Lessons Learned from Writing My Book in 25 Days

Patty spent the past month writing her book. 65,000 words in 25 days! She shares how that experience has impacted her so far.

Patty’s daughter helped her realize a big aha last week. Get her 3 key insights and hear how her own journey is changing and challenging her.

When we’re making progress towards a goal it’s important to remember to stay in the moment. Focus on where you are right now. Tomorrow’s focus is for tomorrow.

The present moment is absent fear. That makes it the perfect time to be open to receiving what’s here for you.

Don’t miss her prescription for dealing with small failures and small successes. They are both important and, if you let them, will also help you be even more open to receiving.

Final words of encouragement: Ask for help. Allow others to provide support and comfort and recognize you are never alone.

Watch the Facebook Live with Patty and Azul

Transcript

(00:02) Welcome to the wealth and purpose podcast where people who are led by their hearts come to learn the secrets to creating wealth in a way that feels really good and live they’re purposefully in the process. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. I’m an ex type-a corporate banker, turned intuitive business coach. I’m also a wife, a mom to two pre-teens, a professor, girl scout leader and well, Hey, you get it. Like you I wear a lot of hats, whether you’re looking for inspiration to get started or strategies to get growing. I am here to help you create abundance in every area of your life in business. Welcome.

(00:40) Hey there, this is Patty Lennon. Thank you for joining me for this podcast. And this episode is brought to you by the Receiving School. So I want to tell you a little bit more about my journey in writing the book that’ll be out later this year. The working title is No Space For Magic. So, last Monday I completed the manuscript 65,000 words and I wrote it in 25 days. My goal was 30 days. I finished early. And what’s interesting is that on Wednesday, last Wednesday, I was sitting on my couch working, at five o’clock and I don’t normally work around that time of night. And my daughter came in and said, you know, not that I expect you to know this mom, but you are we going to have dinner tonight or what’s for dinner? And I laughed and I said, well, you know, you can expect me to know what we’re having for dinner, at least that we’re having dinner.

(01:43) I appreciate that you don’t think I’m necessarily the one responsible for it, but we, we generally feed you every night. And she said, well, I know you’re on the last week of finishing the book. She figured that’s what I had been working on. I know I was just, actually, I had a little time and I was cleaning up emails in fact, so I could easily, I left the computer. Um, and so I thought that was so interesting. And I said, well, Katie, I finished the book on Monday. And she goes, you did. She was like, well, why haven’t we celebrated? And that was such an amazing question for me because the reality was I did not even experience the completion of the manuscript as a completion as a win. I did on some level, but emotionally and energetically I really wasn’t receiving it that way.

(02:38) And a few people who have, who are in my inner circle, who knew where everything was the status of everything in knew I’d finished data asks me similarly, like, you must feel amazing. What are you doing? But I didn’t feel amazing. And I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about why, why did I not celebrate? Why was I not receiving this victory? And part of it is that because I’ve written books before and I know that the editing process is long and actually probably even harder than writing the book itself in some ways. And really I didn’t have a book in my hand yet. I mean, there was so many explanations I came up with and I’ve been continuing to ponder this. But really what it came down to was I wasn’t feeling deserving yet of this victory. And when I looked at why I felt that there was still more work to be done with the book, I think there’s more honesty to be excavated from within myself.

(03:46) But that’s what the editing process is for. You know, it’s the whole point of the crappy first draft or the shitty first draft is that, you know, you just get it down and then you’re working from this document and you know, so much easier than, really working from this blank page. And I have been thinking about this memoir in some way, shape or form for three years, but actively, you know, working on it in concept for a year and here in 25 days I got the whole manuscript done and so what was going on? And I know that this book is something that has to do with the next level of my career, of my visibility of a lot of things. I don’t know exactly what it’s leading to, but I can feel it. There’s also deep vulnerability in what I’m sharing inside the book.

(04:41) So there’s just so many emotions going on and yet they’re all, at the end of the day, everything is good. You know, producing this book is going to be good. I know it is going to help and heal so many simply because I share so honestly, so many of the failures I’ve, I’ve hit along the way and I know what it feels like to read someone else’s failures and then they’re overcomingness. It’s what is always helped and healed me. And so that for that very reason, I know that it has that potential. It’s not because I think it’s, you know, it’s not in its finished form. So it’s not that I’m looking at it and saying, this is an amazing book. And even as I say this in the podcast, I realize I’m resisting what I know about this, which is this is the greatest gift I could produce at this moment for the people I came to help, which are over givers who struggle to receive people who go above and beyond for others on a regular basis but don’t allow in as much as they give out.

(05:44) And you know, this book is my journey to getting to this place of deeper receiving. But even in doing it, there’s still gaps. And my publisher slash book coach Azul has throughout this process has poked me and, and nudged me in the direction of pulling out the theme of not enoughness. And so as I’ve written this book, I realize this not enoughness, this feeling of not being enough is really the through line in my own hero or heroine journey. And I think for probably you or if not you, then many of the people that are listening, this is a theme, you know, in your life or in their lives. I think we all have this sense that there is something more we need to do before we are deserving or complete or enough. And that’s really what’s coming up. And so I’ve been doing my work on it and tapping and journaling and walking outside and so there’s been layers that have lifted off of me.

(06:47) But here’s what I want to share with you in the process of doing this book and writing this book is, and I, and I share it in the hopes that it will help you achieve your next big thing. Whatever it is, whether it’s a book or something as concrete as a book or something else, you know, maybe it’s to wake up every day happy in your skin. Right? That’s huge. That’s a huge goal and gift when you achieve that, to start a business, to jump careers, to stand up to someone. All of those things are big goals. And so here’s what I found is important because in order for me to pour those words onto the page, I really did need to open in the moment of writing. And so just as you’re moving forward towards your big goal, know that being in this moment is essential.

