142: The Impact of Book Writing on Your Personal and Professional Growth

Welcome to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, Andrea Liebross. Each week, I focus on the systems, strategy, and big thinking you need to CEO your business and life to the next level. Are you ready? Let's go.

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm here today to discuss my why. If you're in this entrepreneurial world, you've probably heard about people talking about their why and why the why is so important, and even Simon Sinek has written a book and has a whole theory on Start With Why, start with your why.

I totally think that is something worth considering. What's the why? Why are you doing what you're doing today? Whatever it is, maybe you're listening to me while you're on a walk, maybe you're emptying the dishwasher, maybe you're in the car. Why? Why are you doing all those things? Start with your why. Do you know why? Or is it just because it's what you've always done?

Today, what I want to do, kind of playing off of the last episode, which was about my experience in writing a book, my experience in doing something new, let's get honest, it doesn't have to even be the book but my experience in doing something new, the last point I made on that episode was about the work worth doing and the work worth doing, writing that book was such work worth doing.

Today I want to tell you about why it was work worth doing. We're going to get into the why. If you haven't watched Simon Sinek’s TED Talk on Start With Why, go do that. Amazing. I'll put the link in the show notes.

If you also haven't heard about my book, She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and into the Extraordinary, if you haven't heard about it, you need to go to shethinksbigthebook.com to download the first chapter, to get more information on the launch day special pricing and access to certain things that not everybody's going to have, shethinksbigthebook.com, you want to go there now and get on the list.

If you're listening to this after launch day, we'll go there too, because you can buy the book right from there. Today my why, now, I want to tell you about really my why was coming from the benefits that I would feel from the writing, not the selling of my book.

Now we could have a whole other episode on my why if I look at it through the lens of selling, but I'm going to look at this why question through the lens of the writing process. I'm going to give you 10 reasons why I wrote the book. These are the 10 same reasons that you should read the book. There are 10 same reasons an entrepreneurial woman should read the book. Actually, there's something in there for everybody. Even if you're not an entrepreneur, you're going to benefit from it, everybody should read it.

Here's my reason number one, the first why that I came up with as I planned out this episode. The first why is that writing, I find, is how you work out what you think. I often don't know what I think about a subject until I write about it. The same goes for this podcast. I don't know what I think about a subject until I sit down to plan out the podcast.

The writing process is the way that I turn my research, both literal research like Google and research with my clients because they're really my whole science experiment out there, I get to have an insight into people's minds, that's how I turn this research into reality. Writing this book helped me solidify my own ideas. It helped me create a better framework for coaching.

I became way better at explaining things through the process of writing this book. I worked out what I think through writing. That's not going to happen just sitting around. The writing of the book, one of the reasons why I did it is because it was a format, a forum space, a container to work out what I thought.

Reading the book is going to help you work out what you think about yourself as a human, yourself as a business owner, your business as an entity. Reading this book is going to help you work through some of those things. Just like in writing this book, I worked out some of my own ideas.

Number two piggybacks on this. Second why, why did I write the book? Because writing, I believe, is also the best way to discover what you don't know but maybe what you need to know. Writing a book required me to explore topics that I was very familiar with but in a whole different way. I had to research them or look at them through different lenses.

Sometimes some things are so obvious to me, but not obvious to someone else. It made me become a better coach. It made me want to work with more and more women because I started to think about things in a whole different way. Maybe if I explained it in this new way, it's going to click with someone else that hadn't clicked with before.

Writing this book opened my door to new ideas. I actually became educated on a variety of the ideas that I was familiar with, but maybe not deeply entrenched in. It was invigorating because I learned so much while I was writing. I think I have emerged on the other side of the writing process way brighter, smarter, and exciting because of it.

Why should you read the book? Reading the book is going to help you identify what you don't know about the entrepreneurial journey, and why maybe you're stuck in your thought patterns or your knowledge base. Maybe you'll find out you're not really stuck at all, but you've just been in a story that you're telling yourself and there's an easy way to change the story, to rewrite your own movie.

