What We Resist is Often The Exact Thing We Need to Do

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

My name is Shelly Hitz. I am a best selling author of over 40 books. I'm the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message, to help you with marketing to to where you don't feel self promotional or pushy. Today I'm gonna talk about what we resist is often what we need to do the most. Let me give you an example. Many times we have different goals in mind. So it may be a goal of finishing your first draft. That may be your goal right now. Or it may be a goal of publishing and finishing all the publishing tasks of your book. That may be your next goal. Or it may be now you have your book out and your goal is to sell, sell more books. Or maybe you have your books out and now your goal is to increase your business and increase your income by creating other products and services. My main goal right now is to increase the members of Author Audience Academy to provide a stable income for my husband and I so that it frees our time up and I can really focus in Author Audience Academy. But it will free our time up to do other things. I have books that I want to write, ministry opportunities, things like that, like free up my time so that I can have time to do other things. But your goals may be different right now and many times the things that we are internally resisting, you know what I mean? It's almost like.

You know, we're resisting those things is what we actually need to do to move forward on our goal. So let me give you an example. Last year my resistance was to webinars. For some reason I'm a speaker. It is in my strength to do webinars. But for some reason it was a resistance point for me. I just felt like, it just felt overwhelming and all these moving pieces and all the, you know, having to come up with all the slides and everything, all the emails, you know, just everything that goes into a webinar. You may have attended one of my webinars, but you may not realize everything that goes into setting up, planning, preparing, creating the slide deck, writing all the emails, the follow up email, it's a lot. Well, once you have a system now I can set up a webinar a lot easier because I have the basic system down, I have the basic templates down. I can just rinse and repeat. But last year I was feeling so much resistance. I finally was like, what is this? Well, I still to this day, I mean, I don't know what that resistance was. I mean, sometimes it's just internally it's a fear of the unknown. Sometimes we even have a fear of success. It's true. Sometimes we have a fear of success. Other times it may be a spiritual battle. If you're a Christ follower, maybe pushback because the enemy knows that what I do. And reaching more people through these webinars is going to help more Christian authors reach more people with the gospel, with the message God has given them with their testimonies. It's going to help more people provide income for their families by expanding their businesses, creating products.

