Pursuing Lifelong Goals

Publish ten books. That’s one of my lifelong goals.

I’m at 23.33%. (I count the recent release of Beatdown in Bangkok as one-third of a book  based on the fact that after we have three Stetson Jeff Adventures on Kindle we’ll make a paperback version, Volume One.)

I’m 42 years old. I was 38 when I published my first book. Will it take until I’m 54 to finish the task? Perhaps; there are plenty of ways my progress could derail, unforeseeable major life stressors like a death in the family. But I’m working on a lot of stuff. Right now, I have a book of poems that’s perhaps 40% complete. And a long literary novel at 115,000 words. And the rough draft for Stetson Jeff adventure #2 in the can. I have MOMENTUM! 

I have to yell it or I forget. I was probably around 34 when I began book one. The first twenty percent of a goal is the hardest part! It took me seven years to finish that first twenty percent. But after that, you find a groove.There’s a good possibility I’ll get to sixty percent in another two years.

Numbers aren’t always a writer’s best friend, but do the numbers: if you begin working and you stick with it, attainable lifelong goals can and do happen!

Beatdown in Bangkok now available!

Happy July Fourth, Denizens of ye olde Interwebs! My newest title is available on Amazon for Kindle ($0.99) and Kindle Unlimited (free). Justin Fike and I are really excited. You’re gonna enjoy a good laugh here.

Our first review came in from Lindsey of emphaticasterisk.com. Here’s what she says:

“Beatdown in Bangkok takes all of the strutting hyperbole of cowboys, mixes it with the terse masculinity of classic noire, throws in a dose of James Bond-esque action and then drenches the entire thing in barrels of dry wit. It is endearingly hilarious, fast-paced, straightforward and action-packed. A good read to fill a summer afternoon or a plane ride. Highly recommended.”
Well, y’all, I nearly forgot to post a link to the book itself. I felt a feeling of embarrassment there for a second, I reckon.
Ladies and gentlemen, cowboys and cheerleaders, I present: Beatdown in Bangkok: A Stetson Jeff Adventure!
And we do appreciate your patronage as well as any review you care to leave. And watch for Mayhem in Morocco coming on Labor Day. Sawadee Klap, Amigos! Thanks!

How to Tell Compelling Stories

Telling a compelling story isn’t easy, but it’s how everything gets sold. Do you need to get more donations for your nonprofit? Do you want to up-sell customers some accessory for your basic product? Do you want to entertain with a book or movie script? Children’s books that don’t do beats well but rely on children liking the pictures or something else drive parents crazy. There’s books I just don’t want to read my kids.

In my first novel I may have done things with beats instinctively, but I was fumbling around as a storyteller, learning how to write a novel by just writing a novel. I think this is a great way to write your first novel: don’t worry about what you don’t know, just write. I see writers all around me spending  way too much time studying beats and structure and so on, and not learning how to tell a story by telling a story. That was great, but not enough. My first book is pretty good, and if you like literary fiction you’ll enjoy it. There are some real positive reviews. But it’s not the best I can do.

As I began to think about a proposal I submitted to our county’s Community Foundation to teach storytelling to nonprofits for their fundraising, and at the same time began working with Justin Fike to co-write a comedy adventure series of short novels (check out Beatdown in Bangkok: A Stetson Jeff Adventure on Amazon this July 4th) it became clear that I’d need to understand story beats a lot better, moving from unconsciously incompetent to unconsciously competent.

Working with Justin, who has a Master’s from Oxford U in Creative Writing, and knows beats like a grizzly bear knows how to catch salmon, has really pushed me to the place where I realized, man, you have to learn this stuff. So I began reading up on it too. And it confused me for a while.

Here’s where I see an opportunity to clarify something for everyone, because I was really struggling with it as I read a bunch of blogs on this topic: No matter what titles you give to the beats there are some basic things that have to happen. At first I thought they just referred to the overall story arc in a macro sense, but my real eureka came when I saw that the beats could be repeated in miniature within a chapter, or paragraph, or even a sentence!

You have to show how things were. This is the Prologue, How it Was.

Then, something has to change. This is your Inciting Incident. If you’re running a nonprofit, this might be the day when you realized “This is wrong, something must be done.”

