Transforming Your Identity by Writing a Best Selling Book with Kim O'Hara

H: So Kim, you and I met created magic instantaneously now we're doing a pod swap. You do something that I have been circling around for years, you are a book coach to bestsellers who help high achievers write excellent books. I mean, what could be better than that right?

G: That's a great job, it's a great life. I'm steeped in creativity all day.

H: But this isn't your first rodeo, as they say like you did the whole Hollywood movie producing screenwriting, and there's plenty of people who would think there's nothing good after that like that is the pinnacle. But for you it was like enough of this, can you tell us a little bit about the transition before we get into all the meat and potatoes about writing a best selling book?

G: Absolutely. I mean, there was nothing fancy about my movie career, you know, even when I went to Cannes and walked the closed set. I had to ice my feet, you know, for two hours after, from just like pounding the pavement, trying to sell films and get films financed and have anybody who might have a modicum of like, authority to listen to you talk about like your scripts, you were schlepping along, you know, and we didn't have like little drives and we didn't have all that stuff, we literally schlepped stuff around, so it was never glamorous. I did the movies in screenwriting and I realized this much more in hindsight later because of my love for story and because of my love for characters. But that was a fiction world that I was in and so when I moved into book coaching, the biggest transition was non-fiction. It was, I was going to actually sit with people and hear their stories, and at first it was do I have, am I a container for that. I mean, and then I realized I was a very empathic person, I was a very intuitive person. I could hear someone talk about maybe on surface level, something that they had had happen in their life and I could go deeper and so it seemed like a good transition cuz the depth.

H: You know, it's really funny because I read almost exclusively non-fiction when I was a kid, I read tons and tons and tons of fiction. Now I don't feel like I have time for all of it, so I read mostly non-fiction, but that's a fascinating sort of redo. Now, I know that it wasn't one big flying leap from producing movies and doing screenwriting too. I think I'll wake up one day and I'll start helping people write memoir, another kind of nonfiction book. Did you like stumble into it, fall into it? Did you have a wake up call or how did it, how did it actually come to pass?

G: Definitely had a wake up call, I had gone from filmmaking through a divorce. I was single parenting two small children, and I needed something to shock my ego. I mean, that's really what it comes down to and I got a job at Trader Joe's and it was definitely a divine intervention because at the time Trader Joe's jobs were like really hard to get, like nobody could get a job at Trader Joe's. And not only did I go in and hit the moment right on the time they were hiring, literally that hour, she was like, we were just about to hire somebody. They created an A and B schedule for me, for my pickup time, for my two small children which was really beautiful. I did that for about six months and then, you know, knew it was time to go. I had enough meat juice dumped in my head in the walk-in freezer, and I ended up as a substitute teacher because again, it was one of those things where I had been volunteering at the school and someone's like, you can get paid for this.

So I was doing that when I went to a business event and at that business coaching event and I knew nothing about coaching. I had never been in a room with this many women before. Movie making was a male dominated business, I was always around men and I went into this room and after knowing me for a day, the main coach was having the event. She goes, you're gonna be a book coach and I was like, I have no idea what that is and she's like, you're gonna figure it. And I got my first client that moment out, stood up in front of 250 other women and said, I'll hire you and she did. Yeah, my friend Gail, she just actually put out her book this past year. It was a long journey you know, I've been a book coach for eight years. I met her eight years ago and she had all these like crazy crisis in her life and she just put out her book Money Come Dance With Me last year and it's a beautiful book.

