Ep233 Judi Harrington—From Stuck to Published: How Leaders Turn Expertise Into Books That Actually Matter

Judi Harrington 0:00

The people in your audience who are thinking like, Well, what about like? Is my ID even really worth it? Of course, it is because you want to be able to reach as many people as humanly possible, but only when they have that struggle point of implementing should they be able to come to you right.

Mike O'Neill 0:18

Welcome to get unstuck in on target, the weekly podcast that offers senior leaders insights and strategies to not only lead with confidence and vision, but also to achieve groundbreaking results. I'm your host. Mike O'Neill, I coach top level executives on the power of ethical leadership to forge teams to be as united as they are effective in each episode, join me for insightful conversations with leaders just like you providing practical advice to help you get unstuck and propel you and your company forward. Let's get started. A number of leaders that I know have lately been asking the same question, Should I write a book? And usually it's not about the book, it's about whether they have something worth saying. My guest today, Judy Harrington, is an author, a certified book coach who helps the author curious turn ideas into books that matter. We talk about how writing can close the recognition gap, that space between being brilliant at what you do and being known for it. If you've ever felt that pull to share your story, this episode will help you see how writing a book can clarify your message, amplify your impact and strengthen your leadership. My guest today is Judy Harrington, and if you're thinking, Wait, hadn't she been on before, you're right. Because when someone helps leaders turn their expertise into books that actually matter, you invite them back. Judy is an author, a certified book coach, and the founder of Judy 411, but here's what makes today's conversation timely. I've had more executives ask me in the last three months, should I write a book? I've heard that question more in the last three months than I have in the last three years combined. And beneath that question is usually a deeper one. Do I actually have something worth saying? Judy's here to help us answer both questions and to reveal what writing a book can really do for your business, for your leadership and, yes, your legacy.

Judi Harrington 2:37

Welcome back, Judy. Great to be here. Thank you for including me in the conversation.

Mike O'Neill 2:44

Judy, here's what I know after doing coaching for a long time, the leaders who write books aren't always the best writers, but they're the ones brave enough to believe that their experience matters. Agree or disagree.

Judi Harrington 2:57

So so true, and it gets I say this to writers all the time is that there's, I find that there's generally three things that people the tapes that run in their head that hold them back from writing a book. And I'm going to throw them out there for your listeners, so that they can hear the CounterPoint. The first is that, who wants to listen to me, right? I'm a coach. How many coaches have written books, right? But no one coaches like you. No one has the insights that you do. No one knows your market the way you've experienced it, right? So there's that, but it's also, why not. Why not? And actually, one of my writing coaching clients right now is a coach, and she has a really beautiful philosophy that the content that she puts out in the world, like for her blogs, which she's done repurposing as a book is her way of she believes that the information she can share should be accessible to as many people as humanly possible. Only when they can't implement her ideas that on their own should they come to her. So for the people in your audience who are thinking like, Well, what about like, Is my ID even really worth it? Of course, it is because you want to be able to reach as many people as humanly possible, but only when they have that struggle point of implementing should they be able to come to you, right? Yes, you can have that wide influence. So the second thing that a lot of people think about writing a book, and maybe it's not, for me, it's like, Oh, I'm not really a writer. And for me, I think that that's a lot of fake news, and what really that is informing that is that they've been given a lot of bad writing advice. So. There's also the there's editors out there. There's a reason I have a job is that I can help massage men. I made a career of massaging messages. And I think we also hold ourselves to really unreasonable standards, and we see books on a shelf and we think that that was the first draft, did? I assure you, it was not. There's so many people who have their fingers on the page. Literally, of every book that's been out there and been written, what you're seeing at the end is the end product. And that doesn't necessarily mean what was started in the beginning was just beautifully polished. You know, there's a lot to be said about the not so great first draft, and the only way to get started is to begin. And then the third one, of course, is, I know time to write a book and like, Well, if you've got time to listen to this podcast, if you've got time to go watch TV, if you got time to scroll social media, then you got time to write a book. You just have to good accounting of time. He's moving it from one column to the other.

Mike O'Neill 6:10

Judy with AI being what it is, speak to it and how that has influenced your work with authors,

Judi Harrington 6:20

I will say what's funny you should say that, Mike, because I remember a few years ago, right at the beginning of like chat GPT had just come onto the scene, I was in conversation with somebody who who told me they had several book ideas in the bin, and then they said to me, Well, I'm not going to Need to work with you, because I have AI. And I said, Okay, well, good luck. And I just released like, it's fine. Here's the thing. AI is a tool, and the same way I use a hammer to get nails in the wall, that serves a certain purpose, but I can't build an entire house with only a hammer. AI is a tool. Chat. GPT is a tool. Claw is a tool. All these things are tools, but you have to know how to use it. It can give you a good foundation. Give you it can be an inspiration point. It can give you the bones of a chapter, but really it doesn't know what you know in your head, you're the only person who can get that on the page, and your voice is really the only voice that can get your message out there. You do? I literally have people now coming to me on the copy site, copywriting side of my business, who said, Well, I started with chat GPT, and it's not really working, because I didn't identify my ideal client, or it doesn't really sound like me, and people don't think it's me, so there's always a trade off, right? Like, you can get some ideas on the page, but when you're really talking about your voice, your message, your thoughts, that's not something that a bot can do.