Someone has to make a choice. This is the Doorway of No Return. “I will do it.” It’s much more difficult to write a compelling story in which the main character says “I will not do it,” but there are some pretty darn good ones in Hebrew scriptures, such as the story of Jonah. Think of any major disaster or alien movie. When everyone else is running away, the Main Character runs toward. They are getting involved.

“Mastering this won’t be easy,” I said to myself. “It’s complicated when you begin to see that there are beats for the whole book, beats for a chapter, beats within a paragraph!” I still don’t know if I’ve got it all down. But that’s  the point in my story where victory isn’t assured. Someday I hope one of my books will really take off, but I’m going to have to put in some effort to learning this stuff. So I attacked it, and felt that the realization that you could do this on a macro or micro level meant I was entering upon another piece of a lifelong learning process. Bring it on. I’m up for the challenge.

Eventually there’s a Crisis, Showdown or Climax,

Then a Resolution of Dawn of a New day.

So this is the path I’m on, and I’m always practicing. In fact, I want to invite you to read this blog through again and see where the beats are. I told this as a personal story rather than just a how to, and I did that on purpose so I could practice putting the beats right in here. Can you see in my own story where I showed you:

How things Were

An Inciting Incident/ Doorway of No Return

Build-up

Crisis, Showdown or Climax

Resolution/ New Dawn.

I may not be great at it yet, but I’m definitely conscious of my incompetence and working on it.

 

 

Death by Pen

I’ll take this deadly weapon, the pen.

You can have your firearms, go–

bear them in your well-regulated militia–

while I bare my soul instead.

We shall see who leaves the

more indelible mark.
Perhaps someday my pen will kill me.

That would be no accident,

even though I have this bad habit

of leaving the safety off.

Quitting vs. Giving Up

First of all let’s address the semantics. For the sake of my argument, I have definitions I’ll refer to as I make distinctions. I suppose the distinctions could just as easily apply if you reversed the terms, but for the duration of this conversation I’m going to create my own differentiation.

If you were raised with some version of the phrase “don’t be a quitter” I think you might find that injunction to apply more to the way I define “giving up” in my following argument. When I talk about quitting, it’s strategic, it’s a battlefield retreat. When I talk about giving up, it’s the end of a long, hard emotional road, a slow death you’ve stopped caring about preventing.

They’re easy to confuse. They both come as the result of fatigue and defeat of some kind.

Quitting: a proactive move based on the information available. A business decision.

Giving up: saying “I’m done” to your gifts and calling, walking away for good.

Jason Ropp asked me on Saturday in relation to my new partnership writing fiction with Justin Fike called Cha’am Cowboys Publishing: “how do you know when it’s time to quit a series?” His question was somewhat geared around whether or not we found financial success in our upcoming Stetson Jeff Stetson series (by the way these books are hilarious, message me if you want to be added to Cha’am Cowboys’ mailing list) and how do you decide when to stop writing a series?

First I explained how Mark Daniels and I had published Michiana Art News for about 18 months before we quit. It was a fun project, and broke even but paid very little. We saw that to even with a significant increase in our time commitment to the project, it wouldn’t increase our net very much. So we quit. There’s a business principle behind this: one of the best business decisions you can make is a timely decision not to do business. Mark and I both agreed that it was time to be done. We learned what we could and moved on.

However, with the new project, the decision to quit or not quit has much less to do with the success of any one of our books, or, for that matter, any one of our series. That’s because Justin and I are equally committed not to Give Up. A major distinctive between the Art News and Cha’am’s writing is that the news got old, but Cha’am Cowboys products are fiction, and therefore will always be fresh for readers who discover it later. Ten years later, or twenty. Quitting a series, then, is more a function of feeling we’ve played a certain character out, becoming tired of creating with that character. As long as we’re enjoying the development, we don’t quit. We quit when the story arc reaches its logical conclusion.  We plow the furrow to the end of the row, not looking back to worry about what’s growing behind us.

Look, people only jump the shark when they’re trying to squeeze the last bit of money out of something that’s commercially killing it. The time to quit is before you jump the shark. It’s okay to stop producing a series, even if it’s very successful. It’s okay to end any kind of enterprise in business. It’s okay to quit. There are other things which come along based on your values that may cause you to say “I’m done with this particular enterprise”. But that doesn’t mean you’re through being an enterprising person.

What Justin and I both know is that we’re building a back catalog, plus a joint mailing list, so that when one of our books (or a solo project) takes off, it can carry the back catalog with it. This will pay some kind of dividend, some day, as long as we don’t give up.