(07:46) I am writing in a cohort, so there’s other writers writing with, with me, alongside me, you know, their books and you know, kind of the thing that has gotten people stuck I’m seeing is the overthinking of it. And in that first week of writing I was doing the same thing is you think beyond the page you’re writing and you can’t, you have to stay on the page you’re writing and don’t worry about any other page. The next page comes after the first page is done and this has really been a credit to Azul the coach I’m working with because he’s the one that keeps reminding me of it. That this present moment is the only moment. And I think that’s true for anything you’re trying to achieve, especially the bigger it is, the more critical the present moment is because it’s only in the future that you’re scared.

(08:39) There is nothing in this moment to be scared of. There’s nothing in this moment to resist. And when you’re looking at receiving and in my case receiving the words of this book, it was critical that I, that the resistance be neutral, be at zero. And that’s how I achieve that was to be in this moment with this word, with this sentence, with this concept. And interestingly enough, in that present moment, there was no fear, no resistance. And, without that, the deservingness of this process became alive. I realized the deservingness sort of fell away when I finished the book because I didn’t know the next step yet. And I didn’t have the clear understanding of what the present moment held for me around this book. And once I understood what it was, which is now it’s, I’m reading it right, I’m reading it from start to finish a couple of times to find and mark where I want to expand or where I want to remove stories.

(09:44) I know that I have the next step. I can just stay in that step and so it’s interesting that deserving this can be found in the present moment and the present moment can be found when you stay with just this step. Just this one step that’s in front of you. And then from there it is so important to receive the small successes as well as the small failures and let them be only as big as they are, but let them share their full space. So what I find with the small failures is at least I do, and I see my clients do have a tendency to really blow them up and catastrophize them, make them mean something more. I think I shared this last week or the week before when I was writing in that first week I got to day eight and I didn’t, write and day nine I didn’t write and and day 10 I woke up and I had to let those two days, those small failures just to be those two days and not mean something more.

(10:48) And I’d such us an inclination to make them mean more. But I just said to myself, okay, who are you going to be? Are you going to be a writer or are you going to be someone that gives up on this book because the two days don’t mean you gave up on the book. What you do today decides what the book is. And so that day I decided to get back up and keep writing. And in fact I did actually celebrate that small success. Well, you know, inside, internally, but Katie, my daughter was right when I completed the manuscript. It deserves something more. And so that the next day or the next two days later, we went out to dinner and celebrated. I got my nails done and booked a massage and all that good stuff to really honor what had happened. But I know that there’s more work to be done around that because this was a big deal.

(11:37) I finished the manuscript, I did something that, you know, a deep part of me wanted to resist. And I, and I walk through that fire and that deserves to be honored. And I share that because right now you’ve walked through fires have not yet celebrated and they deserve to be celebrated because those are huge successes. You’re special and it’s important for you to see how special you are and honor that. And then beyond that, in writing this book in 25 days, I just, again, I’ve said this so many times on this podcast, but I’m going to reiterate it. It is so important to receive help. And especially when you’re doing something big, you need to ask and receive. And I shared that on a Facebook live last week when I was contemplating what had happened that I had finished this book and had I really honored it and a client messaged me and she goes, you know, I was listening to you talk about it and you talked about how much you asked Azul for help.

(12:41) And I realize I haven’t been asking you for as much help as I could. And I was so happy because that’s something I tell my clients all the time. Ask me, ask me, don’t, don’t struggle with something, just send me a message. Let’s break through this together. Don’t stand in that space alone when you can stand in that space with someone else because that company makes it so much easier. And Azul was a big part of that and it wasn’t that he gave me my words, he didn’t, he just gave me nudges, he gave me comfort, he gave me company, he gave me the feeling that I was not alone. And that is so, so critical to moving forward, especially when inner resistance is coming up. And so I strongly recommend that you look for it. Reach for help. Now, I have gotten a lot of questions on exactly what this process was that I did in the 25 days where Azul’s process normally is 30 days to write your book and there is work we did ahead of time that really makes that environment of that 30 days so productive.

(13:48) And so, I am going to have Azul on this podcast soon, but today, the day that the podcast drops February 12th, I’m actually going to do a Q & A, sort of a masterclass blend with him on Facebook and we’ll leave that training up there on Facebook. There’s not, you don’t need to register for it. So if you go to my page facebook.com/pattyalennon, you should find that if you search for Patty and Azul, you should be able to find it pretty easily on my page. But I will have the link in the show notes so you can find that. And certainly if you’re listening to this podcast right when it drops in the morning on Wednesday, I would love for you to join us live Azul and I will be taking questions as well on his process and, and we’ll be walking you through how, how he works with his clients like me. And then I’ll be sharing you what my personal journey was like doing this process. So if you have a book inside of you, if that’s your big goal or you think there might be a book inside you and you need help, excavating it as old process is amazing, I would love you to join us and we’ll show you how to write your book in 30 days. So with that, I send you much love and I wish whatever this week holds for you, it holds big celebrations for all your successes.

(15:14) Hey, thanks for listening. And if you know someone who needs to hear this message, please share this podcast with them. And if you’re feeling really generous, I love for you to leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It helps us reach many more people and it fills my heart with so much joy when I hear what you had to say about what you heard, I am cheering for your success. Have an amazing day.