One of life’s great achievements is to write a book. But what happens when you achieve it?
I started my book, Make Diversity Matter to You in 2020. After the events of Black Lives Matter, I wanted to do more to make a positive change in the world. I had previously worked in Diversity and Inclusion in the UK government. My experience demonstrated that the way in which diversity was polarised made it inaccessible to many people who would care.
In my role, I actually had access to far more senior leaders. For them, they didn’t know how to actually address diversity issues. They found the topic frustrating. But I learnt that spending time with them and helping them understand it for themselves led to magnificent shifts. One senior leader went from being very reticent to speak about the subject to one of the biggest champions when Black Lives Matter happened.
With a flurry of ideas, I wrote 20,000 words within the space of a month. It was great, until I didn’t know what else to say. So, I shelved the project and focussed on other areas of my life.
2022 was a year of exponential growth for me as a person. I have done lots of work around shifting my relationship with my thoughts. I’ve experienced some real dramatic changes in how I see and act in the world. This gave me the information I wanted to take the book to the deeper level that I wanted to go.
So writing a book, what an amazing achievement right!? In fact, when I told people they frequently told me how I should be extremely proud.
Except, I wasn’t.
Now that I had a book out in the world, the next step was to tell people I had written a book. This was a new level of fear. What would people think? How comfortable am I to share my message? It would be easier just to let the book sit on a webpage for nobody to see. Now I am doing that, and I’ve grown to stand by the power that this book has – I will say to you right now that if you read this book and apply the insights you gain from it you will experience a powerful change.
But more fundamentally, writing a book was just not that big a deal for me. One of the reasons I wanted to finish this book was because I wanted to start another one.
The thing that brought me greater satisfaction is who I’ve become through this whole process. I know that I can commit myself to do something and make an impact. I’m also hopeful that I can make real change in the world through my words.
You see, when we see the individual task as the great achievement, accomplishing the task itself is rather anticlimactic. I’ve published a book, now what?
We can see this in all sorts of things – a new job, house or relationship. If the goal is just to ‘get’ these things, it doesn’t really give us the deeper satisfaction that we think it would.
The achievement is me. But the achievement is also you. You have done so many magnificent, impressive things in your life, but you may not have thought about it till now.
So if my tale imparts anything, let it be this. You have already achieved incredible things in your life which have led you to the point of where you are right now. It’s not been the individual achievements, but the amazing and powerful person you have become.
You can choose to live into your greatness. It is your choice. I have chosen to live in mine, and I can see wondrous shifts in my life. The power is in your hands.
P.S. If you’re intrigued and want to know what ‘living into your greatness’ means, we can explore that together. Drop me a message and we can chat about it. To be clear there is absolutely zero obligation to commit to anything or secret sales trap awaiting. I want to do what I can to serve you.