I did. I enjoyed working with clients, negotiating deals and drafting contracts and prospectuses. But somewhere along the way, I started writing a novel on the side for fun and became utterly obsessed. That amazing feeling when the words are flowing and the world falls away and hours pass in the blink of an eye - that is better than chocolate. I did what I advise my writing students never to do. I gave up my day job to write fulltime.
It was hard giving up the status of being a lawyer for the strange limbo world of a struggling writer. You say you’re writing a novel and no one takes you seriously. But if I had let what other people thought stop me, I would never have embarked on what has turned out to be an exciting and fulfilling career.
Having said that, you don’t have to make your passion into your career or even be very good at it in order to pursue it with joy.
So, do what you love, do it with gusto. Accept that you might do it badly, at least at first, and that is OK. St Margaret’s is a wonderful school that offers a wide range of activities and opportunities but it’s up to you to grab them. And cheer on your friends when they have a go, too. Only you can create an environment where your peers feel comfortable taking a chance.
By the way, I loved St Margaret’s. My mother went there, and I remember being so excited when I started in Year 6. I had many inspiring teachers who were passionate about their subjects, from Ms Surtees in the primary school to Mrs Bell who taught history and also used to direct marvellous musicals in the high school; the private speech and drama teacher, Mrs Noyes, who made me read The Odyssey in order to understand Toad of Toad Hall; Mrs Davidson, Miss Marshall, Mrs Moody, the legendary Miss Rees, Mrs Grandsden who used to sit on the edge of the desk and tell us about ancient history as if it was a particularly bloody bedtime story; Mrs Gibson, who taught physics so brilliantly that even I, who had zero interest in physics, managed to get good marks. And of course, I made wonderful, lasting friendships. Two of my dearest friends are women I met at St Margaret’s.
If you need further inspiration to try something you might not be good at, I have just taken up running. I’ve started slowly. I have a plan to follow. Red-faced and sweaty I celebrate each session with a quote from Rebel Wilson. I say “Crushed it” with a big smile on my face.
Try something new. Be bad at it. Say “Crushed it” and keep trying.
- We need to reframe our idea of success as something that is within our own control.
As young children, we take big risks all the time without even stopping to think about the consequences. But as we get older we become self-conscious, we develop a habit of criticising ourselves internally. We stop taking chances in case we fail.
I’ll tell you about one of my failures. A few years ago, one of my books looked like it was on track to be a bestseller. The booksellers loved it and put in big orders. The publisher flew me down to Melbourne to meet with the publicity team and they told me everything they were going to do for the book—television, radio and print interviews, advertising in magazines, light boxes in airports, the works.
But what actually happened was that my editor left the company a few months before my book came out, then my publicist left a week before the book’s release, not only having done none of the amazing things she promised me, but having done nothing at all. Without marketing or publicity in place, sales of that book were slow.
I felt like I had failed. I had slogged away at the keyboard for years, sleep-deprived when my sons were babies and small children. Once my sons were a little older, I had taken a big leap and changed publishers and genres, stretching myself to write more ambitious books. I’d taken the leap, and thought I would fly, but instead, I came crashing down to earth.
It’s at times like this when you need your friends and family. My mother reminded me how much I had wanted just to be published, that it was something so many other people dreamed about and never achieved. A wise writer friend said to me, a good book is an author’s success. A bestseller is a publisher’s.
From this experience, I learned that all I could control was the effort I put into my books and the attitude with which I faced the inevitable setbacks. When your self-esteem comes from things you control, you keep your power. When you let things that are outside your control dictate your opinion of yourself, you give your power away.
So I had to reframe my idea of success. Every day I sit down at the computer and put one word after the other, every day I revise and refine that story and make it the best that I can is a day I claim success. So, after a short wallow in the pit of despair, I hauled myself out again, dusted myself off and made a plan for the future.
I wrote one more book for that same publisher and then I made another big leap—this time, to write historical fiction for HarperCollins New York.
Remembering that I had very little control over the commercial success of my books has kept me grounded and focused on the things that I can control. This time, I signed with a top literary agent and received solid publisher support, which meant that my book, Sisters of the Resistance, was a bestseller in three countries and my agent has sold translation rights to three more. Sisters of the Resistance has been mentioned in American Vogue magazine and was chosen as book of the month by a radio personality in the U.S. who has millions of fans. These are wonderful things and I am thrilled when they happen, but I remind myself that most of that is nothing to do with me or even how good the book is. My success was that I wrote the best book I could with the time and resources available to me. Whether it becomes a bestseller is largely in the laps of the publishing gods.
You can’t control whether whoever is casting that play likes your audition, or whether there happen to be four faster students who beat you into the school relay team, or whether, suddenly everyone wants to do a particular university course next year and the ATAR score for that course goes up. What you can control is the effort you put in, the way you learn from your mistakes, and the attitude you take towards any setbacks.
Finally, let me leave you with the same quote from Katherine Mansfield that I chose for my school captain’s speech back in 1991: ‘I want, by understanding others, to understand myself. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.’ I wish you all great success in life, however you define it. Fly, my fierce, powerful dragons. Fly!”