Episode Description:
In the third episode of "What If? For Authors," we dive into the daunting question many authors face: "What if I've tried everything?" If you're feeling stuck in your writing career and you're seeking new ways to break through barriers, this episode offers valuable perspectives and actionable steps to reignite your motivation and discover new possibilities.
Key Takeaways:
Understanding your Enneagram type can help you identify and break free from limiting patterns.
There are always more options available than you might initially see, especially when you shift your perspective.
Small experiments and curiosity can lead to significant breakthroughs in your writing career.
Why Listen? If you feel like you've hit a wall in your author career, this episode offers a fresh perspective and practical guidance to help you move forward. Claire's deep understanding of the Enneagram provides unique insights tailored to individual personality types, making this episode a must-listen for any author seeking growth and new possibilities.
Join the Conversation: Have a question or fear you'd like me to explore? Reach out to me at contact@ffs.media.
Happy writing!
Transcript:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm so glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'll be your host, your guide, your Virgil through the nine circles of hell and back out again as we ask the scary question and then answer it to discover that you're gonna be okay. It'll be fine.
You're great. Besides being a Virgil, I'm an author of a bunch of satire and mystery books, I created and run FFS Media, and I'm an Enneagram certified author coach. Woohoo! I also realized that I am coming up on nine years. Since I told my nine-to-five to suck it, and then started working for myself full time.
My last day working there was May 29th, 2015. Oh, 2015. Ah, we were so naive back then. It was early May. When I decided [00:01:00] I was going to leave, because I got tired of being the lowest paid person in the office, despite doing most of the work for the directors who didn't know their asses from a hole in the ground, totally separate story.
So I had like laid out everything that I've been doing for the last year for the CEO. And I was like, this is the role I want you to create for me. Cause I'm already doing it. I'm just not getting the title and not getting paid. And he said, that sounds good to me. Let me run it by the COO. And then she shot it down and blamed it on the board of directors. So I don't know. She hated me for whatever reason by that point. , but I do think about how my rage in those moments around getting shot down and then the days following, I do think about how that rage, while perhaps admittedly a little outsized in the moment, it was this great catalyst for me to get more in alignment with what I really wanted to do, which was work for myself and be an author full time.
So that anger. Came from a betrayal. So I, I had a long [00:02:00] history with the COO, but basically she used to be a mother figure to me growing up. So that anger was calling me to take action. That's what I really like about anger. As an Enneagram one, my main work is to examine my vice of anger in all its forms.
So, yeah, I think about anger a lot. I used to repress it and pretend I wasn't angry, but I don't do that. now I try not to, and I recommend that anyone listening try not to just swallow down the, the anger and rage. That's no bueno.
So relating to anger, I sort of split anger into two varieties. So there's healthy anger that points us toward right action. So maybe that's like the anger that causes us to stand up to a bully or engage in local activism, or You know, set a boundary that needs to be set or express to someone that they've hurt us or someone else.
That's what anger can inspire us to do. It can give us a little bit of physical energy to [00:03:00] go and do that sort of hard or scary thing. And then there's whatever anger is left over after you've taken all the right action you can think of. And that tends to be Unhealthy anger and it comes from things like, you know, internalized sense of entitlement or perfectionism or insecurity or these other little things that are really happening mostly inside of us stories that we have internalized, , where we're just going to be angry all the time if we don't address those stories.
So when I feel anything in the anger family of emotions, contempt, annoyance, frustration, irritation, uh, obviously rage, I now like to pause and ask what right action I'm being asked to take by that sort of fiery feeling. And if the anger is not asking me to take any clear and useful action, then probably, Probably.
I just need to deal with my own shit because I have some expectation of the world that's unrealistic and sort of causing that [00:04:00] disconnect and that frustration. Anyway, I should talk about today's question. I think it's a good one. , and of course I'm biased because I picked it, but this is one I hear a lot, so I think it's great.
Today we're going to ask this question. What if I've tried everything.
