Building a Category Instead of Writing a Book: The Strategic Decisions That Shape It

This show is powered by Others Over Self. Hit that subscribe button to keep training your brain. From Others Over Self, it's Hardcore and at Ease, a show about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge. I'm host Shelly Rood. If you're building something that's supposed to change people, but you're navigating between the decision of shipping it right and getting it right, well, this episode's for you. We're walking through every strategic decision we made, why we chose narrative first, why 3 parts, why this architecture. When your turn comes to build, you'll know how to think. I've got maybe 30 minutes, if I'm lucky, before my 2-year-old wakes me up. 30 minutes to be here before the work takes over the day. This is Hardcore and At Ease. Before we go deeper, let me be plain about what we're doing here today. This is an exposure episode. I'm living out loud. I'm letting you in behind the scenes of the book that we're writing. We're 35,000 words in. We're in the middle of strategic decisions that will shape what this becomes, and I'm bringing you into the room where those decisions are being made. Why? Because when the time comes for you to write your book, whatever that book is, you need to know how to think about the decisions. You need to see the framework. You need to understand the resources that guide your work. You need to watch someone else walk the path so that when it's your turn, you're ready and you feel confident in making the right decisions. That's what this episode is. It's a masterclass in building something that matters disguised as a book update. It's me choosing to let you see the work before it's polished, before it's done, before I'm ready to show it to the world. And that's the whole game. Living out loud, showing up tired, airing a little bit of our dirty laundry so you really appreciate the things that are squeaky clean. So let's jump in. We're gonna start by naming the problem because everything flows from here. The problem is that women veterans are struggling to interact with each other outside of a mission context. That's not theory. We know this from over 650 women that have been tracked through our gatherings. We've measured it and we've listened. And here's what we've discovered. Military women frequently don't have deep, sustained friendships in their adult lives. Looking at one woman's journey, my own, The pattern is clear: 12 moves in 7 years over 8 different states, 3 different countries. I've had surface relationships but never deep roots. I have 2 blood sisters, but I don't think they're my support system. And I have military friendships, but they never carried into those deeper levels of life. Looking back through every major life stage, I can see that I had military relationships with other women, but they never went deep. Some would move or PCS, someone would separate, our paths would diverge, and I would make little to no effort to stay connected. That's on me. These always felt like surface relationships, and a lot of it I was the problem. I wasn't allowing or investing in the deep roots, and as a result, I paid a price. I made decisions alone that shouldn't have been made. I tolerated unhealthy behaviors because there was no one to call, and I viewed isolation as a strength. But it was actually survival mode, extended survival mode. We see this across the gatherings, women just like me who don't know how to show support to each other outside of this mission context. How you show up isn't always received as intended. We unintentionally trigger each other because we have different operating patterns that have never been mapped or named. And so the problem that we're solving isn't a clinical problem, it's a relational problem. Women veterans need language for how we move. We need to understand our pattern so that we can understand why the same friendship keeps failing. It's not because we're broken, but because they're a hollyhock trying to bloom in an iris's environment. And if that sounds weird, that's okay, because that's where this book comes in. Let's talk about the architecture decision. Here is what we decided to build and why we decided it this way. 3 interlocking pieces. There's sanctuary, signal, and service. In our business, they feed each other, and each one solves a different part of the problem. Sanctuary is our peer support program for women veterans. We've been running this since 2019. We call it Be at Ease Woman Veteran. These gatherings are safe spaces that have been tested through our state contracts and other third-party funding providers. We know what works because we've measured outcomes every single quarter. Women who interact with us leave with 3 things: steady confidence, clearer choices, and the muscle to protect their joy. This is the proof. This is what our work produces. Now, signal— signal is the wilderness and the wildflower. That's the name of our book, The Wilderness and the Wildflower. But here's the decision that we made. We didn't decide to write a traditional how-to book. We chose narrative first. Story is the primary argument, and the framework earns its place by landing inside lived experience. We're not just announcing, and we're not just stating. We're telling real stories. And so the women who read this, you see yourself in the chapter before I ever even name what it is you're looking at. Now the question is, why narrative first? Because you can write books a lot of different ways, but women veterans specifically are tired of being summarized. We're tired of being stereotyped. We're tired of experts telling us what we should feel. We need to stand where you stand and feel what you feel. And women veterans need to feel like they're not alone in it. That was a decision that I made to write this, and that decision has shaped everything. So that's our sanctuary. And that's our signal. The service that we offer is Digital Shelly. She's the 24/7 resource. She is the digital bot. She's