What If You Just Tried Again?
If you’ve been around here long, you’ve probably heard me mention, like 1,000 times, my plan to write a book.
In fact, I’ve talked about it so often like here, here, here, and other places over the years, I feel a little ashamed to bring it up again.
But here are three things I know for sure:
The best thing you can do with shame is bring it up and expose it to light and air because it can’t survive there.
Trying again and again at things you care a lot about is a virtue.
Telling 5,000 of your followers to expect a book soon and asking them to get on board with you, is accountability on steroids.
Not My First Rodeo.
When I was 40, I did write a book. It’s 60,000 words I wrote sitting on the porch of our old farmhouse in Texas. At that time, I even had a couple of publishers interested, but they all had the same problem:
“Nobody knows who you are.”
“Your platform’s not big enough.”
“Get a little more famous, then reach back out.”
Because I didn’t know how to manage my mind or contextualize feedback then, I heard “you’ll never write/publish a book.” So I shoved those 60,000 words in a drawer and went on with my life. I didn’t want to make myself famous - I still don’t - so it seemed pointless.
Pretty soon “the book” became the elephant in my room, my hardest thing, the bear I don’t want you to poke, even when my biggest supporters, like my cowboy singer friend Tim Sullivan, would ask “are you writing?”
Sound Familiar?
What’s your dream? The one languishing under your lack of belief, commitment, or a pile of fear. Do you feel like you’ll never achieve it because you’ve stopped and started 10,000 times?
You and me both babe, so consider this the sign you’ve been waiting for. Here are a few questions I asked myself to get my focus right and begin writing again. Try them on for size.
What do you really want?
Why do you want to do that?
Why must you do that?
What’s scaring you?
What’s the worst that can happen?
What’s the best that can happen?
What’s the smallest first step you can take?
Who can you enlist to help?
Naming the Fear (and it’s always fear).
What scares me most about starting a new book project is…um, well that uh, ummm wait now, what is really scaring me? Actually, nothing. It’s all stories. So my first small step was to hire a guide - a writerly person to help me walk through this forest. Smart.
So I did that and guess what my third assignment is from him is? Write down what your book is about and then share it with 2-3 people (or 5,000), to see how they respond. Smart.
So Here It Is
The working title of my new book is:
The Happiest Girl You Know:
A Beginners Guide to Midlife, Faith and Meaningful Work.
Designed to help women navigate midlife, teaching them how to build their second half on a foundation of joy, connection, and purposeful work, so they spend their last and best years impacting and inspiring the world around them.
Does that sound like a title you might pick up, peruse, and maybe even buy? Do you have a gut-level response? Will you tell me by clicking here? Thanks.
How Hard Is Your Hard Thing Really?
When I look a my “big hard thing” in a regulated way and take measured steps to achieve it (exactly what I teach my clients) it’s not hard really, it’s more demanding in the same way push-ups are. They challenge us to be stronger and better.
This work demands time, faith, diligence, and perseverance; luckily, I already know how to do all that. On hard days, I can lean into places I’ve already won and reverse engineer the how.
So maybe, just maybe, I’ve cracked the code on myself, in the exact way I help my clients crack it. As my coach Lisa T. says: There is no circumstance, person, or event that gets to define what is possible for me. I define that.
I am an author.
ps. If you want to get help with this exact thing: Identifying your purpose, understanding what, why, and where the fear lies, we can help. We’ll open our flagship course The Meaning of Midlife again in late August for a fall kickoff. If you want to hear when we do, reply here.