I get excited, can you tell? But there was resistance. And finally I just had to say, this is what I need to do. And I just need to buckle down. I need to focus, focus on this and I need to get it done. So I did. I had a coach at the time and having a coach for accountability and motivation is really powerful. And webinars have been the number one way we've added new members into Author Audience Academy. There have been a few people that have randomly signed up after listening to my podcast or seeing me on Periscope or live broadcasts like this. But by far, I mean, I should figure out the statistics. But I bet it's 90 some percent of my members have come through webinars and I was resisting them. What are you resisting today? What is one thing? Maybe it's just sitting down and writing. Maybe it's blocking off time for that. Maybe it's social media and you're just feeling that resistance. Or maybe it's email marketing or just finally investing in a page paid service. You know, I resisted that for many years because I had a scarcity mindset. I didn't want to pay, I didn't want to have that recurring payment coming out. And yet email marketing has been the number one way I've sold books. So something else that I have been resisting this year was finances. Getting my finances in order, accounting, that sort of thing. The other thing was copywriting. I love teaching and I'm a prolific content creator, if you follow me. You know, I can just get give you tons and tons and tons of content. I love teaching you. Well, this year I have been resisting the accounting, the copywriting, which copywriting is different than content creation. It's writing it in a way that draws someone in to take action, whether it's to buy your product, sign up for your webinar. Whatever. The third thing was hiring additional virtual assistants. My business is now to a place where we're profitable and it's time for me to get help. I am a workaholic. I tend to want to do everything myself and I'm a bootstrapper. Do it yourselfer. I've tended to attract a lot of DIYers in my tribe. But I want to tell you, you guys, there comes a point you need to grow and you need to keep outsourcing. Fiverr alone is not going to cut it. You need to go on upwork. You need to get some regular outsourcers. I finally have a regular transcriptionist, a regular graphic and a regular video and audio editor that I've hired on upwork. And I hope to do a training here for Author Audience Academy soon. And I'll give you all my templates, I'll give you all my scripts, I'll give you all my emails. I'll show you exactly how to do it. Because you guys, this is a game changer being able to do this for me, like taking this weight off of me like that. You feel like you have the weight of the world that is starting to lift off of you when you start outsourcing. It is amazing and you have to do it slowly as your business grows. But my business is to the place I need to. But there's been this resistance, this fear, like, oh, I don't have time to train somebody. I don't have time to learn this process. I don't have time to get the security down so I can trust someone from another country to be into my accounts. I don't have the time to organize my Dropbox. Well, guess what? I finally just did it. I joined Shalene Johnson's Virtual Business Academy and her four week accountability group and I am in the process of interviewing a Filipino gva. GVA is a general virtual assistant and I'm using the website onlinejobs ph and so far I'm having a good experience. I will keep you guys updated on it. But I just had to finally do it the other day. I was still feeling like this resistance. And no, I don't want to do it. I don't want to invest the money. I don't want to have to go through this process. And what if it doesn't work? What if something happens? You know those things that go through your mind, like all of those what ifs, what ifs, what ifs, what if, what if, what if? Finally did it. I was like, okay, the first thing, I just need to do something to get this resistance out of the way. So I just signed up because you have to pay a little bit of a fee to have access to their site. I signed up for quarterly. I think it was $89 or something. But so far I'm finding some really great people. I'm in the process of the interview and testing and having them go through a process. But once I have somebody on my staff that's a general virtual assistant handling my social media, my content, she'll be formatting blog posts for me, scheduling social media. She'll take me taking my words from my transcripts from these live broadcasts, editing them, proofreading them, putting them into blog posts, putting them into social media posts. And she will be organizing the graphic designer and, you know, all of that for me, hopefully. I mean, if she can't do it, then I'll eventually hire someone else. But can you imagine how this is going to change my business? Already I'm seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. I've been under so much stress. Stress I haven't needed to be. I mean, it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I mean, you can hire someone from another country that it's a really, really good wage for them to earn $3 an hour. And they're great people and a lot of them are Christians, and you don't have to spend an arm and a leg and you can get your life back. Anybody want their life back? You guys, what you are resisting is most likely the thing that is going to make your business, make your books, make your sales. Whoo. Take off. I have been there, too. I know, I know, I know, I know. I experienced that. I'm in it right now. Like I'm walking through it right now. Now I'm in a different place in my business than you are. Where are you at? Maybe you're at the very beginning and it's just getting everything out of your head onto paper so you can get that first draft done. If so, join me@writingweek.com my free seven day nonfiction writing challenge. I'll give you that kick that you need. I'll help you find your writing sweet spot. I'll give tools and things you need to get that first draft done. Maybe you need to now publish your first draft and you need to know how to do it without spending thousands of dollars and without signing a contract that you don't want to sign. That's what I teach in Author Audience Academy. One of my members, Zaheen she's like, I literally saved thousands of dollars by going through the system I learned in Author Audience Academy to publish her book. So if you're at the process where you are now, have your book out, you've already published it, you know the process, you know the system. You have your system and the system that you use and now you're ready to market your books. I would love to help you be able to do that in an authentic way that doesn't feel spammy or self promotional or pushy. I love to teach marketing and I have an entire course in Author Audience Academy where that's what I teach. And I teach you how to do it in the time that you have in the book budget that you have and in a way that is authentic and builds relationships with your audience. Facebook is favoring live broadcasts right now. They're putting them in the feed and people are able to see them more often even if they don't watch it. Guess what? They're seeing you. If you see my face on video, you see my smile and you connect with me. You see me looking in your eyes and you're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Even if you don't watch it and you see me, it makes you think of me. It makes you think of my brand. Author Audience, it makes you think of, oh yeah, she teaches authors. Oh yeah. I was thinking about writing a book or I do need to really have a plan to sell more books. Oh yeah, I really, I want to connect with her. The statistic on Periscope. I've been on Periscope over a year, broadcasting live, and the statistic is that about 1% of all users on Periscope broadcast live. So you could be part of the 1%. I mean, so many people just will never hit that Broadcast Live button. But you can do it. I believe in you. So I have this big master plan and it's actually on my whiteboard right now of how I'm going to be using my expanded team to just blitz the online world with my content. You'll be seeing it everywhere. Pinterest, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. But it's not going to be me doing it. It's going to be other people doing it. Right now I focus on Facebook and Twitt because I can schedule things through Post Planner. But once I really have my team up and going, watch out for the blitz. It's going to be a hit split. Can we get a hit split? That's my little hashtag. I use hit splits. So be ready. Yeah. So you guys have a great rest of your day. Whatever you're resisting, do it. Take one small action today. Just like I took that small action of signing up for onlinejobs ph and just I'm like, I'm going to do it. And then once I was signed up, once I was invested, I was like, okay, now I have to do the next step. I put my job posting up. Then I had to do the next step and start weeding through the applicants. Then I had to do the next step. So just do one small step today. All right, well, you guys have a great rest of your day.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelly's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her Six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.