trained not just on my knowledge, on a collection of my entire team's wisdom, hundreds of hours of interview transcripts, vetted resources, proprietary frameworks. She's available at 2:00 AM because the real Shelly is not. And when you're geographically isolated, When you're in a war zone and you really need a good friend to talk to, that's where Digital Shelly comes in. Now, all three of these pieces exist to serve one thing. I give women veterans permission to be at ease and to love their lived experience, and then they turn that permission into steady confidence, clearer choices, and the muscle to protect our joy. That's the point of view. Everything else is just a delivery mechanism. Now let's take a deeper look at the book structure and the sequences in it. I'm going to walk you through exactly what the book is and why we structured it this specific way. The Wilderness and the Wildflower: Naming the Language of Women Veterans. 70,000 words, 3 parts, sequential. You can't skip ahead. And here's why that decision matters. Part 1 is frame the terrain. It's 8 chapters long, and each one names a specific unwinnable situation that women veterans are facing. Situations where the old map doesn't work. There's 5 criteria from the Wilderness Framework: no map, no training manual, double bind, worth collapse, and moral dissonance. Each chapter opens with a moment from my life in the Army before I had the language to understand what I was experiencing. And then there's a diagnostic, and then there's a beautiful landing, a permission, which is also a reframe for how we can live. Now, why do we start in the wilderness? The wilderness is part one because you can't name your pattern until you understand the terrain that you're on. The sequence matters. You have to ground the reader in the problem before you can hand her the solution. So that brings us to Part 2, Name Your Flower. It's 2 chapters. It's meant as a connection. This is where the Wildflower Framework lives. It's 8 movement patterns: Sunflower, Iris, Lily, Goldenrod, Primrose, Violet, Daisy, and Hollyhock. The assessment helps women identify their pattern, and then they return to the wilderness chapters and they can see themselves with new eyes. They understand not just the terrain, but their specific way for navigating it. Now, why part 2 here? Because now she knows herself. She knows her movement pattern. She's not broken. She's just moving in a pattern that was never named before. This helps her be able to see herself, not just where she's standing today, but she can look back into her past and reframe her lived experience, and she can also look forward and make decisions with higher confidence. And part 3 is Nourish Your Flourish. This is 3 chapters, and they're terrain mapping to compass holding. What do I mean by that? Well, women learn that the wilderness doesn't go away, but you can stop fighting it. You learn to navigate it, Peace isn't available when you're escaping the terrain. It's available for you inside the terrain, when you stop treating it like the problem. And so you see, the sequence is everything: frame the terrain, name your flower, and then nourish your flourish. Each part prepares the ground for the next. The final part includes comprehensive profiles for each of the 8 wildflowers, one for each movement pattern, as well as the Wildflower Personality Assessment itself. Now I'm at 35,000 words and I am totally not finished. I am in the crucible. So let's talk about what we do here, the resource decisions that I've been making. I want to help you understand what's guiding this work. So let me name what's actually working for us. First of all, Donald Miller and StoryBrand. Donald Miller is an 11-time New York Times bestselling author, and he is the coach for CoachBuilder and StoryBrand. His experience is shaping how our narrative lands. The decision that I made is that the customer, or in this case, the woman veteran, is the hero, and I'm the guide who has walked this terrain before her. The framework exists to help her win, not to showcase my expertise. That's the structure, and that's the architecture of how this book breathes. This is a major decision because it changes everything about how this story is told. This book is not about Shelly Rood trying to tell her story or become a bestselling author. It's about a woman veteran who becomes confident in her own pattern and learns how to protect her own joy. I'm just the guide that's showing the other wildflowers the path. In addition to Donald Miller and his team, we've been working with Category Pirates, and they're shaping how we think about category and intellectual capital. Here's the decision we made with them. We're not writing a book. We're creating the category how-to for women veteran healthy friendship. One book isn't the end, it's just the beginning. This is a multi-book strategy. We're talking about intellectual capital that compounds, and this matters because it changes how I write the first book. I'm not trying to put everything into one volume. I'm just laying the foundation here. This book is about terrain and pattern, and future books will be about facilitation of groups, institutional scaling, leadership development. Each book is designed to build on the previous one, and that's the Category Pirates framework, because that is how you build a category. Let's talk for a moment about the data that we have related to the Gatherings. So since 2019, we have tracked just about 1,000 women veterans. We've measured outcomes and we have proof of the concept in action. We know it works because we've measured it. We have steady confidence, clear choices, the muscle to protect joy. Those are 3 outcomes that we can prove that we have given to these women. It's not aspirational. That's what this work produces. And that is fundable language for institutions. Our funding partners want to know, are we going to have tangible outcome? And I can tell them, Without a doubt. Absolutely. Now let's talk about my lived experience. I've had 12 moves