#209: Jessica Abel on How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 209 those notes include a summary of our discussion here, as well as links to resources we mention during the show. Maybe you thought that when you became self employed you'd finally have time to work on that big creative side project. Then you went solo and five years went by without making any kind of headway on your idea. Maybe it's a novel you've been meaning to finish, or a screenplay you've wanted to start writing, or maybe refinishing that antique furniture you inherited from a family member. Or maybe it's really more about finding time to work on your business. You're always so busy working in the business that you never seem to have the time to work on the business, on making it better. Your intentions? They're noble, they're justified. But you feel like you're drowning every week. There's just no time. Isn't that a shame? You'd think the default condition of freelancing would be freedom, but I've found, and maybe you agree, that it's more like bondage. You have to work hard and with great intention to create the kind of freedom you need to work on these non urgent endeavors. You have to push through procrastination. You have to push through self doubt one baby step at a time. Otherwise you'll find yourself working in the worst job possible for the worst boss in the world. Jessica Abel is my guest this week and Jessica is a coach and the author of several books including Growing how to Find Creative Focus when youn're Drowning in youn Daily Life and the book out on the the Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio, which is about how ira glass and 35 more the best audio producers in the world use story to keep us listening. Jessica brings more than 20 years of classroom and online teaching and has taught at the School of Visual Arts and the MFA in Comics program at the California College of Arts and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. You'll hear Jessica addressing all these challenges head on and offering great ideas I and how to deal with them. I'm honored to have her on the show. And I know you're gonna get great value from a conversation. Enjoy, Jessica. And I know you're gonna get great value from a conversation. Enjoy, Jessica. Welcome. It's great to have you here.

Thanks for having me. This is really exciting.

Awesome. Yeah, I'm excited to dive in and I know this is a topic that's gonna resonate really well with my listeners. Before we get to that, why don't you give us a little bit of background, Tell us the Jessica story. How did you get here? And then what is here now? So what do you do, what kind of clients you work with and so forth?

I think I'll start the other way around and start with who I work with and what I do now and then go backwards because it's a little bit of a complicated story.

Perfect.

And I don't want to confuse people. So right now I am online course and program leader, sort of group coaching program leader for a course called the Creative Focus Workshop, which is designed for ambitious and driven creative people to figure out why the most important projects aren't happening and make that change that around. You know, just get the stuff off the back burner. That's really the most important stuff. Figure out true priorities, become more productive, but in a way that is balanced with the rest of life so that it doesn't lead to burnout. And I have a membership group that's sort of incorporated with a Creative Focus Workshop. So it's an ongoing membership that people can join. And I have just incredible people in there helping each other negotiate the complexities of a self generated creative life on an ongoing basis. So that's basically what I do. I lead that community and teach the course, the Creative Focus Workshop and do some coaching in that context as well. So why am I there? How did I get there? I am myself an author and a cartoonist. I. I originally come out of comics and I did, well, a whole bunch of different things. Short stories and a graphic novel that are sort of in a realist literary mode. And then I've done some genre work. I've done a vampire romance and a sci fi book. I also do nonfiction comics. I'm pretty well known for a book called out on the the Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio, which is an investigation of the top narrative podcasters and audio makers, people like Ira Glass and Chad Abumrad and that crew, and sort of looking into how do they do what they do, what are the elements of storytelling that make their stories so awesome and how can we sort of incorporate that into Our own storytelling, created my own podcast, which is a narrative podcast, like a fully scripted podcast that goes along with that book and that work of storytelling. I've also done two textbooks on comics, like how to Make Comics. I've been a classroom teacher at the university level in art school for over 20 years. So I've lived the life that is, the people I work with are like me. And they're not all cartoonists, although certainly there are cartoonists. But I have struggled with all of these issues my entire professional life and absolutely have not solved everything and continue to struggle, but struggle at a different level and in a different way than people who are just starting to grapple with these issues. And so I'm able to help them move through those big stages of resolving blocks in the way of making their creative life work.

I can't see my audience, but I can already tell there's a lot of heads nodding.

I can feel them. There's like wind coming.

