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Check it out! Welcome to the Art of Coaching Podcast. I'm Brett Bartholomew and at a young age, poor communication nearly caused me my life. Now I help others navigate the great area of social interaction, power dynamics and communication So they can become more adaptable leaders, regardless of their profession, age, or situation. This podcast is for everybody who is fascinated with solving people problems. So if you're in the no nonsense type who appreciates frank conversations, advise you can put to use immediately and learning how others navigate the messy realities of leadership, you're in the right place. I'm glad that you're joining us. Let's dive in. Alright, so I got asked recently what has been one of the biggest things I've done in my life that has helped me learn more effectively. Now, we'll put it in the show notes, but we've done a previous podcast on this, but without a doubt, the first thing that came to me, aside from obviously actively applying and you to a lot of building experience, of course. So I'm going to, I'm going to hedge it that way, is simply writing. So when you're listening to this, by the time you're listening to this, I will have turned in what hopefully now is my penultimate set of edits for my next book. I have rewritten this saying five or six times. There's things that the publisher wanted to change. There's all, this has been quite the journey, right? And when I talk about writing, this should be something that's been pretty, it's pretty relatable to many of you because chances are you or somebody you know has had tons of ideas floating around in their head, you're had anything like that.

Right, thought. to be something that's been pretty, it's pretty relatable to many of you because chances are you or somebody you know has had tons of ideas floating around in their head. You're had anything like that, right? Thoughts, opinions, lessons learned over your career. Maybe you're a subject matter expert in something. Maybe you've just lived through a lot of stuff and you felt like I at some point need to get this down. Like a former NFL player I used to work with, Trevin Wade is such an interesting human.

And he's a firefighter now. He does all this stuff. And I'm like, have you, as anybody ever told you, you should write a book. And he's like, yeah, I get told this all the time. But aside from writing a book, right? Many of you, you might have just said, oh, I should turn this into a blog post or a staff resource or a manual,

what's important is not the format.