H: Oh my goodness, you know, it's funny, something that we chatted about when you interviewed me for your podcast, which has yes, the fabulous, fabulous title. You should write a book about it and I believe you've trademarked that Smart Girl. You know, I mentioned to you that over the years, when I would tell little snippets of my personal journey. People would say, wow, you should write a book about that and it happened so many times that I got to the point where I would joke, okay, okay, I'll do it, but only if it's gonna be optioned as a movie. And I want Jennifer Lawrence to play me as a young woman, and I want Sharon Stone to play me as a mature woman. Well, I don't know if Sharon Stone is doing movies anymore, I actually look more like Jamie Lee Curtis, but that part is negotiable. But I never really understood why people were saying that. And throw in the other little bit of statistics that something like, what is it, 81% of people say they wanna write a book, but only 3% of those people do. So what is it from your perspective, like what is this big divide between people who say they want to write a book and those who do, and then what do you look for when you decide to work with someone because you find yourself thinking, they absolutely have a book in them, probably several, right?

G: Yes, and the probably several is very, very true. They just haven't opened the coffers to that yet. They've been on the precipice, right so if we take you, for example, let's put, let's shine the light on you, right? And you've had people say to you, you know, you should write a book and you come to me and you say, you know, I do have like a lot of ideas. And then we, you go on my podcast and you talk about some of those ideas, and then later you say, you know, I really wanted to go deeper into a lot of those ideas and I say, that's why you should write a book. It's that there's more below the original surface idea. There's some people that might just have one idea and there's really no depth to it. There's, it's just a surface, it could be like an essay or a quick article or a post on LinkedIn, right? But then there's other people that really have so many more subterranean levels to go on that topic. They've either lived that topic to such an extent that it embodies them and they have so much to share about it in such a unique way. And I think when they hear you should write a book about that from other people, those people are hearing those discreet, unique words that that person is saying and they don't even realize it because the light has to go on for you. I mean, my brand is a lighthouse for a reason.

H: Oh, wow, I was gonna ask you why that's your logo. Yeah, the light has to go. It's not enough just to have the house, the light has to go on.

G: You have the light has to go on. You have to be willing once you take that step to write the book, you then have to go through that transformation from I'm really scared I'm gonna become an author to the author Identity you now take on that you're serving readers. So now that lighthouse needs to sweep over lots of people, not just you, and you become sort of the lighthouse commander. I don't know what is it like a lighthouse commander what is.

H: I don't know, you and I are both, fond of made up words. I thought works for me, I could go with Lighthouse Commander sure, let's do that.

G: Sound official, sounds kinda sexy that sounds good cause that like a sexy image like anyway, we're not gonna go there.

H: But you tend to work with people who are experts, right? they know their stuff and they have stories. Now, I have to ask you this because I have worked with a couple of book coaches and not produced a book. And one was an online program, kind of a DIY thing, which I didn't DIY, I didn't do it on my own. And then there was a big group program and I didn't do that one either, because I think, you know, what you and I have chatted about is that you're exposing yourself in a way that is different than anything else you've ever done. Listen, I'm a talker, right, I can talk all day long and even though a lot of the things I say, I say on this podcast, and they are out in the world. People can capture them now or well into the future, there's something about writing a book that feels so different for me. I bet you hear that from a lot of people. What is that thing like people can be public speakers, they can be keynote speakers, they can be podcasters, they can be journalists. What is it about a book that really requires a transformation of your identity?

G: Well, when you're out talking all the time, right so like I'm a talker as well, and I've really been learning in the last couple years to be a better listener and to really hear, and that comes when you're writing. So when you're writing, you're actually quieting the F down and you're actually listening to what's really going on in your head versus all the like emoting you're constantly doing like as a speaker or has a talker. And so when you're writing, you're like in this new sort of space that's kind of uncomfortable and you're starting to tap into a lot of that subconscious material that's been hidden in the back of the brain by all the show and the glow, right? And now we're like stripping it down and you're like, it's just you and the page and so it's very vulnerable, it's very honest. You make discoveries about yourself that you hadn't really known were to be true? A lot of what I discover about myself, I do through writing because I'm also a writer and I'm also an author. And you know, I think that a lot of the clients that come to me have not written very much. They might have written for sales or they might have written this academics so they're nervous because they're like, what's this creative writing business. And very soon into it, at least through the first draft, they start to own that authorship, they start to be like you, what that wasn't so bad. Like that was pretty what you, that chapter was pretty good, huh, you know what, I love seeing that, love it.