I can feel the nods. It's like you're talking to me, sister. Yeah. This is a struggle for so many of us. And all of us are creating. We may not be creating art in the sense of illustrations and cartoons and paintings, but we're writing or creating things, we're creating courses, we're creating maybe a screenplay. And it is such a struggle to balance all this. On paper, it sounds like it should all be able to work, but it doesn't quite work out that way.

I mean, that's what we're promised, right? The idea that there's this mythical thing called work life balance, that everything should fit. But as I'm sure you've talked about many times, the things that we see in the media about people who are successful tend to just show us the results and not show us the process.

Yeah. So it looks like they just kind of birthed this thing. It's like an overnight success. I like to joke that I'm a 12 year overnight success. If you saw the process, it's so messy, we could probably make a movie out of it. And of course, if you condense it into two hours, it's going to look great. But those are the best two hours. Forget about the other 5,000 other hours where it's embarrassing. So we have these ambitious goals and projects and ideas that every year, I mean, we just say we're going to do this, we're going to get going on this, and the year is over and nothing has happened. Why is that? Is this procrastination issue? Is this a curse? That's mostly given to creative professionals. Why is it that we tend to struggle or it feels like we struggle so much with procrastination?

Well, I think there are a whole bunch of pieces that go into this and it's different for different people and different even for different projects. But at its core, you know, creative pros have clients. That's the definition of being a pro, is that people are paying you for work. And when you have clients, that work is always going to feel more pressing and more important or more pressing and maybe not more important than bigger picture things that you need to work on, which may include things like building a new offer into your business or mastering a new skill like long form sales pages or something like that, or other kinds of things where you're trying to write a novel or a screenplay and have make a transition into a different kind of writing. All of those things are things that you are the only one who cares about those things. And until they already exist and the level of self belief and trust in yourself that you have to maintain day to day is incredibly demanding. You have to believe it's worth it, you have to show up for it over and over again. And you have to thereby say no to all kinds of demands on you all the time. You know, from your clients, from your family, from your friends, from your boss. If you're working a day job, you know, you have to be able to say this thing that I know I need to be doing with my life is more important than these 18 other things people are telling me they want me to do. So you have to face other human beings and tell them no. It's so much easier just to let it slide and it's completely understandable. We are social creatures, we are monkeys at our core, you know, and what we want is to, you know, at that monkey level is to get along with other people and to make them happy so that they are, you know, like us and keep us included in their lives, you know. So I think that that's what we're struggling with at an essential level. Then there's other things that go into it beyond that. So for example, fuzzy thinking about the time space continuum, like can you really do all 25 items you've put on your to do list for today? I mean you can't, right? It's literally impossible to do to check off that many items in a day. Even if they're simple, you just can't focus on that. So if you plan 25 things, you're going to take the low hanging fruit and the hard Stuff like write novel isn't going to get touched. And then there's a thing like write novel. What does that mean? What, are you going to sit down and stuff's going to pour out of your head? No, I mean, you need to understand how to break down projects into steps and build various kinds of systems around how do you go about your writing process or whatever the project is.

Absolutely. And what I find is many times you have the right motivation, but it's that motivation and that encouragement that day for something that's going to take potentially weeks or months. So you can have this up and down. There's no way. I know, I overbook. I tend to be way too optimistic in what I can and cannot do. And that creates all this negativity because at the end of the day, at the end of the week, I just feel like, oh my gosh, just look at what I didn't get done, you know, so much. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this concept that you talk about in your book of idea debt and the fact that there are two types of idea debt too. I found that really intriguing. Can you talk to us about this concept and explain how it plays into all of this?