Mike O'Neill 8:16

You know, if you would break something down for me, if you don't mind, typical listeners of this podcast, they're in key leadership roles or aspire to be. And I have talked to folks who see writing a book as an opportunity to kind of get a word out more about them, perhaps their business. But you describe something, you call it that recognition gap, and that is, they have something that they should share, but don't really know. How, in what ways have you found authors who do, in fact, do what we're describing and get it down on paper? What does that do for them, not just psychologically, but how about from a business perspective? Well, I

Judi Harrington 9:05

could speak to this from my own experience having my first book, which is not at all related to writing, is a memoir. And Mike, you know the title, I'm gonna worst, if it's okay, because it's a little salty, go ahead. Okay. It's called fuckery, the life and times of a legend in her own mind. And is a humorous memoir and essay celebrating my family and our motto put in the fun and dysfunctional. I wrote that book for a whole different set of reasons. I always wanted to write a book. I took time to do it. It was also helped me in a really tough time in life. I was in middle of my divorce, and it was a great reminder that the years I spent with my husband were not a waste of my time. So there was a very deep and personal mission behind. Book. When the book came out, even before the book was on the shelves, people started approaching me, can you help me write my book? And lo and behold, here we are, three years later, and now I'm a book coach, and I've had authors who have written books that have been Amazon number one best sellers. I have someone right now who wrote a book on American politics, that is, rumor has it, there is a VIP in the very well known space of late night television, who's very interested in having a copy of this book so it can really for me, it opened up a whole other branch of my business. For some of my clients, it is a gateway to speaking engagements. For others, it's a lead generation tool that brings people into their experience of working with them. I've seen lead generation books that really are laying out for people what it is to work with, like one case I'm thinking of specifically is an estate planning firm, and the book that the founder wrote was really just laid out what their philosophy is around estate planning, and is targeted to their very specific ideal client, which is a high net worth family. And it lays out their philosophy about legacy and the importance of relationships, not just about money and assets. And it really gives the reader a sense of like, okay, is this the firm for me or not? It offers this great self selection tool. They offer it for free. You can get it on their website and but it has brought in a significant chunk a business to to their firm. So a book isn't necessarily something I think when people think about a book, they're like, Oh, well, I'm not gonna be a New York Times number one bestseller. What's the point? There are so many other purposes behind writing a book. It's not just for being on a bookshelf in Barnes and Noble. It can be so integrated into your business and brand and can level up. And also, the fact that you've written a book is also a great I mean, it's a great ego boost, but not, I'm not gonna lie. But also, it really does establish you as an expert, and that brings a lot of street cred in networking circles, and it opens up so many other opportunities.

Mike O'Neill 12:48

You know, as I'm listening to you, and those folks who are either listening or watching, and they're kind of leaning in, and they're saying, you know, I too have thought about that. If they don't know where to start, what would you suggest would be the very first step before they write a single word,

Judi Harrington 13:09

there's, well, there's two things I want them to do. The first one is an exercise I call think know and do. What is it that you think that people haven't heard before, or something thinking about, or how a thought that you've shared over and over again that you want to get out into the world. What do you want your readers to know about this particular philosophy, but also what you want? What do you want them to do? So really, this gets in writing coaching with me, this gets encapsulated in an exercise I call why this book and why now? And I require that all my writers go through this exercise, because it really clarifies for them what is their intention behind the book. It also helps guide their reader through the book. The other exercise I have folks do, probably before the think no do is writing down the top 10 things you wish clients understood about your business. Good. And from there you can write 10 short essays that you could put out on your LinkedIn profile. If you did one a month for 12 months, you got 12 essays. You basically have a book. Because one of the other misconceptions around books is that people think they have to be the size of war and peace, they do not one of the most influential and time most time honored books out there is the book called The Alchemist by Paul Paulo Coelho. It is less than 100 pages long, and it has been a bestseller for years. A lot of the books, that estate planning, book I just mentioned earlier, is, I think I'm looking at, I think it's 86 pages, maybe 87 pages, less than 100 pages, is my point. The book I wrote 150 pages. I think they don't have to be the size of the Oxford English Dictionary. They just need to get your point across. I think that's the thing too. So I share that to kind of give people that sigh of relief that, oh, it doesn't have to be this massive tome. You just need to get a point across that people haven't considered from your point of view before.

