#405: How to Actually Implement What You're Learning as a Writer

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

Hey, Kingdom writers. Welcome back to the podcast. In today's episode, I'm going to share how to actually implement what you're learning as a writer. And this is a huge thing that I think all of us need to be considering. In this day and age, we are bombarded by information everywhere we go, whether it's our email, our social media, our devices, billboards, everywhere. There is so much information. And how do you actually move forward in God's call in your life to write, publish and market your books if you're not actually taking action? So that's one reason that we are pivoting Christian Book Academy to be more about implementation and taking action than just giving you more information. I've had the Academy now for eight and a half years and there's a lot of information in there. We have a lot of content. And right now I'm going through, through a reorganization of how I present that content to you to make it easier. We have a progress tracker for each of our main modules in the Kingdom Writers path so you can check off and see your progress as you go through those stages. We are doing so many things behind the scenes, but we also have our unlock your writing program that we host twice a year. We have our take action weeks quarterly. We have every month a 15 minute challenge. We have our two day virtual writing retreats. We have our progress pods which are peer led accountability groups every week. And so we have so many things now that are really just focused on helping you get the thing done, which is typically your book, right? Or your publishing or the marketing of it. And so in this episode, I just wanted to talk a little bit about that. How can we become more action oriented versus just taking in the information? So one of the things I want you to do is to consider having a business meeting with God. This is something we talk about a lot around here. We help you partner with God to write your book, to publish it, to market it. And when you partner with God, things change. And so if you have a business meeting with God sometime over the next week, ask him what is for this season. So what I have found is many times you're taking in content and you're learning things that you won't need for another Year or year and a half or down the road like there it's, you're learning about marketing and all the ins and outs of all of the things when you don't even have your first draft written yet. So that's one thing is just to pray and ask the Lord, what is it that I need to learn in this season to do in this season? There's nothing wrong with learning about marketing in advance. You know, many times you can actually be start setting up your author platform as you write your book. But what I have found is more often than not, when writers start doing that and you start taking all of these courses and all of these things, this bright shiny object syndrome, because there are a thousand and one ways to market your book, then you go down this path and then it gets overwhelming. And then instead of actually building a platform of engaged potential readers, you're just going down all these paths and getting overwhelmed and then feeling confused and then getting stuck. And so what is for now, what are the trainings that you need to do now? And if you're in the first draft phase, just some tough love for you. You're like, there's just, there needs to be a lot of button share time. There needs to be a lot of just time writing. And that's why we have our two day virtual writing retreat every month. That's why we have our progress pods for accountability. That's why we have our 15 minute challenge every month to help you get that first draft out of your head and onto paper. And so we would love to have you join us at, you can come to ChristianBookAcademy.com and join us to get that extra support. And then the second thing I want you to consider is what if you designated one day a week for learning something new and then the rest of the week you spent implementing that particular thing. So you could say, Mondays are the days I'm going to learn something new. And I want to tell you just a little bit about how the brain works. So when we're learning something new, we tend to get a hit of a chemical called dopamine. And that dopamine makes us feel good and it's exciting and it's new and it's fresh. And then when we actually get into doing the work of that thing, we're not getting the dopamine hits anymore. It doesn't feel fun anymore. It feels like a drudgery, it feels like a burden. It feels so hard to get motivated to move. And that's just the way that actually God created Us. And, you know, he created us to have that initial release of dopamine to get us excited and motivated and get us moving. But we can't sustain that. It's not going to be something that is sustainable. And so that's where having accountability, having group writing sessions, having, you know, the different things that we offer you in Christian Book Academy can really help. But also you're telling your brain you're gonna get that hit of dopamine every Monday, so look forward to Mondays. Mondays is gonna be the fun day. We get to learn something new, and then the rest of the week you implement that thing. And then the reward of that is we get to learn something new on Monday. And it can be any day of the week. It could be Saturday, it could be Friday, whatever day you want as your learning day. And then make sure you're actually implementing the rest of the week. And this one simple tip could help you finally finish your book, to take the step of faith to finally finish your book and, you know, so God can use it to impact lives. And that's what we help you do in Christian Book Academy. Every month I have a next steps coaching call. And actually the reason I'm recording this is because this was a question on one of our coaching calls and this was the advice I gave her and she was like, oh, this is amazing. This will help me so much. And so many other writers have already said the same. And so you can get personalized coaching from me every month in Christian Book Academy as well as all of the other things that we offer to help you get the things done that God is calling you to do. This is important because your dreams, your passions, but also the people who are waiting for for your book, you know, they're waiting for you to finish that book. And so come join us. Join Christian. Join us@christianbookacademy.com and if you found this episode helpful, I would love for you to share this podcast with a friend. We would love to help even more Kingdom writers like you to be able to write, publish and market your books. And I will see you in the next episode. Bye Bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you, as a Christian writer, have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy, where we help you give birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom writers.