A Conversation with Len Sone, Contributing Author to
"101 Great Ways to Enhance Your Career"
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| Featured Author Len Sone Contributing Author to "101 Ways to Enhance Your Career" ("Be Dumb, Be Fickle, Be Superficial") |
Tell us about your chapter (#101 in “101 Great Ways to Enhance Your Career”) and why you felt you had to write it?
The book was published by SelfGrowth.com and was a collaborative effort from 101 career experts. My chapter is the very last one and it is career advice for young women. I got very lucky there with the numbering because they filed it under “Young women” and I suppose Y was the last letter they had. I wrote this chapter soon after I defined myself as a coach for young women. Before that, I was a general life coach and I worked with everyone. So in the chapter, I write very candidly about why it took me so long to define myself as that and some of the negative beliefs the world has about young women. I talk about how these beliefs hold a lot of young women back, and that actually we young women do have all these qualities in us. I give advice to young women to create their own careers in a way that’s authentic and I explain what that really means. My chapter is titled “Be Dumb, Be Fickle, Be Superficial.” It sounds horrible, but I make the case essentially that your career should be a celebration of all dimensions of you and to not make the mistake of pretending you don’t have them. The most delicious careers come out of that dumb, fickle, superficial stuff. I am very proud of what I wrote to this day and it’s been a couple of years now. The young women who have read it told me my advice was very insightful and very liberating. As you can see, I like to expose myself and use it to help others. I love working with young women, they are the most powerful creatures in the universe and don’t even know it. It’s like sitting on a goldmine. I wrote what I wrote because ultimately I’m a healer and I’m passionate about healing and empowering young women.
Where do you get your ideas?
My writing ideas come from my burning questions. I live life with deep emotion, I ask all kinds of questions because I want my life to improve, and my Inner Being, that divine spark inside of me, answers in one way or another. That may sound esoteric. Sometimes it very much is. I sit down to write and I get into a slight trance. Writing for me is a form of channeling. I also get inspiration from everything around me that I experience on a daily basis and from countless of self-help and spiritual teachers I love. Sometimes my Inner Being answers directly and sometimes it brings me things and people, and answers through them. However, there’s always this deeper knowing of what resonates with me and what truly works for me and will work for others I work with. If a solution improves my life, then I’ll bring it to my clients and readers. Their experiences also feed the writing. I watch for patterns that my clients share and ask questions about that, “What’s this about? How can I help them?”
Do you ever experience writer’s block and how do you overcome it?
A long time ago, when I was trying to write fictional works, I had terrible writing blocks. I realized later that this simply wasn’t my type of writing. When it comes to personal development, self-help, and spiritual advice, the written word flows very easily out of me because it’s based on my actual emotions and what I’m really experiencing and teaching. As a teenager, I could always write pages upon pages in my huge journal as a diary every day, and this is very similar to that type of writing. It comes from me, from my heart, burning to be released onto the page. If any writer is chronically experiencing writer’s block, I would advise them to play around with different types of writing. Trust that you are meant to be a writer because it calls you. The only question is what type of a writer. Just play with it until you discover what flows easily from within you.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers on the writing and publishing process?
Because I’ve always been interested in being a writer and writing books, over the years I have really listened to the best publishing experts (either who have best-sellers or who have worked for the best known publishing houses). And what I have learned from them is profound. I learned that the idyllic dream that most writers have is completely wrong. Most writers think that if they get published, especially by a well-known publishing house, they’ll get instant fame of sorts and start making money. The surprising reality is that the publishing houses do not market you, they need you to market yourself and sell your own books. A lot of people literally end up with a garage full of books. Or maybe the books are in some warehouse somewhere, but no one is buying. It’s not a bad thing really, but it does change your perspective. What I’ve realized is that writers have to build their own name and their audience. That’s exactly what I tell my clients who are writers. Don’t think for a second that writing the book and getting it published is the hard part and then you’re done. That is actually the easiest part. However, despite all this seeming depressing, it’s really not. You have to realize that the journey to fame and abundance is a personal growth journey. Learning to market yourself and build an audience is literally a personal development journey.
How do you market your work?
The simple answer is I get out there in all ways that feel comfortable and joyful to me and tell people about what I do (as a career transformation coach for young women). Doing this author interview is one example of that. Of course, there’s also social media, flyers, asking my clients to refer other people and providing incentive for them to do so. Pretty soon I’ll start making videos too. Actually, I decided to be a part of the book “101 Great Ways to Enhance Your Career” partly to get my name out there. Because I love writing, that is a big part of my marketing strategy: writing articles for different websites, writing good website copy (a skill in itself because you don’t want people to doze off when on your website). A more complex answer is that simply bringing traffic to your website is useless if you don’t have great conversion on that website, so I learned all that too. I actually teach all that to my clients. It’s very interesting to me that no matter what people decide to do as a career, they always have to learn all those marketing lessons they swore they would try to escape from. It’s not the easiest thing for someone like me and most writers who are actually very sensitive introspective people. However, I’ve learned that our comfort zone expands little by little. I thought I’d never want to make YouTube videos because it was such a scary thought and now that sounds like it might be fun.
Can a writer hire you as a career coach even if he/she is not a young woman?
Actually, I would make an exception for some writers just because I love writing and writers so much. It’s a certain type of soul that attracts me. Writers and movie creators are my people. A writer coming from this site can email me personally about coaching here: Len@LaunchYourOwnCareer.com.
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About the Author:
FOR MORE INFO:
Website: http://LaunchYourOwnCareer.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SunkissedLen