H: You say something on your website that I have to tap into, letting go.

G: I'm scared.

H: No. Come on, come on. We're already besties. It's just me, you got nothing to be afraid of it's cuz it's very prominent. I think it's on your homepage letting go of what you thought your book should be about is one of the greatest gifts you can give a reader. Now there's more to it, but that's the most important thing and I think that sounds both exciting and scary. What do you mean by that statement?

G: If you wanna go just do an ebook or you wanna do a little one and done thing in some kind of program or whatever, you know, you can just go vomit that out and use it as whatever, a lead magnet. But if you really wanna write something that you can like hold and feel and touch and later, like really with your full heart, give out to another person to read that you feel is coming from like the essence of yourself, and you work with someone like me as a coach, who's gonna see you deeper than you normally see yourself. And I know how to work with writers and I know how to take the words and shape 'em into another path. You have to be willing to let go of some of those preconceived notions of what it is you came to write about. That doesn't mean we're gonna scrap your brand or something you've trademarked, or I'm not gonna be like, hell, it's, you know, start again.

There's things we can incorporate, but you also have to be willing to like, take a left turn, take a right turn, see where the words are gonna lead you, because that's where like that next level of magic is. You know, when I used to work as a screenwriter, I would spend eight hours writing in one session, and a lot of that was painful, doing nothing. And then on like the seventh hour, I would write the scene, it was the scene to the point where I would be like, oh my God, it would make me cry, it would make me laugh, and it would be worth the eight hours. But I had to let go of everything I thought I was in that room to do and all the anger I felt when I wasn't doing it.

H: Oh, that's so good. Oh my goodness, that's so good because listen, I, first of all, you're talking to a person that has ADHD and I really fucking hate sitting still for a long period of time. But, also the notion that, you know, and I think because you and I are both abuse survivors, you will probably relate to what I'm about to say, are you familiar with the term toxic productivity?

G: I know, like overachieving and like doing okay, very, very doing and doing.

H: Yeah. Very, very, very, very similar concept. Yes, so it's kind of, maybe it's a sexy new version of kind of the overachieving and the perfectionism and the, you know, all the whole cluster, but it's basically our internal sense of having to, in a way prove our existence our worth our value by working hard and getting a lot done, and just this idea that I'm gonna sit for eight hours and maybe I'll shit out like an hour's worth of pure gold, but then those other seven hours are like gone for good. That some real mindset magic that you must do to convert the eight hours into one hour of magic and seven hours of shit because most people like me be like, no, I want eight hours of gold . It just doesn't work that way.

G: It doesn't and that does not work for my book clients. My book clients maybe have eight hours total to write that week and so a lot of nonfiction you can do a lot faster. Like you'll have an outline and you'll, it's about you so you're always gonna have material. You have to remember I was sitting there trying to create fictional characters so I would sit there for a lot of the time going, what would he do and like what would happen? Like, and then you'd write something, you'd be like, oh, it's that and then you'd be like two hours later and be like, ugh.

H: That sounds way harder. Yeah, that sounds way, way, way hard.

G: It's really, really hard. That's why like doing non-fiction, I'm like, let's go. That's why when people come to me, I'm like, no, you don't understand like, this is easy in comparison to like writing a screenplay, but they don't have that perspective. So I would never say that to anybody I'm coaching, but in my mind, in terms of my confidence as a coach, I know what their capacity is cuz I know what happens in fiction and on the other side.

H: This makes so much sense. So I already know that a book for if you are an expert, you're a coach, you're a consultant, you are a speaker, you are a trainer, you have a personal brand what whatever it is, gives you visibility, it gives you credibility. I've heard a lot of people refer to a book as a calling card. I've had plenty of people tell me people don't even have to read the book to associate you as being a more valuable, more desirable, having more authority. Like just knowing you are a published author does all that for you, even if they never read the book. But are you one of the people who believes everyone should write a book? Everyone has a book in them or like, okay, I see you shaking your head. Okay, good, because I hear that and I'm like, no, no, I don't. I'm not going for that so what are your thoughts about that? If you don't think everyone should write a book, who should?

