Check out Corey Michael Blake’s predictions for 2012 at Corey’s new website!

So you fashion yourself a thought leader and you’ve been thinking of writing a book for years. You might even have pages and pages of writing and yet something impedes your progress. Maybe it’s the thought of a blank screen that intimidates you. Maybe you simply don’t consider yourself a writer. Maybe you just don’t have the time. But what you do have is the passion to share your wisdom. So where do you find a writer who can capture your voice and essence and bring your book to life?

Get Educated

Talk with multiple writers and writing companies to get a sense of what is available to you. Pay close attention to how they market themselves; how detail-oriented they are in their marketing is typically a direct reflection of how well they are defined as a writer/professional. Look to be inspired by their work and their references.

Your Contract

Keep your contract short and sweet and allow for either party to terminate the relationship if desired (this creates accountability on both ends of the partnership). If your contract is a work for hire, it should also specify that you own all the materials created on your behalf, from recordings and transcriptions to drafts.

You Know You Have a Winning Relationship if…

Your writer hits their deadlines each and every time. You’re inspired by their momentum. You always know what your writer is working on.

Tricks to a Great Process

Nurture yourself throughout the writing. Talk about the emotions you’re feeling while creating. Embrace your vulnerability. Treat your relationship with your writer or writing team as a marriage. Be open, be honest, be committed. Do the work. Stay involved. When the going gets tough, it will be easy to make excuses that slow down the creative process. Try your best to keep the momentum alive. Momentum is the key to higher quality and breakthrough moments. Keep a journal by your side throughout the process. If the momentum is kept up, epiphanies will strike you in the oddest places and at the strangest times. Capture them and bring them back to your writer or team to include.

Find Inspiration

While you’re writer or team are working, go live your life. Grow your business and spend time with your family. Read great books and blogs, listen to great speeches. Cultivate an environment of inspiration around yourself. Be patient with yourself and your work. When a piece of writing captures your essence, take time to celebrate.

Dive Deeper

Be courageous. When a piece of writing is upsetting you, that’s the world telling you to dive deeper, to investigate more fully, to find the lesson you have yet to unfold. Stay conscious to the process. Do NOT take sleep medication throughout this process. Dream. Dream of how the reader will experience your writing. Envision what the reader will do with what you’re sharing. Work hard for their sake, not yours.

Remain Accountable to Yourself

Tell everyone that you’re writing, but don’t show them the work in progress. Most work in progress confuses people, because it still contains the roadblocks. So protect the work, but enlist their support and ask them to hold you accountable to your dream. Accept responsibility. No one else can share your story. Commit to your reader.

In Summary

In this day and age, with so much clutter in the world and on the Internet, it is your truth that will break through and move people. Your truth in business and your truth in life. Readers don’t just want your information, they want a personal and intimate look into what guided you to your wisdom. All you have to do is find the right partner(s) to guide you to your brilliance, commit to doing the work, and then… jump.

The stock market has been volatile for years and interest rates on savings accounts are pitiful. So why, as a culture, are we still so hesitant to invest in ourselves where the return is significant?

Over the last five years, I’ve spoken to between ten and twenty people every week who consider themselves thought leaders and have been dreaming of writing a book for years, but lack either the necessary skill or the time to do so. Prior to that I spent five years making films in LA and coaching artists of all kinds on how to best spend their money and time to move the needle forward in the career of their self expression. The five years prior to that were spent doing the same for myself as I navigated Hollywood and a successful acting career on TV. Turns out that in addition to a storyteller, I’m a researcher. I’ve amassed mountains of anecdotal data through my experience working with people’s stories.

This morning, as I was watching a riveting TED talk by Researcher/Storyteller Brene Brown, I realized the amount of insight I have gained from my experiences in both speaking with those interested in writing a book or a movie about their life or their wisdom, and in working in depth with those who chose to walk down that path.

Turns out there is a profound difference between those who think about walking the path and those who do.  And that ingredient, as it was so brilliantly highlighted in Brown’s TED talk, is worthiness.

Those who question their worthiness, find the most amazing ways to redirect our conversations.

