How I Balance Book Coaching and Writing
Today’s blog post comes to us from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash. If you enjoy today’s content, you can sign up for Jennie's weekly newsletter here.
My 10th book just came out — Blueprint for a Book: How to Build a Novel From the Inside Out. I wrote it over the last year, while also coaching private coaching clients in both fiction and nonfiction, and running Author Accelerator, a company on a mission to raise the bar on book coaching. This was also the year of the pandemic, the year my older daughter got married, the year my mother died, and the year my younger daughter moved halfway around the world for a new job. People often ask me how I do so many things — how I balance it all — and this piece is my attempt to answer as honestly as I can.
My kids are fully grown and flown
Let me first say that my kids are grown adults living their own lives. I talk to them all the time and see them as much as possible, but my days of running carpool, throwing birthday parties, and attending parent-teacher conferences are over. I did not have to figure out how to take care of a family and educate my children in the pandemic. My days and nights are my own, and this makes a massive difference in what I can accomplish with my time. I find this empty nest time to be exhilarating and energizing. I feel I can finally do everything I want to do — to use all my talents and experience, learn new things, take new pathways.
I stopped cooking
I made a deal with my husband so I don’t plan meals or cook them anymore. I did it for 30 years and I’m done. He has taken up the task and is enjoying it, which is amazing! (He made veggie chili last night with organic dried beans soaked in spices overnight – delicious!) I use a meal-delivery service for my lunches (Daily Harvest is the latest) and we also eat more take-out than ever before. All of this saves an enormous amount of time that I can spend creating businesses and books, and coaching others to do the same.
We can make some of these choices because we have the money to do so — something we did not have earlier in our careers or when we were putting our kids through college.
I don’t watch TV
If you ask me how the Queen’s Gambit was or what I thought of the ending of Game of Thrones, I can’t answer. Until last week when I was on vacation and watched a few short episodes, I didn’t know that “Ted Lasso” referred to a person. I sacrifice being part of the cultural conversation so I can do the work that is important to me.
I wasn’t a very good friend
During this difficult year, I did not put the kind of energy into my friendships that I normally do. I spent many evenings talking with my sister to try to figure out what to do for our mom, and always prioritize talking with my kids. I often didn’t have time for even a simple phone call to my best friends. Big things happened in their lives that I wasn’t really there for. This is not something I am proud of, but it’s the truth of what it cost me to do all the things I did.
It was not a very joyful time
I accomplished a lot this past year — helping my mother ease out of this life as peacefully as was possible; helping clients with the work of their hearts; committing to this book I have wanted to write for a long time; supporting my children with difficult and major life transitions; and managing to survive the pandemic still happily married. But it was not a very joyful time. There were a lot of miserable and difficult days.
I often wrote with a kind of grim resolve because it was the one thing I could control in a world that felt out of control. I had a sort of “I WILL DO THIS NO MATTER WHAT AND YOU BETTER GET OUT OF MY WAY” energy.It’s an effective energy, but I learned that I don’t want to work that way anymore. I love my work and want to feel joyful doing it.
I have learned a lot from Nicole Lewis-Keeber, Pia Silva, Bari Tessler and Sunni Brown about making sure my businesses serve me in all ways, including financial, emotional, and spiritual. It’s a constant work in progress for me and I rely on a lot of healers and friends and family members to support me in these efforts.
I also finally read the book, Essentialism by Greg McKeown, which has been in my TBR pile forever. I saw myself in every single one of the “Non-Essentialist” behaviors he lists throughout the book. It was a bit rattling! I am now spending a lot of time deciding what is most essential and letting things go that are not. This result has been an overhaul in the way I serve clients as a book coach, a reframing of key boundaries to protect my mental and physical health, and a promise not to repeat the things that made this year difficult that were in my control. I can’t control death and pandemics, but I can control the work I do and how I choose to do it.
I have another book I want to write next, and I will be giving myself a more ease-full timeline for finishing it — and more grace throughout the creative process.
I wrote in tiny chunks
Yup, tiny habits. Bird by bird. I chipped away, paragraph by paragraph on this book, whenever I could. I didn’t write every day at the same time, or even every day. I just wrote when I could. I grabbed the time when I could. It doesn’t sound very snazzy, but it worked for me during this time.
I have used other methods at other times — writing at the same time every day; taking a day a week for my writing; taking a year off of other work to complete a book. Each book seems to have its own way of coming to life.
I got help, including from a book coach
I had trusted beta readers, and used a book coach when I needed another set of eyes. This allowed me to have the goal of just getting words down, knowing I had trusted colleagues to help me see what I wasn’t seeing and refine the work. It makes a huge difference to not do it all alone.
I knew my WHY for the book I was writing
I knew my WHY for the book, which is Step 1 of the Blueprint. I wanted to get my method down on the page so that Author Accelerator book coaches could easily share it with their own writers. I wanted to celebrate the framework we teach in our book coach certification program. I wanted a “definitive guide” to a method I talk about all the time.
Knowing my why kept me going. It’s the only thing that really does.
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