G: Yeah. I mean, going to what you said just, just prior to that, in terms of the calling card and the authority, I disagree with that statement. When I first started book coaching and I needed a sales pitch, that was the one that was handed to.

H: Because that's what everybody says, Kim's what everybody says.

G: Well, and I can't sell that anymore because I've been doing this too long, and here's what I have to say about that. That only matters if you write a good book and that only matters if you have a good marketing platform. And that only matters if you're good at promoting yourself, go on Amazon and see the zillion books they're on Amazon that no one is going to ever read. Do you think it matters that those people wrote them? No, it means poop. It doesn't matter if someone wrote a book unless it's something you actually wanna tangibly. I've been handed books at conferences that are like book door stoppers. I've said to people, I don't save your book, I don't want it not to be like so up in all that. It's just, I can tell by the way it feels. I can tell by the size I can tell by the energy of the book, you know, the way, the title that it's just been, this quickie, burn it out, I'm gonna have a calling card, I'm gonna be a speaker. I obviously don't have a strong opinion about this. If you're gonna come work with me, you're gonna write something that has legs that can go out into the marketplace that you really can use as like, I'm an author, like I am, like I'm an author.

H: So you wouldn't just take somebody as a client if you wouldn't feel proud to help bring their book into the world.

G: Okay, so now you're talking about like subjective, I have no way of knowing if a book is gonna be successful. All I know is the energy of that client so if they come to me and they're open and they're ready and they're on fire and they have lots of ideas and they understand that this is going to be a long game and they have a business model they wanna wrap around the book. Even if they don't know all those things, I'm gonna illuminate them to those things they're willing to invest in themselves. I see a successful model in them. I have talked to people on the phone who've tried to say, well, you know, they try to say, well, can't I just do it, you know, fast and can I just do this and can you show me they want like the magic pill.

H: Oh my God, girl, do you know I recorded an entire episode of this podcast with the title There is No Magic Pill, I shit you not just a couple of months ago.

G: No, just do the work.

H: But you're right, you're right, you're right. So, I had a follow up question who should not write a book, but kind of getting a feel that your answer would be.

G: And you should not write a book yeah, I can't tell you. I can't, that's too hard to say. I can only say that there are people that never will write a book. I've met them, they have zero interest. So if you are someone who's like, I wanna write a book, people keep telling me I should write a book. I can't stop thinking about the book and you think that that's not an indication you should you a hundred percent should. But there are people out there that literally will never think about writing a book, and they're okay with that. Just like, I probably will never really play golf and I don't care.

H: I guarantee you I will not even though I haven't tried. No, it does not look fun at all to me, it's like I play golf at the risk of offending anybody listening who loves golf lake, religion, like hitting a little ball with a stick and then riding around in a cart. I just, you know, sorry, doesn't sell that fun to me. I don't know. Not for me. Not for me, but okay, I have a couple really good questions. Well, I think they're good questions cuz I'm having them and I wanna know the answers. Does your book need to mirror your business because the other programs that I have been in, they are for people who are business owners, coaches, consultants, agency owners, small brands who believe that they need to have a book to kind of give them visibility, credibility, and so forth as we talked about and usually the kind of mirrors their business right? But, you have written a book, it's actually available for presale now I will link to it in the show notes, and it has nothing to do with book writing. Like you wrote a book about recovering from sexual abuse and being able to talk about it. So that book topic, you didn't, in other words, you did not write a book about how to write a book. You did not write a book about how I became a book coach, or how I left one industry and did something. You wrote a book about something completely unrelated to your business.

