Episode Description:
In this episode of What If? For Authors, Claire tackles the question: What if I don’t know the next step? Whether you're stuck in your author career because of a lack of information, poor timing, fear-based decisions, or discomfort in the present, Claire offers insights and actionable ideas to help you move forward. She also explains how the virtues of your Enneagram type can guide you when you're feeling stuck. If you're unsure of what comes next in your author journey, this episode will provide clarity and inspiration.
Key Takeaways:
How to identify if your next-step uncertainty is due to a lack of knowledge—and where to find reliable information.
Why timing might be the issue and how to recognize when it's time to act.
How fear and discomfort can mislead you into searching for "emergency exits" instead of staying the course.
How to avoid jumping ahead to steps you're not ready for.
Ways to use the virtue of your Enneagram type to find clarity and peace when you’re stuck.
Why self-compassion and trust in yourself are key to navigating uncertainty.
Resources Mentioned:
Podcasts: The Sell More Books Show, Wish I’d Known Then for Authors
Book: The Enneagram Guide to Waking Up by Beatrice Chestnut and Uranio Paes
Support the Show: If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on your favorite podcast platform and share the show with your fellow authors. Every review helps more writers discover this resource.
Join the Conversation:
What’s keeping you from taking the next step in your author journey? Share your thoughts and questions by reaching out to Claire or joining the What If? For Authors community.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram Certified Coach for Authors as well as a humor and mystery writer. You can check out my latest book for authors, Sustain Your Author Career, by going to ffs.media/sustain.
Let's jump right into today's episode where we ask the question, what if I don't know the next step? We may experience this in our author career in a literal sense or in a more existential sense. And we'll talk about how to figure out which one it is and how to determine the first step for figuring out the next step.
I've been sitting in this space for a bit myself lately. For one, it's the time of year when it always happens to me when I get, retrospective on my business for the last year and just kind of assess what worked, what didn't, and what I should try next year instead. But I've also felt like I'm not really sure of the next step [00:01:00] on and off all year.
So this is an issue that has really gotten my attention lately, and I do believe I've come to peace with a lot of it and spent enough time observing my process and approach that I can maybe offer some ideas today. If you feel like it's time to take another step in your business. Maybe you just published a book, and now it's time to decide on what to do next, but you don't see a clear direction to move in, the first thing you might try is asking if you don't know the next step because you're lacking industry knowledge.
Is this simply an education gap that you're running into? In other words, what data or information are you lacking that already exists that you could go out and find? And do you know where to find it?
This may look like not knowing how best to market a book or series, learning about an ad platform or reading up on story structure to support the next book idea that's floating around in your head. Do you need to gather information or learn something to be able to know what to do [00:02:00] next? Does that information already exist somewhere?
This can be tricky because we run into the problem of not knowing what we don't know. If you suspect that might be the case and that might be where you are, you can try browsing collections of knowledge for authors like the Alliance of Independent Authors website, or the Creative Pen, or Kindlepreneur, or you can listen to a book marketing or writing podcast like Somewhere Books Show or Wish I'd Known Then for Authors.
Essentially put yourself in the right place to catch the inspiration and information you need to start seeing the next step and learning how to get started on it.
So not knowing the next step might not be a matter of practical knowledge or information. Sometimes it's a matter of timing, and this one is really tricky for humans to accept. You might know that a next step needs to be taken, and you might have a general idea of what that next step will be, but the timing and [00:03:00] conditions Might not be right just yet to take it.
So that could be where the resistance to taking that next step is coming from for you. So your gut might be saying, Nope, not yet. Just wait. And that's hard because people are by and large, terrible at waiting.
Being able to wait. and sense the right moment for it requires a certain amount of faith and trust. And these are skills that we develop through some of this work. So faith is that we would have faith that the conditions will meet a basic threshold if we can wait. And then we learn to trust that we'll know when to take the next step.
So when we talk about this process, though, I do have to say that some people get stuck waiting for perfect conditions, and those ain't coming. So practice identifying when something is good enough. That's a very important skill. For instance, if you're looking for a new genre to pivot to, and you're trying to find a sub genre that's on the rise, that's [00:04:00] trending up, but hasn't exploded yet.
on the scene completely yet, you might identify a few possibilities and want to wait until there's some sort of clear indicator that it's absolutely the right time to start writing in that subgenre. You might be waiting for that before you get started, right? So you could be waiting forever or you could be waiting until it's too late.
So a lot of the successful people in this industry Knew where good enough was right? They're not waiting for perfect conditions. They're waiting for good enough and they pulled the trigger and The book flopped a couple of times, but they kept trying and one of those times paid off So if you are too afraid of the risk of a flop You will end up waiting for perfect conditions that will never come, and then wonder why you feel like you're stuck in decision limbo.
And it's important when we're trying to gauge where good enough is that we give ourselves a lot of room to get it wrong. If you don't give yourself room to get it wrong, [00:05:00] then you're just sunk, because you're not gonna get it, you know, quote unquote, right. The first time. Um, if you do, it's a hundred percent luck,
So it's okay. Let yourself get it wrong a few times and you'll get better at sensing this over time.