It's that chances are you've had that tension that you need to capture something, even if nobody else bought it, read it, done anything. You just want to document it. You want to archive it. And the reality is, is you should. Because for me, and so many other people who had tested this, writing helps you think more clearly. And I want to preface this. I am not, nor have I ever been the type to be like journals daily. I'm not going to lie to you and say, I write daily, I don't think you have to. A million other authors might disagree. I write, I do practice it. I have a kind of prompt notebook that I'll do that allows me to engage in more creative writing. I do write nearly every week for our newsletter. I write obviously copy for social media posts. I've been working on this book for over half a decade. So I write a lot and it helps you think more clearly, specifically sharpen your message, your beliefs, your ideas. We've all thought we knew, oh, I have something to say on this topic. And then you stop and it forces you to pause and you're like, wow, I, yeah, I'm not really sure where I wanna go with this. And this is a big reason why we are doing our new writer's workshop course on April 18th and 19th. I wanna make it clear. This is not a course simply for people who want to write a book. Do we already have people that want to write a book sign up for the course? Absolutely. Are we going to guide them in that context? Absolutely. So is it something you could sign up for if you want to write a book? Yes. But this is also for people that just understand what writing can do for your thinking ability, for your career and other aspects of your life. It is for people that want to get better at taking something incredibly complex, boiling it down, and then making it accessible. And in doing that, creating something really valuable, a record and artifact of their experience. That is why we are doing this. It has been year after year of people just saying, hey, I feel like it would help me with my professional credibility. I've always wanted to write an article or I've wanted to do this. Great. Now you got it. Somebody that just said my entire desk is always littered with notes and pieces of paper. I don't even know what I would write about, but I would love some help just thinking, like, is there a central message here? Is this something I could utilize? Absolutely. Right? And that should be the tension of whether, well, that should be the answer, rather, as to whether you know writer's workshop is for you is, do you feel like you have something in your brain? It's been there way too long and you need to get it out. Do you feel like you have something or knowledge or experiences that could help people? You're not sure what you wanna do with them and how you wanna package them, but you know you wanna get it out. Otherwise, you realize all that experience and all that knowledge kinda dies with you, then this is for you. These are the types of people that should come to writer's workshop. And I think sometimes we all let certain excuses get the best of us, and I'm not saying they're not valid. We're all busy. We have families. We have all kinds of things. Believe me, working on my second book, I didn't abscond to some castle like JK Rowling and just have days where I sipped on coffee and thought, hmm, what inspired me today? I had to make countless trade-offs. I turned business down. There was times where I lost money. But I knew that I had to get this out. I had to get this out. Aside from this, and I think it's important to go through this stuff, right? There are many ways and reasons, rather, why writing matters, even if you do not want to be an author. So we already talked about one is, it helps you process your thoughts more clearly. It just does. There's a portion of my next book, and I probably started writing this portion of it five years ago, that goes pretty deep into complexity theory. And we talked about complex adaptive systems. All stuff that I had studied quite a bit in grad school, given my background in motor learning. And at one point it was probably like 30 pages give or take. And my editor is like fat chance. You know, you get 65,000 words, 70,000 words max with acknowledgments, appendices, you know, your introduction, all the other parts of this book. You are not spending that many words on this. And at the time, I'm like, but you don't understand this is a really big topic. It's part and parcel of the central theme of this book in a way that I'm not going to give away. I want to honor a lot of the researchers that wrote about this. I want to honor what I know. And they're like, that's great. Then do it by making it more simple. And they reminded me that, you know, the reader base that I'm going to be impacting with this next book. And largely isn't, they're eight to 12th grade. I mean, you look at the average reading level of most, you know, larger market leadership books, coaching books, business books. what that is. And so yeah, I start question. I'm like, all right, well, how do I whittle this down? And so I started doing it again and again and again. I started trying to think, what could I trim without damaging the credibility to this concept? What could I do? And always it had to come under the filter of, listen, it's a reminder, if you know it well, it can be simpler and simpler and simpler still. And of course, it was that that helped me discover there was so much bloat. I was getting into nuances that slowed the pacing of the book. This wasn't a book at the end of the day entirely about complex adaptive systems or complexity science. These things were footnotes and important footnotes, or you could just call them secondary actors in the book. Right, and so I had to constantly think, where is this bloated? Is somebody that's gonna be reading this while sitting at an all-inclusive resort, thinking about, gee, should I go get a burger or keep reading this book, going to keep reading? And the truth is, I also had to acknowledge that I'm not really trying to impress the world's foremost researchers on complex adaptive systems with this book. I'm trying to speak to some of that work, acknowledge some of that work, but I'm trying to impact so many more people. And all those people are not going to be interested in that at the same level I am. So it was that anger. I will say anger, that frustration, that fatigue I felt when my publisher and editor kept telling me, nope, nope, cut, cut. And it made me process my thoughts more clearly. And as a byproduct, even though I had to simplify things in the book, you know, dumbing it down takes a lot of intelligence. That's something nobody tells you. And I can speak to a former critic like in myself in that I'd be like, wow, this person dumped this down, this person dumped this down. And of course there's different levels of that. But if you want to make a big impact, simplifying the way you think and the way that you express words and the way that you get meaning across is a critical component of that. And you can't do that without becoming a better writer. You can't do that without taking part in like, like, like exercises that make you think, okay, is there closure and clarity and some level of completeness around this idea based on the goal that it's introduced for. And I also know what it's like to be around, you know, you take the book outside of that. And I, I have spent many nights, especially prior to writing my first book, conscious coaching, just feeling stressed about certain unfinished ideas. And sometimes I'm like, Like, okay, I need to make this into a presentation. I need to make this into some format. And that's again about what writers' workshop will help you do. The end goal is not, oh, you wrote a book and you're a best selling author. Cool. If that's what you're coming for, we can help you write a book. Nobody can guarantee that you're going to be a best seller and that shouldn't be the point. The point is to put something useful down. But the idea is that you get some kind of relief and clarity in your life with respect to saying this idea no longer just feels like it's unfinished. And that requires you, one client that I've been working with for a while in their book, their biggest issue is not a lack of intelligence. It's not even a lack of time. It is literally they just struggle slowing down and forcing themselves to think more critically as opposed to just regurgitating or shouting kind of everything they know I had to remind them. You're trying to write a book, not a manifesto. That was some other helpful advice I had gotten from my publisher as I tried making my second book. I especially tried making my first book, the earliest edition of it, due too much. And then I realized I don't have to do that. So I wrote conscious coaching for a certain goal in audience. Then some of that unfinished the stuff that I wanted

