Finding Myself as a Writer

Bill: There were times that we were laughing and different, those creative times when we were just really in the flow. And there were just as many, maybe even if not more times that we were frustrated with each other and triggered by the process.

Bill: Even the experience of writing the book changed me. it showed me how far I've come in terms of my own healing. It showed me how much I've resolved, but it also showed me how far I need to go and what I still need to resolve.

Bill: The only advice that I would have about that is fall in love with something and then start writing about it.

Bill: Some of the things that happened in that book, it was very difficult to write about 'cause I'm ashamed about it. I still hold shame about.

Marty: Welcome to the True You Podcast. I am, my name's Martin Kettle Hut and I am a, an executive coach and author. Oftentimes when we start our podcast, bill Tierney my partner here will introduce me as author, and today I get to do, introduce him as author. And we wanna, I would like to learn more about the experience of writing and now having completed several publications. Um, and, um, and familiarize our audience with them too, so that they wanna run out and buy them.

Bill: they may want to, maybe not. We'll see.

Marty: Yeah. Yeah.

Bill: yeah, I'd love to talk about that.

Marty: So one, one of them is, um, a workbook and one of them is a memoir. So these, these are interesting genres too, you know, it's, it's not a,

Bill: Yeah. there's by, as we record this it's February 4th, 2026, and I anticipate that sometime April. May I'll, I will have three published works. Two, two more in addition to the one I already have published. So the first one is the Compassionate Results Guidebook and that is a guide for anyone that wants to get results using the IFS model. They wanna make changes in their lives, maybe accomplish some things. It's a great support guidebook for coaches to use with their clients and especially coaches that already know about that, about the IFS model. And know how to use it. And but it's also a great guidebook, I believe, for people that to try to make changes in their lives. Even if they don't have the support of a coach, maybe they get supportive of a therapist or a practitioner, or they just do it on their own. So

Marty: Uh huh.

Bill: that's what that one's about.

Marty: So, like if, if I was, mm. Starting a business or having trouble in a relationship or something like these are typical coaching things I can pick up that book and it would be better to work with somebody, but I could get results just using the book by myself.

Bill: Yeah. In fact you or anybody that picked up the book or just simply to answer the questions on page 13, there's seven questions.

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: What will happen is you'll gain a tremendous amount of clarity about what it is that you wanna change, why you wanna change it, and what kind of obstacles you've encountered before that has prevented you from being able to make those changes already. And that in itself, as far as I'm concerned, is extremely valuable. 'cause

Marty: yeah.

Bill: you want and don't want, now, you might be able to tap into some inspiration and motivation about what there is to do about it.

Marty: Great. Rest of the book explains, not just explains, but shows someone how to identify what gets in their way, and then what to do when that happens. And the, and just the, what I would, if I were looking for it on Amazon, it would be called

Bill: Compassionate Results Guidebook.

Marty: Compassionate Results Guidebook by Bill

Bill: me, you see it behind me there.

Marty: Uhhuh. There it is. Yeah.

Bill: what it looks like. And this is what it looks like closer.

Marty: Great.

Bill: and those, these notes that you see in the back, are for the second edition, which I'm already working on.

Marty: Oh my gosh. Already doing the edits. Great.

Bill: yeah. I've just thought of a lot of other things I wanna add to the book. So the exciting news though is that the Work guidebook is gonna be available on Amazon in the Kindle version next week, next Friday. So what is that? February the 13th? You can start picking up the Parts Work guidebook and many of the people that have been that are familiar with my the activities in the Parts Work guide, part parts work practice group been eagerly awaiting this release. It'll be available here in just a little over a week. And it, it aligns with the exercises that we're doing in that parts work practice, in those parts work practice sessions. So me I'm just one of the, one of five authors, Alison Dyer. Morgan Monte Noga Kreiman, Islena Faircrest all wrote the book with me and we've been working on this for about four years. So it's really exciting and a relief, frankly to have it cross the finish line .