Yeah, of course. So the term idea debt comes from Kazukobuishi, who's a very accomplished cartoonist. And I think his main work is Amulet, which is a seven volume series and I think it's being made into a movie. And, you know, he's a big deal, but he talked about, when I interviewed him for out on the Wire, my show, he talked about this concept of idea debt that he'd come up with. And his metaphor for it was snowboarding. So he snowboards. And as he went down the runs, he would see all these young hotshot guys kind of like clustered around the jumps as if they're like looking at the jumps, thinking about sort of coming up with their best strategy for doing the jump. I don't know, snowboarding, doing, taking, make, whatever. Anyway, the jumps. And what he realized is that these guys are getting colder as they're sitting there. They're getting physically colder. So they're less able to do it, to do the thing that they imagine, but also the thing that they imagine is getting bigger and bigger and more and more scary as they go. And so he said, I learned that what you need to do is you either hit the jump or you just skip it. And this was a big, like, you know, brain exploding moment for me to give a name to the thing that I'd seen in myself, but also in all my students for so long. And what I realized is later is that Kazu is essentially talking about perfectionism. He's talking about how the way if you think about the end result of something too much, it will prevent you from doing the work. And really you have to just get head down and just look at what the next step is and just hit the jump. You just do the thing. And that's what I call idea debt type P so you have ideas that are getting bigger and bigger and bigger in your mind because you're thinking about how they're going to make you famous or make you a million doll, or they're going to be the thing that breaks out of the pack or they're going to whatever it is and the bar gets higher and higher and you feel less and less capable of getting there. And so these sit on the list forever. But what I also realized, and he wasn't really talking about it I don't think, but I have seen this so often, is that there's another kind of idea debt, which is ideas that you've been carrying for so long that they're not actually relevant to who you are today. And I call this idea debt type N for nostalgia. You know, with my students, with my comic students. Back in the day when I was teaching comics, I would see these students come in at age of, you know, 19 or 20 or 21 and they were trying to work on, you know, massive multi volume graphic novel series that they'd come up with when they were 12. And they had no concept of what was missing from their ideas and how much work it would be to actually execute this thing. And as they started working on it, it was became clear that they were no longer the person who really cared about that project. Back then, you know, the 12 year old who loved this idea of the space opera or whatever wasn't there anymore. But they felt because they'd promised themselves for so long that they were going to do this thing, they felt like they had to do it. This happens all the time with like PhDs, you know, with people who are trying to finish their thesis and they promise themselves, they promised the world they're going to finish this thing. But by the time they get to the point of actually writing the thesis or beyond the research phase or whatever, they realize their life has turned a different direction and they don't really care about this anymore, but they feel like they have to finish it. And I've seen so many people struggle through years of finishing a Thesis and ultimately either finishing or not finishing it, but doesn't matter because it doesn't actually contribute to the life that they have now and what they want in their lives now.

Yeah, it's like a should, a big should thing. Instead of looking at it in a pragmatic way.

And it relates to the idea, the economic idea of sunk costs. You've put so much into this already. You've put so much energy into it already. You put time into it. You've written pages and pages, you've done all this stuff. You kind of owe it to yourself in some way to finish it. But the sunk cost is a fallacy. Right. Because putting more costs, more value into something does not get you where you want to go. It's just going to. You lose more time.

Yeah, it's a pit. It's a pit where it just. Yeah.

Examining your idea debt very carefully. And I have a whole process where you go through. You, like, write everything down and you categorize it in various ways and you really assess it from a kind of objective, scientific point of view. Like, what does this align with? How does this actually serve me in the future? What's all those different kinds of things? And you sort that all out. And through my process, you come up with what I call your 1 goal. Your 1 goal to rule them all. Because of course, I'm a sci fi geek. And the idea is that then you devote your time to one major creative project at a time, which is not to say you never do anything else. It's just that you take things sequentially rather than simultaneously.

So one of the things that I've noticed is with my tribe, there are two competing factors here. There is the idea surplus. We can all think of all kinds of things that we want to do and work on. I mean, we're creative people, so we want to create. And at the same time, I see a ton of perfectionism out there. And there's some other stuff too. There's the imposter syndrome and all that. But all this, I feel, is tied together, but you got two competing forces.

It's.

I want to do all these things, but they have to be perfect. Wonder if you could speak to that. What are you seeing out there? Are these things serving us or how do we. It is something we just have to learn to live with and learn to manage.