to add to it, but couldn't, I made into our online course, bought in. And then some of that spilled over into other courses and other courses and then workshops. What's the same with this book? When I first started writing my next book, which is going to come out in September of this year, I had all these thoughts and it was so many chapters and I had to get back to thinking what is the job to be done for this book and I couldn't do that

if I didn't these thoughts and it was so many chapters and I had to get back to thinking, what is the job to be done for this book? And I couldn't do that if I didn't sit down and think. So I hope you become a better thinker. For some of you, some of you are pretty good at speaking and you have some clear arguments already and there's a very distinct reason why you're successful. But you still have some other vague ideas that you wanna turn into frameworks or other strategies and it helps to go back. And again, think about, okay, what's the job to be done here? What's the central theme of this work? How do I get it out? How do I structure it so it benefits the most people? That's part and parcel as well. Another benefit of improving and really working at your writing is it's going to help you refine your voice. A large amount of R-Inquiries are how do I find my voice? And I say you don't find your voice, you develop it and you refine it through doing things like practicing speaking under constraints, which we offer

at speaker school, shameless plug, not sorry. Of course, you develop and refine your voice through life experiences. You start to figure out where you need to be assertive, where you need to stand back a little bit more, but whether it's your tone, whether it's getting across your values, are your point of view, all of that refinement is improved when you sit down and actually try to put words on a page, whether that's with a pen, a pencil, a laptop, an iPad, whatever the hell there is in the future dictation, we're gonna talk about that. That writer's workshop, because there are a lot of times where I felt stuck on some pros that I was writing in my next book. And I just got up and I would turn on a dictation thing in either Microsoft Word or Google Docs or in a secondary app. And I would literally just talk as if I was presenting or talk as if I was talking to one of you or talk as if I was just talking to a friend and'd talk it out and I'd get it out and boom all of a sudden I'd have two pages and then I would go back and highlight the main points that I thought were great and clear and then I'd structure them and it helped me so much more than if I would sit down especially as somebody that hates being sedentary right because motion creates emotion creates emotion. It helped me so much. So we're going to talk about all kinds of little ways that you can make it work for your own quirks, your own preferences. But the bottom line is somebody asked me, oh, what's the selling point of this course? And I said, that's an interesting question. The selling point and the central tension we're trying to solve for people is helping them get ideas out of their head,

helping remove that anxiety that, you know, they're going to forget some of what they've learned,

some of what they've done, help remove some of that tension that makes them feel like,

is it going to matter when I'm gone? You know, because I know all this stuff, but I'm

not sharing it with people and also just help them continue to figure out how to express the ideas that mean the most to them in a way that nobody's gonna judge or worry about because what matters is it's that old Theodore Roosevelt man in the arena, you got it out, you did it. Nobody else in the world needs to see any of this stuff you create if you don't want, but you do owe it to yourself to get it out of your head. You do owe it to somebody else that you might mentor a guy to lead, tell me to learn from your experience. That's what we mean by when you write or you put stuff out there, it becomes an artifact of your experience. It's something other people can learn from. And for as many of you say, well, I want to serve others and I want to support others and I want to make the field better and I want to be more professional in this way or I want to build, you know, a reputation as somebody that's helpful. Great. Give somebody that opportunity to learn from you and that helps bolster your credibility in those areas. Another thing that I think is obvious but not often thought, and it was almost kind of discovered by accident for me is it gave me so much raw material to repurpose for talks, articles, staff training, sales, or even in a way kind of self therapy. I mean, you're going to hear me complain about it again and again. How many times I've had to rewrite this book and work on it and it's the same thing with certain presentations that I started first and I'm like, this is shit and that is shit. But I still keep a huge stockpile and it helps me get it out. It's no different than your favorite musician. You know how many unreleased songs so many of your favorite musicians have? And that's another point to this. Like, give yourself, even if you don't want to release this stuff,