All you really need to do is get close enough to an ideal or however ideal you can get, you can realistically expect, and then. Make it work from there.
A lot of my not knowing the next step this year has been about timing. So for one, I knew that I wouldn't have a good feel on what people wanted to read or what support authors would need until after the election because it is so pivotal in the, , world landscape. So the information I needed to know for the next step was simply not available yet.
What I like to do when I can tell that I'm unable to move on to the next step because it's not time yet is to [00:06:00] allow myself to kind of play around with a few different directions. So this is my strategic strength coming through, so your mileage may vary here. But when the timing is right, and because I have spent years learning the signals of my intuition, , through practices like mindfulness, but also just a lot of painful reflection, I've since learned to trust that my gut will tell me when it's time to make a move.
So one of the options I've been playing around with will become a fairly clear winner. It won't be perfect, but it'll edge out the others, and I can move forward from there and make it work.
Some skills one might need to develop to be able to do something like this are patience, the discomfort of knowing you have no control over the passage of time, the ability to tell when your body is calling you to action, because action is appropriate, not just because your body is feeling it. antsy and impatient, and the ability to allow yourself to get it wrong.
The last part, that [00:07:00] ability to allow yourself to get it wrong, is why I'm always encouraging practices of self compassion. If you have a history of beating yourself up for things because they didn't work out, , for taking a path that didn't pay off, then the stakes are raised for being absolutely sure that the direction you take will work out because you don't trust that you can allow yourself room to make mistakes. But when you build trust with yourself, that you are doing your best you can, with the information you have, and you know that you'll be able to forgive yourself if things don't work out, you suddenly have a lot more room to breathe and proceed with a curious mind rather than an anxious one.
Claire: the other possibility for why you feel like it's time to take the next step, but you don't know what that is, is that it's not time to take the next step, but instead an underlying fear of the present is making your attention shift toward emergency exits. Does this sound familiar? [00:08:00] So, maybe you've just published book three in a series, and you intended to go on for a while with this series, more than three books, but you're thinking, nah, it's time for something else.
Is it really? Or is a core fear telling you that book four isn't the logical next step, and now you're looking for an out? That can be something to ask yourself, and if you're not sure if you trust your answer, try talking with some friends. So you might be surprised what they reflect back to you. So maybe they say, you know, you get like this every time you hit book three in a series, and you're able to notice that pattern and spend a little bit of time poking around at it to see what you learn about yourself from it.
Or you can come talk with me and I can ask you a bunch of questions that your own mind won't think to ask because it's frankly colluding with your fear. in a misguided attempt to protect you, but it may be that the moment you consider that your struggle to find the next step is that you already know the next step but your fear is telling you to do anything but that, it could be that you immediately [00:09:00] solve your own block when you just look at that. And then sometimes we get stuck on the next step because we have a sense of what it is, but it's outside of our current experience and it asks more of us than has previously been asked. When this is the case, sometimes we don't have the support in place that we would need to be able to take that next big step.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't take that next step, but it might indicate that your first step to the next step is to build more support for yourself. So this could look like hiring a business or writing coach, asking your spouse to take on more responsibilities temporarily, or creating a group of authors who are in a similar moment of their career who you can check in with weekly or on an ongoing basis in a group chat or something like that.
I suggest you ask yourself what support would be wonderful to have. No, I didn't say, what support do I need? Some of y'all are not great at judging that because you [00:10:00] may think you shouldn't need support at all. So what support would be just really fantastic to have? What support would make this feel really, really easy for you?
And then just work toward building some of that for yourself.
And now here's a twist I'll throw at you. It's possible that it's not even close to time for the next step, but living in the current step. is too uncomfortable. So you're trying to skip ahead. This can look like, , finding the emergency exits, but it can also look like trying to jump to the next step in a career for someone who's making six figures when you're still struggling to break four figures.
So it could look like trying to build infrastructure for your business. before your business needs anything close to that much infrastructure.
As sort of a silly example, maybe an author doesn't need to think about hiring a security guard for a conference they're attending before anyone knows who they are and what they write. So yeah, that's an absurdist example, but hopefully it illustrates the point. So [00:11:00] sometimes authors skip ahead to solve problems of success that they aren't even close to having because That's a more pleasurable experience than being in the reality that they don't have the success yet, and that they need to keep writing books and learning new skills before they do.
So notice if you're trying to jump ahead to next steps that are actually like 20 steps ahead of where you are. Now if you've gone through this list of possibilities and you're still stumped, and you know that there's a next step ready to be taken but you don't know what it is, one exercise you can do to unstick what's stuck is to is to look to the virtue of your Enneagram type.
So what wisdom does it offer you to handle the discomfort of not knowing the next step yet? If you're not familiar with the virtues of the types, no problem. I'm about to go through them, , for you. And just as a note, depending on what text you're pulling from, these virtues might be described a little bit differently, or even use a different word sometimes, but I'll be [00:12:00] pulling from the Enneagram Guide to Waking Up by Beatrice Chestnut and Yerani O. Pais.