Marty: Four years is, I mean it might sound like a long time, but, um. I was just talking to a fellow author this morning and both of us took 10 years to write our books, so it did. Do you think that writing it as a group made it faster or,

Bill: Oh man. I don't think anybody in the group would agree that it went quickly. It felt, there were, don't get me wrong, we had a lot of fun. We were times that we were laughing and different, those creative times when we were just really in the flow. And there were just as many, maybe even if not more times that we were at juggernauts and uh, log jammed and frustrated with each other and triggered by the process. And in fact, we had to really apply. The exercises that we were writing to our very experiences, and frankly, we found that the exercises were either lacking and then needed to adjust accordingly, or that they worked really well. And we're all very proud of the 23 exercises that are in this workbook because we, I believe it fulfills on the promise of the book, which is to take anybody , regardless of what they know about the IFS model. it, it'll take anyone from brand new, I don't know anything about IFS. What does that stand for? All the way through to having a pretty workable vocabulary and usage of this very powerful tool. And yeah, and we actually tested it and

Marty: So even somebody who's well versed is gonna learn from this.

Bill: yeah. The guidebook will organize the understanding of why it works as well as help. Improve how it works. And a lot of practitioners and therapists and coaches that already are trained in the IFS model and have clients and they want their, they want their clients to be able to understand more about what they're doing and why they're doing it and how to do it.

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: wanna hand this book to their clients because it'll help them in their coaching, in their therapy and in their practitioner sessions.

Marty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Bill: gonna be far more informed and far more practice. These are very practical exercises that they can give to their clients as homework between sessions.

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: be able to mark in a, they're actually gonna be able to measure using our self energy access scale, the progress that they're making using the model.

Marty: I see. So how do five people write a book together? And do you do I'll do this part, you do that part, or do you actually somehow all have your fingers on the keyboard at the same time?

Bill: I, to answer the question, lemme just tell you the story of what happened in January of 2021. I decided I wanted to start a free group for people to come and practice the IFS model. was going on at that time is that I was in level two training in the, at the IFS Institute and up until then I'd been doing a free group of supporting people in how to use the work of Byron Katie. I was sponsoring a bunch of people in adult children of alcoholics, and I had started a couple of meetings there online. You may remember 2021, beginning of 2021. We were just a couple of months into the full acceptance of the fact that we were dealing with the, COVID. And so much forced at that time to go on online and you start using Zoom instead of meet with meeting with people in person.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: So I just put the word out there to a few people that I was gonna be doing these practice sessions and supporting people and learning how to use the IFS model. And at that time I was using the Bonnie Weiss books, the self therapy workbook, which was similar to the book that we've created now, written in a different form and in a different flow, but very useful tool for helping people to learn the IFS model

Marty: You.

Bill: for the first week that I had that meeting. That very first session, 30 people showed up. I just was shocked. Wow. 30 people. This is great. Awesome. And the next week there were 40. And so very quickly I realized I was gonna be overwhelmed by the demand of this and I wanted to be able to meet that demand and needed some help. So I asked Allison Dyer and a few other people, would you be willing to come help me do parts work, practice? And Allison responded and said, yeah, absolutely. And then somewhere along the way we met Emily Kirkman and she was willing to help us create parts, work, practice and we met at least every week to talk about what do we need to do to make this thing work better? not working? What is working?

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: brought on, it continued to grow. We were having anywhere from 40 to 80 people showing up for these sessions. Every single week. And then we moved it to twice a week and we've gone back and forth with how many times we've met, but it was clear we needed help. We needed somebody to zoom tech for us, and we needed people to help us facilitate these sessions because it was growing so much. We learned that we had to have people that were trained in the IFS model. Otherwise, people who were just learning about it themselves really thought that they knew what they were doing, but they really didn't. They didn't know how to support people. We learned some really hard lessons, like we're not here to actually go into breakout rooms and practice using the model with untrained people. And we don't have enough trained people to supervise it. And we don't wanna be training anyhow. We just wanna be helping people practice using it for their own personal. Growth and personal development.

Marty: huh.

Bill: So we started reaching out to other, if FS trained people and asking if they'd be willing to volunteer and help us. And so we began growing a volunteer team that now has 13 people in it. And these are people that all have been trained in the IFS model and that show up because they have this generous giving heart and they too wanna spread the word of IFS in the world. Nova one day said, one of the things that we found that we needed to do was to take Bonnie Weiss's book. The self therapy workbook and adapted for what we were using it for in our. Group, I believe that she wrote it for an individual, and we were trying to use these exercises that she wrote for groups. we needed to change the language and we needed to add a little here and take a little way there. By the

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: Weiss gave us permission to use the guidebook

Marty: Oh.