There's an episode about your life as a movie, your business as a movie, go listen to that one too. Writing, I think, is the best way to discover what you don't know just like reading is the best way to discover what you don't know about your entrepreneurial journey.

This brings me to the third why. Writing this book was a new challenge. It was a new challenge. Life has so many obligations. We've got to take care of our loved ones. We've got to feed ourselves. We've got to make certain phone calls and do things. It can be really easy to fall into a daily rut like, “Everything's okay. Nothing's gone wrong.” I said that in the last episode.

But writing a book is leaving your comfort zone. This is truly something where I had to leave my comfort zone. It was scary. It was something unfamiliar and unfamiliar can be scary. But that is why it's so exciting. That is a why right there. The only way that you grow as a human or as a business owner, as a business is by forcing yourself to leave your comfort zone. Like, jump off the cliff. Write a book.

What if you went and became an author in 2024? I think you'd be amazed at how much you would gain by pushing the limits of your own self-imposed boundaries. Remember, there was like no way am I ever going to write a book I pushed myself. What you're going to gain from reading the book is that you're going to identify if you're just stuck in your own comfort zone and you need a little push to tackle a new challenge.

You're going to figure out the best way to get that push. I have a whole chapter in there on what do you need to move into that next version of you. Do you need support? What do you need? Third reason, I got to tackle a new challenge. You should read the book to figure out if it's time for you to tackle a new challenge.

The fourth thing, why did he write the book? It gave me an opportunity to really master new tools like mind mapping and project management. This was a whole different project management type of extravaganza.

I gained planning tools like time management planning tools, different way because managing your time around a creative process versus completing a task or having a coaching session, which has a nice start and end time to it, managing my time around this creative process was challenging. But yet, these are the tools that are at the core of your entrepreneurial success.

But maybe up until this point, I was just too busy to discover them. I discovered new tools that I can use in how I plan things, which is exactly (the reason to read the book) what we discover in part two, how to create your big plan.

The fifth thing, kind of just mentioned it briefly but time management. I think I'm a master time manager, gotta be honest. But writing the book changed my way of looking at time for large, long-term projects. For example, planning on a podcast episode is short-form writing. It's not writing a book. Writing is long-form writing and I had to figure out how to manage my time around the long-form writing.

It helped me create some better work habits. It helped me get better at putting things into bite-sized pieces. I learned the importance, once again, in a different way and different format of taking daily actions and get better at looking at the long term, and analyzing what needed to be done so that I didn't have that deadline madness.

If you're someone who feels like you constantly have deadline madness, then you need to read one of the reasons your why reading the book is that you can learn my concept of the daily big three. That in and of itself is worth the price of admission. It's worth the price of the book, figuring out that daily big three and there's actually a great resource in the toolkit about planning, scheduling, and doing things.

The reason number six why I wrote the book is decision-making. The best entrepreneurs out there, the best business owners are excellent decision makers. Writing this book changed my perspective towards my decision-making abilities.

There were more options, alternatives, and possibilities at every step of the way in this process of writing the book. How was I going to organize my ideas? What did I want the front cover to look like? What did I want the back cover to look like? How did I want to format chapters? What were going to be the pull quotes? It was like decision overload as if I didn't already have enough decisions in the building of a house process.

One of my whys is that I became a better decision-maker. There is a whole chapter in the book, so a reason to read the book, to access that chapter on decision-making. It is the backbone of getting out of what I call the messy middle.

Reason number seven of why did I write the book: confidence. Your life changes when you hold the book in your hand, and I'm going to hold it in my hand. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see, this is a proof copy, it's not the real thing yet, but confidence, when you hold this book in your hand, I'm holding this book in my hands, I've kind of beaten all the odds.

Studies show that 85% of people in business want to write a book, but only about 5% succeed. They can just be writing a 10-page ebook, that counts as a book. I don't even know how many people have written 200-page books, but my book is really tangible proof that I'm an expert in the field. I developed expertise.