The virtue of the one is serenity. So this can look like accepting the natural rhythms of life, rather than always trying to fight against them or make them more perfect, according to whatever our ego decides perfect is. Could you stop trying to orchestrate the next step quite so hard, and see what
naturally flows when you accept the rhythms of life around you. The virtue of the two is humility, and this can look like acknowledging that you are not a superhero, and you have needs that matter as much as those who you serve. So it can also be to look at how your fear that you're not important has been causing you to take on too much, so that you can feel important.
Could you stop thinking? about the next project and instead think about what you're currently tackling that you need to ask for help on or [00:13:00] give up completely.
The virtue of the three is veracity. This can look like pausing to sort out the false selves you present to the world from the real you. It can look like examining where your career has been boxing you into these false versions of you, and where more transparency might allow you, I don't know, space to breathe and discover that you don't have to keep performing behind masks for people to want to connect with you.
Could you ask yourself how your need for a next step is keeping you from the pause that you need to take to discover your worth outside of your projects?
The virtue of the four is equanimity. This can look like stepping outside of the ride of your emotions to observe them rather than be them. It can look like taking in life more as it is rather than accepting the mirage of it that filters through your emotions as truth. Could some of the back and forth you feel about the next step be alleviated by [00:14:00] Zooming out so that your conclusions don't shift every time your emotions or your mood do.
The virtue of the five is non attachment. This can look like opening up to the inspiration, emotions, knowledge, and energy of the world around you. It looks like accepting what meets you, allowing yourself to be influenced as a pathway to connection, rather than rejecting connection and influence, fearing that it may drain you or lead you to irrational patterns.
Could you let go of some of your need to know the whole process moving forward, or to understand the whole situation and instead listen to where your heart and intuition are telling you to go for the next step in your business?
The virtue of the six is courage, and this can look like letting go of the need for assured safety and letting a deeper sense of purpose carry you forward. Trusting that you can handle whatever comes your way.
Sixes often get stuck on the [00:15:00] next step because they're trying to catastrophe proof it by thinking of every way it could go wrong and pre solving that issue. before taking the action. So this process can last forever, if you let it. So could you let go of your need to know how things might not work out and instead experiment with any possible next step?
Really, anyone will do. when you're stuck in doubt. Could you experiment with any possible next step to notice how well you're able to adjust to the unexpected?
The virtue of the seven is sobriety. This can look like staying focused on one project or task at a time, and remaining steady in the present rather than looking ahead to anything that's to come. Endless stimulating possibilities and distractions. It looks like feeling grounded in yourself long enough to see a project, task, or even a relationship through to the point of real satisfaction rather than jumping ship [00:16:00] when the initial shininess sort of wears off.
Could you let go of the anticipatory dopamine of every imaginary next step for a while and focus instead on what the present project is calling out for? Could you hold off on thinking about the next step until you complete the current one?
The virtue of eight is innocence. This can look like letting down some of your defenses and resting from always anticipating an attack. Rather than expecting to be met with hostility, you can practice assuming you'll be met with kindness. And in doing so, you may stop inviting hostility with the armor that you're wearing around.
Notice where you're conceptualizing your career with a conqueror's mindset. Might your need to remain in a power up position against enemies? Frankly, invisible enemies be driving you to take next steps before you truly have the resources to take them. And isn't that [00:17:00] kind of allowing your fear to take power away from you by always driving your business from a position of fear?
Could you make decisions out of something other than a mentality of hit them before they hit you? And how might your next step be different if you did? The virtue of the nine is right action. This can look like an awakening to your own priorities and an understanding of the impact you can have on the world.
If you shake off the lethargy of the comfortable routine, rather than opting for doing the same things you've always done that sort of blend into the background, you recognize what the moment is calling for and how you can deliver it effectively. And then you take action based on that. Could you wake up to what the moment is calling for from you?
Could the next step have been waiting for you to let go of your comfortable routines this whole time? What obvious opportunities have you been asleep to because they require you to be more visible?
[00:18:00] I know that looking at my own virtue of serenity has really helped me with the question of next steps this year. Speaking from experience, the idea of embracing that virtue might sound distasteful or icky to you, but once you give it a try, what you'll discover is the huge amount of relief it brings you. Our brains will for sure protest and say this is so far from what's familiar for me that it must be bad. But once we take that leap of faith and give it a try, we tend to feel like, oh no, this is way better.
Why was I resisting it for so long?
So if you're wondering, What if I don't know the next step? Start by figuring out if the issue is a knowledge gap, a matter of timing, a fear based issue, or some other attempt to avoid necessary pain. And then look to your types of virtue as guidance for what to experiment with that you may not have experimented with before.
So [00:19:00] those are some next steps for your next steps. That's it for this episode of What If for Authors. I'm Claire Taylor, and thank you for joining me. I think you know the next steps from here, and if you don't know yet, you know the next step to finding the next step. I hope you'll join me next time. Happy writing.