The implication is that if you've tried everything and nothing's worked to get your author career to where you want it to be, then what next? Like, I've tried everything. Do I just give up? , so this sentiment falls into likely the frustration category for most people, which is, my wheelhouse, as I mentioned. Great news though, and this may be a little bit of a spoiler, but you haven't tried everything. If you feel like you've tried everything, spoiler, you have not tried everything. You will never get to the point where you've tried everything. You might get to a point where you feel like you've tried everything you can think to do that fits within your set of rules of what you're allowed to do, but that's not everything that's available to you.
So let's talk about that because the [00:05:00] Enneagram has so much to say about it and it's all good news.
I'm going to do a very brief little primer on the Enneagram first because a lot of people think they know what the Enneagram measures and how it works, but they haven't necessarily studied it. Deeply. So if that's you, this is no shade to you. You're busy. You have other things in your life, which is why you're listening to me right now.
So I can pump facts straight into your ear holes real quick. So let's do it. Uh, each Enneagram type is built on a single core fear and core desire pair. So this is how you know what type you are, what your core fear slash desire are. These two are flip sides of the same coin, so if you're an 8, an Enneagram 8, your fear is to be harmed or controlled, and your desire is to be independent and strong.
You can see how those are the same things from opposite angles, right? Now, for the core fear and desire, which together form what we call the core motivation, these patterns [00:06:00] of thinking, feeling, and doing arise. To oversimplify a lot, I hate to do this, but I, you know, I, I understand it helps sort of grasp the concept at the start, but to oversimplify a lot, if you're an eight who doesn't want to be harmed or controlled, your attention is going to narrow in on threats to your autonomy and independence.
So that attentional pattern means that your thoughts will naturally drift towards power dynamics. You may tune out feelings that make you feel vulnerable. And your actions will mostly be bold and done despite what anyone tells you to do. That sort of sketches a picture of the eight for you right there, doesn't it?
Of course, if you're an eight, you're thinking, I'm not that simple, you don't know me. And I get it. I get it. I'm not trying to control you with this knowledge eight. So the pattern of thinking and feeling and doing Yeah. , those patterns relate to our type and they start at a very young age. You can usually spot them back to about three or four years old when we start having a personality, whether it's [00:07:00] nature or nurture, that's, you know, sort of the question that no one could ever really arrive at what.
What is nature? What is nurture? So I don't think it's important. , the point is that you have one type your whole life, and it usually starts to set in at three or four, but basically those patterns have a lot of time to dig their heels into our lives before we get to the point where they really stop working for us, and we have to like call a timeout and start doing this work.
To look at them, to see how these patterns that seemed like they were really helpful have now kind of, , built a prison for us. So by the time we get to that point, these patterns are, are pretty well established inside of us. So, essentially these patterns getting dug in means that they've created very strong neural connections in our brains.
we've created neural pathways. That when this stimulus happens, this thought about the world is a response, or this emotion is a response, or we do this action. We will default to these patterns before we even realize we're [00:08:00] defaulting to them. That's how, subconscious and sometimes unconscious they are.
So doing NERAM work is all about rooting out those patterns and trying to establish some new options for ourselves by experimenting with new thoughts, feelings, and actions, and creating some new neural pathways for our brain.
So do you know what that means? It means that the Enneagram work leads us to see more options. More options. You haven't tried everything. You're not out of options now. Woohoo!
The Enneagram type, sometimes called a style, is also referred to as a lens. So before we start unpacking these patterns, and that's something you can do through other processes like therapy, reading about psychology and sociology and so forth. There are other modalities that can help you start to see your patterns.
But before we start seeing and unpacking our established patterns. We're essentially walking around with blinders on. So our field of vision, [00:09:00] and this is a field of vision for what is possible, what we, as we know ourselves, do or can do or think or feel, that field of vision is incredibly narrow.