I have another project which is a more sensitive issue for me right now so I’m reserving details. In this project, I felt I couldn’t continue investing at the moment, so I quit. The other party was very unhappy, even angry. I had given my word, and it’s never comfortable to say out loud that I can’t complete what I promised to complete right now.

This happened some years back when my wife got a painting gig which required a ton of wallpaper removal in a tall stairwell. As time went on, she was heavier and more physically awkward with a pregnancy and we realized she had to abandon the project for her own safety.

These things happen, sometimes amicably and other times with more hurt feelings. Having an exit strategy is important in small business, because your partner may not be giving up, but an illness or other mitigating circumstance may mean they have to quit for a while.

I’m about to quit spending money with a certain advertising agency, because I’m not getting the results I expect, but I’m not giving up on advertising my business. That’s a form of quitting everyone expects you to do!

In short, I’m saying that quitting is sometimes a decision you have to make, while giving up is usually more of a gradual process where you’re demoralized and it happens more passively– but when it’s done, it’s very unlikely you’ll ever come back to that thing you loved doing. You’re too bitter to try again.

So I say, don’t give up. Be a quitter if you must, and deal with the fallout, circle the wagons, gather your metaphors and cliches, then figure out a way to Try, Try again… if at first you don’t succeed.

 

Counterfeits

One way to look at authenticity is to examine what it is not.

In any sort of currency there is a potential for counterfeit. Something that looks like the real deal, but isn’t.

If you get a huge flood of counterfeit, then, society has two choices. First is to accept the counterfeit as indistinguishable and therefore equal to the authentic, so that it becomes immaterial. The second reaction is to become suspicious of all currency, meaning that not only do you not trust counterfeits but you also become wary of the authentic.

Counterfeits are wolves in sheepskins. Either way you react, they damage the authentic.

There are counterfeits in terms of more things than monetary systems.

Think about counterfeit love. (love on the internet)

Think about counterfeit community. (community on the internet)

I’m not indicting the internet on purpose. The results speak for themselves. The internet has some great means of sharing love and building community. More often than not, it’s used for counterfeit expressions.

Think about how counterfeit churches, false prophets, and other theological misrepresentations damage the authentic expression of a loving community. Jesus knew his own words would be twisted.

You have to be a judicious reader. You have to consume information intelligently. You have to look for underlying principles: are they real?

In today’s world there are more counterfeits than authentic connections. Scams-a-million.

How are you finding real gold? Where’s the silver you’re after? Is it real?

A reason to live

I was asked to write an article for an online mag, and the theme was “What keeps me up at night? What gets me up in the morning?” This is such an intriguing opportunity. Often times I do a variation on the theme, but this month the theme really attracted me so I went straight after it.

What keeps me up at night: I sleep soundly, and I’m good enough at having home/work life balance that I can model that for my life coaching clients. This isn’t to say that I don’t occasionally work in the evening, but that’s usually balanced out by comp time during the day. I stay up to work on my writing projects that don’t always have an immediate financial payoff, but that feels more like hobby time even though it’s work, too. Besides the idea that something keeping you up at night is workload execution, there’s another definition for “what keeps you up at night.” Those are the things that worry you: they keep you up not because you’re working, but because you’re worrying. There are two basic categories that come to mind here: somebody’s after me, or I won’t get what I need tomorrow. These are fear-driven worry issues. The first one is an integrity issue, which could include indebtedness of a variety of kinds. The second is an issue of faith that I’ll have enough. I don’t really like the word “faith” whether you apply it to a higher power or simply to faith in yourself to go get what you need (new contracts or clients, etc.) In fact, just this week my wife and I were up a little later than usual chewing over some of these things. Business is tough, and summer is my slow season.

“I don’t need more faith,” she said, “just more work.”

I’m happy to say that I rarely have trouble sleeping because a) I don’t have too many integrity issues, enemies, or debtors, b) I work really hard so I trust that will bring results when I need them, and c) back to the top, I don’t often work late at night because I have decent work/family life balance. A few days after the hard conversation I had with my wife, things are remarkably different. I had a meeting with a major prospect who may close by the end of the month. Just in the nick of time. You have to have guts, sometimes. Faith other times. Integrity all the time.