Well, I think you answered your own question there. I think I know what you think. Yeah. I mean, perfectionism is everywhere. It's rampant, it's all over the place. And it's Completely, completely understandable because the reason we have perfectionism is because we care and because we know what's good. As Ira Glass would say, we have good taste. You know, like, you know, what looks good, you know, what you see out there that seems awesome, and you want to do that. And as soon as you set your sights on something like that, you look at your own skills and what's happening right now in your project, especially if you're, you know, mired in the middle of it and you think, I can't do that. I'm not capable of that, so I should stop and try a new project, which is probably going to be much, much better because I can totally imagine how it's going to be awesome and perfect and, you know, whatever, because haven't gotten into it yet. But again, as Ira Glass says, the only way out is through. You have to finish projects, ship them, you know, live with the consequences in order to make it to the next step. And it's really, really hard to face that. And I think, you know, some of the secrets are things, like I said earlier, of not looking at the big picture. Don't think about the end result. Only look at the six feet of sidewalk right in front of you. Just do the next step. Don't worry about where it's going from here. That's really, really helpful. It's not the only answer, but it's a piece of it right now in my community, which is called the Autonomous Creative Collective. In the collective we're doing, we have themes every month. So this month is Dare to Be Bad Month. It's actually, it's called out on the Wire Month for, like, creative risk taking. And so I'm challenging all of my members to think of something really, really dangerous and risky, creatively speaking, that they need to commit to and do this month. And it's really fun. People are just like, there's this kind of, like, frisson of, like, chills going down your back. Like, what am I going to do? Like, what's scary enough to make a difference and yet not so scary that I'm going to literally have a heart attack right now.

Yeah. And if it's early in the month, oh, I still got 25 days to go.

Right. Well, and the thing is, we have a community. Right. So everybody can sort of encourage each other. They can say, this is what I'm going to do, and here's how I'm going to do it. What do you think people can boost each other up and help, you know, help everybody have that courage to do those things and actually put the work out even though they don't feel prepared. The only way to move on is to put out work not feeling fully baked. That's it. That's how it goes.

Well, you're right. I love this idea of just looking at what's in front of you, Just taking one baby step at a time. That's something that I've baked into so many of my programs. Because if you look at the whole journey that you're going to take, it's going to feel completely overwhelming and then self doubt will lead to discouragement and will lead to inaction and will never get anywhere. So I'm a big believer in just taking one step at a time and just doing your best to try to forget the whole journey. I was wondering if we could try something and I'm going to spring this up on you and maybe go through a few actual examples things that I see out there and I don't know, maybe we'll go through two of them and three of them and we'll see that the process or how to approach them is going to be about the same. But I'm going to give you situations that I see a lot of in my tribe and see what advice you would have for this person. How does that sound?

Okay, sounds good.

Okay, so here's one. So again, kind of backdrop here is we got clients, like you said, that's like the fire, that's the immediate thing. We also have personal stuff that we got to take care of. And then we also have our business. I mean, sometimes we forget we need to invest in our business. We need to work on the business, not just in the business. So this one's kind of a personal thing. I've been wanting to write or finish that novel or screenplay but can never seem to find the time. Sometimes I start, I block out a day or things slow down with my clients so I'm actually able to jump on it. But then I have to stop to work on this other stuff because I do land all this work and then it's a big stop. So I lose the momentum I've gained. What do I do? I mean, this has been in the back burner on and off for the last couple of years.

Well, the thing you're facing is dilemma. So dilemma is a narrative concept where there are two or more options and each of those options have both positive and negative externalities that if you choose that option, there'll be good things and there'll be bad things that happen as a result. And so they're competing with each other. And whichever choice you take, you have to take a hit. And so the point you're at right now is it's very painful. And I think that one of the things that is, let's say, just underreported in the creative world is how much dilemma is a piece of all this stuff and how much you have to actually face extremely hard choices, make extremely hard choices and live with them. That there's no perfection at the end of this road where everything fits, everything won't fit. All the things in your to do list will not happen. So in your case, what I would say is you have to face the dilemma of deciding how important is this novel to me? If I really want to make this novel, I really want to write this thing, I have to say no to other things. It's going to take X number of hours a week to stay serious about this and stay engaged in it. And those are hours I cannot devote to either client work or working on my business or personal stuff or anything else I have to do. I have to continue working on this on a regular basis or it's never going to happen. And if it's okay that it never happens and it sort of becomes this kind of hobby thing that fits in, when it fits in, that's fine, that's a choice. But the dilemma, you know, the externality of that is like, wow, maybe I'm not serious about being a fiction writer. And facing that reality can be really, really hard. If you, you can try that out for a while, try on that identity and say, like, how does this feel to me? I am, you know, serious about my business. I'm serious about my clients, but I'm not serious about writing fiction. And I like to do it when I can, you know, try on that identity and say, how does that feel? And if you start feeling, walking around like you have this, like, void in your soul, then you know that's not okay, and you can't live that way. And so then you say, okay, how much less client work can I afford to take on? Do you know your financial picture? Do you know what that all looks like? Can you take one less client a quarter or something like that? Can you raise your prices on other clients because you only have the hours you have? There are other ways to solve that problem, but you really have to address the core. This is why you need time to work on your business and not just in your business. You need time to work on your life and not just in your life and Thinking about those big picture questions is where that fits.