It also has given me confidence that I can do just about anything. I can finish any project. I can tackle anything. Why, it was another exercise in growing a different type of confidence. I always talk about the difference between self-confidence and confidence, this is a whole other category of confidence that I hadn't really experienced yet.

Why should you read the book? Because you're going to figure out how you want to show up as a future you. Future you is going to be there to guide you along the way. It's going to be there to quiet the past you and the present you who might have said you can't do whatever you're setting out to do. Read the book and you're going to become more confident, just like writing the book helped me become more confident

Number eight, curiosity. I think one of the best things about this book is that it continues to give me heightened curiosity. As I was working through parts of the book, I became more curious about how my clients in that day or week were dealing with the concepts that I was in the process of writing about. I became more curious and more dialed into how I could help people tackle some of the challenges of being an entrepreneur.

I got super curious. I could see myself during certain weeks really getting curious about specific concepts. I recognized that probably the best reason or the best why I'm writing a book is that it helped me recognize that writing, yes, it's a way to share ideas with others, but it also is the best way to discover ideas and discover connections that are in your brain that you just haven't put out yet. It heightens your curiosity.

Why should you read this book? Because you're going to discover new ideas and thinking, just like I say that my clients discover on our coaching calls, they discover so much just by even listening to other people get coached. They become curious about themselves about what's really going on, so curiosity.

Number nine, you'll discover who you are. I discovered who I was in writing this book and that was a why. That was a why that maybe I didn't know in the beginning, but by its very nature, writing is introspective and it's thoughtful. The process of writing the book has forced me to get close to myself, gain some perspective about what really matters, decide, and remember going back to decision-making, who I wanted to be and what I wanted to be.

You're going to decide, like I talked about the model, and I think the model helps us figure out why we're feeling the way we're feeling, why we're getting the result we're getting, why we're thinking what we're thinking, you're going to understand and discover more of who you are, why you're feeling the way you're feeling, why you're getting what you're getting as a result by reading the book.

That brings me to number 10. Writing a book, part of the reason I did it is it taught me really how to commit at a whole other level. This was a 12-month project. More by the time we get to launch day, 14 months. The simple act of committing to writing this book and seeing it through was really a measure of the depth of my discipline.

Writing a book was really a powerful way to get in touch with my thoughts, my values, and my motivation. It was evidence that I can move from being just interested to being committed in anything in my life. You need to read the book even if it's just for the part about shifting from being interested in something to being committed to it. Because I'm sure there are things in your world where you're interested in hiring someone else, but you haven't committed to doing it. This book is going to help you explore that.

Then my last non-numbered reason, my last why for writing the book is simply because I could. No more excuses. No more saying to people, “Oh, that's not on my bucket list.” No more saying, “I don't really need to. Everything's fine.” No more saying, “I have a podcast. Why do we need a book?” I couldn't really afford putting off writing a book any longer, and a real book, not just an ebook although I love ebooks.

All that really counts is that I have words on a page. Whether or not anyone reads them is a whole other story. But I have to say, I wrote this book, part of it is because I could. I knew that if I did it, it would bring a whole other of amazingness and extraordinary achievement into my world.

My friends, don't put it off another day. Go write your book. This is the year for you to finally become an author, a podcast host, a seven-figure business owner, the leader of a team, the deliverer of a service, or someone who helps people all day long in some way. You can. It just takes some commitment, some decision-making, and a lot of believing in yourself.

Okay, my friends, those are my 10-plus whys of why I read the book and 10-plus whys of why you need to read the book. Head over to shethinksbigthebook.com if you haven't already and get yourself going on becoming part of the Think Big Movement. I'm creating a movement of more big thinkers, and just by reading the book, you're going to be part of it, shethinksbigthebook.com, let's do it.

Alright, until next time. Remember, this episode right here that I just recorded is all about leveling up. No better time to level up than right now. See you next time.

Hey, listening to podcasts is great. But you also have to do something to kick your business up a notch. You need to take some action, right? So go to andreaslinks.com and take the quiz. I guarantee you'll walk away knowing exactly what your next best step is to level up.