Bill: her, her workbook too. and so one day Nova, one of the practice assistant says, we should just write our own workbook. So it was as simple as, okay, let's do that there. There wasn't a great deal of thought. It was clear and obvious that we did need our own workbook and we had a other people that were involved in the process. At first, it became so and cumbersome to try to write this book that many of the people that were involved. Realized that they were over invested. They were giving it way too much time. It was way too frustrating. They had other things going on in their lives, so they went on and left the project to us. There was even a time when we all just decided, no, this isn't gonna work. We quit.

Marty: Oh, really?

Bill: next week I said here's the way I wanna do it. This is what I think will work. And that's how we ended up forming the five of us that ended up taking it to the finish line over the last three, ago, three years. And in terms of how we did it, I did a lot of the writing, others did some of the writing. But we all went through and redid anything that anybody had to contribute. We met all five of us and we talked about does this flow, does this work well? Is this clunky? Do we need to change it? And then once we had all the exercise written, we needed to write the content that's supported and explained the exercises and how they flowed from one to the other. And that's and it finally came together. And now we've been in edit mode now for the last six months or so, just trying to get it ready to publish.

Marty: Do you feel like you learned a, from that working together about how to better write

Bill: Oh

Marty: Uhhuh?

Bill: definitely. One of the things I learned was that I just need to slow myself way down. Way down. Yeah. And it's okay just to go ahead and put it on paper. I've got an idea. I'm trying to remember who the author is that talks about this, big Magic Who wrote the Big Magic book?

Marty: Elizabeth Gilbert.

Bill: So she talks about how she believes these ideas come and visit, and if we don't take advantage of them, they'll go visit somebody else. So I love that. So when the idea would come to me, I'd get it down on paper and grab it immediately. And it was, it would be rough, but I would bring it to the group and the group would perfect it. And so it was a great experience. Also, I learned a lot about how to work in collaboration in a group. Honestly, I like to be in charge. I'm most comfortable when I'm running the show and in charge and in a group of five in a democratic process, that doesn't work very well.

Marty: Yeah, so how did you deal with that?

Bill: I threw tantrums.

Marty: Okay.

Bill: to quit. powered

Marty: a true method, throw a tantrum.

Bill: my young parts

Marty: it's worked for for millions of years.

Bill: my gosh, my the, some of my young parts that learned how to be in community. In my original family, my original, very dysfunctional family came out parts that I for, didn't even know that I had. When I said I'm not kidding it, it's funny to be able to say, yeah, I threw a tantrum and I pouted and I withdrew. And all four authors would say, yep, that's what Bill did. They would, but they'd also say, and Bill came back. Bill came back, his parts, worked with them and then came back and cleaned things up and we were able to repair any ruptures. I wasn't the only one creating ruptures, but I certainly did. I certainly did. My share of ruptures.

Marty: so there must have been there some growth and healing and returning to the true you that everybody got out of the process itself.

Bill: I won't speak for everybody, but everybody would agree with that. Yeah. I think we've had a lot of discussion about how, there's something about this accomplishment that is far greater than the, than this. This book, it's far greater than the pages in the print, in the book. It's the experience that we had even writing it. And in fact, Eile is the one that said, we really should include in the book some of the experiences that we had as we were writing this exercise. So I think in a, in at least seven or eight places in the book, we have a block at the end of of an exercise that says when we tried this exercise.

Marty: Uh,

Bill: And

Marty: no.

Bill: the beginning of the book, we write about what the experience meant to us and what we got out of it and what was hard and what was rewarding about the experience.

Marty: Lovely. That's great.

Bill: Yeah, it was a, it's a pretty amazing process. I.

Marty: Wow. So the, so these aren't that other woman's exercise. What did

Bill: Wise? No, these are, we made we created these from scratch,

Marty: Uhhuh

Bill: that are in the parts work guidebook.

Marty: and has she written an endorsement of this book?

Bill: She has not, we didn't, I wish we did ask. I wish we had asked her for that. That would that's a great idea. We should have done that, but we didn't. Yeah. I'd love to get Bonnie Weiss's endorsement of this book.

Marty: Right.

Bill: not too late. The print version is gonna be another month or so before it's out, maybe even more than that. And we probably have time to get her endorsement. So Bonnie, if you're listening, we sure would like the endorsement on the book.

Marty: Yeah. Or for the second edition, I mean, oftentimes the opening of the books Second edition has many more additional endorsements, so that's, yeah. I'm, I'm, that would be great to have hers of all people. Yeah.

