Take Action, Authors: Your Actions Define, Reveal, and Express You and Your Priorities

20 of 28 big ideas from the world of coaching to grow your author business

Photo by Kid Circus on Unsplash.

The twentieth in a 28-part series on 28 big ideas from coaching for authors to coach themselves, adapted from my book, The Coach Within.

I once wanted to be a writer. Tell stories. Document my thoughts. It came from being a voracious reader, from books being complete worlds that drew me in, one after another, expanding reality for me with every turned page.

Then I discovered action. Building a business, taking responsibility for it, experimenting at every step, creating as I went, succeeding…and failing. At some point I knew that, for me, living in the world and taking action within it far outweighed writing or reading about it. It was its own form of expression, and my actions strung together and webbing in every direction were my personal expression.

Radio show host, career and relationship expert, and criminal lawyer Mel Robbins in her TEDx talk “How to stop screwing yourself over” makes a hilarious and brilliant case that these days it’s simple to get whatever you want. Very simple. Just not easy. What’s critical to getting everything is taking action on one’s impulses — “forcing” oneself and not…