G: It's not though, if you think about it, everyone comes writes about some kind of trauma to triumph there is always some kind of trauma to triumph story, and I'm using trauma very loosely, right? But whether someone writes a big little memoir right someone writes a memoir that is about, you know, could be about how they got into their business, right? And all the life philosophies that they've learned through the process of what they've been through, right? So my journey talking about abuse denial specifically is for people that are waking up in their forties and fifties and realizing, oh my God, like I behaved in one way because I thought I was something else, and now I'm realizing what I was behaving on, like the course of my life. Also, I'm a good writer, so it's important for me to show anybody that is interested in hiring me, that I actually know what I'm doing. I'm not just a coach cause I took a certification program. I am actually the real deal and I have a second book that I just finished writing about buying a house, which helps show women, single women that you can do that in Los Angeles. But it's also metaphorical and it's also like emotional and again, it's a well-written book so that it is kind of a business thing.

H: Because one of the things that I, you know, kind of have been hung up about. Maybe you just cured me, so is the notion that if you are a consultant, if you're a coach, strategist, whatever, that you should be writing a non-fiction book. But from what you're saying, it sounds like memoir is actually potentially more powerful. So for those who are not a hundred percent clear on the differences, writing a memoir versus writing a, I guess you would call it a self-help or how-to book if you're dealing with a coach or a consultant, which direction would you encourage them to go? Because chances are they could go either way, right.

G: Well, I'll give you an example of my client, Kristen Noel, she has a company called Best Self Media. She's had a holistic media platform for a very long time and she came to me and she said, I really wanna write this memoir about the experience I had when my husband was caught churning on Wall Street and was put into jail for many, many years and how it up, like just up she went from this life of being a fashion model to, but at the same time of writing this memoir. We started discussing how she had been divorced twice, like you and I and she had these like incredible insights on like how she dealt with this relationship with this man who was in jail, who was the father of her child. And I would say to her, you know, you've got really like a lot going on with divorce like you really understand divorce. And like literally we started talking about her becoming a divorce coach. She now is a divorce coach and just finished creating a divorce coaching program with her husband and they just launched a program and they have clients. Her memoir is not even published yet, not even published yet.

H: Too bad, too bad I don't play the ponies cuz you sound like you're pretty good at picking winners.

G: I love that so, and she will publish the memoir cuz you see it, you understand now the memoir supports the business. But there wasn't even a business before she wrote the memoir, but she had a business that was sort of like going in that direction. So I think you have to be if you wanna write it and I have another client who's actually writing a memoir about change as well from a family business and that mirrors the kind of coaching she does for women in transition. So they do work together, they don't have to be so on the nose, they don't have to be like 12 steps to the da, da da da da, you know? You see those books and it's like sometimes those work because they're selling something very, very, very specific. Some, but I like the more storytelling narrative route, but I do work with people that don't just do that. They do actually have a brand and they have a model and we make it the best version of that we can.

H: It almost feels like the market is ready for something that's almost a hybrid, because, you know, I was a psychotherapist. I read tons of self-help books and recommended them to clients and they have a formula, right? It's like six steps to freedom from anxiety or, you know, 50 50 ways to leave your lover, you know, whatever it is. So you've got, you know, and there's a very specific format and there are takeaways, but at the same time, memoir really leans much more heavily on the storytelling and on the personal narratives and people do get lessons from that, so, I'm wondering if is do you ever help people write books where it's kind of part, I guess self-help or how to and part memoir, is there a way to do both?

G: A lot of my clients that write memoir have prescriptive, it's called prescriptive language, and they have it in there where they'll speak to the reader kind of in the midst of their story.

Now, the publishing industry does not wanna hear that you have a hybrid book because to them that translates to something difficult to market so you're still gonna have to call it a memoir. You're still gonna have to call it self-help, and you explain within the body of the book proposal, which you're using to sell the book, how your version of memoir goes into more prescriptive, and then they can explore that, but you're not gonna be able to label it a hybrid. The New York Times came out with an article I think it was about three or four years ago that said that these new books on the market were, I Change, You Change books, which is what you're talking about. It's like, well, here's my story and here's how I changed and through my change, you can then change by extrapolating from my story and adhering it to your version. But that didn't change the way that publishers see the genre, does that make sense?

