I felt compelled to write my book for a few reasons.
First, I’m a financial advisor in my day job as Founder and CEO of North Financial Advisors. I speak with hundreds of people each year about their hopes and dreams along with their finances. What I hear most often is that people desire to live their lives differently, more in sync with their purpose or dreams or simply to have more balance and happiness in life. We all can name these big dreams or big changes we want for ourselves. Yet, the vast majority of us aren’t living them. Why is that?
I wanted to find out the answer, and that’s exactly what I asked when I interviewed and profiled more than 50 people for the book.
I, too, had a dream that had long been put on hold — to work with people one-on-one with their finances.
A story I tell in the opening chapters of my book is how this dream of mine languished for about 8 years. I was too busy, too focused on the wrong things and too caught up in what other people thought of me and what I “was supposed” to be doing. My self worth was tied to my accomplishments, achievements, and full calendar. This all dates back to how I grew up and the experiences and adversities I experienced as a child and young adult.
I often found myself burned out, but then quickly wondering, “what’s next?” I easily moved on to the next thing rather than doing the inner work necessary to get at my biggest dreams.
I bet you can relate, as I’ve heard so many stories at this point, it almost feels like a ubiquitous human condition. At it’s core, this book explores ways which people have overcome these kinds of adversities to live their biggest dreams. It gives you the “how” related to your mindset and inner journey. Then, the taking action part is up to you.
Second, there’s truly a limit to the number of people I can work with one-on-one. I only take on a few new clients each year to my financial planning practice. While I’m able to help coach clients to do some of their deep inner work to not only discover their big dreams, but start living them, the collective dent I’m able to make is quite small. My hope is that offering a book will be a way for many more people to be inspired to start living their big dreams.
Third, I think more people should be business owners and starting a business is one big dream that many people have. The problem is there’s this assumption that being a business owner is hard, draining, and a hustle. Yes, there are challenges, but when done right, being a business owner is a great way to get more freedom back into your life. My book challenges many of the assumptions about business ownership. Dozens of the people I interviewed or profiled in the book have their own business and it was great getting their thoughts on “lessons learned” to incorporate best practices in my book. While my book isn’t about “how to start a business,” it’s more about how to get yourself and your mind in the right place to explore what’s possible and create something that will be sustainable in the long-run.
Finally, I wrote this book for me. It’s not easy to work through the inner stuff as much as we focus on our outer accomplishments and achievements. About 6 months before writing this book, I was looking at my own charitable giving strategy and looking for national trauma-informed non profits doing work to expand people’s knowledge about many of the topics I explore in my book. It didn’t exist. The closest thing I could find is ACESAware.org and that’s mainly a California organization. That told me that we need more awareness first – Part 1 of my book dives deep into how adversities and trauma we (or our families) experienced can be holding us back in ways we’re not even aware of.
What I discovered on my author journey was that there is power in vulnerability. As humans we learn so much through story telling and relating to others, far more than when we memorize facts and figures. While it’s scary to share so much of my story and my past along side all the people I interviewed, developing the courage to do so has changed me for the better.
Do You Want to Write a Book?
There’s a whole host of reasons I think everyone should consider writing a book. First, it’s a fantastic way to organize all your thoughts about a topic and dive deep. The best way to learn is honestly to write or teach about it. It forces you to fully understand both the big picture and the micro details, filter out what’s most important and then share it back to people in a way they can relate. That’s powerful.
Whether you’re a business owner, employee, manager or aspiring to any one of those things, a book can be a great way to develop a higher level of credibility. It’s much easier to earn media appearances, speaking gigs, and business referrals as an author. Having a book on someone’s shelf is much more memorable than a business card. It can be a door opener to creating new connections and opportunities. It’s so much easier to explain, “What do you do?” when you wrote a book on it.
There’s also a fair amount of self-discovery that comes along with writing a book. It can help you answer your “why,” it can help you make an impact, it can help you get comfortable with uncomfortable stuff. I thought writing a book would be a very lonely process, something I did on my own. But as it turns out I joined an author community, had a ton of help, and during a global pandemic managed to expand my network and my reach.
Beware…the minute you start thinking about stretching yourself to do something like this, your brain might say, “Wait a minute! That sounds scary / risky / painful, isn’t there something else you should be doing?
I urge you to instead do one small thing to explore this dream or any other dreams you have. Can you spend 10 minutes researching, writing or talking to a friend about it instead of immediately shutting down the idea?
What’s your big dream? What’s one thing you can do to make tiny, incremental progress on it?
