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📘 Authenticity: it’s easy to say just be yourself. But sometimes it’s hard, especially on the page.Â
📘 Courage: I love the etymology of this word. It’s from the French ‘Courage’ meaning ‘from the heart’ and that’s what it takes to write a great book: you’re putting a stake in the ground for something you believe in and you’re sharing it with the world.Â
📘 Creativity: developing an idea that exists only in your head, to become an actual thing in reality is pure alchemy and nothing less.Â
✨Swimming in the Irish Sea.Â
✨A book isn’t finished until it’s shared.Â
✨Always be kind.Â
✨Gardening; the smell of the woods.
✨If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.Â
✨Aerial Silks, where I get to try, try again.
✨My Mum’s sense of style: at 78 she’s still a fashion queen.
✨Interiors: I’m always drawn to my next home project and I love blending antique, vintage and upcycled with modern and new.Â
I sat across the table from my production manager.
‘We didn’t make it,’ I said. I couldn’t say anything after that. I covered my face with my hand to hide the tears.
It was October 2012 and my production of the Irish Touring Premier of Steel Magnolias had been a financial failure. In just 8 weeks, we’d performed at 1000 seat theatres across the length and breadth of Ireland. It was my first high-end production as producer and the buck stopped firmly with me.
It was a wipe-out. The only fair way to end the project was to put my company into financial recovery. I felt exhausted, ashamed and scared by the threats I received from angry creditors so I stayed home and hid. For nearly a year I felt small, like I’d never be able to create anything again.
Then my Dad gave me a Kindle for Christmas and it changed the way I read books. I’d always loved reading, but now I could get books at the press of a button. I’d occasionally read nonfiction before like Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, but I’d grown up reading and studying fiction. Whenever I’d visit a bookshop, I’d always browse the fiction aisles.Â
Now, in my search for answers to feeling better and getting back on my feet, I easily discovered nonfiction in depth on my Kindle and started devouring these books. I loved how they called me to think and reflect and learn. I loved how I came away from them with greater understanding, insight, knowledge and the steps I could take to implement changes in my life and work.Â
One evening, I was driving home after seeing the play ‘Forgotten’ by Pat Kinevane and I felt a spark. It was the urge to write, but I wanted to learn how to do it better. I couldn’t even afford a teacher on my own so I rang all the mothers on my ten year old daughter’s class list to see if anyone wanted to join a writing workshop. I got enough people together so we could hire a teacher and start.
Around the same time, I attended a local business meeting. The town was looking for a new event to draw in more visitors and I had an idea. What if we had a writing festival? What could that look like? I got support from the committee and together with volunteers, founded a not-for-profit festival: Dalkey Creates.
The festival and the writing courses grew: in 2017 I figured out self-publishing and published 20 new Irish writers who I was giving a lot of support to in the writing groups (at the time I didn’t even realise I was coaching them.) And the festival was attracting prize-winning writers to run its workshops.
In February 2020, I’d never been busier. Then Covid happened and everything, everywhere closed, including the Festival.  And after moving my courses online, my one remaining workshop teacher left and took the students with him.
I felt unsettled and ill-at-ease. And I wasn’t even living in my own home at the time because I was in the middle of building a house so I felt cast adrift and started to panic about money. All my work had been offline and I worked for myself. What was I going to do? Â
A friend recommended reading You Are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero and I loved it. The author wrote with a no-nonsense approach that was funny and exciting. It was a breath of fresh air and the book gave me a fresh perspective that changed my mindset and gave me a feeling that I could still create something amazing. I didn’t know it then, but that book was a catalyst: it changed my life.Â
And while I was reading it, I realised I didn’t mind that all my work had stopped. I actually felt relieved. I’d been juggling too many balls and once I’d dropped them all I could think about what I really wanted to do. I kept reading and looking for an answer. And I found it. She said, ‘Get a coach. Sports teams have them. Just sayin.’ Â
That Summer I moved into my house and googled online business coaches for women. I joined an online business training programme to start my online coaching business. Creating the business from scratch was an avalanche of learning, not only about tech, coaching and business skills but unexpectedly, about myself.
For the first time I realised I could choose who I wanted to work with, and what I wanted to build. It was all by my design.Â
I revelled being in a community of women living all over the world who were doing the same thing in pursuit of their goals and dreams. I realised I could do hard things and the only person standing in the way of my success, was me. And I felt like I’d finally found my sweet spot as creator, entrepreneur and guide.
Most importantly I discovered that the thread that stitched the years of my life together, was the Creative Process. From the art of plays to the art of books, from building a house to building a biz, it had always been about the magic of breathing an idea into life; the alchemy of making the invisible, visible.Â
Knowing that, I was able to accept that there are time I’m going to falter and fall, but that’s part of the process. Then I have to get back up again, and carry on. Books have helped me see life this way and it makes the hard parts so much more bearable.
Fast forward four years and every morning I get out of bed feeling excited about coaching and building the biz that I’ve designed to help Business Owners write great books so they can teach, inspire and lead through authorship.
I’m travelling more and I can be in my business from anywhere in the world. And wherever I am, I’m always ready to share my gifts and skills with you to help you bring your book to the world. Because someone somewhere needs what you know. And you have the power to help change their life with your words in the same way other writers have helped to change mine. And I’m perfectly placed to help you. 😊