in 7 years, tons of surface relationships, my own pattern of isolation, the realization at the age of 42 that I finally had a couple healthy female friendships. That's the credibility that I bring to this work. I'm not just theory, I'm documenting myself and living out loud. All of this together, it creates something that doesn't even exist yet, a proven, measurable, repeatable system for helping women veterans build healthy peer relationships. We've been building it since 2019, and we're so close to being right there. All right, thanks for sticking with me so far. We are gonna touch base on the narrative strategy. Here's the actual story that opens the book. Now chapter 1 is called "When the Path Disappears." There is writing that happens before chapter 1, but we're going to pick up in chapter 1. So I am in seminary. If you don't know what seminary is, it's like a graduate school, and I went to Moody Theological Seminary. So the exercise is making a life map. You draw all your choices, and you're supposed to be able to thread or connect how they led you to where you are. Pencil on paper. And as I was going through this seemingly simple exercise, I realized something. I wasn't able to name a female veteran friend. Really not a very good one. Everything in my life is work, family, mission, movement. But what about my peer relationships with my military women? That word friend, it disappeared from my personal landscape, and I wasn't able to identify it. I had a couple really close civilian friends, but when I was looking for a woman that I served with, I just was coming up empty on a name. Looking at every major life stage on that map— childhood, military service, seminary, civilian work— There was no sustained, deep friendship with another military woman. Even though I have two blood sisters, they weren't my support system, and my military friendships didn't go deep. And so that's where we start. That's the opening. It's what every woman veteran reading this book is going to feel when she opens it, and she's going to recognize herself. And that's the unfortunate part of this. So that's the narrative choice. That's why we opened with the story instead of just jumping in and teaching the framework, because stories stick. They make you feel seen, and that's straight from the Donald Miller framework. The hero needs to see herself in the story before she's ready to learn a framework. Now let's dig a little bit deeper into the publishing decision and talk about mini books and stacking. So here's my publishing strategy, and it reveals something really important about how we're thinking about this project. So we're using the Category Pirates intellectual capital stacking model, and here's how it works. We do weekly posts on Substack. Our Substack is called Mission Wildflower. Every 3 to 5 weeks, those posts stack into a mini book, and multiple mini books stack into a medium book. A medium book stacks into a big book, and that intellectual capital continues to compound. So as you can see here, we've got mini book 1, which is part 1 only, which is the wilderness. And so that's gonna launch first. And then mini book 2 is gonna come out, and mini book 2 is both parts 2 and 3 integrated. It's the wildflower pattern. And so it's gonna launch simultaneously when we publish the full book. Now, why this strategy? Well, because readers have opinions. And so you can read just the part about naming terrain. You can read the full journey. You can read just about the flowers. The intellectual capital doesn't disappear into a 70,000-word monolith. It breathes and it lives on its own and it compounds. People subscribe to us on Substack because they see the trajectory of what we're building. And so here's the key decision that we made here. I'm not waiting until the book is finished to share any of this material. Our chapters are already published on Mission Wildflower. As I complete them, I'm sending them out, and the readers are seeing rough material. You can go right now and subscribe and read some decent, maybe a little bit crappy writing, because I want you to give feedback as a reader, and that feedback feeds into our final version. So by the time this book launches, thousands of people will already have been part of this journey. Now, no, this is not how traditional authors work. Usually it's, you know, maybe one person, a couple close friends, and an editor. But this is how the category pirates think. You build in public, you iterate in public, and so your audience becomes part of building the thing. And that's just beautiful. Let's go a little bit deeper into the process of how we're building this. So let me share with you exactly how we're doing it because this process is part of the teaching. So every chapter exists in its own Google Doc. We use Google for a lot of our work. So you have a Google Drive and you have a Google Doc. I have an element flow document. It's 7 elements that every chapter needs to have in rigid order. This is straight out of the Donald Miller writing framework. It's called Story First Architecture, and it demands it if we're gonna have cohesive work that people will enjoy and follow. Now, before I sit down to write a draft of a chapter, I have to ask 3 questions: Where are the structural gaps? What source material am I missing? And where are the narrative beats that I need to confirm? And then I can sit down and write the draft of a chapter. My editor then looks through the revisions element by element. And when I say my editor, I mean my proprietary Claude AI that I pay for and have trained. It is focused specifically on my expectations for this book. So it tracks the changes, I review it, I integrate them, and then my accountability partner, his name is Keith Gallo. Well, he's mirroring this work. So he and I meet once a week on Monday mornings and we just check in on each other. You see, Keith owns a window company and he lives down in Florida. But he's writing a book not on windows, he's writing a book on planting a church because it's something