What gets me up in the morning? That one’s easy. When the entrepreneurial journey gets tough, sometimes we talk about going back to a factory job, working for the man. The pay is steady, at least. Then we remember how miserable that makes me. I get up in the morning because I absolutely love what I do. I get to provide life coaching, lead an organization, run a business, set my own schedule, write all kinds of books, articles, blogs, and work from home. As I write this my wife is working elsewhere, and my children are home. We don’t have them in daycare. They are unfortunately being babysat by the glowing, one-eyed monster called television… But at least I know what program they’re ingesting.

I have a vision of a different world where everyone has at least one good friend. That’s why I train more coaches; a coach has many roles in terms of accountability and planning, but can also be your friend and peer when your role leaves you peerless. It’s lonely at the top. I make it less so for lots of people, and I love that. I get to deploy my creativity on a regular basis. I love that. I get up in the morning because I love my life, and my work doesn’t (usually) feel like work!

Coaching biz: build a niche, or brand?

 

Notes from my webinar hosted by CCNI on June 7. Many thanks to CCNI, and to all the folks who joined in to hear what I have to say!

I want to share a bit about my personal journey as a coach at the outset so you know who I am, where I’m coming from and what I really have to offer here (and what I don’t).

It’s been brought to my attention by a peer that I struggle with coming across as either arrogant about what I have achieved or whiny about what’s not going well. That’s a major growth edge for me, and in fact it can sometimes mean that I create stumbling blocks for others even as I promote my own coaching business. This friend noted that when people do get to know me they find that these first impressions don’t hold up, which I of course knew; however, what I’m not always aware of in the moment is how others perceive how I present myself. In fact I feel I’m a much better writer than verbal communicator and that’s because I feel like I can massage things better when I have a chance to edit my thoughts.

So by way of introducing myself I want to be clear that any discussions of where I’ve done well or where I’ve been weak in my growth as a professional coach, those things I hope will edify you, not turn you off.

 

The next thing to say about myself by way of introduction is that yes I am a CPCC with CCNI and this call is the one place where I feel that doesn’t need further explanation, you know what it means and what it takes to get there. That’s a journey I’ve been on since 2007, when I was only 33 years old, a very young age to start a coaching career. However, I do not come from a background of church work, and often feel like an outsider; I don’t have megachurches banging down my door to lead coach training classes or coach their entire staff, but I don’t quite fit in the business world either. I’m in the art world, but that leaves me with a ton of cool contacts who can’t afford coaching! I identify strongly as an artist, poet, writer, prophet in the Ephesians 4 meaning of the term, and as such I’m a pretty nonlinear thinker. That has implications for what I write and how I write it, which we’ll come back to.

What I can tell you about the niche and branding discussion is borne of experience in being honest with myself, which is a major success. It is not born of a success in building a financially successful coaching practice. I suspect being honest with yourself is the first step to fruit, in fact I believe it enough to preach it to you without the fruit yet. Also, it makes common sense. Now that you know what to expect, let’s dig into that a bit deeper.

I was always told you need to pick a niche. I will tell you that my niche is at the crossroads of faith, the arts, and entrepreneurship. My favorite clients to work with are entrepreneurial Christian artists: people who are trying to make a living and be missional with their art. In the process of trying to build websites and manage blogs, I was gradually getting more and more blogs and websites, some of them trying to put me in front of artists, and others to attempt to attract business clientele, etc. Until one day, a friend of mine said, “just focus on your personal brand.” One website, one whole person. Let your personality show in one central location online, What I came to understand, and this is a key, is that putting yourself in a niche is actually making yourself generic. The problem with going to a networking event and saying, for example, “I am a health coach,” is that people will say “so what? I know fifteen other health and fitness gurus in this city.” And the same goes for business coaching… to a lesser extent creativity coaching. And you’re back at square one, trying to show people how you’re different…. Without coming across as arrogant or whiny. At least that’s my challenge, because I know I’m one of the best in Northern Indiana and I whine about how those other coaches aren’t really coaching!

It’s been helpful for me to think in terms of how Jesus met people. I’m going to give only one example and I’m sure you can come up with others.

Jesus had a definite niche, and he knew what it was. And that was okay. He focused there. In Matthew 15:24 he was on a vacation, but started getting pestered by a Syrophoenecian woman. So he told her what his niche was. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

She said, “lord help me.”

They argue a bit, and in her persistent faithfulness, which we could talk about in coaching speak as a high degree of buy in, he decided to give her his help.