H: Yeah, it does and also I think what is also true, and I see what you do, is very, very different. A lot of people are going towards self-publishing and there are a lot of book coaches who help people self-publish and they talk about how unfair, you know, traditional publishing is and how if you are a person who doesn't have a platform of a specific side, you're not Kim Kardashian okay, like, right. She could author a diary that's nothing but blank pages and it would fly off the shelves. But for the average person who's not a household word, would there be times when it would be actually more advantageous for them to self-publish than try to get a deal with a traditional publisher when they have no platform.

G: I have a ton of clients that self-publish and I help them go to great self-publishing providers. I also have a ton of clients that hybrid publish, which is a sort of blend of a traditional model of distribution and the timeframe of hybrid. I always say the biggest caveat with traditional is that you need an agent to get in with a traditional publisher. So you have the journey of trying to get the agent first, that could take six to eight months. When the agent then signs you on, now you're gonna have a relationship with the agent and they might want you to rework the book so that they feel or the book proposal. Then they're gonna go out with the book proposal and they're gonna try to sell it to the publisher. Say a publisher picks it up, you're looking at two years before that book comes out. So if you're someone and you've written a book and you're ready to use it at your conferences next year, you're gonna wanna self-publish because you're gonna want those books in your hand in three months.

But if you're someone that wants a higher level of cache to say, I've written something with Penguin, or I've written with something with a small press that's distributed by Little Brown or some Simon Schuster, you're gonna have to wait and if you're willing to wait, then that's the decision. So I think like the big buzz on the street is, oh, I'm not gonna go with a traditional publisher cause they don't give me any money anyway and they're expecting me to have a big platform, I'm like, that's actually not the conversation. Conversation is actually timing.

H: And creative control, it sounds like you're saying because once you're working with traditional it, isn't it true that they can change the title, they can.

ing story, and it came out in: 2015

H: Since I don't remember being in bed with you anyway, right?

G: It was like crazy and then I found who I'm with now, which is Write Life Publishing, who are a hybrid publisher and let me tell you, they put me with an editor who, boy did I get my come up, comeuppance from all the people that I've tortured through book coaching. I got an editor who made me rewrite 75% of because we had to change it to self-help. So I had to like rejigger everything that was just memoir. We had to add exercises and take away moments and TJ, because it needed to be for the reader, it needed to be for the abuse survivor that I needed to help heal at a denial. It really wasn't about me.

H: You had to be ready for that transformation.

G: I loved her, she was so hard on me. I mean, I spent, this just happened, you know, because the book's coming out February 7th. I had a lot of nights, I was up till three in the morning doing notes that I, it was beautiful. Someone calling me out just like I do as a coach, what do you mean here? What are you talking about? What are you, hi like, why aren't you going deeper with this? I don't understand are you sure you wanted to use this word? I was like, oh my God like at point I was throw the computer across, was like, Kim just breathed this person, and she kept saying to me, you are one of the best writers I've ever worked with, this is why I have to do this.

H: That is amazing. That is powerful and transformative, and people have to be the right person. I always say, you know, one of the reasons why I screen my clients so thoroughly before I invite them to work with me is that I wanna be certain that I am the right coach for the right reason at the right time. And that they really know what they're getting into because, yeah, you and I have powerful personalities and you have to really be committed to your outcome and rigorously honest with yourself and the person that you're working with. Because you said, I loved her because she was so hard on me because you knew that's, you knew that's what you needed to get to the best work.

G: I trusted her, I trusted her and that's, it's a trust thing, right? So when you take on a, when a client signs out with you, Diann, and they are saying, I want that transformation that you've had, I believed in the power of your coaching. They have to trust you at least 75%, I'd say at least 75. I would never ask for someone to trust me a hundred percent, that's asking for too much. But if you can trust me, 75%, we'll close the gap soon.