• How much time is this going to take? I’m very busy.
• That’s a steep price tag, what’s the ROI?
• How many best sellers have you had?
• I absolutely want to head down this road… (followed by silence).

I learned the value of self investment in my early twenties as an actor.  I needed certain tools to find work: headshots, resumes, audition clothes, union fees, gas for the car, etc. My third year in LA when I finally joined the union I had my first 30k+ year from acting after investing $3 – $4k in the right tools for the job. Those were simply the rules of the business. You have to invest in yourself to be seen.

Later as an entrepreneur, I took that lesson and reinvested all our profits in Round Table for five straight years. Not every investment showed a return, in fact many of them failed if viewed from a purely financial perspective; however, view them from the perspective of the journey, and each of those investments led myself and my team to a greater understanding of our strengths and weaknesses. That clarity has immense value.

Now, as the company has grown, our self investment has catapulted to six figure levels and I can say without hesitation that I’ve never questioned the value of the transformational journey. In fact, I find that if I’m not on one, I get bored and eventually feel forced to seek the next adventure. What I do is ask myself the following four questions before I make my investment:

1. Is the team I’m paying to lead me to this next level of self-actualization capable of creating the environment I’ll need to be successful (i.e., are they talented, professional, kind, honest, and communicative)?
2. Will I be inserting myself into an uncomfortable experience that will force me to grow?
3. Does this opportunity scare the shit out of me while also exciting me?

If I answer yes to the above three questions, I’m ready for the big one:

1. Am I willing to take all the blame if I don’t achieve my goal with this investment?

This last question is so imperative. I NEVER make an investment and expect the party leading me to deliver my transformation. I have to earn it. I have to be an active participant in my own change. And if it isn’t working, I have to be willing to stop the process, step into the light and expose the problem so it can be solved or the project redirected.

And that brings us back to worthiness. Once I have vetted the team and see the potential of the investment, I have to look inward and ask the ultimate question: am I worthy? Who will I be on the other side of this journey and is that growth worthy of the investment of my time and my money? Is it more valuable to invest in this present experience and my own transformation, vs. the 1% interest I can earn in a savings account or the gamblers luck I would be subjected to in the stock market?

Funny thing is, that even in the booming years of the stock market, I always pulled out money to invest in my next great adventure. It’s the adventure that fuels me.  The knowledge that tons of accumulated experience has created little nuggets of wisdom I can claim as my own. The wisdom holds the value. Want your ROI? Look to the wisdom and ask yourself: Am I worthy?

Yesterday my team had the honor of sitting down with nGen Works, a web design firm led by Carl Smith that we have just started working with on our brand identity. In preparation for that meeting, our four top people, David, Erin, Katie and myself were asked to prepare mood boards about our business— slide shows of images and quotes that we thought represented our business in some fashion or other. Maybe 20 slides each.

In our time together yesterday in person, we shared our mood boards with one another and with Carl’s team and we explained them, image by image, sometimes in depth, sometimes in a single word.

As we spoke, Carl’s group took notes, made comments, asked questions. And while I had seen David and Erin’s mood boards previously, I had yet to hear the explanations for their choices, and had not seen Katie’s mood board at all.

My own mood board centered around images of some of my favorite book covers we had produced that represented titles I was most proud of. And I included an image of Robert speaking, which is what most of our authors aspire to. And then there were some images I captured of sites that I found impressive and simple.

David’s mood board was full of images that evoked an entirely different range of emotions. Espresso being poured and beautifully captured, a fantastic Jack Daniel’s ad, a Twyla Tharpe quote, and a simple carton that depicted how to become a super hero in three easy steps. David’s descriptions were full of a combination of elegance, simplicity, and play. What struck me most about Dave’s board was the feeling it evoked of enjoying the finer things in life, and appreciated excellent craftsmanship.

Erin, who works closely with both our clients and our staff, had such a different approach to her mood board. Hers was full of rich quotes about the experience of working with our company. About the uncomfortability it will create, about the hard work, passion, and honesty required, and the value of the journey. About the difference between getting lost in the bottom line vs. looking up to see the beauty of a new landscape. Erin captured the reality of what we put clients through on the way to finding their brilliance. And she did it with her unique combination of high heels, wit, and calm.