We also tend to assume that everyone is working with the same lens as our own. So when people act based on different core motivations, it can be shocking, enraging, confusing, depressing, or it can just be like really scary to us. So we sense that something is different between them and us, something very fundamental, but we don't have the language, the understanding to name it.
The big scary thing that nobody likes to name when they start learning about Enneagram is that if there are nine types, and they are just one of the types, then maybe their way of thinking, feeling, and doing isn't the best and only sensible one. So that can shake the ground you stand on to think about at first.
A lot of your defaults about how things work and your place in the [00:10:00] world are going to be challenged by just admitting that you are one of nine equal types. And this is where a lot of people kind of nope out of this learning altogether. They don't feel like they're ready to remove those blinders. They don't like how it feels when they do, when someone tries to take those blinders off of them.
It's, it's too much, right? It spooks the horse. There's a reason we have blinders. Okay, so that's a lot of theory, right? Let's ground this theory in some practical application to our author career, shall we? Let's go through some examples of how an author might feel like they've tried everything and nothing's worked, and then how they might go about seeing some new workable possibilities.
I'm gonna start with an example of an Enneagram 6 author who's usually called the Loyalist, but I like to call them the Faithful Writer. That's because the 6's journey is from fear to courage, and the key tool for that journey is [00:11:00] development of faith. So not necessarily in a religious sense, not faith in a religious sense, but this can look like faith in their ability to handle whatever comes their way, 6's are actually damn good at since they're usually over prepared.
So it's really about understanding it and building that confidence that they can handle it, not, building preparedness. Anyway, our sixth writer feels like they've tried everything in their career and their career is just not getting off the ground. Okay, first of all, bummer. That feeling sucks. So the Six's core fear is being unsupported and without guidance, and their desire is to have guidance and support.
Right? Two sides of the same coin. The problems arise when the Six starts trying to do, the thing that we all do, which is seek what can only be found internally, So they're trying to find outside guidance to listen to because they've lost trust in their inner [00:12:00] authority and guidance that inner guiding voice, the sixes start to lose touch with it.
And then they end up in all this doubt and fear because they feel kind of unmoored. It's, it's very, it can be very disruptive to live life as a six. I have a lot of compassion for the sixes out there, but also. We need you sixes. We need, we need someone to point out the risks involved in things and slow things down and make us think about things in a practical sense.
Okay. So the sixes are trying to find that outside guidance because they have lost touch with their inner guidance. But the problem with trusting someone else to be your guidance and support is that it gives them. easy access to betray you, or pull that support out from under you. So this reality can cause a 6 to live in a state of hypervigilance about their social connections and their resources and so on.
Just general hypervigilance about what could [00:13:00] happen. So here's where I'd start to poke around, from my position as a coach. So with a six who thinks they've tried everything, there's probably a lot of great options that the six is scared to try and can't imagine themselves trying feels unprepared to try.
So probably the six already knows what those options are in their gut, but has stopped trusting their gut. So I might ask the six what options they could see for someone else in their position. Or I might encourage them to ask what someone who seemed incredibly confident and brave might try.
Right, just to start sort of engaging in that imagination, it can be really helpful to get outside of her own sympathetic nervous system to start imagining. And there's really nothing better than a call to curiosity, to help us expand our options, right? Curiosity. [00:14:00] is a really nice antidote to fear and anxiety.
Because fear and anxiety is sort of like something bad will happen. And curiosity sort of flips that and goes, Well, I don't know what's going to happen. I wonder what will happen. Right? So we're already taking a little bit of that negative edge off. The Six may not be able to execute on any of the options they come up with for that, you know, imagined, courageous person until they themselves do some work on their doubt and these sort of hyper arousal patterns of hyper vigilance and anxiety.
And that's okay, The Six doesn't need to jump into things. What a lot of people will advise Sixes to do is to just rush towards the thing, right? Just go for it. No, not just go for it. Sixes, don't worry. I'm not going to be like, just face your fear and just run toward it. That is not great. There's this, , window of tolerance that we have, which I can talk more [00:15:00] about it later, but Basically, we want to stay within our window of tolerance and we can expand it through curiosity, but really just jumping outside of it is just going to traumatize us.