Bill: Yeah, I'm just making myself a note. Yeah, so that's, those are two of the books. The first book is self-published. The one that I held up the workbook that parts the Results guidebook And that was quite an experience and learned a ton there. made my, made me appreciate our publisher of this book

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: more

Marty: Yeah. My first book was self-published as well.

Bill: It was, huh?

Marty: I know what that's.

Bill: Yes. Yeah. And I had help. I had I hats off to my virtual assistant, Ari, who does so much of the behind the scenes work for me, so I don't have to, I hired her because I love coaching. I don't love doing the admin.

Marty: mm-hmm.

Bill: and by having her do the admin for me, I can coach, I can write, I can teach, I can train and she can do all the admin for me and I can stay in my joy.

Marty: That's so great. What a great relationship. I'm sure she gets huge benefit out of reading all this and, and, and profiting from the work too.

Bill: it was so interesting. We recently did what the parts work conference and Ari is. We could not have done the parts work practice conference without her because she put together the ticketing platform. She didn't create a ticketing pa, she used a ticketing platform, plugged all of our stuff into it, managed the sale of the tickets, managed the website, created the landing page. Did the follow up, edited the videos from the conference. She

Marty: Wow.

Bill: of this stuff and in one meeting, just prior to our, this is the second conference we've done. We did one back in September. We did one in January, and we're planning to do one again in, in May. But in one meeting with the presenters I called on her. She was in the meeting because she was taking notes about everything that we were talking about and any decisions that needed to be made, and she was gonna make sure that we implemented all those things. but I asked her, Hey, one of the things that we did at the beginning of that meeting was let's do something that we do in parts work, practice. Let's go ahead and connect with our parts by noticing what parts are active and alive inside right now. And so we went around the room and I surprised her. Everybody in the room said I'm noticing a part that is excited to be here, for example. And joining with you guys and seeing you guys on Zoom, we've been working in a silo. And another person said something like I'm noticing a part that's a little bit nervous about being here 'cause I don't feel like my presentation's quite ready yet. So we get all the way around to Ari and I said, Ari, would you speak for a part? And I expect her to say, oh no thank you.

Marty: Right.

Bill: But she's been our zoom tech in, I don't know how many. 30, 40, 50, maybe more of parts for practice sessions.

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: And she's been helping me with my marketing. That all has to do with IFS. She sees every single one of my blog articles. I can't help myself as but I'm gonna be talking about everything in my life through the lens of parts and IFS.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: she's been taking a lot of this on and learning it really indirectly. She spoke and said, Hey, my name's Ari, and I'm noticing a part that is excited to have everybody together here today. Great. So she's learning, I think she's learning a lot about herself and through and about her parts as well.

Marty: That's great.

Bill: Yeah,

Marty: Awesome. Awesome.

Bill: she's lovely.

Marty: Now, but this other book, the memoir, this is a whole different thing.

Bill: Oh yeah. So we're shifting gears here now the third book. That will be published and it's at the publisher now. We've already, I've already approved the book cover.

Marty: I assume that is you on the book card.

Bill: yeah. Yep.

Marty: Should you? As a little boy, very darling picture

Bill: I was a cute little kid.

Marty: you were,

Bill: And most kids are, you know what's cute about little kids is they're just

Marty: they're cute. They're kids.

Bill: they're naive they're just perfect,

Marty: yeah. Yeah.

Bill: yeah, so we, I've approved the I've got a bunch of really beautiful blurbs and endorsements and reviews on the book already. I sent out a sample. You were one of them and I appreciate that.

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: And and we've gone through one round of edits. And the next, I think the next thing that happens is that I'll get, a version of the book from the editor. And I'll go through and look for one more. Anything that got missed in the edits. And within the next, I would say probably four to six weeks, we were probably looking at getting it published, getting printed and available for people to purchase. But it's called surviving myself. And can I tell you the story of how that came about?

Marty: Oh, I'd love to hear it. Yes,

Bill: Probably three years ago, three to four years ago, I was running success club groups and then they converted to other types, but they were all i, these IFS based groups

Marty: Uhhuh.