I love that you address the fact that, look, this is not an A or B answer. It's not binary. Many times the best solutions are actually extremely creative. You have to approach the problem laterally as well, because you just named an example. What if I raise my fees and I'm able to basically boost my income while cutting back my hours to dedicate to this? I mean, I've seen that work many, many times. Takes courage, it takes some creative thinking, but it's definitely doable.

Right? And get back to what we said earlier. When you're raising your prices and you're telling your clients, my prices are this and they're one and a half times what they were last week, you have to say, my novel is worth this. You client, you are paying for my novel and it's worth it. I believe in it. And that level of self belief is what becomes so demanding. And that's why it's so helpful to have other people around you are going through the same thing and can back you up and say, yes, it is worth it, you can do this, you should do this.

Or it could be something different, such as, hey, I've known I needed to let go of this client. I'm going to go ahead and let go of them because I brought this other client in and guess what? I quoted one and a half times what I normally quote. So now I. Oh, for sure, yeah.

You can approach it different ways, but no matter what, you're quoting one and a half times your previous rate.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And you have to stand behind that and say, this is not me being selfish. This is not me being mercenary. My work is worth this and my personal work is worth this. I deserve to have that time that.

Is so important because I see a lot of people with this guilt. They don't feel like they're worthy of that. And that's a great way to frame it. All right, so we're talking about working on the business. I'll give you that scenario. I've been meaning to work on my business instead of just working on client deadlines all the time. The intention is there. Every Monday morning, every Monday, I set aside some time to work on the business. But then Friday afternoon comes by and I realize I've done nothing. So disappointing. I feel like a failure, like I'm never going to get out of this loop.

So number one, I'd say Monday's a bad choice because Monday is when all the stuff hits you from, you know, whoever happened to Email you over the weekend and you're, like, trying to get back on top of things. I would say Friday is a much better choice than Monday for strategic work. That's just a little hack. That's not really the answer. The answer is the exact same answer as my previous answer, which is, what's really important to you? What is your priority, really? And if your priority is to grow your business and to really think about new ways to approach, you know, to think through a new pricing strategy, you know, to create a new offer, to write a sales page, you know, that is going to take this strategic time that you absolutely need to carve out. But that means it is not. That is time that dollars are not coming in the door and people whose emails want answering are not getting answered. And you have to be able to live with that. It's uncomfortable. And I think one of the secrets to this is to actually know your numbers, Know how much money you need to make in a given period of time so that you can feel confident in saying no to things. Raising your rates. Yes. Also, obviously, the same thing applies there, too. But whether or not that's on the table, if you know, okay, I'm hitting my minimum for now in the next three months and I have an emergency fund, then you can say, all right, I'm going to devote my Fridays to strategic work. But you can't do that until you've figured those things out. I'm a huge advocate of ynab, by the way. You need a budget, which is an app I absolutely love that gives you transparency into those kinds of questions.

A lot of creative people don't want to deal with or think about the numbers. But I couldn't agree more. It's so important because it gives you clarity and allows you to make better decisions. And it's really like you said, we got so many tools now. It's not that hard.

Yeah, it's scary, but get over it. You're a grown up.

Well, I tell you what's really scary about it is truth. You punch everything in. You're like, oh, my gosh. What?

Exactly.

No wonder, no wonder I've been struggling. I'm in the red all the time.