H: It's so funny how many of the same expressions you use that I like the magic pill and closing the gap. Like I say this is what I do because I work with high achievers and people who can get like 70 to 85% of the way on their own, and then they get stuck, I help them close the gap to get all the way there. So you've already to the finish line because you know what, 75% of the way you don't get any of the accolade, you're not done like you do all that work, you know what it reminds me of? Now they have a more streamlined process, but before I had my first colonoscopy, I had to drink all this nasty.

G: I love how we just went to colonoscopies.

H: You're so welcome, that was so smooth, smooth talk about that. Smooth.

G: It's like, what are I'm not being facetious. I could talk about colonoscopies forever so go on.

H: Well, okay, we promised each other a hard stop at 45 minutes and I aim to deliver, but here's the thing, what got me through and the prep is so much more streamlined now but before the first one, like you have to drink so much of this nasty ass liquid for so on and on and on and on. And I literally at about the 75% mark where I'd spent hours drinking this stuff, I was lying on the bathroom rug like sobbing. I did not want to continue and my husband comes in and it's like, what the fuck are you doing, Diann, and I said, I just can't do this, I just can't do it anymore. He says, you're almost there, you just have a little bit more to go. I can't, I can't. He says, you know, your doctor, you're adopted, you have like no known medical history. You need to do this and if you don't see this through, you're going to have to start all over again. And I literally like, fuck this, I just got up and I started chugging the stuff, and of course I got through it because I realized you're right, 75% you get it's not like you get partial credit, okay? You write 75% of your book and you don't finish, you get zero credit.

G: It's like you did nothing.

H: And the opportunity cost, the sunk cost of all that you did that is now gone to waste. So how does somebody know when they are actually ready, cuz I'm sure I'm not the only one who is thinking I really should stop faffing around and write a fricking book. How do you know when you're actually ready?

G: You have to be sick and you have to be sick and tired of being sick and tired.

H: How did I know you were gonna see, you have to be sick of yourself making excuses, right Is that it, is that the bottom line here?

G: Yeah, I have to give you, I know we're running outta time, but I have to give you a very quick analogy to you the counterpoint, your colonoscopy, I have to tell my version, but it's not, I'm ready. So I was, I had for nine months, eight years ago when I first, right before I became a book coach, was choking and gagging for nine months and convincing myself that the fact that I couldn't eat and food wasn't going down my body was anxiety. I was like, okay, I'm just anxious with life change. When it became evident through an endoscopy that there was something very wrong with me, I had to go do a test called a Heller myometric. And this thing was like they put a Hannibal Lector like mask on your face and they strapped these, this tape to you and they put a carburetor hose like thing that's metal up your nose, down your throat and into your stomach.

And you cannot be asleep because they need to fill you with goo to see if you can swallow or not. Well, you've told them you can't swallow, but they need to get the insurance to agree for the massive surgery to fix the esophagus, you have to prove you can't. And the nurse comes over to me and she just says, this plain as day she goes, here's the deal, 75% of people abort the test halfway through. They never get the surgery, are you gonna be the 75 or are you gonna be the 25 and get well. And I was like, I'm gonna be the 25, and at one point when it got really intense, I saw, I looked over her and all I just thought was, I'm gonna be the 25. And I've carried that lesson through to everything I do. If you wanna get better, if you wanna write a book, if you wanna be healed, if you wanna be happy, you gotta go the whole way.

H: Please, let's stop with this because if that is not the ultimate mic drop moment in two and a half years of this podcast, I don't even wanna know what is. You are phenomenal, I am so very grateful that we met, that we connected and that our story is just beginning. So thank you for being my guest. So much incredible wisdom here I mean, I'm literally gagging up just imagining what that was but such a powerful lesson.

G: Powerful, this woman that has no idea what she changed for me that day, she was just doing her job.

H: Unbelievable and yet she was doing her job at a level of compassion and understanding and she freaking coached you.

G: She coached me, amazing before I was a coach, I know. Amazing, I just got chills.

H: Thank you my friend, I can't wait to share.