Sometimes, You Need to Pause & Process

Welcome back to B is for Book Coach. I’m B, midwife of big ideas and book development partner for writers and non-writers alike. And for the next few minutes, you are my author.Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.Today, we’re making space for developing.Enjoying this space? Want to dig deeper? Consider booking a Next Steps Sandbox session. I’ll meet you wherever you are now, help you name where you want to go, and put your next steps in your very own Developer Sandbox. That way, you can actually take those steps—and the next ones, and the next, until “done” finally feels real. Today, I spent some time in my Developer Sandbox, working more on the underlying framework of my business and the offers I create for my people. This isn’t the first personal working session I’ve recorded, so if you want to see another video of real-time use of this development environment, just reply to let me know. I’ll send you the link.In this session, I came in feeling a bit of the Monday blues. I have had some incredible moments with the authors and business owners and professionals who have made their way to me. And I have had some really low moments where I’ve wondered if I’ll have the stamina to find the authors and business owners and professionals who still need me.I mean, when LinkedIn is tanking views and social media is not your forte and you really just want to be doing the work, it feels like every single interaction counts. That, or you’ll have to create more interactions, and that’s not at all where you want your energy to go.And by “you,” I mean “me.”I could have done a lot of things with that frustration. I could have ranted (more). I could have posted something unhinged (again). I could have fallen into an AI pit and spun up some confirmation bias to either soothe me or reinvent everything (no thanks).Instead, I opened my Developer Sandbox because I know it’s set up to facilitate real progress. I saw my options—a CRM that could help me reach out to people, a visibility database that could inspire me to create new content, positioning worksheets that could help me dig deeper…And a set of customer journey maps, built one layer of experience at a time, that could bring it all together.I didn’t really have an agenda when I opened this page. I just wanted to get more grounded in my offers. I had just wrapped up a Next Steps session that set two amazing authors up inside of their own Sandbox. I had so much fun and they made so much progress that I really just wanted to figure out how to help more people see themselves in that service. All while fully understanding that it’s a weird service that no one really has a frame of reference for.As soon as I opened the page, all of that internal chatter and all of the worry it came with settled down until I could get really present with the task at hand.That task? To keep refining what I’d said until all that was left was the truth.Right away, I could see the column that held my personal experience wasn’t telling the whole truth. So I started to refine it. Here is where I landed…at least for now:I spent years trying to find a home within the industry…any part of the industry, really. I could tell I was doing good things with my work and clients, and I thought the next level of growth was going to come from someone else making that growth possible. Over the years, even the worst situations taught me something. And because I thought that’s all there was—that I had no other options—I made the most of them. I worked from within other people’s systems, followed their processes, tried to fix them from the inside.And I really did learn SO much. But in a lot of those places, there was also very real harm happening. It would take a long time for me to realize that harm wasn’t necessary.Meanwhile, my unique strengths and approach kept getting reflected back to me as more effective than whatever box I was in.Still, it took me SO LONG to even name my own processes, much less stand in my own point of view. And it took even longer to use those processes and point of view for myself. I r