Mike O'Neill 15:41

Now, you've described quite a bit of work upfront that you require your clients to do before they even start. I didn't realize that that all that work kind of goes into it. Let's assume that they've done all of that and they're underway. What are some of those early mistakes you see first time authors make even though they've been well prepped,

Judi Harrington 16:09

even though they've been well prepped, I think so. The way I typically work with authors is they, they generally come to me and they have some body of work that they've started. They whether it's been blogs they've been writing for years, or a manuscript they pulled out of a drawer. And I work in these I call them writing sprints, and they're 12 weeks long, and we meet every other week, and in between time, you know, we establish goals and things that they're going to work on. But sometimes they come in, they're like, oh, so I have a book in 12 weeks. I'm like, No, you will not. I'm never guarantee a book in 12 weeks. That's unreasonable, and that's actually, like, unethical for me to say up to you, right? You will have a seismic shift in the work you've done. You will be on one step, one major leap forward toward getting your book published. But I cannot possibly guarantee that they sometimes too they come in with a really great big idea, and they think, this is this is it? I'm like, Okay, well, that's a great big idea, but then we have to bring it and narrow it down and focus it. And there's so many details that go into this big idea, and then they're like, Wow. No, my I don't say that to deflate you. I just say we have to hold our expectations loosely, like you don't know actually, where your book sometimes is going to go until you start writing your book. Unfortunately, that is the nature of writing. You don't know until you start writing where it's gonna go and it's the only way out is through like we've heard all of these, you know, phrases before, but they all are, there's a they are truisms for a reason. Think that there's a lot of I think probably the easiest way to consolidate that whole concept is that people are really get attached to an outcome, and you can't control the outcome. You have to be willing to move toward it in a measured way.

Mike O'Neill 18:25

Judy, I've had opportunity to get to know you when we're not recording podcast. You have a wicked sense of humor. I just laugh in anticipation of this conversation. How have you used humor with your clients? Oh, wow,

Judi Harrington 18:50

that's a great question. Well, good, thank you. It is such a great question. And I'm kind of a little stumped, because there's probably just so many thoughts coming through my head. I think that probably the biggest way I use humor is kind of in the self deprecating I want them to understand that the struggles that they're experiencing are also also struggles that I experience as a writer. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the phrases, I think this might be one of the things you're thinking about, is I talk about the whole idea of procrastinator writing, yeah, and if I know that I have an essay that I'm working on and I need to go and, like, go through an editing phase of it, my house is the cleanest it's ever it is so like, let me go organize the spice drawer, let me count again, again. Maybe alphabetizing is instead of by color coding, like, Let me count all the threads in my sheet. It's like anything, anything to avoid it. And when I share that with my writers, they're like, you go through that too. I'm like, Of course I do welcome to the human experience. But yeah, I think that's probably the biggest way that I use humor, because I feel like a lot of misunderstandings around writers that like we somehow wake up every day and we float to the keyboard and there's this great soundtrack going on behind us, and the words just flow out of us and La, la, la, la. And it's just like a great Nancy Myers film. And no, it is not what happens. You know, I cleaned up Good to see you today, but most days I'm sitting here in yoga pants and a sweatshirt, and sometimes at one point in the day, I'm like, I wonder why my mother ever had me. I'm like, What is going on? Like, I can't get these thoughts. I can't articulate the thing I need to articulate. And people find that funny, right and ironic, because I'm a writer and I talk about complicated things, like my copywriting side of the house is all about technical topics, but we writing is one of those things, like you just have to keep doing it to get better at it, but as you're getting better, you're still gonna have struggles. So I think that's probably the easiest. That's probably the most common way I bring humor into the conversation.

Mike O'Neill 21:37

So you describe that you have to be willing to share your experiences. Would you be willing to share another and that is, think of a time where you got stuck and when that happened, what did you do that helped you move forward?

