Turn your words into alchemy, transforming life’s challenges into golden opportunities. For today’s episode, our dear host Juliet Clark unravels the intricate relationship between writing, gratitude, and personal growth. She discusses how writing can turn challenges into opportunities, elevate your mindset, and truly transform your life. Juliet shares her passion project, “Author Alchemy,” a journal born from her journey through the complexities of life and writing. She also introduces the 10×10 practice, a simple yet profound exercise that involves listing ten things you’re grateful for and ten things you wish to manifest daily. She candidly narrates her struggles to find gratitude during challenging times and how this practice led her to profound shifts in her perception. As she embraced gratitude, she not only found the strength to overcome obstacles but also honed her ability to manifest her dreams. If you’re ready to embrace your authenticity, transform challenges into opportunities, and embark on your personal writing alchemy, then don’t miss this inspiring episode. Tune in now!

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Author Alchemy- Writing is a Healing Journey

The Author Success Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building and Leveraging Your Platform

I wanted to remind you before I get started here to run over to Amazon or your favorite distributor and buy a copy of our latest book, The Author Success Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building and Leveraging Your Platform. For many of you, this is an important book because you probably haven’t built it in a way that makes sense to bring on new audiences and also, to sell products and services beyond the book.

That book is a nurture tool. You need to drive traffic there first before you sell your bigger ticket items. I’m going to talk about another new book. This is a passion project. I don’t know how many of you live in an area that snows, but we had an extraordinary winter. It ended at the end of April in Utah. Usually, it ends up at the end of February with a few snows in between in March but this was long this 2023.

I had a lot of time to think about projects that I wanted to do since I hate snow. I put together a passion project that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. It’s a book called Author Alchemy. This is a journal from my days when I was in real estate. I had a coach with one of the big coaching organizations who encouraged me to do some exercises, especially towards the end of my real estate career when I was going through a divorce.

I was a Debbie Downer on the coaching calls because there was so much trauma and so much was getting in the way. However, I learned a lot from these exercises and I wanted to share them with authors as well. The story about this is a little bit about real estate, but when I started putting these exercises together, I was going through an ugly divorce. I was writing a book and working in real estate in the foreclosure market.

Author Alchemy

If you remember, 2007, 2008, and 2009 got really bad. Working a real estate market in a foreclosure market is you’re working, which is a good thing. A lot of realtors weren’t, and they were losing their houses, cars, and assets like that because they had gotten used to a lifestyle from the housing boom. That’s always the danger when you are not a seasoned agent and don’t realize that there are great ups and low downs in the real estate world.

I was having a tough time. There was a lot of anger from my own personal issues, but there was also a lot of anger from my job. Imagine that I knock on your door. I tell you that you have three weeks to get out and here’s your offer of what we’ll pay you to get out. Many of those people were angry. Some of them had tragic life circumstances that were causing them to lose their home.

I got up to go to work every day and I got yelled at. I usually had about 8 to 10 foreclosures at any one time. There were a lot of angry people in my world, and those didn’t even include the people that we had to take to court and evict. I was in and out of court, not only for real estate but for my divorce as well. You can imagine that I was exhausted. I wasn’t finding much good going on in the world, and I was also trying to write a mystery novel. It was a tough time.

As part of that, I started doing these exercises. They were what was called a 10-10. I had to every day write what were the 10 things I was grateful for and what were the 10 things I wanted to manifest. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, for those of you who’ve done something like this before, I had a hard time finding ten things I was grateful for. As a matter of fact, I had a hard time doing the one thing that I was grateful for.

It was great. As this coach was coaching me through this, I realized that the very first thing I was grateful for is in a down market. When other realtors were not working, they were not making money, I was making money, and lots of it. That was my first grateful point. Once I got that going and was able to put those ten things into alignment, then I started manifesting.

I would write down those ten manifesting goals as well but I found that a lot of them were way too big. I finished the book. I pre-published my first book, but the platform building that I was trying to manifest was a lot of big things that I had to learn. Even though I had a marketing background from my ad days, I still found that while the core of marketing hadn’t changed, the things that you used.

Back when I was in advertising, we didn’t have social media. I had to learn how to utilize social media. We didn’t produce content. I had to learn to produce content. I had to learn an email list. I remember my first email drip campaign. It was awful. My coach, Desiree, had me write it and it was pathetic. I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I was looking at what other people were doing.

However, I realized as a part of all of this exercise, that if I broke down those manifestations and said, “This month, I’m going to do this one thing. I’m going to learn how to do this one area.” I started breaking those manifestations down into learnings that as I started doing that, I was able to break it down and start manifesting the things that I wanted to manifest.

The other thing that happened as part of this is that as you start manifesting and you’re taking those things off of the 10/10, off of the list, you’ll find that you get super stoked about it as well. That makes you more grateful, manifest more, and do those things that you’ve manifested. It does become this giant snowball that happens.