So like, if you just go for it and things don't work out really well, you're just going to be less likely to push that sort of, those sort of limits for yourself, you know, cautiously, but, but gently push those limits for yourself. So we don't want to We don't want to do that. Don't worry. What we want to do is, , just acknowledge that the Six can see some options for other people.
It's still progress to simply see that those options are there, even if the Six can't yet see themselves doing that. Right? That seed of curiosity is still planted, and if the six waters that seed, it'll grow.
So when we're looking to try new things, it's super helpful to start small and frame it as an [00:16:00] experiment. An experiment is premised on the idea that that we don't know what will result. And so in reality, we're kind of always experimenting. We may believe we know what the result will be. We may have a pretty good guess.
Our guests may follow previous patterns, but we never really know what the result will be. So living life in sort of this experimenting phase could be really helpful. It can keep us from getting stuck in our patterns. But essentially with an experiment, you're forming a hypothesis, right?
So we all have this hypothesis of what we think will happen. But then we run the experiment, and if it doesn't turn out the way we thought it would, that doesn't mean it's a bad experiment. It means we have more information, And more information, especially for a 6, can mean more security and guidance, You know more now. Right? You're more informed. That can be a sense of security. So it may feel like you're back to square one if your experiment doesn't go as planned, [00:17:00] but you're not. You have information that you didn't have before. You're smarter now. You're wiser. You're better informed. And so maybe the next experiment will work out better as a result.
Activate that curiosity. Maybe this will be better. Let's see.. Do I have time to talk about one more type without losing the attention of the six drunk authors at my table? Uh, maybe. Let's try it. Let's try it. Okay. So with the type four, sometimes called the individualist, but who I like to think of as the authentic writer. I think the authenticity is so central to Not only the gifts of the four, , as an author, but some of the problems that the four runs into.
Let's talk about it. So a four thinks they've tried everything and nothing has worked. Okay. The four's fear is that they'll lack significance and identity, and their desire is to feel significant and authentically themselves. So the four's tight grip onto this idea of authenticity and Is what usually causes the blinders, [00:18:00] to the options for getting their books in the hands of readers, right?
That need to be authentic, fully authentic all the time, can, I see it most often, start to create Some tough situations, some challenges when it comes to getting the books that they've written into the hands of the readers. , their narrow definition of authentic, that's what I would poke at a little bit.
That narrow definition is the narrowing of the blinders for the four. So, fours tend to mention their books, Once every harvest moon or whatever and then expect that something will happen, right? They'll mention it if it feels like an authentic moment to mention that they have a book, but they're not going to create Opportunities necessarily to mention their book and there's this hope that if I mention it once that should be enough.
that's Not reality with selling. It can seem kind of gross and inauthentic to a four to really sell the products So marketing can feel like phoniness and if that's the case for the four They're going [00:19:00] to run out of options that fit that narrow definition of authenticity really fucking quick Let me tell you, , they'll look at the three who has no time to wait around to be discovered and is actively telling everyone who will listen about their books and the four will go, Ooh, not for me.
And fair enough. If you're a four, you're not a three, but if your approach of posting a picture of your book once and then hoping it will be discovered, isn't getting you where you want, maybe it's time to reframe. And we can do a reframe that's going to feel natural here. So I'm not going to be just like twisting things and telling you, just be happy.
Just be optimistic. Um, I'm going to give you a very real reframe here. Here's the question I would pose to you to kind of get that curiosity going. Is it inauthentic to try to get your books to the people who would connect deeply with them? Is it inauthentic to care enough? to try to get the books to the people who would connect deeply with them.
And then I'll [00:20:00] ask you, what's your purpose of writing if not to be understood by others deeply and help them understand themselves more deeply too? That's important. So might it be worth making your cover More, you know, on genre or reworking your blurb to really make your tropes pop. And yes, you have tropes in your book, uh, or might a little bit of comprehensibility and simplification and your products packaging.