Judi Harrington 21:54

That's so funny. You should say that, because I am just coming out of a huge period of stuckness. So I wrote my first book in it was published in 2022, and then, of course, being the overachiever I am, I was like, well, I need to get another book out in a year. Would I talk about my writers before saying they had this unreasonable expectation? I do the same thing, gotcha. And I thought that this topic I was going to dive into was going to be something more serious, and more is how my I lost my mother just a few months before my first book was published, and I thought, Oh, well, I'm going to write about grief. Because things I was doing to grieve was I was spreading her ashes in different places that had a significance to our relationship, and that I thought, Oh, that would make a beautiful story, right? So I'm like, I'm writing all these stories about all these places I go and and then I'm like, I just kind of, I'm like, this isn't going anywhere. I don't see where this is going. So I had a purpose, and I walked to it in the preside kept coming back to it, and I was like, Okay, it's not that. Maybe it's around the struggles I've had with my my children. So when I divorced their father, we were out of contact for I was out of contact with both my children for a significant period of time, and they have since returned to me, right? So when I tell people this story, they're like, oh my god, that's so beautiful. You should write a book about that. And I'm like, you write, that's the book. That's what I'm supposed to be doing. So I go back and start writing all these stories, and I'm like, oh, no, this isn't quite it either, right? So I put it aside. I put it aside. But what ended up happening was that so I also write on sub stack, and I have a series out there called word nerd Wednesday. So anybody who wants to know anything they've ever won't know or not know about grammar, the English language, writing in general, feel free to follow me on there, and we'll make sure that's in the show notes. But so I started writing some essays on there around the holidays and different things, different traditions that we've adopted as a family, like we do family Festivus, for those who are Seinfeld fans, you know what Festivus is? Right? So that that's our way of getting together around the holidays, because I refuse to fight about four days on the calendar. So I said we made up this holidays. When we celebrate, we get together as a small family, we exchange gifts, we get takeout, and we call it a day. But I also have, there's a whole bunch of themes around stories, around the theme of the holidays. And through that, I saw this thread, oh, this is how my kids came back to me in this way. And now. That turned into what is now the second book that I'm in the process of pitching out to publishers and agents called Mary ish unwrapped chaos from the most wonderful time of the year. And so then that was what came out of it. But it was this in between time people like, how's your next book come in? How's your next book coming, and when's next book coming? And I was like, Are you talking to me? Like, I'm like, I wanted to, like, run into and hide in the corner and tend the topic came up, and I felt really stuck. And I was telling myself all these things, like, maybe you're just in one hit wonder, you know, like all all those awful things we hear in our heads, right and but really, it was just a period of of stuckness. But the way I got unstuck was I just kept going back to it, because I knew that if I kept writing, it would bring me to the conclusion that I needed.

Mike O'Neill 26:07

I think that will dovetail beautifully to one of my last questions, and that is for folks who are listening, and they have been sitting on a book idea, maybe for years, what would be one simple thing that they can do this week to start moving that idea from an idea to author,

Judi Harrington 26:30

is that top 10 list. What are the top 10 Things that you wish it doesn't even have to be 10. It'd be three. Keep it small. Keep it keep it manageable. What are the think on your conversations with clients? What are the things you hear yourself say over and over again? And I bet there's probably more than three, but keep it small, keep it manageable, keep it measurable. And I think that is really sometimes it's it's as plain as the nose in our face. It's right in front of us and we don't see it

Mike O'Neill 27:08

drew I want to thank you, as always, for bringing clarity, some encouragement, and, most definitely, some humor. What's the best way for people to connect with you to learn more about your work. Thank you. How do they reach out to you?

Judi Harrington 27:26

Judy, the best way to reach out to me is connect to me through my website. Judy, 411, dot com. It's J, u, d, I, the numbers 411, dot com, and you can see the whole shebang up there, the copywriting and the writing coaching sides of the house. And there's a way to schedule a clarity call with me to talk about your book idea and see if I'm the person for you.

Mike O'Neill 27:54

You know, as is our custom, we will be putting a link to your website in the show notes. So if you're driving, you have to write it down. Just go to the show notes when you get somewhat situated. So for our listeners, if Judy's insights, if they spark something in you, whether it's finally starting that book or just getting clearer on your message, reach out to her. All of her links are in the show notes, including something that we didn't talk about on the podcast. But check it out. This book, idea incubator. It's a neat resource. And here's the thing, writing a book and leading at the next level, it requires somewhat the same muscle, the courage to go first when you really can't see that whole path if you're ready to strengthen that muscle in your leadership, not just your writing. Let's talk. I offer complimentary two hour game plan sessions. These are by invitation only, no pitch, no pressure, just a real coaching session to get clear on where you're stuck and what the next move should be. The link's in the show note, because sometimes a book you need to write is just Chapter One of the leader that you're becoming to everyone listening, whether you're writing a book, Leading a team or both. Thank you for doing the hard work that matters, and I hope that this episode helped you get unstuck and on target. Thank you for joining us for this episode of get unstuck and on target. I hope you've gained insights to help you lead with confidence and drive your organization forward. Remember, at bench builders, we're committed to your success, your leadership excellence and your strategic growth. If you've enjoyed our conversation today, please leave a review rate and subscribe to keep up with our latest episodes. This show really grows when listeners like you share it with others. Who do you know who needs to hear what we talked about today? Until. Next time, I encourage you to stay focused on the target and continue to break new ground on your leadership path.

Speaker 1 30:17

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