However, here’s the other thing that happened as part of that as well. When you think about it in your own life, anytime you decide to take a big chunk of something and you go to God, Universe, or Spirit or whoever it is for you that’s your higher power and say, “I want to write this book,” the Universe is going to say to you, “You’ve got the talent. Let’s do this.”

However, as you get into it, the Universe is going to come back and go, “You’re doing it well. By the way, I’m giving you this power and I need something from you.” That usually requires an up-level on your part. An up-level can be as simple as changing the way you’re thinking or getting rid of a pattern. I noticed that the more grateful I got, the more I started interacting with people different. It brought up these dysfunctional patterns.

When I talk to my authors, they all tell me the same thing. They all have this come up as well. Having this journal and going through this journey can be a way to identify those patterns because once you become aware of them, as you probably know from your own life, if you don’t address them, they keep coming up. It seems like every time they come up, they get worse.

The worst they get, it’s pushing you toward rock bottom with it. Like an addict has a rock bottom, you can have a rock bottom with patterns, emotions, and feelings where you say, “Enough is enough. I can’t do this anymore.” I tried to figure out ways to first of all ignore them, “I’m aware. I don’t want to do anything,” and then it would come back again.

As you become aware of those patterns, grateful, and manifest, you can add that in as well. Also, journal about those feelings because you’ll notice as you change that it affects other people, the people on the other end of that pattern. Those people on the other end of that pattern are used to doing particular things and you react in a particular way.

A lot of times when you don’t react in your normal way, that’s become patternized, and they start becoming angry. They might push back, “You did it in the past. I’ll keep pushing because she always says yes.” You’re going to notice some changes there. That’s what the Universe is looking for at an up-level. It is not for you just to write this book, but for you to grow and you can’t grow without changes in a particular area.

All of this came together. As I said, this is a passion project. I noticed as I went along that not only was I grateful for a lot of things, but I took it to a higher level. Something would happen, an obstacle would get thrown in my way for business and I would stop and say, “That’s interesting. Universe, thank You for that obstacle,” and then figure out how to get around it or what I was going to do to heal whatever it is that needed to be healed at that time. You’ll start to notice and become more attached to yourself. Part of my journey was that I started out to be more of a corporate brand, and I found I was hiding.

One of the best things that happened as part of all this was I had a coach and the coach said something to me that was rude. I pointed out that something that she was teaching wasn’t working for me. She turned it around on me and told me it was because I didn’t like my clients. For those of you who know me, I love my clients. Many of them have become lifelong friends. I adore them probably because they’re very like-minded in the way that they’re always growing, stretching, and doing new things, which is a part of me too.

We always tend to gravitate towards those people who are like-minded. However, I remember the day she said that to me. I was still a corporate brand. I was hiding behind a corporate image and a corporate logo. I didn’t get out and do the content the way I should have. I was the face of the business, but I wasn’t embracing that I was the face of the business. It was so interesting because I had this journey. I’d moved along through it for about five years at that point. I’m still doing the journaling every day. I’m still doing the 10/10, the gratitude practice, and all of a sudden, I got this idea when she said that I was angry.

I called 2 or 3 friends, a branding person and I said, “When you see me, what do you see? When you see my business, what do you see?” Those people gave me great feedback, enough feedback that I said to my branding person who was also my copywriter, “We’re changing the face of this business. I am now the face of this business. I am ready to come out of the unscheduled face closet or whatever it was that I was doing. I’m ready to come out of that and make sure that I’m the face of this business from now on.”

We redid everything. That was a turning point in my company. Now, I could acknowledge that I was the one with the ideas. I was the reason people came to the company. I was the reason that things were happening. You can’t imagine how empowering that is to step into that. The name of the book is Author Alchemy. It is full of inspirational writing, publishing, and doing posts.

It’s an inspiration. It’s getting that daily practice in place that will help you embrace not only how you’re going to build something, but to be grateful for the obstacles that you hit in it. If you’ve ever put a funnel together or done marketing that doesn’t work, you have to go back and do an evaluation. Sometimes that’s painful. I’ve even had it happen to the point where I had a webinar series in 2016. Nobody stayed until the end. I had to evaluate what I was doing, and how I was doing it. Was there enough of it in me that was authentic?

I’m going to tell you, this process of working these is going to make you come across everything more authentically. The book is coming out on September 26th, 2023. It’s called Author Alchemy. I hope you’ll grab it. It is a hard-cover journal. It’s a little bit thicker pages. You can write in it. The pen won’t go through to the other side. I’m hoping that you will embrace your authenticity and use this as your journey as well. Thank you. See you in the next episode.

Important Links

• The Author Success Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building and Leveraging Your Platform
• Author Alchemy

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