But wouldn't it be so much nicer to actually know that and be able to identify with ynab? You can actually see what you're spending on which thing and exactly how much do you spend in clothes or cafes or other things, Whatever your weakness is, and know that and be able to control that. It's so clarifying. And it Gives you so much power over your decisions in your life, you know?

Oh, my God. Yes.

It's the. You know, for me, like, that's the whole underlying philosophy of my work as a coach and teacher is to give creative people control over their lives because so much feels out of control all the time. And to understand that you do have. I mean, there are things you don't have control over, but you have control over an enormous amount of your life. And our society is built to take that control away, essentially, and convince us that we don't have it. And you have to fight back against that.

Well, I tell you, I feel freer. And I don't think. I know I live better today after having that clarity in my finances than I did before I had it. So a lot of people avoid it because they think, oh, if I do that, then that means I'm going to have to be on a budget, and budgets are bad because then I can't go out and then I can't do that. Actually, it's the opposite. Once I have that clarity, I was able to reallocate resources and priorities, and now I focus more of my time and energy on the things that matter and actually live better because I'm focusing on the things that bring me joy.

Right. If you decide you really don't need to waste money at Target every month, but you really do want to go out on date nights, you can put money in that account and be like, all right, this is my date money. And if you know you have your expenses covered, you can feel 100% clear about going out, spending the money, and should do that, should actually enjoy it. I mean, we're getting a little off track here, but this is really parallel to, I think of the way one uses time as really similar in some ways.

Oh, absolutely.

YNAB is set up, which is basically envelope budgeting, if you've heard of that. Yeah, you know, it's. We have the number of hours we have, and if you have allocated enough hours to X thing and you feel comfortable with that, then you can spend that time and you don't have to feel like, oh, but I really should be. Blah, blah, blah, because you've already done the work to figure out what's your baseline, you know, what. What time do you need to put in on your job, on your family, on your whatever, and then what's left over, and then you can distribute that where you want to.

So I'm going to give you one last scenario. This one's a little different, but I suspect that Many of your answers might be the same. I know I should go after better paying clients, but I'm scared to death.

Well, I think it comes back to that creative courage and confidence in your own abilities. This is a different thing, really, because this really is about mindset and understanding your own value. I think when you start to take control of your creative life, this kind of confidence can grow because you feel like you are a person who can be in charge. But on the other hand, there's also this sort of inner critic stuff that happens all the time. I call it the Should Monster. Based on a drawing that a student in the CFW made one time. This, you know, I should be better at this. I should have done this 10 years ago. I should write this thing, finish that thing, lose ten pounds, whatever. You know, all the things. And I have this activity that I go through with my students about the should monster where you literally write all those down. You make a list of all of them which can be very painful. And then you can, if you want to draw a picture or write a poem or make a, you know, use a photo or whatever to represent the should monster physically so that you can kind of focus your rage at that person or that creature. And that's what I did for a long time. But I actually came up with another based on, again on student contribution, another level for this, which is to then actually examine those things and decide which are the kind of shoulds that come from outside, from beliefs that I don't even really hold, but they come from someone. So like if your second grade teacher told you, you know, you'd never make it as a writer and you are holding on to that criticism and you don't really believe it. You think she was an idiot, but it still haunts you. That's something you can identify and pin down as somebody else's garbage that they sort of like shoveled onto you. And it doesn't make it go away, but it does kind of diminish it. And you can put it in a box that way and kind of go, oh, that's my second grade teacher talking. I don't really believe that. And you can have a lot of empathy and self compassion for that little girl, a little boy version of yourself who had that incredibly painful experience, comfort them and say them, we're not there anymore, it's okay, we're going to move on from there. Then there are other things on the list that are not really shoulds, but things you want to do, like lose weight or write your novel or whatever. It is, but you have not allocated time for it. And those things go in the category of idea inventory, idea debt. And you just have to decide, do I want to face the dilemma of the time that this is going to take, make it happen, or do I not want to? And again, that's taking control and saying I'm in charge. I have decided I'm not going to go to the gym this quarter because I don't have time and I'm not willing to devote the time to it. So I'm going to readdress this again in, you know, whatever. Q2. We're going to look at this and see whether I can make time at that point. That is a very empowering thing to do. Instead of I should, I should, I should. Like, I want to. I have decided not to right now.