It wasn’t Jesus’ niche that preceded him and gave him a reputation in Tyre.. it was in fact what modern marketers call a personal brand.

So the point is not that we should eschew niches. We need to know where we focus. But, if we’re dedicated to helping people who have a high degree of buy in, no matter what, when they ask for it, then we can answer that call a lot more often when we’ve focused on a personal brand.

As you know the coaching skill set gives us tools to work with anyone. But one thing I learned from attending networking groups such as BNI is that saying “I can help anyone” gives your listener nothing to focus on. And that’s a niche thing. It’s a lot more effective to say “ can you think of someone who wants to publish a book” than to say “ I can help anyone who wants to work at creative ways to promote themselves.” But while we’re asking for referrals in a niche or two, our personal brand will attract people from well beyond our niche, who will come say “please help me.” Isn’t that ultimately what we want?

Now I want to share about how this impacted my authorship and how I develop my values.

Last year I put a book proposal together for a publisher. I noted that there were lots of great books about how to coach. I have not yet seen one that came from a poetic nonlinear thinker, and I wanted to write one that way. I believe there’s power in artistic treatment of any subject matter. I got the book deal and wrote The Art of Motivational Listening: Creative Ideas for Effective Leaders. I don’t know if I ever would have conceived of, proposed or written this book if I had not come to understand that my personality was something worth celebrating. And that’s all branding really is. Think about branding commercials with no call to action. Huge companies do this. McDonald’s and Coke. They spend a lot more time celebrating a lifestyle than they do with specific calls to action within a niche. The illusion, in this case, is that their products will enhance anyone’s lifestyle! Really there’s only one person whose brand truly enhances anyone’s lifestyle. That’s Jesus. So whatever we do with our personal brand it needs to reflect what Jesus has placed within us as a calling and member of his body.

For me, a second question that rocked my world last fall was “if you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?” it’s a long story of loneliness and rejection, but my answer was simple and immediate: everyone in the world should have one good friend. I want my clients to experience friendship as I deploy my creativity in pursuit of their destiny. My brand is about friendship. That’s what Jesus is to me, and what I want to reflect of him. That’s why I’m not a counselor. It’s even to some extent why I’m not a pastor. I’m a Barnabas and I’m so glad that I found coaching as a channel for my life’s work. I’m discovering this prophetic and poetic element, and exploring that deeper this year, but it feels like I’m just beginning on a long journey with that, embracing the poetic/prophetic aspect of my call, and really an entertainer aspect to that, learning to speak and perform as well as I’ve learned to listen. Thanks for taking the time to come listen to me today, the best place to get my book The Art of Motivational Listening and other books I’ve written is on the bookstore. I’m happy to answer questions or comments.

ps: some great comments and questions came up. One of them was “what’s your creative definition of brand?” And my answer went back to the idea that branding is celebrating your unique personality. This might be the most important takeaway. Please do feel free to comment on the blog as well.

Dragon in my kitchen

Dragon comes in my kitchen, dips his tail in my bowl of guacamole, bites off the tip of his tail, crunchy. Double dips. Eats everything.

Pauses a minute to grow his tail back.

Goes to the fridge, pulls out bottles and jars. Mayo, ketchup, mustard, relish, soy sauce, barbecue, Grey Poupon. Begins mixology. A dash of this, a squirt of that, condiment cocktail. Grabs my olives. Good purple ones from Spain.

“Olives are not a condiment,” I say.

“You put them on sandwiches and in martinis,” he argues.

“Some people consider them a staple,” I say.

“So do I,” he says, and dumps the whole jar, pits and all, into his concoction.

“Why do you only eat condiments?” I ask, “and why in my kitchen? How did this occur? Where are you from?”

“One question at a time,” he says.

“Where are you from?”

“Which came first, the dragon or the egg?”

“All right, smart Alec, why do you only eat condiments?”

“I don’t. Just because that’s what I’m in the mood for today doesn’t extrapolate to my entire diet. Tomorrow, perhaps lamb, the following day, a kale smoothie.”

In the back of the fridge he finds a small jar of mint jelly. “Speaking of lamb,” he says, and scoops it up. Dumps it in his goo. Gives the whole sticky mess a swirl with a lone talon, tastes it.

“Needs salt,” he declares. I hand it to him.

What, am I supposed to stop him? He’s a fire breathing dragon.