Bill: and. As I evolve the way that I coach people in groups, I'm learning more and more about what works and what doesn't and what do I wanna accomplish and what's really not feasible in a group. What and what is. And so I brought in oh I'm trying to think of the name of the workbook that, that I created that was that we were going through in this group. But I brought in six people in a group that met for 12 weeks. And when that group was finished I was in a conversation with one of the graduates of that group who said, bill, it sure would've been nice to have had a workbook as we went through that and what he missed and what, obviously I didn't do a very good job of doing because I hadn't, I had not published the book. I just only had it in A-P-D-F-I provided to him and everybody else in the group, a link to the workbook. But he's an old guy like me. And when I told him, yeah, I gave you that link, and he said, link sm I don't, that doesn't work for me. I want paper in my hand. I want something that I can look at. And he said, I said, then maybe I should do that. Maybe I should go ahead and just go through it again, rewrite it and get it published. And that way in future groups, I can hand them a or can have them go purchase one of these workbooks. He said, and if you'd I can help you write that. I said tell me more. He said I'm a writer. I write memoirs, and I got a pretty good eye and I might have some ideas for you for how to write it and what things to say and where to put things and how to organize it. I be great. What would you wanna get paid for that? And he said what do you think of coaching me using IFS? And we'll just do a trade. And so Jerry and I had been working out a trade now for the last three years, and it, so it started out with him helping me to rewrite the self-led project. That's the name of the workbook, the self-led project. and the more I wrote with him and the more I read, so I read his memoir and I thought, this is great. I love your memoir, Jerry. I love. I think it's called How I Learned to Love the World, I believe is the name of his book. It's excellent. I highly recommend it. His name is Jerry Waxler. In fact, he was on our podcast.

Marty: Yes, he was.

Bill: that's right. So we've been working together for the last three years, and over time I kept changing my mind about what I wanted it to, what wanted the book. I, at one point I said what if I were to write some of the stories from my life and then couple them up with the exercises, maybe that would work out well. says, yeah, that's gonna be hard and tricky. But yeah, you could sure give that a try. So I, I started moving that direction for a little while, and then I really started enjoying writing the stories. And then Jerry and I would meet once a week or once every two weeks for 90 minutes or so. He would read the, read out loud, the stories that I'd written, and then we would stop and edit and he would offer me suggestions like bill, you gotta remember that you're only eight years old at this point in the story, and you're writing as a, as if you're a 70-year-old. gonna be confusing for the reader. You need to write it from the perspective of the 8-year-old so that the reader can go along with you and have and be on this journey with you every step of the way.

Marty: Right.

Bill: So write it. Write it from your 8-year-old perspective. And that was a challenge. Oh my, how the heck do you do that? And yet I did, I was able to find it. Find a

Marty: That's great.

Bill: Yeah. so I, there's

Marty: By accessing an 8-year-old part or, or just how did you get into that mode?

Bill: yeah. I think so. I think I just accessed my 8-year-old self.

Marty: Uhhuh?

Bill: Yeah. Yeah. And I remembered, for example, seeing. Blackie and Susie our dog's name was Blackie. Susie was the dog from across the street. Susie was a girl. Blackie was a boy, and one day I saw Blackie and Susie playing piggyback. And I thought isn't that cute? And I ran to my sister Jeanie, who was 10 years old, and I said, look black and who you're playing piggyback. And she just scoffed and told me what an idiot I was. Oh, they're having sex, they're making little baby puppies. What?

Marty: What.

Bill: how shocking. That was so shocking at eight years old to, or whatever age I was at that time, to learn that for the first, that's the first time I'd ever about sex. I didn't know what sex was. So anyhow, I was

Marty: Definitely comes across like as I was reading the beginning of it and you know, I was like, this is. This feels like 8-year-old think, you know, and, and I can, oh, I can see how the dilemmas arise for an 8-year-old. Or the surprises like about what, you know, it's not playing piggyback and like it really, I was really having an 8-year-old experience along with you as I was reading it.

Bill: I'm so glad to hear that. That's, that's

Marty: And then there are also moments, there are also moments where. There's a turn of phrase or an idea or something that I also know you, of you as, in your current age, and yet it's being expressed by an 8-year-old. So there's like this continuity too, like that's, that's aism, you know?

Bill: Yeah. That's right. That's right.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: So it's, it was a lot of fun. It was also a lot. It was a lot of hard, it was hard. It know. One of the things in the book is that. My parents did the best they could, but they didn't do very good. they had their own trauma and a lot of that trauma got on me and my siblings. And it was difficult to break through the built in defenses against letting the family secrets out. It was difficult to, once I had in that story from being the, essentially the victim of that family to being on my own at age 19 and making my own choices convinced that I was gonna be different than my parents. Some of the things that happened in, in that book, it was very difficult to write about 'cause I'm ashamed about it. I still hold shame about.