Katie’s mood board was perhaps the most moving to me, and I think that’s because Katie is such an exceptional listener who is immersed in the words of our clients, that while I see her work constantly, I don’t often have the privilege of hearing her thoughts about our business. Katie, who has been with us for more than four years now, and who worked closely with me on defining our writing process over that time, captured in her mood board the importance of the story, and of the journey, of the vulnerability and of the reward. One particular image Katie showed was of a single leaf on a gravel road. It was battered and wind blown, and Katie revealed that it was a picture she had taken herself. The entire room felt the power of the image, maybe for different reasons, but I was struck over the head with her belief in the value of the story of that single leaf. And it epitomized how I feel about our business and how I feel so blessed by the people who I work with and their ability to care so deeply about the stories we’re asked to tell.

I cannot thank Carl and his team (Mary, Lori, Russel & Katie) for giving us the opportunity and the space to experience what amounted to a gift to me. Hearing my own team express in images and words, what our company means to them was startling, profound and overwhelming. It was the first time in the six years of our company’s existence, and my 19 years as a creative, that I felt the transfer of ownership move from myself to my team. I have cared about what we’re doing for so long and in such a deep way, and yesterday I had the rare opportunity to see that reflected back to me by loving people, by such smart people, and in ways that created value that I could never have created. They love my baby now as much as I do, and they care for it beautifully.

To say I am grateful is an understatement. I was gushing with a range of emotions. Pride. Humility. Disbelief even. As we sat around the table at dinner and shared old war stories from our theatre days, David described the moment we had in common of being in the middle of a play, and either waiting in the wings off stage or sitting outside the theatre smoking a cigarette when we used to think to ourselves, “I’m fuckin doin it.”

Ladies and gentlemen, we are. And I feel like the luckiest guy alive.

This is a guest blog post from our Director of Ops/Director of Happiness Erin Cohen who shared this with our clients in a recent newsletter.  I thought it was so wonderfully written and a profound piece of the creative journey of putting a book together, that I wanted to share.

After a quick lunch with a client who happened to be in town last week, I walked away with insight into a piece of the writing journey that isn’t always one we think to address or know to express. The emotions that come along with writing are almost always pronounced, whether with the highs or lows. But working with a team to write your book introduces a set of emotions that we sometimes don’t even recognize as emotions until after the fact.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve received an email from a client stating a “problem” that turns out to be an emotional response to the process. Perhaps the first piece of writing has just been delivered or a story just came out during an interview call that is very personal (maybe too personal for the book?). The client feels angry or anxious, and it takes an honest conversation to get to the bottom of the discontent. Face it: it’s not easy for anyone to listen to the sound of their own voice. Reading your own words on paper can feel just as piercing, like nails on a chalkboard. Do I really sound like that? Did I say that on our call? And sometimes what a client thought the book was going to be about doesn’t turn out to be what the book wants to be and facing that reality can be terrifying! Through RTC’s anti-cookiecutter organic process of writing, authors often find out their books are not at all what they thought they’d be. They’re more honest, more real, and quite frankly, better than what was imagined.

If you’re on this journey, with us or someone else, keep in mind that feeling anger, anxiety, frustration, and sadness are all natural parts of the creative process. For those of you writing books about management, leadership, business success, and the like, you’re not excluded. Work is often very closely tied to the definition of self, so when you begin to see your values written on paper, you’re going to be forced to confront them and sometimes even re-evaluate. Ultimately this leads to the epiphany that you’re after and that we want for you. Please take your time reading the first few chapters you create with us and if you feel uncomfortable with them for any reason, it’s time to discuss your concerns. Maybe the voice isn’t there, maybe the content isn’t right, maybe you’ve even decided you need to start over from a fresh perspective. We’ve been doing this long enough to know that your initial reaction is normal, and we’re here to help you understand those reactions and make the changes necessary or simply to support you in accepting the emotional depth of all you bring to the table.

Here’s to the JOY!

Emotion Portrait Credited to Jella Bella