One of the things that I've tried to do with those kinds of things is I love that idea, by the way, but I always then take it one step further and say, okay, this is going to be a next month thing in terms of the real focus. But what can I do now, starting this month, that's so small that at least I'll start moving in that direction? And it may not have a measurable result at the end, but I'm at least being intentional about starting, you know, doing that one pushup or her, you know, going up and down the stairs for five minutes, you know, that kind.

Of thing, I think that can be great. But I think that also creates a mental load. Like, you have to continue to think about that project and make that thing happen. And if you're really, I mean, whatever workouts, everybody should exercise more. Please exercise more. Everybody. But, you know, if it, like, sometimes you're just, you know, you're not going to do it. And to actually put it on hold and say, I'm not even going to think about this. I don't have to think about this until, you know, two months from now, and then I'm going to think about it again and I'm going to start that tiny thing that's going to lead to eventually having this habit. I think that can be. You can give yourself permission for that. So I'm not saying no to your suggestion. It's like, if you really are, like, planning to start this in a month and you want to kind of warm up to it, then yes. But if you're like, I am really not going to write my novel for six months, I'm not going to do it. I don't have time. I don't have the bandwidth, I got to take care of a sick relative and I have the holidays coming up and I've got these big client jobs. I'm not going to do it. But in six months I'm going to look at it again and I'm going to do my best to reallocate my time and resources so that I have time to do it.

Yeah, no, that's a great point about the mental load. At least it takes that off your shoulders and you can really devote 100% to everything else.

And then I didn't really get to the thing you asked is this feeling of I want to have more high value clients. And I don't feel like I'm ready for that. I didn't address that directly, but I feel like the kind of inner work that you need to do on your confidence starts with looking at why do you feel like you're not ready for that?

Oh, I couldn't agree more because you're right. There is something underneath all of that that you need to address. Otherwise it's just going to be a band aid. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. That's why I wanted to throw that one at you. Because look, there's all kinds of tactics on psyching yourself up for that, but you're not addressing the core issue here. So I'm glad you addressed that. Tell us a little bit about your book. You got an excellent book out there growing gills. Love the metaphor, by the way. Can you tell us more about that and who you wrote it for?

Well, I wrote it for the people who are listening. I feel like the people who are in your audience are ideal readers for this. The Subtitles how to Find Creative Focus when youn're Drowning in your Daily Life and the idea is really, it comes straight out of my curriculum for the Creative Focus workshop and my work with students and coaching clients. You know, and it's really, it's sort of step by step program like how can you take control of your creative life, make sure that you're creating, you're carving out the time for the work that is most important to you, facing those really hard dilemmas, you know. So it's a self help book in that sense and has been really, really effective for a lot of people. I've gotten some amazing mail from people who never, I've never spoken to, they haven't joined my course and they've used the book and followed the program and gotten incredible results, finished books and published things and started podcasts and all that stuff.

What else are you up to these days? I mean, I know you're working on some exciting things and anything you want to mention that's particularly of interest to my audience?

Yeah, well, I mean, I hope that a lot of people who are listening would be interested in the Creative Focus Workshop, which is really a more intensive, more focused way of going through the same kind of principles that are in growing gills. And I have a video masterclass that people can take in order to sort of stick their toe in and see how, if they like my teaching style and what they think about the work, which focuses on how to make a plan for literally for tomorrow that's going to be more aligned with your true priorities, the core priorities. And that is available@jessicaable.com cfw yeah, so I think that would be something that would be really helpful for your listeners.

Awesome. We'll make sure to include that link in the show notes and for anything else, where can listeners learn more about you and what you're up to and what you're all about?

Well, you can check me out@jessicaable.com, i have a bunch of stuff in my blog and other kinds of offers and things there, and I hope that there's a lot of stuff there that can help people get to the point where they feel confident enough to face those big dilemmas and make the decisions to embrace the creative work that really matters most.

Thank you. Jessica, this has been fantastic. I appreciate you coming on today to share your wisdom and ideas. I know I learned quite a bit from what you gave us here.

Thanks. This has been really great.

The High Income Business Writing Podcast is a production of B2B business launcher. Learn more at B2B. Launcher.com.