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: So I was able to do it but I really leaned on Jerry for a lot of that too. Not so much for the emotional support. I knew what to do with that. I had a lot of support around if FS for that, but the encouragement to just write it and this was his advice, just write it. You can decide later whether you wanna keep it in the book or not. Get it out there. Just write about it.

Marty: My gosh, you must have changed you.

Bill: It really did. Even the experience of writing the book changed me.

Marty: I would imagine. So the way you're describing what you had to go through to get it out, that must you, you, you're a different person having written this book.

Bill: What it did, Marty, was it showed me how much, how far I've come in terms of my own healing. It showed me how far, how much I've resolved, but it also showed me how far I need to go and what I still need to resolve. Yeah, it surprised me some of the things that. I felt and still feel even though I've written about it, the fact that it was hard to write it pointed to Trailhead that I still need to explore

Marty: I see. I see.

Bill: healing, I still need to do. It's a process. You probably had the experience reading those 82 pages sample that I gave you. Of, of recognizing this is someone who's far from perfect. is someone who is maybe not all the way broken but pretty damaged.

Marty: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It, it's moving it in that, and that's one of the ways in which it's moving, to, 'cause when you read. You know, someone telling their story. You identify, you get into their world, into what they're feeling and thinking and, and identify with them, and it, it was moving to do that very moving.

Bill: I so appreciate you gave it that depth of attention that you were moved by it.

Marty: Oh, it's hard not to. I think anybody picks it up un unless they're just looking, for certain words or something, they're gonna get moved. think.

Bill: it occurs to me that I the rest of the story is the book kept growing and I had a contract with a publisher to keep the word count at X number of words, and that

Marty: 60,000 or,

Bill: like that.

Marty: yeah, that's what mine was. I and I had to cut stuff and

Bill: Yeah.

Marty: paying more so that they could put more, and I know it. I've been there.

Bill: And so I hit that and then, flew right past it.

Marty: Oh wow. Oh wow.

Bill: 120,000 words, and now I had 170,000 words. and so I finally decided this needs to be a three part memoir. And I'm, I can't believe I'm actually saying this out loud for anybody else to know, because now the pressure's on, now that I've got the first 329 pages out in book one, that takes me up to page two, to the age of 20. Seven years old,

Marty: Uh.

Bill: I'm working on Book two and as of right now, surviving myself surviving myself is the name of the first book and I'm not sure what the name of the second and the third book will be, but so far the working titles are surviving myself, book one, finding myself, book two, and being myself as book three.

Marty: Oh, that's great. Lovely. Yeah. Wow. I can just, the, yeah, it's, do you think it'll ever be made into a movie? A trilogy. We'll wanna go back year to see the next installment.

Bill: I will stay focused on, do I think it'll ever get written? And I'm writing it, but I'm finding it very challenging and difficult. There's so much going on in my life right now that it's very difficult to find. The time,

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: it seems like just sit down for 30 minutes and start writing.

Marty: No, I know you need, you need big chunks of time.

Bill: yeah.

Marty: Because you gotta get into a certain space, uh, you know of and re sort of have it all in your head, you know, to be able to, I, I, I, at least that's what it feels like to me. You know, it's like I have to get this whole world conjured up. And it, yeah. There's only half an hour. Forget it.

Bill: you're just getting set up. You're

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: set up, and now it's time to move on to another thing. And my internal system doesn't work that way. I, like you said, I need big chunks of time. I need to be able to just write until I, I'm not writing anymore. And I've thought about things like doing things like just getting really disciplined and I may need to do this. I may just to get, need to get really disciplined and set an alarm and write for an hour. Four or five mornings a week maybe that's what I'll need to do because I don't seem to be slowing down in terms of the things that I'm taking on.

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: So I've got two more parts of my memoir to write. I want to, I'm busy creating a curriculum for training coaches on how to use the IFS model and coaching. That first cohort is full, and then we'll start here in March and we gotta, so we need to be ready to teach that. And we are, we're but I've got a lot of work to do to prepare for that. My coaching practice is just to on fire. I I'd like to get some more group members, but I've got as many one, one-on-one clients as I can handle right now. and yeah, and I somehow, I had the idea that at my current age, I'll turn 71 next month. It probably would be slowing down a little bit. Most of the people that I know that are my age are retired or retiring, I have no interest in that. I am really on fire for all of these projects. And so yeah, the biggest question is when, not if, but when Book two's gonna be done. My goal is to get it done by the end of this year.