Be worth whatever quote unquote inauthenticity you're feeling there if it gets the words themselves into the hands of the people who would cherish those words.
Sometimes, fours can unconsciously convolute authenticity with complexity. So this can look like this. lead to the four making things complex, complicated for the sake of feeling authentic, rather than because the thing [00:21:00] actually needs to be complex. So I'm talking book covers, marketing copy, even just sentence by sentence in the book itself.
Fours can experience a real breakthrough to all kinds of new options when they take a hard look at that false correlation they may be holding between complexity and authenticity. So where might the most authentic expression of something Actually be the most simple. There's a challenge for you fours.
Where are you making processes and marketing and your writing career more complicated merely to appease your ego's need to feel special? Yikes. Okay. That was kind of a cheap shot, wasn't it? But don't worry, all fours like the emotional realness. I, I get it. Um,
so if you feel like you've tried everything, I want to encourage you to pause, take a few deep breaths, and rest assured that you have not. Regardless of your type, you have not tried [00:22:00] everything. Maybe you've tried everything that you can see with your blinders on, but just a little bit of this deep work can go a long way toward creating new options.
If you want to do that and you need a Virgil, you can come work with me and I'll show you those blinders and the steps to removing them. It'll be much more individualized. All my offerings are at ffs. media. But hell, you've listened this long, so, okay, here's a question to ask yourself for each type to start poking away.
Before you even come see me, just ask this question, see what comes up, and you may have some interesting answers. , ideas. You may see some things through fresh eyes. So I'm going to do this by type. So if you are a 1, ask, Where is my fear of making a mistake keeping me from running experiments? 2s ask, Where is my need to be needed preventing me from asking for advice from others?
Threes, okay, threes rarely feel like they've tried everything, but I'll include them anyway. Okay, if you're a [00:23:00] three, ask, where has my definition of success narrowed what I'm willing to try?
Fours ask, where have I been valuing complexity over simplicity when simplicity might be better?
Fives ask, where could I tap into the expertise of others Instead of trying to learn it all myself, sixes ask what low stakes experiment can I run to get more information? Sevens, sevens also don't usually feel like they've tried everything and their dilemma is generally that they want to try everything but can't make it all happen at once.
Uh, but if you're a seven who feels like you've tried everything to, say, focus on one task, here's what you can ask yourself. What pain am I not acknowledging here that is causing my attention to jump elsewhere? Eighths ask how has my need to be an island kept me from [00:24:00] collaborative options? Nines ask what part of myself have I been hiding to avoid conflict, and how has that created unpleasant tension?
inner conflict instead. On that last one for the nines, my hope is that the nine gets a little pissed off thinking about how the world doesn't feel safe for them to show up in fully because nines are in the anger triad, but they fall asleep to that anger. So waking up to it is how they start to connect with their types virtue of right action.
Again, some anger is healthy. Anger is in nines, whether they see it or not. And if they don't see it, then it just kind of sneaks around and fucks with their physical, emotional, and mental health. So nines. It's time to root it out. Alright, that brings us to the end of this episode. If you feel like you're out of options, you're not.
It might take a little work on the inside to be able to see those other options, but I promise it's worth it. A little bit of poking. Can lead to a [00:25:00] revelation, which I think is pretty rad So if you want to go a little deeper on this I do offer a five week course called the liberated writer and I also offer a liberated writer retreat each year for like a small number of Authors people who are fed up with their existing patterns and want a safe and supportive place to Reset and try some new things on for size, or you can book an author alignment with me. You if you're not even sure what your Enneagram type is yet, reach out to me and we can get you set up with an IEQ nine assessment, which is the most accurate one available and will immediately tell you a heap about yourself.
So thanks for joining me as we asked and answered this question together. I look forward to talking at you again in the next episode of What If for Authors.