The Author Burnout Coach
Episode 11: The Gift of Self-Awareness
Hello writers and welcome to The Author Burnout Coach. Together, we will dismantle the burnout culture in book publishing and reclaim our love of stories. I am your host, Isabel Sterling, and this is episode 11.
[Intro Music]
Hey Writer Friends! I am so excited for today’s podcast episode, which was inspired by last week’s interview with Erica Davis. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet (number 10: learning to love revision) I highly recommend you check that out. Erica is a delightful human, so it’s worth a listen.
During that episode, Erica mentioned the acronym thing I do as a coach. It’s officially called the Self-Coaching Model, which was developed by Brooke Castillo at the Life Coach School, which is where I got certified. It’s an incredible self-awareness tool and so powerful in identifying the unique cause of your personal burnout struggles. As I mentioned in the writer’s block episode, knowing the cause of a problem allows you to develop the best possible solution. One that tackles the source of the problem instead of putting a bandaid on the symptoms.
Okay, let’s get into it! The Model posits that everything in life can be boiled down to five main categories: Circumstances, Thoughts, Feelings, Actions, and Results, which we will often shorten to CTFAR.
Circumstances are things that happen external to us that we break down to the most basic facts, without any of our own personal commentary. As such, a circumstance is always neutral.
Thoughts are the sentences that run through our heads and can includes beliefs, subjective observations, judgements, and any stories we have about our circumstances.
You can actually make a lot of progress by simply learning to separate circumstances from thoughts. As humans we tend to attribute our emotional state to our circumstances (such as our job, our sales numbers, whether we have an agent) but the model teaches that feelings flow from thoughts, NOT circumstances.
As such, being able to tell the difference between a thought and circumstance is really powerful. This is trickier than you might initially guess, though, and it’s why having a coach is so helpful. We’ll often state our thoughts as if they’re facts, so we think they’re just the way of the world and not simply a point of view that we’ve consciously or subconsciously chosen.
For example, we tend to believe that it’s hard to get self-published books into bookstores, but that isn’t a circumstance. It’s a thought. The descriptor that it’s ‘hard’ to do is subjective, not fact.
A circumstance might be: Store X has a policy that states they do not shelve self-published books. And then your thought about that fact is “it’s hard to get self-published books into bookstores.”
Do you see the difference? The circumstance is a neutral statement of fact about the store having a policy and the thought is an interpretation of what that policy means. Someone else could think that it’s impossible rather than hard. Someone else might think that’s a good policy while the next person thinks it’s terrible and elitist.
It may seem like a small nuance, but it matters a LOT for the rest of the model. Because the thoughts we think–both on purpose and the ones that happen automatically–affect the next line of the model - your feelings.
Feelings are one-word emotions that cause vibrations in your body, so things like sad, angry, frustrated, hopeful, grounded, ashamed, joy, anticipation, and grief.
Despite the patriarchy’s insistance that emotions are frivolous and silly, emotions are actually HUGELY important. Everything we do in life is either in pursuit of a specific feeling or to try to avoid a feeling. We want to get published because we think we’ll feel proud, excited, accomplished, important, or worthy. We avoid working on our novels because we don’t want to feel frustration, doubt, shame, or confusion.
Continuing down the model, feelings lead to our actions, which we call the A-line. Actions includes the things we do and the things we avoid doing. For example, if you’re feeling frustrated because you’re thinking “I’ll never figure out this story” you might avoid working on your book and instead organize your junk drawers or scroll social media.
And finally, actions are important because they create your Results. Results are the way you experience life. As such, you can only put yourself in your R line, no one else. Your results also prove your thoughts true.
Let’s take a look at an example to see how it all works together.
C: Receive a query rejection
T: This is never going to happen for me
F: Defeated
A: Check your query spreadsheet, wallow in the negative feelings, avoid your current manuscript, consider revision the book on query just in case it’s actually terrible, consider quitting altogether and giving up on your publishing dreams
R: You make it less likely that you’ll succeed (and if you quit, you ensure that it never happens)
Most folks will assume that the rejection itself is what causes the defeated feeling but it’s not. It’s the thought about the rejection that causes the feeling.
Looking at the exact same rejection, we could have the following model.
C: Receive a query rejection
T: This is part of the process
F: Secure
A: Mark the rejection in your tracker, get back to writing your new project, focus on work, or whatever was going on before the rejection email came in, trust that you’re on the right path
R: You continue the process of achieving your dreams
You change the thought, you change your experience of your life.
With a caveat.
I’m fairly certain I’ve mentioned this before, but we don’t try to go from one thought extreme to another. We can’t go from “I’m a terrible writer” to “I’m a brilliant writer” and expect ourselves to BELIEVE IT.
If we don’t believe a thought, we don’t actually FEEL an emotion from thinking it. That is such a key point in all of this, and that’s the nuance we need to use this tool to wiggle out of burnout. One tiny step at a time.
One thought at a time.
Because it’s not any ONE thought that causes burnout. It’s a collection of thoughts and beliefs, strengthened and reinforced by society, that lead to burnout.
The start of the work is becoming aware of the thoughts that contribute burnout, the ones that we believe so so strongly that they feel like truth. Things like “If I don’t meet my deadline, I’ll disappoint my editor” and “my readers will forget about me if I don’t write a book a year” or “There’s always another writer ready to take my place.”
That’s where the work starts. Finding the thoughts that feel true but also feel like shit. Finding them and being open to believing that they aren’t the one and only truth. The changes in behavior, like taking intentional rest and requesting a deadline extension without guilt, can only come after a shift in belief.
And that shift in belief is my specialty as a coach.
If you’re ready to love writing again, I can help you get there. Enrollment is now open for my 4-month coaching program. I hope to see you there.
Next week, I’m letting you in on one word that change your whole world if you cut it out of your vocabulary.
Until then, happy writing!