that he's experienced in. So once a week, Keith and I get together just for half an hour at the most, and we check each other. What's your word count? How are you on your chapters? Where are you struggling? What can we work through? And that accountability helps keep me in check. In addition to that, my leadership team meets twice a month and reviews all of our work. They help us decide what's landing with our audience and what needs adjusting. So this editing is ongoing. I'm not waiting until all of the parts are finished. Part 1 is getting close to completion. Part 2 is still architecture, and Part 3 is pretty much finished. You don't build the next level on uncertain ground. We build the foundation first, which is already established. And then we're able to work on the pieces as our emotions and as our resources best suit. And I have one more thought that I really would love to leave you with today. This is not the last book that I'm going to be writing. I wanna be clear about that. I'm having too much fun. This is just the first book of a multi-book strategy. The category starts here, the wilderness and the wildflower. It names the terrain and it shows the movement patterns. But there's so much more to teach. We have to teach how to facilitate groups because they're not being run good enough. We have to teach how to build institutional programs that women veterans love and want to be a part of. We have to teach how to scale this for our counties, our chambers, our states. We want to help women veterans build leadership from this framework. And so each book serves the category. Each book is building intellectual capital, and each book is compounding the value of the previous ones. As I develop, I'm thinking in terms of a library, not just a one-off, but a collection of books that together define what it looks like to help women veterans be at ease, to love their lived experience, to protect their joy. Because when women veterans love themselves, they're better equipped to love others. And that right there is how we improve the veteran community. So that's the vision and the book that we're writing right now. It's the foundation. So here's what I wanna invite you to do as we wrap up today. If you are a woman veteran and the terrain is resonating, you like what you're hearing, I want you to take the Wildflower Assessment. It's live right now. It's only $20, and you can find it at othersoverself.shop. Or you can take it complimentary. All you have to do is be a part of our next Be at Ease Woman Veteran Gathering. That's our gift to you for showing up and being a peer. And that assessment is going to help show you how you move through terrain. Another thing you can do right now is subscribe to Mission Wildflower on Substack. The chapters are publishing as I'm completing them. Whether or not you're a woman veteran, I invite you to subscribe because you are a part of the process. Give me feedback. And then when the book launches, you'll have been a part of this journey. Now, if you're not a woman veteran or those two options don't sound like your cup of tea, I still want you to be part of the community. So come to join.othersoverself.com. This is my internal business network where we're all learning from each other as ambitious leaders of how to navigate the life that we're living with more clarity and more joy. So let's finish this out with a little bit of fun. Here's what I'm learning while building this. You already know that excellence takes time. Fidelity to the people that the work is meant to serve, well, that trumps efficiency. And that tension between good enough and the excellent that matches the purpose, well, that's not a problem that we need to solve. That's the work itself. Think about that narrative-first sequence because it really does matter, and so do your resources. And so do the decisions you make. Now, internally, if you do this work, if you wanna build to this standard, then you're gonna become someone who refuses the shortcut. You're gonna be someone who walks the path that makes the work what it needs to be. You're gonna be like Keith, who starts out at 36K and suddenly finds himself at 65K when he was editing. Because people like us, we trust the people that need it are gonna find it. And so we build for quality. We train to standard, not to time. If you're like me, then you're someone who's going to think in terms of categories and not just one-off books. Be someone who's brave enough to live out loud while you're still building. All right, now you are a part of something bigger, a category of builders who understand that women veterans, we don't need to be fixed. We do need to be named, and we need to be seen. We need permission to be at to ease with the terrain that we've been handed and to just love our lives right now exactly as they are. That's not radical. That is sane. It's time to put the fist down. And everything that I am building exists to give women veterans that permission. And that's what today was— me giving you permission to see the work before it's done and to watch the path being built instead of just walking down the finished one. Now, right now it is still May in Michigan, and that light is still going to come through my kitchen window in the morning. Everything feels green and beautiful and possible because it's spring, and I'm still going to be racing against that 30 minutes before my 2-year-old wakes up. But now I know that refusing to take the shortcut is not a bad thing. And living out loud while you're building, that is me being me. That's the message for today. Thank you so much for sticking with me. Links to everything that we talked about are in the show notes. I will be here with you next week with a guest every Tuesday with more stories about ambition and going further together. Now I have to get back to some writing. So until next Tuesday, I want you to stay hardcore, be at ease, and trust the process. You're listening to Hardcore and At Ease. Keep the conversation going at join.othersoverself.com.