One lesson I hope people take away from the book

Well, despite the rewrite, the downtime in Maui, the ER, and the EVERY STUPID OTHER THING that showed up in my path I actually AM publishing in December.

December 16th to be exact!

I'm pretty damn excited.

I hired my friend, the enormously talented Kerri Antes to do a photo shoot so I would have some professional pictures for my author page and also for my website and other promo materials.

Here are a couple.

People, there are thousands of pictures of me on the web joking around, making faces etc. There are none that I can think of with me just looking nice.

I hired someone else to catch my good side because I needed some distance and for someone else to "show me" my good side.

This is pretty bad news (not that I could take a photo like this by using selfie mode on my iPhone).

No, because it's a pretty tight parallel to the way I've been treating my book project.

People come to me to help get over the baggage that keeps them from putting themselves out there, to take risks and to drop paralyzing perfectionism.

I want my clients to be aggressively on their own side and refuse to take crap from anyone who isn't on board with whatever crazy fantastic thing they want for themselves.

When I was working with my own coach this week (yes, I have one) she nailed me on my doubt on being able to draw an audience for the book.

"Why don't you think you can do that"?

"I guess I don't have the evidence that I can. I don't know if people will like it or find it valuable".

There is something stupidly incongruous with putting as much effort as I did in distilling down the information my new book contains if I have some lingering doubt that people won't find it valuable or be drawn to its content and lessons.

Good lord! I'm glad I didn't have this evidence requirement when I started writing. There isn't a whole lot of power behind the thought "I'm going to write this thing and maybe someone will read it".

No--you write a book because you want to reach the world.

And you can't wait for the world to tell you it's ok.

I've spent tens of thousands of dollars and years in effort acquiring the knowledge and experiences that fed the content of this book. I threw out everything and started from scratch so that the content would be concise and accessible. I did it because I wanted my audience to get something solid.

Being aggressively on my own side on this one.

If you undertake any new endeavor, don't cheat yourself with foolish thoughts such as "I don't know if its good enough" or "why bother".

Don't.

Just don't.