Jeff Kaplan, my life coaching instructor, had this advice about marketing: “don’t talk about yourself in the way you think your client wants to hear, talk about yourself as who you are”. Being one step removed from yourself is too far away from your creative human nature.
Charise’s Turn:
In the first draft of A Portable Identity, I wrote about myself in the third person, as “she”. Meanwhile, my co-author Debra was easily referring to herself as “me”. Once I saw how she was going about telling her personal story, I realized that I was setting an arbitrary, unconscious distance from what I was sharing. This wasn't going to work. Debra and I had made the decision to include our own experiences in our book, which has a self-help format, as examples. Our stories would provide inspiration for readers to attend to their own experiences. We were also saying that we, mental health counselors, were not immune from the challenge of change to identity that happens when you are the spouse relocating to support your husband’s career.
With a deep breath, I changed all my pronouns to “me” and “my”, set my concern about my image aside, and continued to write what was true about me that had relevance and importance for other expat women. As one of our reviewers puts it, “The authors do not hide behind professional expertise but lay themselves bare, and reveal themselves with all their faults as well as their personal strengths . . . At the end of the book, you feel like you have an intimate personal relationship with each of these very special women. A Portable Identity encourages a woman to take the time needed to get in touch with herself." (Carol Usher, Canadian Social Worker and Book Reviewer for Tales from a Small Planet)
Get Fired Up:
- How are you getting in your own way of taking a risk that will boost your creative efforts?
- What risk can you take that puts you closer to what you want to accomplish, or brings you closer to your creative self?
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