Marty: It just goes to show, I think, this is my interpretation, that when you're plugged into self-energy, it keeps you young, it keeps you vibrant.

Bill: That's been my experience. Yeah. Now I don't always feel young and vibrant, especially after five 30 in the afternoon, but yeah. Yeah, I am.

Marty: But you wouldn't even, you wouldn't even be countenance all this growth and all this new business and all this create creative work if you weren't accessing some deep source, if you weren't like plugged into the sun, right.

Bill: it does feel like that. It feels like I am resourced beyond myself

Marty: Yes. Yes. Amen.

Bill: what a pleasure to be interviewed by you around my writing and these projects. I, as you can tell, I, they are all labors of love. my tantruming and my, my parts that get activated when things don't go just exactly the way I think they should go, or it's quickly.

Marty: Well, I wanna ask you one more question if I could. 'Cause a lot of people, um, when I talk about being an author and an, or just that I like to write, they, they, they get. Interested, like, you know, I've, I've wanted to, I don't know what is that, like, you know, the writing process, I don't think I could do that. There's all these thoughts about sitting down to write, even if I ask people to keep a journal, coaching clients and you know, there are any number of reasons why that's can be very useful. Uh, morning pages as one. But, um, but. But also, um. Going to complete the day, you know, to go, what, what happened? It helps people, get wound down and, and appreciate themselves. There's lots of reasons to journal and oftentimes people are just, uh, I'm not, I don't know if it's trauma from school, you know, not, not being. Appreciated for their writing in school and or what, but there could be any number of reasons, but I wonder if, you know what, 'cause you weren't a writer, so to speak, for many years of your life, this is a new thing.

Bill: a reader. I got all the way through high school and I think I read three books 'cause I had to,

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: I hated reading.

Marty: So do you have any like. Words of, uh, you know, like how to access that in, in, for, for our listeners.

Bill: The only advice that I would have about that is fall in love with something and then start writing about it.

Marty: That's great. Yeah. Yeah.

Bill: I fell in love with IFS, I fell in love with coaching,

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: and then when I, with Jerry's help, I started feeling falling in love with my own, telling my own story.

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: Yeah.

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: And Jerry, by the way, is a great memoir mentor. and if there's anybody that's interested in exploring that for themselves, and he'd be the first to tell anyone. We're all prospective writers. Any of us can write. And what there is to do is to just start writing and if you can get some feedback from someone that can give you some guidance on what to write, how to write, how to think about the writing, and see if it's something you can fall in love with. I'll

Marty: Very good.

Bill: I'll make sure that Jerry Wexler's contact information ends up in our show notes here,

Marty: That's great. Yeah.

Bill: and

Marty: I love,

Bill: have him on the show again.

Marty: yeah, that would be wonderful. I love that we end that we're, the conversation ends on love. That, that, that's really the driving force.

Bill: So what did we talk about here? We talk about my books.

Marty: We talked about your books, but we also talked about. The process and you know, the, not only the circumstances, but the process that brought these on and drew out your love that got poured into these books.

Bill: Yeah, that's right. That's what we did. And the history, the story behind the story and

Marty: Mm-hmm.

Bill: yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was a fun conversation. I hope the listeners will enjoy it. What do we wanna call this? We'll let the listeners listen in on how we create the name of the podcast.

Marty: I don't like the, the, the title of the second volume.

Bill: Oh, finding myself.

Marty: Finding yourself as Writer.

Bill: Finding myself as a writer. Yeah. That's awesome. Great. That's what we'll do. Okay, Marty. everybody for listening. Till next time.

Marty: Bye. Speaker: We appreciate who you are that you would be listening to this podcast and want to acknowledge all those parts of you that yearn for the experience of the true you. Speaker 2: If you like this episode, click like Share it with others and be sure to subscribe. Listen again next week for the newest episode. Speaker: Check show notes for a transcript and a link to resources including a link to let us know if you'd like to be a guest on our podcast. Speaker 2: Thank you for listening and going on this journey with us. Back to the true you.