We're starting off our time together by looking at the essential elements of a sustainable career. We'll dig deeper into them in the other three topics, but this will give us an overview and an opportunity to audit where we're doing well and have built security and flexibility in our business so it can adjust as needed to reality, and where our author life could... benefit from some added attention. 

If you're familiar with my model of Deep Roots, Rich Soil, Dense Forest, then this will be familiar to you. If it's a new structure for you, that's okay, too! I'll be covering (or refreshing you on) the basics, and then we'll do work through the concepts individually, as small groups, and all together. 

Taking stock of what areas in our career may benefit from some added attention is a practice, meaning it's not one and done. As we change and the world changes, our situation changes, too. This topic is one I imagine folks returning to every year or quarter for a quick check-in.

In the Enneagram, we talk about three centers that each person has: the head/thinking, the heart/feeling, the body/gut/action. Always relying on one of the centers to make the decisions for your business leaves a lot of blind spots and generally leads to the same issues repeatedly darkening your doorstep, just wearing a different hat each time. 

Every individual favors one of the three centers and struggles to connect to another. Certain issues arise, depending on how your three centers stack. (Mine go thinking/action/feeling, so I can get stuck in my head and I forget to tune into my emotions.)

As we explore the centers, we'll discuss about how they show up in our storytelling, our marketing, and the way we network. We'll also discuss practices we can adopt to reach a more balanced approach.

Is it time to take action or to wait and think it all through? Would you build your dream life through privacy or visibility? Is it time for detail work or big-picture thinking? Would more autonomy solve this problem best, or would reaching out to connections do the trick? 

Within each of us, we hold various tensions, an ongoing tug-of-war based on the strong influences of the nine Enneagram types. We call these polarities. 

Our internal polarities can drive us up a wall, to the point where we just want to pick one side and go all-in with it. That often comes back to bite us, though. 

Polarities can be harnessed as a strength, if we learn how. Sometimes they call for a tradeoff, and sometimes there's wonderful middle ground to be discovered... but how do we know which is the case?

We'll explore what polarities live inside of us, what tradeoffs we're presented in this industry, and how to leverage our recurring push-pull to our advantage. 

This is a topic I usually only discuss in high-level individual coaching, but I'm going to teach about it for the first time in a group setting during this conference.

The biggest threat to our creativity lately is the attention economy, or what I like to call the distraction economy. Sitting and writing a book requires focus, mental energy, and creative problem solving—things that are being commodified, competed for, and sold off to the highest bidder. If we don't learn how to wrestle back our attention, we'll struggle to keep being creative in any meaningful way that differentiates us from other authors and AI. And we may simply never finish writing the next book. 

We're rounding out the conference with an exploration and new awareness of how to protect our attention, receive inspiration that fuels our work in progress, and allow our natural creativity to feel safe surfacing. 

We must feed our brain the nutrients it needs through our attentional practices if we expect it to produce wonderful stories for us. This topic focuses on practical steps toward doing that—and unearths the emotional, physical, and psychological reasons why we haven't yet done so. Together, we'll put a plan in place that works for you and your life and helps you see that what you're afraid you'll lose in changing your habits is nothing you'll miss, and what you stand to gain is more than you dreamed of.