give yourself the opportunity to create your own version

of these unreleased songs,

because you sitting down and doing the work

and putting your ideas on a page

or whatever format you want,

is still part and parcel of,

I've made myself sharper.

I've made myself think through this.

I've realized which ideas are worth keeping and which ones aren't. So you can build that habit of reflection and ownership. Let alone learning and growth. You've got to test those ideas. You've got to be able to test those ideas. And it's really hard to do that if you're not giving yourself a chance to think, okay, what out of what I just produced here, what out of what I thought I knew really needs to be refined and tested. And one person said, you know, you hooked me on that one because I asked them, you know, what made you sign up for the course in April? And they said, well, you had put something out that basically tested my ego and identity of like, are you a true professional? And you had said something along the likes of, you know, you say that you love learning, you say you want to help people, you say you want to make a difference, then why are you hogging all of your ideas? Why are you keeping them in your head? Why aren't you sharing them? And he's like, I realized that there were some things I probably just didn't know how to articulate. So I was hiding from that. There was some judgment. I always worry what peers in my field are going to think. I was hiding from that. And he said, but then the point that you made about like, I never have to release this. I should do this for myself. That's the reason I'm coming. And that's great. That's the reason why you should come. Because in a world that is so fast-paced and chaotic and ridiculous right now, there are worse things to invest in than stuff that forces you to slow down, reflect, analyze, reason, and not just react like everybody else does. You test what you really, really know. Oh, you have to think, okay, could this be clearer? Is that actually actionable? Is that doable? What kind of person might wanna read this? What are they going through? What are they experiencing? So I don't wanna overdo this. I just wanna make a point that, you know, is somebody that used to hate writing, I still like it to a degree. It drives me nuts. Like it drives me to a few nuts. I don't like being sedentary. I don't romanticize this idea of coming into a dark office, like I've done so often in the last five years and pecking away at the keyboard. But I do very much appreciate the knowledge that it has helped me a crew. I do appreciate the way, in myriad ways, it's helped me provide for my family. It's helped me provide value to other people. It's helped me discover a lot of things about myself. Knowledge gaps that I have and also hidden talents or skills that I don't think I otherwise would have figured out. But the last thing'd leave you with is this none of this start did for me with a clear goal I didn't know that I wanted to write a book let alone two books I didn't know that I was gonna start speaking and presenting and consulting into in this It came as a byproduct of the work that my life evolved like what I evolved into doing So every time I'd go into an organization or every time a client would contract me to be their own version of windy roads, or to speak, if you've seen billions, I would write down reflections and I'd say, what worked with this client? What didn't work? What could I try? And eventually that became my own framework, my own methodology. And I just started testing, well, why do I think this? Why do I think that? And that allowed me to really create what is now a lot of our intellectual property and art of coaching. Some of it you guys have seen, some of it the best is still yet to come because it's what I've been working on. So that's another area I'd encourage you is, don't come to writer's workshop feeling like you need to know what this thing is That's not the point come to writer's workshop because you know you have ideas in your head That you'd like to get out refine put down in some way shape or form and solidify into a useful artifact so that it doesn't get wasted So that all of your knowledge knowledge and all of your experience and all the skills and all the things that you've acquired don't just dissipate and disappear with you because you never know who's going to pick up that manual, that post it note, see that presentation, read that book, come across that blog post, and you will make a massive difference in their lives. It all starts with getting it out of your own head first. So I got it for you. Take a look at it, go to artofcoaching.com slash events. We do group discounts, bring a buddy discount. It is April 18th and 19th. It is gonna be fun. It's gonna help you. Thank you.

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